Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Sneak Peak at IE7 -- 5:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Microsoft Watch dug up some dirt on Internet Explorer 7. The good news? It will include tabbed browsing and full PNG support so we can throw away GIFs forever. The bad? It seems like the days of IE's half-assed CSS support will still be with us. While nothing is set in stone, MS seems inclined to support some but not all of the CSS2 standard. IE7 will be available for WinXP, Windows Server 2003, and Longhorn--assuming that it is ever released. Still as a part-time web developer, I'm glad to see that IE is getting an update. IE6 is looking very long in the tooth. Thanks Slashdot.

"Get Firefox" Button -- 2:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

You may have noticed that a "Get Firefox" button is now on the menu on the left side of all of our pages. While I've tried to keep the layout of The Haus as browser-agnostic as possible, I prefer Firefox since it offers the best standards-compliance in the business. Interested in trying Firefox? Click on that button and tell them that The Haus sent you!

Billy "Wicked" Wilson, Dead at 33 -- 9:01 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GamingGroove announced that their founder (as well as the founder of Voodoo Extreme), Billy "Wicked" Wilson, is dead at the age of 33. The cause of death has not been announced, but there were always rumors of hard living on his part. Billy's sense of humor was, shall we say, an acquired taste but no one can deny that Voodoo Extreme was one of the more popular gaming sites back in the day. It just makes me feel old since I am almost four years his senior.

Monday, March 14, 2005

AIM Update -- 8:30 am CST, Update by The Master

AOL has commented on the furor raised over the AIM TOS changes made last week. You can see the follow-up on eWEEK. America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein had the following to say:

Such language is standard in almost all similar user agreements, including those from Microsoft and most online news publications. That clause simply lets the user know that content they post in a public area can be seen by other users and can be used by the owner of the site for other purposes . . . AIM user-to-user communication has been and will remain private"

While this makes me feel a lot better about the whole situation, it disturbs me that this type of language is becoming acceptable at a large ISP. What this seems to state is that anything you post into a "public" location on AOL does not have copyright protections from AOL or any AOL affiliate. If you write a utility, copyright it, and put it up on a website hosted by AOL, then AOL can repackage your program and sell it themselves (a "derivative work") and there's nothing you can do about it. I hope I'm wrong on this assumption.

A.T. Hun comments: While they may offer that as an explanation for the EULA, that is certainly not what it says. What Qbe said yesterday is true. Assume that everybody and their monkey can read anything that you post online or send via email or IM.

Past Two Days' News

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