Author Shlomi Harif – Home

Haredi Jerusalem is aboil over a teenaged father being charged and jailed for admitting killing his infant son, threatening violence in the streets of Jerusalem.

Passover did not spare the Jewish babe killed during the month of Nissan. The Tenth Plague has hit, both the three-month old baby and the nineteen year old father. But the pillar of fire threatened by some extremists would be a new one for our Seder story. A pillar not of heavenly sign and safety, but hatred and fervor unfettered by common sense, Jewish ethics, or the rule of even Noatic law.

I think perhaps this anger is projected from the very community that failed the father, and failed the son. They should be angry! Angry that they allowed a marriage, created by the community, of a boy so damaged, so witless so as to kill his own son. Anger at not being watchful for the real, instead of imagined dangers that lurk in their insular community. Angry at themselves for standing by and being responsible, by proxy, for the death of a boy who drew his first breath given from god only three months previous.

The fire the Haredi speak of is far more lethal to them than to lawful Israel, however they choose to wield it.

I had two interesting conversations this past week. One was with some Intel mid-range folks, who were pushing really hard for my organization to embrace the new Intel Macs. We’re currently freezing all Apple purchases, because some of our key software doesn’t work on the new platforms (and, no, it’s not a ‘Mac Classic mode’ issue).

They were keen to tell me all about the cool features of their dual-core processor, and made appropriately sexy-sounding noises about upcoming ‘multi-core’ boards. This compared to Steve Jobs’ folks, who don’t know themselves when their sales lives are about to change.

They were especially interested in talking with me about their onboard desktop management and enterprise management tools, which, for me, is a major stumbling block in deploying yet more unmanageable machines. (Okay, okay, they _are_ manageable, they just don’t play with any of the same sets of tools we use for our PC-based systems.)

Today I met the Apple SE, a breath of fresh air when dealing with vendors. Call’s ’em as he sees ’em. I asked him whether Apple was going to do anything with all the neat, new tools their platform now affords. Being a Jobbite, of course, he had no roadmap. But, he pointed out, it would sure be funny to see how this played out with the PC makers. After all, he said, Intel didn’t dedicate over a thousand folks to get Apple, a tiny market player, retooled for their chipset; there had to be more to it.

Imagine the scramble if Intel popped Microsoft out of the desktop management business, just like popping a CPU out of a board. What’s better, hardware-level management regardless of operating system, or hoping that booting and loading all those gajillions of layers of drivers succeeds before updating a computer?

I think Microsoft has a lot of changes in store. Not counting, of course, getting Vista out the door and into the market. I’m still not seeing the value of bloated operating systems.

In my last post I went over the vote count. In that analysis, Kadima had a 61-seat majority among its solid allies: Labor, Meretz and the Pensioners’ Party. That majority, with the decision today to move one seat from Labor to Ram-Ta’al, one of the Arab parties, reinforces my comments regarding the demographic shift. It also shows just how truly democratic the Israeli democratic process functions.

The problem was with ballots that had been tallied but entered for the wrong party. Even with the fate of Kadima’s plan in possible balance, the reassignment of a critical seat went without much of any comment. True, the 20th Labor Party seat went from one Arab MK to another, but it’s the party that lost 5% of its power, and Kadima must now face the more serious choice of how to create and maintain a government with only a 50% share of assumed support in parliment.

Of course, full disclosure is necessary here. The party list system is seriously flawed. Lists are a function of what each party believes is important: don’t look to find the voting demographic, or women, given any kind of fair representation.

[A technical primer: The Israeli Knesset has one hundred twenty seats, doled out proportionally to parties according to their percentage wins at the election poles (which are for parties, not people). Parties create their parlimentary seating lists (usually) before the elections, and the list is used to seat members of parliment in the order of their seating priority. Parties that get less than a certain percentage of the vote get no seats (the votes are lost). Parties may agree to ‘pool’ votes, so that there are no seats lost when both parties have extra votes insufficient to deserve an additional seat in parliment. See here and here for more information.]

Journalists are wimps.

Iran, the country that doesn’t have the spare parts to keep its thirty year old aircraft in the air, has superweapons! Missiles that can’t be tracked, can avoid radar, yet are MIRVed. Torpedoes that fly underwater at over 200MPH, also sonar-evading. Read about it in any major media outlet!

While Teheran has ‘created’ its own fighters, tanks, missiles and other weaponry, the reality is that they have adapted (read repainted for the most part) North Korean technology. Guns for oil… just like Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and now Iraq.

Just a few weeks ago the papers broke the story about how Saddam Hussein had kept the fiction of weapons of mass destruction alive not for the ears of warmongering Bush klansmen, but for his own people, to keep them in fear of what he’d done to the Kurds.

And now the mass media is doing it again, with silence, with acceptance, instead of with jeers. The country that can’t support keep its own planes in the air, the country where millions of its citizens in mud brick houses, a country that hasn’t had an original thought since the corrupt Shah was ousted, a country that looks to North Korea for even slight technological achievement, is assumed to have leapfrogged all the advanced technology research centers of the world?

Reporting this idiotic pap, in this way, plays right into Bush administration hands that would rather ratchet up the fear, for internal political purposes, than portray Iran as the pathetic hotbed for suicidal radicals that is really is.

So what if this is a real threat? Where’ the news media analysis to support that? How do we assess such developments? From Karen Hughes’ situation room? From Rumsfeld’s office? From unnamed sources in the Bush administration? Me, I’d rather hear an analysis by a report who has spoken to real rocket scientists, or to non-factional experts in the field. Instead we hear translated half-quotes from Iranian television and their military press office releases.

Journalism isn’t just about the scoop interview or the ‘first to the presses.’ It is about analysis of the data, the credibility of the source and the ‘big picture.’ Even if embedded reporting is sexier. Try harder, folks, try harder!

[A side note: In preparing this blog entry I researched over one hundred separate articles. The vast majority, as you can read through these links, all hark back to the same AP piece written by Ali Akbar Dareini, their Iranian reporter. They were retouched or lightly edited for the end news outlet. Perhaps there aren’t anywhere near as many journalists as we think…]

I can’t run the only organization that has this problem. On one hand, our plant management folks are talking about the millions of dollars we can save each year in deploying power management software on our computers. With over one hundred sites, all those humming computers between 5PM and 8AM, a lot of heat is getting cooled for no particular reason.

At the same time, the rise in grid computing (in which I have more than a passing interest), demands CPU cycles to be used to help create cures for cancer, new peptide polymers to create the latest designer drug to fight the dreaded liver spots, or seaching for Alf’s home planet.

There’s no confluence of interests in the cube farm. Sure, monitors can be powered down. With flat screen monitors, the heat difference is hugely lowered anyway. But that CPU, twiddling its digital thumbs for of most it’s glacial interaction with humans, can’t both effectively race for the cure while simultaneously give the HVAC systems — and our environment — a break.

The solution is to move grid computing away from the desktop, where the erg ROI is shaky and the grid software becomes an additional load on the desktop TCO, and back to the server. With their ability to manage larger jobs better, and with concomitantly faster payoffs, grid computing can be better accomodated. This is the logical direction: the grid community’s ROI is better and the incremental cooling costs are better managed in a more efficient and better controlled environment.

And we’ll let our faithful desktop servants sleep when we leave them at the end of the day.

Hamas says it won’t arrest militants who attack Israel
Incoming Palestinian interior minister Said Seyam: Hamas will try to coordinate militants’ operations.

Okay, let’s string these together:

1. Hamas, an organization with an avowed goal to destroy Israel, is now in power.
2. The PA considers itself an entity akin to a country (i.e., representation on UN, power to make international agreements, consular or diplomatic-esque representation in national capitals around the globe).
3. They will not only allow, but coordinate militant operations, violating treaties with Israel signed by the previous government.

I believe we’re talking casus belli for Israel to attack the PA.

At the time of this writing there are over a dozen specific terror threats regarding suicide and other bombings or terrorist attacks against Israel, as it prepares to elect a new leadership. The ability for these terror cells to coordinate their activities will surely result in additional civilian casualties.

I can’t think of another country that would permit this kind of activity on its porous borders without eliminating the cause of the threat.

Of course, none of this involves oil, and it does involve Jews, so the United States will stay away from this on the grounds of the former point, and the rest of the world for the latter.

I realize this post doesn’t illuminate mysteries, but it shows how strong terror has become, how weak and unsupported Israel has become, and how indifferent to the situation the world has grown to be.

There have been some pieces in the news lately about the crossover of IM and text message ‘speak’ into English. The cries of purists are amusing (kind of like the minority Canadian Quebequa wanting all signs in their province in French), especially since English is the original bastard language; just ask anyone who grew up with a rational language structure how hard it is to learn English!

We’ve architected English, verbed nouns, mashed words and done everything possible to give Americans more words than every not to know. When I recently had a co-worker talk about polyhierarchical taxonomies, she and I were the only ones in the room (with a group of college grads and educators) that could even parse the concept. Of course, anyone ever stopped for speeding knows what a radar gun is.

So now, IMHO, we LOL, sometimes even ROTF, in <3 with these book new words. To be added to lasers and scuba gear.

Hebrew, a language with a paltry 150,000 purely Semitic words compared to English, has been conjugating acronyms for millenia. Prime Minister Golda Meier used the phrase “Zabash’cha’ to create the word ‘it’s your problem’ from Ze Haba‘aya Shel’cha.’ When referring to a deceased person, Hebrew-speakers will say “Zahl” after their name, or “Zatsal,” meaning ‘blessed be their memory’ or ‘blessed be that holy person’s memory’ respectively.

English, with its incredible palette of words and phrases, changes slowly, word meanings generally outstripping new words. But as technology speeds memetic infection, each new communication facet will bring its own changes to work, culture and vocabulary.

Check out The-Ping for a short discussion on technology, linguistics and a universalist vocabulary.

Democracy relentlessly marches on. The power of the presidency is rightfully diminished, and the parlimentary system of multiple parties creating a sole or coalition rule waxes in a country least suited to almost any kind of rule except by the fist, stone, or gun.

Democracy is twelve years too late. Had both Israel and the Arafat regime taken the brave steps after Oslo, we might have had the ability to keep today from occurring. Neither side stepped up to the plate, as we have so historically managed to dodge solutions in search of obstacles.

And now we are left with a rapidly dissolving head of the PA, a man grasping at saving the Palestinians from ruining relationships he and his predecessors worked for decades to build. Hamas has brought a mountain=sized rock to the West Bank, and Europe, post-London, post-Madrid, post-9/11, is in a very hard place.

I admire Mahmoud Abbas for his attempts to stop Hamas from himself, and this, sadly, may be the only legacy left to him.