Finally I remember to post about this nifty little program. Does anyone still say nifty anymore? Perhaps that’s too laid back for something that is so damn gorgeous.

EarthView places the entire globe on your desktop in a customisable form. It has some kind of funky hi-res texture map for the entire globe (’1km detail’ in the trial version, ie 1 km for every pixel). You won’t be spying on your neighbours but this isn’t GoogleEarth, this is all about surveilling the majesty of the globe from your desktop like some almighty space-jeweller. During the day the continents glow in the the sun, night veils the continents in the (realtime) shadow, and the world lights up with millions of homes illuminated.

Then you can do all kinds of nifty (what) things like zooming in by 100% or so to bring it into nice detail over your favourite patch of land, and adding a classy starfield affect, and showing locations and times. The full version can even - with a cheap annual subscription - download real satellite cloud photos and digitise them over the top (in the shot I have lower-res faux-clouds enabled).

I’m sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch, but you can trial it free for 14 days so I don’t feel particularly shameful. And I sincerely recommend downloading the higher detail texture files if you’re going to get up close and personal like I have.

little eye on the world indeed.

“High Court rejects itunes.co.uk dispute review.

Internet domain names registrar Nominet has been handed a victory in its court case with entrepreneur Benjamin Cohen, who had disputed a Nominet ruling ordering him to give the iTunes.co.uk address to Apple.”

Likely not the final move in the ongoing saga between Ben Cohen and Nominet/Apple, but one that disappointed me.

The dispute has been running so long now that even though I have kept in touch with it I struggle to recall each and every back-and-forth in its history, but I’ve always thought from the outset that Cohen has been manhandled by the courts, Apple and Nominet. Let’s check out the score:

2000, November - Cohen registers the domain for his own business when itunes itself wasn’t in existence, let alone in the UK.
2001, January - itunes comes into existence.
2004, October - Cohen offers to sell the domain to Napster, Apple’s rival, who he was already redirecting 4000 hits to, per day. They declined.

Apple offered him $5000 for it, but he declined and asked for an extra zero on the end. Apple declined.

2005, March - Nominet rules that itunes.co.uk should go to Apple saying that the domain registration was ‘abusive’ (formally cyber-squatting) and that Apple had rights to the brand.

This is despite the fact that he registered it in 2000. Yeah, what?

That would have been the final straw but Cohen made a challenge to Nominet’s impartiality, claiming they had a bias against smaller parties. Today’s decision overturns that.

The www.itunes.co.uk URL currently redirects to www.apple.com/uk/itunes.

It’s Phriday again: “So the concept is taking a book/movie/TV show, and switching the title with that of another unrelated piece of work, but the title has to work just as well or better than the original title…”

..and it only took a couple of hours.

This was a little quicker.

The current in-production thread is located here, and very amusing it is too.