Sunday, January 27, 2002

Defogging the clarity issue

Paul Snively picks up on "transparency". I agree with what he says. I also think there are some things that need to be transparent in order to make infrastructure with them. Certain protocols, for example. I'm not sure about operating systems, but I think they are now so commodified that making their base workings clear is a good idea. I think Apple is moving in the right direction on this one (basing the OS on freebie Unix) while Microsoft is not (pushing out the frontiers of intellectual property enforcement, among other things). We'll see.

Not that they didn't shoot their feet off at the crotch

Glenn says Molly Ivins is fulla shit about Enron never making anything. Good post.

Shelf criticism

Adcritic.com has shelved itself for awhile, it says.

There's a New York Times story here. And a Guardian story here.

Question: does a service that does such an equivocal job of explaining its own failure deserve to live?

Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the links, by the way. Soon as Jerry gets a blog together, expect me to roll it shamelessly, since Jerry is a good friend, an A-1 human being, and one of the Wise Ones.

Raising the Red Flag, sort of

Here's Red Flag Linux in Chinese. And here it is in English, translated by Babel Fish. Not bad, considering.

Not all that coherent, either. I like this, under "Success, because of Red Flag":

The heavy fist attack pirates greets into world challenge Red Flag Linux attacks city slightly forestall machine

Which in turn leads here:

In November, goes to the (untranslatable) buy machine consumer discovers, in the (untranslatable) each big computer market brand machine " turns hostile " in abundance. Turns on the computer power source, greeted the consumer is " the smiling face " all turns the domestically produced Red Flag Linux tabletop operating system. It is reported, this is enters border the world in China, initiates by the Beijing electron chamber of commerce computer profession branch, the Beijing association soaring science and technology limited company is responsible for the brand computer which organizes refuses to pirate the operating system the unified action. Starts from in this November, to include 800000000 space and times..

But you get the drift.

(By the way, if any of ya'll can point to, or help with, a real translation here — or better yet, the real story about Red Flag and what it's up to — I'd like to hear from you.)

31,400

Blows my mind.

Journalism as Usual

Clive Thompson puts The Press on the hook for failing to expose the obvious about Enron when it counted. The peerless Molly Ivins did the same in early December, making the most of her own and others' quotability:

The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services; it has not added a single widget to the world widget supply. Enron is in the business of "financializing," making markets, trading in wholesale electricity, water, data storage, fiber-optics, just about anything. One Enron executive told The New York Times the company's achievement was to create "a regulatory black hole" to suit its "core management philosophy, which was to be the first mover into a market and to make money in the initial chaos and lack of transparency."

I wrote about "transparency" in another context the other day. I think now is the time to invest in that word, transparency. It'll be like getting into leverage in 1984 or disintermediate in 1996.