Category: Consuming

Sad housing story from Seattle.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Microsoft to face Challenges in Brazil. And from the New York Times, Novell Linux Desktop gains on Windows in Brazil.

Maybe the gloating makes me a bad person, but I’ll take what good news I can get: Sun to miss date on Solaris features and Microsoft to restrict crippled Windows version to outdated hardware.

Novell Linux Desktop decal kit: send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to get a replacement your “Made for Microsoft” sticker. Hell yes.

The Spanish saying “cada loco con su tema” (literally, each madman with his theme), suggests that everyone has their own obsessions. So, to continue with the usual fare here, two links copied out of the Times: Gee, yet another article on how realtors are unethical, horrible people. And, whoo-hoo, an article about the dangers of foreign banks refusing to hold US currency as their reserves. (Note that the second item, like every article published on the subject, cites Nouriel Roubini as the proponent of the more pessimistic expert on currency markets– Brad DeLong seems to be an admirer and his arguments are pretty cogent to a layman, so I think he’s believable. Plus, funny names are a bonus in my book.)

Did Cassandra ever get tired of her Jeremiads?

Finally, the quality of the corporate bonds reflects the quality of the factory products.

There are perhaps five or ten of these bikes in my city, and two of them are now parked outside my building. Both black. Mine, of course, has the custom low-rise shock absorber and a bumper sticker that says “My other ride is your mom.” The newcomer has all of its reflectors intact though.

MyPyramid.org, from the US Department of Agribusiness. A parody of MyPyramid.gov, the food-pyramid of the US Department of Agriculture.

Making fun of government informational brochures is like making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Diana Pittet, now working on a dissertation about American cheddars at New York University, quit teaching Latin to work at Neal’s Yard Dairy, London’s foremost cheese store. Lori van Handel was a full-time art conservator in Williamstown, Mass., who became a freelance to free up time to take cheese classes in Manhattan and Vermont.

Now, I dare you to tell me that there are no great American cheeses, or that there is no cheese culture here. I dare you!

The Boston Globe on Windows “Longhorn” notes that it has some new features. It does not note that most of these new features were already available on MacOS and Linux. It does not note that there is any competition for Longhorn. It notes that Windows runs on more than 90% of systems, but fails to note any antitrust concerns. I don’t expect deep discussion of this in a quick note article, but this is little more than a rehashed press release.

The icing on the cake, though, is right at the end:

To keep consumers satisfied in the meantime, Gates said a new version of Windows, called ”Windows XP Professional x64 Edition,” will begin shipping next month that can crunch more information at one time, handling 64 bits of data compared with 32 bits in the previous generation.

Now, do you see anything in that that indicates that this is for a new hardware platform? A hardware platform that’s been available for over a year? That you can’t just run out and put x64 edition on your PC? This product is not a “quick update to keep consumers happy.” It’s long-delayed support for 64-bit processors that will mostly be of interest to business customers, primarily in the server or high-end workstation space. I guess you can blame this on the article being by the Globe Wire Service, but dammit, let’s have some accuracy here.

What gets me is I’m sure that most of the reporting in the world is equally wrong, and I don’t know it because I’m not a subject-matter expert on anything else.