Wednesday, June 2, 2004

The $45 million question

Chris Nolan asks, What really happened in Iowa?

The top line: We don't know.

The bottom line somebody needs to pay for. At $40k or so (her best guess for now), it's a cheap deal. The price, of course, goes up every day. Especially if the National Security President gets re-elected in November. My butt says odds favor that. (But I try not to listen too close.)

Running on full

New: Autoblog. Proof Jason's been busy.

I'm still on the same ride. Got a new battery for it yesterday at Costco. It replaced the old battery, which I bought at Costco a couple months ago.

Costco has an interesting way to sell car batteries. They just put them on shelves, like D cells or bottles of shampoo. You want a battery? Fine. Drag one away. No swappage on the old ones. No installtion. It's DIY, all the way. When I turned in the old one, I brought it to the counter, the kid there gave me full credit, and I went back to the car crap aisle and pulled down another one, fully charged. Got back out to the car, installed it, and off I went.

I had fantasies that somebody would try to steal it while I was in the store. No such luck.

Homefull

The Gillmor Gang has a new home. Steve hosts, and it gets better every week. Listen in.

Polyblog pong

Marc Canter responds at his blog to what I wrote yesterday here in response to what he wrote in his blog and in a longer piece over at AlwaysOn.

Now my own latest volley is over at IT Garage.

Bonus link: Eric Raymond's latest broadside: "Free Hardware": a Trojan Horse? In it he takes issue, basically, with the notion that hard goods should be free just because they're commoditized. While Sun talks "free hardware," Eric suggests, Most likely the whole bundle would be structured as a lease deal — the vendor retains ownership of both hardware and software. And there is the gotcha — because under those assumptions, the vendor wouldn't just own a critical piece of your infrastructure, they'd get an even harder hammerlock on it than traditional proprietary software licenses give them.

Read the whole things.