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And now a public service message from the Rolling Stones.

YMMV, but I've been watching these stones for fifty years and they move around quite a lot.

Lame. Companies need to understand that fan-made content extends product life and popularity, and keeps their product selling off the shelves.

Guess the kids are going to have to be old-school guitar heroes, playing their real guitars along to illegally downloaded MP3s of their favourite songs. Maybe they'll even develop real talents of their own, instead of making burned-out has-been rock star geezers even richer.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

"And who are these archaic groups?"

Right here

Actually, Great Britain and Ireland produce far superior music. Movies and software? Well, considering that the majority of software development is now offshored and Hollywood is resorting to remakes of old TV shows and films to make a quick buck, I'd argue against that as well.

At the same time, Lucas himself will concentrate on a long-suppressed ambition to make smaller films, even documentaries.

So who the heck has heard of Bill Wyman?

And why would anyone care about the former Rolling Stone?

His use of the domain name for individual promotion isn't any more critical to his career than the present owner. It certainly wasn't important enough for him to register it when it was available.

Perhaps he could learn a lesson from his former band mates? The Rolling Stones are well known, but nonetheless they've certainly have a reasonable understanding with the magazine of the same name.

Why couldn't the *former* member compromise about this as well (especially since the owner was born wtih that name)? billwyman.org or williamwyman.com or any of a dozen variants are readily available.