...more recent posts
What about the idea that keeping a weblog (especially if you work in front of a computer all day, and take small random breaks from your work to do a little blogging) is a way for information workers to maintain a sense of self in an otherwise depersonalizing situation (i.e., the long hours many spend doing mundane information processing tasks for their corporate benefactors.) Maybe the small amount of time lost to these personal pursuits is O.K. in the end as it allows workers to always maintain a little loop of their own personality in the background. The weblog is an excuse to see and comment on things that are important to you personally, and you can do this pretty much continuously (espcially, like I said, if you work in front of a computer all day.) I know Alex has commented that this sort of personal project can really make working for someone else bearable (or even just acceptable.) And while people have always done this (like reading on the job when things are slow, or writing a personal letter) the concept of micropublishing your thoughts for others, and the pressure to keep updating your blog, makes the weblog sort of time wasting much more valuable for maintaining a sense of self that is separate from your job. I'll have to work on this idea a little.
It didn't reduce very well, but today's picture is a piece by Paul Laffoley. A bigger version of this picture is here (112kb) I first heard about him at the disinfo conference a few months ago. In my opinion, the most interesting speaker at that strange event. Anyway, I bought a book of his work at that time, and then MB gave me an original for my birthday. I'll try to get a picture of that up. Here's some more info about him. And here's a reproduction of his piece "Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth." Yes, he has actually designed a time machine, and I don't doubt that it will work. Unfortunately, to test his idea, we'd have to put this huge machine into orbit, and then drill a hole all the way through the earth. I'll guess there will be a little delay before the jury comes back in on that one.
More conflicting info about my next computer. zdnet has a piece about new G3's due this fall from IBM with clockspeeds from 500 - 700 mhz. The article speculates that these will go into the next generation powerbooks which they anticipate sometime in the fall. D'oh. What about the G4e that a different IBM spokesman said we'd see in a portable before the end of the year? I guess that was too good to be true. This new time table seems more reasonable. New G3 powerbooks in the fall. OS X and multi-processor desktop G4's in January, and THEN the G4e powerbook in the spring. Not quite as fast as I'd hoped.
Lars finally responds on the Metallica/Napster imbroglio. I guess it's easy to make fun of Metallica, but I have less and less good feelings for Napster. I wish there was an open standard in place so that the "free information" side wasn't in a position to make a boat load of money off the whole thing. Seems like that sort of ruins the argument. But could a napster clone, without any corporate backing, make it beyond the small percentage of super geeks?
Lots of talk in the news lately about possible break up scenarios for Microsoft. I haven't been commenting because it all seems like talk at this point. But reading the Times today (that's what I do when I go get my coffee in the morning) it all came together for me. First off, even though I don't try to hide my anti-micorosoft bias, I am not in favor of the government getting involved in breaking them up. I rarely favor any sort of government intervention in any situation. The less Washington does the better. Still, I think Microsoft makes bad products. And not so much because I have some insight into how the code is written (I've never seen any of it) but because I disagree with their whole philosophy of producing computer products. Anyway, my dream would be for Microsoft to lose marketshare because consumers educate themselves enough to learn how it is that Microsoft is holding the whole computer/internet revolution back. In other words, they should lose on their own merits. Fat chance, I know, but the marketplace is the proper regulatory mechanism. As long as people insist on buying Windows, we all get what we deserve (i.e., buggy, virus prone, unsecure software.) So, my thought today was that the government CAN actually play an important role in all this. But not by trying to control Microsoft's actions through legislation and court actions. Instead, what I think should happen is that the government should review Microsoft and their products, and if they come to the conclusion (as Judge Jackson appears to be doing) that Microsoft is not making the best products if you take the health of the industry as a whole as your context, then the U.S. government should stop all of its arms from buying Microsoft products. To employ one of my least favorite terms: they should use their position as a "bully pulpit" to help educate users about the problems with these products. An example of this is the US army switching from NT based servers to Apple servers after a rash of security problems. Since the switch - no more problems. If all branches of the government dumped all Microsoft products (with maybe a yearly review of Microsoft, giving them the chance to change their ways) this would go much further to correcting the problems then just breaking them up into 2 or 3 (or even 5) seperate (monopolistic) companies. The government should lead by example, not by legislation. Corel actually sued the government a few months ago because they were buying Microsoft Word without any review of competing products (which is required by law for all government contracts.) This should happen on a much larger scale.
After a few months of quiet (following the not ready for primetime Netscape 6.0 preview release) the Mozilla project is again picking up steam. First up, it look like Activestate will be bringing Perl and Python into the Mozilla development environment. Says ActiveState project leader Dr. David Ascher, "By providing bridges between Perl and Python and the Mozilla framework, we are giving the Perl and Python Open Source projects deep access to the power of Mozilla." Becasue remember, it's not just a browser. In other news, alphanumerica has written code that will allow javascript inside mozilla easy access to local filesystems. They have based this on the very easy to use PHP filesystem functions. All code has of course been released free to the community. They built this input/output system because they needed the functionality to build their mozilla crash recovery system. With this layer installed in Mozilla, the browser will continuously track the state of all open Mozilla windows, and in the event of a program or system wide crash, will be able to restore the state of all windows on reboot. (!) I wonder how much of a speed hit you take for running this? In any case, very cool, and this could be incredibly important as the web morphs from a page based model to an application based model. Who wants to use a web based application (word processor, spreadsheat, ect...) if you lose all your data everytime your browser crashes?
The BBC has this amazing story about the development of a tiny pill with a camera inside. The pill can be swallowed by a patient, and doctors can view the video feed from inside the body. "The researchers believe patients will find the capsule hugely preferable to the current endoscope technology which requires a fibre optic cable to be put up the back passage." I'll say.
Slashdot has a poll today asking how people like their steak. I am pleasantly surprised to find "I don't eat meat" is actually in the lead (25% to 22% for "medium rare.") I knew that junk food and caffeine were staples of the geek diet, but I have never heard anything about vegetarianism. Anyway, in the comments that follow the poll, somebody posted this short sci-fi story vaguely related to the topic. Very amusing. (This post largely stolen from rasterweb.)
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