those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Summing it all up How do you feel about going to war against Iraq? Let us make this decision based on what we will expect our children to fight and die for, because this is indeed the decision that we are making. - andy [347.com || Andy's World] [dws.] 3:01:28 AM    comment []

How Long Can They Keep the Lid On? © 2002, John H. Farr Our fearless leader "deplores" the nightclub bombing on the island of Bali but hasn't said a thing about the loss of 90,000 jobs in Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), for instance. Now, I don't know about where you live, but anywhere I've ever been, if 90,000 of my neighbors had lost their jobs, that would be all we talked about. This is really weird. I just don't understand why there aren't riots in the streets. For example: I just posted an article at Applelinks about how commercial real estate vacancies in the D.C. high-tech corridor west of the Beltway are over 30 percent in some areas -- plus, the buildings were constructed specifically for telecom use and can't be used for anything else, hahaha. Wouldn't you like to figure that one out? In the Silver Lining Department, I just heard that Merrill-Lynch is firing 300 investment bankers. Maybe they can go to the Bay Area and do volunteer work. Meanwhile, let's conquer Iraq, woo-hoo! -- only watch out that Afghanistan doesn't boil over. Witness this bit from today's ABCNews.com concerning weekend attacks on U.S. troops: "Attackers typically use timers or remote control to launch rockets at U.S. bases in Afghanistan, and troops rarely find the people responsible... 'Unfortunately, we haven't been able to engage the enemy directly,' [a U.S. military spokesman] said. 'The enemy has been pretty stealthy; they don't come out and show themselves.' Some timers are as simple as a punctured water can filled with water. As the water runs out, it completes an electrical circuit and launches the rocket." I'm showing my age to say this, but that sounds an awful lot like the kinds of things we heard almost 40 years ago about a smaller, wetter country farther east of the Khyber Pass. And guys using leaky buckets to time rocket launchers have got to be awfully determined sumbitches and lousy neighbors to boot. Maybe everything is a pop quiz from God: "What's wrong with this picture?" "WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Monday there is "a pattern of attack" by al-Qaida terrorists in Kuwait, Indonesia and Yemen, raising concerns that Osama bin Laden's troops are on the move again and could strike the United States." Bin Laden's TROOPS? "On the move again"? Oh please. What on earth is he talking about, a fleet of dhows anchored in the Potomac launching smallpox-infected model airplanes? [FarrFeed] [dws.] 3:01:16 AM    comment []

Seattle Times columnist Paul Andrews writes about the large numbers of Unix and Linux users who are switching to OS X in Apple-Linux merger powers 'Mac' switch. [Mac Net Journal] [dws.] 2:59:19 AM    comment []

I made a PDF of the page before Microsoft turned tail and ran. What are they thinking when they do something this stupid?! [dws] Mitch Ratcliffe deconstructs the now-withdrawn Microsoft "Switch" campaign, which is clearly an embarrassment to the company. Dave Winer and others are doing a great job of following the story of Microsoft's fake switcher story that ran earlier today. MS posted a page about a woman who supposedly switched from the Mac to Windows XP, but it has since been discovered that the woman pictured on the page, which has since been removed from Microsoft's site, is a model and the photo appears in a image library. Check Scripting News for links to the ugly truth in all of its Microsoft goodness... Links: Google's cache, and a thread about the fake switch on Slashdot. [Mac Net Journal] [A Father and his two girls] Microsoft "regrets" Mac-to-PC ad. The software giant's "Confessions of a Mac to PC convert" was a short-lived conversion. The ad, which took a cue from Apple, is already dead. [CNET News.com] Yea nice job MS, and the picture is from stock files and bla bla, see a good take on slashdot and at http://scripting.com/ [A Father and his two girls] BTW, she's not a real person. Thanks to Jim Stegman for the pointer to the Slashdot thread where it is revealed that she's a model in a stock photo database. You'd think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it. (Postscript: MS nuked the page. Should have taken a screen shot. Damn.) [Scripting News] Bing! Niklaus Gustavson grabbed a screen shot before they took it down. I love the Internet. John Foster sent me one too. Mike Donnelan had the HTML source in his cache. Paul McJones points out that it's still in Google's cache. [Scripting News] Oh, Microsoft... Cannot even use a real person to fake an ad.. don't they have enough money to pay someone off? They... [kasia in a nutshell] [dws.] 2:59:05 AM    comment []

Check out my new PQI 6 in 1 flash memory card reader. Very nice, about the size of a deck of cards, the USB cable folds into the reader case and then the reader slips into a nice travel cover. It included a 3 ft USB extension I haven't needed. I use the reader plugged into one of two USB ports on my Microsoft Internet Keyboard. $30 at Frys [dws.] 2:58:42 AM    comment []