Rants: Who's Going to Save You?
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Readers sound off on the joys of sticking to the formula, the history of digital music, and who needs saving. Plus: Links to our most commented blog posts.
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Just put your exclamation mark in the box Reader poll The "will they, won't they?" Microsoft-Yahoo! cliffhanger has had the IT world on tenterhooks for a couple of weeks now, and planet Earth has temporarily stopped spinning on its axis in anticipation of the outcome of the marriage proposal from Redmond to the company! which! saved! the! exclamation! mark! from! extinction!â¦
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.
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In response to the Feb. 9 letter from Gabrielle E. Vantol, in which she asks "Can somebody please tell me how we can support our soldiers and their families?" Here is one option. I will warn you though, that this option can become an addictive habit.
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Tycho:  You might want to see this, or you might not:  I know that Gabriel has sworn off all exposure to the game, which may also be your policy.  Even so, this is the first time they've shown the distaff side of the character creator, so maybe you'll rescind your earlier mandate.  A video with a similar theme popped up over at 1up as well, and it does things a little differently:  I don't like its look at the character creator as well, but the cut they have of the intro is far superior.  If you watched the other one, you're in for a penny, in for a pound:  you should check it out.    There's a lot of other content out today as well  at GameTrailers - but the whole thing is a minefield of spoilers so I'll understand if you hold back.  The intro itself (from the 1up cut) is perfectly executed.  Understand that I am almost the optimal audience for this sort of game, but even so.  I see a lot of game content, and you need to dig pretty deep to generate actual wonder.      I was excited to learn that they got Jack Wall in to do the soundtrack - he's worked with BioWare before, but he also did the soundtrack for Myst IV: Revelations - one of my all-time favorites.    (CW)TB
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Comment is free: Mark Lawson: Our ridiculous vigilance represents a society gone mad, but the disagreement is over why this happened.
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With all the hoopla over Bush and Kerry, some of you may not have been paying close attention to the other races going on in this loaded US political season. I've read a good dozen or so Senate outlooks, and my blurry eyes and spinning brain kept getting lost in all the numbers and losing track of who, ultimately, was likely to control the Senate on November third. So I made my very own Senate outlook to figure it out (or add further confusion, depending on what you think of my predictions). The bad news is, we probably won't know who controls the Senate on November third. The good news, if you're a Democrat (or a person who loves one), is that my best guess at this point is that when the dust settles, Democrats will probably be in control by the very slimmest possible margin. Shock! But everyone knows the Dems have no chance of taking either house of Congress. I think everyone hasn't been paying attention. Read on for my rundown.
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By Thomas Ginsberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Feb. 9--Pleading hasn't worked. Freebies ultimately fail. Outright pressure can backfire.
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Environmentalists crash Macworld and chide Apple for its lackluster recycling efforts. Also: Notes on how to stop cyberbullying are here & hellip;.  Motorola loses its number two, who wanted to be number one & hellip;. and more.
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First, thanks for the great comments on yesterday's post about Apple and the hard disk of my MacBook. People were universally positive and helpful, and I can say I really learned some really important things as a result of the discussion. First, the cost of the data on the hard disk swamps the value of the value of the disk and even the value of the computer. There was source code on the computer, and other information, which if it fell into the wrong hands, could cause some serious problems for me. I have no agreement with Apple that covers the security or privacy of the data. As far as I know they think they own the contents of the disk as well as the disk itself. The experience I had with them actually makes me think they probably do feel its theirs. This from a company that takes the security of its own private information very seriously, they seem to have almost no regard for the security of its customers' information. You have no control over when a hard disk will crash, or any foreknowledge of when it's even likely to crash. So there's no way to protect against this kind of security issue. And that's what it is. What kind of sense does it make to invest in firewalls, and of what value is Apple's claim that Macs are inherently more secure, when all the data on one of my computers is now completely out of my control forever? I'm not so concerned about the privacy issues, but I could imagine that other people might be. And if identity thieves are not aware of this backdoor way to get access to private information, how long before they are? Security experts always warn us that obscurity is not a good strategy for security. So what to do?  Basically I've given up on trying to get Apple to do the right thing and give me my disk back. Some people at the Emeryville store are well-itentioned, and are just naive about the problems that can come when you trust people with all your data. Others just don't care. Either way it seems unlikely that I'm going to get it back, and even if I do, it's been out of my control for too long.  I'm going to go through the tedious job of changing the passwords on all my sensitive online accounts. That was overdue anyway. And next time a laptop blows its hard disk, I'm either going to replace it myself and shred the old disk, the same way I'd shred any sensitive documents before throwing them out, or just throw away the whole computer. I know this isn't green, but there seems to be no other course that's anything close to secure. And always be aware that you could lose a laptop, or it could be stolen. So far it seems that this is not yet an identity theft concern, but you can't be sure, and it won't be long before it is.  Thanks again for all the good info, advice and vibe.
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Tycho:  Gabriel's ill-conceived Pong Pong challenge has brought out the wolves, and now the forest rings with their baying. Amaze Entertainment is holding tryouts internally to see who will leave our merry band in ruins. Upstarts from the DigiPen Institute of Technology will arrive soon to unseat the last generation as is the charge of all young men. "Suckerpunch" will cease to be a euphemism when one of their usually mild animators suddenly strikes my diaphragm.
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Tycho:  I'm super depressed.  I thought I had invented a new word - mirthquake - and then I was going to say that you should prepare yourselves for the aforementioned, as today's comic strip was rated this or that number on the rictus scale.  I mean seriously, I've been excited all weekend.  A simple Google search put me in my place - the word is practically ubiquitous.  Expect it soon on Urban Dictionary, that mausoleum of once vibrant language.
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I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.  I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started. First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence. Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.  None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever. Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing. People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should! With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on? And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.  And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff. Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done? PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.
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By Mike Peters, Greeley Tribune, Colo.  Mar. 3--OK. We know you're gonna be mad about this, but we're doing it anyway, so you might as well just take a look at the helpful stuff we're going to give you and try to understand.
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Tycho:  I watched this video myself on Friday, and then watched it again, and then watched it a third time when Khoo came in - providing commentary throughout, which I'm almost certain was unwelcome.  I urge you not to watch the embedded, nasty  version over at GameVideos, but to take advantage of their "Download" or "Watch Larger Version" options.  This way, you can obsess as I have - pausing on each screen of the character generator or battle interface, drinking deep of their  forbidden texts.  (CW)TB
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Yesterday's piece on health care and the presidential election got a great response, and some of it from Republicans, using the slogans and logic I hoped they wouldn't. But that's okay, it helps me focus my rhetoric on the precise point of disagreement, and hopefully by illuminating it, I can either convince some of the Republicans to come over to my side, or help eliminate some of the confusion on both sides. Or maybe it'll just keep the argument from slopping over into all kinds of irrelevant issues. The basic Republican argument goes like this. Why should I pay for the health needs of people who are so irresponsible as to not have health insurance.  If I got it wrong, please set me straight. Now I'd like to answer this, very carefully. The Democrats aren't proposing that you should pay for the uninsured. Key point. They either agree with you, or know that they're not going to get their proposal passed unless they take this into account. The Obama plan says you don't get care unless you have insurance. His proposal aims to get a lot more people insured. Clinton goes one step further, by requiring everyone to have health insurance.  Also, you already pay for the health needs of the uninsured. Whether you or I like it, we don't look the other way when someone is in need. You may feel the system should work differently, but that's not responsive to the proposal the Democrats are making. The debate is how health care works for the non-indigent.  If you have property, a car, a house, or if your kids go to private school or college, or if you want to take a vacation, or have a baby, or exercise between jobs, getting sick without insurance is a sure way to go from being middle class to being poor, quickly. This is why we have health insurance, to smoothe out the risk, to protect our family's lifestyle. It seems to me it's a good thing. It's the market solving a basic human need.  So this is what we should be discussing, how can we get insurance for all the people who want it, or should we require it for everyone -- this is the debate of 2008. This is what the Democrats are putting on the table, and what McCain, or whoever is the Republican nominee, will have to respond to, if we're going to have the respectful debate everyone is talking about having.  Why is this such a problem?  A lot of people, even healthy people without pre-existing conditions, can't get health insurance. And what if you have a pre-existing condition? Do you really think it's cool for the insurance industry to refuse them coverage? Why is that a good thing? I honestly don't get it. Consider the penalty for not having insurance. (See above.) So far the leaders of the Republican Party have managed to keep health care off the national agenda, but this year, it's there. If you doubt me, just ask a few people you know, and don't just ask poor people or Democrats, ask Republicans. Disease isn't a party issue, and while poor people tend to have poorer health, even well-off people need health care. And most people can't afford to pay for a catastrophic illness, and enough of them can't get health insurance to make this an important national issue. If you disagree with this, please let me know why. PS: Phil Windley asks where it stops. Should we provide free housing for the homeless? And what about free cable TV for people without cable TV? (He provides other examples.) No, this is only about health insurance. It's not about any of the other things mentioned in Phil's post.
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Tycho:  With PAX coming up this weekend (!!!), we didn't really have time on Friday to invest in Virgil's Wikiscanner - that mystical oracle that takes a raw IP range and then excretes a list of that organization's Wikipedia edits.  This is the pulsing, possibly Martian device that dished up last week's awesome Electronic Arts edits.    I wasn't sure if we should feel sorry for them or not - now that EA is situated in the number two slot, does that make them the scrappy underdog? - but I quickly realized it probably doesn't matter.  They can come right out and say "Yes, we edit it all the time," mischaracterize the nature of the edits, and by the time it's on the second page the events in question never happened.  People don't remember anything these days that isn't on the first page of their feed aggregators. In any case, the entire affair is talking place  on Wikipedia.  Kudzu will grow over the propaganda soon enough.    Though time was indeed in short supply, we did fritter some portion of it pawing through ancient email headers, scraping for filth on old enemies.  Or enemies with whom we have resumed talks.  Or enemies who are now friends!  Even people I hope to make enemies in the future by my careless commentary must fall beneath the scanner's baleful eye.    Like a chugging trawler, we hauled up net after net of treasure onto the deck, sifting it on hands and knees.  I'd never expose it, of course - sparking a desperate arms race to find self-serving commentary is a conflict I'm likely to lose.  And with the deep catalogue of nemeses we've inspired worldwide (and even below the world, in the warrens of the pale Gambrya, where hate is eternal) it's not what I'd call a fabulous scenario.  For us, at least; no doubt, our foes have already begun their malevolent harvest.