Wii

My Nintendo Wii arrived today, and I’ve been checking it out. ((And for those who asked me how I got one, I bought it on eBay. When it arrived, the receipt showed that it had been purchased from Amazon.com, confirming my suspicion that a considerable number of those that we are selling are being snapped up by people using “sniping” software.)) I like the overall user experience, though I imagine that the relentlessly cheerful pieces of music that accompany everything could get tedious after a while. The online mode is completely seamless. And as for the games… well, I’ve only played one game of tennis, which I lost. I suspect that this is going to be quite addictive, and not a bad work-out either!

The one-dimensionality of political discourse

Good piece from The Barefoot Bum on Political dimensions. Take, for example, Iraq:

The trouble is that if you criticize the war along one axis, you risk by your silence on the other axes to be held in agreement. If you criticize the war as irrational, it sounds like you would approve of its aims if only they were being pursued competently. If you criticize the U.S. conduct of the war on moral grounds, you sound like you therefore approve of the morality of the opponents. If you criticize Islam, you sound like you’re in favor of the war. (I myself was accused of being pro-torture because I virulently criticize Islam.) If you try to criticize the war on all three axes, 90% of your audience will simply mutter TLDNR ((Too Long, Did Not Read)) and move on to something simpler.

I can never go back to Massachusetts…

From the Massachusetts General Laws ((Hat tip to AtheistPerspective, via Gene.)):

CHAPTER 272. CRIMES AGAINST CHASTITY, MORALITY, DECENCY AND GOOD ORDER
Chapter 272: Section 36. Blasphemy
Section 36. Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.

EPL: what will it look like next May?

Watching this weekend’s English Premier League matches, it’s clear that “everybody expects” that by the end of the season three of the top four slots will be filled by Chelsea, Manchester United, and Liverpool. ((Of course everyone also has an opinion as to what the order should be…)) But which will be the fourth team? Arsenal? Tottenham? Everton? Or (mirabile dictu) will Manchester City prove to be more than a flash in the pan? I hope it will be Spurs, with Berbatov and Keane weaving their magic, and Lennon finally coming into his own. But the early signs aren’t promising.
So who do you think it’ll be? Or are the “big three” going to falter? ((I just watched Manchester United vs. Tottenham, and ManU’s defence was absolute rubbish. A fair score would have been 2-1 to Tottenham, including the penalty for Brown’s handball.)) It’ll be interesting to revisit this blog entry at the end of the season.

This has to be an Apple viral marketing campaign

From Boing Boing: Microsoft WGA servers down; all XP and Vista installs being marked as counterfeit

DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today.
The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in.

UPDATE: Apparently this was not a joke ((Well, not intentionally!)): MS has acknowledged (and fixed) the problem. Of course, this points up the deep problem with DRM schemes of all kinds. A simple screw-up by Microsoft can cripple millions of PCs. Now it is true, of course, that a screw-up by Apple – e.g. a bug in a Software Update – could cause millions of Macs to stop working. I think that the difference is that experience with Microsoft’s WGA program has made it clear that Microsoft regards the customer as “guilty until proven innocent”: there is code in Windows to deliberately cripple your PC. ((Speaking of which, it appears that Sony has once again released CDs with rootkit software. Will they never learn?))

New Facebook group for Sun Alumni

I’ve just created a Facebook group for Sun Alumni. Sun Alumni group
You might wonder why. After all, there’s an existing, very successful Yahoo! discussion group, the Sun Microsystems Alumni Association, with an associated group over on LinkedIn. However the organizers of SMAA want to keep the tone “professional”, which tends to rule out such things as (e.g.) an honest debate about the merits of “SUNW->JAVA”. That’s one reason for setting up the new group; the other is that Facebook is a much livelier environment. There are already quite a few corporate alumni groups there.
So come on over to Facebook…
PS For those who can’t understand why professionals would want to get involved with Facebook, check out this BusinessWeek story.

Rearranging the deckchairs Repainting the nameplate…

This is the kind of thing which drives me crazy:

Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW – News) today announced that it will change its Nasdaq stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, the ubiquitous technology and brand it created in 1995. The stock ticker change will go into effect for the trading community on Monday, August 27, 2007.

Exactly what shareholder value does this create? Is it going to open the door to new sales opportunities? Are stock analysts going to upgrade Sun on the strength of this change?
And what is the opportunity cost of doing this? Even though it’s managed to squeeze out a series of small profits, Sun’s product revenue numbers are flat. I’m sure that over the last 12 months there have been several unsuccessful bids which Sun could have won by incremental product or support engineering – engineering that would have cost much less than this relabelling exercise.
So how does Jonathan explain it? In three sentences:

“The Java brand and technology have evolved to be among the most pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and opportunity for the community that leverages it,”

Technology? Absolutely. Java is the standard language for SOA engineering. It’s the Visual Basic of the server side. But brand? I don’t think so. The Internet has moved beyond branding technology; what’s important now is branding services and communities.
And has Java’s success yielded “extraordinary awareness for Sun”? Not obvious. Certainly among those who are aware of technology, Sun’s workstations, servers, and Solaris OS are at least as important as Java. Indeed Sun seems to think so too: recently I’ve see more Sun press releases about Solaris, multithread chips, “eco-computing”, and so forth than I have about Java.

“More than a billion people across the globe, representing nearly every demographic, market and industry, rely upon Java’s security, innovation and value to connect them with opportunity.”

Absolutely true, even if 99.99% of them have no idea whatsoever that they do so. That’s the power of infrastructure engineering.

“That awareness positions Sun, and now our investor base, for the future.”

Bzzzt! First this awareness is probably illusory. Second, how would such “awareness… position [the] investor base for the future”? This is simply silly. Investors care about the business proposition, performance against goals, financial reports, and the rate of return. None of this remotely justifies a rebranding exercise such as Jonathan is proposing.
Look here. I really, really wish Sun well. I’m a shareholder, I’ve got a lot of friends there, and I admire the way in which Sun continues to push the envelope on computing technology. The recent announcement about transactional memory is a great example of this. ZFS is fantastic, and Black Box is a great idea. I want Sun to win. But stunts like changing the stock ticker symbol are not going to persuade skeptical customers to buy. (In fact it’s a distraction: Sun salespeople are probably going to waste 10 minutes on every sales call explaining this nonsense, time that they should be spending on Niagara throughput or ZFS availability.)
P.S. I liked Kevin’s take on this.
P.P.S. I wonder how all those loyal Sun staff who have SUNW license plates feel about this…
P.P.P.S. Dave Johnson’s keeping score.