Montag, Mai 31, 2004

Possible Opera Fix

Internet Explorer is now something less than the necessary evil it once was for many of us. Thankfully, the real fallout of the Netscape-Microsoft was not the limp-wristed settlement that the Redmond legal team finagled. Nor is it the stiff-armed approach of EU litigator who continue to hold Ballmer's balls to the wall of European competition standards. In Europe, Microsoft has been fined US$600million (a piddly amount for a company who's annual European revenues are several billion $US), ordered to open up some of its code to licensing, and even to sell versions of Windows sans the odius Windows Media Player.

All of which means fairly little for a company that has fast-tracked itself into a multi-media conglomerate and for whome the server business is rapidly falling behind.

Luckily for users, techs, and developers, this means that the Windows Open-source and free software flora has flourished as Microsoft has turned its attention to greener, more iPod-like pastures.

Thank god for Opera. If not for Opera, Mozilla, and their ilk, we in the IT world would still be struggling through the pop-ups just like the 80% of computer users who use the factory-installed options. I would just rant on into the night, but since eclecticism already did it, I'll scamper along. Just click on the Better Browser link on this page to escape the horrors of IE.

>>The fix that I had previously posted did not, in fact, fix the issue. Many apologies.<<<

Donnerstag, Mai 06, 2004

I Cannot Let This One Slip Past

Anne Applebaum published a terrific article in yesterday's Washington Post.

However much I agree with her assessment of violence and violent impulses -- of course they are universal human characteristics, horrific ones we need to come to terms with as a human race -- she is (unintentionally?) slandering Rwanda.

Ok, slander might be taking it a bit too far, but the implication that Rwanda is a "primitive" culture, while Cambodia is an "ancient" one is ridiculous. "Primitive" and "ancient" are arcane, sloppy, and relative terms which should not be applied to human societies.

Yes, Rwanda is economically underdeveloped. Yes, Cambodia has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. And vice versa.

Lesson of the day: qualitative comparisons of societies are generally fallacious. Societies are self-contained entities that are not reliant upon external measures of "good" and "bad."(1)

(1) See Your Anthropology 101 textbook.