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Saturday, January 21, 2006Says Jaron Lanier:Regarding "slaves": The slaves I spoke of are the end users who engage in "tweakage denial." We pretend to spend less time being humiliated by our machines than is actually spent.Lanier's tone is a bit dark, and as I type along on my cute little laptop with Windows XP that does so many more things than I would have thought a laptop could two years ago, I'd like to take him on. But if the future is the internet and network computing... I spent two hours at work this week on multiple efforts to convince Citrix Metaframe to just print from the printer that is physically attached to my pc (with Windows 2000) instead of the printer that used to be attached to a computer across the hall but hasn't been for two months. Since it's Windows, of course, there is an answer: I make a few impossible requests, crash Citrix and hope that it will work when the desktop in the metaframe reboots. Four or five tries... ten or twelve minutes... and I can print again for anywhere from two hours to four days. Monday, of course, the process always starts over again, since the IT people "fix" any bugs that are popping up over the weekend. 
posted by gbarto at 1:38 AM Thursday, January 19, 2006A crying shame...This piece indicates that the dubious manner in which a relative was elected to the state senate in Tennessee will wind up creating a link between the Honorable Harold Ford Jr. and the phrase "vote fraud". I for one am deeply saddened to see an association between Harold Ford and vote fraud. I hope all will join me in disentangling him from the shenanigans of his family so no one associates Harold Ford and vote fraud. They say that dead men tell no tales. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't vote, and when they vote for Harold Ford's relatives, that shouldn't mean that we should associate Harold Ford and vote fraud. After all, if we shouldn't speak ill of the dead, then the dead shouldn't speak ill of Harold Ford either. Certainly not if it associates Harold Ford and vote fraud anyway.
posted by gbarto at 5:16 PM from Assymetrical Information: Carriers (Verizon, Comcast etc.) are petitioning the government to allow "level of service" agreements for internet traffic. Currently, the government actively regulates media in general, through decency standards on public television, funding public radio, and enforcing a variety of community and public interest standards across media in general. The unregulated internet is an anomaly in the media world and it's not surprising that carriers want that to change.One of the commenters notes that we already have tiered service - dial-up, dsl, etc. And how! Right now I am connected to the internet at... 4800bps! Let's all shout, "Hurray for Verizon! I live in the mountains. It's raining. And the wind blew yesterday afternoon. Which means that for the twentieth or so time this week, my connection ain't for crap. I've called Verizon, but got fed up with listening to the buzzing in my ear while fussing with the goddamn box on the side of the house in the rain to make sure the problem was theirs, not mine. I'm not sure how the problem would be in the house considering that the phone's fine if we've get in a day of decent weather and goes to hell otherwise. But I ran their tests, then hung up by accident and said the hell with it. It's been my experience that if you get a customer service rep on the line from Verizon, he or she is very pleasant and helpful. And can even get a repair team up the hill pretty quickly if it's something affecting multiple homes - even just two or three. But it seems like in the last few years the phone menu trees, etc, have been putting more distance between me and the customer service reps. My favorite is when the phone's out and they helpfully advise that you can get a work order faster by going to verizon.com. This is not, by the way, an extended "let's rip apart Verizon" post. It's just a reminder: When a telco says it needs the government to step in and regulate pricing so that it can deliver its services better, skepticism is in order.
posted by gbarto at 2:58 AM Wednesday, January 18, 2006Advance our policy interests and do the right thing? Unheard of!Roger Simon flags Michael Ledeen advancing the idea for Iran: With an unfriendly Iran pursuing nukes, we can figure out how to keep them from getting them... or we can make Iran friendly by supporting the student democratic movement. The second idea, if it works, seems much more palatable and Ledeen is wise to advance it. One question, though: Before we take the extreme step of unilaterally promoting peace, stability and human liberty in yet another corner of the Middle East, shouldn't we give the UN one more chance? I'm thinking... Cash for No Nukes... The U.S. pays Iran not to develop weapons, the U.N. administers the funds... and when Kofi Annan gets the cell phone call in his gold-plated Mercedes announcing the destruction of Israel, he can call a press conference to say it's Bush's fault.
posted by gbarto at 11:51 AM |
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