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.

Broken Windows can be soooo embarrassing

Spot the deliberate mistake in this attractive puff for gee-whiz computer technology (i.e. leading-edge uselessness).

Yep — you guessed it. It’s another one of those Microsoft inactive “active desktops”! (For other sightings, see here and here.) You have to look carefully to see it, but my eagle-eyed colleague Andy Fisher spotted it. (Well, he does have a gorgeous big monitor…)

New 40-Gigabite iHOP holds up to 10,000 Pancakes

Er, from The Onion.

Thanks to Dave Hill, from whom no joke is hidden.

Mozart’s letters

Faber have just published a new edition, translated and edited by Robert Spaethling. Nick Lezard’s lovely review has persuaded me to buy it. Here’s an excerpt:

“Robert Spaethling’s approach has been, above all, to preserve the tone of the originals. I cannot quite believe this hasn’t been done before. Then again, I can. Here he is, 16 years old, in Bozen (now Bolzano), writing to his sister: ‘We are now already in Botzen [sic]. already? only! I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m sleepy, I’m lazy, but I am well. At Hall we visited the convent; I played the organ there. Botzen is a shit hole. Here is a poem by someone who was totally fed up with Botzen, and angry: Before I come back to this Botzen place, / I’d rather smack myself in the face.’ Spaethling kindly explains that he has translated the word ‘fozen’ as ‘face’, but that it also means ‘female genitals’. Spaethling says ‘face’ is ‘definitely the meaning here’, but I’m not so sure. The important thing, though, is that we are told about the alternative.”

Poppies

Why are they such evocative flowers? I photographed these earlier this evening on a roadside verge near where I live.

Technological determinism and the future of the BBC

One of the most disturbing and misleading myths current at the moment is the notion that technology must ultimately determine everything. So the commercial and anti-BBC lobby argues that the advent of multi-channel TV automatically makes an organisation like the BBC — funded by a general tax on every viewer — unjustifiable in political terms. What this view overlooks is that decisions about media are (and should be) ultimately made by politicians, not by technology. There’s interesting corroboration for this view in Paul’s Starr’s magisterial study of the history of US media, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, (Basic Books). He shows that at every stage in their evolution, US media were shaped by political choice, not by technological determinism. Or, to quote James Fallows’s excellent review,

“The decisions [Starr] describes are striking to the modern reader not so much because they turned out a certain way, but because they were made at all. They suggest a belief that societies and their governments can affect the path that technologies and markets take, rather than an acceptance of whatever the path turned out to be as inevitable. This concept seems utterly missing from current discussions of the media. Regulators and the public feel there is little they can do to steer the content or quality of the media (with the feeble exception of the F.C.C.’s punishing broadcasters for vulgarities that would barely be noticed on cable). Members of the media feel they have no choice but to give, immediately, what the market demands.”