Robot Wisdom Weblog for March 1999 (waxing)

I pulled the poll at 100 votes... thanks:

What's your preference for background/text colors for the RW Weblog?

- The current scheme (purple on purple) is fine. 40%
- Please just use a white background. 29%
- Color-experiments are fine but some of yours have gone too far. 17%
- The wilder the colors, the better I like it. 15%

Excellent synopsis by Peter Ackroyd of a new Whitman bio: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/01/timbooboo04004.html?1334425

Yet Leaves of Grass was a distinct and idiosyncratic production; he believed many of its effects were borrowed from Italian opera, as well as the Bible, but the main progenitor was the wide vista of America with its ever-widening horizons and its boundless confidence. "The United States themselves are the greatest poem," Whitman wrote.

Chillingly excellent day for Progressive Review:

...one senator asked: How many Albanians have Milosevic's troops massacred this year? The president's emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at each other. They rifled through their papers. One hazarded a guess: "Two thousand?" No, the senator replied, that was the number for all of last year.

[Plus:] India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee says his country is examining a possible alliance with Russia and China following NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia:

[Plus:] Investor's Business Daily reports that from 1993 to 1997, federal officials requested 2,686 wiretaps. The Justice Department approved all but one: a tap in 1996 on the phone of Wen Ho Lee, now a suspect in the theft of nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Lab.

Meta: Re-reading today's blurbs (below), I notice my clarity really sucks. Sorry... I guess I'm a bit distracted.

New New Scientist includes this short GPS-alert palmtop-software idea: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990403/nshorts.html#14

It monitors where you are, and as you approach a familiar place, say home or the railway station, it will remind you of the note you made the last time you were there--something which needs to be done at that location such as pruning the roses or buying a season ticket.

Metallic diamond: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990403/newsstory5.html

"The shock waves compress the material into what we think is a metallic state," says Collins. The transition probably occurred when the diamond melted, loosening electrons so they could roam freely.

Cosmology gets goofier: (hairy) http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990403/thefifthel.html

The Universe can hover at the critical density if 30 per cent of its mass is in the form of matter and 70 per cent in the form of springy space, which has mass because of the energy it contains.

Nielsen (Jakob) crows over bad banner-ad stats: http://www.useit.com/hotlist/spotlight.html

A new study from Nielsen Media Research found average clickthrough of 0.15% in February.

(There's been several other decent items at this site recently, too-- check it out...)

A marginal McLibel victory for Helen and Dave: http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990331/news/0922907652-0000002003.html [More]

In Wednesday's decision, the judges said it was a fair comment to say McDonald's employees worldwide "do badly in terms of pay and conditions... More significantly, we have concluded that the allegation in the leaflet about a 'very real risk' of heart disease from a diet affected by eating McDonald's food was justified," the judgment said.

If you could smell what I hear: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/03/990331063123.htm

To make a sensor, a thin selectively absorbing polymer layer is coated on the piezoelectric surface. When specific chemicals absorb into this layer, the acoustic waves travel more slowly. This change can be detected by the sensor microelectronics once the acoustic wave is converted back to an electric signal.

Excellent: On beyond integrated circuits: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/uwmad-ttg033199.html

"What I'm trying to do is promote a new silicon age," said Lal, who believes that integrated circuits are only scraping the surface of the material's potential. "It's the most perfect material you can find for the cost. One silicon wafer might cost $15 bucks, and it is practically flawless structurally."

The material allows the machine-makers to integrate mechanical and electrical properties together in the same device. That means medical tools can be equipped with built-in sensors and monitors that will instantly communicate back to doctors.

With cutting tools, the vibrating motion cuts tissue with far less force, and the pushing or pulling of tissue is what tends to cause pain. An ultrasonic needle will create similar needle-tissue interactions that reduce pain.

I vaguely remember this ascii-art interview, but I don't remember seeing the article before: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/wiredview/story/6346.html?wnpg=all

Kangaroo: I was always captivated by the way a sometimes detailed picture can be created out of something so simple as plain ASCII text!

Another excellent MS smoking gun: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,34469,00.html?pfv

"Our DOS gold mine is shrinking and our costs are soaring--primarily due to low prices, IBM share, and DR-DOS," a competing product, Gates wrote to Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer, who later became the company's president.

Mega-kudos for Big Ol' Blue: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,34470,00.html?pfv

In a letter sent to online advertising customers today, IBM, the second largest advertiser on the Web behind Microsoft, is leading a charge for more privacy on the Internet, vowing to pull its advertising from sites in the United States or Canada that do not cite clear privacy policies.

Search-engine referral stats: http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,1087,3_90031,00.html

1. Yahoo -- 45.92%
2. Excite -- 21.68%
3. Alta Vista -- 9.70%
4. Infoseek -- 5.32%
5. Web Crawler -- 3.35%
6. HotBot -- 3.42%
7. Snap -- 3.09%
8. MSN -- 2.32%
9. Lycos -- 1.83%
10. GoTo -- 1.69%

Moderately interesting doc-management/ metadata case study: (short) http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2234670,00.html

Like most document management systems, the FileNet product requires users to fill out several data fields so information can be classified and stored for later access. Most users initially balk at spending time to fill in data fields. And, at BOA, it took a management dictate to get users to supply the required data.

Meta: One thing I've learned by posting polls is that the first dozen votes always anticipate the final totals very closely, so since 'white please' has almost 50% that will surely be the winner (in this CBS projection ;^/

Neal "Snow Crash" Stephenson has written a very, very long but pretty fun thinkpiece on the history of pc operating systems: (new mirrors due to Slashdot effect) http://www.polarcom.com/~patawi/matt/glass/beginning_CLI.html http://www.io.com/~mccoy/beginning_print.html

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks...

...This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring of 1984 in a computer store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when a friend of mine--coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh Powerbook and instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk crash utility programs were unable to find any trace that it had ever existed. During the intervening ten years, I had a passion for the MacOS that seemed righteous and reasonable at the time but in retrospect strikes me as being exactly the same sort of goofy infatuation that my friend's dad had with his car.

These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to make fun of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if Microsoft had done focus group testing of possible alternative graphics, they probably would have found that the average mid-level office worker associated fountain pens with effete upper management toffs and was more comfortable with ballpoints.

[DisneyWorld:] All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, or course, and protected from real rust by a plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless you get down on your knees.

[Unix:] The "pon" command, which is used to fire up a PPP connection to the Internet, requires so much detailed information that it is basically impossible to launch it entirely from the command line. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into three or four different files. You need a dialing script, which is effectively a little program telling it how to dial the phone and respond to various events; an options file, which lists up to about sixty different options on how the PPP connection is to be set up; and a secrets file, giving information about your password.

The BeBox's most distinctive feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that zip up and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how hard each processor is working. I thought it looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable collector's item.

I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways, at regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall. Each contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS.

Commander Slashdot suffers a lot more LloydWood's than me: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/03/31/0137221

Do you kick your grandma in the head if you want another piece of apple pie with your dinner? (If you do, can I eat at your house? Your family would make mine seem functional, and would probably also make an excellent FOX sit-com). Well Mr. Webmaster got kicked thousands of times in the head that day.

I requested "world weather map" at Google and what it liked was this great page of spypix and maps, etc: (slow load (from Thailand!), hideous colorscheme, and the 700k animated-gif world weathermap didn't animate for me, though) http://www.escati.com/world_weather.htm

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the Earth
Taken coming back from the Moon.
And you couldn't see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all.
[Lyric source]

(I just noticed Google considers it a phrase match if all the words are on the same line, in whatever order!??)

How Palermo challenged the Mob: http://www.sfbg.com/focus/35.html

After especially brutal Mafia executions of two Sicilian judges, one citizen scrawled antimafia signs on a bedsheet and hung it from her window. Others joined in, and soon the vast majority of city residents were hanging similar signs of protest from their apartments. The "Committee of the Sheets" had been formed.

I don't understand why THAAD/StarWars hasn't worked yet. Are they using dumb, slow academic AI? http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/march99/033099b.htm

For the sixth time in a row, the U.S. Department of Defense is reporting that a high altitude anti-missile defense system (Theater High-Altitude Area Defense) failed to hit its target at White Sands Missile Range today.

I love it when cams throw sudden curves! (0745 CST) http://www.kpix.com/live/

Rant: I have two big problems with the RSS headline-aggregation strategy:

1) It demands the loggers maintain two files, one HTML and one RSS/XML. There's no reason for this, except to show off the geeky new tech. (For example, why can't I just submit a regexp that pulls out a series of items from my page?)

2) It effectively demands one-liner headlines, and most loggers write awful headlines. Conveying the content of an article in a single line is really difficult, as a visit to NewsHub should prove. (Nielsen calls this the microcontent problem.) If the RSS movement encouraged people to write longer headlines (instead of the opposite) that would at least be a start.

The purported Melissa hacker's website has been taken down, but Google has this much cached: http://google.com/search?q=cache:sourceofkaos.com/homes/vic/start.html&docid=20701082

This matches one of his aliases, but maybe it's coincidence: (pic) http://www.millweb.com/st_04rok.htm

Dawns like Birmingham's offer sights I've never seen, anywhere. (Picture a play opening with this visual pattern... and each glimmer becomes an actor with a candle...)

Musing: When there's a webcam in every backyard, some server will be able to offer a continual site with thousands of live sunrises at every moment (factoring in both location and weather).

This astropic is visually boring but scientifically cool: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990331.html

The gravitational lens effect of the red, foreground, elliptical galaxy creates a cloverleaf image of the single distant quasar.

Camille P-- in top form-- orders a makeover for Liddy Dole (etc): http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1999/03/31pagl.html

Unfortunately, Dole didn't factor in that the front rows into which she sailed this time with her plastered-on smile would be packed with cynical, slouching reporters, who couldn't conceal their boredom. The whole event, carefully staged for media coverage, looked horrendous on camera -- like that amateur play mounted in a high school auditorium on "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," discombobulating campily fuming guest-diva Tallulah Bankhead...

[Plus:] Once again, I was repelled by Paltrow's shallowness -- the ludicrous obviousness as she concentrates ever so hard on "being sexy"; the thin lips, clamped teeth, whiny nasality and smirky prep-school mannerisms; the supercilious, manipulative princess airs. I would be curious to know how broad is Paltrow's African-American fan base (I suspect it's zilch).

[Plus:] It must be Rose McGowan, then, who got up Courtney Love's nose on Hole's short, ill-fated tour with Marilyn Manson. Anyone who can sock it to an ersatz Beverly Hills Dionysian like Love gets high marks in my book!

[Plus:] I view Wendy Shalit as a spoiled, beadily ambitious fantasist who has dated her way to the top of the conservative heap. Gosh, it sounds like preening, pretty-in-pink Paltrow all over again!

TV 2nite: Species (CBS); Sports Night (ABC)

Is this the ultimate Futurama site? http://bart.simplenet.com/futurama/ Hmmm, maybe not-- most of the links are bogus. But here's a spoiler-packed episode guide with 13 blurbs: http://www.bart.simplenet.com/futurama/lists/epguide.html

Lots of details and spoilers on the Futurama characters: http://search.dejanews.com/viewthread.xp?AN=459664775

Matt Groening seems to like the phrase "Science Friction" which shortens to "Sci-Fri" or "Sci-Fry". Incidently Bongo Comics registered the internet domains SCIENCEFRICTION.COM, SCIFRI.COM and SCIFRY.COM late 1996.

New Onion:

Trophy Wife Mounted

Early freeze-frame analysis of Futurama: http://search.dejanews.com/viewthread.xp?AN=460263282

>Did You Notice
> ...a medieval civilization rose and fell during Fry's
> hibernation?

That was the 24th century, as in the policeman's "I'm going to get 24th century on his ass."

(DejaNews is reconfiguring again?)

After about three hours of downloading, the 18Mb Uranus MPEG is pretty disappointing: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1999/11/index.html

Now that Slate is free, I can start following the Egghead weblog there: http://www.slate.com:80/Egghead/99-03-30/Egghead.asp

News from academe. Compiled by the editors of Lingua Franca

New Village Voice pulls all the stops for its Diallo coverage; plus their Kosovo-for-dummies: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9913/ridgeway.shtml

Deployment of ground troops would mean casualties, which Clinton wants to avoid both because it will ruin his legacy and because it will cause problems for Gore. If an air war is run right, it's pretty much casualty-free.

Who are the combatants? On the Kosovar side, the largest group, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), seeks independence through guerrilla war and eventual alignment with Albania. It numbers nearly 15,000. A second group, the Democratic League of Kosovo, seeks self-government within Yugoslavia and eventual independence through nonviolent protest. Arrayed against them are Milosevic's police and army units -- more than 20,000 heavily armed troops backed by artillery and tanks.

My main longterm project involves both Joyce and AI. Here's the latest 'progress report': http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=460741123

- there's a crisis-moment when Shaun betrays his hypocrisy-- HCE's stutter in the Park.
- this transforms Shaun into Shem. he retreats from public life (FW ch5), and pursues his art in private (cf Joyce's silence, exile, and cunning).
- the art is thus a compensation for the stutter.

A new week o'sleaze: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/more_stories.html

- CLINT EASTWOOD UNDER FIRE FROM 20 ANGRY WOMEN
- Bad News For Bad Guys! One Drop Of Blood Will Soon Reveal A Criminal's Face
- Outrage! H'Wood Peddling Nudie Joltin' Joe Pic [I'm looking, I'm looking]
- Rosie: Mama Mia Is My Idea Of A Model Mom
- BANDS OF GOLD! THOSE OLD TOY RINGS CAN BE WORTH A FORTUNE

Request: I know my webcam geography is half-assed, so if anyone can easily correct any timezones and/or re-sort for strict longitudinal sequence, I'd be grateful.

Don't miss: Using MS's sleazy hidden ID to trace the Melissa hacker: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2233931,00.html [Slashdot]

In other words, the electronic "fingerprints" on the Melissa virus inserted in the Word macro and those on the documents posted on the Web site are the same. The electronic fingerprint, called the media access control (MAC) address, is a unique serial number for a PC's Ethernet card.

The Web site belongs to a malicious hacker, and a writer of virus tools, known by several handles, including VicodinES, Sky Roket, John Holmes, and Johnny "One Leg" Johnson, among others, according to Smith.

The FBI is looking to prosecute the writer with a fine of $350,000 and five to 10 years, according to statements made by Michael Vatis, director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center.

Scott R on the new Gates book: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1999/03/cov_30books.html

If you plow through "Business @ the Speed of Thought" you will quickly realize three things: Nearly everything Gates writes is obvious. Nearly everything Gates writes is right. Yet somehow he has missed the real story.

The "digital nervous system" becomes a feedback-and-control loop that lets managers slice their bean-counts ever more finely and tune their organizations to a peak of responsiveness.

The last time Microsoft dismissed a popular new technology as being good only for "the student and hobbyist market," as Gates is now describing Linux, it was the early '90s, and the technology in question was the Internet itself -- which, like Linux today, was "too hard to use," "didn't have a good graphic interface" and just didn't fit into Microsoft's vision.

And don't miss: Brilliant Jamie P: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1999/03/30poni.html

"...Well, I'm doing Pilates with the cable news on -- it helps me clear my mind and get centered -- and guess who I see? Susan Sarandon, on the television, prime time, getting arrested. Looking absolutely f___ing drop-dead gorgeous, I could rip her throat out. Have you heard about this Amadou Diablo man in New York...?"

"Civil-rights legend, my ass -- the man's a bigger camera hog than Jenny McCarthy."

"Well, Mr. Skeptic, eat your words. It was amazing: the stone-throwing, the police dogs -- it was just like "Born on the Fourth of July.""

Scientific research as if communities matter: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/30/text/p2s2.html [More]

"I tell them, visit the local school. Talk to the people. Hold some classes. Have an exchange of some kind and tell them what you're doing," says Jean Colvin, director of the University Research Expeditions Program in Davis, Calif.

...But UREP's ethics code goes further. It asks researchers not only to help the host country develop its own scientific infrastructure, but also to "help improve life in your research area."

Johnny Wilson's articulate defense of CGW's violent ads: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/30/text/p20s3.html

In computer games, the gamer wants to experience and cause the results, not merely watch or hear. The easiest way to allow the gamer to cause the results is to build in cause and effect contingencies. Unfortunately, portraying violence and its reprehensible aftermath is the easiest and most commonly used means to give the gamer this opportunity to directly cause something to happen on the screen.

When I said that I was a prophet trying to call for more meaning in games, I didn't mean that I had succeeded. How arrogant that would have been! How many prophets actually succeeded in their own lifetimes? Did John the Baptist succeed in getting Herod to change his marital state? Didn't Amos get told to shut up and go away? Well, there are times that the industry tells me to shut up and go away, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a "mission."

The intro to this nicely-done, one-page 160k online version of a book of Dickens' letters to Wilkie Collins includes the original editor's memories of seeing Dickens on stage: http://www.cyberramp.net/~jrusk/letters/letters.htm

To see this grown-up David Copperfield in the flesh, doing all sorts of ridiculous things in the farce of Mr. Nightingale's Diary; to feel that, perhaps, he had a letter at that very moment in his pocket from the real Micawber; and that the actual Agnes was in the wings waiting to go home with him when the play was over, was to this particular little boy the greatest treat of his young life. And he has never ceased to thank the considerate father for the blessed memory of that wonderful night in Liverpool so many years ago.

From comp.human-factors:

The German browser iCab (http://www.icab.de) for the Macintosh also supports the the <link> tags. It's pretty nifty. It adds a toolbar with icons representing all the basic functions (home, search, next, prev, contents, author, copyright, up, etc.), and also has a pulldown menu which lists all <link>ed objects (incl. stylesheets and stuff).

Rushdie-fatwah cowardice forces satirist to self-publish? (Telegraph) [More]

"I think it's the timidity of publishers, political and intellectual timidity, that has prevented publication of Fatima's Scarf."

A fun paean to Catcher: (Telegraph)

J. D. Salinger has a way of doing things. And in Catcher he drew as fine and funny and true a portrait of juvenile desperation as we've had since, well - David Copperfield.

Hairy, excellent technical analysis of the new iMac network-boot technology: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-473.html

When someone boots a Macintosh with the "New World" ROM-in-RAM architecture - currently only iMacs and blue and white Power Macintosh G3s - pressing the N key during startup forces the machine's Open Firmware to look on the local Ethernet network for a NetBoot server, using the industry-standard BootP protocol.

A major obstacle faced by NetBoot is that boatloads of Mac OS applications assume they can write to the startup disk. On a NetBooted machine, they can - but the changes are redirected to this shadow disk image.

As long as applications ask the Mac OS where the Preferences folder is instead of assuming its location, everything magically works, and each user's preferences are available from any client machine starting up from the same NetBoot server.

If your startup disk image file occupies 50 MB, then you must have enough disk space for each concurrently booted client to have its own shadow copy of that file.

Open Firmware is burned into a ROM chip on older machines and can't realistically be patched to add such major new functionality. So, only iMacs and blue and white Power Macintosh G3 computers can be NetBoot clients.

There will almost certainly be some compatibility issues at first, as there were when Apple II machines first acquired network booting capability in 1987 with a far simpler operating system.

Mind-blowing new 4Mb timelapse/animation MPEG of Uranus's weather, etc: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1999/11/index.html [Fla]

The movie, created by Hubble researcher Erich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona, clearly shows for the first time the wobble in the ring system, which is made of billions of tiny pebbles.

(I think I'll grab the 18Mb hi-res later-- it's way cool.)

The unglamorous sector of the market (and the smart money, imho): http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307152a.htm

"We buy companies at 12 times earnings and they go down to 10 times earnings," says Kaplan. "It's depressing. No one cares."

Monday's Pacifica ends with a great, short Chomsky interview where (as in the article yesterday below) he foresees a new world community uniting against the new 'rogue superpower' (US). RealAudio direct link: http://www.webactive.com/audio/pacifica/pac990329f.ram

(Saul Landau on the Cuba ballgame is interesting, too.)

Yesterday's Zippy was pretty good, though late: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/sfgate/zippy.cgi?weekday=1

Zerbina: "Zippy, I can't sleep...!"

Great good sense from the Progressive Review:

What would a peace-centered policy look like? Some of the components would include stopping the bombing, using third parties to negotiate, avoiding the demonization of disputants, bringing back international observers, providing honest broadcast and print information (including debates between the parties) to replace the propaganda all side are fed, and using economic aid to encourage those involved to look towards the future rather than to the past.

Extremely dry Chomsky comparison of Kosovo with Colombia, Turkey, Laos, etc: http://www.zmag.org/current_bombings.htm [Whump]

Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers.

The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action.

Realist "international relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower.

Scouring CGW for reviews that slipped past, I find this 2.5-star gangster-sim: http://www.gamespot.com/strategy/gangster/review_cgw.html

...here you've got to manage every detail of an organized-crime empire, from the activities of the lowliest thug squeezing the neighborhood grocer for money up to the delicate top-level relationships between competing crime families. It's a game about recruiting hoods and retaining them when they whine for a bigger cut; it's about deciding how much staff time to allocate to extortion and how much to intimidation; it's about carrying out blood rivalries in a ruthless, calculating way; and it's about making money, any way you can. [Fun pix]

Drudge offers this lovely jpg-link of Chelsea and Hillary on camelback: http://us.yimg.com/p/nm/19990328/mdf68757.jpg

Movie review search-site: http://www.mrqe.com/ and bookmarklet:

Movie Review Query Engine

(You can read up on bookmarklets at http://www.bookmarklets.com/ They're most efficient in your browser's 'personal toolbar', or on your start page. You can use your browser's popup menu to copy the link above-- that's Cmd-click on the Mac, right-click in Windows.) .

Microsoft's XML is seriously ugly? http://www.strom.com/awards/149.html [SN]

To test this format, I saved a few Word and PowerPoint 2000 files in the MS-XML format and then opened them in a text editor. What I found surprised me: a single HTML file that used to be intelligible was transformed into multiple files.

This Eyes Wide Shut site now has a 13Mb hi-res trailer. And the 3Mb version also includes the sound: http://www.countingdown.com/eyeswideshut/fans/multimedia.htm

Fun-sounding job: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/03/990329070015.htm

To test what structural components work best against falling trees, researchers engineered what they call the "The Drop Zone," a 24-foot-tall truck-mounted device that can winch columns weighing up to 1,500 pounds into place and then drop them, ax-like, onto the structure being tested.

Welcome to the Internet, Eric S Raymond: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html [Slashdot]

Even though you know with the top of your brain that a lot of the hecklers are testosterone-poisoned adolescents acting out at your expense. Even if you know that not one in fifty of the back-seat drivers has anything like your coding creds, not one in a hundred has the right personality type to fill your shoes, and not any damn one of them has walked a mile in those shoes. It will hurt.

This morning's Christian Science Monitor's links are all broken.

0830 CST! http://www.africam.mweb.co.za/sabi.htm

Cool pix of test launch from sea platform: http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/intelv/sealaunch/inaugural/index.htm

Forbes analyses net.connectivity across Europe: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/mar/0329/feat.htm

A- U.K.
B+ Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands
B Norway, Switzerland
B- Germany, Ireland
C+ France, Belgium, Austria
C Italy
D+ Spain
D Greece, Portugal

         Percent         Cost to
           of      PCs    get      Annual    Credit/Debit
         people    per   online  disposable   cards per
         online    1000   ($)     income ($)    1000


Europe     6%      352   $49.32   $14,801        39
U.S.      16%      580   $34.87   $21,928       148

I'm still waiting for a good account of this x-rated Midsummer Night's Dream: (Telegraph)

There's a particularly effective scene when a bowler-hatted butler and a prim lady-in-waiting meet in the woods, rip each others clothes off and have an enthusiastic snog: suddenly we realise that they have been transformed into a randy Peaseblossom and Puck.

And here's a totally inadequate first wrapup on the reallife Japanese Truman Show (12 Nov below), now finally concluded: (Telegraph)

His diaries were published as a book and became best-sellers and his face soon graced commercials for some of the things he won. [Great old RealVid]

Here's a new web-based parsing-browser service: (I haven't tried it yet) http://www.quickbrowse.com/quickbrowse/english/what.html [IrishTimes]

Quickbrowse speeds your browsing by combing all the pages you normally look at into a single one.

A level-headed guide for humanities PhD's entering the business world: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/career/1999/03/29career.html

Having hung around almost exclusively with other academics for a decade, I had to create a non-academic network from scratch.

People in business practice a mode of communication that is actually much more diplomatic, democratic and dialectical than what is generally practiced in the academic world.

While academics may scoff, the business world is the thinker's Mount Everest.

Special Times section on Le Carre: [multipage, frames] http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/03/29/timnwsnws03013.html?1334425

TV 2nite: FUTURAMA! [hmmm... i expect it will get better when the villain is introduced?}; TV Ultra loves Femme Nikita: http://www.tvultra.com/

Like the '60s surrealist spy show, The Prisoner, La Femme Nikita is about creeping paranoia, control by shadowy government entities, and the real and potential abusive powers of predatory surveillance and other military-industrial technologies.

Sigh: Orioles win in eleven, 3-2. (Disappointingly uneventful game.)

WashPost sneers at Drudge: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-03/28/021r-032899-idx.html [OSRR]

Each night he scans media sites, from the big American papers to a Chinese wire service, for advance billing of tomorrow's stories, which he will trumpet hours early with big, black, screaming headlines.

He didn't fabricate stories like Stephen Glass, or retract flimsy nerve-gas charges like CNN, or blow up a truck like "Dateline NBC." Who are these folks to look down their noses at him?

"He rips off our advances," complains National Enquirer Editor Steve Coz. "He's so quick, he can have things up in five minutes."

Initially, Drudge made very little from his report; by 1997 he was getting $36,000 a year from AOL. But Drudge's television and other deals -- and new advertising on his site -- have boosted his income to around $400,000.

Matthew Drudge is the only child of what he calls "liberal hippie parents" -- his father is a social worker and his mother, a lawyer, once volunteered at the Clinton White House. ...While he was in junior high, his mother was hospitalized for schizophrenia, and his parents later divorced.

Drudge set up his simple graphics with Paint Shop Pro software, the big tabloid headlines sometimes amplified by a flashing police light. But the genius of the site was its digital links -- to major newspapers, wires and everyone from Arianna Huffington to Liz Smith -- that provided one-stop shopping for news junkies. Anyone could have done this, but Drudge was among the first, with a fairly eclectic list.

A New York brokerage has offered to put up millions of dollars to finance an online venture he's contemplating with Dick Morris -- he won't say exactly what kind of venture. On Monday, he woke up to hear Fox's Tony Snow on the Rush Limbaugh show saying that a Chicago research firm, judging from Drudge's Web traffic, believes he has a potential market capitalization of $4.5 billion if he were to become a public company.

Drudge in high school (w/pic!): http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/archives/cover/1998/cover0313_drudge.html [OSRR]

His '84 yearbook entry is one of the briefest ever recorded in the annual Arrowhead. The inscrutable senior revealed little except his zodiac sign (Scorpio), his favorite color (Caribbean blue), his preferred food (Jalapeno bologna), and his personal motto ("Where there's a will, there's a way").

I went thru the last few months of logs and sorted the best links into the net.literate portal categories linked above. (It's still way messy, but most of the onsite links should work now, too.) Eventually, it ought to provide a richly linked, readable overview of each topic area:

fun | art | media | issues | net | tech | science | history | search | shop

RealAudio has a very impressive way of recovering from bandwidth gaps, apparently without losing any words...

Yee-ha! WBAL is carrying the Cuba game on the Net: http://www.broadcast.com/radio/Talk/WBAL/ or http://www.audionetcanada.com/radio/talk/wbal/

Hard game to find: Will ESPN carry the Cuba game live on the Net? Doesn't look like it: http://espn.go.com/liveradiotv/

The ballgame starts at 10:55 CST-- but where on the Net can one follow it best? (Maybe it'll make Chgo radio?) http://espn.go.com/mlb/features/01181353.html

[Cuba's fans:] On a nearby platform, five teen-age cheerleaders in red halter tops and short white skirts gyrated hips to the toot-toot-toot of a huge steel horn powered by a diesel engine. Housewives in curlers, elderly laborers smoking enormous cigars, little boys clutching baseballs all screamed passionately as the Havana favorites achieved victory. Orchestra players with trombones, trumpets, and the large metal bell known here as a "cecerro" blared and clanged their approval.

What are these Poles doing? (Sunday afternoon there) http://www.krakow.pl/kamera/duzy.html

Good day to check out Sabren's weblog: http://www.linkwatcher.com/metalog/

Kosovo for smart dummies: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.13/kosovo.html

Herzegovena was inhabited by Croats, who are basically Serbs who are Catholics instead of Orthodox and who write their dialect of Serbian using Latin letters instead of Cyrillic.

OK, so now three years or so after our strictly limited one-year peacekeeping mission to save the noble Bosnians (who only go out and slaughter Serbs and Croats when they manage to get guns) from the Evil Serbs (who already have lots of guns and so slaughter Croats and Bosnians all the time) and the Semi-Evil Croats (who slaughter Serbs whenever they can but would rather slaughter Bosnians because they don't have so many guns) -- after all this time, we still have Our Brave Boys (and Girls, and, er, don't ask, don't tell) over there Doing a Wonderful Job of Nation-Building.

NATO's mission is now to promote love and peace throughout Europe; that's why we let in Poland and the rest. It's like a Certificate of Appreciation on the wall saying you're a Good Country now. These new little countries were so happy to get their NATO merit badges, isn't that cute?

There's a new song that's haunting me, with the refrain "I'd hate to be a woman", accompanied by a sort of UK-style-siren rhythm. I can't trace it yet, though.

Short Nokia 9000 testdrive: http://partners.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article8.html

I snapped open my phone and located a small green button marked Internet. My fingers are not svelte -- they have, with age, svelled -- but with effort I surfed my way to Cheese Net, "the Internet's cheese-information resource." There I learned that Lou Palou is a tangy ewe's milk product from southwestern France...

Which cues make it clear this isn't the USA? http://www.bolton.ac.uk/htbin/cam3/

Heh: I just realised that when Ask Jeeves claims these are their most frequently asked questions, they're not really tracking the users' typed-in questions, but rather the hits to their own content-indexers' reverse-engineered titles: http://www.ask.com/docs/funnyyoushouldask.html

December's most popular questions:
What are the greatest science fiction movies of all time?
Where can I download action games for Windows?

American Heritage magazine mostly puts me to sleep, but its homepage has an interestingly non-conformist design: http://www.americanheritage.com/current/

A biography of Stephen Gaskin (et al)'s SF Zen guru: (short) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-03/28/248l-032899-idx.html [More]

Suzuki's genius was to turn American ignorance of Zen into a virtue. He called it Beginner's Mind, saying, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

Imaginative reconstruction of the Dead Sea Scrolls' milieu: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-03/28/251l-032899-idx.html [More]

According to Wise, the scrolls tell the story of a Jewish priest, whom Wise calls "Judah," who was like Jesus in nearly every way: a brilliant, apocalypse-obsessed charismatic who preached a New Covenant and considered himself the Messiah. After his death, his disciples believed, he had been elevated to God's right hand and would return to preside over the end of the world.

In his somewhat obfuscatory footnotes, Wise announces that he has taken other, unspecified liberties with translations. One should note that most Qumran scholars have never viewed the Teacher of Righteousness as a messianic figure, either in his own mind or in those of his followers.

First time I ever wished for ESPN: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/americas/9903/27/BC-CUBA-USA-BASEBALL.reut/index.html

And Cuban president Castro, 72, an avid player in his youth, is expected both to meet the U.S. players and attend the game, which starts at 1 p.m. (noon EST) (1700 GMT) and will be televised live both on Cuba's state-run television and the U.S. network ESPN.

B-movie classic: The Dentist: http://www.sffa.com/fotl/fotl_archives/loop004.html

I believe in the Stephen King philosophy. The normal things in life are often the most horrifying! Who is NOT afraid of going to the dentist?

Kazowie, Maui-- sunrises over the Pacific: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/asiacams.html

9am to noon, CST: This is Hell live RealAudio (best-of, repeating Kevin Poulsen, Count Zero of Cult of the Dead Cow, and Michael Moore interviews); Kosovo website of week

Decent tips on websites-for-selling: http://www.hatfactory.com/customer.html [SN]

Give something back to your audience. Consider each page of the site, and make them a gift of an interesting tidbit of knowledge, an engaging graphic, or a revelation about themselves or the world. With each page impression, you have the potential to teach, to illuminate and to inspire. If you take advantage of the opportunities, people will expect more back, and view more of your pages hunting for more value.

I'm adding EuroCams: (huge) http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/eurocams.html

Free-Compaq deal ($40/month, actually): http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/business/story/18714.html?wnpg=all

The catch? Every computer's homepage will be permanently locked on Compaq's AltaVista portal site. Moreover, a permanent desktop icon will link directly to Compaq's Shopping.com online mall.

Fifteen other permanent icons on the desktop will link to the sites of vendors who pay Compaq and PC Free a bounty.

Nine tips for the net-biz.pitch: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,4005,00.html

1. Trendy buzzwords...
2. Flaunt relationships with Web players...
3. Number of years experience...
4. "Everyone's got the same revenue growth chart"
5. Six or seven colors...
6. No competition...
7. 20-minute format...
8. Don't forget to ask for the money...
9. Finally, practice....

Disney.com extends its tentacles: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,4001,00.html

With 190,000 paying subscribers, the Disney site is bringing in a minimum of $7 million a year in subscriptions -- and that's less than the revenues from advertising and e-commerce.

While most of the site content is free, only paying members will get to use the coolest new features, like instant messaging.

Disney.com solicits feedback from kids about programs on the Disney Channel, which is incorporated into the following episode.

TV stations try spam-by-permission: http://www.urlwire.com/newsarchive/032699.html

For example, if a viewer has a particular interest in fitness, he can notify the television station by visiting its Web site and "signing up" to receive e-mail messages indicating the time and date a story on fitness will air.

The targeted and personalized communication created by ENN can also provide revenue generating opportunities. Television stations can sell advertising links to accompany e-mail messages to selected audiences such as persons interested in health care or education.

Random House has a monthly literary-PR zine: http://199.29.97.173:80/index.html

Strange weather: http://www.nk-g.co.jp/teiten/city001.jpg

New reviews at Computer Gaming World:

- King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (4 stars) [Impressive pix], [Ditto], [Urk!]
- Return to Krondor (2.5, wasted potential) [Cool pix]
- Falcon 4.0 (4.5, realistic flight sim) [Okay pic]
- Luftwaffe Commander (2, bland flight sim) [Dumb pic]

Theme of the new Fast Company is 'The Agenda': http://www.fastcompany.com/online/23/index.html

PhilG turned his web-design book into a PhD thesis by writing this academic overview: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/thesis/overview.html

[Closing par:] How has technology improved as the world moved from MUD to the Web? By and large users have been stripped of their ability to perform server-side programming. In its place, they've gotten Java-enriched banner advertisements that crash their browsers.

New Science News

http://www.vox.com/shashainterview.html [Japan] [More]

Sha Sha Higby approaches dance through the medium of sculpture. Using the painterly manipulation of materials and textures, she creates intricate costumes made of wood, silk, paper and gold leaf...

"I think of the work as a private thing. It can also be for others but it's something between the skin and the air that you could pull delicately and it would come off, like layers of compressed auras."

More pix: [multipage] http://www.artnetwork.com/sculpture/Shasha/

My work strives to create a path where movement and stillness meet. Shreds of memory lace into a drama of a thousand intricate pieces, slowly moving, stirring our memory toward a sense of patience and timelessness.

Emotions and thoughts cluster on the surface of our bodies and then break away, fly and float off.

More words: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0327li23.htm

"This is a diary of my trip to Myanmar. Only drawings because he can't read letters," she said. He? Who is he? "He is the Wooden Sun!"

Origami professional uses CAD: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0327cu26.htm [More]

Goto designs the shape and position of the margins to be glued together, to create the delicate curves on the computer screen. However, it is difficult to calculate the flexibility of the paper on a computer, therefore, delicate manual adjustments must be made continually, forming an object many times. It takes nearly two weeks to complete one paper craft animal. Goto's work includes rabbits, wild boars, turtles, penguins and frogs, all with a friendly appearance.

Escher-inspired sculptor? http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0327cu17.htm [More]

Yamada, 48, showed some of his work from his studio in Hachioji, Tokyo. His latest is a 30-cubic-centimeter box made of finely rusted steel in which a multicut crystal, the shape and size of a chicken egg, appears to float. The object can be seen through a clear hole at the top of the box, but when you try to touch it, there is nothing there.

SpiderWatch: I've submitted just two robotwisdom.com URLs to AltaVista so far... and it hasn't bothered to discover any other pages on this new site: [Search pattern]

Rickie Lee Jones line:

"Downstairs at Danny's All-Star Joint
They got a juke-box that goes 'doit doit'..."
(Sorry, no sample)

New The Nation is AWOL/overdue, but here's a late goodie from last issue-- Zinn's "People's History" miniseries (5 July below) really starts to roll: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990405/0405gogola.shtml [More]

After many months of wrangling, all parties recently agreed on a six-part dramatization of key sections of Zinn's book, based around the individual exploits of average Americans caught up in major historical moments.

Bob Dylan and Winona Ryder have already signed on--he's singing, she's acting--and John Cusack and Danny Glover are negotiating for roles. "That's a huge help," says Pool. "To get that level of interest from talent is very unusual and very difficult in television."

Cool phrase of the day: black silicon: http://www.sciam.com/exhibit/1999/032299silicon/index.html [CG]

Examination of the treated area in an electron microscope [pic] revealed that the surface now consisted of surprisingly evenly sized, extremely sharp spikes of silicon. The individual spikes [pic] are about 40 microns tall and taper to a mere 1 micron at the tip. The treated area appears black because almost all the visible light hitting the surface is reflected back and forth between the spikes, instead of being reflected back up from the surface. The effect is similar to the way egg-carton structures are used to absorb sound in recording studios.

(AltaVista finds 149 pages.)

Grrr: Guaranteed 100% unusably short headlines: http://my.userland.com/

(Really, does anyone find this useful?!?!?)

Free Lunch Dept: http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/new.html

If your site has fewer than 5000 pages, you can use Thunderstone's free search service to index your domain. Then use the free Make Search Bookmarklet tool to make the bookmarklet.

This may have been live-- the cam was chasing macrofauna off and on this morning: http://www.africam.mweb.co.za/sabi.htm [URL fixed, HTML hopeless]

Mostly excellent semi-serious ark-thread on flamewar- (etc) topology: [Deja URL]

After five years I still wonder at times why my carefully crafted jokes, who make myself laugh incontrollably and of which I am extremely proud, are regularly ignored, while all the lame articles I write while drunk/intoxicated and posted by mistake generate endless threads. I routinely blame this on my newsservers. Except that, six months later, somebody remembers "that extremely funny article you posted" (not that I have been anywhere near half-funny in the last couple of years, mind you) and mentions that he did not dare to followup, as anything else would have paled in comparison...

And remember kids: the purpose of ARK is not to be 'funny.' It is to have an ever-increasing score and a prettier colour in Leader Kibo's Colour-Coordinated IQ-Determining Future-Predicting Scorefile.

Lucid recap of turbulence theory: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/03/990326062209.htm

Up until Komogorov attempted to describe turbulence, physicists recognized four patterns of flow: still, steady convection, periodic convection, and turbulent convection. Each of these can be pictured by imagining a pan of water on a stove. When the burner is lit beneath the pan, the flow of the water will go through each of these transitions as it is heated.

...And the very theory that predicted hard turbulence also led to predictions by Eric Siggia of Cornell University of a seventh final and universal pattern of flow, that of ultra-hard turbulence.

The liquid consisted of almost one ton of mercury driven by a heating coil that supplied up to 20,000 watts into a one square foot area.

The eastern-western cam page is great at sunrise: (oops, too late) http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/ewestcams.html

CSM reader takes Johnny Wilson of CGW to task: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/26/text/p10s3.html

Ads for the game "Kingpin" boast: "You're gonna die. Target specific body parts and actually see the damage done - including exit wounds." ... If there is any meaning in these ads, it is that killing is thrilling, and I am puzzled why Wilson feels a source of pride in promoting these games.

To blame parents for not monitoring their child's computer time is an extraordinarily easy escape route. Does he feel no responsibility at all as he accepts money for the ads, and places them so liberally throughout his magazine?

In the late 60s, Warner's LP's inner-sleeves used to advertise sampler-albums, one of which included Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/0326/fea5.htm [More]

Parks' first solo album, the 1968 Song Cycle, is a vastly ambitious work that should, in retrospect, be considered as significant as Velvet Underground And Nico or Trout Mask Replica.

(Gak! This brief biog omits his brilliant, joyous Uncle-Remus musical "Jump!")

Yay! CD Universe has tons of samples.

People who buy Van Dyke Parks also tend to buy these artists: Baez, Joan - Reed, Lou - Charles, Ray - Vargas, Chavela - Auger, Brian - Bowie, David - Williamson, Sonny Boy - Mclean, Don - Beach Boys - Brown, Charles - Creedence Clearwater Revival - Canned Heat - Hollies - Oldfield, Mike - Brown, Ruth - Guthrie, Arlo - Little Charlie - Nighthawks - Toure, Ali Farka - Young, Jesse Colin - Dylan, Bob

The discipline that dare not speak its name: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/feature/1999/03/26feature.html [More]

By studying the history of masturbation, academics probe where the myth of "hairy palms" comes from and other social inventions. According to UC-Berkeley history professor Thomas Laqueur, autoeroticism was unremarkable until the 18th century, when it became transformed into "the first secular source of guilt" with the development of modernism.

In many ways, one-hand lovin' has become an overinterpreted, empty vessel into which theorists can pour their every inspiration. ...Masturbation as ritualized prayer? Sure thing. How about psychological self-therapy? OK! A representational enactment of suicide? Why not?

Laqueur, on the other hand, is just in it for the intellectual quest. "I wish I could say I had a political agenda, but I don't," he says. "It's more direct for me: The old readings are wrong."

"It's very liberating for some undergrads to know that Plato talked about homosexual relationships." Maybe with a professor demystifying the history of masturbation, students can begin to likewise transform their relationship to their own bodies.

This face-reading lie-detector is just a scam, I'm sure (cf 16 Sept below): (Telegraph) [More]

The program draws on work from the 1970s, when a team of psychologists led by Ekman developed a code that breaks facial expressions down into component movements by individual facial muscles. each of which has a designated action unit number. "So you could describe a smile as AU6 + AU12," said Bartlett.

Speech-recognition breakthru claim: (Telegraph) [More]

King has found speech decomposes into 29 distinctive components, from which you can rebuild anything anyone says by combining just a few.

The patterns of components people use when speaking are highly distinctive; Domain Dynamics has therefore been able to make a card that knows you are allowed to use it by the sound of your voice, using a 32-bit smartcard with three neural networks.

Brian Edmundson, Rotodata's director of electronics, says Tespar picks up frequency differences in signals that otherwise look identical.

Secret eco-village (pic source 24 Oct below) wins reprieve: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/03/26/timnwsnws01007.html?1334425

The 16 villagers faced losing their homes when their secret location was betrayed by sunlight glinting from a solar panel on the top of a roundhouse built from turf and logs. The hidden village survives by generating its own electricity, growing much of its own food and taking water from a stream.

Cam pages reorganized by (approximated) timezone:

Eastern Western Hemisphere: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/ewestcams.html

Western Western Hemisphere: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/wwestcams.html

Asia and Australia: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/asiacams.html

Europe and Africa: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/eurocams.html

Birmingham sunset: http://www.wbrc.com/weather/

Linus on design-choices in the early days of Linux: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-03/lw-03-opensources.html [Slashdot]

The funny thing is if you actually read those papers, you find that, while the researchers were applying their optimizational tricks on a microkernel, in fact those same tricks could just as easily be applied to traditional kernels to accelerate their execution. In fact, this made me think that the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research.

If you want code to be portable, you shouldn't necessarily create an abstraction layer to achieve portability. Instead you should just program intelligently.

I read up on the 68K, the Sparc, the Alpha, and the PowerPC memory management documents, and found that while there are differences in the details, there was a lot in common in the use of paging, caching, and so on. The Linux kernel memory management could be written to a common denominator among these architectures...

In other words, if you had not been thinking about portability as a design goal, but had just been thinking about optimization of the kernel on a particular architecture, you would frequently reach the same conclusion-say, that the optimal depth for the kernel to represent the page tree is three deep.

While a proprietary vendor can sometimes try to push the design flaw onto the architecture, in the case of Linux we do not have the latitude to do this.

Linux has inherited a number of terrible interfaces from previous implementations of Unix.

I think that all the other projects from the GNU group are for Linux insignificant in comparison. GCC is the only one that I really care about. A number of them I hate with a passion; the Emacs editor is horrible, for example.

We ended up deciding (or maybe I ended up decreeing) that system calls would not be considered to be linking against the kernel. That is, any program running on top of Linux would not be considered covered by the GPL.

If anyone were to abuse the guidelines by using the exported symbols in such a way that they are doing it just to circumvent the GPL, then I feel there would be a case for suing that person.

At this point the honest truth is I don't envision major updates to the kernel. A successful software project should mature at some point, and then the pace of changes slows down.

I don't think Java or Inferno (Lucent's embedded operating system) are going to succeed for embedded devices. They have missed the significance of Moore's Law. ...Everything is getting so cheap that you might as well have the same system on your desktop as in your embedded device.

Web serving has always been an interesting problem, because it's the one real application that is really kernel-intensive.

In fifteen years, I expect somebody else to come along and say, hey, I can do everything that Linux can do but I can be lean and mean about it because my system won't have twenty years of baggage holding it back. They'll say Linux was designed for the 386...

Thanks for the poll feedback-- I expect to indulge my enthusiasm for a while more, though:

How much effort should I put into "Cam of the Hour"?

- I love it-- give it whatever it takes: 13% (includes large bozo factor)
- I like it so much I don't mind if the links suffer a bit: 11%
- I enjoy it, but not if the links suffer: 57%
- I have no interest in "Cam of the Hour": 20%

Measles (etc) and HIV (etc) share common virus ancestor? http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/nwu-vdv032299.html

The fusion protein is embedded in the membrane that envelops the virus. It serves as a grappling hook that snags the membrane of a host cell and pulls the two membranes together so that they fuse into one, like soap bubbles, dumping the viral genes into the host cell where they take over the cellular machinery to make more viruses.

4500 BC portraiture: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0324/i_ap_0324_122.sml

Carved on melon-sized heads, each face is different - some have open round mouths and long noses, others sport with beards and black and red eyelashes. One figure with a round, bald head and protruding nose is affectionately referred to as "Homer Simpson'' by the pottery restoration team.

Microsoft Venus!?!?!? http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,31277-50280-373576-0,00.html [More]

But the new product -- a slimmed-down operating system called Venus that works in concert with a television -- still faces hurdles before finding its way into Chinese homes.

The Venus system is among the first products developed by a Beijing research laboratory Microsoft set up last year...

Life imitates crap: http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,31284-50289-373663-0,00.html

The helicopter was commandeered during a tourist flight by a woman who forced the pilot at gunpoint to land inside Sydney's Silverwater maximum security prison, police said.

Pop sounds we love: The new Jewel song "Down So Long" includes a throwaway Rickie-Lee-Jones-like vocal lick that's just fantastic: [Lycos MP3 pattern]

Brave dance-concept: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-03/25/074l-032599-idx.html [OSRR]

Such was the barely controlled chaos of "Dances for Dogs and People Who Walk Them," an homage to the whimsical rhythms Orr said she observes every day in parks and playgrounds all over Washington.

During "Paw Deux Dogs," the audience cheered as Longfellow circled the field, tracked down his squeaky ball and then chomped on it, all to the beat of the standard "Unchained Melody."

"There's all this feeling going on between people and their dogs. The audience really gets excited about that, feels that. I heard someone say, 'Now why did that make me cry?' "

More webcamiana: (this list will probably grow all day)

- the most unpromising cowtowns (eg Fargo) can turn to shining jewels at night
- i never noticed how blue sunrises are [Google pattern: "blue dawn"]
- there's no english word that covers both sunrises and sunsets-- 'half-light' is as close as i've come (Cam Laird gets half-credit for 'crepuscular'-- adj-only, bio-only. "CrepusculeCam" is a non-starter, though!)
- grenada quickly grew cloying
- if a cam looks pretty as a postcard on your first visit, it's probably not live!
- i still haven't explored most of europe, japan, and the usa's cams
- i appreciate email suggestions, preferably with the usual background on what and where and how
- i think i can establish an efficient rhythm where the cams are loading in the background while i read articles...
- so about once an hour i can upload the new links plus a new cam
- i tried to illustrate the nokia article below with a live helsinki-cam, but they were all too lame
- shifting-pov cams are nice to visit, but they're too esthetically-unreliable for cam-of-the-hour, i'm afraid

Okay overview of the expert-systems state-of-the-art (etc): http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/25/text/p15s1.html

But if a health-conscious vegetarian suddenly orders a pork roast, the system is capable of abandoning its past rules, guessing there's a party in the making, and offering potato chips with fat-free dip, says Gad Barnea, chief technology officer of Manna Network Technologies in Newton, Mass.

Machines can do the routine sniffing: determining that a railroad tank car is carrying the correct chemical and that a printed candy wrapper won't make the chocolate bar smell bad.

When the world's top players showed up for the international bridge championships in France last year, some were spooked by GIB, the only bridge-playing computer invited to the tournament. "Its tempo is bizarre," concedes Matt Ginsberg, the University of Oregon professor who created it.

Nice coverage of Penguin's new biog-series: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/25/text/p17s2.html

Future matches include Carol Shields on Jane Austen, Jonathon Spence on Mao Tse-tung, George Plimpton on Muhammed Ali, Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens, and Peter Gay on Mozart.

(And Edna O'Brien on Joyce.)

Request: If anyone's been following the Stephanopoulos brouhaha closely enough to say which article covers it best, I'd appreciate that URL.

I'm wiggy for Popo, but I don't dare put it as cam-of-the-hour because it's so slow to load: http://www.cenapred.unam.mx/UltimaImagenVolcan2.html

Meta: If I add a 'best reporting' category to my awards page it's gonna have to go to Forbes... and TidBits, I guess.

Don't miss: How Nokia won: [4pg, grr!] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/mar/0325/feat.htm [More]

It recognized that brand identity, along with global volume efficiency, was going to be essential in a market where the retail price of its phones is often lower than the wholesale cost.

"We are the only company in the world selling phones that work in every major cellular standard," says Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's 45-year-old chief financial officer and the president of the company's U.S. division. "We were first to segment our product line, first to build a brand identity, first to understand that design was essential in this business, and first to make sure we could take advantage of the efficiency of global manufacturing in a business where R&D costs are high and can only be recouped with worldwide volumes."

This digital age gadget packs a microbrowser into a phone that has the sleek look of a tiny cell phone and includes a set of advanced innovations--a predictive dictionary to guess at words as you spell them on the keypad, a rolling mouse and (perhaps the most important feature of all in a data-cum-voice phone) built-in Chinese language support.

"Profits are hard to come by in the handset business. But Nokia has figured out how to do it by amortizing design costs over a lot of countries and distinguishing itself with sleek design."

Nokia was early into the portable radio phone business in the 1970s... Nokia became a conglomerate in 1967, merging rubber, timber and electronic cable companies.

The secret: great design and a near religious belief that wireless will replace traditional voice, and all will be IP soon.

Better yet, the impact of AT&T's one-rate plan is expanding the field as a whole so there is plenty of room for all vendors, and the wireless wave seems to be just starting to gather steam. According to Yankee Group numbers, average landline phone usage is about 400 minutes per month and only growing as a result of Internet connectivity. A couple of years ago wireless usage averaged 100 minutes per month. Today that number is closer to 300 minutes...

Offtrack online: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307062a.htm [More]

"Just as Amazon.com filled the book space, we feel we have the assets to be the leading on-line, live-event wagering company in the world."

Eight states let you bet the ponies over the phone, even if you live outside the state. Customers simply set up accounts at racetracks or at offtrack betting parlors; 78% of all horse bets are already placed at sites other than the actual track.

The company is rolling out a nationwide on-line-wagering system, charging high rollers $5.95 a month plus a cut of each bet.

"I do not share their view of the legality of this," says John Van de Kamp, a former California attorney general, now serving as president of the Thoroughbred Owners of California.

Specialised data-mining app with a browser interface: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307124a.htm [More]

Dubbed customer-relationship-management software, their programs extract corporate data on customer behavior and let nontechnical marketing people analyze it for profitable patterns.

Wells Fargo tried data warehousing but pulled the plug on the project after $36 million and a year of struggle. "It was dangerous," says David Holvey, a senior vice president at the bank. "A lot of the data that we were getting out of it was garbage. We were lucky that the answers it came up with were so ridiculous that people with very sharp pencils were able to say, 'That's not right.'"

Conversely, Epiphany helped the firm pick out its most costly customers and determine minimum balances to justify free personal service. "[Those who] are only comfortable talking to human beings in a branch office are going to need to have a certain amount of money with us -- or pay for the privilege," says David Chambers, Schwab's director of database marketing.

If the regular Doonesbury link above didn't work for you this morning, here's a temp: (GREAT series, btw) http://www.masslive.com/eguide/comics/

Another simply-ravishing astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990325.html

On March 3rd, looking toward a beautiful sunset from a beach on the Hawaiian isle of Maui, photographer Rick Scott recorded this fleeting, four-planet "hockey stick" array.

Cattiest post-Oscar wrapup: [Deja URL]

I never thought I'd live to hear a Brian Eno song played by an orchestra.

Try not to think about this: At least one Academy member thinks "Batman" had one of the three best movie scenes EVER.

Saying something positive about Robert DeNiro: if his hair were fiber-optics he'd make a lovely lamp.

Patrick biopic in works: [Deja URL]

"Patrick Bergin's knack of putting on his truthful performances for the kids appears to have stuck," says Bob Rafelson, the director of the first film ever about Saint Patrick. He prepared for his latest role by reading St Patrick's autobiographical writings, and his prayer, Saint Patrick's Breastplate. Bergin says: "It's beautiful, maybe second only to the Lord's Prayer. I can't emphasise that enough. I say it every morning. It brings goodness and strength. It calls on the sun and the moon, the earth. Patrick is a bridge between pagan and Christian beliefs. Fifth century Ireland wasn't that sophisticated. As well as the Christian message of love, Patrick brought European sensitivities. He set up monastic communities and schools."

Text of Breastplate: http://www.c3net.net/kennedy/breastplate.htm

Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

New New Scientist describes sterilization via 'cold flame': http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990327/newsstory9.html

While the helium ions are neutralised within a few micrometres of the end of the tube, the oxygen atoms stay intact long enough to be blown onto the contaminated surface about a centimetre away. There, the oxygen atoms react readily with organic compounds, breaking down nerve gases and other biowarfare agents such as anthrax spores into harmless constituents.

Vote if you like: http://www.builder.com/Business/Nominations98/?st.bl.fd.sg1.feat.1633 [Tomalak]

Cast your vote for the individual or team who revolutionized the Web in 1998, then tell us why you made the choice you did. You can only vote for one innovator, and the voting period will close April 6.

A readable observance of the Exxon Valdez oil-spill tenth anniversary: http://www.counterpunch.org/ [More]

Reacting to the smouldering fury of the spill's victims, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska put through a law, known as the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, which forever barred a rehabbed Exxon Valdez from plying Alaskan waters. Unabashed, Exxon renamed the tanker the Sea River Mediterranean and tried to sail it back to Valdez. When the tanker was stopped, Exxon challenged the constitutionality of the 1990 Act. This bid failed and so the company filed a "takings" claim, demanding $125 million from the federal government, on the ground its tanker had been unfairly "demonized".

The persistence of fax machines: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307056a.htm

Peter Davidson, a consultant in Burbank, Calif. affiliated with International Data Corp., reports that worldwide fax transmission minutes grew to 395 billion last year from 255 billion in 1995, and will leap to 647 billion by 2002. At big corporations faxing accounts for a third of phone bills.

Contrarian argument that the US is a net carbon sink (good news global-warmingwise): http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307126a.htm

[1] First, there's regrowth on abandoned farmland and previously logged forests. Growing new trees sucks up a lot of carbon. Modern agriculture is so efficient, produces so much food on so little land, that we are returning lots of old farmland to forest.

[2] Fertilizers are worth 0.2 to 2 billion tons a year on the credit side of our carbon ledger.

[3] Carbon dioxide in the air promotes green growth, just as phosphates do. Up to a point greenhouse gas is its own antidote...

"America to Kyoto: 'Pound Sand.'"

I'm adding new cams this morning: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/cams.html

Domain-names get classical: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/booknew.html

- The Canterbury Tales (at canterburytales.org)
- The Divine Comedy (at divinecomedy.org)
- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (at arabiannights.org)

Don't miss: Chris Byron on Greenspan and Goldman, Sachs: http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm

The section reports that during the 15 years from 1983 to 1998, worldwide economic output barely tripled, to $29 trillion. Yet during the same period, the market value of equity stocks worldwide soared sevenfold, to an incredible $23 trillion, while the amount of new borrowings worldwide rocketed 20-fold, to nearly $3 trillion. This has happened basically because for the last 15 years the Federal Reserve has been printing money at almost twice the rate of growth in the economy. And since 1995 that growth rate in the money supply has exploded from a 6 percent annual rate to an 11 percent rate...

It is that excess liquidity -- and nothing else -- that has been fueling the super-boom in the stock market.

In the last 40 years, there have been only 18 months when the money supply grew faster than it did last November, and 17 of them fell during the 1970-1982 era of economic horrors.

TV 2nite: Check out "Sports Night" if you haven't yet

Popo is nitey-nite: http://www.cenapred.unam.mx/UltimaImagenVolcan2.html

"Wolkencap is on him, frowned; audiurient, he would evesdrip, were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far ear. Murk, his vales are darkling. With lipth she lithpeth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow. She he she ho she ha to la. Hairfluke, if he could bad twig her!" Finnegans Wake 023.21

New Onion:

National Pork Council: Many Americans Suffer From Pork Deficiency

Slashdot experiments with mass group-moderation: (hairy) http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/03/23/1058204

So what is the change? Simple, we had 20 or so moderators. Now we have 408.

The system was tracking moderation done to each user internally for just this purpose. (I had a score of 2, Anonymous Coward had a -1628 grin) All users with a positive score were given moderator access.

Anyone can disable the actions of the moderators by simply setting their default user preference to -5 or something really low. Tada! Slashdot in all its flamey off topic glory...

From the new Progressive Review:

Only 24 hours before President Clinton claimed that there was "no evidence" of espionage by China at US national labs, the FBI and CIA told the president that such spying was "widespread." That according to career intelligence officers speaking to the on-line journal, Capitol Hill Blue. "The President was fully briefed on Thursday," said one FBI analyst. "He was warned that the Los Alamos case was only a small part of a widespread pattern that spreads throughout the scientific community." Added a CIA intelligence officer: "We have provided the White House with reports of an extensive Chinese spy network."

...South China Post reports that Russian experts are worried that a cache of war-time chemical weapons on the floor of the Baltic Sea could soon rupture and leak. Involved are more than 300,000 tons of chemicals taken from Nazi Germany and 45,000 ton of Allied poisons. The location of the ships involved is known. Half of the barrels contain mustard gas, while the others are filled with more than a dozen other deadly poisons. Major leaks could put an end to fishing in the Baltic and parts of the North Sea.

Juicy new Village Voice includes a nice, historical Blondie review: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9912/gaines.shtml

Drummer Clem Burke defends the digressions, saying, "There's nothing so wrong about being a dilettante, you have to be a pretender to become real." And he's right: What was punk anyway but one big amateur hour, a cultural celebration of the dilettante? In the audience one day, onstage the next?

In the early 1960s, nobody was tougher than people who worked in pizza stores.

As we drive out of the city to Massapequa, through the East Village, Chris Stein shows me all the places the Blondies once lived and copped.

"It's totally thoughtless on the part of the powers that be, there's no consideration for the arts...."

Love that Deborah Jowitt! http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9912/jowitt.shtml

In Big Dance Theater's production of Mac Wellman's playlet Girl Gone, evil is a misty thing with sharp little teeth...

Earlier in the scene, Buggins lifts the lid of her desk, and, to her delight, it glows inside- suggesting the pursuit of knowledge not only as a Pandora's box, but as an alternate reality.

She thinks it may have been Lazar's idea to have two women, both playing the maid Felicite, concealed under their mistress's hoopskirt, but it was her task (along with the performers) to figure out how they emerged.

Condemnation of David Hare's new Mid-East monolog: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9912/solomon.shtml

"I visited two countries where people are regularly dying for their beliefs," he says in the same interview, betraying everything that's misguided about Via Dolorosa: first of all, there is no country of Palestine at the moment, and second, apart from some settlers, Israelis are hardly willing to die for any beliefs these days.

A good piece on vibrators-- legal, historical, technological, etc: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9912/kushner.shtml

These tiny engines are not easy to examine, since they're usually encased in hard plastic. I had to run over the Smoothie- an ultra-smooth multi-speed stimulator- five times in my car just to crack it open. Inside the tip, I found the guts of many high school science projects: a spool of thin copper wire surrounding a tiny metal rod. At the tip of the rod is a small, off-balance weight. The battery's current causes the rod to spin the weight, which oscillates and buzzes and vibrates. Bliss is centripetal motion.

A somewhat dejavu-inspiring interview with Might-editor David Eggers: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9912/goldberg.shtml [More]

The result is McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a journal that comprises killed articles and odd, obliquely humorous experiments culled from Eggers's circle of former Might cronies, as well as from a few A-list scribes like Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace (none of whom get paid).

"It's the same reason I can only read Suck once every few weeks, because it's like having someone shouting in your ear."

"I've never found chat groups that interesting. I'm not even a huge Web reader, though I think The Onion is the best use of the English language in my lifetime."

"Back in San Francisco, once Dave Moodie and I had done the mind-numbing graphic design work that paid the bills, we'd work until two or three in the morning on Might- even if we didn't have to. It was like an endurance contest, and whoever left first was a kind of traitor."

Reviews of three indie-film websites: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9912/lim.shtml

Another classics-made-stupid website (cf this from 18 Dec 98 below): http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9912/howe.shtml [More]

Reducing the Great Books to the size of a zen koan might prove a profitable business plan: the site, which plans to make its revenue off advertising, claims to have received 80,000 hits in its first 10 days online.

An amusing full-color comic about the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9912/sutton.shtml

Solutions to their ultra-hard movie quiz [qv] from three weeks back: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9912/atkinson.shtml

Directors-cum-novelists (22) are apparently a larger demographic than we thought, ranging from Robbe-Grillet, Duras, and Marker to Barker, King, and Wood. Even Errol Flynn, who directed a documentary about his own yacht voyage in 1952 and published a late-in-life potboiler, got remembered.

Critique of that way-cool-imho VW ad: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9911/dark.shtml

The people on the street are the music, busy being the sounds -- and that's hip-hop. The couple in the car simply receive the music, digitized and denatured in their rolling isolation chamber -- and that's electronica. The daily life of the city is translated into a soundtrack for day-trippers.

Controversial study minimizes danger of pedophilia: http://www.washtimes.com/news/news3.html [More]

Forty-two percent of the male college students viewed their abuse as positive when looking back on it, the report said, and 24 percent to 37 percent of the men saw it as a positive influence on their current sex lives. In fact, "the vast majority of both men and women reported no negative sexual effects from their child sexual-abuse experiences," it said.

Fresh white ejecta from Popocatepetl? http://www.cenapred.unam.mx/UltimaImagenVolcan2.html

(It's already melted-- was it frozen volcano-steam?)

Tucson's graveyard of failed franchisees: http://weeklywire.com/ww/current/tw_curr1.html

The first national food franchise to really fall on its Tucson butt was Minnie Pearl Chicken, all the way back in 1970...

We've also said bye-bye to Hardee's (still operational elsewhere after Carl's Jr. bought them out), Burger Chef, Winchell's, Bob's Big Boy, Sir George's, Po' Folks, King's Table, Love's, Sambo's and Kenny Roger's Chicken.

Maybe the fast-sliding JB's chain needs to find a minority group to offend. They could try changing their name to "Saddam's" and go for the anti-American crowd.

These three headlines resisted deletion:

Sinead suicide attempt (Times)
Tofu Boy (and other monsters) from early 18th C Japanese comix (Japan)
Russian sex-scandal video clip (BBC)

New New York Magazine looks at homophobia on Wall Street: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=2251

For many gays and lesbians, Wall Street is a not-so-quaint throwback -- a testosterone-drenched frat house complete with ritual hazing.

The code of silence was so strict that in 1983, an executive named Robert Hudson co-owned a brokerage firm with a gay partner, and neither realized that the other was also gay.

Vogue is also (cf Vanity Fair below) getting its feet wetter on the Web, including some nostalgic archives of old covers, with short summaries of each issue for selected years: http://www.vogue.co.uk/content/Generic/184/357745-0-1-1.html

For Autumn 1967, Vogue hailed Courreges' black and white geometric jumpsuit as the most contemporary shape in Paris...

Vanity Fair sneaks onto the Web with a devastating Hitchens review of the wagging of the dog: http://www.vanityfair.co.uk/content/Generic/14/361319-1-2-1.html

[Milt Bearden:] "Having spent 30 years in the C.I.A. being familiar with soil and environmental sampling across a number of countries, I cannot imagine a single sample, collected by third-country nationals and especially by third-country nationals whose country has a common border, serving as a pretext for an act of war against a sovereign state with which we have both diplomatic relations and functioning back channels."

Take away all the exploded claims about Sudan, and the question "What was the hurry?" practically answers itself.

"Do you imagine that the current administration is sitting on evidence that would prove it right? It's the dogs that don't bark that you have to listen to."

...Once again the question: What was the rush? It must have meant a lot to Clinton to begin the Iraq strikes when he did, because he forfeited the support of the U. N., of Russia, of China, of France, and of much of the congressional leadership - all of which he had enjoyed in varying degrees in November. ...the postponed impeachment debate continued well into Saturday, December 19, and so did the bombardment, which concluded a few hours after the impeachment vote itself.

Thus, when the United States did not want a confrontation with Iraq, over the summer and into the fall, Butler and the leadership acted like pussycats and caused Ritter to resign over their lack of seriousness. But then, when a confrontation was urgently desired in December, the slightest pretext would suffice...

(Hitchens fails to mention Clinton's baldestfaced lie of all, claiming to be shocked anyone would suggest he was dogwagging.)

Recent additions to the alt hierarchy:

alt.fan.natalieportman.binaries
alt.furniture.mid-century-modern
alt.music.b-witched
alt.online-service.webtv.sucks

TidBits pioneers better mailing-list automation, via smart headers: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-472.html

> List-URL: <http:/ /www.tidbits.com/>
> List-Archive: <http:/ /www.tidbits.com/search/>
> List-Subscribe: <mailto:tidbits-on@tidbits.com>
> List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:tidbits-off@tidbits.com>
> List-Help: <http:/ /www.tidbits.com/about/list.html>
> List-Owner: <mailto:editors@tidbits.com> (TidBITS Editors)
> List-Software: "ListSTAR v1.2 by StarNine Technologies, Inc."
> List-Id: "TidBITS Setext Distribution List" <setext.tidbits.tidbits.com>
> List-Post: <mailto:tidbits-talk@tidbits.com> (Discussions on TidBITS Talk)

Plus a fun benchmark:

My new G3 Mac finished "woodchuck" over 600 times faster (and 5,000 times cheaper) than that 15 megabuck Cray...

Mr Rogers addresses adults: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/03/23/text/p11s3.html

"Who in your life has been such a servant to you - who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let's just take 10 seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life - those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight - just 10 seconds of silence..."

I thought this headline was going to be about hitcount cheating! http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/health/newsid_300000/300910.stm

Eclipse cooks eyeballs

Jakob Nielsen observes: http://www.useit.com/hotlist/spotlight.html

Comparing Media Metrix's Web traffic estimates for 1996 and 1999 shows that only 3 of the sites on the top-15 list in 1996 are still on the list three years later. In other words, 80% of former top sites have dropped out of the list in this short period. These traffic estimates are good supporting evidence for my argument that Internet stock is over-valued because future users are likely to prefer other sites than the currently popular ones.

Lucky Mac owners can get the cutest lil sunrise-finder ever: http://www.cuug.ab.ca:8001/~dattad/sunclock.html (Thumper)

(Where's the apostrophe in "li'l"? "Lil'"?? "Li'l'"???)

Fun issue of the Telegraph book review identifies an "Edwardian supermodel": (Telegraph) [More]

At one point in Laura Beatty's irresistibly enjoyable life of the Edwardian beauty Lillie Langtry, I found myself thinking that I had strayed into some undiscovered play by Tom Stoppard. It was when Oscar Wilde made a (starring) appearance and decided to teach "the Lily", as he called her, Greek and Latin...

In praise of 'Wind in the Willows': (Telegraph)

The book is marvellously written. I did not know that at the age of eight, when I was first gripped by it, but I have become increasingly aware of it with every rereading. Every sentence makes you greedy for the next, like particularly good chocolate.

Predicting bad neighborhoods from first principles: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307053a.htm [More]

CAP Index Inc., doesn't bother with arrest records, which municipalities may manipulate anyway. Instead, it uses 21 demographic variables culled from updated census tracts. The variables are weighted and pumped into a formula that produces color-coded maps. An Excel spreadsheet breaks down the likelihood of murders, robberies and other crimes in the area relative to a national and state average.

In 1987 one of his guest lecturers, a security consultant concerned with gas station robberies in Maryland, asked Figlio to rate the stations from safest to most dangerous. The companies didn't want to invest in costly security measures where they weren't needed, as some politicians were demanding.

In its infinite wisdom the federal government has made it illegal for a real estate agent to tell you that a house you like is in a crummy neighborhood. So you go on-line to get the facts.

How will CAP or its clients defend themselves against charges of illegal redlining? Figlio's answer: His algorithms are race-neutral in their calculations and conclusions.

Doonesbury started a series on hackers and kiddie-scripts yesterday: http://www.theadvocate.com/comics/

Spooky poem-of-the-day: http://www.poems.com/today.htm [More]

Your strategy is persistence, proceeding
like the first edge
of moon, late in the day...

Gillian Anderson in her punk days: http://mrshowbiz.go.com/people/gilliananderson/content/Bio.html [More]

At the age of fourteen, she hooked up with a twenty-one-year-old Sid Vicious wanna-be, winning his loyalty by buying him "Big Gulps and cigarettes" and sometimes singing back-up in his punk band wearing nothing but bandages. The rebellion spilled over to high school, where she was a notorious hellcat; she was even arrested while trying to glue the school's doors shut just days before her graduation. Anderson got a hint of her fame to come in her high school's hall of fame when she was voted Class Clown, Most Bizarre Girl, and Most Likely To Go Bald.

Is that a critter's eye-reflection? http://www.africam.mweb.co.za/

(PS: I've seen a lot more of these gleams since, in contexts that make it very likely.)

Cringely on OS X as a con game, and MS-Linux: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990318.html [OS]

In other words, we can do Apple's work for Apple, and if we do it well, they'll call it theirs.

Microsoft could actually add value to Linux through device drivers, a better installation program, even a Windows 9X graphical user interface.

Plentiful excellent cams, in random pairs: (reload generates new pair) http://aaronland.net/toys/randomcam/ (aaronstraupcope)

On my best-cams page I've got links to a couple of new Spanish cams that 'push' infinite jpegs with changing points-of-view. Do these crash anybody? http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/cams.html

I hate the current Nerve series: (PG-13) http://www.nervemag.com/Beecroft/

Cute new-media name: http://www.dotdotdot.com/

ellipsis@dotdotdot.com

New NY Review of Books is early:

- Peter Canby: The Truth About Rigoberta Menchu
- John R. Searle: Can Computers Make Us Immortal?
- Ian Buruma: Joys of Victimhood
- Robert Cottrell: The New Conquest of Europe
- Marilyn McCully: 'The Picasso Papers'
- Christopher Benfey: Emily Dickinson's Secrets
- P.N. Furbank: Tocqueville's Lament

Psychological denial about welfare reform: http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/080/oped/The_boom_in_povertyP.shtml [CDreams]

Yes Magazine recently reported that articles in The Washington Post mentioning homelessness declined from 149 in 1990 to 45 in 1995 to just 17 last year. The poor are not just politically unpopular, but invisible to an inured middle class.

Don't miss: Excellent Nielsen summary of the principles of URL-design: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html

The social interface to the Web relies on email when users want to recommend Web pages to each other, so email is the second-most common way users get to new sites (search engines being the most common): make sure that all URLs on your site are less than 78 characters long so that they will not wrap across a line feed.

It is likely that domain names only have 3-5 years left as a major way of finding sites on the Web. In the long term, it is not appropriate to require unique words to identify every single entity in the world. That's not how human language works.

Excellent day for Forbes includes an alert about Sony's PlayStation ambitions: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307052a.htm [More]

"We have designed it so there will be no limits on whatever marketing decisions are made for it," says Shinichi Okamoto, a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment.

More than 30% of PlayStation users are 30 or older; only 17% are grade-school students.

One key edge was an open design process that unleashed a creative outburst by the maniaku (maniacs) in the hundreds of small Japanese software companies that produce most of the world's computer games.

And Stephen Manes on geeky interface design: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307132a.htm [More]

Alan Cooper owns a clock that's even more of a horror, in part because it doubles as a CD player. In his trenchant new book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams, $25), he uses it to illustrate the question "What do you get when you cross an alarm clock with a computer?" The answer -- "A computer!" -- is the same for virtually every computer crossbreed, from digital cameras that must boot up before they can shoot pictures to ambiguous airplane cockpit instruments that can kill people.

Cooper advocates a development process modeled after the movie business, where the product is planned out in minute detail before an inch of film is shot.

Cooper recommends using design professionals aiming not to satisfy generalized "users" but to delight a single specific person in the target market.

When your computer crashes, does it offer an apology or put the blame on you?

Plus his unrelated 'sidebar' on web-enhanced phone-haggling: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307132s1.htm

"I saw it at buy.com for $353," I said, omitting mention of the word "preorder." "I don't know if I can match buy.com," came the response. "But we can do it for $375."

Hubble2 planned: (no pix) http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/032299d.htm [More]

Right now, NASA planners anticipate it will be parked about 1 million miles from Earth - roughly four times beyond the moon's orbit.

The telescope's 26-foot mirror - Hubble's is just 8-feet across - will be looking for infrared radiation.

Chicago Home Depot site of rainforest protest: [Deja URL]

Further adding to the chaos.. Apparently sombody's learned the intercom access code to all those floor phones , hum,,, and they apparently felt the need to educate the consumers of the isues, deforestation and Home Depot's role in it.... for about an 1-1/2 hrs, these anouncements would intermittently and mysteriously fill the super store. The store management, security, the 25 plus cops, 7 or more fire fighters and two paramedics were befuddled.

Baffling Asian-stereotypes joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Mar/asians.html

YOU KNOW YOU ARE CHINESE IF...
1. You think you're the smartest people in the world.
2. You have a pager and cellular phone with you at all times.
3. Today's steamed rice is tomorrow's fried rice...

Rowerbazzle! http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/new.html

It appears that Microsoft has deliberately and needlessly killed bookmarklets in IE5. Perhaps they didn't want to easily give up screen real estate.

Update: Microsoft has denied that this was intentional. (22 Mar)

Ten screenwriters on screenwriting: (short, smart, fun) http://eXaminer.com/990321/0321screenwriters.shtml

Jay Presson Allen
Paul Attanasio
Nora Ephron
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Lawrence Kasdan
Ring Lardner, Jr.
Ted Tally
Robert Towne
Melvin Van Peebles
Buck Henry

[Attanasio:] "A day where you throw out everything you've written but learn something about your story would have to be considered a good day. A day where you stare into space and close up shop feeling utterly lost and worthless would have to be considered average."

Top Ten Cool Things About Being A Screenwriter:
10. No heavy lifting
7. Carpal tunnel rarely fatal

Webbies throw a good party, sez NetSkink: http://www.examiner.com/990321/0321skink.shtml [OSRR]

It takes a real touch to embrace deep-pocketed sponsors without alienating computer geeks, and for that feat, credit belongs to Tiffany Schlain, the Webby Awards' original and current creative director and executive producer and a master of public relations at the age of 28.

Wowie, Maui! http://windcam.com/index.html

I added some comments to my webcams pages, and a third page for major duds that may yet redeem themselves: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/cams.html

New reviews at Computer Gaming World:

- Fireteam (4 stars, XCom-like w/voice) [Cool pix]
- Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (4, side-scroller) [Very cool pix]
- Carnivores (4, dino-hunt) [Decent dinos]
- Carmageddon2 (3) [Burning man], [Hi-speed dismemberment]
- Rogue Squadron (3.5, StarWars theme) [Okay pic]

J. Orlin Grabbe offers a sort of hacker's guide to smartcards: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.12/smartcards.html

A typical smart card might have an 8-bit CPU operating at 5 megahertz, 256 to 1024 bytes of RAM, 6 to 24 kilobytes of ROM, 1 to 16 kilobytes of EEPROM, and perhaps an on-chip encryption module.

(Hairy-- I may not get around to reading it for a while, myself.)

Juanita Broaddrick up close: http://www.zolatimes.com/aiceman.html

Then she started back towards the house, wondering why some neighbor boys were sitting for so long out at the road in their truck. She didn't know it at the time, but they were there trying to take her picture for $500, offered by a foreign journalist.

NBC shot eight hours of tape including Juanita and at least seven corroborating witnesses. They told her that her story would be edited to one full hour. They verbally promised her it would air before the Senate's vote to remove. Both of these promises were broken...

This Canadian finch-cam is indoors, but reliably charming: (daytimes only, CST-1h) http://cbt.bungi.com/finchcam-nf/index.html

Mercator's-eye view of the current locations for sunrise, sunset: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Earth/action?opt=-p (Scottie Mac)

(It wouldn't be so symmetrical except it's the equinox today!)

This sounds semi-decent: http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,1087,10_83041,00.html [More]

HitBOX.com features more than 280,000 independent Web site members, with all of them using HitBOX Tracker, WebSideStory's free Web traffic analysis tool. HitBOX Tracker provides data that enables developers to enhance and improve their site design and make informed marketing decisions. The tool features more than 125 real-time statistics, is Web-based and doesn't require the use of server resources.

Getting serious about palmtops: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?990319.whmicroracle.htm [More]

MicroStrategy's solut