Day: August 14, 2000

Jakob Nielsen and the Idiocy of the Microsoft Anti-Trust Case

The funniest thing about the whole antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was
watching how Microsoft’s detractors continually talk out of both sides of their
mouths. Even professionals writing in the computer industry often seem like
they just don’t get it.

Take web design guru Jakob Nielsen (please). At his site’s Spotlight section, Nielsen briefly outlines Microsoft’s new ClearType technology, which
supposedly makes text easier to read on monitors. Nielsen reports that:

A Microsoft manager is quoted as saying that ClearType will be available
next year “for all Microsoft applications.” The Anti-Trust folks should look
into this. If ClearType is made available for Microsoft applications and not
integrated fully into the operating system, then that is the final kiss of
death for any independent software developers. Nobody wants to spend 10% more
time reading their email, their spreadsheets, their documents – or web pages,
for that. So once ClearType becomes prevalent, nobody will use any software
that doesn’t have it.

Has Nielsen been asleep over the past few months? The antitrust trial specifically
sought to prevent Microsoft from integrating something like ClearType into the
operating system with the claim that by integrating something like ClearType
at the OS level, Microsoft was harming developers who might come up with their
own technologies to do the same thing. The entire Justice Department case against
Microsoft is implicitly predicated on the notion that if Microsoft is allowed
to embed something like ClearType at the OS level that will discourage innovation
by making it unprofitable for other companies to work on their own software
to make computer text easier to read.

And as Nielsen inadvertently demonstrates, this is stupid since it puts the
government in the position of making a wide range of close calls about software
since it makes judges and lawyers responsible for deciding what should go in
an OS and what should go in an application.

Democrats Appease Racial Intolerance

    On August 14, USA Today ran an interesting article (“Lieberman says loyalty questions hurt”) on Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman’s reaction to anti-Semitic statements made about him. The story is interesting because it is fascinating to see how far Democrats are willing to acquiesce to racial intolerance when trying to court African American votes.

    How unfashionable anti-semitism is among whites can be seen by the fact that the only white individuals who made anti-semitic remarks directed against Lieberman were fringe white supremacists — the sort of folks who tend to hate Catholics as much as Jews.

    On the other hand, anti-semitic views seem to have a much stronger grip in African American communities. In a recent poll, 40 percent of African Americans interviewed said they agreed with the statement that Jews have too much power in America. Wow.

    That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that two representatives of prominent African American organizations quickly raised questions about Lieberman begin a Jew. First, Lee Alcorn, head of the NAACP chapter in Dallas, told a radio talk show host that,

I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with, you know, money and these kinds of things.

    To its credit, the NAACP moved quickly to suspend Alcorn, with NAACP head Kweise Mfume calling Alcorn’s statements “repulsive.”

    Louis Farrakhan, who in the past has referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” also weighed in saying that he questioned whether Lieberman would “be more faithful to the Constitution … than to the ties that any Jewish person would have to the state of Israel.”

    The surprising part is Lieberman’s reaction. According to the USA Today story, Lieberman actually plans on sitting down and talking to Farrakhan about, in USA Today’s words, “the issue.”

    So rather than strike out against anti-semitism and in favor of racial tolerance, Lieberman is going to sit down and talk with a man who once told American Jews they were “wicked deceivers of the American people…You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”

    After Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush visited Bob Jones University, which prohibits interracial dating, Democrats and the media had a field day. Here was the Republican’s racial intolerance on full display for all to see. But apparently the rules are different for Farrakhan who can question the loyalty of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee based solely on the fact that he is Jewish and, far from being excoriated by the candidate and the party, buy himself a seat at the table for his outburst.

    Just like the Republicans, the Democrats are more than happy to embrace and exploit racial intolerance when taking the moral high road means the risk of alienating core constituents. For this it should be ashamed.

PGN to JavaScript – Yes!

PGN to JavaScript tool on CoolTool.Com I was so geeked I dropped everything I was doing to download and play around with it. Bottom line — this thing rocks.

For those of who are not chess fanatics, PGN is the most common format for describing chess games. It is a fairly straightforward text format describing the date of the game, the players and then a list of moves. What the PGN to JavaScript tool does is convert a PGN file into a JavaScript mini-applet that simulates a chessboard.

For example, check out this game that I played on Chessmaster 6000 over the weekend. Note that although I love chess I pretty much suck at it and I set Chessmaster 6000 to what I call the “idiot” level so even I could beat it (i.e. if you know anything about chess, this game is probably likely to make you giggle at my moves). But watching the game replayed via the web is just enough incentive to make me want to crack all those chess books I have been collecting over the years and get with it improving my game.

I wish there were more applications like this to take real world stuff and easily put it on the web.

We Don’t Need to Keep the Web Relevant (But Archiving It Is A Good Idea)

Cyveillance released a report yesterday
claiming that its study of the Internet suggests there are currently a little
more than 2 billion public web pages, and that the number of web pages is currently
growing at a rate of 2 billion pages per year (i.e., the size of the web will
double this year).

Those are some pretty amazing numbers. To put that in perspective, a web researcher
quoted in USA Today says that is about the same amount of text that
is available in the entire Library of Congress collection.

But USA Today could not help but get a dig in at the web in its story,
tracking down consultant Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies who said that the
problem is keeping the web relevant, “Creating a web page now is piece of cake.
Even my dog has a Web page. A lot of people’s dogs have web pages.”

Apparently the conclusion that most people are supposed to reach is that a
web page featuring a dog is simply not relevant — more noise than signal. But
this makes an erroneous assumption — that information is only useful if it
is homogenous and intended for consumption by millions of readers.

Consider books. USA Today pretty much turned its entertainment section
into an advertorial for the latest Harry Potter book the past few weeks. Now
I love the Harry Potter series, but the reason USA Today devoted so
much attention to the book was not because of any particular value the book
has (lots of very good children’s literature is published every year), but because
millions of people are interested in the Harry Potter book.

It is extremely unlikely that USA Today will ever run a book review,
regardless of how good the book is, of a small self-published effort with a
print run of 2,500 copies. To USA Today‘s publishers, and most of its
readers, such a review would not have much relevance.

The web is different because the low cost of providing information makes assembling
and publishing information aimed at heterogeneous audiences cheap and easy.
You might not care at all, for example, that there are hundreds of web sites
listed in Yahoo! devoted to paint ball, or that I have hundreds of pictures
of my daughter on my web site. But to the people who are interested in paint
ball or my daughter, such information is very important.

So, I say, bring on the dog home pages.

On the other hand, it is good to know that someone is trying to collect all
(or as much as possible) of the information on the Internet. The
Internet Archive has collected 1 billion pages in its archive since 1996.
The archive is stored on magnetic tape and currently occupies 13.2 terabytes
of data, and is growing at a size of 2 terabytes a month as of March 2000.

Lets do the math. A terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. The largest consumer-level
hard drives available at the moment are in the 75 gigabyte range, so if I wanted
my own local copy of the archive (and who wouldn’t?) it would take 177 of these
75 gig hard drives. In other words, all I have to do is wait 5 or 6 years and
I will be able to install a local copy on my LAN. Now that would be cool.

Bias in Schools

John Leo wrote an op-ed piece a few weeks ago (Anti-male bias increasingly pervades our culture) claiming that increasingly there is an anti-male bias present in popular culture. He repeats a couple of well-known incidents, most notably the brief controversy over an American Greetings Cards ad campaign which featured a greeting card that read on the outside, “Men are always whining about how we are suffocating them,” and then the punch line on the inside goes, “Personally, I think if can her them whining you’re not pressing hard enough on the pillow.”

Switch the gender on the card and you’ve got an instant boycott by the National Organization for Women, but at the time American Greeting Cards saw nothing wrong with the message of the card, noting that “we’ve heard no protests from consumers who are buying and using this card.”

While these sorts of things are a bit annoying, I tend to think some of the reaction to the male bashing cards, calendars, etc. is an overreaction. Yes, the feminists are complete hypocrites on this issue, but on the other hand there are more important things to worry about. Near the end of his column, however, Leo highlights a disturbing case of the kind that does deserve more attention.

Barbara Wilder-Smith, a teacher and research in the Boston area, was recently quoted in several newspapers on how deeply anti-male attitudes have affected the schools. When she made “Boys Are Good” T-shirts for boys in her class, all 10 of the female student teachers under her supervision objected to the message. (One, she said, was wearing a button saying “So many men, so little intelligence.”)

“My son can’t even wear the shirt out in his back yard,” she said. “People see it and object strongly and shout things.” On the other hand, she says, nobody objects when the girls wear shirts that say “Girls Rule”…

That is extremely bizarre, but very typical of the attitudes from radical feminists in academia. This reminds me of an online forum my wife and I participated in that included feminist college students. After a particularly heated debate over some issue, one of the feminist decided to insult my then-pregnant wife with the worst insult she could come up with at the moment — “I hope have a boy!”

It turned out we had a very bright, beautiful daughter, but I would hope that whether they are boys or girls all children in schools are treated with the utmost respect and as individuals, rather than being singled out for special treatment and disdain because they are members of a politically incorrect sex. Unfortunately this sort of equality now seems entirely at odds with the feminist desire to ghettoize people by sex.