Rob Sayre's Mozilla Blog

The first album I owned was Thriller. I was 6. I don’t remember where it came from, but it was mine, and I was fairly certain Beat It was the coolest thing in the world. I didn’t understand what Billy Jean was about. At that time.

It was a white cassette tape with screen printed letters that made for a muddy brown track listing. I figured out that I could take the little boombox outside. I could listen to Thriller and climb trees at the same time. To my parents credit, that was allowed. A psychedelic trip, for sure.

Greg Bensinger: “New York Times Co. said in a survey of print subscribers that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s Web site.”

Back in ye olde 2008, I wrote about record companies expecting the same revenues from digital distribution that they got for actually doing something.

I was a paper boy when I was a kid. An unreliable one. You might have found your paper wet in a shrub, but I might also have forgotten to charge you. One morning, I fell off my bike, and skinned my knee. Since it was 5 in the morning, I figured I screwed up, and kept going. Remember that making a teenager wake up at 5 is like asking an adult to wake up at 3. The natural wake up time is earlier for older people–school is optimized for teachers.

Anyway, I got back home with my skinned knee, and my mother had been wondering whether I was ok… because there had been an earthquake while I was out on my paper route.

That doesn’t happen when you look at the New York Times on the Internet. What are you paying for?

update: I’ll answer the obvious question: What about that brilliant reporting?

Or maybe I’ll just let it hang.

Daring Fireball: “Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE ‘desktop Linux’ racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.”

I posted on sprites a while back, scratching my chin about whether some sort of archive format would be better. Well… duh. There is one in Firefox. Jos Hirth has the details.

Maciej Stachowiak, Apple: “I’m surprised at the level of confidence expressed in Theora not infringing unknown patents…”

That’s right folks, it’s working group amateur hour. Step right up, try your hand.

Anne van Kesteren: “Opera has announced support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis“

That’s right, the WHATWG accepts secret feedback.

But… I thought secrets were bad.

Something must have changed. Secrets seem to be OK now. What am I missing?

This just in…

<othermaciej> sayrer: the normal definition of “open stanard” doesn’t automatically imply royalty-free licensing
<jcranmer> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard disagrees
<jcranmer> “The term “open” is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies”
<jcranmer> (2nd para)
<sayrer> but that was written by hippies, obviously
<jcranmer> “The definitions of the term “open standard” used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand and the Venezuelan governments.”
<sayrer> othermaciej: how about this: proprietary is where you pay
<othermaciej> wikipedia seems to disagree with actual standards orgs (as stated in later paragraphs)

That’s right folks, standards orgs producing patent-encumbered standards claim their standards are open. Clearly, a fair and balanced approach is called for.

Maciej Stachowiak: “I believe the wide availability of H.264 hardware is in part because H.264 was developed through an open standards process that included the relevant stakeholders.”

Wikipedia: “Microsoft SQL Server Compact (SQL CE) is a compact relational database produced by Microsoft for applications that run on mobile devices and desktops.”