Industry analysts have to be the biggest group of clowns around. I wonder how they come up with their “analysis”. Certainly it doesn’t involve thinking or actually talking to people who do any thinking. Here’s a choice quote from a CNet article on Mozilla 1.1:

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blockquote> “If you have a religious aversion to Microsoft products; if you feel Netscape went too commercial when AOL bought it; if you don

This weekend, my project is installing Gentoo Linux on my laptop. A reader mentioned that Gentoo was one of the distributions that was more KDE-friendly than Red Hat (which we use for just about everything at work), and I decided to go great guns and just install it. Gentoo is not for the faint of heart — the installation process involves booting off of the CDROM and then doing a bunch of stuff at a root prompt. Strangely, I prefer this to the Debian installer, which never fails to leave me with a broken system and poor attitude. Anyway, I installed Gentoo, but I screwed it up. I then managed to successfully recompile the kernel and hack on configs repeatedly until I got everything working as I like.

Gentoo’s Portage system seems better than RPM for sure and perhaps even than Debian’s package system. It’s kind of like FreeBSD’s ports system, but I think it’s even cooler than that. Also, Gentoo makes it easy to stay on the absolute bleeding edge of what’s going on, and I’m really into that. The main advantage from my perspective is that it doesn’t have the upgrading problems that plague RPM-based distributions (and just about every other OS). Of course if things take a turn for the worse, I’ll have Red Hat 7.3 back on the system by the end of the day on Tuesday. So far, though, I’m loving Gentoo.

Ever since I started watching Simon Cowell, the abrasive British judge on American Idol, I’ve been tempted to start a lot more sentences with the word “look”.

A spokesperson for Thomson says that the licensing terms for Thomson’s MP3 patents haven’t changed.

Last night I read an entry in Eugene Volokh’s blog which made me sit down and think. It’s short, and here’s the meat of it:

“LET’S NOT ATTACK OUR SELF-ANNOUNCED ENEMIES NOW; IF NEED BE, WE CAN ATTACK THEM LATER, WHEN THEY HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.” On thinking more about the Iraq debate, I realized that the above line is a pretty apt summary of the bottom-line plan that the anti-preemption forces advocate.

Reading that gave me some trouble, because at first I kind of bought it. Then I realized that there are really plenty of other outcomes that are possible, not just attacking now and winning, or being forced to attack later and dealing with an opponent with nuclear arms. I’m not categorically against going to war with Iraq, I just haven’t seen the case made that it’s a necessity at this point. Furthermore, I feel like we’re kind of being railroaded by the administration and the hawks. Posts like the one above seem to assert that there are two options: take care of Saddam Hussein now, while he’s weaker, or let him bully us later when he’s got nuclear clout. However, the spectrum of possible outcomes is a hell of a lot wider than that. Let’s categorize them two ways: we go to war, and we don’t go to war.

We go to war with Iraq:

• We win, but Saddam Hussein survives and continues as an insurgent, or his fate is ultimately unknown. We have recent experience with that.
• We win, but the government we choose turns out to be no better than the one Iraq currently has.
• We win, but the new Iraqi government decides that maybe being a nuclear power still makes sense.
• We win, and Iraq gets a new democratic regime, but we manage to kill 250,000 Iraqis in the process.
• We lose. There’s no doubt in my mind that if we go to war, a heck of a lot more Iraqis will die than Americans, but that doesn’t insure victory. In Somalia, 18 US soldiers were killed. Quite literally, hundreds of Somalis were killed. Nobody would classify that mission as a success. On a larger scale, in the Vietnam war, we lost 47,378 troops and our Vietnamese allies lost 223,748 troops. We managed to kill approximately 1,100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, and 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians. We still lost. Iraq, being run by a brutal dictator, has a higher tolerance for soldiers getting slaughtered than the US does. A couple of battles with high casualties on the US side could cause the people on the home front to lose the will to fight pretty rapidly.

On the other side, we wait:

• Saddam Hussein continues to hold out against weapons inspections, and secretly builds a nuclear bomb, and blows up Tel Aviv. Or, he builds a nuclear weapon, gives it to Al Qaeda, and they blow up New York. This prompts immediate retaliation and we blow up Baghdad. This is clearly the worst case scenario. If you believe this is truly the likely outcome, then going to war with Iraq makes sense.
• Saddam Hussein continues to hold out against weapons inspections, tests a nuclear weapon, and then uses his new nuclear clout to cause all sorts of trouble in the Middle East, secure in the knowledge that taking him out has become infinitely more risky for the US. An ugly scenario. If you believe that this is likely to happen, then it still probably makes sense to go to war with Iraq.
• Saddam Hussein bows to pressure and accepts weapons inspectors, and they are successful enough to stymie his weapons programs until Saddam is out of the picture.
• Iraq develops weapons of mass destruction, causing what’s essentially an indefinite stalemate, because Saddam Hussein doesn’t want a war with the US and the US doesn’t want to fight a toothy nuclear power.
• Iraq’s weapons program fails to produce useful weapons of mass destruction.
• Saddam Hussein exits stage left for any number of reasons, perhaps by death due to natural causes (he’s already 65).

There are plenty of other ways things can go in the “we don’t go to war” category, and the thing is, as events develop, we can always go to war. War is always an option. The question is, does war makes sense right now? The people who are telling us that it does just aren’t making a whole lot of sense, at least from where I sit. My back of the envelope analysis also takes into consideration on the US and Iraq. Obviously, those are the two most important players, but there are other geopolitical issues at stake. The only country around the world that would be pleased by our attacking Iraq right now is Israel, and they’re already pretty tight with us. Is basically every other country in the world wrong? If they are, then convince me. I haven’t been convinced yet.

And don’t write in telling me that Saddam Hussein is going to arm terrorists with nuclear weapons. I don’t believe that’s going to happen, and I haven’t seen any evidence suggesting that he would do such a thing. (Not that I believe he’s above it — I just think that he’s not suicidal.)

baseballreference.com has the coolest idea yet for raising money to support the site. If you’ve never visited the site, it provides career statistics for (as far as I know) every player in major league history, among other things. They’re allowing people to sponsor individual pages on the site — you can think of each site as sort of an online baseball card. Anyway, normal people can pony up to sponsor their favorite players and businesses can pony up to sponsor the pages of more popular players. THe price for each page is scaled based on the popularity of the player (ergo, traffic to the page). Another cool thing is that the enterprising player who earns money by selling memorabilia and autographs could sponsor their own page with a pointer to their memorabilia site.

Dave Hyatt smacks down his former bosses at Netscape for ignoring the obvious:

Plenty of other engineers at Netscape (as well as managers) complained about these problems and fought with those higher up to correct these problems. We lost every battle. The simple truth is that the people in charge of running the Netscape browser are incompetent. They don’t understand how to make a good browser, or they don’t care. Their engineers tell them what they’re doing wrong, and they don’t listen.

Maybe you’ll listen to the public. How about eWeek’s article, Netscape 7.0 Shrivels Under Mozilla’s Shadow? Are you paying attention now, you ignorant, stupid, incompetent buffoons?

The problems he’s referring to are the ones you already know about … the AOL crap everywhere in Netscape 7.0, the removal of useful but subversive features, and the general bloatedness of it. Everybody knows they can get the good stuff at mozilla.org, only the ignorant would even bother to download Netscape 7.0.

I’d consider doing all my work in Linux if I could get my Linux desktop to look like this. But I don’t know how to get there. I think the problem is that Cygwin is a crutch. If Cygwin didn’t make Windows so much less unpleasant, I would probably be inspired to get off my butt and actually start fiddling around more with Linux. As it is, I have two laptops on my desk at work, both identical Dells, and the one that’s always in my docking station is the one running Windows 2000 rather than the one running Red Hat 7.3. I do perhaps 5 or 10 percent of my work on the Linux box, but I could probably do 80% of it there if I didn’t find the Linux desktop environment so unappealing. I could probably make it a lot less unappealing if I were forced to use it, but I’m not. I’d be totally fine with the current arrangement were it not for my conscience. I’m a tortured soul.

Is all censorware inherently evil? Are there any enlightened companies that make censorware with open lists of sites and keywords that they block (for home use)? I have a friend who just got a broadband connection and wants to prevent her kids from mistakenly surfing to obvious pr0n sites (no, dicks.com does not belong to Dick’s Sporting Goods), but doesn’t want to subsidize the corporate versions of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The bias I bring to this is that censorware doesn’t work, and is a tool created by and preferred by repressive morons who have a problem with freedom of speech. Am I even a little bit wrong? Are there options here for the progressive parent? Send email.

Everybody knows that the browser war is over, right? Well it’s still going hot and heavy here at rc3.org. Yesterday, there were more hits from Mozilla (not all of Netscape’s browsers, just Mozilla) than there were from Internet Explorer. That’s pretty impressive, even when you count in the fact that my hits to the site skew the numbers in Mozilla’s favor slightly.