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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: August 2003 (page 1 of 8)

AFK

I’m going to be away for a few days. Posting should return to its regular schedule next Wednesday.

Darl McBride

The Economist has a 50,000 foot view article on the SCO versus Linux battle royale. Darl McBride makes me think ugly thoughts.

Next Generation of XDoclet 2 Announced

Looks like some major changes are on the way for XDoclet. If you’re a Java developer and you haven’t looked at XDoclet, you really should. It’s a code generator that enables you to generate supplementary source (and mapping) files required by various frameworks using Ant and some pseudo-JavaDoc comments in your code. The best thing about XDoclet is that it manages the divide between hand written and generated code in a sensible way. Some generators want to generate the code that really ought to be written by hand by the developer. XDoclet doesn’t have that problem.

First World War.com

If you’re interested in the history of World War I, check out firstworldwar.com. It’s an amazing resource written and created by volunteers. I thought for sure that it had to have been produced by the History Channel or some museum.

Thought for the day

One of the most insightful things I’ve read lately is that the internal structure of large corporations is functionally equivalent to a miniature version of a Communist state. The more I think about it, the more true I realize it is. (Note that the person wasn’t talking about the idealized small-c communist state, but rather an actual big-c Communist state like those that have actually been implemented.) For more, see this article by Brad DeLong.

The President who never told the truth

File this under “news that will only surprise people who still believe the President.” Looks like next year’s deficit is going to be bigger, not smaller. Here’s the crux of the matter:

Administration officials quickly dismissed the Congressional projections as too speculative to take seriously, noting that long-term budget projections have been notoriously inaccurate. But the new analysis is nonetheless based on fairly cautious assumptions. It assumes that economic growth will surge next year and remain solid for the rest of the decade. The biggest reason for potentially much higher deficits is the added cost of legislation that both the White House and the Republican majority in Congress support.

In other news, Paul Bremer gave an interview to the Washington Post. You won’t be surprised to learn that what he wants is more money. Here’s how the article starts:

Iraq will need “several tens of billions” of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy, and American taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to contribute substantial sums, U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday.

I’m all for coughing up that money. It’s going to be expensive and painful, but we stuck our foot in the middle of it by invading Iraq, and as far as I’m concerned it’s now our responsibility to do our best to fix things there. Unfortunately we have a President who refuses to acknowledge the real requirements of the task before us, both in terms of money and manpower. Every honest, informed observer said prior to the war that post-war Iraq was going to be like this: a money pit that was going to take hundreds of thousands of soldiers to properly secure. The White House told us something different. It looks like I might die waiting for the political fallout from that, though.

Intellectual property, not necessarily bad

Generally when I talk about intellectual property here, I discuss its abuses, but the ability to exert rights over the things you create is a cornerstone of our economy and society. I think it’s stupid for BMW to tell Web sites not to use any variation of “Mini Cooper” in their name. They may be legally entitled to do so, but they’re biting the hand that feeds them. On the other hand, I think that Amazon.com’s suing spammers who fraudulently claim an affiliation with their company is perfectly reasonable.

That had to hurt

Here’s a web page you don’t want to see when you’re looking at taking two trips by plane within the next week or so: hail damaged 737 (via Boing Boing).

People suck

People suck.

A confession

One of the reasons why I never post those “I feel your pain” posts about the email worms and viruses that seem to blow up the Internet periodically is that for whatever reason, I seem to be unaffected by them. I didn’t get hundreds of copies of the Sobig virus. In fact, to my knowledge, I didn’t get a single one. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it’s true for me with nearly every email worm. There was one that I got a few copies of, but by and large, none make it to me. Maybe it’s the general cluefulness of the people I correspond with, I’m really not sure. I get plenty of spam, but very few email worms.

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