Posts

Seymour Hersh has written the definitive to date article on the makings of our crisis with North Korea. If you need a distraction from our buildup to war with Iraq, this article is a must read.

I tried out Syndirella today, or I should say that I tried to try it out, but it crashes on startup. Maybe I’ll wait for the next release, since I don’t know how to get .NET apps to generate a stack trace when they blow up.

Is “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful the last “considered harmful” essay that we ever need to see? Probably.

Farhad Manjoo has a story at Salon on the ongoing battle between Java and .NET. One thing he doesn’t seem to address is that despite the battle for supremacy, this isn’t a winner take all fight. There are no doubt billions of lines of Java code floating around, and as time passes the best features of .NET are going to be sucked into the Java world. By the same token, with Microsoft’s muscle behind it, .NET and the CLR are going to be successful. The software development ecosystem is going to support both of these options long into the future. I’m also encouraged by the fact that a court is going to force Microsoft to include the JRE with Windows. Now Sun ought to be putting a ton of time into making a much friendlier and more elegant JRE for Windows. Obviously right now most of the Java action is on the server side, but there’s an opening on the desktop here for Sun to exploit. Hopefully they won’t blow it. ...

A reader sent this link to a New York Times op-ed by William Perry and Ashton Carter, The Crisis Last Time, which discusses how we have to handle the crisis with North Korea. I’m not sure we’re taking any of their advice right now.

I just wanted to say that I love Anil Dash’s rant about diamonds. I also freely admit that I gave my wife a diamond engagement ring when we got engaged, despite the fact that I pretty much knew how sleazy the international diamond trade is. It’s not a huge diamond or anything. Such is the power of tradition.

Three Senators (all Democrats) have attached an amendment to a big spending bill that would put a stop to the Total Information Awareness project. I’m just glad to see that this creepy project is freaking out some of the people on Capitol Hill.

Microsoft is going to be sharing the source code for Windows with the Russian government to enable them to audit it for security purposes. It’s a move designed to forestall the advance of Linux internationally. Does this mean that security through obscurity is officially dead? How does the US government, which is obviously heavily reliant on Windows, feel about Microsoft sharing its source code with other governments? To me, this is the worst of all possible worlds – the people with big bank accounts get to see the innards of Windows, but the rest of us are stuck out. At least Linux is egalitarian, everyone gets a shot at looking for exploits. ...

Larry Lessig has come up with a new proposal to win back the public domain now that the Supreme Court case to roll back the Sonny Bono act was repudiated by the scoundrels on the bench. He now proposes that after 50 years, all copyrighted works be subjected to a minimal tax for maintaining the copyright. After some window of time (he proposes 3 years), if the tax remains unpaid, then the copyright would be revoked and rights to the work in question would enter the public domain. While the the corporations in the copyright industry would, of course, pay their taxes, many other works that simply disappear due to the current long copyright duration would enter the public domain after 53 years. This proposal would take the form of an act of Congress, and we have a heck of a lot more influence over Congress than we do over the Supreme Court. I’m glad to see Lessig come back fighting immediately, and with a strong alternative proposal to boot. ...

One of the things SBC got when they bought out Ameritech was a patent that they claim covers frames (as in the HTML tag). While I’m ordinarily against this sort of abuse of the patent system, anything that discourages the use of frames is OK with me.