FireFox 1.0 Released
Jeremy’s put together a collection of links to make it easier to pick it up as well (as of right now, mozilla.org has a good chance of timing out on you).
Happy browsing.
Pirated Album Released on Internet - No Kidding
CNN is reporting U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” has been pirated and released on the internet before the official release date. Wow, what a shocker. This puts them right up there with almost every other album released over the past 5-10 years. This happens with everything, you just have to know where to look. Obviously this is on some major download spots for it to gain the interest of CNN (along with being U2).
Not really a big deal since most people are probably sick of Vertigo already, the song in the overplayed iPod commercial.
The music industry will pretend this negatively affects sales, which it doesn’t according to most non-RIAA funded studies. Mark Cuban wonders “when will the music industry will get it right?”
Beats me.
Keep That Blog Lowkey
The blogging world has garnered a good amount of attention over the past year, much of it related to politics and journalism. Blogging doesn’t always get you somewhere though, Jeremy’s written about bloggers being fired, and now a probable first in blogging: Mark Cuban was fined by the NBA for comments he made in his blog.
I do wonder exactly when his entry was brought to the league’s attention. Was it passed on from person to person before it finally hit someone in the league office, or do they actually have someone monitoring Cuban’s blog?
His big criticism of the NBA was opening its season on the same night as the election - makes sense to anyone, unless you’re the NBA it seems.
Thinking Ahead
I decided to check out the headlines on most major portals and news sites. On the front of MSN is an ad for Halo 2 and the soundtrack for it. Looks cool so I click it (hey, ads aren’t always evil). It takes me to a press release like page for some information about the Halo 2 soundtrack. There’s a button there that says “hear the first song”, even better. So I click again. What a good little sheep I am. I wind up back on MSN, in their movies section on a page about Halo 2’s soundtrack. On there is a link to listen to ‘Blow Me Away’ by Breaking Benjamin, looks good, let’s click again. Windows Media Player pops up and lets me know there’s a problem with my sound/video device. Odd, I’m not doing anything else on the machine, what could it be? I think, I click again to make sure it wasn’t Outlook receiving new mail and setting off the new mail sound alert. Nope, still an error. So I stare - and there it is. Right on that same web page is an ad for The Polar Express. There’s a small video going within the ad. The sound’s not on by default, which I’m usually very happy about as I don’t care for ads with sound; but because this was playing on a page which really has little purpose other than to listen to this song, I received my error. I have no tricky setup on this machine, I would imagine most people who visit are going to run into this conflict. These types of problems should really be found during some sort of QA process. I mean, if you’re going to have sound/video on a page, don’t have a multimedia ad there that can load first and conflict with it.
MLB Relies on Big Spenders
Here’s a good article from the the Chicago Sun-Times, Big spenders pump life into game, found via Skip from The Sports Economist.
It recognizes that while the Yankees and Red Sox spend a fortune, they bring money to the entire league and that the league is strengthened by big market success. It seems like an easy concept, but it seems to be one that few understand or recognize, go figure.
So What Now?
This nation was completely engulfed in the election for months taking breaks only for things like the World Series.
Some other heated issues were thrown into the election like same-sex marriages and some marijuana reforms (Montana approved the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes).
So what now? What will politicians and/or the media attempt to smother us with after the election settles? Some new/old “heated” issues? The “war on terror” (that thing needs quotes more than anything else) or perhaps it’s time for a little blonde girl to get kidnapped?
Any predictions?