technology, politics, culture, life
So I’m flipping through the morning’s news and snark on my Google Reader, and I see this, from CNN’s Top Stories feed:
Seriously speaking though, when a new organization that tries to sell itself as serious gets into this nonsense, it’s all gone out the window.
Technorati Tags: cnn, bush, idk my bff jill
There has been a lot of chatter and debate in the Mozilla development community of late over a recent decision by Mozilla’s powers-that-be that will see the development of Mozilla Thunderbird, the e-mail companion software to the (far) more popular Firefox somehow spun off into its own entity. There’s been a lot of spirited debate about this decision and a lot of people are questioning the decision. However, there is a crucial element that I think hasn’t really been explored properly, one that really puts this decision into true perspective.
Let me explain by first saying this: I am pretty old school when it comes to approaching email. I keep my primary personal email account in Outlook 2003. I actually do use Thunderbird for several of my other accounts (primarily my dimensionsix accounts), and I do find it a perfectly capable email client. The key thing here is that I’m still living in fat client land. I’m definitely a part of a shrinking majority. With the emergence of web-based email services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and GMail, more and more users have switched to using one of these services for their email needs. What we are experiencing in growing numbers is what I would say is little less than a (slowly evolving) paradigm shift in email from fat-client model to a web-client one. Within this paradigm shift lies a key concept: the user platform for email functionality has changed as well.
Think about it this way. I remember the original Hotmail in 1995, before Microsoft acquired it (by the way, interesting aside: do you know why they called it Hotmail? Maybe because buried in that name are the letters H-T-M-L? Nifty, huh?). It was cool to be able to send and receive email through the web, but the functionality was limited, and fat-clients like Netscape or Eudora made the most sense to use. They had the newest features and the up-and-coming innovations in email usage.
Let’s fast forward 12 years now. We’re currently in the midst of this whole Web 2.0 cycle of innovation. Technologies such as AJAX and JSON have enabled web developers to start to do really cool stuff with their website applications. Email has naturally evolved to follow this pattern. Google was the first and most prevalent with GMail, but Yahoo and Microsoft have followed suit. The fact of the matter is that the big three have been able to bring their web email experiences on par with the functionality that most desktop clients provide (e.g., both the new Hotmail and Yahoo’s mail beta allow you to drag and drop messages to folders you have in your email, like you can with a fat-client). In fact, some features, like GMail’s tagging tools, somewhat exceed what a fat-client offers. And, this isn’t limited to just consumer-level email. With each succeeding version of Exchange Server, Microsoft continues to improve it’s excellent Exchange Web Access feature, which allows you to get your corporate email via the web. Now instead of companies putting their effort into developing out fat-client email programs, they’re leveraging all these web technologies to make fat clients unnecessary.
Once you look at it in this way, Mozilla’s decision to push off Thunderbird and focus solely on Firefox makes a lot of sense. We’re finally starting to see some of those lofty promises from 1998 about how the web will be the platform and all of that, at least in this one limited way. The driver for all of this has been developers like the folk behind Firefox (and yes, even Microsoft, for without them and their wonderful XMLHttpRequest object, this would be a moot discussion) who have taken these new ideas and turned the web browser into something far greater than just a means of viewing textual data. It’s something to think about before you complain too much.
Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail
These days, when any sort of news happens, our news organizations go utterly bananas with the wall-to-wall coverage. For example, tonight there was a steam pipe explosion near Grand Central in the City. Yes, this is serious news. A lot of people were hurt, at least one person was killed, and there was a lot of damage done. Fine, but do we need all the New York networks sitting on the air for like three hours talking about it, especially when there’s no new information about it?
These things are always the same. Some big event happens. They cut into whatever’s on and announce it. They’ll then proceed to show the same 30 seconds of spliced camera footage over and over and over again and talk about the same crap over and over. Seriously, it’s tiring.
And that’s to say nothing of the cable news networks, which have turned this into an art form. It’s kind of sad to see what CNN has become. Remember when CNN had actual journalistic integrity? It’s hard to believe that the network that revolutionized the news industry by broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad at the start of the Gulf War has come to this. These days, if there’s a missing blonde, or a crazy person with a gun, or something like that, you can count on CNN to be on that with wall to wall coverage. The important news? Well, maybe they’ll get their talking heads on that one for their punditry shows in the PM.
It really is sad to see what has become of our broadcast media.
One thing that’s pissed me off in the wake of the Live Earth concerts are groups like PETA piggybacking on this, and trying to use the event (once again) as a platform for us to all go super veggie. While I’m not going to even try and argue the logic that raising animals is a tax on the environment, I want to say the following:
First, it’s utterly pompous for them to make this claim:
The organizers of the Live Earth concerts list “green your diet” as one of the solutions to the environmental crisis, but we want people to know that it can be the solution.
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot? The solution? More than getting off our addiction to fossil fuels, setting up strict laws regarding pollution and hazardous chemicals, and other things of that nature? Sorry, but cutting meat out of your diet won’t suddenly make the environment magically better.
Secondly, and more importantly, I wanted to point this out. We humans are omnivores. That means we eat both meat and plant foods. There’s a really good reason for this. For as amazing of a bio-mechanical machine that the human body is, it lacks the ability to synthesize a wide range of essential vitamins, minerals, and other building blocks essential to keep the machine running in an optimal state. This includes proteins and amino acids that we need for building muscle and other essential tissues. While we can get some of these from the plants and other things we eat, we need to get a lot of those proteins from meat. It’s just a fact of human biology.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t more closely moderate what kinds of meat we eat and choose healthier choices. Those are important things for overall health. That’s important. It’s just that it really pisses me off when people like PETA try to get into an issue and take it over as their own.
Technorati Tags: live earth, peta, vegeterianism, biology
In the wake of Live Earth, I just thought I would point out that the real tool to answer the call of the climate crisis is this:
The only way we’ll ever make a real dent in the climate crisis is to rise up, every last one of us, with the loudest voice we have, and that voice is not at a rock concert. The people who are in charge of making decisions are easily swayed by big money from corporations and industries that are against altering the status quo and making an impact. As long as they stay in power, the current trends will continue. If you really want to break the cycle, you need to begin where it needs to be begun: at the ballot box.
Far too often, the people of my generation seem to think that being an agent of change means doing these small things on the periphery. No one seems to be involved with the idea of voting anymore. What they fail to realize is that by sitting on the sidelines that way, they continually keep things the way they are. Dropping out of the process doesn’t fix anything. You can only be an agent of change if you fight to effect it on the front lines. That means getting out and getting registered.
End public service announcement.
