no more JPEGs?

Strange days indeed: No more JPEGs - ISO to withdraw image standard [The Register]

According to Richard Clark, JPEG committee member and JPEG.org webmaster, Forgent's royalty grab -- coming after two decades of royalty-free use -- means that ISO is obliged to withdraw the specification.

 

 blog theory

In looking for the text of the September 1999 Chicago Tribune article on weblogs (which has, of course, dropped off the Web) [wait, wait, a copy of it is here], I found myself quoted in a May 2001 article by librarian Darlene Fichter (not sure where it was originally published) referencing the Tribune piece. I'd forgotten I'd said this, actually:

Blogging Your Life Away. [FindArticles]

Steve Bogart, quoted by Julia Keller in her Chicago Tribune article "She Has Seen the Future and It Is--Weblogs" (September 7, 1999), sums up the best and worst of Weblogs when he says: "At their best, weblogs are both content providers and context providers for the mass of information available on the Web. At their worst, they're exercises in vanity, giving us the illusion that we've done something valuable by copying and pasting a link."

I think it still holds up. (Hmm.. turns out a few more people have quoted that too... what an odd feeling.)

Other weblog navel-gazing thoughts:

• Journalists can blog, and they people can commit journalism on their blogs, but blogging doesn't make you a journalist. Doctors can blog too, but blogging about medical matters doesn't make you a doctor either.
  
  
• In spoken conversation, you can't insult or attack someone and then erase the words you said; to take it back you have to say "I take it back" or "Sorry, that didn't come out right, let me try again". In e-mail, you can't erase the words you sent to someone else's screen; you have to at least send another message saying "ignore what I just said". On a website, however, you can grant yourself immunity from responsibility for your words by simply removing something you said a minute, a day or a year ago with no marker to indicate it was ever there.
  
  Most people don't handle their sites that way; most will honor the expectations inherent in other forms of human communication and: strike out the old text and write in other text, or delete the words and say "I thought better of what I said here." or "I take it back, ignore what you saw here before." That approach shows integrity. Pretending you never said it in the first place does not.
  
  (To pacify nitpickers: copy-editing something to clarify or re-wordsmith doesn't count unless it changes the substance. And removing a post with no pejorative content is a much smaller deal.)

Okay, that's enough of that.  

 goodbye sam

Goodbye Sam: Actor Rob Lowe to leave NBC's 'The West Wing' over salary dispute [AP/BayArea]

The actor decided to leave after finding out that Martin Sheen received a raise that nearly triples his pay to $300,000 an episode, Variety and the New York Post reported, citing anonymous sources.

Lowe has made about $75,000 an episode since the series began in 1999. The other supporting players -- Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, John Spencer and Bradley Whitford -- banded together last year and negotiated a raise to about $70,000 per show in a deal that keeps them on through the seventh season.

Seventh! Guess that's a spoiler. Oops.