Category: it could be called work

beware of geeks bearing gifts

TIME Magazine: Coolest Inventions 2003, Apple Music Store

Jobs has one more reason not to be concerned about the competition. “The dirty little secret of all this is there’s no way to make money on these stores,” he says. For every 99¢ Apple gets from your credit card, 65¢ goes straight to the music label. Another quarter or so gets eaten up by distribution costs. At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother? “Because we’re selling iPods,” Jobs says, grinning.

A Trojan Horse, indeed . . . .

reviving the draft boards?

DefendAmerica News – Article

Local Board Members are uncompensated volunteers who play an important community role closely connected with our Nation’s defense. If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines.

Anyone remember Mr Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life” reviewing the draft applications, growling “1-A, 1-A” as he went?

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.”

Half a million troops on the ground, in the air or at sea to secure the peace in Iraq: that’s a lot to ask.

reliability in services

Lest anyone think I am just taking potshots at MSFT when I suggest that Google running on Win2003 might be less reliable than the home-grown architecture they use now, an anecdote might help.

When I worked at CNN.com, we ran almost exclusively Sun Solaris on Sun hardware and when I left, we had more than 100 machines in services. Having just one machine out of service, though it might be one of twelve identical systems, was a Big Deal and it didn’t take a day to get it resolved. Not that it happened very often: I’m trying to think of a second instance.

We had a fellow join us from MSFT and he took a tour of one of our data centers/machine rooms, remarking that it was nowhere near as impressive as Microsoft’s Internet Data Center (you could hear the initial caps in his phrasing). Why, we have so many machines, fully a quarter of them are down for maintenance or being rebooted at any given time, he explained.

A quarter. One in four. Twenty five percent. Offline, out of service . . .

So take the 10,000 to 15,000 servers mentioned in a comment to the previous post, and add 25% to the costs of the licenses you would need. It would get pricy very quickly.

Panther impressions

Apple – Mac OS X

It’s just that fast.

It’s actually quite zippy on my elderly Blue & White G3, so on the 500 MHz iMac, it should be quite nice. Opened windows drag around more smoothly, things just seem to pop where they didn’t before.

I miss the CPU monitor, even though it has been replaced by a more full-featured system monitoring tool (yeah, I could show some screenshots, but I’m not on that machine right now). Perhaps someone at Apple will make that available again: I liked having my utilization displayed in the Dock.

I like the networking panel in the new brushed-metal Finder, as well. Since the systems on my network speak every protocol I know about — AppleTalk, samba/CIFS, NFS — I have a couple of choices to share files. But I found browsing them to be fast and easy. The shared volumes don’t mount but display their contents in the panes of the network browser: not a big deal. AppleTalk volumes do mount and appear on the Desktop as one would expect.

One feature I want to try out is the Fax server: it will received FAXes and can print and/or email them. I see that as being very useful to mobile types (like realtors) who do a lot of business by FAX. What I would like to be able to do is print to the FAX server as if it were a printer: should be possible, but I haven’t looked into it yet.

Sadly, I’ll never see it on my 2 * 1.25 GHz work machine, since I’m leaving in two weeks and I’ve already given it away (I was asked “if there was any way to get any value out of it, would anyone want it?”). But perhaps if I can find something else I can finally snag one of those 12 inch iBooks, expecially now that they’re G4s.

the London Underground map: the map organizes the territory

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

The Underground Map and Minard’s famous Carte Figurative of the French Army’s disaster in Russia in the war of 1812 are alike in important respects: both are brilliant, and neither travels well. The Underground Map and Napoleon’s March are perfectly attuned to their particular data, so focused on their data sets. They do not serve, then, as good practical generic architectures for design; indeed, revisions and knock-offs have uniformly been corruptions or parodies of the originals. Both, however, exemplify the deep principles of information design in operation, as well as the craft and passion behind great information displays.

discovered via rogue semiotics

keeping faith

meta-douglasp

What really struck me hard was this is likely all that is left for us to remember them.  This one tiny piece of paper is all that remains to tell us they were even here.  This one wilted and tattered sheet that sat unnoticed by an ungrateful ancestor. 

I just discovered what I think is my grandparents’ wedding gift list (my grandmother was not one to omit recording these essential details), and since my father — the link between us — will be here in a few days, I plan to show it to him (I ended up with the box of 100 year-old photographs and oddments that some families have).

Finding it didn’t make me sad: I was glad to find it, as it gives me yet another insight into their lives.