According to the EFF, CNET has not been living up to its standards with regard to bundled ware:

The blogosphere has been buzzing about revelations that CNET’s Download.com site has been embedding adware into the install process for all kinds of software, including open source software like NMAP. For the unwary, some of the ads could have been read to suggest accepting the advertised service (e.g., the Babylon translation tool bar) was part of the installation process. Users who weren’t paying attention may also have clicked “accept” simply by accident. In either event, after their next restart, they would have been surprised to find their settings had been changed, new tool bars installed, etc. Gordon Lyon, the developer who first called public attention to Download.com’s practices, found a particularly egregious example last night: a bundled ad for “Drop Down Deals,” an app that, once installed, spies on your web traffic and pops up ads when you visit some sites. It’s hard to imagine that many users would choose that app on purpose.

This practice is not only deceptive, it directly contradicts Download.com’s stated policy, which promises users that it has “zero tolerance” for bundled adware and that “when it comes to fighting unwanted adware . . . Download.com has always been in your corner.” Indeed, that promise was one reason users and developers had come to trust Download.com as a reliable source.

CNet was really a pioneer in anti-bundling efforts. I remember when they first announced that they were no longer going to be accepting anything that relied on adware being bundled in. It was a questionable decision because some people (like me) wondered how these freeware providers were going to be able to make money. But it worked out splendidly because the freeware kept on coming and they either made money by having a beefier version that you had to pay for or they didn’t care that they weren’t making money.

I am increasingly loathed to pay for software. It’s not that I can’t afford it. It’s not just that there are free alternatives most of the time (this is necessary, but not sufficient - sometimes the paid stuff is really better). Rather, it’s because I don’t want to have to buy the product several times over. I keep a fleet of four operational desktops and regularly use about four laptops. I seek for a degree of consistency for what’s installed on them. I never really know, when I purchase software, whether I can install it on all my computers or only a limited number. Even when it starts off the first way, sometimes it converts to the latter. Then, further, I don’t know if when I upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7 whether it will continue to work or if I will have to buy it all over again.

With free software, I don’t have to worry about it. I can install my free version of TeraCopy anywhere I choose. Or OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

The major exception to all of this is Windows itself. If I ever make the transition to Linux, it’s not because I can’t stand spending $150 on an operating system. Rather, it’s because I can’t stand it when I want to do an F&R, can’t, and have to go to the illegitimate well I should be able to avoid buy paying for the license in the first place.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, what CNet’s policy normalized was making free software less hassletastic than the paid alternative. Even though they seem to be ignoring their policy, they normalized it so that I don’t have to just assume that any free software I get has something bad bundled in with it.

Apparently, someone reached my original Trumanverse map by googling images for “map of the usa with state names”.

Relatedly, I wrote this on LoOG yesterday:

With Wikipedia down, Timothy Lee points out that this could be Wikipedia-alternative Citizendium’s chance to shine. I tried to use it, but it’s pretty… thin. Personally, I thought that this was Uncyclopedia’s turn at the wheel. They joined the blackout, though. Shame. That would have made for some awesome term papers.

Much of last week was spent on computer stuff. It was a bad week, some of it my own fault and some of it not. The main goals were to (1) assemble and get a new PC up and running and (2) install a new SSD hard drive on one of the laptops. Though assembling a PC can be fraught with hazard and it’s a pain to go through and reinstall everything, it all should have been pretty straightforward. But nothing that was supposed to go right went right.

I expected that I might order a wrong part due to carelessness, or that I might forget to plug something in and freak out when the computer doesn’t boot like it should, but neither of these things happened.

Instead, things started happening everywhere else in the constellation. The laptop that was plugged in to the TV downstairs stopped working. The laptop I assigned to replace it wouldn’t do the one and only thing I really needed it to do: play video. So the laptop I had to use was the one I wanted to put the new hard drive in. So before I could get to that, I had to format and restore the one that wouldn’t play video (the typical things, such as installing new codecs and drivers, didn’t work). Then, after having taken the PC I am replacing apart, one of my other PCs started acting funky and was no longer reliable. That meant placing a last minute order for a new power supply as I had isolated that to be the problem.

Everything with the new PC worked except for the high-falutin’ video card. Except, it being a new PC, I didn’t know the video card was the problem. So I had to run all sorts of tests to isolate that as the problem. In my investigations, I discovered that the video card wouldn’t work through a DVI-VGA adapter, which meant that even if it did work, it wouldn’t do what I needed it to do without a new monitor and KVM switch. But even accounting for that, the card still didn’t work. I called tech support and was on hold for four hours before giving up, leading me to question their “24/7 commitment to customer support.”

Then, the power supply I ordered didn’t fit into the machine I ordered it for. It was the right size, so it wasn’t an obvious mistake on my part. However, to get to the place where there was room for it, I had to go through a place where there wasn’t enough room to get it through. There may be a way to remove one of the offending bars, but it’s going to be a pain.

Note, while video cards and power supplies can be cheap, these weren’t. They cost $110 and $150 respectively. Oh, and I discovered that because of the pure awesomeness of the motherboard I got, having a 4-slot video card wasn’t even necessary because the mobo would let me use the PCIE card in conjunction with the mobo card.

So then on to the laptops. The F&R on the video-problemed laptop went smoothly until I installed a piece of “updater software” that updated everything from “working” to “not working”, forcing me to start again from stratch.

And the new SSD HD didn’t work. It took me several hours to figure that out (to rule out the possibility that the problem could be anything else).

Then, out of nowhere, the initial laptop that failed causing me to play the 3-card monty with my laptops suddenly started working perfectly again. I mean, a working laptop is better than a non-working laptop, but it rendered a lot of what I had been working on unnecessarily.

With the exception of a desktop sitting on the sidelines for lack of a power supply, and the inability to see video on one of my other desktops (I can still access it through Remote Desktop), things are working okay.

It does make me wonder a little - only a little - if there isn’t something to the whole notion of having “a computer” instead of “thirteen computers.”

On the other hand, throughout all of this I never lacked for a computer no matter what I did. Even on the PC downstairs, if I had really been adamant I could have hooked the Pentium Vista computer up and still been able to watch something. So it was and does remain nice that short of a nuclear bomb, I always have something.

Courtesy of my red-headed step-computer:

Issue

NTLDR is Missing.
Related errors

Below are the full error messages that may be seen when the computer is booting.

NTLDR is Missing
Press any key to restart

Boot: Couldn’t find NTLDR
Please insert another disk

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl Alt Del to Restart
Causes

Computer is booting from a non-bootable source.
Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS.
Corrupt NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM file.
Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
Attempting to upgrade from a Windows 95, 98, or ME computer that is using FAT32.
New hard disk drive being added.
Corrupt boot sector / master boot record.
Seriously corrupted version of Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Loose or Faulty IDE/EIDE hard disk drive cable.
Failing to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS.

When the computer started malfunctioning, I feared it would be something easy to fix. Which is an odd thing to think, when I have spent twenty hours or so over the last week or two trying to get the computer back up and running. I had to do a complete Format & Restore because under the previous installation, tasks that should take seconds were taking minutes. I had hoped, upon reinstallation of Windows, that the problem would come right back.

Because then I would be done. Done, done, done.

This computer has been a pain since I very first got it. It’s required more attention than all my other computers combined. It had shifted from my second machine to my fourth by the end of its fourth year, passed up by computers five years older than it that had the virtue of actually doing what it was supposed to do (albeit at a considerably slower pace). But it never gave me an excuse to just junk it. Like the slowest kid in the classroom, I simply gave it the most rudimentary assignments with high malfunction thresholds (so if it locked up or something, it wouldn’t be a big deal).

But now it’s dead. Dead, dead, dead.

I mean, I could go through all of the various things, test this and that, and isolate the precise problem. And I confess a little piece of me is tempted. Just to get it back up and running. But perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that I was going to need to permanently sideline it anyway. I’m building a new computer. The computer to end all computers (until it’s obsolete, of course). And that made for five computers in a KVM switch with only four slots. Once I got Windows reinstalled, the plan was to just stick it in a closet, not touch it again, and hope that it gets demolished in the next move.

In retrospect, I realize that this is kind of irrational. Not the least of which because, by salvaging the parts that excludes the motherboard, I will be saving about $300 on the new computer. And taking the slightest step back, I realize that the motherboard-processor aren’t worth a fifth of that, which is what I would effectively be paying to keep this computer operational, unplugged, sitting in a closet and waiting to die.

Of course, the thought occurs to me that I am 95% sure that the problem is the motherboard. I think the processor is fine. If I were to just replace the motherboard, it would probably be as good as…

Therein my madness lies. Not this time, though.

If I were really sincere, I would be looking at the computers I got in 2001 and junking those rather than going to the trouble of replacing the fan on the one that needs that and the case on the one that needs that.

I’m not quite that sincere at this juncture.

Anything comment with the “coaching” on it will be automatically deleted.

Because I really, really hate coaches.

Okay, not really. We’re just getting nailed with a spammer.

I prefer the drug spammers. It’s easier to blacklist words of obscure drugs that few use than a word that everybody uses.

Anyway, hopefully this will pass soon and we can talk 24/7 about coaching again. Or the spammer is a live person and they will get creative and I’ll have to not announce which words I am blacklisting.

I’m still trying to get a handle on the malware problem my computer picked up during installation. The CPU-hogging has been killed, but there are still other issues. The first problem is that it has its hooks into Internet Explorer and random ads pop up after the computer has not been used for a while. I can work on the computer for several hours, and it’ll be fine, but if I leave it on for an hour, I’ll come up with three porn ads. The second issue is that it has hijacked Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If I do a search, everything will come up normally, but the links themselves will send me to some link aggregator. Fortunately, it seems limited to IE, Chrome, and Firefox, leaving Safari alone, so if I need to do a search, I can. I just have to use a lackluster browser to do it. Even so, anything that gets in the way of googling has proven to be a major pain.

The first thing I did was install Avast Virus Proction, which thus far hasn’t been able to find squat (it didn’t find the CPU hog, hasn’t found any of the other problem). Then I installed Malwarebytes, which is proving similarly ineffective. But one thing they’re both dang good at is blocking one another. Unless I turn one of them off, I get a message every couple of minutes from one informing me that it has blocked something the other was trying to do.

The laptop that my work issued me did not come with enough RAM or hard drive space. The first part was easily-remedied, the second part less so. There was some encryption software installed that made any sort of cloning from small hard drive to large hard drive more trouble than it was worth. So I reinstalled Windows from scratch.

How secure is Windows 7? So secure that I hadn’t even finished installing all of my software before I’d gotten invaded by a host of spyware and adware. Now, generally speaking, adware has to be conspicuous in order to be effective. I get that. The spyware/malware, on the other hand, is completely getting it wrong.

If I am making some sort of spyware, one of my main goals is that it is not discovered. If I make spyware that sucks up 90% of the CPU on a quad-core machine, it’s not going to take people long to either start looking for the problem say “screw it” and reinstall Windows. It makes the computer that they’re trying to gather data from useless. People will be less inclined to use it. With a little bit of discipline, that thing culd have been on my computer for weeks and weeks without my knowing about. The virus scanner didn’t find it. I wouldn’t have known. Instead, I tracked down the file I was looking for and hit “delete” and that was that.

It’s usually the making of a bad movie when the bad guy is so bad that he gets in his own way. Yet, for the spyware industry, it seems to be standard operating procedure.

When it comes to computer performance, as often as not it comes down to bottlenecks. The computer can only move as fast as its weakest point will allow it to.

For a lot of people, the bottleneck is RAM. Their computer is fast enough, but without the memory, it spends all of its time and energy moving data back and forth between the memory and the hard drive rather than using the energy to do the things that you bought the computer for.

I’ve found that most of the time, the bottleneck is RAM. I’ve found that you can breathe new life into computers that are 5, 6, 7, or 8 years old if you just put in enough RAM. Most computers can take 2GB, and most of the time that’s all you need.

That’s been changing lately, however. I’ve started to run into memory logjams even on machines with 2 or more GB of RAM. Even when running Windows XP (with Win7 it’s a bad idea to even try). And unfortunately, upgrading beyond 3GB of memory is hard to do with XP. So the bottleneck becomes the speed of the hard drive that it has to swap data with.

Enter the Solid-State Drive (SSD). The solid state drive is smaller than a regular hard drive, and a lot more expensive. But it’s also super-fast. So even if the computer does have to move data back and forth from the hard drive, it does so lickity-split.

I’d been wanting to try one for a while, but wasn’t sure about where to implement it. Then I realized that my ultra-mobile Thinkpad X60 laptop was starting to simply become unusable. I don’t know what it is about the X60 model in particular, but its performance has simply never lived up to its specs. Hit Coffee friend Holic has said the same about his (indeed, it was what convinced him to become an Applyte*).

Anyhow, I’d read that SSD HDs were good at breathing life into old machines. While this machine wasn’t old, it was mature for its age. So I went and bought one.

The results have been amazing.

I didn’t think I actually cared all that much about boot-up times, but with the SSD HD, a process that used to take 5 minutes now takes one. This is quite handy for an ultra-mobile machine, but it’s something that I could get used to for other computers.

It turns out that slow boot-up times were something I just got used to, but now I am sitting here thinking “You mean it doesn’t have to be that way?” In fact, knowing I can boot the PC up in under a minute would probably make me more likely to keep them off, saving energy.’This makes it good for battery life, too, as before I would often just leave the computer on and close to take it wherever I wanted to know. With this, I just turn it off.

It’s taken one of the least pleasant computers I have and has turned it into one of the most.

Beyond boot-up times, it allows me to open up as many tabs on Firefox as I want without fear of going into swap mode. It used to have to think about it just about every time I wanted to move between any open apps. Now, if it does, it does it so quickly that I don’t notice.

These may sound like small things, but outside of actual malfunction, it doesn’t get much more annoying than waiting through ten minutes of swapping just so that you can get to the point of closing applications in order to free up memory.

So now I am re-evaluating SSD hard drives for all of my computers. The really old ones can’t take them, unfortunately. The really new ones don’t need them. My work laptop (where I am seeking out a HD replacement) needs the space more than the speed. My newest personal laptop.

There is potential for my desktops, though. Especially since I know I shouldn’t be keeping them on as much as I do but want them accessible at any point. With fast boot-up I can keep them off the vast majority of the time because I’m not using them the vast majority of the time. I do keep my main desktop on. But even there it could be worthwhile because it’s a place where 2GB is starting to no longer cut it. I’ve been debating upgrading the RAM. Maybe I’ll upgrade to SSD instead.

Anyhow, if you have an old but not super-old computer that needs some new life smacked into it, I would recommend considering SSD drives. The same is true if you have a laptop that you take a lot of places.

* - It actually started when he was talking up macs about how PCs can just spend forever and ever swapping with the HD for every little thing you do and every time you want to switch apps. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, I got this model, which was the last he had used, and I understood what he was talking about.

I was extended, and have accepted, an invitation to join Burt Likko, aka Transplanted Lawyer, at Not a Potted Plant. NaPP is a more pointedly political blog, so there will be some more directly political stuff there than here. It shouldn’t be affecting Hit Coffee too much. There will be a little cross-posting. I plan to recycle and refresh some of my posts here for over there. But mostly, my wonky thoughts there, and other commentary here.

On a sidenote, the commenting rules that apply here do not apply there. We do fall under The League’s Civility Code, however. And, I should add, the commentariat over there is not going to be more hostile to certain points of view involving immigration and multiculturalism as you might find elsewhere in our blogging region.

I was considering changing my gravatar to the old Simpsons image that I made. But when I tracked it down, I realized that I had created it before my weightloss. So I’ve updated it, putting me in front of a classroom rather than an office and changing my appearance somewhat.

Here’s my previous self.

Half-Sigma today:

For some reason, I’ve never had any desire at all to edit Wikipedia. Nerdy value-creation skills are undervalued as it is. Why should I do it for free?

Even nerdier than editing Wikipedia is working for free on Linux or some other open source project. I find it even more mystifying that people want to do that for free.

Mr. Blue a few days ago:

We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool. We’re the productive ones that let the IT companies reduce their staff without taking productivity hits. If more of us were like them, there’d be more jobs to go around.

So let’s kill the “geek culture”. Let’s force the women in. Let’s make it so that we want to leave at the end of an 8-hour day. Bring on the apathy that dominates virtually every other field out there. Let’s spend more time making sure that everyone feels welcome and less time getting shit done. The shit we get done just makes more of us redundant. The wisepeople have spoken (utilizing the technology that we built). They apparently know something we don’t about what’s important.

UPDATE: Dave points to this article:

But many startups today have crossed over the line into freestrapping. Pay isn’t “low”, it’s “no”. Operations aren’t lean, they are free. Revenues aren’t small, they don’t exist. That’s right — no revenue and no overhead that can be strictly assigned to the business. Workers work virtually so there’s no office. Or maybe they spend hours at the local coffee shop mooching Internet access. They work for free, sustaining themselves some other way. Maybe they work part-time, have a working spouse, still collect unemployment or have “walk-away” money from their last gig. There are no materials in the strictest sense since they are creating a web-based or mobile application. Even their tools are free. Can you say open source? Or maybe they are using a “free 30 day trial” of a development tool. (Ah, so that’s why the agile development scrums are so short!) They are creating something from nothing. (And, yes, guilty as charged. That’s how we did it. There were a few out-of-pocket expenses but so far nothing that seriously cut into my coffee habit.)

If you are an experienced bootstrapper, this all sounds familiar, right? You are used to making nothing or next to nothing. The difference, and the trouble lies in the lack of revenue or prospects for revenue and the use of free raw materials and tools. The expectation of free has become so pervasive that we are harming our economy’s ability to grow. How can we make a living if we give everything away for free? And why should we expect anyone to pay for what we produce when we don’t pay for the tools we use?

When your software takes up 50% of my CPU capacity and half a GB of RAM, it’s not going to stay on my computer very long. On the other hand, if you can come up with something that has a smaller footprint, it’s going to take a lot longer to notice and you can collect more information on me to use for your nefarious purposes. Discipline, people!

For some reason, I am no longer getting email notifications of comments. That means I will be somewhat less quick to respond or pass comments through moderation. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The Huffington Post singles out six states that are the worst about software piracy:

According to a new report released by anti-piracy organization Business Software Alliance, only six states were responsible for nearly half of all software piracy incidents reported in the United States in 2010. {…}

Which states were the biggest offenders?

BSA pointed a finger at California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Michigan. As much as 49.3 percent of unlicensed software is believed to have originated in these states.

Nearly fifty percent. That sounds shocking until you look at the states. With the exception of Michigan, what do the other five have in common? In fact, they’re the five largest states in the country (Michigan is 8th). And if you add up the populations of those states, you get 40% of the country. They’re also the states with the largest economies. So it’s not exactly surprising that they would have 20% outsized share of software piracy.

This cannot stand.

Another stat shows that 80 percent of babies and toddlers know how to use the internet.

OH MY GOD TODDLERS AND BABIES ARE LEARNING TO USE ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL TOOLS OUR TIME! THIS IS POSITIVELY DISASTROUS!

Okay, actually, I find that statistic more puzzling than disastrous. How is “use the internet” defined? Learning to click on a link? Playing an Adobe Flash game? However you define it, being a toddler is a time for children to develop motor skills and language skills. Assuming that they can’t read, figuring out that clicking the button thingie when the pointer thingie will consistently cause such-and-such to happen strikes me as kind of useful. Granted, the spacial skills that come with playing with blocks are moreso, but are we really worried that kids aren’t playing with blocks?

Okay, setting that one sentence and my unreasonable response to it aside, let’s go back to the beginning:

• Text messages sent per day in the U.S.: nearly 5 billion
• Number of emails sent per second in the world: 2.8 million
• Average professional/work related meetings attended per month: 61

Sounds positively ominous… or does it? The first statistical set is the United States, the second set is the world, and the third is… what? Not the world. I doubt it’s even a company. I assume it’s an individual, in which case that’s actually kind of horrifying for a different reason. Does the average person really go to almost three meetings a day? I guess since I’ve only rarely been in management, that sounds awfully high to me. But I guess while I attended only one or two a week, there are others who just go from meeting to meeting and so it balances out to that. And maybe they define meeting liberally (though not so liberally, I would assume, that any time you stop by a boss’s office, that counts).

So is this a rallying call for more meetings? Why settle something with the convenience of an email when you can disrupt everyone’s schedule and have them drop what they’re doing for more “face time”?

My response may be somewhat intemperate, but with the exception of the part about Blackberries during family time (which I agree can be problematic), I am having difficulty what I am supposed to be pulling from this article other than “Be scared” and/or “You may not realize it, but you feel isolated.”

Except… I don’t. At least not in any of the ways that the article mentions. I have historically worked in the IT sector. We are not exactly luddites when it comes to electronic communication. We’re also not known for being the most sociable people. But, if anything, the places I have worked have involved us spending too much time talking to one another face-to-face. Often just chewing the fat. It’s a product of the Cubicle Age. I’m an introvert, but even I start up conversations with the guy sitting next to me. The only time I really avoided facetime was when everyone around me spoke through heavily accented English that I had difficulty understanding. And the only times I was really anti-social to my coworkers involved heavily accented English or an office full of people that were twenty years older than me or the fundamentalist father of triplets. I mean, am I alone in this? Due to geek-cultural solidarity and employers too cheap to spring for separate offices?

And Facebook? For every friendship it has created problems with (I can think of maybe one), it’s reignited friendships with dozens of others. I went to college at the dawn of Instant Messaging. ICQ came around my second year. My best friend Clint and I barely talked that first year. The second year and beyond, he was coordinating to see me every time he came to town and I was taking trips out there to see him. And of course this doesn’t even touch on BBSes, which provided me more friends than high school ever did. I don’t mean cyberfriends. I mean people that I met. People that I am still in touch with. And, of course, it provided me a course-correcting social education that my schools did not. But this is all kind of beside the point. The point is that unless you live in Callie, Arapaho, or some place similarly small, the only way you’re not making friends from cyber-communication is if that’s what you want. And if it isn’t bolstering your friendships, you’re likely not doing it right.

Which is not to say that there aren’t pitfalls to avoid. And in fact, I may be in one of those pitfalls now. Spending too much time online and not enough time around town making local friends which I might be forced to do in an earlier era. But a lot of that is circumstantial. I had a number of ideas on ways to meet people, but they sort of fell apart. And most of the ideas that occur to me are ideas that involve making friends way out in Redstone. And really, I was lousy with meeting people before the Internet (and BBSes), so it’s not like I can blame it on the wire. You can call it a crutch, but my ankle is sort of sprained.

So yeah, on the part about being able to put the Blackberry away at the dinner table, I’m kind of sympathetic. But complaining about the Internet getting in the way of “real communication” is like complaining that bicycles are problematic because they don’t give you the same workout as running.

A little while back, the New York Times reported that, as Wikipedia contributors, women are grossly underrepresented:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

For Slate, Heather MacDonald rebuts:

For anyone who is actually interested in finding out whether sexism currently shapes participation in public discourse, Wikipedia is a dream come true. Feminists have been complaining for years about the unequal representation of females on op-ed pages and in influential book reviews, magazines, and journals. In 2005, for example, political commentator Susan Estrich prominently accused editor Michael Kinsley of excluding female writers from the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section. Estrich’s only evidence for Kinsley’s alleged animosity to women was the lack of gender proportionality among Times contributors, which a posse of Estrich’s female students at the University of Southern California law school had been tracking. A New York outfit called the OpEd Project performs the same bean-counting more widely, running a regularly updated gender breakdown of opinion pieces at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Salon. And last week, Meghan O’Rourke (writing in Slate) and Robin Romm (writing for the Double X blog) reported the results of yet another such tally, this one by the women’s literary group VIDA, which counted bylines at 14 influential magazines, book reviews, and literary journals over the course of 2010. Pointing to VIDA’s findings—namely, that male bylines outnumbered female ones—O’Rourke concluded that “decisions about who and what gets published” must not be “the result of merit alone.” Romm, meanwhile, used the occasion to observe portentously that “the gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.” Neither felt the need to determine the underlying ratio of male to female writers before decrying the byline imbalance.

The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check. Any female writer or speaker who is not painfully aware of the many instances in which she has been included in a forum because of her sex is self-deluded. Far from being indifferent—much less hostile—to female representation, every remotely mainstream organization today assiduously seeks to include as many females as possible in its ranks. Nevertheless, the idea that someone or something is inhibiting women’s intellectual and political involvement remains robust, which is where Wikipedia comes in. Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy. (The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.) Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females’ low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion.

It’s not impossible that an atmosphere dominated by men would be inhospitable to women even if there aren’t any formal gatekeepers. Web has commented on Wikipedia in the past as being very clannish (and biased). Given the number of male contributors, this would inevitably have a gender dimension. There are a lot of organizations that don’t formally exclude anyone but that people outside certain demographics would be uncomfortable. However, if the association or non-association is entirely voluntary, is there any damage done?

The answer to that is not necessarily “no.”

Given that Wikipedia doesn’t pay the vast majority of its contributors (if it pays any), that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous and therefore not a launching pad to a writing career, and apparently the contentious atmosphere of the sausage factory (errr, in more ways than one I suppose), it’s arguably the case that women are being done a favor here. It’s not their time being wasted. However, if you read past the first couple sentences of the New York Times article, you get to this:

Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said in an interview on Thursday. “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.”

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.”

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

These strike me as quite legitimate concerns. MacDonald is so buys knocking down feminist tackle dummies that she doesn’t even address these points. I am not inclined to believe that a lack of diversity is inherently a problem. In the past, I have pushed back against forcing men to take down Incredible Hulk posters cause women might think that they are guilty and choose to work somewhere else. A lot of the time, I ask… “so what if they do? Is the job getting done?”

But a project like Wikipedia is different. It could really stand to be improved with greater diversity. If the contributing population more closely matched that of the reading population, it would put out a product more useful to a larger number of people, which is Wikipedia’s stated purpose.

Google claims Bing copies its search results

The story began with Google’s team for correcting typographical errors in search terms, which monitors its own and rivals’ performance closely. Typos that Google could correct would lead to search results based on the correction, but the team noticed Bing would also lead to those search results without saying it had corrected the typo.

Next came the sting, setting up a “honeypot” to catch the operation in action. Google created “one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term,” then wired those results for particular, highly obscure search terms such as “hiybbprqag” and “ndoswiftjobinproduction,” Sullivan said. With the hand coding, typing those search terms would produce recognizable Web pages in Google results that wouldn’t show in search results otherwise.

Next, Google had employees type in those search terms from home using Internet Explorer with both Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Before the experiment, neither Bing or Google returned the hand-coded results, but two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded.

Does anyone remember (or still use) Metacrawler? Before Google, that was my search engine of choice. It used to swipe from Yahoo, Webcrawler, AltaVista and others. Back then, the problem was as frequently “no results returned” and so it was really helpful to be able to search all in one. These days, though, the issue is relevance. Google, Yahoo, and all of the others return more links than you can possible peruse for all but the most unusual names. I started using Google when it demonstrated the ability to put the most relevant stuff on top.

Some time before I started using Google, Metacrawler became useless. I think that the other search engines were putting something in their code that made Metacrawler stop working for them. Or maybe they threatened to sue. I’m not sure what the IP-repercussions are for something like that, or this Bing-Google thing. But since Metacrawler is back and explicitly advertises that it’s using Yahoo/Google/etc, I would guess either it’s perfectly legal or they’ve come to an agreement.

As a general rule, I try to respond to most comments and all comments that ask me a question. I missed a comment by Nanani and I’ve been missing a few lately due to increased posting volume. Any time I have not responded to your comment and it’s a couple days old, you’re welcome to follow up and point out that I missed something. I do not take offense.

Farhad Manjoo declares it dead:

On paper, the entry-level $999 Air looks subpar. Its processor isn’t nearly as fast as that of a full-size machine, and its screen is too vertically scrunched. The biggest problem, though, seems to be its limited disk space—there’s only 64GB of room for all your files, less than any other computer Apple offers. (The Air uses solid-state flash storage, which is faster and smaller than a traditional mechanical hard drive. It’s also more expensive—for an obscene $200 more, Apple will give you a 128-gigabyte solid state drive.)

But these limitations don’t bother me very much. I was looking for a laptop as a secondary machine, not for getting a lot of daily work done. The Air’s portability and five-hour battery life were more important to me than its screen and speed (which are quite good for most tasks, I’ve found, and certainly better than most netbooks I’ve used). The fact that I can get that portability in a machine with a full-sized trackpad and keyboard—indeed, this is one of the most comfortable keyboards available on a laptop of any size—was a bonus. Still, there was the issue of disk space. How would I make do with a computer that offered less room than some iPods?

When I read the title, and the first paragraph about how this was about an Apple, I figured “Oh, yes. Another example of how if Apple doesn’t offer it you’re better off without it.” But actually, I agree up to a point. SSDs are not really worth the price for the kinds of computers I buy, but if you have a computer with weaker processing power (which may be necessary for something as thin as a Macbook Air) then maybe it is. The Macbook Air doesn’t appeal to me for the same reason that netbooks don’t, but I recognize that both appeal to people who are not me.

Anyway, what I agree with is that by and large having 64GB isn’t that much of an issue. Manjoo goes on to say that we’re going to transition to external drives and the like. A lot of us will. I already do with my pocket drive that I have for the convenience of switching amongst my laptops whether I am home or away. What Manjoo doesn’t really address, though, is that 64GB is enough for most people even without an external drive. It’s a common fault among tech writers to assume that most users are a lot more like them than they are. Which is what Manjoo does.

You would have to spend in the order of $10,000 in order to fill up one of those hard drives with music. Or illegally download 10,000 tracks. Or buy that many tracks off a cheaper service like eMusic (if they’re still cheaper like they used to be). That is not something that most people do. Nor do most people download videos, which is what really takes up the space. If you’re not a music afficionado, which most people aren’t, a hard-core pirate, which most people aren’t, or downloading videos, which most people don’t, there is no reason that you can’t fit everything on to that drive.

Apple, to its credit, understands this. And this corner that they cut is a good one. With hard drive capacities far outstripping need, sideways upgrades make a great deal of sense. Trading processing power for better drives make sense. Not because everyone is going to go out and get a pocket drive, but because most people will never need to. Particularly if the Macbook Air is not their only computer, which it frequently isn’t going to be. They can easily do what I do (with or without the pocket drive) and keep everything on their desktop and move things to their laptop/netbook as required.

Along these lines, I think that Manjoo is right that we’re going to be moving away from singular laptops into something more specialized. Perhaps I am falling into the same trap (thinking everybody will do/want what I do), but with more specialization than ever in computing, it makes sense to have a netbook for light-but-extremely-mobile usage, a desktop for more serious computing, and maybe a laptop for serious computing on the run. And of course a smartphone for extremely-light-and-ridiculously-mobile-but-hard-to-use usage. And an iPad fitting in there somewhere.

Since I was in college there has always been talk about how computers are going to become dumb terminals. Any day now. It still hasn’t happened, but over ten years later I’m finally starting to see it do so. In a fashion. Due largely to the specialization where you have an iPad for some things, a netbook for others, and so on. From experience, it’s going to get harder and harder to keep everything on each computer and easier and easier to use centralized services like GoogleDocs and the like. Particularly when/if you can count on a constant connection to the Internet. That’s the biggest hold-up for me with regard to GoogleDocs. When I have a constant 3G connection with which I do not have to worry about bite usage, it’s going to become a really attractive option. Or at least a good offline editor with good synchronization. Right now a lot of this is under the assumption that you will always have a connection when you need one, but we’re not there yet.