One more for the funny pages: the Onion’s theory of "Intelligent Falling".
|
My Outlook Inbox, which doubles as my to-do list, is at zero items! It seems I’m finally ready to start summer vacation! Oops, too late - the kids have already been in school for a week… P.S. Don’t use this as an excuse to send me more mail, at least till next week ;-).
But I’ve noticed that we’re getting pretty tired of hearing about how bad Walmart is - it distracts us from what we like to do best - shop on sale! Now the New York Times reports on early signs that Google may be the next to take over the mantle despite their carefully managed public identity which seems to basically be "we’re not evil."
Being the good guy is a hard pedestal to stay on top of when people start throwing rocks at you. As Google grows the target gets bigger, as do the opportunities to simply stumble and fall off on your own. It’s easy to keep your ideals when your stock options are shooting through the roof. As Google grows it will increasingly be under pressure to become yet-another-giant-multinational with the accompanying unreasonable expectations for revenue growth. It’s been a bit frustrating to me to watch Google get away with some things Microsoft was excoriated for. But that disparate public treatment can turn about pretty quickly! So when the honor comes your way, enjoy it Google! It’s probably not possible to avoid becoming the company America most loves to hate, but by careful conduct and holding to your high ideals as closely as you can you may be able to quickly pass the trophy on to another "worthy" candidate! By way of Michael Champion:
Seems that Intelligent Design should have a place in the curriculum after all - at Comedy School. Ironically, the W3C Web Services Activity appears most productive when it’s on holiday ;-). An impressive list of deliverables from the Web Services Description and Web Services Addressing Working Groups has appeared this month, while the Working Groups take their August break. Maybe we should take holidays more often! Or were we just so motivated to start our vacations that we actually came to agreement over the hard issues represented in these publications?
In any case, congratulations to all my fellow WS-Desc and WS-Addr members on a productive summer! This marks a significant jump in the level of stability of each of these documents, and shows that there may indeed be a light at the end of these tunnels. I love the Do Not Call list. I signed up immediately and the level of phone solicitations has dropped off to near zero. The primary remaining calls are my credit card companies, who call ostensibly to verify some detail of my account, and then attempt to move smoothly into a sales pitch for balance transfers, payment protection, or some other crap that I have already repeatedly turned down by tossing dozens of junk mail solicitations. But, I am increasingly bothered by junk faxes. There are unscrupulous marketers out there that have automated systems to call and detect fax numbers. They send faxes to those numbers selling insurance, vacations, all kinds of junk. It’s bad enough when these junk faxes fill up my computer’s fax inbox, but they also attempt to send them to my home phone. At odd hours. This morning it was two attempts at 2:45 and 3:15 AM. I didn’t get back to sleep until almost 5. I’m grumpy and I’m not going to take it any more! I spent some of that time trying to figure out ways to make such marketing un-economic. The fax itself doesn’t come with a source number, so I can’t send 1000 faxes back to the source for every one they try to send me. Most of these junk faxes have an 800 number to call and remove yourself from the database, but this doesn’t seem to have reduced the volume any. The automated systems on the other end seem suspiciously identical. Trying to set up my computer to bombard the 800 number for delisting didn’t seem to work - they must have protections built in against that. The product being hawked usually doesn’t have an 800 number either, and it’s not economic for me to invest my long distance dollars in annoying the spammer indirectly. As fax spam is illegal, there is small claims court or class action lawsuits. But perusing junkfax.org doesn’t give me much hope for a simple strategy to combat fax spam. At least there are folks wielding the full weight of the legal system against this invasion of my home. I was surprised that good-old-oil-boy George W. was promoting hybrid technology in the energy bill. Has he greened up a bit? Or is this simply a token gesture, meant to obscure the immense subsidies to oil business? But perhaps W is even more devious than I had imagined. Perhaps he knew that many new "hybrids" are not providing better gas mileage at all - just increased power. GM’s hybrids are a sham. Even Honda is a culprit. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a whole Hybrid Center which details these problems. The government incentives for buying hybrids still apply, whether you are trying to save the planet, or simply want to get from 0 to 60 quicker. This is reminiscent of Bush’s 2003 push for a hydrogen economy, which sounds like a good way to go green until you realize hydrogen is currently manufactured mainly from - yep - natural gas. Nobody should be fooled into thinking that George W. isn’t the least envrionmentally responsible President we’ve seen. You knew I was bound to be predisposed towards a theory of creation named the Design By Committee Theory ;-). But this lighthearted look at Intelligent Design points out the (to me) biggest self-inconsistency in that theory - that if you look at the wonders of material creation and infer there was a Divine Creator, you must also look at the evils of material creation and infer that the Creator is either evil or inept, to be fought against in the name of Good, or to be ignored as an inconsequential or random force in our lives. As Jacob Weisburg of Slate points out, when you assume that matter and material phenomenon is all there is, you really have no rational choice but to find that the material evidence for evolution fundamentally opposes the very existence of a material God. Thank goodness God is not material.
I love this story - a class-action lawyer is threatening to sue Microsoft unless Windows Vista has an unconditional warranty against security vulnerabilities and bugs. Even the Microsoft-bashers understand that this guy is an idiot. Security is always a trade-off. If you’re afraid your car will be stolen, you can lock the doors, you can install an alarm, you can hire guards to watch it, you can never leave your own locked garage, or you can simply not have a car. The more secure, generally the more expensive and inconvenient, as Dilbert illustrates. We all know the most secure computer is simply not plugged in. My favorite reader comment on the above story:
But really, I smell a business opportunity for Microsoft here. Complete security is self-evidently unachievable, but warranties are a numbers game, right? Introducing Windows Vista Unlimited Edition, with an unconditional warranty against damages caused by hackers or bugs. It’s targeted toward enterprises with at least 100 seats so it requires a 100 seat minimum. Each seat is modestly priced at, say, $1,000,000. Microsoft takes half of the $100,000,000 minimum per enterprise and buys nice fat insurance. It uses part of the remaining tidy profits to fund programs teaching rudimentary computer science and economics to class action lawyers and aspiring politicians. The rest funds the continuing quest for even greater security and reliability in future versions of Windows that are priced for the mass market. I wonder if these guys would have gotten even better than 110 miles a gallon without (I assume) ethanol in their mix. After all, ethanol lowers the amount of heat stored in the fuel:
As I’ve blogged before, I’m glad to see more evidence of Prius fanaticism, even when it’s taken to rather ludicrous extremes (driving 1400 miles in circles is hard to justify as "efficient" ;-). I think it’s been common scientific knowledge for a while now that one way to conserve oil would be to stop ethanol production. A recent study puts some numbers on it - that ethanol made from corn requires about 29% more fossil-fuel energy to make than it contains. Clearly a bad investment. Would you invest in something that had a huge investment and a guaranteed 29% loss? Apparently that’s a good enough return for the Senate though, which proposes increasing ethanol subsidy in the new energy bill, to double the ethanol output by 2012. Gee, I trust them to determine whether medical savings accounts are cost effective, don’t you?
Anyway, I wondered at the time what the meaning of all these psychedelically painted bears was. One rather interesting explanation occurred to me - that Berlin is downplaying its place in some of the awful events of the 20th century. Any tourists afraid of the (Nazi, Soviet) bear? No need to worry, you can see the bear has been tamed into a colorful, friendly, and harmless cartoon. Disneyification is the ultimate symbol of Westernization. You know what I hate? When a movie ignores its own logical system. National Treasure, which is IMO a pretty good action movie if you can stand Nicholas Cage’s same old tortured character (who made this guy an action hero?). Stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers. The logic of the movie is a series of hidden clues ala DaVinci Code or it’s much superior predecessor Focault’s Pendulum, leading to a fabulous treasure hidden by the Knights Templar. Each clue provides a clue, ambiguous to any objective observer but somehow obvious to the hero, which may lead closer to the final treasure or to an uncertain end. So the part that really gets me is the clue involving a particular shadow on a particular wall at a particular time. They make a big deal about the introduction of daylight savings time since the clue was laid, yet blithely ignore the fact that the shadow will naturally fall on different spots on different days of the year! What seasonal progression of shadows? Any old day will do! Can we assume that the writer of the story was unaware of this obvious fact of nature? That anyone could escape experiencing that in their lives? I don’t think so. Can we assume the director chopped this important fact for time reasons, keeping the clever but relatively unimportant daylight savings time connection? Did they have so little imagination they couldn’t find a way to fix the problem? Were they just lazy? Did they think that their intended audience wouldn’t see such a celestial flaw? I don’t know how this omission came to be, but the end result is that the viewer’s intelligence is insulted. And that’s what I hate.
And what’s with Johnny Depp? He looked and acted like Michael Jackson, and the parallels between Wonkaland and Neverland are difficult not to infer. There’s a way to endear your character to the audience (not!) I would have wanted to shout "run children run!" if I was immersed in the story to any meaningful degree. I definitely plan to stay away from the Corpse Bride (Mr. Burton’s next release, which looks to have about as much subtlety as Lemony Snickett has happy endings) in favor of Wallace and Grommit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (I already watched the trailer several times ;-). [Update 2005-08-10: some sort of clever access control seemed to be preventing the display of the images linked from imdb.com. So I copied them instead, and added links back to imdb.com. Corrected some other links too.] |
|
|
|
|
I was selfishly relieved when 
to accrue to companies that demonstrate incredible success year after year, and reach a size that makes their potential influence rather scary to some.![mcdonalds_logo[1]](http://jonathanmarsh.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/mcdonalds-logo1.jpg "mcdonalds_logo[1]"){kind=logo}
Given the opportunities for leveraging their assets to keep revenues on the up-and-up as the company matures and things start to flatten out, we should rightly be concerned that Google’s ideals fade perceptibly in the face of shareholder expectations. And a slight change in Google can completely change the dynamics of an industry, an economy, a country, or even a 
Posts (RSS)