Five years on

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My lovely Sue died five years ago today. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, just as it was then. The house is peaceful. The lilac tree we planted where she planned to put it is thriving. Life goes on, but the sense of loss endures. A few evenings ago, walking in the grounds of the church where she’s buried, I remembered Thomas Hardy’s poem, The Walk:

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

iMovie ’08: another view

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Michael has posted some interesting thoughts about the iMovie controversy. His view is that the new iMovie is a better fit with the rest of the iLife package. The old iMovie HD, he argues, is really a cut-down variation on professional editing software.

iMovie ‘08 is clearly not as flexible as iMovie HD was if you want total control over your movie, or more special effects and so on, but in return you get something that I think is much more accessible for non technical people to use. People who want to just take a few camcorder clips and put them together, cut out a few duff bits, and add some sounds and titles. iMovie 08 makes that so much easier, and that to me is what Apple’s iLife was meant to be about. iMovie HD was too complicated for that, iMovie 08 fills that gap.

Michael thinks that the actual product spectrum looks like this:

iMovie 08 — iMovie HD — Final Cut Express — Final Cut Pro

On reflection, I think he’s right.

iPhone SIM unlock software put on ice

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Hmmm… Engadget reports that:

UniquePhones (the team behind iPhoneUnlocking.com, who’ve claimed to have the second proper iPhone SIM unlock software hack) got a threatening call from AT&T’s legal team urging them to not release their software — or else. Now, we can understand why any smallish business wouldn’t exactly want lawyers repping AT&T (and Apple) breathing down their necks for a potentially market-shifting discovery — which is why the company is now officially holding the release of their SIM unlock solution indefinitely while they assess their legal position. Fair enough, but we still haven’t even had a chance to verify their solution does unlock iPhones.

However, the interesting (and possibly telling) bit comes up at the end of their release, where apparently UniquePhones is “evaluating what to eventually do with the software should they be legally denied the right to sell it.”

I mean, it’d be such a shame if it found its way onto the Net, now wouldn’t it…

The Ides of August

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This morning’s Observer column…

Irish Novelist Edna O’Brien once wrote a novel called August is a Wicked Month. Tell that to the folks who run Skype, the internet telephony service that 200 million people worldwide now habitually use for voice calls and instant messaging, and you’ll be rewarded with rueful nods….

Quagmire news

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I’ve rarely seen a more revolting spectacle than that of George W. Bush — who, remember, dodged the Vietnam draft — lecturing his countrymen on the ‘lessons’ of Vietnam.

But it’s interesting that he was at least implicitly acknowledging that the Iraq fiasco is beginning to resemble the Vietnam adventure ( a comparison that nobody who’s ever read Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly would have missed). At the beginning of the Iraq adventure, Administration officials used to deny the validity of any such comparison.

Now comes a New York Times report of a new US Intelligence Assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — A stark assessment released Thursday by the nation’s intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year.

References in the report to Al Qaeda in Iraq are to a homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led.

The assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, casts strong doubts on the viability of the Bush administration strategy in Iraq. It gives a dim prognosis on the likelihood that Iraqi politicians can heal deep sectarian rifts before next spring, when American military commanders have said that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq.

But the report also implicitly criticizes proposals offered by Democrats, including several presidential candidates, who have called for a withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by next year and for a major shift in the American approach, from manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations to lower-profile efforts aimed at supporting Iraqi troops and carrying out quick-strike counterterrorism raids.

Such a shift, the report says, would “erode security gains achieved thus far” and could return Iraq to a downward spiral of sectarian violence.

The real message of the report (available here in pdf) is that the US cannot go forward — and cannot go back). Which is not a bad working definition of a quagmire.

One of the more intriguing things about Tuchman’s analysis is how a weak and incompetent government — the Saigon administration — could effectively control a superpower, because the weaker the South Vietnam regime became, the more the US was sucked into propping it up. Now it’s becoming clear that the Iraqi government is incapable of running the country, and the Americans are experiencing the same pressures as they did in Vietnam. The main difference is that then the US had a conscript army (minus the draft-dodging contingent of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Clinton et al), whereas now it’s exploiting — and over-stretching — its professional forces.