La France se prépare son petit DMCA, ça promet.

Back to Google AdSense: there was a page I hadn’t read. And now it says thatAdWords ads may not appear on personal pages. Getting more and more confusing: is a blog with tens of thousands of daily readers (what? well, yeah, I’m talking about myself here, why? or maybe I’m just thinking about others, or maybe I’m just making stuff up) considered a personal page or not? And if they do exclude blogs (the FAQ also recommends to [p]lace ads on content pages that don’t change frequently, I feel kinda targeted by this), who else will be interested by their system?

I may not be getting their business model quite right. Especially since, so far, I’ve only seen Google ads on a few (highly popular, tech-centered) blogs. So what? I’m gonna end up having to write them for information, but… oh well, nah, that would be too demanding, and let’s say the weather’s too hot for that.

Using a hands-free phone while driving is just as dangerous as a regular phone, they say. Only trouble is, it seems they didn’t test a simple discussion with a car passenger, although it should pretty much yield the same results. And I can’t imagine a government passing a law to ban talking to your passengers while driving. At least not until cars are driven by robots.

via gizmodo.com

Google Adsense is Google’s latest strategy to capitalize both on their good reputation and their robots. And that’s neat. Except that their instructions aren’t so clear on many levels. The FAQ specifies that only sites in English can participate, even though this scripts gives me ads in French if I enter my site’s URL. Then, more confusing, they say they can work with webmasters from all over the world, but they ask for a Tax I.D. in order to pay them, and that doesn’t sound at all like something foreigners can give. Screwed.

So, in short, it sounds quite good, but I’m waiting until French bloggers test out the field for me and let me know how it goes. It’s up to them.

This can’t be true?! Damn, it can’t be true?! In OS X.3, they managed to put brushed steel as far as on the Finder?! Their designers have really lost grip at this point, and they’re beyond the point of no return. I’ll summarize by quoting Daring Fireball: Metallic Finder Windows: Good god, shoot me.

And there’s also that Windows -explorer-like sidebar, which I’m sure everyone could have done without. Has the three-pane, NeXT-inherited finder window completely disappeared in the process? If the point of it all is to make OS X look more and more like Windows, well, thanks but no thanks, I’ll stay on Windows with the Stardock software.

A nice idea: integrating Secure Empty Trash (which rewrites seven times over deleted files so they’re unrecoverable) directly in the system is quite interesting. By the way, if it doesn’t exist as a freeware Windows extension, it could: all it’d take would be to add an item in the trash’s context menu. Neat;

Exposé is a nice use of Quartz, that Microsoft should use as inspiration for Longhorn (whose graphics engine copies Quartz, basically generalizing Windows 2000/XP’s layered windows concept to the whole system). Since all windows are in bitmaps, you can scale them down and arrange them temporarily on the screen any way you like without messing with the user’s desktop arrangement. Great idea.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe they had to wait until OS X.3 to have a keyboard shortcut bringing the desktop forward. I never use the shortcut in Windows, but still. Well, I guess it’s a bit like the labels reappearing just about ten years after the switch from OS 9 from OS X…

via al.blog.typhon.net

Phonecam blogging: c’est pas si mal, cette technologie peut avoir un intérêt après tout [src]

Of standards (again), of their zealots attacking me, and the others defending me (yet they’re not nearly as many). Because, well, I don’t like to think there’s all this crap on my home page, so it’s been moved to the article’s long version. It’s already sad that I’m wasting my time with them, I’m not going to waste yours in addition.

Since I reinstalled Windows (on my brand new 80 GB hard disk, I don’t know if I mentioned that—now I could be editing hours and hours of DV on my computer, and I’m only missing… ideas), when I use Ctrl-Left or Ctrl-Right to move one word at a time in a Miranda dialog window, it considers accented letters like word separators. Like two word separators. So if I’m typing, for instance, prémédité (French words are funny, they’re full of accents), I have to press Ctrl-Left six times in order to reach the beginning of the word. I know nobody cares, because almost nobody uses those keyboard shortcuts, but I’d really like to know why, suddenly, on a new Windows, and while I’m using my previous Miranda installation (hence, no plugin or setup changes), it now behaves stupidly. I suppose I’ll have to reinstall Miranda in case it puts something in the registry, but I find that quite weird.