| Sunday, December 1, 2002 |
03:16 - Sore Thumb
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/12/EuropeanDecline.shtml
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Where is Europe's Intel? Where is Europe's Microsoft? Where is their IBM? Their Dell? Their Applied Material?
It's tunnel vision on my part, it's nit-picking; I know it is. But I just couldn't help-- couldn't help but notice the conspicuous absence of a particular company whose mention would only have helped bolster the overall point of this article.
Guess this is what Apple gets for placing a high value, throughout its life, on internationalization, separable text strings and multi-forked apps and files for easy localization, and a unified text input system extensible to pretty much all the world's languages, years and years ago. That's what disqualifies them from being exemplary of ingenious innovative American companies: they're not Ameri-centric enough.
Yes, yes, I'm being facetious. But c'mon. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders where Europe's Apple is, in the same context.
Anyway, I note that some companies that aren't mentioned by Den Beste are the Content Czars: AT&T, Verizon, Bertelsmann, Amazon, Disney. They're truly entities which know nor respect no national bounds-- they are nations unto themselves, operating under rules they write for themselves, using technology developed by others (or for other purposes). Microsoft wants to be in among these, but Apple doesn't-- it sees the value of front-loading the cost of a product or service so the customer doesn't have to contend with it on a daily basis. The price of entry is high so the price of usage is low, monetarily as well as in terms of annoyance. Apple gets this, and Lileks gets that:
Five: launching too soon. I admire the idea; I will welcome it, some day. I like to take pictures. I like to take movies, listen to music while mobile, make calls, play games. But I am utterly certain that the devices they are offering, and the service on which they depend, is inferior in every way to the tools I have now. My iPod: more capacity, no bandwidth charges. My camcorder: high-quality video, and reasonable quality stills. My camera: high quality pictures. My cellphone: itll do. I would rather tote four devices that perform separate functions extremely well than carry one device that does everything poorly.
Yup. True, this leads to utility-belt-ism; but for some, that's not a problem (the more gadgets, the merrier); and for others, like me, you don't need all your gadgets at once, nor does a single person need to own every gadget and its functionality. I rely on my iPod to regulate my heartbeat and breathing, but I only carry my camera when I'm going somewhere where I'll want to take pictures-- and it'll be a dark, windy, rainy day in Hell before I'm caught in one of those clinics where for a paltry few thousand simoleons they take a few inches out of your head (possibly by removing the middle section) so a three-inch cell phone can reach from your ear to your mouth without your having to shout for everyone else in the line at Taco Bell to absorb every word of your side of the conversation.
Anyway, I don't mean to pick nits or appear as though there's only one issue that I ever think about, be it appropriate or not. But hey-- it's 3:15 AM, and vacation's over-- I gotta get up in a few hours to trudge back into the bit mines. What am I supposed to do-- sleep, or something?
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22:44 - Just a random note
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There's one nice thing about motorcycles, I have to say.
It's that when you're sitting on a motorcycle, you're sitting up high enough off the ground that your rear-view mirrors don't blind you when some SUV-driving fuckbucket RIDES YOUR BUMPER ALL THE WAY BACK HOME FROM THE PIZZA PLACE WITH HIS HIGH BEAMS ON, COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS TO THE FACT EVEN THOUGH I'M WAVING MY ARMS IN FRONT OF MY EYES IN THE FULL BROAD BEAM OF THE LIGHTS SO I KNOW HE CAN SEE THEM...
... Right. Yeah.
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19:25 - Sunset on Mt. Hamilton
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Whether it's a long holiday weekend or not, Sunday seems to be turning out to be the day almost every week when I get to go out and do something visually satisfying-- sometimes it's taking in the latest movies with friends, but more often it's just me doing something on my own, something I can enjoy by myself and absorb the visuals (or take pictures) so I can repackage them and publish the results so anybody who happens to be interested (hey, it could happen) can take some kind of third-hand part in it.
Sure, it'd be nicer to do these things with somebody. But if I did, then somehow the visual record wouldn't seem to me like something I should multiplex out to the world, or try to frame as some kind of Greetings From Sunny California pamphlet to showcase why I live here. It's this way with movies too, though-- I like to see things on my own, and then I can tell everybody at once what I thought. The alternative is to share it with someone at the time, and then not have anything left to talk about after discussing and absorbing it face-to-face.
So if you take Quimby Road up into the mountains from behind my house, drop down over the crest into the Grant Lake valley, and then follow the road as it rises back up the other side again, you'll find yourself aimed squarely at Mt. Hamilton, home of Lick Observatory. The road is a favorite of motorcyclists, but while this was the first day in months that I've had the opportunity to just head out into the hills while the sun was still up (one reason I'm not wild about winter), for most other bikers this is way far into the off-season. So I had very little company on the road for most of the fifteen miles of hairpin turns and switchbacks filled with little piles of rubble that had fallen from the cliffs that the road winds around.
(By the way-- no, I didn't have my iPod with me this time. It would've been kinda neat to get a photo for the iPodLounge.com "iPods Around the World" gallery, but there's not a lot of room in a motorcycle helmet for headphones or earbuds. Nor would such a thing be very safe.)
Today wasn't the greatest day for picture-taking, unfortunately. (Hey, we can't be choosers, we who wake up so late we get four hours of sunlight on weekend days during winter.) There was a big inversion layer over the whole Bay Area, the kind that completely blankets the region and makes any kind of long-distance panorama viewing an exercise in glum futility. (The clearest air happens in spring and summer-- and oh, such air it is.) But all was not lost! If you're facing away from the sinking sun, up into the hills, the quality of the light is something to behold in and of itself. I've always been a sucker for sunlit hills against a dark cloudy backdrop; somehow it just seems so cool. And today was no exception, inversion layer or no inversion layer. The sun streamed in between the little knobby foothills and made dusty visible rays through the oak branches; it lit up the dry grass covering the hills and turned them bright gold against the dull dark gray of the sky behind. And for most of the way up, there weren't any other road warriors-- either on two wheels or four-- pushing me up the hill, their engines grumbling at my pathetic slowness. (Hey, c'mon, guys... I'm still getting my legs back.)
So I got to the top, and I pulled into the observatory parking lot just in time for the sunset. I parked next to a couple named Mike and Christine who were a lot of fun to talk to; they apparently come up to the peak fairly often, and they were well equipped with digital geek toys that they were all too willing to talk shop about. (They appreciated my tales of digital photography and wireless picture-posting from the line in Emeryville.) We spent a good half hour talking about random stuff-- motorcycles, Silicon Valley, DSL availability, home mortgages, and the fact that Mt. Hamilton was the spot where John Muir once stood and, facing east, saw the setting sun lighting up the whole line of the Sierra Nevada, whereupon he named it the Range of Light. (You can still see the Sierras from the peak, on good days. Today was not a good day.) And they had me take a couple of pictures, with their camera, of them posing with my motorcycle.
The trip was not to be without its technical hurdles, however. After the sun had just about vanished behind the large western cloud bank and I knew I'd be riding back down the mountain in a thick dusky haze, I decided to start 'er back up and head down-- except the bike wouldn't start. The starter chugged, and chugged, a-n-d c-h-u-g-g-e-d... ho boy. My battery has been fairly temperamental lately; I have to keep it hooked up to a battery tender to make sure it starts up on command. And on top of a mountain is not a good place to lose warp plasma containment. Several increasingly nervous minutes went by, many of which were spent in trying to raise a human at the other end of Christine's cellphone, which seemed strangely unable to accurately report whether it had any signal or not. (It would say it had full signal strength, dial, ring-- and suddenly say "No Service". Rinse, repeat.) So I never was able to get a call through to anybody with jumper cables. And anybody who's about to seize on this opportunity to point out that ha-haah, cellphones are useful after all... hey, shut up, at least it didn't work.
So anyway, I went back to the bike, thinking that surely the battery was drained by now-- when the starter-motor chugs start getting slower, it's not an encouraging sign, especially if you have those ultra-retina-searing carbon-arc lights that flicker while the bike is starting, presumably sucking down the equivalent of a couple of minutes in a metal vaporator every time I turn the key. But much to my surprise and then delight, when I hit the trigger again, it started right up, instantly. Whew!
I took this picture on the way down the mountain. Whether it's smog, an inversion layer, the Smokes of the Spirits, or whatever euphemism you might care to ascribe to it-- it certainly can make for some interesting sunsets. I don't much mind that I couldn't see Half Dome or Mt. Tamalpais this time up; I will, some other day. But I won't be able to get pictures like these.
But I mentioned another technical nuisance that reared its head. That would be my stupidity in pulling in behind this guy and his girlfriend in a BMW-- who had been riding my rear bumper all the way down the mountain, pushing me way faster than I was hoping to go, until I pulled over and let them by, only to catch up with them again at this infamous switchback on Quimby Road. They were pulled over, engine and lights off, obviously enjoying the romantic view-- and along I had to come, parking right behind them on a downhill slope with my kickstand in a pile of sand, so I could take this picture.
When you're aimed off the road with only a couple of feet between you and the rear bumper of a BMW, with your rear wheel higher up a curved slope and your kickstand in a pile of sand, you're kinda screwed. I spent about ten minutes frantically hurling my weight from front to back, desperately trying to back the five hundred pounds of bike up the hill so I could get myself some turning room and escape the trap. The couple in the car were blissfully unaware-- though they turned back to glare balefully at me once or twice as my light flooded past their windows rhythmically with my undulating exertions. I'd discarded my glasses-- they were fogging up under my panting breath in the cold air-- and finally I gave up, went to the driver's window, and asked him to please scoot forward just a few feet so I could get out. He seemed quite happy and accommodating, once it became obvious what my pathetic problem was. And all ended well, as I puttered my way down the rest of the hill.
But that could have happened anywhere. Quimby Road itself, however, and Mt. Hamilton, can't.
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04:50 - Missed Opportunity
http://www.apriliausa.com/ridezone/ing/models/ridefr.htm
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Why do I get the feeling that I missed out on being able to get an Aprilia SL1000 Falco in one of those solid colors it came in when it was introduced-- blue, or silver, or black, or yellow, or that lustrous deep red?
Nowadays, two years later, it seems that there's only the "R" model, which is distinguished from its non-R predecessor by being decalled all to hell. What's become of the thick silvery double-bar frame member that stood out from the body-color panels like a pair of epaulettes (or like that sash thing Mayor Quimby wears)? What's happened to the shiny symmetrical exhausts? what's happened to the sense of unity and purpose and red-haired Italian supermodel flair? It's all been broken up like the side of a naval cruiser under jagged camouflage paint. Every piece of exposed metal-- which used to be what gave the design so much style-- has now been powder-coated to a dull blackish gray, and now the only motorcycle that has ever really captured my eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door shut... seems to have melted into sportbike anonymity.
Ah well-- maybe this means I have to look in the used market for a 2000-01 model, which could save me some good money. But who'd be willing to part with one of these specimens?
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| Saturday, November 30, 2002 |
23:22 - Revisions
http://www.wtc2002.com
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Two new refined proposals have been posted at the WTC2002 site. These new ones are even taller than the original (2000 feet), and one has a dome-- which I'm sure would, if built, end the Washington Monument's long reign as the Nation's Most Phallic Symbol.
It's still gigantic and ostentatious, but oddly graceful... and though I seriously doubt that it will get built as-is (especially because the guy running the site, while proficient at Flash, is undeniably kind of a nutcase), I do hope that at least some people whose designs are being considered are looking at it and using it as an anchor point for one end of the design spectrum. Whatever does end up rising in Lower Manhattan, I wouldn't at all mind it being reminiscent of this.
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22:57 - Movie Day
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I saw the Bond movie today; it was big, loud, dumb, and fun-- just the way a Bond movie should be. Lots of horrifically huge situations with potentially world-shattering consequences, with eerie allusions to current events lurking around every corner, but eventually just leading back in on itself to a self-referential resolution illustrating every regular human's essential decency and the monstrous megalomania of one central fictitious villain. Countries may have their disagreements, but everything would hum along nicely if it weren't for these evil geniuses popping up here and there, setting up secret labs and hideouts and weapons foundries and DNA clinics in impoverished third-world countries, using immaculate technology that the "civilized" world won't see for another twenty years. (The US always seems to turn out to be dumber and more primitive, if stronger of will, than all the rest of the countries in a given Bond film-- Cuba and North Korea, in this case.) But keep the madmen from going to the Evil Pet Store to trade suitcases of diamonds for long-haired white cats to stroke, and it'll be a happy planet. Ah, if only the real world were so neat and tidy.
John Cleese is turning out to be awfully fun in his Q role; he certainly seems to be able to wring a lot more fun out of the ubiquitous "gadget" scenes than his predecessor did. But then, facial crags aside, he is still John Cleese. Brosnan, I think, just looks more like James Bond should look than any of the previous Bonds; but maybe that's just me. And the Moneypenny scene at the end was a gem. (I'm told I was supposed to be watching Halle Berry's curvatures more closely than those of the Aston Martin, but I seem to have failed that particular test of Bond-watching Basics.)
Having just seen a week-long marathon of the classic Bond films on TNN, including Dr. No (the first one), I can at the very least say that these things have gotten a good deal more fun to watch over the years.
Anyway, then I retired to a friend's place to see Reign of Fire. This one, I have to say, was pretty aggressively stupid, but it wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. Sure, the worldbuilding was nonexistent, the practicalities of dragon biology and military weaponry and all that were inconsistent and flawed to put it as charitably as possible, and the whole plot felt chopped-up from a much longer screenplay, and left full of throwaway elements that in any other movie would have swung back around later in the story to close a circle-- in The Iron Giant, to take a random example, everything from the dent in the giant's head to the playing Superman to the reassembling-himself-from-component-parts comes back around to tie up dozens of loose story arcs; but in Reign of Fire you never see another mention of the capture method with the skydivers and the nets, the crop harvest, the horse, or anything. The "prayer" with the children reappears in a throw-and-catch that's pretty effective, but that's about it.
But it wasn't bad, or not as much so as I was expecting. Although I am curious as to why so many of these post-apocalyptic movies take place in non-US English-speaking countries. What is it in the British or Australian psyche that revels in fantasies of futuristic self-immolation? (Kevin Costner aside.) I don't know whether to make anything significant out of the role of Van Zan and his American soldiers in the movie; the first line we hear from the defenders when the Kentucky Regiment comes over the hill in their marauder tanks (hey, at least they weren't jetskis) is "There's only one thing worse than dragons... Americans." Van Zan arrives as a messianic figure, arms spread, rallying the dying Northumbrian fortress to action, bringing hi-tech new battle techniques and an uncompromising and joyless single-mindedness to his dedication to the cause. But he eventually gets his ass kicked by his own overconfidence, and when the final attack on the London nest takes place, it's just the three of them on foot-- Van Zan telling Quinn, pointedly, "You lead. We follow."
I dunno... maybe I'm reading far too much into this. It's just another big, dumb movie with lots of explosions. But hey-- what's the use of living in a decadent, doomed nation if you can't while away holiday weekend afternoons musing over the deep sociological significance of dubious pieces of popular fiction?
Oh-- and there's a new Chow Yun Fat movie coming out called Bulletproof Monk. My reaction was: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Matrix."
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| Friday, November 29, 2002 |
19:38 - "We Got It Right This Time, We Swear"
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=443
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This week's Photoshop Phriday at Something Awful is the best one they've had in a while, following a long streak of mediocre concepts with less-than-stellar execution. This one is "Rejected Software", and it's got some very choice bits.
It starts out kinda slow, but things pick up in the later pages. Particularly amusing are "Microsoft BackAlley", "Windows Type R", and the Ellen Feiss one (which is a masterful piece of Photoshoppery).
Oh, and don't forget the "hidden" Eleventh Page, which consists of something that may be a first: Photoshop jobs whose humor content and/or execution are so inept that the SA admins who put it together felt it was worth breaking the fourth wall of editorialism and posting them just to ridicule them and their creators. CapLion refers to this as the "Photoshop for Windows page".
"phoenix_r" gets the credit for this messy image. I think this is intended to be an OS-movie hybrid, which is a concept that can be funny, but only in the capable hands of someone with capable hands. This just ends up looking like another Macs are for Nazis joke, which is neither funny nor fair to Nazis. The curbjob scene from American History X isnt quite known for eliciting laughter either. Bonus negative points go to the fact that phoenix_r must have gotten his front Mac OS X text from a tiny 100x96 sized thumbnail image he pulled out of a dead robots ass and enlarged to the point it looks like a mangled mess of gigantic blurry pixels.
This is only minorly and tongue-in-cheekily a swipe at Apple, and it's more obviously an example of OS X and other such products having gained widespread acceptance and respect. I like.
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| Thursday, November 28, 2002 |
23:29 - Beneath The Dome
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Okay-- if you have the 2-disc DVD set of Star Wars: Episode II, go look at the "Dex's Kitchen" section, and the little documentaries in it. Right now I'm watching the one on R2-D2, which covers his whole life and career (including the dark period when he was on drugs and let his hair grow). Yeah, cute. Good stuff (beach obstacle on Saving Private Ryan? Holding a cell phone? Screwing up the other actors' work?)... yeah, well, let's see what it'll take in Episode III to make him forget he had those rocket-jets. (Must be the same mental wipe technology that makes C-3PO and Owen Lars forget the latter's ownership of the former, eh?)
The "Films Are Not Released, They Escape" sequence is all about sound, though, and it's cool from a Mac-watching standpoint; from the look of these behind-the-scenes scenes, the whole of Skywalker Sound is done on Macs. Macs are everywhere... in voice replacement, effects editing, effects mixing, language creation. In pretty much every role you'll see either a top-mounted toolbar, a clear optical mouse, that wide flat telltale classic Mac keyboard, or the glow of the Apple on a TiBook screen. I don't think I saw a single PC, as a matter of fact.
Lots of other fun stuff on the disc, too. Though maybe it's the tryptophan talking, but I'd love to know why in the hell Natalie Portman turns in a better acting performance in the bloody interviews than she did in the movie. What, does she forget there is such a thing as inflection as soon as the real cameras start rolling?
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10:30 - Wassail, wassail
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So I'm going to be spending the day walking from door to door, singing Thanksgiving carols and being invited in for a heaping plate of cranberry sauce and turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce at every house from here to Petaluma.
...Okay, well, not quite... but I'll be on the road a lot, heading up to my grandma's apartment in Larkspur for the midday meal with my family, and then scooting on back down here to San Jose for the early-evening one that Lance is putting together for all our local social circle. Hopefully by that time the football will be over with. (I can dream, can't I?)
Which means I'd better load up my iPod and get a move on. See you all this evening.
Wait a minute. Did Leonard Cohen's voice change that much between 1968 and 1974?! Good lord. What'd he do, install a tar filter in his throat?
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| Wednesday, November 27, 2002 |
02:55 - It's Christmas in Heaven, all the children sing
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De Anza Boulevard is the main north-south thoroughfare through Cupertino. It's what branches off into Mariani and Infinite Loop right at the intersection with I-280; and for almost its entire length, from El Camino Real in Sunnyvale up to Saratoga in the foothills, across three name changes reflecting historical hegemonies of communities (and a sign indicating the boundary of a sliver of San Jose itself, showing the date of founding as 1777), it has a neat, clean, smooth, landscaped median between the lanes.
Up in Apple's neighborhood, the median is adorned with decorative wooden ivy-covered bowers, and the vegetation is strung throughout with Christmas lights. And starting Thanksgiving week, those lights get turned on at night.
 
All it's missing is snow.
(Which isn't to say I mind the fact that I still have to have my window open a few inches and my arm hanging out at night. Looks like the arrival of winter a few weeks ago was sort of a false alarm...)
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01:47 - Kumbaya
http://www.mikeoverbeck.com/osama/
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Here's what I'm thankful for:
That gifted animators like Mike Overbeck, creator of such delectable bizarritudes as Atlas Gets a Drink, have not had their senses of just and ironic vengeance dulled by time, success, and no more home-soil terrorist attacks. No way-- not him.
These are his "Osama-Rama" cartoons, and there are four of them. I'm hard pressed to come up with which one is best-- "Anthrax: The Invisible Victim" seems to be the one that speaks most eloquently to my heart of hearts, however. You be the judge, though. I think they all kick ass.
On the subject of Osama-themed Flash cartoons, On the Run Again is pretty good too.
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22:38 - Wheeere's the Wahhabism?
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory111802.asp
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In Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the political veneers of Iraq, various mosque leaderships here and there throughout the Muslim world-- and the US. And not many other places, says Stephen Schwartz in NRO, via UNMEDIA. Stephen Schwartz, that is, a Sufi Muslim convert with a very sane viewpoint, a retained Western name, and a refreshingly tolerant attitude toward the rest of the world's faiths-- something I wish we could see more of.
He methodically lists the countries where Wahhabism is prevalent, and the countries where it has an influence-- and the nature of that influence.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is the only country outside Saudi Arabia where the Islamic establishment is under Wahhabi control. Eighty percent of American mosques are Wahhabi-influenced, although this does not mean that 80 percent of the people who attend them are Wahhabis. Mosque attendance is different from church or synagogue membership in that prayer in the mosque does not imply acceptance of the particular dispensation in the mosque. However, Wahhabi agents have sought to impose their ideology on all attendees in mosques they control.
I hope those in charge of the WOT have this kind of filter to look through at the Muslim world, because this does exactly what we've been hoping for for a long time: it identifies who should be (and who should not be) the targets of the WOT, in a religious, political, economic, and national sense. And it tells us where we should be able to find sympathy, and why; and who in the Muslim world we should consider long-term allies and assets, once we've established that Wahhabism, specifically, is what needs to die.
I'm comforted to think that leaders like George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard have all made public statements that establish that they realize exactly what the score is, as Schwartz lays it out. They know what path the WOT will have to take as soon as the roadblock of Iraq is out of the way. (In a way, Iraq probably is going to turn out to be about ooooiiil as much as the other reasons, largely because we'll need it from the Iraqi fields in order to take on Saudi Arabia when the time comes.)
Anyway, there's lots of good stuff in this article, including admonishments against the media (for oversimplifying Islamic sects into a single entity, and for failing to present any kind of respected Muslim figureheads and their viewpoints to the Western public), and a reality-check about where our attention should be when looking for pan-Islamic sentiments that condemn terrorism (hint: it's not going to come from the Arab Street, but the Arab Street is not and never has been strategically important).
Of course, for much of the media, the primitive and simplistic image of Muslims as uniformly extremist and terrorist is easier to report, more popular, and "better TV" than that of a complex conflict inside a world religion. It also supports the left-wing claim that it's all our fault, or Israel's. It's so much easier to say they all hate us because of our hegemony and Zionism than to say, as I do, that they don't all hate us, and that the real issue is the battle for the soul of Islam.
Maybe there are some holes in what Schwartz is saying; it may not even be based in facts. But at first blush, it appears to be just what I've been waiting to hear for a very long time.
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20:40 - Can't argue with that
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11-27
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Seems Gabe of Penny Arcade has himself a new Tablet PC, and he likes it.
Today's comic strip was done from start to finish on the Tablet PC. I started out by sketching the characters in Alias Sketchbook. It blows me away that a piece of software this good is free. One of the big problems with the Tablet PC is that there just isn't much space there to work with. Most art programs would take up the majority of your screen with tools and windows. However Sketchbook was designed for the tablet PC and so roughly 90 percent of the screen is pure white digital paper. The tools and options have been placed in an almost Sims like radial menu that sits unobtrusively in the corner. I picked a 2B pencil and started sketching. After a bit of screwing with the pressure sensitivity settings I was in heaven. I was able to sketch just as I would on paper and with the same results. In no time I had all the sketches I would need for today's comic. I think that for artists, the Alias Sketchbook software is the killer app that the Tablet PC needed.
I guess it's downright silly to begrudge anybody the development of a successful new platform, especially if it's sparking genuine innovation and a new class of well-designed software that serves the user's needs-- "delights the customer", as the marketeers have it.
It remains to be seen whether anybody will end up finding the Tablet PC's handwriting-recognition stuff to be useful-- after all, even a patently superior handwriting-recognition system (the one in the Newton and now in OS X) doesn't lend itself to much practical application. But as a drawing pad, a cheaper and more portable (and better integrated) form of the Wacom LCD tablets that have been around for a while-- which you'd attach as a second monitor on your desktop machine and draw on the pad/screen in Photoshop or Painter-- it might well have a niche to grow into.
In which case I'll have to give Microsoft points for behaving like a real, genuine innovative company for once.
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17:52 - Give a think! Don't delink!
http://wilde.poetweb.net/archives/00000282.htm
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Via InstaPundit-- well, anybody reading this has probably already run across this item already anyway, but if you have read it, you'll understand why I'm adding this little stitch into the vast Riemann-surface-looking piece of fabric that is the blogosphere.
It involves two blogs/bloggers that I'd never heard of before today, but it could as well be a fable dropped from on high out of the blue: if you come at this from a perspective of certain types of bloggers fitting certain molds and behaving certain ways, this one sort of turns those preconceptions right on their heads. Or it doesn't, depending on how you look at it.
The synopsis is: a self-described conservative Democrat posts some perfectly civil thoughts in the comments section of an arch-conservative's blog; and even though the two are of similar minds in a lot of issues, the arch-conservative responds to the mere fact that he is a Democrat by delinking and IP-blocking him.
Read the whole exchange, and the comments too. I don't know how much more of this Rittenhouse/LGF-ian delinking nonsense is going to take place-- if it's going to become the next fad of the Web or something. (Censor dissenting opinions for fun and profit!) But I for one would like to see it stop, right quick.
Every blogger has the right to not link to whatever site he or she feels like not linking to, and that includes the right to remove links that the blogger decides are no longer worth endorsing for one reason or another. These links are courtesies that blogs extend one another. Unless one person is paying another to have his name in lights, nobody's beholden to any other site for referral traffic. It's all about individual choice. That's the whole point of the Internet in its purest original conception, and it's what makes the blog world what it is.
But there's such a thing as being mature about it. And more important to me than whether delinking amounts to "censorship" or not is the attitude that someone takes when declaring someone else unworthy of endorsement.
These characters sure show their respective true colors, eh?
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13:42 - Inspectors on the scene
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/11/27/iraq.inspectors/index.html
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Well, after a day of activity, evidently nothing obvious has been unearthed by the Blix team.
I must admit, I'm more nervous about these proceedings at this stage than I've been about anything in a while. There's so much riding on the inspectors' ability to turn up damning evidence of WMDs-- if they find any, it would cause the long-awaited meltdown of the credibility of Saddam and all his higher-ups who have been claiming all along that they have no such weapons and any claims that they do are evil lies. Not only that, but it would force pretty much everyone who's been seizing every opportunity to side with the UN and European leaders and take Saddam's official claims at their word-- to admit that they were on crack. It would be the clearest case of US vindication on record since 9/11; even Afghanistan continues to have its detractors, and its present political situation remains in doubt (riding primarily on whether we choose to stay and rebuild). But Iraq is another story.
Because if for whatever reason the inspectors are not able to turn up any compelling evidence by December 9th... well, the PR consequences would be just about as bad against the US. It's one thing to be Iraq, historic bully and enemy-of-all-that-is-right, who in the absence of incriminating evidence seems to have recently turned over a new leaf and become all benign and happy (and no doubt all kinds of people would come to accept his 100% victory in the recent election as genuine and legitimate). But it's quite another to be America, up till now more or less a "good guy" as far as First World countries are concerned, but with lots of intangible, semi-Washington-endorsed imperialistic aims consisting of Golden Arches and oil tankers, bombing lots of innocent civilians in what is undoubtedly a long series of war-crime atrocities that have been masterfully covered up, so nobody can prove anything for sure-- suddenly turning out to be unequivocally the evil lying oppressor that Iraq makes us out to be. Everybody's worst dread would be realized. We'd be "proven" to have fabricated this whole set of allegations about Iraq's nonexistent weapons and trumped up the war so the Republicans could seize power. The US would become in everybody's eyes the Enemy of the World, by the stroke of a pen in the hand of the Inspector General.
I have to imagine the inspectors will take a bit of a different approach this time, though. I have to believe this is going to be a different kind of "inspection" than the "Make sure such-and-such destroyed factory was really destroyed" checklisting of the post-Gulf-War inspections. Interviews I've heard on NPR talk about how some of the inspectors (who are back there again now) were endlessly frustrated by the crap they had to put up with from the uncooperative Iraqis and the things they were obviously hiding, and they were clearly gung-ho about having a chance to get some real progress made this time around. And judging by this, there's all kinds of crap we know about that even local Iraqis don't realize is there.
So I guess I'm pretty confident that something will arise, though I'm going to be on edge and pondering all that time they've had to methodically hide and smuggle away any contraband that they'd been developing, ever since we started making the noises about our inevitable return to the trail. How many months now have they known that we'd end up back in the country, the only variable being how long they could stall us? How much could they have hidden or spirited away in that time?
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| Tuesday, November 26, 2002 |
09:30 - It's not what you think
http://applecrap.com/
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Here's another unusual take on the Mac-fan-site genre... you know, the "double" kind, or maybe "spit".
It's a site called "AppleCrap", and it's run by some unapologetic Mac fans whose stated goal is to poke fun at the moronic and/or misguided things Apple does-- of which there are indeed many-- while at the same time exhibiting a clear deep-seated fondness for the company itself and the good things it does.
We don't hate Apple or Macs, we are not anti-Apple or anti-Mac. We own Macs and have been Mac users for years. We love Apple, but that doesn't mean that they, and others, have not done boneheaded things. We think it is our job to remember and mock that crap, and that is what this site is for.
We could be MicrosoftCrap, but that's too much crap even for us. Besides, why restate the obvious?
This site uses PHP and MySQL to store, format, and display data. PHP stands for Photon Hypermega Phasor-thingy and MySQL stands for MIGHTy Super Quantum Light-storing-thingy. It's really technical stuff.
Looks like another entry into the "Informative Humor" category, already populated with the likes of As the Apple Turns and Crazy Apple Rumors.
Ees fun.
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| Monday, November 25, 2002 |
20:11 - Tule Fog a-go-go
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/shownh.php3?img_id=5266
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Good gawd. I wasn't kidding about the tule fog in the Central Valley last weekend.
(Via InstaPundit, via Jerry Pournelle.)
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20:03 - "My name is S. Claus, and I'm a Switcher."
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/will/
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I love a company that laughs at itself.
Apple has just posted two Switcher ad parodies starring Will Ferrell in a Santa suit. Yes, ad parodies. Right on Apple's site.
Granted, Microsoft did commission those Clippy parodies starring Gilbert Gottfried, for the introduction of the supposedly Clippy-free Office XP. And they, too, were funny. (Though parts of them, like the IT droid burbling "Office XP is a great upgrade!" in that overenunciated glottal-nasal marketing whine, are unbearably smarmy.)
But-- well, there's just something warm and fuzzy about this.
Maybe it's the beard.
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19:33 - Reverse Taqiyeh
http://www.southknoxbubba.com/skblog/archive_2002_11.html#597
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Someone should disseminate this amongst the Wahhabi clerics worldwide. Maybe they'll fall for it.
That'd be entertaining.
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13:51 - Switch to the Dark Side
http://sterlinganderson.net/sw_switch.htm
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Seriously-- no kidding on this one, folks.
These Switch parodies just keep getting better and better. Are they going to be opening up "Make Your Own Switcher Video" booths at Six Flags soon?
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| Sunday, November 24, 2002 |
03:03 - When Harry Met Sully
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/1102/110204.html#112502
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Today's Bleat has some great stuff about pizza, but some even better stuff about Monsters, Inc.
He covers pretty much what I would have said about it, so there's not much point in my adding to it here; his reactions and mine seem to have been fairly close to identical. We clearly have very different attitudes regarding little kids, but this movie did the nigh-impossible: it starred one in a major role and managed to endear her to me. Quite an accomplishment. But, as with all things Pixar, pulled off in a way that makes it seem effortless.
Considering the amount of effort that does go into their movies, that in itself is no mean feat.
One thing to note regarding realism and facial expressions and the like: The tragicomical scene in which Sully watches what he thinks is Boo going through the trash compactor-- is that not the most unbelievable set of facial expressions you have ever seen on the big screen, bar none?
And that ending... far from being the unfortunate sappy-corny-fourth-wall-breaking lounge lizard crapstravaganza of Toy Story 2, or indeed from being the off-into-the-sunset truck-out or the happy-triumphant-together pomp of so many other movies of the genre, this one went into a class all its own. Possibly the most novel ending, in an emotional sense, that I've ever seen on an animated movie.
Fortunately they provided those "outtakes" during the credits, to make sure we roused ourselves from our thunderstruck hearts-wrenched-to-the-side reveries and were all laughing helplessly again before we headed out to the parking lot. I knew they wouldn't let us down.
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19:09 - The OS That Would Not Die
http://www.blachford.info/morphos/morphos_in_detail.html
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Kris points me to this article on MorphOS, which is a new effort to modernize the Amiga platform (sigh, yes, Amiga) and rebuild it as a global OS that stands at the center of another new breed of unique applications.
It's supposed to be PPC-based, meaning it can currently (or will shortly) run on Open Firmware PPC boxes (read: Mac clones) and some older Macs.
An interesting read from a technical standpoint, but still more so from a sociological one. How many times has the Amiga burst into flames and hatched again, now? Surely nobody really expects that this effort will go anywhere-- but it's a testament to the iron will of some people who refuse to stop believing in the dream their computers represented, even if that dream lives on now only in their memories.
Doomed, but valiant, as Kris puts it. It's possible to respect the latter even if the former is true-- and to leave open the possibilities just in case it does have a chance. Sometimes, after all, discretion is not the better part of valor.
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16:47 - Views
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One of the comments in the MacSlash article linked to in the last post got me thinking. It noted that one thing on the Mac that Windows has not yet got around to adopting is the hierarchical list view.
On Windows, you've got a whole series of views available-- from "icon" (and now "thumbnail", which does previews of previewable file types, not actual custom icons or anything) up through "list" and "details". But something that I'd never really noticed, or at least it never leaped out at me until I started thinking about it, was that the three different views on the Mac-- icon, list, and column-- are fundamentally different styles of viewing files, each with their unique metaphors and capabilities... whereas the views on Windows are a continuum, each setting gradually making the icons smaller and adding more information. Icon view lets you move the files around to arbitrary positions, while list view sorts them by some criterion; but that's about the only major difference. It's still just a list of files. The folders in Windows are listed at the top, and to see what's in them, you have to open each one in a new window (or in the same one). At one extreme, you've got placement freedom at the expense of visible information. At the other extreme, you've got strictness of placement but more information at hand.
And that's fine, to a point.
The difference in philosophy, however, lies in that on the Mac, each different view has unique advantages-- it's not just a preference along a spectrum, where the user decides what an acceptable compromise is between placement freedom and information visibility. On the Mac, there is no confusing one view from another-- they're all very different, with very little conceptually in common with each other, and no unnecessary gradations or "hybrid" views to confuse the user. And some folders work best in a particular view-- something Apple understood way back in the dim times when the multiple-view model was first being developed.
Icon view lets you scale up your custom icons to 128x128, arbitrarily, smoothly. You can place the icons anywhere you want in the window, snapping to a grid if you want, or sort them by a criterion. Some limited information is available as subtitles (like image dimensions, folder contents, etc), but this view is best suited for things like collections of pictures, so you can see them all and their contents at a glance. I also kinda like using icon view for applications, sorted alphabetically. The reason for this is that in icon view, there's no direct, inline way for getting down into a folder. You have to double-click on a folder to open it, either into a new window or into the same one. Then you have to deal with multiple windows, or Back buttons-- and that's kinda ugly. So I use icon view for folders that are by their nature flat, where I know I won't have to do any mining, where I won't need any details on the files. Everything I need is right there in the one view.
Then there's column view, the newcomer in OS X, the NeXT immigrant. This one is a whole new metaphor for a lot of users-- but its strength is in folder navigation, the direct opposite of icon view. There's extreme strictness of placement here (only alphabetical listing), and there's also no more object information available than in icon view, except for a selected item (which gives you a pane full of data and a preview). This view is tuned specifically for navigation. Zoom back and forth up and down folder trees, finding what you need without any double-clicking or multiple windows, and with an unmistakable visual record of where you are in the system (just scroll back and forth to see the whole path). Because I don't generally need to see big thumbnail icons or rich item data for all my files, I tend to use this view most frequently; if I'm trying to go directly to a known location and bring up a file, it's highly optimized and extremely efficient.
And then, in the middle, there's list view. It sounds pretty straightforward-- a list of files, with all the data for each one listed in columns, sorted by whatever column you click on. It's like the "details" view in Windows. But what makes the Mac's list view fundamentally different from Windows-- and what makes it unique in its operation and keeps it from being just a point along the continuum between placement freedom and navigational speed-- is that it has a unique feature of its own, a feature that Windows still apparently hasn't adopted. That is the ability to expand any folder in the list, inline, by clicking on the triangle next to its name. This gives you a view that's optimized for item data, while de-emphasizing icon placement and (to a lesser extent) navigability.
That's the three views and their conceptual strengths: placement (icon), data (list), and navigation (column). Each view is tuned for its respective goal, with an ideal in sight that serves the feature's design criteria. I can't help but feel that the Windows implementation of its various views had none of these ideals in mind; the designers in that case were evidently more concerned with putting more elements into the "Views" menu than the Mac had, rather than in making each view genuinely and uniquely useful.
In other words, "Views" in Windows is really sort of a slider-- a selector that moves from "big movable icons/no visible data" to "small icons in a list/lots of visible data", with several notches along the way. But if you want a completely different navigational style, you have to go to the "Explorer" view, which you have to enable via the "Explorer bar" menu option, and which gives you a hierarchical tree view. This places navigation outside the standard workflow and divorces it from the listing mechanism itself; you have to know it's there, and you have to contend with the bizarre inverted tree structure which places the Desktop at the top, followed by "My Documents" and the folders on the user's Desktop, among which is "My Computer", followed by the disks. Clicking on folders in the navigation pane opens them in the view pane, but folders are all that's listed in the navigator-- no files, even if they're at the same level as the folders you're looking at. If you're browsing one folder, you can't tell what's in another. It's really easy to get lost in a filesystem that only operates by folder names, rather than by visual feedback that tells you what files and how many of them are in each folder in your navigation path.
This method fits with the now-common Windows method of putting a hierarchical navigator on the left and a view pane on the right, regardless of how inapplicable it might be (IIS, the various Administrative Tools), and regardless of how easy it is to get confused about what you've clicked on, double-clicked on, and collapsed, with the potential for mirroring of hierarchical information from one pane to another. But many of these things let you remove panes, or add new ones, according to taste and need. It's a conceptual model that starts out very small and austere, but forces the user to tack on more and more panels and toolbars to get more functionality-- but which only ends up muddling the workflow.
A filesystem might be hierarchical, but people's brains aren't. When you think about how to move through your disk, you want to pick a single viewing method and be able to do everything in it-- and so your viewing methods are best presented in a flat, equitable manner, with as few choices as possible, with each choice customizable within its own parameters but without forcing the user to hunt down adjuncts in order to make it work properly. Icon, List, Column... pick one depending on what you need. The other two will always be available right there if you change your mind.
And that's the kind of thing Yo-Yo Ma is talking about.
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14:51 - What's that they say about imitation?
http://www.macslash.org/articles/02/11/23/2230205.shtml
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Sure, it might be "flattery". But as any reader of Jhonen Vasquez will understand, nobody likes to be confronted with a "Jimmy the Homicidal Maniac."
Not Johnny. Jimmy. Mmy. Remember him?
I can't add much to this that CapLion hasn't already said. In fact, some of these are likely mock-ups and/or fakes. But AquaFinder isn't.
Check it out, but make sure you have a bucket handy.
Presumably the whole reason to do this kind of skinnery is "eye candy", because without the information-field-query-based navigational system of the real iTunes or the automatic everything-just-works of the real Dock (though ObjectDock does at least attempt to be a proof-of-concept that harnesses the Dock's practical benefits and not just its looks), that's all this can be. And yet it doesn't matter, somehow, that this stuff looks like ass.
I just don't understand something fundamental about the mindset. Why would you imitate something for its beauty, and then make your imitation so ugly?
Apparently, some Windows users will do anything to get something that looks like a Mac onto their desks-- anything-- except, of course, buying the real thing.
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| Saturday, November 23, 2002 |
15:25 - That, too, is unlikely to help
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=234454&lang=e&dir=news
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I haven't yet been able to find anything on this online, except for a brief blurb in the BBC World Service headline crawl, which didn't link to a story (yet); I'd only heard the details earlier on the radio, on the way to Emeryville.
Apparently Israel has just banned all Palestinian fishing activity off the coast of Gaza; the reason for this is an incident earlier today, in which a Palestinian fishing boat strayed across into Israeli waters. The coast guard approached and tried to open a channel, to get the boat to turn back; but as the cutter got closer, the fishing boat exploded.
They're not sure whether it was a terrorist operation or not; but a sound bite from the Israeli officials called it "a suicide fishing boat".
What, so now they're using suicide as a method for fishing too?
I'm reminded of the Radioactive Man shoot-- Bart walks up to "Milhouse" and says hi, whereupon Milhouse responds by... exploding. "I didn't do it...I didn't do it! I wished him well!"
So next I suppose we're to expect suicide restaurants-- "Hi, I'd like a cheeseburger." "Yes, sir: BOOM!" Or suicide auto mechanics-- "Aha, it looks like a clogged fuel injector. I know how to fix this: huh-BLAM!" Or suicide news anchormen: "And today in weather-- a cold front will be moving into the area this evening, with increasing KABOOM!"
Hint, guys: it doesn't work any better for endearing yourself to world opinion, either. Time to try something else.
UPDATE: Thanks to CapLion, the story link has been added.
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14:53 - Pompitous of Googoogajoob
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I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say... "Huh?"
Yes, yes, I know the song. But... well, all I've got to say is, that's one helluva lot of quote marks.
Yes, I know it looks like an inexplicably stupid Photoshop job. But it's not; it's an inexplicably stupid actual decal job. That's just part of the mystery, I guess.
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09:43 - Blogging from the line
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Just 'cause I can.
The employees are a little concerned that the AirPort signal won't reach to the coffeehouse two doors down, but it's pretty much okay as long as you're facing the store. They want people to be able to have coffee and surf from their tables, after all.
A homeless guy with a shopping cart walked by me and said, "It's not too late-- you can still get a Hewlett-Packard."
"And get my dick burned off? Shyeah," I told him. He got a kick out of that (once I explained the situation).
So far they've given out Krispy Kreme donuts, little frisbees, trial versions of CorelDraw, and a couple other rounds of stuff; right now one female employee is going up and down the line getting a count of Switchers who are here-- they've got extra goodies for them.
I switched three years ago; does that count?
Oh, and iChat with Rendezvous is fun-- everybody's name comes up next to their picture, and then you can scan the people waiting in line for faces that match; then you can say hello already knowing their name. How cool is that?
UPDATE: Photos are here. The store is one of the new smaller "30-foot" layouts, with no theater and no software aisle down the middle-- instead, software is stacked on shelves along the back walls. The checkout counter is also at the back instead of right at the door, and the Genius Bar is in the middle of the right-side wall.
Steve Jobs didn't turn up, though many expected him to-- Pixar is right down the road, after all. Apparently he's been lurking about the place over the past few days, though. One of the employees pointed to one of the hanging translucent sectional signs, where you could see the backwards image of the label on the other side of the sign ghosting through. "This is the kind of thing Steve gets on our case about," he said. "He'll make us put in a thin sheet of opaque Plexiglas between the two sides of the signs, like other stores have had to do." Talk about perfectionism. But the effect, it can hardly be argued, is well worth it.
As they opened the doors, the employee who did the ribbon-cutting said this was the fiftieth store to open. Something tells me this little venture has been at least somewhat successful.
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07:19 - Another one of these damn things
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I'm off with some friends to go wait in line at the grand opening of the new Apple Store in Emeryville. See, I don't have enough t-shirts from these things yet.
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| Friday, November 22, 2002 |
22:54 - Today's Hottest Laptops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28245.html
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Boy, The Reg is on quite a tear lately.
And now for proof that some laptops run hotter than a badger. A 50-year old scientist, previously healthy, burned his penis after placing his laptop on his, err lap, for an hour. Oh, he was fully dressed in trousers and underpants, according to this letter printed in the Lancet, the UK's best-known medical journal. (reg req'd, free.)
The following is not for the squeamish:
... which you can go and read if you so choose.
Apparently, in the Windows world, it's common practice for laptops ('scuse me, portable computers) to carry warning labels like the following:
Do not allow your portable computer to operate with the base resting directly on exposed skin. With extended operation, heat can potentially build up in the base. Allowing sustained contact with the skin could cause discomfort or, eventually, a burn.
Which, as the article notes, occurs even through pants and underwear. Charming.
The laptop in question? Why, according to Google and an astute reader of the article, that would be a Dell Latitude of some description.
This mystifies me. Here in my benighted world of iBooks and PowerBook G4s, I'm used to sitting here on the couch downstairs, watching Star Trek, blogging with my computer sitting quite comfortably on my lap. It's pleasingly warm, but under no stretch would I consider it "too hot". The possibility of being burned doesn't enter the equation.
...But the Latitude's processor is faster. That trumps all other benefits, including the ability to refer to these things (without risking legal action) as "laptops".
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22:47 - Axis of Snivel
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/23/nkorea.dollar/index.html
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North Korea is still pouting that we found out about their secret successful nuclear bomb program, which (according to them) they've only been working on since Bush called them Evil a year ago (being called a nasty name, you see, is grounds for nullifying an international agreement).
'Cause, you know, a year's all you need to develop a nuke completely from scratch in the enlightened communist paradise that is the DPRPDRK.
So now they're banning all US dollars.
China's Xinhua news agency reported that North Koreans and foreigners will need to convert U.S. dollar accounts at the state-run Korean Trade Bank into euros or other currencies, quoting a letter from the bank.
North Koreans have had to adhere to the measure since November 18, the letter said, while foreigners will need to convert their dollars by December 1.
"Hotels, foreign-exchange shops and foreign-related services will receive no U.S. dollars from the start of December," a staff member of the Korean Trade Bank was quoted as saying in the Xinhua report.
U.S. dollar accounts will be converted automatically to euros if no declaration is made by the end of the month.
The dollar ban was a "political means" to react to increasing pressure from the U.S., an unnamed British diplomat was quoted as saying in the Xinhua report.
Uh, guys, you only get to take your ball and go home if you have a ball in the first place.
How come the world has trained itself so thoroughly to turn a blind eye when some country repeatedly backs itself into a dangerous corner and yet persists in refusing to admit it's ever, ever done anything wrong? Why is insane fanatical xenophobia and self-righteous rejection of reality seen as such a virtue?
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17:39 - MS Windows Flaw Prevents Hacker Access
http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/000481.html
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I've seen gags of this sort before, but this is a particularly well-done one. Scrappleface scores once again.
Thanks to Capt J.M. Heinrichs for the pointer!
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17:24 - Dogfood
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28226.html
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This is priceless. Literally-- after all, I can't imagine this kind of thing ever surfacing through legal means.
An older MS internal whitepaper from August 2000 on switching Hotmail, which MS acquired in 1997, from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K, reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX, but concludes that the company ought to set the right example by ensuring that each division "should eat its own dogfood."
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server. There are a number of other fascinating documents posted, in which the careful reader will find a veritable treasure map for hacking the citadel, but the one I enjoyed best was the comparison between Win2K and UNIX.
And off it goes... long, categorical, and damning. Oddly enough, this whitepaper-- whose gist is that "If we were not Microsoft, moving to Windows would cost us an ungodly amount of money and technical woe and be 100% inadvisable. But we are Microsoft, so we'd better just lie"-- doesn't bear much resemblance to the TechNet whitepaper they released to the public around that same time, which claimed that the move to Win2000 was technically sound and financially advisable. (For Microsoft, I'm sure the latter was true. Not for anybody else, though.)
For example, TechNet assures us that, "administrators generally find benefit from porting 'cron' jobs to Windows Task Scheduler events. Both Microsoft Interix 2.2 and SFU allow administrators to port 'cron' files to Windows 2000 without any changes in most cases, allowing administrators to gradually transition scheduled events and scripts without impacting operations i.e. at migration scheduled events can still run as 'cron' jobs. After the migration, the 'cron' jobs can be migrated to Windows Task scheduler events. The Windows task scheduler has better integration with event logs."
But the whitepaper had found that, "using FreeBSD, such tasks are scheduled by the cron service. Jobs are scheduled by being listed in a file, one line per job. Changing the file is easy to accomplish using the command line (or rdist), and replacing the entire file is a good way to ensure that each server has exactly the schedule of jobs that the administrator intended. Jobs can be scheduled to execute once, or at intervals down to one minute.
"Although the Windows Task Scheduler service is fundamentally able to look after such jobs, the interfaces provided in Windows does not measure up to the task. The usual interface is the GUI, which is appropriate for setting up jobs on a machine at a time, is labor-intensive and error-prone.
"The command at is deprecated, is not able to schedule repeated jobs at a frequency of less than one day.
"The command jt was offered by the Task Scheduler team, but it is unsupported and awkward to use (it was intended for testing).
"None of the three interfaces offers an easy way to replace the current task schedule entirely. The team met the need by running the cron service provided in Services for UNIX. As described earlier, relying on Services for UNIX (or any other package subject to extra license costs) provides a bad model for other customer deployments."
UNIX geeks in the audience will read through this article as though it's a Christmas list. It's one for the archives.
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15:33 - View from the sidelines
http://www.iecommerce.com/2002/11/21.html
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Ravi Pandya has some higher-level observations on the ongoing Mac/Windows brouhaha that bubbles up every so often around here.
Most people who use the phrase "disruptive technology" without reading Christensen's book seem to think it means a huge leap forward. In fact, his original meaning is almost the opposite: As a technology market matures, the industry leaders follow their most demanding customers past the point where the market continues to value marginal improvements in technology. This opens the opportunity for disruptive new entrants at the "low end" with products that are inferior by all the standard performance metrics but deliver superior value along some other dimension.
Good stuff. There are lots of highly compressed bits of academic detail in here that could be expanded to a fairly large discussion. But one upshot is that Apple does have value beyond simply trying to compete on "speed" terms. That's always been true and fundamental, after all, or else a Mac would be pretty much indistinguishable from Windows today-- and probably dead.
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10:02 - Clever PR Tricks
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Lance just woke up to convey to me the following fun little Microsoft tidbit.
Asheron's Call 2 ships today. They've been selling preorders now for months, to customers in as many as fifty different countries worldwide. But now, twenty-four hours before release, they've suddenly come out with a statement that says that "unless your billing address is in one of the following nine countries, you can't play."
Mexico isn't on the list. Australia isn't on the list. The Netherlands is, but Belgium isn't. Spain is, but none of Scandinavia is. Russia isn't. France and Germany are, but Ireland isn't. Half the EU isn't.
The rationale is apparently that the excluded countries don't have economies that are stable or strong enough for their new billing system. All the public statements they've released so far reek of badly-handled lawyer-ese, and the message boards are lighting up like Las Vegas Boulevard with livid users-- some forty percent of the users of Asheron's Call 1 live in countries that are now barred from participating in the new version.
The fine-print, after all, says that what you buy off the shelf is just the box and the little plastic disc; they're under no obligation to provide the $12.95 service to you, even if you've paid for the setup and installation. So a ton of people are out the fifty bucks-- but also out the months (or years) of gameplay they've been anticipating all this time. Because their countries aren't good enough, according to Microsoft.
Lance has had a great deal to say about Microsoft's mishandling of Asheron's Call 2, both in the sense of the structure of the game and storyline, and in the management of logistics. But this one really takes the cake.
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| Thursday, November 21, 2002 |
00:04 - Then there's this...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2190472,00.html
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I was given this URL directly; I can't find it linked from the main Guardian page or any other big news site. I wonder why that might be (or whether it's likely to change).
PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - About 100 passengers on a Disney cruise ship contracted a contagious stomach virus, shortly after more than 500 people on another cruise ship came down with a similar illness, Disney officials said Thursday.
Passengers and crew members on the Disney Cruise Line ship Magic became ill Wednesday. The ship departed Nov. 17 from Port Canaveral with 3,200 people on board and returns Saturday.
Disney will clean and disinfect the ship at sea, spokesman Mark Jaronski said. Disney's terminal and other locations also will be cleaned.
. . .
After the latest passengers disembarked, 573 crew members began cleaning the ship, emptying garbage cans and wiping down remote controls, clock radios, even Bibles. During the next 10 days, crew members will replace 2,500 pillows and dry-clean, steam-clean and disinfect every surface aboard the ship, which is 780 feet long and has 690 staterooms.
Is this the kind of thing they do in response to stomach flu?
Wait, here's the CNN story.
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16:54 - Has the Afghan story gone cold?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,838892,00.html?=rss
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"I am not sure whether to hope or fear it," says Polly Toynbee of (gasp!) The Guardian, in an extremely well-worth-reading article linked by LGF. It's a Long Hard Look at whether the war was worth it, and what the people there actually think-- unornamented by any editorial sanding-off of the clear joy the liberated Afghans feel toward the US, or of the cynicism the professionals and civil servants feel toward the UN aid workers.
It's all good. It's all valuable and worth your time. However, I wanted to zoom in on one point, the one that leads off the whole effort: women and burqas. Here's what happens when the reporter talks to a bunch of women to get their first-hand opinion:
At the Woman to Woman centre, 20 women of all ages were sitting on the floor, all them with burkas left hanging on pegs by the door. Despite the absence of outward change, were things getting better for them now that the Taliban had gone? There was a spontanteous chorus of cries, hands raised in the air, laughter, sighing, exclamations - my translator could not keep up with their energetic assertions that life had changed beyond recognition. This relative liberation - freedom to walk outside for many who had never left their one room in years - was hard to imagine. "I never saw the light of day in five years!" one widow said.
So why did they still wear burkas? A gnarled and toothless old woman from the countryside (who might be no more than 50 - already beyond the average life expectancy here) said she had worn hers since she was seven and she could not imagine the nakedness of going without it. But she thought the younger women soon would and should shed it. These women were the poorest, many of them homeless, uprooted by war, or among the country's two million war widows. "We wear the burka because we are still afraid," several said. It is too dangerous; and besides, the psychological effect of five years of terror is not easily erased at a stroke. How many thought they would take them off some time soon? Eight of the 20 raised their hands, mostly the younger ones, though only five said they had ever worn a burka before the Taliban came.
However symbolic they seem, the truth is that the burka is the very least of their problems, mere outward garments, easily discarded. The inner scars of the way women are treated here in this darkly savage place will be harder to erase. As the women talked of their lives, terrible stories tumbled out. Though none of them knew each other already, they wept when they listened to one another. Fahina, a woman in her 30s, wearing a thin black veil and swaying back and forth a little as she spoke, began to tell how she was beaten daily by her husband, a drug addict who had sold everything in the house. So why did this woman not leave a dangerous drug-addict husband who drained her money away? Because, she explained, she would have to leave her 12-year-old daughter behind with him. By now several other women were crying in sympathy.
At the start of this session, many had proclaimed that women should have absolutely equal rights with men, so I asked the translator if they thought it right and fair that this abusive father should keep the child. The translator looked at me nervously and whispered, "I don't think I can ask that." "Why not?" "Because it is our Islamic law, in the Koran, that after the age of nine a daughter belongs to the father." "But ask them if it is fair in this extreme case?" Quietly the translator asked them, and they fell silent and gazed down at the carpet. No one spoke until Fahina, the battered wife, said softly, "It is the law", with tears falling down her face.
Once the shutter of religion falls, the rest is silence. The women are indoctrinated so deep with it that their own inferiority is branded on their brains. Every time sophisticated Muslims in the west use sophistry to explain that the prophet was actually a great liberator of women, every time they fail to condemn outright some of the Koranic laws themselves and demand reformation, they help condemn women across the Islamic world to this self-immolating damage.
Contrast this with what women have been saying recently on the Ar-Rahman list:
Wendy I too am not muslim, but hey, even you've got to agree that islam is better for women then this crazy democratic garbage that Bush and his puppets like Blair, are trying to govern people under. For instance muslim women cover themselves and do not want to show their bodies, im all for that. Whereas western women do the opposite they show their breasts etc, and expect respect from us men, you've got to be stupid, the only thing their gonna get from us is the want to take them to bed. The only thing that i feel where the religion of islam lacks, in fact its not the religion its the people. Islam in all its purity does as they say liberate women, because the way i look at it, women will be only judged on their intellect and faith rather then if they are a 38DD chest size. One question though, why do so many muslim women not wear the hijab, or like in afghanisatan the RWADA (a womens group) are trying to oppose wearing the hijab, when it clearly states in your Quran and elsewhere that the muslim women are obliged to wear the Hijab!?! By the way Christian women are obliged to wear a headscarf to Wendy, so a hope your doing your bit for the Christian faith, whens the last time you saw a picture of Mary without her Hijab?
. . .
Another thing, for the person who thinks that we are opressed women in islam, i dont think so. Whats so oppressed about us huh?
Allah tells us to wear the hijab, ok? did you ever actually think with you brains and say why? or did you just listen what them ignorant ones say that Allah is opressing us, or islam....or whatever.!
How are we opressed when allah is trying to protect us? How are we opressed when we get sooooooo much respect from people more than the one who do show off there body like what keanbin said?? How are we opressed when woman were mentioned in the quran sooooo many times...not sure how many.... but alot mashallah!
Getting raped, isn't that oppression? Getting sexually harrassed, you dont call that oppression? Just being used as a sex material...AINT THAT OPPRESSION?? You tell me! Or is that just how kuffar live? like animals! And say that we are oppressed....Subhan allah! How many muslim woman do you hear everyday getting raped??? NONE! because Hijab is not just a peice of scarf on our heads, Hijab means a covering, and protection from people and eyes!
Whether or not the Koran actually decrees the hijab (Aziz has told me it doesn't), isn't it interesting to see how much more appealing the idea seems to women who aren't and have not been required to wear it-- who live in countries where they have the free choice not to?
I have no problem understanding that women who choose to cover up their bodies find that they're treated with more respect and are less subject to feeling worthless and objectified. But this is like a "voluntary security measure"--something women ought to be able to choose to do on their own, whether as a form of protest, or because it makes them feel more empowered and modest, or whatever the reason might be. It's something that only really matters and has meaning if it's a choice... if it's decreed for all women regardless of their personal feelings, capabilities, and level of comfort with how the world treats them, then it loses any significance that it would have had if it had been freely chosen.
I hope Karzai can keep dodging those bullets... and considering his situation, I'm not speaking figuratively.
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14:03 - In the interest of balance
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J Greely reminded me of something I think I'd mentioned before in passing-- a potential reason to root for the Xbox.
This would be that there seems to be a general trend in the gaming industry toward console platforms, and away from the PC. This is happening through the integration of networking, high-definition video output, hard drives, and keyboard/mouse input into consoles across the board. This will equalize consoles with PCs as far as inherent architectural differences go; MMORPGS and other text-heavy and saved-data-heavy games could be played on consoles just as well as on a computer. I'm still skeptical in some cases (third-person shooters and RPGs that rely on printing huge amounts of tiny text to the screen work much better when you're sitting close to a high-res monitor than if you're sitting ten feet away from a big-screen TV, even if it is HD). But it seems that's where the industry is headed.
I can in fact see reasons why PC game companies would have an interest in developing for consoles instead of the PC, if they can get away with it. It's a standardized hardware platform; the APIs are guaranteed to work; and there would be no tedious development of convoluted installer scripts to deal with. Just press a disc and off it goes.
I can even see why it would be in Microsoft's interest to push game development onto the Xbox. Surely it would mean a huge reduction in R&D costs for them-- no more need to keep DirectX chicken-wired together, no more need to worry about new hardware drivers and security issues. If Microsoft were to shift their focus from pandering to gaming on the PC and to the Xbox, instead of trying to own both and push both ahead, then things could turn out quite well for all involved.
Because what it would mean would be a major shift away from what drives PC development. There would no longer be this mad headlong rush toward new video cards that push more gigatexels every week; instead, desktop PC development would slow down to a saner level. Since the gulf between games and non-game apps in demand on hardware has been getting wider and wider, suddenly there would be a whole lot less pressure on the PC market to forge ahead at the same breakneck pace. Intel probably wouldn't like this, and nor would NVidia and ATI-- and nor would Dell and HP, who wouldn't be selling as many replacement machines every two years anymore. But even so, it might be a good direction for companies like Microsoft to move in, if the economies of scale work out that way.
It's already been proven that as far as technological merit goes, a closed and dedicated box with a relatively low-powered CPU and other such modest statistics can hold its own against the software made for the most top-end PC hardware. Now the only things to overcome are the aspects of games that are uniquely "PC"-- and the cult of upgrades that currently defines the personal computer market.
If that happens, Apple stands to gain a lot of credibility. Suddenly the whole "speed" thing wouldn't matter so much anymore, either in perceived merit or in actual practical matters. Software availability (for which read "game availability") would no longer be as much of an issue. And an entirely different class of buyers would make up the majority of the market, buyers with different values and needs. I don't imagine that this kind of outcome could be a bad one for Apple. Or for Linux or FreeBSD or anybody else who doesn't currently have an entrenched gaming market.
So, maybe I ought to be looking at the Xbox as evidence of Microsoft's commitment to a future that I have no argument with. It's a long shot, and if it happens that way it'll be the first in a long series of Microsoft-related outcomes that turns out in a way that I find amenable. It could just as easily turn out that PC games continue to dominate the technological landscape and the Xbox ends up dominating the console market. But hey, there's a glass-half-full way to see everything, isn't there?
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09:59 - Generation Xbox
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That's what I'm going to start calling the invincible army of scaly little toad-children who crawl around the Internet, leaving slug-trails behind them all over the sites they infest, operating under the conviction that it's okay to steal a piece of artwork that someone has posted, remove the signature and copyright notice in a pirated copy of Photoshop, and then upload it to other sites like Neopets.com (or even the same site they got it from) under their own name.
And they've learned this code of ethics before they have attained two digits of age. And they never learn any better, in a distressing proportion of cases.
These are the same people who call me names for posting negative things about Microsoft, by the way, because hey, m1cr05oPh+ m4k3z the Xb0x-- and making a fucking video game system (and buying up independent multi-platform game companies in order to brute-force a saleable exclusive platform, and dumping it onto the market with prices subsidized by money obtained elsewhere in the conglomerate, just so as to undersell the established players and eventually own this market too) trumps any other alleged unethical behavior by the company. To them, any technical, legal, or ethical shortcomings of the company are rendered irrelevant, and and they'll grow up feeling benevolent toward Microsoft because Microsoft provided them their soma during their pre-teen years.
Ugh. Some days my inbox is just not a pleasant thing to wake up to.
Yes, I know that the Xbox has certain qualities-- both in its development style and in its target audience-- that set it apart from what usually characterizes Microsoft. And I don't mean to antagonize readers who have Xboxes but don't fit the description above-- they're cool.
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| Wednesday, November 20, 2002 |
01:56 - More Mac-ish Musings
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Just a couple, before I turn in.
Lileks pointed me towards the newly Cocoa-ified Transmit 2, an FTP program that I'd never noticed before now-- which is a shame, considering that it's by Panic, the company that writes such buffed-with-a-diaper-till-it-gleams specimens as Audion. Audion is an MP3-player app that I haven't had much use for since iTunes came along; it's the "traditional" style of MP3 player, in the sense that it's skinnable (Quartz transparency is something to behold in these skins!), has support for things like album art and liner notes, and it plays MP3s in filesystem order or by manually defined playlists (which seems hopelessly primitive now that I'm used to iTunes' means of navigation). But the program itself is superb, and its presentation is polished within an inch of its life, which is why I've continued to support Panic with registrations for each new version of Audion that they've released. These guys deserve plaudits for what they've made into a business and a labor of love.
But anyway, I was talking about Transmit 2. This is one slick little app. It's based on the ncftp core, which is widely used; and the interface is both playful (with local and remote file listings labeled "your stuff" and "their stuff") and practical (it opens directly into exactly the screen you need, with your favorites ready to hand, and all options easily accessible). It supports SFTP by a single selection in the main login screen. It has a live-resizeable preview drawer for all recognized file types. It even has a mirroring function and a remote text file editor.
All the functions and layout elements have the feel of a no-nonsense checklist, ruled by algebraic symmetry and space-saving aesthetics: "This pane goes here. This progress bar goes here. Here are the input fields you need to set up a session. Every button label is a verb. Destructive action buttons are separated spatially from the other buttons." The strict adherence to this kind of austerity of design leads to a reassuring, pleasing workflow that the user immediately understands without having to meander around timidly clicking random buttons until something happens. Everything here makes sense, everything does what you expect it to, and in using each function, it seems like folly to imagine it being done any other way.
"FTP That Gives Mac OS X A Great Big Hug." I tell you, it's impossible to stay in a bad mood when you're using software like this.
Incidentally-- today I was burning some ISO images of FreeBSD 5.0 DP2, and I had the opportunity to see how Disk Copy worked. The answer is very well indeed, thank you. Go to "File->Burn Image..." and select the .iso file when prompted. The machine sticks out its tongue, you drop in a CD. It sucks it in, burns it, and spits it out. You take a drink, sit there with your chin in your hand, and plot how to manage eloping with a computer.
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00:19 - The Towers Regrow
http://www.capitalistlion.com/article.cgi?155
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CapLion has found a story on Mayor Bloomberg's unveiling of the new WTC No. 7 tower. Go give it a look if you're interested in what's going on with the site.
I do wish, though, that papers like The Independent would refer to the WTC as "Center" rather than "Centre". And maybe look up the proper usage of "principal" vs. "principle".
At any rate, Bloomberg certainly seems to be full of ideas...
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19:18 - Wind Tunnels
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Kris and Chris and I were doing our usual Mac dishing near my cubicle, when Mark, one of the engineers upstairs who had recently bought one of the new so-called "Wind Tunnel" G4 towers, walked by with a 2U rack-mount device balanced on his head, striding off in the direction of a lab somewhere.
"Hey Mark," Kris called after him. "You've got a noisy Mac, right?"
Mark didn't break stride. "I can't hear it next to the Windows 2000 machine on my desk."
The fact is that these machines are not all that loud. Yes, they are in fact louder than their predecessors-- about twice the ambient noise, or 3dB-- but the predecessors were and are extremely quiet. Kris, who has one of the Wind Tunnels at home, says that if the TV is on, he can't even hear the machine.
The moniker primarily comes from the noise the fan makes when the machine is first turned on (or rebooted). The CPUs in this model do suck more power than the previous ones (and they're dual), so the power supply is a beefier multiphase one than what my three-year-old 450 has (Kris speculates that this is all overkill in anticipation of the IBM chips next year). When the machine is powered-on or rebooted, there are several seconds before the temperature sensors kick in, and the fans default to an "atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed" mode that yowls like a cat on a fence. But it quiets down as soon as the temperature sensors come online and everything settles out.
We couldn't find the decibel meter that another co-worker (who isn't in today) usually has; next time we see him, though, we're going to try to get hold of the meter and do some real measurements.
But the upshot is that "Wind Tunnel" is a tongue-in-cheek epithet, not a derisive one.
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11:36 - A thought on network effect
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/01/fog0000000140.shtml
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Den Beste has mentioned "network effect" several times as evidence that Apple is doomed and Windows will achieve 100% penetration. From his original article on the subject:
There is a marketing term: "network effect". It refers to the fact that for some kinds of products, the product becomes more valuable to each individual customer as more and more people buy it. Companies love this if they can get it, because there's no manufacturing cost associated with network effect, so the value (and potentially the sales price) of the product can rise and thus profit margins can increase.
The effect exists; I'm not going to argue that. It's a truism of humanity that the more the people around you do something, the easier it is for you to do the same thing.
But I have to wonder whether the effect will lead to where Den Beste thinks it will. I find myself thinking that the result of network effect on any given niche depends heavily on circumstance; it's not a foregone conclusion that it will lead to homogeneity.
My thought is that network effect is only really potent when the choice in question is in fact a choice. I'd say network effect was absolutely instrumental in Windows attaining the critical mass that it achieved in the mid-to-late 90s. Back then, a new computer user was an informed buyer, someone with geeky tendencies, who knew what a computer was supposed to do and what he wanted to do with it. He had a choice between Windows and a Mac; he weighed the merits of each, and eventually the fact that all his friends were using Windows because it was cheaper and had more software won out. That's network effect in its purest form.
But that's not the case these days. Using Windows isn't a choice, it's a default. New computer buyers don't know what operating system their computer runs any more than they know what encoding standard their phone uses. Network effect doesn't enter into the buying decision; when someone is getting a new computer, it's going to run Windows. Only if the user is savvy does he weigh the relative merits of Windows and the Mac-- and such users, though it may not look that way from within the blogosphere, are vanishingly few. They're not a significant part of the numbers which drive sales.
It's at a time like this that network effect actually can work in favor of the niche player. My personal experience tells me this. Time was, after all, that nobody wanted to use any Apple products; the Mac was seen as a "toy", the Mac OS was seen as limited and restrictive and unstable, and Mac users were usually simply called "gay" and left at that. (Network effect in reverse.) But these days, the situation is quite different. People come up to me to see my iMac and my iBook and ask questions about it-- what it can do, how much it weighs, how much it costs-- quite unprovoked. They're seeking it out. If I flash my iPod while in line for burritos, people's heads turn my way and I get to show it off to a genuinely admiring audience, rather than having to hide it from people who think it makes a statement about my sexuality. (I just saw an iPod on the title-card sequence for "Modern Marvels: Boys' Toys" on the History Channel.)
And that, too, is network effect.
Using a Mac is starting to be seen once again as something real people do. Everybody has a friend who uses a Mac-- and such people are more common than they were a couple of years ago, at least in my experience, anecdotal though it may be. The "Switch" ads are putting memes into the water. Everybody knows what an iPod is and what an iMac looks like. OS X gets high-profile billing in movies like Men In Black II. People create videos in iMovie and photo books in iPhoto. Apple Stores present hip and inviting facades to passers-by in high-income malls. There are more games being produced for the Mac platform than there ever have been since the mid-90s. These things enter the collective consciousness. And they're doing it more now than they used to.
One of the most common refrains here at work is "When I get my Mac..." --and a big driver for that is the fact that there is already that crucial seed of shock troops within the company who have already bought Macs and are visibly happy with them. That makes it easier for more people to consider, "Hey, now, maybe these things are worth looking into. Sure can't be worse than this Windows box, can they?" And when a friend sees my iPod and plaintively says, "God, everybody has one of those except for me!"... it means an imminent sale is dependent only on whether it turns out to be in the guy's budget for the month.
When those around you are increasingly making a certain choice, you're more likely to make that same choice yourself. I see that happening with Apple products more and more these days. But I don't see it happening with Windows anywhere near as much, because to use Windows first has to be a choice that one has to consciously make.
I suspect that network effect is only really valid in a plural market, is what I'm saying. It confers the most momentum to a product or company while that company is a minority and on the rise, but its potency falls off as that product or company achieves near-total penetration. Beyond that, other effects take over-- more volatile ones, depending largely on PR, economics, design, and luck. Anything can happen. But in a situation like we have today, I don't think network effect is really something Apple has to worry about as much. Instead it's an ally, as long as they can keep it fed and don't blow it.
Popular opinion toward Apple is curious among the casual and respectful among the savvy; the zealous are zealous as ever, but the hostile are a vanishing bunch. This is a much different environment from what it was two or three years ago. Apple is no longer a pariah-- and whatever its products' numbers might look like, the environment is a rich one for growth.
OS/2 failed because while it was a niche player with a similar position to Apple's, it didn't bring anything to the table that was compelling and hip, the way Apple does now. Good as it was, it didn't have an exclusive "killer app" that IBM could show off on TV and build consumer lust. There wasn't any reason for the man on the street to think, "Hmm, OS/2-- that's cool stuff, right? I oughtta go get me some of that!" Nor was there for Be, which had cool idealistic prospects, but nothing concrete for people to latch onto. But aha... Linux started off as a niche player, and it had the crucial network-effect ingredient that it brought something desirable to the table-- something that would overcome its minority position and gather adherents even in the face of overwhelming opposition from the status quo. Somehow that worked. Linux brought a concrete benefit to people who wanted to make an informed choice and achieve something specific. And that's what Apple is doing too; that's why Apple is better equipped to survive in its current market than, say, OS/2 was.
Or maybe I'm just on crack.
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| Tuesday, November 19, 2002 |
23:42 - Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still doooooomed
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And as the volume of PC sales continues to rise, and as Apple's sales continue to stagnate or even drop, that price disparity will only become worse, with the PCs continuing to fall in price due to economy of scale while continuing to rise in relative value compared to the Mac both because of improvements in technology and because of network effect. What this really means is that the "Switch" campaign is doomed; there will be little in the way of switching, and most of that will be Mac users switching to the PC. Apple's primary business will continue to be replacement units for existing users in a declining overall customer base.
Quick, somebody tell the eight people at my company who have all bought iPods and/or their first Macs over the course of the past year.
Someone remind them that they're supposed to be all dissatisfied with them and stuff, and want to switch back to the trusty Windows world. They just won't snap out of it. What's wrong with them?
And for God's sake, do something about the numerous people I know, both at work and elsewhere, who have gone from outright derision of Macs as of a year or two ago to curiosity, intrigue, respect, and genuine, money-on-the-table interest. Someone warn them before it's too late!
Doomed! Dooomed, I tells ya!
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17:54 - Perceived Quality
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1272
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Here's a meta-article about a C|Net review of the 17" iMac and its build and design quality as compared to similarly-priced HP and Gateway PCs. (Gateway is a particularly eye-to-eye Mac rival these days, considering the recent stunts like the Profile 4-vs-iMac ad, their retooling of the Gateway Country Stores to be more like the Apple Stores, and the "You can do all this stuff with Gateway!" ads for them-- though one that I saw the other day, in a promotion run by AT&T Broadband, gushed about the great online services offered by AT&T and Gateway-- while the camera zoomed in on the Ethernet cable plugged into the side of the iBook on the laughing actress' lap. Hey, props for recognizing visual style when it suits the ad setting, but points off for Photoshopping a piece of graphical ad-copy onto the iBook's screen when the camera zoomed in.)
Anyway...
Yes, Wilcox even cites the cables, and their tangle-free properties, as a indicator of high quality.
But more importantly, the review shows what you don't get with low-end PCs: high-end video cards. But even on HP's mid-range 883n - lineball with the iMac at $2,000 - HP resorts to an analog video card with an LCD monitor, merely to save a few bucks. The result, says Wilcox, is a blurry LCD, which compares poorly with the iMac's bright, clear 17" display.
Of all Apple's purported weaknesses these days, one of the least-often cited is "fuzzy/blurry/dim LCD screen". The display on my iMac at work still gets admiring stares from passing co-workers. It really does look good.
The review does note a number of legitimate gripes, though (I'm still scratching my head over the iMac's power button being at the back and flush with the body so you can't find it no matter what you do). And that's fair.
But the tech press as a whole is being very pro-Mac lately-- and not in a rah-rah way (which would betray the presence of idiosyncratic Macophiles on editorial staffs here and there, using any excuse to blurt out a sycophantic paean to Jobs), but in a critical and even-handed way. That's money, baby.
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17:31 - Writing Without Reference
http://www.arizonarepublic.com/business/articles/1119e-komando.html
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I'm sure we all remember the last time Kim Komando poked her nose into the fray and talked about how the Mac failed to wow her through its dazzling and inspiring unique abilities to run Word and Excel, and ignored all the iApps because she didn't do things like make movies or listen to music-- evidently they just weren't something she was wired to understand.
Now, I'm glad she's continuing to pay lip service to the Mac in her insightful and informative articles ("RAM is the area where information is stored temporarily while the microprocessor works on it. Random means the data can be stored anywhere in memory, and the microprocessor can go directly to them. That really speeds things up. Many computers will run faster with more memory."). But sometimes, reporting erroneous information-- even if one's market is small enough that it won't really matter-- just makes you look like a doofus.
The procedure is similar on a Macintosh. If you're using Mac OS 9 or earlier, select "About this computer" from the Apple menu when you're at the desktop. In Mac OS X, choose the Memory control panel from the System Preferences application.
Yeah-- A for good intentions, C for effort. There is no "Memory control panel" in System Preferences. If you want to know how much RAM is in the system in total, just use "About This Mac" like in the old days. (Since it's UNIX, though, it's less straightforward to ferret out how much RAM each app is using. But these days that doesn't matter either, thanks to transparent VM. When was the last time you got an "Out of memory" error, anyway?)
That's an interesting point, though. Nowadays, the only clear reason columnists like her can elucidate for buying more RAM is that it "makes things faster" (rather than enabling apps to run that used to result in errors, the former obvious reason). RAM has now become a transparent and nebulous under-the-hood concept, like using higher-octane fuel. Isn't that veird?
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17:17 - Never is heard a discouraging word
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,45378,FF.html
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Speaking of journalistic "switchers", here's an article in Business 2.0 by Shoshana Berger, lauding not only the Mac laptops but also the Move2Mac software with the cool logo.
The Move2Mac software made the whole process less painful than popping a pill. Using a USB cable, the program transferred my documents, photos, MP3s, and Web bookmarks to my new Mac. Best of all, it threw all of my Outlook Express contacts in a knapsack and made like a hobo across platforms. Switching ain't the 12-step program it used to be.
She clearly likes the imagery on the box too.
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15:02 - The Mysteries of Life
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WHY are there always SHOES on the side of the freeway?
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11:12 - The Numbers Game
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/11/Thedifferencegrows.shtml
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In reading this article, as with so many others like it, one gets the impression that there's nothing more to a Mac or to a PC than a column of numbers that add up to a grade. Slip in the Scantron sheet, count up the little pencilled-in ovals, and give the kid his score. A high enough score gets you into Stanford.
Indeed, if computers were really like that, this argument would have a lot of weight. Den Beste would be 100% right. The whole world should be using Wintel PCs, and anybody who consciously chooses to use a Mac is either heroically stupid, or just insane.
Well, computers are more than numbers. And while I hate to use the "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" argument, I must point out that I can rattle off the names of eight to ten bloggers-- easy-- extremely high-profile bloggers at that, bloggers whose sites are read by tons of people, bloggers with very intelligent and educated readerships, bloggers whose opinions and judgments are respected and debated and talked about over the water cooler-- who all use Macs. Passionately, even.
I'm not prepared to dismiss their choices of computers and their opinions on technology as deluded lunacy from kool-aid drinkers who refuse to see the big picture. And I don't think most of their readers are either.
There is more to the Mac than numbers, and these guys all realize it.
This isn't necessarily a compelling case for existing Mac users to switch to the PC (though for some who are considering an upgrade anyway, it might be). That's not the point. The question is: why would any PC user in the professional graphics industry want to switch to the Mac? They'd pay more for a box which ran hotter, was substantially slower, was louder and provided fewer features. The only answer is a lame one: "Well, you'd be more productive using the Mac OS." I'm afraid you'll have a difficult time making that case. Ultimately, anyone can be productive on any system, and there comes a point where a 1.5:1 increase in compute speed affects productivity more than any esoteric issues about how pretty the buttons are on the screen.
Actually, there are two points to be made here. One is that compute speed is not the only reason why every DV and NLE house in the country is a Mac shop, standardized on FireWire paths and Apple software. Believe it or not, the user environment actually is important, as is build quality (my Dell server is popping components like a Yugo in summertime) and hardware lifetime (my three-year-old G4/450 is still eminently usable, but my PC at work-- which was built last year-- is already a pig) and vendor consolidation (who wants to play phone ping-pong between five different hardware and software vendors when trying to resolve a problem?). These are, granted, subjective issues to some degree. Statistics can be gathered for them, but it still tends to come down to taste.
The other point, however, is a very concrete one: ColorSync. It's the industry standard for color matching throughout the prepress and graphics industries. There's nothing like it in the PC world, and if it's not patently impossible because of the hardware variance or whatever, Microsoft has certainly not made any efforts to try. Some video card manufacturers have tools which try to sync your card to your monitor, but that's all these tools do. They should not be confused with ColorSync, which is a technology designed to be integrated throughout the production process. Color profiles for the output devices of the creator of an image are embedded into the image itself, and then when the image is opened on another person's Mac, the application-- all of which on the Mac are ColorSync-aware-- reads the profile, matches it against the recipient's own output devices' profiles, and displays the image with the same color characteristics as on the creator's machine. This integration is embedded throughout the output process, whether you're talking about printouts, lithography prep, or film. Professional graphics would be impossible without ColorSync. Printing houses charge extra if you bring in PC files for them to reproduce, because of the extra work they need to do in order to compensate for the lack of ColorSync data in the images.
And this is without even bringing up the Final Cut Pro argument. FCP has lots more features than Premiere and is a lot less expensive than Avid, and it's fast becoming the standard throughout the industry for those reasons alone. And here's the kicker: while all three of those major players in the professional DV editing market are available on the Mac, FCP-- the most popular-- is Mac-only. That might have something to do with it.
In other words, the reason why so many graphics professionals use Macs is that Apple caters specifically to graphics professionals.
Believe it or not, those graphics houses who know what the hell they're doing are aware that there is more to computing than whether you have a CPU that's twice as fast as last year's model or not. (These guys don't do a whole helluva lot of upgrades in any case; that's why, two years since OS X's release, FCP is still maintained synchronously for OS 9-- because so many professional studios don't upgrade, as a matter of policy as well as of expertise.) Without certain critical features-- among which can be counted such abstract concepts as "trainability", "consistency of interface", "stability", and "a single vendor", as well as such concrete examples as ColorSync and FireWire-- the work is impossible (or at least prohibitive) regardless of how fast your hardware is. Sure, do your DV editing on a PC if it's so much better for your productivity to do it on a 3.06 GHz processor than on a 2.4 GHz. But sooner or later, the process will have to pass through a Mac house, and then there'll have to be a price paid for breaking away from the established standard and taking the unnecessarily long and primitive way around, and you'll lose in days of overhead what you gained in minutes of saved rendering time.
There's a reason why journalists, like David Coursey, keep pulling stunts like "spending a month on a Mac" and then deciding at the end that they're not switching back. There's a reason why otherwise perfectly sane bloggers exhibit what must come across as complete irrationality by standing firmly by their Macs, dialing their iPods in bliss as they type out the columns that thousands of web-surfers read every day. And there's a reason why the "Switch" campaign says not one single word about speed and numbers. (Even in cases where the numbers would speak in favor of the Mac.)
That reason, as I've discussed before, is that anecdotes speak louder than numbers. And when a company has a vast grass-roots following that's determined to let the world know just how happy their Macs make them, let me tell you, it's not because the Scantron spit out a bubble sheet without any tick-marks in the margins.
It's because they know what's truly important in computing, and Apple fulfills it for them.
UPDATE: If you don't believe my second-hand observations on the nature of the video-editing community are valid, you can always try these first-hand observations instead:
You can't run a graphics house when every machine, even if they have the same brand and model of video hardware and display, will display colors and white balance differently. It's simply impossible to achieve reproducible results. Those who try and conclude that PC's are every bit as productive in the professional graphics industry are not in the professional graphics industry. They're little more than weekend warriors making uninformed decisions based on the fact that they can splack home videos together in Premiere.
Yeah.
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| Monday, November 18, 2002 |
23:26 - Everybody look what's goin' down
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While out back watching for the Leonid meteor shower (the biggest particulate cloud won't be for another couple of hours, but it was worth a shot), we saw a light show of a different kind: a long stream of large military aircraft-- C-5s and C-130s and the like-- rising from Moffett, droning southeastward over our house in South San Jose, and then banking right and heading out to sea. Possibly toward Guam. In half an hour, we saw at least three of these, rising along the same flight path, one that I've never seen taken before.
You'd think something was up.
UPDATE: The later part of the meteor shower rocked. We saw several bolides (exploding meteorite chunks that created long, hugely bright streaks, displayed a flare-out at the end, and left a visible trail of smoke in the upper atmosphere); one of which looked to have penetrated down to about 30,000 feet. Quite a show...
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17:50 - Grass roots grow a little deeper
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Network Computing recently ran an article which featured my company's product in competition with all the relevant competitors in its category (naturally, we trounced 'em); our PR guy, as he usually does, forwarded it around for our edification.
I filed it away after a brief skim. However, Kris noticed a few unusual details that had evaded my eye (the emphasis is his):
For client machines we used 10 Intel Celeron 500-MHz white box PCs running Microsoft Windows 2000 and an Apple Computer PowerBook G3 connected to the [devices under test] at 100 Mbps through an Extreme Summit48 switch, and then to a dual NIC Dell Computer PowerEdge 2450 running Windows 2000 with routing enabled. A T3 (45 Mbps) link was simulated with a Shunra Software's Storm STX-100.
Our server was an Apple Macintosh dual 800-MHz G4 with 1 GB of RAM. We ran FTP, Apache Web server and the Apple Darwin streaming server and used Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner 7.5.1 to generate as many as 100 real TCP sessions. We broadcast "live" a large QuickTime movie set to nonterminating continuous loop. This movie output was, on average, 1.6 Mbps per stream.
LoadRunner let us generate real Windows TCP sessions, and we always ran enough users to oversaturate the T3. Our Web tests included simulating users downloading several multimegabyte pages as well as multiple small pages in succession.
We also tested transferring Web and FTP data simultaneously. We set a policy for a minimum of 20 Kbps per connection with a burst of 50 Kbps, a minimum of 500 Kbps per connection for Web traffic, and 20 Mbps maximum for FTP. We also tested streaming video while concurrently running 100 large Web transfers.
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Looks like Macs are making a slow comeback!
Of course, everyone knows that in a totally rational market, this would never happen. I guess more and more people are just becoming irrational, what?
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13:08 - Doc Pemberton was so worldly and ahead of his time
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From the Ar-Rahman list, which has been blessedly free of blistering anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment for the past couple of months, ever since someone spoke up and mentioned that hey, this stuff is actually kinda offensive:
Oh. Yeah. Geez. No idea why I never saw that before. Hey, I've got some incontrovertible proof, by the way, that Barney the Purple Dinosaur is really Satan. See, just add up all the letters that can be interpreted as Roman numerals, and you get 666, or something. <yawn> Next...
Hey, and I thought all the good Doctor was trying to do was capitalize on the great taste of a narcotic with syrup. Time for everybody to switch to Mecca-Cola, eh?
(Ah well. At least our religious loonies more or less keep it within the family, or at least they keep the racist conspiracy theories locked up in their woodland cabins where they can't hurt anybody.)
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| Sunday, November 17, 2002 |
22:11 - Tribute (or nepotism)
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On Home Movies tonight, which is the first show Cartoon Network plays in its "Adult Swim" block, there was a scene at a public indoor pool where McGurk was trying to learn to swim.
On the wall in the background was a poster that said ADULT SWIM 10:00-1:00.
Sweet.
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| Saturday, November 16, 2002 |
00:42 - Preaching Laughter
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It's been remarked here and there in the blogosphere that comedians seem to be the public figures who most frequently exhibit that they have heads securely welded to their shoulders. Forget political demagogues and religious leaders; from the mouths of comedians does all-too-frequently come wisdom. Free of the strictures of political correctness, unafraid to offend any particular "aggrieved" group among their audience (who waives their right to be offended by the act of purchasing the tickets), comics get to say things that so many other figureheads with wide reach are muzzled from saying.
I just got back from seeing a Lewis Black show at the Punchline Comedy Club in Sacramento with my folks. Black is the "angry comic" guy on the Daily Show and elsewhere on Comedy Central; I haven't seen much of him to date, but I'll have to keep an eye out for him in the future. Nothing quite beats seeing him from four feet away and at ankle level, with our dinner-theater table actually touching the edge of the stage.
Anyway-- after nearly an hour of gut-busting material covering Halloween costumes, Enron-esque CEOs, candy corn, drinking water, his Jewish upbringing, and creationists, he suddenly dropped to a serious tone and posited that in life three things are really important: patriotism, faith, and humor. He said that the biggest reason that our current enemies are our enemies is that they've "been wandering the desert for thousands of years and never run into a knock-knock joke. ...Guess that's the price they pay for living in tents." He went on to claim that if only there were a tradition of humor in the Islamic world, nobody would have ever been able to stand in front of a group of men and say in all seriousness that if they blow themselves up in the name of Allah, they'd be met in heaven by 72 virgins. "They'd recognize it as the punchline of a joke!"
I've said that kind of thing before here, myself; after all, I haven't seen a whole helluva lot of evidence for comedy and not-taking-oneself-so-damned-seriously in that community. Unless you count the cartoons of M. Khalil of The Arab News, which I don't believe fits the description of "humor".
Anyway... on the drive home from Sacramento, I encountered what one of the featured comedians (whose name I can't remember) described in great detail having encountered the night before: an immense bank of fog-- "Tule fog", they call it-- that rolls off the Sacramento River and blankets Highway 80 all the way across the Central Valley. And when I say "blankets", I mean "fills with a palpable mass that light cannot penetrate". The Central Valley is our own little Midwest; it has Eppie's and Quizno's restaurants, which don't exist in the Bay Area, and used-car dealerships are closed on Sundays for church. But I didn't get to see any of that on the drive home. I got to see fog. It would be ineffectual to describe it in numerical terms: I could say how I could only see twenty feet ahead, or couldn't see past two of the reflectors on the edge of the freeway, and it would tell you nothing useful. It's only marginally more effective if I tell you that I couldn't see the approaching headlights of the cars going the opposite direction on the other side of the median, or that the only way I could tell I was going under an overpass was that the air and the sound suddenly and briefly grew thicker and darker-- after which the subtly changed light allowed me to see the beads of water gathering on my windows and migrating backwards. No, I think the only way I can convey what it was like would be to say how on a 75mph freeway, I was going about 60, hunched forward over the wheel, hands gripping it at the top, jinking back and forth as my vision-- which petered out after the second reflector, meaning that I couldn't tell whether the next reflector ahead would be in a straight line or a sudden curve-- told me to react on the basis that there might be a car right in front of me, or there might not, and I'd never see it until it was too late-- gritting my teeth and yelling Jeez! . . . Crap! . . . Fuck!! . . . into the night.
I shot out of the fogbank with a whoof sound right at Vacaville, which I could tell because of the giant tall tombstone-towers on the sides of the freeway which advertise malls and the stores in them. And shortly afterwards, I was back in the mountains, and then I was back in the Bay.
No wonder geeks like California. Travel fifty miles, and it's like you've traveled to a different state, only in virtual reality.
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13:18 - A different kind of "Switcher"
http://bantha.cjb.net/john
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Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncalled-for?
It's a whole "Switch" ad parody advocating moving north. Go watch it and see. And here's an article in The Ottawa Citizen which provides some more-or-less impartial analysis and background.
Now, I realize that Apple is a company whose clientele is not known for being a bunch of Limbaugh-listening, Falwell-watching flag-wavers. And I know what Mr. Jobs' personal leanings are like, as evidenced by the recent front-and-center Jimmy Carter tribute. But I for one really don't appreciate the ad campaign and the corporate trade dress being hijacked in order to spread "Bush is a monkey" memes. If Apple has any bones in its body, they won't appreciate it either.
I'm not saying it should be taken down or anything... I just think it's in poor taste, and I'm not used to seeing things in apple.com-looking trim that I consider "in poor taste".
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| Friday, November 15, 2002 |
03:06 - Zoinks!
http://corsair.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_corsair_archive.html#84529599
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Corsair has found a truly frightening photo. Go look if you dare.
Lance said it looked "like a doctored Michael Jackson".
I replied, wasn't that a redundant term?
By the way-- via InstaPundit, here's the page that the picture comes from-- it's a fully annotated chronology, and a laugh riot. But nowhere near so much as the estimable webmistress's hate mail page. Boy, they'll let just about anybody on the Internet these days, huh?
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19:44 - Duff Man is thrusting in the direction of the problem. Ooh yeah!
http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
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It's an ongoing documentation effort by one Michael Jennings, entitled Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. The author prefaces it with this statement:
The author wrote this article because of the need to give his customers fundamental information about the direction Microsoft wants to take them. Few people have the technical background to understand fully the advantages and disadvantages of software as complex as an operating system. Without fundamental information, it is difficult for non-professionals to understand the advice of professionals.
The author is not anti-Microsoft in any way. There appear to be management problems at Microsoft, but the author would like any problems to be fixed, rather than have the entire world suffer through Microsoft doing poorly. Because he has spent considerable time trying to understand the problems, and because he cares deeply about fixing the problems, the author is, in that sense, "more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates".
That said, give it a read. I'm going to bookmark it and keep an eye on future additions.
Then again, this guy seems like a bit of a ranter, with more concentration on making poorly-bolstered blanket claims than on listing empirical evidence. In contrast, the virtual memory feature in the Linux operating system works extremely well. Really?
Ah well. It's a good resource, but I'll probably have to keep looking if I want the Definitive Reference.
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| Thursday, November 14, 2002 |
23:18 - Easter eggs in plain sight
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I'd discovered this one a while back, but Chris just ran across it today, and I couldn't help but think it was a good candidate for a little bit of time-lapse blogtography.
In Mail, how narrow can you make the "Date Received" column before it loses all useful data? Let's fuh-find out.
One...
Ta-ha-hoooo...
Thrrree...
There's still more space-dust here...
The times go away...
The date collapses again...
The title of the column changes to "Date"...
Down to slash-delimited format...
It was at this point that Chris, who had concluded somewhere around the sixth variation that whoever coded this had had way too much fun doing so, looked at his screen with scrunched-up eyes and a tense smirk, and burst out, "SHUT up!"
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22:58 - Yo, yo! Ma! KnowhutAhmsayyn?
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/yoyoma.html
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Yo Yo Ma is a Switcher, according to the newest ad.
These are getting more fun, not less, with time.
(The ads from Japan are also up on the main TV ads page.)
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21:50 - Virii
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/11/Virusmarketing.shtml
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Steven Den Beste has a post which claims that the lack of viruses on the Mac is a sociological/economical phenomenon, rather than a technical one.
I'd rather not get into the speculation over things like the vulnerability of OS9 and prior releases to viruses, other than to mention that the biggest risk in a virus lies in its ability to propagate itself, which in Windows manifests as a gleeful romp through Outlook and IE and IIS (after all, I'm sure Klez does a whole lot more damage in simple dental chafing over how many times it appears in people's inboxes, rather than in actual damage to people's systems). The Mac OS, while potentially more fragile in its memory structure, was much less likely to be exposed to worm-style exploits because the Mac lacked badly-written and widely-used vectors like Outlook. But that's a separate issue.
I just wanted to clarify something:
MacOSX is protected against that if properly used, as is WinNT/2K/XP. Of course, if a user routinely runs with an administrator account, they discard this protection. I don't. I have an administrator account on my Win2K systems which I use when need be, such as to do installations, but I routinely run with a "Power User" account, which does not permit me to seriously damage the system by mistake. I do that deliberately. I'm not a fool and I don't generally do things which are harmful, but this represents a level of protection that I choose to use, in part because it protects me from hostile programs which actually do end up fooling me. Unfortunately, a lot of people have gotten in the habit of routinely using an administrator account and by so doing they are throwing away one of the best protections their systems give them, to protect them against the actions of those who write hostile programs, even for OSX.
You can't discard this protection in OS X, though.
The fact is that unless you go under the hood and perform some serious monkey-wrench tweaking, you cannot log in with an administrator or "root" account in OS X. Admin security in OS X is done via the "sudo" model, in which any system-altering action (such as new software installations, modifying file permissions/ownership, or the unlocking of system-wide preferences that you have locked) must be authenticated by a designated admin user (of which there can be more than one) entering his own password. This establishes that the person who is using the current login session is the rightful owner of that account, and has the rights to perform an administrator-level action. (Non-admin users, by the way, can install software and such from within their own login sessions-- by entering an admin user's username and password.) It's on-demand action-level security, not session-level security (which, by the way, is prone to hijacking by malicious local users if the rightful user leaves himself logged in). Each unique action is assumed insecure and prompts for admin authentication. System preferences which alter global settings are unlocked at login time for admin users, but can be locked again at any time. Thus, the "root password" is irrelevant (the root account can't be accessed in the default installation, even from the command line), and for any new and potentially system-altering action, the user is given a challenge to prove he's a trusted admin, and a psychological reminder that the requested action is potentially dangerous (which may in fact be the more important benefit).
I've written our project-management system at work based on this model. Any data can be viewed by anybody; but anytime a user attempts to execute a data-altering command, he is prompted for a login and password. This has the dual effect of authenticating the user and making the user think twice about what he's doing. It's prevented a huge number of user errors that were a matter of daily maintenance to fix in our earlier system, which happily and transparently accepted any data-altering action from any user who had logged-in and authenticated once upon starting the client app.
The fact that so many people choose to run their Windows machines via administrator accounts is a symptom of the "convenience and security are orthogonal goals" axiom; if the system makes it unnecessarily inconvenient to operate in a secure manner (e.g. by running as a standard user and only using the admin account when absolutely necessary, or by using a "Power User" account, which offers limited admin power), then the user will choose to operate in a less secure manner (e.g. using an administrator account for day-to-day computing). Logging in and out of desktop sessions is inconvenient, and, today, something a user rarely wants or needs to do. If admin tasks are not made a part of the standard and convenient workflow (as OS X and best-practices UNIX server platforms do it), then users will make them part of their standard and convenient workflow, regardless of the risk involved.
Whether OS X is or is not inherently more or less porous than Windows is, again, a side issue. The crux of this particular point (granted, only one part of the larger thesis) is, however, based on the assumption that OS X admin security is done on the same asking-for-trouble model that Windows uses-- and that isn't the case.
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17:50 - They're already doing remakes
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Last night I saw the new Fellowship of the Ring DVD boxed-set Director's Cut edition.
Well, let me backtrack. The evening started innocently enough, with a nice relaxing episode of South Park-- the new one with the boys in Tolkienian costume trying to return the One Porn Tape to the video store. Oh, how sarcastic. I love how Trey and Matt are clearly well versed in the real story, but they decided to cast the kids' version in a funky cross-bred D&D milieu for the purposes of the episode. (I didn't, however, enjoy watching it in the presence of a female acquaintance who insistently peppered the show with commentary that set my teeth on edge: The black kid's name is Token? <gasp> Oh my God! It's like, "the token black kid"! Ha haah hah! I wonder if they realized that?)
But the topic came up of the new edition of the actual movie that had just been released, so at 10:30 I decided to run down to Hollywood Video and pick up a copy, as well as some tacos on the way home. This I did, and we cast the One Disc into the DVD Player of Doom (never mind that there were three others remaining to be thus consumed). And lo, sleep was not to occur until about 4:00 AM.
This new version is for the fans. If nothing else were to make this evident, it would be the thirty minutes of alphabetized names of members of the official Tolkien Fan Society that has been tacked onto the end of the credits. I mean, good lord.
But the movie itself-- well, it feels more like the book now. The texture is completely different, and it's as much a result of a new and more leisurely sense of timing (supported by a completely rewritten and re-recorded score by Howard Shore) as of the new expository material that's been added throughout. There are more names, more fragments of history, more little pieces of texture tossed in-- and more of "Tolkien's Greatest Hits" (as defined at the infamous Bakshi movie review at the Tolkien Sarcasm Page), the memorable little quotes that punctuate the nice atmospheric little scenes that didn't add enough to the story to be included in the theatrical version. Midgewater Marshes, for example, gets coverage here: "What do they eat when they can't get hobbit?"
There's a new framing scene at the beginning, with Bilbo narrating a version of the "Concerning Hobbits" prologue. It's good stuff to have, and it fleshes out the Shire nicely. But my reaction to it was... well, ehh. What I found so fascinating about the theatrical version of the movie was how Jackson was able to allude to so much of the story, so many of the plot elements, through brief little scenes masterfully photographed and textured by music-- without having to make the scenes overly long or resort to too much exposition. Gandalf, as he holds out the envelope for Frodo to slip the Ring into it, conveys everything you need to know about the intensity of the contrast between the seeming innocence of the circumstances and the cataclysmic importance of this tiny little act. It's masterful directing that conveys the essence of several textural threads at once, all in a few crucial seconds of screen time. In the new version, scenes like that one (though not that one specifically) get lengthened just a teensy bit-- enough to change the flow and the rhythm of each one, just to the point of making it feel like a page read out of a book, rather than a multifaceted lens through which to view a piece of complex character interplay. The theatrical version had tight storytelling and timing. This one is more leisurely-- it takes its time, and it doesn't leave things to the imagination.
Many of the added scenes bring a great deal of depth to the story, and there are some great bits: Gimli's Khuzdul curse at Haldir, for instance, and the first look Frodo gets at the face of one of the stone trolls (which gives way to Sam's face sliding into view). Aragorn and Boromir nearly come to blows on a couple of occasions (in scenes that just don't seem to work properly, even if they do bring some more memorable book dialogue to the table). We hear the names Elessar and Valinor and Nenya and Smιagol. We hear hobbit drinking-songs. And we get to spend what seems like an eternity watching Galadriel pass out gifts, in what I knew would have been far too tedious to have made it into the theatrical version. (I was right. It's even sorta painful for me, as it is, and they still omitted several crucial gift-givings.)
Some sound effects have been changed in quite odd ways. The sound the palantνr makes as Gandalf tosses the cloth back over it is now a very human snarl, instead of the staccato, bestial screech of the original version. And when Frodo sees the road go all fish-eye ("Get off the road!"), this version indicates the impending danger with a loud, high-pitched keening shriek. Subtle it ain't. I'd say most of the new sound effects are a bit over-the-top, in fact, and less than masterful-- as are a few confusing new camera angles, like the weird top-down shot with the blinding white back-light in Moria. (What the hell was up with that?)
Props to Howard Shore, though. The new score keeps the effective themes of the original, while bringing some new structural support to scenes in which the new melodies seem much better suited to the situation. Gandalf's The road goes ever on song as he arrives is now underlined by a score piece, to take just one example; the big heroic "adventure" theme that you hear as the party takes off from Rivendell is now tighter, without the weirdly off-tempo drumbeat, to cite another. But not all of the musical cues are improvements. Some feel distinctly out-of-place, like they were transplanted from a Disney movie or something Pouledorisian. The effect is that the textures of a whole lot of scenes have been changed very subtly but very deeply. It has a profound effect on timing, on mood, and even on character development. I'm still trying to decide whether it's successful overall.
In fact, I'm undecided on the whole movie, come to think of it. The new version is great for completists-- it has a lot more depth and world-building. But it's not as good a movie. It's just not as tight or as finely crafted as the original. It feels like a suit that's been altered over and over again, with material grafted from one place to another, and with a whole new dye job. It might be a better showpiece in the end, but it just doesn't have the purity of execution that the original had. If I were to pick a "definitive" version of the movie to point to and to prop up on a pedestal, I'm still leaning toward the theatrical one, even though the new one is so deeply geared toward the hard-core fans' cravings.
But I take heart regardless. Because in this day and age, when our most beloved directors are working full-time at hacking away at their own senses of integrity (E.T. with walkie-talkies, midichlorians, etc), Peter Jackson has shown himself to be one of those directors we'll be treating as a worldwide treasure and locking in a cryogenic chamber thirty years from now. He's doing something he loves, purely for the fans-- because he himself is the biggest fan there is.
From Meet the Feebles to the top of the world in one fell swoop. It's a phenomenon in the making.
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12:05 - Progress Bars
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I was just burning a CD in iTunes, something I don't normally do very often, while trying to reproduce a problem that Joe User described in burning non-iTunes-created MP3s onto CDs. (I wasn't able to recreate the error. I hate when this happens-- everything works perfectly for the self-described advocate, but things break unaccountably when performing for an impartial third party who is prepared to pull no punches about things that break.)
But I noticed something that I think is new in iTunes 3.0: a timer on the CD-burning progress bar. I don't think earlier versions had the countdown. I don't burn many CDs, but I seem to recall that the last time I did it, there were separate "Burning" and "Verification" stages, and no timer for either one. This is a nice change.
And it brings up a little example of the Mac OS design sensibility, something that I find makes Mac apps (particularly those written by Apple) consistently more enjoyable to use than their Windows counterparts. That is the guideline that If you must display only a single progress bar for a process, that progress bar should cover the entire process, not just whatever intermediate subprocess you're in at the moment.
For the longest time, for example, Windows was coded so that if you had dragged a group of files from one disk to another to copy them, the progress bar would show only the progress on each individual file-- resetting as each file was copied-- rather than the entire process of copying the files, which is the command the user gave ("Copy this set of files"). Recent versions of Windows fixed this, by showing two progress bars, one of which is for the overall process; but the second bar is still reminiscent of the uselessness of the old way, fluttering between "empty" and "full" in an endless seizure-inducing flicker.
(Another favorite of mine is how Windows 2000 has a progress bar in one of the text-based startup screens. It's probably the shortest phase of the startup process, and only one of four or five major steps, the rest of which don't have progress bars. You wait for thirty seconds to get to the progress-bar screen, which then takes five seconds; then you wait another thirty seconds for Windows to come up and log you in. Joyous. Whereas while the gray-screen initial phase of the OS X boot process can be quite long, the progress bar that comes up after that phase completes is much more representative of the time actually required before you can use the machine.)
OS X has been reaffirming Apple's commitment to the usefulness of the "whole process" method, in areas like app installers and CD burning. It does make tons more sense-- after all, the user wants to know how much time is remaining before he can start using the machine again, not how long it is until the next in an opaque and mysterious series of steps, its description meaningful only to the software itself, is undertaken. There is some unavoidable inconsistency, naturally, and different programs handle it differently: the Installer program has no way of knowing how long the update_prebinding task ("Optimizing") will take, so it continues to report "Less than a minute remaining" while the "Optimizing" phase takes the five to ten minutes or so that it ends up requiring (though recently they've added a live-updating percentage counter, which is helpful). And iTunes gives you the slowly-rotating "barber pole" bar during the "finishing" phase at the end of a burn process. But other than that, a progress bar on a Mac typically means your meaningful progress, not just a piece of moving feedback to reassure you that the computer hasn't crashed.
It's a minor thing, but it's the minor things like this that Apple engineers sweat over.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Borisch adds this rejoinder:
Silly Boy, the fluttering progress bar is part of the Windows PSYOPS campaign to make Windows appear much faster than the Mac.
"See look at that progress bar, this PC here is getting much more work done while the Mac whose progress bar just sits there practically still"
My point is, perception of performance is more important than reality.
My Mac advocate boss is repeatedly disheartened when he sits at the 2GHz Dell we have in the office and is astonished at how fast the screen redraws compared to his mac with 2 1GHz processors. I say "But do you get your work done any faster when you sit at this PC."
Not to mention when we unboxed said Dell, there was a clunking from inside the case. it was one of the exhaust fans and the baffle that sucks air over the processor flopping around unattached, doing no good at all. Good thing that P4s have that processor cycling overheating protection. Feh!
Touchι.
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| Wednesday, November 13, 2002 |
18:56 - Fine Olde Debate Fodder
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,692149,00.asp
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John C. Dvorak has a tirade in PC Magazine about the ubiquity of porn spam.
So where is the government and where are the anti-obscenity laws? According to most sources, anti-obscenity law enforcement had been largely curtailed by (gee, what a shock) Clinton. In fact for most of Clinton's administration, the various pro-family, Christian, Christian-right, and vocal conservatives complained bitterly about the whole situation.
PBS did a Frontline Report called "American Porn," which made the same accusations. Regarding the documentary, Ann Hodges of the Houston Chronicle wrote: "Frontline has no fear of placing blame. Bill Clinton's administration opened the door to a porn explosion on the Internet, it says. In her rebuttal interview clip, former Attorney General Janet Reno said dropping porn prosecutions was a matter of establishing 'priorities.'"
The worst offenders in this regard have been the free speech advocates who make the dubious claim that somehow a photo of someone performing an unnatural act with a horse is "free speech." First of all, who's talking? I have been a libertarian as long as I can recall, and have always been baffled by the concept that something other than words spoken constitutes free speech. Even the printed word, according to our Bill of Rights, needs to be mentioned separately (freedom of the press) since it isn't obviously covered by the definition of free speech. But I digress. There has been a long history of anti-obscenity lobbying in this country. Lenny Bruce got arrested for doing nothing more than cussing in a private nightclub in San Francisco some years back. What he did was deemed illegal. Today, graphic images pour out all over, and this is legal. What's wrong with this picture?
I'd argue that "speech" is in fact a larger concept than "people speaking", and "the press" is a very specific concept centered around the free flow of information. Free Speech does not imply Freedom of Press, nor is the reverse true.
Freedom of speech is invoked (and rightly so) to protect all kinds of artistic expression, including physical media and software, regardless of the medium, against thoughtcrime policing on the individual level. Freedom of press is about making sure that the government can't censor the newspapers, or restrict the flow of opinion and facts (beyond matters of classified information) through publicly respected news-dissemination organs.
The difference is subtle, but it's meaningful. It's just not meaningful in the way Dvorak means it.
But either way, obscenity laws have fought with the free-speech laws for a long, long time, and they've reached a balance. Dvorak does indeed have a point in that there should clearly be some form of regulation upon unsolicited porn being sent by traceable companies to minors' inboxes (to say nothing of other people's inboxes who aren't interested in, er, what they have to offer).
But how much of this stuff actually originates in the US? How much actually comes from Europe, Southeast Asia, or offshore interests specifically created so as to be free of laws banning this kind of thing? Crack down at home, and the business will just shift all the more to the Cocos Islands and Tonga and Niue.
The best answer may have to be the inelegant semi-solution of client-side filtering. Mail in OS X has a heuristics-based spam filter that is doing an excellent job for me-- I still have to weed out maybe five or ten pieces of spam per day, but lest I think it's missing a lot of the offending messages, I just have to look in the Junk folder to see that it's correctly catching and filing-away about a hundred per day. And the rate of false positives is extraordinarily low; the only ones I'm seeing are messages that can easily be construed as spam by all criteria you could name, but that I happen to want to receive. (This is easily fixed via the learning mechanism.) And my daily Klez ration has dropped from about fifty copies to maybe two.
I suspect all popular e-mail programs will do this in the not-so-distant future; most will probably not be perfect. Either way, it means lots and lots of wasted bandwidth, as the spam continues to be spewed all over the Internet, possibly even rising in frequency as spammers try desperately to raise their "hit count", while network administrators (with filtered e-mail) remain blissfully unaware of just how many of those little LED flashes on the LAN switch represent spam mail. I can easily see things getting to the point where over 99% of a network's traffic is spam mail, crowding out legitimate e-mail as well as other application protocols from the infrastructure. But that may yet be the best we can do.
It's not an easy solution, otherwise I'm sure we'd have found it by now. But I don't think things can go on like this much longer.
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| Tuesday, November 12, 2002 |
22:21 - The iPod's Second Christmas
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At the side of the Bayshore Freeway in Mountain View, the perennial Apple billboard has just recently attained a new coat. The current slogan, next to an iPod on a plain white field, is:
Hello, stocking.
Cute... very cute. And you know, a seasonal advertising skewer like this isn't something Apple is prone to doing, aside from the usual back-to-school promos.
Considering what a sought-after item the iPod has become in the year since it was first released, though, this kind of ad is pretty much a no-brainer. And worth an appreciative giggle from passersby.
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22:16 - Just your average, run-of-the-mill 13-hour workday
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Ah well. At least I got a lot accomplished in the post-seminar hours-- and again, the food was far too good and far too plentiful during the day.
Two down, one to go.
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16:35 - Yet another perspective...
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Today in the seminar, during the breaks, Chris and I were able to check e-mail and do other random online work through a bit of OS X geekery. He linked his TiBook and his Handspring Treo together and used the Treo as a wireless modem; then he turned on AirPort and Internet Sharing, and I was able to attach to his wireless network and surf through his cellphone/PDA seamlessly. As could the guy with the HP laptop running XP, if he'd so chosen. (And assuming it had a wireless card.)
One side note: What is it with people who buy PC laptops and then never remove the market-fluff decals from the handrests? How much fun can it be to use a year-old laptop with labels declaring TAKE YOUR MUSIC TO GO-- Rip MP3s! Burn Customized CDs! and 1 month of free Internet access included with purchase! plastered all over the exposed flat surfaces? Do people just not realize they can remove these things, or do they actually like the way they look? Do they think it improves the resale value-- if they leave the decals on, the machine will fetch a higher price on eBay even if they keyboard is covered with finger gunk?
And to think I thought it was bad when people left the little foil Intel Inside <insert logo chime> stickers on their computers.
(He also had his laptop on what looked like a little black bun rack-- a wire grille that kept the laptop elevated from the desk, for airflow purposes. Now, I know the iBooks and TiBooks can get nice and toasty... but apparently this guy's HP can be downright hazardous if you don't take proper heat-conduction precautions.)
ANYway. After we had done our quite visible net-geek thing a couple of times, and shown it to the instructor who looked at the rig with what seemed like sincere appreciation, he then started up a new segment of the class with the statement: "Now, I know some of you Mac people might disagree, but most people buy computers for usability, not for functionality. In other words, most people don't go for the whiz-bang features; they go for what's easiest to use."
The implication being that Macs are groovy from a feature-set standpoint, but dad blast it, compared to Windows, they're just too hard to operate.
To say I was caught off guard would be to put it rather mildly. But if that's a popular sentiment, well... Apple's certainly got a lot of battles to fight, don't they?
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| Monday, November 11, 2002 |
21:00 - Blog? Huh?
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Not much blogging today-- and probably not for most of this week. I'm at all-day seminars, which begin at some ungodly hour of the morning and involve my driving up to San Francisco and back, followed by several hours of actual work, supporting our current mad dash toward release.
At least they feed us well there, though.
Anyway, I'm off to see The Ring now.
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| Sunday, November 10, 2002 |
02:12 - A little trans-border soul-searching
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg.asp
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In the interest of not offending my Canadian friends, I don't want to say much here, other than that this article is worth a read and a ponder.
Well, I will say one thing: observations that we on the underside of the border absorb an awful lot of criticism from those on the upper side are, to my mind, fairly accurate.
Note, however, that I'm not saying I entirely agree with the piece.
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01:24 - Monitors Confuse Brian
http://www.samsungusa.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id
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I saw an ad for this Samsung monitor in this month's Road & Track. 24" LCD, 1920x1200, HDTV-ready, with a 3D Virtual Dolby Surround sound system attached.
That's a whole lotta monitor, I thought. Especially considering the ad's slogan: DigitAll envy. A 24-inch digital LCD? Good heavens that must rock. Certainly beats the crap out of the 23-inch Cinema HD Display. What must it cost?
No price in the ad, naturally; it directs me to samsungusa.com, where after digging for a while to get to the page linked above, I found still no prices-- just links to retailers.
But I did find out something interesting: This monitor isn't digitAll at all. The input is analog RGB or CVBS.
Isn't that just a little bit disingenuous?
Ah well; surely it must at least be fairly price-competitive, right? I'd expect that what with all these features it has, with the sound system and the HDTV hookups and the TV tuner and all-- I'd say, oh, what-- about $2000, right? After all, the Cinema HD Display doesn't have those extra funky bits, and it's $3500-- but I have to assume that it's priced higher than the median for the feature set, as Apple products tend to be. Yes?
Well, here's what MonitorOutlet says:
Retail Price: $7,299.00
Our Price w/ Free Shipping: $4,452.00
Um... how's that?
Almost $4500, and that's the reseller's price-- reduced by nearly $3000 from the MSRP? Huh? Who's taking the bath here?
Anyway, there's also this guy-- the 240T monitor, another 24-inch LCD, this one a combo analog/digital one. Okay, cool-- it's not quite as nice-looking as the 241MP, but it does take digital input. Same HDTV 1920x1200 resolution and all, and speakers. And wall-mountable. Neat.
But what they don't tell you, though, and only comes out if you download the PDF, is that the maximum resolution of 1920x1440 is for analog-- the best the digital input can do is 1280x1024.
What does MonitorOutlet quote, price-wise?
Retail Price: $6,749.00
Our Price w/ Free Shipping: $2,997.00
Again, I don't understand where this monstrous discount comes from. But even assuming the latter price is where the supply-and-demand curves meet, is this monitor really worth this kind of scratch?
I'm sure there's something I'm missing.
CapLion: Of course it's analog. Has to be able to hook up to a $500 eMachine, after all.
Me: Though if there's a market made up of people who buy $500 eMachines and $7200 monitors, I'd like to get a peek into their living rooms...
CapLion: Of course there is. They saved so much on their computer, see.
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18:49 - Daily California Affirmation, with Stuart Smalley
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It's rapidly getting so that Sunday is the spiritual center of my week-- not in any kind of go-to-a-building-and-kneel sense, but in a sort of mutant Thoreau sense.
Sundays, you see, I get to wake up extremely late, like after noon (usually because I've been up till at least 5:00 in the morning working on something). I have a leisurely lunch, catch up on pending e-mail backlogs, and either work on whatever parts of the site or book or whatever still need working on since last night, or revel in the fact that there's nothing more of such work to do right now. And then I strap on my iPod, pull on some shoes, and head up into the hilltop neighborhoods of South San Jose for a nice long soundtracked sunset walk. I find a nice place to enjoy the view and the weather, I sit there for a while watching the clouds with some appropriate music alongside, thinking appropriately expansive Whitman-esque thoughts, and then I head home. Then I laugh myself hoarse at Adult Swim for the rest of the night.
I should point out, by the way, that the iPod has a very bizarre sense of humor sometimes. With well over a thousand songs in its library, and the random-play setting turned on, the oeuvre with which it serenades me as I march up the hills is usually very diverse, and often oddly fitting. Yet it seems to zero in, with irritating frequency, on "Sit On My Face", by Monty Python. Sometimes it pulls it up at the most inopportune times. I don't know what it's trying to prove, but it's got me peeking over my shoulder now on occasion, looking for the hidden cameras.
The fact that when I left the house, the first song it played was "Shaking the Tree" from the Peter Gabriel studio album that it's on, and the very last song that it started playing two hours later as I came within view of the house again was "Shaking the Tree" from the Secret World Live tour album, didn't do much to allay my paranoia.
Anyway, tonight I took advantage of the fact that the rain had cleared from our neighborhood for a while to head to the highest point I could find in the general area and watch the clouds break across the valley. I made my way to the top of Silver Creek Valley Road, which winds its way through gated communities and posh country clubs to a narrow hilltop pass beyond which no houses have yet been built; the road on that side winds down into the Hellyer valley where there are some dot-com business parks, but the steep canyon and hillside in between is as yet uninhabited (though lined with manicured trees and polished stonework medians). At the crown of the pass, I scrambled up the hill from the sidewalk to the knob right above, and found myself at the end of a ridgetop with an exquisite view of the southern end of Silicon Valley. I found a relatively dry patch of ground and sat down.
One of the nice things about living in a place without any bugs, by the way, is that I can go up to a grassy hillside and sit down and stare across the valley as the sun goes down. It's something I take for granted until I go elsewhere in the country, where such a pastime would be suicide, a selfless sacrifice to the clouds of pests which seem to inhabit every other place I've been to. There just don't seem to be any here.
Actually, I lie. There was one mosquito-- a very inexplicable one. It hovered about two feet above my head for about ten unbroken minutes, wavering from side to side. Picture this: I'm sitting with my back to the hilltop, and there's a gentle breeze coming from behind me and rolling out away from me down the hill. This mosquito seemed to be trying to fly back over the hill, but perhaps it was just a wuss-- it couldn't make any headway against the breeze. I couldn't figure it out. But if all mosquitoes acted like this, I'd have nothing against them at all.
At any rate-- there I was, at the bald peak of a hill about a thousand feet up, gazing out across the Valley to the Santa Cruz Mountains on the other side. I was facing westward, right toward the setting sun. But in between myself and the sun was a huge, dark bank of cloud-- it was clearly dumping rain on the valley floor below me, but I was far off to the side and above it, and I could see its upper contours as well as its lower draperies of moisture. The entire bank was moving slowly southward, toward my left. Its upper edge sloped downward to the right. As the clouds moved left, the sun sunk lower; it never actually came out from behind the cloud bank, but rather followed the moving contour of the clouds as the upper edge sank lower and lower, fading southward. And because of the wisps of high moisture that made up the only cloud presence against the blue that domed the rest of the sky, the sun was creating a deep orange flood across the western sky-- which backlit the slow, trundling cloud bank with edgework of orange and pink. Far from the indeterminate haze of a Midwestern horizon, where you can't really tell whether there are clouds in the distance or not against the milky white sky, these clouds were all razor-sharp against the blue, with clear and detailed texture that looked near enough to reach out and grab hold of. Every few minutes, a jet emanated from the cloud bank, slowly descending, bound for the San Jose airport. Orange and gold light glinted off its wings as it crossed my plane of vision.
And me without my camera.
I sat there for almost an hour. The music that came on my iPod as I watched the clouds' edges burst into orange flame was the final "Farewell to Neverland" score track from Hook, a long orchestral piece that fit the scene better than anything else I could have dialed up, except possibly Beethoven's 6th. The recurring theme played a few times, the way I'd remembered playing it in Band back in high school. The light began to fade; the sun, though I couldn't see its position exactly, was surely below the immovable cloud horizon by now. And the music rose to the unmistakable John Williams Fantasy Finale-- grand, royal chord progressions, the kind that can go with no possible visual but a sunset like the one I was now watching, and the words THE END. A couple of birds fluttered by as the chords faded and the track ended. I waited a couple of seconds, taking a deep breath, letting it all sink in, serene and happy as I've ever been on one of these Sunday walks, as relaxed as I've ever been sitting on a grassy hillside with nothing to do but watch birds and--
SIT ON MY FACE, AND TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME!
Aaauuuuugh! <jabjabjabnextnextnext>
I swear. I love my iPod, but some days it can be such a butthole.
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04:40 - Misunderestimating Bush
http://www.capitalistlion.com/article.cgi?127
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Earlier this week, Tim Blair made the oft-since-quoted remark:
Thus far, the reputed idiot Bush has graduated from Yale and Harvard, made a stack of cash in the oil industry, become the first consecutive-term governor of Texas, defeated a dual-term VP for the Presidency, and led his party to yesterday's extraordinary triumphs. Let his opponents keep calling him stupid; if they do, within five years Bush will be King of England, the Pope, and world Formula One motor racing champion.
CapLion has an expansion on this, as do a number of other people from blog to blog.
Bush is not Dumb. Oh no. He is by far one of the most crafty, intelligent politicians of his time. Anyone, which is to say most everyone, who underestimates him is in for surprise after surprise.
Bush knows people think he's the dim bulb in the drawer, and he's using that to a downright amazing advantage at every twist. Remarkable.
I've been wary of the malapropisms-as-proof-of-stupidity thing since 2000, because they seemed to exhibit a major distinction from those of (for instance) Quayle: Quayle's stemmed from a kind of willful ignorance, a seeming goat-skulled insistence on focusing the theses of so many speeches directly on some outrageously incorrect claim or assumption. What a terrible thing it is to lose one's mind.
But Bush's stumblings are more like stuttering. One's mind and mouth travel at slightly different speeds, and the result is a missed shift here and there. I know first-hand that this kind of poor verbal footing is not indicative of lacking mental capacity; I have close friends whose minds, among the most agile I've ever run across, are masked by unfortunately poorly-tuned speech machinery. I know better than to ignore the thoughts in question just because they aren't being delivered with the teflon texture of an Oxford don.
Actions and accomplishments speak reams, and I think those who continue to ridicule Bush for his podium presence alone-- which oddly enough don't even include Matt and Trey (That's My Bush never seemed to play on this aspect of the president's persona)-- are themselves going to look sillier and sillier as time goes on.
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| Saturday, November 9, 2002 |
21:52 - Hail the Great Innovator
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30442-2002Nov8.html
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Via CapLion, who exhibits no small amount of glee at this WaPo article explaining point by point why Microsoft's brilliant new "Tablet PC" revolution is about as insightful and innovative and crucial to the future of technology as the Pen PC was back in the mid-80s. (Remember that thing?)
Unlike other handwriting-recognition devices, tablet PCs normally leave your scribbles as "ink" on the screen. This divorce of ink from text fatally compromises the tablet PC's usefulness.
First, if your writing is unreadable on paper, it will look even worse after being digitized as ink.
Second, ink is an inefficient, incompatible way to store words. An 11-page handwritten document measured 422 kilobytes, a lot to download in e-mail or fit on a floppy disk. Ink files can't be edited on anything but a tablet PC, and e-mails written in ink may be unreadable in many mail programs, especially those on a cell phone or handheld organizer.
The tablet PC software offers only limited, clumsy ways to transform ink into text. In Windows Journal, the core handwriting-input program, you can select up to a page's worth of ink, then navigate to the Actions menu and select "Convert handwriting to text" (a tricky maneuver with a stylus); the software will offer its interpretation as well as alternative transcriptions of any words it's unsure of.
With most other applications, you need to invoke a foreground window called the Tablet PC Input Panel, which accepts your handwriting, converts it in batches and pours the results into the current document.
If you leave your ink as is, the tablet PC will still do some transcription in the background, which lets you search inexactly through an ink document: It correctly found one instance of "compact" but thought it had located three more in the words "control," "comfortable" and "computing."
Take care to write slowly and precisely in cursive or print and the tablet PC may perform quite well. But if you rush, things go downhill in a hurry. (The tablet PC just interpreted that phrase as "Things go downhill or, a henry!") Its suggestions for alternative spellings can resemble the rantings of an increasingly deranged poet, such as these interpretations of "Christine": "Christie, Caroline, Caustic, Carotene, Carthorse, Christ-ire."
At no time can you see a tablet PC's transcription in real time, letter by letter, which blocks you from learning what parts of your writing confuse the software. It breaks the feedback loop that lets users of other pen-input systems -- Palm handhelds' Graffiti, Apple's Ink for Mac OS X and Microsoft's Pocket PC -- improve their accuracy.
The tablet PC software, in turn, isn't programmed to learn from your use of it.
This setup has been puzzling me all week. Half a decade ago, Apple's Newton MessagePad 2000 transcribed my handwriting with impressive accuracy while running on a far weaker processor. Can't Microsoft do better today?
But, naturally, one of two things will happen:
1) The Tablet PC will fail miserably, a victim of reality and its own nature as a solution looking desperately for a problem (and a dozen companies gambling that Microsoft knows what it's doing will suffer a great deal in the process); or
2) The industry will pigheadedly create applications for Tablet PCs, crappy and useless as they are, and this non-learning-your-handwriting and non-convertable-on-the-fly garbage will become The Standard, because people always believe Microsoft knows The Way To The Future.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of what most of the world thinks is the most innovative company in the world.
Ask a kid why, and he'll tell you "M1cr0s0fT m4kes H4L0 !!!11` Xb0X ROOLZ!!!"
Ask the man on the street why, and he'll tell you "Well, everybody uses Windows, so it must be the best... right?"
Ask a random person watching TV why, and he'll tell you that those ads on the History Channel which show companies seamlessly interconnecting all their subsystems using .NET and Tablet PCs and XP desktops clearly demonstrate Microsoft's brilliant and unique vision for the future-- and the way they say "From Microsoft" at the end of each ad (with the falling tone, the conspiratorial and reassuring sidelong smile: From Microsoft :)) is proof positive of the company's benevolent, down-home goodness and innocence.
Ask the federal judge why, and she'll say "Any company that can make itself into a monopoly on the strength of a shoddy, ripped-off pile of unstable spaghetti code and two decades of illegal and destructive and detrimental-to-the-software-industry corporate actions makes that company worthy of every government protection."
Ask eWeek why, though, and Timothy Dyck will explain how Microsoft is really innovative-- and just what we'll buy ourselves by refusing to see what Microsoft wants the computing industry to become. Now that it's proved that they can't do anything monopolistic enough to warrant punishment, they're setting about methodically shutting out all computing that uses open and free standards like, oh, say, ASCII text, HTML, JPEG and GIF, MP3, and MPEG.
Sound like a rosy future to you?
If not, too bad, because now there's nothing to stop it.
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14:15 - It's the Comic-o-sphere vs. the Blogosphere...
http://www.ozyandmillie.org/
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Here's what the artist of Ozy and Millie has to say in parallel to the above strip, which is part of a series:
I'll be blunt. I'm seriously upset about the election results. Now we have two years of unchecked George W. Bush. I hope you conservatives out there in readerville will be decent enough not to write me, either arguing or gloating; it won't diminish my fears that a lot of things I believe in are going to take serious abuse in the next two years, maybe longer. So I spent today walking around being depressed and drawing political cartoons. I feel a little better. (And no, I didn't draw while walking around. Although my drawing table does have wheels, so I guess it's theoretically possible.
No, I won't gloat. Not now, anyway. I might, however, two years from now.
This seems to be a popular sentiment among comic artists these days, in any case. Ah well-- at least Boondocks has shut up a bit about the Bushistas forging poll results so as to look like there is more than zero popular support for a war to obtain Iraqi oil and spread some good ol' White Man's Burden.
Doonesbury, predictably, has been forecasting doom just like Simpson. But then, Trudeau is attacking blogs while he's at it, so while I still think there's humor there, there's a clear train-wreck of a decline in realistic focus. Such a shame.
If all the comics are left-leaning, and all the blogs are right-leaning, and the comics run their own commentary pages, does that mean we have to make up our own comedy?
Jeez. Even Red Meat has gotten obliquely political. That's a first.
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14:11 - Instead of... a block party?
http://www.videoclipstream.com/akamai/h-l/jaylo/oops_email.html
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Okay, this is amusing. Fox News anchor makes a bit of an embarrassing live stumble on a story about Jennifer Lopez.
Seems almost as though the writers were trying to trip him up... well done, boys.
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| Friday, November 8, 2002 |
21:47 - Gadzooks, that's funny.
http://www.libertymeadows.com/gallery/LM36.jpg
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The most recent freaky thing from Frank Cho, via Marcus:
The Superfriends versus Space Ghost, at a monkey knife-fight. Dear lord.
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21:32 - Unpleasant Little Surprises
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In all the recent musings over the commitment to quality in Apple software and the ideals of design which are upheld for the express purpose of directly benefiting the user, it's easy to get the impression that I feel Apple can do no wrong. And yeah, there are some days when I feel that way, especially when my Mac looks like an inviting oasis that I can only reach after trudging through a day-long wasteland of Windows ennui.
But Apple's far from perfect, as I have mentioned and demonstrated here from time to time-- and possibly not often enough. My musing on file-browser sort routines has had a fairly long aftermath, both positive and negative, for example. J Greely sends the following, by way of keeping me honest (in that "The Pravda of the bloggers. -- the New York Times" kind of way):
So here's one that's been amusing me recently: I have a directory that
contains JPEG files name 00.jpg through 30.jpg; if I try to open them
all in Preview, the order they load in depends on the mode I'm viewing
the folder in.
Viewed as Icons, arranged by name, the order appears random: 00, 03, 01,
25, 24, 21, 14, 19, 30, etc. Viewed as a list, arranged by name, they're
in reverse order, except for 20, which comes between 03 and 02. Only
when I select them from the Columns view do the files load in ascending
order. Doesn't matter whether I select with Command-A, click-and-drag,
or painstakingly shift-click them in order. Only one view does the right
thing, and the other two "think different".
Touchι. This is indeed broken, and I (among others) have submitted this via Apple's handy-dandy Feedback page, as this is certainly a step backward in functionality from the OS 9 days. Isn't it ironic, as Greely notes, that the Column view-- the new, NeXT-derived one that was greeted with such suspicion from the long-time Mac-heads-- is the only view that does it right?
Another long-standing and very stupid bug, which I wrote in with months ago but isn't fixed even in Jaguar, is the following:
Cute, huh? If you are using List view, with large icons, if you click on a filename to change it, that filename jumps up by several pixels (as though it were still aligning itself with the default small-icon geometry, which is almost certainly what's going on in the code). It's an obscure and (probably) little-used mode, though, and the reason the bug still exists probably has a lot to do with the fact that Apple's QA staff likely uses that mode about as frequently as they fire up a Windows 3.1 box for its user-interface nostalgia. (It probably also has to do with the fact that this is purely a cosmetic problem.)
But Apple is working on these things; with every new release there's a new tweak to the general user interface, a new piece of polish that wasn't there before-- either bringing OS X's functionality to a par with OS 9, or taking it beyond in cases where it's already reached parity. Windows file-sharing consisted of third-party SMB tools operated from the command line in 10.0; in 10.1 it became integrated in the form of typing a URL into the "Connect to Server" box, of a strict and difficult-to-remember form. In 10.2 we got name browsing. 10.3 will undoubtedly bring domain integration and further tweaks.
There's always fine-tuning going on, and seeing everything from the bundled Utilities to the appearance of the file-copy dialog box gain extra levels of spit-shine with each update is, to be honest, rather exhilarating. The fact that it's (in many cases) compensating for existing shortcomings and flaws that shouldn't have been there in the first place is sort of a side issue. It's just fun.
And it demonstrates that Apple knows what areas, no matter how trivial, are weak-- and is committed to sharpening them all up, across the board, with time. Some fixes are simply prioritized further into the future than others.
I'm sure glad to see, for example, that the Installer program now prompts you automatically for an administrator password, as soon as you launch it, rather than flatly stating in big letters that you "need an Administrator password to continue", and making you "Click on the lock to make changes". Somebody noticed, and it got fixed.
And there was much rejoicing.
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19:19 - Root Causes
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
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Via Aziz Poonawalla's UNMEDIA list, here's an article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple that's well worth reading. The topic is France, and the current state of social affairs in the immigrant ghettos that has till now gotten very little attention-- though after reading this, it seems as though weeding out the Attas and the Moussaouis from the world would be like mowing the lawn one blade of grass at a time.
If you have any interest at all in France and its historical stature, give it a look. The first few paragraphs might elicit a smirk of schadenfreude, but by the end you might have a tear or two welling up.
Even if it is by their own hand, France is in a state for which we can be excused for offering pity, not just jeers.
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18:22 - I feel ill.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-110602A
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At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law right off the bat-- You know that sinking, sickening feeling you get in your gut when you find yourself watching a show on TV about the Hitler Youth, the death camps, or about the rise to power of the Nazi party-- and whatever show it is features a lavishly recreated recitation of some piece of vile propagandist rhetoric from the mouth of some high-ranking politician or some fire-in-the-belly soldier or some utopian author? You know that feeling you get when you're listening to something you know is just so desperately wrong, so terribly cruel, and yet the person saying it is utterly convinced of its truth and rightness, and bolstered by victory and surging popular support?
I swear, I haven't felt like this since my last visit to MEMRI.
Good Law, Good Economics
By David R. Henderson
11/06/2002
It's hard to believe that the Microsoft case is Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's first excursion into antitrust. Her decision reads as if written by someone with a nuanced understanding of the complex series of precedents that constitute modern antitrust law. In antitrust cases, knowledge of the law must also be supplemented with an understanding of economics. Here, too, the Judge shows a grasp of key principles, especially the crucial importance of incentives in encouraging innovation.
. . .
I would, of course, have preferred the Microsoft case not come to this. After all, for the next five years, Microsoft will operate under onerous regulations that none of its competitors will face. Still, had the dissenting states had their way, Microsoft's principle assets would have been expropriated
A judge who has just finished handling the first, and, most likely, the biggest antitrust case of her life, has done a great service, not just for Microsoft, but also for consumers. More important, she has ably defended the property rights and rule of law that protect the freedom and wealth of us all.
Who is this guy? Does he honestly believe the things he's saying here?
I don't know what to say about this. I've been staring at it for a full day now, and I still don't know what to say.
Capt J.M. Heinrichs, who sent this to me, does, though:
I would like to read this article as humour or parody. Unfortunately, I
checked the author's credit at the end and was unsurprised to note a
potential view of interest.
At one point, he gives the Judge marks for rejecting a Sun Microsystems
request to penalise MS for 'improving' Java, a known open standard. Without
meandering through details, the author has no knowledge of the history of
computers, PCs or otherwise, save MS History of Computing.
And to someone with no understanding of what engineering is all about, or what other companies have contributed to the technology industry and what Microsoft has done to them, (and not to mention to someone on Microsoft's payroll,) I'm sure this does look like a great victory for an innocent company against greedy and groundless plaintiffs. I'm sure it doesn't look at all like some greaser kicking a puppy in the teeth, laughing, and having the Mayor drive up and hang a medal around his neck for his service to the city.
Microsoft will operate under onerous regulations that none of its competitors will face. Jesus Christ. And this is TechCentralStation publishing this garbled piece of suck-up?
Fortunately it's Friday, and I won't have to think about Microsoft or their products for another two days.
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15:59 - Pleasant Little Surprises
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More and more since OS X was first released, and most of all with Jaguar recently, the experience of using the operating system has been one of constantly discovering cool new features. One of the most common sounds in and around my cubicle these days is "Whoah! I didn't know it did that..." upon stumbling across some feature, either a long-standing part of the Mac OS that has been translated seamlessly to X, or a new piece of operational polish that's really bloody cool. I love running across little things like how if you double-click on the column-sizing thumb at the bottom of each set of scrollbars in Column View, it automatically resizes that column to fit the contents-- and if you resize the column so it's too narrow for one of the longer filenames, the text on that file alters its kerning on the fly to scrunch more letters into the visual space. I love playing with the software Apple keeps churning out-- iTunes, iCal, iSync, the .Mac features like the Screen Saver Publisher-- and realizing just how much value they keep packing into these machines for free, just as a perk for those who have already paid the price of admission by getting a Mac. And I love how we're now in an age where if I take my laptop to all kinds of different places, whether connected to Ethernet or not, with the prevalence of AirPort base stations in surrounding buildings, the task is to prevent the machine from setting up a valid network connection, rather than fuming over TCP/IP settings trying to get it to create one in the first place.
Damien Del Russo e-mails me with a cool anecdote along these same lines, regarding potential methods for accessing the Internet wirelessly from an airplane:
Well, I wanted to let you know that there is actually a pretty cool way to
do it! I found out yesterday when I got my D-LINK Bluetooth USB connector
in the mail. I hooked it up (i.e., plugged it in - no installation
required) and linked it to my T68i telephone, because I want to iSync the
phone numbers and calendar from my wife's Palm to my telephone (and on our
Macs and iPod of course LOL). Anyway, much to my surprise I see that the
iBook can use the Bluetooth telephone to dial an ISP and get internet
access! Anywhere I have GSM service, in fact! Now most of America doesn't
have GSM yet, but a network is being rapidly built. And it's the standard
in Asia and Europe.
So, check this out. When I go with my wife to Thailand, we could,
technically, take a photo, plug the camera into the iBook, (auto) load it,
dial into an ISP in the USA using the GSM/Bluetooth phone and D-Link, upload
to my Apple iDisc, publish to a new web page, and email the URL to friends
in, like, a minute. Perhaps PCs can do this is well, but is it likely that
the user would discover this ability *by accident??????*
I daresay that even if they did discover such a thing by accident, they'd be in a much worse mood upon doing so; if my experience is any indication, wrestling with Windows, even if the end result is successful, is just inherently draining.
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10:27 - On Idealism
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The last couple of posts got me thinking. Perhaps a little reflection on the nature of idealism is in order.
The last post indicates that I'm a pragmatist when it comes to politics; but anybody who's been paying any attention to this site for any length of time knows that when it comes to technology, and to Apple, I'm anything but. I come off like a raving campus sign-waver, I realize.
Here's the thing: ideals are fine things to have, and I believe everybody has certain ideals that they'd pursue... if only reality didn't have that nasty habit of getting in the way. Libertarianism is a fine set of ideals from a political viewpoint. But the realities of life today preclude those ideals from making total sense. They're good things to have in the room, up on the shelf, peering down at the people making the decisions; but they can't be the only things that go into a policy. The reason I want to see a Libertarian treasurer is that it would provide push-back against government expenditures and taxes; it wouldn't be a policy-making entity in and of itself, but it would provide a necessary counterweight, something to help keep the money flow sane. Reality dictates a balance of power as the most stable and effective system we can hope for.
But... when ideals can in fact make a difference, I feel that it's no inconsistency to try to pursue those ideals as fervently as possible. In technology, for instance, I'm no idealist in most cases-- believe it or not. As a software engineer, my life is ruled by expedience, and even more so as a quality engineer. My entire existence revolves around how my definition of good enough meshes with the company's marketing and sales needs. It's all about compromise and common sense, and sometimes a less-than-perfect product is the answer when market realities demand it.
However, in certain cases (*cough*Apple*cough*), I see a company that is uniquly situated so as to stand effectively for a set of ideals that I find admirable. Apple is about open standards, ease of use, Human Interface theory distilled to its finest essence, design elegance, and quality of product. Under most circumstances, I'd say "Hey, you know, those are nice things to have... but reality says it's not feasible. Better to just compromise and settle for good enough." But that would only hold water if Apple weren't a successful long-term company that keeps staying afloat (and even gaining, in credibility if not in market share) even in the face of all predictions of doom. And through all this they've stayed true to their ideals. And that, I feel, is something special. It's something worth aligning with. It's something worth fighting for.
You've got to pick your battles. The trick lies in making a convincing case that you've picked the right ones; and maybe I haven't. But at least there's a reasoning behind it, and I think it's consistent.
It certainly feels right, anyway.
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09:44 - W00t!
http://ackackack.com/
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Wow, look-- I'm part of a demographic! I feel sooo like I belong. :)
Judson has a theory that being a Simpsons fan and a Mac-head makes for a Libertarian. (He cites me rather flatteringly as an example. Thanks!) I wouldn't be surprised, given the prevalence of such sentiments in the blogosphere; there seems to be a Simpsons quote for every occasion, and I continue to be startled at how many high-profile bloggers have telltale links specifically to Mac resources.
I wouldn't quite say I describe myself as Libertarian, though. I certainly didn't vote a straight Lib ticket or anything. I'd like to see a Lib as attorney general, and maybe one as Treasurer, but other than that there's policy to be made that I think the Libertarian agenda is just a little too unrealistic for. Sure, those are fine ideals they've got-- but there are realities of life in this complex world that just have to be left to a central government to handle. And I don't place individual rights above all other priorities under all circumstances; for example, I think racial profiling is a regrettable but necessary means of protecting the public. No, I'm not a fan of the feds pawing through the carry-on bags of every Arab-American who gets on a plane. But I do think that makes a whole lot more sense, and inconveniences a whole helluva lot fewer people, and gives a hugely better impression of the government's intelligence and common sense, than patting down old ladies and single parents with kids in tow.
Yes, we need to be alert for individual liberties wherever possible. But we don't have to be damn fools about it.
That's why I wish there were an Anti-Idiotarian party to vote for. Too much to ask, I know; politics is, by definition, the art of making the people happy with your actions and opinions. And even with this week's Republican landslide, and even with all the efforts of all the bloggers with all their loyal readership, it still isn't the majority of the public who thinks like we do. Most people need to be told what to think, and need to feel like an R or a D, if they take an interest in politics at all. My friend Chris has a set of Laws, the Third of which is: I am not the target audience. It's a mantra we should all repeat to ourselves as often as possible.
Just remember: by definition, half the population has an IQ of less than 100.
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09:27 - Time for a change of tactics?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28008.html
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Thomas C. Greene of The Register reports on the backfiring of Microsoft's attempts to slay Linux through FUD:
The Beast has hired a research crew to do a bit of attitude sampling among the Great Unwashed in the US and abroad, and has found that slagging Linux is not winning it any points. In a company memo posted by Eric S. Raymond here we learn that regular folks are both eager for a Microsoft alternative and generally respectful of the open-source concept.
We also learn that bombastic hoots by Steve Ballmer likening the GPL to a virus are in fact offensive to many people. Outright lies, like Ballmer's claim that Windows is, overall, cheaper than Linux also haven't been playing well, the researchers discovered.
Well, duh. Who likes a petty, land-grubbing dictatorship who kicks any underdog who dares show its face?
What this might mean we're almost afraid to ask. But apparently we can expect Ballmer to start waxing sentimental about how wonderful Linux and the GPl are, second only to Windows and the license that keeps on taking.
"In the short term, then, Microsoft should avoid criticizing OSS and Linux directly, continue to develop and aim to eventually win the TCO argument."
Not that they need worry. After all, if they commit monopoly crimes, the worst they can expect as chastisement is the DoJ sending some infant judge to set off across-country toward Redmond on a tricycle, there to lie on the ground and make colicky fussing noises while Microsoft goes about its business.
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| Thursday, November 7, 2002 |
02:11 - Another Most Excellent "Installer" Window
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It's how things oughtta be.
Thanks to Mike for reminding me to keep an eye on the progress of this stuff. It's the Dream That Would Not Die... and Chimera is getting very smooth indeed.
Still not enough to unseat OmniWeb, but it's getting there...
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20:49 - Winter is in effect... nnnnnnnnNOW!
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It was summer yesterday...
That's how it is in the Bay Area, though. Summer lasts about six months. Right up until yesterday afternoon, it was warm, even hot-- the same kind of clear, boring, clear-sky conditions that characterize California weather from April through October.
Then, last night, while I was relaxing in the hot tub... suddenly the wind rolled over me like the sandstorm from The Scorpion King, tossing an armload of pine needles from nearby trees into the water and on my head. A glance upward revealed swathes of angry, fast-moving clouds hunching over us. We hurriedly covered up the tub and retreated from the first prickly raindrops.
This morning it was drizzly, and there was some detritus on the roads, but not too bad; it still looked like summer still existed, somewhere, deep beyond the current battle front. But after work, well...
Work ended rather... abruptly, shall we say. I was perusing the comments upon a recent LGF post (sorry to hear about Rasheed, Charles), when the iMac screen suddenly went dark. Stunned silence... then I realize that the silence is fairly total. The one or two other late workers and I stand up, prairie-dogging out of our cubicles, silhouetted against the emergency lights. The hell?
"First rain of the year," I note. "A branch falls on the power lines, or the substation arcs. It's how we know winter's arrived."
And indeed, the streetlights and traffic signals at the intersection between us and Infinite Loop are darkened. With nothing useful that can be done work-wise, I pack up my iPod and head out.
The parking lot, this time, is filled with debris. I'm talking matted. Branches, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, large pools of standing water. The wind is driving sheets of rain into my face, rendering pointless my attempts to shield my laptop by sticking it into my shirt... and as I start the car and pull out into the intersection, trying my best to behave with the rest of the drivers as though it's a four-way stop even though my windshield wipers-- which haven't seen action in six months-- are sticking and shuddering across the glass, I realize that the NPR station, KQED, is just static.
Seems the transmitter's been hit. Hokay... I turn to KCBS, where I learn that large parts of the Bay Area are in chaos. The mountain highway to Santa Cruz is at a standstill (as it always is under anything but ideal conditions). Mill Valley and the Buena Vista Hills area of San Francisco are blacked-out. The Richmond/San Rafael Bridge has been shut down, because construction equipment on the bridge was being blown around by the wind. And as the traffic reporter relates from a caller on the Bay Bridge, who witnessed it as it happened, the transformers at the toll plaza suddenly shot huge blue sparks into the air as a gigantic electrical arc zapped across the station-- and all the lights on the bridge went out.
It was summer yesterday, I will reiterate. And tonight there's a Winter Storm Warning in effect-- which in these parts means "watch out for water on the road, and drive really carefully. And stay out of flash-flood gullies!" Heavy rain is predicted throughout the coming week.
I'm home now, and there are candles burning here and there. The power's on, but it hasn't been that way all day.
Sure, the weather's boring here most of the year. But when it gets interesting... boy, does it get interesting.
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11:48 - Okay, now what?
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I just got the following e-mail:
From: "NELSON DANDY" <nelsondandy44@eircom.net>
Date: Wed Nov 6, 2002 8:00:54 PM US/Pacific
To: m_s2002uk@hotmail.com
Subject: URGENT HELP
Reply-To: <nelsondandy33@mail.com>
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
> From: MR NELSON DANDY JNR.
> E-Mail :nelson_dandy20022000@yahoo.com
>
> ATTN: THE DIRECTOR /CEO.
>
> Dear Sir,
> URGENT ASSISTANT
>
> You may be surprise to receive this kind of message
> from me since
> you do not know me personally and we have not met
> before. The purpose
> of my introduction is that I am MR. NELSON DANDY
hello mr. nelson dandy i don`t know who r u but i can
help u on certain rules of my own made see u r
investing some heavy amount in my account i don`t mind
but the govt will mind certainly so i bhave more than
4 accounts if ur relly interested u can contact me i
want 100% of bank interest than only iam reddy for
agreement.
> JNR, the first son
> of DR.NELSON STEVE DANDY, who was recently murdered
> in the land
> dispute in Zimbabwe. I was furnished with viable
> information from the
> world trade center here in Amsterdam-Holland and
> decided to write you. Before the
> death of my father, he had taken me to Spain to
> deposit the sum of
> THIRTY FIVE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED
> STATE DOLLARS ONLY (USD$35.5M).In a security
> company, as if he has foreseen the looming danger in
> Zimbabwe.This money was deposited in a Box as Gold
> and Diamond to avoid much demurrage from the
> security company. This amount was meant for the
> purchase of new machines and the chemicals for the
> farms and the establishment of new farms Swaziland.
>
> This land problem came when the Zimbabwe president
> MR ROBERT MUGABE introduced a new land act that
> wholly affected all rich farmers and some few black
> farmers. This resulted to the killing and mob action
> by Zimbabwe war veterans and some lunatics in the
> society. In fact a lot of people were killed because
> of the land-reformed act of which
> my father was one of the victims. It is against this
> background that I and my family who are currently
> staying in Amsterdam decided to keep the money in
> Madrid Spain,since the Law of the Netherlands
> prohibits a refugee (asylum seeker)to open any
> account or to be involved in any financial
> transaction of this magnitude. As the oldest son of
> my father, I am saddled with the responsibility of
> seeking a genuine foreign account where this money
> could be transferred without the knowledge of my
> Government who are
> bent on taking everything we have got. The
> Netherlands Government seems to be playing about
> with them.I am faced with dilemma of investing this
> amount of money in Netherlands for the fear of going
> through the same experience in future since both
> countries have similar history. Moreover, the
> Netherlands foreign exchange policy does not allow
> such investments from asylum seekers. As a
> businessman,whom I have entrusted my future and my
> family in his hand, I must let you know that this
> transaction is risk-free. If you accept to assist me
> and my family, all I need you to do for me is to
> make arrangement to make a trip to Madrid Spain so
> that you can
> non-resident account which will aid us in
> transferring the money into my account you will
> nominate in your country or elsewhere. This money I
> intend to use for investment.
>
> I have options to offer, first you can choose to
> have certain percentage of money for nominating your
> account for the transaction, or you can go into
> partnership with me for a proper profitable
> investment of the money in your country. Which
> options you choose, feel free to notify me please,
> contact me with the above E-mail address or call me
> briefly with the above telephone number and I will
> call you back for more details on the subject. I
> implore you to maintain the absolute secrecy require
> in this transaction.
>
> I wish you the best of luck.
>
> Thanks and God bless.
> Sincerely yours
>
> MR. NELSON DANDY (JNR.)
It's either:
a) Someone replying (in full dupe mode) to a Nigerian Scam Letter, who somehow managed to get my e-mail address as a Bcc: recipient; or
b) A bizarre variant on the NSL in which it's engineered to appear like someone replying to the NSL in full dupe mode. Perhaps to attract unsuspecting do-gooder recipients of the reply into e-mailing the poor sod who appears to be falling for it, to warn him off. For the purpose of-- what, I don't know. Harvesting a single working e-mail address? Seems like an awful lot of work and social engineering.
One possibility assumes immense moronicity in the people involved. The other assumes a quite astonishing level of Machiavellian plotting and espionage-type forgery.
And these days, thanks to Klez and friends, I honestly don't know which is less plausible.
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09:47 - The Burden of Proof
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=4642
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"It's all a matter of perspective," some say. "What we call terrorism others call fighting for survival."
Well, check this out, via LGF:
I went to see the minister of education at his home in Riyadh. Mohammed Ahmed Rasheed and half a dozen deputies, men in long white robes and headdresses, arrayed themselves on chairs against the walls and worried their beads. They talked fondly about time spent at American universities Stanford, Indiana, Oklahoma, Michigan; Khedir al-Qurashi, the vice minister for girls' education, spoke of his love of Hoosiers basketball.
They were defensive about American suspicion of the religious hard-liners' influence on boys' schooling. "Why don't you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they're saying `If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?' " demanded one deputy. Agreed another: "If 5 or 8 percent of our curriculum has to be changed, then 80 to 90 percent of the content of American media has to be changed."
Huh. Yeah. Why don't we?
Why don't we confront the blatant hypocrisy in our own mass media? Why don't we wake up to the obvious hegemony of the Zionist conspiracy in everything we read, hear, think, and teach our children?
Every week the blogosphere uncovers some new example of what's being taught to children in Saudi Arabia and Egypt-- to recite that Jews are "apes and pigs", that learning math is less important than memorizing the Koran, that the US is a hypocritical Jewish-run entity who can't stop the Righteous from learning the truth about Jews. But this is terribly one-sided. Why don't we rub our eyes and wake up to the much worse irrational zealous anti-Muslim bias in our own popular culture?
Could it be...
Just maybe...
...that there isn't any?!
These guys seem to understand the principle of the statement that "information wants to be free", but as yet they exhibit no comprehension of the reality of the world in which that principle applies. How best can I illustrate it? Hmm-- okay, I know: Only one of these societies in question has a blogosphere.
Those who wish to apologize for the unbelievable level of irrational, taken-on-faith, absorbed-from-the-imams anti-Jewish hatred that can be found in the Muslim world need to help out their cause by uncovering one example of what this interviewee is accusing exists. Just one.
Will their failure to do so convince them of anything but the even greater power and penetration of the Zionist Conspiracy? No, probably not.
But hey, all our laundry is out in the open, dirty or not. Paw through it. Go right ahead. Information flows freely here. Nothing's stopping you. You can see all the ideological weapons we have at our disposal. We have nothing to hide.
Of course, that's the mistake the Minbari made.
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| Wednesday, November 6, 2002 |
23:29 - FoxTrot-- always good for a giggle
http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2002/11/06/
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Did I mention how much fun this stuff is?
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23:26 - Hee hee
http://www.anyfun.net/pics/pics/comp16.jpg
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UPDATE: But it's okay, because Microsoft has just put a single button on its Tablet PC that emulates the Ctrl+Alt+Del keystroke. Now that's innovation!
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21:38 - iPod World Tour
http://www.ipodlounge.com/assets/galleries/iatw_gallery/
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Okay, this kicks ass. "iPods Around the World".
This is what I mean when I say Mac people have fun with their technology.
UPDATE: CapLion concurs. Yeah, how many "RioRiotZone" and "DimensionAddict" sites do you see?
ANOTHER UPDATE: This one could have been a Coke ad.
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20:12 - Huh huh huh. It's incredible.
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A whole shelf of these, and candy novelty-type-things like them, was in the supermarket right next to the Valrhona and the Godiva, which undoubtedly turn away their creased faces with a sniff and an upturned nose at having to share shelf space with such... monstrosities.
But somehow I'm encouraged to see that the candy industry has become so audacious all of a sudden. (One of the other delectable offerings was "[gummy] rats in a [sour-powder] bucket", and another was a set of dispensers of liquid/syrupy material billed as "toejam", "pus", and "boogers", among other things.)
There's a sour revolution going on, in fact, and I've never been happier. Except for the unaccountable prevalence of watermelon, raspberry, and green apple flavors in everything? What the hell? What happened to the good old favorites-- lemon, orange, grape, cherry? Adding citric acid to those flavors was a perfectly fine idea. And yet they've gone about inciting a new shift in the flavors that make up the candy landscape, perhaps the most significant since the early-century shift away from flavors like plum and quince and horehound.
It's a dirty trick someone's pulled on me. A sour revolution! My fondest dream come true! And yet... and yet... it's soured by this bizarre cultural shift, which for the life of me I can't imagine is demanded by the public.
(But then, this summer, in rural Ontario, I stopped at a store that billed itself as the World's Biggest Candy Store or some such-- a claim that is probably not unfounded-- and the kindly lady inside told me, much to my amazement, that the candy companies are being flooded with feedback that kids just can't get enough of watermelon, green apple, and raspberry. Huh. Go figure.)
Ah well. I think that even with all these startling new developments-- even with sour-powder toilets with candy plungers; even with Sour Starbursts; even with Sour Skittles; even with Nerds Ropes; even with the sudden universality of sour in every checkout aisle-- nobody has quite gotten the formula as just right as Goelitz, with the Jelly Belly "Sours" mix. It's the right flavors, and the right level of acidity. It has the perfect balance between flavor and kick, between dissipation speed and corrosiveness.
And they've dispensed with those five awful new flavors they tried to add to the mix a couple of years ago.
Yeah, I'm happy.
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16:30 - Oh good-- All Is Lost after all
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Nope, they sure don't disappoint.
Dear MoveOn member,
Yesterday's loss was devastating. We truly face dark times.
The light in this darkness is you, and the tens of millions of
people like you, across the nation and around the world, who
will stand for a vision of hope, and not be blinded by the
politics of fear.
With Paul Wellstone's recent death, we've all been thinking
a lot about heroes. What defines a hero? And when do you know
that someone is a hero?
To stand up when it's darkest and continue the fight. That's
heroism. To fight against the odds, for something that matters.
That's heroism. To step forward, when the rest of humanity
seems to be in retreat. That's heroism.
You are heroes.
And when you step forward, you will not be alone.
We will be there, with you.
Three weeks ago, we honored four heroes, who stepped forward when
much of Congress was in retreat -- Paul Wellstone, Rush
Holt, Jay Inslee, and Rick Larsen. You came forward for these
heroes with a tremendous outpouring of support -- thousands of
volunteers and more than one million dollars in contributions.
Holt, Inslee and Larsen all won their races yesterday. And
of course, we all know Paul Wellstone would have won.
In the end, we will win.
We will win by rebuilding a new political will founded on
vision that goes beyond the tactics of fund raising and
triangulation. We will win by projecting a vision of hope
for our country and the world that is too compelling to deny.
We will win by supporting exciting new leaders on a
political landscape filled with dinosaurs.
Bush will try to position our loss as his mandate. But
remember one thing: less than 20% of the American electorate
voted for GOP candidates. Nearly as many voted against, and
far more stayed home. There is no mandate.
With your help, we will fight the coming onslaught.
We will support heroes in the House, like Minority Whip
Nancy Pelosi, who led an overwhelming majority of House
Democrats to oppose the Iraq war resolution. We will support
heroes in the Senate, like Senator Robert Byrd, whose eloquence
brought us to tears in the Senate debate on Iraq.
It's time to make a fresh start. We will demand quality
leadership in these difficult times. The Democratic party must
find its voice, represent its members, and promote the broad
interests of the American public. We will accept no less.
Thanks for everything you've done.
We stand together, with you,
- Wes, Joan, Carrie, Peter, Doug, and Eli
MoveOn.org PAC
Wednesday, November 6th, 2002
PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG PAC
"Dark times" indeed. Hey, weren't conservatives supposed to be the ones who live in the past, don't accept existence proofs, and can't recognize which way the winds are blowing?
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10:56 - New Laptops
http://www.apple.com/
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Oh yeah-- nearly forgot to look.
Looks like the rumors were all pretty accurate: new iBooks at 700/800 MHz, priced under the four-digit point; and new TiBooks, up to 1GHZ, with Bluetooth and a SuperDrive. Neato!
I don't know how much DVD burning people are going to want to do on the road, but hey-- it's a nice checkbox item. Radeon Mobility 9000-- cool. 60GB drives-- cool. And the entire range of models comes in at under $3000. Super-cool.
This'll probably be the last major rev of the TiBook; in January it'll be lighting three candles on its current form factor, and the time will be ripe for a replacement. I can't begin to guess what direction they'll go in this time.
Now that Best Buy is commissioning knockoffs, it's probably just about time to forge ahead again.
My prediction: it'll be made of an aerogel.
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10:45 - So there's a market for this, eh?
http://www.detto.com/move2mac/
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Cool that it exists. Looks like a no-brainer kind of product, and genuinely useful (enough so that Apple is plugging it on its own site).
But I just have to say, I love the logo graphic.
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| Tuesday, November 5, 2002 |
01:32 - A Republican Sea Change?
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/11/06/elec02.main.day/index.html
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Via CapLion:
The final tabulations aren't in yet, but it looks like we got the House, Senate, and largest Governor turnaround.
It's only a matter of hours before the stunned, then bewildered, then tearful "All is Lost" e-mail from MoveOn.org arrives.
Me? I voted all over the map. (Kinda hard to do otherwise when you're in California, where your choice of governors is a coin-toss between an idiot and a crook.)
But I won't complain a bit to see the air let out of the head-in-the-clouds Leftern ilk, after this past couple of weeks. (And this past year, for that matter.)
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01:20 - What is wrong with some people?
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/1102/110201.html#110602
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You know, there are content producers in this world, and there are content consumers. I don't hold that one group is inherently superior to the other; people are just inclined differently. Some people create, because it's in their nature; and some people hoover, because it's in their nature. That's fine. Diff'rent strokes and all that.
But I've just got to say: it takes one hell of a content consumer to write the thing quoted at the end of today's Bleat. And I don't mean that as a compliment.
If it's any consolation, James-- the good Fairy can only dream avariciously of being someone who has so much e-mail to answer that it becomes burdensome. And his anonymity is proof enough of the shame it causes him.
The rest of us consumers are fueled by 91-octane Bleats. Don't let one guy with a bomb-laden harbor dinghy cause an oil crisis for the blog world. Gratitude? A four-digit inbox means five or six digits' worth of grateful-- but silent-- readers.
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22:27 - Blockbuster Courts Gamers
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11-04
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...And does a pretty piss-poor job of it, too, according to Penny Arcade.
Obviously this ad is intended to get gamers interested in renting games from Blockbuster. So they decided the best way to do that would be to lure us in with an unflattering caricature of our subculture. I can just imagine a table full of advertising execs trying desperately to pin down the defining characteristics of that most sought after of all demographics, the 18-24 year old male. "They wear funny clothes like a clown or a hippy," says one exec before he takes a long pull from his coffee coolata. "Their hair is really messy," says another as he tries desperately not to think about his erectile dysfunction and the devastating effect it has had on his marriage. "I saw one today at the mall and he seemed very extreme." They all nod and murmur in agreement. "So what we need then is a messy-haired clown who seems vaguely extreme." Then they all pat each other on the back and joke about who is buying lunch. Jackasses.
I love how caricature cuts both ways.
Anyway-- good, I was hoping for a new reason not to rent from Blockbuster, now that the statute of limitations on public disgust over their censoring of Reservoir Dogs has pretty much run out.
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16:22 - PC Mag Gushes over the XServe
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,575556,00.asp
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Here's something you don't see every day: a PC Magazine article about an Apple product that has nary a true negative point in it.
About the worst it gets is:
Configuring the server, user accounts, and services was a breeze. In fact, service configuration in Mac OS X 10.2 Server is so easy that it actually confused us on some points. For instance, we had trouble enabling file services for Windows. But after looking for 20 minutes, we found the single Windows File Sharing button right in front of our face, hiding in plain sight. Too easy.
Yep. You know, I've been leery for a while now of the XServe-- we haven't heard very much about its success in the marketplace since its introduction, like for instance whether Apple's in fact selling any of them. (This is, after all, a huge experiment on their part, and a tremendous gamble on the machine's ability to overcome widespread mistrust of the Apple name in enterprise-class IT environments in order to make inroads against the likes of Dell and Sun.) But if the comments at the bottom of the article are any indication, there are at least some of these things selling, and those doing the buying are finding their purchases to be well worth it.
I just installed an X-Serve with the configuration tested and conclude it's everything you mentioned and more. Also available are net boot and net imaging. The server pages me if there are any problems with heat, drives or processors (no calls so far!) The dual gigabit ports plugged into my Cisco gear simply works as billed, fast! I set up a video stream and connected a lab of 25 computers to the stream and it played wonderfully. Set up is simple, performance is reliable and trouble free. We have Windows XP, Mac OS-9 and OS-X clients connecting and it's just been rock solid. Money very well spent!
It doesn't get much more five-star than that.
One thing I have to wonder, though: is the author of this article a secret Hewlett-Packard shill?
...Each drive is controlled by its own 100MB master interface to maximize the data througHPut, leaving even Ultra 160 SCSI drives in the dust...
Pretty strange way to encode secret subliminal marketing messages, if you ask me.
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10:13 - Here goes nothin'...
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Last election, I was completely unable to find my polling location, even though I spent an hour both before and after work looking for it.
Maybe I'll have better luck this time. Armed with a map from Sherlock, which describes a location completely at odds with what the address on my sample ballot would suggest, I might just make it.
After all, MoveOn.org has been flooding me with message upon message all this past two weeks, begging me to get out the vote and help wrest the undeserved power away from the evil warmongering Bush cronies.
I'll vote, all right. Wouldn't want to disappoint them.
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| Monday, November 4, 2002 |
01:51 - Helpful Error Messages
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A couple of days ago, my Windows 2000 machine ate itself-- or at least it did a darn good impression of eating itself. Upon boot, it presented me with the following clearly stated message:
NTLDR is missing
Press any key to restart
Well, a couple of astute readers mailed me to point out that I should check the floppy drive. Because, see, that's the standard error message that the newer NT-based Windows variants emit when there's a non-bootable floppy in the drive, and when (as is typical) the BIOS is configured to boot from the floppy first and then the hard drive.
(We'll leave aside for the moment the fact that a) Macs deal with non-bootable floppies by ejecting them before proceeding automatically to the next bootable device, and b) Macs haven't had to deal with floppy-boot-sequence issues for years anyway.)
I was pretty sure that there wasn't a floppy in the drive, but it was at work and I wasn't, so I had to wait until today to check. So I did, and lo and behold-- there it was, a disk in the drive. I ejected it and pressed the "any" key, and the thing booted right up. Fancy that.
Now, naturally this makes me feel pretty silly. But at the same time-- and it isn't only wounded pride talking, I'm pretty sure-- it occurs to me that they could possibly have made that error message (NTLDR is missing) just a little more informative... couldn't they?
This, bear in mind, is Windows 2000-- the core of the new, enterprise-class Windows platform family, the rock-solid foundation upon which the Businesses of the Future will be built. And yet somehow I recall that the old and primitive versions of Windows-- 98, 95, 3.1, and the MS-DOS that they ran on top of-- seemed to have had a much more useful error message when the machine encountered the stupefyingly uncommon boot-device configuration of a floppy in the drive. I believe it went a little something like:
Non-system DISK or DISK error
See, it had that ever-so-helpful word DISK in it. Twice, even. It led the user to conclude that maybe, just maybe, the reason the computer wasn't making with the taskbar and Bonzi Buddy was just perhaps something to do with the DISK.
In other words, MS-DOS had a more informative error for one of the most common unrecoverable boot conditions than an OS written twenty years later does.
Are they getting stupider up in Redmond as time goes on, or just more malicious?
UPDATE: I believe I know what happened. The floppy in question had once been formatted as a WinNT/2000 boot disk. Since that time I had reformatted it for use as a conveyance for random data, and it was empty. However, the reformatting didn't clear the NT bootblock from the MBR, and upon boot the disk still thought it had a valid NT loader to invoke. I needed to have done a low-level format (or fdisk /MBR) to get rid of the bootblock.
This doesn't much excuse the opacity of the procedure or the user feedback, or the stone-age retardedness of the PC BIOS architecture (can't they make it so that if one boot device fails, the BIOS skips to the next one?!). But at least I know what the machine was trying to say.
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21:20 - Snotty Germans!
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44140&threshold=1&commentsort=3&tid=179&mo
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Here's a comment thread regarding the news coming out lately that there will be an iBook/TiBook speed-bump sometime this week.
First, the kicker-off (interestingly modded to "Troll"):
Apple's next step
A better move would be for Apple to sell cheaper Mac's - I can't afford an iBook and I don't want an iMac or an eMac:
I want a Mac about the size of a SPARCclassic, with a fast 3D card, a dvd+burner and all the rest of the Apple goodness, but with no monitor. I've got my own perfectly good 17" sony. Why can't I get one of those!
Followed-up immediately by the following riposte:
I have the same complaint about...
BMW. What's up with those snotty Germans? I really want one of their M-Series cars in the form factor of a VW Bug with a 1000 CD-Disc Changer & MP3 Player w/ OGG support (Fraunhofer can stick it! Snotty Germans!), corinthian leather and all the rest of that German goodness (Can you say that?). I've got my own tires from my old car but those arrogant sausage eaters won't sell me a Beemer without tires. Why can't I get one of those!? Why do I have to pay the tire tax?
BMW is never going to have a large market share if they don't let customers buy the cars the way they want. They will just be a niche car company selling expensive cars to really arrogant, snotty people that think they are superior to everyone else. Plus I hear their owner likes to wear black all the time.
Bravo, suh. Personally, I'm partial to the clamor for a 23" Cinema Display that you can wear on your wrist.
Some people still just don't seem to "get" the Mac; they think Apple's a company trying to surf the same business plan as Dell, with millions of options tailored to individual customers' needs, and with infinite variability resulting in rock-bottom price.
That's not what Apple's for. The point of a Mac is that it's a whole-widget piece of engineering. It's targeted at users who want to sit down and enjoy their computing experience, comforted by the fit-and-finish of a product that's put together from bits to screws by the same company with the same guidelines of style and substance. If it costs more than an econobox, well, things do. Macs aren't econoboxes. People who think they are, or who think Macs are supposed to be hot-rods for kooky versions of Linux to run on while the case sits open on three sides with mineral-oil ducts running through it, are completely misinterpreting matters.
To some, the ultimate aspiration of a PC is to be an infinitely personalized, Frankensteined musclecar, complete with rear spoilers (and front-wheel-drive) and a giant air scoop sticking out of the hood and obscuring the driver's vision. To some, it's all about having a virtual equivalent of a messy room, something to laze around in, something that's full of digital odds and ends and sharp things to stub your toe on. But it does the job, it doesn't smell too bad, and hell, it'll have all of its parts individually replaced within six months anyway, so who cares what it looks like?
But for some people, the whole point of a computer is to facilitate work and play-- to provide a clean, welcoming, attractive environment in which to interact with electronic data. It's a well-maintained and janitored city park to stroll through, as opposed to a cluttered backyard. City parks cost more to maintain, it's true-- but for some people, that's a fair price to pay.
That's who Apple sells to.
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18:30 - DMCA Breach in Progress
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Let's take a look under the hood of a certain recent e-mail message, shall we?
The following is an e-mail sent from within an enterprise, by a user running Outbreak-- 'scuse me, Outlook, to an Exchange server, destined for another employee accessing that Exchange server via IMAP. This is how the message-- a multi-part message with a Base64 attachment, which I will abbreviate with an ellipsis-- appears in the recipient's e-mail program. Only the names and addresses have been changed to protect the innocent.
From someone@somecompany.com Mon Nov 4 17:33:56 2002
Received: by exchange.somecompany.com
id <01C2846B.5133FFA0@exchange.somecompany.com>; Mon, 4 Nov 2002 17:33:17 -0800
Return-Receipt-To: "John Doe" <someone@somecompany.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C2846B.5133FFA0"
Disposition-Notification-To: "John Doe" <someone@somecompany.com>
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0
content-class: urn:content-classes:message
Subject:
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 17:33:17 -0800
Message-ID: <6107F196AD71B94CB77452F9405ADAAA0FB262@exchange.somecompany.com>
X-MS-Has-Attach: yes
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
Thread-Index: AcKEa1AiOXXxBet6QYeLMP3WUZ0HnQ==
From: "John Doe" <someone@somecompany.com>
To: "Joe Recipient" <recipient@somecompany.com>
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------_=_NextPart_001_01C2846B.5133FFA0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----_=_NextPart_002_01C2846B.5133FFA0"
------_=_NextPart_002_01C2846B.5133FFA0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<<08250206.txt>>=20
"The only place where success comes before work is in a dictionary." - =
Vidal.
------_=_NextPart_002_01C2846B.5133FFA0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=3D"Content-Type" CONTENT=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Diso-8859-1">
<META NAME=3D"Generator" CONTENT=3D"MS Exchange Server version =
6.0.6249.1">
<TITLE></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<!-- Converted from text/rtf format -->
<P><FONT FACE=3D"Arial" SIZE=3D2 COLOR=3D"#000000"> =
<<08250206.txt>> </FONT>
</P>
<P><I><FONT SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Times New Roman">"The only place where =
success comes before work is in a dictionary." - Vidal.</FONT></I>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
------_=_NextPart_002_01C2846B.5133FFA0--
------_=_NextPart_001_01C2846B.5133FFA0
Content-Type: text/plain;
name="08250206.txt"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Description: 08250206.txt
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="08250206.txt"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[...]
MDAwMDAwMCAwMDAwMDAwMCAwMDAwMDAwMCAwMDAwMDAwMCAgLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4N
CjB4MDNiNjA0YjQ6IDAwMDAwMDAwIDAwMDAwMDAwIDAwMDAwMDAwIDAwMDAwMDAwIDAwMDAwMDAw
ICAuLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLi4uLg0KMHgwM2I2MDRjODogMDAwMDAwMDAgMDAwMDAwMDAgMDAw
MDAwMDAgMDAwMDAwMDAgMDAwMDAw
Notice anything.... strange about this message?
If you're at all familiar with the raw-source structure of MIME messages, you will. I'll give you a hint: a proper MIME-encoded message would be a little bit longer.
There is no MIME separator at the end of the encoded attachment. It just breaks off. There should be a ------_=_NextPart_001_01C2846B.5133FFA0-- after the end of the encoded section, symmetrical with the one at the beginning of that block. But there isn't.
This means the attachment does not show up in any e-mail client that properly parses MIME. (Of course, it shows up just fine in Outlook, which doesn't give a rat's turd about requiring things like </TABLE> tags or closing MIME separators.)
This problem occurs whenever a user sends a message via Outlook to an Exchange server, and the recipient retrieves the message via IMAP. It doesn't happen if the recipient uses POP3, nor if the recipient is on a remote server to which the message must be relayed via SMTP.
Because, you see, Outlook communicates with Exchange in an internal DCOM-based proprietary Microsoft format. I'm sure it's very nice, and provides all sorts of nice features and hooks for Exchange to handle the message with, and it makes things nice and smooth when Outlook clients retrieve the message via IMAP.
But if Exchange has to relay the message on via POP3 or SMTP, it must translate it from its internal format to the standard mail format. The bitch of it is that it uses an entirely different rendering engine to serve the message to an IMAP client than to convey it via POP3 or SMTP. The internal structure of the message is totally different depending on what protocol you're using to access it.
And the IMAP translator is broken. People using IMAP, and clients other than Outlook, are out of luck when it comes to attachments, because whoever wrote this brain-dead translator apparently didn't allocate a big enough buffer for the message or something, or simply didn't bother to emit the closing separator because hey, Outlook doesn't require it-- and it just cuts the hell off.
You know, I have had it up to here with this crap. The software Microsoft produces is utter garbage, and it actively deters customers from doing work. This isn't a tool, it's an impediment-- and whoever is responsible for writing it, if there were such a thing as certification for software engineers, should be stripped of his or her credentials.
Those who promote Microsoft as some kind of paragon of software design and recommend it as a provider of mission-critical enterprise-class software-- this kind of incompetence is what these people are endorsing. This is the mediocrity to which we're condemning ourselves by not demanding that software be held to a higher standard than the bare-assed minimum that can be sold to the unsuspecting, overworked IT manager and the petty corporate bean-counter.
Some companies have already had to pay for this kind of negligence. Motorola, for the better part of the year 2000, had no e-mail at all because their Exchange server went completely belly-up-- and the Microsoft experts who they'd hired to come out and work on it full-time were unable to fix it for months on end. No internal e-mail communications. None. All because someone decided that Microsoft is the Way, and that anybody who doesn't go with the flow is just building sand castles while the tide comes in.
These kinds of stories are going to get more frequent, too-- not less. Sooner or later the failure will be quite catastrophic, and we'll weep for deliverance.
But by that time it will be far, far too late.
Thank you very much, Your Honor.
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| Sunday, November 3, 2002 |
02:40 - Curses!
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Betrayed by Cartoon Network!
Last week I was singing their praises, raising a paean to the heavens in thanks for their unaccountable largesse in putting everything-- everything-- on TV that I longed to see on a relaxed Sunday night. I was rendered giddy by the prospect of their showing Rejected by Dan Hertzfeldt. Oh, how I looked forward to it. Oh, how I did cue up my DV tape. It was so very cued-up. It was cued up so high I expected to see Al Capone doing the Charleston on top of it.
And tonight rolled around, and Home Movies was stomach-crampingly sarcastic as usual, and then it was 10:30, and right there on the digital cable schedule banner dealy it said Rejected...
...But that's not what came on. Oh no. Rejected is Denied! The Animation Nazi has spoken! Instead they showed The Lewis Lectures, a short starring apartment-dwelling dogs living the life they live when the humans are gone. I'd seen it before-- it's funny, yes, but it's not what they promised me, dammitalltohell! I mean... what happened? Was there a last-minute... injunction, or something? Did they discover at about 8:00 tonight that Bitter Films hadn't in fact given them permission to broadcast? Did somebody forget to clear it through legal first?
So now I'm all bummed. No Kelp Dip with extra sodium for me tonight.
And while I'm at it, why is it that Vlasic Original Dills are so much smaller all of a sudden? I thought it was just a bum batch for a while, but now they're all weeny little gherkins that amount to barely a mouthful, and they've been so for at least three or four months. True, granted, the old big pickles would always neatly anchor themselves into the shoulders of the jar, and when I managed to dislodge the first one from a freshly opened supply (unavoidably dousing myself in brine in the process of unscrewing the lid, because for some reason there's no dry way to open a jar of pickles, no matter how motionless or careful you are), the wedged first pickle would sproing out and spatter a fresh load of green salt water up the wall and/or my shirt. Yes, that problem now seems to be solved. But the price is too high! The pickles are now all too bloody small! We've made too great a sacrifice in the name of 1/2-as-neat broaching procedures. I'd gladly suffer a soaked shirt every week if I could have my Big Pickles back again.
... Uh, right.
"Brian Don't Bitch". It's a new Madonna song.
Time for a new workweek to get going, methinks. That'll get my head screwed back on. Homer sleep now.
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| Saturday, November 2, 2002 |
02:43 - You have got to be kidding me.
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/eightcrazynights/
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Adam Sandler... with his own new Christmas movie... that's animated... starring him as himself.
Who gave the world permission to go ga-ga while I was out?
Then again, I've never really been an Adam Sandler hater; I think he's pretty funny. (And he can even act for real, witness Punch Drunk Love.) And for what it's worth, this movie-- done by Sony Pictures, though what animation house is being used I'm not sure-- looks to be high in production quality. Hey, maybe it'll be good. And I'm a sucker for good animation-- any good animation.
Sorry-- this just caught me way the hell off guard here.
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02:13 - Santa Cruz
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I spent the day today down in Santa Cruz, sightseeing with my folks; seeing things I'd either never seen before, or hadn't seen in years.
While it's easy to tar Santa Cruz as a Berkeley with the added handicap of being isolated from civilization, it must be said that it's what I believe is the most California of all California towns. That is to say, it's a microcosm of the entire state; it has steep pine-clad hills, quaint homey town life, a huge volleyball beach with a Boardwalk that became prototypical of the whole franchise amusement park genre, a University, a beach highway, vast ocean and mountain views, a Monarch butterfly wintering ground, and a prime surfing destination. It's everything about California rolled into one thick doobie.
After lunch on the Wharf and a stop at the Monarch butterfly grounds at Natural Bridges (with the interesting interlude of a large brush fire breaking out behind the visitor center, which attracted two fire engines who had to string their hoses for a mile out to the nearest hydrant), we headed up to the UC Santa Cruz campus.
If this were 1994, and we'd toured this campus back then, I might very well have been so enamored with it I'd have directed all efforts toward going there. This is one of the most gorgeous college campuses I've ever seen. Sure, any Ivy League can boast fine architecture and genteel Dover Boys leisure life. But how many of them can do it on the side of a mountain, packed into a forest?
Picture a long, long, wide hillside-- no, a bigger one. Like, three miles on a side. Most of it's wide open, just bare grassland. And it's all on an incline that would make a bike trip from the bottom to the top just too tedious to want to do every day. Picture numerous clusters of "colleges" scattered throughout this road-encircled space, each one with its own unique architectural style and its own academic discipline, comprising both residential buildings and academic facilities (one such cluster is neo-natural slant-sided post-modernism, one is neat Northwestern peak-roofed white-trimmed Colonial, one is almost Plantation-like in style-- look at this virtual tour full of QTVRs for the visual record). All the signs are spotless, all the parking lots are tucked away behind hillocks and trees. But wait-- it gets better. The entire northern, uphill half of the campus area is sown directly into the forest primeval-- the roads wind up into thick redwood groves and deeply cleft canyons, and at the top of the main entrance road, in the northwest corner, there's a five-story parking structure-- all but hidden from view in among the trees. You look around and see other large buildings, built in such a way as to not disturb the trees that are already there (presumably at great cost-- this is massive construction at the top of a large hill, at the limit of human penetration into a large redwood forest, for crying-out-loud). It's like they built a city's downtown into the middle of a State Park forest, with no detriment to either's sensibility. I thought it was breathtakingly attractive.
Since everything is so far-flung, buses travel up and down the hill all day, ferrying students from residences to academic locations and gyms and student unions and the like. And naturally, because this is a liberal university in a liberal town, the campus' sentiments beat on you like the humidity in the South. But when you're driving down the hill and you break out of the treeline and are faced with a panoramic view of the Monterey bay and the surrounding hills, it's almost enough to offset any unpleasant peer pressure towards smirking cleverness of parallelism and moral equivalence and America-loathing. By its very character-- its architecture, its placement, its views, its playful layout, its mascot (the Banana Slug)-- it embodies more that's cool about living around here than almost any number of shrill banners hung from residence-hall balconies can negate.
...Almost.
Anyway, the Boardwalk is as much fun as I remember it-- it's still freely open to the public and each individual ride operates on tickets, rather than it being a single-massive-cover-charge with a big entrance gate like so many modern theme parks. The Giant Dipper is still great fun-- built in 1924, and still a thrill even by today's standards. And the "Neptune's Kingdom" arcade is full of as many 1980s-vintage classic games as of modern favorites. You'd almost forget they're having trouble keeping the place open these days.
Why they close it at 5PM, though, I'm afraid I don't understand.
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00:02 - Never thought I'd see that again...
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There's a That's My Bush marathon on tonight, post-midnight, on Comedy Central.
Is this another sign of the post-9/11 better-not-mock-Bush era being officially over already? I know the show was already canned by that time, but I always suspected it would have seen a swift disappearance if that were not the case. And I certainly didn't expect to see it return, even in the wee-hours slots.
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21:18 - Good God!
http://www.miltonbradley.com/games/pl/page.viewproduct/product_id.9432/dn/default.cf
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I just saw an ad for this game, which I don't believe I've ever seen before. Brand-new for the Christmas 2002 season, eh?
My question: how long will this thing last on the market before PETA raises its screeching voice against it and gets it removed?
Somehow I'm encouraged at the thought that they actually managed to create it, though, in this day and age-- that it got through all the levels of marketing and executive approval without being black-flagged. This isn't the age of Lawn Darts anymore, but still...
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10:56 - Interesting if true
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Forwarded to me by a friend:
Anyone remember this?? It was 1987! At an old news video of Lt. Col.
Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan
Administration, there was Ollie in front of God and country, getting the
third degree, but what he said was stunning!
Some senator was drilling him -- "Did you not recently spend close to
$60,000 for a home security system?"
Ollie replied, "Yes, I did, Sir."
The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience,
"Isn't that just a little excessive?"
"No, sir," continued Ollie.
"No? And why not?" the senator asked.
"Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir."
"Threatened? By whom?" the senator questioned.
"By a terrorist, sir" Ollie answered.
"Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?"
"His name is Osama bin Laden, sir," Ollie replied.
At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn't
pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn't. A couple of
people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued --"Why are you
so afraid of this man?" the senator asked.
"Because, sir, he is the most evil person alive that I know of," Ollie
answered.
"And what do you recommend we do about him?" asked the senator.
"Well, sir, if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team
be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth."
The senator disagreed with this approach, and that was all that was
shown of the clip.
By the way, that senator was Al Gore
------------------------------------------------
Also: Terrorist pilot Mohammad Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986.
The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the Oslo
agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, Israel had to agree to release
so-called "political prisoners". However, the Israelis would not release
any with blood on their hands. The American President at the time, Bill
Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, "insisted" that
all prisoners be released. Thus Mohammad Atta was freed and eventually
thanked the US by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade
Center. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the
time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the US
from all later reports. If you agree that the American public must be
made aware of this fact, pass this on.
Hoax? Legit? Bizarre variation on chain letter? I don't know. Anybody have any details?
UPDATE: Fiction, and fiction. Thanks to the many who mailed.
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| Friday, November 1, 2002 |
18:03 - Ooh, what a scary little monopoly!
http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/01/technology/microsoft_remedy/index.htm
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So the trial is pretty much finished, then. And, in a far cry from what happened in the good ol' days of Thomas Penfield Jackson (who scared the bejeezus out of Microsoft's lawyers when he interrupted their stream of let's-confuse-the-poor-grayheaded-fogey techno-gibberish with "Counsel, I know what a DLL is"), Judge Kollar-Kotelly (did her parents meet in the registration line at college or something?) has handed out a nice Halloween treat to the obviously harmless little software trust. This was a sentencing, following a conviction. And the sentence?
The approved settlement requires Microsoft to disclose some sensitive technology to its rivals months earlier than the company and the Justice Department had proposed.
That's how a convicted criminal monopoly is punished these days.
Just think, though-- if the states hadn't raised hell, Microsoft's punishment would have been that it would have to give away copies of Windows to schools. For free! Which is about what it costs them! They'd have been punished by being forced to extend their hegemony into the education market at a deep discount beyond what they normally would have had to spend.
Oooh. Thank you, sir, may I please have another?
This result, which pretty effectively throws aside all the states' objections, transmits a clear message: All clear, Bill. You're good to go.
Here's what has really gotten under my skin throughout this whole thing:
Microsoft said it was reviewing the decision.
"The issues in this case are significant, not only for Microsoft but for the industry and consumers," spokesman Vivek Varma said. "We are committed to resolving these issues in a constructive way so that we can focus on long-term growth and innovation for consumers."
Every time there's been some development, some settlement proposal, some advancement of language in the case, Microsoft has been reported to be reviewing the situation. A few days later, they'd invariably come back and say, "Hmm, nope, nope... I don't think this is going to work. See, your Honor, this proposed solution would result in harm to Microsoft, and we can't allow that."
Maybe I'm severely missing something here, but since when the hell does the defendant on trial get to have a say in what punishment is meted out to it? Why does Microsoft get to veto a ruling against it? Why does their opinion matter one miniscule buzzing fuck?
At least the charade is over. It was never the DoJ's goal to dispense any kind of actual justice, not the timely kind, not the kind that would have mattered. Microsoft is way too entrenched in the world's economy and governmental machines by now for anyone to seriously consider touching them with a ten-foot pole. Instead, the idea has been to conduct an insanely long, drawn-out, and ultimately ineffectual public spectacle so as to give the people some sense that something is being done... while the only intent behind it was simply to run out the clock until the original issues upon which the original case was founded are rendered moot by the implacable march of technology.
I'm sure most people don't even know what the original charges were. And when told that it was about Microsoft's embroidering Internet Explorer inextricably into Windows 98 and shouldering aside Netscape, they're caught by surprise. What's Internet Explorer? is the usual reaction. Windows without the built-in web browser? Unthinkable! Yeah, no kidding.
This was never one of Microsoft's more serious crimes, in any case. This was simply a convenient and visible prop to use in order to get the bread-and-circuses tour moving. It always rankled with me that this was the best anybody could do-- not Microsoft's purchasing of IE from Spyglass, with the promise that Spyglass would be reimbursed with a percentage of all sales proceeds (and the omission of Microsoft's intent to give it away free). Not the outright theft of software from STAC, a company whose crown-jewel software was made a part of DOS for years, illegally-- but Microsoft kept the complaint stalled in court for as long as it took for STAC to go bankrupt with legal fees, upon which the disputed software became Microsoft's as spoils of war. Not the criminal negligence in the design of software like IIS, Outlook, and Windows itself, which has resulted in untold damage to companies over the years who stood there while their IT infrastructures crumbled and their servers were breached and their internal networks were flooded with spam and viruses and their mail systems stood inoperative for months on end, secure and confident that they had made the right decision. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!
But it's all over now, and we know now what the plan was all along.
Keep everybody distracted-- fool 'em into thinking the right thing will be done-- for as long as the illusion can be sustained. And then it'll be too late.
UPDATE: Yeah.
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16:39 - The Thing That Should Not Be
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This, taken from the body of a bounced e-mail message, is just so fundamentally wrong:
+ADwAIQ-DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC +ACI--//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN+ACIAPg- +ADw-HTML+AD4- +ADw-HEAD+AD4- +ADw-META HTTP-EQUIV+AD0AIg-Content-Type+ACI- CONTENT+AD0AIg-text/html+ADs- charset+AD0-utf-7+ACIAPg- +ADw-META NAME+AD0AIg-Generator+ACI- CONTENT+AD0AIg-MS Exchange Server version 6.0.6249.1+ACIAPg- +ADw-TITLE+AD4APA-/TITLE+AD4- +ADw-/HEAD+AD4- +ADw-BODY+AD4- +ADwAIQ--- Converted from text/plain format --+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-P+AD4APA-FONT SIZE+AD0-2+AD4-Build of PolicyCenter pc1.3.0b24 completed for branch tag ps5+AF8-30.+ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-/FONT+AD4- +ADw-/P+AD4- +ADw-/BODY+AD4- +ADw-/HTML+AD4-
(Emphasis mine.)
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15:31 - W1ND0VVS 1Z TEH ST4ND4RD!!!!11``!`
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There I was, down to the wire today, finishing up the last piece of testing before beta-qualification was approved today: a suite of printing tests from part of the Web interface for our product, using IE. On Windows, naturally, because that's what we support.
I'm regressing something backward through the last few versions of our product. Print in the current version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the previous version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the version before that: click....
Uh, click....
Right-click?
Oh look, there's the dialog. I wait another few minutes. (Yes, minutes.) Finally, the little printer icon shows up in the systray. Huh. That's odd; the printer icon usually takes all of three seconds to show up. And I wait.
And I wait.
The printer comes to life, but no paper spews forth.
I try right-clicking on the little printer icon, to try to bring up the printing monitor window. "1 document(s) pending for briant," it tells me confidently. Good, I'm so glad Microsoft took the time to handle singular and plural so elegantly. Eventually the print queue comes up. It's empty. It remains empty for a good three minutes; finally (after going through "Connecting" and "Initializing" phases), my document appears in the queue.
"24 bytes/120.4M," it says.
I watch as the 120.4M number continues to climb... slowly, sloooowly. Not the "24 bytes" part, mind you, no-- the total size. Yeah, that really fills me with warm fuzzies.
(The fact that I'm printing out a simple one-screen Web page, and that it thinks that amounts to 120 megabytes, doesn't do my heart good either.)
Right-clicking works, though. So I hit "Cancel", and it deletes the document from the queue.
Well, that was pointless, I think. So just to be safe, and to see if it might help, I decide to log out and log back in.
"Start->Log off briant". Uh... huh. Windows stares back at me with the expression of a cow chewing its cud in the middle of the most placid set of train tracks in Kansas. Okay... "Start->Shut down". Nothing.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Aha! There's the six-button menu thingy. "Log off!" I tell it. And it does! Fancy that.
I log back in; everything seems peachy. I connect again to the site and print. Annnnd... the same thing happens again. I'm in one of those backwards-talking slow-motion dreams where everything's in reversed grayscale. Nothing I do makes a difference. I click on one thing, and a menu pops up somewhere else on the screen. ToolTips on the icons in the systray pop up behind the taskbar. (How helpful.) And no printout is forthcoming, even after a patient ten minutes of waiting.
Okay, okay... I know where this wind is blowing. Time for.... a reboot-to-the-head.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete (the "Shut Down" in the Start menu still doesn't work), and hit the Shut Down button. I select Restart. It goes black, whirrs, and beeps.
$%^#%. %^$&^ $%#)_%^&()* &*^&*^^& ^&$%$. <deep breath> ^&*)&&*( $%^$ $%W#$%@# ^&%&* ^***(&^ *(())+_%&%!!!!
Why in the donkey-humping fuck is this the unquestioned standard operating system in business today?
This is, if you recall, the same machine whose upgrade-to-Win2K procedure, which ended up costing me an entire week's worth of productivity, caused me to harangue the company into springing for a new iMac back in February. Since that time, I've been blissfully free of these kinds of nightmares of technology gone horribly wrong, except for those times when I'm obliged to test the functionality of something under Windows. Then I approach the machine with a chair in one hand and a whip in the other, and getthejobdoneasquicklyaspossible so I can leap back to safety without getting unduly injured or slimed.
Well, today it looks like its revenge is complete. But it couldn't stop me from finishing the test suite. With the help of others' Windows machines, I was able to sign off, and the release was certified; my computer appears to have been the only casualty thus far. I made it back to the ledge without getting dragged under.
Here's my desk today. I think this says it all:
One of these boxes is not like the other; one of these boxes just doesn't belong...
Hint: it's not the one that's working.
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| Thursday, October 31, 2002 |
16:54 - Now you're talkin'.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=32749
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Via LGF and InstaPundit.
According to the Moskovski Komsomol newspaper, Russian security forces have decided to bury the terrorists from last's week's hostage siege wrapped in pig's skin. The aim is to deter potential Islamic terrorists from future attacks.
Shahidi (Jihad martyrs) believe by their nefarious acts that they ascend immediately to heaven. Using their beliefs against them, wrapping their corpses in 'unclean' pigskin prevents them from entering heaven for eternity.
At least some people understand the kind of playing field on which we're tussling. We would do well to learn from this example, particularly if the reaction is something new, something other than the age-old and feckless cycle of diplomacy from the civilized and shrieks of holy rage from the zealous. These two kinds of reactions feed off each other, because they're so mutually alien. But to fight zealotry on its own terms... now that's a novel idea.
UPDATE: Aziz has some clarifications. Well, drat.
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10:47 - Electronics Recycling Porn
http://www.foxelectronics.com/webcam.htm
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Boy-- they have everything on the Web these days.
Fox Electronics, a Bay Area company specializing in the scrapping, recycling, refurbishment, and destruction of random electronic whatever-the-hell, has live webcams of its operations.
I saw this on a truck on the freeway the other day: LIVE WEBCAMS. I was sure it couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to mean. Half the truck's signage was about an electronics reclamation facility; the rest said LIVE WEBCAMS. It was like someone had just bought the truck and had only half-finished repainting the trailer walls; they still betrayed evidence of the truck's former life as... a conveyance for door-to-door Swedish masseuse delivery or something.
But no, it's actually just what it says. Live webcams... of the conveyor belts, assembly lines, warehouses, and shredder machines.
I sure hope they've registered with the proper rating agencies; I can't be held responsible for any damage to young sensibilities caused by following the link.
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| Wednesday, October 30, 2002 |
01:22 - Ingenious Spam of the Day
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I growl and I begrudge, but I have to admit that the following piece of spam is a work of evil art:
That's right... whatever spam-generating program does this, it goes out and crawls the web, finds random websites with e-mail addresses on them (like, oh, for instance, http://www.grotto11.com/Extensions.html), HTML-renders each such page, captures it into an image, composites it into a mosaic of other images so it appears to be displayed on a laptop screen, and then mails the composited shebang out to the owner of the website in question.
Ingenious. Masterful. Admirable in its simplicity and the elegance of its execution.
Why the hell aren't these efficacious people blessed with a sense of ethics and decency? Why can't they put their talents to some honorable use?
Ah well. They did use a TiBook.
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17:21 - Paying for entertainment
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1781196896
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Here is what has got to be the most oddball thing I've ever seen on eBay-- that doesn't, I should clarify, involve vast amounts of money or pranks or gods selling the Earth to other gods or whatever.
Go check it out-- for a laugh, or to enjoy the involved and entertaining story, or (hey!) to bid on the item in question. 'Tis the season, after all. And while you're at it, ponder the asking price, the bids (which currently hover around $5), and the idea that whether you even receive the item or not, you've paid for the story-- and you know, I'll pay five bucks for a story.
You can create a story and sell it online. But the RIAA doesn't want you selling your music there.
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13:30 - Well, there's a "Switch" for ya...
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-963901.html?tag=fd_top
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Remember when the iPod was first introduced-- how many people said it would never sell?
Then, when it sold really really really well (to Mac users and to on-the-edge Wintel users who were swayed via the iPod toward buying a Mac, or who were willing to put up with third-party software), some people said they still didn't consider it worthwhile unless there was a native Windows version?
Then, when Apple brought out a native Windows version, (a few) people still said it wouldn't sell purely because of the Apple name?
Well, apparently those voices are being drowned out by a clamor from Dell customers who want to by iPods with their Dell boxes, instead of the Archos and Creative MP3 players that Dell already carries.
So Dell is now going to be featuring the iPod on its own online storefront.
"Yep, Dell is reselling iPods," Apple said in a statement provided to CNET News.com. "We are delighted to offer our 5GB, 10GB and 20GB iPods for Windows through Dell's direct retail channel. iPod has been a big success to date, and we would like to make it even bigger."
Apparently the draw of Dell's online store for Apple and the lure of the iPod for Dell were enough to convince the bitter rivals to set aside their differences. The two companies compete especially hard in the education market, where Dell has moved ahead of the Mac maker to become the largest seller of computer gear to schools.
That's exactly what Apple needs. Whoever at Apple had the idea to do a killer-app-of-MP3-players, something that would outshine every competitor in every regard and become universally desirable to the entire spectrum of technology users, deserves some kind of medal. The iPod will make Apple a huge pile of money in the long run-- but more important still is the credibility boost that it gives the Apple logo.
One of the biggest problems Apple faces is in selling products to people who may have tried a Mac once, like back in the System 6 days or something (or perhaps an old Mac IIsi puttering in a friend's back room, while Pentium IIs were churning happily away in the front), and come away from the experience with a bad impression of Apple's engineering. "It was so slow," people commonly say. "And I couldn't figure out how to do anything-- there was no Start menu. What was I supposed to click on?" Over and over I've heard this story-- an unsupervised session with an ancient Mac led to a bad first impression, one that stuck with the person forever, cemented by the familiarity with which he returned to Windows.
But if Apple can slip a little something into everybody's pocket-- a piece of genuinely good technology that nobody can find immediate fault with, that works really well and instantly demonstrates its usefulness and value... they've won an immense hearts-and-minds victory. A spin of the dial will attenuate to nothing the endless chorus of sneers: "All Apple products are crap!" and "Macs are little candy-colored toy computers with tiny screens!" and "Macs can't be networked!" and "Can Macs do color yet?" Instead, people will associate the name Apple with good, useful products, and maybe-- just maybe-- be willing to try a modern Mac and see what the experience of using iTunes or making movies or working without a Registry or filename extensions can be like.
"We don't consider Apple a competitor across the full range of products," said Dell spokeswoman Mary Fad. "Maybe it would be odd if we had iMacs on the store (Web site)."
I must say, this does improve my opinion of Dell significantly.
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| Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |
19:37 - At least they're not calling it a "Blogged Filesystem"...
http://thinksecret.com/news/macosx10221.html
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I'm a bit late in getting to this one (the trailing bits of AR and the release cycle I'm in continue to prevent me from keeping up with the news); but it's still worth reporting.
There was some skepticism a couple of weeks ago when news was first broken that 10.2.2 would include a journaled version of HFS+. Daring Fireball, in particular, expressed doubts that it could be done-- and still remained skeptical several days later after being mailed by various people that such layering was indeed possible (for instance, in Linux's Ext3FS). His conclusion was that while it may be possible, it isn't likely that Apple would have it ready in time for 10.2.2.
Well, if this screenshot found at Think Secret is any indication, I'd say it's fairly certain:
Which is good for all involved. Hey, it's been said that if you keep wary and skeptical throughout life, all your surprises will be pleasant ones. Here's to pessimism! ;)
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10:52 - Even the BMW stayed in the lines...
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10:03 - ...And they are illiterate
http://www.mikesilverman.com/2002_10_27_log_archive.html#85611407
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However moronic the far Left might appear to be, the far Right continues to have them beat six ways from Sunday. Even the worst of the Idiotarians, it must be said, generally exhibits a functional grasp of spelling, grammar, and logic.
Go see Mike Silverman's site for an example of the kind of thing he gets to put up with, and why it deserves no response more direct or serious than posting the whole thing for us all to see and point at and go Ha-ha!
Is it just me, or does it seem possible to write a Random Bigot Generator program for a website-- along the same lines as that Shakespearean Insult Generator thing? You specify a length and a level of vitriol, and it crams together a set of randomly selected clichιs like "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" and mails it to the selected target? It shouldn't be too difficult-- and I have to imagine it's already been done, 'cause I don't know if much else can explain the lack of imagination or originality in these kinds of e-mails.
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| Monday, October 28, 2002 |
19:57 - "Because of me, they now have a warning!"
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Something I've been having to remind myself of lately is that whenever you see any disclaimer or warning on any ad anywhere on TV, in print, or anywhere, there is a lawsuit behind it. Or at least a complaint.
As my boss mentioned in passing, one of the best classic disclaimers he's seen is to pregnant women: Refrain from sexual intercourse after the water has broken. I mean, do people really have to be told these things? What, is the guy sitting there lecherously rubbing his chin, grunting, "Well, hmm-- just how frequent are those contractions, honey?"
It was with such things in my mind that I saw an ad come on TV for one of the new Transformers, which contained a disclaimer that for some odd reason I can't remember being a part of Transformers ads back in the heyday of the 80s. It said: Actual transformation time may vary.
...In other words, my brain was startled to realize, some oh-so-caring parent watched one of these ads with its trick time-lapse cappuccino-laced kid converting Optimus Prime from a truck into a command base in less than four seconds, bought it for her son, and then was confronted with the kid complaining that he couldn't transform it as fast as the kid on TV could. And (now this is the part that really gets to me) the parent, secure in her child's purity of heart and righteous indignation at the blatant false advertising of the uncaring corporation, complained to the company and got them to put up a disclaimer so future hapless moms wouldn't be entrapped so cruelly when their own time of trial came.
(Yes, I know this is all based on assumption. But if the story behind this particular case is off-base, I'd love to hear the true details. If they're in any way significantly different from what I'm guessing, I'll be very relieved indeed.)
What I want to know is, why couldn't this parent trust in her own ability to handle the kid's complaints herself? How is this any different from the Santa Claus situation? Yes, Dear, I'll get that letter in the mail to the North Pole right away! You'd think this would be an ideal time for her to impress upon the kid some concept of what reasonable humans should expect from reasonable companies selling reasonable products: Sometimes, Junior, we can't believe what we see on TV. Or at the very least: Yes, Dear, I'll handle that mean old toy company for you. Don't worry about a thing! I'll make sure they don't mislead any more innocent families like us! ... on the full understanding that the kid's enjoyment of the toy in its own right would outlast his attention span for frustration at the transformation speed, and with no actual intent to follow through on an endeavor that's both Quixotic and moronic. Wouldn't you?
And to think I thought it was bad when Barbie doll ads started foraying into CG animation, and they had to start peppering them with Dolls do not move by themselves...
UPDATE: Wouldn't I know it-- Hiker has the whole scoop on this. Ask him, and he'll also expound on the horrors of he current crop of Happy Meal Transformers-- robots in primary colors with big chunky parts, designed for kids of choking-hazard age-- as well as "Transformers Go-Bots", a name which strikes me in my sojourning-from-the-80s ignorance as a juxtaposition of concepts so cataclysmic as to risk creating an antimatter explosion merely by my typing them together. Oh, the things I've been missing out on...
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19:49 - Cartoon Network, how do I love thee...
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Sunday nights are the highlight of my week. The "Adult Swim" lineup, particularly on Sunday when they trot out all the wacky and subversive stuff made by people who go through life with a constant giggle, is just so jam-packed with material I never thought I'd see on TV again that it completely restores my faith in The System to provide a conscientious palliative to discerning viewers. They know it isn't kids watching cartoons at midnight on Sunday; it's sarcastic twentysomethings would would rather watch anime with boobs or twisted neo-nostalgic romps that give new life to ill-begotten 1970s superheroes or the knife-edge artistry of Samurai Jack. It feels like someone who knows exactly what I want to watch is holding the levers on Moltar's control station and diverting a personalized stream of soma into my TV. It's never been better than this.
Freaky! Outtie! FREAKY! OUTTIE! FREAKY! OUTTIE! ...Ahem. Sorry; got carried away there.
And what should they report to be showing next Sunday night? Why, "Rejected", by Don Hertzfeldt, of all things. Yes, that bizarre, jiggly little five-minute doodle that you may have seen in godawful low-res WMV format floating around the net. I haven't been able to find a decent version of it, so the WMV is all I have. But Cartoon Network will be showing it next Sunday night. The preview ad, showing the guy with the not-so-silly hat, being beaten to death by the guys with the silly hats under the SILLY HATS ONLY sign, in glorious full resolution, made me break down and weep openly.
I'll be recording it this time, and making a decently-sized QuickTime out of it for future enjoyment on the plane or wherever I might happen to be when I'm in desperate need of a giggle.
And by the way, if you'll permit me to yank the stick hard-a-port for a bit: What the hell is it with QuickTime that makes people shun and hate it so much? I mean, when it has the following things going for it:
The player application isn't the least bit gaudy-- no embedded ads, no freaky trippy color scheme, no large bulbous ameoboid shape with randomly ovoid buttons. Just the obvious controls, thank you very much.
QuickTime is the only player that lets you copy a still frame from a playing movie and paste it using the Clipboard into another application. I mean, what the hell? How can people stand to use Real and WMP when they don't even deign to provide this basic functionality?
Live back-and-forth scrubbing through any movie type, including (in QT6) live MPEG-4 streams. Real still doesn't let you do live scrubbing, and WMP's scrub bar is shoddy at best (it loses video sync if you move the window around).
And for the content creators, some pretty damn fine codecs. Sorensen 3 isn't open, but it's the equal of DiVX;-) LOLOLOL OMG J00 GET DA 1 WIZ BRITN3Y SP34ARz NAKED B00B!!1!!``` any day of the week, and it also uses MPEG-4 natively, and is the flagship platform for that codec. Yet people still stick to Real and Windows Media, for reasons that are unclear to me. C'mon, guys, $30 gets you a complete content creation suite, and the broadcaster is free. And cross-platform.
And there's plenty more stuff about it that's subjective. Whether on Windows or the Mac, QuickTime just makes me feel like I'm a lot more in control of what I'm watching. As far as downsides go, though, this bullet point seems to trump all foregoing line-items:
It's made by Apple.
Shock and horror! Can't have that!
Now that QuickTime has been largely crowded out in the Internet data pool by MPEGs and WMVs/AVIs (and even .MSWMM files, from Windows Movie Maker, which WMP can't read, for God's sake), I'm forced to conclude that for no good reason at all, we're now going to be forced to live with video-handling systems that are far, far less controllable and integrated into everything than what we could have had.
Ah well. At the very least I'll be using it for my own content creation and personal re-encoding purposes. It works bloody well, and I can copy a frame out of an existing movie and copy it into Preview so I can save a thumbnail JPEG for it anywhere I choose.
Urrg. Sorry. Just one too many WMVs getting uploaded into the art archive, which I can't play back accurately or copy a frame out of. But that's the Way of the Future! Get with the program, Brian!
Sheesh.
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| Sunday, October 27, 2002 |
20:59 - Ow... I hurt...
http://216.136.200.194/auction/Oct/200210263376895213102630.jpg
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I'm not at all sure what the context of this is-- all I was sent was the URL. But regardless, a hearty belly laugh to whoever is responsible.
I know it's easy to want to mock the wannabe terrorist guys who have popped up in the past year, from Richard Reid to John Mohammed. But... they kinda seem to be setting themselves up for it, don't they? Not exactly XXX-style supersoldiers, are they?
UPDATE: Here's the context.
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05:02 - Superman gets the coolest cartoons
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For animation fans, one of the best pieces of classical revelry in the art for its own sake-- much more so than the self-conscious Warner stuff of the era, which is valuable for entirely different reasons-- is the wartime Superman series by Dave Fleischer.
Fleischer's early Popeye cartoons (which Cartoon Network trots out with nostalgic glee every Sunday night, accompanied by informative and often snidely geeky commentary by the narrator) are themselves immensely good fun; the color Paramount Popeyes are episodic nonsense in the vein of modern Saturday-morning dreck, but the Fleischer stuff was art. Deliciously quirky (and very human) animation and engaging original music accompanied lavish background art and very clever songs to create a tapestry with rhythm, art with a beat. I love it when the "I'll do anything that you do" episode comes on, or the classically giggle-inducing "Goonland" one, or the lavish "Sindbad the Sailor" featurette with the full-multiplane backgrounds, or the "Beware of Barnacle Bill" one with its delicious song-and-dance complete with sneering volta at the end: Just like you just did to that poor Barnacle Bill the Sailor! The love for the craft that is evident in these shows raises them to a level of enjoyability well beyond what was evident in animation through the "Golden Age" of the 50s, the experimental floundering of the 60s, the dark, dark Scooby-Doo-dominated valley of the 70s, and the directionless 80s. It wasn't until the animation industry was kick-started in the 90s by The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Animaniacs, and (yes) even Beavis & Butt-head that TV animation started being respectable again, drawing out of the woodwork the fans of the medium who were no longer ashamed to say they grew up watching The Superfriends. And it raised to power giants like Genndy Tartakovsky and Jhonen Vasquez, for which I'll forever be grateful.
But anyway-- I was talking about Superman, wasn't I?
Right: They just showed a set of the old 40s shorts tonight, the usual all-too-brief list of outings that survives the era (the one with the giant gorilla is in pretty sorry shape). If you aren't familiar with these, you really ought to track them down and give them a look: they're astonishingly well animated, with every frame lovingly detailed, and cels painted with the same depth as the backgrounds on which they were placed-- an extremely expensive process indeed, and the reason why the shorts bankrupted the Fleischer studio and forced them to give the Popeye property over to Paramount afterwards (much to the series' detriment). But the quality they paid for is up on the screen.
Watch these shorts for the visual language in which the plot points are conveyed: the transmitter on the volcano failing to transmit its SOS message because the line has been severed. The Moderne-as-hell levers and dials on the machine the Mad Scientist has aimed at the city's bridge, as he cranks up the dial. Superman's quick but human leaps down the staircase to safety as the observatory collapses around him. The postures of the flying robots as they snap to attention. The frame-for-frame correctness of the silhouette on the wall each time Clark Kent slips aside to don his costume.
If there's any one filmmaking nit I would pick with the series, it's that all too often, there's far too much good animation and even dialogue that's tucked away into a too-long fadeout at the end of a scene. Modern shows, when they do a fade-to-black, make sure to have the on-screen characters at rest, in a static position, and finished with all their dialogue and useful facial expressions before the fade begins. But in the "mad scientist" episode, for instance, Clark's wink to the audience at the end (and that bright, conspiratorial grin that belies the starkness of his usual facial construction) are all but lost in the ponderous gradient.
But no matter. This stuff is gold, and we're unlikely to see anything with its depth of production quality in anything short of feature films again. Sure, modern TV looks better still than the Superman shorts-- but they benefit from computer coloring/modeling and cartoony senses of timing, both of which allow animators to create stuff that represents a lot less pain and effort than ever before for the sake of something so fleeting as a seven-minute short.
Fast-forward to 1996 or so, when the new post-Bruce-Timm Superman series appears. This stuff follows the success of Batman: The Animated Series, which made waves (and rightly so) with its innovative use of black-paper backgrounds, nostalgic Golden Age of Comics art style, and unflinching willingness to tackle big issues with real adult characters. (I love that Mad Hatter episode, with the little Carroll lines tossed in willy-nilly, almost offhand in their appropriateness to each scene.) But Superman, which now shows after the anime chunk on Saturday's "Adult Swim" lineup, is bigger and jollier, more smirky and fun. And yet it has moments of great, honest beauty.
Last week they showed the "Apokolips... Now!" duet, the two-parter in which Superman leads the defense of the Earth against Darkseid... except in the end, it isn't him who leads the resistance, but the gruff Dan Turpin-- sort of the Detective Bullock of the Superman world, except that he uses his big bushy eyebrows for a determined, no-nonsense good when it comes down to brass tacks, instead of bitterly getting in the hero's way. He's a recurring character for the first two seasons. And then, in "Apokolips... Now!", he incites the people of Metropolis to defend their planet, even with Superman displayed in front of them, helpless and bound. Turpin frees Superman with a spear to the manacles, and a deus ex machina in the form of forces from New Genesis appears in order to force Darkseid back from his conquest. As Darkseid retreats, Turpin taunts him, getting in that one last barb. And Darkseid turns, scowls, and with a gesture strikes Turpin dead.
Cut to the funeral, in which the eulogy is being read and sung... in Hebrew. Which makes a startled kind of sense, considering the deeply Jewish conception of Superman in the first place. But I was quite surprised, and pleasantly so, to see the show's producers take such an active and sincere role in paying homage to that. Just as one of the Batman episodes consisted of three featurettes done in the respective styles of the 50s pulp stuff (the ones with the BIFF! POW! SOK! and all that), Frank Miller's tank-like black-on-red, and another style that I can't recall at the moment: these guys know and love their stuff, and it shows.
Superman stands by Turpin's gravestone, and says over it: "Earth didn't need a super man. Just a brave one."
From TV Tome:
NOTE: This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jack Kirby (1917-1994). The dedication appears at the end of the episode and reads as follows: "This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jack Kirby/ Long Live The King". Jack Kirby was one of the most influential and respected illustrator and creator of comic books. Amoung the characters he created or co-created are Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, The New Gods, Kamandi, Darkseid, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Captain Victory, The Silver Surfer, The Mighty Thor and many others.
* Continuing character Dan Turpin dies in this episode. His gravestone reads "Daniel Turpin/ Earth's Greatest/ Hero".
That visual has stuck with me all week, and I've been trying to figure out how to approach it. Now that I've seen afresh the original material as well as the modern incarnation, and been able to appreciate how much love went into each one respectively, it does me good to realize that Golden Ages do cycle back around so we can enjoy them again.
Lileks said at one point that while most of the world probably thinks Americans relate best to Superman, we probably actually find Spider-man-- with his smirky smartass teenager humor and his do-the-right-thing-because-that's-what-good-people-do mentality-- to be a better fit for us. I think there's a lot to be said for that. I do feel it's probably true; we certainly don't individually feel like a bunch of Colossi striding the earth, knocking down evil with a single blow of our jutting lantern-like chins. But Superman is a paragon of something else to us: not something to aspire to, but a personification in human form of moral rightness and strength, something free of religious affiliation but unambiguous in what it stands for. It's a rock upon which the waves can dash themselves in vain. It's the prototypical Superhero, the concept that The Right Thing will be done, in the long run-- taking, if necessary, the metaphorical form of a punch in the mouth. It's a way of reducing Roosevelt and Hitler to political cartoons, caricature heads on Mr. Universe bodies, putting them in the ring and sounding the bell, and watching the inevitable result ensue.
Superheroes of this model are deeply ingrained into our consciousness by now, and they're one of the first metaphors that leaps to mind in a time of crisis, when we need to reduce the world to a context our minds can manage. And now that metaphor has some very real people, lives, stories, and national identities tied up into it. It keeps reinventing itself, and just as with the Santa Claus lexicon, it survives on self-referential nostalgia as much as on new angles on new material.
How lucky we are that in this day and age, we have Justice League instead of The Superfriends.
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| Saturday, October 26, 2002 |
23:24 - Ach-bar
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Just watching tonight's "History of Britain" episode on the History channel over burgers... it was the one that centered around Bonny Prince Charlie, the Jacobites, and the end of the Scottish warrior tradition at the hands of the British army in the mid-18th century.
It was the usual battles-and-dates-and-all-that-rot for most of the sequence. But the final few minutes were extremely eye-opening. After the Prince was exiled, the British government went about destroying Scottish nationalist culture. They forbade Scots from wearing tartans and clan colors, and from creating nationalistic art (such as portraits of the Prince-- an example of which, created after the ban, was painted in such a way that it was unrecognizable as art unless you viewed it reflected in a candlestick-- ingenious). Scottish warriors were given the opportunity to enlist in the British army and fight for the Empire.
And how did the Scots react to this heavy-handed and stifling treatment? Why, by changing the world, that's how. The Scottish warriors underwent a sudden change-- and transformed themselves into great academics and revolutionary thinkers. We got David Hume's philosophy. We got William Adam's architecture, which helped usher in the dignified austerity of classical forms. And we got Adam Smith's invisible hand-- a distinctly non-spiritual idea that uplifted personal accomplishment and innovation above the "romantic self-destruction" that Scotland had been indulging until their tartans were stripped from them. It's to this revolution that we owe everything we have in the modern world, from a government in which church is separated from state to an economic system where genius, like that of the post-warrior-culture Scotland, is rewarded.
It wasn't much of a stretch, but I couldn't help but consider these lessons as an example of what might become of the Muslim world in the aftermath of a firm and heavy takedown of Islamic fundamentalist nationalism. If Muslims long for the age when they led the world in innovation and genius, maybe they've got an opportunity coming up.
I know this is just another iteration of the "It worked in Japan" theory as propounded by Den Beste, among others; but it seemed just too clear an example to skip, and one that I don't think I've seen cited in among the invocation of Japan and Germany as examples of post-destruction-by-America success stories.
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| Friday, October 25, 2002 |
21:22 - Hey, c'mere-- wanna see a Michael Moore takedown?
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000102.html
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A really good one, too. I hadn't heard much about the man outside a Lileks screed and some gushing from various acolytes of his at work over Bowling for Columbine, but the letter that gets Fisked all to hell here by Rachel Lucas so richly deserves it.
Maybe because it manages to cover so many angles of the leftist landscape today, and is antibodied so efficiently by so much ready-to-hand reason and fact. Whatever the reason, I greatly enjoyed it.
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20:56 - Albus Saavik
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/25/harris.obit/index.html
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Hmm. It seems Richard Harris, aka (among many other things) Dumbledore, has died. That's gonna suck...
It hasn't been a very cheerful news day, has it?
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14:49 - Makes me wanna buy more hard drives
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Kris' new G4 tower arrived today. After the usual crowd of gawkers stopped draping themselves over it, as they'd done the other day with his new Cinema Display, like a bunch of marionette spiders dangled by a puppeteer, we took a closer look at the hard drive carriers. I'd thought the (single) carrier in my old 450 was well designed; but whatever else one might say about this current form factor (does anybody know what the real code name for this iteration is? I'm sure it can't be "Wind Tunnel"), it's one of their better designs.
Both carriers have space for two disks. The main carrier, on the ATA-100 bus, is vertically positioned against the inner wall; it's not screwed down (though there's a hole for a screw if you choose to put one in). Instead, there's a white clip that you can pull back with a finger, and lift the carrier up and out:
 
The carrier has extra screws in it for the second disk, if and when you install one. To reinstall the carrier, just snap it back into place.
Then there's the second carrier, on the ATA-66 bus. The connector cables are positioned right where you would need them to go, and the carrier (which is the same unit as the primary one) is mounted horizontally below the optical drives. It too has a white finger clip, and slides out from a couple of rail tabs that hold it in place (you have to slide it back in along the tabs). The screw hole on this one which corresponds to the one on the primary carrier would be unreachable except by a trained rat; so there's a second screw lug which you can reach, on the left.
These may not be the fastest disk buses on the planet, but the machine itself is certainly expansion-friendly. More so than any Mac in recent memory, I believe.
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13:46 - Non-Joke
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/4365595.htm
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Regarding the Moscow theater hostage situation:
The rebels have killed one hostage, a 20-year-old woman, and her body was dragged from the theater Thursday, wrapped in a black blanket. A spokesman for the Federal Security Service said she had been shot through the chest and her fingers were broken. A radio report said a female rebel killed her after she refused to stop talking on her cell phone.
This would be the perfect setup for an extremely tasteless joke, if I were willing to make it. But I'm not, so I won't.
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09:49 - It takes Porsche...
http://www.cnet.com/techtrends/0-6014-7-20573465.html
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Porsche Design GmbH has been responsible for a lot of funky niche products over the years-- bicycles, coffee makers, that sort of thing. They all look good, I'll give 'em that.
Now they've done a TiBook-alike. It matches the PowerBook in just about every dimension and spec, right down to the slot-loading drive and the positioning of the power button, and I have to admit it looks pretty good indeed. The sound system sounds quite cool to boot.
Of course, the TiBook design is approaching its third birthday; when it rolls around in a couple of months, it'll be right about ripe for an overhaul. These designs tend to last about three years. I'm not at all sure what direction they'll go in next. (That's part of the fun.)
But in the meantime-- nice work, Best Buy.
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| Thursday, October 24, 2002 |
11:20 - I used to be with it...
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"...But then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me!"
Remember a few years ago, how it seemed that the bright new future of the Internet would involve seamless heterogeneity-- every computing platform would have roughly the same functionality and could interoperate natively on open standards? No matter what your OS of choice, you could plug the machine into the wall in your dorm room or cubicle and it would "just work"?
Well, technologically that's happened. But sociologically, we're moving backwards. And you can thank the hackers for that.
UC Santa Barbara, for instance, has recently instituted a new policy whereby Windows 2000 and NT are banned from the student ResNet. (A peek at the site reveals that they've already taken a lot of heat for this, and they've gamely explained the reasoning behind it as stemming from the fact that nobody administers the network but the students themselves, most of whom are no better equipped or prepared to de-Code-Red-ify and de-Nimda-ify their computers than the average home users is. Though this won't help much when the next such attack, to which XP is vulnerable, rolls around.)
Quoting Jeremy Epstein, from the RISKS digest where this was brought up:
BTW, students have to pay for a copy of WinXP. Maybe this is a fundraising effort by Microsoft... put out products that are so vulnerable that users have to spend more money to buy a less vulnerable version. "I'm sorry ma'am, but the wheels frequently fall off the 1998 model cars. We have no intention of fixing the problem. Would you like to buy a 2002 model for $20,000? By the way, you'll also need to build a new garage on your house to park it in, and a new driver's license, because the old ones aren't compatible."
So, nothing but XP for UCSB students. And meanwhile, many companies-- including my own, and Cisco (whose network was brought to a standstill by the networking stuff in XP during a beta), still prohibit XP within the corporate network. Anything but XP for such people.
And to add another bubble to the Venn diagram of platforms whose interoperability overlaps are rapidly retreating from each other like grease spots when you dump in the detergent, King's College of London University has banned UNIX and Linux from their network. In the interest of security and "network integrity".
> You may not run any Unix operating system since they can represent a serious
> risk to network integrity. Any student found running a Unix system (e.g.
> Linux) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected.
Because, see, all hackers use Linux; everybody knows that. Windows users, however, are to the last man pure as the driven snow. And all viruses and Trojans are really spread by UNIX. Never did trust them UNIX blokes, me. No balls at all.
(I suppose it goes without saying that Macs are banned too, because they're UNIX. Can't have them screwing up KCL's perfect and pure network integrity.)
Hybrid vigor, they called it. Free-enterprise competition. Survival of the fittest. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The "mutts" live the longest.
Whatever became of that grand vision?
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10:52 - Better update my resume...
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...Because evidently someone's trying to prepare me for being Laid Off.
(Go to the site, by the way-- Odd Todd has posted a new Halloween Special. And if you haven't been following the "Laid Off" series to date, you ought to check out all four episodes that are available. Isn't it amazing how something so deliberately crude in its execution (it's clear that the guy can draw better than this if he so chooses) can be such a rich and fertile ground for new memes?)
Mep!
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10:49 - The World Must Know!
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On the way in to work this morning, I saw a big pickup truck in the next lane over. In the rear window of the cab, there were some decals: "COWBOY" on the driver's side, and "COWBOY'S GIRL" on the passenger side. Aaaww, isn't that sweet.
In the center was one of those ubiquitous "Calvin pissing on some logo" stickers. He was wearing a cowboy hat. What was the object of his derision and urine? TERRORISM.
Boy, I'm sure glad we know what side of the issue COWBOY and COWBOY'S GIRL come down on.
Hmm. I wonder if the fact that I'm reacting like this means that the bumper-sticker phase of the post-9/11 era is more or less over?
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10:45 - Hot Tub Weather
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For about six months of the year, Silicon Valley doesn't really have weather. From May through October, and most especially right during those endpoint months, it's hot and dry and still here in the inland valley where the onshore flow can't reach us (but where it keeps the air cool throughout the latter part of the summer). No bugs, either; so nighttimes are spent with the window standing wide open and my arm hanging down the outside wall.
Then there comes a day, usually in late October, when suddenly-- like the sudden palpable flow of cold air that rolls over you when you're camping out, late in the evening, that says "Hi, I'm the air. Nighttime tickover has occurred; I'm going to be cold now"--suddenly the whole region freezes right up. The windows close; the waterbed heater comes on; and I have to stop wearing shorts to work.
That day was yesterday. It was chilly again this morning, so it looks like we're in for the season of interesting cloud patterns and rain sculptures in the skies, and ski season will be upon us soon.
God, I love this place.
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| Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |
20:39 - Slow and fugly wins the race
http://www.xbitlabs.com/storage/usb20-fw/
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Marcus points me to this bake-off at X-bit Labs between external FireWire and USB 2.0 drives. USB 2.0, you'll recall, is the 480MBps version of USB that's supposed to beat the tar out of the 400MBps FireWire, just as the latter has become established as the interface of choice for A/V and other media transfer type stuff.
I've talked before about the technical merits of FireWire vs. USB 2.0 (namely, the six-pin noiseless differential design versus the four-pin noisy design that must be shielded, as well as other things like FireWire's peer-to-peer symmetry). I had to come to the conclusion, though, that it's another case of "good enough"-- all USB 2.0 has to do in order to become dominant is to come within barking distance of FireWire, and for most people it'll serve whatever purpose they'd had in mind.
(Never mind that FireWire at 2x and 4x speeds is already in the spec, and ready to be rolled out at any time, using more efficient utilization of the available pins and cycles, as with gigabit Ethernet; whereas USB can only be enhanced further by bumping the clock speed still higher.)
Apple did charge royalties for FireWire during its formative period, which I'm sure the stockholders found to be a good decision when it was the fastest thing on toast; then they stopped charging when USB2 became a legitimate competitor. I don't think FireWire's adoption by videocameras and mass-storage devices was hampered much by the fee. (The little 1394 port on my cheapass camcorder says otherwise, at least.) Either way, that isn't what's fueling the current gravitation toward USB 2.0 these days.
But at any rate, these benchmarks show the USB 2.0 drive lagging pretty severely behind both FireWire and ATA-100 (which run pretty much neck-in-neck for most of the operations, and track the same curve patterns, whereas the USB drive hits internal bottlenecks).
Even so, the site concludes with a sigh,
So, let's take the results into consideration and wait for future USB 2.0 tests.
It's important as this interface is becoming a standard de-facto and we all will have to put up and work with it
'Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.
Ah well. Maybe at least some of the real speed tweakers will see reports like this and conclude that FireWire is in fact something worth supporting. After all, they're the ones who direct the course of the whole rest of the tech industry...
UPDATE: Den Beste has his own results, using a test rig that was manufactured this century. Yes, it did raise an eyebrow or two when I saw XBit's "Coppermine" platform...
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18:47 - Flame Warriors Roster
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html
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I don't know if this is something that's been around forever and I only just now stumbled across it, but it seems to be one of those rare memes that betrays a true, deep, genuine talent behind it. Mike Reed, the guy behind this exhaustive listing of characters we all know and loathe, has as much skill with caricature as with humor.
I sort of suspect this project has been a long time a-building, but that's one of the things about the Net-- whether you're talking about Usenet, IRC, web-based forums, or comment boards attached to blogs or news sites, the sociology of the participants is pretty much a constant.
It's a great piece of work to self-consciously click through if you've got about an hour to fling to the wind.
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16:56 - Nice try, I guess...
http://capitalistlion.com/article.cgi?81
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CapLion has the scoop on a breakthrough new MP3 player device from Creative, launched in the hopes of eclipsing the iPod.
Unfortunately, it's physically bigger, has a smaller screen, doesn't get power through FireWire, and uses filenames to sort MP3s rather than an ID3-tag database. Plus the interface, such as it is, involves little ridge buttons instead of anything halfway intuitive (like many other iPod-wannabes have gamely incorporated in recent months).
But hey, it's cheaper.
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13:37 - I Can See For Miles...
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Kris decided to splurge a bit and kick up his home computing horsepower a bit (he's stitching together some 2.5GB (in 170 separate panoramas) of contiguous photos into a series of linked, navigable QuickTime VR movies of our building, and the old 450 is blowing hard under the load); yesterday, he ordered one of the current "Wind Tunnel" G4 towers, the dual-gigahertz kind, which came to a nicely reasonable price via a friend's employee discount.
He also ordered this, which arrived today (!):
Hey, what the hell, right? Three side-by-side code pages, or every palette in the world open at once, eh? He and I both have 22" Cinema Displays from our initial purchase back in early 2000; they're still extremely fine monitors, but this new HD one will make it look primitive by comparison. (No, I'm not getting one for myself. Yet.)
Unfortunately we can't set it up here at work to test it out, because we don't have any ADC-equipped machines handy. Except one guy upstairs with a new tower; we cornered him in the parking lot and asked if he would let us set up the monitor to see how it looked. Sure, he said-- he'll throw himself on that particular grenade. Oh, the hardship...
So what's Kris going to do with his old 22" Cinema Display? Why, dual-monitor, of course. Over 3500 pixels of wide-wide-wide-screen goodness.
Hey, conspicuous consumption isn't dead...!
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| Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |
01:49 - Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead
http://talg.blogspot.com/2002_10_20_talg_archive.html#83300848
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You know, for all the coverage that this stuff gets in the blogosphere these days, it's fairly easy to forget that Israelis are still getting blown up by the dozen in buses.
How did this kind of thing stop being newsworthy?
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22:53 - And so it goes...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,642737,00.asp
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Here's an eWeek story, along with links to screenshots, of the "Longhorn" project-- Microsoft's successor to WinXP, due out in 2005 (last I heard). And surprise surprise, among its features it counts:
One third-party developer, who requested anonymity, said the Longhorn shell, or user interface, is taking shape quite nicely. Microsoft is developing a Longhorn compositing video application-programming interface for apps written with .NET that is similar to Apple's Quartz on Mac OS X, he says.
Yeah, we didn't see that one coming. Hey, you know, that kind of compositing-engine technology actually is useful, guys; you don't have to put it in just because Apple did it already.
(Sorry, that just sorta slipped out.)
It'll also have the new "Yukon" filesystem, which is presumably that SQL-based thing we've been hearing whispers about for a while now; if there's any sanity in Redmond at all, this will finally bring to Windows the unique-file-ID functionality that the Mac has had since day one, enabling people to write Windows software that keeps track of files no matter where you move them-- the lack of which functionality is the primary reason why Windows doesn't have an MP3 player that works as well as iTunes. (Though it's maddening when even Mac software is written by people without a clue how to take advantage of this obvious superior technique and instead use hard-coded paths for components. Like the RealOne player, which installed itself onto my Desktop, and registered itself into my IE; but then, when I moved the player into my Applications folder, IE lost track of it and was unable to play back Real streams, because it was stupidly coded to look for it on the Desktop. Hello! McFly! Mac applications are all registered into the Desktop database by their IDs; you don't have to solder them into the walls by referring to them by the blinkin' filesystem paths!)
Also:
Previously, members of the Windows community had speculated that this dockable pane was based on a Microsoft-Research-developed technology, code-named Sideshow. It still is not clear how and even if Sidebar and Sideshow are related.
Newsweek just had a story about how Microsoft is sending its human-interface psych-gestapo into volunteer Nielsen families' households, setting up camera crews and watching the family members poke at an MSN/Longhorn beta. It told the heart-rending story of how the eldest daughter saw the new "Sidebar" shelf on the side of the screen, and spent a determined five-to-ten minutes trying to get rid of it. "This will break the heart of some engineer back at the base," sighed the Marty Stouffer of the GUI from his blind.
At least they're trying, though. Whether they have the slightest clue what to do or not, at least they're being kept nervous and active by the presence of a competitor.
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22:15 - Looks like it's working
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2202
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The "Switch" campaign is having an impact as a cultural meme, evidently-- or at least if you're willing to believe the word of one of the Kool-Aid-soaked brethren.
It seems to me that any marketing campaign has a critical period of a couple of months, in which it's just getting off the ground, where the company just has to weather whatever criticism the press heaps on it. If they can keep it up through that period, then the people who have actual opinions about the campaign will have tired themselves out talking about it, and then the 98% of the public who takes only a passive interest in the miasma of advertising that is the modern TV landscape... will have absorbed it. People can quote one-liners from the ads, and their friends will laugh. Penetration will have occurred.
And once penetration is complete, there's an unspoken assumption in people's minds: The company that made the ads that that one-liner came from is cool.
It worked for the Dell Dude. It worked for the "Can you hear me now?" guy. It worked for that damn Taco Bell dog. It worked for the Jack in the Box ads-- to this day I can't stand their food, but I still keep going in there once every couple of months, just because the ads are so cool, just to reaffirm the sad truth of the burgers' stubborn uninspiredness.
Something tells me that the Apple marketeers knew that the intelligentsia of the tech world would sneer at the "Switch" ads, particularly the first wave of them; the refrain would waver between What kind of moron can't figure out how to use his computer? and Who wants to take computer advice from these clowns? But that would only last a month or two, and by then the damage would be done. The tech pundits might guffaw and jeer and cast dark aspersions upon the parentage of whoever plays that maddening balalaika tune. But the average Joe Computer User will be imbued with the thought: Macs are real computers that people actually buy and enjoy. And the slightly more astute will think: Apple is a strong enough company to run prime-time ads.
I don't know how many computers the Switchers campaign will ultimately sell, but I do believe that Apple will continue to be a very recognizable brand. And from what I know about business, that's half the battle.
Apple's advertising has most frequently centered around artistic and abstract concepts, rather than the typical price-and-performance focus you get with Gateway and Dell. But currently, it seems they've hit upon the idea that brand recognition, especially if done in such a way as to play off the anecdotal and human strength of the products, is way more important than dickering around with statistics and details and the benchmarks of cold little pieces of plastic and silicon. Hell, I never would have known the name Enron until the meltdown, if it hadn't been for those incomprehensible ads with the guy shuffling around in the metal suit.
There's a reason why most arguments in favor of the Mac are anecdotal, while most arguments in favor of the PC are numerical.
And there's a reason why I (and others like me) continue to use Macs, regardless of how many gigaflops the CPUs can or can't pull. It's that anecdotes-- and, in particular, first-person anecdotes-- speak more loudly than numbers on a page.
Like this one: Today in a meeting with a colleague on speakerphone, Kris and I were outlining the schedule for our testing of the current project. I had my iBook open, with NotePod running, and the little calendar date-picker activated so we could pin down days of the week. I had turned the laptop around so we both could see the screen. Kris, speaking into the mike to the other guy but peering at the screen, said sidelong to me, "That's too small; I can't read it." So I reached over, pressed Option-Command-+, and the screen went whooOOOOOOSSSSSHH! and zoomed in smoothly onto the calendar. I'm not sure if he actually jumped, or laughed, or what, but he did lose his footing in the sentence he was working on.
(Okay-- so maybe you had to be there. That's the damnable thing about anecdotes.)
The gamble is that enough people will discover what it's like to use a computer made by a company with a vested interest in making the user's experience a happy one. That, I think, is the big distinction, and the big secret to Apple's remaining flush with cash: a certain, stable percentage of the world's people are willing to pay more for a higher-quality experience. And, as the anecdotes and the statistics bear out, that's what they get.
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| Monday, October 21, 2002 |
20:41 - That's what I was looking for...
http://cgi.argusleader.com/cgi-bin/techwrapper.pl?URL=http://www.gannettonline.com/e
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I said I had no flippin' clue what to say about Steel Battalion; fortunately, though, Marcus is better equipped:
The top 5 things to say about "Steel Battalion"
5) We didn't think the system pack-in controller was big enough.
4) And you thought Dance Dance Revolution had a weird controller.
3) Think of all the money you save not having a game library like the PS2's!
2) If some of the buttons aren't working right, we'll have a patch out quickly.
1) A fool and his money are soon parted.
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19:35 - Pretty good day for comics
http://www.herdthinners.com/2002/1021.html
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19:24 - It's like he looked right into my liiiife!
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm?uc_full_date=20021021&uc_daction
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18:53 - Midnight in the garden
http://www.grotto11.com/blog/?+1026153129
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I'm not in the habit of re-posting stuff I've written in the past; but just for those curious, here's something I wrote a few months back on the subject of "good" and "evil" corporations, and what each respectively does for its customers.
Why? No reason.
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11:25 - Sorry, I've sort of been out of the loop.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-962483.html
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I missed this the first time around. It's certainly worth pointing out, though, especially if people have been hit with it (as one of the machines in my house was, this weekend) and have no idea what it was all about.
"The feature can be used to notify a user when a printer job fails," said Lawrence Baldwin, president of myNetWatchman.com, a company that monitors incidents on the Internet through a network of sensors set up by volunteers. "It was never the intention to let someone halfway across the world send messages that pop up on your screen."
Granted, the messenger service can be turned off. And conceptually, this is no worse a case of "trusting in infrastructure" than Apple's fiasco a while back in which its Software Update mechanism was found not to have any form of authentication, and to depend entirely on the proper resolution of a central server's DNS name. But still, this has the potential to become a major problem-- how many millions of Windows users don't have the slightest clue how to turn off the messenger service? How many will think that these "admin messages" are in fact authoritative missives from Microsoft that they'd better heed or else? Worst of all, this feature can't really be "fixed" except by shutting it off by default, which is what's apparently being done in the XP firewall. But that means IT managers are going to have to make sure employees turn it on (and can't turn it off)...
What surprises me is that it's taken this long for someone to exploit this.
DirectAdvertiser.com, a U.S.-based firm registered in Romania, has created an application that lets users send advertisements via the messenger channel to anyone whose computer is set up to receive messenger-service notes. The program costs $700 and has, in two months, already sold more than 200 copies, company founder Zoltan Kovacs said in an interview.
"You always get some people who don't like the product," Kovacs said, referring to the moderate amount of critical mail he has received. "But many more are interested in the product."
Kovacs stressed in the interview and on his Web site that the application is not for sending spam. However, a testimonial on the Web site says, "If you've been a bulk e-mailer like myself, you owe it to yourself to try DirectAdvertiser."
Why is killing these people still considered murder?
Ah well; now that the genie's out, we can expect this brave new form of technology to ramp up exponentially.
"This is just going to be a whole other delivery vehicle for spam," Baldwin said, adding that the fact the service is turned on by default is another indication that Windows security has a way to go. "But welcome to Microsoft," he said.
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09:30 - Stop me before I blog again
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Acompulsiontorevisionism.shtml
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I really should let Den Beste have the last word in this; but I can't bring myself to do it. I don't have the willpower. Sorry about that.
It turns out that Apple has been lagging PCs in hard disk technology, too, but I've already gone into this enough. It's exactly the same story. The reality is that on the hardware level, Apple has been a follower in nearly every regard, adopting many technologies only after they're considered obsolescent in the PC world. Apple has been between one and three generations behind in RAM, in graphics chips, and in hard disk interfaces for years now, and it still is.
So tell me, what brand of 802.11 cards were the computer manufacturers putting into their laptops in 1999? Oh wait, sorry-- only Apple was doing that, weren't they? Okay, how about flat-panel monitors? What superior supplier fueled everybody else's push toward an all-LCD lineup in 2000? Oh wait, never mind-- seems Apple's monitors still keep winning top marks from the reviewers even today. USB? Who was using USB before the iMac popularized it? Lemme get back to you.
Remember when Apple was criticized for continuing to use SCSI disks, when everybody else had gone to the cheaper and crappier IDE? Now they're "behind the curve". Great.
The technology that Apple adopts early in the curve is the technology that creates new capabilities. If it's something completely new, they're right in the forefront. Whereas technologies that just make existing tasks faster (RAM, disks, video)-- yes, they stagnate, because making existing capabilities faster isn't what Apple's about. It isn't where they've chosen to stack their chips.
I want to see an ad campaign that goes: Still using a Mac? Get with the program! Buy a PC! Free yourself from those DVD burners with their one-click operation. Trash those FireWire-driven music players and video editors. Break the cycle of creativity! Succumb to the siren song of the Registry! Throw your built-in wireless Ethernet and widescreen displays out the window; you won't need those anymore, because your computer will be faster!
Oh, and note that not a single one of the "Switch" ads says a word about the Mac being faster at anything.
I despise Jobs for lying like this, for doing so repeatedly and shamelessly. And I find myself revisiting the subject time after time because I'm astounded that otherwise rational people can drink the kool-aid and not realize that they're being conned.
...And yet, somehow, the stunts Microsoft pulls are just peachy-keen.
Somehow I get the feeling that if the two debators on this topic want opposite futures for Apple and its market share, then it's sort of pointless to debate the finer points of how the company's marketing works.
I've been treating as axiomatic the "Apple is a force of good in the industry" line; I've used that as the basis for both my cheerleading and my criticism of Apple here. (If they do something that I find worrisome or disagreeable, I point it out, in the hopes that they'll fix it, in the interest of being a better and more successful company.) But if we can't agree on that-- if we can't agree that having Apple around is good for technology as a whole-- then there's very little common ground to be reached.
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| Sunday, October 20, 2002 |
13:37 - I have no idea what to say about this.
http://cgi.argusleader.com/cgi-bin/techwrapper.pl?URL=http://www.gannettonline.com/e
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Aimed at video game enthusiasts with deep pockets, publisher Capcom (www.capcom.com) says its upcoming $200 "Steel Battalion" title, plus bundled game controller, will hit store shelves Nov. 19...
But Capcom says "Steel Battalion" a futurist battle-mech simulator played from a first-person perspective uses the most elaborate interface ever created for a game and thus requires a special controller.
The controller sports an unprecedented 40 buttons to position the nearly two dozen battle-mechs and their assortment of weapons.
Seriously. Not a flippin' clue.
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13:03 - Just for the record...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Weregonnabefaster.shtml
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Update: Brian Tiemann comments. He misses the point: When the Mac's marketshare falls to a certain point, there will begin an unstoppable downward spiral as developers stop stupporting it and users are forced to leave because the software they need is no longer available. Many an elegant wonderful usable marvelous candy-colored design has died because of market forces.
I wasn't missing the point; I was ceding the point, and making a different one.
Yes, I know it's inevitable that the cheaper and crappier solution will always win. But is that any reason to gloat over the death of the competitor who had the audacity to try to hold itself to a higher standard? I mean, you know that the other computer companies hold Apple in higher regard from a business standpoint than the average consumer does. Apple has billions in the bank (and while they posted a $45 million loss last quarter, somehow their cash assets grew; doesn't sound to me like a company that's on the brink of bankruptcy); and though they've been steadily going out of business for twenty years now, Compaq has been merged, Gateway's only got a few months left at best, and Dell looks to be the only real contender to survive the dot-com crash. And yet they all look to Apple to tell which way to run. They see Apple as a survivor, a harbinger of public taste, and a pioneer with arrows in the back. They all let Apple come up with the cool designs, and then they copy them. And their advertising and marketing-speak betrays that they consider Apple the team to beat: Gateway's "iMac-killer" machines, Dell's blatantly false claim to have been the first to put 802.11 into its laptops (Apple did it a year earlier). They see Apple continuing to be wildly successful, when all the numbers and common sense says they should be long-dead history. And they do it while earning an insane amount of customer loyalty, the kind Dell or Gateway or even Microsoft would kill for. Seems to me they're doing something right.
Part of the difficulty here is that both of them are talking about something different than I am. What they're saying is what should happen, because of coolness and happiness and the search for elegance. What I'm saying is what will happen, because of market realities.
Yes, and that's the difference between what we're arguing for. I know what the market realities say. I know that it's inevitable that everybody's elegant and well-designed system will eventually be replaced by something unspeakably pedestrian. But my argument is, why try to hasten that process? Apple is a force of good in the industry today. As I said above, the other companies rely on Apple to push the envelope on cool new features and designs (and to take the fall if they're misguided). I think innovation would stagnate without Apple around, just as MSIE's development froze solid as soon as Microsoft had driven Netscape from the market.
I happen to think that what should be is worth fighting for; I don't intend to just roll over and pee on myself because of the overwhelming burden of the futility of it all. While there's still a chance that the ideals of elegant design will remain alive, I'm going to fight to prevent the inevitable from happening. Maybe that makes me completely disconnected from reality. Maybe it means I'm taking the role of the Taliban, who should have surrendered the instant it became clear who would win the war. But I think that if something should be, then it's worth defending. There's always a chance, isn't there?
By the way, Brian's problem with Excel was, well, with Excel and not with Windows or the x86, and it probably would have failed the same way on OSX.
No, that's not what I was getting at. My beef is with Excel, yes; but more accurately, my beef is with this cult of software shittiness that we've all embraced with such gusto. We encourage, with our dollars, the intense mediocrity of software written to Microsoft's standards, instead of software written to Apple's. Companies everywhere talk about crises of perceived quality, yet they refuse to do anything about the lack of design guidelines and expectations that software written in the Mac tradition has.
I'm not naive enough to believe that there's no buggy software for the Mac. Of course there is. But when the paragon of software quality that we all admire is Microsoft, and we keep gleefully gobbling up the turds they keep flinging out the door at us (and begging for more), then software is never going to get any bloody better. Mac software has design ideals and guidelines that are followed in the software development community to a much greater degree than even the best commercial Windows software written by the paragons of design that we consider supreme. If more people would pay attention to how Mac software was written-- or at least take some goddamned pride in what they write-- then we would all spend a whole helluva lot less time bitching and moaning about our "stupid computers" and buying anti-virus and and anti-spyware and Registry-cleaning software in a dogged attempt to pretend we know what the fuck our computers are doing.
If Excel had been written by Apple, you can bet that at the very least, that "Document was not saved" error message would have been just a trifle more helpful.
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| Saturday, October 19, 2002 |
13:33 - Is your God FAST enough?
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Weregonnabefaster.shtml
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I swear, that is the current slogan on a banner outside the church that stands between my workplace (coincidentally right across the street from One Infinite Loop) and the local Togo's sandwich shop.
Certainly well-educated and sophisticated Americans would never think that icons of their religion could ward off evil, could they?
This was before the creation of the Macintosh, however, and before it fell behind in technical performance and in market performance, and before Steve Jobs returned from the dead to lead the Mac faithful to the promised land. His presentations at various MacWorld's are virtually indistinguishable in style and substance from a revivalist minister, and his disciples routinely wave various icons towards the x86/Windows volcano to stave off extinction.
Sometimes the icons look like jelly beans.
Hhhyep. Here we go again.
Computers are about more than a column of numbers.
The fastest Xeon in the world wouldn't have enabled me to save my Excel spreadsheet yesterday.
But three-year-old CPUs don't prevent me from enjoying the process of rummaging through my songs in iTunes, or video-editing in iMovie, or using an OS that doesn't have a Registry. The user experience, and the existence of the software in the first place, is of much greater importance to Apple, and to Mac users, than raw CPU speed. If Apple had decided at the outset that the most important selling point for their computers was going to be speed, then Macs would have been a lot faster. Maybe they'd have used Intels. Maybe a lot of other decisions would have been made. But they certainly wouldn't be Macs as we know them today. In fact, make price another paramount initial goal, and Apple would probably be dominant today. And the software would probably also be about as good as Windows software.
They didn't make that decision, though, and the result is a fundamentally different kind of software. It's software that the user enjoys using. Regardless of the speed of the CPU. My three-year-old G4/450 can video-edit just as well as my brand-new iMac at work. Sure, the final export time is a bit different, and I appreciate that. But it's not what I lose sleep over. What would give me the night sweats is not a world in which Macs never got faster than they are today. What would drench my pillow-- in sweat and in tears-- is a world in which the magic of technology and software is completely commoditized out of existence, in which the whole world-- without exception-- sees computers as something to cope with instead of something that makes them feel good.
To people who use Macs, this distinction is self-evident-- enough so that it's impossible to put it into words. But to those who don't, the bottom line-- the numbers, the economics, the statistics-- all resolve out to a resounding thumbs-down.
Wintel machines win on the objective. Macs win on the subjective. Trouble is, only one of those can really be measured.
I'm sure everybody has had a variation on the following experience: Your company decides that it's going to implement a new billing system, a new sales-tracking system, a new project-management system, a new e-mail system-- something to replace the chugging workhorse the whole company uses. The new system looks great on paper. The numbers are awesome; it's so fast, it's so interconnected, it's so modular, it's so made by a partner company-- er, I mean, it's so cheap. Great things are expected. But once the new system is in place, it turns out that the user-interface is a disaster, the stability is abysmal, and its newness and unfamiliarity are not the only reasons why the company's employees come to hate it so quickly. They're subject to huge downtimes as the company tries desperately to make it work. But no matter what those numbers in the sales brochure say, even if they're accurate-- nothing alters the fact that the employees all wish they could go back to the old, "inferior" system.
If only there were a way to know that would happen beforehand, right? A way to quantify the user experience, the stability, the ease with which it allows people to do their work-- with the same ease as one can quantify the number of clock cycles per second or simultaneous transactions or RAM footprint? Oh, if only. That's the problem with subjective analysis. That's the problem with trying to argue in favor of a system that "feels right" over a system that has great numbers in its bottom line.
Den Beste is right to characterize Mac advocacy as a "religion"; those who aren't a part of it just don't "get it", and to | | |
Brian Tiemann
