Amy Wohl‘s always excellent — and free — newsletter reports on a Linux for Desktops conference:

Nat Friedman of Ximian (another Novell acquisition), offered a lively presentation, pointing out that the Linux desktop is ready now and that most of the problem is that of a mismatch between what’s there and user expectations, rather than of something being wrong. … Nat notes that users turn to the Linux desktop for control and choice first, and lower cost, second. Barriers remain application availability, interoperability (file formats, network protocols, device drivers), and the cost of support (mainly because of the need for better usability and more manageability tools).

Usability? Hah! If you want to see the barrier to desktop Linux’s acceptance, watch over my shoulder one day as I try to use KDE or Gnome to do ordinary tasks such as keeping my MP3 player running if any other sound is emitted (oh yeah, guessing which processes are audio ones so that I can then manually Kill them hoping that I got the right one is reaaaal user friendly) or downloading and installing a new application. Fabulous end user experiences.

Lord love Linux and godspeed to it, but desktop Linux is so Windows 3.0.

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I’ve was asked yesterday to pre-register for an event because of security concerns. (Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of England is speaking.) I’m refusing. Oh, I’m happy to register. But I draw the line at pre-registering unless I’m registering before the registration process begins.

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From Living Networks (the book) by Ross Dawson comes this Fun Fact:

In 1421, the government of Florence award the world’s first patent to Filippo Brunelleschi for a means of bringing goods up the usually unnavigable river Arno to the city. He demanded and was duly awarded legal protection for his invention, being given the right for three years to burn any competitor’s ship that incorporated his design. (p. 92)

How brutal and primitive! Now, of course, we take a much more civilized approach to patent infringement: We sue, destroying not just the boat but the factory, the business, the distributors’ business, and the future ability of all those who ever worked on the infringing object to earn a living ever again…unless of course the boat could be used for terrorist purposes in which case we can whisk the inventor and manufacturer away to get a twelve year tan at Guantanamo.

BTW, the source Ross cites says that before this first patent, inventors and scientists “used ciphers such as Leonardo’s mirror-image script” to protect their ideas. Now, of course, writing backwards violates the US PATRIOT Act.

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Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist in the Boston Globe. His response today (link will break tomorrow) to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling permitting gay marriage is to warn us — Sanctorumly — that we’ve started down a slippery slope towards polygamy and incest. After all, he writes, one of the dissenting judges said that state’s equal rights amendment was cited in the Court’s decision, and the Boston Globe in 1976 had dismissed the claim that “the amendment would…legitimize marriage between people of the same sex.” Yet, 27 years later, that’s exactly what’s happened. Likewise, in 1989, the Globe editorialized that the gay rights law does not “put Massachusetts on a ‘slippery slope’ towards” a right to gay marriage.

Cool research. But I seem not to be following Jacoby’s logic here. The ERA of the Massachusetts Constitution started us down a slippery slope that has led to gay marriage. This is evidence that the gay marriage ruling will lead us down a slippery slope to polygamy and incest. Thus the gay marriage ruling is bad. That’s his reasoning, right?

But doesn’t that logic also mean that the ERA was bad? Does Jacoby really want to maintain that guaranteeing equal rights for women was a bad thing for the state? “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.” Yeah, there’s a slope we should be afraid to get on. Who knows where it could lead?

And there’s an argument just as good as Jacoby’s that says that the 15th Amendment started us down the slippery slope to the ERA. Damn Abolitionists!

You know, there’s a reason why the slippery slope argument is classified as a fallacy. Jacoby’s just illustrated it.

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The S.P.E.W. Factor is what most of the contributors to the Word Pirates page think Word Pirates is about. (Thanks to Tom Wilson for the link.)

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Here’s a map that shows you where each candidate’s money is coming from. Interesting. (Thanks to Darhl Stultz for the link.)

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I’ve been guest blogging at the Corante Many2Many site and just posted an entry on how non-rich connections enable social networks.

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An article in the Boston Globe (online today and tomorrow only) reports on an interview with Dean in which he calls for “reregulation“:

In an interview around midnight Monday on his campaign plane with a small group of reporters, Dean listed likely targets for what he dubbed as his “reregulation” campaign: utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Dean did not rule out “reregulating” the telecommunications industry, too.

Go Dean!

And, Gov. Dean gave an important speech yesterday that talks about the economic issues that (from my point of view) underly the question of whether the economy is trending up or down this month. Some snippets without context:

The government today is no longer working for all the people. We need a new social contract for the 21st century…

[The Bush administration has] created an economic program that enriches their friends and supporters at the expense of ordinary working Americans. A program deserving of the name — Enron Economics.”

Today, there are new technologies which can be the foundation of our economy for the next century. We can invest aggressively in them, just as our nation did when it invested in railroads, in rural electrification, and in public roads and highways.

We will never win the war on terror with a purely military strategy. Al Qaeda knows that their most powerful weapon against us is not terrorism — it is persuasion. We are waging a military campaign, but for years, they have been waging a political campaign. And our military campaign is only serving to strengthen their political argument. They are preaching fear and hatred against all that we stand for, and we are not responding.

We need a global effort to provide education, to foster democracy and to promote capitalism and economic opportunity in areas of instability. We need to champion the rights of women across the world. Above all, we must demonstrate that our vision has the interests of the world at heart, and not merely our own.

Worth reading in full.

PS: At our get-together last night, 15 of us wrote 100 letters to undecided voters in Iowa. Feels good to write the letters and even better to meet a diverse group of Dean supporters.

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Back in 1995, I was VP of Strategic Marketing at Open Text, which at the time was 25-person SGML indexing company. The company had initially built itself on a single lead project in the late ’80s: Indexing the Oxford English Dictionary. Doing a full-text index of such a massive work was considered impossible. Who could dream of indexing tens of thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words? But under the technical direction of Tim Bray, breakthroughs were made and full-text retrieval took an important step forward.

Fifteen years later, Tim Bray and Open Text have moved onto other challenges. But only now has the fruit of that original effort paid off in full. Yes, the latest issue of WordWays, the oddest journal on the planet, announces that computer-aided searches of the OED have found 523 of the 625 vowel tetragrams. A vowel tetragram, in the words of Susan Thorpe of Great Missenden, England, the author of the article, is “a group of 4 vowels unbroken by consonants.” She suggests that AQUEOUS, QUEUE, ONOMATOPOEIA, COOEE, HAWAIIAN and SEQUOIA “are perhaps the most familiar.” For example, I recently found myself saying, “The aqueous Hawaiian and great sequoia stood in a queue to ask, in onomatopoeia, what the hell a cooee is.”

Thorpe has unearthed other familiar words such as EEEEVE (the iiwi bird), BEOUIEN (tremble), IUAEIN (to hate), OUOUO (no stinting), UIUIA (type of beer), PLOIIER (ply), and MEAOUSTE (see Miaotse). If you know of words that contain UIII, OIIU, OOOU, AAAO, AUUU and about 100 others, Susan wants to hear from you.

Ah, yes, it’s the kind of day that makes your hard work figuring out how to use B-trees to encode arbitrary SGML data seem all worthwhile…

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I support gay marriage yet I found myself made unexpectedly happy by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling. I’m elated. Woohoo!

I like marriage. It’s a great thing when it works: being married has made my life into something even I like. And I no longer can see what the serious objections are to gay marriage, assuming that “Seeing men kiss on the lips is creepy” doesn’t count as a serious objection.

So, let me repeat: Woohoo! (And now begins the fight to avoid a constitutional amendment that would annul today’s joy. Sigh.)

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