Month: December 2000

Slashdot today was talking about this interview with Linux evangelist Eric Raymond. In the interview, Raymond’s comments come across as almost being a parody of Linux true believers. Raymond is apparently seriuos about the following claims,

I think Linux will become dominant before it is really ready technically for the end users. And the reason I believe that is because I now think that Microsoft monopoly is going to collapse for other reasons in the near future.

One of the reasons is that prices for hardware is steadily dropping. This is a problem for Microsoft because their business model depends on charging a fixed price for pre-installed Windows on a machine. As hardware prices drop, that fixed price represents a larger portion of the margins of the desktop OEMs. The desktop OEMs are going to reach the point when prices drop to a certain level where they simply can’t make any money paying the Microsoft tax.

And it is at that point, that the Microsoft monopoly will collapse, because they will then unbundle Windows from their machines, and offer something that’s inexpensive (like, say, Linux), in an effort to get some of their margin. I believe that will happen probably within five to six month from now, and that’s probably before Linux will become polished and be ready for the end user.

Ummm, no. Hardware companies selling Intel and AMD boxes won’t discard Windows or replace it with Linux for one simple reason — nobody would buy them. Okay, the Linux enthusiasts might, but general users wouldn’t touch the things with a ten foot pole.

What Windows, Mac, and Linux advocates forget is that most end users could care less what OS they’re using. What the average end user is concerned about is application support on the OS. When my wife looks at a new computer she doesn’t care about the technical aspects of the OS, she just wants to make sure she can write her thesis on it, and occasionally take a break and play “The Sims.”

Linux is a long way from having the ease of use and application support to see it migrate to desktop computers except as a niche market. The manufacturer who tried this would almost certainly end up regretting it.

Wired reports that Register.Com won in its efforts to have a judge place a preliminary injunction on web hosting service Verio that forbids Verio from using Register.Com’s database to spam people who register new domains.

The order specifically forbids Verio to use Register.Com’s database “to enable the transmission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail, telephone calls or direct mail.”

On the one hand, the endless junk e-mails and junk mails I get simply because some company’s robot software pulled my name out of a registrar’s database is annoying (and sometimes hilarious — the “international business directory scams” are amazing). On the other hand, I’m not sure that litigation is the best response, in general, to the problem, although in this case it does seem warranted if only because Verio apparently used Register.Com’s name inappropriately in its e-mail pitch.

One of the earliest school lessons I remember about American democracy was this: under the tyrannical rule of the King of England, colonists had little protection from royal police. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ensured that the government would never assume for itself such sweeping powers to intrude into people’s lives. Of course my teachers never figured that an administration as corrupt as Bill Clinton’s would ever come to power.

Attorney General Janet Reno recently abrogated the Fifth Amendment so completely, that normally sycophantic U.S. Rep. David Bonior (D-Mich.) had enough and publicly called for Reno’s resignation saying, “In my 25 years in Congress, I have never seen such an act of injustice.” What had Bonior in such a fight mood?

After holding Algerian immigrant Anwar Haddam in jail for four years without ever revealing the evidence against him, Reno used a little-known law to circumvent a judge’s order to release him — guaranteeing that Haddam will remain in jail at least into February.

Ironically, Haddam originally came to the United States in search of political asylum. He claimed that if he returned to Algeria he would be killed, and The Board of Immigration Appeal in Falls Church, Virginia, agreed that his life was in danger and granted him political asylum. Which is where the Clinton administration enters the story.

The Justice Department claims it has “secret evidence” that Haddam is, in fact, a terrorist. Despite the Fifth Amendment, Congress several years ago passed a law allowing the state to confine non-citizens to jail entirely on the basis of secret evidence. Another foreign national, Mazen Al-Najjar, has been jailed for three years based entirely on “secret evidence” that he is a Palestinian terrorist.

As much as it disheartens them, however, there are limits even to the Clinton administration’s power and recently an immigration judge ordered Al-Najjar and Haddam released on the grounds that the U.S. government was unwilling to provide enough evidence of their alleged crimes in order for them to defend themselves at trial. Given how the Clinton administration has found itself with egg on its face over things like the supposed chemical weapons factory in Sudan that turned out to be a legitimate pharmaceutical factory, it’s likely as not that the government simply doesn’t have a solid case against Al-Najjar and Haddam (which doesn’t mean they aren’t terrorists, but in a nation of laws, the state has the burden of proof, not the defendants).

But Reno wasn’t about to allow Al-Najjar and Haddam to just walk out of jail. Instead she recently used a temporary, 45-day detention order to keep the two in jail, leaving the issue of the men’s freedom up to the next administration.

Bonior went public quickly saying,g

I am calling for Attorney General Janet Reno to resign today. This is an absolute outrage. These are Gestapo-like tactics. … This is a brutal decision. I am really distraught and I’m made as hell.

Bonior has sponsored a law that would do away with the United States’ own version of the Star Chamber, but it is likely that the anti-terrorism hysteria will guarantee that the law remains in effect for the foreseeable future.

Bonior is correct when he told the Associated Press that, “When you tell people about the secret evidence law, they don’t believe this goes on here in this country.” At the same time, however, Bonior himself has been one of the major defenders of the Clinton administration’s blatant abuse of power. It is commendable that Bonior finally saw the light, but he’s a little late to call for Reno’s resignation. If he’d started doing so three or four years ago, maybe he could have had some effect, but waiting until the last month of the Clinton administration means his protest will be a footnote that probably won’t even make the nightly news.

Source:

Democrat Congressman demands Reno resignation. NewsMax.Com, December 9, 2000.

Since I don’t follow much of what happens in the NFL in the off-season, I was a bit surprised after the Rams scored a touchdown and started doing their “Bob ‘N Weave” dance in the end zone that John Madden commented the celebration was illegal and would get the Rams players fined by the league.

Sure enough, ESPN’s John Clayton reports the players involved got $2,500 fines apiece per celebration,

You remember the “Bob ‘N Weave,” the symbol of last year’s Rams Super Bowl run. After a touchdown last season, five or six Rams offensive players formed a circle, bent over, pumped their arms and shouted their motto, “Gotta Go To Work.” It was innocent. It was fun. The Competition Committee, led ironically by Vikings coach Dennis Green, treated it as a punishable offense, fining players $2,500 a “Bob.” Five Rams received those fines after a touchdown in Week 3 against the 49ers, so they stopped.

“This team is about emotion,” Warner said. “When we show and play with emotion, that’s when we play our best. I called the players in the other day and told them that we need to get that back. I could care less if we do the Bob ‘N Weave, but I told them if we do the Bob ‘N Weave and get fined, it’s on me.”

This is insane. The throat slashing maneuver? I could see why the NFL wanted to put a clamp on that. The sort of excessive celebration that Terrell Owen did earlier in the year at Dallas? Absolutely uncalled for. But doing the Bob ‘N Weave in the end zone after scoring a touchdown? Why should that draw a $2,500 fine? Seems like good wholesome fun to me.

(Or to put it another way, if I’m going to be taking pain killing shots on Monday after getting knocked around by 250-300 pound, 6’6″ guys on Sunday, I’m definitely celebrating in the end zone if I score a touchdown).

At the end of October an almost surreal story about Africa’s obvious lack of presence on the Internet made the rounds of the usual news agencies. What were they thinking?

Okay, here are the bottom line statistics. Although 10 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, less than 1 percent of the world’s Internet users are Africans, and 40 percent of those live in South Africa.

Don’t worry, though, the usual suspects have a solution to this “problem.” The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are prepared to ride to the rescue and make sure Africans have Internet access. Given how unsuccessful the World Bank and IMF have been at putting the economies of developing world on a solid foundation, by the time they get finished with Internet access, Africans will be lucky to have even spotty telephone service.

The Associated Press captured the surrealist of the World Bank and IMF devoting itself to getting Africans on the Internet when it actually included this sentence in the lead paragraph of a story on the report: “…A million South Africans have access to the Web, but practically nobody does in war-racked Congo.” What a surprise! The next thing you know, we’ll learn that people in war-torn Ethiopia and Eritrea also have almost no Internet access.

The bottom line is that where civil society has taken hold in Africa, and democracy and free speech have replaced dictatorial rule and indiscriminate power, telecommunications services have taken off. Ghana is well on its way to being a wired country, for example, because it privatized its telephone services in 1994, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo is likely to remain off the Internet for the foreseeable future as its ongoing decade-long civil war will make building up a telecommunications infrastructure all but impossible.

The focus on Internet access in Africa seems to be the worst sort of case of offering Western technologies as the solution to the continent’s problems.

Sources:

Report shows African Internet use disparity. The Associated Press, October 30, 2000.

According to The BBC what was believed to have been one of the best examples of Icthyosaurus turned out instead to be a fake.

The forgery, which was done during the Victorian period, was discovered when curators decided to clean the skeleton and realized the fossil was, in fact, a combination of bones from two separate animals along with bones made out of plaster to make it appear as a perfect Icthyosaurus specimen (insert cliche here about how things that seem to good to be true usually are).