Matthew Cruickshank

www.holloway.co.nz

No, cheese is good.

Oh yes. Copyright will change along with those expecting more flexibility from their media. The likes of EFF dislike how copyright is moving toward publisher's wants under the guise of artist rights - and they will change copyright law.

My beliefs are that when you've bought a CD - the physical CD media, you should also own a right to listen to those tracks (a license). Even if the media is destroyed. There should be no legal problem downloading other people digitised copies of the same music provided you have a licence.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has the belief that you do not have a right to use music in this way - you have only bought the physical media.

Listening to others' copies of the same song is wrong (I don't mean remastered or acoustic versions, I mean the same song). Now copyright only exists for things that can be sold by duplication - that's their very nature. It's always a song or a piece of art or some writing - and you buy a copy. I would like to see copyright move into licenses, rather than treating intellectual property like a product - which doesn't work when the media or format is so interchangeable.

As if biting my thumb at the platform entirely - I don't go online. I have tried stealing from others' websites, but I'm so completely incompetent at covering my tracks. It's obviously Glassdog ... but green, or AWOB with kittens.

The current Holloway is based on memories of the brightness at Cathedral Cove, and I was so happy when a reader guessed that. These days I find going for a walk and looking at things to be much more productive. Or off to the opportunity shop and their junk with imaginary scrollbars, or CD covers. The database-driven template look of some sites, it's cack.

I try to avoid that. But then commercial work demands it, bless them.

1. Massive radiation as a child.
2. The Velvet Underground.
3. It was a protest of gas prices at the time.
4. Fall of the Berlin Wall.
5. New Plymouth townships' slope toward the sea.
6. Pick one.

Stuart Campbell, because of his marvelous pants.

I'm repeatedly disappointed to read specifications of a free 21" monitor only to discover the owner lives in Bulgaria and it's three days trek behind huskies (ps. I pay postage). Freeboxen is undeveloped - a newsgroup could do an equally good job in its current state. It really does need location searching.

If anyone lives in Hamilton and wants a 4.2 Gig internal IDE, or what i'm told is a 1.2 Gig external SCSI HDD, project an image of goatse.cx on the cloudy night sky.

Netguide? ha! ...TV Guide, more like. I'm sure they're nice people (they are nice people) but their audience isn't those making things for the Internet, it is the users - and as such James Cameron's 'Titanic' will win (er, in website form). Their awards seem to be spawning into Emmy-like proportions: `Best beardy weirdy news page in a supported role`.. um, what? I'd rather not comment on specifics. When I won, I didn't deserve it.

I'm reading 'King Solomon's Ring' by Konrad Z. Lorenz, which is excellent. It's a detailed book about the nature of animals.

• http://kuro5hin.org
• http://metafilter.com
• http://my girlfriend's site.

Hi mom.

Cheaper bandwidth is a webdesigner turtl..bottleneck.

Americans, while at home, have been using cheap high-bandwidth connections to serve their own content for a year, maybe two. Low entry costs have resulted in lots of crap, but also wonderfully odd test-beds of new server-software and ideas and protocols.

I have read several (non-american) magazines proposing such things, and stating the apparent facts that with broadband came localised content. A favourite site of mine came out of this, www.advogato.org, and I tend to agree. That said, www.emale.co.nz bucks the trend of quality, and is quite a laugh.

I do mean usability in Flash, specifically, is the devil in trousers, and this is why:

1. Search engines cannot trawl through Flash, and many sites do not provide textural descriptions of the Flash content. The author should not have to work around the faults of Flash: that it does not provide a way of accessing the content aside from being viewed and played graphically. Similarly, visually impaired folk cannot use Flash - even if just to read the text within.
2. URLs for HTML content allow the selection of unique pages. This allows you to bookmark, or to write it down, or to send the URL to others. In a similar way to the complaints about HTML frames (the URL doesn't always reflect your current browsing) many designers put content which normally would span an entire site in a single file. You cannot ask the flash file to advance to 8:40 via the URL. There is no simple way to export a Flash movie into separate scenes (read: files).
3. Dynamically created flash? I certainly haven't seen it. You can't have a database-backed flash animation with customised content - I think. Flash is suitable for it's original purpose, animation, but the format's structural failings prevent anyone from making an entire site (as you suggest). It has it's niche for websites: advertising companies with goofy stock photos, and General Motors, but that's it. Macromedia, the creators of Flash, are talking about usability for Flash and trying to educate authors but their software does not help. When the tools for competing vector standards such as SVG mature, Flash will be over.

I operate a fruit stall outside Te Kuiti. It's called eFruit@TeKuiti 2000 Limited. We give away free fruit, and our business model is based on banner impressions.