Posts

Talk about shooting fish in a barrel … David Pogue’s column in MacWorld this month reviews some of the preditions of Apple’s death from the mid nineties. Some of the quotes are now great comedic material though. Even I had forgotten how deep the pessimism about Apple ran back then. Apparently the President is easily impressed when it comes to computers. On Feb 21, I linked to a story about Cynthia Herdrich’s case against her HMO that’s being heard before the Supreme Court. Slate’s reporter covered the testimony in that case, and explains the issues involved much better than the LA Times story did. ...

Interactive Week has an article about Microsoft’s subversion of the Kerberos standard in Windows 2000. Microsoft took an open standard and added some proprietary crap to it so it wouldn’t work with existing implementations of the standard, and is now reluctant to document the proprietary crap that they added. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m linking to this article about email monitoring only because my friend Todd is quoted in it. There’s no good reason to use your employer’s email system for personal messages these days. Get a free email account and use that. (I use ssh to connect to my Web hosting provider, and read my email there, for what it’s worth.) The article doesn’t address the real problem plaguing email systems – Powerpoint presentations sent around as attachments. ...

Some security geeks at the San Diego Supercomputer Center did a cool experiment to determine how long an unsecured Red Hat 5.2 machine could survive in the wild without the benefit of patching or a firewall. The answer: not very long. Here’s a link to the actual Amazon.com affiliate program patent. There’s a protest site up at nowebpatents.org. I’m still putting my thoughts together on this whole thing … I’ve read a lot of interesting stuff from both sides this weekend, and I’m distilling it into a piece that’s too long for the front page. I’ll add a link to it when I’m finished. ...

First the PTO gave Amazon.com a patent on one-click ordering, now they’ve given them an extremely broad patent covering affiliate programs. These patents are a cancer on the Internet industry, as is the practice of patenting “business models” and obvious software solutions. Because Amazon.com is bound and determined to bludgeon everyone else in the electronic space with patents, I’m removing all links to Amazon.com on this site. Naturally, I won’t be placing any more orders with Amazon.com either. ...

Rick Thompson just doesn’t get it. The quote: “If supermarkets were designed like Web sites, milk and bread would be at the front of the store.” The sort of cynical mistreatment of customers that works well in traditional retail isn’t going to fly on the Web. If you make it harder for people to find the things they need on your Web site, people will shop somewhere else. The Washington Post has a story about Al Gore and Bill Bradley using the Web as the vehicle for negative campaigning. Bill Bradley gets points for offering scans of real letters written by Gore on his site. ...

Salon has finally published its story on Eazel. They plan on making money by offering a subscription service that allows users to easily find software they need and keep their software up to date. Spurred on by Al Gore’s discussion of his (in my opinion, reprehensible) views on the death penalty, I decided to try to figure out what the views of all the candidates are on capital punishment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any information at the Bill Bradley or John McCain sites (we already know that Dubya is perfectly OK with the DP), nor was I able to find information on the presidential candidates on any number of anti-death penalty sites. Oh well. ...

Hot on the heels of the introduction to RFCs that I mentioned yesterday, Webmonkey has published RTFM: A Guide to Online Research, by rc3.org friend Steve Champeon. It explains all of the relevant Internet standards bodies and what they publish. It’s a really excellent article, and I offer it with my standard advice: even if you don’t need to read it, someone you know does. News.com is proclaiming the death of Usenet because MSN is dropping their newsfeed. If anything, this will probably make Usenet healthier. I’m sure that hardcore newsniks would probably like AOL to drop their newsfeed as well. Usenet is probably the best example of how a forum can become worthless when it grows too quickly. As Yogi Berra said, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” ...

Palm is finally shipping a color handheld, the IIIc. It looks nice, but I’ll stick with my mono IIIx for now. The unit has built in rechargable batteries, like the Palm V, so even though it burns through batteries pretty rapidly, you can just put it on the cradle to recharge it. Salon has an article about an interesting plan to thwart investigators looking for DeCSS sites on the Web. Mr. Bad has created another application named DeCSS -- this one’s used to removed Cascading Style Sheets from HTML documents. He’s hoping that lots of people will mirror his new, admittedly useless, program thereby making it difficult for investigators to find sites that host the real DeCSS software. Of course, if his plan takes off, how will people who want to play DVDs under Linux find the software they need? ...

Ted Rall explains Godwin’s Law. Here’s a shock … when millions (and perhaps billions) of dollars are at stake, people are willing to play dirty to get as much of it as they can. The Industry Standard explains why it’s a bad idea to trust venture capitalists. If you’re not a baseball fan, you probably haven’t noticed that spring training is under way. I think that the reason I love baseball more than all other sports is that you can analyze it “scientifically”. As an offer of proof, I provide you with this comparison of two young players. I love that stuff, and you just don’t see articles like it written about other sports. ...

Simon St. Laurent offers a fine bit of XML evangelism over at A List Apart this week. If you’ve never really understood what the hype is about when it comes to XML, you should read the article. Here’s a funny link that’s been floating around: a comparison of Windows NT vs. CP/M. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours? Dell has released its first multiprocessor desktop PC for the corporate market on the heels of the Windows 2000 release? Why? Because Windows 2000 is so bloated that you need two processors to achieve the same performance you could with Windows NT 4.0. At least that’s what Dell thinks. Also: Windows 2000 is supposed to be great for laptops because it provides all sorts of laptop-related features that were in Windows 95 but weren’t in Windows NT. Of course if it’s that much slower than Windows NT, won’t it really suck on laptops, which are slower than desktop PCs? And finally, one of the best new features in Windows 2000 (at least from Microsoft’s perspective) is the new licensing scheme that will cost customers big bucks. ...