From Farhad Manjoo’s otherwise very good Kindle review:
“E-ink come at a cost, though: This display responds more slowly than a mime at a parliamentary debate.”
I had another major computer disaster this past week, and still haven’t resolved it. I’ve lost days of work, and possibly completely tanked one important project. I finally completely lost my shit and awoke from a trance to find myself standing in my living room vigorously miming punching Bill Gates repeatedly in the face while making little grunting noises. (Tgirsch had some smart remarks to make about that but I think it’s perfectly understandable.)
So I took the plunge and decided to set up a Linux system - all the caveats notwithstanding. From what I know, the current Ubuntu distros are stable and offer a choice of usable GUIs. Still a few bugs in the system, but wireless Internet (Tgirsch’s concern) is not my current problem. My biggest worry was MS Word compatibility - I like Open Office despite its slightly weird interface, but it really only emulates Word about as well as any “emulator” does, meaning that formatting gets significantly futzed when you move files from one to the other, as I often have to do. But when Windows ate its own registry and refused to boot - and MS’s Web site confidently encouraged me to copy the old registry file onto the corrupted one to fix the problem, not stopping to realize that you’d have to boot the computer to do it!*, I just gave up. Anybody who wants to trust themselves to Word and the rest of Bill Gates’s demonspawn is welcome; I’m bugging out.
So I started looking around. A friend suggested to me Everex’s new $200 Linux computer - a decent system at an outstanding price. It retails through WalMart, whom I didn’t want to patronize, and also through an outfit called ZaReason, who build customized Linux systems at good prices. But when I checked ZaReason’s Website, I immediately got seduced by the slightly higher-priced systems they build themselves, which are much more powerful than the Everex. I couldn’t find quite what I wanted so I e-mailed their tech support address, and got a response (on the weekend!) from their CTO himself. (I suspect he’s actually the entire tech-support office, but that’s still awfully good service.) He made some useful suggestions and alerted me to an upcoming offer they were just about to release that would be an even better deal than what I had been looking at. I thought that was great, and got ready to order one.
By coincidence, however, while I was waiting for the new deal to show up on ZaReason’s Website, I stumbled across a discount ad from Dell. This week only, they’re offering $350 off any “Inspiron 531″ system retailing for $1,000 or more (go here, configure the system however you like, and enter discount code 4J1M7748R2RRV6 at checkout; you also get free shipping and a $100 gift card for future purchases). By judicious juggling of product options, I was able to put together a screaming system that far outpaces the ZaReason configuration and comes with a boatload of accessories and peripherals as well. Of course, it also comes with Windows Vista, and they won’t preinstall all the Linux OS and apps that ZaReason loads to your specifications for you for free. Too bad. But it’s got a huge hard drive, so I figure I can partition it and set up a dual-boot system, thus still being able to boot to Windows if I absolutely have to, but with lots of room for Linux as a main configuration. And, the 19″ flat-screen that comes with it is selling on eBay for over $150, and I already have a better monitor of my own, so, I see a way I can recoup almost a quarter of the expense of this system, coming out within $50 of ZaReason’s price for a much more powerful setup.
It also means I’ll have to install Ubuntu and all the apps myself, so if you don’t hear from me for a few days, send somebody by my apartment to make me stop shadowboxing and screaming “Torvalds! I’ll kill you! . . . “. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.
I actually felt guilty not buying the Linux vendor’s system, and I e-mailed the CTO guy back to thank him for his input and explain the special offer Dell was making, and ask if he thought I was overlooking anything by not buying from him. I assumed he’d give me some line about “build quality” or something, but in fact he wrote back and said flat-out that it was a good deal, and that if I thought I could handle the install myself, it was a better system than they were offering for the price.
I thought that was very honest and fair, and was impressed. After dithering around a bit more and comparing options, I finally bit the bullet and bought the Dell system - paying (of course) a good bit more than I’d originally intended, but coming away with a hell of a lot of computer for the money. Out of some weird sense of loyalty I wrote back to the ZaReason guy again, thanking him again for his input and explaining that I’d felt I couldn’t pass up the Dell offer, but that it had been a close call. I didn’t expect to hear back from him, but I wanted him to know I had regard for his company. I also didn’t expect him to care what one single customer did, or why.
Today I got another e-mail back from him, congratulating me on getting a good deal and suggesting a Website I could go to for help in doing the Linux installs! Yep - he wrote me a goodwill note for buying someone else’s product, just because I got a good deal, and then went out of his way to be helpful in getting it set up!
Now, that is just too goddam cool. Go buy something from them.
*No, I didn’t have a backup, or a boot disk.**
**Yes, I think installing and configuring a complete Linux system from scratch should be perfectly simple for someone with no experience who’s too dumb to make a Windows boot disk.
Yes, this is not the most attractive thing in the world, but the Kindle looks like a very good evolutionary step in the ebook reader. It appears that it has web browsing capabilities, so that you also get an internet appliance for the cost of only the reader, since the service is free to users. Since the service is free to users, I doubt it is a complete internet experience, but it might be good enough. I have seen e-ink screens in action, and they really do look good quality paper, if a bit gray. Browsing through the store, it seems to have a very good number of books, including quite a few by my favorite authors(thought none of the O’Reilly technical books, a serious hole in their offerings in my opinion), at less than 10 dollar prices, sometimes even less than paperbacks. The magazine subscriptions, at least, look cheaper than their paper counterparts, though I need to examine that further. Charging for rss subscriptions is dumb, but if it does have web browsing capabilities, then you don;t need to worry about that. Finally, it has search an annotation capabilities, along with a built in dictionary and complete access to Wikipedia. Those are features that ever ebook reader should have as a bare minimum requirement (I’m looking at you, Sony).
I understand the objections of book traditionalists. I and my wife are readers, and our children, thankfully, are turning into the same. I appreciate the advantages of real books, and the emotional attachment to real books. Books don’t run out of batteries. Their DRM doesn’t die or get updated to an incompatible version. They don’t break when you drop them, or become unusable when they get a bit damp.
But I have over 500 hundred books — and that count is from before the birth of our children. I shudder to think of the number now. I am a programmer, so I have dozens of pounds worth of technical references at my various desks. I have countless folders of meeting reports, technical specifications, etc from my work. It would be wonderful to store all of those items in the future someplace compact and portable like the Kindle.
I am not completely sold on this. I would want confirmation that I can store the Kindle books off the machine, in case of hard drive failure. I would want to confirm that the internet access is really complete and completely free. I would want to confirm that I could print out the contents of their proprietary files (a tech spec for a new project that I cannot get off my Kindle once I have gotten to the meeting city isn’t terribly useful to me). I would want confirmation that the free conversion service is reliable, even if a bit slow. I would like to know that the book prices are going to largely stay in the 10 dollar or less range.
I don’t like the price. But if I get five years of good use out of the thing, then as long as I don’t lose any of my books, the convenience alone would make it worth it. And if this is a real internet appliance on top of it? Thats makes the calculus all the better.
I cannot know for certain, because I obviously cannot try one out (that’s a hint Amazon. Surely, the power of a blog with, umm, hundreds of readers, must be worth something?), but it looks as if Amazon may have moved the ball considerably on ebook readers.
I’m thinking about ditching my Gmail account. It’s gotten to be too big brother for me. What bugs me is the “sponsored link” line at the top, where it targets ads and news links based on the contents of my e-mail messages. My sister sent me an e-mail with pictures of Jack-O-Lanterns she carved, and Gmail happily put up a link for Halloween decorations. A Saab dealer sent me an e-mail follow-up to a test drive my wife did some months ago, and a SAAB link shows up there. But the last straw was today, when I got an e-mail from Say Uncle, and Gmail conveniently gave me a link to a news story about a shooting somewhere. That’s just too damn wiggy for me.
Has anyone else had this experience?
The more time passes, the more I miss the good old days of POP3.
Is there any easy way to remove a Firefox plugin if you’ve decided you don’t want it. The last I checked, they make them easy to install and update, but a chore to remove (you have to hunt down the files themselves and delete them). Anyone know a better way?
In particular, I installed the Download Statusbar plugin and have decided that I don’t like it. But removal is easier said than done!
UPDATE: I already have my answer, thanks to commenter Mitch. (My disconnect was that I was searching Firefox help for “plugins” when I should have been searching for “Add-ons”)
Wow.
Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.
Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.
Well, that’s it for 411. $7B of annual revenue simply . . . vanished. Of course, this doesn’t include residential listings, apparently because Google’s already got the business data from its other applications, and can keep it updated the same way - so maybe the whole industry won’t go . . . yet. But even so, it’s a huge hit to an industry whose business model was based on keeping information secret and charging for it.
I don’t know if you can make more money by secreting information or by broadcasting it; I would guess probably the former. But this project is in keeping with Google’s model and ethos - first, by becoming an all-things information provider, Google can produce revenue in ways that don’t necessarily require blocking access to the information they control; second, the idea of going to lengths to share the information they have seems in keeping with the “don’t be evil” mindset of the company. It isn’t evil to charge money for providing telephone listings - nobody requires a company to do so at all, so it can’t be evil to charge for it; but it’s a positive good to do so for free. And between an organization that makes great benefits available as widely as possible for free, and ones that do nothing unless you pay them literally for answering a simple question, the former deserve support and the latter deserve to die.
It’s easy to make too much of “the new economy” (the dot-com bubble proved that), but to at least some degree I see things like Google and the open-source movement as introducing a new kind of capitalism - one that sees profit as a welcome by-product of doing good things for people, and not as an entitlement to be screwed out of customers by any strategem, to their detriment. This form of capitalism often takes profit to be a secondary motivation - the point is to do something valuable in itself, and take what you can get for it, rather than to do whatever will bring the most revenue no matter the consequences to others. As such, it’s naive, and perhaps at an inherent competitive disadvantage against rapacious companies who will use the greater profit margins of a profit-above-all mentality to squeeze less aggressive competitors out of the market. It’s the kind of capitalism practiced by artisans and small landowners or specialty tradespeople - people who do what they do because they choose to, and take the doing of it to be their motivation in and of itself. I don’t know how well that translates to global-level enterprises like Google. (Earlier examples, like the Whole Earth Catalogue, food co-ops, and the like, tended to retain a small-business model, usually within a regional or local market.)
But the examples of Google, the commercial Linux community, even to a minor degree Apple Computer (in its ethos, not its business model), suggest there is a viable alternative, and one that can compete in large-scale markets, capture market share in large industries, and provide employment for people who want fulfilling jobs but aren’t cut out to be organic prune herders or handmade ceramic bong artisans. Sticking it to the Man is a welcome side-benefit. Good luck to them.
The New York Times Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.
Dick Cheney and the neo-cons still think it is 1974:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”
That attitude is one of the reasons our response to 9/11 has been so pathetically off target. Aside from their out0sized belligerence, their fatal flaw is that are apparently constitutionally incapable of understanding the modern world. They really and truly appear to believe that state sponsored terrorism is the primary driving force behind terrorism. Worse, they don’t seem to understand that the modern world has created a situation where small numbers of people can do large amounts of damage with just a little bit of money, some planning, and some luck.
This failure is apparently in the neo-con blood stream. As far as I can tell, the Project for a New American Century treated terrorism as a tertiary concern and thought that most of it would come in the form of state-sponsored groups. Laurie Mylroie wrote and article and a book making the ludicrously unsupported claim that Saddam was behind the first World trade Center bombing. That book was published by the American Enterprise Institute, which is what passes for the intellectual arm of the neo-conservative movement. Paul Wolfowitz was credited in the book for providing “… crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”
When th Administration took power, terrorism was a low priority. It wasn’t included in the top twelve priorities of the new Justice Department’s first budget, and the focus of the Bush Administration before 9/11 was on missile defense and China. They acted as if their primary problems were those created by rival nations, not those created by terrorist groups. Even after 9/11, Wolfowitz could not bring himself to believe that Al Qaeda was carrying carrying out their operations without the active help of a state:
Wolfowitz fidgeted and scowled … “Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.”
“We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,” I answered. …
Wolfowitz turned to me. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1999 attack on New York, without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.” I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
Even Bush thought that way:
“Go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…”
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. “But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred …”
“Absolutely, we will look … again.” I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”
They just don’t understand. They formed their opinions of the way the world worked in the Cold War, when the conflict between the two super-powers dominated the world stage. During that time period, much terrorism was state sponsored and the largest threats to the United States did come from state actors. But the world has changed. Technology has made states unnecessary for terrorists. Technology allows small groups of people to communicate effectively, to raise money easily, and to devise means of killing a lot of people easily. They don’t realize that; worse, they seem incapable of realizing that.
Now they are apparently feeding money to Sunni terrorists and insurgents, many with connection to Al Qaeda, in the hopes of checking who they see to be the real threat in the region: the state of Iran. I would bet almost anything that these people think that once they have made the Saudis happy by weakening or demolishing Iranian power in the Middle East, the Saudis can call off these Sunni terrorist groups. But they cannot. These groups are not the puppets of the Saudis, at least not all of them and certianly not those working with Al Qaeda, are not controlled by anyone other than themselves. Assuming that the Saudis would even want to reign these groups in, there is little reason to think they could in any comprehensive fashion. Perhaps it’s their natural authoritarian nature, perhaps it’s their contempt for the little people, perhaps its their cold war experiences, perhaps it’s the bubbles they have built for themselves, but the neo-cons seem to be simply incapable of realizing that small groups can and are lethal. It is a failure of stunning proportions, made all the worse because it is still driving American policy.
New Yorker link Via Digby.
Atrios links to this very good advice to Obama — and, really, any candidate — by Zack Exley. The post is long, but worth the read. The most important part, I think, though, is right up front:
Everyone knows the story about the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate. Nixon showed up at the debate pale, with a terrible 5:00 shadow, and his shirt didn’t fit. He refused to wear makeup to improve his appearance on TV, fearing embarrassment in the press. Even though his performance was comparable to Kennedy’s, he lost the debate in the voter’s minds because he just looked awful.
It was a matter of failing to understand the new medium of television—of failing to understand it personally, at the highest level of the campaign, at the level of the candidate, campaign manger and senior aides. They knew how important television was—but they still thought of it as some new fangled thing external to politics. Sure, they had media consultants, but they weren’t around when he was putting on his shirt that night, and when he was being asked whether or not he wanted makeup. It wasn’t enough to have TV consultants, Nixon and is inner circle of two or three top aides needed to understand the medium themselves.
The power of the internet is that, right now, in politics, it is something completely new. And since it is something completely new, no one has really figured out how to use to its full potential. Dean’s campaign showed the outlines of what that might look like, but even they weren’t able to use the Internet the same way that the Kennedy campaign used television. Television transformed politics by breaking the existing centers of power. The decline of the back room and the party boss was, if not started by television, certainly accelrated by its appearance. Television allowed a candidate to go around the then existing power structures and even create new centers of power. Kennedy’s and, even more so, Reagan’s understadnign of how different television was gave them an enormous advantage over their opponents.
The internet can do the same thing now. A smart candidate can use the internet to work around the established power centers of big money donors and media consultants. But it will take a candidate that really gets how people use the internet, that understands the various cultural norms of the internet and is willing to make the use of the internet one of the central pillars of their campaign. I the same way that modern campaigns craft almost all of their events, appearances, and media strategy around how they will work on television, the modern campaign must do the same thing with the internet. They must immerse their campaign in it the same way past campaigns immersed themselves in the ethos and aesthetic of television. It will be a lot of hard work –the interactivity of the internet requires more thought and honesty than the sound bite of the television screen. But then, the internet does not limit candidates to the sound bite. Whoever figures out how to use the internet to inspire, to spread news, to build community, to work around the limitation of the current media environment, to new centers of political power, is going to have an enormous advantage over their rivals.
the internet, like most other tools of mass communication, really will change everything. Eventually. Whoever does the work to get to “eventually” first will be well rewarded.
How come there’s no “Print” option in my right-click menu? How do I make there be one? IE has one. And I’m at a web page that I’m supposed to print, only it opened in a new window that doesn’t have any menus or toolbars, so without the context-sensitive “Print” option, I can’t print.
Firefox is a wonderful product otherwise. How could they have overlooked this?
UPDATE: Commenter Paul Kim provides a solution in comments. It’s non-trivial, but it’s a solution that works. Thanks!
When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.
Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.
I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.
This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.
This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.
The MIT Technology Review has a brief piece by a Portuguese Professor sorta taking Open source usability to task:
Collaboration can cut both ways, however. Because new functions may be proposed and appended by almost anyone at any time, open-source software can become every bit as feature-rich as its commercial cousins, and thus equally vulnerable to the creeping excess that bedevils many mainstream products. As the code slowly grows in complexity as well as capability, usability suffers, not only because new functions add to the user interface but because such additions are ad hoc and implemented case by case.
Open source may be superior in producing robust, reliable code. It can hold its own in providing functionality. But its weakness remains usability, which increasingly is the battleground for competing programs.
He doesn’t provide any support for his contention that usability suffers in open source projects, but he doesn’t really need to. Anyone involved in software - -the audience for this article — doesn’t need convincing. Open Source projects lag far behind their closed source competitors when it comes to the user experience for non techs. Linux desktops for example, have gotten better but there is not one that is better — or, really, even comparable — to the ease of us in Windows or Macs. Prof. Constantine wonders if they ever will. I don’t think so, at least not anytime soon.
the first problem open source projects have is one of selection bias. Good programmers do not necessarily make good user interface designers, and good user interface designers do not seem to be involved in large numbers in open source projects. Perhaps because there are still some quarters in programming that consider designers to be a lessor breed. I think, though, that the larger reason is the kinds of projects that generally get created through open source methodology.
Most people who work on open source projects have two things: time and an itch to scratch. Since we are talking about programmers, for the most part, the itches are usually related to things that make programmers lives easier. Not always — I have done work for projects that weren’t related to anything I did professionally just because I liked the idea of helping the target audience out — but often. Desktops and user experience in general aren’t the kinds of itches that really get under programmer’s skins. Most programmers — through necessity — learn their way around their environments very quickly. So unless they are dedicated to Linux Everywhere!, most programmers gravitate to other “itches” more important to their own experiences. Mac OsX, the best desktop interface I have ever used, is built atop an open source operating system. It could have been done by open source programmers. That is wasn’t tells us something about the priorities of said programmers.
More importantly, programmers don’t need their interfaces to be as simplified as the general population does. Since programmers by definition understand software better than most people, the level of usability that programmers find acceptable is a lot lower than that most end users. What seems “simple” to an expert is very often seen as complex and confusing by the general population. Since there are fewer designers in the open source community, and since most of the people who use the end product are, if not technological professionals, much more at ease with computer technology than the general population, the developer’s version of “simple” is what gets released. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, because I don’t see the incentives for participating in open source projects changing anytime soon.
There is a lot of talk in the United States about global warming, with even Republicans and some of their big business allies finally bowing to reality. But there ha snot been, so far, a lot concrete action. The Democratic controlled House did pass a bill rolling back some of the tax giveaways to extraction industries, but only 5.5 billion out of a possible 40 billion or so. Government policy does little to provide incentives for the use of alternative energies and even less to discourage the use of fossil fuels.
Compare that to the Danes:
Whether by issuing credits for energy efficiency, cutting registration fees on hydrogen-powered cars or increasing expenditures on clean fuel research, the government will make it easer for people to contribute to the national goal of 30 percent renewable energy by 2025.
The plan, presented Friday, would require a doubling of the amount of renewable energy currently used in Denmark. At the same time, fossil fuel use would be reduced by 15 percent.
Increasing the use of alternative fuels is precisely as simple as the Danes make it appear: create attractive incentives for people to use alternative energy, help providers create more efficient, less costly means of creating energy, and actively seek tro restrict usage of fossil fuels.
Global warming is real and it is largely caused by human activities. Anyone who denies these simple facts is so far from reality that they could not see it with the Hubble. The only questions that remain are how do we mitigate its extent and how do we deal with the damage it is going to cause. No matter what the complete answers to those questions are, it is clear that the sooner we start addressing them the less costly the solutions will be. the Danish government understands this. Unfortunately, neither major American party does.
The Dems are much better on this issue, but they still lack anything resembling a serious plan for moving the country away from fossil fuels, much less a serious plan for preparing the military, diplomatic corps, civil services for dealing with the consequences of the world to be created by global warming. If that is to change, then the environmental groups in this country will have to do a much better job of changing or co-opting the structural impediments to change. I’m not really hopeful, truth be told, which is one reason I am so anxious to see Gore in the race.
Oh, this is just peachy:
A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.
The company, Ciber, of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.
Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.
Somehow, large portions of our voting infrastructure in this country has been handed over to companies that follow the simplest, most obvious best security or coding practices and/or have testing procedures that are opaque to the country or completely unreliable. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but, man: if I wanted to electronically rig an election, I would write the kind of code that has gone into too many of these voting machines and use the kind of shoddy “testing” that appears to have gone in far, far too many cases.
If these companies made any of their other products to this level of shoddy craftsmanship, I find it hard to believe that they would still be in those markets. And yet they still produce the machines that our votes or recorded and tabulated upon. It is an honest to God national disgrace.
I have never been that impressed with Michael Crichton. Some of his work has been quite clever, most is lowbrow pulp nonsense (surprising only because he used science in interesting ways in a few of his books), and when he gets into territory he doesn’t understand he’s as clicheic and naive as the worst of them. He’s done a Christopher Hitchens in the last few years, making a sudden swerve to the right and cranking out talking-points propaganda disguised as plots - which came in for much-deserved lambasting from both literary and political/scientific critics. But that wasn’t bad enough: having discovered he can’t take the heat, he’s descended to the most scurrilous attacks on his critics.
When one commentator gave him a bad review for his recent garbled thriller on (the lack of) global warming, he wrote a one-scene character into his next book using that commentator’s name as the character name (changed from “Mike” to “Mick”), and describing him as a homosexual child rapist with a small penis.
The March [review] article that Mr. [Michael] Crowley referred to concluded: “And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence that he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong — a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms and even the Oval Office.” . . .
The character that Mr. Crowley says he believes is modeled on him mostly appears on two pages in Mr. Crichton’s [just-released] 431-page novel.
On Page 227 Mr. Crichton writes: “Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.”
Mick Crowley is described as a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” with a small penis that nonetheless “caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.”
Mr. Crowley writes that Mr. Crichton’s Mick Crowley not only has a similar name but is also a graduate of Yale and a Washington political journalist. Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule.”
The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.
Very classy, Crichton. Moving Republican science policy forward by leaps and bounds.
This is so close to the eBook that I imagine. It has what appears to be a great display, thanks to the e-Ink technology, great battery life and a good form factor. It is essentially a very slim, light electronic paperback, with an enormous amount of storage. It has a very iTunes like store with 10,000 titles to start with from what appear to be every major publisher and prices that range form the “almost reasonable” to the “this is a great deal” categories. The lack of wireless and a backlight don’t bother me; I think both are very overrated, especially considering the power drain they represent.
However, it is expensive at 350 dollars. And while it reads many non-DRM files, like PDF and txt, it doesn’t read any other DRM files except its own. Which means that retailers like Amazon’s Mobipocket and Fictionwise will sell quite a bit of material that cannot be read on the Reader, barring some sort of conversion process that doesn’t appear to exist right now. More importantly, no magazines appear to be available at the Reader store. Something like this Reader would be fantastic for collecting subscriptions to my magazines and reading them anywhere. If they provided that service, I could almost look past the high price.
But without it, and with the amount of uncertainty about what books I could and could not read on this thing, I guess I have to keep waiting. Unless the user interface — something I obviously haven’t been able to test — is simply outstanding, I think the Reader doesn’t quite get all the way there.
Any election that uses Diebold machines cannot be trusted:
Felton, that Diebold machines are very easy to hack, specifically that:
Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
The opportunity for mischief has already occured in at least one election:
Edwards says Prince George’s County voting officials who did not complete the ballot count on Tuesday night, left electronic voters cards in a truck overnight without security.
The Prince George’s Board of Elections stopped counting votes around 2;30 Wednesday morning and resumed around 9:30 a.m. Results from more than 130 precincts were input using computer cards that election officials hand-carried to the board’s office after equipment malfunctions.
Edwards isn’t sure whether the complaint will be filed in state or federal court, but said she intends to take action by Monday.
“I’m really concerned, deeply concerned, about the integrity of the election,” Edwards said.Thousands of provisional ballots, which could determine the outcome of the election are to be counted on Monday.
The legal action is being taken because, “When the [voter] cards were entered, we saw some troubling shifts in the vote count,” Edwards said.
There are many ways to steal an election. Most of them involve keeping voters form the polls: spurious challanges, too few machines, incorrectly set up equipment, flyers and ads designed to send people to the wrong places or on the wrong day, etc. Now we have to be concerned that electronic voting machines can be manipulated. This country is destroying its ability to function as a democracy because no one is taking seriously either voter suppression or vote machine security.
Every now and again I’ll get a bug up my butt and decide to install Linux on a couple of my computers around the house. I even intentionally leave partitions available so that I can try this exercise. Mainly, I’m curious to see how close Linux is getting to being a viable alternative to Windows for John Q. User.
As of Fedora Core 5, it’s getting better, but it still isn’t close.
The biggest problem it currently faces, as I see it, is that it’s very, very picky about wireless internet, and wireless internet is quickly becoming the norm. I have two different laptops, both with wireless NICs. One has a Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA card, the other has a built-in Broadcom NIC. The latter is recognized by Linux (if you know where to look) but doesn’t work — attempts to get an IP from DHCP fail. The former isn’t even recognized by Linux.
This may not seem like a big deal to some, but without wireless, these computers have no internet access (sure, I could use wired internet, but that’s not always viable when traveling), and without internet access, they’re overglorified paper weights. And in Windows XP, it all just works, seemingly like magic, as much as it pains me to say nice things about Windows.
Mind you, I’ve got 15 years of UNIX experience, so I’m sure with enough digging I could figure something out. I’ve even found several Web FAQs on Linux and Wireless (consensus: it can be done, but it’s a pain). But that’s beside the point in this exercise. I’m not interested in just quasi-expert users like myself. I’m interested in what John Q. User is going to be able to do. And if I can’t get it to work in an hour of futzing, John Q. User’s not going to want anything to do with it.
Anyone else have different experiences? I’d be interested in hearing.
If we must have tax breaks for energy companies, I would much prefer they go to organizations like this rather than oil extraction companies:
The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on such a massive scale and the largest in the world.
Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.
The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years
… Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free from outside electricity.
About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant’s turbines.
Sludge from the county’s wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, and a material created from melted organic matter — up to 600 tons a day — will be hardened into slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects.
“This is sustainability in its truest and finest form,” said Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma, a subsidiary of Jacoby Development Inc.
This is inventive, much better for the environment than alternatives, and could be widely applied in almost every metro area in the country. Helping make these succeed is a much more useful allocation of funds than upping Exon’s profits.
Scientists in Australia may have found a way to use a type of photosynthesis to make solar cells more efficient:
Synthetic molecules that mimic chlorophyll in plants may one day form the basis of highly efficient solar cells, say Australian researchers.
Professor Max Crossley’s molecular electronics group at the University of Sydney recently presented its research at the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines in Rome.
“Nature has evolved this very efficient process, over millions of years, for harvesting light and then converting it into energy,” says Crossley.
“We’re trying to mimic aspects of natural photosynthesis.”
… Based on what nature delivers, they expect to eventually have much more efficient solar cells than exist at the moment.
A leaf is about 30-40% efficient at converting light to electricity and this compares with just a 12% efficiency for conventional silicon-based solar cells.
“We have the basis of a biomimetic organic photovoltaic device or solar cell,” says Crossley.
“In the long term what we’re trying to do is have something we can simply paint on a roof, like a thin layer.”
If this pans out, it will obviously be huge news. And it demonstrates the importance of funding basic scientific research. This is not a minor tweak; it is an entirely new way of looking at the problem. Things like this are one reason the Bush Administration has been such a disaster. Faced with the need to wean the country away from carbon based fuels for a variety of reasons and a public ready to listen to a pitch for more funding for basic scientific research in these areas, the Bush Administration did nothing of any significance. Their tax cuts at all costs economic policy has left no money and their energy policy has largely consisted of paying oil companies to dig out oil they were going to dig out anyway. Research has been less than an after thought.
That attitude slows down the rate of progress. Basic research is a lot like fertilizer. At first, it looks like you’ve just spread crap all over the place. But eventually flowers grow. The Bush Administration is refusing to fertilize a critical area of research, slowing the pace of advancement at a time when we as a nation need to make as much progress as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
