...more recent posts
Today's photo is of the Hindenburg burning over Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937. No reason except it is kind of a cool picture. As usual, this is stolen from the BBC which is running an article on a new German Zeppelin being made for large cargo lifting needs. (Not too interesting, but I liked the picture.)
I finally found a table which explains those cryptic Mac error messages.
I've been wasting time lately in the FoRK Archive. Smart (insider-ish) discussions on what is happening in the high tech world. Like many cool things, I found this through Hack the Planet which is also full of smart (insider-ish) discussions on ...
Photoshop 6.0 hits beta. If you work with images, you probably work with Photoshop. Adobe is calling this a major upgrade (but of course they would.) Apple Insider has the preview scoop.
From Barbelith comes this gem: "I'm sorry, but Jeffrey Zeldman rocks so hard and fast he could vibrate himself through a mountain." Here's the Zeldman piece in question, which Tom calls, "a call to arms, a Manifesto for the true digerati - the people that like to play and create and communicate, rather than the people who consider a "good internet idea" to be selling sportswear (however ineffectively)...."
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.