Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2001
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com
"I may be totally wrong, but I'm a dancin' fool." — Frank Zappa
According to The Marine Times, the U.S. Marine Corps "is preparing to unveil perhaps the biggest breakthrough in weapons since the atomic bomb." It's sort of an itch ray, the story goes on to explain. I think The Marine Times needs to turn on its hyperbole checker.
Microsoft's Jim Allchin unleashed the rhetorical nukes on Open Source software recently as he defended the American Way, doing a little harm to Truth and Justice in the process: "I'm an American, I believe in the American Way. I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat." Nice euphemism, that "education."
If you can't make people smarter, make their tools smarter. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, small-aircraft manufacturers, and university researchers are working on a technological plan to turn flying a small private plane into "a task the average 12-year-old could accomplish with one hand while working a Game Boy with the other," according to Technology Review. Flying for Dummies.
Or just dumb down the whole world. The Province of South Australia has outlawed the posting of any content anywhere on the Internet that is offensive to children in South Australia. People in other countries who are uncertain as to just what might constitute an offense to a South Australian child can check with the South Australia police, who will be charged under the law to use their own judgment on this tricky question.
These Internet legal issues are just so darn tough. A German judge has shut down file-swapping web sites run by owners of the domains gnutella.de and newtella.de. The case didn't have anything to do with the legality of file swapping, though; the Italian company that makes the nougat spread Nutella was afraid that people would confuse distributed peer-to-peer file sharing with its tasty topping.
That would be a dumb mistake, but not as dumb as IBM's. Two weeks after being accused of being the software solution provider for the Nazi death camps, IBM is reported to be holding up insurance payments to Holocaust survivors over a million dollars in disputed software costs. It's not the million dollars, of course, it's the principle of the thing. Principled Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says that cutting 1700 jobs is "very consistent with the HP way." Ditto for delaying raises, curtailing discretionary spending, and reducing the size of cubicles, I assume. Is this called making a virtue of a necessity?
Israeli scientists have created an Eliza-like program that can carry on a conversation at the intellectual level of a 15-month-old child. That's somewhat above the current level of Israeli-Palestinian political debate in the area, but maybe they can downgrade it and send it to the negotiating table.
After researching the technology behind electronic paper for 20 years, Xerox PARC now looks on as others take it to market. That's Xerox: They don't just make a mistake once, they crank out multiple copies of it. If you can't make airplanes and origami out of it, shred it for packing material, or line the bird cage with it, is it fair to call e-paper paper? With rewritable e-paper, will the term "paper trail" fall out of use, along with the promotional fountain pen displaying your garage's name? A decade into the e-paper revolution, will academics be publishing optimistic but unconvincing dissertations on the coming e-paperless office?
For a certain community, web advertising is a necessity. If annoying banner ads don't work, the logical thing to do is to make them bigger, right? That's the current creative reasoning from the online ad community. At a time when e-businesses are bending over backward to assure their customers that they will treat their private data with the utmost respect for privacy (well, many e-businesses are), Network Associates gloats about the customer data that it is ready to sell to direct marketers: "Available for the first time ever. Approximately 6 million unique customers, sliced and diced for you...Take this information and run with it."
The U.S. Treasury Department requires that American astronauts go through customs. You never know who they might have run into up there. British astronauts, if any, would presumably have to be screened for foot-and-mouth disease.
They may be totally wrong, but you've got to admire their chutzpah.