Monthly Archive for December, 2007
Page 2 of 2
I’ve gotten pretty into reading the online archives from the first couple years of Wired Magazine recently, and while the content from this period is consistently fascinating, I’m growing increasingly annoyed with the broke-ass HTML formatting that riddles these texts. Some examples:
- Will Wright Discusses SimCity2K & predicts MMOs in 1994 – Awesome! But the “font size=2 face=”verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif” color=”#FF0000″ garbage that crops up in between every paragraph has really got to go!
- 1993′s “3DO: Hip or Hype?” lays the groundwork for what would eventually become a viable business model 13 years later on XBox Live – Great! But what is with the unrendered “bold” tags around each heading & the fact that each subsequent bulleted list migrates one level further to the right. Also, I’m pretty sure that the bullets on the last page of that article are orphaned from elsewhere in the text!
- By 1995 some of the articles appear to be “fixed” but the monthly featurettes like Rants & Raves & Wired Top 10 remain 100% fucked up. (Note that the template is so broken on that last link that the footer renders *behind* the sidebar
- The .sig file of the month from Issue 2.01′s Net Surf column should probably be in a mono-spaced font & Ok… hahaha j/k on this one, but for comparison’s sake the link to download NCSA Mosaic in this same column STILL FRICKING WORKS!!
- By 1999, things are appearing much more sane in the HTML department, but unfortunately this coincides with the content’s slow decline into tabloid irrelevance, viz 50 Ways to Spend a Lot of Money
- Articles from the near-present-day appear in their “original” format on the site, with images & related links intact, though there is still some roughness around the edges (YouTube embeds are squashed into a non-standard size, for example, causing the playback controls to get cropped)
So anyway… While I’m incredibly grateful that the text of these articles is available for free (not counting the horrific, animated, content-obscuring overlay ads that frequently appear) online, I really do wish there was some way to pretty up the presentation just a tiny bit, particularly on the really cool issues from the first couple years. But I’m sure Condé Nast has more profitable things to do than futz around with preserving obsolete cultural artifacts of interest to a few dorks, geeks & “futurists.”
In conclusion, will everybody please refrain from bidding up the price of 1993-2000 back issues of Wired on eBay for a little while? Even if they do get around to cleaning up the online archives, I think I’d prefer my copies in the original reflective-silver ink on a hot pink background thank you very much and goodnight!
UPDATE: The very last paragraph in the Will Wright article from 1994 is so incredibly brilliant that it makes me want to barf: “I have in mind a game I want to call ‘Doll House.’ It gives grown-ups some tools to design what is basically a doll house. But a doll house for adults may not be very marketable.” LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!
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Lots of good tools here, the Filezilla one in particular has helped me on several occasions
So I was sitting here poking a thumbtack into the little rubber pads on the lid of my laptop because I’m kind of OCD like that and then one of them came off and there was a tiny loose screw underneath it, so I tightened it and I’ll be damned if it didn’t totally fix the whole “wobbly screen” issue that’s been plaguing the thing for months and I had pretty much resolved myself to just living with. Sweet!
That commercial where the girl asks her dad to “drop her off a few blocks away from the theater, because people in that part of town are riding bikes and driving hybrids” and then he proceeds to tell her that their SUV *is* a hybrid and she asks him, “How come you never talked about that before?” So he just shrugs and says “I guess I didn’t think I needed to,” which is a pretty good burn on his pain-in-the-ass daughter, but what he should have said is, “How come you never looked at the back of the damn car before?!” or better yet, “Well if you’re so worried about it then why don’t *you* ride a bike to the damn theatre?!”
In any case he should have figured out a way to work “damn” or “the hell” into his response, but I suppose that wouldn’t help with the whole “not all hybrid drivers are farting hippies & not all SUV drivers are giant pricks” thing that Ford or Lexus or whatever company it was is trying to sell.
There’s a great article in Rolling Stone about “How America Lost the War on Drugs” that chronicles the evolution of the drug trade following the death of Pablo Escobar. Predictably, this is a story of partisan politics and hubris, with a healthy dose of pharmaceutical lobbying thrown in for good measure. Particularly interesting is the story of crystal meth. In 1986, meth’s chemical precursors, Ephedrine & Psuedoephedrine, were “produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world” and while the drug was not yet a major problem in America, these precursors seemed like a fairly obvious target for improved regulation. The DEA pushed for these reforms, but was blocked on 3 separate occasions by the pharmaceutical industry, which was reaping huge profits form OTC ephedrine sales and the use of pseudoephedrine as a decongestant. Congress finally regulated Ephedrine sales in 1993, but an exemption was made for psuedoephedrine. Later, bulk sales of pseudophedrine were regulated, but exceptions were made for pills sold in blister packs. And I quote:
When lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. “Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one,” says Heald.
Some other DEA scenarios also didn’t turn out as expected:
“We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine,” says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, “but it turned out they realized they’d make more money by working together.”
Bill Clinton’s Drug Czar, Lee Brown, was another advocate of reform, proposing a $355 million drug treatment program:
“When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers,” Brown tells me. “When you’re in that position, you see very quickly that you can’t arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.”
But he got chased out of office by the “Republican Revolution” of 1995 and the Clinton administration’s subsequent effort to appear “tough on crime.” But anyway, all’s well that ends well I suppose:
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs – with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes – a twelvefold increase since 1980 – with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
Lots more horrifying stuff in here, but I’ll let you read it for yourself…
