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Don't miss...
...the new Salon cover story, which provides a fascinatingly detailed account of exactly how Thomas White -- Bush's secretary of the Army -- inflated the dubious profit claims of his division at Enron in spring 2001, immediately before leaving for government service. White has said he was operating his division of Enron as a separate fiefdom, and that he shouldn't be tarred with the same brush as Enron's rogue's gallery of corporate scoundrels. But if you read Jason Leopold's story you will have a hard time believing that. Is anyone in Congress listening? Why is this man still serving in what is presumably a highly important position during wartime?
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Digital camera blues
I love my digital camera -- or rather, I loved it until it broke and I couldn't fix it.
My father, a much more serious photographer than I have ever been, had a wonderful Nikon camera, now about 40 years old, and he gave it to me several years ago. It hadn't been used in a long time, some of its controls were stuck, and the little battery for its viewfinder had corroded. No problem -- nothing that a toothpick, some solvent, and some work at a table couldn't fix. So when I went looking for a digital camera a year ago I stuck with Nikon and invested in its Coolpix 775. The camera has taken many wonderful photos of my family, but on our camping trip last weekend it just went on the fritz: the LCD screen read "SYSTEM ERROR" and the zoom lens would not retract.
The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. "SYSTEM ERROR" was not even listed in the instruction manual's "troubleshooting guide." I plugged "coolpix 775 system error" into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera. Nikon's advice is to "leave the battery in for six hours" and hope that this fixes the problem, but that didn't work for me. So now I have to send the camera back to Nikon and hope that they will fix it under warranty, even though -- lucky me! -- I have actually owned the camera for one week beyond the one-year warranty limit.
This is yet another example of a fundamental principle of digital gadgets: They're great until they break. Once they break, more often than not, there's little the hapless consumer can do. Mechanical gadgets are susceptible to mechanical fixes. Digital devices are opaque black boxes, manufactured under the assumption that the consumer will replace them every 2-3 years so there's no sense making them too durable. But I think next time I'll buy a Canon.
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The Javascript mess
My primary browser is Opera, on Win2000. But I find that some sites -- mostly commercial sites (we're shopping for a car so I'm spending some time on auto manufacturers' over-designed pages) -- don't work well on that combination. No problem, that's why I keep IE on my computer too. Fire up IE and the sites should work, right? Only lately I've noticed that virtually every site that uses a Javascript popup window of any kind breaks my IE. OK, time to upgrade, I figured -- I'd been resisting going from IE 5.5 to IE 6 but I took the plunge. No go; I'm having the same problem. Today I downloaded Mozilla and I'm finding that, well, some sites work OK but others are even less compatible than they were on Opera.
Something is badly wrong here. I'd always assumed that the problem was that sites were being designed not to the rules ordained by Web standards codes but instead to the workings of IE, Microsoft's monopoly browser. But these sites crash IE and don't work on the standards-compliant Opera, either! If anyone out there has any insights into this mess, send them to me and I'll share them.
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