Robert Cringely thinks that Windows Vista is assured success:

Those who are trying to figure out if Vista will be successful haven't yet grasped the concept that Vista will be forced on the market, and in time it will be the only operating system you can buy from Microsoft. Of course it will be successful. Will people upgrade their existing systems? Of course not. Microsoft operating systems are always designed for future PC's, not for the installed base. Part of the plan is to make Vista work poorly on current computers so we'll all have to buy new ones. This strategy has been around for years and there is no reason to believe we won't fall for it again. Sure, some percentage of people and firms will upgrade, but most of the upgrades will come with whole new computers.

Mike Crute, on the other hand, disagrees:

Complete lack of innovation. This is pretty subjective but when I look at what Vista is it smacks of Windows XP trying to catch up to Mac OS, and not doing a very good job of it at that. What does Vista really bring to the operating system market? What is new? Well they did revamp the user interface (or “user experience” for marketing people) however what value does this add? I have got to say that in my opinion XP is ugly, the blue new-style theme takes up too much screen real estate and the gray is… well… gray. The new UI look is kinda cool but realistically your going to need a pretty beefy computer to enable all the transparency effects anyhow, plus from what I have seen of Vista its still not nearly as sexy as OS X. What else? Well there is the typical Microsoft-style half-assed attempt to duplicate iLife. Windows “entertainment” applications have always seemed inferior to everyone else, thats why most serious Windows users use Winamp or iTunes instead of Media player. I will refrain from ripping on IE 7 and Outlook Express, everyone else on the internet beat me to it.

My view falls in between these two perspectives.

The problem with Cringely's essay is that it overlooks the fact that the desktop market has changed a whole lot since 1998. Computer sales haven't been growing at nearly the rate that they used to and that means that Vista adoption by that method will be much, much slower. I am still using computers that I bought in 2002 with relatively minor upgrades that most users would never need. Those that do need increased video or gaming capabilities are increasingly able to plug in their own RAM and hard drives or know somebody that can do it for them. The idea that you need to upgrade every couple years doesn't hold true anymore. You can force software upgrades with hardware or you can force hardware upgrades with software, but they won't keep forcing each other for eternity.

As many power users as I know as not have actually declined to even upgrade to Windows XP. For once in their life, Microsoft was a victim of its own success with Windows 2000, an operating system good enough that people don't feel the need to have to upgrade. Between 2000 and XP, a lot of people are going to be willing to hold on. Cringely is right, though, that as long as they're holding on to Windows and not jumping to Linux or Mac then Microsoft continues to win. Be that as it may, that does not make Vista a success. Especially considering the time, money, and hype that has been thrust at it.

The problem with Crute's post can be summed up in two words: Internet Explorer. Despite all of its holes, its lack of features, and its problem it dominates the browser market. 62% of visits to RAW360 are using Internet Explorer (28% Firefox). There are no alternatives to Windows that are remotely as superior to it than Firefox, Netscape, and Opera are to Internet Explorer. OSX is still dependent on priorietary hardware with higher upfront costs. Linux has greatly improved in the last several years (especially in the area of drivers), but even now I can't install Linux on a machine and expect it to work with a minimal of tweaking like I can Windows 2000 or XP and I'm beginning to doubt that it will ever reach the state where I will.

So I agree with Cringely that Microsoft's supremecy is assured, at least for now. There are three main potholes in their road, none of which are that large. First, if DRM gets to the point that using Windows becomes more trouble than its worth, people will find another way. However, this is as likely as not to occur within the Windows platform with cracks and bypasses created for Windows. Second, if they ever succeed in their goal of making Windows crackproof so that everyone has to shell out a few hundred dollars when they replace a motherboard, people will start to more seriously look at other options. I don't think that they will succeed, however, and if they do there is a decent chance that older versions of Windows will still remain dominant even without their support. Third, a lot of Windows dominance rests on the shoulders of MS Office, and if they lose that with the upcoming change in document structure to XML, that will create an opening for competition. But I have my doubts as to whether or not that opening will be enough.

Continued dominance of the OS market via Vista is not how I would define success. I think that Microsoft is more likely to continue to thrive by making the XBox into an all-purpose entertainment center for movies, music, and of course games. But that would be Microsoft's success and not Vista's.

For reasons that I won't go in to, my job requires that I use several different Internet browsers. I have finally managed to bring the number down to three. Anyway, for those interested in broadening your browsing horizons, here are various browsers you may or may not be familiar with (in alphabetical order)

Avant Browser
I've started to use this one more recently. It's more of a skin for Internet Explorer than a separate browser, and that comes with its own plusses and minuses. Since it's a variation of IE, security is an issue. I don't have to worry about it at work because I use it almost exclusively for internal purposes. It has a nice interface and some handy features for work that may or may not be useful at home. You can set refresh rates for Windows, you have decent customization on how it starts up (previous windows, etc). You can only have one instance of the browser open at a time, which can be limiting (though I find it useful sometimes, as well). When opening multiple external files (such as PDFs) it opens up in a the same different tab so that if you want to open two PDFs from the same window and compare, you have to be more conscious of what you're doing. The tabbing interface is surprisingly good for such a light program. I have not experienced any resource spikes while using it, which is very nice. Not a single pop-up has ever gotten through. There is nothing I've found that Avant can't do that Slimbrowser can.

Flashpeak Slimbrowser
This one was introduced by a coworker and have used it pretty extensively for over a year now. Like Avant, it is more a skin for IE than a browser unto itself. Most of the time it's very light on resources, though spikes are not too uncommon. Sometimes it has a little difficulty shutting down. There are some interface distinctions that take a little getting used to, but become convenient once you do get used to them. For instance, double-clicking on a tab will close it. Typing a new URL (or simply hitting Enter with the existing address) will open up a new tab rather than take over the current one. It makes tab use much more fluid. You use a single tab until you don't have anything to click on and then you close it. It may seem a little limiting, but I find it actually leads to more efficient browsing on my part. Though it is light on resources, it does seem to slow down the connection just a little. I only notice on 28.8 dial-up connections. One definite plus of this browser is that it works on old and obsolete systems, dating back to Windows 98 and very little RAM. Only allows one window to be open at a time. Unlike the other browsers, you cannot drag and organize the tabs as you would like. Not a single pop-up has ever gotten through. Refreshing sites with POST data can be tricky, which for specific uses at work relegated it to second-tier status -- I only use it occasionally these days, preferring Avant.

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is the standard by which I judge all others. It's an excellent power-browser's browser. It's extremely customizable with all sorts of plugins and trinkets you can download. There is so far nothing that I've found any other browser to do that Firefox cannot with the right plugins. Unfortunately, it requires customization and plugins to become a really good browser. This is in contrast to Opera, which does most of what you need it to do right after download. Though it is not IE compatible the same way that Slimbrowser and Avant are, you can download plugins to make it so. In fact, you can download plugins to make it do just about anything, it seems. As Firefox becomes more popular, pop-up ads are unfortunately becoming more common (you can customize these away with plugins and settings, but it requires more work). Unfortunately, the piecemail nature of the program can make repetitive upgrading and installation tedious. Its handling of external files is both really good (it opens each PDF either in the window you're using or a completely new one) and really obnoxious (If opening something in an external file, it opens up the external app and then skips back to a blank window in Firefox to tell you tha it's downloaded, serving no discernable purpose). But despite the minor annoyances, if I could only use one browser, it would be this one.

Netscape Browser 8.x
The recently relaunched Netscape is similar to its sibling Firefox. It comes with more built in to the browser, but is less customizable. It has some irksome limitations like the inability to move tabs and no easy way to turn off the little weather program (which is otherwise neat), which got me in some hot water at work. It can be somewhat resource-intensive. No pop-ups that I have seen yet, though I have not used this one as extensively as I've used the others. There honestly isn't a whole lot to recommend about this browser in comparison to Firefox except that security is easier to handle and it does more on the initial download.

Opera Web Browser
If you want to only download the browser and do nothing more, Opera may be your best bet. Efficient tabbing requires almost no customization. It does a better job with IE-only sites than Firefox, though it's not perfect and has no plugins to make it so. Because it's not as big as IE and Firefox, very few pop-up ads get through its filters. Right now it's not worth the trouble for malicious advertisers. You can only open up one Window at a time and it has more resource-spikes than any other browser. I've recently stopped using it at work in favor of beefing up Firefox, though I still do use it at home for select browsing.

It's fun to experiment between browsers, though it's worth noting that they very often do not play well together. Slimbrowser, Opera, and Firefox in particular don't play well with others, causing resource spikes and the like. By "resource spikes" I mean the browser or browsers will start taking up 100% of the resources and will not stop until all of them are closed. It gets pretty annoying. Avant seems to be a team player, however. Not sure about Netscape.

Update: I forgot a couple

Ghostzilla
This is sort of a novelty browser. It is ostensibly so that you can browse without being caught, though its own creators tell you not to do that cause you will get caught and (if it's at work) fired. I actually had a use for it briefly at work during this strange period where we could surf the Internet on break as long as we didn't look like we were surfing the Internet (that eventually got changed to "don't surf the Internet on break" which is why this blog has slowed down substantially). Anyway, there are some sites that don't want to load with it, but those are pretty rare. There's just something neat about a covert browser that finds a good place to hide in your window configuration.

Microsoft Internet Explorer
I haven't used Internet Explorer regularly in years. The only time I have used it has been on Camille's computer, which runs so slow that even Slimbrowser stalls. The other day I was asked a question about how to do something relatively simple, and I could not for the life of me recall. I cannot think of any circumstances in which it is advantageous to use this browser. The fact that it still remains so prevalent makes me skeptical that Microsoft can be toppled, no matter how bad a job it does. All that said, I have not used IE7 yet.

Dean Esmay compares incorrect preductions with incorrect timing:

Sometimes when people predict the future, and we think they're wrong, it turns out that they were only premature in their predictions. Heck, you could even argue that the entire "dot-com bubble" was predicated on only one fatal mistake: it wasn't a mistake based on the notion that the internet would become ubiquitous and ever more a part of people's everyday lives. They were just about 7-10 years premature in their expectations of what was reasonable.

It's quite a good point. We often expect things to happen a lot quicker than they do. We expect a somewhat gradual-but-consistent implementation when instead it will languish for a while and then the change will strike like lightening. It usually, though not always, requires the capitulation of whatever market-force opposes the change. For instance, record companies tried to deny the imminent digitization and computerization of music. They thought if they could shut down Napster, online music and the mp3 would go away. Napsterites, on the other hand, often thought that the change was right around the corner. Instead, nothing happened for quite a few years and then suddenly the dam burst and in the span of a year record companies offered legal ways to listen to music online and in non-media digital form.

The same may be true for Linux. I am a Linux-skeptic from a market standpoint. I believe that Microsoft will dominate desktops for many years to come. I partially believe this because of the Linux false-starts that I've seen. Linux boosters have constantly claimed "We're ready!" when they, in fact, are not. They're still not. At some point, though, I do believe that their software will be ready for the average user in time. But that won't be enough just like the technology for internet business or digital music was not enough. The market will have to come to terms with the notion of open-source software and figure out some way around MS Office's dominance in office software. It could be that they never will and fifty years from now Windows will still be, more or less, at the top.

One thing that could fit in to the greater scheme of things is web-based software, which is the subject of Esmay's piece:

Back in the 1990s the concept of the so-called "thin client" was all the rage. The idea was that every machine would be networked, and that there was just no need for most people to have their own fully functional computer; they should be able to draw most of the resources they needed over the network, and shouldn't need local hard drives or advanced processing power on their desktops. [...]

The advent of free webmail services which offer hundreds of megabytes of storage for free was the first thing that had me thinking that this can be taken seriously. Increasingly, there's no good reason to want to keep your email on your computer. Indeed, there's good reason not to keep it there, since you don't have to worry about backups, and it's nice to be able to get at your mail from any computer. I've been using computers since the late 1970s, and I never thought I'd give up having my own mail client, but for two years now I've been entirely using webmail--because I like to be able to get at my mail from any computer anywhere on the planet with an internet connection.

They said the same thing when I was in college and by the timeline they gave it should have happened by now. It took a little longer to get broadband to be as commonplace as it's becoming.

On the whole, though, I am not convinced that it is as imminent as some believe or that it will ever be as complete as they think it will. The first barrier they face is internet inconsistency. Last night, for instance, my high-speed internet fluctuated between being down and being really slow. It doesn't happen all that often, but often enough for it to be a real problem if when that happens I cannot do anything on my computer. We're still pretty early on in the broadbanding of the Internet so they will get a lot of this sorted out, but the piecemail way in which we're making it happens suggests to me that we won't have complete reliability (or near-complete, which we have for power and water and so on) for some to time come.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that it will ever completely make sense to have the applications run on some central server. Processing power is cheap and getting cheaper by the day. I'm not sure it will ever be cheaper to be moving these things back and forth across the Internet, even if it takes roughly the same amount of time. The same with hard-drive space -- no one is going to run out of harddrive space based on applications alone.

What I see happening is co-existence between local applications and webapps. Most office productivity suites will have both a software and web component. You use your installed MS Office when you're at home, but when you're on a computer that has a different version or different software package, you will use it on the web. Online music supplier Rhapsody already does this, to an extent. You can either download their application or you can listen to it on Rhapsody.com (though at last check their implementation of Rhapsody.com needed work).

While the reasons for software apps being located elsewhere on your machine are limited, having your files stored on a central server and accessible from anywhere is a different matter altogether. Being able to store one's entire music, movie, or book collection to be accessible from anywhere on any computer would truly be innovative. I see OSes moving towards making the integration and synchronization between local and central storage space more seemless.

To use Rhapsody as an example again, right now you can either listen to the music through streaming audio or you can download it for free and listen to it locally (though once you stop subscribing it will stop playing). Having everything available from a central server is great, but so is having it local so that it's not taking up large amounts of bandwidth.

One of Dean's commented brought up an interesting thing:

The companies delivering these services are looking for a way to make money and see the current model as unacceptable- THAT is the driving force behind this on the commercial side. Software cannot be pirated if it exists only on the server side and is accessible only through paid subscription services.

It's no secret that Microsoft would much prefer a subscription model for Office and that would provide quite the incentive for software vendors to discontinue local installations. I'm not convinced that they would be successful, though. Part of the glory of open source software - even when I don't use it - is that it keeps profit vendors from moving too far away from what consumers want. Microsoft, Apple, Corel, and Adobe could all start adopting the same marketing strategy (because it's the most profitable) and we still wouldn't have to go along. That's quite comforting.

Whatever comes of it all, it will be interesting.

The arrogance of Microsoft never seems to astound:

Microsoft has urged UK PC vendors not to give customers the opportunity to buy a PC without a pre-installed operating system.

Supplying base systems, or 'naked PCs', is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft's head of anti-piracy.

Writing in Microsoft's Partner Update magazine, which is distributed to computer dealers, Alexander estimated that 5 percent of computers sold in the UK in 2006 would not include an operating system.

Alexander is keen to bring that number down, even though customers could want a base system because they want to install Linux, or because their firm already has a licensing agreement for an operating system such as Windows.

"We want to urge all system builders — indeed, all Partners — not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business — with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander.

Linux vendors and free software supporters, though, believe these base systems can play an important role in supporting the open source market. Some are concerned that Microsoft may be attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper competition.

"May"?

Not sure about the rules in Britain, but it seems to me that Microsoft does have the right to check up on whether naked systems are having Windows sneaked on them at the last minute. They can do it the same way we do: by buying the PC and seeing if it's installed. Or getting an agreement. On the other hand, if they're simply hanging around the vendors like the chewing gum guy in Clerks, they ought to be able to be kicked off for trespassing.

But here's the thing that kind of surprises me: why are any computers sold without an OS? It seems to me that they should all come with some form or another of Linux (if they don't come with Windows, of course). Obviously different people have different Linux preferences, but anyone who has a "preferred" brand of Linux is obviously adept enough to install it themselves (which they would have to do anyway - and besides, most of them are likely to build their own anyway.

Is there something in Linux licensing that prohibits this?

The strangest thing has been happening on one of my computers. The other day I was listening to Rhapsody and I heard an advertisement for "Omega 3 Iceland Health." At first I thought it was a really weird Eels or They Might Be Giants track or something. But there wasn't even music in the background and it had nothing to do with anything. Was Rhapsody selling ads? That would really have irked me, but I couldn't imagine that they would do that. But I couldn't find another explanation for the fact that Rhapsody stopped playing so that this thing could play.

I chalked it up to a freak thing.

But twice over the past week the ad has started playing in the middle of the night. I will awaken at 3 in the morning to the sound of a bunch of people shilling for Iceland Health. Other than the first time, though, I've never really been in a position to see if maybe there is some sort of ad coming from my browser or something (mystery sounds in the past have come from aggravating Flash ads, for instance) that interrupted Rhapsody (Rhapsody sometimes doesn't get along with other audio programs such as WinAmp).

I don't know. I haven't had the chance yet to check the computer for spyware. If it is spyware, it's the first audio spyware I have ever run across. For now I just turn the speakers off before I go to bed.

I agree with the main thrust of Cory Doctorow's piece on Google Video DRM,I think. I'll have to ponder at least a little more on the matter. But even so I found this argument strange:

DVDs were the first widely-released DRM media. The effect of DRM on DVDs was to deprive DVD owners of the fruits of an open market in players. In the ten years that DVDs have been in the marketplace, no new features have been introduced for the platform, robbing us of the dividends on our investment in DVDs. By contrast, DRM-free CDs ushered in the era of the MP3, home karaoke, time-shifting, media servers, iPods, mashups, MP3 CDs and all the rest of the value that has accumulated in our music collections, the dividend paid on our investment in the CD format.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that CDs got at least a couple years headstart over DVDs. If not in invention, then at least in widespread implementation. I was a slow adopter on both, but by the time I bought a DVD player there were already more CDs than audio tapes at record stores.

Secondly, bearing the above in mind, DVD isn't that far behind CD in versitility. The MP3 era is being matched pretty ably by MP4, AVI, and Divx encoding. The CD in my car can play MP3s from CDRs, but the DVD Player I just ordered will be able to play Divx filed burned to DVDRs. iPods are coming with little screens these days. Too small to be useful, maybe, but not exactly the fault of DRM (besideswich, you can get portable DVD players and if they don't offer portable DVD players that can play Divx files and the like, they will).

Granted, some of this stuff is in spite of DRM and because people have been able to circumvent it. But if nothing else, it demonstrates that DVD DRM may not be benign, but is sufficiently incompetent.

None of this is to say that I am okay with DRM. I hate the fact that I had to buy a separate piece of hardware to get the DVD I purchased to play in the player I purchased on the TV I own. I also hate that a number of TV/VCR combos were rendered completely incompatible with DVD players because everything necessarily went through the VCR. So I'm not enthusiastically defending DRM here because I don't like it, but I found that particular paragraph to be pretty off-base.

I recently purchased a ATI All-In-Wonder (AIW) video card in part so that I could transfer some old tapes onto the computer. VCRs are getting more and more difficult to find in stores and it's starting to make less sense keeping them in that format. Some of the tapes I have were never actually released to DVD so I couldn't buy it if I wanted to, and included in the goodies are videos that I made with my best friend when we were in junior high.

So I get everything all hooked up, but it seemed like I couldn't get a solid connection from the VCR to the video card. The sound was choppy and the video looked like it was getting a bad reception or had a poor connection. It would only do so, however, when the VCR was playing. The blue screen was quite peaceful. Co-ax cables are sometimes spotty, so I tried hooking up my playstation with a RCA yellow-white-red cable. My video card apparently came with two "out" (PC->VCR) cables and no "in" cables (VCR->PC). Luckily I had an old AIW and could use that cable.

By this point I was getting pretty agitated, though I did feel better when the video started coming through.The sound was still choppy. When I tried to record, however, I got a message saying that it couldn't be done. Copy-protection, it seemed. Except that it recorded just fine. The sound even worked!

So determining that the problem may have been the co-ax cable the VCR was connected to, I took a special trip to the store to get the RCA cable. Unfortunately, the problem has persisted. It doesn't matter wether the tape is copy-protected or not, for some reason it's not going through. Last I checked, the VCR worked fine on the TV.

So I'm guessing there's some sort of universal copy protection coming from either the Philips VCR or the ATI video card.

If it's the VCR, that would be an odd thing because the VCR knows when a tape is copy-protected and when it isn't. I don't see why it would make the distiction going from VCR to VCR but wouldn't make the distinction going from VCR to PC. A brief scan of the Internet found people mostly wanting to copy protected VHS tapes and getting confronted with a different sort of copy protection. Also, the method of distortion seems to differ between VCR-VCR and VCR-PC transfers. The former is a color distortion, mild vertical flipping, and almost completely muted sound. The latter just acts like it's not connected right.

If it's the video card, though, I don't understand why a copy-protected DVD would work, but an unprotected VHS tape wouldn't. I also imagine that if it was coming from them, it would refuse to play copy-protected DVDs the same way that it refuses to play copy-protected tapes. At the very least, it would stop me from recording it (like it proclaims to do).

It could be that I just have a bum video card with a weak connection. That is the only explanation I can come up with for the sound. The computer is an Athlon 3500 with 2GB of RAM. I'm hard-pressed to say that it can't handle streaming audio from a card that itself has 256MB of RAM. But while that may explain the audio, it doesn't explain the video.

If it's the VCR, then, I need to find a VCR that is not so aggressive with its copy protection that it will block even unprotected tapes. This line of hardware has been recommended by some. The VHS clarifier costs $70. The fact that I'm willing to spend $70 to get copies of tapes that I spent less than $50 should make it clear that this is not about money. The problem is that if the VCR is not the culprit, I've thrown that money away.

If it's the video card, then I need to know where in the process this is getting distorted. Maybe there's another program I can use to rip the video? Or that will process it better?

The last strange thing is the degree of distortion. The one that comes out the best (some distortion, but only in the top 1/10 of the screen) may or may not be copyrighted, but the one that comes out the worst (Jay's and my home movies) is certainly not copyrighted.

Here's a rundown:

Good

Title	Tape Quality	Import Quality
Second Civil War	Good	Top half of screen is in black and white and distorted.
Wings of Honneamise	Pretty Good	Top half of screen has distorted color and bends to the right.
They Might Be Giants: Direct from Brooklyn	Decent	Nothing is visible, though sound comes in decently.
Evangelion Death (fansub release)	Pretty good	Alternates between "as good as can be expected" to "Am I having an LSD trip now?", just like the movie. Except that it's not supposed to do that.
Stuff taped from TV	Watchable, but Not Good	You can't see anything.
Matchbox Twenty: Live from Australia	Good

I'm kinda at a loss as to what to do on this matter. Does anyone know anything about this subject that I apparently don't?

Five weeks after the Guardian gloated that there was "little the US government can do but acquiesce" to demands that it cede control of the Internet's infrastructure, the US did not acquiesce to demands that it cede control of the Internet's infrastructure. Read carefully and you can almost sense the AP writer's disappointment, or at least his attempts to spin it as a defeat.

First, the article's title: "Nations Urge U.S. to Cede Internet Control."

Except that the US did not cede control of the Internet's infrastructure. Nor did it promise to at a later date.

Representatives of a number of countries remained adamant that U.S. control must be tempered if the Internet is to fully reach its potential. And even traditional allies of Washington considered it to have opened the door to the possibility of more shared governance.

Except that the US did not cede control of the Internet's infrastructure. Nor did it promise to at a later date.

Mugabe's remarks signaled that, despite the U.S. success in winning over a broad group of nations including the
European Union bloc, underlying complaints about American hegemony in Internet control still linger.

In an extreme case, complaints left unchecked could prompt dissatisfied countries to create their own addressing system, splintering the Internet such that two people typing in the same Web address may reach different sites, depending on where they live.

Questions about the Internet's plumbing have overshadowed the summit's original intent: to address ways to expand communications technologies to poorer parts of the world.

Except that despite assurances that the US would have to cede control of the Internet's infrastructure, it did not. Nor did it promise to at a later date.

You also have to appreciate how the only admission that the US won over a broad group of nations including the EU (which had previously supported internationalization) comes after the word "despite."

"The U.S. has done a good job making the Internet safe for robust political discussion and commerce, but will gradually need to start recognizing international norms," said Frank Pasquale, a law school professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Except that the US did not cede control of the Internet's infrastructure. Nor did it promise to at a later date.

I'm really not looking to gloat here. Truth be told, I don't believe that the Internet should be under the control of a single government. I definitely believe, however, that it should not be under the control of many governments. Declan McCullough and Kenneth Neil Cukier explained all that was at stake, and the stakes were considerable. The anti-US side can redefine victory all day long, but they were supposed to at least get the promise of the UN taking control of ICANN.

It was, in fact, the fear of thugs like Robert Mugabe (last seen trying to crack down on email activists) taking control of things that prompted the Commerce Dept to pledge to hold on ICANN longer. The problem with this issue is the same problem with the UN at large: it makes no distinction between democratic states and authoritarian ones. The result of all of this is that there is now plenty of time to cool off and discuss feasible plans for unnationalizing (as opposed to internationalizing) the Internet and holding on to the freedoms that make it so worth holding on to.

And that's a victory for everyone but the bad guys.

Edit: AP Link Added

Update: I wonder if I might actually be misreading the tone. The BBC has a much more straightforward accounting of events and I'm much more suspicious of slants in their coverage than the AP's. I'm wondering if the whole "UN wants control of the Internet" isn't so much an effort to obscure the actual results, but rather an attempt to catch up on the story since there wasn't much coverage of the issue to begin with. Before explaining that US retains control of the Internet, you must explain that someone else wanted control. Of course, one journalistic mistake (missing a story with important repercussions) with another (framing the story poorly) is not particularly impressive. In any event, even if so it conveniently obscures a diplomatic success by the government while playing up the "The World Hates Us Because of Bush" angle that one frankly expects to see more in the BBC than the AP.

I just ordered a bunch of parts from Newegg:

1. A 24 CD Wallet
2. A Samsung DVDRW
3. A Samsung DVD drive
4. Speakers
5. 2GB of Kingston RAM

Gmail, as most of you know, puts up ads based on the content of the emails. So when it sent the receipt to my Gmail account, it tried to sell me:

1. A 24 CD Wallet
2. A Samsung DVDRW
3. A Samsung DVD drive
4. Speakers
5. 2GB of Kingston RAM

Not particularly helpful, but at least the ads weren't cheaper than what I'd just paid.

That would really have pissed me off.

NetThoughts:

• Is anyone else having problems with GoogleAds on Firefox? It doesn't tend to want to go where it's supposed to go, flashing stationary and obscuring the main text of the page.
• As mentioned to the left, spammers have found Ten Second News, so registration is now required over there. On the upshot, Nucleus did a fantastic job of catching their comments. I'm not sure how since I don't even think I had Comment Control on. But none of them got through. I wonder if there's a way to get it to block anything that puts "href" in a post. That would get rid of a whole lot of them right then and there.
• It's amazing how much easier the Internet has become, isn't it? I was just remembering how much of a hassle it was to get connected from the University of Houston dorms using Windows 95.
• It's a great thing that internet domain registration cost has become as low as it has, but I really wish there were some way to prevent people from buying up domain names for prospecting purposes. It's one thing when my preferred domain name is taken by someone that that's using it. It's another when it's taken up just because someone thought that someone else might someday need it.
• I know that you can keep certain sites from being archived, but is there any way to make a site completely invisible to search engines completely?