Posts

I’m still trying to figure out what to make of Microsoft’s licensing Unix technology from SCO. I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall here. Right now, I don’t even know what, exactly, Microsoft has licensed from SCO. Perhaps this is a way for Microsoft to give SCO deeper pockets, or perhaps SCO had some dirt on Microsoft and this was Microsoft’s way out and by getting Microsoft to license from them, it gives them leverage against other companies that they want to blackmail. It’s important to remember that SCO’s lawsuit alleges that IBM violated SCO’s trade secrets – not their patents or copyright. ...

Nicholast Petreley is a Gentoo convert. When I started posting about Gentoo, I said that it was the first flavor of Linux that I was able to live with and not utterly destroy after some period of time. That remains the case. I have two Gentoo boxes that have been up and running since last September, and I haven’t had to give up and reinstall on either of them. I got Apache and PHP into a somewhat horrid state on my development server, but I managed to recover. ...

Ed Felten has a post on using challenge-response systems to counter spam.

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 is out. Not only is it a spiffy lightweight browser, but it’s also the future.

I don’t really understand economics particularly well (other than the simple stuff), and some days, I don’t think anybody in the world really understands economics particularly well. That said, as the economy continues to founder, I become more and more interested in how macroeconomics affects my day to day microeconomic prospects. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to understand the relationship of inflation to unemployment, deflation, or liquidity traps, but in today’s world, we certainly do. I really appreciate that there are economists out there with weblogs who are doing a decent job of giving their impressions of what’s going on. The two I read without fail are Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal and Zimran Ahmed’s winterspeak.com. There are a bunch of other economists with weblogs as well, but those are the two I read without fail. Update: Scott Rosenberg weighs in with a post about the economy as well today. ...

Now that the situation in Iraq no longer merits blanket coverage, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. The stories that are coming out seem to indicate that things are really bad and could rapidly become much worse.

The French claim that the executive branch has been running a disinformation campaign against them. Judge for yourself.

As you guys know, one civil rights issue that really bugs me is drug testing in schools. My number one problem with it is that it teaches kids that they really have no expectation of privacy. Well, unsurprisingly, studies seem to indicate that it also doesn’t reduce drug use among students, either. Unfortunately, I doubt the practice will end because it seems like it should work, even if it doesn’t.

This has nothing to do with Jessica Lynch, who served her country, was wounded in combat, and was, for a brief time, a prisoner of war in Iraq, but rather with those who would exploit her story to further their own agenda (or stuff their wallets). The story, as originally told, is a bunch of hooey. Salon has a story today that confronts the lies, albeit in a format that’s pretty lame. There’s also this Guardian story, but it discusses fewer of the inaccuracies than the Salon article. ...

One of the books I’ve most been looking forward to is Michael Lewis’ book on how the Oakland A’s baseball team is run, Moneyball. I’m a huge Lewis fan in general, and I’m a fan of baseball in general and the A’s in particular. Anyway, Lewis does a great job of explaining why the book is important in an interview with ESPN"s Rob Neyer: This will sound strange but it is completely true: I was far more certain of the importance of the subject while working on this book than I was when I wrote Losers, which is about people running for President of the United States of America. I could talk a week without exhausting the argument, but the nub of my conviction was this: if professional baseball players, whose achievements are endlessly watched, discussed and analyzed by tens of millions of people, can be radically mis-valued, who can't be? If such a putatively meritocratic culture as professional baseball can be so sloppy and inefficient, what can't be?