Posts

blogs.salon.com goes live this evening. Salon is hosting Radio UserLand-based blogs. Scott Rosenberg is going to be blogging there as well.

Michael Thomas complains in Salon today that the big problem for IT companies isn’t the accounting, it’s the products, which often don’t work. This certainly jibes with my experience. I’ve found that the more a software product costs, the less likely it is to work properly, and the harder it will be to implement. In the Java world, for example, I’ve used Tomcat, Resin (a cheap servlet engine from Caucho Software), and BEA WebLogic. Of the three, WebLogic was the hardest to get up and running, the hardest to deal with on a day to day basis, and was the most expensive by an almost unbelievable factor. I’d be willing to accept that BEA offers a lot of features that the others don’t, but frankly I’ve never run into limitations in the other products that sent me looking for more. ...

NPR has revised its linking policy to be in line with expected Web usage.

Mozilla 1.1 Beta is out. The alpha seemed a bit plagued with bugs (which makes sense), but the nightly build I downloaded a few days ago has been working well. Hopefully the beta will be even better.

It’s looking like there may be a real peace deal in the Congo. I’ve been following this ongoing conflict for years now, and I’m glad to see that it might actually be coming to an end.

Looks like Steve Earle decided to kick a hornet’s nest. The lyrics of the song don’t seem particularly profound or meaningful to me, but hey, sing what you want. I also think that there are better people to glorify than John Walker Lindh. I mean, maybe he is a confused kid who got caught up in something, but that doesn’t change the fact that he found his way into an army that fought every principle prized by liberal society. ...

I found a link to The Talent Myth, a must read article by Malcolm Gladwell, at Jonathan Delacour’s weblog. I can’t say how affronted I am by the idea that “talent” is the key to success at anything. Even if talent won out over all, the systems that we have for measuring talent are incredibly inexact. If you look at sports like baseball, where the skills required for success are well defined and there are objective measurements for many of them, you’ll see that evaluators of talent miss on prospects all of the time, both by overrating some and underrating others. In the corporate environment, where the skillset is more complex and difficult to measure, it’s nearly impossible to even say who’s talented and who isn’t. Simply assuming that every jerk who managed to ace a standardized test and work his way through a blue chip school is more talented than people with less fancy educational backgrounds is possibly the worst way to go, and yet it seems to rule the day. ...

My little jeremiad yesterday was not aimed at the hard working businessmen who go about their daily business honestly and ethically. I know that there are plenty of them, and as I’ve said, I’ve even worked with plenty of them. It’s aimed at the various commentators (like Andy Grove, President Bush, and any number of other executives I’ve seen on TV) who want to try to persuade us that unethical behavior in the world of business is somehow unusual. I’m not saying that these business men are all bad people, and that they beat their dogs and plot evil in the shower before work every morning. What I am saying is that most people are prone to ethical lapses, and that once you get started in that direction, it’s hard to stop. Anyway, if you’re a businessman who behaves ethically, keep up the good work. If you’re a businessman who’s unethical, I hope you get fired before you screw things up too badly. Either way, somebody ought to be keeping an eye on you. ...

Today, MEMRI sent out a translation of an Al-Hayat column by Tunisian writer Al-‘Afif Al-Akhdhar, condemning suicide bombings. In it he points out that violence by Hamas (and other terrorist groups) is the sustaining force for Israel’s right wing. Al-Hayat, an Arabic-language London daily, must be a fascinating paper to read. They seem to publish both the most liberal and the most bellicose Arab writers without discrimination (at least judging by what I get from MEMRI). ...

Via Interesting People: The TCPA; What’s wrong; What’s right and what to do about by professor William A Arbaugh.