On internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner writes:

The Republic of Estonia is under a massive cyber onslaught that apparently is targeting government servers in a broad-based distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Quantitative data points the finger at a broadly based attack, but speculation is rampant that the Russian government is behind it.

He calls in an expert, Jose Nazario, who is a software and security engineer for the Arbor Networks Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS). It's a distributed botnet, he says, and there is also evidence that there are different attacking groups and it's not just one botnet behind it, which makes it harder to take down.

This is something that doesn't require a government . . . though one gets the strong feeling that the Russian government is, in some way, behind this. Whether Putin has been in on it, I've no idea. It's the kind of thing that might start out as a policy initiative but then takes control of itself, like a distributed terrorist network.

This may be the nature of the next attack upon America from Islamic extremists, by the way.

I've something in my eye.

I just bought Blink by Malcolm Gladwell yesterday. And today I pick up a Time magazine from 2005, and there Gladwell's interviewed, saying the darndest things:

I'd like to make a distinction between change and progress. . . . [T]echnology related to golf has improved and will continue to improve dramatically. Golf clubs are way better today than they were 10 years ago, and will be way better 10 years from now. Golf scores, however, have remained absolutely stable. . . .

The explosion of choices on the internet — the fact that I can get 100,000 songs on iTunes as opposed to 1,000 songs &mdis that progress.

He means the answer as No. I answer Yes.

Gladwell, at the second elipsis, had interuupted an interlocutor expostulating on choice, stating this: But most of this falls into the category of giving me more of things that I don't need.

The iTunes example was inapt, though, no?

When iTunes had only a few thousand songs, I couldn't get Tibor Serly's Rhapsody for Viola and Orhcestra. I could get a bunch of pop songs I didn't want. Now, with thousands upon thousands of downloadable musical works available to me, I have purchased music composed by Martinu, Stravinsky, Benda, Stamitz, Haydn, Griffes, Bolcom, Russo, Gershwin, Schuman (yes with one n), and many others.

Did I need the music by these composers? Well, I needed them more than I need music I didn't buy, and wouldn't, when iTunes had less music to offer.

Is Gladwell's remark as elitist as it sounds? I don't know if he's attacking our wants in general, or some particular wants. Were we supposed to be content buying stuff we didn't like because there didn't used to be many options? Is he actually denying value pluralism?

I like diversity in society, because then I'm more likely to find people and things to my taste. When we're stuck with only the people at hand, and their limited talents, we're stuck with a lot of substandard people and stuff.

That's just simply the case.

Yes, there's change that's mere change. From my perspective, the move from woman-bashing rap to man-bashing rap is mere change. But change to a greater diversity of options that enables me to find music that bashes neither women nor men — is just very good music, with or without commentary — is progress.

No winking. I'm serious.

I have many of these, holding paperbacks, mostly. These interlockable boxes make for very efficient paperback shelves.

But I do put things other than paperbacks in them. Smaller hardbacks, such as my Classics Club set, for instance.

I bought mine for a buck a piece at a local Dollar Tree store. I highly recommend them.

Why do I use OS X and not Linux? Very simple: OS X is very simple to use.

For example, I've used multiple monitors for years on my Macs, from OS 8.6 on. I use two extremely cheap 17" monitors now in Panther and Tiger. They are easy to set up, easy to configure.

Now, see how it's done under Linux:

First, as usual before any changes, you need backup current xorg.conf. Next open config in favourite editor, and add following lines under section Device:

Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP, CRT"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP, CRT"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "DFP LeftOf CRT"
Option "NoPowerConnectorCheck"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "1"
Option "Metamodes" "CRT-0: 1280x1024, DFP-0: 1680x1050"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31-82"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "56-76"

And that's just the beginning.

Linux is still for people who like to code. I reject it not because it is part of the white western male power structure, but because it still demands more attention than I'd like to details I've no interest in.

Contemplating the Sony Reader, in the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Skinner writes:

[T]he virtues of portability are being exaggerated, but the Sony Reader has other selling points; above all, its potential to reduce the clutter of books. For me, the perfect advertisement for this device would be a picture of my bedstand without its ever-present leaning tower of literature. More reading, the tagline would say, fewer books.

No, no. This is wrong. At the risk of pedantry, I suggest that the line should read

More reading; fewer bookshelves.

Or maybe this:

More reading. Fewer ungainly towers of stacked books.

I have no trouble with the look and feel of a book. But the housing of such books, that can become a problem.

I've designed many a computer reader in my head. Just its functionality. Not its technical foundation, of course. And I think I'd be a great part of the Apple team. Sony? I haven't read a Reader for a test read, yet.

But I do know something: A computer-based, PDA-like e-book reader should cost no more than a bookshelf. So the Reader has a long way to go. Over $300 is way over its ideal price.

Still, my ideal portable digital device, mimicking as it does the handheld codex, the book, could, I suppose, be priced nearly as much as a computer, because it could indeed do many jobs, from providing a drawing sketch pad through browsing the Web to . . . letting you read a book.

The key? Two pages . . . two screens. Perhaps I thought of it because I use two monitors on my computer. Perhaps because a book presents two pages to the reader at once. But that's just the beginning of a truly useful portable device, a device that would make the PDAs of today look as limited as Post-It Notes.

(I think of my design as the iCodex, because it so well imitates the design of a book. The iBook name was already taken! Problem? It would almost certainly be shortened to iCod! Well, Apple could use as a logo a cod — yes, a fish in profile — and give it those three original Apple colors! Perhaps with a bite taken out on the right.)

From Skinner's review, it's obvious the Sony Reader was not designed by Apple:

[T]he Reader's shortcomings prove that whatever stage of development it represents, it is not to literature what the iPod is to music. Pages can be marked to help you find your way back to a passage, and the "continue reading" function returns you to the page reached before the device was last turned off. But pages cannot be marked with marginalia, a common enough practice with books that one hopes--or perhaps the verb "to dream" would be better here--that Sony is trying to figure how to make something like it possible with the Reader.

Also, maneuverability within books and within the Reader is limited. Text is not searchable. Flipping through several pages in a row is a small ordeal. A row of small buttons beneath the screen allows you to choose items from a central menu. Unfortunately, the buttons, like the Reader's small mouse-type pointer, are awkward and hard to use. The buttons can help you shift through a long text but do not correspond to obvious reference points like chapter openings, and the selection system is slow to respond.

But really, I'm more in the market for books and bookshelves than a replacement for them. Physical books, made of paper, seem like a very, very good idea to me. They've lasted because they are very good at what they do. They perform a function well.

I don't expect them to be replaced any time soon.

The newspaper, on the other hand . . . well, its days are numbered.

It appears that Microsoft is the computer company most guilty of planned obsolescence. Its Vista OS makes obsolete numerous other products you may own, including (get this) some of Microsoft's own most-used products!

Contrast this with Apple. I can shove Tiger on a Beige G3 if I want, and have few problems (the Molar, though, won't work well with anything past Jaguar, alas). My own Mac is over six years old, and runs Apple's latest OS without a hitch.

If you ask me, most people's addiction to Microsoft products is an example of sheer and utter folly.

My best dream last night was a long involved dream going back to an old place of work. I've forgotten most of it, as is the way of dreams. But one moment stands out. I look down, and there, on a bench is an old, vintage Macintosh computer, pre-PPC.

Thing is, though, is that it was snow white, like a modern iBook. But its design was halfway between that of a Color Classic and an LC5x0 series all-in-one computer, but with far more curves than either. The screen was small, like the Color Classic's, but it had, paired with it, another, slightly larger color separate monitor, also snowy white in the chassis.

Macintosh never made anything like it, really. It was much more Art Deco than Mac items have been. It had more swoopy curves than an iMac or a Molar. If I had good drawing skills, I might draw it, but, my skills being what they are, in no way can I do my vision justice.

I woke up after seeing the thing. I knew, in the dream, that it was a dream, in part because the operating system's desktop image had a feature that I've long wanted: a hide feature, that would make the top white bar in all versions of the Mac OS disappear (mostly, except for the date and the far left Apple and name of program), only to reappear when the mouse aims for that vicinity.

To my knowledge Apple has never designed the desktop to look like that. I would like it to.

But, I wake up. Still hasn't happened.

In The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, Steven Levy ruminates on the iPod's cool factor. Undoubtedly iPods are cool, but what we mean by cool is not always clear, or the same from case to case. I grant you, for example, that my two iPod minis (one green, one silver) are cool. But the kid on the corner with the nose rings, tattoos, split tongue, and holey jeans, screaming to whatever sounds he's downloaded from the Web and uploaded onto his iPod, is he cool? Some girls no doubt think so. To me he seems like a pathetic nincompoop.

As Levy tells the tale, when Sony debuted the Walkman, the company sent out free samples to musicians in the New York Philharmonic. When Jobs debuted the original iPod, he got copies to rap artists and pop stars.

That's been a limiting feature of the iPod from Day One: pop music. The thing is marketed towards people utterly besot by pop music.

Perhaps that's why some of my friends who now lean away from the pop music they'd drenched their lives with in the past, have purchased non-iPod digital music devices.

But here's what I've noticed: yes, the iPod and iTunes regards all cuts of recorded music as songs. And that is annoying when you are listening to a symphony or concerto.

But hey: most movements of symphonies or sonatas or string quartets or concerti are longer than your average pop song. So, by restricting a cut of recorded music on iTunes to 99¢, classical music listeners get more for their money than do pop music listeners.

Of course, in a sense, that's always been the case. We get more for our time and money. The music is better.

Is that cool?

Ah:

Boot time needs to be zero -- you turn it on and it's on, Lazowska said.

That is indeed a good goal for an o.s. I mean, if it's doable. We are impatient creatures. Why wait?

And yet, I use a Mac running Panther (Tiger next week!), and the turn-on of using a Mac isn't its turn-on time. While the computer warms up and before the login shows up (login security is important), I arrange my chair, my blankets and scarves (cold office), my Diet Coke . . .

Why a Mac? Why OS X? It's the beauty, ease of use, stability (bye-bye OS 9!), and common-sensedness of it. I'm not at all interested, really, in the new vistas after Vista. I've got OS X.

Five sensible questions to ask yourself when contemplating automating your research project:

1. Is your workload big enough?


2. Is reproducibility paramount?


3. Is the cost of mistakes prohibitive?


4. Would scaling up offer additional benefits?


5. Is your protocol automation-friendly?

Contrast these questions with ones you should ask whether you really need a Roomba or not:

• How thick is the pile of your carpet? (No shags.)
• Do you have a large dog who likes to play frisbee? (If yes, consider that the Roomba is vaguely frisbee-shaped.)
• Is a necessary part of your vacuuming process the opportunity your cleaner provides to improvise melodies over the machine's drone? (Roomba doesn't have a drone, so to speak, though it does make a rather high-pitched electric-engine noise as it wanders around the room.)
• Just how lazy are you?

Note: the Roomba has become my first real robot. I've owned toy robots before, but this robot actually does work, thus living up to its name. (See R.U.R.)