It’s official, the IT job market still sucks. The good news is that theoretically it sucks as badly as it’s going to suck, and may at some point start sucking less. I think we’re supposed to take solace in that.

Dell is changing its name from Dell Computer to Dell Inc. The question I have is how much they paid a naming consultancy to come up with the new forumation.

Tim Bray has a nice piece that explains how GAAP is misused in accounting for expenses.

I have only one comment on the Bill Bennett, gambler story that’s making the rounds. The most damning thing to me is that Bennett has blown millions of dollars on slot machines and video poker. That, to me, is pathetic. If the guy were blowing his fortune on high stakes games of Texas Hold ‘Em, I’d have some respect for him. Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single trip doing nothing but plugging chips into a high stakes slow machine tells me that you really are just addicted to the most base cravings served by gambling, not any of the other thrills involved.

Looks like the White House is now admitting that we lost to North Korea. We aren’t going to be able to keep them from going nuclear. The focus now is going to be on making sure they can’t do for others what our good buddies in Pakistan did for them, that is to say, enable them to join the nuclear club. Of course, the fact that North Korea is now going to have a nice big nuclear deterrent to protect itself and the horrific deeds of its leaders is going to provide just the marketing push they need to get potential customers for nukes to line up. Anyone care to make a list of countries that would like to discourage outside meddling?

For future reference: Java programming dynamics, Part 1: Classes and class loading

One thing I really like about the Creative Commons project is that they’re at least encouraging people to think consciously about the power of copyright and how it is applied. Whether a CC license is right for your works is less important than the fact that just presenting people with a number of copyright alternatives encourages them to consider how they want their work to be licensed, rather than just silently accepting the copyright terms that Congress has agreed to in order to help out Disney. Tim O’Reilly is putting his money where his mouth is by jumping on board the Founders’ Copyright project, and even better, releasing the content from O’Reilly’s out of print books under an attribution license.

Via Unqualified Offerings, the definitive weblog post on WMDs in Iraq, or rather the lack thereof. I, like every sane person, hope that the new, post-Saddam Iraq turns into a wonderful place to live, but I will never forget that those in power dragged us into war with a pack of lies. When I spoke to people who have more faith in our leaders than I do, they told me that they supported the war because they felt like the government knew more than they did. As it turns out that could be true — they may have known all along that there were no WMDs or that inspections were working and chose to keep that from us. As I’ve always said, there was an argument to be made that we should get rid of Saddam because he’s a scumbag who viciously oppressed his own people and who would attack his neighbors as soon as he felt like he had the power to win. But that wasn’t the marketing plan for the war President Bush just lowered the curtain on last night. I really wish that anyone considering voting for Bush would think hard about what it means to have our President send hundreds of thousands of our citizens overseas to subject the millions of citizens of another country to the horrors of war for reasons that he felt we didn’t deserve to know.

I wasn’t going to say anything about President Bush’s arrival for his speech last night, but what I will do is let Joe Conason say what I was thinking.

Since I’m considering updating/rewriting the software that powers this site, I’m interested in these proposed requirements for a weblogging system compiled by Matthew Thomas.