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Thursday, March 27, 2003
Get tuned 
| | Just heard from The Head Lemur that Dave Winer was on NBC's Nightly News tonight, near the end of the show. Still time to catch it in the Pacific Zone. |
Give 'em hell, Henry
| | Henry Norr, a fixture in Bay Area and technology journalism for two decades, says he has been suspended from the San Francisco Chronicle for making his own news: |
| | I'm a technology reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Or at least I was until yesterday (Wed.), when I was suspended, without pay, for getting arrested last week in peaceful civil disobedience against the war. The offense the Chronicle is charging me with is falsifying my timecard, but this is a bogus, after-the-fact cover for an act of political retaliation and an attempt to intimidate other employees. The plain truth is that the paper's senior editors ordered my column pulled from the paper before I had even filled out the timecard. Not because of any objections to the column's contents (it was about spam, and they hadn't even read it), but simply because I had been arrested the day before, just as I had previously informed my supervisors I would be. |
He was overheard to have said...
| | It's good stuff. Read it. |
Warhacking
Substantiating the inevitable
| | Welcome to Gandhicon 4 is my latest at Linux Journal. It's occasioned by research from Evans Data Corp. that shows a huge shift in developer preference to Linux from Windows, and not just from other UNIX family members. |
Beating a live Bush
| | Just got pointed to Max Speak, You Listen — a peaceblog artfully done by Max B. Sawicky, a Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute and contributor to "Marketplace" on public radio (I knew that guy's voice...). Lotta good stuff in there. |
Overhearing
| | Many in the technology industry blissfully ignored the war while attending PCForum, technologist Esther Dyson's annual confab in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week. Instead, attendees at the database-themed show buzzed about the last-minute no-show by the industry's leading database guru, Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison. |
| | ...The war was barely mentioned and television monitors in the conference rooms were turned off, as networking and business deals got done. But that didn't mean war news was totally shut out, as evidenced by Doc Searls, an author and expert on the Linux operating system. Mr. Searls had some fun by running an Apple hacker program called EtherPEG that snooped on unencrypted images attendees downloaded to their laptops over free Wi-Fi connections set up in the conference's main lecture hall. |
| | Layering each new image atop one another, EtherPEG created a kind of living mosaic of the crowd's Web-surfing habits. There were a few whimsical standouts: photos of a recently crowned beauty-pageant winner, rock star Ozzy Osbourne and large bottles of Crisco cooking oil. By Tuesday, though, they were crowded out by now-familiar views of war from online news sites. "It's almost like you're looking at a weather map when you're looking at EtherPEG," Mr. Searls says. It captures "the winds of human interest." |
| | One problem: The war put relatively few images up on EtherPEG — at least on my screen (everyone's is different). Instead, the most common visuals were those from the show itself, during which attendees contributed countless digital pictures to a library that got plenty of viewing. If I get a chance later (long shot), I'll put up a typical screen shot. |
Way
| | There once was a hooker from Boulder
who charged way too much, and I told her.
She said, "Listen you creep,
you been gettin' it cheap!"
So I put her on ebay, and sold her. |
Get your waron
| | I listened to the Bush & Blair Show from Camp David on the radio this morning, and it pained me to hear them try to put a positive spin on news that is clearly not going according to plan. |
| | And it will get worse, as American bombs put more burned babies where more cameras can find them. No matter how greater the evil we fight may be, the lesser evils we commit in the process will inevitably provide plenty of lens fodder for the media and governments that oppose us. And they are legion. |
| | Got a pointer this morning to this item from Oliver Willis. As with TV and radio, The War is crowding out pretty much everything else. As George S. Patton famously put it, Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so! |
| | Swap the words war and love in those last two statements and you'll see where I stand on the whole thing. |
WhyDentity
| | We don't want separate IDs everywhere, whether singly or in arbitrary affinity groupings. We want a single sign-on, preferably encrypted in our browser, Java ring or biometrics, that works everywhere. But we don't want our data centralized, which would leave us hostage to an identity czar. |
| | Among other things, Britt points to Tim Bray's Enterprise Software Wreckage, the subject of which I believe was the real story (for me, at least) to come out of PC Forum, which ended yesterday. Says Tim: |
| | It's really hard to get anybody to talk about this in public, but pick any of the famous big-ticket software packages (SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle Apps, that kind of stuff) and try to find a deployment that went according to plan or was finished in under a year. I've never heard of one. |
| | This is just nuts. The Web infrastructure is everywhere, technology is more standards-based than it ever has been, and it still takes double-digit months to get a business application up and running? |
| | The Big Boys aren't leading any more. Because they can't. They have legitimate roles to play, but they're large-scale, long-term, cautious and incremental. In a world where free-range minds are creating infrastructure, tools and useful solutions almost overnight, the Big Boys are too often the Bog Boys. |
| | That leaves independent developers, working for themselves and for small organizations, formal and informal, commercial and noncommercial, internal and external — doing whatever it takes. |
| | It is from this group that we can expect the real Identity Infrastructure and its killer apps to emerge. The best the Bog Boys can do is welcome the new facts of life. |
| | And that, I believe, is the positive side of what Liberty and (yes) Microsoft (or some groups at Microsoft) are trying to do with Identity. |
| | I say that because I took part in some terrific conversations at PC Forum involving my old friend Kim Cameron, the metadirectory pioneer who is now an architect working on identity issues at Microsoft. |
| | Semi-related: Kim's thinking about polyarchy might be helpful to thinking outside everybody's box on issues like identity. |
| | [Later...] I'm on the phone with Britt, talking prophesies, and this line just came out: |
| | The world is turning into a place where more people do well and fewer people get rich, and there's nothing wrong with that. |
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