Posts

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. ...

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

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 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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Dave Smith just emailed to let me know that the theme I’m using is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. He’s detailed the fix here, which I’ve applied. If you’re using depo-skinny, you’ll want to fix it as well.