Mitch Townsend

Conflicts of Interest

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It looks as though Microsoft will require the installation of their new operating system, Vista (née Longhorn), in order to run the PC version of their hit video game, Halo II. Vista has already been delayed several times and is now scheduled for release in December 2006. No independent software maker would have written the game for an OS that doesn’t yet exist. Instead, Microsoft seems to be using their application software to drive sales of their operating system software. Don’t be surprised if you see the next MS Office release “optimized” for Vista, or backward compatibility problems between Vista and older versions of Office.

This also may help explain why Microsoft released part of its Windows source code to the EU in connection with a monopoly investigation. Call me paranoid, but I suspect that parts of that source code will become obsolete.

We saw similar issues with the Sony DRM/spyware/rootkit problems. Sony is both a content provider (music and movies, CDs and DVDs) and a hardware manufacturer. One of their hardware lines is the Sony Minidisk system. The proprietary encoding software that comes with the player includes a system for counting how many times a song has been “checked out” from your hard disk to a minidisk, with the maximum set at three (net of the times it has been “checked in” and removed from a minidisk). The original version of the software and player did not allow for MP3s; the current version will play them, but cripples some of the functions available on other players.

Sony’s spyware ploy was based on the realization that the market had left their minidisk player behind, so their preferred method of controlling the spread of copied content had failed. The minidisk hardware and software were both proprietary and not adopted by other companies, with the exception of some third-party minidisk manufacturing. They were in effect trying their Betamax strategy again, and it didn’t work this time, either. Earlier attempts to restrict copying had been evaded by disabling the copy-protect function resident on the disk. Sony’s solution was to alter the user’s application software to mimic the behavior of the minidisk player. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

Two out of Three isn’t Bad

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From ABC News, via Best of the Web Today:

Recently, Larry Watson saw proof in one of the college classes he teaches that Black History Month was needed more than ever.

“I asked the students in my class whether they knew who their Senate representative was,” said Watson, who teaches music and sociology at three colleges in Boston. “No one knew. And when I asked who was Sen. Edward Kennedy — the most activist senator in our country — the only thing most of my students could say was that he was fat and that he was drunk…”

Don’t blame the students, Prof. Watson. I have lived in Massachusetts for over 25 years, and while I knew that the senior senator from my state was fat and drunk, I never knew he was black.

Yet Another Sign of the Apocalypse

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If Jonathan’s sartorial taste were not enough, an unmistakable sign of the end times was recently revealed. Someone has made a movie out of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. If you have never read this book, I weep tears of joy on your behalf. Assuming, that is, that you go on to read it — otherwise, I just weep. The book was published in 1760, which is only 20 years after the first novel written in English, the abominable Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (yes, it is every bit as bad as the title indicates, plus a 10% bonus of awfulness for being written in epistolary form — only Tom Jones, which brutally satirizes it, justifies the waste of ink on this steaming lump of sirreverence). Tristram Shandy wanders off on digressions, digressions from digressions, subplots in flashbacks, flashbacks in subplots, asides to the reader, imagined dialogues with the reader, and pages printed in marble pattern to indicate the impenetrability of a discussion of noses. It affixed a “kick me” note to the diaper of the infant English novel. Think of going from Bach to Zappa in 20 years.

I haven’t seen it. It’s safe to say, though, that it will likely depart somewhat from the text. I gather that the movie is a movie about making a movie out of the book, which seems about right, but only if the movie is never quite finished (Tristram only gets to about age seven in this fictional autobiography, despite the thickness of the book).

To give a small taste of the book, here is it’s dedication, which is found in Chapters 8 and 9 of Book I:

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Organic Farming = Species Extinction? Oopsie!

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The Law of Unintended Secondary Effects provides for the imposition of the death penalty. In this case, it is insecticide rather than homicide. In gardening and agriculture, “natural” pest control includes the introduction of beneficial insects to prey on insect pests. Unfortunately, some of these beneficial insects become pests themselves. The asiatic ladybug is still available by mail-order, even though they have become a nuisance in the US because of their habit of nesting indoors. A vacuum cleaner is recommended for removing them; they leave a nasty stain if you squash them.

In the UK, the problem is more serious. There are similar native species that are being destroyed by being out-competed by the aliens, or even by the more direct method of being eaten by them. The various native species may go extinct as early as 2008.

“Natural” does not mean “benign.” When we as a species were in a state of nature, we were prey. Stuffed amanitas, anyone?