Thursday, March 4, 2004

People get the best government they provide

Politics as Unusual is my latest SuitWatch from Linux Journal. It includes some mind-opening thoughts from my local friend Patrick Gregston, who knows local politics far better than I do. A sample:

Government isn't the problem. People need to bring solutions to government. Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you'll get somewhere.

I don't have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and not only problems.

A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems or to carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you're constructive, you can participate in that ecosystem.

This seemed consistent with what I've learned from Phil Windley, too.

Over and begun

All our stuff is finally out of the old place, and we're surrounded by unsorted chaos and appliances that don't work. Worst news today: our new $900 Panasonic digital phone system (one wireless desk set and 4 wireless hand sets) sounds terrible at the other ends of calls and screws with the household wi-fi (and vice versa). Major bummer there. Lesson: don't get a 2.4GHz phone system if you want wi-fi.

But the residential cable internet service is in, and the problem my wife had with Eudora over the business connection is now avoided. Still no clue about why her Eudora works fine over the residential connection and not over the business connection (both going through wireless routers serving up their own DHCP). Makes no sense at all.

Big Sister is watching your kid

Biometric for Busriders is Eric Norlin's latest at Digital ID World.

Truth in sausage

Truth in Advertising used to be up at iFilm, but disappeared awhile back, even though there's still plenty of pointage to it. Now it's back up at Gavinroy.

I have no information about the video's provenance. It's been kicking around for years, mostly because it's a scarily accurate — and extremely funny — portrayal of life inside an advertising agency. (Avoid it if dirty words bother you.)

Thanks to Jim for the pointer.

And thanks to Steve Malett for adding a new RSS feed to Opensource.org as well.

Losing at hardball

Over at OpenSource.org, Eric Raymond annotates Halloween X, a leaked internal SCO memo (authenticity not confirmed) that pegs Microsoft's payents to SCO at a level apparently north of $100 million. Hoovers reports SCOs sales last year at $79.3 million, with a net income of $5.4 million. Not hard to do the rest of the math.

Meanwhile Willy Smith at A42 reports on a study from a French buisness school that predicts the death of Microsoft. Here's a bit of what Willy translated from the study:

Microsoft, world leader of software to the point of being almost in a monopoly position today, is caught in the web, as prey to a situation of rupture which even calls its structure and business model into question.

Perhaps some of the francophones among you can translate more of it. The thing isn't short.

[Later...] Tim Bray: ...for me, the best part were some bon mots that amused me and may even survive my laborious translation from the French. Too much arcane punctuation for me to repeat here, but it's worth a trip to see what Tim pulled out. Fun stuff.