Friday, June 14, 2002

If you've ever read Richard III ("my kingdom for a horse") -- or are at least familiar with the story about the Tower of London, and evil, deformed, hunchback Richard locking his nephews away to rot -- and you haven't read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, do yourself a favor and pick it up. An aside to MC: I've got a copy at home if you want to borrow it sometime. 11:59:44 AM

So this article was #1 on daypop. I almost dismissed it completely after a quick scan of the first paragraph, as soon as I saw that the author made reference to the QWERTY/Dvorak keyboard myth. I was reading too fast and had skipped the first sentence, honing in, instead, on the false statement that Dvorak keyboards are "demonstrably superior" to QWERTY keyboards. Good thing I kept reading. I'd read Liebowitz's analysis of network effects maybe a year or two ago, looked it up again with a Google search, but didn't get the fact that the Salon article was about more analysis by Liebowitz until I got to the second paragraph and was surprised to notice that I'd already followed the "argued" link in the first sentence. Gotta slooow down. Slow. In any event, this is a good interview on his interpretation of the pros and cons surrounding file sharing: And to be honest, it looks like [file sharing] should really cause problems. I honestly believed it too. If you look at the logic of it, then you say this one is real, this one should really do damage. And I'm not willing to say that it's not going to. But I'm just saying it's beginning to look like a lie. 11:48:03 AM

From slashdot: McAfee and Symantec (and all the other AV vendors out there) are waging a PR war to "discover" ever more news-worthy viruses to defend against. To get maximum coverage, your new virus needs to do something unique or different -- make your computer turn green, or infect something previously uninfectable, or whatever it might be. Compare this to Klez, a very basic virus similar in most ways to viruses that have gone before, which is still out there looting and pillaging tens of thousands of computers every day, but isn't ideal for AV vendors because they don't have a monopoly on the cure. 11:17:33 AM

Courtesy of metafilter, a link to In Passing, a collection of conversations you weren't supposed to hear. Which reminds me of something I'd meant to jot down last week, overheard as I was walking through the lobby of a downtown office building, on my way outside. Two friends, co-workers, brothers, whatever, were leaving the building, too. First Guy: "I can't wait to get some fresh air." Second Guy: "Yeah. Me, too ... I need a smoke." 11:05:53 AM