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 Monday, June 17, 2002
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We watched Mulholland Drive Sunday evening. David Lynch is very good at creating atmosphere, and very bad -- or perhaps merely disinterested -- in creating narrative. I love him for the former, and I loathe him for the latter. With this movie, he's cleverly figured out how to combine the two without compromise. I fully expected to finish my two and half hours feeling puzzled, entertained, and still vaguely disappointed; but instead I finished the movie intrigued and satisfied. It's a Hollywood dream, and it's dreamed skillfully.
(Salon has a pretty good WTF piece that tries to explain what happened in the film; beware -- chock full o' spoilers.) 11:50:38 PM () 
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Beijing Closes Internet Cafes. A city official said Monday that the move was motivated strictly by safety concerns, but the closures coincide with a nationwide crackdown on Internet cafes. Thousands of such businesses have been shut down over the past year for failing to install software to track which sites users visit. [AP World News] 7:54:45 PM ()
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Two Singapore programmers claim to have created an operating system that can run programs written for Windows as well as Linux. [via cnet]
It's very difficult to determine from this article whether or not this is just a VNC system, or if it's a more sophisticated approach. The article implies that computation is being done locally on the handheld device, and it's only when you do something like saving that the call is redirected to the server.
But my bullshit detector is in overdrive; what they're describing seems pretty magical. Any kind of serious emulation is almost by definition NOT as lightweight as they describe. So it may be that they have one or two cute cases where they can do work offline, and they're puffing it up. Or it may be that the cute tricks are sufficient to keep bandwidth low, but that the ability to work offline is just smoke and mirrors.
It just sounds like too many academic papers I've seen where someone has "invented" something that's supposed to be revolutionary, but only applies to three cases that you only care about if you're a grad student. 11:30:30 AM ()
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Top Quotes from IRC
My favorites:
#4278
<BombScare> i beat the internet
<BombScare> the end guy is hard
#5273
<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. 10:49:35 AM ()
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Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) has a very interesting essay on what the business motivation is for a company like IBM to put significant weight behind open source software. The upshot is every product has a complement (the thing which goes with the product: bread & jam, plane tickets & hotel rooms, hardware & software), and that the price of a product goes up when the price of its complement goes down. And that OSS is the complement in many of these cases for whatever these companies are trying to sell. It's not a surprising argument, but it's an interesting and well argued one.
There's a small bit at the end (where he's arguing that it's hardware for software to be an interchangeable commodity than for hardware) where he sez:
And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between. Despite the fact that Mozilla has all the features I want and I'd love to use it if only to avoid the whack-a-mole pop-up-ad game, I'm too used to hitting Alt+D [in Internet Explorer] to go to the address bar. So sue me. One tiny difference and you lose your commodity status.
It's interesting, because IE on OS X is a distinctively subpar experience compared to IE on XP. So for much the same reasons as he gives above, it was easy for Mozilla to edge out IE for me, because it did 95% of what IE does (it's mostly a commodity), but adds a few distinctive features (tabbed browsing, support for Quartz anti-aliased text, and pop-under ad suppression) that make it totally worthwhile for me. Because the product essentially behaves the same, the extra cost of learning the few differences was small in comparison to the cost of staying with IE.
However, I'm an "early adopter" type guy; most people just don't even contemplate making the switch unless they're forced to (e.g., they hit some wall where they can't solve a problem with the old tool). When I show Mozilla to friends, they say "that's cool, I need that!" But they don't switch :). On the other hand, when I actually installed Mozilla on Carrie's Mac, she thought it was awesome and has expressed no desire to go back (and Carrie is not an early adopter type). 9:21:52 AM ()
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