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May 31, 2005

I hate my new work phone

The new phones at my office are digital IP phones provided by Avaya. Unlike our old AT&T ISDN 8520T phones, these phones have several annoying flaws.
1) The new phones don't have separate buttons for selecting the lines and speed dial. That means whenever you get a call, your speed dial switches to show all the phone lines routed to your desk. That means you are always hitting more buttons to speed dial
2) The headsets don't have a side tone. A side tone is that small portion of the your voice that is routed to your ear on the phone. This is what keeps everyone from yelling into land lines the way they do into cell phones. The background noise and poor isolation of the cell phone prevents your from hearing the side tone.
3). The button you press on my old phone to pickup the headset was a giant, tough button. Now we have a tiny grey button that looks just like most of the other buttons on the phone. Now they made the hold and speakerphone buttons different colors, so they were clearly thinking about this, they just dropped the ball on how many people use the headset and never use the speaker phone. They'd lynch you if you tried around here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:48 PM | Comments (0)

Thanksgiving and art?

Around thanks giving I've been known to have the occasional long conversation about the nature of giving thanks. I maintain that the acts of giving thanks implies the existance of someone to thank, and so, being thankful (rather than thanking people in specific) is a kind of prayer.

Well it seems that art may be a form of prayer as well.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)

Living in the land of Demoltion Man

In an interesting article at the WSJ, In Asia, It's Nearly
Impossible to Tell A Song From an Ad, they explore how the rampant music piracy has transformed the music scene in Asia. It seems that without the ability to make money in music we have returned to the medieval system of patronage, with corporations sponsoring artists to make songs that double as advertisements. The free (pirated) music subsidized by those too foolish to download it themselves is coming to an end. Now you can take your pick, undiscovered bands making a pittance from their paypal accounts, advertisement songs, or bands making money off concert tickets and t-shirts. Expect a new crop of winners and losers, with the already famous filling up rooms, a revival in hearing live music helping the theatrical performers, but the middle stars catering to to the downloading demographic, along with those unable to perform live (organs, giant bells, the handicapped) losing out.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

Is that unsporting, like attacking on Yom Kippur?

I saw a bunch of Pakistani sailors in town for fleet week amongst the thousands of US sailors wandering the streets of NYC. I noticed that they, unlike the American troops, often wore a beard, presumably for religious reasons. We don't allow our troops any more facial hair than a small mustache because it interferes with the operation of the gas mask. They don't make a proper seal when they go over the hairy skin. We probably also like the uniform, clean-shaven look. Now the Pakistanis have been lousy allies, helping us when they have to and hurting us when they think they can get away with it. As such, I don't feel too bad about them inspiring what I'm about to suggest.

Why not take a page out of the unconventional warfare playbook, and use of knockout and nauseating gasses on Islamic militants. We know that they will have trouble using gas masks, so while gas has a bad reputation, at least it might decrease the harm we do to innocents. I feel kind of dirty using someone's religious rituals as a way to defeat them in war, but this is a matter of life and death, and better a hundred Islamic militants than a single innocent Iraqi civilian. I just wouldn't let on about the reason for this change of tactics, or we'll have a serious PR problem .

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)

Cheap, if your time is worth nothing

I hate keyboards. I mean, sure I use them for my livelihood, but they have an awful design. First, the nipples, the little bumps on the F and the J keys are much too small. Second, the insert and caps lock keys are worthless. Third, at least in modern keyboards, the lack of good springs makes for an unsatisfying noise and too little key pressure to depress each key. That makes it harder to hold ones hands above the keyboard as good form required.

I've been addressing this piecemeal. First, I've pried off my insert and caps lock keys. Second, on my old keyboard, I glued little pieces of plastic spoons the home keys to make them feel more pronounced. I'm considering buying a cool IBM MODEL M keyboard, which has a great feel and noise. It lacks the windows key, but I don't use that much anyway.

But recently, there is a lot of fanfare about blank keyboards. That is, keyboards where the labels on the keys have been removed to discourage casual use and force the owner to memorize all the keys. The idea was first made famous by a character in the book Neuromancer . Das Keyboard ($80) has a new model that allows this, as does the happy hacking keyboard people ($250). But here you can find a neat article on sanding off the labels on your own keys to save money and use it on your existing keyboard. I've considered doing this on just the alpha portion of the keyboard, but maybe I should do it on the whole thing to make myself finally learn those symbols. Others have suggested using vinyl die, a messy, fun, and fast way of dying your keys black.

OR I guess I could just get this, the TouchSteam LP ($339)

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2005

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

In an insightful little article on effective responses to calamity, Glenn Reynolds has some great ideas. Citizens should carry firearms when permitted to do so (and the places they can do so should be expanded) people should keep their wits about them as best they can and try to help, and people should use video and still cameras to document events as best as possible.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)

More Snow Crash ideas made real

This millimeter wavelength radar article at Cnet talks about a technology I first saw mentioned in Snow Crash. The department of homeland security is using the technology to spy on pretty girls make the homeland safer by detecting non-metallic weapons at checkpoints. It this affront to privacy worth what we gain in safety? Maybe, but despite having heard about ceramic guns years ago (was it in Die Hard?) I've never heard about a single crime being committed with one.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)

Unlimited power, water and AC?

In a new bizzare article at Wired, The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea, they interview Jown Craven. Craven was a ocean engineer, lawyer, and a lead scientist in the navel weapons programs. Now he wants to pump cold water from the bottom of the ocean, run through big outdoor radiator-like structures on tropical islands, to provide cheap air conditioning, water from condensation (much cheaper than reverse osmosis or distilation, and power through a vacum evaporation turbine. The article makes him sound like an insane and easily bored genius, but this could be big in spite of him

Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:13 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2005

Imagine if the yellow pages came to you...

At Alibaba you can submit a request for quote to the worlds largest database of suppliers. Post a description of what you want, and let the hordes come to you. Or, check off a few suppliers of your choosing to specifically request a quote. You could nearly virtualize your whole corporation.
The MoustDriver Chronicles, which I read a few months ago, detailed how you can use services like these, combined with fulfillment & product distribution servicesto outsource manufacturing, packaging and distribution of your product. Then you can focus on high valued functions like marketing and R&D. Combine this with the incredible growth of do-it-yourself technology, and you have the potential to unleash a torrent of well designed products. Why? As pointed out in Harnessing Complexity, to harness the benefits of experimentation, we need short delays for feedback. That allows users to at least find local maxima. Rapid, economical, manufacturing of goods in small batches unleashes experimentation and allows unprecedented short delays in feedback.

For a few years now I have looked forward to buying an all in one cell phone, palm pilot, MP3 player, video player that requires no manual, never crashes and the battery lasts all week. An now, a garage tinkerer could make one up in his basement and order a thousand from some company in Hong Kong he found on the internet. He could hire a guerilla marketing planer, and have UPS handle the shipping. Who says we don't live in an age of miracles?

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

How cheap is social security?

One criticism provided by those against privatizing social security is that the private mutual funds are much more expensive then social security is. It is true that the average mutual fund charges fees (expense ratios) of about 1.52% of assets. However, a far better measure of the real cost of a privatized system would be a massive, indexed mutual fund with an expense of .18% (Vanguard) or the plan available to a couple of million federal employees, of .05% (the Thrift Savings Plan). Now as far as I can tell, the expense ratio of the social security system is about .21% of assets (.6% of revenue). So not only is this rate worse than private funds, it doesn't even measure the expenses not paid for by the SSA, like the compliance, tax and administration costs of employers. Would there be costs of employer compliance if these funds ran like social security? Sure. Would expenses go up some if there were many small accounts? It would be likely, but let's not pretend that the current system is a paragon of frugality.

Now it was pointed out to me that some of the costs of social security are actually spent on disbility insurance benefits and trusts, which would have to be paid anyway, and may be more expensive to administer due to an even smaller average account size and more fraud. We may have to shave a few points off their expenses. Disability payments are about 19% of payments, so let's assume they are half the expense. The private funds are still cheaper.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2005

I would love this!

A NY Times article, New Weight-Loss Focus: The Lean and the Restless, discusses how non-exercise physical activity over the course of the day may be a significant factor in why some people are thin and others are fat. It seems that most lean folks in the study were spending two more hours a day standing, pacing around and fidgeting for an average additional caloric burn of 350 calories a day. To take advantage of this finding, Dr. Levine, one of the studies author replaced his work desk with a treadmill where he walks at .7 miles per hour ( a pace a second) as he works on the computer and talks on the phone. This keeps him active and alert all day long. With my tiny little slot on the trading floor, I can only envy such health luxury.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

Reforming The Republic of Georgia

Last night I attended a lecture at The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), set in a beautiful mansion in downtown Irvington on Hudson. The guys are serious Libertarians, and they invited Dr. Kakha Bendukidze, economy minister of the Republic of Georgia. This is guy is amazing. I leaned about him after he was profiled in the Economist back in late July of last year. I considered writing to ask for a job, just to work for a radical free market public official. Trained as a professional biologist, then self taught in Austrian economics when doing so in the Soviet Union was illegal, third a mini-oligarch in post soviet Russia and most recently a public official in post rose revolution Georgia. His English was good, despite him telling us that this was his first public speech in English. Truly, the man is an amazing polymath.

He lectured on the extraordinary reforms he (and mostly he) created in Georgia to turn around their economy that was at once statist, corrupt, and bureaucratic. Essentially, he made the following argument. Corruption is the leading problem in semi-developed economies. Corruption is made possible by two major parts, regulation, which creates opportunities for bribes, and state involvement in the economy, which brings politics into economic decision making. Cut the regulation and privatize the state's assets and you can kill a tremendous amount of the corruption in one shot.

They dismantled the highway police (long despised) and fired 80% of the remaining police. There were 23 taxes, and now there are 7, all flat, and he hopes to get rid of a few more. They combined this with a complete tax amnesty (including the ability to request and destroy all old tax documents) to create a new dawn in tax compliance. Tax collection rates went up significantly.

In his privatization efforts, he marked about all the resistance he encountered from the rich "helpful" donors in the west. He is privatizing the ports (opposed by the French as Anglo sphere madness), privatizing their pipeline (opposed by the Americans for security reasons), and even the trains (domestic opposition). The first round of privatizations (before the rose revolution) privatized 85% of the Georgian economy but raised only 50 million. Since last June, Dr. Bendukidze has raised 200 million by privatizing just a portion of the remainder. He has very simple rules for these privatizations, you must pay all cash, and the goods go to the high bidder. He pointed out something I had never considered, that shadowy privatizations don't result in the efficient allocation of capital. He gave the foundation library we were in as an example. It could be best used as as a resort and gather place for speakers. But you get the title in a under the table deal for a few thousand dollars. You aren't sure if your deed is valuable, so you won't poor money in for making it a great world class resort, even if doing so would be very profitable. Why? That would attract attention, and someone might claim your deed is invalid and your investment lost. So you sell the books, the furniture, and maybe the wiring from the walls, then shutter the building. You make a nice profit, but the asset is damaged and removed from efficient use. So it is essential that privatizations be conducted in an all cash, sunny day manner so that all agree on the true owner of the assets. This is what creates real economic vitality.

He also spoke about his compromises with popular demands for socialized medicine and education, and he victories in the use of vouchers in these areas to create more efficient situations.

Humorously, he said the lecture was originally titled "Moving Georgia from Socialism to Capitalism" but that it would have been more accurately called "Moving Georgia from Nowhere to Capitalism". Have all his reforms worked? Last year they had real GDP growth of 9.5% in a shrinking population. May he serve as an inspiration to poor and oppressed everywhere.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2005

Max Headroom was right!

Adrants brings us aninteresting posts today. The advertisers in France and Belgium bring us once step closer to the head exploding blipvert micro advertisement with their new one second advertisements. With research showing us that first impressions are formed in as little as 6 of viewings, these hideous things are likely to be with us for a while. Worst thing is, we may do it to ourselves, Perhaps legions of TIVO users fast forwarding though ads, will force the creative to push for ads that makes sense when viewed at high speed. We'll convert old fashioned advertisements into blipverts in our own attempts to avoid them.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)

Who is this guy?

This Spengler guy really is amazing. This article suggests that the Spanish Inquisition was actually a preventive tool which spared Spain from the brutal civil wars of Northern Europe.
He suggests that the Inquisition hunted Jews, because they knew Hebrew, and might teach it to Protestants, as they had done in Germany, to then translate the Bible.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:40 PM | Comments (0)

Moved and confused

I just read a haunting, lyrical piece by Spengler at the Asia Times about Music and the Catholic Church. How could I not love an article with a quote like this "The Biblical notion that human suffering moves the creator of heaven and earth, such that this creator cannot help but attend to the cry of the widow and fatherless, the ugly and the crippled, appears orthogonal to the Greek concept of beauty and harmony. It is a crude, shocking, baseless claim which, for better or worse, is far and away the most influential idea in human history."

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

Great gifts

My mom gets me much better than I thought she did. She bought me five books for my birthday and three of them were on my amazon wishlist, which she hadn't seen. One of them I'd read a review about and thought, "hey that'd be an interesting book" but it never made it to my wish list, and just sounded really cool.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Freakonomics
Never Let Me Go
Assassination Vacation
Bringing Down The House

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:05 PM | Comments (3)

Now that is radical idea

I was reading mom's copy of Natural History Magazine yesterday before we went out to celebrate my birthday. The letters to the editor section were discussing an obesity article from the issue prior.A doctor wrote in with the idea that obesity might be caused by a pathogen. That might sound insane, but with ulcers caused by H Pylori and viruses suspected in causing cancer, this isn't as out there as it first seems.

So I did a bit of digging on the matter and it turns out they even have a suspect pathogen, the "adenovirus". It seems that in "a test of 500 humans showed that roughly 30 percent of obese people have antibodies to Ad-36, compared to only ten percent of non-obese people." Read more here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2005

You break into my home, you die. Get it?

Florida, pioneering a new chapter in American gun policy, just passed into law Senate bill 436. Quite simply, this allows you to use a gun the way you'd expect you could. That is, to use deadly force, against an intruder in a dwelling when threatened, and be immune from criminal prosecution or civil action for doing so. Formerly, Florida, like many other states, required that the gun wielder flee, hide, or use warnings unless it was established that no lesser force would suffice. Now Florida residents won't have to do such a dangerous calculus, just identify the threat and remove it. In Florida, their murder rate went from 36% above the national average when carry reform went into effect in 1987, but fell to 4% below the national average by 1991. I wonder what will happen to murder statistics now? I'd expect little improvement (although this does seem like a sensible reform) because most people don't want to kill anyone unless necessary and few people are much worried about a sympathetic juries for the armed burglar they just shot. I don't know that this will avoid many prosecutions, but at least it will keep prosecutors from going after citizen home defenders, keeping them more focused on real problems like kidnapping and tax fraud.

Florida has been a pioneer in shall-issue gun permit laws, which now cover 37 states (though it depends what you count)

Expect guns rights advocates to be emboldened by this victory and try to get similar bills passed in other states.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2005

There is much left to to discover

More proof that mastery of our world need not require advanced equipment comes today from Dr. Flynn figured out that if you have coffee grinds, terracotta clay, and enough cow dung use as fuel to harden it, you can make a reusable, nearly free filter capable of extracting bacterial contamination. This joins the invention of oral re-hydration therapy and pot-in-pot refrigeration as tools available to our ancestors, simple, and incredibly inexpensive, that they somehow missed and can save or improve millions of lives.

I hope he wins a rolex award next year.

Read an interview with the inventor.

Download the directions to make clean water.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:42 PM | Comments (0)

The meth and the internet in the AIDS tipping point

In an article at The New Yorker, HIGHER RISK. Michael Specter discusses how crystal meth has interacted with the internet to form a disastrous reemergence of the epidemic. Having just finished The Tipping Point, I'm seeing the problem as a classic example of Gladwell's paradigm. First, HIV starts off as a very sticky disease, it incubates for a long time, can take years to form visible symptoms, can't be inoculated and can't be cured. Second, the use of the internet dramatically increases the connectedness of the sexually active, providing more partners, in a wider array, faster than cruising or other older methods of seduction in the homosexual community. Finally, crystal meth (along with Viagra) provides the power of context. Men take meth and often find their libidos inflamed and all their lessons of safe sex forgotten. Combined with Viagra, this leads to an explosion of sex parties, creating a fluid swapping environment much like that of the bathhouse environment that incubated the HIV virus in the first wave of the epidemic. The disease not only lower inhibitions, but it seems to harm the immune system, raising likelihood of infection from contact.

If we want to stop this epidemic, we just need to adopt the techniques of the of decreasing stickiness, and removing context. If you think that this problem warrants state intervention, require police officers to be posted at sex clubs, discouraging lewd acts. Advertise for safe sex on hookup website. Add a medicine to Viagra to make it cause something unpleasant when it interacts with meth. Educate opinion leaders in the drug using community on the importance of safe sex. We could post reminders prominently in bars and clubs with a big gay presence. And for a radical idea, we could legalize meth, standardize the dosage, and find out the best and safest methods of delivery. Hell, include free lubricated condoms in the box. A tragedy, yet so understandable and preventable.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2005

Actually, that isn't corporate welfare

Jane Galt, in an article titled More on the PGBC and corporate welfare elucidates a common confusion, that the pension guarantee company (PBGC) is a subsidy of pension insurance rates that amounts to corporate welfare. For those of you learning about this for the first time,the PBGC insures corporate defined benefit pensions against under funding when the company is bankrupt so unable to fund the shortfall. Defined benefit means that a company says how much money you make based on income and retirement, and they can contribute to that in a tax advantaged manner if they obey a slew of rules about how to invest the money. The benefits in the event of default are indexed to the year your plan fails and your social security income, but with a max of about $45,613.68. That means the pilots at The Bankrupt airlines are looking towards a far more turbulent retirement. In the event of a loss of pension pressure, your 401k plan may act as a retirement flotation device.

So, what at first appears to be another horrible example of corporate welfare, turns out to be a fairly targeted and limited version of middle class safety net.
Her argument is as follows. Let's assume that the PBGC rules end up requiring that firms fund an actuarially appropriate amount each year. If times are good for investments then the pension remains solvent, government subsidy has no value. Now, if the market turns, they may have been saving the right amount in probability, but cannot afford to payout the pensions. The company is required to make large catch-up payments. If they can't afford it, they go bankrupt, and a certain amount of the firms assets (which by definition can't cover the liability) go into the PBGC general fund. Then the payouts are capped and paid out of PBGC's assets and income from those assets. All solvent firms pay $19 per worker or retiree plus $9 for each $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits which further funds the PBGC. Are you beginning to see how this subsidy goes to the employees? Either the firm pays what is required or goes bankrupt. If the firm fails, the employees benefit for this guaranteed payout. The firm basically purchases subsidized pension insurance on behalf of all its pension fund beneficiaries. By socializing the risk, they avoid the moral hazard of well funded firms withdrawing from the pool.

One criticism is unaddressed by Jane's comments. Only bigger companies can afford the organizational overhead of a defined benefit program. Since this amounts to a subsidy of the employees of these companies, they can recruit superior talent at the same price. That gives them an advantage in the war for talent, this ends up being yet another factor encouraging the growth of bigger companies at the expense of the small.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2005

A victory for freedom, but a loss for strict interpretation

In Granholm Vs Heald the Supreme Court has ruled that it is a violation of the commerce clause to bar interstate shipments of booze. I mentioned this last week. That's great for freedom. I thing the 21st amendment, by virtue of coming later should allow the states to regulate this, but I'll shed few tears for the lose of these pointless acts of protectionism. However, I believe that bad judging is not the solution to stupid laws. Why can't we accept that a law can be stupid and pointless without being illegal? Then make the legislatures sort the mess out.
New York is one of the states party to this case, so maybe I'll celebrate by ordering some wine online.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2005

The Blogs I read - 7

Daily Dose of Excel is a great place to expand your excel skills. Learn good reasons to finally understand pivot tables, named regions, and matrix functions. If you use excel every day, are getting good, and want to take your skills to master level, you should be reading it.

If you want a more directed education on a specific excel or VBA technique, you need Excel-VBA.com. That is where I learned about sumproduct, which just might be the second most important excel function you ever master. T

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)

Free Newspapers

Matt Welch, in at article at Reason discusses the prosperity of the American newspaper industry. Despite shrinking circulations, margins are over 20%, so the business remains insanely profitable. This has triggered a growth in free daily newspapers distributed near public transportation hubs as the major genre. He cheerfully praised this as American capitalism in action. I'm sympathetic to that. But, be wary of this. Recall that on television, the product is not the programming, the product is you. HBO is able to be innovative because they have one goal, to please the viewer. The networks struggle because their true taskmaster is the advertisers. Free newspapers would be far more likely to go soft on important and controversial issues concerning advertisers (who pay the bills) and politicians (who can make trouble for them) so if they become dominant ultimately public debate will be cleaned up, toned down and simplified. Let's just hope there is room for both.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

World's Nastiest Spyware?

Slashdot has an article on the Aurora, the foulest piece of spyware I've ever heard of.

This nasty piece of spyware:
"Aurora installs at least two services [Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Services]; they're down at the bottom, called "Win" this, and "Win" that [I forget the exact names, but they're pretty obviously malware services]. It also installs executables and "cabinet" [.CAB] files all over your computer, as well as desktop links and web browser plugins, and probably a whole host of other things I didn't discover. And every user who logs in after the infection will get copies of this crap installed throughout the entirety of their "Documents and Settings" folder.

If you have a second copy of the operating system [at worst, take the hard drive out and install it in another computer as a secondary drive], then you can search the entire hard drive for files that were introduced on or later than the date of infection and delete MOST of the crap that was installed.

However, in our case, the underlying file that invoked "Aurora" was \WINNT\zbkiebmtvti.exe [it might have a different name for you], but it was somehow installed with a modification date of 04/09/2004 [our infection was yesterday, 05/08/2005], so a simple search on recently-modified files will not find that one [and may not find other newly-introduced files, with fake modification dates, that are lurking in other parts of your hard drive].

However, even if you disable the services installed by Aurora, and even if you could delete all the files it installs, it does something FAR more malicious - something that I've never before seen in malware, which gets back to the point I wanted to make at the beginning of this reply: At or near the registry point HKLM\Software, Aurora inserts an "infinitely large" subtree into your computer's registry [I assume that they used either the maximum size of a registry subtree in Windows, or the maximum size of an entry in the underlying MSJet database, or something similar]. When either regedit.exe or regedt32.exe encounters this "infinitely large" subtree, they both crash, and tend to exit Dr Watson style [I guess it never dawned on the poor guys who designed regedit.exe and/or regedt32.exe that someone would do something quite so evil]. You can't search beyond this "infinitely large" subtree, and neither regedit.exe nor regedt32.exe are capable of deleting any of its branches [at either the beginning of the subtree, or at its end], so you can't do the old trick of searching for "RunOnce" and then moving up one key to get to Run. "

Some things people have suggested for expert spyware hunting
1) Use multiple spy and Trojan bots: Trojan Hunter, Trend Micro Housecall, Ad-Aware, Spybot-SD and MS Antispyware beta
2) Delete all the DLLs and activeX controls from your IE Downoads directory.
3)check the start menu -> Startup folder. Delete any links from here that aren't familiar.
4)open the registry (RegEdit) and search for "RunOnce"; directly above it will be "Run". Delete any keys in the "Run" folder that don't look right. Search about 3 more times for this entry.
5) Kill suspicious services through computer Management: Administrative tools
6)IF you narrow it down to one spyware, you may have to unplug after a making changes, as some spyware can reinfect quickly while still hiding in memory
7)Set the permissions on rouge executables to deny access to everyone by command-line switch "/D Everyone"
8) Kill unkillable processes with either a super killer like pskill or using the trick that Using the command line 'at' command, schedule taskmgr.exe to run in interactive mode. If the clock on my system tells me that it's 2:30:56pm, I'll run the following command:
at 14:32 /interactive taskmgr.exe
That will produce (at 2:32pm) an instance of the Task Manager running as 'Local System', which has even higher privileges than Administrator. From there you can kill nearly everything!
9)Try using a Linux boot CD to get access to bad files and remove them in an environment they don't control
10) Use a program like HijackThis to identify all running files to track down.
11) And of course, you can boot into dos, save your data and format c: the beast

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:07 PM | Comments (1)

Japan Inc. 2 (yeah right)

In an article at Foreign Affairs, Down to the Wire, Tom Bleha argues for massive government intervention the us telecom and cable industry to expand the aviability of home and mobile braodband. He does a good job of showing that the South Koreans and the Japanese do have higher penetrations of both, and faster service when they have it. What he doesn't sucessfuly explain is why we should care. The benefits of widespread broadband adoption are surely overblown and the reasons for America's lower adoption rates are sensible and explainable.

A major reason for America's lower broadband penetration is population density. Japan has a population density of 337 inhabitants/km². South Korea of 492 . The US has a population density of 31 inhabitants/km². A huge difference. Second, he argues that broadband is much less expensive in Japan than in the USA. However, the true economic cost must include all subsidies, and Japan is notorious for its massive subsidy of infrastructure. It is still unclear that subsequent revenues justify these outlay or that they are the most effiecnt use of capital. Also, we know that broadband is a good with network effects. Being able to share files, photos and games with friends and family, as well as share expertiese and interesting websites makes adoption accelerate. That means that the subsidy has masive distortion in adoption rates.

Major benefits? " The Japanese and the South Koreans will also be the first to enjoy the quality-of-life benefits that the high-speed-broadband era will bring. These will include not only Internet telephones and videophones, but also easy teleconferencing, practical telecommuting, remote diagnosis and medical services, interactive distance education, rich multimedia entertainment, digitally controlled home appliances, and much more. " If this is the best that anyone can come up with, then who cares? More bandwidth to steal movies? Buying soda's with cell phones? Videophones have been around since 1970 and still no one wants them. Remote diagnosis and medical services? Maybe, but this is likely to be in a clinical setting, and those places already have great access to broadband. Many of them don't depend on being real time either.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:04 PM | Comments (1)

Wouldn't it be nice.

Two recent court cases have left me wondering if it is unconstitutional for some states to restrict alcohol shipments from other states to require them to go through a state wholesaler before reaching consumers.

It makes good economic and civil libertarian sense for the the booze distributors to be taken out of the middle to allow direct, interstate shipments of alcohol to consumers. However, this tenuous use of the intrastate commerce clause is bludgeoned by the 21st amendment, which seems to clearly reserve rights of regulation to the states.

The commerce clause says, "To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes"However, the 21st amendment says, "The transportation or importation into any state, territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited." Doesn't get much clearer that that -- does it?

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

Well actually...

In the NY Times article, The Roads Are Paved With Pork, the times OP-ED board makes some good points about the massive $284 billion+ bill federal transportation spending bill. Specifically, how under-funded public transportation is in it and the grotesque number and size of trophy projects.

However, they also say something very stupid, "It continues with...pet projects inserted by House members in their role as self-appointed masters of the transportation universe". This is exactly wrong, They aren't self appointed and they are in charge. They are the elected masters of bills dealing with intrastate commerce. Chosen by the smallest number of ordinary citizens of any federal office, and as Section. 7, Clause 1 says, "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives"

Ah well, so much for good editing.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

Alas, the Real ID act passes

We are now one step closer to a national ID card system. TheU.S. Senate has passed (100-0) the $82 billion Iraq Supplemental Spending Bill which was approved by the House last week, which was some much needed funding for the Iraq war. Alas, it also included the Real ID act driver's license reform act. If only this would make us safer. But it won't work.

The more important you make one form of ID, the more incentive there is to forge it. You start to ignore other forms of identification, relying on the seemingly invincible security of the secure national ID card. But what you really get is cement; a strong, but very brittle security environment. Fake the card well enough and you can pass through anywhere unmolested. And just like the problems of gun control, the criminals, illegals and terrorists who these systems are designed to exclude have the most incentive to seek good forgeries.

What we get instead is another expensive federal mandate to the states that does little or nothing. We get a single machine readable card with lots of personal information. Sure the states and the federals promise not to share the data, but no such rule exists for liqueor, gun or other stores that scan your id before a purchase. Do these places even have privacy statements? Expect tremendous amounts of personally identifable data to be tied together. That might mean more interesting junk mail and more customized services, but also brings us one step closer to the death of privacy.

Maybe this is just about the death of distance. Libertarianism and freedom seem to require distance to keep us out of each other's hair.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2005

The joys of educated friends

Me:
What is the deal with the contraction "won't" why isn't it "willn't"? How did that happen?

Smart Friend:
I have never had reason to formally learn why that is, but off the top of my head I know that the Germanic word for WILL comes in two variants -- one that is something like WILLEN and one that is something like WOLLEN -- and that the two of them have a way of sharing the "will" space in languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc.

So it looks like the WOLLEN one is used with negatives, and thus WON'T -- also note the relationship between WOULD and WILL -- "He would go if he could" refers to something in the hypothetical future, just as WILL is the "normal" future. WOULD comes also from that WOLLEN root.

Sometimes different roots with the same meaning collide -- note TO BE, where there was once BEON and WESAN, such that now there is both BE, BEEN, and the like, as well as WAS and WERE from WESAN. Also, TO GO -- there is GO and WENT, because there was another root that we now use in TO WEND ONE'S WAY, and so on.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:54 PM | Comments (5)

Not just in your Cracker Jacks

The nice people at Flippie will take your digital video footage and make a custom flipbook for you. The minimum order is 2500 though, so it is not practical for personal use. It seems it is aimed at gorilla marketing for businesses.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:48 PM | Comments (0)

Are we getting better at poker?

A wierd question perhaps, but with IQ going up and baseball breaking records, this mini-craze of poker playing we are going through leaves me wondering if overall poker play is reaching new heights. . Despite years of decline in many social activities, poker seems to inspire more reading and communal gathering for play than ever before. Amazon's most wished for list shows poker books as 10 of the top 25 most wished for books. Now it could be that dummy accounts are spamming these rankings in much the same way that poker spam pollutes our blogs and email boxes. Is this a bubble in the sense that people have an exaggerated sense of their skill in poker and how easy it is to make a buck doing it? We could track poker play by looking for common mistakes of poker play and seeing if they have declined in the last few years. A lot of work has been done to discourage
poker robot use, but their continued presence suggests that there is still much money to fleece from rubes. Other ways to monetize this craze are investing in publicly traded ventures like The World Poker Tour Or, if you are smart, mathematical, and calm, to get some good books on the subject, warm up with a few smoky nights with some friends, and join the stampede.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

History of the GUI

Ars Technica is a bunch of smart engineers writing lucid prose with detail and insight into how technology works, plus the usual technology fluff of super PCs, loud speakers and tiny phones.

They just posted a fantastic article about the history of the graphical user interface (GUI) with screen shots going all the way back to a 1968 display of video conferencing and hypertext. Read the whole thing here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)

May 9, 2005

The brain as a decreasingly black box

New MRI based brain scanning techniques and studies of those with obscure brain damage are providing insight into how the brain functions. A few gems are that they can tell what you are looking at, that consciousness may consist of two minds operating in your head and that, meditation, like cab driving, can make structural changes in your brain with sufficient practice.

Read the whole article.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:33 AM | Comments (0)

May 6, 2005

PlanPlus for Microsoft Outlook Version 3

I have begun my free trial with PlanPlus for Microsoft Outlook Version 3 and I worry that the functionality is not there to justify using it. This is a real disappointment, because the application has a great feature set, tight integration with Outlook, the ability to see email and tasks in the same view (which I have wanted for ages), and great Franklin Covey productivity tips.

There are three major problems. First, security rules due to Outlook patches do not allow the notes page to work. Second, the Franklin Covey home page in Outlook is infuriating. It is especially so because it comes so close to what I want. My Holy Grail of organizational tools is to have my unread email, my email flagged for follow-up, my calendar, my daily tasks and a notepad all in one tight screen. It has each of these, but all and all the implementation is maddening. Third it is slow

Let me go though and explain what I mean. The best way to see unread and flagged mail across folders is to aggregate them first in search folders. It will not allow you to display a search folder. The covey tool has a folder navigator in the home page, which is a neat idea, as it allows you to visit other folders without taking your eye off the tasks of the day. The way they did this is horrible. When you switch to another folder, it ignores the formatting you have done to that folder. Therefore, you get a bad formatting for that folder. That is bad. What is awful is it also writes over the formatting of that folder – without notification! It lets you customize the formatting of that email folder, but then it does not remember it the next time you visit the folder. That might not be so bad if, like the rest of Outlook you could save a customized view and load it whenever you wanted. That is right, you cannot use saved custom current views for folders on the mail pane. Though experimentation I was able to show flagged mails, but not unread ones, and certainly not both.

The notes section too has problems. There are two kids of notes, organized by date (which works) and power notes that are orginzied in any way you want. That does not work because of new Outlook patches. For some reason the page is valid (I got the page to open in internet explorer) but Outlook has patches due to one to may viruses I guess. There does not seem to be any way to export messages from the daily message tab, nor can you view a month at a time or search them by keyword.

The calendar has some good things going for it, but again, I do not like the way they did it. It is flexible in useless ways and rigid in important ways. It shows the date in huge letters so you do not forget. Okay, this might avoid mistakes in putting meetings on the wrong day. It is likely a carry over from the paper version of Franklin Covey planners, with a big label for each day. For me this is a huge waste of screen real estate. My taskbar shows the date (just expand it to more than one line.) The widget they use to shows you this is also used to navigate the single day calendar. Therefore, it displays an entire month at a time. That is neat because it circles the current date in red, but you can choose other dates. That means fewer mistakes as well. I have a solution I much prefer to this, available right off the shelf in outlook, show a whole month at a time. That way you can store events in the same space as the interface for selecting dates. The way they do it, you get a huge navigation widget and a tiny calendar one.

If Franklin Covey is interested in me beta testing new versions or has suggestions on how I can work around my issues, I would be happy to hear from them.

This is what the home panel looks like:

This is how you can see the date in my task bar

This is the huge anoying date widget

This is what the calendar I like looks like

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)

Gun Control

A fabulous discussion on gun control is available over at reason:
Straight Shooting on Gun Control
Highly recommended. The best part is at the the end, where it talks about how gun advocates would benefit from becoming knowledgeable about other, not gun-controlling method of crime and violence reduction. That way they can say something like " "Well, no, I don’t support a ban on handguns, primarily because it doesn't work. However, I do support [Project X or Program Y] because it has demonstrably reduced gun-related violence in several crime-ridden cities across the U.S. I reserve my support for policies that actually reduce crime and violence."

Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Clever fellow

A researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT once said (approximately) "if the book had been invented after the computer, it would have been considered a breakthrough -- low power consumption, instant boot-up and virtually instantaneous random access to any portion of the file."

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

Is the WSJ, wired, tired or expired?

In his article "Whither The Wall Street Journal?", Adam Penenberg argues that the WSJ subscription model is jeopardizing its relevance in cyberspace and by extension the world of media and business. He makes some interesting points about lack of presence of the WSJ in articles in their areas of expertise, and how their subscription model causes this by discouraging linking. Even if a subscriber manages to read an article they can't share it through email or their blog. Word on the street is that the New York Times went from a $7.5 million loss on its Internet site in 2001 to an $8 million profit in 2002, so people are making money giving away their content. But he has an interesting idea, open up the WSJ archives.

Let me flesh it out a little. A subscription model would continue for articles less than 3 business days old. The archives would be free (from the archives online only, as you would still charge for reprints) for every article older than 3 days. The links would stay the same as the article became free. They could still require registration and track these non-premium customers for add purposes. Hell, you could torture them with ads and flash the way the NY Times does. People would link to the pages, either by finding them later or by giving a heads up to subscribers and letting everyone else know that they could check back in a few days. This shouldn't cannibalize much of their existing business, because the same people willing to pay for content now are likely those who can't wait even an hour for the paper's critical contents.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)

May 5, 2005

So that is how that works

I was reading a review of the Sony F828, a high end non-SLR camera. In the ensuing discussion of the review, Svein-Frode Gudbrandsen made a comment which explained something I'd long found confusing.
The review claimed, "f/8 on the Sony gives you a MUCH larger depth-of-field than f/8 on a DSLR." Svein however corrects, "NO! It gives you exactly the same depth of field!!! The Sony F828 is fitted with a 7.1 - 51mm lens (the 28-200mm spec. is just a confusing 35mm comparison that does nothing other than describe the angle of view of the lens) Fit your DSLR with a 7.1mm lens..."

Confused?
Those of you shopping for a digital SLR may notice that many of them use a sensor smaller than a 35MM piece of film, only the center of the light coming through the lens falls on the sensor. This has two consequences. First, it improves the average quality of the image on the frame because it uses the best part of the glass. Second, it magnifies the effective focal length of the lens. My EOS Digital Rebel, for example, multiplies the effective angle of view by 1.6. I wondered, but had difficulty articulating before Svein's comment, if this also modified the depth of field of the shot. After all, different lens lengths have different depths of field. It does not. The depth of field remains the same. The shape of the glass determines the depth of field and the magnification of the sensor determines the angle of view.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2005

Thank you Belligerati for reminding me

Buy one here

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:27 PM | Comments (0)

Other Belligerati

Many people believe that American military dominance is driving other nations to pursue nuclear weapons for protection. Now we can't very well diminish our military capacity just to discourage others from building nukes, so what are we to do? We could build bunker busters,
or allow non-strategic nuclear force employment (people other than the president authorized to launch nukes. Show our enemies that we'll either fight you the old fashioned way or make your homeland a smoking ruin. Your choice.

Read more here

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:17 PM | Comments (0)

Why didn't I think of that?

Here is a brilliant, objective and simple standard for approving drugs if it is "as safe as aspirin" the FDA approves it.
Read more here.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:08 PM | Comments (0)

Another marvelous quote

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton

Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)

May 3, 2005

A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality

David Horowitz, a former lefty radical now hell-bent on creating a safe place for conservative voices in academia has a neat site where you can see profiles of the foundations and figures in the left in the United States. Calling it "A guide to the political left", he has a achieved a stunningly thorough profile of how the left works.

See for example a profile Paul Krugman. It would be neat to use friendster or other network mapping software on the site to see who the low profile, high impact opinion and funding people are.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:39 PM | Comments (0)

GMO vs Breeding

More proof that genetically modified food isn't any different than traditional breeding in a new press release by the folks at University of Adelaide's Agricultural Research Institute. They have been hard at work creating super foods with increased yields and nutritional content, but without the yuppie scaring (and therefore pilot project funding jeopardizing) that the golden rice and other similar GM food projects have. This is just a dumb, tragic situation. Gaia worshiping fools are literally killing people with their superstitious views on food science. All these anti-gm breeders prove is that selective breeding is almost as scary (in the sense that is capable of many of the same results) but with far greater effort, slower timelines and ultimately, more limited potential. All they show by matching the potential is that their fears are a form of luddism, not a scientific risk management precaution. Then, the poor in the third world deal with higher food prices while greens in the US and European leaders in general scare them from growing the most productive and nutritious crops they can. In the end, it is a statistical inevitable that suffering and death is higher than necessary.

Read about it here

Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:48 AM | Comments (2)

May 2, 2005

You majored in English? No, I majored in literature...

Interesting article, beautiful writing
Check out these quotes:

" Amis's hero is a medieval historian, but the preponderance of academic novels are set in English departments. The reason for this can be found in universities choosing to ignore a remark made by the linguist Roman Jakobson, who, when it was proposed to the Harvard faculty to hire Vladimir Nabokov, said that the zoology department does not hire an elephant, one of the objects of its study, so why should an English department hire a contemporary writer, also best left as an object of study? Jakobson is usually mocked for having made that remark, but he was probably correct: better to study writers than hire them. To hire a novelist for a university teaching job is turning the fox loose in the hen house. The result--no surprise here--has been feathers everywhere.
Showalter makes only brief mention of one of my favorite academic novels, The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein. Ms. Goldstein is quoted on the interesting point that at Princeton Jews become gentilized while at Columbia Gentiles become judenized, which is not only amusing but true. Goldstein's novel is also brilliant on the snobbery of university life. She makes the nice point that the poorest dressers in academic life (there are no good ones) are the mathematicians, followed hard upon by the physicists. The reason they care so little about clothes--also about wine and the accoutrements of culture--is that, Goldstein rightly notes, they feel that in their work they are dealing with the higher truths, and need not be bothered with such kakapitze as cooking young vegetables, decanting wine correctly, and knowing where to stay in Paris.

Where the accoutrements of culture count for most are in the humanities departments, where truth, as the physical scientists understand it, simply isn't part of the deal. "What do you guys in the English Department do," a scientist at Northwestern once asked me, quite in earnest, "just keep reading Shakespeare over and over, like Talmud?"

"Nothing that grand," I found myself replying."

"Such has been the politicization of the MLA that a counter-organization has been formed, called the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, whose raison d'être is to get English studies back on track. I am myself a dues-paying ($35 annually) member of that organization. I do not go to its meetings, but I am sent the organization's newsletter and magazine, and they are a useful reminder of how dull English studies have traditionally been. But it is good to recall that dull is not ridiculous, dull is not always irrelevant, dull is not intellectual manure cast into the void. "

Civilization and Its Malcontents Or, why are academics so unhappy?

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)

You don't own what your home looks like

You may recall how foolish Barbra Streisand (who happens to be my aunt's cousin) looked when she tried to sue a photographer for taking a picture of her house and the beach from offshore photography. She lost big time. California happens to have a anti-paparazzi statute, which is tries to prevent trespassing and stalking on private property. That discussion may soon be revisited. The clever folks at Heavy Trash have invented big, heavy ladders so that passers-bye can peek into gated (and walled) communities in the LA area. While I certainly support the rights of individuals to voluntarily limit their freedoms by forming private agreements to enjoying greater quite, visual appeal and safety although not everyone agrees that it achieves this. But I do worry about decreased social mixing, the blurring of corporate and civil power, and the death of true public space for the enjoyment of rights like free expression. I like this piece of installation art. It forces discussion of an interesting and complex issues while be funny and a bit annoying. Well done guys.

Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:02 PM | Comments (1)

We don't have the time for you

Time reports that the Bush Administration prevented the representatives from several firms from Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meetings because of donations that they have made to the Kerry presidential campaign. They could easily have gathered this information from public records and you could too at fundrace
That's just low class. You don't make friends by excluding and silencing people.
Choice quotes
“We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and—call us nutty—it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that.”
Nokia response:
“We do not view sending experts to international meetings on telecom issues to be a partisan matter. We would welcome clarification from the White House.”

Read the article here:

Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)