And Still I Persist

Just ask Jeff Jarvis:

– Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
– Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
– Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.

Whoa, as Keanu would say. Be sure to read all the stats. ..bruce w..

Language Log is one of my favorite blogs. It is a gathering of linguists, mostly unrepentant descriptivists, who don’t hesitate to bring to bear their full education and resources on, well, issues that only language geeks (like myself) would wonder about.

Here, as a sterling example, are a pair of posts exploring the origin of the phrase “to blame A on B”, which apparently was considered at one time to be an unacceptable colloquialism (the preferred constructs were “to lay blame for A upon B” or “to blame B for A”):

• Blame it on Kipling
• Blameless

Yes, I find all this very fascinating and entertaining. Your mileage may vary. ..bruce w..

Roughly 18 months ago, I wrote a post about the problems with the industry’s inability to agree upon a next-gen DVD format – leading to the split between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Among other things, I said the following:

So now we come to the next generation solutions for video playback: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. During the years that these technologies were under development, technophiles hoped and prayed that the respective consortia would merge their research and standardize upon a single format. They failed to do so, and the result, I believe, will be failure for both formats, with both limited to market niches.

Now, 18 months later, this prediction appears to be holding. There’s an excellent analysis by David Mumpower of the current state of the next-gen DVD format wars over at Box Office Prophets, and it doesn’t look good. He starts with:

Futility, thy name is the next-gen DVD “war”. Truly, the struggle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is a pointless skirmish that serves no purpose save for the aggrandizement of woefully out of touch corporations Sony and Toshiba/Microsoft. The two titans of the business world could have averted this current public relations disaster had they been willing to broker a compromise in 2005. While there were extensive discussions along these lines, however, neither side was willing to cede their demands in order to come to an agreement. Microsoft found the Blu-Ray technology unsatisfactory for personal computing while Sony would not budge on file structuring, believing a similar decision in the past had cost the company billions in royalties. The impact of these two behemoths behaving thusly is roughly the equivalent of two men putting buckets on their heads then repeatedly trying to head-butt one another. Unfortunately, random violence, while initially humorous, grows tiresome all too quickly.

And here’s the most telling statistic:

Consumers were even kind enough to give next-gen DVD distributors a code red this holiday season. On Black Friday, one of the biggest days of the year for consumer consumption, roughly 600,000 DVDs were sold. A combined 57,000 units of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray hardware were sold. Billions have been spent on next-gen nonsense yet customers are buying outdated technology at a factor of over ten to one.

Read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

George Santayana famously said:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends upon retentiveness…Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Victor Davis Hanson, the noted military historian and classics professor, reminds us of the recent past in Iraq:

After the victory of the 1991 Gulf War, a bipartisan consensus had emerged that Saddam Hussein had to be contained — by both arms and sanctions. Our government wanted to prevent him from using oil revenues to obtain more dangerous weapons, destroying more of his own people, and from attacking or invading yet a fifth nearby country. Few, if any, disagreed…

Read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Bhutto yesterday, Pakistan has seen several large cities erupt in violence. Many of the protests have been peaceful but quite a few have turned violent, with rioters focusing on burning property and destroying anything they can. A summary map of the most active cities below:

Far and away the most violence is reported in the city of Karachi, where police and paramilitary troops are on the streets attempting to enforce a curfew. Rioters have in fact been attacking police in large bands, and have been setting some police stations on fire. Hundreds of vehicles are burning, businesses being looted and torched, and general mayhem is the order of the day.

Al Qaeda must be pleased. At this moment Pakistan and its security forces are focused inward, working hard to quell the violence and rioting. This leaves them open to move people more freely in the NorthWest territories.

As time goes on I am more certain that a direct link to Al Qaeda will be proven, and we will see evidence that there were multiple attackers. In other words a traditional coordinated attack against Mrs. Bhutto. This is further evidenced by the fact that another opposition candidate was nearly killed that same day by a second team that failed.

We hope and pray that Pakistan can gain control of itself before they further trash their own country.

I have heard a lot of talk about “securing the nukes” in Pakistan from news presenters. This makes me laugh a bit, as they seem to assume that they are sitting around in a warehouse somewhere in Karachi with a couple of fat drunken guards keeping the rioters out. Suffice to say that the United States and other western countries have been working with Pakistan since 2001 to beef up their nuclear security, and implement safe guards. These safe guards help ensure that even should some one get a hold of a weapon, the would not be able to arm or fire it off.