Americans and Logic
Apparently, a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with Bush - Kids, just as info: 59 million of you voted for him.
Archive 28. June 2005
iTunes Podcasting not with old iPods?
It seems that PodCasting is only supported with iPods starting from the Clickwheel-iPods. Those with the old mechanical wheel don't get a firmware update, and neither do the Touchwheel-iPods. Which I honestly find quite pathetic. The Touchwheel-iPods aren't that old after all, they don't need to be phased out already.
Not that it bothers me much - I don't read most of the blogs by podcasters, I wouldn't know why I would want to listen to them - but somehow it bothers me when gadgets are retired as too old too quickly. Especially when they are high-priced items like an iPod.
Pfahl confesses
Pfahls-Prozess: The "Phantom" in Court - and indeed as the tenor. And a weak glimmer of hope on the horizon shows - that perhaps one of the most vile political smear stories will be unraveled.
Strucki apparently has damage from the stroke after all
After all, this would explain his latest idea - which I found on the Schockwellenreiter - to want to use unemployed people as training material for the Bundeswehr.
On the other hand: with this, he could then practice armed house combat and storming of civilian fortifications again. Really nicely with hand flamethrower cartridges, battering rams, fragmentation grenades ...
Hey, according to the argumentation of various politicians (if I hear this dehumanizing "fördern und fordern" already), the unemployed are anyway the last dirt, so it doesn't matter if the Bundeswehr freaks - whose gentle manners are proverbial - then nicely heat up the opponent.
Well, it is probably true: you can't be stupid enough to become a federal minister.
Entrepreneurs against software patents
Software patents: Entrepreneurs accuse Union of "electoral fraud":
Entrepreneurial initiatives from several federal states warn in an open letter (PDF) the CDU and CSU members of the European Parliament against "committing systematic electoral fraud" and "causing entrepreneurial misjudgments (...)." The Union should finally admit that it is closer to Microsoft than to the German middle class.
One trigger was SAP:
The Walldorf-based SAP AG recently placed full-page ads in EU magazines urging the proposed directive. SAP demands "patent protection (...) for innovations in IT, as created by SAP (...)." However, these innovations lie exclusively in the software sector. SAP software is used for accounting, order processing, and financial reporting. The SAP ad mentions the term "business processes" (between companies and within) three times.
Of course, the Justice Ministry sees this massive incompetence quite differently and still claims that pure software patents are not possible - even though reality has long since said otherwise. And so we (open-source programmers as well as medium-sized software companies) are being sacrificed on the altar of the software industry - which then politely thanks with greater job cuts and relocation of software production to countries outside the EU.
What a mess
vcXMLRPC is an XML-RPC implementation in JavaScript. Very practical for integrating JavaScript code and server code when you don't want to manually piece together every encoding/decoding. However, the project apparently stopped being developed in 2001.