Andrew Leonard’s review of Diablo II discusses my favorite feature of the game, the fashion show aspect. The game itself is pretty simple, the real challenge is getting enough stuff to make your character look cool and distinct. The fact that your character appears at the bottom of the chat screen when you log into the multiplayer game only makes it more imperative that you find the perfect outfit to send the “I’m a bad ass” message to your fellow players. ...
Salon has a great article about food in France. The one thing I admire about France is that they’re obsessive about eating high quality food. The way I see it, we eat many thousands of meals over the course of our lives. They may as well be good meals. Slate has a story about the effect of rampant cynicism on political coverage. Like the writer, I think cynicism is as fun as anything, but it doesn’t belong in straight news stories. ...
Salon has an interview with Joe Firmage, the founder of USWeb who was run out of his job after he went on a big UFO kick. Firmage seems to have backed away from tales of alien visitation since he originally published his book (humbly titled The Truth) on the Web. He now seems more focused on science education and a new propulsion system that his alien visitor told him about. (That was a gratuitous swipe, but I couldn’t resist). In the interview, Firmage talks about how science is generally marked by radical ideas that create immense change. If you want to read a learned account of how this works, check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas S. Kuhn. ...
The variety of ways lawyers figure out how to screw people over never ceases to amaze me. Personal injury lawyers get a bad rap, but it’s the corporate lawyers that really scare me. Check out this article on “clawback provisions” in stock option agreements. If you sign a contract with one of these, companies can take back not only vested options, but profits you make by exercising and selling those options. Nasty. ...
I have to agree with FAIR on this one, repeatedly showing footage of the Central Park sexual assaults violated the victims nearly as much as the assaults themselves. I think that the depravity of the attackers could have been portrayed adequately without showing the victims over and over at all hours of the day. Scott Rosenberg’s latest column takes on Microsoft’s .Net initiative, and provides a good overview of what it’s all about if you haven’t figured it out yet. The only problem I have with it is that it says that .Net isn’t a “me too” offering from Microsoft, which isn’t really the case. While the origins of the idea behind .Net are less obvious than those behind Windows or Internet Explorer, .Net is a rearticulation of concepts created by Apple, Sun, and others. Jaded technology watchers can see things like Jini and OpenDoc as the inspiration for much of what appears to be in .Net. Certainly using XML as application glue isn’t an idea that comes from within Microsoft. ...
LWN has a nice wrapup of the reasons behind MySQL’s move away from a proprietary license to the GPL. rc3.org friend Joe Komenda wrote an excellent rebuttal to the awful essay by Michiko Kakutani that I linked to yesterday. It gets right down to the core problem, that slang is meaningless absent context. The Industry Standard’s cover story this week is the bizarre tale of Internet video company Pixelon. Its founder managed to start the company and attract 30 million dollars of VC money without so much as a drivers license or Social Security Number. The VCs, new at the game, signed an agreement with Pixelon that was outrageously in their favor, but in the end it was they who got played. Pixelon had no technology and no business prospects. They managed to spend 16 million dollars on an all day rock concert before flaming out. ...
How do you define megalomania? Eric S. Raymond gave a 5 hour The Cathedral and the Bazaar rehash as the keynote speaker at the MacHack conference. The worst part is that the keynote begins at midnight, so he pontificated until 5 in the morning. I’ve read few articles that disturbed me as much as Michiko Kakutani’s selective survey of the “cyber-lexicon” or whatever else the writer chooses to call it. She paints a stereotypical and almost entirely inaccurate picture of “geeks”, using terms she mined from various dubious sources (quoting axe-grinder Paulina Borsook on just about anything is a sure sign that you’ve got an agenda). I’ve never seen most of the terms she cites used in online conversation, much less in real life. Her unnuanced analysis should be an affront not only to the people that she insults directly, but to any thinking person. She totally misrepresents the usage of the terms that actually are in common parlance, completely missing the self-efacing manner in which they’re often used. I could go on a lot longer about specific problems with the article, but I’ll just close by saying that it’s really a shame to see this kind of hit and run writing in the New York Times. Of course, ESR’s rebuttal in Salon isn’t really any better. News flash to ESR: there are plenty of geeks and hackers who aren’t libertarians. ...
I’ve been kind of fixating on C# for the past day or so, and I’m feeling news starved. I realized that I have no idea where Windows developers get their news and gossip. I checked out MSDN magazine, developer.com, and a bunch of specialty Windows magazines on the Web, but none of them have any timely news on C#. If this were an open source project, I’d have the full scoop already, but I’m coming up with nothing here. I’m looking for things like interviews with the creators, quotes from Microsoft developer relations people, and that sort of thing. Anyone have any ideas? ...
How do I hate Network Solutions? Let me count the ways … Their latest shenanigans involve auctioning off lapsed domain names rather than just returning them to the pool of unregistered names. This allows them to do two things; collect more than the standard registration fee for domain names that have already been registered, and more importantly, prevent people from registering those names with another registrar. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth it to throw out the domain name system and start over with something that doesn’t involve Network Solutions at all. ...
Random thoughts and observations on the latest Microsoft initiative, Microsoft .NET: The Microsoft .NET web site is not actually found at www.microsoft.net. The name is really stupid as well, but at least it’s not another contrived acronym. (DNA, anyone?) Some vision of the future this is. People have been talking about everything Microsoft has announced for years. Pervasive network connectivity to all devices? Accessing all of your applications through one window? Building applications out of dynamic, downloadable components? These are all other people’s ideas. Vaporware? Of course. Microsoft says they’re at least two years away from delivering on any of this. They’re just telling you about it so that you don’t use anyone else’s products if they release them first. Microsoft is trying to cut off the air supply for the burgeoning gang of ASPs by announcing their own ASP called bCentral.net. Optimists see this as a sign of a new openness from Microsft, an acknowledgement that they don’t rule the Internet. I don’t think I’m buying that. I mean, how do people even know that given that any software based on this initiative is two years out? Microsoft’s utter humiliation of its former competitors continues apace. First, Steve Jobs kissed the ring before the crowd at a MacWorld conference a few years ago. Now we see Marc Andreessen swearing fealty to Gates at this announcement. I wonder if we’ll ever see Scott McNeally or Larry Ellison kneeling before the Microsoft throne? XML.com is running Simon St. Laurent’s article XML: A Disruptive Technology, which covers the changes and considerations XML is forcing on the existing Web protocols and standards that it uses. The article discusses URIs, HTTP, and MIME-types. Very interesting stuff. ...