Category Pointers

An ex-superpower in the making

Salon has an interesting, yet excessive article on how the oil crisis of the mid-to-late 2000s potentially strips the United States from its economic and military might and at the same time revives Russia as a powerful player in the world. While over-the-top in its conjecture, the article is a strong reminder of how fragile our economic and political structures are and how long-established hegemonies are dependent on oil.

Resampling Needed

Those using Firefox 3.0 may have noticed that by default when someone scales the content of a page, the images are resized too, a behaviour long-pioneered by Opera. Those using Firefox 3.0 on linux will be sorry to find out that upscaled images are not resampled using anything but what seems to be nearest neighbour (I haven't checked the code): they are ugly, pixelated and definitely not pleasant to the eye. This is well documented on the Mozilla Bugzilla repository and sadly it may be the case that it's not fixed until Firefox 3.0 final is out. Which is a shame, as many people with higher resolution displays, especially high-resolution laptop displays that sometimes reach approximately 150dpi actually depend on the scaling functionality to be able to read stuff properly. Ironically GTK+ offers pretty decent image scaling functionality and hopefully it's not that hard to make use of it in Firefox in the near future. Here's an illustration of the problem. The picture on the left shows the original (unscaled) content of the ΜΠΛΟΟΓΚΛ hellenic blog search engine. The one in the middle shows the scaled version, as shown in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. The one on the right shows a resampled version of the image using the (pretty computationally expensive) lanczos algorithm, which although not probable as a solution it's quite close to the (realistically possible) bilinear resampling for upscaled images of this size. Image Upscaling in Firefox 3.0B5 (Linux) You can follow the progress on this issue on the Mozilla Bug tracking page here.

Steps Towards Irrelevance

Mary Jo Foley, Microsoftphile and tech writer (since the company's early years) writes, when asked about the future of Microsoft's leadership once Bill Gates retires:
There's always been this dichotomy between "Bill's guys" and "Steve's guys." Steve's guys have MBAs and their roots are in sales. Bill's guys have been traditional technologists. The people who are more like Steve will probably get more power and will run the show, so I wonder who's going to be the tech champion for Bill's guys. I think that's going to be a big cultural and noticeable change once Gates is out from his day-to-day duties.
That's funny. Microsoft has been pretty much excellent in marketing and sales for many years, but mediocre (or even poor in some cases) in engineering and technology. If "Bill's guys" have been running the show all these years, how will "Steve's guys" help Microsoft overcome its pretty obvious technological problems without squandering its strategy? I'm guessing if Steve Ballmer is going to stay --- which he probably is --- Microsoft will probably move a bit faster, but still quite gradually, towards irrelevance. It's not salesmen and marketers that make or break a company like this. It's not technologists either. It's visionaries, pioneers and innovators. Microsoft never really had many of those in positions of power, and it desperately needs them to compete in today's market. Innovation and a solid vision for the future have always been at the fringes of corporate policy at Microsoft or in Bill Gates' books and lectures. Sadly, I doubt the 'MBAs' and 'salespeople' that are going to run the show in Redmond for the next few years have any clue as to what any of that mean.

Dynamic IP friendly SPAs.

At last, Linksys just upgraded their SPA (formely Sipura) 942/962 series phone firmware. Among many other bugfixes, the new firmware fixes a number of longstanding and extremely annoying SIP registration bugs (CSCsm28353, CSCsk69012) that afflicted dynamic IP ADSL users whose external (routable) IP address gets changed frequently and necessitated a relatively long process to make the phone behave properly. Kudos to Linksys for fixing this, albeit quite late.

Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted

It's funny, but statements like these are probably the reason a large, and increasing, part of the population chooses to treat religion with contempt. I'm quite certain that, at the end of the day, any religious leader would rather see his/her religion treated as a 'private matter' than a meaningless joke of yesteryear, for in a modern society it can probably only be one of the two.

Η Spinalonga στο "Βήμα"

Σήμερα, στο Κυριακάτικο 'Βήμα', υπάρχει άρθρο του Γιώργου Σκιντζα για την ελληνική ανεξάρτητη μουσική σκηνή. Το άρθρο, αναφέρει --- μεταξύ άλλων --- και τη Spinalonga Records, τις τρείς συλλογές που έχει κυκλοφορήσει στα τρία χρόνια της ύπαρξής της, το μη-κερδοσκοπικό μοντέλο καθώς και τη δραστηριοποίηση της στον χώρο των live δίνωντας έμφαση στο επερχόμενο live των Gevende την ερχόμενη εβδομάδα σε Αθήνα και Θεσσαλονίκη [Facebook Event][Last.fm Event].

Screwing up the Classics, "Straight to Video".

It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, or even a particularly good movie, but WarGames (1983) was one of the few Hollywood flicks on the contemporary 'hacker' subculture set in a quasi-realistic environment and one that has since become a 'classic' of the genre. It's also one of the few movies by Lasker and Parkes (another being Sneakers from 1992 --- notice the similarities?). It's a shame then, that --- as with countless other films --- the studios chose to pick up the franchise once again. But even if this might make some sense to some, what certainly doesn't is following a movie like WarGames with a B-grade, straight-to-DVD release. I guess expecting the studios to get a clue is a bit too much...

A detailed case study of Magnatune

It was written by ORG's Michael Holloway, who did an incredible job of synthesizing information from our web site, interviews with me, and my dozens of comments.