Posts

In the WWF, I believe they’d refer to this as the smackdown.

Ellen Ullman: The Orphans of Invention

I usually don’t write that much about weblogging here because, you know, who cares? However, there’s a habit common to many webloggers that kind of bugs me, so I’ll post about it here in hopes that at least one person who exhibits this habit will see the light. Oftentimes, I go to a weblog and see a citation that says something like “Slate says that Al Gore is only three feet tall,” or “The New York Times says Bush plans on criminalizing the use of words longer than five letters,” only to see that the link goes to something like Kausfiles or an opinion piece by Paul Krugman. What I wish is that people would make it a habit to cite the writer of articles rather than the publication that they appear in, or better yet, both, when pointing to something. In my opinion, even bylined news stories should be cited by the name of the writer, but that may be an extreme position (and it’s not one I adhere to all the time, either). For magazine articles and op-ed pieces, the byline is by far the most important thing. A magazine like Slate or even Newsweek has all sorts of writers who bring their own set of biases to the table. Once you follow the link, you know who wrote the story anyway, but I think that sloppy citing can be a symptom of sloppy thinking, the kind that leads us to tired assumptions about the liberal media or various other accusations of media conspiracy. ...

For future reference: a concise explanation of the evils of preferences in applications. It seems like it’s only been recently that I’ve been exposed to the idea that more options are not necessarily a good thing in applications. Generally I like to tweak my applications, so preferences are something I like, or at least put up with. Then I think about the fact that even though I know exactly how to configure Microsoft Word so that it doesn’t screw things up when I try to write, I hate going in and doing it, and it all makes sense. ...

Tim Bray asks whether home pages are going away. He says: Lauren starts up with a blank page; she relies on RSS and bookmarks. Her browser sure does start up fast. Maybe that's the future. These days, Google is my home page, but I’m not sure why. I could just as easily type in my queries in the location bar. A long time ago, I set my wife’s home page to about:blank, and not long ago I reinstalled Windows on that computer. IE set MSN or whatever as its home page, and my wife asked me not long after to set it back to about:blank. So, yeah, I’d say the home page is going away. Strange given that much of Netscape’s value was at one time derived from the fact that Netscape browsers all started with the same piece of real estate as the default home page. ...

I never thought I would read of Ariel Sharon saying this: It is not possible to continue holding three and a half million people under occupation. This is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy. Today 1.8 million Palestinians live thanks to support from international organization. Do you want to take responsible for them yourselves? I do not think that it is right to control Bethlehem and Ramallah. I have no idea what the implications are, but the fact that Sharon said it is stunning. ...

In this Economist story about the state of things in Afghanistan, they mention that CNN has shut down its Afghanistan operation. Hopes for America seeing things through in Afghanistan seem particularly bleak to me – we weren’t very committed before we invaded Iraq, campaign season will soon go into full swing, and there’ll be even less attention avaiable for the luckless Afghans.

Microsoft has submitted its thoughts on spam to the Senate Commerce Committee. No brilliant ideas are contained within. Larry Lessig comments on one specific part, a safe harbor provision for spammers who join self regulating industry groups or something along those lines.

ESPN is recapping every single one of Annika Sorenstam’s first shots today, for those of you who are curious about how the first woman to play in a PGA Tour event in 58 years does.

Ben Edelman, an economics grad student at Harvard, has published a study of how Gator actually works. I have never had this abomination installed on my machine, but I imagine plenty of my friends and relatives who have yet to escape the hinternet probably do.