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.

"I'm not a scientist, but I play one in court."

Picture this.
You’re a moderately successful businessman, with an amateur interest in evo-devo. One day you dream up a weird theory about how evo-devo works: it’s all to do with geometry, specifically patterns of toroids. Now this is a strange idea, but fortunately it’s one can than be easily tested: all we have to do is point a microscope at developing organisms and compare what we see with the strange “balloon creatures” that your theory predicts. Evidence. Good stuff, that. And the results are not what you hoped for.
But as I said, you’re a successful businessman. You have a little money to play around with. And so, undaunted, you assemble a book to explain your theory. You don’t have much original material to work with, so you include photocopies of unrelated articles by various authors, and you pad it out to 160 pages. You self-publish this puppy, and pretty soon it shows up on Amazon.com priced at $60. At this point, a real scientist who specializes in this stuff finds your book, reads it, and publishes a detailed review which exposes your theory for the nonsense that it is.
So what do you do next? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You sue the reviewer for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS, for “Assault, Libel, and Slander”.
Sadly, this farce is actually playing out right now. The crackpot amateur scientist is one Stuart Pivar, and the reviewer is our very own PZ Myers, a.k.a. Pharyngula. Inevitably, the blogosphere is all over this, here, here and here. If there’s any justice, Pivar will lose his shirt over this.
UPDATE: Here’s the ultimate take-down from a lawyer, Peter Irons. Pivar’s attorney may wish to draft a letter of apology for wasting the court’s time…

Hitchens on Lilla

Good review by Christopher Hitchens of Mark Lilla’s “The Stillborn God“. (You might have caught Lilla’s related piece in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine.) Hitchens’ conclusion:

To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here’s the totalitarian element again) “plan.” Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do. This was not quite the case in previous centuries or even decades, and I do not think that Lilla has credited us with such slight advances as we have been able to make.

There's a pattern here.

Years ago, Namco released a wonderful sword-fighting game called Soul Calibur. I bought a Sega Dreamcast to play it.
Later, Namco released Soul Calibur II for the Playstation 2. I bought a PS2 to play it.
Next, they released Soul Calibur III, also for the PS2. I bought a copy, played it, and went back to Soul Calibur II. Better gameplay.
Now, Namco Bandai have revealed they’re bringing an incarnation of Soul Calibur to the Wii. It’s going to be called Soul Calibur Legends. No release date yet, but the screenshots look gorgeous. And so today I bought myself a Nintendo Wii, just to be ready.
Update: According to Amazon.com, “This item will be released on November 13, 2007.”

A quick visit to California

I just got back from a weekend trip down to California. On Saturday morning, I flew down to Oakland; Celeste picked me up in my old DARWIN (which now has a boring California registration), and invited me to drive it one more time. So we headed south on I-880, and I finally got the opportunity to drive one of my “fun” cars ((among which I count my Mazda Miata, Mercury Cougar, and Subaru Legacy GT)) over Highway 17 to Santa Cruz. Sadly the traffic was too heavy to really explore the potential for accelerating a 250 HP AWD car into one of the climbing turns that make Highway 17 so much fun. But never mind. The killer rabbit
We met up with Chris and Merry at Bookshop Santa Cruz. In spite of the threat from bigger bookshops, this remains the cultural centre of Santa Cruz, and it’s still fun to browse after all these years (ever since Chris was an undergraduate ar UCSC). We then meandered down to Aptos for lunch with members of our extended family, in a lovely home with a statue of a killer rabbit in the yard. (See photo.) We then followed Route 1 south to Carmel, and drove to Merry’s parents’ place, where we stayed overnight.
Lamborghinis on the red carpet in Carmel.Today we headed down into Carmel. This is car week in Carmel, and gorgeous cars were everywhere. This is the kind of situation where they roll out the red carpet for cars rather than mere human beings. Even when we walked down to the beach, the cars followed us. (See photo gallery.)
Then after lunch, we (Chris, Celeste and I) headed back up to Oakland. I’d brought along Stop The Clocks, the “greatest hits” double CD from Oasis (the one I’d got from Tescos in Abingdon for £5), and we cranked up the volume and sang along to “Wonderwall”, “Morning Glory” and “Champagne Supernova”. (Of course Oasis were at their peak when Chris was living in Cambridge, England.)
I reached Oakland airport in time to catch the earlier Alaska flight to Seattle, so I got myself added to the stand-by list – but to no avail. That flight was full, and so was mine at 8:00pm. There seem to be a lot of people moving around the country right now…
And now I’m home in Seattle, all set for another week in the real world. I expect there are a bunch of EPFL games on my DVR; I’ll try to avoid reading any sports news from England. No spoilers, please!