Net Neutrality Will Increase Government Regulation - WSJ.com

So it turns out that Google's enthusiasm for government-imposed "net neutrality" is qualified. The Internet giant wants cumbersome network management rules applied to everyone—except Google.

Net Neutrality, like "health-care reform" and Global Warming initiatives have become religions. People are for them, without actually knowing what they consist of or what might fall out of them.

Google founders, like all libtards in modern academia have learned to question all that is traditional, while at the same time setting up new traditions that can't be questioned.

To put a positive spin on it, for the companies involved, I'd say that it's all about big companies encouraging new regulation to hold back the upstarts, and that is certainly true, in its effect.

But as religions, which these things have become they represent not competitive advantages, but a modern form of Luddism that simply desires a return to the "god old days" of five, ten, or fifty years ago (depending on your age).

Don't be surprised if Google (and other new companies) regularly act against their own best interest in the name of these modern replacements for religion.

Microsoft Changes 'Laptop Hunter' Ad After Apple Complains | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Brian: The main reason you can't run OS X on a PC is that Apple doesn't want you to. Apple could claim unique use of hardware when they ran PowerPC chips, and they could have done some fairly interesting high end things in that realm, but they chose to make Apple computers more like PCs, and in fact there is very little difference in the technology. There are supercomputers made from PowerPC chips, all the game consoles use them (for speed) and there is a lot of commonality in PowerPC and the chips used to build IBM mainframes. But no, they weren't “good enough” for Apple.

Now, to show I'm an equal opportunity hater... It's clear now that Apple's (or Jobs' anyway) goal was to comoditize the Apple computer, make it MORE like a PC, and thus cheaper to stamp out by the thousands in some far away country, just like Dell and HP do. Other than unibody Aluminum enclosures and chicklet keyboards, there is less and less that is unique about an Apple computer with every revision. Apple is instead turning to innovation in total user experience, making computer, multimedia, phone, and online products that seamlessly (or more seamlessly than the alternatives anyway) integrate.

Why does Microsoft have to advertise products (PCs ) that they don't even make and hardly mention the part of it they are responsible for? Well, I think that question answers itself. There is nothing new and exciting about operating systems, any of them, and there isn't really much that is new an exciting about the hardware either. We are finally approaching the cliff that turns our interaction with computers into something akin to our interaction with TV sets and refrigerators. A greater reliance on hardware standards (an idea pushed early on by Microsoft of all companies) has made the technology differences in PCs (including Apples) minimal which means that the OS has less covering up to do. That coupled with a greater reliance on the Internet, means that prices on both hardware and software will continue to erode. This will force both Apple and Microsoft to make uncomfortable changes to heir business models. Microsoft is responding by becoming more of a network player. Apple is playing a move ahead by concentrating on non-PC technologies, while at the same time milking the high-end market for all it's worth. Neither of these strategies are sure bets however.

As details of discreet vs integrated circuit boards and variations on Dolby are no longer the subject of talk by any but the most fanatical audiophiles, in a few years nobody will be talking about which operating system you use. There may never be an OS XI or Windows 8, or if so they will go unheralded by most people. There will also be less talk about losing all your e-mails, personal photos or music files, because most of that stuff will be “online”. Even most large businesses now forbid employees from storing important thtings on the local hard drive. E-mail and documents worth saving go on networked drives, making the desktop system easily re-formatted with no backup-restore. You have to wonder why you would need a $400 OS for such a task.

In the early 90s when some of my mainframe colleagues proclaimed PCs just a fad they were right, it's just that the fad lasted a lot longer than they thought it would. Thankfully it is coming to an end.

VDH's Private Papers::Why I Oppose Judge Sotomayor

I particulalry liked this quote from Bork:

Judge Bork describes post-modernism as follows:

This development can be seen in any number of academic, previously intellectual fields. Sometimes called post-modernism or post-structuralism, the denial of truth is, as Gertrude Himmelfarb says, "best known as a school of literary theory. But it is becoming increasingly prominent in such other disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology, law, and theology..." It is also becoming increasingly difficult to call some of those subjects "disciplines." In every case — the attack on reason, on the concept of truth, and on the idea that there is an objective reality to which we must attempt to make our words and theories correspond — the impetus behind such assaults comes from the political left. … Nonsense these attacks may be, but, as the history of our century teaches, there is no guarantee that nonsense will not prevail, with dire results. In law, philosophy, literary studies, and history, among other subjects, we are raising generations of students who are taught by the "cutting edge" professors that traditional respect for logic, evidence, intellectual honesty, and the other requirements of discipline are not merely passé, but totalitarian and repressive, sustaining existing social, political, and economic arrangements to the benefit of white, heterosexual males. To change society in radical directions, it is said, it is necessary to be rid of the old apparatus. (Slouching towards Gomorrah, pp. 268-9)

Bezos: We've got issues with Google Book Search | The Social - CNET News

"We have strong opinions about that issue which I'm not going to share," Bezos said to interviewer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference. "But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited."

What? You have a copyright on your opinions too?

My problem with Amazon is that after they came out with the Kindle they acquired Mobipocket and on the homepage of that site are listed the "100 last arrivals", which it seems came to an abrupt halt on 2006-03-19. Fortunately there are alternate (and better) sources of public domain books in Kindle compatible format, but no thanks to Amazon, who would much rather direct you to moth-eaten hardcopies at their partner sites (used bookstores who pay Amazon for the privilege of selling through them).

I like the Kindle, but I don't like some of the self serving attitude that goes with it. Amazon can keep their strong opinions to themselves.

GOP 99% Socialist | Cato @ Liberty

My point in the New York Post piece is that the GOP needs to challenge Obama’s big spending agenda at a more fundamental level. They need to do some careful research, pick out some big spending targets, and go on the offense. Why not propose to eliminate the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development? Why not sell off federal assets, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, in order to help pay down the federal debt? Why not open up the U.S. Postal Service to competition?

Obama won’t agree to these reforms at this point, but they would hopefully open a serious national debate about reforming our massive and sprawling federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the congressional Republicans in 1994 didn’t win by splitting hairs with the Democrats over 1% of spending. They offered a more fundamental critique.

Atomic Warfare - Cringely on technology

The problem with PC’s in general and netbooks in particular is that they aren’t very profitable for Intel campared to the good old days. Microsoft makes more profit from every Windows PC sold than does the PC manufacturer and LOTS more profit than Intel makes despite its massively dominant market share in microprocessors. And with Netbooks retailing under $400, compared to Microsoft Intel makes hardly any profit at all. So Microsoft has to die.

This is a huge change for Intel, which has for decades acted as Microsoft’s bitch, doing pretty much whatever Redmond demanded for fear of being written-out of the next Windows PC hardware spec in favor of AMD or even IBM. But that was the old Microsoft. The Microsoft of today isn’t nearly as powerful, whether they yet know it or not.

And this may back that up:

Linux To Be First OS To Support USB 3.0

Asustek Vows to Out-Apple Apple - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

"So far, Acer’s model of selling cheap gear and following quickly behind Asustek has translated into higher sales for Acer. In fact, Acer now leads in netbook sales despite Asustek being the first to market with the products.

“Acer has a larger channel, and people know Acer more than Asus,” Mr. Tsang said. “That is the reality, and we need to face it. But we will keep running faster. They may pick up on our products after half a year, but then we will have another product and another one.”"

Sunset - Cringely on technology

"IBM doesn’t want Sun and is gleeful with the idea of Oracle taking over, as you’ll learn if you read the internal IBM memo copied below. Big Blue does a very good job here of explaining its thinking and most of it makes sense. No white knight."

Gawker - Why Newspaper Shouldn't Buy What Steven Brill Is Selling - Steven Brill

"Steven Brill launched American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, Brill's Content and those airport security fast-passes. Now he wants to help newspapers broker their online content. Clue: Smarter people already offer that."

Rise of the Machines - Cringely on technology

I’m beginning to think there aren’t as many devils as one might suspect in this passion play. There are a few devils, sure, but also a lot of innocent dopes who may have made the situation much worse while not even making very much money from our pain.

A lot of it comes down to a probable misapplication of technology, something that hasn’t been discussed much in the coverage of this financial crisis. We talk for seconds at a time about the confounding complexity of derivative securities then quickly go on to something more understandable.

Is technology our friend in this mess or our enemy?

Particularly:

If a bunch of wealthy traders get together at Starbucks and agree to short-sell a company or a financial instrument, driving down that price ideally to the point where it never recovers, well that’s against the law. But with trading automation and the Internet as a platform it is possible to accomplish this same end WITHOUT it being explicitly illegal. It is even possible that the perps don’t know the level of damage they are inflicting, though I doubt that’s true. The trick is to avoid communication. If there is no communication between traders there is no chain of causation, no conspiracy, just an unhappy accident.

Slashdot | $100 Linux Wall-Wart Now Available

The Long Retreat - HUMAN EVENTS

"America's relative decline since 2000 of some 30 percent represents a far greater loss of relative power in a shorter time than any power shift among European great powers roughly from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. It is one of the largest relative declines in modern history. Indeed, in size, it is clearly surpassed by only one other great-power decline, the unprecedented internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991."

The Great Awakening: Boomers, Your Crisis Has Arrived (Part 1 of 3) -- Seeking Alpha

I don’t have a preconceived notion of our country’s destiny, but I’m getting a bad feeling about the track we are on. The last thing in the world I want to see is my three boys being forced into a war caused by a bunch of clueless 60 year old political hack morons in Washington DC fulfilling their destiny to cause the once in a century national crisis. Based on the foolish actions of most politicians in Washington over the last thirty years, I fear for the future of our country. I don’t think the politicians in Washington comprehend the state of affairs. I sense the mood of the country turning. Fear, anger and disillusionment are the prevalent themes. Change is coming, but it is not the change that Barack Obama campaigned for. It will be forced upon us by circumstances beyond any one person’s control. While we are hurtling towards our summit with destiny, Congress continues its path of pork barrel spending, short term solutions, party politics, and condemning our children and grandchildren to a lower standard of living. The “leaders” of this country are using the tried and true method of using fear to ram through their $900 billion tax on future generations. President Bush used the same fear tactics to launch his invasion of Iraq. I see a similar success story with the coming stimulus package. Maybe the coming crisis will ultimately lead to Great Leaders rising to the occasion.

If there are any.

Staffing Up Will Be Key Task For New Motorola Chief - WSJ.com

"The fastest-growing phone makers in the U.S., including Apple Inc. and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd., have hired key employees from Motorola. Apple has lured away a global head of sales for the game-changing iPhone, a seasoned supply-chain chief and sales reps to help it break into Motorola's turf in Latin America. RIM, which now makes one in 10 cellphones sold in the U.S., says it has hired more than 500 former Motorolans since early last year."

To paraphrase master criminal Moriarity: "Everything I have to say to Mr. Jha has no doubt already occurred to him."**

Come to think of it, that would make a good motto for this blog.

** But just in case it hasn't: Like a 98 pound weakling that has gotten into the ring with the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and now looks like an uncooked piece of hamburger, your options are to go to the hospital, or go to the morgue. But whatever you do, don't get back into the ring (I made a pun).

To Motorola, Yahoo, Palm, and many others: we are tired of reading about how you are a victim of "unforeseen" circumstances etc. You are serial screw-ups and the chances of you having a great idea that gets you back into the game are infinitesmally small. Please, just go quietly into this good night (or something). Shareholders: Get your money out now and redeploy it where it can do some good. Advancement in technology needs new blood and companies with bold new ideas, not just companies incrementally milking a monopoly they already have, or once had. (Are you listening Microsoft?)

I just saw a Motorola Razr phone advertised for one of the pay-as-you-go cheap phone companies. There is your niche Motorola. Make the worlds most advanced give-away, throw-away, who-cares-if-you-lose-it phone for Tracfone and others to flood the market with (but that's not without risk too because Nokia, LG and Samsung already have a lot of those). Otherwise, open up a nursing home, gas station or some other business that doesn't require a lot of advanced thinking. There is such a thing as too late (and such a thing as too long a post over something that is of no relevance).

PC World - Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps

"Dell, Intel and their partners announced last week new technologies that represent major leaps forward for mobility. The companies seem to have discovered the secret to making such bold leaps: Cut Microsoft out of the deal.

One technology involves enabling users to gain instant access to a laptop's e-mail, browser and other basic functionality -- without booting Windows at all."

PC World - The Next 25 Years in Tech

"The future ain't what it used to be. In the pre-PC era, futurists predicted huge changes in transportation. By 2008 we would be flitting about in personal jetpacks and taking vacations on the moon. But the communications revolution spurred by personal computers and the Internet wasn't on anyone's radar."

One has to wonder (well, I have to wonder) whether our preoccupation with infinite desktop CPU speed (needed to boot Vista in one's lifetime) and other Star-Trekish technological impossibilities like teleportation and materializing manufactured goods out of thin air from the VR world hasn't permanently unhinged our imaginations from real world things that could have actually been accomplished.

Day by day, the Futurological Congress is coming to life near you, although it may be in the form of a computer screen rather than a pill.

The Internet Is Down -- Now What?

"It’s likely that the Internet will soon experience a catastrophic failure, a multi­day outage that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars.

Or maybe it isn’t likely.

In any case, companies are not prepared for such a possibility.

But then again, some are.

These mixed messages come from credible sources. The confusion stems in part from the fact that the Internet has never seen anything much worse than local outages and brief slowdowns. But could it? And if it did, how ready would your company be?"

I have some valuable thoughts on this, which are unfortunately too large to fit in the margins of this blog.

AOL adopting XMPP aka Jabber

"Proprietary protocols are things from yesterday. Today, Opensource technologies are taking over the world! AOL / ICQ has just launched a test server using XMPP, an open technology. This means that you’ll soon be able to talk to your ICQ / AIM contacts via Jabber. Google has already started using it. So who’s next? MSN!"

I guess anything is possible. One of the comments on linked blog post indicates MS is indeed working on some sort of Gtalk compatibility (as of Oct. 2007). I certainly look forward to only having to signed on to one thing to do IM, E-mail, and a few other things, but more importantly, I look forward to having a choice of who I sign on with without locking myself away from those who chose differently. E-mail ought to serve as an example of how everything else should work on the internet. I shouldn't have to be an AOL user to communicate with AOL users, or a Microsoft user to communicate with other Microsoft users. Clearly the technologists at these companies understand this even if the MBAs do not.

Laptop Project Would Welcome Intel Back - washingtonpost.com

"He called it unfortunate that Intel made statements that OLPC asked the chip maker to stop working on the Classmate PC. 'The picture that painted was one of OLPC being anti-competition, which is ridiculous. We'd like to see as many laptops out there as possible and kids have the widest choice possible,' he said."

Your Social Network

Full Image at title or click this fragment.

I also want to add that I do think there is a use for this stuff. If you've ever posted any sort of resume online (and I have) you may have given away more information than you would on one of these social networks.

It would make sense to have a central place to post (for example) a complete resume, including all sorts of personal details (name address phone number) but only have that information available to a select few, for example with a key that can be reset as in your Google photo albums. No need for this information to even be available to your "friends" list.

I have at times submitted resumes without full contact information, or without salary history, or without a previous employment history at all.

Can the interface be made simple enough to use, and yet allow for all these variations (and more)? If so, it would be a great alternative to keeping track of all the variations with Word documents, PDFs, etc. Updating a field, like your phone number, would be a one step process, and only those with "need to know" would ever see this information.

Unfortunately I don't think any of the existing "Social" sites approach this seriously (especially Facebook, which makes a lot of claims in this area).

Here is an idea, free for the taking (patent pending):

A single place where all such information about your career life, social life, dating preferences, hobbies, etc. can be typed in using combinations of free-form fields, check-boxes, menu-lists, etc. Now the hard part, as I've mentioned, is making the access matrix both easy to set up, but complex in how it parcels out information. Not desirable for a potential employer to see your dating preferences, nor for a potential date to see your employment history. It needs to be EASY for you to keep these things straight, not a complex maze as Facebook now has. I personally think that Facebook is working at too many cross purposes to make this even possible.

Orkut, on the other hand, hasn't painted itself into a corner yet by making all sorts of high minded claims while actually implementing something totally different.

For Orkut, it should be possible for me to make both my friends list and my interest groups information invisible to everyone, or only visible to selected individuals. Facebook has addressed this to a limited extent, but then muck it up with their need to generate revenue. Google doesn't have this problem, Orkut is just one of the many products they have to keep you connected to them and viewing ads, they don't live or die by Orkut.

Finally, if all of this information could be collected, and properly segmented and secured, I should be able to do the following things with it:

1: Generate a nicely formatted resume for printing out or e-mailing or posting on a web page (with a revocable key in the last case). There might be a variety of formatting options for standard government resume formats, or more casual forms.

2: Generate a business card summary from above information. There are of course $69 Windows programs to do this item and the one above, but I don't NEED or want to manage such a system on a single PC, especially a Windows one with all the security and database corruption issues it has. Windows has been so bad it has made it positively acceptable to get data off your local PC as fast as possible and onto secure servers somewhere (but NOT a Windows Home Server!).

3. Coupled with online calendar information, photos, blogs, news feeds, address lists, credit card data, and so on, you could also do automated slide shows, photo albums, either online or for printing, holiday card processing...

I can't think of anything you wouldn't want to connect up to this, assuming of course that you have confidence in the security of the application, and as I've mentioned, the online alternatives don't have a very high hurdle to get over to be way ahead of what Windows has established as baseline for local storage.

Supposedly, Google is working on an online health system that would keep (will it be selected, or all?) of your medical history, prescriptions, allergies, and so on that can be rapidly and easily shared with your medical professionals. If this can be done in such a way that people trust it, I see no reason why even less sensitive information that would go into a resume or business card, can't also be stored online, all the time, for those with a "need to know" to get at.

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See also: A Lover's Journal: Contacts Management System