Monthly Archive for May, 2003

One Irish politician said, “if there were no weapons of mass destruction then the war was fought on a lie.” In the US, over 40% of the public, according to a recent poll, either believe that WMDs were found in Iraq or are unclear on whether they were found. The US has moved on from the war. Iraq is over and done, and the fact that the entire basis for war was lies, falsehoods, fabricated evidence, and spin doesn’t bother us in the least. Meanwhile, the continued reports of civil unrest and American mismanagement in Iraq doesn’t phase anyone here…and people still refuse to accept that we will need to be in that region for several more years, and provide hundreds of billions in aid at the same time that we are cutting taxes and raising the debt ceiling for an already struggling economy.

There is an apt quote that explains all this. It comes from way back seven years ago in the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Vampires had attacked a bar and Xander knew one thing for certain – the town would never be the same. Except that it was. People had moved on, made up stories and excuses, substitued “gangs on PCP” in place of vicious monsters. Well-established worldviews won out over scary and new and real.

Giles commented thusly: “People have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can’t.” Pretty much sums up our country, I think.

I like this comment from a Slashdot story:

I know it’s elitist and all, but I seriously wonder sometimes if many of the people out there using MS and AOL are the kinds of people the Free Software Movement should be wooing. I work in a menial tech support job (where I’m forced to actually help, and not just smirk) at the moment, and the amount of stupidity out there in the user population is staggering. These are people studying and teaching at a major university, some of whom are involved in incredibly complex subjects… and they don’t “getâ€? what a file is versus a folder, or what an email “addressâ€? is. And part of this stems from the watering down of the tech world by companies like this to the point now where everyone bases their idea of what a Killer App ™ is on the abilities of either the mythical “Joe Userâ€? or someone’s grandma. And I’ve got to say, if I ever run into either of those two people, the stupidity confronting me will probably be my end.

Sorry Grandma.

I saw Parade at OCHSA and was very impressed, both with the performance and the show itself. I had some issues with the show that I won’t get into except to say that I thought the story was probably more complicated then it seemed, and I felt that it was hard to really get in touch with the characters and get behind their reasoning. The story was powerful and, while somewhat detailed, still seemed too simplistic. There must have been more going on in the true murder story then we saw on stage.

Steven Olfey of the New York Times apparently wrote the following article for that paper. It is a very interesting and much more in-depth account of the actual events, and based on the other things I have read about the murder, it appears to be very accurate. That Olfey could get the entire story into one article I think backs my assertion that the people who made Parade could have put in more details to create more ambiguity and thus realism without creating too much confusion.

Because the NYT archives are pay-for-play, and I’m not sure this article is in there anyway, I have included it on the next page.

Reading the Nextel newsgroups, I saw a post about how Nextel was doing surveys asking people what they might do if other cell carries started a push-to-talk feature like Nextel’s DirectConnect. I went on to speculate (not on my blog) about the Nextel service, since I have just become a subscriber. It all seemed very clear to me. Nextel phones are bulkier, have shorter battery life, less features, worse screens, and older technology then the other carriers. The only thing Nextel has going for it is its PTT service. Now this is no mean feat. The iDEN service that Motorola and Nextel developed is truly wonderous, and the PTT service is magnificant, but because of the low volumes and the huge investment required to launch the service, not to mention the massive spectrum buys required, Nextel is in huge debt and has to sell their services at a premium, while offering fewer features then their competitors.

If Verizon or AT&T or Sprint can do a few things, including unified billing, giving out numbers in blocks, and, most importantly, engineering a nationwide, sub-one-second connect time PTT system, the whole world will change. Seriously, PTT is that cool. The social etiquitte of always-available instantaneous walkie-talkie-like services is still being explored. When it gets to the masses, it will take off, and the social experiment will be fascinating.

First each system will be proprietry, like the various SMS schemes, but eventually they will need to interconnect if they want to make a useful system. As much as the cell companies hate it, they must work together. Their silly and short-sighted single-network solutions harken back to the AT&T phone monopoly of old, and it is just stupid. But when I can PTT with my friends on Verizon and Sprint, boy, that’ll be neat.

There is an excellent Wired article about information technology during the Iraq war. It is amazing for me to think if, because the Cisco switches and Sun servers that they use are supposed to be sitting in climate-controlled clean rooms, but they are out in the middle of a desert where it is over 100 degrees F and there are constant sandstorms. These critical pieces of network infrastructure are running the war, and they are in little outposts scattered in the Iraqi deserts, and the people in charge of them are running patch cables like mad and constantly vacuuming to try to get the dust out and are rolling in “tactical air conditioners” to keep the darn things cool.

Why is everything off-the-shelf hardware? Because Microsoft Chat and Internet Explorer is better and more efficient then waiting for a year for the military procurement process to come up with something ruggedized for the battlefield.

There are other problems. “When we were deployed from the States,” says Lieutenant Marc Lewis – the commander of the convoy’s 27 heavy equipment trucks – “they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own.”

Same goes for special, military-grade encrypted GPS units. The ones that will work when the military enables Selective Availability to drastically reduce the accuracy of normal GPS units. Well, SA wasn’t activated, and with good reason — it would have hurt the US military more then the enemy.

Lewis is improvising as best he can. Before leaving the States, he bought a handheld eTrex GPS device, which he uses to track each of his forays into Iraq. In essence, he’s created a map of Iraq’s charted and uncharted freeways and desert roads. He just has no way to share it with anybody. But he is able to navigate as well as any of the tank or missile commanders he transported. I notice that at least four other soldiers in the convoy have brought their own store-bought GPS handhelds. These devices keep the convoys on track in lieu of having proper systems. “If we run out of batteries,” Lewis says when showing me his map of Iraq, “this war is screwed.”

The signals intelligence people in the military did a phenominal job with what they had — but what they had was nowhere near enough. If we had been fighting a real foe, an organized and coordinated enemy with good weapons, the casualty count would have been much higher.