SteveX Compiled

Microsoft has come out with their first ad response to the Get a Mac ad campaign by Apple.

I don’t get it.

It’s fun and whimsical, but it seems like one of those videos you show at the start of a company meeting, not something you use with mass media to try to improve your image.

I like the fact that Google Chrome runs each tab in a separate process. What happens when one of those processes dies? Fire up Task Manager, pick a chrome.exe and try it out:

Google Chrome is available now, here.

If you haven’t heard of it - Chrome is Google’s new browser project. It’s based on WebKit, giving it some similarity to Apple’s Windows version of Safari.

I don’t really understand why Apple wanted Safari for Windows, and I don’t really understand where Google is going with Chrome. But hey, it feels fast, looks good, and it’s free. Check it out.

This is some good soup.

I did a bit more tweaking of the Recipes site for the iPhone this evening. It basically came down to using the iPhone CSS on a few more pages, which makes the text big enough to read on the iPhone.

I ran into a problem with setting the background for the <pre> tag using CSS. In Safari on the Mac (and in other browsers), the background would be as wide as it needed to be based on the width of the content. On the iPhone, the background would be narrower than required, leaving the text floating on a strange grey box. To workaround this, I changed it so there is no background behind the recipe on the iPhone, though I think it looks better the other way.

One thing I can’t figure out is what to do about the Google ads on the recipe pages. I’m forcing the text to 32 point, but I can’t change the size of the ad, so you get this teeny ad at the bottom of the page:

Anyone come up with a way to ads that look good on the iPhone?

Yeah, that’s what my PS3 says when I put a PS2 game in. I got it for Christmas and didn’t realize I got the version that couldn’t play PS2 games. So I bought a PS2 game. And I can’t play it.

Bummer.

This is a bit of a strange move. I’m watching TomTom to see when they come out with a GPS that has a better screen, since that’s my main complaint with their current hardware, and instead they come out with this.

These two “new” devices are the old devices with a new sleeve and some new policies surrounding warranty, support and updates. I hope there’s more coming.

About a month and a half ago I mentioned that my old cheapie popcorn maker broke, and that I ordered a replacement. It arrived a few days ago.

I also ordered some Wisconsin White Birch popping corn, since I discovered while checking Amazon reviews of popcorn makers that the popcorn you use makes a difference.

This is good stuff.

The popcorn maker works well. No wasted popcorn, no mess. And the popcorn itself is very good - strangely white, but light with a good texture, and noticeably different from the usual popcorn that I get at the grocery store.

This makes me wonder how much variety there really is in different types of popcorn? I’m tempted to order this sampler.

It’s also interesting that for $15 you can get a popcorn maker that looks like the one pictured above, but sucks, and for another $15 you can get one that works remarkably well. And guess which one tends to be in stores.

I just tweaked my Recipes page a bit, to add an iPhone CSS file. It basically just detects the iPhone and makes the font bigger. I also cleaned up the page a bit, removed the obsolete search methods and just left the Google search.

I plan to sprinkle some more iPhone awareness throughout the site - the recipes themselves are already pretty plain and generally look good on the iPhone (especially sideways) but there’s still some room for improvement.

I wish the Google search results page would detect the iPhone and look better. I’ll have to see if there’s a way I can style that.

There are a number of Internet businesses that have been based on copyright infringement. YouTube, LimeWire, Napster, BitTorrent, even Google and their cache of web pages was initially deemed infringement (and still is by some people).

The thing that lets these businesses survive is the DMCA, strangely enough. Thanks to the DMCA, I can let a user upload videos to my site and basically close my eyes to what gets uploaded. If someone uploads something that they don’t have rights to, it’s not my problem - it’s up to the copyright owner to notice that it’s there and send me a takedown notice. Until that happens, I can let users view that video.

Here’s the text from the DMCA itself:

Under the knowledge standard, a service provider is eligible for the limitation
on liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware
of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gaining
such knowledge or awareness, responds expeditiously to take the material down or
block access to it.

This gives entrepreneurs the freedom to build companies based on copyright infringement, doesn’t it? Nice thing about the Internet is that there are enough users out there willing to pirate material that if one of them uploads something and it gets taken down, there are 20 more people waiting to re-upload the same content.

This is what Mygazines seems to be depending on. Mygazines is a YouTube for Magazines. But unlike YouTube, there isn’t even the pretense that the site exists for sharing legal material. It’s a place to upload magazines for other users to view them for free, until they get pulled.

What will be the next ludicrous, obviously-illegal business to start using this same loophole? I’m guessing a commercial software sharing site that lets you upload ISO images of commercial software for other users to download. Or has someone done that yet?