February 2001 Archives
Had my root canal mid-afternoon. Much faster and easier than I was expecting. Ran a couple errands after, then came home and crashed for a few hours. Right now, it doesn't feel too bad, but that may because I'm floating in a warm, fluffy cloud of ibuprofen.
Do you think that stories of corporate influence and political meddling sound like something out of a John le Carré spy novel? So does John le Carré.
We have become the creatures of these people. Advertising as news. It's prevalent in every aspect of the press. It's very skilfully done. The amount of energy and money and ingenuity applied to corporate spin and corporate lying has never been greater or more effective than it is now.I need to check out his new novel about corporate skullduggery.
To the monkeyfisters, nothing is apolitical. Not even XML.
I only watched the beginning of The Merchants of Cool last night, but its examination of modern teen-targeted marketing was chilling enough from that excerpt. More thoughts when I finish seeing the whole thing.
Last night's Buffy (Is it a spoiler if you're just confirming what everybody knows happens?) hurt to watch. Not the performances (including the best I've ever seen from some of the supporting cast), but the story. Heart-wrenching.
I have to go in for a root canal this afternoon.
When I post about books, I like to link to some source for buying and/or finding more information on those books, but I dislike endorsing any specific bookseller (mostly due to some lingering hard feelings about a specific company's abuse of patent law) with said link. Thankfully, Dan points out ISBN.nu which does a price comparison across a number of sites. If it had reviews, discussion boards, etc. like IMDb does for movies, it'd be darn close to perfect; as it is, I wouldn't be surprised to see this site catch on among the blognoscenti.
I know there are other MP3 / CD players on the market, but the Rio Volt looks like an especially nice model. [via Street Tech]
Happy Mardi Gras, everybody! I'm not doing much to celebrate, other than enjoying the fantastic king cake my mom has shipped up from Paul's. There is a local celebration every year in Soulard, but I've never been to their parades in the five (six?) years I've lived in St. Louis. Chuck, a true New Orleanian, could probably give you a better picture of the N'Awlins Mardi Gras experience than I could. I'll just agree that there's a lot more colorful tradition and family entertainment available in New Orleans at Carnival time than most people seem to hear about. While I've made the trip to New Orleans a few times, both with family and with friends, I'm a lot more familiar with the smaller celebrations that towns from New Orleans to Mobile, AL put together as a community effort. In my youth on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, these always centered around family-friendly parades, with generous throws of cheap beads and plastic doubloons, colorful but simple floats generally built with more enthusiasm than skill, local school bands given their favorite opportunity to strut their stuff, and mobs of happy children enjoying their day off from school. I'm sad to hear, though, that small-town Mardi Gras seems to be losing its family flavor.
Wonderful toys coming out of Q Branch these days, no?
I found an interesting quote in an academic paper about Emeril Live:
Emeril's technique has been called sloppy, and his recipes vague and confusing. Amanda Hesser of the New York Times says that instead of being a cooking show, Emeril Live is "a prime-time sitcom filled with gags and lots of action" and no quality cooking. In fact, there is truth to these claims. Emeril frequently botches recipes, and his instructions are often vague. And because there is so much repetition in his dishes, Emeril often appears uncreative. In truth, sometimes his show doesn't even seem like a cooking show.Well, now that you mention it...
The RIAA has finally come up with some statistics to support their claims that Napster has hurt their sales: A decrease in the sale of CD singles. But is this drop due to song-sharing, or the industry itself?
Some experts trace the drop in the sale of singles back to the record companies themselves. Industry watchers say that record companies have cut production of an unprofitable product that no longer serves the needs of the industry.I can't say for sure, since it's been years since I've found a CD single for any song that I actually wanted.
E-mail hoax of the week: There is no such disease as the Klingerman Virus, and it certainly isn't being spread by snail mail. That's the word from the Centers for Disease Control; they oughta know.
A balanced view of WaSP's push for browser upgrades.
I've always believed that the recording industry's war on Napster has more to do with control than with money. I'm not the only one:
What's new is that, under Napster's proposed business model, not only can relative nobodies market and distribute their work right along with the big boys, but they can also get paid for it. The last thing the RIAA wants is for being an independent artist or label to be lucrative. It's as if every Tower Records, Sam Goody, and HMV in the country were now carrying copies of that local band's demo tape right alongside the labels' latest offerings. Even worse, it's as if it were guaranteed that every customer who walked in with $10 was forced to spend exactly $2.50 to support independent music, with the major labels left to fight over the remaining $7.50.
The disaster doesn't end there, though. Under the proposed plan, the artists themselves don't have to go through a major label to get at that $10. (Recall that it falls to the labels to divvy up the dough amongst their artists.) The artist can either go after a slice of that $10 directly, or they can go through an indie label who will offer them a better cut of what they're earning than a major label. Thus, the artist's options are improved, and he or she has real bargaining power when negotiating a record contract.The usual disclaimer: I don't use Napster. I just want a different model for the distribution of music than the corporate behemoths of today.
If any Netscape 6 / Mozilla users can tell me why I have extra margins around my graphics, I'd love to hear it so I can fix my layout.
Iron Chef fans, don't forget that tonight's battle (spoiler available for the ingredient) is the tiebreaker for probably the most spectacular tie ever seen on the show. I'm still amazed at the outcome of the Foie Gras battle: Every judge split 19-20, and Asako "Russian Judge" Kishi awarding the first 20 I've ever seen from her.
Charles Taylor gives the new movie Monkeybone a glowing review, but wonders why the studio seems determined to ensure its commercial failure:
There may not be much most critics can do to alert potential audiences. Fox didn't screen the movie for critics until Wednesday night, about a day and a half before the opening. This guarantees that the weeklies won't get to cover the movie before the all-important opening weekend, and that most daily critics will have limited time and space to meet their Friday deadline. This is the strategy that the studios use when they have no faith in a movie and do everything they can to try and make it look like a bomb. As Pauline Kael once wrote, "Mediocrity and stupidity certainly don't scare them; talent does." By that standard, "Monkeybone" must have had the brain trust at Fox shitting in their Helmut Langs.Sadly, this reminds me of Warner Brothers' pathetically inept marketing campaign that denied the wonderful Iron Giant the family success it deserved.
Did I mention that John Derbyshire was an unrepentant asshole? Just making sure.
Bah. I've let myself be sucked back into playing The Sims again lately, and now it looks like the House Party expansion will turn it into even more of a time suck.
IBM appears to be giving up on building copy protection into your hard drives. Yay!
It's amazing to read about this kind of community support for a public library.
Fueled by a love of books and community spirit, this eastern Nebraska hamlet turned out on a frigid Wednesday to form a human chain and transfer thousands of books from the town's old library to its new one.
Some 350 of the town's 1,200 residents stood shoulder-to-shoulder to pass sacks containing a few books each to the newly built library. It took about 10 minutes for each sack of books to make the trip.Must have been quite a sight as well. Of course, I'm sure Pat Schroeder would be enraged at this support for the Enemies of Publishing.
As per Mike's suggestion, I'd like to point out that not only is John Derbyshire an asshole, he's an unrepentant asshole as well. (Actually, this is a better link, but I'm leaving the other as is for technical reasons. Spread the meme!)
I'm trying out BookmarkSync as a different way to manage my bookmarks across browsers, computers, etc. It's a web service that stores your bookmarks on their site, but it also has a client that automatically synchronizes the native bookmarking systems of your various browsers. One cool feature is that it can export your stored bookmarks as an XBEL file. I'll have to see how it compares with the Backflip system I've been using.
Yes, you can come up with a silly reductio ab absurdum example against using CSS for everything, but overall, life is too short to maintain <font> tags. (Besides, <div align="center"> has always seemed more consistent with the rest of HTML's block-level formatting than <center> ever did, even if it is a few more keystrokes.)
So is that what that scene in Pretty Woman was all about?
Short Shameful Confession: I would have watched (or better, taped) the Grammys if I had known the Blue Man Group was going to be on.
Roy Blount Jr. has forgotten the best answer to impertinent questions from John Ashcroft. In the immortal words of George Carlin, "Bend over, and let's find out!"
Another one bites the dust. Internet file storage service Driveway appears to be the latest free web application to close shop. Doesn't affect me that much (I'd forgotten I even had an account), but it makes me worry about other free apps that I do use all the time.
I just spent half an hour sitting in my car waiting for Shrub's motorcade to get moving. I thought he'd left the area last night, or I would have avoided driving into work past the farm where Bush stays with some family friends when he comes to STL. As it happened, I was close enough to see the motorcade pass. Yay.
Is there any value to producing more food with high-tech methods if they don't contain the nutrients we need?
Every keen gardener will by now have received a load of seed catalogues, offering all kinds of newly developed vegetable varieties. They will have been specially bred to mature earlier, to resist disease, to last longer, to look better. The unglamorous business of trace elements is way down the priority list. And if that's true for ordinary gardeners, it's going to be 10 times more true at the industrial level, where our diet is controlled.[via YAWL]
Why was the movie version of Heinlein's The Puppet Masters such a travesty? [via David Chess]
All Your Base Are Belong to Jon Carroll. (Although, if you are one of the five people who haven't seen this... thing yet, perhaps the mirror that Zannah put up would be a better link.)
With Mardi Gras approaching, does anybody need a King Cake? Paul's of Picayune has some of the best and they'll ship anywhere. They claim to have invented the cream-filled king cake, which they offer in a variety of flavors. I'm starting to worry about their judgement though; this year, they seem to be offering a pizza king cake. That is wrong on so many levels.
Inamongst all the partisan rancor and hysteria of recent days, it can be difficult to remember that the fanatics and freepers don't make up the whole of the Republican party; fortunately, Garrison Keillor hasn't forgotten.
The tide of junk mail from irate Republicans suddenly abated and in its wake came a few pleasant letters from Republicans who said, "Don't judge us all by the extremists." These are the Republicans I know from my youth, those moderate, business-minded civic boosters and unapologetic patriots who were the linchpins and bulwarks of small towns across the Midwest, the enthusiastic backers of projects for the civic good, usually in partnership with the town liberals (the librarian, the bar owner, a lawyer or two, the Methodist minister, the banker's wife). These Republicans were uniters and diehard optimists and persons of compassionate conscience, inveterate doers of good deeds. They're still around, doing good deeds and working for their communities, but here in Minnesota their party got shanghaied by the religious right and they became the party that waved photographs of bloody embryos, and it took the moderates a long time to reassert themselves. When Republicans set themselves up as a religious party, they get very scary. Their strongest appeal is to common sense and decency and to civic optimism. Anyway, those are the Republicans I know, and the fine folks who've been filling up Mr. Blue's mailbox are another species entirely, characters out of Flannery O'Connor. Interesting folks but not ones you'd want on the school board.Who knows, there might be Democrats left who aren't either partisan hysterics or money-grubbing political operators as well.
I've been thinking a lot the last few days about the latest issue of Jeffrey Zeldman's A List Apart. Zeldman calls for abandoning support for old web browsers that don't follow current standards. His approach gives up on trying to make the site look the same in all browsers, but does its best to make the site as universally readable as possible.
Meanwhile, this site complies with standards and works in any browser. It looks better in CSS-compliant browsers, but the content is accessible to any browser or device. It's also a low-bandwidth design (and even lower now that we can discard 6K of nested table cells), which makes it friendlier for those with slow connections and older equipment.I'm seriously considering taking this approach, to some degree, on my personal sites. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up on table-based layout, but I'm willing to try some of their techniques. These days, though, it seems like time is a more limiting factor than skill or inspiration.
On the other hand, I think that the Web Standards Project's Browser Upgrade Initiative is going too far; not the principles, but the techniques they recommend. Their idea is to forcibly redirect non-compliant browsers to an explanation page.
Naturally, there's been a lot of both praise and hand-wringing over at MeFi. Overall, I see a lot of merit in the ALA approach: Universal readability, standards-compliant beautification; explain the differences, but don't push anyone out.
The latest word from Dan Gillmor on the Jim Allchin / Open Source flap sounds a lot like Microsoft is backpedalling, to me at least.
When an online game with a loyal fan base fell prey to yet another dotcom collapse, a group of players pooled their resources to save the game, and their online community. Could this be a model for other web applications that might be in danger of disappearing?
Perhaps the reason Microsoft is attacking open source so vigorously on the Linux front is because their arguments are weaker in other arenas. Here's a look at the dominance of other open source projects in the web application world. [via CamWorld]
Dan Gillmor catalogs some of the reactions to Jim Allchin's remarks about Linux that have been posted to the web. I'd say more, but I don't want to start frothing at the mouth keyboard right now.
Every know and then, Microsoft makes you glad that some of its half-baked ideas don't work:
The second factor to consider is context-sensitive help and access to applications. This is something that Microsoft has been striving to get into Windows for years, and there are clear signs in the XP code that it really wants to make something of it this time around. But can it? In the product activation phase of the most recent builds a cartoon Wizard pops up, introduces himself as Merlin, and offers context-sensitive help. But our informants claim to have clicked on him and hammered away at F1 to no avail - Merlin's underlying help seems not to have arrived yet.Emphasis mine; this seems to be saying that Microsoft wants to integrate its obnoxious Office Assistant technology (the annoying little animated paper clip that Will Not Leave You Alone) at the operating system level. The horror, the horror.
What use is it to swap music if you can't use it as you choose once you've downloaded it? Digital music with cumbersome restrictions is more useless than no digital music at all.
It's been one of those mornings which makes me wonder whether I'll live to see the age of 31.
Which, theoretically at least, means 6:18 PM CST today.
If you're concerned about the dangers of scripting within Outlook or Outlook Express, Dan Gillmor has (obscenely convoluted, through no fault of his own) instructions for shutting off scripting within e-mail. Yeesh. I wish it were possible to define specific subsets of HTML to be rendered depending upon the situation; I wouldn't mind a minimal amount of text-based markup within e-mail, but would love to be able to tell the program to throw images, tables, scripts, etc. on the floor.
This Harry Potter game sounds especially promising:
Even more amazing is the Harry Potter Wizard Spell Casting Playset, due in the fall. The game play changes each time a different casting stone (sensor-equipped) is placed in a special trough. One hundred twenty-five different stones will be available! The play set also features a laser-like display that spells out stuff in seeming mid-air (actually on a fast-moving stick flipping up and down).I love games where the rules change on the fly, such as Fluxx. I'll have to check out this Harry Potter game to see just how dynamic the rules are. [via the Cauldron]
"I just want to say one word to you... just one word. Are you listening?
'Plastics'." After all, new advances in polymers will allow plastics to heal themselves under conditions of fatigue, wear, and damage.
Microsft's Digital Rights Management plans sound more invasive every time I hear about them.
You can spot a likeness here - is the Product Activation technology used in Windows XP somehow related? Product Activation sets out to individualise the PC, and although you can see how useful Rights Manager's individualisation of the player client is in the narrow but potentially lucrative field of digital music, you can see how even handier it would be to broaden it. Wouldn't it be great (not from your point of view, obviously, you're just a user) if you knew absolutely about absolutely everything each and every individual PC was allowed or not allowed to run?Chilling.
Microsoft has hit new depths in its war on Linux: Apparently, the free (both libre and gratis) operating system is a threat to innovation and American values. (Life imitates Segfault.) As I mentioned on MeFi, "innovate" is one of those words that Microsoft tends to redefine as necessary to suit its own purposes. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Touch-sensitive fabric would appear to have lots of interesting applications; why the focus on silly musical clothing?
Microsoft's war on Linux moves to the developer front: the Beast of Redmond seems to be trying to reduce support for the free OS by offering jobs to Linux programmers. Didn't Linus himself once say that he wouldn't work for Microsoft if they offered, because he didn't think they were doing anything interesting?
The Big Three auto makers have the technology to dramatically improve fuel efficiency in their vehicles, even oversized SUV's. However, don't hold your breath waiting for more than a token effort to promote fuel efficiency anytime soon.
I haven't written about the Napster shutdown so far because I've never actually used the program. However, I still wish that the music industry could learn a few lessons from Napster's popularity.
The motivation, clearly, already exists. If the Napster phenomenon proves anything, it proves that the Internet public wants a universal library of immediately accessible, easily downloadable music. That Napster makes the music free is plainly an added attraction, but it's also clear that millions of people would pay for the right to keep using Napster in its current form -- if the music industry could only find a way to accept that outcome and participate in its revenue.
There is still an opportunity, however slim, for the recording industry to redeem itself in the eyes of its millions of customers by saying, "Yes, we want you to pay for our products, but we will give you something new and different and wonderful, because this is a new and different world." Otherwise, it could find itself regretting it ever chose to take Napster to court.Napster's popularity seems to me to have had as much to do with frustration with the music industry's current distribution model (promotion of a few carefully-selected artists, buying a whole CD for one good song) as with the desire for "something for nothing".
When I want to England a little over a year ago, I don't think my appreciation of Stonehenge would have been diminished in the least by an admission that the site had been restored in the modern era.
Hemmed in by busy roads and rattled by jets from a nearby air base, Stonehenge nonetheless remains a majestic sight. The lichen-encrusted stones rise from Salisbury Plain, 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of London, amid a landscape dotted with sheep and ancient burial mounds.I still remember my first sight of Stonehenge, riding through the English countryside in my parents' rental car a few hours after they picked me up at Gatwick. It was one of the things I most wanted to see on my trip, yet I was unprepared for the awe I experienced when we crested a hill and I got my first gimpse. Even the obvious signs of the modern world couldn't distract me from the sense of history I felt walking through the site. [link via Rebecca]
Damn, but my design is messed up in Netscape 6, although it seemed to look just fine in 4.whatever. It seems to be playing silly buggers with my table spacing.
I've already had a lovely little "What the hell were they thinking?" moment this morning. I had to get a user up and running on my intranet application that I set up on her system months ago, but which she has not yet had a reason to use. When she tries to run it, it doesn't pick up on the VBScript (I know, I know) that the app needs, because some UPS application has installed its own version of Internet Explorer, without the scripting component. No problem, I think, all it wants is the UPS install disk, and it will install that component in about a minute. So we track down the CD-ROM. I put it in the drive. The bloody UPS software starts installing. It doesn't ask me if I want to install, it starts installing, and I am loath to stop an installation because the user in question needs UPS a lot more than she needs my app. Eventually (the usual OS reboot or two later), it's done installing, and I can finally install the component that was the original point of this exercise.
Mind you, I'm sure UPS has a couple of surprises in store for me later on; I've dealt with UPS's install of IE before, and it seems to take a perverse joy in fiddling around with system settings for no clear reason.
But, good grief, what idiot programmer starts a major install on CD AutoRun without making sure the user really wants to install?
Windows XP may let you stick with the devil you know after all.
Luna is one of two interfaces Microsoft will deliver as part of Windows XP; the company also plans to allow customers to choose the existing Windows interface.Elsewhere, the "innovation" seems to be roughly what we've come to expect from Microsoft:
"This is so sad. They're just lamely trying to copy Steve Jobs' Apple presentation--right down to the guy having a black shirt and black pants," said one Whistler tester who watched the Seattle event via Webcast and requested anonymity. "It's almost like Windows ME 2. Or as Apple might call it, Windows Me Too."
What's the most appropriate way to find new (or at least new to you) weblogs? Another weblog, of course. Well, I haven't seen a lot of these, even if you have.
Joy. The Windows XP screenshots I wanted yesterday. Ghod save us all, because Microsoft won't. [via CamWorld via Flutterby]
I just want today over with.
Microsoft may be trying to Trojan Horse some major Digital Rights Management into Windows XP.
The system is designed to work behind-the-scenes, so that consumers aren't aware of any digital rights management. When the operating system accesses media files, noise is added so that if the audio is intercepted, it won't be usable. Once the file makes it through the hardware device and passes it to the Windows Media Player, the noise is removed and the file plays.Other concerns about this system include worries about an unprecedented control over "authorized" audio hardware.
There may be more to Slick Willie's last-minute pardon of Marc Rich than a payoff for political contributions after all.
If Clinton was influenced by Israeli pleas on behalf of the undeserving Rich, that wouldn't excuse his decision, which has been justly criticized as improper in both substance and appearance. Nor is Clinton exempt from criticism because his predecessor awarded pardons that were even worse. But a pardon given for reasons of state, in pursuit of peace, ought to be regarded as wholly different from a pardon awarded for political and charitable contributions.There may have been more going on than I (and others) originally thought, but I still tend to believe it was a bad choice. To quote Conason's conclusion, "Exercising an extraordinary power that ought to be reserved for the repentant and rehabilitated, he rushed to a bad judgment that benefited a very bad man." Salon also looks at the paperless trail that may have led to the pardon.
Who's really “only a heartbeat away from the presidency”? [via Ghost]
The vultures circle the first public preview of Microsoft's next operating system, and speculate just how different the product will really be.
But maybe it's not exactly task-based at all, rather like the way many terms used by Microsoft turn out not quite to mean what you previously thought they did. Frederiksen maybe gives the game away when he says: "We built intelligence into the design so the applications that are used most frequently will 'bubble up' and be quickly and easily accessible." If it's task-based then the tasks bubble up, not the apps, John - at best, this sounds like Microsoft is designing some kind of halfway house.Lots of talk about some fantastic new UI, but no luck (yet) finding anything vaguely screenshottish.
If I didn't know better, I'd be starting to think that Jocasta and Guido actually like weblogs. While I wait for the other shoe to drop, or the long knives to be drawn (or for yours truly to come up with a decent metaphor) I hesitantly point you to their Weblog Clinic's second episode. Perhaps Graham "Kill Your Blog" Freeman is mellowing out in his old age. All they need is a weekly puzzle to become the weblog scene's own Click and Clack.
There must be a conspiracy behind the absence of Shea & Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and Koontz's Dark Rivers of the Heart from Salon's paranoid booklist. At the very least, Salon's usual free-floating snobbery should have guaranteed Eco a slot.
I usually manage to stay off the radar of major virus propogators, but I've already received (and deleted) three copies of the Anna Kournikova virus. Remember, children, do not take attachments from strangers.
A non-family-friendly parody site has one of the best responses to hate mail I've ever seen:
Congratulations! You are the 666th person to write to us and tell us to "get a life!" (I bet Satan is really proud of you.) But here's a question for everyone that tells us to "get a life:" Which one of us spent thirty minutes writing a web page and which one of us is jumping up and down and hollering and having a stroke because of it?Also, "God and I aren't afraid of anyone on AOL." Heh. I'd seen this site before, but thanks to Flutterby for bringing it back to my attention.
In Canada, once you start buying Microsoft products, things can go downhill fast.
I'm not paranoid; that's just a vicious rumor being spread around by my enemies.
Today, if you're a little bit paranoid, you're normal. If you're very paranoid, you're a prophet or a philosopher, a seer standing in a cloud of burning sulfur, speaking the dark truth that no one wants to hear. Paranoia has such cachet that it often ceases to be paranoia.Salon looks at paranoia this week, starting with those who think that everything wrong with the world in the past year is a result of the Y2K bug.
Our interest is in the contagion so many of us share: pop paranoia, the domain of the quirky, the obsessive, the slightly loopy dot connector, the compiler of bent facts, curious coincidences and curly conundrums, the sociopolitical fantasist, the darkly imaginative hobbyist -- neurotics, perhaps, but not psychotics. In other words, you, me and almost everybody we know.Hey, don't look at me; I'm part of the problem.
I've been getting a lot of really annoying search requests lately from one particular old entry. I think I've figured out a trick to prevent that page from being indexed for the irritating search terms in question without (visibly) changing that entry: Insert a comment or two in the middle of the word. It doesn't show up as a gap when the page is displayed, but hopefully search engines will se it as such. Anybody tried something like this before?
With billg's work towards feeding the hungry and curing the sick, I've got to find somebody in the industry to detest for non-technical reasons.
"Most people in the United States are at work right now, and that's a good thing because people, when they're at work, are too tired to shoot guns off in the wrong place or do bad things. They're paying taxes instead of being on entitlement programmes. And when they're at work, they're typically getting trained."
So we've all got to "go after" expanding NAFTA and trade with China, "and we've got to not let the human rights and environmental issues clobber the opportunity to make everybody on both sides of the border better off."Good thing he's got time to spare from petty pissing contests to save the world from human rights.
You know who's going to be hurt worse than the musicians by the IUMA shutdown? The poor kid who was named after the site by money-grubbing parents. [via rc3]
I'd been wondering about The Tree That Owns Itself ever since Eric linked stories about the 8-Track Gorilla and a fleet of Spy Cars. Thanks, Sapphire.
Whether or not they cause cancer, cell phones can be deadly:
The reason? The searcher had his mobile phone turned on and it was disrupting the avalanche transceiver's digital signal. Eventually, an analogue transceiver was located but it was too late and the man was dead. Now all searchers are being advised to turn off their phones when looking for someone - even the analogue kit is slightly affected by the mobile signal.
In case any Neal Stephenson fans out there are looking for more of his work (and have already been through the material under the Stephen Bury nom de plume), I just picked up a reissue of his first novel, The Big U. From what I've heard, Neal may not be thrilled at the republication, but it looks to be an amusing read. Just noticed something odd in his bio, though:
Stephenson admits that he runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and saying “this is our business plan.”As much as I enjoy Snow Crash, I suspect this could explain a lot of dot-com failures.
I saw a Microsoft commercial tonight during The West Wing. They were bragging about a server that had been running for days and hadn't needed any physical access in that time. That's right, days. I guess if you set your standards low enough...
It may be that the secret to truly affordable, high-quality internet access is to band together with your neighbors and take matters into your own hands.
That's according to the residents of Laramie, a city of 26,000 people in deepest, darkest Wyoming. They run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service called Lariat (Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications), which includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US.They also offer advice on setting up your own community internet system.
Hey, Dan, if you find the catch in that cheap AT&T internet access, let me know; if it's not too bad, it might be the way to wean my cousin off Juno. And by the way, artist Georgia O'Keeffe always spelled her name with two f's. (I've always claimed that our branch of the clan lost one over the side of the ship during a rough Atlantic passage.)
For those of you interested in building your own computers from components, Ars has just updated its infamous system guide to suggest the best fit to your particular needs. Personally, I'm a budget box kinda guy, and hope to pick up some new hardware in the next month or so.
I got to sit in on a surprisingly interesting meeting with these guys yesterday, flogging their line of network storage systems. The network department had already been looking at better ways of managing storage, file-sharing, backups, etc. when these guys called, and us IT guys managed to wrangle an invite to their presentation. Anyway, it's a massive, centrally-managed shared-storage system that looks to the computers using it like just another disk. Redundant seven ways from Sunday, and it sounds like a darn good basket.
I suppose making almost half a mil without having to finish the project you were working on qualifies as a success.
I am exactly the type of legitimate user for whom Microsoft's asinine Product Activation system will cause more problems than for pirates.
It's not that often I can take Camille Paglia seriously, but...
...I think that for most Americans trying to conduct their daily lives, Democratic activists have cried wolf once too often. The saturation point has long been reached for hysterical, rote charges about racism, sexism and homophobia – particularly when they issue from a party that professes populist ideals but has just elected the detestable, money-grubbing Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton henchman, as head of the Democratic National Committee.There's a lot about Bush and his appointees I don't like, but they ain't the end of the world.
I've had a site redesign floating around in the back of my head for a while now, but every time I start to get serious, I see something like this that makes me throw up my hands in despair. The design is gorgeous, and would wipe the floor with any kind of lame geometrics I could come up with. *sigh*
Burn the heretic!
Memo to President W: I don't want a tax cut.Steven Conn dares to question the belief that Shrub's massive tax cut may not be what the country needs. *gasp*
The hazards of HTML mail:
He sent his bugged e-mail to a couple buddies who agreed to be guinea pigs. Each friend added a message to the original e-mail before forwarding it to somebody else. Each time, Voth got a copy of the entire forwarded mail, including their comments.In general, I'm all in favor of adding some simple formatting to e-mail. (Although there are times I'd be happier without it; anybody know how my dad can turn off HTML formatting in AOL mail when he sends a message to my wireless device?) But there really ought to be some way to allow or disallow certain subsets of HTML (scripting, images, etc.) in certain applications. I hate when I'm reading some old mail on my local system, and Outlook Express tries to dial out to fetch graphics.
The states are starting to make noise about election reform, but show no sign of interest in any real substantive change.
There was a brief grumble here about obnoxious search results that have been turning up in my referrer logs. Then I realized that keeping the entry as written would likely have produced even more obnoxious searches.
The next version of Microsoft Windows is to be designated XP, which seems remarkably appropriate:
According to Reg reader Paul Grayson, aircraft with just the XP designation (such as the XP-55) were unconventional in design, prone to crashing, and generally a waste of R&D.All of which qualities are integral parts of Microsoft's Brand Identity.
Generally, I'm not one for linking cheesecake pics, but sheesh... It's Alyson Hannigan. *sigh* [via Bryan via Scott]
Gareth-Michael Skarka, the role-playing-game designer who last year created the Underworld RPG in an online column, takes on a new challenge for the coming year: 52 weeks, 52 game designs.
Naturally, the new series is to be called 52 Pick-Up.
These, by neccesity of space, will not be intricately detailed. However, they will feature enough of the background and rules that any gamer can pick them up and flesh them out with their own ideas, and have a perfectly usable game system. (Hence the "pick up" part of the title.) The forums for this column will be a place for readers to offer their own suggestions to the frameworks presented, which will develop these games even further. Plus, it's all free, and if you don't like a particular game, then wait a week and there will be a new one for you.
Warner Brothers may be backing down on its crusade against Harry Potter fansites. [via The Leaky Cauldron]
Juno, one of the the world's largest "free" (i.e. ad-supported) ISP's, is planning on using its members' PC's for massively distributed computing.
Juno is still working out the details of its plan, but Ardai said in the future, subscribers who want to get free access to the Internet may be required to participate in the project. This means they will have to download Juno's computational software and likely a new screen-saver as well, and leave their computers on all the time. Juno is one of the largest free ISPs with more than three million subscribers. It has 842,000 paid subscribers. Free subscribers who don't want to participate may be asked to pay for a subscription, he said.I have a cousin on a budget who's using Juno, and I suspect she'd be less than thrilled about having to keep her computer running 24/7.
I'm sorry to admit that I had thought that the Firesign Theatre was an artifact of the past. But no, they're still around, still bozos, still on the bus, and still topical. (Warning: Gratuitous flashturbation and Bush-bashing.)