Weird, but true. It's Rob Malda's take on how local newspapers should survive and thrive in the digital age, and is worth reading for anyone with an interest in media, journalism, blogging, etc. I truly hope his vision comes to pass. I have to admit, we cancelled our subscription to the local paper awhile back. To cut costs, they fired most of the journalists and columnists, replaced all local journalism with stuff they downloaded off the wires and the web, and laid the whole thing out back in Eastern Canada. It was really odd, paying for and seeing appearing in print articles that I'd read for free weeks ago on the web. I don't need a bad Google News imitation printed out every day and delivered to my doorstep, killing trees and worse yet, cluttering up my recycle bin. Having to pay for it was merely added insult to injury. They gave us a free, "Won't you please come back" subscription recently, and I was merely reminded of why we'd cancelled in the first place.
It's not that I don't have interest in the local community; I do. And a good, local newspaper could be a focus for that community. But hey, I live in the 21st century, I contribute to mailing lists and blogs, I trust Wikipedia more than the NY Times, I wanna participate in that community. Slashdot is easily ten times as good as any of the computer magazines it put out of business, and let me tell you, it's not from the articles, it's the readers. I hope that vision comes to pass, but from what I think I know about how newspaper management thinks about the web, somehow I doubt it. So craigslist will replace Careers, Freecycle will replace the classifieds, and everybody will host their own blogs and wonder why they don't have readers. Such a waste. With a little thought and some editors, the local paper could be so much more.
Y'know, it's funny, when I wrote my last piece about OpenOffice, I hadn't even used most of the applications that come with it, just the text editor and the calculator, the two oldest, most heavily used parts of the package. Recently I tried out the database, just for educational purposes (mostly), working my way through this nice little tutorial. The author mentioned a couple hiccups, but nothing serious, and people are using it, and it is after all a 2.0, so I figured, how bad could it be?
The answer: really, really bad. Nothing works, constant crashing, data loss, strange hangs. I found myself learning to do an operation (make one change on a form, eg), save everything under a new name, quit all OO applications (including all instances of the "quickstarter"), restart OO, open the latest version of the db, test it carefully, and start rolling back through the versions if I noticed dataloss. Once confidence develops that the last change didn't break it, I'd feel ready to try another. How much of this is necessary? Who knows. I feel like a dog that keeps being randomly kicked, and develops a wide variety of aversions, resulting in twists and turns and bizarre behavior. I read that it's mostly a developer annoyance, and things are "rock solid" once your forms etc. are in place, but gosh almighty, how would anyone know? It's not release quality, not for anyone, it's not beta, I don't think it's even alpha. I don't even feel good ranting about it, I just feel sorry for the developers whose names got associated with it. But my heart truly goes out to those trying to get work done in this environment. I'm so sorry. I know that no words of mine can help you, but my thoughts and my heart are with you. May 2.0.1 arrive soon and resolve the worst of your troubles.
On the sunny side, the #1 rated bug I wrote about last time got closed, so at least there's turnover in the bug database.
Sam asks some pertinent questions about the sweet yet sad story of Judith and Scooter. In standard political blogging practice of avoiding even 30 seconds of web research before spouting off, I'll take a hack at them...
Did Miller go to jail to protect Libby as a source or as a boyfriend?
"Both" would be the obvious answer. I'm not sure that's correct, however. Miller stuck it out in jail on multiple conditions: not just getting release from her source (and demanding said release both verbally and in writing, difficult matters to arrange while in the Big House with a high government official about a heavily publicized case without giving the whole thing away) but also extensive negotiations about exactly what questions she would answer under oath. The double-release demand makes me think she preferred to be in jail, and wanted to delay release; the limitations on questioning speak to the reason why. The implication is that she was trying to conceal something, and not have to testify about it under oath. The exact nature of her relationship with Scooter is the exact kind of thing humans wish to avoid having to get nailed down on. People do remember the Clinton story, which also featured extensive negotiations about what exact questions he could be asked, and his perjury conviction was based on failure to truthfully answer questions which weren't asked. As for why she's so sensitive about the relationship, beyond the obvious usual, see below...
Are they both going to jail now?
I haven't heard that Miller was accused of a crime, other than the contempt of court she's now discharged. The most serious stuff against Miller goes like this. Before the Iraq war, the NY Times printed as settled fact the Ahmed Chalabi/Iraqi National Congress story that said "Saddam has WMD and is ready to use them, the people will greet your tanks with roses and sweetcakes". This story, though widely questioned at the time and ultimately shown to be completely false, was the core public argument the neocons used to justify going to war. The NYT had (and maybe still does) a reasonably solid reputation for getting facts right, and is generally perceived as moderate-leftish in editorial policy, so those stories, backed by the integrity of the Times, did play a role in gathering enough support for the country to go to war. The reporter on those stories? One Judith Miller. So that's the charge against Miller: through credulous and inaccurate reporting, her judgement clouded by personal entanglements, she used the reputation of the NY Times to take the country into the most expensive, damaging, and detrimental war in a generation. Crime? No. But her footnote in the history books is getting longer. For Miller, a little jail term to try and massage the past, avoiding the most embarassing bits, might seem like a small price to pay.
As for Scooter, I don't think he's going to jail. That's not the way the US treats high political criminals. Even imagining (a big stretch) the prosecutor gets a provable case, he'll take a plea bargain and testify against whoever drew the short straw, immunity in exchange for talking to Congress (like Ollie North), or a pardon (like Nixon, or any of the tens of thousands Clinton pardoned on his last day). Regardless, he's lost his seat of power, and is now condemned to the conservative book tour, which is punishment enough from a Washington point of view.
Can they get adjoining cells?Sounds like one for Slate's Explainer column. Adjoining tables on the book tour, perhaps.
Sorry, I've been busy for the last week (family visiting) and I've been lazy for about six months. But I didn't get this Libby indictment thing until the second time I read T's post below--
Right?
So my questions include -- Did Miller go to jail to protect Libby as a source or as a boyfriend? Are they both going to jail now? Can they get adjoining cells?
And perhaps most importantly, since Libby has already been punished for lying to a federal prosecutor by losing his job and getting indicted, will his detractors stop baying for jail time? After all, one B. Clinton did approximately the same thing and didn't even lose his job!
Oh, sorry, chose to retire entirely voluntarily, only coincidentally after a multi-week settlement process, reports the NY Times in yet another article about itself. This is a big deal, union rules make it tougher to fire a NYT reporter than a tenured faculty member. I like the coy way the article reprints the suggestions and denials of an improper relationship between Miller and Scooter Libby, just so that clued-out readers can know the real reason she's gone. So it turns out that she's not untouchable, but now we know why she was protecting someone who was oh so much more than just a source.
With respect to that relationship, Susie Bright reprints some of Scooter's purple correspondance with Ms. Miller, along with gentle suggestions for improving his next erotic novel. It's sometimes said that everyone has a novel inside them, the real key is figuring out how to keep it in there, and not let it escape into the wild.
Journalists love open source software. Free as both the communist and libertarian senses, David vs. Goliath grassroot movements against giant evil multinationals, all those good storylines. So, naturally, product reviews tend to be at least guardedly positive, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, that sort of thing. Heck, I've even done my bit for OO evangelism.
Now, with the release of OpenOffice 2.0, Massachussetts standardizing on OpenDoc as a document format, a big vague deal with Google, it seems like OO has arrived, and is ready to slay the dominant player in the office software marketplace. Reviews are already starting to be written, no doubt based mostly on Sun's marketing materials, and even those who find the actual To Do list for ongoing development won't find much that sounds like a concern. As a result, there's a serious risk that OpenOffice reviews will be all glowing and nicey-nicey, with perhaps just a couple of boilerplate complaints like "starts up slowly" or "crashes constantly, though usually my document survives". In the vital interest of perspective, then, here's a quick guide to being outrageously negative (yet accurate!) about the all-new OpenOffice.
1. Read what users complain about most, as seen at the OpenOffice.org buglist sorted by votes.
2. Meditate on the fact that entering a bug or a vote into Sun's byzantine and molasses-slow issue tracking system probably requires an hour of work for each first-time complainer, not counting the investment required to isolate the bug in the first place. Each and every bug report was a big deal to somebody. Anything reported in duplicate is huge, a bug with a community; ditto for anything with multiple votes. These are the complaints of the converted, the starry-eyed acolytes desiring to make the world a better place by improving Free Software.
2b. Just in case the starry-eyed acolytes think the System cares, note in passing that Sun's byzantine tracking system 1) hides votes by default, 2) cannot be queried to sort by votes, 3) throws away votes for issues marked as duplicate, and 4) doesn't think this is a bad thing (#22519). That query in point 1 was not easy to create.
3. Goggle at some of the stuff just plain not done. The top complaint, #18285, 500+ votes and ignored patches from a Korean hacker, is this some obscure font thing, of interest only to people needing bizarre languages? That's what I thought. Until I tried to italicize something. That's right, select some text, hit the "I" button, just what the Mac made easy to do 25 years ago, nothing more. Try it with the default font on Linux, it just doesn't work. How about counting words, bugs #4568 / #17964? Sounds simple, and vital for anyone who's publishing, or submitting documents to granting agencies, courts, anyone with space limits (in other words, most anyone writing for a living). But nothing got done at all until someone pointed out that a hypothetical reviewer might try to actually use the app, if only to write their review, and they'd rapidly discover the failing. Now it's a major new feature for 2.0 ("New! with nearly all the functionality of wc circa 1975!") and it's still not right. How about handling notes (#6193)? Pointless glossy frivolity, right? Sure -- unless you have a coauthor, and are trying to communicate about a draft. How about reference tracking, a la LaTeX or EndNote a decade ago, should you be so foolish as to attempt to write your dissertation in OO? Ummm, well there's a whole project devoted to thinking about working on that someday (#4260). Maybe in 3.0. That's all fuzzy-wuzzy humanities stuff though, OO is made for serious technical users, right? These folks are well-served... until they write an equation, and discover that each equation must be vertically aligned by hand (#972) -- couldn't TeX do this 20 years ago? With free, open code, ready to copy or emulate? Or until they try to make a graph in the spreadsheet, and discover that you can't simultaneously plot two independent data series on the same chart (#3997), or have useful error bars (#366). I love the low number on that one. It tells you just how long people have been complaining about it, with nothing getting done. I'm starting to become convinced that the overlap between developers and users of OO is nearly zero, in contrast to a normal community development project, an impression backed up by the fact that 90%+ of OO developers are full-time professionals, mostly Sun employees. If a feature isn't useful to Sun coders, it's hard for them to see the need. Even coder features (eg #10457, request for UML patterns in Draw) get ignored for years if they're not specifically required inside Sun.
4. Pretend you discovered this stuff all by yourself. You're a software reviewer, after all.