Monday, April 24, 2006

I love Shrook, now freeware!

Mac users, Shrook is now freeware:

[A] few months ago I went a bit crazy and declared war on Brent Simmons and NetNewsWire. It’s taken me a while to work out what to do and to put all the pieces in place, but this is what I’m doing: I’m making the full version of Shrook freeware.

This isn’t a temporary promotion and this isn’t a sign of abandoning Shrook. I just want as many people as possible to be using it, because it is better than NetNewsWire and NewsFire and everything else out there. Shrook fans (that’s you) can now recommend it to their friends without requiring them to spend money.

I loved it before, I love it still. It’s the best darned Mac feed aggregator around.

We’re all Dick Tracy now

Martin Reynolds, the Gartner guy in the podcast I pointed to earlier on the demise of wristwatches, responds to the observation that once we envisioned a future with Dick Tracy talking into his watch. Reynolds says that’s exactly what we’ve got:

Wristwatches aren’t that old. They were only introduced, effectively, in about I think the 1930s and displaced the pocket watch, the reason being that people couldn’t make mechanisms robust enough to keep accurate time that sat on people’s wrists. But, if you think back, if you skip that out, we do have people talking into their watches. The cell phone today is a splendid analogue for the pocket watch of history.

Other devices destined for obsolescence? Videotape and the desktop phone are definite goners and the cell phone will replace the camera for all but professionals. He comments in conclusion:

What we’re seeing here with the wristwatch is not the demise so much of the wristwatch but a change in the kind of people that are going to work in your organization or going to be customers of your organization. And there are really two things; one is they’re not so interested in what the absolute time is. They’re much more interested in how quickly you respond to their requests. That’s going to become culture shock.

When you’re meeting with people now watch; see if people in the meeting are wearing a wristwatch. And the funny thing is if they’re not wearing a wristwatch they’re likely to be far more impatient than if they are.

No computer but still sued for filesharing by the RIAA

Close to home and on an issue I care about:

A Rockmart [Georgia] family is being sued for ongoing illegal music file sharing, despite no longer having a computer.

A federal lawsuit filed Friday in Rome by the Recording Industry Association of America alleges that Carma Walls, 32, of a Morgan Street residence, has infringed on copyrights for recorded music by sharing files over the Internet. [...]

“I don’t understand this,” Walls said. “How can they sue us when we don’t even have a computer?”

Carma Walls said that the family did once own a computer - for about two months. They haven’t had a computer in their home for more than a year, she said.

During the short time the family had use of a computer, she did download some music from Internet sites, she said. But she had no inkling that the sites she visited or the practice itself were illegal.

“I thought it was like recording songs off the radio like we did when we were kids,” she said.

The RIAA’s lawsuit maintains that Carma Walls, through the use of a file-sharing program, has infringed on the copyrights for the following songs: “Who Will Save Your Soul,” Jewel; “Far Behind,” Candlebox; “Still the Same,” Bob Seger; “I Won’t Forget You,” Poison; “Open Arms,” Journey; “Unpretty,” TLC; No Scrubs,” TLC; and “Saving All My Love for You,” Whitney Houston.

Via Cory Doctorow:

Good to see a real standard of care in place over there at RIAA sue-your-customers HQ; this is probably more profitable in the long run than suing people who do share music, since those people are statistically more likely to spend money on CDs. Focusing on shaking down people who don’t own PCs will keep the music industry from alienating its diehard fans.

The end of watches?

At first I thought, I’m a dinosaur! Then I realized, I won’t really miss them either:

Have you looked at any kids lately?

I mean really looked at them.

Have you noticed anything different?

They don’t wear watches.

Really.

Ask someone under 25 for the time and they’ll pull out a cellphone.

If they do own a watch, they got it as a gift.

Young people aren’t buying them.

Gartner agrees: the demise of the wristwatch via podcast.

Via A VC.

Religious groups push same-sex marriage ban

This is news? I note the cynical, blatantly political motive:

A coalition of about 50 prominent religious leaders, including six Roman Catholic cardinals and a half-dozen archbishops, have signed a petition and pledged their influence to support a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.

Organizers of the petition said it aimed to revive the groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage that played a major roll in moving conservative voters to the polls in 2004. Republicans are increasingly worried about turnout in the elections this autumn, and Republican Senate leaders have scheduled a vote in June on the proposed constitutional amendment.

No one expects it to pass, but conservatives hope to use the vote to rally their grass-roots supporters against liberals who oppose the measure as discriminatory toward gay people.

I link to it because genuinely think they push, the quicker we get to a tipping point that flips the issue on its head:

[T]he depth of popular demand for amending the U.S. Constitution over the issue has never been tested, and at least one survey has suggested that the public’s opposition is cooling.

In May, a nonpartisan Pew Research Poll found that 51 percent of the public opposed legalizing gay marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

LATER: A typo in the headline (I left off the word “ban") led to a traffic spike and a false impression. I’ve corrected it.