Monday, August 5, 2002

I'm Microsoft-neutral, but I don't like things like this at all: New XP/2K EULA. Microsoft is trying to slip by a EULA requirement in W2K SP3 and WXP SP1 that grants them administrative priviledges on your machine. I'm pro-Microsoft, but this kind of underhanded crap has got to stop somewhere. I don't care what the stated reason is. There's no way I'm going to let them do that to my boxes. And don't even get me started on Palladium. How much is too much? Personally, I'm getting there. Quickly. Link   Discuss [The .NET Guy] 1:25:07 PM     Happy 50th, Mad Magazine. Wired News is running a nice appreciation of Mad Magazine on the eve of its 50th anniversary. Before Bart Simpson and before David Letterman, there was Alfred E. Neuman, the creation of a respected 62-year-old portrait artist who responded to an ad in The New York Times only to find that the magazine that wanted him was Mad. The artist nearly huffed his way out of the offices of the fledgling humor magazine. But editor Al Feldstein convinced him to try and give life to a poorly formed Mad character. "I wanted him to make this kid into a real live kid. I wanted him to be lovable, not ugly," Feldstein said at the Comic-Con International convention, which ends Sunday in San Diego. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 11:06:29 AM     Enron to Bush: fly me While we are still digesting the unsurprising but still flabbergasting report about the Bush campaign's use of Enron and Halliburton corporate jets during the Florida recount fracas, Al Gore comes out punching -- finally -- in a Times op-ed today. Looks like Gore is mad about comments from Joe Lieberman and others that he was wrong to play the populist card in 2000. My only question is what took the once and presumably future candidate so long to enter the fray. Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee spokesman Bill Buck wins the soundbite prize: "The Bush-Cheney administration literally flew into power in Enron's and Halliburton's corporate jets." [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 8:42:42 AM     Party of the pocketbook As the latest Bush recession heads into its second dip, it's washing away one of the oldest truisms in American politics. When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, conventional wisdom about our political parties was clear: Democrats stuck up for working people and minorities, but you couldn't trust them with your money. For that, you wanted a Republican. This reached a head in the late '70s, as Jimmy Carter faced runaway inflation, oil shocks and unemployment, and couldn't seem to make headway against them. Reagan's election brought a recession, a tax cut and a deepening federal deficit -- but one way or another he got credit in the national mythology for dispelling the Carter malaise and putting the economy right. Since Reagan, though, a new pattern has emerged, not just in the reality of the economy's numbers but in the shorthand of the popular mind. Bush I: Recession. Clinton: Economic growth. Bush II: Recession. Circumstance and luck play a huge part in all this, to be sure. But patterns like these are what build popular myths. If Bush doesn't begin improving the fumbling performance of his economic team, or break free of his "tax cut or die" ideology, he could inherit a cruel variation on James Carville's mantra from the 1992 election -- as "It's the economy, stupid" gets transformed in the popular mind to "It's stupid's economy." [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 8:41:44 AM     Here's a great example of giving back....not only do we get great tools like Huevos and NetNewsWire, but we also get re-usable components like this and a similar RSS Class. Open Source OPML Class for Cocoa. The OPML class that I developed for NetNewsWire (so that it could import subscriptions files) is now available under the BSD license. The included test app shows not just how to parse OPML but also how to hook it up to an NSOutlineView. Here’s a screen shot. [ranchero.com] 8:22:23 AM

© Copyright 2003 George Herndon. Last update: 2/27/03; 10:39:06.