Download Squad

Ever wish you could go back to 1984 (and we mean the real 1984, no the other 1984)?

Now you can. Sort of. Run BASIC is a site that lets you relive those heady days of PEEKs and POKEs by giving you a place to run BASIC programs.

Actually, Run BASIC is based on Liberty BASIC, not the more familiar Apple or PC versions, so it only takes you back to 1992. But all your favorite command line and lo-res favorites are there, including hangman and HiLo. You can also write your own programs, or just dig out those old manuals.

This really geeked me out when I saw it. The thrill I got from flipping on our first //e, typing a few simple lines into the built-in BASIC interpreter, typing 'RUN,' and watching my programs actually begin to to something was what got me hooked on computers in the first place as a kid. Seeing how high the computer could count was always a favorite, as was anything that involved an infinite loop or GOTO sequence that left an END someplace other than the last line.

[via Chris]

The fourth annual Global Piracy Study, conducted by tech market research company IDC on behalf of the Business Software Alliance, was released this morning. The researchers estimate that again this year, 35% of all software on PCs worldwide is pirated. This is despite claimed advances in legitimate sales in traditional problem areas like China, where the government's decision to license operating systems and other software is uses on state-owned PCs has resulted in a 10% drop in three years (a drop from 92% to 82%, but still). Other developing markets, though, seem to be taking up the slack. Nearly one third of countries surveyed has piracy rates topping 75%, and while developing markets account for fully 30% of global PC sales, they only account for 10% of software revenue.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that, despite the world's lowest piracy rate--21%--the estimated value of pirated software in the US is the highest on the list. IDC estimates that the US accounts for US$7.3bn in piracy losses. That raises a red flag in my mind: are we really buying (or not) that much more software than other countries, or are we getting ripped off paying for software that sells for less elsewhere?

Even taken with the XXL grain of salt BSA funding requires, these are big numbers.

A couple of prominent web design gurus have announced a mini conference on "Web Browsers, Standards and Interop" during XTech 2007 in Paris on May 15th. The idea is to get browser vendors, web developers and designers all in the same room to spend a day talking about about how to make life easier for each other and, most importantly for website visitors. Ultimately, the organizers want a return to "the original platform and user agent agnostic vision of the Web."

That may sound like pie in the sky, but the organizers have made a good start: Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software have already committed to attending. Hopefully, the Apple WebKit developers and the KHTML team won't be far behind. Ideally, of course, some standards organizations would be involved, too. And who knows? Since this is all happening in Paris, some members of ISO and ECMA working groups just might stop by.

Personally, I'm excited about this. This conversation is about twelve years overdue. I don't expect to wake up on the morning of May 16th and discover that Trident and Gecko render CSS the same way, but it's a good first step in the right direction.

Yesterday afternoon, Flickr announced the release of a new feature that hard core Flickr users have been clamoring for for a while now: subsets or sets of sets. Or, as Flickr calls them, collections. Users can now build up large collections of pictures from building blocks of multiple sets, and even other collections. To differentiate them from regular sets when you're looking at them in the sidebar, collections have icons that are mosaics, with a number of pictures from the different sets that make up the collection.

As you can see from the screencap below, there are a couple of quirks. First, collections can only be nested 5 deep. for most people, this shouldn't be an issue, but some power users may hit that limit fairly quickly. Second, any collection can be composed of sets or other collections, but not both. That means if you have a collection and you want to create a new collection with that collection plus another set, you have to put the set into a collection first. There doesn't seem to be anything to stop you from creating a collection with a single set, so it's no big deal, but it is an extra bit of hassle, and it potentially costs you a layer of nested collections.

Finally, drag and drop editing of sets and mosaics doesn't seem to have the kinks worked out in Safari yet. When I clicked on the icons to arrange the mosaic on my test collection, the icons floated around the window nowhere near the mouse pointer. And the finished collection never showed up, even though everything looked fine. Firefox seems just fine, though.

Internet security watchdogs at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center are reporting two unrelated issues with the DST changeover on Windows platforms.

The first issue incolves isolated problems where clocks display incorrect times despite being patched for the new US Daylight Savings Time rules. Apparently the problem affects certain systems that were patched using directions from Microsoft the TZEdit.exe application or manual edits to the Registry. A patch is available from Microsoft here.

The second involves certain applications that rely on the TZ environment variable. a patch for that is available here.