Linkdump: Ethics and Other Obsolete Things

By Evan — — Miscellany

Today’s linkdump is brought to you by Simon Willison. Simon, now my list of links links to your list of lists of links.

  • Wilcox High School sacrifices its football season on principle. “He said, flat out, a rule was broken and even though it’s not our fault we’d have to pay the consequences,” senior captain Anthony Reyes said of [Coach] Freitas’ address to the team. “It broke my heart. I’ve been waiting for this for four years. We were on top of everything, and it all got swept away.”

    I agree, it truly is heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, this is a time to be more proud of our alma mater than ever.

  • History of FrameMaker. I had no idea that Sun Microsystems had such a significant role in FrameMaker’s early history. Incidentally, reliable sources report that Sun has dropped internal support for FrameMaker on Solaris and is forcing its tech writers to move to StarOffice. Speaking for all my fellow tech writers, I think this is a fabulous idea. Now Sun will need twice the number of writers to accomplish the same amount of work. Ladies and gentlemen, send in those resumes!

  • The Wingnut Debate Dictionary. Cute, but I like the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 a bit better.

  • The RCA SelectaVision VideoDisc Web Site. My family rarely makes good technology choices. Case in point: the RCA VideoDisc player. Back in the day, you had two choices for watching movies at home: videotapes, and videodiscs (not to be confused with another dead technology, laser discs). Videodiscs had a number of disadvantages. They were far bulkier than tapes. You couldn’t record on them. They held less than an hour of material per side, which meant that halfway through the movie, you’d have to get up and flip the disk.[1](This was back before the days of the remote control, so we didn’t mind so much.) The VideoDisc player’s main advantage was that it cost about a third of what a video tape player did. Unfortunately that cost advantage evaporated in a few short years, and with it, the VideoDisk player market. I should note that my family did clean up when all the video stores started dumping their discs for $1-2 a piece. My folks still have the player, and for all I know it still works. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad investment after all.

  • Analysis of the Voyager Record (hat tip: my second cousin Andrew). How do you convince an alien race that they’re holding an artifact produced by another intelligent species? That Carl Sagan was one smart cookie. Plus he looked sharp in a turtleneck.

1. I remember that when I watched the Count of Monte Cristo, I accidentally started the movie on side 2 of disc 1. I spent most of the movie wondering, “Who is this mysterious Count of Monte Cristo? And why is he so pissed off?” I had completely skipped the whole Chateau D’If / Edmund Dantes part. Come to think of it, this might be the preferred way to see the Count of Monte Cristo.

One thought on “Linkdump: Ethics and Other Obsolete Things”

  1. When I was in high school, my mother was taking a class at the local college on film, so every Friday we’d go watch a foreign film together. Wouldn’t you know it, one film from Senegal (about a revolution and tribal dancing, I think) got the same treatment as your Count of Monte Cristo. (Well, not the Count, the disc.) We only realized it because the title came up on reel 3. =-)

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