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Thursday, March 04, 2004 |
Details
on how the US used its ability to track a cellphone chip (Swisscom)
globally enabled them to shut down al Qaeda operations and capture key
operatives. Of course, al Qaeda is a learning organization (heterarchies are good at this), they have since moved from cellphones to the Internet and hand delivery (most likely Skype for voice):
A half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe
agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation
because, they said, it was completed. They also said they had strong
indications that terror suspects, alert to the phones' vulnerability,
had largely abandoned them for important communications and instead
were using e-mail, Internet phone calls and hand-delivered messages. [John Robb's Weblog] 
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William Lind whacks the neo-con thesis: democracratic capitalism can be imposed. Case point to contrary: Haiti.
The neo-cons in fact are Jacobins, les ultras of the French
Revolution who also tried to export “human rights” (which are very
different from the concrete, specific rights of Englishmen) on
bayonets. Then, the effort eventually united all of Europe against
France. Today, it is uniting the rest of the world against America. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Blackmail and terrorism. This is a real trend.
A previously unknown group calling itself AZF has threatened to
blow up France's SNCF state railway if it can't be satisfied with a
ransom of five million US dollars (four million euros), officials said
Wednesday.
On Feb. 21, the police found one sophisticated time bomb under
rails near Limoges between Paris and Toulouse following hints by the
AZF.
This is unusual given that it was directed against a state
run organization. It is much more effective against companies that
trade in public markets. Terrorists are quickly moving away from away
from mercurial sources of funding (donations and state funding) to
self-funding via economic crime (drugs, blackmail, protection money,
stock market manipulation, etc.). This move will make terrorist
organizations much more difficult to shut down. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Full text of the Zaqwari letter (not just quotes). The last paragraph is particularly interesting.
SO IF YOU AGREE WITH IT AND ARE
CONVINCED OF THE IDEA OF KILLING THE PERVERSE SECTS, WE STAND READY AS
AN ARMY FOR YOU, TO WORK UNDER YOUR GUIDANCE AND YIELD TO YOUR COMMAND.
Here's an alternative interpretation: It implies that Zaqwari's
operation wasn't set up by al Qaeda. By emphasizing the
negative/perils, he is making his case for help and command ownership
from the larger organization. [John Robb's Weblog]
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But They Will Want It All Someday, Even if They Don't Know It Yet. Consumers Don't Want It All, and They Don't Want It Now
"Many consumers are not interested in handheld devices that offer
multiple functions beyond making phone calls or holding data, according
to a survey by Guideline Research, a custom market research firm. The
survey of a representative group of online consumers also found that
25% of consumers think these multifunctional devices have limited
functionality.
As the market for electronic handheld devices has become saturated,
manufacturers of such electronics are driven to add features in an
effort to maintain their growth. To this end, they are hoping to add to
their general consumer base by offering products to those who are
looking for devices that perform two or more functions. Yet, despite
their efforts, 49% of consumers surveyed said they have no desire for
such a device." [infoSync World]
I think it's a bit misleading to be asking consumers these types of
questions just yet. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the
headline could have read, "Consumers Don't Know that They'll Be Able to
Have It All Very Soon."
Whenever I show someone new my Treo 600, I get one of two reactions:
1) I want one and I want it now (followed by shock and disappointment
when they hear how expensive it is), or 2) I'm not ready for that yet.
The key there is the "yet." After all, I'm sure that 20 years ago, more than 25% of consumers would have said that computers have "limited functionality" and well more than 49% of consumers would have said they have "no desire for such a device."
With the introduction last year of converged devices like the Sony
P800, Treo 600, and any number of devices in Japan (along with faster
networks in the U.S.), we're finally getting to a point where such a
beast is useful and actually works. It won't take anywhere near 20
years for them to become as mainstream as computers have become. Maybe
3-5, but that time is definitely coming, and libraries need to prepare
for it. [The Shifted Librarian]
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What Is RSS-Blog-Furl High School Missing?. Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School
"English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up
the computer at his classroom desk. It’s 6:50 in the morning. After
logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog.
There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines
and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting
that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a
quick click, Tom uses the 'Furl it' button on his toolbar, adds a bit
of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl
journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the
link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for
students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of
summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the
night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks
through to the student’s personal site and adds a positive comment to
the assignment post. He also 'Furls' that site, putting it in the Best
Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for
students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created
to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It’s
7:00...." [Weblogg-ed News]
Check out the full text of this amazing post by Will Richardson. In
it, he pulls together the beginning threads of integrating blogs, RSS,
and social bookmarking in an educational setting. It's a great vision,
one that I fully believe will eventually happen in one integrated app.
However - and this is a big however - the only time the library
shows up in Will's post is when the teacher unsubscribes from the
library's feed! There's no mention of a topical feeds from the library,
use of library databases to support research or assignments, no
collaborative collection of web-based resources managed by the library,
or any other daily interaction with the library and its resources. It's
actually pretty sad when you think about it, but unfortunately, it will
be accurate if librarians don't start understanding, using, and
providing information to these types of tools. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Component builders and solution builders.
Despite lots of second-guessing, there is no consensus that the CLR is
inherently unfriendly to dynamic languages. The JVM didn't bend over
backwards for such languages either, and yet Jython is a great success
thanks to the heroic efforts of its inventor, Jim Hugunin. Now Hugunin
has turned his attention to .NET, and reports promising results with a
prototype Python implementation for .NET called IronPython.
Such projects always seem to spring from an inspired
individual or small team. In fact, Microsoft has such a team. It
created JScript.NET, the most dynamic of Microsoft's .NET languages.
But JScript.NET is the unloved stepsister of C# and VB.NET.
Dynamic languages are rooted in a culture that is simply not
indigenous to Redmond. That may change, but for the time being, the
future of dynamic languages in .NET lies with non-Microsoft innovators.
[Full story at InfoWorld.com]
The day this story posted, Larry O'Brien pointed me to Jim Waldo's essay, To type or not to type, which says in part:
When we argue over whether or not a programming language should have
types, we are not discussing a matter of fact. Instead, we are
participating in what [linguistic philosopher John L.] Austin would
call confessional language; what we are really doing is saying something about ourselves.
... [Jon's Radio]
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The Purpose of a Business. This is largely a response to JP's comment on my last post...
As a libertarian, I can hardly object to making money... Indeed, I think making money is something very much worth striving for.
However,
any business that is -just- about making money is unlikely to spur
sufficient passion in its employees to succeed over the long term. This
is, I think, one of the big problems with Disney animation; if you read
what animators have to say about what it's like to work for Disney,
it's pretty horrifying. What was (for an animator) once one of the
coolest jobs in the universe is now rote work on formula plots. There's
a reason Pixar triumps and Disney fails, and it's not
technology--although Disney has, naturally, come to the incorrect
conclusion that drawn animation is dead, and 3D is the future.
A
business is an organization. Organizations--businesses, non-profits,
social clubs, government institutions, organizations of all kinds--are
founded by people who have -something they want to do.- A business is a
good type of organization for many of the things that people want to
do--not feeding the hungry, but making microchips--precisely because it
-does- allow its owners to profit from its success.
But profit
is not the =purpose= of a business; profit is the condition of survival
(to borrow Tom Peters' phrase). A business that does not
profit--indeed, more than that, a business that does not provide a rate
of return at least comparable to that available from other
investments--will not survive long.
The purpose of a well run
business is not profit in and of itself; a well run business always
seeks profit, but if a book publisher, say, could make more money
investing in junk bonds (a very likely scenario, by the way), well, it
probably won't do that, because its management and employees don't want
to invest in junk bonds. They want to publish books.
The purpose
of a game company is to produce games. The way to motivate the
employees of a game company to do their best work is to allow them to
work on games they think are really cool.
By and large, most
people are in the game industry not because they want to make big bux,
but because they love games. There are exceptions--there seem to be a
lot of marketing and management folk who are in the game industry
because they can't get the job they really want in Hollywood (and some
developers who qualify here too), but almost everyone could make more
money doing something else. Programmers could make more money working
on financial transaction systems for investment banks. Artists could
make more money doing animation for TV. Marketers could make more money
working for packaged goods firms. Game designers... Well, okay, maybe
they're stuck, but they surely didn't become game designers as a second
choice after they couldn't get hired as technical writers.
JP is
right that part of the game industry's problem is a somewhat cynical
concentration on the bottom line at the expense of other
considerations--considerations that, as I've argued, are actually
equally important to ultimate success. But part of it is also a failure
of taste, I think; I suspect a lot of people pushing the new racing
title, the new football game, the new RTS just like the last one
actually do think it's pretty darn cool. Or have swallowed Warren
Spector's Kool-Aid, and have convinced themselves that if they have to
do a Scooby Doo game, by golly, they'll make the best darn Scooby Doo
game they can.
But a lot has to do with the cover-your-ass
syndrome. It's easy to greenlight the tried-and-true. Greenlighting
novelty puts your ass on the line.
I'm not sure how to get out
of this fix. I've argued previously that we need an independent games
industry, with a parallel but separate distribution channel from
conventional games; that would be nice, but it hasn't happened yet.
I
remember Warren telling me, years ago, about a conversation he had with
an executive at his then firm. Warren pointed out that all the titles
he had worked on up until then had been profitable, even though none
had sold in excess of 300,000 units. The executive told him, yes, but
if he funded the next Wing Commander game, it would sell a lot more
than that, and be a lot more profitable. And thus he was cancelling
Warren's title. Warren felt he couldn't really argue.
But he
should have. The next Wing Commander might sell a lot more than the
next Ultima Underground, but they'd both make money, in a field in
which most games lose money. The right thing for the executive to do
was fund the Wing Commander game--then go raise capital, however
possible, to fund Warren's game, too. It really wasn't all that risky a
proposition.
I'm not in favor of big financial risks on novel
like, say, Majestic. (An idea, incidentally, that anyone with a history
in multiplayer online games could see was badly flawed--not that EA
listened to anyone in its studios with experience in multiplayer online
games, since they weren't at Redwood Shores.) I am in favor of placing
a lot of smaller risks.
What the industry learned from Deer
Hunter was "jeez, Wal-Mart can move a lot of product." What it should
have learned was "hey, find a new market niche and you can make big
bux." The original Deer Hunter cost low six figures to make.
I'm
not holding it out as a beautiful examplar of jewel-like innovative
perfection. It sucked, when you come down to it. But it was a big
innovative leap, in its own strange way. We need a lot more of them. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Douglas Adams media archive. An extensive online media archive dedicated to the creator of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
The Douglas Adams media archive is presented here by the wi2600.org
groups for your enjoyment. This allso is to serve as a tribute to Mr.
Adams's great, but suddely shortened career. Those who have not heard
his voice and those who know it well will both enjoy having this
material available.We will miss him!
Link, which will no doubt be BoingBoinged to death by the time you read this, (Thanks, Chris!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Gene Wolfe's rules for writers. Gene Wolfe's rules for writers are amazing and sensible and good.
Examine your modifiers ruthlessly. What do they add to the story?
Cut adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors which do not shed light or develop the narrative voice.
Don't repeat yourself.
Give the reader small surprises: moments of humor, delightful metaphors, something that jolts.
Understand your characters. No one is a villain to him/herself. No one is clinically sane if you know them well enough.
Link
(via Making Light) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Stop geting credit-card offers.
A Kuro5hin writer has posted a great step-by-step for ensuring that you
never receive a pre-approved credit-card solicitation again.
Fortunately, hidden away in the fine print of every single pre-approved
offer sent to consumers is a paragraph stating how to prevent credit
bureaus from including you in pre-screened lists. If you're like me and
always end up throwing these offers away, I urge you to follow one of
these procedures to notify the four credit reporting agencies of your
request to opt out.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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How to run a beta test. Joel gives us 12 rules on how to run a beta test.
I would add one other thing: reward top testers. Adobe gave me a
$1400 laser printer for reporting more bugs than any other Acrobat beta
tester (this was back in the Acrobat 1.0 days). The next release they
told everyone they weren't going to give away any prizes and my bug
reporting went WAY down. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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InfoWorld's CTO on Blogging ROI. Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld's Chief Technology Officer, talks about blogging ROI.
"In media business circles, most discussions focus fundamentally
on ROI. A lot of these folks are asking, "What is my return on weblogs?
Why do weblogs?" In financial terms, because weblogs are so simple to
produce, I think the business folks should focus more on the minimal
"I" involved -- the investment. There is very little financial risk in
starting a weblog, so clearly-defined returns aren't as necessary." [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Joel has interesting thread on offshoring. Joel Spolsky
really is on the top of the "A list" of tech bloggers for me. Why do I
say that? Out of all the bloggers that have linked to me lately he's
sent me more traffic than any of them. 7000 came from one link alone.
Plus, he gets talked about in the lunchroom and at geek dinners.
Both of these things tell me that developers look up to him a great
deal.
His readers, too, are interesting and intelligent. At lunch today we were talking about this thread about offshoring. It's one of the most interesting discussions about offshoring that we've seen. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Robert Kaplan
turns his focus to the newly emerging American warrior diplomat (again,
a back to the future moment), with a profile of the US military advisor
to Mongolia (this has to be one of the best jobs in the world). He's
working to hold the country together in the face of Chinese and
terrorist encrouchment. An example of his work is his plans for border
enforcement:
Wilhelm's plan for policing the border was a mobile force that
would mix fast ponies and Bactrian camels with light, high-tech
communications gear.
A little flavor of the job and the man:
Having swallowed a glass of
blood and eaten the animal's testicles and eyeballs, Wilhelm turned to
me. "Like I said," he announced, "this is better than rush-hour traffic
on 395 en route to the Pentagon." He never tired, never stopped
laughing and slapping his fellow officers on the back. Major Altankhuu
confided to me at one point, "Colonel Wilhelm is a great man. He makes
us like America so much."
More:
The victorious army had a
handful of T-72 tanks with stereo speakers blasting Jimmy Buffett's
"Last Mango in Paris." That, Wilhelm told me, was "postmodern war, or
whatever you want to call it."
BTW: Mongolia sent 175 troops
to Baghdad to help the US. This is the first time since the Mongol
empire killed 1 m people in and around Baghdad, by hand, nearly 800 years ago. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Art project on economics of tech outsourcing to India: Aladeen.
Danielle Spencer (a BoingBoing pal who works with David Byrne, among
other things) points us to a new art project from The Builder's
Association debuting in LA this week. It's "a techie sort of production
about globalism and outsourcing in Bangalore," says Danielle, adding
"The performances of ALLADEEN will be at REDCAT (the new LA
Philharmonic Gehry space) on March 3-7. There is more information about
the specific show here. Other sites which may be of interest: www.alladeen.com, and The Builder's Association." Here's a snip from the project summary:
The Alladeen project encompasses three collaborative works: this web
project, www.alladeen.com (directed by Ali Zaidi); a cross-media stage
performance (directed by Marianne Weems); and a music video (directed
by Ali Zaidi), featuring music by Shrikanth Sriram (Shri) and video by
Peter Norrman. Although distinct, these three works have been created
in tandem, drawing on a common pool of imagery and information, with
material from each interwoven into the others. [The show] explores how
we all function as "global souls" caught up in circuits of technology,
how our voices and images travel from one culture to another, and the
ways in which these cultures continually reinterpret each other's signs
and stories.
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Water on Mars. Life on Mars. Wow..
Human beings reached a milestone in our understanding of the universe
today, thanks in part to a hard-working robot. The NASA Mars rover
Opportunity found evidence that an abundance of water once covered an
area of the planet's surface. Where there was once water, it is
presumed that there was once life -- and that living things may in fact
still exist on the red planet.
[A] rock outcrop at the site, a shallow impact crater in
Meridiani Planum, was once "drenched'' in water, Ed Weiler, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration's deputy associate
administrator for space science, said at the agency's headquarters in
Washington. "The rocks here were once soaked in liquid water,'' Steve
Squyres, the mission's principal scientist, said in elaborating on the
discovery. The concentration of salts in the rock suggests the
formation may have emerged in a briny sea, he said.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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