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Paul Wellstone, R.I.P.

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We’re getting ready to post a tribute by Joe Conason. Here’s a response from Minnesotan Dr. Jane Dusek:

  We are not doing well in Minnesota this afternoon. After hearing of the
death of Sen. Paul Wellstone — one of the few lights of political honesty wewill ever see in this country — I got in my car and drove over to the Wellstone campaign headquarters in the Midway business district area of Saint Paul.

I could not get near the place. The crush of media and police units was too great. There was nowhere to park. People milled around the entrance of the headquarters. The doors were locked … people kept trying the doors, to no avail. Folks from businesses across the street milled around on the sidewalks, there. Everyone was in shock. Everyone was stunned.

As I pulled past the building, I saw a sight that nearly stopped me cold. A lone staff person, standing next to The Green Bus, Paul and Sheila’s well-known campaign icon. He was leaning in the railing, his head bowed in grief.

That sight broke my heart.

We don’t know what will happen, now, here in this state. We don’t know what will happen in the US Senate race, now, either.

All I know, right now, is that none of us are doing well.

And that we have all lost today.

Lost big.

Sick

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Flu had me out of commission the last couple days, but the bug seems to have receded today, so I hope to catch up with the world as the day progresses…

Salon Blog watch

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“I have been aggressively overestimating the risks from the sniper and they still come out far lower than a lot of everyday activities, including ones that we have no control over.” David Harris considers the odds.
There is serious (and not-so-serious) cooking — and writing about cooking — going on over at the Julie/Julia Project. If you haven’t yet checked it out, how can you resist Poulet Saute a la Creme… Bavarois a l’Orange…
Toby grapples thoughtfully with the reaction to his critique of Michelle Goldberg’s “Peace Kooks” article.
“I met Jesus in a diner in Lexington Park. I don’t remember what he looked like, but his name was Bob and he was from Chicago.” Read more on No Code.
“Pulp Fiction” — postmodern? or modernist? Charly Z of Driver 8 weighs in.

PIM cups runneth over

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Outlook may have killed the commercial marketplace for “Personal Information Management” (PIM) software. So the new Outlook challenger is going to be the product of an open-source project, backed by a foundation. Dan Gillmor writes about it all here.

Mitch Kapor is funding the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), and its first project will be “a new take on the Personal Information Manager. It will handle email, appointments, contacts and tasks, as well as be used to exchange information with other people, and do it all in the spirit of Lotus Agenda.” Kapor — the Lotus Software founder who later was one of the key people behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation — is blogging the project here.

I missed Agenda during its heyday, fell in love with Ecco Pro and have been mourning its death (or at least its cryogenic suspension) for years now, so I greet this news with delight. Kapor’s team includes the legendary Andy Hertzfeld, a key creator of the Macintosh and later one of the masterminds of Nautilus, Eazel’s Linux desktop. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Don Park (via Scripting News) raises a question worth pondering: “What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software. If OSAF succeeds, consumers will have access to a wide array of high quality software for free. Most likely, every PC will start to ship with them preloaded. Every time a new OSAF product ships, a market segment will die.”

To me the key thing here is that this market segment is dead already. Outlook killed it. No one will fund commercial PIM software, and brilliant, wonderful pieces of software have withered on the vine. So how else can we get good software into users’ hands?

Open spectrum, explained

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I found Kevin Werbach‘s white paper explaining the open spectrum concept to be a great quick introduction to this topic. Open spectrum advocates maintain that with today’s technology we need to stop thinking of spectrum as a scarce resource that must be strictly regulated and begin to figure out ways to open up vast swathes of the radio band to new uses. According to this view, Wi-Fi is just the beginning. The apt analogy for wireless spectrum, Werbach argues, isn’t a clogged network of highways, but rather the open seas. Better read his paper — it’s not that long — than try to grasp this in digest form.

$40 billion, but nothing for the shareholders

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Dan Gillmor posts about Microsoft’s latest financials, pointing out that the company is now sitting on a $40 billion cash hoard. What most companies do when they are making as much money as Microsoft does these days is distribute some of those profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. But like most technology companies, Microsoft has never much believed in dividends. (Technology companies typically see themselves as “growth” companies that need to reinvest all their profits in the business.)

Gillmor says this is because Gates and other key Microsoft owners don’t want to deal with the tax implications of dividends given the size of their holdings. Maybe — I can’t say I’m an expert on tax management for billionaires, never having had such worries.

But I also think the Microsoft hoarding instinct is a weird function of the company’s ingrained, perpetual paranoia. As numerous insider accounts and much testimony at the antritrust trial have shown, Microsoft’s culture imbues employees with the sense that disaster is always around the corner — if they make one misstep, the competition will eat their lunch. This paranoia is a sort of management tool, to be sure, but it’s also an attitude that emanates directly from the company’s leadership. Microsoft is hanging on to its $40 billion because, hey, who knows how much money it might need when the next big seismic shift in the technological landscape threatens to unseat its monopoly? Think of that $40 billion as one big Windows replacement fund.

Peace kooks

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Michelle Goldberg’s Salon cover story yesterday, documenting how some of the biggest protests organized against Bush’s Iraqi war plans have been organized by groups on the far-left fringe (Revolutionary Communist Party, supporters of the Shining Path, and so forth), has evoked a blistering response from Toby’s Political Diary:

  The reason Goldberg’s article was so bad was that it missed an important story for some ridiculous fluff that even sounded like old fashioned red baiting. The important story is not the reincarnation of the factions of the 1970’s left, but rather the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people to make political sense of their lives by connecting their day to day experience of work and environmental degradation with the larger issue of corporate control and America’s role in the world.

I think a lot of us at Salon would agree that that’s an “important story” — while defending the importance and relevance of Goldberg’s article. We’ll keep covering both kinds of stories. In the meantime, there are some well-considered comments on Toby’s post as well.

Redesign blues (and neon greens)

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Wired News has redesigned its site and gone back to at least some aspects of the old-school Hotwired color-scheme and look. Pulling off any kind of redesign in the post-dotcom-boom Web doldrums is a coup. Douglas Bowman of Hotwired and Terra Lycos has posted some interesting comments on the reaction to the redesign here (link courtesy Dave Winer):

  What’s interesting about the negative feedback is that, aside from the aesthetic — which is always subjective — none of the feedback is consistent. One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite.

Here at Salon we recall our last major redesign in summer of 2000, when a combination of technical snafus on launch and a couple of bad choices that we reversed within a week or so led to a massive reader outcry. Those problems obscured the deeper reality that we’d pulled off 95 percent of an extraordinarily complex project, and that we’d put in place a design that still serves Salon well two and a half years later. Someday, of course, we will revamp our site again. And when we do, I expect many of the same readers who told us back in 2000 that we’d destroyed their dearly beloved Salon to write in again and defend the current design — the very same one that they so detested in 2000 — from our awful innovations. It’s okay! It’s just the nature of user response. The most important thing is that the readers actually care; they feel a sense of ownership of a site that they visit regularly. Wired News should take considerable consolation from that.

Lessig is more

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Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig recently argued the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft before the Supreme Court. This is the “Free the mouse” case — the argument against letting Congress continue to extend the term of copyright each time (to cite one example) Mickey Mouse is on the verge of entering the public domain.

The case has been covered widely and deeply, but I found Lessig’s notes on his blog, posted after the oral arguments, fascinating and well worth reading for anyone interested, not only in the substance of the case, but in the process of Supreme Court jurisprudence.