Looks like people are finally getting the kick in the pants they needed to move to Ogg Vorbis. I shall begin re-ripping my MP3 collection post haste.

The conventional wisdom thusfar has been that Secretary of the Army Tom White was just a gladhander in his Enron days and wasn’t really involved in the whole white collar crime thing. However, Salon has a story today claiming that White was the decision maker when it came to covering up losses of the ill-fated division that he helped steer into the ground. Nice exclusive, particularly if it brings down White, who’s had it coming for quite some time now.

As you’d expect, the Detroit Free Press has a very detailed article on the four men indicted on terrorism charges yesterday, including details on their capture and what they’re accused of. This is the first terrorism indictment handed down since the government began rounding people up after 9/11.

I just finished reading High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars, by Charles H Ferguson. First, let me say that I recommend that you read business books years after they’re printed. Business writers cover their topics fully armed with conventional wisdom and the benefit of hindsight, so as a reader it’s wonderful to have these benefits as well. Ferguson’s book was written in 1999, before the dot com bubble blew up, and he was writing about 1994 and 1995, the very bottom of the Internet curve. In case you don’t know, Ferguson was the founder of Vermeer, which created FrontPage and then was immediately acquired by Microsoft.

I read a recommendation of the book a few years ago, and only now got around to reading it, and I’m glad I did. Make no mistake about it, Ferguson is an arrogant fellow, but that doesn’t hurt the quality of the book at all, because Ferguson tempers his arrogance with his seemingly complete candor and his best effort acknowledgement of his own failings as a businessman and as a person.

The most valuable information in the book is the discussion of the ins and outs of founding a high tech company. Ferguson lays out the details of starting a company, hiring people, dealing with venture capitalists, and building a company in full detail. He also discusses the pitfalls of dealing with people across the food chain — potential executives, venture capitalists, acquirers, and everyone else who would do your company ill. If you ever want to get in on the ground floor of a startup, you can really benefit from Ferguson’s experience.

Ferguson also offers the best explanation of why Netscape failed that I’ve yet read. That’s tempered by plenty of other things that he doesn’t get quite right, including the potential of things like Apache and Linux, and the degree to which FrontPage has succeeded in the market. Ferguson was under the belief that FrontPage would become a tool used by professionals to build complicated Web sites, when in fact it has turned out to be a tool used by neophytes to build Web sites that drive people crazy. A big part of that is the way Microsoft has used FrontPage strategically — Vermeer’s intent was to make FrontPage the sort of tool that Dreamweaver became.

Anyway, I recommend the book highly. Having read other reviews of the book, it seems that Ferguson’s general tone rubs them the wrong way, but I confess that it didn’t bother me at all. There’s no doubt in my mind that Ferguson would admit today that he regrets all of the things he got wrong in the book, just as he admits in the book all of the things that he got wrong when he was running Vermeer. Ferguson is neither afraid to make mistakes nor to acknowledge them, and that’s a quality I respect.

I confess that I’ve mostly lost interest in the various antitrust cases in which Microsoft is embroiled, mainly because I just don’t think any of the cases are going to amount to much when it’s all said and done. We all know Microsoft has a monopoly in several key markets, and we all know that the government isn’t really going to do anything about it, so the industry is just going to stay utterly screwed up indefinitely. I try to work around that. For example, the latest news from Sun’s case against Microsoft is that the judge is considering ordering Microsoft to bundle Java with Windows. What good is that going to do? If it’s guaranteed that there will be a JVM installed on computers running Windows, will developers suddenly start flocking to Java? I find that unlikely.

I just want to take a moment to applaud Dan Hartung on this post, which describes in full (and captivating) detail, the nature and origins of Noam Chomsky’s political philosophy. It makes me want to sit down and categorize myself sometime, but I think that would require a lot of research that I don’t feel like conducting right now.

The Congressional Budget Office announced yesterday that it’s deficits as far as the eye can see for the federal government, because tax receipts are way down. Remember when President Bush pushed through that juicy tax cut because of those big surpluses and it’s our money after all? The Republicans of course want to pin the problems on 9/11, but the numbers just don’t bear that out. I like paying less taxes as much as the next guy, but returning to the Republican tradition of major red ink (even if it is to gird for war with countries that piss us off) is going to lead to major long term problems, especially when it comes to providing social services to all those soon-to-retire baby boomers. (The punch line to the joke is that independent budget forecasters see the new CBO numbers as optimistic.)

Slate comments on the utter hideousness of the state quarters, with illustrations. They did seem like a good idea when they were announced. The commentary on Maryland’s quarter is particularly humorous:

State politicians in Maryland and Pennsylvania have so lost touch with their citizens that they actually put the state capitol building on their quarters. The Maryland coin is what quarters would look like if they were designed by a politburo: a government building, generic garlands, and a motto both dull and cryptic (“The Old Line State”). A trip to any Maryland souvenir store would show what capitalism would have picked for the quarter: crabs.

Salon has an interview today with Diane Raines Ward, the author of the book Water Wars, which is about the growing scarcity of fresh water. I don’t know about you, but the idea of ongoing, extreme scarcity of a resource that most of us who don’t live in the desert take for granted really freaks me out. We’ve had a drought all year, and this past week we’ve gotten so much rain that many communities around here have flooded. Anyway, these kinds of large scale, seemingly intractable issues always fill me with angst, particularly when they don’t even seem to be on the radar screen of the professional infighters in Washington DC.

Mozilla 1.1 is out. You know you want it.

There are a number of nifty updates in Mozilla 1.1, the best being that now the various sub-apps have real icons. When you have them open, you can look at your task bar and actually see what’s running. It looks like ESPN’s Web site is getting closer to working in Mozilla, too, which is always nice.