Matthew Gifford

Slashdot reports that Yahoo will be using PHP for all new development. Hopefully this will give some credibility to the language. I don’t understand why it has such a bad reputation.

Hilary Rosen of the RIAA took part in a debate about music sharing (Boing Boing) at Oxford University on Thursday. Of course, since the audience was largely college students, her side was trounced in the voting.

In other news, Kid Rock starves to death due to mp3 piracy.

The RIAA, MPAA, and songwriters’ associations are drafting a letter intended to scare CIOs into cracking down on piracy on their networks by vaguely threatening them with litigation. It’s only a matter of time before they start sending copyright thugs from business to business like the Business Software Alliance does.

This is so wrong. More here.

But tight IT budgets mean that Web services are being used merely as integration tools, said IDC, noting that “most of the Web services vision is just pure speculation.”

What a bunch of crap (Scripting News). Anyone who listens to this kind of advice is going to miss the boat.

Dave Winer on baseball and men:

It may be male hormones that makes us such suckers for the schmaltz, or it might be the male heart, that loves the greatness of his gender and finds today so few ways to express it.

Dan Shafer’s followup is good reading, too.

It’s really a shame that so many people fail to appreciate the sport these days.

Notre Dame is number three in the first BCS rankings. It’s amazing what a real coach can do for a team.

Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation is building an open source, cross-platform, serverless personal information manager (Aaron Swartz). Check out the feature list.

A couple weeks ago I ended a post with this rather vague statement:

The nature of the Internet is to make the cost of disseminating ideas virtually zero. … I think this is what’s really at the center of the push by the MPAA and RIAA’s attempts to save themselves through legislation. It’s not really about copyright. It’s about keeping the gates closed.

Conveniently, Richard Menta has written an article that says it better than I could.

Aaron Swartz has posted the transcript of the oral argument from Eldred v. Ashcroft.