Movable Type released v2 on March 20. No blog cloning yet, though :-(, although automatic thumbnails are there. (I played around with Radio Userland 7 and Movabletype briefly before cooking up my own system for ChaosZone!)

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CNN: Playboy seeks ‘Women of Enron’.

Playboy is hoping to entice some of the women who lost their shirts in the Enron scandal to reveal a little bit more.

“That’s rich,” said Deborah DeFforge, co-chairwoman of the Severed Enron Employees Coalition. “We’ve had so much depressing news or stressful news, and then to all of a sudden come up with something like that, it’s kind of cute.”

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Message to Userland: get a graphic artist, guys, and lose that ugly white patch around the OPML coffee mug. (btw, you sure Sun hasn’t patented coffee mugs ?)

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Visual Studio.NET Pricing: over one thousand dollars for the Professional edition and two-and-a-half thousand dollars for the Enterprise Architect edition. (The .NET SDK, which has C++, C#, VB and JScript compilers plus online help, a debugger and a profiler is, of course, free.) I don’t mind the high-end pricing, most corporations will buy into it. What disturbs me is that developers and ‘hobbyists’ (msft term, that) who like to program at home, in their spare time, are getting locked out of the GUI game because of this ridiculous pricing scheme. That’s a shame, because availability of good tools was always a plus point for Microsoft. This is a serious opportunity for things like Borland JBuilder Personal Edition and KDevelop to build up some mindshare.

The standard editions (Visual C#, Visual Basic, et al) are pretty affordable, though, at $109 apiece. Haven’t used them, though — so can’t say how good they are, though I suspect they’ll let you create forms-based apps with minimum fuss.

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There’s some talk about cloning the Radio Community Server in Python and Java these days. RCS is already free, cloning a free add-in to a $40 product doesn’t make too much sense. Of course, if it turned out well, Frontier sales could be in trouble. The miracle of all of this, at least for Userland, is that not too many people are interested in cloning Radio itself. Fortunately from Userland’s perspective, Radio is so *cheap* that it’s probably not worth it to clone the thing — buying it (and getting ad-free webspace to host your blog, plus a groovy scripting environment) is a much better proposition.

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There are days when you just have to quote Dave. [On TiVO]: A note to Eisner and the other filthy bastards who think I’m a pirate, I pay $60 per month for this service. And I largely use it to watch stuff that’s broadcast over the public airwaves for $0. Go figure.

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USS Clueless:

It took a direct order by Emperor Hirohito to make it happen. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he finally bestirred himself and ordered a surrender. And with that, the entire martial tradition shattered like broken glass. The influence of the samurai on Japan was destroyed forever, and Japan is now ruled by its merchants, as are the Western nations.

It took a crisis of faith; it required the people of Japan to believe that they were defeated. They had to give up a thousand years of cultural chauvinism, to accept deep within themselves that their culture was inferior in practice, and had to be replaced.

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From the newly discovered blogs dept: The Kolkata Libertarian.

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Lee Jeans commercial: say hello to happiness. Weird.

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John Robb: If we had copyright term reform, we could see a world where people carry around the Library of Congress — legally — on their laptop.

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