July 2009 – Page 3

Month: July 2009 (page 3 of 4)

One definition of blogging vs. journalism

I thought baseball writer Rany Jazayerli’s description of blogging versus journalism was interesting:

If you define a “blogger” as someone who delivers opinionated commentary over the internet from an informed but access-free perspective, then I’ve been a blogger since the founding of Baseball Prospectus over 13 years ago, which is to say for longer since the word “blogger” has existed. The part about “access-free” is critical, because that really is they lynchpin of the whole blogger/journalist dichotomy. Joe Posnanski has one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, but he’s not a blogger: he’s a journalist with a blog.

For all the criticisms that the mainstream media heap upon the blogosphere, most of them are just variations on a single theme: that bloggers neither have nor need access to the subjects they are covering, and because they don’t have access, they also don’t have accountability. It’s a simple fact of human nature that it’s a lot harder to criticize someone when you have to see them face-to-face on a regular basis.

He goes on to explain why this is one of the most compelling features of blogs. Certainly lack of access is one of the hallmarks of this blog.

Google Chrome OS is vaporware

July 10, 2009 / Rafe / 6 Comments

John Gruber points out that Google Chrome OS is vaporware. There’s no running code, there are no devices, and there aren’t even screen shots. He asks but doesn’t answer why Google made this announcement right now. Steven O’Grady punts on this question in his analysis as well.

This is the burning question for me, why now? In the olden days, we’d call this FUD. There are not many reasons to announce something so early. One is that it was about to leak, and Google wanted to get its story on the record before the media took off with the story. The other is manipulation (FUD). You announce something early to keep people from making decisions without taking your future plans into account.

Right now the market share of the Chrome browser is small. That gives Google little juice in terms of demanding a seat at the table in discussions of future browser development. Google may be trying to raise the prestige of Chrome by letting people know that soon there will be computers available which will support Chrome and only Chrome for browsing. If people presume that Chrome OS will be successful, then suddenly it becomes much more important to take Chrome into account in the overall browser market. So that’s my guess: Google is announcing Chrome OS so that more people will take Chrome seriously.

Tweetbacks installed

July 9, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve installed the Tweetbacks plugin to try to capture tweets about blog posts as comments. We’ll see how it works out.

The wages of a torture regime

July 9, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The Obama administration is withholding federal money promised to Mexico for fighting drug trafficking because authorities in Mexico torture suspects. As you might imagine, the Mexican government sees this as hypocrisy.

The “fee for service” problem, again

July 9, 2009 / Rafe / 11 Comments

The latest article on health insurance everybody is pointing to is David Leonhardt’s column on prostate cancer. It is yet another explanation of how the “fee for service” model that dominates the health care industry creates economic incentives that guarantee health care expenditures that permanently spiral upward. Imagine if programmers were paid by the number of lines of code they produce. Yes, programmers would do more programming, but they almost certainly wouldn’t produce better applications.

The thing to remember as the nation debates health care is that doomsday approaches regardless of what’s done in terms of expanding the availability of health insurance. Our core problem is rising costs, and no matter what any politician says, this is a problem that we must address at some point. The core question that we face is how to remake the economics of the health care industry. Wish I had a solution.

Google Chrome OS

July 8, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Google has officially announced its PC operating system, Chrome OS. It’s the Linux kernel, a new windowing system, and the Chrome browser. It’s targeted to run on netbooks. My first thought: Network Computer.

Update: Steven O’Grady has written one of his Q&A pieces on Chrome OS.

A new way of writing a standard

July 7, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve been paying attention to the various goings on in the world of markup this week, and there will be lots of relevant links in the next roundup I post, but I wanted to comment on this email from Shelley Powers on Ian Hickson’s decision to give every browser maker veto power over any of the features listed in the HTML 5 specification. Powers absolutely hates this idea, but I confess that I’m intrigued.

Hickson has decided that the spec will not contain any features that browser vendors have not committed to support. This is very different from the usual standard-writing process, especially when it comes to W3C standards. In the past working groups have come up with lots of exciting new features and various rules to be obeyed and then the programmers go off and create something loosely based on that standard. The degree to which browsers are compliant with recent standards is a running joke, although things are much better now than they were a few years ago.

When asked whether each browser vendor can, by themselves, prevent a feature from being included in the HTML 5 recommendation, Hickson responds:

Not immediately, but if you had notable market share and we could not convince you to implement these new features, then yes, I’d remove them and then work with you (and everyone else) to try to come up with solutions that you would agree to.

Even if you did not have notable market share, I would work with you to understand your objections, and try to resolve them. (Naturally if your goals are substantially different than the WHATWG’s goals, then this might not go anywhere. For example, if Microsoft said that we should abandon HTML in favour of Silverlight, without making Silverlight backwards- compatible with HTML, then this would be somewhat of a non-starter, since backwards-compatibility is an underpinning of our work.)

What I find interesting about Hickson’s approach is that he makes the presumption of good faith. His process will only work if the browser vendors wish to collaborate to improve the Web experience by adding new features to HTML 5. Powers objects because she assumes bad faith on the part of vendors:

If we continue to allow one vendor/one veto to be the underlying philosophy of the HTML WG, then we might as well end working on it at this point, because I can’t see it being anything more than a race to the bottom, with each vendor looking to cripple open web development in favor of its own proprietary effort.

Worse, this process completely and totally disregards the community of users, of web developers, web designers, accessibility experts, and gives ultimate power to five companies: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera–with Microsoft having the largest veto power. The rest of us might as well go home, because we have no say, no input, nothing of value to add to the future of the web. Not unless we crawl on bent knee to each vendor and ask them, “Please sir, I want some more.”

So here’s what I like about the Hickson philosophy. It will expose whether browser vendors want to work together to build new things everyone can benefit from, or if they want to rekindle or perpetuate the browser war. The thing is, we’ll know it earlier in the process than we would otherwise. Powers proposes a “three vendor” standard — if three vendors promise to implement a feature, it will be included. But then what happens is that the features go into the spec, those three browser vendors implement the feature, and the intransigent vendors do not? As professionals we can’t use new features anyway until they’ve been implemented. Under Hickson’s approach, the inclusion of a feature in the recommendation signals a commitment from all browser vendors to implement. We can plan ahead based on that.

If nothing else, it’s a new approach to an old problem. I’ll be curious to see what the process yields.

James Fallows on Robert McNamara

July 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

James Fallows said the following in 1995 when Robert McNamara wrote his memoir expressing his regrets about the Vietnam War:

In the cycles of life, the desire to square accounts is natural, but Robert McNamara has forfeited his right to do so in public. You missed your chance, Mr. Secretary. It would have been better to go out silently, if you could not find the courage to speak when it would have done your country any good.

And today Fallows adds:

My tone then was harsher than I would be now. Perhaps that’s just because I’m older; perhaps because McNamara has now died; perhaps because he had fifteen more years to be involved in worthy causes, mainly containing the risk of nuclear war or accident. But mainly I think it is because of Errol Morris’ remarkable 2003 film The Fog of War, which portrayed McNamara as a combative and hyper-competitive man (in his 80s, he was still pointing out that he had been top of his elementary-school class) but as a person of moral seriousness who agonized not just about Vietnam but also the fire-bombing of Tokyo during World War II, which he had helped plans as a young defense analyst.

I think that there’s another reason for Fallows to leaven his tone, which is that it was not too late for McNamara to help his country. Had the Bush administration taken McNamara’s memoir to heart, the war in Iraq could have been avoided. Had President Obama done so, maybe we would be taking a different course in Afghanistan. Rarely does a week go by where we don’t hear about unarmed drones blowing up dozens of Afghans or Pakistanis. We are still failing to take the lessons McNamara learned too late to heart. But because he did eventually talk about the mistakes he made, we do have the opportunity to learn.

I understand completely why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert feels that McNamara’s mistakes were unforgivable, but as recent history cruelly reminds us, it still isn’t too late for McNamara to make a difference.

Revisiting Robert McNamara

July 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Back in 2005, I posted my initial reaction to Fog of War:

The film was particularly powerful for me personally because McNamara’s basic approach to life is similar to my own. McNamara is an empiricist whose approach to problem solving is to collect and break down the data to come to a rational decision. The lesson of McNamara’s life is that doing your best to gather the facts and act rationally can’t prevent you from making the most horrible kinds of mistakes.

Dime store hypocrisy

July 7, 2009 / Rafe / 7 Comments

Robert McNamara just died. He is most famous for serving as Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and LBJ and serving as architect of the Vietnam War. He was also President of Ford, President of the World Bank, and in the end was the subject of the Errol Morris documentary Fog of War. I don’t really want to write about McNamara, though. The New York Times obituary I linked to is outstanding, read it.

What I do want to write about is the comments on a qualified expression of sympathy for McNamara by Kevin Drum. I’m revolted by the sanctimony expressed by the commenters. It’s ironic that the value McNamara came to appreciate most late in life — empathy — is found to be so sorely lacking in his critics.

What I’ve come to realize is that in many ways, decisions are decisions. We criticize politicians for lack of transparency, but in our own behavior we fail to be as transparent as we should be. We condemn people for failure to recognize mistakes and change their behavior, but I’ve certainly been known to stick with a bad plan due to a lack of courage to speak the truth and suffer the consequences. The main difference between people like Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld and most of the rest of us is that we lack the authority to err on such a colossal scale. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t call out their errors or their moral failings. People who take on such responsibility should be held to a high standard, and more importantly, examining the mistakes of the past may in some rare circumstances prevent other people from making the same mistakes in the future.

What sticks in my craw, though, is that so many people feel that they are incapable of making such mistakes. Or that having made mistakes, they are not required to atone in the ways they demand from public figures. It strikes me that most of the people who are fastest to condemn would be better served by being grateful that the stakes of their own decisions are far smaller.

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