Before
A chronicle of an American life
Archive for October, 2007
30 October 2007 at 2.39 am · Filed under Random
CNN reports the Gap Corporation was shocked by reports that a subcontractor in India used child slave labor to make clothes. The report is heartbreaking, especially in 2007. However, it speaks for itself, leaving me to comment on something else I found shocking.
What on Earth is CNN reporter Alina Cho wearing??? It’s a shapeless mufti with two freaky Band-Aid/buckles haphazardly sewn over the shoulder. Didn’t she realize this was a story about clothes? Or — chillingly — is she one of the victims, too?
27 October 2007 at 8.27 pm · Filed under City life, Funny stories, Technology
So I’m sitting at the Caribou Coffee, here to do some writing and thinking. There’s an incredibly bad guitar singer here with an amp — which never happens. I’m trying to work, but the old man is cranking out bad renditions of the Beatles and the Monkees. (Come on man, pick one and get good at it!)
I am grateful, then, that I at least have my laptop with me so I can listen to my own music. But there’s some terrible problem, and I can’t get the music working! Windows Media Player says it can’t access all of my files, which is bizarre. So I download WinAmp, copy the music to other locations, try Yahoo Radio, reboot multiple times — anything to drown this guy out, but nothing works. It’s a travesty and I can’t think!
Finally, after half an hour of screwing around and NOT writing, I figure out the driver problem, and I crank up the first song that plays: Sedated, by the Ramones. Ahh, sweet blessed peace. I start jamming along, banging my head and really being happy.
And that’s when I notice them. A group of four ‘tweenies, sitting in front of me, giggling. And one of them has a camera phone and is trying to casually hold it over the shoulder so he can video my inspired Ramones performance. The others are dying laughing and trying to discreetly help him point it the right way.
Not wanting to wind up on YouTube, I stop chair-dancing and just stare at the phone intensely. They quit taping me and act like it never happened.
That’s when I turn on the flashlight on my phone, lean over, and take this picture of the little bastards:
(Perpetrator in blue hoodie.) They immediately melt in mortified embarrassment. Giggling stops, whispering starts. Nobody can stand to look at me after that.
Suck on it, punks. I’m not thirty yet.
23 October 2007 at 1.12 pm · Filed under Technology, The law
Microsoft announced it would not appeal its adverse antitrust judgment in the Court of First Instance to the European Court of Justice, Europe’s highest court. I will leave it to those who actually know European law to comment on the merits of any possible appeal, but focus on the technology and on the press coverage of this significant ”event.”
In exchange for not fighting the case further, Microsoft agreed to open up certain software protocols at a lower cost than previously, and to license some patents at a lower cost.
The media went nuts with the coverage. Yesterday’s Marketplace radio show ruled: “It’s official — Microsoft is a monopolist.” (That was official long ago, and being a monopolist isn’t illegal.) The Times today allows that the effects remain uncertain but trumpets others’ pronouncements that the deal is “a huge breakthrough” and one that will have a “profound[ e]ffect” that will continue for years to come. Over at CNET, it’s an “important milestone” and “a large win” for everyone but Microsoft.
Amusingly, the most likely effect of this “deal” is to further tighten Microsoft’s grip over those areas where it is already strong: workgroup servers like file and print servers, and of course, the desktop environment — Windows Vista and Office.
It’s all about interoperability. But interoperability already exists. For example, you are probably reading this on a Windows PC or a Mac, or maybe a cell phone. But it is being served to you by a computer running Linux. You don’t know, and you don’t care, thanks to common Internet protocols not controlled by Microsoft. These protocols are free for anyone to use, so there’s no way to make money off monopolizing them. (Of course, people have complained for years that Microsoft has tried to add proprietary extensions to some of them as a way of coopting them. But this hasn’t worked.)
As part of this deal, Microsoft may publish additional undisclosed protocols, but I haven’t seen that in any press coverage yet. Right now, what they offer is mostly junk. The protocols Microsoft is currently licensing are available from other sources (UPnP), tragically outdated (IPX, Gopher), or worthless (the Echo protocol literally just echoes back whatever is sent). You can also license CIFS, which, as the Times article noted, is perhaps the most important one for interoperability in Microsoft’s core file server market. It was completely reverse-engineered by the open-source Samba team; no need to pay for it.
CIFS is an example of why Microsoft’s licensing deal is not the world-changer some might say it is. That protocol allows people using Windows PCs to store files on other computers’ hard drives — the common “file share” or “network drive.” In practical terms, what the Samba program does is let you get rid of a Windows server and replace it with a Linux server that has the same functionality. Samba makes it “look like” a Windows share drive to users. So users don’t notice that their files live on another type of computer, and just like you reading this web page right now, they don’t care. Nobody ever cares what protocol is used to store their files on another computer.
The core of my argument is: if Microsoft opens its protocol library a little more, and makes it cheaper to use those protocols, they are actually strengthening the importance of Windows. It becomes easier for people to build solutions around the Windows PC, and that only increases the value of being a Windows PC owner. A good analogy is the iPod world. There are thousands of products that fit the iPod, whether it’s special headphones, TV adapters, Bluetooth connectors, or whatever. My friend Tom Parker even has a whole bookbag with rubberized iPod controls on the strap and a headphone jack on the outside. All these “interoperable” accessories just make being an iPod owner more compelling — but they don’t really make it easier to, one day, finally get rid of that damn monopoly product, the iPod. By the way, I can’t resist pointing out that Apple has never published or been forced to publish the protocol for the iPod connector, and it changes all the time – much to the annoyance of Tom, whose $75 bag is now “broken” because it’s incompatible with the current iPod. If Microsoft did this — and when IBM did it in the 1960’s — competitors would cry foul and complain of the abuse of monopoly power.
Making new rules for Microsoft’s licensing agreements isn’t going to do anything for competition except increase the dominance of Windows and the other juggernaut, Office. It’s hard to see why Europe would accept this, but Europe has a history of securing worthless promises. The last one was “Windows N,” a version of Windows that didn’t include the Media Player application (and which Microsoft originally called “Windows Reduced Media Edition”). Making Windows N available was supposed to open the market for competing players like RealPlayer, even though you could already run RealPlayer on Windows. What happened? Europe’s regulators made no requirement to sell Windows N at a discount to regular Windows, so Microsoft sells it at the same price, and no rational user would purchase something if he can get more for the same money. Nobody buys Windows N, but Microsoft has to support it anyway. Meanwhile, RealPlayer still sucks.
19 October 2007 at 10.26 pm · Filed under Political
It’s not often that I get to say this, but I was right and I have proof.
If you have been reading my site forever, you’ll remember that I wrote about Jack Whittaker, the man who won a $314.9 million Christmas Powerball jackpot, back on December 29, 2002. In that posting, I argued that the lottery was bad for the people of West Virginia, who are among the poorest in the nation, because it lures them into wasting money on a prize they have no realistic hope of winning. I still believe that huge jackpots like Whittaker’s are dangerous, because they give hope to those susceptible to playing the lottery, and the lottery almost never pays off.
Unfortunately, what happened to Whittaker shows that the payoff isn’t always something you’d want. Whittaker himself has suffered greatly from the burden of winning all that money, according to a recent AP news story and other reports.
According to the Lincoln Journal Star, July 27, 2007, “his granddaughter died of a drug overdose; he was sued for bouncing checks at Atlantic City, N.J., casinos; he was ordered to undergo rehab after being arrested on drunken driving charges; … and he settled a lawsuit filed by the father of an 18-year-old boy, a friend of his granddaughter’s, who was found dead of an overdose in Whittaker’s house.” The New York Times reported in 2003 that “[m]ore than $500,000 was stolen from a sport utility vehicle that [Whittaker] parked at a strip club,” although the money was recovered. But Whittaker didn’t learn his lesson, according to another Times report in 2004, because his truck was robbed again of $100,000. (I haven’t seen that kind of cash rattling around in a back seat since 2005, when Justice Terrence O’Donnell told Cleveland police the $18,000 cash stuffed in a suit bag that was stolen out of his car was merely the product of years of accumulated pocket change.)
A lengthy September 2007 AP story, part of which appeared in the Columbus Dispatch, tells the most human part of the tragedy. “His wife left him and his drug-addicted granddaughter — his protege and heir — died. He endured constant requests for money. Almost five years later, Whittaker is left with things money can’t cure: His daughter’s cancer, a long list of indiscretions documented in newspapers and court records, and an inability to trust others.” He still works, starting the day at 5am, but the story reports on Whittaker’s struggles with “drinking, gambling and philandering,” and by his own account, he has been “involved in 460 legal actions since winning” (some baseless, brought by people who figured he could afford to pay out). The saddest part has to be that he had hoped his granddaughter would inherit his businesses and fortune, and had structured everything to go to her when she turned 21. But a year after Whittaker won the lottery, the 15-year-old granddaughter was in Oxycontin rehab, and she died just 17 years old with cocaine and methadone in her system and a syringe and pills in her bra. According to the article, “Her body was found two weeks later wrapped in a sheet and plastic tarp, hidden in a yard by a boyfriend who panicked when he found her dead.”
Come on, people. Lotteries are bad news. They hurt those who can afford to waste money the least. (Interestingly, by all accounts Whittaker was a millionare when he won, owning his own pipeline construction company, so he should have been better suited than most to handle the sudden wealth.) Most people lose every dollar they bet, or win only token amounts. No one should play lotteries, and no democratic state should be in the business of profiting off these gambling rackets. Whittaker’s sad story is just one example why.
