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Saturday 9th March

A quickie today, as I’m very pushed for time.

A long, long time ago (it seems now) there was a Web service called eGroups. This was a very useful service, where people could join subject-defined groups ("eGroups") and discuss stuff, either on the Web via their browser or by using eGroups as a mailing list and having the stuff appear in their inboxes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very useful.

But one day, eGroups was engulfed by the terrible might of the Yahoo! Collective, disappearing behind the name of "Yahoo Groups". In some small ways, the Yahoo Groups improved a little on the old eGroups service, but the downside was that obtrusive advertising would appear, often almost doubling the time it took to use the service on the Web; those using it via email noticed a strange thing, namely that some messages would arrive in answer to an earlier message which they had never seen — and nor would they see them unless they went to the web site; but most infuriating of all, the service would frequently go down for many hours at a stretch, and at these times a page displaying a picture of a shrugging plumber would explain that this was for necessary maintenance (the plumber metaphor fitting nicely with the fact this always happened at the weekend, when most people wanted to use the service), and it would be back online as soon as possible…

Many victims of the Collective moaned and gnashed their teeth, but one bright spark has fought back, his weapon humour: Welcome to YahPoo! Groups.

Thursday 7th March

Fester Speaks: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (you remember him, sounds like Fozzy Bear, looks like Uncle Fester) has been whining that if a court imposes the sort of sanctions nine states are seeking then Microsoft would have to withdraw Windows. Well, we can hope — but you would have to be terminally naïve to believe that. In true Microsoft style, his comments don’t really mesh with anything recognisable as the truth:

Under questioning last month from a lawyer representing the states, Ballmer contended that the strict sanctions proposed by some of the states would create havoc among consumers and in the computer industry by requiring Microsoft to offer thousands of different version of Windows.

Yeah, right. The Register strips the would-be tragedian’s spin:

He maintains this quietly-agonized disposition even while indulging in pure fantasy, as he does contemplating the "thousands to millions" of Windows versions the dissenting states would force the company to develop…

Of course the states are asking for a modular version of Windows which users could trick out with whatever features and applications they please, like a Linux distribution. But MS has been so persistent in floating this fantastic nonsense about ‘millions’ of versions that the states have been forced to explain the obvious.

Ballmer really heads for a Disneyesque fantasy land when he says he likes to tell our engineers to work hard every day on the R&D, the brilliant ideas, the intellectual property, the quality, the security, that are going to differentiate Windows from Linux, and to justify its positive price. As so often, the Register’s comment hits the nail on the head:

Ah, yes; the quality, the security. The e-mail worms, the malicious Javascript, the closed APIs, the product activation, the licensing extortion. All those wonderful things are in jeopardy if the holdout states have their way.

I got an email from a friend commenting on one of Ballmer’s statements. Windows, Ballmer says, can’t be made modular because That’s the way good software gets designed. So if you pull out a piece it won’t run.

Er… really? I think I’ll let my friend’s email do the talking.

Err, no. That is expressly the way bad software is written. Good software is modular and fault tolerant. It also divides tasks up to group items which are really related and separate items which aren’t. In particular IE has no place messing with the window manager. Now if it wants to be a window manager that’s a different story, but there should still be a separate window manager — cf fvwm, xwm, kde and gnome all running on X11R6.

Fester Speaks II: It gets better and better. Having said, as the Register (again) so skillfully puts it, that the states’ demands would mean Microsoft would have to do a million billion trillion versions of Windows, Steve Ballmer (quote: I’m not an expert) also says there’s no demand for versions of Windows with middleware removed. Wait a minute…

Having confidently asserted that there is no substantial demand from OEMs for versions of Windows "from which pieces of middleware have been removed," Steve is asked how come there would have to be an infinite number of versions of Windows, if nobody was actually going to ask for them.

Cue paranoid fantasy of the century (I know, it’s early days yet):

"Well," says Steve, "the way this thing is written, this is not just a request from OEMs, it’s also a request from third party licensees, you know. Sun Microsystems go buy 10,000 copies and they can just have people sit there and generate work requests to us every minute of every day. Just as an example."

Fiendishly cunning isn’t it? And we bet Sun hadn’t even thought of it until they read it here. But Steve’s only just getting warmed up - there’s more: "Any - any rogue who wants to can do it, or anybody who wants to pay an OEM. Somebody could say, ‘Look, I want to make Microsoft’s life miserable so I’ll tell you what, I’ll pay you $10 million a year to torture Microsoft,’ and under this provision that works out pretty well." He doesn’t say, but he’s just got to be thinking about Crazy Larry here, hasn’t he? Yes, he is:

"And, you know, we have competition who I think has been very involved in this whole process, who I could see easily saying, ‘I’ll write - I’ll write that check.’"

After all the crap spouted by Christian fuckwits about the evils of Harry Potter, it’s nice to see some balanced, reasonable concern being voiced.

A number of concerned British Harry Potter fans have spoken out against the Bible, claiming that the holy text of the Christian Church can cause serious damage to children. “Reading the Bible teaches children to believe in the supernatural,” said one English Literature academic from Oxford University, Lewis Williams. “The tales of Jesus turning water into wine are fairly harmless, but there is a serious risk of children drowning if they try to walk on water,” he said. “And the chance of serious bodily harm isn’t exactly minimised by that whole ‘resurrection-from-the-dead’ story either.”

Christians have responded that reading the Bible assists with literacy skills, but Williams rejects this idea too. “The Bible is only ever read in very small chunks, a few paragraphs at a time. It’s never read as a long sustained narrative like the Harry Potter series. Reading too much of the Bible promotes a very short attention span,” he says.

Critics such as Williams warn that without appropriate parental guidance, reading the Bible may make children unable to enjoy quality children’s literature. “Enjoying books such as Harry Potter or the Narnia series requires the ability to suspend disbelief,” he said. “When children are taught that the Bible is absolutely literally true, and that a story like Noah’s Ark actually happened, the imagination is completely stifled — it’s very detrimental.”

Williams has also pointed out that some of the scarier elements in fantasy novels will really frighten children if they think they are true. “Some children may think that murderous Dark Wizards such as Voldemort (the villain of the Potter series) are actually real if they’ve been corrupted by Christians who believe that devils and magic actually exists,” he said.

Brilliant.

That marvellous piece — which didn’t even draw on some of the truly hideous things which happen in the Bible — comes from The Chaser, which seems to be a sort of Australian version of The Onion, except that The Chaser’s main existence is offline.

I’m not at all sure that The Chaser doesn’t outdo The Onion for acerbity, as this story summary illustrates:

TEL AVIV, Wednesday: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been forced to apologise for the death of 16 Palestinians. The apology came after it was revealed to the Israeli Knesset that they had died of natural causes rather than as part of an overblown retaliation.

Wednesday 6th March

You scratch my back, I’ll poke your goddamn eyes out: The Shrub wants allies in his "war against terrorism". Someone should hit him repeatedly about the head until he grasps the idea that you don’t win, or keep, allies by starting a trade war with them. The one good thing about this is that it makes Blair look a right twit.

The music industry wants to ban copying, full stop. To promote that end, their pet senator, Fritz Hollings, got rough with with Leslie Vadasz of Intel because he dared to point out that the sort of copy protection Hollings (of whom the Register notes, Hollings, apparently, is an ‘honest politician’ according to Brendan Behan’s formula: when he’s bought, he stays bought.) and his masters want will cripple computers and the computer market.

Hillary Rosen, of the Recording Industry Association of America, says that surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. The Register’s comment is very apt:

The ‘some people’ says it all. Most people are criminals, and only a tiny minority are honest and decent, Rosen assumes. This is also the official perspective of Hollywood — of Eisner, and Valenti, and Hollings. It is a perspective natural to a certain class of person. Consider that we all imagine others to be more or less like ourselves. Decent people expect others to be decent, just like themselves. Criminals expect others to be criminals, just like themselves. When Eisner and Rosen and Valenti and Hollings see a world populated by cheats and frauds and freeloading scum, what does that say about them?

The New York Times reports that everyone who has lived in the USA since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive fallout.

The new study, which was completed in August 2001 and was first revealed yesterday in USA Today, suggests that for all Americans born after 1951 "all organs and tissues of the body have received some radiation exposure." The study says in highly guarded terms that the global fallout could eventually be responsible for more than 11,000 cancer deaths in the United States.

But the study said any medical implications were uncertain because the average American had received almost 20 times as much radiation from medical procedures like chest X-rays as from fallout of all kinds over the same period.

I hate Java. I make no bones about it. Java sucks. Why? You want a reason? OK, how about: it is so slow I could go out and pick up a woman, impregnate her and be well on the way to buying the kid’s first school uniform before the sodding applet loads. Or: some half-assed moron of a "deezyner" can’t produce a decent menu with HTML so he uses a Java applet which doesn’t let me navigate the site because it crashes the browser. Crashes, they go with Java like salt & vinegar.

I’m not the only one. Read, for instance, Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant by Simson Garfinkel (doesn’t that look like a Guardian typo?). After telling us he hates Java, he goes on:

The reasons are straightforward. Java hype is built on the promulgation of two Big Lies. No. 1: Java is as fast, or faster, than other programming languages. And No. 2: Java is "portable" — it is "write-once, run-everywhere" — in other words, a Java program can be written once and then run on any kind of computer or operating system. But five years after Java’s introduction, it is still slow and cumbersome, and not only has the "write-once, run- everywhere" promise not been delivered on, it’s also turned out to not even be necessary.

Lest we be in any doubt what he really thinks:

The creators of Java tried to make a better C++. But they ended up with a language that is ugly, hard to read and that requires an inordinate amount of typing because of a variety of pedagogical restrictions imposed by Java’s creators. They ended up with a slow mess.

Hear, hear — as George Galloway might not be saying for a while. (Oh, frabjous day!)

It doesn’t much matter if developers continue to use their crappy Java applets, those of us with brains keep Java disabled when we’re surfing. And now here’s yet another reason to do so: a Java applet that hijacks your browser and can potentially grab passwords and sensitive information.

Tuesday 5th March

Interesting report in The New York Times the other day. It seems that on the morning of September 11, nine of the nineteen terrorists who hijacked the four aeroplanes that day were identified under the security procedures in place at the time for "special scrutiny". They were not questioned, nor was there any reason to stop them boarding the aeroplanes because there were no explosives in their baggage — which was the one thing security was looking out for.

The current issue of Time carries the question "Can we stop another 9/11?" [sic]. The answer would seem to be a pretty definite no, even if the intelligence agencies get their acts together.

One of the most striking parts of the cover story, though, is the revelation that in October 2001, US intelligence believed that New York was the target for a terrorist nuclear attack.

In October an intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies… The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned to smuggle it into New York City. The source of the report was a mercurial agent code-named dragonfire, who intelligence officials believed was of "undetermined" reliability. But dragonfire’s claim tracked with a report from a Russian general who believed his forces were missing a 10-kiloton device… That made the dragonfire report alarming. So did this: detonated in lower Manhattan, a 10-kiloton bomb would kill some 100,000 civilians and irradiate 700,000 more, flattening everything in a half-mile diameter.

Thankfully there turned out to be nothing to substantiate the information — but that was cold comfort because the authorities realised that if terrorists did manage to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the city, there was almost nothing anyone could do about it. One very interesting aspect of this scare is the level of secrecy involved:

It was … highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National Security Council, the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani says he was never told about the threat. In the end, the investigators found nothing and concluded that dragonfire’s information was false.

This has not gone down too well in New York, as one can imagine.

"I do believe that the New York City government should have been told, and it was not," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who took office in January, months after the report of the threat was received and debunked. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, said that he did not know whether the report in Time was accurate or not, but that if it was, he should have been informed.

"If it’s true, then I should have been notified, the New York Police Department should have been notified and the governor should have been notified, and the state police should have been notified, at a minimum, and maybe others," Mr. Giuliani said.

Gov. George E. Pataki said that in the days and weeks after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, there was an "ongoing problem" in getting information from the federal government. "We didn’t have the knowledge at that time of the threat that is now being reported, and I think that’s unfortunate," the governor said.

And both of New York’s United States senators, Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that New York officials should have been told of the threat.

It’s difficult to see why they should not have been told. No one is arguing for public dissemination of such information, but if such a threat exists and is to be dealt with, surely the officials who would have to deal with it need to know about it? I would have said this was a no-brainer, but then I remembered who’s sitting in the Oval Office.

It also strikes me that the new New York mayor seems a little complacent:

Mayor Bloomberg sought to reassure New Yorkers about their safety. "If I were a terrorist, the last place I’d go is to try to challenge a city that has as good a group of law enforcement and intelligence people as this city does," he said. "We’re probably better prepared than any city in the world. At least that’s our intent, and we think we are."

Of course, that may just be a bit of political flim-flam to reassure the public — but if he really believes that, it’s a bit worrying.

To return to that Time article for a moment: in conversation with friends following the September 11th attacks, one of the topics of conversation was naturally whether and how the US’s foreign policy over the years had encouraged an attack like this. One of the points someone made was that in the eyes of many people in the Middle East the USA was cowardly, not only because they only "bomb people from afar" (as someone from the Middle East said on a TV programme in September), but because terrorist acts against the USA have pretty much gone without retaliation. It seems this has been recognised in the USA:

By keeping the pressure up, the U.S. hopes to correct its biggest mistake of all. According to this view, the U.S.’s failure to retaliate massively after past al-Qaeda attacks against U.S. military barracks, battleships and embassies tempted bin Laden to go after ever more outrageous targets—and finally the World Trade Center. Now the U.S. has destroyed al-Qaeda’s training camps and undermined bin Laden’s capacity to lead. And yet the Sept. 11 hijackings were years in the making—which means bin Laden could have ordered up another, more lethal attack before his world came apart. "We were overwhelmingly defensive in our orientation before Sept. 11," Admiral Dennis Blair, the head of the U.S.’s Pacific Command, told Time. "Now we’ve gone on the offensive." The big question is whether we did so in time.

Talking of going on the offensive, the USA has deployed new "thermobaric" bombs. Thermo = hot, baric = pressure; but if you still can’t figure out what they do, The Chicago Tribune tells you with pretty pictures.

Given that it’s about six months since 19 Muslims slaughtered a few thousand people in the USA, Osama bin Laden has been seen on TV celebrating the slaughter, and an American reporter has just been brutally murdered by Muslims, it doesn’t seem all that likely that Western society will listen to a call for it to change its negative image of the Muslim religion, which is what a conference on women and Islam has called for.

In particular, the conference in Cordoba criticised the stereotypical picture of Muslim women:

Delegates said they were tired of being portrayed as timid and downtrodden.

They said the decision to wear a veil or headscarf was often portrayed as their central preoccupation when in reality there were many other subjects of concern to them.

Well, possibly. But clearly they don’t grasp how offensive the veil is to many Westerners. It’s one thing to wear a simple headscarf, it’s another to be draped head to foot in thick grey curtains with not even the eyes visible. This, to a Westerner, is oppression and subjugation. Arguments that it is anything else are going to find it tough going since we’ve all seen the beating of women in Afghanistan for accidentally baring a patch of skin.

My precise words on learning that Hewlett Packard and Compaq were to merge under the HP brand were: "Eh? Why?" Since then, plenty of people have been asking the same question. One of the latest to come out against the merger is Lewis Platt, who used to run HP. More and more I’m thinking this isn’t going to happen.

If there is one country above all which comes to mind when thinking of the United Nations, it is probably Switzerland, which was the home for the League of Nations, and currently holds the UN’s second largest offices, plus the headquarters of the WHO and the International Labour Organisation. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to discover that Switzerland has only just joined the UN. The only remaining state which is not a member is the Vatican.