8 March 2001
Sorry about the gaps here, but my paying work takes priority (and there's plenty of it), and now we've got a wedding to plan too, so the weblog just hasn't been high on my list of stuff to get to. I hope to do better, but no promises. Attention potential Babylon 5 fans: the SciFi Channel's rebroadcast is wrapping back around to the beginning Friday, starting with the high-quality 'prequel' movie being shown tomorrow at 6pm Eastern. If you've wanted to try B5, tomorrow is the time. (Or at least the time to fire up the TiVo.) Hey. Like having a hard drive you can put anything on and make as many copies as you need to feel safe? Me too. Like being able to burn audio and data CDs, regardless of where your files came from? Yup, me too. This is the hardware industry saying "Hey, pal. Be a shame if something... happened to all that open hardware, wouldn't it? It'd sure be a tragedy if you couldn't find any more of those drives once yours... wore out. Wouldn't it."
This is potentially very bad news for all sorts of reasons, most having to do with privacy and personal liberty. It may be necessary to stock up on FireWire drives someday soon before they all go away... I suppose it's too much to hope for that all this is just a gambit to make people appreciate the usefulness of the general-purpose hardware they can get today, thus paving the way for industry-wide price increases (which would be comparatively benign, frankly). OTOH, Apple is explicitly saying 'use our stuff to make your own CDs'. And they have an impressive batch of musicians helping them say it. Apple is on the right side of things here, and I hope they stay that way. That's all for now...
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