Listening to the universe

One of the radio telescopes at Lord’s Bridge at dusk today.

Quotations, schmotations

As someone who collects quotations, I was pleased to get this for Xmas — and even more pleased to discover one quotation by me in it. (I once said that comedienne Ruby Wax “talked like a cement mixer from Brooklyn” — which was unfair to cement mixers btw). But the clueless compilers have managed to get my name wrong, not once, but twice! I’m “Naughton, Denis” in the index, and “David Naughton” on the page. Scholarship, like nostalgia, is not what it used to be. Sigh.

The problem with dictionaries of quotations is that they are often lazy compilations — consisting mainly of recycling of the hoary old annuals and leavening the mix with the froth of the last few years. There’s rarely any sign of intelligent editorial life. They all, for example, recycle the celebrated exchange between Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker:

Benchley: Calvin Coolidge is dead!
Parker: How can they tell?

The only problem with this is that Benchley replied “He had an erection”, but this wonderful payoff line was judged too scandalous by quotation hunters and so was discreetly excised from the records, leaving Parker with the credit for the joke. Benchley’s widow went to her grave lamenting this slight upon her late husband’s wit.

Shoots and leaves

It was snowing in Derbyshire yesterday, but some plants were unimpressed by their covering.

Slate bought by Washington Post

Looks like Slate‘s gone mainstream. Microsoft has sold it. But Gates and Co deserve credit for having nurtured it to maturity. Of course one could argue that the costs of running an online mag amounted to just loose change to a profitable monopoly, but still…

The Christmas queue

One of the great Cambridge traditions is the Carol Service in King’s College chapel on the afternoon of Christmas Eve (broadcast worldwide by the BBC). Associated with this is the traditional orderly queue in the biting East Anglian wind.

Christmas comes early in Luxembourg

Judge Bo Vesterdorf, president of the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, upheld the ruling of the European Commission on Microsoft’s bundling of media players with Windows. The Commission had ordered the company to offer a version of its Windows operating system without its software for playing digital music and movies on personal computers. It also ordered the company to (i) offer personal computer makers and consumers in Europe a stripped-down Windows with Microsoft’s media player removed and (ii) license to competitors the technical information for Microsoft’s software for servers, which would give rivals equal footing.

It also fined Microsoft 497 million euros ($665.5 million) which the company deposited in an escrow account. Microsoft is appealing the ruling, and had argued that the proposed sanctions should be suspended pending the outcome of the appeal (which of course will take years to work it way through the courts). But Judge Vesterdorf would have none of it.

The ruling applies only to Europe, but it represents the first time since antitrust challenges to Microsoft began in the 1990’s that the company will be forced to alter its core business strategy of bundling its software products and features with Windows. The commission ruled that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power to stifle competition in the markets for media players and operating systems on servers.

According to the New York Times report, “Microsoft will post the information for licensing its server software on a Web site within a day, the company said. Next month, Mr. Smith [Microsoft’s general counsel] said, Microsoft will have a stripped-down version of Windows available for PC makers, and that alternative should be available in the European marketplace by February.”

Wow! Who says there’s no such thing as Father Christmas?

Re-framing the debate about intellectual property

I was invited to give a talk on “Public Awareness, Piracy and Digital Rights Management” at the Westminster Media Forum, an influential talking shop. I had the distinct impression they weren’t quite expecting to hear what I had to say.

Sky view

Grays Inn Road, London, December 15, 2004.

Religious mania

A play in a Birmingham theatre has been taken off because of violent behaviour by ‘devout’ Sikhs who find the play offensive to their religion. Ah, the poor dears. In an ideal world, every play would offend somebody’s religion. Correction: in an ideal world, there would be no religion and therefore none of the bigotry and intolerance which religious certainty breeds. As someone who was brought up in a fanatically devout Catholic family in a country (Ireland) dominated by a repressive, censorious and corrupt church, I had my fill of this nonsense by the time I was 15. Ever since then, I’ve taken H.L Mencken’s line. “We must respect the other fellow’s religion”, he wrote, “but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.”

Browser design

I’ve been thinking about the design of web browsers in the light of making comparisons between Firefox and Internet Explorer, and rapidly came to the conclusion that simply making check-lists of features is a banal exercise. So, back to first principles…

The basic problem is that for various reasons (including Microsoft’s operating systems monopoly and the elimination of competition in the browser market after the demise of Netscape) there was no serious competition in this area. That doesn’t mean that better browsers didn’t emerge (they did — in the shape of Opera, Safari, Omniweb, etc.); but none of them gained real traction in the face of the monopolistic bundling of Explorer with Windows. Which meant that Microsoft had no real incentive to enhance or improve Explorer, so the program wound up being the end of a particular line of browser development. To take it any further would have meant rethinking the program completely — re-architecting it in computerspeak. And there was no commercial imperative to do that.

For once, I’m not making an anti-Microsoft point. As far as they were concerned, Explorer wasn’t broke, so why should they bother fixing it? But this has had a serious downside for the rest of us, because the web browser is the program people use most: it’s their window onto the Web, and (to develop that metaphor) if a window is distorting and dysfunctional and inefficient, then it distorts one’s view and makes it more difficult to see things.

So browser design matters, and this thought led to the question of what kinds of principles should guide browser design. At this point I stumbled on this terrific essay by Scott Berkun, who in an earlier life worked for Microsoft and indeed was a program manager on the Internet Explorer project. So he knows a lot about the thinking that went into the design of Explorer. He examines the things people want to do while browsing and then ponders their design implications. The only point where I found myself disagreeing with him concerned the way he appears to lump RSS technology with the discredited ‘push’ technology of aeons ago.

The main conclusion I draw from Scott’s essay, though, is that although Firefox is undoubtedly a step forward from Explorer, browser design has an awful long way to go. Software’s wonderful, but it’s still terribly crude compared with the sophistication and adaptability of the human beings who have to use it.