MPAA: “Pirating is bad – unless we do it”

Oops.  So much for the “ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences.” stance of the MPAA.  The MPAA claims they pirated the film because they were concerned about their employees’ safety.  Read the whole article for the details.

As The Consumerist notes, “If you’re really worried about the well-being of your employees, you call the police, end of story.”

[tags]Piracy, MPAA, Hypocrisy[/tags]

Joel on great design

Joel is another favorite of mine.  Like Paul Graham, almost anything he writes I find interesting.  His specialty is design.  Or at least, most of his writing that I read is about design.  If you do interface design, Joel’s latest column should be of interest to you.  I don’t do interface design because I stink at it.  Thanks to Joel, though, I can at least recognize bad design, and sometimes even make suggestions to improve things.

Here’s a great part of his column:

Here’s why I’m afraid to turn off my cell phone: because I can’t always seem to muster the brain cells necessary to turn it back on.

It has two buttons on it, a happy green button and a scary red button. They have funny icons on them that don’t mean very much to me.

You might think that the green button turns it on. Green means go, right?

Wrong.

[tags]Joel, Software, design[/tags]

Paul Graham:How to do what you love

I’ve never seen a Paul Graham article that wasn’t a great read.  His latest, as noted in the above header, is “How to do what you love.”  As always, he covers lots, and it does take a little while to read.  But it’s as good as all his other stuff.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

[tags]Paul Graham, work[/tags]

Bush presidency as an adventure game

Sure to offend some, I looked at it as not to serious a post.  Over at DefectiveYeti, there is a fun post covering some highlights of the Bush presidency as an old Infocom-style adventure game.  The comments reflect both sides of the political spectrum, but no one seems to get too upset by the post.

[tags]Bush, Infocom, adventure, game[/tags]

Oblivion nearly ready

Nice write-up from Bethesda on what’s going to be in the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion packaging.  The important part for fans is to note that whether you get the regular or collector’s edition, you are getting the game on DVD.  That’s right – it’s only available on DVD.  Almost everyone I know has a DVD drive, so I doubt that people who have a computer capable of playing Oblivion will have an issue with this requirement, but it needs to be pointed out, just in case someone wants the game and hasn’t gotten a DVD drive yet.