Author: Stagger Lee

So if I started off as a student, then became a political scientist, then changed classes and became a computer tech, then changed classes and became a blogger in addition to a tech, does that mean I’m actually now a bard?

(If you never played first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, take my word for it, all of what I just wrote was !-ing hysterical.)

* Florida won 27-3, but one touchdown came off an INT and another after a Vandy slip on a punt that gave the Gators the ball at the 13. Tebow got sacked four times, and Vandy’s starting QB – the backup, Adams – wasn’t sacked once. I think we’re a lot better than what we’ve shown this year, but that doesn’t mean much at 2-8.

* Jahvid Best has probably played his last game of the year after a godawful injury – he was knocked out cold to the point where they cut his jersey off and took him off the field immoblized, with a blanket for shock and an oxygen mask on. How bad was it? Fans from Oregon and USC were logging onto the Cal boards in real time to say how horrible it looked and that they were praying for #4. It looks like he has movement in all extremities, but the concussion – a much worse one than the one last week which wasn’t even caught until Monday – pretty much sticks a fork in his season, and by extension Cal’s. I wouldn’t be too sanguine about Big Game at this point, and I’m pretty sure the Washington game is a loser. Not much left to do at this point, but when the offseason arrives, it’s time for a serious long look at where the Cal football program is and where it’s headed, because the rest of the conference seems to have solved the puzzle.

* Bama has won the SEC West and will play in what is essentially the national championship semi-final against Florida. Better not overlook Mississippi State (I’m not worried about overlooking Auburn). I know I’ve gotten distant from the Crimson Tide in recent years, and it feels awfully bandwagon-ish to be going out in the red cap or the houndstooth now, when they’ve been the third team in the house for so long – but dammit, I just want to be associated with a winner. With Vandy coming back to earth, Cal falling apart, and the Redskins locked into permanent shit-the-bed mode, I just want somebody to give me at least an even shot at a W on weekends. Even Celtic is hitting the wall under Tony Mowbray. But I do have a longer history with Alabama than any other team in sports…

…I’d like to hear an argument against gay marriage that doesn’t boil down to “it’s against God” or “it’s icky.”

Except, you know, there isn’t one.

The reason we have a representative democracy, rather than a direct one, is because people are assholes. Anybody who says different is drunk on the milk of human kindness or else just not paying attention. And at some point, a higher authority – I’m thinking five or so people in DC – will have to make it abundantly clear that your rights under the law may not be curtailed by a 50% vote because some people think you are oogy.

And please, please, please spare me the sanctimonious retching about “states rights.” It’s amusing to me that states’ rights never come up when they want to go to the left of the national standard. When I hear “states’ rights”, my gun comes off safety all by itself.

Remember the Web 1.0 era? More to the point, remember the rise of Internet Explorer, and MSN, and how Microsoft bought everything from Hotmail to Claris Emailer en route to world domination? How everything was bundled, internally API’d and basically made into an inexorable juggernaut? Hell, we’re still paying for the integration of IE into the operating system – a trick pulled to sandbag Netscape in 1996 has been providing us with security nightmares for a decade. But I digress…

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that as soon as the Droid rolled out today, with the new Navigation package built free of charge into Android 2.0, the shares of Garmin and Tom Tom both plunged 20% almost immediately. All of a sudden, they’re stuck with a hardware premium, competing against a bundled product that’s free of charge. Sound familiar? Seriously, look at the list. Google Search (whether web, toolbar, desktop or whatever), GMail, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Chrome, GTalk, Google Reader, YouTube, iGoogle portal…and that’s just the stuff I use on a routine basis, not counting things like Google Earth, Google Wave (more on that in a minute), Google Docs, Google Voice, Picasa, Google Calendar…seriously, every time I do the list, I think of something else hanging out there that I hadn’t considered.

We had three rules in DC: we didn’t drink fruit-flavored liquor, we didn’t smoke machine-rolled cigars, and we didn’t put mission-critical work on Microsoft products. That was ten years ago. Now look at the list above, and think: if tomorrow morning all Google services vanished, completely, 1) how screwed would you be, and 2) what alternatives would you fall back on?

Put it like this: it is now very nearly possible to have a pure Google ecosystem. You can have a Google OS on your phone from two different carriers (and more on the way no doubt). Google can be your mail, calendar, contact number, voicemail, productivity suite, GPS system, web browser – pretty soon possibly even your OS, depending on how the Chrome OS for netbooks works out. And while you have to pay for your cellphone and its service, for now the rest of it is all free at the point of use. As far as you can see, it’s not costing you a thing.

That’s where the trouble starts. No matter how good a product Garmin or Tom Tom might make, how are they going to compete against a product that is a) good enough and b) visibly free? Microsoft ran up something like a 95% market share in web browsers that way, and still has a majority – the only thing that made a dent was the rise of Firefox, aided and abetted by Microsoft’s utter failure to innovate in the browser space and by the security nightmares engendered by the aforementioned browser integration. Or put another way: if Microsoft had taken viruses seriously and given half a thought to tabbed browsing and privacy mode in, say, 2000, Firefox would be a side project for neckbeard Linux hippies.

As I may have mentioned before, Google has your data. In a lot of ways, though, it also has your inertia. When’s the last time you used anything else for search, or for maps or directions? I was looking at my own usage, and in addition to Maps being right there in the iPhone’s home screen, it occurs to me that almost every single iPhone RSS app relies on Google Reader as its backbone service. I could ditch GMail and GTalk tomorrow, especially now that my employer runs its own in-house (encrypted!) IM service, I’ve got Safari and Firefox for browsers, I don’t really need a portal anymore but Yahoo could do that, I’ve already paid up for .Mac to cover mail and calendaring and some web service there…

I guess the point is: monoculture is dangerous. If you put all your eggs in the Google basket, then the first time it breaks – they get hacked, they decide to start charging an arm and a leg, they start strip-mining your personal info and selling to Russian pharmaceutical companies, it doesn’t matter, whatever – when the bough breaks, your cradle is going to get fucked right up. But for whatever reason, that hasn’t yet occurred to people. Maybe it was just slow – Google didn’t really displace Altavista as my go-to search until 2000 sometime, GMail dropped in 2004, the mass conversion to Reader only seems to have come along in the last 6 months, Blogger and YouTube were acquired at diverse times in the past. Maybe people buy into “Don’t Be Evil.” Maybe people just can’t resist free stuff. And maybe the cult of Google has just gotten to the point where they can roll out any old shit and people will break their neck for invitations, only to find themselves wondering “what the hell is this FOR” when they get there (I still don’t have one single real-world use case for Google Wave, and I’m a NERD).

But by whatever means, Google has quietly got a better grip on our collective nuts than Microsoft has – after all, they just have an OS. Google has your data – hell, Google has a non-trivial chunk of your life. And others could have that, too – but only Google has come right out and said they’re building their business on your data. And if I’m in the information business, in any fashion, I’m not going to sleep well for a long, long time. And even if I’m just a user, I’m starting to get a little uneasy about how tight the grip from Mountain View is.

Especially as I’m posting this via Google Wi-Fi.

…and the Droid looks like it might just punch equal weight with the iPhone 3GS, based on the features and demos seen today. But three things spring to mind:

1) We still don’t know what the battery life is like. I want to see that thing survive all day in the real world, speaking as somebody who routinely pummels an iPhone 3G to the tune of 6+ hours live use in a day (and that with virtually no actual voice usage).

2) We still don’t know what the data plans are like and whether Verizon can fight off the urge to squeak every last nickel out of its users. Still want to see how app sales, etc. play out.

And most important:

3) We don’t know how long it will take before Moto/Google pops out a GSM Droid so they can play in, oh, EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH besides South Korea. Verizon better have those exclusivity deals locked up for a while.

I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about here, although this will definitely light a fire under them (not to mention make me glad I’ve passed on the 3GS – whatever comes next will have to be even better now). But if I’m Palm, or Microsoft, I’m shitting myself right now. And RIM has to be FRISBEE pissed that on the day they release the Storm 2, all the oxygen in the room got sucked up by the Droid. I think the Blackberry has got to do some serious shaking up if they’re going to compete with Apple and Google in the consumer-smartphone space.

So Lane Kiffin vaporlocked in the last minute of the game – his quarterback has finally found the range, Alabama is suddenly unable to stop the short slant passes, and his kicker has had one miss and one block from roughly the same area of the field where Tennessee has the ball with 40 seconds to play, first down, and no time-outs.

So what does he do? Do they spike the ball to stop the clock and then take a couple of deep shots down the sideline? Do they at least attempt to get closer and make things easier on the kicker, if not try to end it outright with a second touchdown in as many minutes?

Nope. Lane Kiffin runs the clock down to four seconds, attempts the field goal, gets it swatted back in his kicker’s face, goes to the locker room, pees sitting down, and blames the refs.

Does the SEC have a crisis in officiating? Absolutely, and if you don’t believe me, check out last Saturday’s game at Mississippi State. Did the refs put a gun to Lane Kiffin’s head and tell him to wuss out after his offense got its head out of its collective rectum for the first time all day? If they did, CBS sure didn’t get it.

Memo to Hello Kiffy: this is not the Big 12, and you’re not Mack Brown. You don’t get to whine your way into anything in the SEC. If you don’t have the sack to go all in, don’t come crying when you flop a deuce.

So WIndows 7 is officially in the wild. No OS survives contact with the user base, so I’ll be curious to see how this works out. The biggest problem will be the lack of a direct upgrade path from XP – which means you’re basically wiping your machine, installing 7 clean, and then hoping that your restored/reinstalled apps and data work out fine. I think that, like always, most people will get 7 by just saying “to hell with it” and buying a new machine, and Apple – with their refresh of the least expensive items in their hardware lineup – is counting on at least some folks going their way.

This points up a big issue – for all their Mac envy (which is plain to see if you look at the opening of the Microsoft Store in Scottsdale), Microsoft’s number-one competition for Windows 7 is…WIndows XP. There has to be a compelling value proposition to make it worth moving up. Apple’s not immune to this, either – the biggest competitor to the iPod is the iPod you already have, not the Zune or Sensa or Archos or whatever piece of shit washed up from Shenzen this week.

Thing is, though, Apple’s never been afraid to shoot the golden goose – the iPod mini was their most successful product since the Apple II, and at the height of its success, they killed it dead – in favor of the nano, which quickly became more successful than the mini. The successor to the iPhone was the 3G, which added some more stuff to the mix – but the successor to THAT was the iPhone 3GS, which adds a truly compelling value proposition over the original iPhone (video camera, 3G, GPS, voice control, ridiculous improvements in speed and storage, etc) just in time for that first 2-year contract to expire – and for an initial outlay that’s probably half what was paid for that first iPhone anyway.

I haven’t done that much with Windows 7 – I’ve used the RC1 version in a virtualization environment, so I can’t say for sure how well it works running right on the metal or configuring the networking. It certainly looks prettier than XP, and it was definitely less of a PITA to get up and running than Vista under similar circumstances, but I wonder how much of the improvement in 7 comes from the fact that three years on, the median computer is faster and has more RAM and hard drive than when Vista shipped. But the really compelling thing is that despite being long in the tooth (pushing what, 8 or 9 years now?) Windows XP is actually not terrible – it’s certainly inferior to Leopard (you could not fathom how much it kills me not to be able to SSH into a Windows box and run top or kill) but in all this time, most of the hard corners have been rubbed down and it’s got a lot of the bugs worked out. The measure of Windows 7 is whether it will be worth the hassle for those who don’t just throw up their hands and buy new hardware.

As it is, I wouldn’t say no if somebody threw a WIn7 netbook into my hands, just to get to know the thing. Like I say with the iPhone – if you can give me something better, I’ll take it with no complaints. But in the words of St. Ric Flair, if you wanna BE the man, you gotta BEAT the man…

“You can’t save everybody. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t save anybody.”

Apparently Coke is going to make us all healthier by selling smaller portions.

Anybody smell a scheme to make more money by giving us less stuff? Who the hell do they think they are, Blue Shield of CA?

This team is officially beyond help. There will be no success in Washington football until:

1) Daniel Snyder either sells the team or completely recuses himself from its operations;

2) An actual general manager is installed with carte blanche to turn over the roster;

3) An actual head coach is hired and allowed to install his own staff;

4) The offensive line is completely replaced with younger, fresher talent; and

5) The rest of the roster is repopulated as necessary with fewer big-name free agents and more well-chosen spot performers.

Even if the team were forcibly sold tomorrow to some 21st-century Jack Kent Cooke, who hired some 21st century Bobby Beatherd, who in turn brought in the 21st century Joe Gibbs, Joe Bugel and Richie Petitbone, the whole player-personnel situation is untenable and will probably take a good two or three years to clean up.

Unless…

Right now, if there is no new collective bargaining agreement with the players’ association by next year, the 2010 season will be played without a salary cap – and if that happens, you can almost certainly count on the owners locking out the players in 2011. This will basically put the entire salary cap, roster, contract situation in a blender and possibly give the Skins a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to massively disrupt and reconstruct the team, possibly shortening the time needed to make the turnaround. IF you have the right guys in place, smart enough to take maximum advantage of the situation.

But as long as Snyder’s running this team, they’re going to be the Raiders. Or Clippers. Or worse. In perpetuity.

Um…Geaux Saints?