Short blurbs, links, comments on technology, law, business, science, religion, design and other stuff. But never my back pain.

RIAA hypocrisy shouldn't surprise anyone.
posted by Todd Walker at 6:55 AM

Cullen Murphy tackles our obsession with precision in The Atlantic Online (Atlantic Unbound).
posted by Todd Walker at 9:50 AM

Sweet Fancy Moses posts a list of customer reviews of the Modern Library's top 20 20th C. novels from Amazon.com. My favorite:


10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Patrick S. Inglis from new york city -- "I figured it would have some vineyards in it or something grape-related. Nobody drinks wine or eats grapes because there is no grapes to eat. Not even raisins. Just dust."

I think this guy got the point...

posted by Todd Walker at 8:09 AM

From the Journal of Electronic Publishing, The Ideology of Ease talks about the inexorable push in GUI design towards ease of use, sometimes referred to by those with a preference for the comman-line as "dumbing things down." The article posits that this is slightly different from making things "user friendly," and that making things easy as opposed to easy to learn results in users who ultimately know nothing about the tools they are using and are unable to extrapolate the specifics of using a particular application to the bigger picture of the system as a whole.
posted by Todd Walker at 6:42 AM

Tim O'Reilly has posted a response to Jim Allchin's bizarro comments about the open source development model. Allchin's comments about the effect that open source efforts will have on intellectual property were so weird and lacking in substance, I'm surprised people even bother rebutting. I guess when you're the chief of the monopoly operating system, people pay attention to you even when you say something stupid. And they say technology has nothing in common with politics...
posted by Todd Walker at 7:02 AM

FEED | Digital Culture - Stories on a Rail is Steven Johnson's latest essay about interface design, following in the footsteps of his excellent Interface Culture. But, I'm bothered by the sidebar hawking the games he describes in the article.
posted by Todd Walker at 11:19 AM

Why Flash Is Significant [Feb. 02, 2001] is an interview with Bruce Epstein, an Oreilly author on Director and Lingo. The interviewer asks some tough questions about Flash and its use on the Web. A side-bar makes a careful examination of Macromedia's claims about penetration of the Flash plugin (now pegged at 96.4%). This stat takes into account plugins that range from Flash2 to the recently released Flash 5. Lies and statistics?
posted by Todd Walker at 8:31 AM

From Outlaw to Consultant is a short biography of the hacker "Captain Crunch." John Markoff, who writes regularly about Apple Computer, did this piece, a sliver glimpse of the early computer underground (or hobby, depending on your viewpoint.) NY Times requires a free (and worthwhile) registration.
posted by Todd Walker at 11:21 AM

I am not a heavy consumer of CDs, but I am considering increasing my spending on music when I have to Start Paying for Napster in June. This article is short on the details, but I might be convinced to pay a subscription if the restrictions on use are loose enough. If the downloads are encrypted or otherwise technologically "crippled" it's a no-go.
posted by Todd Walker at 9:03 AM

Proof that fundamentalist Islam is defenseless in the face of the Western media onslaught....
posted by Todd Walker at 8:12 AM

How, Why Microsoft Went Down is a good explanation of MS's recent DNS problems that knocked out access to their servers for nearly a day. Also touches on the implications of the outage on MS's current "5 Nines" marketing effort focused on their products' reliability as well as what it might mean for .NET.
posted by Todd Walker at 8:02 AM

Enigma Machine Emulator is a Java applet that emulates (duh) the German encryption/decryption device. Good links on the page, too.
posted by Todd Walker at 12:15 PM

Didn't DIVX teach anyone a lesson?
posted by Todd Walker at 9:39 AM

Check out thiscritique of the Scientology cult. The writer went undercover by joining Scientology for a time and then getting out. The getting out part proved to be more difficult than he'd anticipated. More Scientology info is available at the Lisa McPhearson Trust, founded in the memory of a Scientology member who was killed by the cult when she attempted to leave...
posted by Todd Walker at 8:23 AM

Do Not Call Preregistration is being operated by the New York State Consumjer Protection Board. Bascially, a new law took effect on Jan. 1 that telemarketers cannot call New York residents whose names appear on a centralized "Do Not Call" registry.
posted by Todd Walker at 6:38 AM

Stephan Somogyi thinks that Apple has exactly one chance to ship OS X and get it right the first time. In my opinion, this is exactly the problem Apple has had throughout its history, the impulse to get something perfect before shipping it. Microsoft and Oracle have succeeded by taking the exact opposite tactic, shipping a product as soon as it's "good enough" and then going straight back to the drawingboard to make improvements in rapid succession. Perhaps a more correct strategy would be to release multiple upgrades to the curent Public Beta prior to a full release later in the year.
posted by Todd Walker at 10:57 AM

There are many who must periodically bemoan the lack of intelligent discussion or writing or conversation in America (I am one, but mostly in regard to people I am seated next to at corporate events). One such gathering of whiners was shown on CSPAN (yes, I watch it occasionally) where the editor of The Atlantic and the literary editor of Esquire among others were talking about the future or narrative non-fiction. I took a look at the Atlantic Web site this morning and pretty much found an overwhelming amount of interesting articles to read, certainly more than I have time for. One of particular interest is A Republic - If We Can Keep It by Joe Lieberman, written in 1998 concerning the fund raising scandals of the 1996 election.

Another interesting panel discussion I saw on CSPAN was about the future of the US Army (I had a lot of time on my hands last week - vacation). This discussion was focused on reoganization of the Army hierarchical structure to better handle new mission criteria. For instance, most missions the Army is involved with today are joint operations in conjunction with the Navy and/or Air Force. However, the organization structure assigned to these operations (typically the brigade, rather than a full division) do not contain all the elements that the joint services require, such as Theater Missle Defense, which are typically supported at the division level. You can see the full discussion online in RealVideo format, which is a great service of CSPAN.org.

Why was this interesting? Aside from my intrinsic interest in how the Army seeks to change its own culture and operational structure, the same issues faced by the Army are faced by any large human organization, but specifically large corporations. Companies no longer go to market in the same way they did even five years ago, and many are making poor showings in how they change themselves in reaction to new market forces (you know what I'm talking about.) For a good example, compare the Web sites of The Atlantic and Harper's magazines (atypical companies, but illustrative.) Heck, Harper's couldn't even get its act together in time to lock in its real domain name.
posted by Todd Walker at 9:09 AM

The Hoeffler Type Foundry has released another one of their outstanding type families, Knockout. It's based on one of their earlier faces, Champion Gothic. Again, reminiscent of or inspired by vintage boxing posters, its got all the characteristics of the great type this foundry is known for, i.e. a wide (immense!) range of weights and widths in the family (32 faces) and a distinctive, but not over-the-top-radical form/design. (Kinda the antithesis of Emigre.)
posted by Todd Walker at 7:55 AM