Compulsory License
If Congress continues to push for essentially perpetual copyright, something has to give to allow for new works built on the old.
I recently read a really disturbing short story. It was “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson. In the story Robinson describes a conversation between the wife of a dead songwriter and a powerful congressman [...]
In the current Biz 2.0 magazine, Chris Taylor, whose day job is ace correspondent for Time magazine in San Francisco, takes a critical look at the forthcoming Tablet PC.
The writer’s conclusion about taking notes in your own handwriting and storing them digitally makes me drool and count down the days to November 7th—when Tablet [...]
Pocket Informant has leap-frogged Agenda Fusion in the planning wars with their new 3.2 upgrade. The new version adds to the excellent category management and saved views of 3.11 by giving you the ability to see today’s tasks in the graphical “blocks of time” day view. This makes it even easier to convert tasks to [...]
Author Up or Author Down?
Who should be in control of publishing? The publishers or the authors?
Traditionally, the publishers have been the king dogs of the publishing business. This may seem like a “duh” statement; it’s called “publishing,” after all. What I find interesting about this arrangement is that without the writers, the publishers have no [...]
Yep, Beth Goza and company at Microsoft are at it again. I’m flying out to Microsoft again this October for Mobius 2002, an in-depth look at Pocket PC Phone Edition, Smartphone 2002 and other Microsoft mobile tech goodies. If you guys have any burning questions about wireless networking and mobile computing, start loading me up [...]
If you love to write well, you probably have a library of resources on your mobile device to help you ply your craft.
My own PDA is loaded with dictionaries, spell checkers, encyclopedia, and various other references (in far too many formats, but that is another rant for another day).
And as a “real” writer, [...]
I found myself out for a walk today, when I realized I still hadn’t faxed a document to Palm that they need in order to cut me a check for my Palm Digital Media royalties. Fortunately, I had the document on my trusty Jornada, PrintBoy installed, and there was a Kinkos ahead only about one [...]
Palm Reader Desktop
The best ebook reader for PDAs has made the leap to PC and Mac desktops. How does it measure up to desktop readers from Microsoft and Adobe?
Well, first off, given that it’s free, how can you possibly complain? Palm Reader is now the only full-featured ebook reader to work on Palm, Zaurus (via [...]
By request, I’ve added the ability to permanently link to posts. Unfortunately, this would make the size of AvantGo channel even larger, since it goes one level deep of the main page to get to columns. Now it will scarf every archive page off the main page as well. Between that and other people complaining [...]
Wired has a great article about the threat Digital Television poses to current digital recorders like Tivo and ReplayTV. As someone planning on buying a Tivo as soon as I can afford one, I read the article with extreme interest. Afterwards, I found myself muttering and ranting under my breath for a while. Some people [...]