Bad News

How to politely tell Microsoft its new baby is ugly; KDE 4.3 needed, stat; Escaping the Matrix, with help from the Mennonites; Whose anti-terrorism policy worked?; Fox the quagmire; AND: Robot reporters

All liberals are vermin in the eyes of Morbo. | Pretprieel

What’s the best way to tell someone they’re ugly? If you really had to, you’d somehow turn a negative (ugliness) into a positive (being much better looking than they were before the rhinoplasty).

That’s the gist of how kind-hearted tech reviewers across the Internet have not broken it to the would-be belle from Redmond, Wash. Microsoft’s new product sucks—same old shit, new, less shitty packaging—but my god, is it better than the last one.

David Pogue at the New York Times says it’s good if you’re done with XP and better if you’re currently stuck with Vista. (Does that imply Pogue thinks you should stick to XP if you’re satisfied with it?) But it’s hard to take this seriously:

Believe it or not, software for managing photos, editing videos, reading PDF documents, maintaining a calendar, managing addresses, chatting online or writing e-mail doesn’t come with Windows 7.

What kind of operating system doesn’t come with an e-mail program?

In fact, this column at Windows Secrets says what Pogue kindly leaves out: If you’re satisfied with your current Windows platform, especially if it’s XP, stick with it.

When someone actually gets around to comparing Win7 with another operating system, it gets laughable. This utterly idiotic slide show supposedly shows what Windows 7 has that Linux distributions don’t, like—not kidding—XP mode. What Linux user would need a feature created by Microsoft to appease users who hated their last operating system upgrade? The only way to make MS commercial products look up to snuff is to set up obvious straw men for them.

KDE 4.3: Needing those updates

Speaking of getting my high-quality software for free, nine days until Kubuntu Karmic Koala and some time before openSUSE 11.2, both with the new KDE 4.3. I haven’t installed KDE 4.3 on any of my systems because I happened to want three clean installs, but the updates couldn’t come sooner. Some KDE bugs and anachronisms that might be fixed in 4.3 would be a big help.

My plasma panel on my Kubuntu desktop #1 keeps freezing. It still works, but the graphics act like they’ve survived nuclear war and the clock shows the time the bombs went off. Worse, you can’t see new open windows in the task manager, and old ones are frozen in place.
The desktop widget’s new navigation feature will be a big help on my openSUSE laptop, which is primarily for productivity.
New, new Network Manager, maybe? (Or should I just stick with wicd?)
Fixing that annoying thing where the kicker menu doesn’t close when you click away on the Plasma panel it’s on. Hate that.
A panel spacer that won’t kill Plasma.
Make those bindings more configurable, as promised

Nine days...

Jaron Lanier’s 90’s Dreamworld

I like Jaron Lanier and his thoughtful take on technology, and, in no small part because of that, have come to barely tolerate dreadlocks on white people. But the UC-Berkeley futurist’s pro-technology, human-centric views have not aged well since their heydays in the late 90s.

Typical of the high-tech upper-middle class cosmopolitanism of the 1990s, Lanier loves the idea of diversity of lifestyles, but has no room in his world view for diversity of income. Still, whether you’re rich or poor remains, after thousands of years of human history, the most decisive force in people’s access to and dependence on technology. Lanier, nevertheless, lives in the class-free cheap energy la-la land of Douglas Coupland, not the real world of inequality of access to vital technologies.

What makes Lanier appealing is the assertion that humans don’t have to be a slave to their technology. "You are in control," he said on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Tuesday. "The machines are inert. They only run because people operate them. They have no autonomy. You simply stop" in order to remove yourself from their influence. Call it information age critical theory.

And then there’s the correct assertion that using techology involves a kind of literacy. "There is a certain kind of skill to being on-line well," he said, arguing that some kinds of on-line behaviour, like getting all your news from Michelle Malkin, actually "has an effect of disengagement ... not utilizing the on-line world to be a good citizen."

It sure sounds good. But it only takes a little thought to see where Lanier goes wrong in his rather optimistic views of human autonomy and individual choice. In fact, it reminds me of the so-called mommy wars, the debate over whether working mothers should spend more time at home taking care of their young children.

Embedded in Lanier’s argument is the assumption—often completely and utterly wrong—that technology users have both the physical and economic choice to disengage from electronic gear. For example, he lauds the Mennonite culture he became acquainted with here in Southern Ontario:

I appreciate what the Mennonites are doing. I was charmed by them ... a little jealous, perhaps. ... To spend a day away from all these gadgets connects you to life and nature that is less mediated. You see less of your own take on life embedded in the way you perceive life, and I think it’s remarkable.

Hopefully this does not extend to technologies that don’t deserve a hiatus, like the printed word and the vaccines that make people not die of polio. But reductio ad absurdum here is a straw man, and Lanier’s concern is a real one:

I hope we retain some diversity in the styles of life that we lead in the future. I do think that there’s a danger that the Internet has a tendency of bringing people so closely into their peer groups because they find each other on-line that they live in a way narrower life.

Yet despite his full-throated advocacy for new technologies, Lanier treats them like sometimes useful distractions rather than vitally important elements of success in an incredibly competitive information-centric marketplace. Lanier preaches gadgets as a lifestyle choice—like the one wealthy mothers can make about staying home to raise their children, an option the vast majority of parents could never even dream of. Typical of the high-tech upper-middle class cosmopolitanism of the 1990s, Lanier loves the idea of diversity of lifestyles, but has no room in his world view for diversity of income. Still, whether you’re rich or poor remains, after thousands of years of human history, the most decisive force in people’s access to and dependence on technology.

Lanier, nevertheless, lives in the class-free cheap energy la-la land of science fiction, not the real world of inequality of access to vital technologies.

Freedom means believing in yourself more than the technology. ... I think it’s good to think about technology... like dirt. It’s this cheap stuff, we can use it, we can use it well, we can use it badly, we can mold it, we can change it, we can try to make it better, but it’s not anything with a tremendous status on its own. It’s not there unless we use it, it’s not alive by itself. If we make it too real, if we respect it too much, inevitably we end up respecting ourselves a little less. If we care too much about our Facebook page as a shrine to ourselves, inevitably our life suffers. Your digital doppleganger should not replace you. And that’s the great coming challenge for all of us.

A parent who wants to keep in touch with their pre-teen in case of an emergency can’t simply turn off his cell phone. Same with anyone dependent on income from on-call work. And what of the thousands of bloggers and on-line writers whose incomes—sometimes quite modest—are dependent on Internet access? These people are not narcissistic Internet celebrities willing to do anything for fame, nor are they obnoxious Facebook socialites with five-digit tallies on their friends list. These are, more often than not, normal people with normal problems whose lives and livelihoods are inexorably linked to technology. If they do complain about being chained to their Blackberry, we don’t have reasonable grounds to tell them to turn it off and stop whining. That would just be unhelpful snark from those who have the luxury of doing so themselves. Don’t like your job? Quit. Don’t like this country? Move somewhere else.

Still not convinced that Lanier is preaching a fantasy?

I personally believe that if we had flying cars now, we wouldn’t have terrorists, because young men would have something to do that would really fascinate them. In some ways, technologists keep the peace by expanding wealth and expanding the repertoire of experiences to please everyone.

Tell that to a New Yorker.

Whose Counter-Terrorism Plan Works Best?

Another terrorism arrest under the Obama presidency. Assuming that these recent police actions will amount to something, I want to know whether if the success is a result of changes in counter-terrorism strategy in the Obama administration or changes in the Bush administration. Or were there any significant changes at all since those horrid, confused days early in the Bush era?

How much did Bush administration intelligence (harsh interrogation, arbitrary roundup of Muslim men) contribute to taking down these recent terrorist cells, which seem to be genuine (compared to, say, Lackawanna 7, who were not a real cell at all)? The Bush anti-terror strategy seemed to be chasing its own tail with boondoggles like the Orwellian total information awareness and many arrests that went nowhere. But maybe good police and intelligence work takes time, and only now are we reaping the fruits of those labours.

We Report, You Deride

How to solve a problem like Fox News? Well, if you’re a liberal, African-American president, you have few options: You can wage an unapologetic war against the right wing outlet, causing an ironic backlash from actual journalists. Or you could keep your distance, earning the rabid accusations of censorship from the network. Or you could full-on engage with Fox, giving the propaganda outlet credibility, an action that will surely be rewarded with the same predictable mud-slinging from the right.

In other words, as with any mire based upon unhinged radical zeal, there is no good solution to Fox News.

And the worst case would be to give the world the signal that Fox News has been accepted, like all other news outlets, as a credible journalistic enterprise, when in fact it’s about 5 per cent reporting, and full-fledged Republican propaganda nineteen times out of twenty. (Take their slippery polling methods, for example.)

And the last thing America needs is a Nick Griffin.

It Reports, You Decide

Can a computer cover a ball game?

Yes. It could also very well write a story about a rather routine fire or crime. The ball game story would miss some pizazz, but reporters could throw that in afterward. (Presumably you wouldn’t want pizazz in a story about a stabbing.) And at some point, automatons might actually come to take offense to the idea that they lack the "human" touch (such a bigoted term). Bender "Bending" Rodriguez has plenty of pizazz.

The future might already be here. If you read enough Politico, you might come to believe a robot could breathlessly cover the horse races in Washington politics today End.