Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Four years ago today: "If you made it this far, here's your reward, a piece of virtual cheesecake. No calories or fat." 

News.Com asks if blogs are worth the hype. I loved the comment from the former NY Times editor, Howell Raines, calling blogs "unsourced ranting." A few years from now we'll look back and wonder what all the fuss was about. When it's all shaken out, it'll be clear that, far from being unsourced, bloggers are the sources. When the pros stop thinking of us as competition and start seeing us as tools, it'll all just work out. Sure, some reporters will lose some power, because we'll be able to find out if their quotes are accurate, and get more points of view, but why, if they have a passion for news, would that bother them? Answer: It doesn't bother real journalists.  

Zane Thomas: "The attempt to banish monolithic operating systems is no mere intellectual exercise." 

Tony Chor, the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team explains SP2. 

Don Park has links to various sources of SP2. I've installed it. Looking for ways to disable spyware. Haven't found any so far. 

My tombstone, as generated by The Tombstone Generator. 

BBC: "The file-sharing lobby group, Downhill Battle, has taken matters into its own hands. It has made a copy of SP2 available using BitTorrent file-sharing technology." 

Ever wonder how certain people in the news get a tagline that everyone seems to use? Like the guy who's fighting against our regime in Iraq: radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It's as if the part in bold were his official title, one that no one ever gets it wrong. Gives me the willies. It's like the scene in The Manchurian Candidate, where they realize that not only do the two guys remember the big event exactly the same way, they use exactly the same words to describe it, right down to the order of the adjectives. And by the way, I've read the book, and it's excellent. Very well-crafted writing. Not your typical book that inspired a movie (or two). 

This evening at dinner we talked about the next BloggerCon, which will be hosted by Stanford University in the fall. I'll write some more about it in the morning.