Posts

I was thinking this morning about how much we’ve learned to live with Microsoft’s monopoly. I was thinking specifically about email, and the general awfulness of Outlook and Exchange. They’re absolutely horrific, and even worse, they haven’t gotten appreciably better in years. I don’t know of anyone who feels any urgency to upgrade from Outlook 97 or whatever it was to Outlook XP, nor have I heard of one decent feature that makes the upgrade worthwhile. And there are certainly no messaging systems out there that are even positioned to compete with Microsoft. The thing is, though, I don’t even see people clamoring for something better. That’s frustrating. The fact is that competition has stalled in so many areas of the software industry that people don’t even know what rapid innovation even looks like any more. If you take a look at the progress being made on the hardware front, where there’s great competition in RAM, video cards, CPUs, case design, and just about everything else, the pace of progress is amazing. In the software industry, it’s crap. Sometimes I hate this sorry industry. (One great exception is tools for software developers – there’s a lot going on there between Java and Microsoft and all of the free tools that are available.) ...

Mark Lewis has an interesting article on why people aren’t investing in gold despite the fact that the economy is in the dumpster.

Hanan Cohen did some interesting legwork on FAS, the Internet archive, and government secrecy and wrote it up for our benefit.

Security researches discovered a man in the middle attack that can be used to get people to unknowingly decrypt intercepted PGP messages and send them back to the interceptor. The flaw isn’t in the software, it’s a complex form of social engineering that relies on the person replying to the intercepted messages and not trimming their reply. So here we have it, yet another reason to be courteous and trim your replies. ...

Oxford researches have discovered that the New Caledonian crow is smarter than some software developers I’ve worked with.

The Economist has a powerful article about America’s prison problem: we’re putting more people in jail than ever and we’re not doing much for them while they’re there. As long as we’re letting people out of prison after we put them in, we may as well do what we can to make sure that they won’t do things that land them back there. The raw statistics by themselves are pretty staggering: ...

US Airways filed for bankruptcy, kind of making me wonder what the whole airline bailout thing was all about.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra passed away on August 6. Dijkstra was probably best known for writing the seminal paper “Goto Considered Harmful,” but he accomplished a heck of a lot more than that. He was truly a pioneer of computer science.

WorldCom says, “Make that $7.1 billion in fraud.”

Scott Rosenberg’s comparison of the Bush administration’s handling of leaks to the Nixon adminstration’s treatment of same seems apt to me.