Perot Charts » Charting Government Fiscal Irresponsibility

"The American people must wake up and face the reality that promises made in the past will soon bankrupt this nation. These problems are explained in an easy-to-understand chart presentation discussed further at the bottom of this page. Comments to the charts and other material described to the right are encouraged."

He's BAAAACK.

D.C. Tries Cash as a Motivator In School - washingtonpost.com

"For years, school officials have used detention, remedial classes, summer school and suspensions to turn around poorly behaved, underachieving middle school students, with little results. Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior."

Oh, yeah, I'm sure that will work.

I just heard about the results of a program to reward kids who pass proficiency tests to get into college. Results: fewer kids passing, lower scores. Of course the lower scores can be explained by kids taking the test just for the chance to "win" money. Fewer kids passing: Our retarded public education system.

Records Sought in AMD's Suit Against Intel - WSJ.com

AMD filed its suit in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in a world-wide campaign to coerce its customers into not doing business with AMD. A trial date is set for 2010. News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co. unit, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was among the organizations making the request.

Twenty Ten?!

That was news to me, I find it hard to believe.

I wonder if FTC computer systems aren't sabotaging the effort?

FTC Bureau of Competition

The Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition champions the rights of American consumers by promoting and protecting free and vigorous competition. The Bureau:

* reviews mergers and acquisitions, and challenges those that would likely lead to higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation;
* seeks out and challenges anticompetitive conduct in the marketplace, including monopolization and agreements between competitors;
* promotes competition in industries where consumer impact is high, such as health care, real estate, oil & gas, technology, and consumer goods;
* provides information, and holds conferences and workshops, for consumers, businesses, and policy makers on competition issues and market analysis.

These guys must be new. What you want to bet they are all running Windows machines?

Microsoft Yahoo Merger

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

Here is my theory, just based on personal experience, with no hard facts (but some rationales) to back it up:

Companies know more about their revenue sources than they are required to report. FASB rules require them to be consistent about how they report, but they are also allowed to change how they report from time to time. You can "book" revenue from a sale immediately, or spread it out over time, or put it off until all product is delivered if you want. I've worked for small, privately held companies where I knew the accounting people, and I know that while changing the way we booked revenue or merging or splitting of a part of the organization often had innocent (i.e. valid business) explanations, the real explanation was often to obscure failures at the executive level. Failures to sell new product, failures to manage cost of delivery, or (and this is especially true of small companies) failures to manage executive perks which often sapped company resources.

In the 2000 time frame I worked for a large organization that signed a volume purchase agreement (VPA) with Microsoft. I don't know when Microsoft started using these VPAs, but I do remember reading that they changed the way they "booked" them about that time too although that didn't strike me as interesting at the time. The process was heralded by people higher up in the organization as a major cost savings, but as time went on and as activities associated with the VPA either happened, or in some cases were just stated to have happened, I began to suspect that there was no actual cost saving and that we might actually be spending more on Microsoft products than we would have otherwise.

I remember us having to come up with a count, which was really an estimate, of how many Windows PCs we (the entire organization) had. I know the count was more of a wild ass guess than it was a count, and the count was rounded up to satisfy Microsoft and (theoretically) get a lower unit cost. This organization was big, very big. Very few of our machines were on the Internet, and most of the machines were only networked locally, in many hundreds of LANs with local administrators. Had some new inventory process been imposed on these people I would have heard about it, and I didn't hear about it. Furthermore, most of these machines were not typical desktops, but were in place to run a specific set of locally written applications. They did not need to run Microsoft Office, for example, but the counting process glossed over that fact and even included the rights to run Microsoft products that weren't in use at all. The whole thing seemed to be a publicity stunt for certain organization managers, sounding great for the customer, but was really a windfall for Microsoft.

We were running Windows 2000, and nowhere near ready to convert to XP since in fact there were stragglers still running Windows NT, so in effect, we were paying a second time for software we already had. No worry though, said Microsoft, the contract includes an upgrade to XP, whenever we decided to do it, that is, as long as it is within five years, after which you do another VPA (I remember out VPA being for five years, but I don't think all VPAs have that term, some are shorter, I don't know if they come in longer terms as well). Nominally in fact the VPA was for Windows XP, it's just that other than writing a big check to Microsoft, nobody cared when or if the upgrade actually occurred. Do I have to spell out the rest of the story?

My guess is that the number of deals such as this is large (the entire Federal government agency by agency for a start) and when Microsoft makes claims about the number of 2000, or XP, or Vista licenses out there it's a lot of accounting tricks, after all, we didn't get an actual copy of any Microsoft products for each machine we ran. Instead we installed off the net, or from copies of copies of copies of the original disks. No need to mess with those fancy laser printed product keys. A single key made all the installs work without contacting the mother ship.

Yes, there was a costs "savings" for these VPAs, but the savings failed to take into account that facts that: (1) the machines were purchased with Windows already installed, (2) previous licenses had paid for the software again, (3) VPA1 had paid again, and (4) a subsequent VPA2 paid yet a fourth time. The savings MIGHT materialize if there were more frequent product releases from Microsoft (but guess who controls that) and only then if the customer were able to upgrade almost immediately (something the technical people know wasn't going to happen, but then the company/government negotiators are not generally technical people).

So, when Microsoft does their quarterly reports on how many licenses of various products they have sold I figure they are about as accurate as a weather forecast for this day next month. This is not just because I don't trust Microsoft, but because I think a lot of companies play these games. Maybe all of them do.

The difference between these "booked" numbers and what Microsoft deposits into the bank every quarter gives them a lot of room to paint a rosy picture when things are dropping off. If that is the case, and they make subsequent cuts or change their business in some drastic way those ruts in income stream can be smoothed out and the problem resolved without stockholders ever noticing. The more other activities the company is involved with, the more room there is to spread the blame around, making it look like the sacred cash cows are still in good shape while only these new (and ultimately expendable) ventures are holding things back.

Of course these book-cooking operations can't hide a monotonically decreasing income picture forever. The actions you have to take in the background get more and more drastic. Microsoft could use the billions they have in the bank to pay off any shortfalls they have, but that doesn't impress the stock market. If instead, you do something to drastically change the way you keep your books, say merge with another large company, spend most of your cash, stock swaps, redundancy layoffs... Some of these actions may actually improve your picture, but even if they don't you get an excellent opportunity to obscure the picture even further and a chance to promise shareholders that once the merger costs are absorbed, things will be wonderful again.

That's what I think is going on here, and because I think Yahoo has been playing similar games, no matter if the merger goes through or not, both companies are going to face dismal futures unless they make actual and substantive changes to their business models rather than superficial ones. (And did I mention the long term costs of ignoring your customers actual needs while you tinkered with your company spreadsheets?)

(This post revised and extended from an original Slashdot comment I made)

Political Promises

"Taxpayers have become accustomed to the whoppers candidates tell on the campaign trail: A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, tax cuts, spending increases, and a balanced budget all at the same time.

The problem is that we can’t afford hot air. Our nation is in the midst of fiscal crisis: the economy is in a tailspin, we have a budget deficit of more than $400 billion and our national debt tops $9 trillion. We spend hundreds of billions each year just on interest payments to service that debt. And that doesn’t even consider the looming financial challenges of Social Security and Medicare."

Election Process Broken

"Let it be said: Our border can be secured; the illegal aliens can be sent home; the magnets that draw them here can be turned off. This crisis can be resolved if the courage and will are there. Unfortunately, we have a government that does not seem to care and probable nominees neither of whom is committed in his heart to doing it.

Given the manifest will of the people that this invasion from the south be halted and rolled back, the 2008 election is shaping up as yet further confirmation that American democracy is a fraud."

Well, fraud implies intent, and I'm not sure I'm willing to go there.

We clearly have a system that produces surprising results during the primaries while the general election is almost always forecast accurately well in advance.

Oh for the smoke filled rooms!

Should any of this surprise us? Have you noticed that we have a primary system that in no way resembles our general election? Each party does their own thing, states vote at different times, rendering the latter ones almost meaningless, which in turn leads to earlier primaries each year. The Dems allow delegate votes to be split, the Reps use winner-take-all. (Update: and I forgot to mention that some states like Texas allow cross over voting and some say that now that the Republican nomination is more or less settled, Republicans might vote for the Democrat that they think is easier to beat. This is being given as one explanation for yesterday's results in Texas, at least and maybe Ohio too).

It has become less and less clear to me how this is better than just letting party higher-ups select the nominee in a big room somewhere. If average people are going to feel they didn't have a say in the matter anyway, why not at least do the thing as cheaply as possible?

And then there are those election machines (no, not the ones in Chicago and New York, I'm referring to the mechanical variety). We had a system that pretty much worked for years, until one day in November of 2000 when Al Gore (peace be upon him) sitting in a limousine somewhere, couldn't make up his mind whether to concede the election to George Bush or not. He waffled a bit, and we've been waffling a lot over how to run elections ever since. Eight years and several questionable elections later, many states are dumping the expensive electronic retrofitted laptops that replaced the paper-driven mechanical voting machines and replacing them with... paper-driven mechanical voting machines. Thank you Al Gore (PBUH), I hope your ego has been adequately salved by the intervening Nobel Prizes, Academy Awards, and that odd Miss America title you received as consolation prizes.

It has now become a standard operating procedure to question the outcome of each election based on one or two close states, and to find something inappropriate about their process that could only be explained by some sort of underhanded tampering. Everyone (especially the losers, and especially if they are Democrats) get all worked up for a month or two and then forget all about it. Never mind that there are election irregularities all over the place that don't even get reported, because it is the nature of people who do these things to cover up as many mistakes as possible.

What do you want to bet that this election will be no different?

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. (Update: But... looking at that picture above, one can't help but think that if there was a vast conspiracy of some sort to elect another big-government, no-change President, things could not possibly be going better than they are now.)

Promulgated Principles and Practices Purport to Promote Portability

Probably Not, if Past performance is Predictive.

Vista Not the Only Bloated Thing We Have to Worry About

An only slightly modified cartoon from an old Punch magazine. I'm not sure what the original joke was about, but given ur now all-liberal slate for President, I could only think of one thing.

The Radio Equalizer: Shuster 'Pimped Out' Flap Parallels Imus Kerfuffle

"The biggest issue here is how the Clintons, with help from the Soros- backed Media Matters crowd, are now directly dictating network programming standards and even MSNBC's staff roster, since Shuster has been suspended and might face termination."

And the press thought the current administration was unfriendly.

A 125-Year Picture of the Federal Government's Share of the Economy, 1950 to 2075

Federal Outlays, 1962 to 2001



Federal Outlays by Category, 1950 to 2075


Conclusion

Under the assumptions CBO made for this 125-year picture of the federal government's finances, the projected rise in expenditures for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would drive total federal outlays well above the level that they have been throughout much of the post-World War II period. The core costs of the federal government--that is, ignoring net interest on the debt--could rise from approximately 18 percent of GDP today to 24 percent in 2050 and 28 percent in 2075. Left unattended, that steady escalation in spending could cause major deficits to emerge and thereby push the government's debt and interest expenditures to unprecedented levels. The total cost of government, including interest expense, could more than double as a share of the economy, rising from 19 percent of GDP today to 40 percent in 2075 (see Figure 3 and Table 3).

"I’m tired of Bush and Clinton families running America and want a change."

I think I can summarize your choice in simpler terms: you've decided to vote for a Democrat no matter what, and you don't want it to be Hillary. Fine.

If Jeb Bush were running and a viable candidate at this point your statement above would be a good way to disguise the fact that you eliminated a Republican vote from the start.

Most people, rightly or wrongly, choose the party they are going to vote for well in advance of all the debates. It only irks me when people pretend that they are exceptions to this.

Go to the CBO web site and look at projected Federal spending as a percentage of GDP (and note where the money goes, also note the optimistic assumptions about "other", finally note that this is ONLY federal spending). Explain to me how any of the Dems are going to address this.

Have the Reps done a good job of addressing it? No. But at least they acknowledge the problem and resist the temptation to add yet another exponentially growing entitlement to what may be the downfall of our way of life.

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."

Three Dollars Too Much

To try and thwart Nicholas Negraponte's One Laptop Per Child effort Microsoft is making copies of Windows available to a competing Intel box for $3 as I understand it. They are also working to make a version of Windows that will run on the OLPC, presumably for a similar price.

I know a lot of people that use computers. Before I left the big city to head for the beach I might have had conversations about home computer use (leaving out work related use for the moment) with dozens of people. But having been in the boondocks for a while my circle of friends has grown smaller. Get this though, here is the percentage of my Windows using friends who are reporting significant problems with their home installations: 100.

It just struck me the other day that I don't know any Windows users, not one, who isn't having problems, and I don't mean minor problems, I mean major "lost everything" problems. To help convince you that I'm not making this up, here are their stories, names omitted to save them the embarrassment...

Case A is a retired technologist, programmer for the Apolo moon missions, inventor, and aspiring author. He doesn't want to tinker with computers any more, he just wants to write his books. For months he has been doing so on a laptop, without major incident, but having "normal" Windows users issues with pop-up ads, spy-ware, spam, and drivers mysteriously failing to do what they used to do. His reaction to these problems has been to remove almost everything except Microsoft Office from his machine. Having sent him either links, or actual files that require Adobe Acrobat or Real Player I find that he has uninstalled those things out of fear. Nevertheless he managed to get Internet Explorer outfitted with so many "helpful" tool-bar additions that there was little screen real-estate left over for anything else. His sound card stopped making sounds, pop-ups continued to pop-up and he complained that the machine was getting slower and slower. He didn't want to try Firefox though as Microsoft has succeeded in convincing him that his problems have nothing to do with Windows itself, but just that big-bad world that it has to live in on the Internet.

He recently called in a panic to tell me that his machine, a laptop, suddenly wouldn't boot at all. Long story short, he had installed yet another "security" package from his ISP that had caused the condition. A trip to the shop for an overnight stay and $65 later the machine was working again. Fortunately, the fact that he hadn't done a recent back-up didn't cost him anything as they were able to retain his existing file system. Fortunately or otherwise, he was so shaken by the experience he purchased another PC as a "back-up machine" on the rather safe assumption that a similar thing will soon happen again. If the medicine makes you sick, try taking more of it.

Case B is a dear little lady that I agreed to help with her e-mail problems. Now I've steadfastly refused to get involved with anyone's Windows issues other than offering generic advice such as "why are you still using that crapware?" but in this case the problems seemed to be mostly "older person trying to cope with new-fangled technology", so I stop by once in a while to get her unstuck with sending a reply, forwarding a message, or attaching a photo. Unfortunately this has turned into three machines so far. The last one I purchased myself, used, from a shop I trusted, with a clean install of Windows XP and little else. I put on anti-virus programs and such, and so far so good. I can't be sure that her earlier machines were hardware or software failures. At some point it gets hard to tell from a post-mortem point of view. Power supplies burn out, fans die and machine overheat, often after running at 100 percent CPU for days at a time doing no-telling what in the background. If she manages to kill this machine, her next one will run Linux. Enough is enough.

Case C is a minister, on a dial-up connection, who really doesn't do much more than e-mail and print out church related materials from time to time. When I first saw his machine it had an obscure virus that was not removable by any of the major packages that are supposed to do such things. Fortunately I learned this through research, which was much quicker than trial and error. He too took it to a "competent" shop who managed to get rid of the virus and most of his applications software at the same time. I'll be installing Open Office for him and he is already using Firefox, thanks to some other kind soul he ran into. Should the need arise, he will already be over the hurdles that tie most people to Windows.

Case D is a couple of guys that run a small home business involving shared files with several other people working at home. Their Windows machines, although of relatively recent vintage are always bogged down doing something in the background that nobody can quite define. Opening a web page is a go-to-the-fridge-for-another-coke sort of operation at times, and while some of this problem is a slow ADSL connection and a care-less Verizon support system, my Apple laptop works pretty well on their network, even wirelessly, while their hardwired desktop systems continue to crawl.

Finally, the co-workers in this small business are always having trouble with their PCs too, except for the one Apple user of course. So those machines have to be regularly hauled over to "headquarters" for diagnosis and I dread even hearing about the long tortuous road to recovery, which is often followed by an almost immediate relapse.

So those are my sample points. All of them. Other people I know that are using Apple computers or Linux haven't been complaining much about slow systems or slow Internet or random crashes. Oh I know, there are Apple machines that are junk (I had one of those once too) and Windows machines that perform flawlessly, those just don't happen to be in my universe of users at the moment.

Worth three dollars? Hardly.

Indian River Inlet Bridge Project Flushes Millions Down The Toilet

To remind us that not ALL wastefulness, fraud, deceit and excuse-making happens at the federal level:

According to Cole, the state expects to announce the new bidding process for the project “within a month,” and the contract to be awarded “within a year.” Construction on the new bridge should begin shortly after that. And to answer a question that has been posed on the air a few times, whatever bridge ends up being built should work just fine with the new approaches.

A statement that soon proved to be formed from the atmosphere of interplanetary space.

FEMA Workers Play Role of Reporters

As hard as the previous story is to believe, this may be even worse:

"WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California. The agency—much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago—arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director."

Can't we just fire everybody and start over?

TPMmuckraker | Talking Points Memo | D'Oh: House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

Link from Slashdot.

This is hilarious.

On Slashdot they are arguing over whether Dems or Reps are more likely to experience such a snafu.

Correct answer: both equally

If the actual error was made by a contractor, there is a good chance someone will lose their job or at least get shuffled to a position where they can do no further harm. Not so with government jobs.

Believe what you will about the motives for each political party, but doesn't this make the case for smaller government?

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

And then there is this:

Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.

A committee spokesperson emailed the following statement in response to TPMmuckraker's questions:

The tip line was created to be a confidential method for Justice Department employees to provide the Judiciary Committee with information that might aid the Committee in its ongoing investigation of politicization at the Justice Department. Because of the confidentiality agreement, the Committee will not discuss any emails sent on this tip line. A technological error in a recent communication inadvertently disclosed certain email addresses.

"A technological error"???

Sounds like the inmates of the asylum have nothing to worry about.

Saving Facebook

It's all been said already by those who can say it better than I can:

The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)
Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web
Facebook ‘Grants’ Devotees a Disappointment

But when did I ever let that stop me before?

My history of "social web" goes something like this...

I've had a web page for almost as long as individuals outside of universities could have web pages of their very own. Why? Because it was there. I've always been more interested in the creating/writing/tinkering than with whether anyone was reading it. I've never even told family members or most of my friends (and certainly not employers) that I even had a web page. My web pages have always been anonymous, or as now, used an "online" identity, and I think with fairly good reason. Until someone pays me to be a journalist, I'd just as soon not have to worry so much about identity theft, stalking, and things like that.

In the time since the early Web, I've participated in dozens of online activities, chat rooms, IRC, instant messengers (just about all of them at one time or another), and on to 3D virtual reality systems, which led to operating a forum, creating a lot of content for the forum, starting a blog, then another, and another, buying a few domain names, and so on.

In the process, I've made a few online friends. People who I would never have met in real life, but who are just as much friends as those I have met in real life. Friendships are built on common interests, common viewpoints, common struggles, longevity, trust, and so on, and whether they are primarily face-to-face, primarily by e-mail, on-line chat, or Morse Code, I think is far less important than those other factors.

But I'm not sure the founders of Facebook see it that way. In fact they make it clear they want you to only use your real name, something I am loath to do. I know this because I saw one of them in a YouTube interview say exactly that, and that their goal was to mirror each persons "real world" network of friends, associates and relatives. I'm getting ahead of myself though, first back to my history...

One of the many things I did to experiment with the Internet was to set up a domain named "Paperworth.com". The original plan was very simple. At the dawn of the personal web page era, it occurred to me that there were far too many people giving far too much information out about themselves to total strangers. My plan was to do a tongue in cheek parody of such efforts as an example of what not to do. Paperworth, a name I chose because I couldn't find that real name in a phonebook or online anywhere (I have since) was going to be the name of a fictitious family in "mid-America" who's father had just gotten his very own web page for the family. I've told this story before, so I won't drag it out, but I was going to include photos of the family, pets, and kids, including such useful tidbits as where we hid the spare key to the house and what the kids route to the school bus looked like. I'd have photos that carelessly exposed credit card numbers, private phone numbers, and so on. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was having a real job at which I worked too hard, and too many other "hobbies" like getting drunk five nights a week and recovering the other two. OK, I probably shouldn't have divulged that last part, but I've reformed, retired, and told potential employers where they can stick it so many times that any career for me will have to start with busing tables anyway. Of course when I did have enough time to do the project it was too late. Real people everywhere were now telling more about themselves to the entire world than I could ever have made up, the joke had become real, only in its reality, it wasn't funny any more.

With that in mind, I've since anonymized my domain names, checked pretty carefully for identifying info on those web photos and so on. Do I think it would be impossible to track the real me down if someone were determined to do so? Of course not. Just as you can't keep some nut from picking you at random in the grocery store parking lot as someone worth giving a hard time to, nothing protects any of us from random acts of insanity, or from very determined villains either.

So, when I first wrangled an invitation to Orkut out of curiosity (and before they were acquired by Google), I used a fake name. Orkut was fine for what it was, but it wasn't all that interesting to me. If everyone I knew in the world had suddenly shown up at Orkut, I would certainly have wanted to continue using e-mail, the telephone and air travel as a means of communicating with people. The groups you could join on special topics were less useful than the average IRC channel or Usenet group or web forum on the same topic. I soon dismissed Orkut as not useful enough to stick with. In fact at some point when I realized that almost all the messages I was receiving in Orkut were in Portuguese I just deleted my account. Apparently it had become really popular in Brazil.

It wasn't until MySpace was in the process of getting purchased for billions that I decided to test those waters again. This time didn't take nearly so long. I hated MySpace. First of all I didn't know anyone there. The interface was cluttered from the get-go, and all the features that allowed you to customise your "home page" (or whatever they called it) only seemed to make it more so. Add to that the system was very slow at times, and the things that would often spill out onto the screen taught you more than you wanted to know about MySQL and PHP (or whatever language they were using at the time). My testing of MySpace ended after only a week. I kept the ID for maybe a month, checking back from time to time for an announcement that they had thought better of it, wiped it all out and started over. When no such announcement came I again cancelled my account. One less thing to generate e-mail reminders that I hadn't signed on for a while or... whatever.

Always a glutton for punishment, I was intrigued again by the hype over Facebook (instead maybe the nature of the hype should have served as a warning).

So I signed up. Nobody invited me. Nobody I knew had told me how great it was. I just made up a name, not my real name, and signed up. There was nary more than a mild warning that they wanted you to use your real name. But like the second thing they asked for, my credit card information (which they said would be for "my convenience" in making future purchases) I decided not to take that request too seriously. Like almost everything online today, my "proof" that I was a real person consisted only of my giving them an e-mail address they could send my authorisation link to. Whoop Dee Doo! But then, I wasn't as hung up on this "real person" angle as the Facebook people seemed to be.

Oddly enough, using my online name, I was eventually discovered by several of my online friends. Hey, this Facebook thing might be useful after all! Hopefully they weren't going around looking every new user up in the phone book or something. I continued to not worry about it.

But then I looked up my university. Not working at the moment, I couldn't "join" as a member of some company, but I wanted to join something that was more than just a special interest group "sewing for men" etc. So I went to my university, where I found out you had to actually have an e-mail address associated with the university to join. Hmmm, I'm a member of an alumni thing. Is there an email address associated with that? Turns out there was, but I had never signed up for it. So off I go to do that. Of course they are fancy and really serious about identity, they get your name and address so they can send you letters begging for money. And of course if you are going to have a chance to contact old school chums through that (assuming I had any) using a fake name you just made up a few years ago would hardly do.

So now I was stuck. To test this whole social network thing with my alumni association, I'd have to change my name to my real name on Facebook. Could I even do that? After all, I'd already sworn on a stack of Bibles that I had used my real name in the first place. But the name change option was pretty easy to find, well trodden path I would say, complete with a fresh warnings like "You must use your real name", and "Facebook staff must approve your name change". Sure they do. The staff seemed to have done their work in mere seconds. My network of Facebook contacts didn't even notice a ripple in the space-time continuum.

So now that I was the real me, I could look up people and connect like crazy with other folks I went to school with right? Well, maybe. Only problem being that as wildly popular as Facebook might be at Harvard, and Stanford, and Starbuck coffee shops around Silicon Valley, it didn't seem to have caught on so well with my ole buddies at Podunk U. I couldn't find a single name there that I even remotely recognized, nor a picture, and similar to my experience with Orkut, it seemed that everyone who went to college where I had, now resides in India or Brazil. What-up with this?

Then I tried my high school. Well, I didn't see anything that required I have an old high school e-mail address, if there even was such a thing. Only problem is, they had a drop-down for the year I graduated, only the years didn't go back far enough to cover when I graduated. Now I know I'm old, but this is ridiculous. It's not like I was in the first (or 8th) graduating class or anything. I don't actually know how long the school had been around before I went there, but I know it had seen some wear and tear. So, essentially, there was not a single soul I recognized from my high school either, even though they would have all been younger than me, I should have been able to spot someone or some name, that I'd recognize. Well, at least they all hadn't moved to India!

Now this last week, a fairly well known online celebrity known as "Mini-Microsoft" was unceremoniously ousted from Facebook for the obvious TOS violation. Now MM couldn't exist as he/she does being critical of Microsoft from within, and I'm quite sure the individual made no effort to join the Microsoft employees group as that would have required an identifiable MS e-mail address. So what was the problem? Did some MS exec apply pressure to the company they were talking about investing a few million in? Inquiring minds are still inquiring on that I guess.

So there it is on "Real" versus "Virtual" identities. Facebook is only interested in the former (preferably with credit card information to go along with it), and not the latter (even if you have more REAL friends online than virtual friends in the real world). They talk a good game about verifying identities, but they really let alumni associations and workplaces do all the work. Want to game the system? Get a free web site from Google (or AOL), form a fake company and you and all your fake friends are off to the races! Are you getting the picture yet about what this company is really all about?

Now on to usability, and usefulness of Facebook. In short, as far as I can tell, there isn't any.

Is there an IM (Instant Messenger) capability? Well, no, unless you count keeping a web page open and bringing it to the foreground every 30 seconds as there is no beep or other indication of activity. Do they hook up with AIM - no, MSN - no, or the free and open Jabber used by Google - no.

They have something that sort of resembles e-mail, except that you can't send from a real e-mail system into it, or from it outbound to a real e-mail system. No, instead, you are supposed to go about your business as usual, until something important happens like, uh, someone throws a virtual pie at you from within Facebook at which time you get an e-mail message that summons you to Facebook where you are informed that "Someone has thrown a pie at you". And that's it. No fancy graphic, no splat sound, nothing. You have to wonder why they couldn't have just included the text with the e-mail message they sent you... as in: "Someone in Facebook has just thrown a pie at you, you might have better things to do than check on that right now, but if not, come on in." Who in their right mind would want to use this for business, or anything that remotely resembles business? Oh, yeah, Robert Scoble.

Yes there ARE some people who get paid to play with technology and write about their experiences. I don't begrudge such people the idyllic life they lead. I do get annoyed at the presumption that they have anything meaningful to say about how the majority of us... and by "us" I don't mean factory workers and plumbers, I mean people who work with technology, like payroll system, billing systems, aircraft avionics, and so on... how that fairly large group of people are going to benefit by whatever the latest fad is in Silicon Valley. (And while we are at it, shouldn't some of these WhizzBang things be of benefit to factory workers and plumbers?) I mean unless you are in some sort of specialized area, that somehow (and I can't even imagine how) benefits from sending and receiving a constant stream of text messages regarding what you had for lunch, how is a service like Twitter of any use to you? Sorry, but to me it can never be anything but a toy, and if you really need text messaging from anywhere at any time, then Blackberrys are already in place and do that job just fine. A better use of Silicon Valley's supposed brain power would be to duplicate the functionality of RIMs service at a fraction of the cost. How about free?

Oh, but back to Facebook, a program, that like Myspace, might dump screens full of MySQL and PHP statements out at you at any moment. The same program that wants my credit card info RIGHT AWAY, just in case they, um, need it for something, takes a regular DUMP (we used to call it that in my mainframe days and nobody ever laughed, I don't know why, it seems like such an uncomfortable word to use now) on my screen with all sorts of information that I suspect the programmers would rather I not see. How can they expect to be taken seriously? Just because the kid that started it, or stole the code, or whatever he did, looks and acts a lot like the young Bill Gates? Pull the other one. That seems like a reason to avoid Facebook like the plague. Why would anyone want to go down that road again? The biggest detour 'round the barn that technology has ever taken, Windows, and we are looking for someone just like that to invest our time, no, time and dollars into? OK, I'm dense, I admit it. So 'splain it to me Lucy.

OK, so you've now figured out I don't have much use for Facebook. I don't. As it stands anyway. But I'm not above giving my advice, and then saying "I told you so!" later when the company has run aground. Like, you know, when I was against Apple's switch to Intel, which I'm still sure, eventually, in thirty years or so, or someday, will be seen to be the mistake that I.... Well, OK, I probably got that wrong.

Take Second Life for example. For the life of me I can't figure out what to do with it other than to go in there and play tinker-toys. It's fun. But I think it should be more than that. IBM thinks it should be more than that. I think it can be more than that, easily, relative to the difficulty of a virtual reality in the first place. I've begged in the forums (while they still had forums) for better interaction with the outside world. Nothing. But I go in to talk to an IBM guy, in a well built IBM "build" and he knows less about IBM than I do. Five minutes and I've done all there is to do there other than oooh and ahhhh over how nice their building is. But these things have to be more than just fun don't they? They have to be useful for something. I'm a big supporter of Second Life, have been since the beginning. I go to an IBM presentation, "simulcast" in "real life", "Second Life" and some other virtual world (one I used to use and don't have much ongoing respect for) and the whole thing seems silly. The slides aren't in sync with the speech, they keep having to pause for technical issues, and as far as I can tell, and I really had to stretch to get this out of it: "we're in there, because it's there, and we don't have anything better to do."

Well, there is nothing wrong with doing something just because it's fun. People play video games for fun, go bowling for fun, and if they want to send text messages to each other all day for fun, who am I to say they shouldn't? Just don't pretend to be anything else but a fun thing. Second Life, if after all this time you haven't seen the advantage of hooking your virtual meetings into an IM, IRC or other text interface, I guess you never will. Can I ever send a message to an SL user without going into the interface? Can't each SL user have their own web page? Can't Facebook, using standard old HTML and RSS and messaging technologies work seamlessly with iGoogle, MSN Live, and AOL Instant Messenger? It isn't rocket science, but I guess if you 're all about scoring the next big billion dollar buy-out you can make it look like it is.

Warning to investors: It isn't worth it. Scoble and some others will tell you that once a company builds that walled garden and gets a few million users inside you will never get them to switch. Some carefully chosen examples will support that claim. But tell Yahoo that people haven't migrated from Geocities or their own e-mail program, not to mention search. Tell Blockbuster that Netflix hasn't hurt their business, or tell Netflix that Walmart, Amazon and Blockbuster going online hasn't hurt theirs (even if some of those efforts haven't been spectacular). There is a healthy ebb and flow of customers in any healthy commercial ecosystem whether it's cell phone carriers or plumbing supplies. Where there isn't that free flow of consumers there is decay. Windows, and the ecosystem that surrounds it is a perfect example. That's being fixed though, it took way too long, but it will get fixed eventually, with or without Microsoft's cooperation.

I don't think the tech sector is stupid enough to go down that road again, not during this generation of users anyway. Maybe in another twenty years when the echos of "Where do you want to go today?" have faded.

What we need today are more projects like OpenID, Jabber, cross platform operating systems and browsers and a spirit that says "I'm going to compete on features, I'm not going to lock you in, I'm going to let you weave in and out of my system freely and into others that may be of more use for you in other areas. You can get my stuff on your phone, instant messenger, home page, or inbox, it's all up to you, and we will take input from all those sources as well. And one more thing, we'll value you as a person whether you use your real name or not. We'll take the real you or the virtual you, and let you hook up with other people however you choose."

I don't hear those words coming from Facebook, and until I do, they can't be the next big thing.

Update: Apparently Dave Winer has pointed out that Facebook is a closed system. So Scoble now agrees that it sucks. Which seems odd considering his name is on this document:

http://opensocialweb.org/

here are some other handy links on the subject:

http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability

http://movemydata.org/home.html

http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability

Vote for (against) INCITS 2341 by IBM Corp

If, by chance, this flawed specification is approved despite the process outlined in the JTC 1 Directives, what will be the incentive for the submitting organization and company to resolve all of the known submitted technical comments if the ballot has already been passed?

Ooops, forgot to quote that.

Slashdot | Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books

From one of the articles:

With the backing of some of the groups opposed to the Google Library project, the Open Content Alliance should experience smooth sailing.

In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competing product is dropped like a hot potato.

Why would ANYONE trust Yahoo, MSN, HP or Adobe with content of any kind?

I fail to see what is wrong with the Google approach: I can search on content with strings. If the found content is not under copyright I have full access to it right away. If the found content is still under copyright I can at least verify that it actually covers the topic I'm interested in (as opposed to just containing a word or two in the glossary) and I can then procede to order the book, go to my public library, or whatever I need to do to get the information.

I love Project Gutenberg and the like, but considering the players involved this thing stinks to high heaven.

Of course Google could just make it easy on themselves and pull the plug on their efforts right now. Let these bandwagoneers do the heavy lifting and just provide searches on it all (which they are likely to do in any event).

My guess is though that this group will disband about a day after Google stops scanning.

We WILL get fooled again!

Theo de Raadt on 'Intel Core 2'

"- Basically the MMU simply does not operate as specified/implimented in previous generations of x86 hardware. It is not just buggy, but Intel has gone further and defined 'new ways to handle page tables' (see page 58).
- Some of these bugs are along the lines of 'buffer overflow'; where a write-protect or non-execute bit for a page table entry is ignored. Others are floating point instruction non-coherencies, or memory corruptions -- outside of the range of permitted writing for the process -- running common instruction sequences.
- All of this is just unbelievable to many of us."

also...

(While here, I would like to say that AMD is becoming less helpful day by day towards open source operating systems too, perhaps because their serious errata lists are growing rapidly too).

I guess I'll stick with my old "previously owned" P4 computer for a bit longer after all.