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Friday, February 7, 2003
What happened to Columbia 
Blog on
Clone of the attack
Deja view
| | Dave Aiello points us to Chapter 8 of Lift Off! An Astronaunt's Dream, a book by veteran astronaunt R. Mike Mullane, who served aboard a 1988 Atlantis shuttle mission in which the spacecraft sustained real tile damage from booster debris during its ascent into space: |
| | I shiver with fear as I imagine what would happen to Atlantis if there is major damage. On reentry, fire would melt a hole in the belly and then start burnging through wires and equipment.... |
| | Meanwhile, the commander and the pilot would be doing everything possible to keep the shuttle flying straight. But, in the end, atmospheric friction would win the battle. The shuttle would start groaning and vibrating as pieces of the wings burned off... and the shuttle would slowly spin out of control. From the ground it would look like a giant shooting star, scattering flaming pieces of aluminum across the sky. I would be dead.... That's what I'm thinking as I carefully twist the robot arm underneath the fusilage. |
| | Finally, the belly heat tiles come into view on the television screen. We gasp. Hundreds of tiles are scraped and gouged! At least one tile is completely missing. What's going to happen to us on reentry? |
| | The book's Amazon sales rank is currently 748,353. Let's see what happens. |
Real stories
| | Tale of Two Stories is a long piece I just wrote for Linux Journal . It's about how traditional journalism isn't quite equal to covering what's really going on with Linux — or with any other subject where you can't get to the meat of the story just by talking with analysts, vendors and customers. Because, in many cases, none of those three parties is involved in what's really going on, and one journalist can't engage enough primary sources to get the whole story. |
| | Look at it this way: Blogging we know about. Here we've got countless journalists (amateur and professional) writing about journalism (and everything else) in countless journals. Other subjects aren't so easy. Journalism As Usual isn't going to tell all those subjects' stories, especially if the stories aren't stories in the usual sense, where characters wrestle with problems, and events move in the general direction of some resolution. Not every story fits the format, and therefore plenty of stories go uncovered. |
| | This is all a very complicated issue. If you want to respond to it, I invite you to do that in the comments section of the piece. |
| | [Later...] Some push-back here. Good stuff in the tread that follows too. |
On the other wing...
| | All that matters is: There will be war. And from this war will rise ... something unimaginable. It always does. |
Give me Liberty or give me... I dunno. Something.
| | Mitch and Bryan go at it over the Liberty Alliance. |
| | Some of this stuff is a little too tech for me (yes, it happens... more than you'd think), so let's just pause to observe that, for better or worse, Liberty Alliance is a bunch of big companies, presumably doing what big companies do. The burden is on them to make clear that their intentions are friendly. This here... |
| | Federated network identity will enable the next generation of the Internet: federated commerce. In a federated view of the world, a person's online identity, their personal profile, personalized online configurations, buying habits and history, and shopping preferences are administered by users, yet securely shared with the organizations of their choosing. A federated network identity model will enable every business or user to manage their own data, and ensure that the use of critical personal information is managed and distributed by the appropriate parties, rather than a central authority. |
| | ... almost does it. The problem is that it still sounds too bigco. What does it mean for a user to "manage" his or her own data? Is anonymity a choice? (I dunno.) |
| | One thing I wish they'd do (or somebody would do) is come up with some term other than "federated" for whatever it is that "federation" does to one's identity. It's a creepy term. I know it's too late, but I'm being cranky. And realistic. Be honest: do you salivate at the idea of having your identity "federated?" |
| | Anyway, if the Liberty guys are as friendly as our mutual friends say they are, they need to come across a bit more like they're on our side here. |
| | Changing the subject a bit, I've been re-reading The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. It's a popular bigco book, because it's spot-on about the difference between sustaining and disruptive technologies, and how disruptive technologies threaten the sustaining ones that keep bigcos alive. (Witness what Linux is doing to Sun's Solaris right now. And even to Windows in some cases.) |
| | Sustaining technologies are what big companies sell. They innovate gradually and grow at the same pace. They don't take many risks, especially when the returns aren't compeltely apparent. They depend on customers and investors for money, and they obey those market forces. They avoid small markets that don't solve their large-scale growth needs. They don't believe in markets that don't yet exist. Their marketing imperative is Necessity is the mother of invention. |
| | Disruptive technologies are what small companies sell, or what companies of all sizes might give away in hope that they'll achieve ubiquitous adoption at no cost and change the world for everybody. Disruptive technologies often start out in forms too simple, small and trivial for big companies to take seriously. They appear in markets that don't exist, can't be researched, and therefore don't interest big companies. Their marketing imperative is Invention is the mother of necessity. |
| | What excites me about the prospect of new Tier 1 sovereign "Mydentity" digital IDs is their ultimately disruptive nature. One of these days somebody will invent something that uses these things to mother necessity. When they do I expect we'll have more privacy and autonomy and power as individuals, not less. And one reason will be that the feds and the bigcos aren't doing it. |
| | By the way, I don't expect it to happen first on computers, but rather on embedded and portable devices. Maybe on SIM chips or something. |
BJ vs. JJ, cont'd
| | Post (Leslie Walker): "While blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth." |
| | Scripting News (Dave Winer): "...if the pros are so good at "established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth" why do they get the facts wrong, and skim the surface and repeat what has already said so many times? These pieces always set up the same question -- will weblogs replace traditional media, and they always conclude that it'll never happen. Somehow I wonder if that's not the purpose of these pieces. Don't the editorial people at the Washington Post care about this clear conflict of interest?" |
| | Leslie actually has two points. One is about resources: big news organizations have people and money to pay them. The other is about standards: big news orgs have "established principles," yada yada. Dave is absolutely right to nail her on that last issue. This hauteur about standards was ludicrous decades ago, and it's an absurd anachronism today. Newspapers and magazines get stuff wrong all the time. They're on tight deadlines. Copy editors miss subtle details or just plain screw up. Reporters have axes to grind. Sure, everybody does the best they can; and sometimes it's fabulous work. Does anybody really believe everything they'll see on the front page of tomorrow's paper in any city is entirely fair, accurate and true? Come on. |
| | In my writing for Linux Journal, I expect to be wrong less than I am on my blog; but that's because I know my readers will correct me faster here. I can change "the record" in a few keystrokes. I don't have that luxury for something that's going out in print three months from now. But careful as I may be, I still make mistakes. And I'm not fair, accurate and truthful anywhere close to 100% of the time. My point: I have the same standards whether I'm blogging or writing for print. And I think they're pretty darn high, frankly. But the medium is different. So are the relationships — both with readers and with the subjects I write about. A key difference is the "open source" issue Chris brings up below. The advantage with blogs is a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" kind of thing. (The AP visits one bug example in todays papers. Thanks to Hylton for that one.) |
| | Here's Chris' own take on the argument: |
| | I think Weblogs represent a distinct break in the nature of authorship. The surprise is that there is a large number of people who don't happen to be professional reporters or writers who have a lot to say that is valued by some group. This isn't to say that there is not a lot of crap on the Web and in blogs: there is. It's also not to say that 'blogs are likely to maintain the editorial standards that you see at the Washington Post: the vast majority don't have the resources (but see 'Open Source', below). |
| | But blogs are enormously valuable, IMHO. They allow thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of domain experts to converse, debate and discover new and better ways in fields as diverse as software and politics. The very stuff that makes blogs possible, and easy, things like HTML, XML, RSS were largely driven and developed by debates that raged on Web sites and Weblogs. Until we humans evolve telepathy and can find souls with like interests by closing our eyes and thinking warm thoughts, blogs are a good proxy. |
| | In the same way that television went from 3 networks to 500 channels, blogs represent the next evolution: hundreds of thousands of channels are now avaiable, and they've formed themselves into communities that make finding the channels 'just for me' relatively easy. |
| | The other disruptive change here is that prior media forms, from billboards to newspapers to TV, were one-to-many, or broadcast media. The 'ones' were expert writers, reporters, photographers, TV personalities et al., whose only job was to tell the story. The feedback mechanisms, i.e. 'letters to the editor', were feeble. |
| | Blogging is many-to-many: there can be, and often are, as many authors as readers. The conceit that 'the pros' are on some higher playing field is just that: few legit media types get that point as well as Dan Gillmor at the Merc. |
| | Will blogs kill newspapers and journalism? I don't think so. Will blogs change journalism? Already happening. Will blogs change the economics of, say, newspapers? I think so. |
| | I agree with all of that. I think we also need to credit blogs with an advantage in respect to the all-crawling 'bots of Google. Name a subject with more than a few blogs on the case, and you'll have much better luck getting answers on the Web from those blogs than from newspapers. |
| | As long as the papers continue to see yesterday's news as a vital revenue stream rather than a way to expose their knowledge and authority (that all-important "record") on the Web, they'll continue to get waxed (a bit worse every day) by blogs in subject searches. |
J st Wond ri g
| | Why is it that ink jet printers refuse to print because they say a print cartridge is out of ink when the printer software says the cartridge is more than half full? |
There are responses to this message:Re: Friday, February 7, 2003, lou josephs, 2/7/03; 4:34:18 PM Re: Friday, February 7, 2003, A Zimmerman, 2/7/03; 1:38:19 PM Re: Friday, February 7, 2003, lou josephs, 2/7/03; 10:49:50 AM
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