Slashdot has an interview with one of my favorite programmers around, John Carmack of Id Software. One is forced to wonder if there is any meaning left at all in assigning a commemorative day, week, or month to an issue. I was OK with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but everything past that has just been excessive. In San Francisco, at the behest of monied software companies, mayor Willie Brown actually decreed October 15 as No Piracy Day. ...
How do you define brazen? How about lobbying Congress to cut the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice when you’re in the middle of an anti-trust suit? This is the perfect story for me: it makes Microsoft looks bad, it’s on a technology related topic, and it discusses how influence is bought and sold in Congress. Intel is going to integrate graphics chips into their motherboard chipsets, eliminating the need for graphics adapters. I think this is bad news for mainstream video card makers like ATI, but won’t really hurt companies like Nvidia and 3DFX, who make all their money selling to gamers who demand the best performance available. Intel just can’t stay on the cutting edge like these graphics specialists. ...
I almost never link to sports stuff, because even though it’s incredibly interesting to me, I doubt most of my regular readers share my fascination. However, this column on why streaks don’t exist is fantastic. If you’re a geek, you’ll love the fact that math triumphs over the intuition of almost every sports fan you know. Basically, the article explains what most of us know already: the fact that if you flip a coin and it comes up heads 10 times in a row, the next time you flip it, it will just as likely come up tails as heads. ...
Microsoft is finally putting all the pieces together in their plans to start raking in transactional fees from as much electronic commerce as possible. If I have time, I’ll write something about this later. There’s a trojan horse being distributed via email that sends the user’s AOL password to a malicious person when they run the program. It gets the AOL password off of the user’s hard disk. AOL isn’t taking responsiblity, of course, but I’m forced to wonder why AOL passwords are stored unencrypted. Maybe they are encrypted and the story fails to make that clear. At least the trojan horse lets you know that it just stole your password, so you can change it. ...
Time’s Digital Daily has a moronic article about “Netscape Communicator 5,” in which they totally miss the point that Mozilla is Netscape Communicator. They also make the mistake of assuming it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on with the project, when all they have to do is go to http://www.mozilla.org. Aren’t these people supposed to be journalists? Developers are complaining about the new pricing scheme for Filemaker Pro. They’re blissfully ignorant – in the relational database industry, the licensing schemes are much more draconian than Filemaker’s. ...
The New York Times has an analysis of an advertisement paid for by the health insurance industry attacking the “patient’s bill of rights.” Naturally, the ad warns against allowing lawsuits against HMOs, because it will lead to a trial lawyer feeding frenzy. Unfortunately, as normal people, our only recourse when wronged by a corporation is a lawsuit. Currently, we are allowed no such recourse when an HMO denies us needed medical care. That’s wrong. ...
As everyone who visits this site knows, I’m less than fond of Microsoft. Unfortunately, their enemies aren’t very likable, either. (Scott McNeally and Larry Ellison, I’m talking about you.) Bad news for Windows CE, no matter how you spin it: Phillips has cancelled the Nino. I thought it was the best looking of the Windows CE devices. At some local high schools, they’re considering eliminating class rankings, because there are so many good students that even very smart kids can have a mediocre class ranking. Admissions officers at colleges are against eliminating rankings, mainly because it would make their jobs harder. Unfortunately, class rankings are a nearly worthless measure of a student’s performance. Why should the validectorian of a school filled with idiots have a better shot at getting into a good school than a smart kid from a school with lots of smart kids? ...
I spotted this alarming headline at ESPN.com … or was it the Weekly World News? Microsoft is taking a swipe at Linux on their NT Server Web site. Free advertising for Linux. Apple seems to have fixed every single one of the things I complained about when they released the original iMac. The new iMac has a slot-load CD-ROM drive, more RAM, a better graphics adapter for playing games, and a price of $999. The only thing left is to make a real keyboard and mouse. In any case, I think the time to buy has arrived. ...
The Washington Post has gone to Kansas and found real, live idiots, saving us from having to just assume that they are there. Abuse is the Web’s killer content app, according to Suck. They point to the original Outraged! manifesto as an example. I don’t think that’s a compliment. Well, MIT has sold out to Microsoft for a measly 25 million bucks. We’re so rich now that we can afford to give jobs to liberal arts majors. Seriously though, I’ve long advocated giving jobs to liberal arts majors and pure science majors, who I feel get a better education than business majors. You learn almost all of the important stuff about your job after you get it, no matter what your major is, so you might as well hire the brightest people with the best learning skills if you want to get ahead. ...
Just a data point: last night I went to buy some music online, and wasn’t exactly sure where to buy it. I don’t buy music online much, so I have no brand allegiance. I was predisposed not to buy from Amazon.com, because I thought that they should stick to books. I checked out CDNOW and Tunes.com, but wound up buying from Amazon anyway, because they have more information about the CDs. I wanted to buy an Old 97s CD and wasn’t sure which one to buy, and the revies at Amazon.com helped me make a decision, so I added the CD to my shopping cart there. ...