Bayosphere

Back at PC Forum, where we got to dinner early last night because Larry Ellison was a no-show. I ran a straw poll, asking people if his reported excuse — “The plane wouldn’t start” — seemed credible. Not credible was the nearly universal response.

Seems to me that Ellison may have combined two cliches I didn’t imagine possible to combine: “The dog ate my homework” and “Let them eat cake” — any others you can think of?

To see other people’s postings about PC Forum, visit SocialText’s Wiki and Nikolaj’s Trackback page.

My own running notes (which will be somewhat sporadic due to the high quality of other people’s postings) below.

Running notes on Day Two of PC Forum.

I think I’m going to blog less and listen more today.

First panel talks about data mining, all offering the usual sop to privacy. Now Cory is nailing them, pointing out the inevitable misuse of this stuff.

A panel on identity management produced not much I hadn’t heard before.The adding of RFID (radio) tags to all kinds of products is unnerving, if not downright creepy. Benefits are giving companies an easy way to track what they buy and sell. Downsides are the obvious invasions of privacy.

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I’m heading to Phoenix today for the annual PC (Platforms for Communication) Forum, which remains one of the highlights of my year. Occasionally someone says something fascinating on stage, but the chief value is the quality of the audience — frequently a stellar crowd of technologists and policy makers.

This is Esther Dyson’s show. Her company publishes the Release 1.0 newsletter, one of the more influential journals of its type.

By the way, I’ll be writing an upcoming issue, in which I look at the technological tools that are shaping tomorrow’s journalism, and apply them to the business world. An example would be corporate weblogs. If you know of any companies in this space (defined as widely as you’d like) that I should be looking at, please let me know. Thanks.

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Ask a question, and you folks are fast to answer. Case in point: I asked how to move my OS X network locations to a new computer, and got several great answers. Here’s how to do it.

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Washington Post: House Approves Bush’s $726 Billion Tax Cut. Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the Budget Committee’s ranking Democrat, said President Bush’s tax cut plan was imperiling programs such as Medicare. “This is self-inflicted pain,” he said of the potential impact of the cuts.

At least there’s likely to be some common sense in the Senate, where several Republicans are moderate enough to realize that this irresponsible fiscal policy endangers the health of our nation rather than helps it.

Notice that the Republicans and the Bush people utterly refuse even to guess at the cost of the war even as they push these tax cuts for the rich. They won’t do any short-term stimulus, which is what we really need, meanwhile.

I predict Bush will get most of what he wants. The Democrats are too cowed, and since the war is likely to give the administration a huge near-term boost, get ready for even more serious economic trouble before long.

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Question for OS X mavens: How do I move my network locations from one Mac to another. Both are running OS X 10.2.x, though one is at .4 and the other is at .3 at the moment. I’m looking in the var folder and don’t feel comfortable enough to just do it. Please let me know if there’s a way to handle this smoothly without having to re-enter everything, and I’ll post the answer here. Thanks.

UPDATE:

OK, I got some help from several kind folks on this. Here’s how one person advised me:

1. Ensure you have admin rights on both the Old machine and the New machine.
2. Boot the Old machine normally, and then the New machine in Firewire Target Disk mode by holding down the “T” key while you boot.
3. Ensure both show up as volumes in the Finder.
4. On the Old machine, open Terminal.app, ensure you are in your Home directory by typing “pwd” without the quotes (Print Working Directory).
5. Type these commands:

cd /var/db/SystemConfiguration (This changes you to the directory where this preference file is kept)

sudo cp preferences.xml /Volumes/ibm/var/db/SystemConfiguration (in this case, ibm is the name of my New machine, you would substitute your disk name)

6. You’ll be prompted for your admin password for the “sudo” command — implying SuperUser Do, which is copying the preferences.xml file from your Old machine to the New machine in the identical location on each disk.
7. Unmount your New machine by dragging the disk icon to the trash.
8. Boot the New machine normally, your network and dial-up settings should be good.

I wish this were easier, but you can’t copy this file via the Finder GUI, the native GUI doesn’t permit sudo actions, thus the need for the Terminal.

Actually, I did this a slightly different way, but the key was replacing the “preferences.xml” file on the new machine with the same file from the old one. So far, so good —

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In a city where joyful excess is standard, the mood today is somber. Everyone expects America will be at war in a day or two, and that tends to put parochial concerns in their place.

I’m at the CTIA Wireless 2003 show in New Orleans, where the keynote session promised to be interesting, as it featured (among others) FCC Chairman Michael Powell. It wasn’t interesting. Powell had nothing new to say.

The show floor, on the other hand, is a preview of how wireless communications will look in a couple of years. It’s amusing to see all the breathless talk of mobile messaging and camera-equipped phones, which are yesterday’s news in places like Japan and Finland. The U.S. is far, far behind the rest of the world. Better late than never, of course.

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The nearly total question mark surrounding Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is starting to get more than a little alarming. The world’s top medical people have a scary mystery on their hands. May they solve it, fast.

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports here in quite a bit of detail, and offers some reasons to hope the outbreak will fade of its own accord.

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Bruce Chizen, the chief executive of Adobe, and several of his top folks stopped by the Mercury News last week for a lunch with the publisher and some editors and reporters. He gave a good account of Adobe’s marketplace and financial situations, including the interesting news, reported here by Jon Fortt, that the company is turning Acrobat into several different products.

Chizen made the typical Silicon Valley CEO statement that treating stock options as expenses is a terrible idea. Why? Because it will force companies to create a new way of describing earnings — the number mandated by the financial standards bodies, and another number that reflects something more realistic.

Odd. Tech companies never seemed to mind doing precisely the same thing when they were misleading investors in other ways that pumped up “earnings” in outrageous ways.

Of course, then he said it was no big deal in any event. Why? Because investors would figure out what was actually going on.

What will happen to employee options, he was asked? Well, there will be fewer, and the bulk will go to the folks at the top of the corporate ladder. Why? Because they’re the ones who really make a difference in the direction of a company.

More weird logic. The problem with options has never been the grants to rank-and-file employees; in fact, companies that give the bulk of options to those folks tend to do better, and shareholders tend to do better, too. Many of the worse outrages have been, in general, from companies that gave huge options grants to those very people who can steer the company: the executives who then made short-term (and sometimes outright corrupt) moves designed to pump up the stock price.

This perverse thinking is why investors have absolutely no faith in corporate leaders.

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Steve Kirsch: The five lessons of 911. The terrorists have won. They have successfully convinced America to attack itself.

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I didn’t blog the event yesterday, but Derek Slater did in “A Copyfighter’s Musings: Harvard JOLT Copyright and Fair Use Symposium”.

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