Josh-Kerr.com

If you’ve been hiding under a rock you probably don’t know what the RIAA is.  The RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, is the group of people that have been suing the pants off of people for “pirating music” and for copyright infringement.  The RIAA became widely known when it sued Napster back in 2000.  Later the RIAA announced that it would start suing individuals who download/distribute its music.  So far there have been over 14,800 lawsuits filed and around 3,400 reached a settlement.  Essentially the RIAA is suing to protect is “intellectual property rights” but they’re in a loose-loose situation.

Let me start out by saying that I actually agree with the RIAA decision to sue Napster for copyright infringement.  Let’s face it, Napster was illegal!  Trading music back and forth for FREE is a form of copyright infringement.  Why this caused so much controversy was because the web really had and still has no control.  Napster was a great idea, trade files for free.  Problem being that it was trading copyrighted material.  So you have all these people who think everything is great because they’re getting something for free and then the “big bad” RIAA comes along and shuts it down.  Death to the RIAA the masses screamed for cancelling an illegal service.  However since it was free and “uncontrolled” people got used to the idea that music should be free.  That idea is a loss for the RIAA.

So after suing Napster the RIAA decides to start suing its customers.  I DO NOT agree with this decision.  Sure they’re loosing some money due to P2P services out there but the amount that they’re loosing is minimal.  What gets me is the fact that they decide to sue for an un-godly amount of money.  It’s a bully technique sure but who are they trying to bully?  Their customers!  Piss of your customers and you’ll loose them.  Those customers who “leave” the RIAA are the ones who then go and download music illegally.  Hence the RIAA is in a loose-loose situation.  They’re loosing money but when they sue they’re pissing off their customers so much that they actually want to rip them off!  I don’t have a solution for them, that’s why it’s called a loose-loose situation but the suing needs to stop.

I will recommend to those that do “steal” music to check out iTunes or a similar site.  I know people that have moved to iTunes to buy music because it’s cheap.  Unfortunately you can’t get away from the RIAA since iTunes pays royalty fees to the RIAA but the idea is great.  Pay a little bit of money and you can get music that you want.  You don’t have to go spend $18 on a crappy CD when all you want is one song.

Part of my job is developing a website that will be ran on a Treo 650. The Treo is a cool palm pilot/cell phone that runs for about $600 if you’re interested. What makes devloping this website so much fun is that the Treo uses a browser called Blazer. Blazer is actually a decent browser for a palm. It has HTML 4.0, XHTML, XML, CSS 1.0/2.0, and Javascript 1.5 support. The Javascript support is debateable in my oppinion considering some simple scripts don’t work while others do but it does have some support. One of the most anoying things about Blazer is the way that it handles tables. You can create a table, specify the width, border, cell padding/spacing, etc all you want. Won’t actually do you any good but you can specify it. Table borders are the only thing that seems to work correctly! Another annoyance, however needed, is the way that selects, drop down lists and lists, are displayed. Sure it has to render the selects but why can I not specify the width?! Something like

<select name="name" size="2" style="width: 20px">

<option>1</option>

<option>2</option>

<option>some really long text goes here!!!!</option>

</select>

would work fine on just about any browser. However when it’s rendered it still takes the full required length! There are other things that are annoying but are just small quirks that I won’t go into full detail right now. Check out the simulator if you’re interested.