If you think CNN is biased, you should try listening to the BBC. The BBC's partianship is so extreme at times that it just comes across as sloppy journalism. A mere symptom of a disease known as "lack of competition operating on a level playing field." The BBC lacks significant domestic competition and has slowly drifted into being completely out of touch with reality.

For example, this morning the news report (i.e. allegedly hard news) talked about the "draconian" changes to American laws "severely curtailing" American "civil rights" and "civil liberties". What draconian laws would those be? Maybe it's my weaker grasp on the English language but "draconian", to me means...well draconian.  Of course, they are vaguely alluding to the "Patriot Act" that many on the left rail against as being a "wholesale surrender of our constitutional rights".  Of course, when pressed, most on the left are not able to actually articulate what in the Patriot Act is so vile and horrible.  The rest who have actually bothered to read the Patriot Act talk about how it could potentially be abused by the government. When Michael Moore is marched away to Guantanamo Bay to be held then we can worry. In the meantime, the left should stick with the facts and not paranoid fantasies.

The BBC went on to interview "average Americans".  Based on the BBCs reports, there are no Americans except maybe a hick or two in Iowa who a) feel safe (despite the "Draconian" laws) and Are against the US's actions in the war on terror.  "We should be trying to find out why people hate us and solve that!" said one interviewee in Chicago. "I don't know why we're in Iraq but it's not for the reasons they told us." said another in Portland a state described by the BBC as "split" between Democrats in Republicans (in the same way, I suppose, Massachusetts is split between Democrats and Republicans no doubt).

This kind of dribble from the BBC wouldn't be so obnoxious if it weren't taking place on 9/11. The problem with the intelligentsia on the left (And I use that phrase kindly) is that they fall into moral equivalence arguments easily when confronted with undeniably heinous acts by mideast terrorists and yet amazingly at the same time have no problem turning it all around and arguing that there is no deed we don't deserve.

Here are, in my mind, my opinions that I believe no reasonable human being could possibly object to:

• There has been no US foreign policy action  towards the Middle East that makes the United States deserving of having 4 civilian jet liners hijacked and 2 of them flown into the largest civilian building in the world, a third flown into the Pentagon and a last one targeting either the White House or Congress.
   
• Anyone who has bothered to listen or read the arguments by the Islamo Fascists should by now realize that these guys are little more than really well armed Klu Klux Klan types. You cannot excuse the vile actions of people simply because they don't happen to be white Anglo-Saxon males. These guys are as bad as the Nazis were. But don't take my word for it, read up on their own views. If they had their way they'd have extermination camps that would make Auschwitz look like a park.
   
• The United States has a fundamental sovereign right, having been attacked, to defend itself.  Its interests have been attacked by these forces for over a decade and using international institutions and treating these actions as law enforcement issues helped lead to 9/11.  The United States does not need the permission or blessing of any international body or group to carry out what it believes is self defense. The right of national self defense pre-exists international bodies (which some forget ones created by the United States in the first place). 

I believe that the United States has behaved extraordinarily well given the circumstances.  In the two years since 9/11 there have been no further attacks in the United States. There have been no significant terrorist attacks against the United States overseas (no USS Cole, no Embassy bombings, etc.).  The Taliban in Afghanistan is gone. Saddam Hussein is gone.

And while the BBC would describe US forces in Iraq as "bogged down", most objective people would consider the removal of Saddam Hussein with only a few hundred casualties to be an incredible achievement. Regardless if there's still snipers and uber-snipers (snipers with RPGs), Saddam is gone and the US is in control of Iraq. That several dozen troops have died is a tragedy but one must ask, what is the mortality rate per thousand per month of males aged 18-25 here in the US? I suspect in 9 months a random selection of 200,000 Americans of that demographic would show similar "casualties" from various sources. Iraq's not secure by any means but describing US troops in a "Quagmire" or being "bogged down" is a disservice to them and to those counting on those news organizations for factual reports.

And so here we are, 2 years from 9/11 and generally speaking, the War on Terror has been a great success.  Compare the progress made in the past 2 years to the first two years of World War II.  In 1943 US forces had just gotten into Italy. D-day was still in the future. And the war on Japan was still nearly 2 years from completion.  American casualties in World War II were in the hundreds of thousands.  Two years into this new campaign, troop losses still have not exceeded civilian losses from the first 9/11 attack. I would say that things are going pretty well.

For the past year I have been blogging about the various things that interest me. If you click on the JoeUser classic link near the top you can see the kinds of things I've talked about over the past year. It's been really fun.

But I was distressed by a few things during my blogging:

1. It sometimes felt like blogging is already a clique. A handful of blog sites got all the "glory". Part of my job at Stardock is to analyze the popularity of various websites. So when I applied my techniques to blog sites I found popularity was essentially a mixture of how long these sites had been around, how active they were, and to a less extent, the quality of the blog. This is fair -- on the surface. Afterall, those blogs had put in the time and effort. But at the same time, the level of popularity wasn't just a slight difference, it was a massive difference. A handful of blogs get 90% of the total traffic according to Alexa. There were tons of really good blogs out there that I had a hard time finding that were constantly putting out great stuff that few people would ever find.
2. The blog sites where you could create an account and have your own blog on there seemed primitive. For one thing, little recognition was given out to people for their efforts. The tools and features seemed lacking.
3. On top of the blog sites not having the features I was looking for, they charge money. A lot of money. I couldn't believe it. It shouldn't cost money to have a blog. I help run WinCustomize.com. That's a site that has real expenses. What makes it successful are the skinners who submit their themes, skins, icons, etc. to the site. The idea of even charging them for that would be absurd. They are the ones creating the content.  I can see charging for special features beyond blogging. But it should be free to have a blog with unlimited bandwidth and articles on it.
4. Many of the sites looked ugly. Even JoeUser classic looked pretty awful. When my friends and family looks at what I write, I want it to look nice. So we put together a new look for JoeUser.com that looks nicer.  We'll be coming up with ways for other blogs on JoeUser.com to customize their setup quite a bit but we want to make sure that all the blogs look visually appealing.

And so we've started opening up JoeUser.com. My handle here is Draginol. My real name is Brad Wardell. If you contact someone (see bottom of the page) it still goes directly to me as it always has. But starting now you'll occasionally see articles written by other people on the home page. Maybe they'll be articles I disagree with a great deal. Heck, someone wrote a pro Michael Moore article already! Brrrr. But people who write things that interest other people will percolate to the top. A points system is in place that will help ensure the most popular, best articles come up.

And we'll be having Stardock and its sites link to JoeUser so that blogs written here can be seen. And yet at the same time we'll be putting in features so that you can control who sees your blog (everyone, just you, just a select group of users, etc.). 

It's going to be fun. As for the original Joe User (Draginol), I'll still be blogging. My specific page here is draginol.joeuser.com. So you can still see my specific stuff.

Over the past few weeks WinCustomize has been moving to a new bandwidth compression technology that hopefully has noticeably improved performance.

A Typical WinCustomize page, uncompressed, is over 100K in size! That's a lot to download. And most of it is HTML. With the new licensed compression technology, that size has been chopped in half which should increase performance.

Or more to the point, it has increased performance since it traffic to the site has increased substantially since implemented. Of course, some of you may not be seeing this as this graph shows:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/graphs/tr_main_r7.gif (that damn worm going around has affected global response times on the Internet as a whole).

But for everyone else, hopefully the site is faster. Now, for our next trick, we're going to be migrating everything from Atlanta to California and nearly double our available bandwidth in the process on a set of brand new servers -- all thanks to WinCustomize premium subscribers! https://www.wincustomize.com/store/

Okay gang, we've started opening up JoeUser.com so people who want to write articles on politics or whatever else can now do so there.

 https://www.joeuser.com

Just sign on using your WinCustomize account, then click on "account" at the very top of the page (in the tab) and you can create your blog there. Then if you want to write about politics or anything you can do it there and people can then comment to your article back and forth.

We'll be adding a zillion features to blogs in the coming weeks. Today was the first day we had it so that you oculd actually create a blog on the fly including having your own sub-domain (i.e. like draginol.joeuser.com).

Here are some blogs already on Joeuser.com FYI:

• http://draginol.joeuser.com
• http://joe.joeuser.com
• http://tandis.joeuser.com
• http://calor.joeuser.com

That should help get you started on seeing what people do with their blogs. I personally recommend using an HTML editor like Front pgae and then paste the HTML into the built in editor but you can also type directly into it.

We will shortly be offering blog groups. That's where people of like minded interests can join a metablog where your blogs are combined on a second blog.  So people interested in politics could create a politicaltalk.joeuser.com and everyone in that could combine together.

I'm wearing my Register shirt as I type this so given I'm already apparently a tool of The Register I might as well go all the way and point you to an article John Lettice there has written about Microsoft's seeming obsession with Linux.

Personally I think Linux is crap. At least from a desktop point of view for getting general office productivity done.  But as a server, Microsoft needs to worry. I think they have an uphill climb to win the argument that Windows is less expensive than Linux due to TCO (total cost of ownership) because that is only true while Linux specialists are hard to come by and hence can charge a premium for knowing the arcane ways of Linux.

The real problem with Windows on the server is cost per license combined with scalability. Microsoft has increasingly closed the door on third parties being able to extend Windows.

To use a basketball analogy, it's like when you're playing a 4 on 4 game and your team is losing. There is that temptation, when you think you're the best player on the team, to try to do it all yourself. In the end though you'll lose. I think there's an argument to be made that Microsoft is suffering a bit from that.  Rather than just open the door further and let third parties provide solutions, Microsoft seems paranoid about security in the wrong places.

For instance, a lot of what makes Linux appealing for IT people is its transparency. It's "simple" if not user friendly. Stardock's a Microsoft shop and the difference between doing dynamic pages where you have X.wincustomize.com on IIS versus what you can do on Linux out of the box is just one example of where Microsoft envisions the OS being used in specific ways and tailoring the OS for that. In contrast, Linux, because of its open development structure tends to not have any particular focus which has the good side of making easier to mold to a specific use.

Longhorn, from what we've seen early on, has us concerned because it may be going even further in that direction. Microsoft recently made an announcement saying that nearly half of all Windows crashes were due to non Microsoft code. The inference, to me, was that if only people would stop using crappy third party software Windows would be perfect. Of course, that's absurd. It ignores that there's a lot more third party software being run than Microsoft and yet Microsoft's code seems to cause the majority of the crashes.  But worse, it's the entire attitude that third party software developers are a pain for them.

The security craze is really what's driving things right now over there combined with a concern that Linux is making in roads. Put together, it's creating a mindset, at least from here, in which third parties are really just a potential security issue that they wish would go away. I could be wrong on that but consider this -- Windows XP bundled zip, image management, CD burning, instant messaging, movie making, skinning, and other software which cuts many developers off at the knees.  Longhorn is scheduled to come with a built in database layer on top of NTFS, DVD burning, and virus scanning. And that's with 2 more years at least before release, who knows what they'll add in the meantime.

But it gets worse than just the bundling. In the name of security, there are talks of making much hard to extend the OS. Hooks and other ways third parties use to extend the base feature set of the OS may be taken away to make the OS secure (yea because that's where all those viruses come from! system hooks! Not say Outlook Express email attachments and vulnerabilities in protocols...).  This won't have much affect on companies with the resources (i.e. money) to spend the time to "do it right" (i.e. Stardock) but it'll close the door on freeware and many shareware developers who just don't have the time or knowledge to navigate the maze of security or digital signing licensing or whatever to make innovative new stuff.

Consider this: If Instant Messaging hadn't already been invented and Longhorn came out as currently planned you'd not likely see it because instant messaging relies on a keyboard/mouse hook to determine when a user is at their machine. Now Longhorn is likely to allow such hooks still because of instant messaging but that's just the point, who knows what other things that won't be possible because of this kind of "security".

And as a result, these developers are going to increasingly move to Linux. You can see this already. I know of a few Fortune 100 companies who are moving to Linux on the desktop as well as the server because Linux is easier for them to customize.

Microsoft, in essence, is helping build Linux without realizing it.

So Microsoft fights back using the same tactics they used with OS/2. Except those tactics won't work this time because Microsoft won primarily for 2 reasons: 1) They convinced third parties not to write for OS/2 -- that their better opportunity was with Win32 and 2) They made it cheaper to bundle Windows.  You can't convince third parties to write to Win32 when Microsoft continually cuts them down through bundling or removing their ability to do things with the OS that Microsoft hadn't already thought of. And Windows can't be cheaper than free.

So now they're moving to the total cost of ownership argument which only work as long as Linux remains hard to use (relatively) and the number of people familiar with it remains low.  And Windows is no panacea. I still can't figure out how to get Active Directory to work across domain controllers.

If I were emperor of Microsoft I would be focusing on creating the APIs that open the door to third parties to create the next generation software rather than trying to have it all. I would also suggest trying to develop Windows such that it works more generically. Don't try to envision how it's going to be used all the time and make it difficult to use in ways that MS's team didn't think of.

Just my 2 cents. BTW, I also don't think the security issues in Windows are Microsoft's fault but I'll get to that in my next article.

 

I'm wearing my Register shirt as I type this so given I'm already apparently a tool of The Register I might as well go all the way and point you to an article John Lettice there has written about Microsoft's seeming obsession with Linux.

Personally I think Linux is crap. At least from a desktop point of view for getting general office productivity done.  But as a server, Microsoft needs to worry. I think they have an uphill climb to win the argument that Windows is less expensive than Linux due to TCO (total cost of ownership) because that is only true while Linux specialists are hard to come by and hence can charge a premium for knowing the arcane ways of Linux.

The real proble with Windows on the server is cost per license combined with scaleability. Microsoft has increasingly closed the door on third parties being able to extend Windows.

To use a basketball analogy, it's like when you're playing a 4 on 4 game and your team is losing. There is that temptation, when you think you're the best player on the team, to try to do it all yourself. In the end though you'll lose. I think there's an argument to be made that Microsoft is suffering a bit from that.  Rather than just open the door further and let third parties provide solutions, Microsoft seems paranoid about security in the wrong places.

For instance, a lot of what makes Linux appealing for IT people is its transparency. It's "simple" if not user friendly. Stardock's a Microsoft shop and the difference between doing dynamic pages where you have X.wincustomize.com on IIS versus what you can do on Linux out of the box is just one example of where Microsoft envisions the OS being used in specific ways and tailoring the OS for that. In contrast, Linux, because of its open development structure tends to not have any particular focus which has the good side of making easier to mold to a specific use.

Anyway, here's the article at The Register below.

You can read more rantings by me over at my new home page http://draginol.joeuser.com.

A lot of people claim Fox is a tool of the Republican party. But one has to wonder where that comes from. Being a regular FNC viewer, I decided to take a look at the line up and disect its "conservativeness".

In a nutshell, FNC is simply a mirror of the other major news organizations. Instead of liberals picking and reading the news, it's conservatives. But unlike the other news organizations, FNC seems more inclined to present both points of view. Take a look and judge for yourself or as they say, we report, you decide.  For each show, I rated it on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 would be extremely liberal like say Gerhaldo's previous show on CNBC (who ironically is now on Fox, that conservative!). And 10 being extremely conservative like say Rush Limbaugh.

Time	Show	Comments	Rating
6pm	Special Report with Brit Hume	Brit Hume is fairly conservative himself. The Fox News panel is quite conservative with editors of The Weekly Standard. But on the other hand, it's no more conservative than the CNN's "Capital Gang" is liberal.	7
7pm	Fox Report with Shepard Smith	Shepard delivers news with an attitude. While he's probably somewhat conservative, this show is popular because it covers a lot of stuff in an interesting way with Smith not being afraid to make fun of obvious dumb stuff.	6
8pm	O'Reilly Factor	O'Reilly really is an independent. Of course, liberals consider him conservative because to someone far left, anyone who deviates from their mold is a conservative. O'Reilly is pro-gay rights. Pro-Gun control. And slams nonsense at every turn. Sure, he's obnoxious but he's not a mouth piece for the Republicans by a long shot.	5
9pm	Hannity & Colmes	This show is pretty evenly balanced. In fact, I would argue it is mildly liberal only because Colmes comes across as so reasonable and Hannity comes across as such a blatant tool of the right.	5
10pm	On the Record with Greta Van Susteren	Greta Van Susteren is definitely not a conservative. But she's not a raging liberal either. She, like O'Reilly is an independent. She's against tort reform and was a vocal opponent of the Clinton impeachment.	5

So what's the verdict? I'd say Fox leans a little to the right but it's not a hive of right-wing propaganda as some hysterical members on the left think. Al Franken's book, while humorous at times, really bespeaks the cluelessness of Franken than in showing his targets as "liars".

What I think you're really seeing is the left getting a taste of its own medicine.  ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, and especially CNN have always given a somewhat leftwing point of view. Not anything extreme like some of the right wingers claim but easily if not more so left of center than FNC is right wing.

Even as someone who takes a pro-choice position on abortion, I couldn't help but cringe when I'd see CNN put "Anti-Choice" as a caption for a pro-life demonstrator.  Moreover, when CNN's "Capital Gang" has one true conservative, one ghastly pseudo-conservative who always seems to be against anything Republicans are doing, with the rest reliable Democrats in their views, it's hard to see how the left can complain about Brit Hume's panel.

CNN's anti-war coverage was breathtakingly absurd. And continues to paint things in Iraq far worse than they really are. You'd think they'd show some objectiveness after the admission that they purposely distributed Saddam's propaganda to retain access in Iraq.

And while some argue whether O'Reilly is conservative or not, there's no doubt about Chris Mathews and Hard Ball being left of center. I don't have a problem with Hard Ball, I like the show, I only don't like it when people try to pretend that something's "objective" when it's clearly not.

But wait, what about talk radio? I'll trade you talk radio for the New York Times.  Of course, liberals don't see any bias in the New York Times. Liberal opinions tend to come out as being merely the "voice of reason". The Wall Street Journal is certainly not going to counter the New York Times in terms of shaping editorial opinion across the country in all media.

The point being, Fox News isn't exactly middle of the road but unlike most "objective" news organizations, its modestly conservative anchors and commentators do seem to try to give both sides a shot which is a lot more than can be said of its competitors. It should, therefore, be no surprise why FNC is so much more popular than its competitors.

People on the right tend to have an almost blind faith in market capitalism.  But people on the left tend to have a blind faith in the government's ability to distribute "Fairness". Nothing shows the perils of fairness more than when you talk about how much different professions pay.

After all, what kind of world is it where a basketball player can make $10 million a year while a teacher only makes $30,000 a year? That, on the surface, strikes many people as a reasonable question.

But the problem with that is that you end up having to make a value judgment on which jobs are more worthy than others.  Basketball players make a lot of money because professional basketball, as an industry, generates a great deal of money for the owners of basketball teams. Those owners make their money largely based on how good their team is. Therefore, they must compete against one another for the best players in the world, the price for the world's best players drives the price up.

In contrast, teachers, a worthy profession, are much more common. And because the government runs schools via tax dollars, there is no "profit" in the education "business". Therefore, it's a simple supply demand equation. The number of teachers or potential teachers is very high and therefore their salaries reflect that.  Those who wish teachers to be paid more should demand that the government get out of the education "business" and let private industry run a highly regulated education industry. There, schools would compete against one another to get the best scores in various areas. That in turn would create competition for getting the best teachers.

Now before someone emails me telling me of the dangers of making education a private enterprise, my point isn't that we would be better off as a society, only that teacher, or at least good teachers, would very likely get paid more than they do at present. Any goal is going to have negative side effects.

I personally don't have a problem with the public school system. It works adequately. But then again, I don't have a problem with teachers not being paid as much as professional basketball players. 

If you have a premium subscription to WinCustomize.com (which costs less than $1 per month!) you can now access the WinCustomize libraries directly from Stardock Central.

Here are some screenshots:

https://www.stardock.com/products/wincustomize/wc-sept03a.jpg

https://www.stardock.com/products/wincustomize/wc-sept03b.jpg

Stardock Central is part of Object Desktop or Drengin.net but you can also use it on its own for fast message forum access, access to Stardock's various freeware and shareware programs, and more. It's at http://www.sdcentral.net.

If you would like to get a WinCustomize subscription, go here: https://store.stardock.com/addproduct.asp?PRODUCT_ID=ESD-SDS-W052

The internet has definitely taken a beating this week.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week the Internet was practically shut down for some people. Particularly Tuesday and Wednesday. The first chart represents how many people are doing stuff on the net.  The second two charts represents the lag and packet loss.  As you could see, on 9/2 and 9/3 traffic was down yet lag and packet loss were up. That spells doom for dial up users and pain for everyone else as well.

I started investigating this because our direct sales (sales via the Internet) were oddly down.  And sure enough, that damn worm and email virus are the main culprits. Whoever created those things should be shot after having been given a wedgie and then marched in front of his school (it's gotta be a high school kid as worm and virus writing is the type of thing that appeals that age -- it's like shooting windows out of an abandoned building, easy to do but yet destructive on a larger scale).

That sad thing is that the twits who create this stuff don't realize (or care) about the harm it does. People who rely on the net for their livelihood get hurt and I'm not talking about Internet companies. Anyone who relies on the Internet for their business in a major way is affected. These virus writers need to get a life and a wake up call -- writing worms and computer viruses is trivial. Any half wit software developer can make them. Get over it.