Category: observations

he said it

If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA, who declined to recuse himself from a case involving his friend and hunting companion, Vice President Dick Cheney. This is but one pointed sentence in a 21 page memo defending his right to free association and excoriating the press for questioning his probity in the decision over the VP’s right to keep his secrets.

I’m surprised it has gotten this far. But then this is the same court whose involvement in the 2000 presidential election generated so much discussion.

The framers and their countrymen conceived the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and fought a war against one of the world’s most powerful empires for this?

ennui

I took a couple of days away from the weblog.

I hope my 60 or so subscribers aren’t disappointed.

It’s been hard to find anything worthwhile to comment, or at least in a way that adds anything to the conversation. I read an article about a VP at MSFT who, while trying to convince Warren Buffet in 1997 to buy/bless MSFT stock, mentions that his net worth is several hundred million dollars. From the standpoint of a full-time domestic engineer who only brings in $2 a day in Google AdSense revenue, good for him: don’t we all wish we had a “is a 90%+ margin business.”

And then there’s the warheads thinking their opinion about who should govern Spain trumps the people who live there. What arrogance.

I’m not sure if it’s ennui or dyspepsia . . .

the sacrifices we make in the name of science

CNN.com – Guinness mystery finally solved – Mar 15, 2004:

Scientists said Monday they had finally proved that the dark stout’s creamy bubbles defy expectations and flow down instead of upwards.

“Our group carried out preliminary experiments at a local pub a few years ago, but the results proved inconclusive,” said Dr. Andrew Alexander, from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry.

I’m not sure I concur: I may have to conduct my own experiments.

yet another RSS feed I’d like to see

Perhaps not as interesting as some others, but as a full-time domestic engineer, it is to me.

I would like to see sale information, new products, specials, and other stuff at my local food emporium(s). Frinstance, I was shopping today, and noticed that my preferred brand of a given product was now available: I had looked in vain for years and there it was. This could be the first week it was there, but how useful would it be to have a list of new products, seasonal produce and seafood, manager’s specials, that kind of thing.

Probably way down the list, especially with the demise of the delivered grocery services (HomeGrocer, WebVan). But I’d use it if it was there.

hey, little government worker, would you like some candy?

Army to Gates: Halt the free software | CNET News.com:

Since the launch of Office 2003 last year, Microsoft has given out tens of thousands of free copies of its flagship software, which retails for about $500, to workers at its biggest customers. The giveaway was expanded to government workers this year, but ethics offices at the Department of the Interior and Department of Defense have said the offers constitute unauthorized gifts and must be returned.

The Department of the Army went a step further, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to stop sending the software to Army personnel.

[ . . . ]

A Microsoft representative said giving away the software is a way to let some customers experience new features. “The goal of the program was to give customers a taste of the software and allow them to learn how it might be of use to their organizations in a positive way,” Microsoft spokesman Keith Hodson said.

Although Office has captured more than 90 percent of the market for productivity software, convincing customers to upgrade to the latest versions of Office has become a growing challenge for the company. And upgrades are essential to Microsoft: Office and Windows produce substantially all the company’s profits.

And I’m sure that when government employee Andrew uses the new version to open a document and then sends it to his colleague Betty, she can open it with her older version, right? And then when she uses her “free upgrade” and modifies the file, Claude finds he has to install it, as well, or the project he owes to his boss, Danielle, won’t be finished . . . .

I’ve used the phrase Trojan Horse today, already, haven’t I?

owning your own data/information

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: be careful what you ask for:
John comments:

Microsoft seems to have realized that we keep building database features into applications and layering them on top of the OS. I am no Redmond booster, but a light came on in my head when I saw what could be done by building the database into the OS in the first place.

They have also realized that by letting people keep all their information as files on a disk, the switching cost of moving to another platform is dangerously low. So moving all client data into a proprietary datastore, in the guise of a fast indexed “file system,” could be a trojan horse. This won’t be a file system as we know it, but a database without a backing store (where Zoe is a database/index built on top of the mbox files, WinFS sounds like a database without the underlying files). Creating a new file will mean you’re creating a new database record, and editing an existing one will be updating one.

So all the icons you see in your Windows explorer will be abstractions: where a “file” is actually a record in your filesystem’s allocation table and the inodes that hold the data, you could end up with a a disk that, when removed from a machine, might contain just one “file.” It will be the raw disk space managed by the database/filesystem layer, and otherwise unusable.

Add to this the notion that access to the data will be managed through the .NET architecture — you run a .NET server at your enterprise or pay a fee to MSFT to use one of theirs(!!) — and I think it’s pretty risky.

Contrast this with all the talk about storing all Office application documents in XML — light, open, and human-readable — and I have to wonder which is the real strategy. These are likely being built by different groups — WinFS would be owned by the OS group — which might explain the differing positions.

And of course, we have seen what happened when the broswer got built into the OS: it became moribund and stale. Market forces are a powerful thing, and sometimes the only leverage you have.

Reading the full article might make these points more clear. There may be updates as well: I should take a look myself.

is this a fair way to fight?

Tim Bray, newly-minted Sun employee, alludes to a variation of the Valerie Plame affair, perpetrated by MSFT.

ongoing · Sunny Boy:

Personal disclosure: In 1997, as a result of signing a consulting contract with Netscape, I was subject to a vicious, deeply personal extended attack by Microsoft in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there. It was a sideshow of a sideshow of the great campaign to bury Netscape and I’m sure the executives have forgotten; but I haven’t. I should tell that story here sometime so that should my readers discern an attitude problem regarding Redmond, it ain’t because I work at Sun. Also, it has a funny ending.

He also mentions that he knows some smart, honest and ethical folks at MSFT: while I don’t doubt there are some, I would love for someone/some entity to poach as many of them as they could and set up shop with all that talent and none of the baggage.

what happened in Madrid?

I have heard a lot of commentary and analysis about this, so what makes me think I have anything to add? Like that’s ever stopped me before . . .

The timing isn’t just a matter of being 6 months off from the September 11 attacks. If ETA was the culprit, that would strengthen the hand of the ruling party, and with an election coming up 4 days after this attack, that could be significant. But if someone else, like Al Queda, were the ones responsible and it’s considered retribution for Spain’s support of the Iraq war, then the anti-war side may have an edge.

What if ETA took a leaf from Al Queda’s book and used their style of attack? Of course, the goal of terrorism is to call attention to one’s cause and they have denied responsibility so far. So that’s doubtful . . .

This may mean Al Queda is not as moribund as we’ve been told and that they’re willing to strike outside their traditional targets but with their traditional methods.

What I haven’t heard referenced is any reference or link to the historical Islamic presence in Spain: it was a part of an Arabic, later Islamic, empire for seven centuries.

brutal anniversaries

PapaScott: Death in Madrid:

Death in Madrid

es311

At 7:40 this morning my commuter train had pulled into the main station in Hamburg, and I was on my way to the U-Bahn to go work. At the same time in Madrid, 190 commuters in Madrid were killed by at least 10 explosions at 3 commuter stations. I can only think of the words from the memorial service for the victims of 9/11. To paraphrase for todays events… this was not 190 people being killed, it was 1 person being killed, 1 person with home, family, friends, 1 person being killed…. 190 times.

While I realize that it is necessary to find those responsible, be they from the ETA or al Qaeda, but on the other hand I find the speculation on which group is responsible to be somewhat cynical. Does it really matter to the victims for which supposed cause they were killed? Doesn’t the attention given to the perpetrators and their motives give them a false legitimacy and encourage similar attacks in the future? At this moment, I would rather think of the father and husband who, unlike me, was not able to step off the train and onto the platform at 7:40 this morning, than about the twisted reasoning and motives of those who killed him.

Now the world has twice-annual reminders of the handiwork of terrorists. Scott’s words echo Mrs Thatcher’s resonant phrase “the oxygen of publicity”: the only thing of hers I can recall agreeing with.

(sorry for the redundant quoting, but I couldn’t find just one quote: one has to decide when to stop splitting a diamond.)

<update> the other eerie resonance is that the attacks were 911 912 days apart . . . . (so the resonance is lost, now that I have done the math correctly (it would have been right in a non-Leap Year))

[via Ton]