Jeremy Zowodny talks about his good experience in switching from a Powerbook to a Windows laptop: Here's the funny thing. I've found that nearly every one of the Open Source applications I've installed seems to work better and significanly faster on this machine than on my nearly new Powerbook. As you can imagine, his post attracted a flurry of comments from Mac users.
Cameron Purdy has written a great general purpose laptop buyer’s guide, from a road warrior’s perspective.
USA Today reports that the Department of Education paid a talking head to promote the No Child Left Behind act. The question we have to ask now, I think, is who’s getting paid to tell us that Social Security is in crisis.
The average amount of time an unpatched out of the box Linux server install goes before being compromised is up to 3 months. Not bad.
Slate’s Chris Suellentrop has a useful run down of Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation hearing yesterday.
CNN is cancelling Crossfire and has fired Tucker Carlson. In justifying the decision, CNN’s new President, Jonathan Klein said, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” MSNBC seems to be picking up where CNN leaves off, as they’re probably going to give Carlson a prime time show that leads right into the horrific Scarborough Country.
Charles Miller made the smartest comment I’ve seen about the Six Apart acquisition of LiveJournal: On the other hand, Danga was a casually-run company that existed to keep Livejournal running, and its founders cupboards full. SixApart is a venture-capital backed organisation that has a much more concrete appreciation of the concept of return on investment. It’s inevitable that at some point, someone will look at the statistics and realise that fewer than one in fifty Livejournal users are actually contributing to its upkeep. I suspect he’s right. ...
Mark Schmitt argues that the best way to fix campaign financing is not to govern donations but rather to publicly finance elections. The obvious question is whether people can add in their own money or donations they drum up, and how you decide how much to give to whom. Probably smart people have already come up with reasonable answers to those questions (and they may even be in the paper linked from the article). All of this is purely hypothetical, since I can’t see any political will for spending government money to torture us with more ads in election years. Besides, I think the party that’s in power is pretty happy with things as they are. ...
You know, when you read news stories about what’s going on in Iraq, or in the White House, or behind the scenes in an election campaign, it’s always worth thinking about the level of accuracy in news stories about subjects that you are intimately familiar with. Here’s what I mean, Internetnews.com reports that Roller Weblogger, an open source project that has been under active development for a long time, is a Sun product that is going to be open sourced in the future. The third result from Google when you search for “Roller weblogger” is the project’s page on sourceforge.net. On the project’s download page, you can see releases all the way back to September of 2003. How hard is it to do the most cursory research for a news story? I think most media criticism regarding bias is completely overblown, the real problem is accuracy. ...
So the rumor is that Six Apart is going to buy LiveJournal. I’m sure you’ll read plenty of analysis of the transaction in terms of expanded user base, number of eyeballs, and the possibility of growing Six Apart’s revenue stream. Who cares about that? The real question we have to ask ourselves is what happens when you consolidate that much Perl code under one roof?