The creation of these fonts truly was a significant event. The design approach taken by Carter was a departure from tradional type design. Daniel Will-Harris has a great article on this theme, including an interview with Carter:

• Georgia & Verdana Typefaces designed for the screen (finally)

The following is a short excerpt:

In graphic design circles, people think of screen fonts as preview mode--it's only when the toner hits the wood-pulp that we usually judge a typeface.

But that's an increasingly short-sighted view of life. Larger numbers of computer users spend their entire time in front of a screen and never (or seldom) print anything. So it became obvious to us that this was a reversal of priorities--we should not approach this as one of doing printer fonts adapted for the screen, we should design them as screen fonts from the outset, the printer fonts are secondary in this case.

In the past I've been burned starting from outlines and trying to be extra clever in the hinting. So I finally deciding, ‘I'm better off grasping the nettle. What's most important is to get the bitmaps right at the sizes people use most often.'

Because Microsoft makes these fonts available for free, I don't see any reason not to use them. Indeed, Verdana includes 893 glyphs, which represents a fairly large subset of Unicode characters, including all Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters. That's a much larger subset of Unicode than most other fonts provide.

The following links provide more information about Verdana and Georgia:

• Verdana information from Microsoft
• Georgia information from Microsoft
• Channel Verdana

Others would do well to follow ZDNet's example. Specifically, keep their videos short, relevant, and pithy. And put a human face on it. I think these whiteboard presentations could be much more effective than a buzz-word-laden white paper.

If you get a chance, do have a look. Some of my favorites include Microsoft's Dilemma, The Google Galaxy, and SEO 101.

According to the thinking of this group, your "attention data" is valuable, and you should have the right to control it. Attention data is the record of your past online activities that indicate where your attention has been. Attention data has predictive power, which is why it's valuable to advertisers -- they want to know what will grab your attention and what you will immediately dismiss. Above all, AttentionTrust.org believes you should have the right to control how your attention data is used, and even negotiate the terms for its use.

Recently, one of the directors of AttentionTrust.org has launched a new company called Root Markets, with plans to build a business around attention data. The concept of the business is abstract, but the basic idea is to act as a broker of attention data.

This all seems incredibly abstract to me. And so, I have to ask this question: Can AttentionTrust.org and Root Markets gain any broad acceptance if the "attention" of the average person does not include an interest in attention data? The point is this: the ideas of "attention" are far too abstract to be of any interest to the average person.

Why?

Control-S, and "manual save," are so natural, we never stop to think about whether it really makes sense. But if you do stop and think about it, I think you'll agree with me that we really don't need it.

A world without Control-S is a different world. When you make a change to a document, the application stores that change immediately. The upside is that you never lose your work because of a crash or power failure. At first, it may seem like the downside is that you can't undo, but that's not the case. All modern desktop applications support multiple undos. The downside really is just that you may have to perform a lot of undos to get back to the place you want. So, in the end, it comes down to what is more important: never losing any work or having to do multiple undos to go back to a previous document state. I think it's time to rethink Control-S. A good alternative might be a "Save a Copy" menu item, which allows you to save a snap shot, or a "Create Checkpoint" menu item, which saves a named checkpoint somewhere, possibly even in the document itself.

For more reading, check out Michael Feathers article entitled I'm Tired Of Saving! Michael suggests that the IDEs used by software developers could not only do away with Control-S, but could also run test suites in the background and provide instant feedback about any problems in the code. This is a step beyond just checking the syntax in the background.

O'reilly is a popular publisher among techies, and deservedly so.

One of the valuable services O'Reilly provides is the Open Books Project. This project provides books online for free. There are many reasons O'Reilly has made these books free. Some books have outlived their economic viability, meaning that O'Reilly would not recover the expense of another printing. Some books are free because the author(s) negotiated a deal that required that they be free online. Some books are free for still other reasons. Even though these books are free, you may buy the printed book versions from O'Reilly.

Some of the most interesting books include:

• DocBook: The Definitive Guide
• Version Control with Subversion
• Creating Applications with Mozilla
• MySQL Reference Manual

The Open Books Project web site is worth knowing about, as it can save you a few bucks. However, if you are like me, sometimes you will still pay for the printed book because you prefer reading on the living room couch, or on a plane, or someplace other than a computer.

Every few months, there is a discussion on the IETF general mailing list about the format of RFCs. The result is almost always the same: we'll continue to publish plain text RFCs, but we'll keep an open mind.

Well, a few years back, Marshall Rose and friends created a tool named xml2rfc that converts a certain XML format into the standard plain text RFC format. In addition, the tool converts the XML to HTML. (There are similar tools that convert from nroff and from Microsoft Word into plain text RFCs, but not HTML.) This made the text-only side happy, and it allowed the plain-text-sucks side to be happy, too.

The problem is, not all RFC authors use the xml2rfc tool, and they continue to create only plain text RFCs. For those of us who prefer to read HTML in a browser instead of plain text in a text editor, it's helpful to know which RFCs are available as HTML, and where to find the HTML version. It turns out that the developers who created xml2rfc wanted the RFCs linked together, so they created a database for RFCs. The xml2rfc tool checks the database to find the link targets for referenced RFCs. You can check that database yourself if you want to see if a particular RFC has an HTML version. You can get the database as a zip file or just visit the directory.

As a side note, there are a lot of RFCs converted to pseudo-HTML, which are available at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/. These "HTML" RFCs are basically text with <pre> tags around them.

I have felt for a long time that XML schema is ugly and useless. It's ugly because it is so difficult to read. Most published documents, even Word documents, don't publish the XML Schema with syntax highlighting, which would certainly help. But if it's hard to read, at least it's machine readable, right? True, but it's rare for anyone to use validation tools with a published XML Schema. The published schema is often just for human consumption.

Now, however, I feel that my feelings have been affirmed. The following is quoted from an email by Tim Bray:

Many people in the XML community - I hesitate to say consensus, but would claim at least a plurality - feel that [Relax NG] is substantially technically superior to both DTDs and W3C XML Schemas. ... W3C XML Schema is a profoundly bad design which exhibits very poor comprehensibility and interoperability.

So, at least in Tim's opinion, Relax NG should be the way forward.

Read Tim's complete email in the archive. It's a short but interesting read.

But isn't this backwards from the other popular distribution model? What about cable TV? Imagine Comcast telling Disney that it must pay to use Comcast's cable lines. No, in the cable TV business, the cable company pays the content company. Comcast's cable lines have no value without the content. So, perhaps someone should ask Mr. Whitacre why his situation is any different.

"We definitely believe that subscription is the model that most people will adopt," said Shannon Ferguson, director of Yahoo Music Europe.

I don't know what most people will adopt. Some people will definitely sign up for a subscription service. A paid subscription service is not much different from a paid radio service, like XM Radio or Sirius. The difference is that with a music subscription service, you pick your own playlist. With a paid radio service, someone else picks the playlist.

Then, it occurred to me: doesn't the music subscription service diminish the perceived value of the music? Even though it's a paid service, it's so much like just listening to the radio, which is free. The monthly subscription fee is small. In return for paying, you get to listen without advertisements.

Much of the value of music comes from having something -- something you can hold. What if, ten years from now, there are no new CDs manufactured? What if the only way to get music is to download it from the Internet? Will music still have its perceived value?

I'll suggest an answer to the last question. There may be no value attributed to the music. Instead, the value will be attributed to the service itself. In other words, we won't be thinking, "Is this song worth $X to me?" Instead, we will be thinking, "Is this service worth $X a month to me?"

Verso Introduces Carrier Grade Skype™ Filtering Technology

The announced network "filter" would enable ISPs to control the kind of content that may be conveyed through the networks they own (and "lease" to their customers).

Who could possibly feel threatened by Skype? Skype is relatively low bandwidth. I don't know for sure, but I would guess that Skype uses less than 64 kbs. Besides, with Skype being free, one would think that ISPs would tout Skype as a feature, like email, blogging tools, etc. It seems odd that Verso would advertise that the product is targeted at Skype, when there are worse applications from the perspective of an ISP.

The whole issue of ISPs policing the use of their networks -- allowing some applications and disallowing others -- is controversial. Don't expect anything Draconian from the ISPs. They would never get away with blocking applications willy nilly. For example, a cable internet service provider like Comcast, which charges $55 per month and offers 3 Mbs downstream, would never get away with blocking Skype. However, we should expect situations where the ISP makes a stonger case in favor of blocking. Consider an MVNO (mobile virtual network provider) that would like to provide basic wireless email access, in the model of the Blackberry, that wants to block Internet phone calls.

I still think one of the best ways to learn conversational German, other than spending time in Germany, is to watch videos of TV shows in German. For $40 you can get a DVD drive for your PC, set it to Region 2 encoding, and watch videos in German. (PAL videos play just fine on a PC.) You can order the videos from amazon.de. Shipping costs about $20. I prefer videos that have both English and German language audio tracks. When I watch the show in English, I understand everything. Then when I watch the show in German, it's easier to catch the German words because I already understand the meaning and I am aware of the context. However, I usually watch the show first in German because it's more challenging.

Enter the IM Federation, which is pushing just such a model. The federation is based on the XMPP standards for IM, which is based on Jabber. Since Google's IM, called Google Talk, will use XMPP, the IM Federation should get noticed.

In the other corner are Microsoft an Yahoo, who announced that they will connect their IM networks. Interestingly, this combined Microsoft and Yahoo network will also be based on open standards, namely, SIP and SIMPLE.

The question remains, though: will there be spim (Spam through Instant Messaging)?

Reflecting on the movie, I think it's interesting that the Republic's technology was so unevenly developed. They built tremendously advanced spaceships and weapons, while their medical technology seemed lacking. In particular, I had to wonder: If Anakin Skywalker had been told of the promise of stem cell research, perhaps he would not have gone to the dark side. Perhaps advanced stem cell technology could have been used to grow him new legs, lungs, etc. too.

• Consumers — Production and distribution costs have fallen. Pass the savings on to us. We want inexpensive (or free) music.
• Big record labels — Don't ruin our past profitable offerings. We'll take the status quo, thank you.
• Indy labels — Finally, more money for us?
• Superstar artists — We deserve to make millions. Don't ruin it for us.
• Artists — Pay us our share of royalties.
• Artists' agents — We get our share, too.
• Song writers &mdash Pay us our share of royalties.
• Music publishers — Pay us our share of royalties.
• Consumer electronics manufacturers — New products, new revenue streams.
• Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology providers — Pay us our patent royalties.
• Codec technology providers — Pay us our patent royalties.
• Operating system vendors — You need us. You must pay our tax. One day we'll own you.
• Online music sellers — We think there's profit in there for us.
• Politicians — Money talks.

In a steady state, the pie gets divided up. Perhaps some parties are not happy, but everyone gets his share. But when new technology comes along, the steady state gets shaken, it turns into a free-for-all grab. Eventually, we will get back to a steady state once again. But we won't get there until the fight over how the pie gets divided plays out.

Sometimes greed keeps us from sharing and enjoying abundant wealth.