Jan. 13th, 2010 09:05 am:
Barbie, ¿Que?

The Mattel Corporation, makers of Barbie, have produced an online poll asking people to vote on the next occupation of "teenage-fashion model doll" Barbie. Choices are "Environmentalist," (although a doll made entirely out of plastic might be a poor spokesperson for this career), Surgeon, Architect, News Anchor, or, drumroll please: "Computer Engineer."

Seriously. Go vote for "Computer Engineer." Whether you believe Barbie’s influence on young girls to be positive or negative, you cannot deny that there is an influence. And Computer Engineer will go a long way towards correcting the "Math class is tough" version of Barbie.

Dec. 21st, 2009 08:47 am:
Please take the time to answer

 Poll #1501740 Readership Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 1

Does anyone still read this?

LiveJournal User?

Frequency of checking my journal?

Should I take the time to redo my layout?

What type of entries would you like to see from me in the new year? (check all that apply)

Anything else?

Dec. 17th, 2009 09:10 am:
Distributed Denial of Satire

IT professionals are often familiar with the Network/Server/Application blame game. "Whatever the problem, it’s never our problem." The avoidance of this blame game is one of the key reasons network monitoring and network management products exist; to avoid the blame game and get straight to the root cause of a problem.

But if you were to give an award for the mother of all network performance blame games, a good candidate for the honor would be the spat AT&T and Apple are having regarding whether Apple’s iPhone design, Apple’s iPhone users, or AT&T’s network are the cause of problems like dropped calls and slow data transfer speeds.

In the midst of all of this, satirist, "The Fake Steve Jobs," a.k.a. Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, proposed to his users that in order to protest "AT&T’s bastardly behavior over bandwidth usage," that users should attempt to overwhelm the AT&T 3G data network at Friday, December 18th, at noon PST, by using the most data-heavy apps possible.

The intention, I believe, is to "send a message" to AT&T about their service – and a spike of traffic at that time would be a quick way to give AT&T hard numbers on how many of their customers are ticked off.

An AT&T spokesman responded by saying:

"We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog."

"He started shouting, but just then — I’m not kidding — the call got dropped, because, see, I was on my goddamn iPhone and the damn thing can’t hold on to a call in downtown Palo Alto.

I tried moving six inches to my left, and got a signal. Then I moved back, and I lost it. This took place in downtown Palo Alto at my yoga studio. I tried going outside, and got a signal again. Randall [Stephenson] called, I picked up, got dropped. I walked down the block, and dialed him back. Finally got him. He’s like, "Just don’t f***ing move, okay? Just stand right where you are and let me shout at you for a minute." I was like, Fine, whatever, shout away, and I put the phone down on a bench and did some stretches.

Nov. 23rd, 2009 10:45 am:
Dad, can I use the IBM computer tonight?

Nov. 4th, 2009 09:19 am:
This is war!

Achordants http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIeoNP5VB4k
Menage-A-Cappella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So9e9wD11PM
MIT Logarhythms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9zb_Gr8iLc
UCSD Beat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqowQIZU5bI
Umass Dynamics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dK2Qrvhh8A
UMD TrebleMakers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Nzgniv7QQ

Oct. 12th, 2009 05:13 pm:
Wisdom Through Pain

Note to self, x-rays don't scan for shit.

Anyways, the following are why I was crying like a little girl today:



Hard to see, I know. But those are from the bottom left and bottom right of my jaw. In both x-rays you see 2 teeth that are nicely aligned (and their fillings) and then there's this 3rd... "tooth" that's coming in low like a defensive linebacker. They call it "impacted" I call it a series of expletives and other colorful language that I won't repeat here.

Oral surgeon tomorrow for the eval, hopefully get these things taken out soon after. There's not enough Orajel in the world for this.

Sep. 8th, 2009 11:50 am:
The United States Already Spends More Per Capita On Socialized Medicine

In this video Al Franken is not exactly "talking down an angry mob" but he and the people who disagree strongly with him seem to be having a fairly reasonable discussion. I consider this remarkable considering that the level of political discourse between partisans has not been particularly inspiring lately.

At the 5:54 mark the woman on the left asks a good question: "Do you honestly feel, given how everything is, that it can be paid for by the government and by the taxpayers and by all of us?" This question brings me to a recent realization that I've been meaning to mention.

The United States does not offer universal health care to its citizens, but our government does spend some amount of taxpayer money on socialized medicine in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA system. The government also reimburses hospitals for deadbeat patients who have, for example, visited the emergency room where health care is most expensive and provided a fictitious name or accounts which are otherwise unbillable.

How much money does the United States pay for its limited version of socialized medicine? Let's look at the numbers from the 2009 World Health Statistics report.

In the United States $6719 is spent per capita on health care, $3076 of which was government spending.
In Canada $3673 was spent per capita on health care, $2587 of which was government spending.

In other words the United States spends more money per taxpayer providing national health care to some of its citizens than Canada spends per taxpayer providing all of its citizens with health care. And Canada is not even a particularly efficient example. Here's a table I made from this data comparing per capita public health care expenditures. Every country except Denmark spends less tax money toward health care, and Denmark still beats us in both quality and total health care expenditures.

So in answer to lady-sitting-to-the-left-of-Al yes, I absolutely believe that "given how everything is" universal health care could be paid for by the government. The lady wearing the "Taxed Enough Already" t-shirt will be happy to know that the average taxpayer would get a ~$550 tax cut, we (or our employers) would pay ~$3000 less out of pocket, we'd be getting 10% better health care than we have now, and everyone would be getting it rather than just veterans, poor people, and old people. And that's just if we do an average job. If we're able to provide universal health care not particularly well.

You want best case? France gets credit for being #1 but the real cost/benefit superstar is Italy. If America adopted the Italian health care system we'd all get a $1045 tax cut, we (or our employers) would pay $3000 less out of pocket, and we'd get health care that's 18% better than what we have now. I should add that Italy somehow manages this even though it's a gateway to Europe for Africa and the Middle East and is flooded with illegal immigrants.

Caveats:
- We're talking about local expenditures not financial flows so I'm using PPP exchange rates not dollar exchange rates.
- I selected the countries on the list at random. If there's a country you'd like to see in the table I can add it.
- Italians might have better numbers due to diet and lifestyle.
- The most recent cost figures are from 2006 but the most recent quality ratings are from 2000 so it's possible things have changed.
- OSX 10.6 / Safari users who click on the WHO's pdf might crash their browser. This bug has been reported.

Update:
I just added Ireland, which is an interesting case. Their total health care spending is only $2034 per capita and the government covers a little more than half of that, but for $1938 less tax money and a mere $896 out of pocket per year they still manage to rank 10% better than the USA in quality. I'd also like to know why Norway ends up spending so much.
 

Sep. 3rd, 2009 08:09 am:
A blog post on the necessity of distrac—hey, a squirrel!

One of the big concerns that companies have when setting up IT departments is how much freedom to give to the workforce when it comes to the Internet.

There are two major philosophical ideas on the subject. The first is that employees are paid to work, not paid to surf the web, and that as such, any possibly distracting Internet sites that are not required to do the job should be off limits – or at least, harshly discouraged. The second is that if you treat your employees like robots, they’ll resent it, leading to on-the-job unhappiness, lost morale, loss of top talent, and therefore, overall loss of productivity.

It’s hard to find hard numbers supporting either theory though – until now. As it turns out, Dr. Brent Coker at the University of Melbourne studied the effects of "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (or "Recreational Traffic" as I’ve come to call it), and found that "employees that surf the Internet for fun at work are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t."

The attraction of WILB, according to Dr Coker, can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. "People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.

"It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity."

"You wouldn't want the brain to just switch off, because a bear might walk up behind you and attack you; you need to be on the lookout for something happening," Andrade says.

"I was the information systems intern, with the web design experience, so I hacked together a script hosted on my own server that allowed us to chat with each other and with any friends that wanted to visit the link. It worked because it was browser based and no one had to install anything. But I messed up. The script would refresh the page every 10 seconds… and the IT guy in charge of the network soon noticed that certain computers were making hundreds of requests to my server per day. When he found out what we were doing, he logged into the script just long enough to say "There is no chatting allowed on the company network. Goodbye."He then banned my domain for the rest of the summer."

I'm glad I don't work there anymore, and since then I've only worked for smaller firms that don't do this kind of crippling to your computer usage.

Aug. 20th, 2009 04:16 pm:
I knew they were real!

Aug. 7th, 2009 01:19 pm:
Condo Docs List

My packrat tendies come in handy with anything legal. In terms of buying my first condo, I'm definitely collecting a nice list of documents. It also helps that I version everything.

We all like lists. ...Well, I like lists. So here is my current list of condo-related documents. I'll add to it as the list grows.

• Additional Clauses Addendum.pdf
• Beachwalk4312CorrectedPages.pdf
• Beachwalk4312CorrectedPages - INITIALED.pdf
• Beachwalk Rules and Enforcement Policy.pdf
• Condo Insurance Quote.pdf
• Condominium Disclosure Statement.tif
• Condominium Disclosure Statement - SIGNED.pdf
• FAR BAR As Is Contract For Sale And Purchase (ASIS-2x).pdf
• FAR BAR As Is Contract For Sale And Purchase (ASIS-2x) v2.pdf
• FAR BAR As Is Contract For Sale And Purchase (ASIS-2x) v2 - SIGNED.pdf
• FAR BAR As Is Contract For Sale And Purchase (ASIS-2x) v3 - SIGNED.pdf
• Home Loan Pre-Qualification Letter.pdf
• Short Sale Addendum to Purchase and Sale Contract (SSA-2).pdf
• Short Sale Addendum to Purchase and Sale Contract (SSA-2) v2.pdf
• Short Sale Addendum to Purchase and Sale Contract (SSA-2) v2 - SIGNED.pdf
• Executed Contract - FINAL.pdf
• Escrow Deposit Letter.docx
• Escrow Deposit Envelope.docx
• WellsFargo Document Collection.pdf
• WellsFargo Document Collection - SIGNED.pdf

Aug. 7th, 2009 09:24 am:
Risky Business

Bruce Schneier, if you don’t know him, is one of the Web’s foremost experts on security. I don’t just mean computer security, though he focuses on that – but security overall, including anti-terrorism and crime security. I read his blog often, because I’m a security geek and his writings are very insightful.

Schneier often talks about how human beings can sometimes misunderstand the ideas behind risk .

For example, there’s the oft-cited example that statistically it’s safer to have a gun in the home than a pool. (How the gun got into the pool, I’ll never know!)

That is, while people are more willing to put up with pools than guns because you get more enjoyment out of a pool than a gun, and that a gun is designed to be dangerous (if you’re standing at the wrong end of it,) and the dangerousness of a pool is an incidental side-effect of water and concrete… proportionally, more people die in homes with pools than in homes with guns. So when we evaluate risk, most people instinctually think the gun is "riskier" than the pool.

But other than those "freakonomics" type cases, Schenier points out in his latest post that for the most part, human beings do understand risk, and that there is a certain level of risk that we’re comfortable with – indeed, there’s even a certain amount of risk that we crave.

So when he was at a security conference, where the speaker made a familiar complaint that end users at a company don’t understand security, and don’t grasp the importance of it. Schenier suggested that perhaps the security researcher didn’t understand the importance of the end-users getting their jobs done.

They know what the real risks are at work, and that they all revolve around not getting the job done. Those risks are real and tangible, and employees feel them all the time. The risks of not following security procedures are much less real. Maybe the employee will get caught, but probably not. And even if he does get caught, the penalties aren't serious.

"Fire someone who breaks security procedure, quickly and publicly," I suggested to the presenter. "That'll increase security awareness faster than any of your posters or lectures or newsletters." If the risks are real, people will get it.

Jul. 13th, 2009 03:51 pm:
How To Advocate For Legislative Action

A fellow LJ'er and I have a difference of opinion about civil rights for homosexuals. Specifically, Proposition 8 vs. legal recognition for same-sex couples. Short summary: I'm for equal legal recognition, he's against it. And we've been having a surprisingly civil discussion about it, all things considered. We've already discussed whether Prop 8 supporters deserve the names they're sometimes called, whether a string of legal victories indicates bias or tyranny, and even whether the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent, intercessionary God who doesn't want us to recognize same-sex unions can be empirically demonstrated, but we haven't yet had the chance to discuss the central issue of the problem: Is the legal recognition or actual practice of same-sex marriage actually harmful to society? Is this actually an issue that society needs protection from, and is Prop 8 effective protection?

I'm not a fundamentalist libertarian but I do think that individual liberty is a good default. People should generally be able to do what they want and government should start taking away liberties or start treating populations unequally only if there's a very strong reason backed by compelling evidence. And I think that CA Prop 8 was stupid evil. I think it's not just a discriminatory and unnecessary infringement of a minority's civil rights, which is evil, but that it also doesn't even actually accomplish anything. It's like racists trying to limit the spread of leprosy in America by passing a law prohibiting black people from hugging each other. It's not just an apparently mean-spirited persecution of a minority group; it's not even an effective solution to an insignificant problem.

But I'm willing to give the other side a fair shake. Perhaps they know something I don't, and I ought to keep an open enough mind that I will be able to accept their perspective if it is valid. In many ways it would actually please me to discover that there was a rational reason to oppose same-sex marriage, because then I'd be able to stop thinking of Prop 8 opponents as confused or delusional and start thinking of them at least as people with a different solution to a problem that everyone can at least agree exists and needs fixing.

If I'm going to be persuaded that same-sex couples ought to have their civil rights and personal freedoms and liberties limited or that someone else could reasonably believe this, the justification has to fit what I hope we can agree is a reasonable five point rhetorical standard.

A) There must be a significant empirically demonstrable public health or safety issue.
- There must be a significant cost or risk to society or individuals. For example drunk driving, improperly maintained brakes, unsafe buildings. On the other hand many behaviors and choices are only marginally harmful and should not be legally restricted. The natural consequences of choosing unwisely are punishment enough. Casual sex, moderate drinking, the consumption of unsulfured wine or unpasteurized cheese, flying experimental homebuilt aircraft: all OK. Legal recognition of same-sex marriage must rise beyond the level of commonly accepted risks and be more or less equivalent to something else that you and I agree ought also to be forbidden by law. There's a difference between something being legal and something being a good idea.
- The risk must be demonstrable. "You will get lung cancer" is demonstrable. "Your chi will become unfocused" is not. Claims about God are not (as far as I know) unambiguously empirically demonstrable. If your God doesn't want you to do something because it's going to be bad for us, let's talk about the consequences that we can demonstrate will befall us rather than his personal opinion about it.

B) The risk or harm in question must be mitigated by and in proportion to the proposed solution. Symbolic stances and get-tough gestures that don't actually accomplish anything are empty and dumb. Pissing off your enemy is not the same decreasing harm. Middle eastern terrorists might hate you for banning all falafel but it will not decrease the frequency or effectiveness of their attacks

C) No fallacious reasoning:
- No inconsistency or special pleading. Rules must be consistently applied to relevant groups. (Childlessness counts equally for childfree hetero and homo couples.)
- Do not float questionable causes such as confusing correlation and causation or cause and effect. It's possible to demonstrate causality, but you have to show that coincident events are more than coincidence.
- No begging the question or circular reasoning. Don't just restate the point you've not yet demonstrated.
- Stories with evidence we can't examine or corroborate are anecdotes. I have no way of knowing whether the horrible same-sex couple that you know is as horrible as you say, or whether they are representative of all same-sex couples.
- No slippery slopes. If same-sex marriage is fine but other points along the line eventually lead to something bad we should ban the bad thing and leave harmless actions alone.
- No naturalistic fallacies. Space flight, Moon Pies, polyester, or inhaling helium from balloons to make funny voices are without natural precedent. Disasters, parasites, and rape exist throughout the natural world.

D) It ought to go without saying, but reasons must actually be true. You can't just make stuff up.

Here are some examples of reasons which would be disqualified.

"We must protect traditional marriage because it is threatened by gay marriage" fails C (circular reasoning: "we protect TM from threats because SSM is a threat"), C (what 'harm' actually results?), and D (not actually true)

"Homosexuality, by definition, cannot create children" fails A (childfree couples do not significantly harm public health), B (same-sex couples will not be encouraged to have children by banning their marriages), C (inconsistency: some hetero couples are also sterile or childfree), and D (not actually true).

"So-called committed homosexual couples had an average of eight extra-sexual partners per year" fails A (so what?), C (marriage-banned single people will have even fewer reasons to be monogamous), and D (special pleading: should hetero swingers also be forbidden from marrying?)

"Without Prop 8 children will be taught gay marriage in school" fails A (so what?), B (Prop 8 did not effect educational standards), and D (not actually true: previously married SS couples are still married and can still be talked about in schools after parental permission is given)

"We must discourage unhealthy lifestyles" fails B (nobody's going to say "I'll have to take a rain check on that gangbang, looks like I can't get married"), and C (inconsistency: should we also ban marriage for IV drug users?).

"No culture has survived once it ceased to support marriage and monogamy" fails C (correlation is not causation: no culture has survived once it used marble as structural building material), D (lots of cultures currently recognize same-sex marriage and are currently surviving), and B (Prop 8 decreased support for "marriage and monogamy").

"Churches would be forced to recognize and accept same-sex marriages" fails D (not actually true; Prop 8 limited civil marriages, not religious ceremonies. Churches are always free to sanction or condemn anything they want).


To be clear, I'm not saying that the above justifications are automatically invalid. I'm just saying that they're not sufficient as I wrote them but you're welcome to put a finer point on it. You can still say "children will be taught gay marriage in school", but you have to also show how doing so would be a problem and how Prop 8 might stop it.

And also to be clear, these are broad rules that we all should follow, not just in this discussion but in all future discussions about civil liberties or reasonable government action. If I'm arguing in favor of laws banning torture or in favor of enforcement against torturers I have to show that the harm they cause is significant, that the proposed solution will mitigate the problem, etc. You should bookmark these rules and hold me to them if I slip up in the future.
 

Jun. 30th, 2009 03:01 pm:
The Slippery Slope

A few years ago I was talking with a friend in California about some difficult moral issue. I mentioned that what made it difficult was the slippery slope - if we accept the problem to a small degree who knows where the madness will end? She cut me off short. "That's just the slippery slope argument, and it's lame." It's taken me a while to accept, but she's right. The slippery slope is a totally lame argument.

Here's why. The 'top' of the slippery slope is a point that reasonable persons agree is more or less reasonably acceptable. And the first few steps down the slope also seem somewhat reasonable to reasonable people. And the 'bottom' of the slope is where people agree that things have gone too far. And the argument asks "Where does the madness end? How do we stop ourselves, or know when to stop?

We know when to stop because, as the slippery slope presumes, we are reasonable people who recognize that the top is OK and the bottom is bad and this means we ought to stop somewhere in the middle. Reasonable people who are capable of discussing the pros and cons of where that point ought to be. Reasonable people who are not bound to "follow the argument to its logical conclusion" because we recognize that its conclusion isn't reasonable and that happiness is found in moderation. The slippery slope bothers me because it abandons common sense or reasonable moderation and turns complex issues into oversimplified, black-and-white, all-or-nothing propositions. It pretends that there can be no line if none exists rather than inviting us to discuss where to draw that line. It pretends that moral value judgments are some sort of death pact that must be followed to the grisly end rather than ethical guidelines that inform a series of open choices.

And it fails because of itself. If we allow slippery slopes to dictate our morality and actions where does the madness end? Will I be not allowed to marry a twenty year old because I might want to marry a ten year old? Will I not be allowed to drive 50mph because then I might want to drive 150mph? Should I not be allowed to eat veal because then I might want to eat human children? Of course not. Because we are reasonable people, and we shouldn't use the lack of an exact answer to set the limit at an unreasonable extreme.

Of course there are some people who genuinely don't seem to understand that there's a difference between a zygote and a four year old child, or a rifle and a nuclear bomb, or an adult human partner and a duck. It's fair to ask how to explain the difference to one of those people, especially if you are one of those people. And of course some people will not agree on where exactly the line ought to be drawn - reasonable people can disagree. And of course some people aren't reasonable, and will try to get away with things they know they shouldn't. And of course what some slippery slope arguers are really trying to say between the lines is that some issues can be complex with vague, arbitrary, and subjective edge conditions. And that's true. People are complicated. Life is complex and pragmatic moral choices are difficult. It's important to approach problem-solving and compromise-brokering with that understanding - so that you don't turn the result into a black and white issue. And that's why you shouldn't take the slippery slope cop-out seriously.

Caveat: A "slippery slope" is where things are OK at the top of the slope but get slippery on the way down. Trying to say that everything in a category is bad because some of the things in that category are bad is conflation, which is a lame argument for different reasons.
 

Jun. 17th, 2009 09:04 am:
Supreme Leader is a Great Gig If You Can Get It.

There have been many jokes about the irrelevance of Twitter – or at least about the irrelevance of much of the content on Twitter. Some of them have been amazingly creative and funny, like the Tonight Show’s "Twitter Tracker," and some of them not funny at all, like any of the jokes I've made.

But the events of the past few days have killed Twitter irony. In a country where "subversive" blogging is punishable by death, Twitter (along with YouTube) has been the go-to to get information about the happenings in the tightly-controlled Iran.

Furthermore, the relevance of the newest of the new media highlights some of the irrelevance of the "traditional" media. The Revolution, it seems, will not be televised – CNN.com didn’t mention the unrest for days. As ReadWriteWeb.com put it:

"Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' confusion about the switch from analog TV signals."

Jun. 16th, 2009 07:45 pm:
A Patient‘s Psalm

Found this and busted up laughing, had to share it with you all.

A Patient‘s Psalm

The Lord is my Genetics Counselor, I shall not want for risks.
He maketh me to lie down in genealogies; he nondirects me beside karyotypes.
He restoreth my inborn errors; he leads me in the paths of reproduction for my name‘s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of amniocentesis or under the shadow of fetoscopy,
I will fear no evil: for thou, the Greatest Good of the Greatest Number, art with me;
thy chromosome counts and thy enzyme assays they comfort me.
Thou preparest multiphasic screening before me in the presence of my illnesses:
thou anointest my head with check-ups;
my profile runneth over.
Surely mutations and heterozygosity shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of computerized biomedical information forever.

-Paul Ramsey, JAMA, March 13, 1972.

Jun. 11th, 2009 10:56 am:
Cisco on the Dow

Last week, General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That same day, GM was delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s replacement – a company I'm all too familiar with – Cisco.

"Cisco makes the paving bricks for the information superhighway and it's affecting the culture in kind of the same way that automobiles affected the culture in the 20th century," John A. Prestbo, editor and executive director of Dow Jones Indexes, told The Associated Press. "We thought it was a fitting replacement for General Motors."

Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist for ConvergEx Group, in New York said Cisco was a logical choice not only because the company's business is an important one but because its shares aren't as high as some companies analysts speculated might have been added, like Apple Inc. or Google Inc.

The Dow is weighted by price so adding Apple and Google, which each have triple digit share prices, could have been more disruptive. Cisco at $19 won't have as much weight as IBM Corp. at $106. Google, at $417, would have vaulted to the most influential Dow stock. By comparison, Cisco will have roughly a 2 percent weighting.

Jun. 8th, 2009 03:13 pm:
Patch Tuesday

Tomorrow Microsoft plans to unleash a large patch – the largest "Patch Tuesday" in eight months.

In many ways, the smaller size of patches seemed, at the very least, to imply that the codebase behind the Windows OS and Office might have been stabilizing, or at the very least, that the XP and Vista codebases were wrapping up in anticipation of the Next Big Thing, Windows 7. Apparently, that's not the case.

When I was a younger, brasher, more hot-headed geek in high school, the very name Microsoft would conjure up images of hatred. When Windows XP came out, I had heard rumors of something called "Palladium" and draconian DRM measures – and, let's be fair here – this was around the time Microsoft's competitors were starting to get good. Despite competition from MacOSX and Linux – very good competition, I might add, - Windows is still the OS of the masses, Office has not been displaced as office king-of-the-hill since it displaced WordPerfect, despite attempts by Sun, OpenOffice.org, Zoho, and Google. (That may change in the future, but not likely, according to Forrester.)

But it’s been an interesting road for Microsoft; XP SP2 wasn’t released with a whole lot of fanfare, but its basic competence (well, it compared favorably to previous versions of Microsoft OSes in the stability area, and similarly to contemporary MacOSX 10.2.)

Then Vista came out, and suddenly the old hatred for Microsoft is horrible again. To be fair, I ripped on Vista when it first came out, as it seemed like nothing worked; most of these problems were fixed with the service pack, but it was still more problematic than Windows XP while still doing the same basic job; this is one of the reasons that business adoption for Vista remains – well, let’s just say that most businesses will probably skip Vista and head straight to Windows 7.

Which brings us back to Patch Tuesday. If it wasn’t apparent before, it seems that no operating system is "done" anymore, like the Windows 95 and 98 days; (Even 98 had "98 second edition") and that even the most basic part of the computer – the operating system – requires the internet. But it also implies that patching is not something we're ever going to grow out of – that operating systems are never done. The open-source model, of course, relies on "release early, release often" but it seems that through Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 9, and Windows 10 (and Mac 10.6, 10.7, & 10.8) we'll be waiting for that big glob of data to download every week, to keep our systems up to date. On the other hand, Patch Tuesday is repeatable, predictable – hell, it’s so predictable, we call it "Patch Tuesday."

Jun. 4th, 2009 11:13 am:
Here's One of My Pet-Peeves

When people repeat the last word of an acronym, like PIN Number, NIC Card, NOC Center, etc.

May. 8th, 2009 04:37 pm:
Amazing!

Apr. 29th, 2009 09:29 am:
The George Bush Tax Hike of 2009

In 2001, George Bush had a problem. He wanted to give tax cuts to the rich, but he didn't want it to be obvious how much this would cost the middle class taxpayer or the national debt, and budget proposals come with 10 year cost projections. So the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 gave the rich a variety of tax cuts that would expire well before 2011. George Bush passed his tax cuts by claiming that they were temporary and short-term, because that's the only way that the numbers didn't start looking ludicrous.

Of course that was never the plan. The 2003 Congress didn't watch these temporary, short-term tax cuts expire; they voted to extend them a few more years with the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. But just for a few more years to preserve the illusion that the cost would be minor and temporary. A few conservative groups tried to do the honest thing by pushing to make the tax cuts permanent which would have at least clarified what they actually wanted to do and how much it would actually cost us, but it never happened because the reality was too bitter a pill for even Congress to swallow.

And that's what bugs me about calling Obama's recent tax hike on the rich both "Obama's" and "a tax hike". He's allowing Bush's intentionally short-term tax plan to expire on schedule. He's letting Bush's plan play out exactly as Bush designed it to play out. If Republicans want to blame anyone they should blame the 2001 and 2003 Congress and their "temporary tax cut" charade. I thought I remembered one of Obama's campaign pledges being ending this practice and honesty about cost projections, but I can't find a citation and it doesn't seem to be in the promise tracker.

If you want to see an even more egregious example of 10 year budget impact malfeasance check out how in 2001 Bush eliminated the estate tax starting in 2010. No better way to disguise the ten-year impact than to make sure it starts ten years from now.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Obama's only modification to the tax code is sitting back passively while Bush's tax cuts expire, just that this is a major and often overlooked and mischaracterized component.