What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.
Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.
What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.
--Paul Krugman
Read the rest in Op-Ed Columnist - The Resentment Strategy - Op-Ed
The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?
--George Will
Read the rest in George F. Will - McCain Loses His Head
John McCain has spent decades in Washington supporting financial institutions instead of their customers, so let's be clear: What we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.
--Barack Obama
Read the rest in McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition
Palin is a master of the nonanswer. She can turn a 60-second response to a query about her specific solutions to healthcare challenges into a folksy story about how she's met people on the campaign trail who face healthcare challenges. All without uttering a word about her public-policy solutions to healthcare challenges.
--Andrew Halcro
Read the rest in What it's like to debate Sarah Palin
Arrogance Maxim: The ease of defeating a security device or system is proportional to how confident/arrogant the designer, manufacturer, or user is about it, and to how often they use words like “impossible” or “tamper-proof”.
--Roger G. Johnston
Read the rest in Schneier on Security: Security Maxims
A huge speculative housing bubble has collapsed. We’re going to have a recession. Unemployment will go up. Credit is going to be tighter. The challenge is to contain the damage to a “normal” recession — and to prevent a devastating series of bank runs, a collapse of the credit markets and a full-bore depression.
Everyone seems to agree on the need for a big and comprehensive plan, and that the markets have to have some confidence that help is on the way. Funds need to be supplied, trading markets need to be stabilized, solvent institutions needs to be protected, and insolvent institutions need to be put on the path to a deliberate liquidation or reorganization.
But is the administration’s proposal the right way to do this? It would enable the Treasury, without Congressionally approved guidelines as to pricing or procedure, to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of financial assets, and hire private firms to manage and sell them, presumably at their discretion There are no provisions for — or even promises of — disclosure, accountability or transparency. Surely Congress can at least ask some hard questions about such an open-ended commitment.
--William Kristol
Read the rest in Op-Ed Columnist - A Fine Mess - Op-Ed
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
--George Will
Read the rest in George F. Will - McCain Loses His Head
The first new Vista audio API didn't provide a way for drivers to tell applications "the buffer is nearly empty". Instead, applications had to check "Is the buffer empty now?". And because the buffer status changes as the sound is played, they had to check over and over again. "Is the buffer empty now? Is the buffer empty now? Is the buffer empty now? Is...". This is called polling, and as a general rule of thumb, polling-based systems are to be avoided. Each time the application checks the buffer, it's having to do extra work, and if the buffer still has plenty of data in it, it's pointless work. The thing is, this flaw is kind of obvious to anyone writing audio software. No-one likes polling. Other low-latency audio APIs (Steinberg's popular ASIO and Apple's Core Audio included) tell the application when the buffer needs more data.
This design issue would be obvious to anyone writing an audio application. But it apparently didn't occur to Microsoft. It didn't occur to them with DirectSound either, which has no reliable, low-latency mechanism for receiving buffer notifications either. It wasn't until Microsoft sat down with third-party audio developers quite late in Vista's development cycle that it changed the driver API to introduce a notification mechanism. With this, the hardware can actually tell the application that it needs more data. By the time the change was made, vendors had already put work into the first new Vista driver model, so they probably weren't entirely happy that Microsoft went ahead and changed it (though the audio software vendors certainly were).
Apple, on the other hand, does use its APIs. So Apple has a much better idea of what works well, and a much better idea of what the system ought to do and how it ought to work. Microsoft provides APIs to third parties and hopes that they'll be OK; Apple provides APIs to itself, and when it's certain that they work well, it lets third parties loose on them. If something's good enough for Apple, it's probably good enough for everyone else. There is some irony in this; in software development this concept of using your own software is known as "eating your own dogfood," and it's an idea that was, at one time, pushed strongly by Microsoft.
--Peter Bright
Read the rest in From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X—Part III: Page 3
the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.
That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)
But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.
I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.
--Paul Krugman
Read the rest in Op-Ed Columnist - Cash for Trash - Op-Ed
There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16. And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead (somewhere Chester Gould is wondering how he got it backwards). So it's safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product ever invented.
However, have you ever considered just exactly how powerful these ubiquitous devices are? The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago (assuming you even had a PC; most mobile users never have). It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly at low temperatures), and light meter (to determine screen backlighting) on the more basic phones; a location sensor, accelerometer (detects vector and velocity of motion), and maybe even a compass on more advanced ones. And most importantly, it is by its very nature always connected.
Project out these trends another ten years. You will be carrying with you, 24x7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else. So what are you going to do with it that you aren't doing now?
--Andy Rubin, Google
Read the rest in Official Google Blog: The future of mobile
A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.
Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street.
--Michael D. Shear
Read the rest in McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition
For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin’ redneck," like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re "untested."
--Tim Wise
Read the rest in White Privilege, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election | BuzzFlash.org
John McCain wants to tax your employer-provided health care benefits. He wants to replace those benefits with an insufficient tax credit--$2500 for individuals and $5000 for families (the average cost per family for health insurance is $12000).
There is a positive, progressive tax aspect to this: wealthier people should have to pay for health insurance themselves, without tax breaks from the federal government.
But make no mistake: this plan will do little or nothing for those who do not have insurance now--unless they are young and healthy--and it may well hurt a fair number of workers, especially unionized workers, who get gold-plated benefits from their employers.
It will certainly do nothing for families with members who have pre-existing conditions or children with special needs--because it makes no provision to regulate the insurers, forcing them to cover all comers at "community" rates that don't discriminate against the people who need health insurance most.
--Joe Klein
Read the rest in McCain's Health Care Tax Increase - Swampland
But Bernanke and Paulson are really going all in on this, they're letting banks play with depositor money:
The Fed added that it was suspending a rule that normally prohibits deposit-taking banks from using deposits to help finance their investment banking subsidiaries to allow them to fund activities normally funded in the repo market on a temporary basis until January 30 2009.
This is a dangerous game, because instead of firewalling that money away from investment subsidiaries, it allows banks to gamble that with depositor money they may be able to turn it around. This was exactly the sort of thing that Glass-Steagall was designed to make impossible - banks to not be in the brokerage business, insurance companies not in banking, and so on. Glass-Steagall was partially repealed in 1980 (part of what made possible the Savings and Loan fiasco), further parts in 99 under Clinton, and now the Fed has violated the fundamental principle that banks shouldn't be gambling with depositor money. Because, be real clear, if you don't really know how much in the hole you are, or how much further you could get, lending money to the unit that's in the hole is gambling.
--Ian Welsh
Read the rest in Firedoglake » As the Markets Plunge, Bernanke and Paulson Gamble Depositors Money
AT&T has oversold their network. You can tell because the worst service of all is from one iPhone to the other. If the call doesn't spontaneously disconnect half the time you often still can't understand what the other person is saying. Service is somewhat better going to landlines or other mobile providers.
I'm sure AT&T will fix this eventually but I don't like being treated this way. No wonder they are so hot to keep that iPhone exclusive, since half the iPhone users I know would jump to T-Mobile if they easily could.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in I, Cringely . The Pulpit . What Did You Say? | PBS
Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
--Gloria Steinem
Read the rest in Palin: wrong woman, wrong message
I was fired because of, primarily the reason of her former brother-in-law. I think that my unwillingness to take special action against her former brother-in-law was not well received. I think there are some questions now that, coming to light about how transparent and how honest she wants to be.
--Walt Monegan, former Alaskan Public Safety Commissioner
Read the rest in ABC News: Fired Alaskan Official Says Palin Hasn't Been Truthful
One key way of coming up with solutions is to ask the question "why".
Write down what you think the problem is, and then ask WHY is that a problem? WHY do we need a "machine-readable and standardized way to apply semantic properties (metadata) to DOM elements"? Then, replace the problem with the answer to the question "why", and then try again. Do this until the answer is "I don't know why, people just want to do this" or "because it makes people happier", and then include the last few iterations as the problem statement.
--Ian Hickson on the whatwg mailing list, Tuesday, 9 Sep 2008 20:42:47 +0000
On behalf of the media, I would like to say we are sorry.
On behalf of the elite media, I would like to say we are very sorry.
We have asked questions this week that we should never have asked.
We have asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?
We have asked mean questions like: How well did John McCain know her before he selected her? How well did his campaign vet her? And was she his first choice?
Bad questions. Bad media. Bad.
--Roger Simon
Read the rest in Why the media should apologize - Roger Simon
there’s this terrible glaring conflict between what sensible managers want and what sensible programmers know. Managers, good managers, want a plan; they want to lock in design constraints so that work can be dealt out and progress tracked and promises kept. Programmers, good programmers, know that they’re not smart enough to get the core design choices right until they’ve built something that works.
The various techniques and disciplines gathered around the banner of “agile” are on balance more honest at facing up to this unavoidable tension. But there’s still lots more work to be done.
And the most important thing is, we all have to remind ourselves, all the time, that we’re not smart enough to get anything important right the first time.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Build One to Throw Away
I believe that when we Americans look deep into ourselves and ask us what we want our government--because it is our government: it is our agent to do what we want with our money just as the guy in Florida we hire to keep grandma's one bedroom condo in repair is our agent--to do, we conclude the following:
- We want to let the Bush tax cuts expire.
- We want to close the 75-year Social Security gap, half by raising the limit on earnings taxed by Social Security so that the upper middle class and the rich pay more for Social Security and half by reducing the rate of growth of benefits at retirement.
- We want to stop sending our soldiers--the best-trained and best-equipped high tech armed forces in the world--abroad to be military police in countries riven by sectarian conflict where they do not speak the language--and so return defense spending to its late-1990s share of GDP.
- We want to reduce but not eliminate the "excess" cost growth in Medicare and Medicaid: we believe our doctors, nurses, and druggists will learn how to do wonderful things over the next two generations, and we do not want those wonderful things in the way of medicine applied only to the rich but to the poor and old as well.
- Whether or not we decide to do (1) through (4) above, we want to raise taxes to cover whatever of the long-run fiscal gap remains, and so bring the federal budget back into balance over the long run.
Note that (5) is not optional. As the late Milton Friedman liked to put it: to spend is to tax. If the government buys things, it must get the money to buy them from somewhere. It can get the money from three places. It can tax. It can borrow--but then the borrowing has to be repaid with interest, and the more is borrowed the higher the interest and the worse the value the taxpayers ultimately get for their money when they are taxed to repay the borrowing. Or it can print the money and so inflate the currency--but that too is a tax, and an especially unfair, painful, and destructive one, as lots and lots of people victimized by inflation find their wealth doesn't buy what it used to and what they expected.
We can argue over whether (1) through (4) is what we want to do--that is what politics is about. But whatever we decide to do with (1) through (4), (5) is not optional--not, that is, if we want to continue to have a rich country in the long run. And the politicians who have told you that (5) is optional from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Robert Dole to George W. Bush and now John McCain are not your friends, or America's friends.
--Brad Delong
Read the rest in Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi
It's regularly pointed out that young adults can volunteer to serve in Iraq but are prohibited from buying a beer. But young adults are also free to produce children (many children). A young adult can plan the entire course of his or her life by the age of 21. A young adult can serve on a jury and determine the fate a fellow citizen. If a young adult chooses, he or she can act in pornographic films, gamble nightly, smoke several packs of cigarettes or, in some places, even engage in the truly depraved act of becoming a politician.
Yet this same young adult is breaking the law when ordering an appletini?
It makes little sense. And when a large number of college presidents ask, "How many times must we re-learn the lessons of Prohibition?" the answer is: We never learned the lesson the first time.
--David Harsanyi
Read the rest in Let's chuck the drinking age
JavaScript is built on some very good ideas and a few very bad ones.
The very good ideas include functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. The bad ideas include a programming model based on global variables.
--Douglas Crockford
Read the rest in JavaScript: The Good Parts
A comment "Do not touch --- generated code" means to me the formal language used is at fault and that I should rather find another language to use.
--Kristof_Zelechovski on the whatwg mailing list, Friday, 29 Aug 2008 00:12:15
A&T's Consumer Services Agreement is substantively unconscionable and therefore unenforceable to the extent that it purports to waive the right to class actions, require confidentiality, shorten the Washington Consumer Protection Act statute of limitations, and limit availability of attorney fees. We emphasize that these provisions have nothing to do with arbitration. Arbitrators supervise class actions, conduct open hearings, apply appropriate statutes of limitations, and award compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorney fees, where appropriate. Courts will not be easily deceived by attempts to unilaterally strip away consumer protections and remedies by efforts to cloak the waiver of important rights under an arbitration clause.
--Washington Supreme Court Justice Tom Chambers
Read the rest in Court says AT&T can't force arbitration
What an embarrassment that the IOC president Jacques Rogge bashed Jamaican superstar sprinter Usain Bolt for over-celebrating. Bolt has been one of the most appealing and engaging athletes of the Games and nobody I talked to thought his style reflected any disrespect for his rivals. Why doesn’t the IOC pick on somebody its own size? Like China maybe. It couldn’t work up the same righteous indignation when the Chinese reneged on key agreements like dispersal of information. And now they have reluctantly taken up the matter of China’s transparently underage gymnasts, flagrant cheating that is the moral and practical equivalent of doping.
--Mark Starr
Read the rest in Beijing Beat: A Blog of the 2008 Olympic Games : IOC Should Butt Out on Bolt and Other Olympic Thoughts
The idea that the U.S. can, should and must be, more or less, in a state of permanent war, and can start wars in a whole host of circumstances having nothing to do with defending the country from an attack or imminent attack, is as close to an unchallengeable, bipartisan article of faith as it gets. We're a country that fights wars and uses military force in far more places and for far broader reasons than any other country in the world, by far. Again, regardless of one's views about whether our wars are really Good and Just -- even if one believes that what we drop on other countries are Good and Loving Freedom Bombs -- it's still just a fact that no country views military action as a more appropriate response in more situations than the U.S. does.
That's why it's so amazing to watch Condoleezza Rice, more or less without contradiction, say things like this:
Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century.Other than our media elite, is there anyone who doesn't recognize how absurd it is for Rice to be issuing a sermon like that? Who is the target audience for that? And what does it say about our political discourse that Rice knows she can say things like that with a straight face -- and, before her, that John McCain can do much the same -- without its being pointed out how darkly laughable it is?
--Glenn Greenwald
Read the rest in Rice: Military power is "not the way to deal in the 21st century" - Glenn Greenwald
McCain’s approach and tone on foreign policy has always been more emblematic of a tv pundit rather than a sober president. While McCain has attacked Obama as the "celebrity" candidate, the fact is that a bad place to be over the last 25 years has been between John McCain and a TV camera. The New York Times on Sunday noted that one of the first things McCain did after 9-11 was go on just about every TV program - where he incidentally called for attacking about four countries. In its biographical series profiling the candidates the Times also noted that McCain was attracted to the celebrity of the Senate with one close associate noting that McCain “saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.” McCain clearly enjoys being on television and he has been a constant commentator on the Sunday news shows and the evening talk news programs.
But TV appearances encourage sound bites, over-the-top rhetoric, and good one-liners, not reasoned and nuanced diplomatic language. This is especially true from guests who are not in the current administration, since you are less likely to get invited back on Face the Nation if you down play a crisis or take a boring nuanced position. Thus on almost every crisis or incident over the last decade, McCain has sounded the alarm, ratcheted up the rhetoric and often called for military action - with almost no regards to the practical implications of such an approach.
The big concern with a McCain presidency – a concern which I am surprised has not been vocalized more fully – is that the U.S. will lurch from crisis to crisis, confrontation to confrontation, whether it be with Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. The danger is that McCain’s pundit-like rhetoric will entrap the U.S. in descending spiral of foreign policy brinksmanship. Just think about the very likely scenario of McCain giving Iran/Russia a rhetorical ultimatum and Iran/Russia ignoring it. Now we are stuck - either we lose face by not following through on our threats or we follow through and go to war. We can’t afford such a reckless approach after the last eight years. For the next eight we need a president not a pundit.
--Max Bergmann
Read the rest in democracyarsenal.org: A Pundit Not a President
This is yet another embarrassment to the once-grand tradition of American aviation. United has become a pathetic, washed-up mess of an airline. Patriotism be damned, I’m a consumer: If United is the primary carrier on an international route I need to fly, I would bend over backwards to fly another airline, preferably a carrier without an American flag on the tail.
--Mark Ashley
Read the rest in Downgrade made official: United eliminates free meals on most transatlantic flights » Upgrade: Travel Better
In this case, it was a two-word question: “Define rich.” Obama answered it. McCain rambled a bit about richness in our lives, which transitioned to misleading rhetoric about small businesses, which transitioned to bizarre complaints about a government take-over of the healthcare system. Before long, we were into bear DNA, congressional recesses, and energy prices. McCain didn’t really like Warren’s question, so he told us all about the various other issues on his mind. The audience didn’t seem to mind.
But somewhere along the line, we got to the answer: $5 million. As far as McCain is concerned, if you make $4.9 million a year, more than 99.9% of the population, you’re not quite rich.
Just how out of touch is John McCain? On the one hand, he’s running ads talking about how “tough” times are “for the rest of us,” but on the other, McCain, one of Congress’ wealthiest members, thinks people who make millions of dollars a year aren’t quite rich, and he doesn’t want to bother them with taxes anyway.
--Steve Benen
Read the rest in The candidates define ‘rich’
A fundamentalist is one who believes in a literal interpretation of sacred books, and a third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. That's about 10 times more than any other developed country in the world. It's entirely possible to be a religious believer and to accept science, but not if you're a literal religious believer. You can't believe that the world was literally created in six days, and be open to modern knowledge.
--Terence Mcnally
Read the rest in How Anti
Long story short, the Protocol Buffer approach looks like a good one, but let's not let the details get lost in the shouting: Protocol Buffers, as with any binary protocol format and/or RPC mechanism (and I'm not going to go there; the weaknesses of RPC are another debate for another day), are great for those situations where performance is critical and both ends of the system are well-known and controlled. If Google wants to open up their services such that third-parties can call into those systems using the Protocol Buffers approach, then more power to them... but let's not lose sight of the fact that it's yet another proprietary API, and that if Microsoft were to do this, the world would be screaming about "vendor lock-in" and "lack of standards compliance". (In fact, I heard exactly these complaints from Java developers during WCF Q&A when they were told that WCF-to-WCF endpoints could "negotiate up" to a faster, binary, protocol between them.)
In the end, if you want an endpoint that is loosely coupled and offers the maximum flexibility, stick with XML, either wrapped in a SOAP envelope or in a RESTful envelope as dictated by the underlying transport (which means HTTP, since REST over anything else has never really been defined clearly by the Restafarians).
--Ted Neward
Read the rest in Interoperability Happens
Michelle Obama has been one of the most refreshing things about this election year. But within weeks of the end of the primary season, the handlers stepped in to deal with the "Michelle problem."
What problem? She speaks her mind? She wears what she wants? Her biggest sin, according to the punditocracy, was to say that, as a black woman, this may be the first time in her adult life she's been really proud of her country. Shock! Surprise! Outrage! But not from any of the black women I know.
You have to be white and stupid to not know what she was really saying. If you don't understand, let me ask you this: Have you been proud of what this country has been doing in the past few years? Are you proud your neighbors had their house taken from them? Are you proud to be sending a good chunk of your paycheck to the oil companies so they can post record profits? Are you proud to know your vice president outed one of our spies and put her life and the lives of others at risk?
That's all she was saying — what we are all feeling.
--Michael Moore
Read the rest in How The Democrats Can Blow It ...In Six Easy Steps : Rolling Stone
Making simplistic categorizations accomplishes nothing except to stick an image into people's heads and in all likelihood sell some kind of a product to them. There are no black and white issues here except to those who have no interest in learning more than what they already know. We need to dig deeper and understand what goes on in the mind of a hacker and how we can learn from that, rather than simply condemning him, whether by laws or by words, as a criminal. And of course giving a free pass to all of the corporate giants is another mistake. A lot of what goes on "legally" is quite simply wrong and needs to be challenged. The way our personal data is left unguarded is about as criminal as you can get. And the whole hacker/cracker thing is really silly. There are some people who believe they're "good" hackers so they decided to make a new word to categorize all of the "bad" hackers. So some hackers began calling other people crackers, thinking that would solve the problem. It didn't. All it did was make every non-hacker confused. And by attaching this negative connotation to something mysterious, they were basically doing the same thing the mass media had already done to the word "hacker." And you could prove this quite easily. Some of these people didn't believe Kevin Mitnick was a true hacker and so they labeled him a cracker. And the response of those who subscribed to these definitions was predictable. As soon as they heard someone was a cracker, they lost all sympathy in them. Except there was one thing left out. They never found out WHY they were labeled in this way. If you call somebody a criminal, people will ask what he did. But calling someone a cracker, you just make assumptions as to what he did and never actually ask the question. There are already plenty of words to define criminals and they're all fairly descriptive: thief, fraud artist, etc. Cracker brings the condemnation but not the description which is why it's a bad thing.
--Emmanuel Goldstein
Read the rest in GeekDad Interview: Emmanuel Goldstein | Geekdad from Wired.com
I was initially very excited about Scala until I realized that two features were close to being deal breakers for me: implicits and pattern matching.
Have you taken a look at implicits? Seriously? Just when I thought we were not just done realizing that global variables are bad, but we have actually come up with better ways to leverage the concept with DI frameworks such as Guice, Scala knocks the wind out of us with implicits and all our hardly earned knowledge about side effects is going down the drain again.
As for pattern matching, it makes me feel as if all the careful data abstraction that I have built inside my objects in order to isolate them from the unforgiving world are, again, thrown out of the window because I am now forced to write deconstructors to expose all this state just so my classes can be put in a statement that doesn't even have the courtesy to dress up as something that doesn't smell like a switch/case...
--Cedric Beust
Read the rest in Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Return of the Statically Typed Languages
In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.
--Iraq War Supporter John McCain
Read the rest in Think Progress » McCain: ‘In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.’
The great thing about software is how you can literally take nothing (i.e. a blank computer screen) and build something that changes the world. Bill and Paul did it with Microsoft. Larry and Sergey have done it with Google. Jerry and David did it with Yahoo!, and some might say Mark Zuckerberg is doing it with Facebook. Are any of those companies YCombinator-style, built-to-flip companies? Nope.
--Dare Obasanjo
Read the rest in Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written. The desired human interface for a program or feature may affect the data model, the choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the need for threading, the format for storing data on disk, and even the feature set of the program as a whole. But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.
But the more code has been written, the harder it is to fix a design problem — so programmers are more likely not to bother, or to convince themselves it isn’t really a problem. And if they finally fix the interface after version 1.0, existing users will have to relearn it, frustrating them and encouraging them to consider competing programs.
--Matthew Paul Thomas
Read the rest in Matthew Paul Thomas » Blog Archive » Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
It's probably too much to ask politicians to reflect a little before they lunge for a political hot-button issue. But any conservatives so inclined should think about what they're defending. What's so conservative about the Pledge?
Very little, as it turns out. From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state.
--Gene Healy, Cato Institute
Read the rest in What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?
More generally, the notion that secrecy supports security is inherently flawed. Whenever you see an organization claiming that design secrecy is necessary for security — in ID cards, in voting machines, in airport security — it invariably means that its security is lousy and it has no choice but to hide it. Any competent cryptographer would have designed Mifare's security with an open and public design.
Secrecy is fragile. Mifare's security was based on the belief that no one would discover how it worked; that's why NXP had to muzzle the Dutch researchers. But that's just wrong. Reverse-engineering isn't hard. Other researchers had already exposed Mifare's lousy security. A Chinese company even sells a compatible chip. Is there any doubt that the bad guys already know about this, or will soon enough?
Publication of this attack might be expensive for NXP and its customers, but it's good for security overall. Companies will only design security as good as their customers know to ask for. NXP's security was so bad because customers didn't know how to evaluate security: either they don't know what questions to ask, or didn't know enough to distrust the marketing answers they were given. This court ruling encourages companies to build security properly rather than relying on shoddy design and secrecy, and discourages them from promising security based on their ability to threaten researchers.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Schneier on Security: Hacking Mifare Transport Cards
The genius of this is that it's completely reusable.They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over. What this means is that almost any vulnerability in the browser is trivially exploitable. A lot of exploit defenses are rendered useless by browsers. ASLR and hardware DEP are completely useless against these attacks.
--Dino Dai Zovi
Read the rest in Windows Vista security 'rendered useless' by researchers
as far as database query is concerned, ad-hoc end users do not write code: they use simple form-filling interfaces, notably the single-search-term Google query. The characteristics of such interfaces are (a) there's no such thing as a syntax error, and (b) you don't need to know the schema.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 11 Feb 2008 09:26:38
Funny how people won't pay if you just give them your products for free. Their problem is in being a hardware company with hardware that there's little point in buying - you can find cheaper stuff elsewhere, and then run Sun's software on it without having to pay for it. You can say a lot of things about that, but "viable business model" isn't one of them.
--James Robertson
Read the rest in They'll Make it up in Volume
For many of the journalists who regard John McCain as an unusually honorable politician, listening to his increasingly dishonorable campaign rhetoric is a painful and puzzling experience. They are openly wondering what has driven him to denigrate and even smear Barack Obama in a style more reminiscent of McCain's old enemies in his own party than the straight-talking maverick. They want to believe that he has not really changed, and that somehow these lapses can be blamed on someone else. Like a spouse in a bad marriage, they have yet to face up to the fact that he actually changed years ago -- or to ask if he was ever the man they once thought he was.
--Joe Conason
Read the rest in Salon.com | Wanting the White House in the worst way
If modality is the number one enemy of usability, then pop up dialogs must be enemy number two. How many times have you filled in a dialog, and clicked 'OK', only to be informed you entered invalid data and must try again? If you're like me, hundreds of times. Most applications punish users for entering data that they allow the users to enter. They bash users over the head, effectively telling them, 'You stupid user, why did you enter such stupid information? Go try again!' In our view, it's not the user who is stupid, it's the application: applications should never punish users for entering data they allowed the users to enter.
--John De Goes
Read the rest in Interview: John De Goes Introduces a Newly Free Source Code Editor | Javalobby
Here’s how you update a file containing valuable data safely: ¶
First, you write out the new version without touching the old version, and carefully check that it worked.
Then, you move the old version aside, giving it name like Tim.ics.backup, and carefully check that the move worked.
Then, you move the new version in to the location of the old version and carefully check that this worked.
Then, you delete the backup. Even better, don’t; keep a few generations around.
I don’t want to be rude. But a personal-productivity application that updates crucial high-value information files in place is Broken As Designed, and evidence of an extreme lack of professionalism.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · iCal Sucks Hugely
The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government's business. I don't think it is the government's business to tell you how to spend your leisure time.
--Barney Frank, Democrat-Massachusetts
Read the rest in Legislators aim to snuff out penalties for pot use
It's no exaggeration to say that Ed was one of the preeminent consumer rights activists of the digital age. During his more than 20 years as a "reader advocate" at InfoWorld, he was far ahead of his time, recognizing that in a world increasingly dominated by software and online services, the digital consumer needed a champion when squaring off against the likes of Microsoft, Adobe or AutoDesk. Following in the traditions of the best consumer reporters before him, Ed exposed software vendors and online service providers that treated their customers shabbily.
But it was in his tireless work against "sneakwraps" -- those "end user license agreements" (EULAs) and "terms of service" (TOS) that require our "agreement" -- that Ed was without peer. You may not be reading all those "agreements" before you click thru, but Ed was. He recognized earlier than most that sneakwraps were going to be the digital consumer's worst nemesis, the mechanism that stripped consumers of the legal protections they enjoy when buying a book, a chair, or an automobile. Long before most consumer groups were thinking about sneakwraps, Ed was covering and participating in efforts to block UCITA, a package of state laws pushed by large software vendors that would have stripped consumers of valuable protections under contract law (UCITA was ultimately adopted by only two states, VA and MD, and has since been abandoned). Ed also contributed his insights on DRM, product activation, and reverse engineering to groups like AFFECT (Americans For Fair Electronic Tranactions) and EFF, making sure we knew what consumers were dealing with in the trenches.
Ed will be sorely missed, both professionally and personally, by all who benefited from his wisdom.
--Fred von Lohmann
Read the rest in In Memoriam: Ed Foster, 1949
Flash is taking over web video with H.263 knock-offs… and JMF offered all-Java H.263 playback in 1999! So, dot-com crash notwithstanding, why wasn’t YouTube delivered as an applet seven years ago?! I’d submit to you that, once again, distribution problems are the deal-killer for client-side Java.
--Chris Adamson
Read the rest in Rebooting Java Media, Act II: Development
I have avoided commenting on the EU's proposed 45 year extension for sound recordings because the effort is so clearly wrong, so clearly another example of politicians ignoring the public interest in favor of hobnobbing with (in this case aged) stars that there is nothing constructive to say. Term extension will benefit a very few a great deal, and most not at all. The public will suffer as it always has done, but because the suffering is suffered in small amounts and diffusely, politicians are spared confronting directly the ugly consequences of their failure to act in the public interest.
--William Patry
Read the rest in The Patry Copyright Blog: The EU Railroads Term Extension
What happens at the end of the day, all those votes are thrown into a magic box with one troll inside, the troll jumps out and says "Here are your results! Ta-Da!!'" That's it. There's no validation of the code, there's no authentication.
With the Connelly Anomaly, if that was in a banking environment, instantaneously --- instantaneously! --- the entire system inside that box would be frozen. Any programmer who reviewed any of that code would be alerted, all the executives assisting in that process would be alerted, the hard drives would be frozen in place, extracted and immediately placed in forensic analysis. 'Cause somebody did something major.
--Stephen Spoonamore
Read the rest in The BRAD BLOG : Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
the two-part Prentice plan is rapidly coming together - a Canadian DMCA could be introduced next week, while by the end of the year Canada may have agreed to an international treaty that mandates new levels of surveillance for ISPs and border guards. The effect of these reforms will dramatically reshape Canadian law with Prentice and Prime Minister Stephen Harper rolling out the red carpet for President George Bush's demands and leaving Canadians wondering how their consumer, property, and privacy rights suddenly disappeared.
--Michael Geist
Read the rest in Michael Geist
As a developer, the best code is code you don't have to write; anything you don't have to write, you don't have to debug and you don't have to maintain. If the framework can do something for me, then it means that I don't have to do it myself, and that's what frameworks are for.
--Peter Bright
Read the rest in From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X—Part III: Page 2
We need a new federal law that says class action lawyers have to be compensated in the same manner as their clients. Give those hard working guys and gals some $30-off coupons, please!
--Chris Walters
Read the rest in Stein Mart: Stein Mart Settles Personal Data Breach By Offering... Coupons
designed by geeks, for geeks. That's why Linux, Apache, Perl, and many similar products have been so successful — at least as long as the audience remains a group of technology-obsessed users. Of course, these same products don't stand a chance of growing their user base to include ordinary humans.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Bridging the Designer
Every quest had to be available to every character, no matter what they said or what race/class combo they were. That meant no 'nasty' dialogue options could actually turn the NPC against the player unless the quest was already done. No class quests were allowed outside of Tortage. No race-based quests were allowed at all.
I hated that.
I think it was a wasted opportunity on an incredible scale to make the game like that. So many reviews and previews alike were heavy on how great the conversation/quest system was for an MMO. I think there was a real chance to do something great, rather than take the first steps towards something great. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased as punch with what I did and what the quest design team got into the game, but while seeing all the great reviews, I always think 'Yeah... but we could've done so much more.'
--Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Age of Conan Senior Dialog Writer
Read the rest in Exclusive interview with AoC Senior Dialog Writer Aaron Dembski-Bowden
The fashion in most programming languages today demands strong typing. The theory is that strong typing allows a compiler to detect a large class of errors at compile time. The sooner we can detect and repair errors, the less they cost us. JavaScript is a loosely typed language, so JavaScript compilers are unable to detect type errors. This can be alarming to people who are coming to JavaScript from strongly typed languages. But it turns out that strong typing does not eliminate the need for careful testing. And I have found in my work that the sorts of errors that strong type checking finds are not the errors I worry about. On the other hand, I find loose typing to be liberating. I don't need to form complex class hierarchies. And I never have to cast or wrestle with the type system to get the behavior that I want.
--Douglas Crockford
Read the rest in JavaScript: The Good Parts
The natural resources that the strongmen and civil warriors sell off are made into products sold in America. The money we spend on these products goes back to pay for their Kalashnikovs, helicopter gunships, and fleets of private jets. Paul Collier estimates that 290 million of the world’s “bottom billion” people are caught in what he calls “the resource trap.” Millions of these poor people must watch helplessly as their countries’ resources are sent overseas while our money flows in to the men with guns.
This is literally theft. The authoritarians and insurgents have no right to sell these countries’ resources. As the ancient Roman legal maxim says, Nemo dat quod non habet: no one can give what they do not have. The authoritarians and insurgents do not own these countries’ resources. The natural resources of a country belong, after all, to its people.
--Leif Wenar Read the rest in Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppressed People
Now if you fancy MMOs as playgrounds where half the fun is to freely gank people and find new ways to exploit the game, Age of Conan is perfect for that - in its short lifespan there has already been duping exploits, powerleveling loopholes and PvP exploits, and I'm sure there are plenty more for the evil gamers to find. For us less evil gamers, if you decided to jump in, you need inhuman amounts of patience and hope to go with the game box, as what you are getting is effectively a half-finished beta with a subscription fee. There is some potential for sure, but based on historical evidence with Anarchy Online, personally I'm not holding my breath. Simple bugs and missing things will most likely get fixed as the time goes by, but there are several flaws that run so deep that they are almost impossible to correct at this point.
The impressive sales figures of Age of Conan demonstrate the massive demand for a new top tier MMO. Current ones just can't push out new content rapidly enough to keep the players happy, so there is room for new contenders. It's a shame that those players who took the early positive comments based on early parts of the game will most likely end up disappointed - and Funcom will see the greatest monthly percentage drop in MMO subscriber numbers since... well, the launch of Anarchy Online, most likely.
--Jarno Kokko
Read the rest in YouGamers - Reviews
In our us-versus-them culture, every political campaign is a battle to define who exactly the "us" and "them" are. Republicans typically say it is natives versus immigrants, Christians versus non-Christians and heartland folks versus Hollywood elites. At their most effective, Democrats parry by defining the "us" as the majority of working people, and the "them" as the tiny group of plutocrats who control the country.
In recent years, Democrats have stopped making this case for fear of offending their big donors. But this is exactly the argument they must make if they hope to defeat John McCain.
--David Sirota
Read the rest in Countering race with class
On top of that I've had no luck getting a real review copy. Many months after Java One when they said they'd get me a copy right away, they gave me a license that would timeout. Yes, I could afford to buy it, and I do buy products when it makes sense. But I'm sorry, there's a line; I'm not going to invest a lot of effort into something that, if I like it I would end up promoting, just to have the license timeout.
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in On the Thought: NetBeans 4.0 & IDEs
For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.
--Christopher B. Leinberger
Read the rest in The Next Slum?
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.
The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)
--Bill Gates
Read the rest in Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail
Mr. Obama may be on slippery ground because of his previous commitment to stick with the public system. But given that his campaign essentially embodies the ideals of reform — to a degree no one seriously thought possible just a few years ago — it’s going to be difficult for the McCain campaign or the chorus of scolds to generate much traction on the issue. After all, Mr. Obama’s all but certain financial advantage in the campaign will be derived from donors of modest means — not wealthy vested interests.
Ever since Watergate, the ideal of campaign finance reform has been to replace a system fueled by special interests and big money with either full public financing or a system of civic-minded small donors. The former is abhorred by much of the public while the latter looks remarkably like barackobama.com. In effect, the Obama campaign has come closer to achieving the ideals of campaign finance reform than 30-plus years of regulation. To condemn the campaign’s departure from the system is to elevate rules over the principle that gave birth to the rules in the first place.
--Francis Wilkinson
Read the rest in Bring It On - Campaign Stops - 2008 Elections - Opinion
So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.
That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.
--Glenn Greenwald
Read the rest in George Bush's latest powers, courtesy of the Democratic Congress - Glenn Greenwald
In the standard Ruby deployment, using the standard core XML processing library, there is no way to write out XML. It is impossible because of bugs in the library.
The worst part?
THAT STUPID BUG IN THEIR CORE LIBRARY WOULD HAVE BEEN FIXED WITH STATIC TYPING. Even more if you have a type system which can check nulls for you. Null pointers/”nil when you didn’t expect it!” errors are totally solvable problems. The fact that our industry hasn’t moved past this painful left-over from C is driving me crazy. The next person who tries to tell me that dynamic typing is the best thing since sliced bread is going to get an earful. It is a flat-out wrong position, and I’m done hearing otherwise from anyone.
--Robert Fischer
Read the rest in Enfranchised Mind » My Frustrations with REXML: Ruby’s Standard Library for Reading/Writing XML; or, Ruby’s Problem Is Its Type System, and Don’t Try to Tell Me Otherwise
I think there's two things right now that are pushing the changes; they're really pushing the database world. The first thing that's going to push the basic old OLCP transactional database world, which you're right--that world really hasn't change in some time now--is really a change in the number of cores and the move to solid state disks because a lot of the code that has been written today or a lot of the concept around database is the idea that you don't have access to enough memory. Your disk is slow, can't do random reads very well, and you maybe have one, maybe eight processors but you think about yourself like-- you look at some of the upper end hardware and the mini-core stuff, like some of what Sun has got to a lesser degree Intel has got and you're almost looking at kind of an array of processing that you're doing; you've got access to so many processors. And well the whole story of trying to optimize for getting away with --trying to optimize around the problem of Random IO being expensive well that's not that big of a deal when you actually have solid state disks. So that's one whole area I think that will not actually push but it will cause a rethinking in what we call--what we think of today as the standard Jim Gray relational database design.
On the second side of this which may actually be more exciting is the issue of--instead of the structured data world of the relational database but the semi--the semi-structured world. You look at what is being done today with CouchDB, you look at Amazon ScaleDB, to a lesser extent but to a similar extent you--not ScaleDB, SimpleDB--to a lesser extent or a similar extent Tokyo Cabinet, those databases are really kind of fascinating because those databases are redefining really how we access data and how we are going to be searching and using data. So there's a whole world out there that's just starting to open up in that direction.
--Brian Aker, MySQL
Read the rest in Brian Aker's Vision for a Livable Design, Looking at MySQL as OSCON Approaches
MMO gamers are a strange bunch - some people seem to accept just about anything from a MMO launch these days, as long as the developer promises that there will be fixes and patches later on. Fanboys may keep defending a flawed game long after it's obvious that the pre-launch PR materials they devoured and worshipped were just that - advertising to promote the game in the best possible light.
Personally I subscribe to the school of thought that judges the game purely on it's merits and expects games to be released when they are complete, with patches reserved for introducing new content, fixing unforeseen problems and correcting non-obvious balance issues. Funcom, on the other hand, has effectively released a half-completed beta version, and hopes to "fix it all after launch". The grumpy old MMO gamer in me is not pleased, and I'm disclosing this straight up; I passionately dislike games that are published incomplete, and Age of Conan is one of the worst examples in the recent memory.
--Jarno Kokko
Read the rest in YouGamers - Reviews
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty- first in per-capita energy use.
--David Owen
Read the rest in Green Manhattan
The tools market is dead. Open source killed it.
--John De Goes
Read the rest in Interview: John De Goes Introduces a Newly Free Source Code Editor | Javalobby
This willingness to leave old technology behind is a great strength of the Apple platform. Rather than enshrining past decisions in perpetuity, Apple has a willingness to say "enough's enough; this new way is better, so you should use it". There's no denying that this is a double edged sword. The upside is that this approach lets Apple concentrate its (relatively limited) resources, and if all software (eventually) uses only one toolkit, the UI experience will be much more consistent and familiar to users. The downside is that it does requires more work for software developers. Those with large Carbon applications now have a tough choice; rewrite their UIs, or remain 32-bit forever. One high profile practical consequence of this dilemma is that the next version of Photoshop (CS4) will be 64-bit on Windows but not on Mac OS X; a Cocoa UI won't be available until Photoshop CS5.
Although this does cause some short term inconvenience, in the long run it makes for a more nimble platform that offers a better experience to users. Apple can make sweeping changes (switching from PowerPC to x86, say) without having to think about how to migrate every last bit of legacy technology. Users benefit from applications that are actively maintained, which leverage new OS features as and when they're developed, and which work in a consistent way without surprises. The regular pruning of dead wood that Apple's software ecosystem undergoes makes the whole thing much healthier.
--Peter Bright
Read the rest in From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X—Part III: Page 3
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature.
Eventually I figured out that some of those features were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them were poorly specified, and so were more likely to cause portability problems. Some resulted in code that was difficult to read or modify. Some induced me to write in a manner that was too tricky and error-prone. And some of those features were design errors. Sometimes language designers make mistakes.
Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be a better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts. After all, how can you build something good out of bad parts?
It is rarely possible for standards committees to remove imperfections from a language because doing so would cause the breakage of all of the bad programs that depend on those bad parts. They are usually powerless to do anything except heap more features on top of the existing pile of imperfections. And the new features do not always interact harmoniously, thus producing more bad parts.
But you have the power to define your own subset. You can write better programs by relying exclusively on the good parts.
JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. It went straight into Netscape Navigator 2 just as it was, and it was very rough. When Java™ applets failed, JavaScript became the "Language of the Web" by default. JavaScript's popularity is almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language.
Fortunately, JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript is so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent toy. My intention here is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding, dynamic programming language. JavaScript is a block of marble, and I chip away the features that are not beautiful until the language's true nature reveals itself. I believe that the elegant subset I carved out is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.
--Douglas Crockford
Read the rest in JavaScript: The Good Parts
Most of the rules in this book derive from a few fundamental principles. Clarity and simplicity are of paramount importance. The user of a module should never be surprised by its behavior. Modules should be as small as possible but no smaller. (As used in this book, the term module refers to any reusable software component, from an individual method to a complex system consisting of multiple packages.) Code should be reused rather than copied. The dependencies between modules should be kept to a minimum. Errors should be detected as soon as possible after they are made, ideally at compile time.
--Joshua Bloch
Read the rest in Effective Java, 2nd edition, p. 2
It turns out the mobile devices have grown up so much that even a cell phone, even a fairly, like, middle-of-the-road smart phone today probably has more computing power than the first desktops that were used to run the Linux at. And that doesn’t seem to be stopping.
So, I think especially as far as the kernel is concerned, people worried about that more than I think it turns out you need to worry. The biggest issues on the mobile side tend to be not so much – well, there is still the kernel side; you want to make it smaller, you want to make it more efficient, but I think the thing that more people worry about is actually interfaces.
It makes more a difference that the way you connect to a mobile phone is different from the way you connect to a desktop. You have a very limited keyboard, you have touch screen issues, you have a very small screen and I think the bigger issues tend to be in things like the UI interfaces.
--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in Linus Torvalds
The principle of national ownership is deeply embedded in international law, but it is also violated daily under cover of a rule from the days of European colonial empires. By this archaic rule the internationally recognized power to sell off the territory’s resources is vested in anyone violent enough to cow a country’s people into submission. By this rule any tyrant or civil warrior can gain the right to sell off a country’s resources simply through force of arms. According to this archaic rule for selling resources, might makes right.
It is this archaic “might makes right” rule that generates systematic incentives toward the curses of tyranny, violence, and poverty. Authoritarians who gain the resource right use the money from resource sales to buy weapons and spies to keep the population living in fear. Coup plotters look for ways to grab the resource right from the current regime and then become authoritarians in their turn. Rebels who can seize control of resource-rich territory gain the funds they need to start or escalate a civil war. And the people, whose resources are being sold off, become not the beneficiaries of this wealth but the victim of those who use their own wealth to repress them. “Might makes right” is the rule that sets off a violent contest to extract poor countries’ resources while crushing popular resistance, and it is the rule sends the products of crime into our gas stations and shopping malls.
--Leif Wenar Read the rest in Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppressed People
the most important principle in all of software design is this: Systems should never reboot.
If you design a system so that it never needs to reboot, then you will eventually, even if it's by a very roundabout path, arrive at a system that will live forever.
All the systems I've listed need to reboot occasionally, which means their practical lifespan is anywhere from a dozen to a hundred more years. Some of them are getting up there — lots of them are in their twenties and thirties now, and there are even a few in their early forties. But they're all still a far cry from immortal.
I think the second most important design principle, really a corollary to the first, is that systems must be able to grow without rebooting. A system that can't grow over time is static, so it really isn't a system at all; it's a function. It might be a very complex function with lots of possible inputs and outputs. It might be a very useful function, and it might live for a long time. But functions are always either replaced or subsumed by systems that can grow. And I've come to believe, over nearly two decades of thinking about this, that systems that can grow and change without rebooting can live forever.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: The Pinocchio Problem
Filtered through the lens of a couple of awkward turns of phrase and an oratorical style that could seem tendentious, Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing years, he stepped out of campaign journalism. He began sending his speeches out directly over MoveOn.org's e-mail list, made a movie that asked people to sit down and listen to him for the better part of two hours, and did his rounds on interview shows on which he could have fairly lengthy conversations with hosts.
The result? A massive rehabilitation of his reputation, including in the eyes of the very political pundits who once spurned him. According to a CBS News poll, Gore's favorable rating late last year was at 46%, up from 18% in late 1999. At 46%, incidentally, Gore's rating is higher than the most recent ratings of Bush (30%), Obama (44%), Clinton (42%) or McCain (32%).
Ask those pundits about the new Gore, of course, and they will sigh and search the heavens and moan that, oh, if he had only been this way when he was in politics, how different it all could have been. But he was this way when he was in politics. He was a substantive global-warming obsessive with a penchant for long disquisitions on meaty topics. When his pipeline to the public was a gaffe-hungry media looking for ways to humiliate him, that didn't turn out so well. When he was able to speak directly to the public, those traits were considerably more attractive.
--Ezra Klein
Read the rest in A campaign without the 'gotchas'
Dell has engaged in repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing, and failure to provide warranty service and rebates."
--Judge Joseph Teresi, New York State Supreme Court,
Read the rest in Five Steps Dell Should Take To Address A N.Y.
Judge's Fraud Ruling
commercial companies are realizing that the term "open source" can be co-opted to some degree, and are starting to confuse us with software that is mostly, but not completely open source. Or they do so with licenses that are similar to, but not completely identical to, the open-source licenses that they publicly tout. Or they do so with software that is described as fully open source, when in fact there are proprietary add-ons required to make it useful.
The bottom line is that in open source, as with everything else, let the buyer (or downloader) beware: Richard Stallman might have been the first one to realize that seemingly clear terms can easily be confused by the general public. In the case of open source, the problem is less one of semantics and multiple meanings, and more one of companies blurring the line between their profitable proprietary software, and their attempts to move into the open source market.
--Reuven Lerner
Read the rest in Read the Fine Print on "Open Source" Software | OStatic
You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or shaving cream — even the plastic in your computer may be the product of theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally stolen from some of the world’s poorest people. These thefts are permitted — indeed encouraged — by an archaic rule of international trade that violates the most fundamental rule of capitalism: to protect property rights.
Tracing these stolen goods back to where the thefts occur lands us in some of the most wretched places on earth. What these countries have in common is an abundance of natural resources and plentiful political violence and corruption. All suffer from what Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs call “the resource curse.” Here dictators and insurgents sell off the country’s resources to foreigners, terrifying the people into submission while keeping the wealth for themselves.
--Leif Wenar
Read the rest in Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppressed People
Love is bigger than government. Who the hell are we as a government to tell people who you can fall in love with? I think it‘s absurd that fact it‘s even being debated.
We can solve the problem simply. Government only acknowledges civil unions then you don‘t have to put your sex down. Let the churches acknowledge marriage. They are the private sectors. If they don‘t want to acknowledge it, they have every right to do so. How on earth can we even entertain the fact that government should have the ability to tell you as an individual who you can fall in love with? Ridiculous.
--Jesse Ventura
Read the rest in Crooks and Liars » Jesse Ventura Schools Pat Buchanan on Gay Marriage
I think most software is crap. Well, that's not quite right. It's fairer to say that I think all software is crap. Yeah. There you have it, Stevey in a Nutshell: software is crap.
Even so, I think some software systems are better than others: the producer of the crap in question swallowed some pennies, maybe, so their crap is shiny in places. Once in a while someone will even swallow a ruby, and their crap is both beautiful and valuable, viewed from a certain, ah, distance. But a turd is still a turd, no matter how many precious stones someone ate to make it.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: The Pinocchio Problem
Most of the people around you would love to be able to use the language that they really like, but the cost for the company just doesn't make sense. I would therefore revise your break down as follows: the reason for not using a non-mainstream language in a big company is 10% politics 10% technology and 80% common sense.
Let me turn the table on you and imagine that one of your coworkers comes to you and tells you that he really wants to implement his part of the project in this awesome language called Draco. How would you react?
Well, you're a pragmatic kind of guy and even though the idea seems wacky, I'm sure you would start by doing some homework (which would show you that Draco was an awesome language used back in the days on the Amiga). Reading up on Draco, you realize that it's indeed a very cool language that has some features that are a good match for the problem at hand. But even as you realize this, you already know what you need to tell that guy, right? Probably something like "You're out of your mind, go back to Eclipse and get cranking". And suddenly, you've become *that* guy. Just because you showed some common sense.
--Cedric Beust
Read the rest in Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Return of the Statically Typed Languages
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)
The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.
Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.
--Naomi Klein
Read the rest in China's All
One of the favorite arguments of the free software and open source community for the obvious superiority of such software over proprietary alternatives is the user's supposed ability to take control and modify inadequate software to suit their wishes. Expectedly, the argument has been often repeated in relation to OLPC.
I can't possibly be the only one seeing that the emperor has no clothes.
I started using Linux in '95, before most of today's Internet-using general public knew there existed an OS outside of Windows. It took a week to configure X to work with my graphics card, and I learned serious programming because I later needed to add support for a SCSI hard drive that wasn't recognized properly. (Not knowing that C and kernel hacking are supposed to be "hard", I kept at it for three months until I learned enough to write a patch that works.) I've been primarily a UNIX user since then, alternating between Debian, FreeBSD and later Ubuntu, and recently co-writing a best-selling Linux book.
About eight months ago, when I caught myself fighting yet another battle with suspend/resume on my Linux-running laptop, I got so furious that I went to the nearest Apple store and bought a MacBook. After 12 years of almost exclusive use of free software, I switched to Mac OS X. And you know, shitty power management and many other hassles aren't Linux's fault. The fault lies with needlessly secretive vendors not releasing documentation that would make it possible for Linux to play well with their hardware. But until the day comes when hardware vendors and free software developers find themselves holding hands and spontaneously bursting into one giant orgiastic Kumbaya, that's the world we live in. So in the meantime, I switched to OS X and find it to be an overwhelmingly more enjoyable computing experience. I still have my free software UNIX shell, my free software programming language, my free software ports system, my free software editor, and I run a bunch of free software Linux virtual machines. The vast, near-total majority of computer users aren't programmers. Of the programmers, a vast, near-total majority don't dare in the Land o' Kernel tread. As one of the people who actually can hack my kernel to suit, I find that I don't miss the ability in the least. There, I said it. Hang me for treason.
--Ivan Krstiç
Read the rest in ivan krstiç ? code culture » Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi
No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, "You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience." Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook. And I’ll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.
-- John Roos
Read the rest in The Amazing Money Machine
What a joke. JavaFX was announced with great fanfare at last year's JavaOne and yet what has actually been released in a year? Nothing of value. Just more hoopla and blah blah blah. Way too little, way too late. Especially now that Adobe has started opening up Flash and friends.
Indeed, with all of the improvements to the world of JavaScript/Ajax libraries, frameworks, and tools and most especially with the growing capabilities around the support of canvas in browsers, there's very little real reason to use those wretched "Rich Internet Application" packages like Flash and JavaFX.
--John D. Mitchell
Read the rest in John D. Mitchell's Blog: JavaOne 2008: Day 1, The Good, The Bad, and The Lame
Martin Odersky and I chatted about the wildcard syntax and the history of generics. He said that the Sun folks approached the introduction of generics very cautiously because they did not want to repeat the disaster of inner classes! At the time, inner classes were perceived to be a short-sighted reaction to C# delegates, with ugly syntax and initially underspecified semantics. Indeed, it took many years for the generics proposal to mature. Wildcards were literally tossed in at the last minute. (The ? super T syntax was suggested at Java One, shortly before the Java 5 release, by someone in the audience of Gilad Bracha's presentation, to replace the proposed T extends ?.)
Now, of course, we have people urging caution with closures so that we don't repeat the disaster of generics.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog: Java One Day 3
In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
--Peggy Noonan
Read the rest in Declarations
Saying you should use systems that don't scale well when your project is tiny is like saying you should use Roman numerals for calculations involving small numbers.
--Ben Lynn
Read the rest in Git Magic
The depiction of McCain as a truth-telling, apolitical maverick is just about as accurate as previous similar depictions of Bush were. On virtually every policy issue of significance, McCain's positions -- not his rhetoric but his actual positions -- ultimately transform into those held by the dominant right-wing faction of the Republican Party and, even more so, are identical to the positions that shaped and defined the failed Bush presidency.
In every way that matters, this exotic, independent-minded maverick is nothing more than a carbon copy extension of the Bush worldview, nothing more than a George W. Bush third term. One sees this most clearly in McCain's view of America's role in the world, whereby he channels the central, and indescribably disastrous, Bush mentality almost verbatim.
The central animating principle of the two Bush/Cheney terms has been that Islamic radicalism is not merely a threat to be managed and rationally contained, like all the other threats and risks the United States faces. Rather, it is some sort of transcendent ideological struggle -- a glorious War of Civilizations -- comparable to the great ideological wars of the past. As such, it will engage all of America's military might and the bulk of its resources, as the United States navigates an endless stream of enemies and wars that subordinates all other national priorities and that assumes a paramount role in our political life. That was the central theme of George Bush's presidency, and it is the central theme of John McCain's worldview now.
--Glenn Greenwald
Read the rest in Glenn Greenwald: Great American Hypocrites: McCain's Old Packaging
Efforts to sustain the housing bubble ensure that houses will be unaffordable for young people or to families moving into bubble inflated markets. For this reason, perhaps the house price support program should be dubbed the "The Housing Unaffordability Act." Every member of Congress would be proud to have their name attached to that one.
--Dean Baker
Read the rest in TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | <strong>What Happened to “Free-Market” Conservatives (or Neo
let's try to take immigration completely out of the picture for a moment and imagine that, instead of a wall, the federal government was proposing to build a 4-lane expressway along the river from Brownsville to Laredo. Wouldn't there be a unified grassroots uprising against it? What if they revealed that it would cut right through parts of the LRGV Wildlife Corridor, which has been so carefully patched together and cultivated over the last 20+ years? And what if there would be no exit or overpass anywhere near the Sabal Palm sanctuary and other sites, effectively cutting those places off from the existing road system? And, on top of all that, what if they announced that, in order to speed construction, all environmental review would be waived? Wouldn't we all be outraged?
--David Sibley
Read the rest in Sibley Guides Notebook: More on Texas Border Wall
Android is a completely open system, while Apple is definitely more of a closed system. They say, "Here’s a very small box that you can work in." It’s a very nice box that has a lot of nice features, but as a developer, you’re a little bit constrained
--Jason Cline, SitePen
Read the rest in Macworld | SDK showdown: iPhone vs. Android
The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. What is not the failure to communicate is when something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they wanna do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a "wack-a-doodle." It's to paint me as something. Something's wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with this country. There's -its policies. We're perfect. We-our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them. That's not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.
I think they wanted to communicate that I am- unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And, by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That's what they wanted to communicate.
--Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Read the rest in Firedoglake » If the Secret Service Can Apologize to Wright, So Can the Media
In today’s America neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf
--Tony Judt
Read the rest in Reappraisals - Tony Judt - Book Review
C and C++ are definitely losing ground. There is a simple explanation for this. Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion. The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.
--Paul Jansen
Read the rest in Dr. Dobb's | Programming Languages: Everyone Has a Favorite One | April 23, 2008
It's interesting for me to see the way the Chinese authorities are treating the flame with such reverence, almost as though it symbolized their claims to regional, if not global, hegemony. Symbols, after all, can mean what you want them to mean, and in a society which has totalitarian control of whatever 1.4 billion people (and their relatives abroad, if they ever want to see them alive again) think, the importance of a mere symbol can be very strategic. The first move to politicize the Olympic torch was a Beijing Government move. As Olympian Alice Mills, quoted in the article above, says, the Olympics, "is not an event that is supposed to be about controversy, it's about the world uniting," But what if the world, or at least the Australia, Burmese, Tibetan, and some other bits, doesn't want to unite behind a fascist Chinese despotism? Then maybe it is supposed to be about controversy. The concept of "Li" or harmony as it is most often translated is used by the Beijing government to mean cooperation with authority. Human rights have no place in this kind of harmony.
--Roger Williams
Read the rest in Readers' Comments: Thorpe 'not worried' about torch protests
the MacBook Pro arrived last summer - I was sold enough that my wife got a MacBook - which she loves. Now I've upgraded my old iPod to a Nano, and my wife is getting one of the classic models.
This is a sea change for us - not too many years ago, I was arguing that Macs simply weren't worth the cost premium. Now? The sheer amount of time I haven't had to pound my head on the desk makes up for that differential.
--James Robertson
Read the rest in Apple
The real question isn’t “What can Microsoft do to fix the