| :: | Tuesday, November 4, 2003 |
The current Xbox is based on a Pentium 3 processor running at 800 MHz or less. One problem Microsoft has faced is the conversion of Xbox systems into personal computers. By buying a heavily subsidized $200 game machine from Microsoft, and then adding a pirated disk drive, the Xbox can be used as a "poor man's PC, turning a $200 game machine into a $600 personal computer, which Microsoft doesn't like at all," Doherty said. That may have led Microsoft to the PowerPC platform developed by IBM.
He bluntly dismisses the promise of a democratic Iraq -- "impossible, a fantasy" -- citing obstacles similar to Russia's. "Democracy requires, among other things, individualism -- the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run."
It is not lost on Pipes that his criticism goes directly to the judgment of the Bush team, conservatives like himself, in some cases former colleagues, most prominently Team B's own Wolfowitz. "Paul didn't have much education in history," Pipes says. "It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures."
The terms: deployment in China is royalty free and everywhere else it is 30% cheaper than alternatives. With 250 m cellular users, the ability to mandate faster acceptance, lower costs for upgrades (due to $0 royalties), and a spill over effect into the rest of SE Asia (perhaps another 100 m users): China may win big here (particularly Chinese consumers).
The Ten-Year-Old is trying to install SimIsle on our lone Windows computer--purchased because the Thirteen-Year-Old wanted to play Medieval Total War, and there was no Macintosh version.
It is throwing up a post-installation error message: something about WinG32.dll incorrectly installed in the "System" rather than in the "System32" directory.
Shouldn't an operating system smart enough to know that the WinG32.dll file is in the wrong directory also be smart enough to move, copy, or link it to the right directory? I mean, what's the problem requiring human-level attention here, anyway?
I don't like the lesson this machine is teaching the Ten-Year-Old: that when she tries to do simple things, they just don't work, and computers can only be understood and made to work by Big People like Dad.
The fact that this is an accurate lesson, at least as far as Windows machines are concerned, is beside the point.
Kevin Drum momentarily visits an alternative branch of the universe's quantum wave function in which things that Paul Wolfowitz says are true, in which "100,000 troops... [are] enough [to keep order in Iraq]. Occupation costs ... [are] low. Oil exports... amount to $15 billion or more. There's no ethnic strife in Iraq. Iraqis... welcome an American liberation force. Other countries ÷ even France! ÷ ... see the light and help out after the war is over."
Calpundit: Wishful Thinking: WISHFUL THINKING....As I was Googling links for the post below, I came across this Eric Schmitt article for the New York Times from last February. In retrospect, it is nothing less than mind boggling, and a salutary reminder of what the administration was really telling us nine months ago. Here are some excerpts:
Mr. Wolfowitz...opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year.
....."The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark," Mr. Rumsfeld said....A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate.
....In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.
....Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. "I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact," Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high....Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.
100,000 troops should be enough. Occupation costs will be low. Oil exports will amount to $15 billion or more. There's no ethnic strife in Iraq. Iraqis will welcome an American liberation force. Other countries ÷ even France! ÷ will see the light and help out after the war is over.
Schmitt's entire story is less than a thousand words long. It hardly seems possible to pack so much wishful thinking into such a small space.
And these guys are still in charge.
Once again, where are the grownups in the Republican Party? What do the Republican senators think that they are doing, exactly?
Julian Sanchez makes an interesting find in a used book store:
Julian's Lounge: Notes from the Lounge: Strolling home today from the cafe where I sometimes work so as to get out of the apartment for a while, I popped into a local used bookshop. Browsing through the new arrivals, I spotted a hardbacked copy of Effort, Opportunity and Wealth by the late economist Julian Simon. Flipping it open idly, I was surprised to find it inscribed:
For Bea and Irving,
In hopes of more [ILLEGIBLE] together,
Julian
January 10, 1988I had chanced upon a copy signed by Julian Simon! But what of "Bea and Irving"? I immediately thought of Irving Kristol. But wasn't he married to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb? I asked the clerk to Google Kristol's name along with "Bea" and quickly saw that Himmelfarb is known as "Bea" to her friends. So this was indeed a book Simon had given them some 15 years ago. I don't know how it came recently to this little bookshop, but it's kind of a cool find—15 bucks in mint condition.
Kinda sad. The only books of mine that are in "mint condition" are those that are still unread, after all. No copy of anybody's book should have to suffer that indignity...
The Financial Times's Martin Wolf tries to make sense of Russia:
FT.com Home US: A clash between arbitrary power and illegitimate wealth. That is the conflict between Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, estwhile chairman of Yukos. Power will surely win. The question is how it will use that victory. Will it support a market economy or lead to a new cycle of predation? Either way, Russia's progress towards what contemporary westerners regard as normality is to be measured in decades, not years.
Secure private property is the foundation of both a market economy and democracy. Parliamentary control emerged in England because the Crown had to obtain the consent of the propertied to taxation. In time, the suffrage widened with the circle of those whose consent was necessary. In the Russia of Peter the Great, however, the state owned everything. When private property was granted, under Catherine the Great, it took the form of absolute ownership of the country's principal resource: its people. Inevitably, as Harvard's Richard Pipes notes, property "was widely viewed as an enemy of both freedom and social justice". The serfs were at last emancipated in 1861, only to be re-enslaved, after 1917, by perhaps the most despotic state in history.
That this history made a swift transition to a law-governed, property-owning democracy nigh on inconceivable is evident. Yet how far Russia has gone backwards to its future is astonishing. An arbitrary, but ineffective, state faces vast, but illegitimate, wealth.... A less foolish comparison is with the successful reformers of central and eastern Europe.... Russia failed to carry through such [comprehensive] reforms, as it struggled with the simultaneous collapse of its ideology, its empire and its regime. Partial reforms allowed a group of shrewd people to amass huge fortunes. Privatisation permitted both them and existing managers to seize industrial assets. Finally, the notorious "loans for shares" scheme of 1995 transferred much of the country's natural resources to private hands....
[S]izeable improvements have been made. Gross domestic product this year is forecast to be some 36 per cent above its trough in 1998.... Yet these improvements, albeit real, must not be exaggerated. The data... suggest GDP is still below 1990 levels.... The Economist Intelligence Unit estimates capital flight at $191bn from 1994 to this year inclusive, and $23bn this year alone. The cumulative flight is not much short of twice annual exports and two-thirds of GDP.
The question is whether Mr Putin's authoritarian state will improve the economy further. This is possible, but doubtful. The Khodorkovsky affair can only underline the insecurity of property and the discretion available to the state. Those who support Mr Putin understandably resent the wealth of the new tycoons. That is a recipe for ongoing capital flight and corruption. Finally, the basis of wealth in Russia remains natural resource rents. As long as this is the case, the pursuit of wealth will be seen as a zero-sum game, with victory to the powerful.
James Sasser believes that Bush administration (and bipartisan congressional) China-bashing is being made by those who have no conception of what good long-run economic policy is and no regard for the long-run national security of the United States:
FT.com Home US: ...China's progress toward reform has been slow, sometimes meandering, but ultimately steady and entirely real. China's commitment to free market reform has been consistent and remains a powerful force. Its efforts to comply with the terms of its WTO accession, while imperfect, have been favourably received by many US exporters. China has begun to dismantle its massive tariff regime and is opening its markets to a wide range of foreign goods and services. As a result, US exports to China increased by more than 15 per cent between 2001 and 2002.
China has also worked with the US government on several post-September 11 2001 anti-terrorism initiatives, including a recent agreement allowing US customs officials access to the ports of Shanghai and Shenzhen in order monitor container traffic destined for the US. By western standards, China's record on human rights continues to be tragically inadequate; no one is suggesting that its pace of democratic reform is as rapid as we should like it to be.
But there is much to lose if we allow short-term domestic political advantage to blind us to the long-term strategic consequences. Hu Jintao, China's new president, is eager both to safeguard existing reforms put in place by his predecessor and to advance their momentum. Nothing could more jeopardise Mr Hu's reformist designs or play more into the hands of the hard-liners than policy dictates from the US that would increase Chinese unemployment (which is already at dangerous levels) or weaken its economic foundation and thereby undercut the essential foundations of continued reform...
Matthew Yglesias writes about the infamous "Team B":
TAPPED: November 2003 Archives: IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED. Over the weekend, The Boston Globe ran an interesting profile of Richard Pipes, the historian of the Soviet Union whose anti-communist zeal led him to Washington to do some practical work as a cold warrior:
In late 1975, a dramatic reshuffling of the Ford administration installed a new defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a new chief of staff, Dick Cheney, and a new CIA chief, George H.W. Bush. It was Bush who approved the formation of "Team B," a group of 16 outside experts charged with challenging what some considered the CIA's sanguine estimates of Soviet military strength. Pipes, named the group's chairman, brought in a brilliant young weapons analyst, Paul Wolfowitz. "Richard Perle recommended him," Pipes says of Wolfowitz today. "I'd never heard of him."This is a pretty serious misrepresentation on Pipes' part of Team B's work. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek over the summer:Team B was engulfed in controversy from the outset. A top CIA analyst called it "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view." Others said its mission was to hype the Soviet threat. Pipes disagrees. "We dealt with one problem only: What is the Soviet strategy for nuclear weapons? Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours. It's now demonstrated totally, completely, that it was," he says, adducing documents in Polish archives that show the Soviets planning to use nuclear weapons in the event of war.
It all started with the now famous "Team B" exercise. During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B--which included Paul Wolfowitz--produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.This is significant because the Team B personnel are now back working in the government, where they once again decided to circumvent the intelligence agencies and over-over-estimate a threat that it appears the agencies were already over-estimating on their own. Take a look at Pipes' defense of the intention-based approach to intelligence gathering:In retrospect, Team B's conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having "a large and expanding Gross National Product," it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber "probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984." In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.
The reality was that even the CIAâs own estimates--savaged as too low by Team B--were, in retrospect, gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that every year it had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat along all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace less than 60 percent of them.
Today Pipes defends his approach. "Hardware doesn't tell you anything. You can have a neighbor who's a peaceful man who likes to collect guns because he likes to collect guns. But he may also be a criminal, or someone who collects them for a different reason." The big question, in other words, is intention.This makes no sense whatsoever. Clearly, if you want to know whether or not somebody is going to shoot you, you need to know two things. First, does he have a gun? Second, does he want to use it? In Pipes' example it's simply taken for granted that the neighbor has a gun, but we now know Saddam Hussein's WMD program was all hat and no cattle, so his intentions hardly seem relevant.Pipes and his collaborators seem to have gained a lot of confidence from America's victory in the Cold War, but the fact remains that they had relatively little to do with it. In the second Reagan administration, a reform-minded Soviet leader came to the helm and the president largely sidelined the super-hawks in favor of a return to containment. As a result, the Soviet Union was kept in its box and the communist system collapsed under its own weight. The Soviet menace wasn't growing any more than Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.
Getting something like this wrong once is pretty understandable -- intelligence gathering is an inexact science -- but having been proven wrong once, the same group of people came back to power, used the same methods again, and were proven wrong again. Pay attention to administration statements about the WMD search and you'll see the goalpost-moving strategy Pipes employed in this article -- trying to switch the conversation from whether Saddam had weapons to whether he wanted them. Doubtless we'll see the younger members of today's team back 20 years from now insisting that the CIA is underestimating the looming Peruvian threat or something. Some people never learn.
--Matthew Yglesias
Elizabeth Lane Lawley channels Mary Ellen Bates:
mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes: Mary Ellen Bates on tips for searching effectively. These are her tips, not mine. My comments, when I have them, are parenthetical.
I almost hate to share these, because these are the kind of tips that let people like me come across as an “angel of information mercy” to the people who ask me for help in finding things!
BTW, Mary Ellen is a great presenter. Funny, interesting, clear. She’s got a free “tip of the month” email update, which you can also read on her web site.
- Always use more than one search engine. (You’ll often get very different results; useful to triangulate.) See a test at www.batesinfo.com
- Use AltaVista’s “world keyboard” to insert non-Roman characters.
- Use AltaVista’s “sorted by” box to filter results. It’s not an “AND”, but it causes results with the sorted-by contents to bubble up to the top. “Softer than an AND but more relevant than an OR.”
- Use thesauri and web dictionaries to identify key words, put client’s request in context. (e.g. Google’s define feature, etc)
- Use spell-check to identify American-only spellings (fiber/fibre, labor/labour, etc). Type search terms in MS Word, set language to UK English, and run spell check!
- Watch for alternative phrasing (retirement/superannuation, revenue/turnover). British to American tips
- Use Google’s synonym feature. ~search-term; e.g. ~sheep returns sites with terms livestock, lamb.
- Use “pearl culturing” (particularly in for-fee services)—look for key concepts in just the title of elements, then find the keywords assigned to that document. Use a similar approach on the web by using a “reverse link lookup”—find out who linked to a site, on the assumption they’ll have more like it.
- Use Google’s “related:” operator. Syntax: related:www.altvedmed.com ; doesn’t find linked pages; finds similar pages.
- Use tools, not search engines. Open directory (dmoz.org), subject-specific directories. Use search engine to find a tool, use the tool to find the answer. Let someone else (an expert) find the most relevant/authoritative information.
- Search for sources, not just information. Assume key information will be buried in the “invisible web.”
- Mine weblogs, don’t subscribe to ‘em. “JIT research, rather than JIC reading.” Use daypop, technorati searches. (“Weblogs are the most efficient source of time wasting.”)
- Use AllTheWeb’s URL Investigator ; type URL in search box and see lots of meta information about the link.
- Use “reverse link” searching as a citation search, and to find “more like this”. Google syntax is link:www.somedomain.com Works best with less common sites. Works better in AllTheWeb
#Use Wayback Machine to find deleted pages, 404 pages, etc. It now has full text searching which greatly enhances its value. Useful to see how an issue was treated at a specific point in time, or how it changed over time.- Use whois to track down elusive companies. whois.sc, allwhois.com, easywhois.com. Caveat: some people lie. Aternative, Dialog’s Domain Names database (file 225), which lists Whowas records.
- Use commercial online services to search the web. Dialog, Factiva, LexisNexis. Search for keyword near multiple occurrences of “www” — this generally leads to a good overview article, with related links.
- Use Teoma.com to identify experts’ sites, link-rich pages. (Look at “resources” section on results page; these are “link-rich” sites on your topic.)
- Poke around the site. Be nosy. Use the “search this site” function, use site map, check all the pull-down menus.
- Mine Yahoo! Groups. Many groups have shared files, but you must join the group to get access. Find groups on a specialized topic, use that as a subject resource. (“Where would people with shared, obscure interests go to discuss a topic with like-minded people?”) This is invisible web content; you won’t find it in a general search engine.
- Buy a kitchen timer. After 15 minutes, re-evaluate your web research strategy. You can get so deep into “following the trail” that you lose your focus. (My note: Great idea for a lot of things. Blog reading, etc.)
- Use “type of document” indicators; for audio, include things like listen or hear — for opinion pieces look for PDF or DOC files. For statistics, look for .XLS files; include chart or graph along with keywords.
- Know the advanced search capabilities of at least three search engines. Truncation? Proximity searching? Case sensitivity? Field searching?
- Use results “clustering” or refining features when you can. Example of “mooter.com”, an Australian search engine, which clusters results visually. Small index right now, but the concept is very cool. (My note: This kind of clustering is what I’ve always liked about NorthernLight, which was my pre-Google favorite engine.)
- Search inges only show 2 or 3 results from a site; click the more results from… link to see (often) many more pages.
- Know what you’re looking for. What kind of answer? A phone number? An expert? Search engine might not be the best tool. Think creatively about what kind of information you’re looking for; where would that be likely to be?
- Use the web to find experts, then pick up the phone! Makes you “value added” in a way that matters to clients.
- Use free sources to scope out what’s available, and to find problems in your search strategy— then go to a for-fee service.
- Disambiguate. Know what you’re looking for. What does “mobile messaging” mean? Net-enabled PDAs, or vehicles that display advertising. Always rephrase the request in your own words.
- What works best for the professional online services doesn’t work well with web searching. Complex searches don’t work on the web. Order of the search terms matters. Forget precision and go for what will likely float to the top.
- Some searches are simply not meant to be done online.
Two Boston Herald reporters accurately report a phone conversation they had with a Massachusetts Catholic bishop, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston calls them "either ignoran[t] of [the] church's teachings or [expressing] a media sympathy for the gay rights agenda."
Don't I remember something about "not bearing false witness"?
Church: Media got bishop's words on gays all wrong : ...A front-page story in the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, The Pilot, deals with the controversy. An accompanying editorial states the reporters who wrote the story for the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe and other media displayed "either ignorance of church's teachings or a media sympathy for the gay rights agenda."... In a telephone interview with a Herald reporter after his testimony, Reilly was asked about denying benefits to "gay couples." Reilly said: "That's wrong, and that's too bad." He further said: "We have to find a way" to give civil benefits to gay partners. Reilly did make it clear... that the church opposes any form of "gay marriage."
Why slime reporters who were doing their jobs well? Why not a simple "Bishop Reilly was off message"?