Two comments on Rice’s testimony worth noting: Brad DeLong excerpts the passage in which our national security adviser declares that a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States” did “not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.” This is the memo that the Bush administration has steadfastly refused to declassify.

And Gary Wolf dives into the thicket of Rice’s multiple-passive-voiced, conditional-subjunctive avoidance mechanisms to try to untangle her evasions. What Rice said: “If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something… I would have been expected to be asked to do it.” What emerges from Wolf’s “Double Whammer Grammer Jammer”: “If I needed to do something, somebody would have asked.”

As Wolf says: “After this reformulation, no further clarifications are possible without altering the meaning. The passivity of the statement is no longer an artifact of awkward grammar, but an expression of Dr. Rice’s state of mind. She did not take action because she was not asked. This is exactly the passivity that Richard Clark complains of in his book.”

Last night I drove down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to hear Frederick Brooks, Jr., Bob Evans and other veterans of the IBM System 360 project celebrate its 40th anniversary.

System 360, rolled out in 1964 as IBM’s $5 billion, all-in-one, bet-the-company New Thing, became the core of modern computing. It powered the original SABRE airline reservation system and the NASA program, and drove the rise of information technology as an engine of business change. Its amibitions were vast: It aimed to meet “every need of every user” (!). Its name referred to the 360 degrees of a circle. It was intended to be literally all-encompassing. And — after some rocky initial months — it was phenomenally successful, so successful that it became the ultimate symbol of the computing establishment. That has also made it, ever since, into a target for revolutionary cudgels. (Apple’s famous 1984 ad didn’t actually depict an IBM computer; it didn’t have to — everyone knew who Big Blue Brother was.)

Today, System 360’s mainframe technology has been repeatedly superseded by succeeding generations: first came the minicomputers from Digital, HP and others, bringing the price of computing down, extending its availability and changing its paradigm from batches of cards to “interactive” sessions; then came the microcomputers from Apple, IBM, and eventually everyone else, putting a computer on every desktop and, as the PC visionaries repeatedly told us, changing the world in the process.

What was fascinating to hear on Wednesday night was the number of times the speakers used the phrase “change the world” to describe the impact of the System 360 itself. In 1964, Brooks suggested, the design concepts it embodied were revolutionary in their own right: a single product family, with upward and downward compatibility, so that software that would run on the cheapest model would run on the most expensive, and vice versa; a standard input/output interface allowing for easy swapping of devices; a disk-based operating system; and other fundamentals of computing that we take for granted today.

Brooks, who helmed the software development effort for the 360 and then left IBM for academia, was inspired by his work on the project to write “The Mythical Man-Month” — one of the first and still among the very best explorations of the nature of programming. Someone asked Brooks how he came to write his classic:

“When I was leaving IBM, Tom Watson came to me, we had a very good conversation… He said, you’ve managed the hardware part of a project and you’ve managed the software part of a project. What is the difference from a management point of view between the hardware and the software? Why does software seem to be so much harder to manage? And I said, well, I can’t answer that on the spot, but I’ll think about it. It took five years.”

Though Brooks’ years of though provided us with some valuable answers to these questions, Watson’s pained query still haunts the computer industry, 40 years later.

Over at the NRDC’s Web site my old friend Bill McKibben has a great piece about how John McCain got religion on global warming. The article also offers some sharp words and insight into how the Republican party, once home to Teddy Roosevelt and friendly to aspects of environmentalism, has become today’s “no polluter left behind” GOP. [Link courtesy Worldchanging]

I can’t make it to the second Bloggercon on April 17 at Harvard, but it looks likely to be a fascinating program with great people. I look forward to following the proceedings from a distance.

Salon bloggers and readers of Salon blogs should be seeing much improvement in the performance of our servers, particularly the rcs.salon.com server (which does comments and updates listings) that used to get bogged down a lot. Thanks to our partners at Userland for upgrading this service last week. I’m seeing much better results both for this blog and for others that I read. Keep us posted if your mileage varies.