Microsoft stopped selling licenses for Windows 3.1 on November 1. It was originally released in March, 1992. Consider this a reminder to developers that the crappy code you’re writing today may go on to live for decades. As an interesting side note, Windows 3.1 has been around longer than Raymond Chen has been at Microsoft.
Time magazine has an article on the Obama transition’s plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and move the detainees into the legal system.
I’m wondering what the quickest route is from the results of a SELECT statement in the MySQL command line client to a CSV file that can easily be imported into Excel. Using INTO OUTFILE is an option but only if you have the proper privileges and have access to the filesystem on the server. It won’t select into a file on the system where the client is running. (This seems like a huge oversight to me.) ...
I feel like one of the laziest tricks in argument is the post hoc misrepresentation of one’s expectations. People often lie, particularly to themselves, when hindsight takes over. So as a form of insurance, I’m going to write down some ways that President Obama could fail to meet my expectations. Then, a couple of years from now, I’ll be able to look back and see for myself whether the Obama Presidency is what I thought it would be. ...
Newseum has a collection of today’s newspaper front pages from around the world. Update: Many wonderful things have been written about this election, but The Onion’s take may be my favorite.
I’ve been obsessed with the election for over a year, and I’m just as obsessed today. Here’s a disorganized guide to election return watching that I’ll be updating throughout the day. First of all, ignore exit polls and hope that whatever network you’re watching for returns does the same. Here’s a short list of what to look for tonight, and here’s an election night viewer’s guide from Nate Silver. John Dickerson lets you know what to look for all day today. ...
Here’s a collection of Barack Obama endorsements from blogs I read. I’ll be adding to the list through tomorrow. I’m still trying to decide whether to write a full endorsement. Andrew Sullivan John Scalzi Tim O’Reilly Linus Torvalds Karl Martino
When intellectually honest conservatives criticize Barack Obama, they say that he’s the most liberal Democratic nominee since 1972. (The dishonest ones call him a radical or a socialist or other silly things, but they’re not worth arguing with.) At the same time, people on the left argue that he’s not a “real progressive” and warn their fellow liberals that they should lower their expectations about what he wants to accomplish in office. ...
I’m not a legal expert, so I’m mainly just gathering information, but it sure looks to me like the patent regime as it relates to software is in for fundamental change thanks to a ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday. Links: Inside Counsel has a story on the case, in re Bilski, from last year. The Wall Street Journal’s story on the ruling. The Chicago Law School Faculty Blog has an outstanding post, explaining the 1998 State Street Bank ruling that led to this case, the background of this case, and the three dissents in the 9-3 ruling. The title says it all: In re Bilski: The Fed Circuit Tells Inventors to Stuff It. Gene Quinn (a patent attorney who favors the existing patent regime) reports on the ruling and reflects on the implications. IP reporter Joe Mullin rounds up reactions. He argues that the decision is not as monumental as others seem to think. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the patent regime as it exists today provides an incentive for individual inventors to create inventions. Most of the patent activity, especially in the world of software patents, is sponsored by large organizations who have the infrastructure and budget to try to patent everything they can. I’ve worked at a number of small companies and we’ve never been able to patent much of anything. We’re too busy coding. On the other hand, my friends at large companies are constantly being encouraged to file patents on everything they work on. ...
There’s a reason why I’ve been more optimistic than many of my fellow Democrats about Obama’s chances on Tuesday. It’s the first hand observations of the competing ground games provided by fivethirtyeight.com’s On the Road series. Today they posted a wrap-up of sorts. Here’s what they’ve seen: In Cortez, CO, we had Republican volunteers pose for action-shot photos. The same in Española, New Mexico. Posed. For some time at the outset, we were willing to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. They convinced us they were really working, and that we had just had unfortunate timing. It wasn’t until the pattern of “just missed it” started to sound like a drumbeat in our ears that we began to grow skeptical. We never “just missed” any of the Obama volunteer work, because it goes on nonstop, every day, in every office, in every corner of America. ...