Thought for the Day

From the Notebook of Lazarus Long:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”

- Robert A. Heinlein

Thoughts on the Maersk Alabama piracy case

Captain Phillips is safe, and I am elated, because of incidental ties to many of the players: U.S. merchant seaman from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and the U.S. Navy. They represent values and standards thought by many to be passe; thank goodness they are still alive and well in some parts of our society.

As my brief bio mentions, I attended the United States Naval Academy for several months in the 1970's. I entered in 1972, when respect for military service was at a low. At a time when service people were being spat on in airports, my classmates and I got our heads (nearly) shaved and started learning how far we could stretch ourselves, and the importance of being there for our classmates (and knowing it was mutual).

I got through plebe summer and the first academic semester, which I was told was "the hard part." Although I chose to leave, I left with an enduring respect for the service and the people who comprise it, reinforced by first-hand experiences with the officers and midshipmen I was privileged to know.

Fast forward thirty-plus years. My son applied to and entered Massachusetts Maritime Academy. MMA is part of the state college system, with major differences. The school is organized as a military academy: incoming freshmen endure an intense two-week orientation modeled in part on the national service academies, then continue the regimentation into the academic year, with morning formations, inspections, uniforms, and the like. The goal is to instill the responsibility and dependability into men and women who will someday have to depend on each other in trying or hazardous situations at sea.

It amazed me that non-military college students were willing to put up with it, but they do, and as civilian college students they are in a class unto themselves. MMA students are rightfully proud of their educations, and great representatives of the school with core values sadly lacking among their contemporaries from more "respected" schools.

[I'm sad to say my son flunked out of MMA, but I think he now recognizes that he learned valuable things there and earned pride in accomplishments nobody can take away from him.]

Moving to the present, I see all those ideals, treated with "derisiveness" (to quite Obama) by modern liberals, lived out by Captain Phillips and his rescuers. Captain Phillips put himself at risk on behalf of his crew, and you could see the mutual loyalty reflected in his crew after they had been freed and he was still captive. The Navy SEALs put themselves in harms way to position themselves to rescue Captain Phillips, and, when the moment came, all acted decisively and courageously.

I am thankful to live in a society that can still produce people such as these, in spite of the popular sentiments of the day, and proud to have been a member of the community even for for so short a time and so long ago. I resolve to be more worthy of the sacrifices they are willing to make, and remember, when the air conditioning isn't working right or bonuses aren't being paid, that there are more meaningful definitions of "adverse working conditions."

Dealing with the Somali pirates

From the New York Times, April 11, 2009 (I'm not linking because it requires registration to read):

"But any effort to wipe out Somali pirate dens like Xarardheere or Eyl immediately conjures up the ghost of “Black Hawk Down,” the episode in 1993 when clan militiamen in flip-flops killed 18 American soldiers. Until America can get over that, and until the world can put Somalia together as a nation, another solution suggests itself: just steer clear — way clear, like 500 miles plus — of Somalia’s seas."

Fuck that; as the column points out, the U.S. Navy cut its eyeteeth on fighting the Barbary Coast pirates, and since then has never been afraid to show the flag in any international waters. We need to get over — not forget, get over — "Black Hawk Down", grow a spine, and put an end to this.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Obama administration has that kind of spine.

Can the Mac survive success?

[Old entry that apparently never made it to the blog. Still relevant.]

This column, way more articulately (if somewhat obscurely), raises a point I have hoped to worry about for years.

From the beginning of the Macintosh, Apple promoted user interface guidelines to encourage developers to accept and adopt common look-and-feel for common operations. The premise was that users of applications should be presented with familiar interfaces for commonly performed operations, so that the learning curve for adopting a new application would be as shallow as possible.

A simple case in point is file-open and -save dialogs. Apple strongly promoted adopting a standard user interface to this common operation, so that users of new applications would not have to learn new ways to perform a common operation. This was drilled into early Mac developers, and accepted as common wisdom.

By contrast, when MS-DOS developers became Windows developers, there was less of an ethic for consistent user interfaces. I distinctly remember Windows developers at Lotus seeking to implement "better" file-open and -save dialogs than those standard to Windows.

This sounds trivial, but it's fundamental: in those formative days, Mac developers defined themselves by how well (and, sometimes, creatively), they could adopt the platform standards, and Windows developers focused on how they could perform common operations "better" (i.e., differently).

As time went on, the Mac community, users and developers alike, embraced the guidelines and held developers accountable. I remember this as a developer of Lotus 1-2-3 for Macintosh, presenting the product to users at MacWorld Expo and listening to their critiques. I saw it again as the architect of Symantec C++ for Power Macintosh, representing the product to our customers (other developers), and being held to the same standard.

The Macintosh community, users and developers alike, mandated adherence to platform standards, and became informed judges of what was acceptable innovation. From my point of view, this worked to benefit of all Mac users.

Today, the Mac is being adopted by large numbers of former Windows users, and there is a lot of pressure to accommodate those users by addressing their sensitivities. In other words, there is a point of view that the Mac platform should adjust itself to the expectations of the legions of former Windows user who are now adopting the Mac.

I understand the logic, but I think it's a horrible idea.

People who have been attracted to the Mac have, by definitions, accepted a certain degree of change. I don't think we, as Mac developers, should give into the temptation to accommodate the expectations of neophytes.

It isn't voter fraud unless...

This is just ridiculous.

The defense offered in this story (and many others) is that "There are no known instances of fictitious people actually voting...". Are you kidding? We're supposed to shrug off bogus voter registrations as unimportant unless there's an actual vote? There's nothing suspicious about registering non-existent (or dead, or ineligible) people to vote?

So it's OK if I pollute my town's voter rolls with hundreds of false voter registrations unless (until) somebody actually votes under a false registration?

It doesn't matter that the election workers have to deal with the noise of bogus registrations? Faced with reports of bogus registrations, I would expect (hope) that election workers would be more careful vetting voters on Election Day. But maybe then we'll hear that voters are being "harassed" or "suppressed".

Try this on as a conspiracy theory:

ACORN (or somebody else) contrives to falsely register thousands of bogus voter names, and they (and the press) shrug it off as "not real voter fraud, because nobody has actually tried to vote (yet) under a bogus registration."

But election officials, faced with reports of bogus registrations, are compelled to examine voter credentials more closely on Election Day.

"Closer examination" of voter credentials is deemed by some to be "voter suppression."

So we're faced with two possible outcomes (under the assumption that massive registration fraud has taken place): many fraudulent votes are cast, and/or there are charges of "voter suppression" when thousands of voters (most or all legitimate) are subjected to unusual scrutiny (in an effort to eliminate fraudulent voters).

Consider some possibilities:

Obama wins, but there are challenges about those thousands of false registrations sponsored by ACORN, an organization he has worked with in the past and actually contracted with to foster voter registrations.

Or...

McCain wins, but there are complaints of "voter suppression" as election workers try to screen out the false voters represented by the bogus registrations.

It's a no-lose situation for ACORN, set up by themselves.

John McCain and Me

I attended the United States Naval Academy for a brief time: I was inducted on July 6th, 1972, endured Plebe Summer (a sort of Basic Training for midshipmen), and the first semester of the academic year, then resigned at the beginning of second semester.

It's a complicated story: I am immensely proud of being accepted, enduring Plebe Summer, and being a part of the Class of '76, even though I decided not to continue, for complicated reasons best discussed in another post.

It was a trying time. Plebe Summer is designed to push you past limits you thought you had and recognize that you can perform at higher levels than you believed possible. Once you think you've got it under control, academic year arrives with the pressures of new upperclassmen, academics, and new responsibilities. I probably performed at the highest levels of effectiveness in my life, but received the poorest feedback (a 2.58 GPA, which wasn't half bad, in retrospect), and decided that "I wasn't good at it" and decided to bail and study Computer Science at WPI (which has worked out very nicely, as it turns out).

My time at USNA was probably the longest eight months of my life.

While I was there, we were very much aware of what was happening to previous USNA graduates, including Marines (the Marines are a branch of the Navy, and many Marine officers come from the academy), river boat ("Swift boat) forces, and, of course, Navy pilots.

Now let's compare:

John McCain was a graduate of the academy (in an era where the life of a mid was even more strenuous than mine), and had walked the same halls I had in Bancroft Hall. He had become a prisoner of war on October 26th, 1967, when I was in eighth grade. He was tortured or neglected for most of the time I was in high school. He had been a prisoner for almost five years before I started my "ordeal" at the academy, and he was released about a month after I left.

My point:

I believe that I have been tested, and succeeded to a degree, to an extent that few Americans have. I take a certain pride in that.

John McCain has been tested to an immeasurably greater degree, and passed those tests admirably.

I will follow him anywhere.

And I close my ears to those who will belittle him.

"McCain scares me"

I've heard this comment from a couple of people recently, and it really bugs me.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because I hear he's a hothead? Do we want someone like that with his finger on the nuclear button?"

Please. McCain will tell you himself that he has a temper; he's even committed it to print in at least one of his books.

But how do you get from shouting an occasional epithet in a Senate anteroom to nuking a country in a fit of anger? It's absurd.

In fact, I can make a case that John McCain is one of the most forgiving people on the planet.

It is commonly accepted that McCain was abused, as were so many others, during his 5+ year ordeal as a POW in North Vietnam. (How many people have endured more than 5 years of anything as unpleasant? No marriage jokes allowed.) But McCain has been in the lead in normalizing relations between Viet Nam and the USA. The memories are still there, but he rises above them.

In 2000, McCain and his family were the target of some vicious and personal smears by pro-Bush forces during the primary campaign. After the election, McCain was able to support Bush when he found it appropriate. (I ask you to set aside the not-unreasonable question as to whether McCain should have supported Bush in those circumstances; the point here is that McCain was able to overcome his personal anger when the situation warranted.)

The bottom line: John McCain is the most tested candidate for president than we've seen for years, comparing favorably to JFK's and DDE's war experiences and exceeding everybody else since then. I can think of very few people I would trust more in a stressful situation.

The abridged version

Jeff Jacoby sums it up in today's Boston Globe.

Dissecting the financial crisis

This video provides an almost too-quick narrative of the path to the current financial crisis. I suspect many will be turned off by the production values or the obvious perspective of the creator, but the pattern of facts is hard to ignore.

It may not be the economy, but it's a mess; whose mess?!?

The depths to which some will go

This is just sick.

From my reading of history, there is maybe one truth in this garbage: the North Vietnamese did refer to McCain as "The Prince" because his father was CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief Pacific), and maybe even sought to leverage that status. But beyond one (contrived) "confession" that McCain acknowledges and regrets, the assertion than he cooperated is ludicrous, insulting, and, ultimately, reflects on the credibility of Rhodes and rest of Air America.

Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs

I ask you to read this letter, multiply-derefenced through Curt Schilling's blog.

To some, it's going to sound like a lecture from Jack Nicholson's character in "A Few Good Men." But the Real People who take on the role of the sheepdog are much more human than the caricature in that movie.

Pravda

For those who don't remember, "Pravda" ("The Truth") was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party during the Cold War, and the great irony was that it frequently published flagrant distortions of fact.

Today, we were treated to a news item that Russia considers events in South Ossetia in August were somehow equivalent to 9/11:

"The world has changed and it occurred to me that August 8 2008 has become for Russia as September 11 2001 for the United States. This is an accurate comparison corresponding to Russian realities.
"Humankind has drawn lessons from September 11 tragedy and other tragic events. I would like the world to draw lessons also from these events [in South Ossetia]."

I am probably uninformed about what was happening in South Ossetia in early August, but I have some idea, and I am at a loss to understand how it somehow compares to the attempted (and somewhat successful) simultaneous attack on the economic, military, and political nerve centers of the USA in September of 2001. It strikes me as an incredibly shallow attempt to establish "moral equivalency" to the response of the 9/11 attacks, and it's all the more disturbing that the "free press" in the West is not challenging it.

Dissecting a media attack on Sarah Palin

Howard Kurtz, "reporting" on Charlie Gibson's "gotcha" on Sarah Palin in his interview on "20/20":

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

On Fox, Newt Gingrich called this "a sad commentary on the growing anti-religious hostility of the news media." I would call it asking the governor about her own words.


Glenn Beck, who I'm normally not inclined to quote, addressed this canard before the interview:

There has been some hard-core journalistic malpractice on this one. The Associated Press ran this headline about a speech she gave at her church: "Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God'"

In the story, they omit the first part of the sentence they're quoting along with the entire previous sentence for good measure.

Here are her actual words: "Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

Palin is clearly praying that we're doing the right thing in Iraq, something sensible for an introspective woman of faith concerned about the lives of our troops to do. She's not saying that she just received a text message from heaven's BlackBerry ordering her to launch missiles. Sorry to disappoint you.

And for those of you who think politicians asking God for guidance is offensive, might I remind you of this famous politician's prayer:

"Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will." --Barack Obama


Indeed, Lincoln is reported to have said:

"Some time in the early part of the war a clergy man said in his presence that he "hoped the Lord was on our side.' "I am not at all concerned about that," replied Mr. Lincoln. 'For I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right, but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.' "


To me, it's clear that Palin was channeling Lincoln's hope, not making an arrogant assertion. And Gibson's quote within his question was flagrantly out of context.

A final note: several sources have noted that Palin was at a disadvantage in an interview that could be (and was) aggressively edited by the network that aired it.

This needs to be seen

I'm linking to Curt Schilling's blog, because he deserves the credit for calling attention to it:

Please take a minute.

Experience & Expectations

[I've lost about 5 posts to issues between MarsEdit and Blogger; hopefully they're fixed.]

1) Many Obama supporters are screaming about Sarah Palin's supposed insufficient experience to be President, ranging from outraged to snarky to childish. (Matt Damon, not that I take him seriously, even postulated Palin as President.) Do they really want to have a conversation about the relative experience of the candidates? Especially comparing a proposed President-in-waiting to a proposed President-to-be? It appears that they don't, but it's going to happen if they keep challenging Palin's experience.

2) Likewise, they are screaming that Palin must submit to press interviews immediately, clearly because they expect her to fail the test. In doing so, they are lowering expectations, and a merely competent performance by Palin will seem like a brilliant success.

Lots of catching up to do...

Apple has been very busy, and I can't avoid politics any more. Where to start...?

Test Post

Trying to get MarsEdit to recognize my account.

Is Boot Camp As Ingenious As I Think It Might Be?

I blogged this on 6/14/05:

On the other hand, if Apple ships boxes that can run OS X and Windows XP, but generic PCs are precluded from running OS X, Apple keeps (virtually) all of its existing hardware customer base, and adds to that Windows users who either a) are attracted to Apple's better hardware designs, or b) want the option of migrating to OS X later. All upside, no downside, excluding the Mac users that Apple loses to Windows, which I believe to be a very small number, and even some of them will hedge their bets with dual-purpose hardware.

Let's look at what Boot Camp has done with respect to that scenario. Basically, Boot Camp provides a quintessentially Apple approach to configuring a dual boot system: partition the disk, set up a boot loader to choose a boot volume, and install the alternate OS (Windows) on the new partition. The Apple touches: most of the installation runs in the familiar application mode (as opposed to a character-based installer), and you can re-partition your disk without destroying your existing data (it's been done before, but it's not common).

The interesting nuances: the process pretty much assumes that you are only going to install at most two OS's, and one of them is always OS X.

The bottom line is that Apple has made it very easy to buy Apple hardware and run Windows on it, but OS X always remains as a boot option. These constituencies are served:

Committed Mac users don't care; they don't use Boot Camp, and continue to use their Macs to run OS X.

People who would prefer to use OS X but need to use Windows in a pinch use Boot Camp to set up their Windows environment on their Mac hardware, and re-boot as needed to switch environments (as dual boot users do for other permutations, such as Windows/Linux).

People who would prefer to use Windows but are attracted to Apple's elegant hardware buy the hardware, configure it for dual boot, then set Windows as the default.

Apple has already made a killing: the loyal Mac base doesn't notice the change, a very small percentage of people who want to run the two OS's and are willing to deal with the complexities can do so, but the killing lies in the people who buy Apple hardware to run Windows. If you stipulate that Apple currently has 4% market share in system sales, if 1% of Windows users buy Apple hardware, that's a nearly 25% increase in Apple's hardware sales (where all the margins are). That's a compelling number all by itself, but there's more.

Remember, under normal circumstances, even those Apple machines that are running Windows all the time have retained their ability to boot into OS X, even if their owners aren't planning on doing so. The only downside for those users is that some portion of their hard-drive space is "wasted" on the OS X partition; but these days, hard drives are typically so big that this isn't likely to be an issue for a while.

Now suppose that at some point in the future, Apple introduces something akin to Wine, which enables Windows executables to be run from within the OS X environment. This is not wild speculation; Wine is already pretty robust under Linux.

At this speculative stage, we have people running Windows on Apple hardware who now have the option to boot their previously dormant OS X partitions and continue to use the applications and data that they have been using via Windows. All of a sudden, a Windows user who happens to own Apple hardware now finds it almost completely painless to boot into OS X and continue to use the Windows applications and documents on their Windows partition. These users lose (practically) none of the capabilities or data that they were using under Windows, and gain the additional (and, IMHO, attractive) capabilities of OS X. For these users, there is little or no downside to configuring their machines to boot into OS X instead of Windows, and if they find a problem, they can switch back to Windows without having lost anything.

As an admitted Mac zealot, I assume that a substantial percentage of Windows-centric Apple owners would choose to start booting into OS X, and start pointing out to their Wintel-using friends that they've achieved full compatibility on Apple hardware. And the already-beneficial trend would continue.

My Cup Runneth Over

I've had the MacBook Pro for about a month now, and it was worth every day of the wait. For most things, the perceived performance is on a par with my dual 2GHz G5, and there's no perceived difference when I run PowerPC binaries under Rosetta. (It should be noted that none of my performance-intensive work is done under Rosetta.)

In my spare time, I'm trying to get the MacBook set up to work with my HDTV:

- I've got the video connected with a DVI cable. The MacBook is capable of driving the built-in display and the HDTV separately, but FrontRow seems to require configuring the Mac to mirror the displays. Makes sense, assuming the long-term goal is to sell the Mini or something like it as a set-top box where the TV is the only display.

(By the way, what's with the price of DVI cables? Radio Shack had them listed online for about $12, and there was even an empty hook at the store so marked, but all I could find in stock at RS, Circuit City, etc. was $100+ DVI cables. Methinks someone is artificially jacking up the price as an "anti-piracy" initiative...)

- I still don't have sound figured out. The MacBook and the TV both purportedly support digital audio, but the only input jacks available on the set are what look like a normal pair of RCA jacks for analog audio. I used a cheap analog mini-plug-to-RCA-pair cable, but the sound quality is terrible, as expected.

This could become a dream setup: set-top box via Front Row, or settle in to the leather recliner with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a 50" display for "work"...