Posts

Today Salon is running an interview with Neil Young, the creator of the new game Majestic. Majestic has been getting a ton of press, because it’s completely different than other computer games. In fact, I don’t understand it well enough to really describe it (I haven’t played). Is anybody playing this game? How do you like it? Malice or stupidity, you be the judge. Verizon is prohibiting its DSL customers from relaying mail with a From: address that isn’t @verizon.com, presumably as some sort of misbegotten anti-spam measure. Not only is the system completely wrongheaded, but it’s poorly implemented as well. One of the great tragedies of the demise and consolidation of independent ISPs is the replacement of competent small-business owners with faceless corporate entities run by incompetents and morons. It pains me to get my Internet service from Time-Warner Cable, but it’s not like I’m going to dump my broadband service to go back to having a second phone line and a modem connection. ...

Elizabeth Drew’s article in the New York Review of Books explains in detail the goals behind Dubya’s tax cut, the political wrangling it took to get the legislation passed, and the weird details of the legislation itself. It’s the best article on the tax cut that I’ve yet read. I’m sorry I’ve been ragging on Dubya so much this week, not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because it’s tiresome. That said, I read today that Dubya’s widely publicized trip over to the Habitat for Humanity construction site was scheduled to last all of 15 minutes. Being that the whole thing was set up as a photo op, and he really didn’t help out in the building of the house at all , why does the media even report on it? And just so you don’t think I’m too biased, I know that most politicians do this sort of photo op oriented crap, and I hate them for it. I don’t have a problem with people doing things for publicity, but they at least ought to really do them, not pretend to do them just long enough to have some pictures taken. ...

Microsoft is appealing the ruling that it was guilty of violating antitrust laws to the Supreme Court, arguing that Judge Jackson’s bias should disqualify his full ruling. The appeals court already vacated his remedy in the case along with parts of his ruling, but they let some of the antitrust violations stand. Microsoft failed to get the appeals court to reconsider their verdict, and now they’re taking their case to the Supremes. If they succeed, we’ll have to start the whole trial over. I imagine that the DOJ would probably abandon its case rather than do that, given the current makeup of the executive branch. ...

Dmitry Sklyarov is out on bail. His arraignment is set for August, 23. CNN Headline News re-launched yesterday, with a new studio, a new anchor, and new graphics. The most startling change is that they’ve shoved the poor anchor into a disturbingly small box in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The ticker on the bottom has gotten much larger, and now incorporates a weather map, sports scores or a stock ticker, and news headlines. The upper left quadrant of the screen is now occupied by additional information relevant to the story being read. I suppose I’ll get used to the new layout, but I find it way too busy right now. I think that Andrea Thompson does a fine job as anchor, despite all the complaining from the media establishment when she got the job. ...

Robert X. Cringely’s latest column is another anti-Microsoft diatribe. I’m no Microsoft fan, but I find Cringely’s conjectures to be increasingly irritating. In the column, he asserts that every feature in Windows must increase Windows’ market share. That seems highly unlikely to me. He then goes on to say that the reason Microsoft is providing access to raw sockets in Windows XP is so that they can increase market share. Also unlikely. Certainly he doesn’t provide any sound reasoning explaining why access to raw sockets will result in an increase in Microsoft’s market share. He then spins a crazed theory about Microsoft intentionally flooding the market with insecure TPC/IP stacks so that they can justifiably replace TCP/IP with their own, proprietary protocol. Judging from the column, I don’t think he even understands what raw sockets access is, or that for all the power Microsoft has in the market, they don’t have the power to force everyone to use a new protocol. And when does Microsoft plan to implement this scheme, before or after they relocate to another country (to look back on another Cringely prediction)? I’m beginning to think that Robert X. Cringely and Wayne Green need to get together to compare notes. ...

Phil Agre sent out some Code Red links yesterday, if you’re interested in keeping track of this thing. The big effort in Mexico to install Linux on school computers has failed, at least for now. The problems are the same ones facing Linux adoption by casual users in the United States – lack of Linux expertise and Winmodems. “Too often PHP is thought of as only an HTML-embedded web scripting language.” Version .1 of PHPGTK has been released. It’s a toolkit that enables you to write client-side GUI applications in PHP using the GTK library. Why? ...

Building on the success of their green ketchup, Heinz has released a new color – Funky Purple. I’m sure it tastes like plain old red ketchup, but looking at it makes my stomach churn. It’s interesting how much color affects us when it comes to food perceptions. Rob Walker explains the 45 billion dollar loss posted by JDS Uniphase last quarter in his Moneybox column at Slate. Money has an interesting article on how the S&P; 500 works. The received wisdom among knowledgeable mutual fund investors has been that the S&P; 500 outperforms 80% of the managed mutual funds on the market. If the guys at S&P; who decide on the companies that make up the S&P; 500 keep messing with it, how much longer will that be the case? ...

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill. I can just see Denny Hastert now, “Damnit, Dick, you made Shays cry.” Wired News has an article on Microsoft’s backpedalling on their statement that allow PC makers to decide what to put on the Windows desktop on new PCs. Strangely, about 10 years ago some friends of mine lived next door to Allan Van Fleet, the attorney quoted in the article. ...

I finally got the SirCam virus, via a mailing list. I was feeling so left out. Fortunately, since I read my email using mutt, I deleted it with impunity. Officials Fight ‘Code Red’ Attack, urge system administrators to install FreeBSD and Apache on their servers. I wish. Apparently they’re going to fight the worm by holding a press conference.

Next time you consider complaining about Perl’s obfuscated syntax, take a gander at some TECO source code.