evanmorris.com
From the monthly archives: December 2008
I imagine this has been around forever, but I like it. Then again, I spent several years explaining computers to lawyers.
Totally not safe for work.
And it will be impossible to reverse. Paul Mulshine (who was my editor at the Newark, NJ Star-Ledger) explains what’s being lost:
… The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn’t a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news. Blogger Glenn Reynolds of “Instapundit” fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”
No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.
The type of person who can’t even keep track of the number of times the letter “N” appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues. But the democratic urge expressed by Mr. Reynolds is not new. Someone is always heralding the rise of “the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people,” as H.L. Mencken once put it.
In his 1920 essay “The National Letters,” Mencken traced this sentiment back to the early days of our democracy. He noted how first Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Walt Whitman prophesized the rise of what Whitman termed “a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known.” Mencken was pessimistic about this prospect thanks to what he termed “the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes.”
[more] via Opinion: A Newspaper Wish – WSJ.com.
Tags: Computers, Evil, Idiocy:
Microsoft hopes to charge you for PC hardware and software in much the same way wireless carriers charge you for text messages.
As detailed in a patent application recently unveiled by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Redmond seeks exclusive rights to a “Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience.” This would involve saddling PC users with a machine whose components can only be used if you fork over more cash.
Filed in July 2007, the would-be patent describes a computer with “individually metered hardware and software components that a user can select and activate based on current need.” And each of these items would have a cost associated with it.
“Beyond simple activation, the user may be able to select a level of performance related to processor, memory, graphics power, etc. that is driven not by a lifetime maximum requirement, but rather by the need of the moment,” Microsoft’s shameless patent application continues.
“When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user.”
For example, Redmond says, use of Microsoft Office might cost you a dollar an hour, whereas an hour of gaming might be $1.25. An hour of browsing? 80 cents.
[more]via Microsoft eyes metered-PC boondoggle • The Register.
I wouldn’t use Word if they paid me $10 an hour. Well, at this point, maybe. But it’s $100/hr. for me to use Outlook.
Why yes, they were on drugs:
SAN DIEGO — As a supervisor at a Washington Mutual mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons was accustomed to seeing baby sitters claiming salaries worthy of college presidents, and schoolteachers with incomes rivaling stockbrokers’. He rarely questioned them. A real estate frenzy was under way and WaMu, as his bank was known, was all about saying yes.
Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.
Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved.
“I’d lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated,” said Mr. Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest — all involving drugs.
While Mr. Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said.
“In our world, it was tolerated,” said Sherri Zaback, who worked for Mr. Parsons and recalls seeing drug paraphernalia on his desk. “Everybody said, ‘He gets the job done.’ ”
[more] via The Reckoning – WaMu Built an Empire on Bad Loans – Series – NYTimes.com.
today’s moodcat
