Day: May 8, 2001

CNET has the most informative review of the AlphaSmart 3000 portable word processor that I’ve read (wish it had been available when I bought mine — I wouldn’t have waited so long). Overall, for only $230 the AlphaSmart is a great product. As CNET says, “Businesspeople and writers who just need to crunch a lot of words or students composing e-mails and essays may find that the AlphaSmart is a simple and cheap complement to their regular desktop computer, giving them a fully functional, wireless keyboard with just enough word processing power to let them work on the road as well.”

Here’s some more quotes from the CNET review with my comments:

Use the AlphaSmart for standard keyboarding on your computer, then disconnect it and use it as a mobile word processor.

Nobody in their right mind would use the AlphaSmart for a standard keyboard. It is a lot better than most laptop keyboards I’ve used, but the space bar is only half-size in order to accommodate a couple command keys which makes it much less desirable to use for desk-bound keyboarding.

When you return to your desk and plug the keyboard back into your desktop computer, just open your word processing program and upload your work to the application with one keystroke.

I haven’t used my AlphaSmart with a Macintosh, but at least with Windows one nice feature is that you don’t need to carry around a driver disk. Plug it into a USB port and Windows automatically recognizes it as a keyboard.

The AlphaSmart runs on three AA batteries (the first set is included) for up to 500 hours. We didn’t have time to test this assertion, but users we queried reported battery lives of anywhere from 200 hours to 500 hours.

I have no idea what the battery life is with my machine, but it is so long that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had mine for 5 or 6 months now, and have changed the batteries only once with moderate usage.

When you hit the road, the optional ($29) Get Utility software lets you download text from your word processor into the AlphaSmart’s memory for another round of mobile word processing.

I really can’t imagine using the AlphaSmart for this sort of text editing. It excels at being a lightweight tool I can pull out of my briefcase and type out a letter or draft article if I’m stuck waiting somewhere for 10 or 15 minutes (or longer), and then edit that copy back on my desktop machine.

The main limitation of the keyboard is the four-line, 40-character LCD display (no backlighting). That’s room for 25 or 26 words at a time which doesn’t lend itself well to editing longer documents.

It is, however, great for exactly those situations where you might want to take time to work on an article, but you don’t want to lug around a traditional laptop (and aren’t willing to spring for the $3,000 necessary for a top-of-the-line Sony Vaio). Not to mention that the AlphaSmart hasn’t crashed on me yet, unlike my laptop.

Jon Katz is worried that steganography — hiding one set of information within another, such as with digital watermarking — may “determine whether the Net — and much of the data that moves through it — stays free or not.” I’d like to see this stuff work in the real world before getting all bent out of shape.

Katz seems impressed by this Wired article detailing a Microsoft demo of a digital watermarking technology designed for audio files. Microsoft researchers made a lot of claims about how good the technology works, but then again so did the Secure Digital Music Initiative. And, of course, even relatively secure systems can be compromised by boneheaded errors — just ask the people responsible for the DVD protection system.

Which brings me to my recommendation for people concerned about this stuff: do everything in your power to make sure Microsoft’s standards are accepted. Last week Microsoft had to publicize yet another security problem with their IIS server. A hacked copy of Office XP was on the Internet weeks before the supposedly secure system was to be released to the public.

And these folks are going to be able to provide a long-term solution for securing music? I don’t think so.

AntiWar.Com has an excellent piece by Alexander Cockburn comparing the media treatment that former Sen. Bob Kerrey received after he finally went public with his story about killing civilians in Vietnam, to the media coverage received by Tom Blanton, who was finally convicted for the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing.

No one is talking about the “ambiguities of that bitter and divided time,” or the “fog” of the fight over segregation in the South. No one is saying that Blanton was just a compliant foot soldier in a struggle for which the commanding officers in Dixie — Strom Thurmond and the others — bear responsibility.

Yet listen to the forgiving words from liberals for Bob Kerrey, yesterday a US Senator and today the President of the New School in New York. Bob Scheer, Los Angeles Times columnist, liberal Democrat, writes that Kerrey is “a good man”, and that our anger should be reserved for Robert McNamara, Pentagon chief in the JFK-LBJ years.

And, of course, he quotes Christopher Hitchens on Fox News going on about how he likes Kerrey “very much” (apparently if Henry Kissinger kills innocent women and children he’s a war criminal, but if you current boss at the New School admits to such transgressions, it was just another day in a bad war).

Cockburn notes that if the United States were being consistent, it would call for a special United Nations expeditionary force to seize Kerrey (and perhaps bomb Washington, DC, into submission if the government interfered with such efforts).

Especially since, as in Kosovo and in the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing, the government seems to have played a major role in helping domestic criminals cover up their acts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation long had surveillance recordings demonstrating Blanton’s culpability but never divulged that fact, just as a number of people had to look the other way for decades for Kerrey’s actions to have gone uninvestigated and unpunished.

Maybe it’s time for sanctions and other measures to force the United States to comply with international human rights laws.

Source:

Kerrey, Blanton and the Liberals. Alexander Cockburn, AntiWar.Com, May 4, 2001.

Unless you’re a comic book fan, you probably don’t know who David Sims is. Sims is the creator of the long running independent comic book, Cerebus. At a time when comic books were still dominated by the super hero genre, Sims launched his independent, black and white book that proved there was a market for comic books beyond big breasted women and supercharged characters. Unfortunately, Sims is also a subscriber to an extremely noxious form of traditionalist anti-feminism.

Sims recently expounded on his views in a lengthy copyright-free essay which was published online by Comics Journal. The essay, Tangent, is one long misogynist screed against women (the essay is so bizarre that it is very understandable why Carol West, and administrative assistant at the company Sims set up to publish Cerebus quit, according to Sims’ account, after typing in a draft of the first two parts of the essay).

Sims writes in the sort of broad generalizations to which only true believers can subscribe. To Sims, for example, it is a simple, obvious fact that “women are emotion-based beings,” from which it clearly follows that “any female-centered or female-originated political movement – more precisely, “political” “movement” – will lack sound intellectual footing.”

This site often challenges the claims made by feminists. For Sims, this is a waste of time — in his mind, he need only point out that the claims are made by women which proves that, regardless of whether or not the claims are true, they cannot be based on any “sound intellectual footing.”

Sims’ version of traditionalist anti-feminism is extreme even for this position, but he is not that far from more widely read advocates of this position such as George Gilder. Sims seem to think his version of anti-feminism is the wave of the future, but fortunately his views (and that of other traditionalist anti-feminists) are really nothing more than the last gasp of a philosophy of women that is as wholly irrational and wrong as anything coming out from the worst radical feminists in academia.

Source:

Tangent. David Sims, Comics Journal, March 16, 2001.