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February 2008 Archives
The MacBook Air chronicles #4: success with VMWare
As reported a few days ago, my new MacBook Air -- while undeniably svelte and beautiful, and while having surprisingly good battery life, and while generally performing in much snappier fashion than my Vista laptop -- was giving me trouble in one big way. I had been trying to install either VMWare Fusion or Parallels, the two systems that let you run Windows programs (on an Intel-powered Mac) side by side with Mac OS X. Or that's what the two programs are supposed to do. I couldn't get either of them actually to start up a session of Windows XP. (Was I going to load Vista? Let's be serious.)
Problem now solved! And it proved not to have been VMWare's fault. I don't know about Parallels -- even though I bought that program for full $80 retail at the Apple store in New York last month (it being the only one available), I never heard back on my requests to its tech support line. But VMWare, which I downloaded as a free 30-day trial product, did reply and gave me the right answer. (Details below.*) I will with relatively good cheer pony up my $80 to register the product -- or $50, after a $30 rebate for previous purchasers of the rival Parallels.
MacBook Air running WinXP, under VMWare, with "dock" of Mac program icons at the bottom:
Continue reading "The MacBook Air chronicles #4: success with VMWare" »
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Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Du (Beijing air watch dept)
(Updated, below.)
Another very good Beijing-byline story by Mei Fong in the Wall Street Journal (link here, if it has not gone behind the firewall), about the ramped-up efforts to clean up the local skies before the Olympic games.
Two interesting details:
- Making vivid what it might mean to "do whatever it takes" to close down factories, traffic, etc long enough before the August 8 opening ceremonies to make the air acceptable:
One plant affected by the Olympic cleanup is a Beijing Eastern factory in southeast Beijing, which will be closed by the end of June, according to the Xinhua news agency. Workers at the plant confirmed that the factory -- which employs about 1,000 people -- will be suspending operations in May and reopening in a new facility in southwest Beijing at year's end. Many workers don't know what they will do in the interim, or if they will continue to receive their wages. "No one knows what will happen tomorrow," one worker said.
- The print version of the story, in the Asian Wall Street Journal, intriguingly has a final paragraph that is missing from the online version. It ends with this quote from Mr. Du Shaozhong, deputy head of the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau, who pleads with foreign journalists to give their readers a more positive image of Beijing as an Olympic venue:
"We need help from the media," said Mr. Du. "Tell them what you see with your own eyes."
Hoooh boy. What I saw with my own eyes today was extremely nice! After ferocious winds yesterday, this afternoon's skies were beautiful in Beijing, and the air was even kind of non-frigid! Jianwai, near Yonganli metro station, looking east, 3pm today:
But if outsiders are going to convey what they see with their own eyes -- well, let's hope it's all like today.
Update: What I am seeing with my own eyes, the next day:
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A good answer at a press conference by GW Bush!
President Bush's last answer at yesterday's press conference has got him into trouble. That's the one where he registered amazement at the prospect of $4/gallon gasoline. But on the question just before that, about the Beijing Olympics, I thought he actually gave the right, somewhat complex answer concisely and well.
Here was the question:
Q In China a former factory worker who says that human rights are more important than the Olympics is being tried for subversion. What message does it send that you're going to the Olympics, and do you think athletes there should be allowed to publicly express their dissent?
In his answer Bush confidently made the point that the Olympics had its own momentum and importance, but that respecting the event need not mean (as the Chinese government would wish) that the outside world must bite its collective tongue about political issues. And he also had a knowing aside about the particular leverage he had in raising such issues:
THE PRESIDENT: Olivier, I have made it very clear, I'm going to the Olympics because it's a sporting event, and I'm looking forward to seeing the athletic competition. But that will not preclude me from meeting with the Chinese President, expressing my deep concerns about a variety of issues -- just like I do every time I meet with the President.
And maybe I'm in a little different position. Others don't have a chance to visit with [President] Hu Jintao, but I do. And every time I meet with him I talk about religious freedom and the importance of China's society recognizing that if you're allowed to worship freely, it will benefit the society as a whole; that the Chinese government should not fear the idea of people praying to a god as they see fit. A whole society, a healthy society, a confident society is one that recognizes the value of religious freedom.
I talk about Darfur and Iran and Burma. And so I am not the least bit shy of bringing up the concerns expressed by this factory worker, and I believe that I'll have an opportunity to do so with the President and, at the same time, enjoy a great sporting event. I'm a sports fan. I'm looking forward to the competition. And each Olympic society will make its own decision as to how to deal with the athletes.
Recognizing the independent athletic (and spectacle) existence of the Olympics, and also their undeniable importance to China, but still speaking freely, plainly, and on live TV about the values the U.S. should stand for and the practices of China's it condemns -- to me, that's something like a policy. Credit where credit is due.
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The Atlantic: today's news, a year and a half ago!
My very good friend David Ignatius has a very good column in today's WaPo, about a more realistic approach to the Global War on Terror. It is based on a new book by Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer (whom I also know and like), which argues that is long past time for the U.S. to take a less panicky, emotional, and fraidy-cat approach to the threat of terrorism -- OK, fraidy-cat is my term, not his -- and think more calmly about how to defend ourselves. As Ignatius puts it:
The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.
If by chance you would be interested in hearing Sageman (and many others) quoted at length to this same effect a year and a half ago, in, ummm, a lengthy cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, with our free archives now all you have to do is click!
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Oscar category: Best documentary
I don't think the Oscar show was run live here in Beijing, and anyway I've been out interviewing people all day. (About Chinese coal mines and so on. Bracing!)
I had a personal though divided rooting interest in one category, Best documentary. There, one film that I hear is outstanding -- Taxi to the Dark Side, by Alex Gibney, son of the esteemed late writer Frank Gibney and brother of my friend and Atlantic colleague James Gibney (which I haven't seen because it has not yet shown up in the local pirate video stores) -- was up against another film that I know is outstanding. This is No End in Sight, by my friend Charles Ferguson. I had talked with Ferguson while he was developing this film and had a little cameo interview appearance in the final version.
Maybe they could share the prize?
Alex Gibney's film won, and sincere congratulations both to him and to Charles Ferguson for illuminating the consequences of America's perverse approach to "security" these last six years.
The odd part is, the clip that was shown at the Oscars to introduce No End was apparently of me talking, from my cameo interview. Via instant-feedback on Blackberry, I got a quick pulse on which of my friends and family were watching the Oscars (as I would have been, if in range) - and which were not. And, yes, in the "not" category I'm talking about you, Dad! Time to get back in touch with mass culture!
My ambition for next year: the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
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Ralph Nader: tragedy to farce
I have liked and admired Ralph Nader so much. I first worked for him when I was in my teens (and he was in his 30s). Under his auspices, encouragement, and relentless pressure, I'd written two books for his organization by the time I was 23 -- if only I'd been able to keep up that pace! Or that sales success, since one of them -- Who Runs Congress, turned out in eight weeks, with Mark Green and David Zwick --- eventually sold in the millions.
Nader was funny, warm, brilliant-seeming, and, yes, caring. He visited my wife in the hospital after our first child was born. For years after that, he never failed to ask about both of our kids (or my wife) whenever I talked with him. I say all this as an indication of why Ralph Nader has so many people who actually are loyal to him -- and who wish they didn't have to face the reality about the choices he has made over the last eight years.
That he stayed in the race in 2000 was tragedy. (See: Invasion of Iraq, 2003, and subsequent occupation.) That he came back in 2004 was unfortunate; his entry in 2008 is farce. Farce because it suggests detachment from political reality (the differences between the Republican and Democratic nominees are so faint that we can say, What the hell!) and, worse, narcissism. The fact that it won't make any difference in the outcome actually is sad.
I will always like and respect Ralph Nader and will always admire the wonderful things he has done. But I wish to God that he had not made this decision, or will reverse it soon. (And, I am sorry that saying this will make me an enemy in his eyes.) He is a better man than his recent decisions indicate.
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MacBook Air #3: Some performance comparisons
Eventually we'll get to whatever philosophical differences separate computing on the fancy new MacBook Air ultra-light machine from computing on a classy high-end ThinkPad T60 running Vista with its latest updates. (Hint: differences less profound and sweeping than many people assume.)
Also, some of the practicalities involved in shifting the center-of-gravity of your work from one platform to another. (Hint #1: If you have a lot, lot, lot of info stored in Microsoft Outlook .PST files, as I do, a full shift is not as easy as you've been told. Hint #2: At least for me, neither VMWare Fusion nor Parallels, the two programs that let Intel-powered Macs run Windows programs, has been all that simple to configure and get running -- though I remain hopeful that I'll get one of them to work!)
Let's talk today just about numbers: ones that have gotten my attention. They involve the lost-time overhead a computer imposes on you while you wait for it to work. What I've found:
Putting the computer to 'sleep' (so you can save battery power when you step away for a while). Time from issuing command till end of disk activity and screen display, three trials:
Thinkpad T60 / Vista: 12 seconds, 13 seconds, 15 seconds, average about 13 seconds. I am excluding as an anomaly the first time I ran this test, which took 80 seconds.
MacBook Air / Leopard: 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, average about 3 seconds.
Continue reading "MacBook Air #3: Some performance comparisons" »
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Too noisy to think, too "misty" to see
It is the fifteenth and, I devoutly pray, the last day and night of nonstop firecracker explosions in Beijing, to welcome in the Year of the Rat. This promises to be the most intense evening since Fifth Night. If my calculations were correct and that night I heard several hundred thousand detonations ... well, there are going to be more tonight.
By the way, "firecrackers" does not quite convey what's going on here. "Little sticks of ammo" is more like it.
Anybody who thinks that the Chinese populace does nothing but toil in factories to produce low-cost goods for exports -- well, that idea needs some refining. Unless maybe we're talking about mini-ammo factories, for domestic use. And if anybody is ready to give another little lecture about how economic modernization makes cultures the same all over the world -- hey, shut up. I couldn't hear you over the din anyway.
新年快乐, and now let's get back to work. By the way, today's cheery skies were officially classified as "lightly polluted" (pollution level 152) by the official air-quality bureau.
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OK, I really will stop after this
Beijing skyline, February 21, 2008, 10am. 169 days to go until the Olympics
As mentioned earlier here and here , in a reverse-backflip way it's been heartening to see the air quality deteriorate so catastrophically as China goes back to work after a two-week holiday. After all, that suggests that the closed factories and limited traffic during the holiday had some effect. By that logic, I should be growing more heartened by the day.
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MacBook Air #2: batteries etc
I’ve only just now begun installing “real” software on my newly acquired MacBook Air.* So until now, I’ve been using the Air exclusively for online activity – and haven’t been giving it the full long-airplane-flight test to see how much time it takes to run the battery down while doing real work.
Instead, I’ve done indirect tests, like setting the Air up to play nonstop streaming audio from internet radio broadcasts while running on battery power. That way, I know that it’s continually drawing power to work the WiFi and run the speaker (yes, the speaker -- just one, and not that good). The screen, though, self-dims in a way it wouldn’t if I were sitting there typing.
Still: this has been enough to give an impression. Battery life on this machine seems “pretty good,” and the time it takes to recharge the battery is not bad at all.
Continue reading "MacBook Air #2: batteries etc" »
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'Great Firewall' article now online
Two week ago I mentioned that the March issue of the Atlantic -- by that point snugly in subscribers' hands! -- would include my article on how the Great Firewall of China actually works. That article is now online, here. So is the entire issue, which is full of great stuff.
Also, my interview about the article and the general China-tech scene is online here. It was conducted by the Atlantic's estimable Abby Cutler -- as the last thing she did on our staff before leaving to begin medical training. Applying the healing touch in different venues, is the way we like to think about it at the magazine.
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4GW Meets Campaign '08
I have known and liked Chuck Spinney for a very long time, since I wrote about him and his original "defense reform" colleagues, notably John Boyd and Pierre Sprey, in the Atlantic and in National Defense in the early 1980s. Boyd of course originated the concept of the "OODA Loop." This was the idea, derived from Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict" briefing, that the victor in any conflict would not necessarily be the stronger or better-prepared party. Rather it would be the one who recognized changing realities, and chose and implemented the right new course of action, faster than the opponent. Boyd came up with the theory by analyzing aerial combat among fighter planes, but in his view it could be applied to every sort of human contest, from sports to business to armed conflict.
(OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. To react to changing reality faster than the opponent can, or to interfere with the opponent's ability to perceive realistically what is happening to him, is to "get inside his OODA loop." Everything anyone would ever want to know about Boyd, Spinney, Sprey; about their contemporary colleagues like Chet Richards, Donald Vandergriff, WIlliam Lind, GI Wilson, etc; and about OODA loops and the related concept of 4GW, or Fourth Generation Warfare, can be found at two excellent, related "Defense and the National Interest" sites, here and here.)
And the theory also applies to politics, as Spinney has argued in a recent item about the contest for the Democratic nomination. His analysis, "Is Obama inside Hillary's OODA loop?" comes after the jump. The incidents he mentions are all familiar; what's at least a little new is his combination of them in Boyd-style perspective -- in particular Bill Clinton losing his sense for how the battle is shifting. I am posting this before the Wisconsin results are known, and before the (in my view bogus) "plagiarism" flap has died down, so that Spinney's observation can be tested against those results.
In any case, Spinney's analysis below:
Continue reading "4GW Meets Campaign '08" »
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On plagiarism
The "plagiarism" flap over Barack Obama is bogus and overstated. It makes me think worse about whoever is pushing this complaint, rather than about Obama himself.
Continue reading "On plagiarism" »
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Feeling more encouraged still
If yesterday's Beijing skies were weirdly encouraging, I have to feel even better today! Guomao, looking southward, the city's second day back at work after Spring Festival.
Last on this topic for a while.
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Update: Here is how the sky looked about a week ago, when the city was shut down and a ferocious wind had howled in from someplace cold. This is of course the new CCTV tower, whose two legs have recently been joined. It's not far from the scene above.
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Pot:kettle department (NYT op-ed division)
The Times's newest columnist, being brutally frank about the unwillingness to draw careful distinctions, and the lack of exposure to bracing market forces, among the leftist commentariat:
And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.
We all delude ourselves about ourselves. But I wonder if Bill Kristol can imagine how this line -- criticizing scholars for a descent into hackdom, and for being comfortably ensconced in sinecures -- will strike many of his readers.
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Weirdly, I find this encouraging
After ten days -- or ten months, I've lost track now -- of nonstop explosion-enhanced welcome of the new Year Of The Rat and Of The Olympics, Beijing appears to have returned to work today. That's what I judge from the jammed roads this morning, and the jammed sidewalks this past weekend, full of people carrying suitcases as they come back to town.
And it's what I judge from the air. It's been quite nice these last ten days. But this morning, at 10am, we have:
In the short run, plenty discouraging! So what's the good news here? If closing down China's factories and cars for even two weeks made a noticeable difference, maybe there is some hope that the widely-expected months-long closedown before the Olympics will do the trick. Especially if the famous Chinese weather-modification teams can arrange for some of the gelid Siberian blasts that have roared through the city in the past, blue-sky week to reappear in August. Just a thought...
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Life in the gray zone
As I mentioned a few months ago ("Tales from the everything's-slightly-substandard economy"), there is a strange trade-off in a lot of daily life in China. Nearly everything's cheap. But a whole lot of everything is a little bit off, marred in some subtle but grating way, not quite legit, and, well, cheap.
Today's illustration: On my trip to the U.S. last month, I saw that a 14-screen theater near the office in DC was playing a whole bunch of movies I had heard about and wanted to see. Juno. There Will Be Blood. The Great Debaters. No Country for Old Men. Charlie Wilson's War. American Gangster. Sweeney Todd. Eastern Promises. A revival of I'm Not There, about Bob Dylan. And some others I'm surely forgetting now -- whatever was popular a month ago. (Even Golden Compass???)
I thought: hey, I'm here on my own, I'll see a bunch of these. Life got busy, and I saw only one. But this weekend, on the street in Beijing, my wife and I found a good video store -- they're slightly more discreet than in Shanghai -- and loaded up on every movie I've just named, plus a bunch more, at a little under $1.40 each. Extortionate, compared with Shanghai, but the best we could do.
The good news is, we get to see these movies, and they don't cost much. The bad news is, there's something a little bit wrong with all of them. For instance: tonight's showing was The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker, which we actually liked. Here is a typical scene, featuring Denzel Whitaker (no relation to the other Whitaker, or to Washington) as a young Wiley College debater, going up against some snooty Harvard boys:
Sigh. I assume it was a "for your consideration" Oscar-promotion version of the movie. At least it hadn't been dubbed into Russian, like a lot of the cheapo movies we see here. For another time: consideration of what this gray-zone existence might mean for the Chinese economy in the long run.
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Tom Tancredo's nightmare
Outside the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish language and cultural organization (like the Alliance Francaise or the Goethe-Institut), in Beijing . Apparently it's not just Little Havana any more!
Update: Those spots next to the bicycle, in the inset in the bottom-left corner of the map? Apparently they're the Philippines! As reader Andrew Miller points out, counting them in the world of Espanol, even cross-hatched, is a much bigger stretch than counting the United States.
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To spell out the joke for non-Americans or those not sodden in U.S. politics: Tancredo, now disappeared from the Republican presidential race, was the main alarm-raiser about the immigrant menace to America -- especially immigrants from Mexico and points south. How would he feel about a sign saying: "Do you know that Spanish is spoken in more than twenty countries?" -- with a map showing the United States already halfway there??
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MacBook Air: first of a series
I didn't expect to return from my latest trip to the U.S. with a brand-new MacBook Air in my hand, but for various surprising reasons that's what I brought back.*
I have not given it a full workout yet, and the reason is related to one of the quirks of this machine: it has no CD/DVD reader and is designed to install software wirelessly, either from the Internet or via a connection to another Mac or PC. I have not yet gone through the process of installing the programs I'd like to use on it, so all I've done with it is work online. Collect email, check out the news, and, yes, compose and post this message.
More reactions to come later, about the aspects of this machine that have raised most questions. How good is the battery, really -- considering that unlike most laptops, but like iPods etc, you can't change it yourself or bring a second to swap in during a plane flight? Is its 80GB hard disk big enough for modern computing life? How well does its wifi-only approach actually work, given the absence of a CD drive and an Ethernet port? Will the remote installation process let me put Parallels or VMWare on the system, so I can run the Windows programs I really care about? All this, as I say, for another day.
For today, an aesthetic and emotional reaction: This is an astonishingly successful work of industrial design. Even industrial art. Its case is very small and thin, and seems even smaller and thinner. It is very light, and seems lighter than it is. (Maybe adrenaline rush to the arm muscles?) By the specs, the processor is not tremendously fast, but the computer feels agile and responsive -- all the more so in contrast to my Vista ThinkPad. The screen is bright and big (maybe related to battery life?), and the keyboard is full-sized and convenient. It is as beautiful a piece of machinery as I have seen in a long time.
Later: how it works when I'm trying to do something more than reach web sites. Maybe the shock of aesthetic appreciation will have worn off -- somewhat -- by then.
__
* To spell it out: these reasons do not include any baksheesh, "demo copies," or other favortistic efforts by Apple or other companies.
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I know I'm tempting fate by even mentioning this, but...
The latest set of patches and updates for Windows Vista, mentioned recently, really do appear to make the system noticeably faster and more responsive.
In addition to eliminating (so far) the chronic previous crashes when my laptop went into or out of hibernation, they seem to have reduced another big annoyance: the interminable periods when the computer appeared simply to be paralyzed -- "it's thinking," is the more charitable way my wife once put it -- and would not respond to keystrokes or commands. In real time these could last 30 or 40 seconds, which seemed like centuries. Such brain-dead spells -- for a fast computer with a lot of RAM -- have been cut way down.
Similarly: the new version of Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery utility (available through the ThinkVantage Update software that comes on new ThinkPads -- more info here) is a big improvement. This software makes frequent backups of everything on your computer, which are obviously reassuring to have. But its original version was a significant culprit in my first big problem with Vista on a ThinkPad -- that it gobbled up every bit of available disk space. The latest release works faster, takes less disk space, and is easier to use.
The Vista patches will be part of the "Service Pack 1" that is circulating informally and is supposed to be officially released soon. New ThinkPads presumably come with the latest Lenovo utilities installed. If my first exposure to Vista and the Lenovo utilities had been to this new, improved incarnation -- and I hadn't had the last year of hatred-inducing frustration behind me -- my impression would have been much more positive, and I would now own fewer Macs. I suppose I've merely re-proved the principle that wiser souls discovered long ago. Never buy or use a new release of Windows, or perhaps of any major system software, until it's been on the market at least a year and has gone through its first "Service Pack." Live and learn.
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We criticize because we love
First boiled frogs, now basic math. I hate to keep wondering whether the NYT Op-Ed page employs fact checkers, but it's impossible not to wonder after passages like this. From this morning's Gail Collins column:
Most people have never been to a caucus, even if their state happens to have them. In Washington, the caucuses last Saturday drew a little more than 1 percent of the registered voters.
Those wacky caucuses! But wait a minute....
As a former Seattle resident I recall that Washington state has six or seven million people. After investing 0.75 seconds in internet research time I see that a little over half of them, let's say 3.75 million, are registered to vote.
One percent of 3.75 million is 37,500 people. Now, let's think back to reports of those caucuses. All the stories talked about "record breaking turnout" and "unexpected crowds." Some 20,000 people had crammed in to a pre-caucus Obama rally in Seattle -- with thousands more outside, and presumably thousands of others in the rest of the state also supporting Obama, or Clinton, or McCain, or Huckabee. And among all of them, only 37,500 show up?
And... It turns out that four years ago, the Democrats alone had 100,000 people for their much less dramatic and consequential caucuses. By all reports, highly publicized on caucus day, at least twice as many turned out for the Democrats this year. But somehow, according to the Times, only one-sixth that many people showed up for both parties???
And... I hear from friends and local news reports that the Democratic caucuses in just one Seattle-area legislative district attracted 18,000 people. (This detail from a story with the typical headline, "Turnout Shatters Record.") So, that district accounted for half the total for both parties across the entire state????
Obviously something went wrong here. Let's say the Democrats had maybe 200,000 at their caucuses, and the Republicans mabe half that many. That would be 300,000 total. Not enough to legitimize what is in fact a wacky caucus system. Not enough to prove that people of every class and background were involved. But different by nearly an order of magnitude from what our paper of record reports, in a factoid that will no doubt be picked up and considered "true".
What's the explanation? (And, by the way, I wish that some other NYT columnist had committed this howler, since I am a fan of Gail Collins' columns.) Maybe the "too good to check" instinct when coming across a tantalizing statistic? I don't know. But if we're looking for job-creation opportunities in America, how about for common-sense checkers?
___
Update: Mystery may be solved! The number of precinct delegates chosen at the caucuses, who in turn vote for the state delegates to the national party convention, was in fact close to the magic 1% figure. An understandable mixup, perhaps -- unless you apply the "can this figure possibly be true??" common sense test.
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Nerds only: a Vista update
The household census of computers here at Beijing HQ now includes:
- 2 WinXP laptops (one ThinkPad T40, one Compaq. This last is my wife's; Stoic that she is, she makes do with one.)
- 3 Macs (Mini, iBook, and the unbelievably glamorous MacBook Air, subject for another time)
- 1 Vista laptop (ThinkPad T60; used to be two Vistas, until I "downgraded" the T40 back to XP)
Each has its place in the great and intricate division of local labor. The Vista machine is partly a test bed to see how things are developing in Vista land. I have been making a list of tweaks and improvements to mention, but here is one that immediately caught my eye:
The latest WindowsUpdate for Vista (via WindowsUpdate on the Start menu -- important patches usually come out on the second Tuesday of each month), includes #943899, "an update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista." As if there might be any room for improvement in those realms.... The good news is that this patch is aimed at one of the most egregious (for me) Vista problems: its tendency to crash, hang, or churn for minutes on end when going in or out of hibernation. In specific the welcome news is:
This update improves performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista in various scenarios. This update resolves the following issues on a Windows Vista-based computer:
• You receive a "Stop 0x000000A0" error when you try to switch the computer to the hibernate state.
• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009f" error when you switch the computer to the hibernate state or to the standby state. Or, you receive this Stop error when you resume the computer from the hibernate state or from the standby state. This problem occurs on a computer that has a wireless network connection.
• The disk does not spin down after a specified time of inactivity.
Well, those are the exact problems I often have. If this truly "resolves" the issue, then Huzzah. We will see. If you have Vista on a laptop, check it out.
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I was feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton...
... just now, when I saw the expression on her face as she waited to go onstage in El Paso. This process is so grueling. And the rejection, when it comes is so personal, in a way "normal" people never experience. Even a performer as professional as she couldn't conceal the bone-tired, beaten-over look on her face.
But now, fifteen-plus minutes into a dreary recitation of policy-points that will do nothing to satisfy those who want her to say what her campaign is for, I am feeling less sorry. She has not had the grace to mention Barack Obama's name, nor his existence or success. Not as "Senator Obama," not even as "my worthy opponent in the contest for our great party's nomination -- for this battle we all believe in to change the course of the nation's future" and so on. This on a night when he has just trounced her fair and square in Virginia and, presumably, will in a few minutes be shown to have done the same in Maryland and D.C. (Update: Maryland just called, the second the polls closed.)
CNN has just switched off her speech (and I'm not going to see it on CCTV). This is not classy and does not help. Not that the campaign is short of critics at the moment (see my Atlantic colleague Josh Green's excellent inside account), but whoever advised her to take this petty approach made a mistake. Or maybe, reacting as a normal person, she just couldn't bear to talk about it.
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When I voted last week in DC
(Updated, below.) A week ago I voted absentee in Washington, just before getting on the plane for Beijing.
I had an "I voted!" sticker on my sweater when I stepped into a cab downtown. The driver did a double-take when he saw it, so I explained and asked him if he was planning to vote on the normal election day.
He appeared to be in his 70s, a black man who said he'd been born in Washington and never lived anywhere else. He said he probably would vote, and was leaning Democratic. "But I'm kind of undecided between Mrs. Hillary and this new guy -- what do they call him, 'Bama?" As in someone from Selma or Mobile.
On balance, he said, he would probably go Clinton. "You can say what you want, but you know that he is going to be back here running things," referring to Mrs. Clinton's husband. "Those times were good!"
Ah, the pageant of democracy. Get out and vote!
(I write this from a country where people aren't given the opportunity. Also: having gone this many decades in journalism without using a "the taxi driver told me" chestnut -- at least that I can remember -- I figure I can get by with one, on an election-day theme.)
Update: Reader Edward Goldstick points out that if I really wanted to get a double-take from the next taxi driver or passers-by in general, I should have kept the "I voted" sticker on and worn it around Beijing.
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Further on WA, NE, and ME caucuses
In response to this account of a Seattle-area caucus in which the vaunted Obama "organization" turned out to be hordes of enthusiasts showing up on their own, a large amount of email containing other first-hand reports from caucuses in Nebraska, Maine, and Washington state -- all won by Obama of course. Accounts fall 75:25 into these categories:
75%: It was exactly the same in the caucus I saw in Maine/Nebraska/Washington! (Spontaneous huge crowds for Obama; small and disspirited groups of Hillary Clinton supporters; outpouring rather than "organization.")
25%: It wasn't that way at all in the caucus I saw! (Light turnout, narrow margin for Obama, and anyway caucuses are idiotic ways to make these decisions.) Accounts from Washington state emphasize the oddity of the Democrats having both a caucus day and a "normal" primary election, but counting only the caucuses for choosing delegates.
I agree that caucuses are basically an idiotic practice, given that the nominee finally has to run in a "normal" election ("normal," except for the out-of-date wackiness of the Electoral College). In any case, I pass this along just for the record.
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Too noisy to think
Noise you are not yourself hearing, like pain you are not feeling or cold you are not shivering through, is hard to take seriously. So unless you yourself are sitting right now in Beijing, Shanghai, or some similar venue, I expect your eye to skid past the assertion that I will have heard hundreds of thousands of loud explosions before this night is through. (Math below.)
But my God! This Fifth Night of China's "Spring Festival," when the God of Wealth is welcomed in -- with explosions!! -- for the year ahead, is one of those moments when the noise is so relentless and inescapable that you can barely think of anything else. The last such time that comes to mind for me: being on the deck of an aircraft carrier, on a reporting trip years ago, with the jets screamingly preparing for takeoff and everyone with a set of protective headsets except for the visitor, me. Right now, in my Beijing apartment, my noise-canceling headset, over a normal set of foam ear plugs, has never seemed so useful.
A year ago, in Shanghai, my wife and I were far enough away from the center of Fifth Night detonations to be able to think: how folkloric! This year, with strings of firecrackers being set off, continuously, just across the street from our building, and fireworks being sent up from the building's driveway and exploding at eye level outside our (21st floor) window, we're reduced to telling ourselves: at some point, this night will end. In the meantime, where are more of those earplugs?
(Math: a string of 1000 firecrackers takes about 20 seconds to detonate -- and we've seen such strings fired off nonstop today. That's 50 per second. Let's generously assume that through the course of an hour the average rate is much lower, say 10 per second. That would be 600 per minute, 36,000 per hour, more than 100,000 every three hours. Or even if it's half that much -- it's a lot. And the night is young.)
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Dispatch from the WA state caucuses: it wasn't about the ground game
A reader who lives in Washington state and strongly supports Obama sends this report about the caucus activity two days ago, which of course led to a landslide Obama win.
As Clinton loses caucus states, she keeps saying they favor Obama, and so does the press. The press in particular says that the caucuses reward greater organization. Whether or not that is so, and whether or not Obama is better organized than Clinton, the fact is that NEITHER candidate was that well organized for the WA caucuses (see my note below), and I suspect Obama was not for Maine.
The dispatch goes on to say that the point is not at all to belittle Obama's organizers. Rather, it's this: that at least in Washington, the contest appeared to have moved beyond the strict get-out-the-vote, nuts-and-bolts marshaling of resources, attrition-style warfare and onto some different level. (I have removed a few personally identifying details from the note):
Continue reading "Dispatch from the WA state caucuses: it wasn't about the ground game" »
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Brueghel comes to Beijing
(Previously in the Brueghel comes to China series, here.)
Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, Houhai area:
A few hundred years earlier, in Europe:
A friend is doing a story about the odd variety of vehicles Beijingers have adapted to the ice, so nothing more about that now. I will say that on the latest supply run from the U.S. I had brought along an old, crummy pair of ice skates, with frayed and re-knotted laces and blades as sharp as a rolling pin. Imagine my relief in spotting a sign that said 北京冰刀王 -- Beijing Ice Skate King -- and being helped by the king himself, as he put a razor edge on the skates and added a new set of laces, all for 35 RMB (a little under $5).
The king and his crest:
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News of the future: Internet, Olympics, Great Firewall
I believe that the Atlantic's March 2008 issue is already in subscribers' hands. The link on our main web site will be available in a little while. (Another illustration of the "Better than Free" principle laid out by Kevin Kelly!)
In the new issue I have an article about the "Great Firewall of China" -- the government's means of regulating the internet, or trying to. When that article comes out, you'll see why I was so interested in this recent AFP/Yahoo news story, about the government's deliberations over what to do with the GFW when Beijing is crawling with foreigners during the Olympic games. Basically: I have some inside details that complement what the Olympic organizers are now saying in public. Stay tuned.
(Thanks to Daniel Lippman for tip.)
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Six months to go!
Six months from this morning, the first Olympic competitions will start in Beijing. Opening ceremonies: 8/8/08 at 8:08pm. The next day, August 9, let the games begin!
At 9am this morning, February 9, with the city practically shut down for Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year), and with the atmosphere cleaned out by an arctic blast from Siberia or somewhere, it looks pretty nice outside! (For past comparisons, including the same out-the-window view on other days, go here.) Because of the glare, it's slightly hard to see in this picture, but roads that are ordinarily jammed have virtually no cars:
An omen that this new Year of the Rat will bring clearer skies, if not fewer cars? And an environmentally-successful Olympic games? Let's hope.
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New Order at New America
Yesterday the New America Foundation announced that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, would become the new chairman of its board. He replaces the person who has been in that job in the nine-plus years since New America was founded, ie me.
In 1998, during a brief spell when I was not working for the Atlantic, I heard from a group of people who had been cooking up plans for a new, non-partisan, non-crony-ridden think tank that could help young journalists and policy people get started in their careers. These were Ted Halstead, Walter Russell Mead, Sherle Schwenninger, and Michael Lind -- people all known by that point for their writing and editing achievements who were hoping to create a new institution.
Their appeal to join this effort was persuasive. Over the next year, Halstead (who became New America's president, and who by that time had cowritten a cover story for the Atlantic) and I spent a lot of time raising money to get the institution started -- I mean, mainly he did. Mead (who has an article in the Atlantic's upcoming issue) has been on New America's board since that time; Schwenninger and Lind (lots of good articles too!) have been important figures in its operation. If we were honest all of us would have to admit we are amazed at the scale, importance, and standard New America has attained.
Last fall, Ted Halstead, still in his 30s, stepped down as president after nine years of non-stop effort, to be succeeded by the highly accomplished Steve Coll. In a complementary move toward new blood, Eric Schmidt has agreed to become the new chairman of the board. Given the gazillion-dollar enterprise that Schmidt oversees at Google, versus the tiny, ramshackle enterprise of my own writing life that I "manage," this is a preposterously out-of-scale transition. But it is evidence of Schmidt's public-mindedness that he would take it on.
(Steve Clemons, whom I met while living in Japan twenty years ago and who is now a New America comrade, has a separated-at-birth hypothesis about the Coll-Schmidt working relationship.)
Congratulations to all. Not being by nature an organization guy, I'm actually very proud of what this organization has become -- and has ahead of it.
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Year of the Rat
Twenty four hours into Year of the Rat, and safely back "home" in Beijing. Actually feels like home -- or maybe it's just the travel-induced thousand-yard-stare 24 hours after starting the trek from DC. Apartment looks and smells great; Beijing Capital Airport keeps applying various de-bureaucratizing (!) speed-up tactics US international airports could study*;and my wife and I are hoping that the ongoing cannonade of New Year's fireworks outside the window, will, in compliance with "strict city regulations," end as promised at midnight.** Or that we'll be tired enough not to care.
新年快乐, Happy New Year.
--
* One-third as many forms to fill out as on our previous visits. Immigration card, yes. But no longer a public-health screening form, which I assume got started during SARS; and no customs form at all, unless you have goods to declare. Despite our huge, groaning suitcases full of supplies from the U.S., we technically had nothing to tell the officials about.
** This might sound like an amusing festive touch, but based on last year's New Year celebrations in Shanghai, it's closer to living through some documentary about City At War, with concussive blasts round the clock. In this new year of pre-Olympic orderliness for Beijing, we'll see how the not-past-midnight rule goes. Outside just now: KABOOM!!!
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If I were voting in California
In my kind of journalism, I don't think I have any business "endorsing" candidates. I have strong and unconcealed views about certain issues -- that it was a gigantic and foreseeable mistake to have invaded Iraq (let alone to have done it so badly), that it would be just about as wrong to attack Iran, that we need to be more rather than less open to immigrant talent, that the economic growth of the last decade has been dangerously and shamelessly unbalanced, that we don't need to be terrified of China but that we have to take it seriously, etc.
While certain preferences for parties and candidates naturally flow from those views, actual "endorsement" is for organizations or public figures who feel their backing might sway others. Here instead is an account of what I would be thinking if I were voting in the Democratic primary in my original home state of California tomorrow:
- On domestic and economic and environmental policy, it’s a wash. The Clinton and Obama positions are similar to each other and different from any Republican's. Some people think there is a huge difference in their health-care proposals. Having seen administrations come and go, I am absolutely certain that the difference between Clinton's and Obama's stated objectives in 2008 matters much, much less than what either of them will be able to get through the Congress in 2009 and afterward. Thus: an important distinction in domestic policy is which candidate will bring in a larger bloc in Congress to work with.
- On foreign policy, Clinton and Obama actually do differ, and I agree with him more than with her. He (like Al Gore) was against invading Iraq before it happened; she was for it. He (like Jim Webb) opposed the infamous Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which at the time was undeniably an attempt to legitimize military action against Iran; she voted for it. (Obama, to his discredit, failed to show up to cast his No vote, but his position was not in doubt.) He has criticized the current flat-earth idiotic US policy toward Cuba; she has defended it (as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out in a strong recent essay). I understand the argument that Sen. Clinton has to take these positions to maintain her "credibility" and appearance of strength. To me that matters less than that she keeps voting in what I consider the wrong way. Thus: the positions and “mindsets” differ, and and I like his better.
- On style and governing philosophy, she is for incremental policies and incremental politics -- "experience" and "competence" – based on the underlying belief that Republican obstructionism makes nothing else possible. Not even for a dreamer like Obama. He obviously is trying for something more -- as Bill Clinton was in 1992, when I preferred him to an incomparably more experienced and time-tested President.
- On straight electability, just unknowable. Given that everyone in the country already knows her and a large minority say they don't like her, a narrow victory seems the most that is within Hillary Clinton's grasp. People can argue that Obama would be capable of much more -- or, on the contrary, even less, and that not even a narrow win would be possible once the smear machine got through with him. There is simply no way to be sure now, when it's time to vote. Thus: also a wash.
- On diversity and opportunity, a breakthrough either way. But on a deeper level of “diversity,” we have the prospect of returning a husband-and-wife team – Bill Clinton’s emergence has made this unignorable -- already in the White House for eight years, versus fresh blood.
Any vote for anybody is a gamble. Who imagined that the George Bush of 2000, with his “compassionate conservatism” and critiques of “nation building,” would become the man we’ve known in office? We have no idea what surprises will confront a President Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Romney, or McCain, or how they might respond. We have to place bets -- roll the dice, if you will -- based on what we do know, which for me is the elements above.
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Correct link for "Better than Free" essay by Kevin Kelly
The previous item, about how organizations might be able to sell the same information they are giving away via the internet, had the wrong link to Kevin Kelly's valuable "Better than Free" essay. Here is the right link -- also now fixed in original item.
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A very good essay about the economics of "free" info on the internet
(Updated to fix bad link.)
The Atlantic -- which was early to the idea of making its content available free on the internet, then went to a subscriber-only model, and now has come back -- is one of many publications wrestling with the question of how, exactly, you sell something you are simultaneously giving away.
One of the best accounts I've seen of why our current approach might make sense -- and more generally, of why individuals and organizations may still be able to do well selling information they're also offering free -- is this one, from Kevin Kelly, on his "The Technium" blog. His analysis does ring true to me, and it clarifies some possibilities I've heard discussed mainly in hazy terms.
Everyone knows that the world demand for sophisticated, rapid, reliable information and analysis can only keep rising -- and everyone also knows that the traditional models of paying for such information are in trouble, with newspapers being the most obvious case. Ten years from now, or twenty, or some time, a new way of paying for the information will have evolved. I found this essay useful in pointing toward some potential paths of evolution.
(Thanks to Paul Holbrook, of the Zoot users' forum on Yahoo, for this tip.)
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I'll say this for South Florida....
...where I have (intentionally) spent very little of my previous life but where I have been, for oddball reporting reasons, these last couple of days:
Being in the San Francisco Bay area makes me feel old, since everyone else is 25.
Being in the Boca Raton area makes me feel young, since...
Pretty soon I'll be back in Beijing, where I'll have no time to fritter away on such thoughts, since like everyone else I'll mainly be concentrating on surviving the next traffic jam or "mist" event that would be called deathly smog elsewhere. I am weirdly beginning to miss the focus-on-the-now such daily challenges educe. Rather than "old" or "young," it makes me feel... engaged.
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
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Looking at the Sun
