Will wonders never cease

And now for something completely different.

John Bolton, the controversial U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize!

I feel like Alice.

For those of you who don’t follow this kind of stuff, last year the Democrats in the Senate successfully blocked Bolton’s appointment to the UN. It was only by the President performing a last minute appointment, when the Senate wasn’t in session, that allowed him to (temporarily) take the position. In fact, he’ll be up for re-approval sometime this year. I wonder how the Democrats will deal with him as a Nobel Peace prize nominee…

 

2/8/2006 2:20:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs | politics

End of an era (again)

This just in: Borland is leaving the integrated development market (Computerworld). They will be selling off their Delphi and JBuilder products (the only real ones left) and concentrating on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).  This really is the end of an era. Many of us cut our developmental baby teeth on Borland products. In the past they were technology leaders in areas like Pascal and C++. In fact, before Borland came out with Turbo C++ in the late ‘80s, it was accepted that it was “impossible” to do object-oriented Windows development, because of Windows’ weird programming model (remember the WinProc, lParams and wParams?). Borland did it.

But, they stumbled during the ‘90s, concentrating first on database systems and then on web development. At one point, they even renamed the company to Inprise. After that, at the Software Development Conference, Richard Hale Shaw insisted on referring to the Inprise crew as Borland. Sure enough, in a few years, they were Borland once again. But the company had become only a shadow of what they once were.

In the intervening years, there’d been a huge “brain drain” at Borland, and they never were able to regain any real traction in the software development area. I was at the rollout of Delphi in 1995, back in the pre-Inprise days. Now, the guy responsible for Delphi (and Turbo Pascal before that) works for Microsoft (Anders Hjelsberg), and (in fact) gave us the C# programming language.

I expect that Delphi (and maybe JBuilder along with it) will be bought by a foreign outfit, maybe European (where Delphi continues to do well). JBuilder is basically a dead product, since Eclipse has taken over the Java IDE space, and is in fact way better than any of the commercial tools out there.

As for Borland, dead corp. walking. They’re just going to fade away. What a shame.

 

2/8/2006 2:03:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  development

The whitening of America

What follows is just my impression, no links & no references. Your mileage may vary…

There seems to be a trend in America now that is “whitening” people. As a frame of reference, keep in mind that, generally, when an American refers to a person as “white”, what this is synonymous with (though they may be unaware of this fact) is “white anglo-saxon protestant”. That’s because most non-ethnic Americans can’t tell the difference. Back in the dark days of the early 20th century, when white supremacists were pushing their brand of racial intolerance as “science”, all the various ethnic groups were categorized in order of advancement, with white anglo-saxon protestants being on top, and black sub-saharan africans being on the bottom. All the other various ethnic groups stretched between the two, so that your typical supremacist of the time knew just how superior to feel about them.

Today, this is considered “racist”. Okay, it is racist, but (in my opinion) the current attitude is also racist.

Today the attitude seems to be that African Americans are “black” (which is not bad) and everybody else is “white” (which can be bad). Note that this is an American attitude, not a black or white American attitude, though its generally held by the non-ethnic Americans. Those of use with ethnic identity tend to not see the world in this way, instead seeing the multitude of cultures out there and understanding that they’re all different.

Now, I don’t know what to do about this, except to make sure that whatever children you have are raised in a “properly” ethnic community, where people know their roots, and don’t see a problem with that. I think that way too many people in America are trying to act “white” or “black” (whichever piece of America they identify with).

2/3/2006 4:06:01 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

A rock and a hard place

It seems that Israel is caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, Israel dearly wants the Palestinians to have their own country. For the most part, this is not due to any altruistic feelings. The Jewish leadership in Israel have come to the realization that the Palestinian (muslim) population is growing faster than the Israeli (Jewish) population. They only have two (rational) choices: “allow” the Palestinians to set up their own government, or eventually turn over the government of Israel to the Palestinians (as happened in South Africa with the end of apartheid). Since there’s no way that their turning over the government, they have to allow the Palestinians to set up their own government and therefore stay out of Israeli politics.

On the other hand, Hamas is now running the Palestinian authority, and the Israeli government doesn’t deal with Hamas (except to fire missiles at their leaders).

So, Israel is now stuck. At this point, almost all of the cards are in Hamas’ hand. What a country.

2/2/2006 10:08:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs

The next great fuel?

digg pointed me to an article in CNN Money today on replacing gasoline with ethanol. It was an interesting read. For the record, I think we need a real replacement for oil as soon as possible. It was oil that drove the technological boom of the 20th century, and until we come up with a fuel source that tops it in what I call “energy density”, we’re never going to make the kind of jump we did before.

That being said, it seems that ethanol is poised to replace gasoline as an automobile fuel. This could be quite interesting, at least for the short term.

 

1/30/2006 11:04:41 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Wal-Mart and Academia

Via Instapundit (I do like that Instapundit ), James Joyner has an interesting article comparing Wal-Mart and academia. Part of the article noted that a new Wal-Mart store in the Chicago area attracted 25,000 applications for 325 openings. That’s 25 thousand. An interesting sideline to this bit is that, apparently, the Chicago city council recently turned down Wal-Mart’s request to build a store in the city limits due to public pressure. Instead, Wal-Mart built the store just outside the city limits, and the only real difference is the loss of tax revenues to the city of Chicago.

Back to the main point of all of this. The anti-Wal-Mart folks seem to fall into two groups: the union organizers (who dislike any non-union enterprises, especially successful ones) and high paid folks to think that “those people” (the ones who work at Wal-Mart and possibly shop at Wal-Mart) are being taken advantage of.

Now, I understand the issue of small companies being driven out of business by Wal-Marts moving in to an area. However, this is nothing new. Way back when (in Hawaii, we refer to this as our “small kid days”), we had meat markets, and fish markets, and produce markets. You literally shopped around to get everything that a family needed for daily living. Then along came the Super Markets (notice the name). They basically killed all of those specialty shops, mainly because they could leverage cost and offer the same goods at a lower price than the smaller stores. I don’t see anyone protesting against Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger’s (Fred Meyer up here in the Northwest).

So, why this ill feeling toward Wal-Mart? The trend is no different than the Super Market trend of the 1950’s, and as James Joyner says, no different than what people face in academia too.

 

 

1/27/2006 5:47:53 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Courting Alex...

It’s that time, the Spring TV season is starting, and one of the new shows is Courting Alex, with Jenna Elfman and Josh Randall. The only review I read for the show said that it was so-so; I wasn’t hoping for a lot.

Turns out, the show is pretty good. I’d say that it has the potential to be the best show in CBS’s Monday lineup, better than Two and a Half Men.

 

 

1/24/2006 8:30:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Honesty in journalism - What a concept!

Today, Joel Stein wrote a column titled Warriors and Wusses. In it he says something very honest: “… I’m not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken…”.

Bravo (at least half-way) to Joel for telling it like it is. At last, someone on the anti-war side who tells it like it is. You can’t (honestly) be against the war, but for the people performing the war. Come on!

Now, let me be up front here. I’m for the war. Before the war started, I felt that we had worked ourselves into a “fish or cut bait” situation: We either had to accept that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (sound familiar? 20/20 hindsight out there?), pick up our toys, and go home… or we had to accept that we had to go to the next step and invade. To be honest, I never expected the President to invade. I expected what we saw during the 8 years of the Clinton administration (and to be honest, the end of Bush 43’s administration): lots of sabre rattling followed by us backing down. But, once the decision had been made, it can’t be unmade: we’re there for the duration.

Back to the central point of this rant: The armed forces in Iraq are doing what they believe their duty is. By and large, they believe that they are doing the right thing. If you think they aren’t, then you’re not supporting them! Be honest about it. As Joel says, this doesn’t mean that you need to spit on them when they come home (as happened way too much during Vietnam), just be honest with them about what they’re doing.

And I’ll continue to disagree with you about that, and support the war…

1/24/2006 11:09:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  politics | general

The new Low-Rent Huffington Post

By the way, I noticed that in many cases, The Huffington Post is now just linking to stories in other electronic news sites. Looks like they’re in a slide downward. Too bad.

1/23/2006 4:01:38 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Geese and ganders

Norman Solomon has an interesting article in the Huffington Post regarding leaks, the Plame case, and the NSA case.

He treats both cases as simply political issues and trivializes their legal impact.

He ends by assuming that journalists will either be on the “side” of the “truth” or “powerful government officials”, and completely misses the “side” of the “large corporate interests” held by most media outlets. Let’s not forget that the New York Times sat on the NSA story until they could get the best monetary gain from it.

Frankly, I don’t buy the idea that newspaper writers (supposed “journalists”) and TV news writers are somehow entitled to special shielding from the government. IMHO, Freedom of the Press is a right shared by all americans, and grants all of us the freedom to publish, in print and otherwise.

1/23/2006 3:58:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics