Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

From the Tim Cook talk at the Goldman Sachs Conference, as transcribed by iMore:

And y'know, for everyone at Apple, we're all there to make great products, and really enrich peoples' lives, and we believe in leaving the world better than we found it. And so, along those lines, our greatest contribution to society will always be through our products, because we can empower people to do some incredible things there, but we also put our energy into a program called ConnectEd, and are working with the administration on bringing our technology to kids in very underserved schools that desperately need technology.

We partnered with the Global Fund, with a focus on eliminating the transmission of AIDS from mother to child, made a huge — we're up over a hundred million dollars in donations here, and this saves millions of lives.

...

And just today, we're announcing our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious project ever: We are building — we're partnering with First Solar — to build a solar farm in Monterey County, so not too far from here. It's 1300 acres. It's enough power for almost 60,000 California homes. ...

And I think, just to make this point, because I know this is a financial conference, and I'm sure some of you are interested in, well, "Is that a good use of funds or not," and, y'know: quite frankly, we are doing this because it is right to do, but you may also be interested to know that it's good financially to do it. We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed-price for the renewable energy, and there's quite a difference between that [renewable energy] price and the price of the brown energy. And so we're thrilled to continue on this course of doing things that really leave the world better than we found it.

Emphasis mine, of course.

Let's not beat around the bush -- Tim Cook sees himself (via Apple) as much more than a CEO of a successful company. He sees being CEO of Apple as the chance to be a corporate savior. He wants to solve the world's problems, and, bless his heart, make a buck while doing it.

And you know what? Good for him. If you're sitting atop the company with the largest market cap in the world (ironically and tellingly beating out Exxon/Mobil for the crown), the only one whose culture's really not worried about answering to shareholders worried about tomorrow's profits, and you're driven to push that money for real, significant change, good heavens, kudos for you. It worries me that the Jobsian reality distortion field crops up a little -- has Apple really saved millions of lives with a hundred million dollars of AIDS donations? No. No, you haven't. To even imply that you have is, at best, horrendous marketing bluster. But let's stipulate Cook wants to find the overlap between profit and the ability to do good.

And man, to think about a company looking to do good with "first world problems" blows my mind. Gates didn't start doing Good with a capital G until he cashed out, didn't he? (If he started earlier, I'm not giving him enough credit. Looks like he did, but look at how Gates' Good work is separate from profit -- this really is Cook's trick.) And for Gates to start with issues like malaria, where a few bucks really can save a life, is brilliant. I've taken a few bucks of Fansidar and had the malaria beasties go away.

But malaria and water and some of the Gates' Foundation's other initiatives aren't where you can get a company to do the most good. If malaria was a profit-making enterprise, pharmaceuticals would've already jumped in and treated it. (This is far from a condemnation of Gates! Selfish sacrifice is A Good Thing, but that has to come from somewhere. Profit-driven Good is simply another, sustainable way to get a different sort of Good done.)

So, in a fairly Deleuzian move, Cook is going to find the intersection of capital and Good. It can happen with energy. More importantly, it can happen, as Tesla shows us, with cars.

Short of electric cars powered by coal plants, I can't think of anything much worse for the environment, once you multiply pollution by population, than cars powered by internal combustion engines burning gasoline. Can you imagine how much cleaner the world would be if just the cars in the US went to clean power? If just the commuter cars?

Think about this. I remember reading a few years back when interest rates on new cars were about zero that just getting new cars onto the road and the old ones off helped make us significantly cleaner. We weren't even buying cars with better MPG, just ones that burned more cleanly.

The pollution caused by gasoline powered commutes is mind-boggling, and the technology for replacing them is finally here. And so is profit. And that makes this not just the right thing to do, but the Right Thing for Tim Cook's Apple to do with its capital.

As many have already noted, Apple knows a thing or two about batteries. It knows something about software. And it certainly knows about designing something end users want. If you can combine these skills with a new proficiency for creating car-sized hardware, well, maybe the "BMW of computers and smartphones" can become the BMW of battery-powered cars too.

Labels: apple, ethics, gates, hats of money, pollution

The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right.

A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange.

That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

(Matt)

Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment.

The Rare Book Room

What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain.

How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you.

More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel.

How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.)

Rare Books and Software

So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.)

Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means.

Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not.

This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms.

Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out.

The Obsolescence of Copyright

I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books.

(Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.)

The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates.

Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens.

Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0

Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it.

So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way.

As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers.

Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console

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Monday, March 02, 2015
Firefox/Yahoo slamming: An Image I've heard of "slamming" in the context of a company changing a phone customer's long distance company without their explicit consent. The switch from Google to Yahoo as the default search engine for Firefox seems to have happened in a similar way. Figured I'd post this screenshot (I may have already; sorry) before I forget I've taken it. I believe I have another from home that shows Yahoo in the search box as the new provider. or at least different behavior when you're not using Yahoo. I don't recall. As I've mentioned before, there's no way Yahoo's gains in Firefox search sticks. It took me one search to get disgusted and swap back. I imagine others will have the same reaction with a little less immediacy. No offense, Yahoo, but Google has search down cold, as long as Superfish hasn't infected your box[1]. Better results, huh? By what metric is that measured? I don't even dislike Yahoo. I just don't think it's cool to slam users who are happy with whatever search provider they selected already. I will back down just a touch (as I may have mentioned before) if this only happens if you never swapped search providers. My iMac at home and my work box are pretty new, and I don't recall if my MacBook or Lenovo acted slammed or not (I've flirted with Bing on both a few times over the years). But if Firefox swapped everyone to Yahoo, not just those who'd been using Google because it was the default, well, that's unavoidably a slam. Anyhow, now with image. Yay. [1] RLY Lenovo? I'm still getting over that idiotic move. Labels: ethics, firefox posted by ruffin at 3/02/2015 04:48:00 PM

Friday, February 20, 2015
Profit-driven Good: Tim Cook wants to save the world with the BMW of battery-powered cars From the Tim Cook talk at the Goldman Sachs Conference, as transcribed by iMore: And y'know, for everyone at Apple, we're all there to make great products, and really enrich peoples' lives, and we believe in leaving the world better than we found it. And so, along those lines, our greatest contribution to society will always be through our products, because we can empower people to do some incredible things there, but we also put our energy into a program called ConnectEd, and are working with the administration on bringing our technology to kids in very underserved schools that desperately need technology. We partnered with the Global Fund, with a focus on eliminating the transmission of AIDS from mother to child, made a huge — we're up over a hundred million dollars in donations here, and this saves millions of lives. ... And just today, we're announcing our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious project ever: We are building — we're partnering with First Solar — to build a solar farm in Monterey County, so not too far from here. It's 1300 acres. It's enough power for almost 60,000 California homes. ... And I think, just to make this point, because I know this is a financial conference, and I'm sure some of you are interested in, well, "Is that a good use of funds or not," and, y'know: quite frankly, we are doing this because it is right to do, but you may also be interested to know that it's good financially to do it. We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed-price for the renewable energy, and there's quite a difference between that [renewable energy] price and the price of the brown energy. And so we're thrilled to continue on this course of doing things that really leave the world better than we found it. Emphasis mine, of course. Let's not beat around the bush -- Tim Cook sees himself (via Apple) as much more than a CEO of a successful company. He sees being CEO of Apple as the chance to be a corporate savior. He wants to solve the world's problems, and, bless his heart, make a buck while doing it. And you know what? Good for him. If you're sitting atop the company with the largest market cap in the world (ironically and tellingly beating out Exxon/Mobil for the crown), the only one whose culture's really not worried about answering to shareholders worried about tomorrow's profits, and you're driven to push that money for real, significant change, good heavens, kudos for you. It worries me that the Jobsian reality distortion field crops up a little -- has Apple really saved millions of lives with a hundred million dollars of AIDS donations? No. No, you haven't. To even imply that you have is, at best, horrendous marketing bluster. But let's stipulate Cook wants to find the overlap between profit and the ability to do good. And man, to think about a company looking to do good with "first world problems" blows my mind. Gates didn't start doing Good with a capital G until he cashed out, didn't he? (If he started earlier, I'm not giving him enough credit. Looks like he did, but look at how Gates' Good work is separate from profit -- this really is Cook's trick.) And for Gates to start with issues like malaria, where a few bucks really can save a life, is brilliant. I've taken a few bucks of Fansidar and had the malaria beasties go away. But malaria and water and some of the Gates' Foundation's other initiatives aren't where you can get a company to do the most good. If malaria was a profit-making enterprise, pharmaceuticals would've already jumped in and treated it. (This is far from a condemnation of Gates! Selfish sacrifice is A Good Thing, but that has to come from somewhere. Profit-driven Good is simply another, sustainable way to get a different sort of Good done.) So, in a fairly Deleuzian move, Cook is going to find the intersection of capital and Good. It can happen with energy. More importantly, it can happen, as Tesla shows us, with cars. Short of electric cars powered by coal plants, I can't think of anything much worse for the environment, once you multiply pollution by population, than cars powered by internal combustion engines burning gasoline. Can you imagine how much cleaner the world would be if just the cars in the US went to clean power? If just the commuter cars? Think about this. I remember reading a few years back when interest rates on new cars were about zero that just getting new cars onto the road and the old ones off helped make us significantly cleaner. We weren't even buying cars with better MPG, just ones that burned more cleanly. The pollution caused by gasoline powered commutes is mind-boggling, and the technology for replacing them is finally here. And so is profit. And that makes this not just the right thing to do, but the Right Thing for Tim Cook's Apple to do with its capital. As many have already noted, Apple knows a thing or two about batteries. It knows something about software. And it certainly knows about designing something end users want. If you can combine these skills with a new proficiency for creating car-sized hardware, well, maybe the "BMW of computers and smartphones" can become the BMW of battery-powered cars too. Labels: apple, ethics, gates, hats of money, pollution posted by ruffin at 2/20/2015 02:55:00 PM

Thursday, March 31, 2011
Open source as an opening strategy From AppleInsider \| Google clamps down on handset makers to stem Android fragmentation: Though it has long heralded Android as 'open,' Google has recently taken other steps to gain control of its mobile platform. Just last week, it was revealed that the company had closed availability of the source code of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, a tablet-specific version of its platform. There's a new-ish mode of engagement with open source that's open source once we're done with it. This allows people thinking about adopting the packages to vet everything fairly well and to mitigate the dangers of being unsupported in the future if, here, Google's support for Android died. But what it allows the provider to do is to retain rights to every bit of code, and fork into a proprietary branch their future development. That is to say, if you release a package you've written completely by yourself under the GPL and never accepted patches, you could then release version 2 based on the same code as a copyrighted, proprietary, closed source piece of software. That's what Google's doing with Android. You initially get more adoption than a closed platform because the source is out there for anyone to maintain if they need to so that they can keep selling hardware, but once enough folk use it (initially for that but later for other reasons, like broad adoption), BAM, close up shop. You've gotten the adoption benefits of open source with the later benefits of proprietary lock-in thanks to planned obsolescence driven by consumer capitalism. It's sort of the issue with BSD for me. BSD really isn't Free Software, precisely because it's too freely (little "f") exploited. OS X is here thanks to FreeBSD's overly unrestrictive license. We'll never see tons of the changes Apple made to the codebase, and are lucky to have gotten anything from Apple via Darwin. Similar with KHTML and Safari, though there Apple has been great about giving back with WebKit. Up until now, at least. Because the software's not properly protected (and here I include LGPL v2), Apple owes us nothing. What good is it if your work only creates a standard for Square One? You want to ensure the future versions enabled by your continues to be an open standard and a force for cough good. Neither of these modes of producing open software, BSD or open after we're done with it, are really "open" in spirit. Both are waiting for conventional modes of production to exploit their resources right back into a closed situation. Bless their hearts. Labels: android, ethics, F/free, Google, hats of money, open posted by ruffin at 3/31/2011 11:12:00 PM

Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Fonz wants to steal your family home There's nothing that better represents the dark potential of capitalism than the reverse mortgage. Nothing keeps a prole a prole more confidently than an inability to create family wealth. And there's no better way to eliminate family wealth than to slowly take one's house away from them a brick at a time -- and tell them that it's a great way to ensure that they enjoy their twilight years. Who tells folk to treat their houses like lottery payments? Well, there's the Fonz (Henry Winkler) and Fred Thompson. Okay, Winkler I can understand. After Arrested Development, it's almost in character. But someone who ran [sleepwalked] for president in the last election? Thank heavens he didn't win the nomination. Thompson's morals are more than questionable. It's questionable that they exist. Labels: ethics, hats of money posted by ruffin at 8/24/2010 08:12:00 PM

Friday, April 23, 2010
Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament Goes Off-air NCAA on verge of 68-team men's tournament - ESPN: Next year, everything through the second round will be shown nationally on the four networks. CBS and Turner, an entity of Time Warner Inc., will split coverage of the regional semifinal games, while CBS will retain coverage of the regional finals, the Final Four and the championship game through 2015. Beginning in 2016, coverage of the regional finals will be split by CBS and Turner; the Final Four and the championship game will alternate every year between CBS and TBS. Under the agreement, the NCAA and CBSSports.com will again provide live streaming video of games, although Turner secured rights for any video player it develops. ... Some fans may find themselves scrambling to find their favorite teams, though. McManus acknowledged late Thursday afternoon that if Kentucky, for instance, has a game scheduled on truTV, it won't be shown on CBS -- even in the team's home city. In a strange mis-mash of networks, the NCAA basketball tournament has been taken off of the airwaves and placed into the hands of basic cable. I've often wondered how long before the sort of setup that the NBA playoffs is using, where only a few games each week are on broadcast television with others split among a number of cable networks, would infect other sports. Right now, only two or three games a week from the NFL are restricted to cable with the great majority broadcast via Over The Air (OTA) television, and the NCAA tournament is only broadcast OTA, with games deemed to have the most local interest broadcast in its respective viewing areas. The NFL and NCAA represent near best cases, but it's a case that's soon to be in the past for March Madness. Now, starting in 2016, those only with OTA will miss the Final Four and championship game every other year, and even before then will only have about a 1 in 4 chance of seeing the game they want to watch in earlier rounds. My concern? To some degree, this is simply a result of the market revealing the decreasing power of broadcast television (as well as the filling of broadcast TV's void with the Internet, which it appears will carry every NCAA tournament game), but it's also a further indictment of college sports. The more that college sports trade accessibility -- for students, for local fans and alums -- for money, the less we can argue that those sports are about student athletes, student bodies, and the taxpayers supporting those institutions of higher learning whether they want to or not. Stock up: Sports bars. Labels: ethics, sports, TV posted by ruffin at 4/23/2010 11:17:00 AM

Thursday, April 22, 2010
The NY Times' "Ethicist" is Anything But From The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - NYTimes.com: [Q:]... The publisher apparently withheld [a Stephen King book's eBook version] to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y. [A:]An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical.... Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability... What crap. Is the book out of print? Is that hardcopy somehow obsolete now? Of course not. There's obviously value added with the eBook or ole C.D. wouldn't've wanted it. How does Mr. Cohen (the "Ethicist") decide when you've paid enough into the system to begin illegal civil disobedience? Can I pay for the movie in the theater and then download? Better parallel: Can I burn a Blu-Ray b/c I've purchased the DVD at full price? What if I paid a clearance price for the DVD? Have I still paid in enough for someone to forward me a bootleg Blu-Ray in high def? If I've read the book, can I sneak into a theater showing the movie that's not quite filled? Where's the harm in that? Would it really put poor, poor CD out to take along that "more than three and a half pounds" of codex on his trip? Really? Look, if you want a law changed because, in this case, you feel superior enough to remark "the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology", then start lobbying. Now show me one fair law that's anticipated a specific technology perfectly. Sort of another anachronism, ain't it? Honestly, I think eBooks are an interesting way to leverage your ownership of IP into more profit. As long as we're not EULAing hardcopies, knock yourselves out. Furthermore, in this case we have easier solutions for CD. Wait for the g******d eBook to be released. Trade time for money. Read another book on your trip. I just finished Water is Wide* by Pat Conroy on my iPod. You'll enjoy it. If you want to read a new book now, ya gotta pay. Or why not go to your local library and reserve a copy to read while you're waiting. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it? You're not out a buck. Now you read Conroy on your trip and you get to know the latest and greatest from that sick-o King[1]. And guess what, you've already paid for the privilege. Take advantage of it. Had Cohen even so much as said, "Though the risk of being caught is low, it does exist, and in NY the penalty is [X]. I would also say that you need to delete the eBook as soon as you return from your trip, when its marginal utility is gone, and that once the eBook is released, you should stop using this rationalization immediately," I would have felt a little better. As it stands, it bothers me that a representative of what's essentially the record of the United States could show such a simpleton's approach to ethics and encourage his readers to break the law without understanding the ramifications on themselves and the corporations that provide them with their goods. I'm no corporate cheerleader, but when a "ethicist" rationalizes stealing in officially sanctioned e-print, you know society's gauge of right and wrong had long since made a turn for the gutter. [1] Actually, I'm suspicious King is one of the best authors alive. I've read a few of his books that aren't about blood and guts, and they're all exceptionally well written. Still, I tried that city in a bubble book and couldn't get past the first few chapters. SICK. It's all about how you apply yourself, I guess. Labels: blu-ray, business, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ethics, evil, hats of money, kindle, licensing, nyt, web 2.0 shiite, zealousness posted by ruffin at 4/22/2010 12:05:00 PM

Thursday, March 25, 2010
The iPad's inherent DRM If there's one thing that I know Jobs would like to have back, it's an Apple computing platform with tightly controlled access for developers. As the Wall Street Journal apparently reports (via AppleInsider): "Jobs has kept 'tight control and directors have rarely challenged him.'" His preferred dev environment is no different. Right now, on the Macintosh, anyone can code up an app and release it without so much as Googling (Binging?) the Apple Human (once User) Interface Guidelines. Heck, even I've released apps for the Mac into the wild. Oh noes!!! Oh wait, Jobs has gotten that closed development environment, hasn't he? It's the iPod, iPhone, and, increasingly overlapping with the Mac, the iPad: In February, it was rumored that Hulu, an online streaming video destination for multiple networks, plans to make its videos available without Flash for the iPad platform. Reports then alleged that the Web site could be prepared by the time the iPad launches April 3, though it was said the service would likely be subscription only. If the iPad only does HTML5/H.264 jive, the fact that this protocol isn't the most popular on the net gives it a leg up on open browsers. That is, if Hulu makes HTML5 pay to play only, thanks to the iPad's effectively closed platform, Hulu has a ready-made, similarly closed/captive market. * If the iPad did Flash, not only would there be a closed system involved that Apple doesn't control, but there'd be no easy way to differentiate folks using the iPad platform. Goodbye Hulu revenue stream. With no Flash, Hulu has a reason to partner/get in bed with/come to the defense of Apple's iPad and to temper its support of Adobe's Flash. Captive markets are exactly what Jobs likes to have (see the iPhone developer program and the rules for distributing software, where Apple can even, 1984-style, rip programs off of your iPhone retroactively!), at least until he gets to the point that market dominance (digital music) makes it so that captivity works against Apple selling hardware*. So once the iPod and the iTunes Music Store dominate digital music, Jobs makes DRM leave the stage precisely to ensure there are no competitors to the gorilla. But, again, the interesting point here is how Apple is reinventing the Mac. As the iPod stretches out and begins to swallow the Macintosh via the iPhone and now iPad, it's essential to pay attention to the compromises these [at least relatively] closed platforms are making. The iPad will do 50% of what I use my MacBook for and essentially 90% of what I use my iPod touch for (the balance being "fitting my pocket"). But I can't run my Java apps on my iPad, and probably never will, and certainly won't without Jobs' permission. (Yes, I realize Apple develops and maintains the standard Mac JVM, but there are others that work on OS X. Don't split hairs, please. ;^D) Labels: browsers, control, DRM, ethics, evil, html, iPad, iphone, ipod, iTunes, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/25/2010 10:01:00 AM

Thursday, March 18, 2010
Finally forked over for VIm After using VIm for years as my primary professional text editor for web development and programming, I finally made a donation to ICCF Holland for ole Bram. The next day, I received a very nice email thank you in reply. Even if (and I assume so) it's a computer generated email, the note was appreciated. The only application I've paid for in my current at-home development suite (and I've paid for it twice! OS 9 and now X) is Transmit, a rock solid ftp client for OS X that does an excellent job syncing edits in VIm to web servers. It's been well worth the $30 I spent, and is a much better solution than Filezilla or whatever that Duck app is that I've tried on OS X several times. (Can't say I care a whit for Coda, though. Perhaps if they integrated VIm in the same way...) In the past, I've shelled out for Ultra-Edit, Visual SourceSafe, and the VB 6 IDE, though the last two at greatly reduced prices during (legitimate) promotions. I suppose you could include OSes, but that's pushing it. Pretty sure I would have bought those either way. ;^) Soon, I'll shell out for Versions, an OS X svn client that was nearly as intuitive as Visual SourceSafe, something I can't say for any other svn client I've tried. Version control is a key tool in any developer's bag of tricks, and in the long run the $53 I'll spend there will unfortunately pay for itself a few times -- unfortunate because if you're benefitting from version control it's because you would've lost edits without it. /me guilty Otherwise, when doing PHP/MySQL work, all I need is MAMP, which is being supported once again and kicks the doors off of XAMMP, at least on OS X. That's free. For Java, I'm still using Eclipse. Free. And for VB.NET the Express version plus sharpDevelop are just enough to get me by. Both free. So after pulling down as much as I have coding, it was about time to pay up for VIm. If Bram M. wants to send that cash on to Uganda, more power to him. I'm nearly embarrassed to admit I read through much of their literature before donating. I sure didn't ask Panic (the Transmit people) where they were putting their cash before I sent it. I hope the VIm money is headed to Kibaale, but seriously, that's up to Bram. It's a great app, and I'm happy he's helped keep the app up. Labels: ethics, F/free, hats of money, shareware, vim posted by ruffin at 3/18/2010 03:57:00 PM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Washington Post Reporters Now Writing Specifically for Computer Readers This from Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post's Ombudsman, titled "Why you're seeing more copy-editing errors in The Post": Why the increased errors [in the Washington Post]? Clearly, reduced staffing plays some role. A decade ago, at its peak, The Post's newsroom had more than 900 FTES (full-time equivalent employees)... Today, the now-integrated print and online staffs total about 650 FTEs... The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day's newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where "search-engine optimization" is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. ... Some relief may be coming for beleaguered copy editors. This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors. [emboldened emphasis mine] I don't know about you, but I'm not happy to hear that journalists are writing for the computers to the exclusion of their human readers. I realize there has always been a pressure on writing to the technology. I've done a review of newspapers from the 18th century, and realize the way that length was constrained by the sheets you could afford to print and sell, or how headline lengths are influenced by column and font size, and how inserting pictures are exceptionally difficult. I've seen papers run out of a font and start printing in, eg, italics to finish up a page to save time. I know that content is influenced by technology directly. Still, what the Washington Post is doing marks a significant change for the press. Now, people are writing content for, say, Google News rather than to point out the most newsworthy events of the day. Like a gamer figuring out the secrets of the algorithm for Mike Tyson's Punch Out ("When he makes the noise, dodge right, and then upppercut"), newspaper reporters, the front line folk, are being asked to learn, anticipate, and integrate the algorithms of the news search engines ("When we're talking about someone in the movies, try to tie Angelina Jolie in there somehow" or "Make sure 'failed Obamacare' is in the title of three of today's stories somehow"). I've noticed the WaPo's declining editorial attention. To redefine what "editing" meanings is to take the lazy fellow's way out. What's happening isn't that you're doing a more complicated job. It's that you're no longer doing your old job. We're more worried about hits than grammar. And what bothers me the most is the degree to which an American institution is pushing onto the front ranks of the free press the onus for making our news match whatever Google's programmers feel is newsworthy. In the briefest terms, then, I'm exceptionally disappointed that Google's programmers have become the editors of the Washington Post. Labels: acad, business, cheating, control, digital, ethics, evil, Google, market, politics, pseudo-academic posted by ruffin at 2/16/2010 09:50:00 AM

Sunday, November 22, 2009
Is there such thing as "practically free" software formats? I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format. Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources? I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl. Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes. Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face). Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time. I hate bluffing. Is GNU/hurd ready yet? Labels: control, copyright, DRM, ethics, F/free, licensing, pseudo-academic, Word posted by ruffin at 11/22/2009 01:00:00 PM

Monday, October 27, 2008
Breathing life into Moore, when he's already dead Researchers find state of matter that may extend Moore's Law - Business - Macworld UK: Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have discovered a new state of matter that they say could greatly extend Moore's Law. That's great, but does a consumer really need more power at this point? I mean, other than for playing Quake. Folding@home claims that it'd cost about $130 to run 24/7 for a year. Why stop there? I mean, we buy our PCs in the interest of distributed computing, right? When do we get an iPhone client? Labels: energy, ethics, iphone, moore, zealousness posted by ruffin at 10/27/2008 10:04:00 AM

Monday, August 25, 2008
I'm an old fogey. University should keep its own email. From UNC's student newspaper: Google has created a new program specifically designed for college students. The education edition of Google Apps includes e-mail service in addition to applications like Google Calendar and Google Talk, an instant messaging service. ... Unlike a campus e-mail service, Google Apps comes at no charge. Arizona State University, which switched to Google Apps two years ago, paid $400,000 a year to maintain their old system, Keltner said. Well, why Google is interested in providing the service for the university makes perfect sense -- most will likely use Google's own web application to interface with email, and that means lots of ad revenue. And I suppose as long as you can use POP3 or IMAP to view your Google-hosted mail, I shouldn't complain. Still, what are the chances that Google stands to net more than $400k a year from your students? That is, could the university not invest in making its own, ad supported online interface and come out ahead in the long run? I would prefer that capitalism kept its sorry grubby hands away from academia, even if the university made the cash -- as if a capitalistic state institution of higher learning were still an option. Labels: acad, business, email, ethics, gmail, Google, market posted by ruffin at 8/25/2008 02:03:00 PM

Monday, May 14, 2007
The Obsolescence of Copyright: Virtual Rare Book Rooms The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right. A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange. That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings). (Matt) Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment. The Rare Book Room What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain. How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you. More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel. How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.) Rare Books and Software So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.) Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means. Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not. This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms. Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out. The Obsolescence of Copyright I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books. (Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.) The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates. Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens. Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0 Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it. So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way. As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers. Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console posted by ruffin at 5/14/2007 11:18:00 PM

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