Adam Osborne dies

Adam Osborne has died. He was an early columnist for personal computer magazines, book author and publisher, and founder of Osborne Computer. Dan Bricklin has a remembrance of Osborne including an audio recording. [Source: Scripting News] There is also a NYT obituary by John Markoff.

This takes me back. I had one of the Osborne ‘portable’ computers, and I loved it, even if I wound up with one arm longer than the other from lugging it about. It resembled a cross between a fancy sewing machine and a Korean War army communications console. But it came with Wordstar, the first decent word-processing program I’d ever used, and I wrote hundreds of thousands of words with it. The downside was that its twin disk drives were terribly unreliable, so I was never sure that it wasn’t about to trash my data. As coincidence would have it, one of my colleagues brought in his old Osborne portable yesterday and booted it up. It worked. Ah, those were the days! If you hang on a moment, I’ll tell you about the battle of Omdurman.

This war is different, says Tommy Franks. Yes, but not in the way he thinks

Fine piece in the Guardian by Brian Whitaker, which says, in part:

“Most wars start by accident or with a flourish of misplaced jingoism. But this war is unique. It is hard to recall any conflict in history that aroused so much opposition even before it began. At best its legitimacy and purpose is in serious doubt. At worst, millions regard it as illegal and/or immoral.

Besides that, it is led by a president for whom few outside the United States have any respect. Just as the onus was placed on Iraq, during the period of inspections, to prove that it had no weapons of mass destruction, the onus now is on the invasion forces to convince a sceptical world of their bona fides. This is probably impossible to do, since the official and unofficial aims of the war cannot be reconciled.

One example of confused messages came on the first day with the attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Apart from looking hasty and opportunistic, it conflicted with argument made during the UN inspection process that the main goal was to disarm Iraq. …”.

It’s different in other ways too. For example, US and British politicians are baffled by the fact that the ‘unity effect’ is less powerful than hitherto. Up to now, when troops were finally committed, the polulation tended to rally behind them. But that isn’t happening to anything like the same extent just now. Why? In an interesting article (also in today Guardian, Peter Preston argues that it’s partly because it’s been sold as a high-tech, low-collateral-damage war waged by machines. And people won’t rally behind machines.

A real, live Iraqi Blog? Or a clever spoof?

See for yourself.

Get Your War On.  [Boing Boing Blog] [t e c h n o c u l t u r e]

SplashPower’s mat charges your gizmos

“You could soon be saying goodbye to having several different chargers for all your handheld gadgets like your mobile phone or MP3 player,” says the BBC. Plug SpashPower’s mat into the mains, plonk down your gizmos and they are charged by magnetic induction. [onlineblog.com]

CNN and the denial of death: more from Scott Rosenberg
This most humane of US journalists writes…

“I just haven’t had it in me to go bonkers posting war links — links wondering about whether that was Saddam or a double, links wondering why shock and awe hasn’t started yet, shocked and awed links now that it has, and so on. Mostly I’m pitching in with my colleagues here, where we keep asking ourselves what stories should be covered that others haven’t already over-covered.

During times like this the onslaught of pure informational noise is so overwhelming that one feels reluctant to contribute to it.

TV is the worst. On the one hand, I feel obligated to tune in, because these are the images the whole nation is taking in as representations of this conflict, and I better know them. On the other, I could only bear about a half hour of CNN this afternoon before having to turn it off.

A correspondent had cornered the leader of a bomber sortie on the deck of an aircraft carrier; the flier had just landed, we were told, just gotten out of his plane, and here was CNN’s embeddee, buttonholing him with a microphone. Oh, he was game, smiling, still soaring on adrenaline, no doubt thrilled to be back and alive and with all of his men. But — and I say this as a charge against the medium, not against the man in uniform, who I’m sure if he had a choice in the matter would not have picked Mr. CNN as his first stop out of the cockpit — there was something obscene about the whole thing. Nothing in that carrier-deck exchange acknowledged the gravity of the moment, the fact that this man had just returned from dropping massive explosives on the ground, weapons that had quite possibly left people — enemy soldiers, civilians; human beings — dead.

War kills people. Whether you feel that this war is justified or not, whether you agree with Bush’s decision to invade or not, you cannot truly “support our soldiers” without acknowledging the skull beneath the skin of battle — without staying conscious of the fact that everyone involved, on both sides, is in mortal jeopardy as long as this war proceeds.

For all the whizzbang 3D maps and crawling newsblip texts and live satellite feeds and pyrotechnic skyline shots, the hyperactive screens of the cable news channels have no room for this one truth. And to me that makes the whole medium feel like a lie.” [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

The fug of war

One of the things that infuriates me about Bush-style warfare is the way it turns grown journalists into zombies. Witness the way they have breathlessly repeated the ludicrous phrase “shock and awe”. Apart from the fact that it represents the lexicon of the kindergarten, it has an interesting racist overtone. What it really says is this: “We are going to show these primitive folks some of our technological magic so that they can be impressed by our power and sophistication”. White man have big flying machine hit bullseye heap good. One expects this kind of bullshit from military jargonauts. But why do adult journalists have to repeat it verbatim? The explanation is, of course, that they are themselves overawed. In my experience, very few journalists are actually immune to the halo-effect of great power or great wealth.

Wonderful piece by Scott Rosenberg about Bush and the war

He was invited by Dave Winer to publish it via DaveNet in the hope of giving it an even wider audience. It deserves it.

Really useful advice from Her Majesty’s Government

What to do in the event of a chemical or biological attack? Why, “go indoors and listen for specific instructions which will be broadcast on the radio”. We should also take “sensible precautions” such as having battery powered torches, radio, ready to eat food, bottled water and blankets close to hand. However, the government says there is no need at present to take further measures such as stockpiling food or buying a gasmask.

Phew! I feel better already.

Larry Lessig on Michael Powell and the FCC’s attitude towards spectrum

Larry thinks that Michael (son of Colin) Powell may, in the long run, come to be more famous than his father. Why? Because the FCC Chairman is beginning to flirt with the idea that maybe the electromagnetic spectrum should be a commons rather than a monopoly resource to be allocated or sold by government. This links with my earlier pointer to David Reed’s conjecture that the notion of finite spectrum is based on a fundamental misconception.