philcrissman.com

A fascinating article in the Washington Post (Link); this fellow is pro-choice, but he’s made the leap to admit the Roe v. Wade is not necessarily the way to defend this issue.

I’m what you would probably call Pro-Life, but this attitude shows a step in the right direction, and in the direction that conservatives, as I understand conservatism, are hoping that this will go. Even without taking a position on the rightness or wrongness of abortion, the place for laws to be decided is in congress. Not in the Supreme Court.

Interesting.

Continue reading ‘Choice vs. Roe’

TIME’s list of best novels (see previous post) is, of course, never going to please everyone. It makes a good attempt, including titles that will even please sf&f genre afficionados, such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

So I’m not going to complain that this or that wasn’t included; you’ll never include enough for everyone in just 100 books.

But concerning what was included… I give them high marks for listing a title by Philip K. Dick, but… Ubik? I loved that book, but I don’t think it was PKD’s best, and is a little out of place on a “best of the century” list. Martian Time-Slip, VALIS, or Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka, BladeRunner) would come to mind first; even The Man in the High Castle, which won a Hugo (though I would say it was not necessarily his best novel).

Oh, A Scanner Darkly or Flow my tears, the policeman said would also have made fine choices.

All that being said, Ubik is a great, and probably popularly unknown, novel. It’s cool that someone liked it enough to squeeze it onto the list, but… I guess all I’m saying is that if we can only have one PKD novel on the “best” list, I’m not sure I’d pick Ubik. Anyone?

Since I’m making my own lists, here are some fine works that, while they may not be on TIME’s list, would certainly be on mine:

• The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (this may not be considered a “novel”, I don’t know)
• Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (not a novel, but one of my favorite books)

I’d better stop with the books and the listing, now, or I’ll have to retitle the blog ElectricBooklistLand. I should probably retitle it anyways, I don’t post about Linux enough anymore to warrant it; there are too many places to find Linux news for me to bother to duplicate it all here.

Oh, and another reminder, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is approaching (November). Always wanted to write a novel? Well, you’ve got 30 days. Now or never. For convenience, they define a novel as 50,000 words, which means 1667 words a day for 30 days. Think you can hack it? Go on and sign up! (Link)

Continue reading ‘More on the booklists, and the impending Nanowrimo’

Whatever you do, don’t start reading the Corner while you’re trying to get some work done.

But do read it, sometime.

Continue reading ‘The Corner’

Or, further musings on web applications.

Brian Glass (insighful, as usual) pointed out, on my earlier post about Roblimo’s condemnation of web apps, that most business… almost all, I’d think… rely on connectivity to make credit/debit card purchasing work properly. In other words, constant connectivity is a pretty high-demand item, and we can expect it to remain so, and probably improve with time.

My reply to Brian’s comment started trailing off onto a different topic, so I figured I’d make a post of it.

Basically, if we do assume that reasonably continuous connectivity to the internet will be possible, there still remains the question of which apps will move to the web.

It’s Gmail which made me think of this. I could set up my Gmail as a popmail account… but I have hundreds of emails archived in under various labels. Not only do I not want to store that locally (I know, I could just delete it once it downloads the first time), but even if I did, I couldn’t label it in the same way that I can online. So I will probably never use an Outlook or and Evolution client with Gmail; it just doesn’t make as much sense.

So this prompts the thought that any other successful web application is going to have to do the same thing. It will have to not just duplicate the functionality of a local app; it will have to be better in some way. Gmail’s labelling system, to me, is simply better than flatly stuffing things into files. It’s more analogous to mathematical sets, where items can be in several labels instead of only one. Now, there’s no reason that a mail client couldn’t implement a similar system, but even if they did, it’s likely that if you downloaded all your archived Gmail, you’d need to reclassify it all; it would download straight into a very large inbox. Are most people going to want to do that? Probably not.

There may be some applications for which we don’t ever completely trust internet availability; there may be applications we want to use no matter what even if we aren’t connected to the internet. Those will always stay local; or, at least, have a local and web version, and a powerful synchronizing functionality.

As if making successful web apps wasn’t competitive enough. I think we’ll find that in the long run, the web apps that stick won’t simply be as good as local apps — they’ll have to be better. Anything else will stay a local app.

Continue reading ‘Which Web Apps Will Stick?’

When I saw this article’s title, I expected to disagree. Instead, I find that I think Roblimo makes a good point; that being mainly that internet based applications could only be a good idea if internet access is simply rock solid. High speed Internet access is pretty good right now, but face it; it would only take one connection failure while you’re working on some important project for you to swear off web apps in an instant and return to local applications.

There may be solutions to this; if you had a web ’server’ running locally with a minimal copy of an app running, and simply sync occasionally with a remote web server, that could help; but then you might as well be using a local app, again.

It’s still clear that better and better web applications are going to be a large part of both the hype and the innovation of the next few years, but Robin’s points deserve some consideration. If I’m doing accounting for my small business… do I really want my spreadsheet app living on a remote server, where one connection outage cuts me off from using it? Probably not.

Continue reading ‘Roblimo’s 3 Reasons not to rely on Wep Apps’