Ransom as a software business model... how interesting. Found this article from a link on Kuro5hin.

10:42:01 PM    comment []

Hmm... kinda finished Fear, however i ended up just skimming the end. I agreed with a bunch of Glassner's general ideas (media over hypes things and misses core issues) however at times he seemed to go over the deep end. Potraying a mass conspiracy against large groups of people. He makes a case for a consipiracy (in effect) between the White House and media companies to hype illegal drugs as an evil thing. I agree that the illegal drug use is probably a smaller issue that abuse of legal drugs, but I don't buy that there is a consipracy. Glassner fell short of actually saying it was a blatant conspiracy...

Anyway, it was still a good read and had lots of good contrary facts against illegal drug abuse, crime rates, teen pregnancy, airplane crashes, and road rage as the biggest fears we should have. Glassner is obviously strongly against guns, which were probably the single most consistently blamed evil in the book.

I have always felt the evening news over dramatizes everything (Windstorm 2002, etc.), and I guess the nice thing is that this book validates my bullshit detector. Net result - don't trust mainstream news.

Interestingly enough, it looks like weblogs might be a good source of information... at least according to the Microcontent News site.

8:12:35 PM    comment []

Microsoft research has a CLI implementation with generics support... At several conferences we have publically said that generics will be added to some future version of .NET. With those two pieces of data, I pose the question - how wide spread should generics be used? Was ATL goodness, or something taken a bit too far?

For those of you unfamiliar with generics, they are basically C++ templates implemented at the runtime level. I'm not a compiler wonk, so I have to go with my most basic understanding - essentially the CLR would do dynamic class generation at runtime, thuse preventing code bloat, but giving you the performance benefit of strongly typed classes. In addition, since the runtime maintains the identity of the class being a generic, features like reflection actually work correctly.

2:43:58 PM    comment []

In process of reading The Culture of Fear. Interesting book, however I was a bit suprised to find such a strong left wing bent. I believe myself to a financial conservitive, but a social moderate. I always like to read a wide variety of opinions - another reason that I liked Zinn's work so much. I'm not a socialist, but I still liked the book.

In my new education of weblogs and what is really happening out there, I came across the google bombs, warchalking, and other fun. Pretty cool stuff. I really like the stigmergy article that Sam Ruby pointed us all to. Oddly I can't retrace my steps to how I found it, but Microcontent News has a great set of google bomb articles.

Question of the day: Why does the "Mars" explorer not support an actual history list? (Note: Mars is the codename for the MSN Explorer program that hosts IE inside of cooler looking chrome).

2:05:40 PM    comment []