Link blog

Ok, I found this very humbling. (It also reminds me of the experience I had reading G-E-B so many years ago: challenging to get through, but ultimately satisfying as the pieces fit together.)

Regarding my post earlier today about the lost tool bag during the space excursion, Adam Rice pointed out to me the "Asoh Defence."

What strikes me about this article is how often in the news do we see somebody actually standing up and taking responsibility for a serious ($100K in this case) mishap?

University of Tennessee has a $43.7 shortfall and is faced with cutbacks and layoffs, but at the same time the recording industry goons have gotten a law passed that forces them to shell out $9.5mil for anti-piracy programs that include "monitoring" software and hardware. I've got an idea: how about more cutbacks. Get rid of all the students and the priacy problem is solved.

There are two kind of people in the world: those who see a dire message in the US ranking on the ITU broadband penetration statistics (fallen from 3rd to 40th under Bush), and those who dismiss it. The current FCC leadership is in the latter group. Susan Crawford, co-leader of the Obama FCC transition team is in the former. This could portend a sea change in net neutrality and broadband policies. People are also reading the tea leaves in areas such as media consolidation, telco friendliness (the current FCC couldn't be nicer to them), and cableco friendliness (the current FCC couldn't be nastier to them).

While walking through Fry's DVD section a couple weeks ago, I commented to my wife that the studios seem to be doing everything in their power to ensure Blu-Ray fails. The pricing model seems all wrong to move the titles from early adopter status into the mainstream. Leave it to the black market to give movie viewers what they want. What's interesting here isn't that the pirates have cracked Blu-Ray (which they have), but that they've invented a new format that provides enhanced def in a more affordable form (albeit one that you'd play back on a media PC rather than a commercial disc player).

Researchers take over a 'bot network to determine the response rate of spam. It's inordinately low, which explains why spammers have to flood their messages so heavliy for the scheme to work. The results are interesting, but there are ethical concerns. I'lll assume CAN-SPAM labeling requirements did not apply, because the messages only appeared to be commercial. Still, I'm not comfortable spamming 12.5 mil unconsenting subjects.

I was impressed that the President-elect had posted such detailed policy initiatives at the new change.gov web site. I returned this evening to do some research on the Obama "Open Government" policies--but it's all gone. I suspect the reason is mundane: the policy content may have been a campaign asset which may not be transferred over to the government operation. I do wish, however, there was some explanation for the disappeared content. (If it really is a campaign asset issue, wouldn't it be a viable workaround tor release such content under a Creative Commons license?)

Austin just went with "single stream" recycling, so the issue has been on my mind. I've heard most of these but didn't really know whether they were true or not.

Last week, I linked to an article claiming Apple was keeping a competitive web browser out of their iPhone App Store. This article backs up on that claim, and then in a later update, backs up on the backup. The situation isn't clear at this time.

You've probably heard that the electoral college favors small states, giving them undue influence over the election result. (The two Senate seats each state gets means two additional electors, and those two electors mean a lot more in Wyoming than they do in Texas.) This article has an interesting chart that shows how extreme the effect is. The scariest part, however, isn't that. It's the observation that if the numbers fall just right, a person could become president with just 22% of the vote.

Nat Tuck is right, Mozilla screwed up badly in the way they handle self-signed certificates. All this policy does is tighten control of the SSL cert cartel.

Apple won't allow a competitive browser into the iPhone App Store. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft tried to block OEMs from loading competing browsers under Windows. Oh yeah, they did do that, didn't they? That's why they got the big anti-trust bitchslap. Apple is engaging in clear anti-competitive behavior, and that's wrong.

Wal-Mart is planning to build a supercenter in the middle of my neighborhood. A year ago the plan was for a huge multi-story building, the second largest retail store in central Texas (first is Ikea). Due to a number of reasons (including the economy), the plan has shrunk to a single-story supercenter under 100,000sq ft. This article shows that the economy is impacting Wal-Mart plans across the country. I wouldn't be surprised, if conditions continue, if they mothball the project entirely. One surprising thing in the article: it says Wal-Mart plans to ramp up the small neighborhood market stores, but we were told during the local fight that those were being cut back. I guess tough times change minds. (Or the developer lied to us.)

Interesting demonstration of why circular "pie" menus are better than conventional pop-ups. The article explains this result using "Fitt's Law," which is one of the best pieces of good, hard science in the field of "Human-Computer Interaction". Thing is, I don't totally buy the argument. The time to perform a task has two components: a cognitive element where the subject determines which action they want to take, and then a physical element where they execute that action. Fitt's Law only describes that second half. I don't think you can waive away the cognitive component like this. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that was the predominant part.

This Economist article identifies "cloud computing" (where you purchase an online service that runs on somebody else's computer, rather than traditional software that runs on your own) as a possible sea change for I.T. and paints a generally rosy picture albeit recognizing there will be losers and the potential for squeezed margins. I forsee some big problems with this trend. One is lack of version control. You no longer get to control your upgrade cycle or feature changes. The vendor does, and, as the recent case of the iGoogle start page update shows, people get upset and can't do anything about it. My bigger concern, however, is software quality will greatly decrease. The barrier to release is greatly lowered (push an update to servers versus burn and mail new CDs), thus so to is the cost of software errors, thus expect more of them. (I grew up in the hardware world, where a bug meant turning a new mask set or circuit board, thus training me to treat mistakes as expensive.) Add onto that the unreliability of network computing, and I think cloud computing represents a potential quality disaster.

I strolled through Best Buy last night lusting after the 40" LCD televisions. This is, of course, beyond stupidity. My current television is a Sony widescreen 30" conventional picture tube. It does 1080i high-def, and while a new television can get me 1080p, I don't have any video sources that produce better than 480p. I think the image of a conventional picture tube is going to meet or exceed an LCD on every ground. This isn't just about adding 10" diagonal image size. I think part of it is my brain seeing the quality of the picture in the store and wanting that, but not dealing with the fact that I'd need to do an end-to-end upgrade to get it. (And probably an equal part feeling that picture tube is uncool these days.) Maybe I'll be ready to buy in a few years, after the recovery from the Bush recession. In the meantime I'll entertain/torment myself by looking. I though this article was useful.

Interesting thoughts on market consolidation and antitrust laws.

Electronic voting machine problems are being reported in West Virginia. The official response is "blame the users." That response often suggests two things. One is that the root cause is defective user interface. The other is that the selection and deployment process was mismanaged.

I remember back, a year ago, when Circuit City made the stupendously dumb and offensive decision to lay off their best and most experienced salespeople and replace them with lower-paid hires. I haven't bought a thing there since. Apparently so too have a lot of you, as Circuit City is about to embark in a round of store closures. This CareerDiva post draws a line between the two. I don't think the layoffs caused the failures, but rather both are symptoms of management failure.