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Wednesday, November 7, 2001
But he didn't threaten them with an Iceberg Award 
| | Eric Norlin is a devout Denver Nuggets fan who is not happy camping with shitty seats, so he is letting the owner, Stan Kroenke, know — by means of an open letter he's also sending to the two big Denver papers and to the greater blogging community. I'm just doing my part as a fading Golden State Warriors fan. They suck too. |
| | Unrelated: I used to know Carl Sheer, who for awhile owned (or partly owned) the Nuggets. And the team's first public affairs director, Ted Malik, was a friend of mine who tragically passed away while he was still a bright young guy doing that very job. |
| | Carl got his big break in the basketball business when he was still doing dplay-by-play for tiny Guilford College, over WCOG radio in Greensboro, North Carolina. Guilford was privileged to have a bruiser named Bob "Horse" Kauffman playing for the basketball team. Bob led the team to the NAIA national finals more than once and ended up being the third pick in the NBA draft. Bob retained Carl, an attorney, as his agent. Carl got a great deal for Bob, more clients, and involvement in the business. I think he was tied up with the Charlotte Hornets too. Not sure. |
| | I got to know Carl when he called football games and I ran the scoreboard (and believe me, I'm the last guy you want with a detail-oriented job like that). Never stayed in touch, though. |
| | Kauffman ended up being a several-time NBA all-star in the early 70's. He peaked with the Buffalo Braves, the hapless franchise that now calls itself the Los Angeles Clippers. |
| | By the way, some other Guilford basketball alumni who found their way to the NBA were M.L. Carr and World B. Free. |
You too can help
| | Actually, what interests me most about weblogs is (you should forgive the expression), memic propagation and amplification. |
| | This is evil genius stuff, and nobody is better at it than RageBoy. That's why we need to help. Our cause is at stake. If we do what the MemeMan says, all we despise will sumbit to death by blog (a form of productively Indecent Exposure). Or something like that. Trust me, it'll be good for blogs, the Web, the Milky Way, etc. |
Get back in the ocean and eat some fish
| | I'm on the phone with Criag, chewing fat about the proposed Microsoft settlement, which appears to be how the Bush administration is dropping the case. |
| | Craig, who competed very effectively with Microsoft at Novell in the 80s, was looking for a good metaphor — not just for this case, but for the motivation behind it, and for the motivations behind every collossally failed effort to bring Microsoft down, including Ray Noorda's at Novell after Craig left the company (and Novell bought every company and technology it could — Wordperfect, AT&T's UNIX... — to compete head-to-head with The Beast From Redmond), Lotus under Jim Manzi, even Netscape under Jims Clark and Barksdale, when the company seemed to think the browser was some kind of platform that could take Windows head-on. |
| | "They were all Ahabs," I said. |
| | "And they all went after the Big White Dick," Craig replied. |
| | "They had to bring it down. At all costs." |
| | "Instead of running companies, they were thumping around the decks of their boats..." |
| | "Even the Federal Case, which started as Gary Reback's. He was the Fed's Ahab. He hijacked their ship and went after the whale." |
| | Okay, maybe that's extreme. But this line of Craig's rings extra true for me: |
| | What we need are better whales, and a lot more of them. |
| | The ocean is the marketplace. It's a huge ecosystem, not just one food chain. Let's deal with that. To quote Craig one more time, Grow some blubber. |
Wanted: OS X feedfront
| | From now to Monday, Job One is (along with the rest of next February's issue) is a review of OS X for Linux Journal. Right now I'm looking for answers to a few specific questions. Any help ya'll can give would be much appreciated. Here they are: |
| | - What, specifically, have independent programmers contributed to Darwin (OS X's BSD-based kernel)? Pointers to (or reports of) actual code would be helpful.
- To what extent is work on Darwin contributing back to the BSD communitiy?
- What Mac programs work or don't work under OS 9 emulation in OS X? I'm looking here for programs that don't require you to restart your computer and run it natively under OS 9. And how much of an issue is that? (It's a lot for me.)
- Exactly how many people weighed in with recommendations for improvements to OS X? Apple published something about this around the time of Macworld last January, but I can't find anything right now. I think the number then was 70,000, but I'd like facts, or pointers to facts.
- Does OS X give us UNIX on the desktop? It does for me, but is it a credible claim to the UNIX community?
- Should Apple now be showing up at UNIX trade shows, giving talks, demonstrating Darwin and its applications (Apple and otherwise) and behaving roughly as the inheritor of the role NeXT played in that community? I strongly believe they should, but I'd like your opinions as well.
- What are some examples of OS X upsuck (I love that term so much better than 'adoption') into business as well as education and science?
- Given UNIX-grade reliability, ease of administration and interop with other platforms (UNIX), plus the ability to run the Microsoft Office Suite (and exchange files with Windows) does OS X finally make Apple a factor in the enterprise?
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| | I could go on here, but I need to work on the project. Anything quotable you could feed me would be welcome. Remember that the editorial frame of reference is still Linux — specifically a Linux how-to publication. |
Geeks at liesure
Hack arrives
| | Once there was a peer-to-peer file-sharing network called Napster. People happily shared music files in flagrant violation of copyright laws. Unfortunately Napster had a fatal weakness: It could be shut down. |
| | Grapevine isn't software yet. It's a spec. But it's the first I've read in awhile that makes me wish I were a programmer. |
Blogs? They're what get you interviewed about blogs.
| | Here's J.D., talking to the Sacrmento Bee about how blogs feed on each other. From me J.D. says he gets "commentary on current events." (I tend not to think that's all I do, but it seems I just did one.) Keep Trying finds me (also Dave and three others) "consistently interesting and thought provoking." And here's Massless, calling me "just perfectly sane and thoughtful." I dunno. Years ago when I was asked, "Who is the sanest person you know," I answered "My mother." I didn't even think about it. Mom is 88 now, and still sane as they come. When I ask her about current events, she dismisses the question and says "Come visit. It's been too long." |
Hot air
| | CNN  and the other U.S. TV networks are all telling the same story, with exactly the same title — the sequel to America Under Siege. Note the word "strike." By itself it tells of revenge, retaliation. Also of air. Mostly we're waging air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Would we be using the same verb if most of the action was on the ground? Just wondering. |
| | You get a different story from less domestic (and domesticated) media. Take Tehelka, which appears to be a no-BS Indian news site (here's its masthead.). In an interview with Tehelka, a retired general says this: The war will start only after they start deploying ground troops. All this while, America has concentrated on air raids and missile drops from the air. They might not send their own troops to fight a ground war though, and use some of their coalition partners or even the warriors of the Northern Alliance. For the moment, I think, the Americans are just trying to scare the Taliban. And as you can see for yourself, it is just not working. The mistake the US made was to misjudge the Afghan character. They thought they could scare the Afghans with all their expensive weaponry. But the Afghans are tough as nails, and cannot be scared. You can go on killing these Afghan Pashtuns, but they will not bend till they are all killed. This is a story we don't want to tell, and don't want to be told. The title of that story will be "America fights back." No editor wants to run that story while "strike" still has box office. |
| | Meanwhile, what's really going on? I think Thomas Friedman nails one big issue (as he does so often) in Fighting bin Ladenism. What we're fighting is the result of many things, but none less than the ignorance and hate that characterize the worst of religion and tribalism. |
| | What is terrorism, anyway? Here's what the linguist and dissent artist Noam Chomsky says, quoting a U.S. Army manual: the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. But what's terrorism's opposite? Is it involved here? What's it fighting? Or does it fight at all? |
More like a one-man Renaissance
| | PopMatters describes Rob Breszny as...the essence of the contemporary Renaissance Man. He's a big-time astrologer, a small-time rock star, and now a novelist of post-patriarchal idealism. He also moonlights as a quasi-pagan trickster god, and as a communal husband. Given that only a small fraction of the population actually believes in the veracity of these ideas and vocations, it's likely that Brezsny will seem like a kook. In reality, Brezsny is merely holding his own place next to other cultural shamans such as Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Reverend Ivan Stang, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. |
| | More stories about (and by — sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, not that it matters) Rob are here. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Wednesday, November 7, 2001, Dwight, 11/9/01; 11:27:29 PM Re: Tuesday, November 7, 2001, Dori Smith, 11/7/01; 6:06:40 PM Re: Tuesday, November 7, 2001, Alwin Hawkins, 11/7/01; 2:10:30 PM
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