Britain’s bloody football culture
Photographed in a Cambridge sports-goods store the other day. I think it’s an ad for a new line of Umbro sportswear, and that the guy is wearing an England shirt. An appropriate precursor to Euro 2004? What is wrong with this country? What makes a sportswear manufacturer apparently glorify football hooliganism?
Gasoline prices: the US perspective
From the Economist of May 29th.
Sun rises on (to?) Open Source
Lots of reports — e.g. this in the NYT — that Sun Microsystems is planning to release its crown jewels (the Solaris operating system) in an open source format. The reports make the company’s position seem completely incoherent, so may be complete hooey. (But most quote the Sun COO as making noises in the open source direction.) Ironically, this development coincides with Sun’s new rapprochment with Microsoft. From my point of view, any convert to open source is welcome, but Sun must be getting desperate to be thinking about it. It’s the way Linux has undermined their ‘natural’ markets that’s at the root of their problems. In which case, they may have missed the boat. Pity. Sun was such a good company, once. But then, so was DEC.
Windows XP and WiFi: the unsolved mystery
From Wired:
“Here are the symptoms of the problem: A Wi-Fi-enabled computer running Windows XP is working fine one minute, pulling up Web pages and processing e-mail. Then, for no reason, the connection drops, websites fail to come up and the e-mail flow stops. The small wireless connection icon in the taskbar says the signal from the access point is strong, so the problem isn’t that the user wandered out of radio range. The icon even shows that the computer’s Wi-Fi hardware is sending information to the access point — it’s just not getting anything back. And manual attempts to re-establish the connection through XP’s built-in wireless configuration tool won’t do the trick. Even more bizarre, the connection sometimes comes back on its own.
From anecdotal evidence, most users assume the problem is with the Wi-Fi hardware. But the trouble seems to arise from a tool in Windows XP called Wireless Zero Configuration, a feature that was meant to do away with the mishmash of software drivers and configuration utilities.”
Microsoft disputes the notion that there’s a problem with the way Windows XP works with Wi-Fi.
“We don’t have data that suggests Windows XP drops wireless connections more than any other system,” said Greg Sullivan, the lead product manager in Microsoft’s Windows division.
Er, I can supply some data?. (Just trying to be helpful, you understand.) We have a Sony Vaio running XP, and we have often experienced the WiFi black hole problem. But we also have several Apple laptops, and I can’t recall an occasion when any of them dropped a connection, except when we’ve had power-cuts and the wireless base-station went down.
In the interest of fairness, though, I should say that connecting to a WiFi net is considerably easier with XP than with other versions of Windows. Now all MS has to do is make sure it holds onto the connection.
After train crashes, what next?
Why bus crashes of course.
Spotted by Bill Thompson (now there’s a really famous Blogger) on a London bus.
Spinning it out
Sometimes one wonders about the New York Times. I read it most days on the Web, and find it useful and exasperating in equal measure. Being accustomed to writing for a British newspaper — where there is always desperate competition for space — I’m irritated by the way NYT journalists are allowed to spin their stuff out. Witness this piece in today’s Times which takes forever to say two things: (a) Google has a lot of PhDs working for it, actively recruits only PhDs and builds research and development into their daily jobs; (b) Microsoft doesn’t especially require recruits to have PhDs, and corrals its R&D into a separate research division. On a British newspaper it would be a 400-word piece at most. But then, we operate in a viciously competitive market, whereas the NYT has a near-monopoly in its market.