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Doug 7:19 pm on January 26, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Media

I finally broke down and rented Minority Report last night. I’d been resisting watching it despite all the buzz and references to it because I’m not a huge Tom Cruise fan.

I am, however, a big Philip K. Dick fan, and I have to rank this movie up near Blade Runner in my list of favorites. Good plot, and some extremely interesting ideas about how the near future looks and feels. I can tell that, like Blade Runner, this movie benefits from being watched more than once. There’s a lot there to catch, even after you already know how it’s going to turn out.
Doug 6:43 pm on January 26, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

We woke up this morning to another couple inches of snow that fell during the night:

It’s been weeks since we’ve seen the ground here without snow. It’s also been bitter cold all week, with temperatures down in the single digits or even below zero at night. A week ago we woke up to the same thing:

The kids seem to like it, but frankly, I’m getting pretty damn tired of it. This is one of the things I moved from South Dakota to get away from!

It seems like the whole world is frozen. The ground is frozen, the air is freezing… people seem frozen, too. The economy is frozen; hardly anyone is doing any significant business. Everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop on Iraq, or the stock market, or something else, anything else, to give them an excuse to move forward. From where I sit, it feels like dark and cold grips the entire world.

I really want Spring to come.
Doug 9:20 pm on January 25, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: computing

Hmmm…this looks pretty interesting:

HelloWorld is a unique software application with a fresh, visual approach to connecting people, online messaging, search and transfer operations, and personal publishing, in a decentralized network environment that is owned and operated by the network community.

HelloWorld looks to be somewhat like Spring. I’d like to give it a spin, but it looks like I’ll have to wait awhile before the OS X or Linux versions are available. Maybe I can prod Eric into giving the Windows version a try and posting a report on his experiences.

The appearance of applications like Spring and HelloWorld pose some interesting questions about the evolution of the desktop metaphor of user interface design. The interconnectedness of network computing is finally beginning to chip away at the dominance of the “files and folders” metaphor in ways the page-oriented design of the web was never able to.

Knowledge workers have come to depend more on networked systems to access information not just through web pages, but RSS feeds, P2P networks, search engines and search tools, and to collaborate with others via Instant Messaging networks. Integrating these disparate tools into one’s workflow becomes an ever more challenging task when each tool’s interface is so different, or is poorly suited to either the desktop or page metaphors. Toss geo-centric information into the mix, and the strictly local nature of the desktop space becomes even more confining and in appropriate.

That isn’t to suggest that the desktop or page (or even command line) metaphors are dead, or always inappropriate. These metaphors work extremely well for an entire range of tasks that hundreds of millions of us perform every day. Rather, it seems to me what’s needed is a better way for operating systems and GUI’s to present and bridge context - using the appropriate metaphor for the information being presented at the appropriate time, switching between them in a manner that’s easy for the user to cope with.
Doug 2:07 am on January 22, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Politics

Via my friend Scott, Rooting Out Evil: Mission USA:

In February 2003, Rooting Out Evil will be sending a team of volunteer weapons inspectors into that greatest of rogue nations, the United States of America.

We have selected the US as our first priority based on criteria provided by the Bush administration. According to those criteria, the most dangerous states are those run by leaders who:

1) have massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons;

2) ignore due process at the United Nations;

3) refuse to sign and honour international treaties; and

4) have come to power through illegitimate means.

The current US administration fulfills all these criteria. And so, again following Bush’s guidelines, Rooting Out Evil is demanding that his administration allow immediate and unfettered access to international weapons inspectors to search out their caches of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

Obviously, this site is not for the irony impaired.
Doug 1:45 am on January 22, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Personal

I had a good day today. The fact that I find this noteworthy is a significant comment on how things have been lately.
Doug 12:46 am on January 19, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Law

In the aftermath of the disappointing Supreme Court decision last week, Lawrence Lessig proposes the Eldred Act:

Professor Lessig has posted an FAQ for his proposal of The Eric Eldred Act, as described in his op-ed in the New York Times, Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art’s Expense.

Basically, Lessig is proposing a system whereby after ~~50 years from the owners death~~ a work has been under copyright for 50 years, maintaining a copyright would cost some nominal sum, say, $1. If, after three years, no one has paid this fee, the work would forfeit to the public domain. The benefit of this approach would be to free up the 98% of works that are no longer being commercially exploited, but remain under copyright because Congress keeps extending Copyright law to protect Disney’s ownership of Mickey Mouse.

While this might not be the solution anti-copyright advocates would like to see, it strikes me as a workable and reasonable compromise. In fact arguing against it would make the Big Media companies look really, really unreasonable, since there’s nothing in this proposal that could be construed as “taking away their property.”
Doug 10:07 pm on January 18, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: art and architecture
Doug 2:12 am on January 17, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Books

Man, Mr. Doctorow just keeps hitting them out of the park! Today, hot on the heels of the release of his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, he has a short story on Salon, titled Liberation Spectrum.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read of Cory’s, so much so that I make sure I have local copies of his Salon published stories cached locally on my iBook so that I can read them when I’m off-line if I want. I enjoyed Liberation Spectrum even more than usual, though, because I could identify so well with the main character.

I’ve been in a senior leadership position in a high-tech start-up. I’ve been in the position of being in the middle of techno-anarchist types and green eye-shade accountant types, understanding and more or less sympathizing with both positions while having to moderate their more extreme excesses. I’ve felt the “leadership brain reward” when it all drops in the pot and you have to think and decide at light speed to pull it out again (note: this will fry you if it happens all the time). I’ve had to deal with asshole investors who don’t understand anything about the business or what it means to you and your crew; who care about nothing more than their money. I’ve experienced the newly-minted MBA who thinks spouting the crap he learned in B-school makes him an expert despite his total lack of any real world experience.

What really brought it all together for me, though, was the fact that I worked, for three years, on the Rez. I was in South Dakota, not back East where the story is set, but the depiction of Native Americans in the story really reminded me of that time. I worked in one of those residential schools mentioned in the story until I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of it any more.

I never thought I’d read “geek speak” and “Rez speak” and “Biz speak” in the same story. That was pretty incredible.
Doug 2:23 am on January 16, 2003 | 0 | # |

Steven Johnson announces his new gig: writing a monthly column on emerging technology for Discover magazine. His debut column just happens to address exactly what I mentioned the other day: the collision of hypertext and GPS technologies that will allow us to “surf” physical objects and locations.
Doug 1:59 am on January 16, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Politics

Still think the Bush administration has any real intent to allow the arms inspection process to influence the decision to launch a war on Iraq? This should remove all remaining doubt:

The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction “could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation” with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday.

That’s right; the very lack of any supporting evidence of weapons programs in Iraq is now itself evidence that the Iraqis are guilty!

I’m so flabbergasted by this line of “reasoning” I hardly know what to say. Do these people really think we’re all so stupid as to buy this argument? Worse, are they so out of touch and megalomaniacal that they really believe this sort of crap?

I find this really, really frightening. How far away are we from having this same reasoning routinely applied domestically. How soon before Ashcroft’s jack boots start kicking in doors based on an assumption of guilt because they can’t find any evidence of wrong doing?