ON BROWSERS AND THE COMMON HYSTERIA:
most computer operations are directly influenced by how you feel, or the power of suggestion. after one conversation with hairball on sunday about how chimera is totally unstable for him, it’s now totally unstable for me. this after months of 23+ tabs open, and crashes only once a week. bastard. so now i’m back in the extremely slow unreactive mozilla, which i can type faster then. i don’t use safari because, well, it’s as stable as chimera in hairballs hands. hairball doesn’t get his dock removal app till he sends me the link to the oly parts…
all the noise for all the years about mozilla being a platform, not a browser has gotten it a website full of unfinished or half finished projects. two beta releases of apple’s safari in two weeks has gotten it a million downloads, and more working scripts/projects then mozdev.org hosts…and the common perception continues to change that beta means usable. able ships ships two betas, and they’re in use. go up to versiontracker, and not only are their more beta programs listed everyday, but increasingly they”re pay to play. like i told all those nicce droids at macworld, i’d love to buy your program if it shipped today, but i’m not buying a pig in a poke, or paying for your beta testing..
Influences: “
Three writers have seriously influenced my thinking about personal online publishing in the past few days.
It begins with Joe Clark’s scathing deconstruction of ‘You’ve Got Blog’.
The blogging/counterblogging form pretends to function as a conversation, but, unlike E-mail or instant messaging or any kind of threaded discussion forum, the effect is one of talking at people rather than with them. But you’re talking at them in public, rather like chatting on a cellphone at the mall, only in this case third parties stand a good chance of reading both sides of the conversation.
… Now, according to the egalitarian mythos of the Web, anyone can publish. You skip the step of requiring an editor and publisher, but no one is willing to skip the step of requiring an audience. Take it from someone who wrote since age seven and has been published in print nearly 400 times and an actual book: Few are the writers who do it for themselves. Even handwritten diaries will be discovered posthumously, as every diarist knows deep down.
… The fears of these neophyte bloggers are, in fact, entirely valid, but may require restatement. It’s not that you missed the Golden Age. It’s just that the age is golden only for other people. And there is pretty much no way to breach the velvet rope: If you’re not an A-list blogger, you will stay off that list forever.
… What the huddled masses yearning to blog their way into superstardom are left with, then, is not merely talking at people, but talking at a perennially minuscule group of people.
It continues with Joshua Allen’s non-apology, I started writing.
Then the web hit the bigtime, everyone got online, everyone got high-speed access at work, and tools arrived to make tech know-how unnecessary. The weblog — and I’m using the original definition here, namely oft-updated annotated links — became the default personal site. I mean of course: it’s easy content. It’s like when you’re in the office kitchen trying to like maybe quietly enjoy a juice box for once and some guy comes in and starts reading the paper and saying Can you believe that? And: What do you make of that?
A very consistent voice cropped up among the new writers: casual, chatty, inoffensive, usually a dash of false self-deprecation, and a kind of subtle condescension — the sound of someone who has been chosen to pass along valuable information to others. This tone of I am interesting, right? was underscored by the guestbooks and comments and karma points and permalinks and trackbacks and referer logs. Even the current vogue of web standards often boils down to: Everyone should have access to what I have to say, I don’t care if they’re blind or reading my words off a cellphone — the message must get through.
It didn’t help that we all had such similar backgrounds and interests. Although the web keeps diversifying, the kind of person who has the time and money and inclination to maintain a regularly updated personal website still falls into a pretty narrow demographic group, which is how we end up with 10,000 posts about The Two Towers, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, iPods, Volkswagen commercials, etc.
And ends with Dennis Mahoney, On Lighthouses.
Remember when personal web sites weren’t taken too seriously and, as a result, featured loads of creamy goodness? Me, neither, but I remember this time I went to a web site and thought, holy cats, this guy really enjoys lighthouses. I got the feeling this guy was pretty much the alpha and omega of lighthouse appreciation.
… When I first discovered the web, I was struck by all the available space. You could do anything. There could be words, images, sounds, even porn. With a couple of scroll bars, there was blank space of infinite width and height. Infinite. So I built a 3-column personal web site with a logo and a mission statement. A personal site with a logo: I thought I ought to brand the site. Yeah, it makes zero fucking sense.
I’m not going to get all LOGOS ARE EVIL on you. But I was spending time thinking about branding and mission statements for my personal site, when I should have been writing about lighthouses. Well not lighthouses lighthouses, but stuff that really lights me up at the moment. That’s an accidental pun, I swear to God.
” Source: dive into mark
RIAA wants your isp to pay for illegal file swaping:
Wired: “
Wired:
“Well, Ms. Rosen, I’ll tell you what: You forward all your e-mail unedited to a public mailing list, scan and post all your private written correspondence to the same list, give us all-read access to your hard drives and post 24-7 webcams in your boudoir and bathroom, and then I’ll believe you understand the invasion of privacy your shrill insistence on flushing what’s left of the Constitution down the toilet entails,” Ferrell suggested.
[via Dave]*
” Source: Archipelago
from Spence:
Russia Military See U.S. Iraq Attack in Feb -Report
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030122/wl_nm/iraq_russia_dc_
4
…[T]he news agency Interfax…quoting an unnamed high-ranking source in
the Russian general staff…
“According to the information we have, the operation is planned for the
second half of February. The decision to launch it has been taken but not
yet been made public,” said the source.
The source added that the main aim of the war would be to secure control
of Iraqi oilfields.
… “Hussein is the pretext. The real aim of the military action is
control over Iraqi oil,” he said.
