“Napster may go by the wayside because it may just sell out. That’s apparently what’s going on now. But people will continue to find ways to share the music that has affected them. With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there’s a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn’t let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music. Fuck ’em. ”

“This article follows the process of recording the material to the hard disk, editing and filtering it with signal processing software, and finally creating an audio CD from the results, complete with custom covers for the jewel case. I’ll present and describe the tools used in each stage of the process, and I’ll explain how you too can turn your computer into a powerful audio CD mastering machine, using only free
and open-source Linux software.”

“The stranger has been a fundamental touchstone of cultures at least since Abraham and Sarah invited
weary road travelers into their tent only to find out that they were angels in disguise. The Odyssey, too, is a meditation on strangers and hospitality: Odysseus experiences different ways of being a stranger on his way home while the suitors abuse every rule of hospitality in his own house. It’s easy to see why strangers are so important: a culture’s attitude towards them expresses its understanding of its position in the world of social groups. In our culture, we’re suspicious of strangers. They’re a threat. They lurk in shadows. On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web. They are what give the Web its matter, its shape, its value. Rather than hiding in our tents and declaring our world to exist of the other tents near us – preferably with a nice tall wall around us – the Web explicitly is a world only because of the presence of so many strangers.”

“As market demands get greater, traditional software engineering is marching full force into the web world. Out go the scripting hackers and in move the systems architects armed with J2EE specification and CORBA components and distributed transaction monitors and with all of that their software lifecycle methods such as Rational Unified Process. RUP is held up by many to be the silver bullet for object oriented success. Rational are pushing their business into the “.com” enterprise. However, several
authors have expressed concern about the effect that RUP might have on the User Experience. Here is some of the latest analysis… ”