The attorney for the Dover Area School Board calls his client’s decision to include intelligent design into the biology curriculum a “modest proposal.”
There have been equally modest proposals of similar merit proposed in the past. Unfortunately, this is no satire.
Robert Scoble thoughtfully provided a list of all the revolutionary stuff he thinks is being introduced at PDC. To his credit, he includes links to at least on detractor as well as a couple of cheerleaders.
I said last week that I’d probably not be all that enthused about anything that they were releasing, and Scoble said for me to wait. Well, I thought I’d work through his list and tell you what I think about it.
Okay, to be fair, I’m one of those long haired hippy freak Open Source/Unix hacker/communists, so it really would have been difficult for Microsoft to wow me. But really, none of this is all that inspiring. It’s not that I don’t like new eyecandy, or sharing photos, or good internet portals. It’s just that while providing candy, Microsoft isn’t providing the meal. What I’d like to see…
Well, that’s enough of a rant for the morning. Time to shower and go work to pay the bills.
Josh, one of the guys who convinced me (by example) to record my podcasts on my PDA scored a new Phone PC at PDC. It seems like quite a cool gadget that runs Windows Mobile 5, it even includes Skype (although Josh didn’t mention it in his brief preview). They were apparently being offered to a limited number of conference goers for a mere $150, which is probably too good to refuse. I would have jumped at the chance too.
My Motorola mpx220 needs a replacement as soon as my contract wears out in November. I can only hope I’ll find as good a deal around that time.
Looking forward to seeing some camera and video samples from Josh.
My Atari 2600 programming projects needed two displays to enter characters on, so I built a little 5×6 matrix of characters (six characters are about the maximum you can put on a horizontal line). Progress!
I’ve been following the PDC blogging a bit this morning, and I can’t help but think that there is very little meat that is actually being blogged about. Here’s a great for instance:
Light up on Windows Vista: The “Top 10” List
What are these top 10?
Wow. I could condense that list into simply….
This list strikes me as so obvious as to be useless. I’m not sure how platitudes enhance the quality of your product development.
Addendum: Okay, okay, I’m acting like someone pissed in my cornflakes. I’ll at least provide a link to the official Microsoft page which provides a bit more detail. In fact, it appears that each of the ten bullet items is supported by a good half dozen new APIs or technologies. I have a different rant for that topic, but I’ll spare you all.
Today’s podcast mostly concerns my confusion on why eBay purchased Internet phone company Skype. Well, not so much why they bought it as why they paid 2.8 billion dollars for it. I present some of my skepticism about the Web services marketplace as well.
Addendum: Jeff Pulver has an interesting perspective.
A crazy story I found while using Stumble Upon: Press Your Luck.
As someone once said:
The generation of random numbers is far too important to be left to chance.
I have seen lots of wacky science projects before, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Basically, the idea is to project a bright image onto a geranium leaf. Where light stricks the leaf, the leaf will produce excess starch, which can be “developed” with tincture of iodine. Crazy. I may have to give it a try.
It’s just not that I bought an original Xbox that died a month out of warranty (so Microsoft decided I needed to send them $129 to fix it), scratched every disk that ever went in it, and generally was a pain in the ass. But Microsoft seems to have not learned something important about Xboxes: people like them because they are hackable. Never willing to actually take a hint from consumers about what they want, Microsoft has decided that it’s worthwhile to keep people from using their machines as they see fit.
Console manufacturers out there listening? If you make a machine that is hackable, I’ll buy one, just on the principle of the thing. I’ll buy games for it. Heck, I’ll write software for the thing. Stop treating your customers like crap.
Last night’s movie was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which appears to be getting the lion’s share of this weekend’s box office. Despite the trailers, this film turns out to largely be a courtroom drama which follows the trial of Father Moore, parish priest to the Moore family who was asked to perform an exorcism to rid young Emily of the demons which possess her. This is an adaptation of the story of Annaliese Michel, a girl born in 1952 who died in 1976 of malnutrition. Her parents as well as the two exorcists were charged and convicted of negligent homicide in the incident.
This story is a modern adaptation of this true story. Laura Linney plays Erin Bruner, a defenese attorney charged with defending Father Bruner (Tom Wilkinson) against the charge of negligent homicide in the death of young Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter). Attorney Bruner uses an unusual tactic: that the idea that young Emily could have been possessed by demons might in fact be true.
Unfortunately, despite some good performances, I think this movie is a bit of a non-starter. In trying to walk a fine line between a courtroom drama and a horror film, it actually doesn’t really work as either. If it were to work as a horror film, it would need to convince you that demon possession were really possible, at least for an hour and a half. It doesn’t. The family in particular come across as rubes who don’t know enough to adequately understand the epilepsy and psychosis which was destroying their daughter. The real life nature of the case bleeds through, and ultimately, you just feel pity for the individuals in that they contributed to the death of their daughter in some horribly misguided attempt to save her from demons.
This film isn’t bad, but I didn’t find it has much to recommend it either.
Addendum: We also saw the trailer for the new Doom movie. Oh my, does it just scream “rental!”.
One year ago today, I did my first podcast. I didn’t even call it a podcast, I think the term was yet to be coined. Since then, by my rough count I’ve done 93 or so podcasts, on subjects ranging all over the map, with varying bits of quality, stupidity, mistakes and the like. In short it’s been a blast.
In the last year, podcasting has gone from something that Adam Curry was trying to get people to do, to something that is organized into podcasting networks, marketed on the Apple iTunes store, and mentioned on major news networks. There are books. There are pundits. It’s everywhere.
And, in some sense, it has left guys like me in the dust.
I was talking to my friend Tom today about why I still am podcasting. I need no more justification than this: I’ve now got an audio record of a slice of my life for an entire year, consisting of over twenty hours of me talking about whatever was on my mind. It’s a time machine. A slice of myself, stored in digital form. Even if it was of no interest to anyone else, it would be valuable for that reason alone.
Still, I hope that you, my occasional listeners and my regular subscribers, have found something of interest. I’ll keep it up, and I hope you all do too.
Addendum: I just listened to my first post again, and what was surprising to me is that even in my very first podcast, I foresaw that I’d really like to have a PDA to record my podcasts. I wouldn’t get my Dell until February, but very early on I wanted the usage scenario that I have settled on for all my recent podcasts: a mobile gadget that I could carry with me and use to record material wherever I was.
Neat.
Oh, and I talked about this grasshopper too.
May you be touched by his noodly appendage.
Hint: use the shadow to determine if you are over your converts.
Last night, I attended an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View entitled “The History of Computer Chess”. It was a panel discussion by some of the pioneers in the field: Monty Newborn, Murray Campbell, John McCarthy, Ed Feigenbaum and David Levy. My daily podcast gives some of my brief impressions. I didn’t learn a whole lot, since I’ve read quite a bit about computer chess and search, but I found the discussion enjoyable and given the increasing age amongst the panel members, I was glad to see these gentlemen talking about the forty-something year pursuit of computer chess in person. The Computer History Museum is having an open house this Saturday, I think I’ll be back with my wife to visit it (it seems like a great facility) and I’ll be joining as a member.
I must admit, I find Robert Scoble to be a fascinating blogger. I think it is because I see him just as a person who is in most respects intelligent and thoughtful, but whose thought processes are significantly hindered by a desire to be good at his job, and his job is to promote Microsoft and make it look fashionable to the world. He was kind enough to reply to my teasing of Microsoft, and (predictably) still trying to promote optimism about Microsoft.
He begins:
Yeah, we still have tons of problems to work through (yes, Mini Microsoft, I am reading you) and yes, we’re a big company with our politics, our slow-moving groupthink, our bureacracies and fiefdoms. Yes, we have given everyone lots of reasons to throw insults our way. Treated our customers and partners horribly. Yes, it’s been a while since we’ve shipped something significant. Yes, we have missed out on several new trends like the iPod and search. Yes, Steve Jobs’ accusation that we’re just copying his company has looked pretty true.
Yes Robert. And yet, you assert that next week, we will all be kissing and making up? Don’t you think that’s the teensiest bit presumptuous? It’s like saying to your spouse “Yeah, I cheated on you. I slept around, spent your money, got drunk and generally made an ass out of myself, but just wait until Monday. Monday, you’ll love me again!”
Yeah.
I’ll make my bold prediction for next week: nothing that Microsoft will announce will be of even the remotest interest to me. I make this prediction confidently because Microsoft has shown a remarkable constancy in their actions which directly oppose the interest of both software developers and consumers.
For instance, computer security on Windows has been a genuine nightmare. Don’t think so? Then why has an entire industry been created to generate software whose sole purpose is to keep my machine from getting infected from the virus or spyware du jour? Why do some people consider throwing away their PC rather than try to delouse it?
Of how about IE? The browser that has a broken implementation of the box model, which it steadfastly refuses to fix, causing web designers the world over, countless hours of trying to exploit other bugs in the implementation so that they can make a webpage behave the way they wish?
Or how about it’s shameless war against consumers in promoting technologies like HDCP, which obsoletes people’s old monitors, and interjects cryptographic negotiation in every interaction between a computer and the screen to which it is attached?
I could go on: the predatory business practices, Windows Me (shudder), or the pollution of the Internet with faulty DNS implementations. To be enthusiastic about Microsoft requires the excusing of dozens of evils, be they political, economic or technical. I doubt that some video on Channel 9 is going to change that.
Addendum: One more prediction: whatever Microsoft is announcing, it won’t be anything which is ready to ship to consumers. They probably won’t even have a release date planned (although given the Longhorn, errr… Vista fiasco, it’s not clear we’d believe any date they tossed out either). One positive thing about Apple: when they announce a product, typically it’s ready to be purchased. You can decide right then whether you want the product, and you can act on it immediately. Google has found this basic strategy to be useful as well. Bam, Google Mail. Bam, Google Maps. Bam, Google Talk. Microsoft begins talking about things months if not years before anything is ready to ship, and therefore, they diffuse any possible spin that anyone could have to be spread out over the same time period.
I’ll tune back into Channel 9 next week, and see how I did in my predictions.
Brilliant, courtesy of www.hackaday.com.
First the TC2K computer (any standard PC) is connected to the phone line via a Caller ID modem or serial Caller ID device. The user creates a setup text file that declares all of the Caller ID strings he considers “annoying” and wants intercepted on the first ring. When a call on the users “hit list” arrives, the computer intercepts the call and picks up the extension. This feature alone is very valuable. It gives the ability to identify legitimate calls anywhere in the house by simply waiting to hear a second ring.
As if that feature wasn’t enough, the TC2K then plays a wave file over the extension for the telemarketer to hear. The user can declare a list of wave files, in a specific order, that he wishes to be played to calls on his “hit list”. The first wave file is played immediately after picking up the extension, the TC2K then waits for the telemarketer to respond, then the TC2K waits for silence (for the telemarketer to finish speaking), then plays the next wave file on the list. The cycle of play wave file, wait for response, wait for silence is repeated for each wave file the user has declared in his setup text file. This way the TC2K can carry on a “virtual” conversation with the telemarketer and the content of that conversation is completely up to the user. All the user needs to do is record his own set of wave files to be played and declare them in a setup file.
Perhaps best of all, the “virtual” conversation between the TC2K and the telemarketer is recorded for the user to enjoy and share with his friends and other TC2K users. We hope to have a forum in the near future to discuss and trade TC2K conversations. It is sure to be very entertaining.
Don’t miss the Flash animation which someone created to one of the soundtracks.