I'm glad that this post made people laugh. But I did have a serious point. These guys who think they can extort a policy change from Microsoft have seen too many movies. I think a lot of nasty stuff happens because people try to act out the unreal fantasies that Hollywood peddles.

Some years back, there was a case in Monterey CA of a guy trying to act out the murders in one of the sleaziest films ever made. Fortunately homocide isn't as easy as the movie made it seem. But maybe all movies should come with a "don't try this at home!" warning.

There's a fellow named Al Kossow. He collects old computer stuff, including a huge trove of computer manuals which he has generously made availablein PDF format. (Warning: these are scanned-in bitmaps, not PS text streams, so the file sizes are huge.) Of particular interest is a IBM 7030 Reference Manual, authentic even to the coffee cup ring on the front cover! I find this particular document fascinating because it is probably the first computer manual ever to use the term "byte".

The 7030 (better known as the Stretch) was not actually a byte-architecture: the addressible unit was a 64-bit word. If I'm reading the manual correctly, a 7030 byte was a variable-length bit field within a machine word. According to various sources, the term was coined by Werner Buchholz, an engineering manager on the project, as a play on "bit".

The 7030 was a commercial disaster. It was never as fast as it was supposed to be, and shut down the line after manufacturing only 3. But it was a valuable disaster, because the innovations that went into the Stretch proved to be valuable to IBM later on, and indeed to the whole computing industry.

This was all in the late 50s. Later, in 1965, IBM introduced the 360 series. The 360 line embraced a huge range of models, from 64-bit scientific mainframes to 16-bit business minicomputers. Despite the difference in word size, machine code was portable between all models. This was possible because the 360 series abandoned word addresses in favor of a smaller character-sized address unit: the now familiar 8-bit byte.

Oh, the trials and tribulations of being a mental packrat and compulsive browser. I used to think that electronic references would make life easier for me, because I wouldn't get distracted as I do when thumbing through a hardcopy reference book. But online references, particularly the web, make things worse -- it's too easy to cross link and free associate.

Earlier today, I was checking up on my favorite cam girl, and found an amusing story where some guys in a bar made fun of her choice of tipple. I sent her a teasing email:

From: Zicsoft
To: Malice <malice@beautydestroyed.com>
Subject: It wasn't your footwear

It was the fact that your tipple is a fruit-flavored Swedish beverage. For shame! ;)

Next time, order a Skkorpio!

While on the Skkorpio web site, I noticed a link to the web site of an Austrialian science show. Now, one of the "presenters" of this show is one Jill, Duchess of Hamilton. Intriguing name. Why, in Australia of all places, would somebody insist on using such a pretentious title?

Never did figure that out, though Jill Hamilton sounds like an interesting person. Journalist, historian, gardener. Advocate of using native plants instead of conventional high-maintenance garden species. (I heartily approve. Aside from the ecological effects, such gardens look much less sterile.) In the course of my Googling, I found an article on the Dukes of Hamilton from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition.

The 11th edition? My ears pricked up. I've long wanted a copy of this one. It was a total rewrite of the encylopedia, done by some of the leading scholars of the day. A few years later, Sears Roebuck bought the whole operation and moved it to Chicago. Later editions had existing articles butchered to make room for new material, and to satisfy political and religious pressure groups. Then in 1942, it went to the University of Chicago, where it got swept up in Robert Maynard Hutchins "great books" ideology.

Never got my own copy, for various reasons. Turns up in used bookstores for a few hundred bucks. Serious scholars always have their own copies, but I've never been a serious scholar. An online version would be worth doing, though, if you could get around the copyright issues.

Turns out there aren't any -- Sony Bono was asleep that day. Anybody can scan it in and publish it, though they have to be careful with the Britannica trademark, which is still active. The scan I found was at 1911Eencyclopedia.org. Alas, it's a pretty half-assed effort. Nobody's gotten round to making sure that each HTML file corresponds to an actual article. Never mind proofreading it. Plus they have obnoxious popups. Glad I noticed that before I hit the Donate button.

You can buy the 11th on CD-ROM for only $100. If I weren't unemployed, I would have already done so.

Found a great Wikipedia article on the 11th. With a link to a project that's doing a proper free version. Guess I'll have to volunteer.

Maybe I should resent it when I'm modded down by the "oh shut up" types. But I don't. Indeed, it gives me that smug feeling you get when you know you've made an important point, and people don't want to admit it.

Somehow, IE has decided that my startup page is in the restricted zone. What's my startup page? about:blank!

I've been thinking of tweaking my own version of Mozilla for Windows. Problem: the official build uses the Microsoft C++ compiler (just the command line thing, not the Visual C++ IDE), and I don't feel like buying a copy. The latest release can be built with GCC instead, but the resulting binaries won't run CL-compiled plugins. So no Java!

Mozilla.org seems to be having a hard time staying away from closed-source apps. Training videos are provided only in Real format, which means that Free Software True Believers can't look at them.

I'm not a FSTB, but I do thoroughly dislike Real's software products. (Intrusive, badly designed, tend to fuck up your system.) Hard for me to understand why everybody's so dependent on them. When I worked at SGI, we would watch company meeting MPEG streams on our IRIX workstations. Of course, that was our own technology (since spun off), but it used standard formats. Open source equivalents exist, but none are ready for end-users yet. So everybody uses proprietary Real and Microsoft formats. Too bad!

Recently, somebody filed an "Ask Slashdot", asking for books on Quantum Mechanics. I couldn't resist making the obvious pun. I would have thought everybody had heard it already -- if you listen to NPR, you hear it in a Car Talk blurb almost once a day. But my post quickly got modded up to the max.

Everyone likes to be loved, but is it right to be loved for this kind of reason? Have to try to put this question in a form that would interest Randy Cohen.

My post included a link to the Volkswagen Quantam Repair Manual on Amazon. For some strange reason, all the reader reviews refer to a German social thinker named Habermas. Some of them also refer to his leading translator, an American named Pensky. Obviously some kind of sociology in-joke. Anyway, mental packrat that I am, I immediately went to Google to look these guys up.

On the way, I got stuck in a small but highly irritating side trip. See, there's this guy named Daniel Takriti. He appears to be a webmaster for various German online shopping sites. As a sideline, he spams Google.

How do you spam a search engine? Suppose you Google for "Habermas Pensky". You'll get a lot of hits on www.24-7-bestsellersbox.com and www.bestbookcity.com. Neither of these sites has any actual content. If you click on these links, you are immediately forwarded to Amazon.com -- using a paid-referral link, of course. Obviously these sites do something quite different when the Googlebot visits them.

This wasn't a big waste of my time, but a totally unnecessary one. I just hate this shit.

Just discovered Salam Pax, an entertaining blogger who logs in from Baghdad. His geeky orientation (how many people would compare postwar Iraq to a William Gibson novel) should make him a favorite among Slashdotters.

I'm looking at "Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust". One of the keyword-sensitive ads at the top of the page is for Storage USA!

This new games section skin hurts my eyes. But that's only appropriate, no?

I've always known that there would be a hystical, racist backlash to 9/11. Although, on the whole, Americans have behaved a whole lot better than I thought they would.

By "Americans", of course I mean "most Americans". I certainly don't mean the southland cavemen who murdered a Sikh cab driver a few days after the attacks. (Sikhs, Arabs, what's the difference? They both wear rags on their heads, right?) I don't mean self-righteous idiots like Bill Maher, who considers his own prejudices "logical" and everybody else's "political correct". And, alas, I don't mean our leaders. Who seems to view terrorism as a very convenient justification for ignoring certain troublesome parts of the constitution. Amendments 1, 5, and 14 seems to be particularly at risk.

I mean, why else is Maher Hawash in jail? For comitting a crime? Well, I've done some research on the dude, and this is what he appears to be guilty of:

• In 1984, he willfully entered the United States, where he acquired an MSEE degree and American citizenship.
• He has maliciously developed video technology for Compaq and Intel, and co-authored a book on multimedia programming.
• The dastardly fellow went on to marry and start a family.
• And, oh yes, he gave some money to one of those charities with "links to terrorism". Not the most suprising thing for a man born in Nablus, on the West Bank.

His choice of birthplace would seem to be the closest thing Hawash has done to an actual crime. So what is he charged with? Not a thing. He's being held as a "material witness" using an old anti-Mafia law. And he's being held in solitary confinement, presumably to cut him off from whatever vast conspiracy he's supposed to have joined.

I know what you're saying. "The Feebs must have information they can't share with us. We should give them some time to prove their case." Nope, sorry. The pattern is too familiar. Under pressure to Get Results, somebody's thrashed through the usual mire of casual association, jailhouse informants, and other low quality source. Hey, if you had to choose between losing your civil service job and throwing some random raghead geek in jail, what would you do?

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe some stalwart Defender of Democracy is off gathering evidence. And in the meantime Innocent Lives will be saved by having this Evil Terrorist behind bars.

Doesn't matter. The bottom line is that we can't allow the government to lock people up without justification. If every brain-dead functionary with a badge can cover their ass by throwing somebody in jail, with no trial, no need to even explain -- then we've got problems. And believe it or not, those problems are a lot worse than a few crazy suicidal terrorists.

So for your own safety (and, to use a much abused term, liberty) you need to go to freemikehawash.org and click on one of the donation links. It's safe I'm sure. The Feebs won't arrest you just for giving somebody money. Would they?

Somebody used up all their moderator points downmodding ("offtopic") the participants in this thread. But only the ones that had already been modded up!

Following GW II taught me two interesting things. One is that many USMC units ride to battle in weird-looking "amphibious tractors", or AMTRACs. The other is that many Marines believe that apricots are evil -- eating them makes enemy snipers more accurate and causes your AMTRAC to break down.

I'm not going to make fun of any of this. (I try not to irritate people with guns.) I just want somebody to explain one little thing to me: Why were so many amphibious vehicles deployed in the desert?

Text-based role playing games (such as those Infocom used to do) are commercially dead. But in a sense, they're more alive than ever, Lots of people seem to make a serious hobby out of writing original games.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I've always admired the whole concept of "adventure" games. On the other, I'm really bad at them! It doesn't help that a lot of current authors have really nasty and perverse senses of humor!

Here's an extreme case: Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. It's driving me crazy! I'd kill for a hint!

Last October I quit my job at Borland. I never had a job I enjoyed so much, and never did losing a job depress me so much. I kind of associated Slashdot with that job -- I started posting regularly shortly after I started the job, mainly because its culture seemed to mirror that of the people I was working with, and writing manuals for. So when I left, I also stopped frequenting Slashdot -- too many associations.

Now, the associations aren't so fresh, so I'm back. I guess.

Why did I quit, if I loved the job so much? Someday I'll explain, if I can figure out a way to do so without sounding like a 5-year-old.