Better living through Internet

The big media whines incessantly about the perils and depredations of the Internet. Even so, they know they have to publish here, and they bring their art departments - if they still have them - to bear to give us traditional newspaper graphics.

Oh, sure, the New York Times pastes up some cool interactive widgets. Many of them go beyond eye candy and are actually informative. They are also well beyond the budgets of ordinary papers.

There are thousands of stories that will never contend for a Pulitzer, for which the Internet provides freely available tools to make those stories better. Any story about a particular place can put the reader there much more effectively with a clip or a link to Google Maps or Microsoft Bing or one of the other mapping sites. Sure, it might be better to send a news photographer out, but that's too heavyweight and expensive for bread and butter stories that fill out a paper.

Here's a pedestrian story about real estate and eminent domain that shrieks for illustration. In five minutes of googling, I found the Newton Assessor's database and this aerial view with approximate bounds shown:


Google Maps gives a better image, sans plot plan, here.

Imagine what I might find if I were a professional journalist! (Yes, I know there are savvy people who are professional journalists. I even know a few. I just don't get why more of their savvy doesn't find the page.)

Answering machines

Xerox and Kodak called. They want their trademarks back, too.

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

What I'm really, REALLY sick of

Windows routinely lets processes run away and hide with the CPU stuffed down their pants. For a while I thought Firefox sucked, but if so Google Chrome sucks, too. The anti-virus package my company's IT people require sucks, too. Anything running a JRE sucks. There's a common thread here, but then Outlook sucks, too. And PowerPoint sucks all the suck out of sucking.

The common thread is the defective process executive of Windows, under which a greedy process can suck up every last cycle that Intel or AMD can give. You don't even need Task Manager to know. The cooling fan ups its duty cycle to 100%, and that means everything up to and including keyboard input turns sclerotic. Rhymes with erotic but makes the blood rush to the other head.

It's not quite as bad as when my college roommate's acoustic fucking coupler used to drop back from 300 baud to 110 and you might as well type with your damn nose, but after 30 years and the assumption of progress, it's close.

We will now return to your regularly scheduled political rants.

But guest workers cost less

In the seething cauldron that passes for debate about immigration, the fact that we already have a guest worker program often gets lost. Of course, I mean the H-1B visa program that permits American high tech companies to hire foreign workers.

The stated purpose of this program is to cover programmer shortages. That is complete bullshit. Many American programmers have the skills to do these jobs; they're just more expensive than a 20-something new grad of an Indian or Chinese technical university. They're also not indentured to the company that sponsors their visa.

Now, of course, American unemployment is pretty high. So, for that matter, is Indian and Chinese unemployment. The Indians I manage across a 10 1/2 hour difference are not nearly as mobile as they were a couple of years ago, when even 30% raises were no guarantee of keeping someone.

If there are too many workers now - isn't that the definition of high unemployment - you might reasonably ask why we need a guest worker program.

The answer confirms what I've been saying from the beginning: Microsoft and other large software companies want more, not fewer, H-1B visas. The reason remains the same - lower costs, not labor shortages. Now, however, there's less political cover for the bullshit.

Making a living instead of a dying

Could attacks on unpatched vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer include good news?

Microsoft noted the upswing in attacks on the company's Malware Protection Center blog late Saturday. "The trend for now is going upwards," said researchers Ziv Mador and Tareq Saadecom on the blog. "We saw a huge increase in the number of reports today compared to yesterday."

Jew and Arab working together on security. (O.K., I'm guessing from their names, but it's a plausible guess.) It's their job, nothing more noble.

It's not a coincidence that peace took root in Northern Ireland at a time when the economy was booming on the whole island. For a change, there was plenty to go around, so anti-Catholic job discrimination no longer appeared to make even short-run sense. Much of the demand was from overseas, and we didn't give a damn which side of the wall that lilting Irish broque lived on. Most of us couldn't even tell the quite distinct accents apart.

Duhbya and the neocons tried a broad-strokes military solution to the Middle East. It didn't work.

The solution I'd like to see tried in Israel and Palestine is bottom-up, start-small economics. People who have worked hard and have a lot to lose don't blow each other up. They're also sleeping at night for the next day's work instead of conspiring.

The radical Palestinians know this. That's why their people remain in refugee camps after sixty years.

The Israeli security forces know this. They cut off border crossing during security crises, in part to squeeze the working Palestinians. I don't blame them for securing their borders, but we all need to find a way to help the Palestinians make a living, instead of making a dying.

Comparative advantage

As a market incentive for the Chinese to continue to pirate everything that can be copied, Microsoft has lowered the price in China of Windows Vista by two thirds. No doubt, Microsoft was responding to its particular assessment of how to maximize revenue.

The irony, of course, is that Microsoft has just made it easier to do business in China than in the United States - with an American product. Software piracy is a comparative advantage in the global economy over the relative obedience to intellectual property law seen in the United States.

An American government that was interested in the fate of its people would protect its economy from this perverse incentive. Ours has failed at this under the bipartisan elite consensus that globalization can do no wrong.

Globalization is working out pretty well for CEOs and investors, who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. The future of the American middle class looks pretty grim, however.