Dawn of a New Day is the subject of a memo written by Ray Ozzie.  According to Reuters, Ozzie is Microsoft Corp’s resident visionary and departing software chief.

In the Reuters story, they gave the following description of the memo:

Microsoft Corp’s resident visionary and departing software chief has urged the company to move on from its Windows and Office roots and imagine a “post-PC world” of simple, global Web devices.

I have to agree with one of the forces that Ozzie identifies as driving the change.

But as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration.

I am going to miss the PC-centric days, but I must admit, right now the thought of buying a new PC fills me with trepidation as I think about all the installed software on my current PC that I will have to install on the new one.

As someone who enjoys writing his own software to solve problems, I hope the day never comes when I won’t be able to write software no matter what form the next computer revolution takes.  This memo just reminds me of the need to stay abreast of the coming changes even though I am retired from the software industry.  What I learned over the past 40 years will have to be constantly refreshed.

From what I have read, this effort to keep up-to-date will either keep me mentally alert or will drive my mental deterioration even faster.

I found the article How To Protect Against Firesheep Attacks on the Computerworld web site.

Firesheep  adds a sidebar to Mozilla’s Firefox browser  that shows when anyone on an open network — such as a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi network — visits an insecure site.

A simple double-click gives a hacker instant access to logged-on sites ranging from Twitter and Facebook to bit.ly and Flickr.

I had to read this a couple of times before it hit me.  Someone else is running Firesheep on their computer to detect when you access your account on an insecure web site from your computer. You don’t have to be using Firefox to be hacked. Firesheep then allows that other person to access your account on that web site.  A few hundred thousand people have already downloaded Firesheep to their computer.

The article does mention some protective measures you can take.  For the ordinary user who has not taken any of those measures, you should not be accessing your personal accounts from an unencrypted Wi-Fi hot spot.  Most such spots are unencrypted.

I suspect that if you are accessing the internet via a wireless router that is not using strong encryption, then you are also vulnerable.  Places where you might do that other than your own leaky wireless router at home (if you are not using encryption at home) would be in a hotel or on vacation in a rented condo.

Update October 29, 2010

The article Firefox Add-on Firesheep Brings Hacking to the Masses in PC World, may or may not bring some clarity to this subject.  That depends on which of the criticisms in the comments you believe.

In the article Fermilab is Building a ‘Holometer’ to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion in Popular Science, the authors state:

Researchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram.

Now before you start wondering whether today is April first, they do provide a link to the Fermi Lab web site section devoted to presentations about the holometer.

There you can read the 2009 Holometer Proposal.  Maybe the following quote explains it better than the Popular Science article:

The theory of black hole evaporation, whereby a black hole state converts to free quantum particle states in flat spacetime, also suggests a fundamental bound at the Planck scale. The correspondence is remarkably precise: the entropy of a black hole, identified with the total number of degrees of freedom, is one quarter of the area of its event horizon in Planck units. This idea has led to the conjecture that all of physics may be “holographic”, encoded in some way on null surfaces or light sheets at Planck resolution. However, there has been no experimental test of this conjecture.

For your information they state that Planck time = 5.4 X 10^-44 seconds.

The Los Angeles Times article titled In two years, a fearful turn in Obama’s speeches, ends with the following:

“As a candidate in 2008, Obama made an appealing but naive promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together in Washington and end the bitter partisan standoff,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies and writes about governance. “He learned that was easier said than done.

“He is now giving voice to a reality that he was hesitant to accept.”

Notice the difference between my headline and the one used by the Los Angeles Times. Like two drunks propping each other up as they walk out of the bar, maybe if you put the slant of the two different headlines next to each other, they could hold each other up.

Of course, even the fellow from the Brookings Institution could have phrased it, “President Obama gave the Republicans a chance to put aside their bitter partisanship, but they didn’t take it.” Are three drunks holding each other up better than two?

I found Thaddeus Russell: Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History on the George Mason University’s History News Network web site.

If I had a category, “And Now For Something Completely Different”, I would place this item in it. In describing what got him fired, the article has the following to say:

I showed them that during the American Revolution drunkards, laggards, prostitutes, and pirates pioneered many of the freedoms and pleasures we now cherish — including non-marital sex, interracial socializing, dancing, shopping, divorce, and the weekend — and that the Founding Fathers, in the name of democracy, opposed them.

I haven’t been following Oregon politics very closely since we left in 2006. I was surprised to see that John Kitzhaber is running for governor again. He got a lot of great things accomplished the last time he was governor (1995-2003). He didn’t do a great job of getting himself a lot of good publicity for what he accomplished. I hope he has better luck this time.

Tim Wise posted this article on his web site, Bikini Liberalism: Juan Williams, Implicit Bias and the Trouble With NPR.

I’ve never been a fan of Juan Williams. Far too chummy with his FOX News colleagues and too eager to attack longstanding civil rights leaders in the name of supposedly courageous political “independence,” Williams is one I have never thought to defend before.

But today such a defense is deserved. Williams, it turns out, has been done a supreme disservice by his other employer, National Public Radio, and it is a disservice to which the harshest condemnation should be applied.

Sometimes Tim Wise and I see eye to eye and sometimes we don’t. In this case, I agree with what he said and the way he said it.  I am not a fan of Juan Williams, but in this case NPR may have done to Juan Williams what was done to Shirley Sherrod.

Whether pro or con Williams firing, I must admit I have not seen the whole interview.  I could be wrong no matter which position I take.

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch in The New York Review of Books is a review of the movie Waiting for “Superman”,

Had I not read this review before seeing the movie (which I have not seen yet), I might have fallen for the premise of the movie.  (Perhaps I might have guessed at some of the information in this review.)

Just a few selected examples from the review follow:

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates.

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Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.

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Another highly praised school that is featured in the film is the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. It has remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance. But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to average current spending for public schools of about one third that amount.

Read the rest of the article to understand some of the other “tricks” SEED uses to get the results that it does.

If we want public schools to achieve the success that some charter schools achieve, then we must know the entire suite of techniques that the Charter Schools use.  If we pick a few techniques that fit our preconceived notions of the cheapest way to achieve good results, we will be astonished to find that public schools cannot make the same achievements.