Lovely letter from an Economist reader:
SIR – The cartoon controversy brings to mind an aphorism by the American humourist Sam Levenson: “It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.”
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Trading standards and free software
Wonderful piece in the Times by Gervase Markham, who looks after licensing for the Mozilla Foundation.
A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.
I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).
Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:
“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.
“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”
I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?
Who indeed? Sometimes, it’s difficult to explain altruism to people. Sigh.
Thanks to Seb for the link.
Our mistake
Thoughtful Guardian column by Martin Kettle. Excerpt:
In Vasily Grossman’s remarkable novel Life and Fate, there is a powerful scene in which two Bolsheviks encounter one another as prisoners in one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1942. The younger Bolshevik, Abarchuk, who is convinced he is there in error, remains a believer in the cause; but his older mentor, Magar, has gained wisdom through experience. When the two comrades snatch what turns out to be their final conversation, Magar looks around the camp and distils their years of revolutionary experience in words of terrible simplicity and force. “We made a mistake,” he tells Abarchuk. “And this is what our mistake has led to.”
It has become increasingly hard for a truthful person not to apply those same words to the situation facing the US and Britain in Iraq. It is not Stalin’s Russia and Bush’s Iraq that are the same, of course. It is the dreadful clarity of Magar’s conclusion about the way events can evolve. In Iraq we too made a mistake. Adapting a comment by the 19th-century diplomat Talleyrand, I see Britain’s role in the invasion not as a crime, but as an error – and the scenes of desecration and murder this week across Iraq are what our mistake has led to.
A billion legal downloads!
Yes, siree! The Apple iTunes store has sold its billionth song.
The billionth song, ”Speed of Sound,” was purchased as part of Coldplay’s “X&Y” album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner, he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods, and a $10,000 Music Card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, to commemorate this milestone, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School in his name.
I wish some corporate psychiatrist from Harvard Business School would write a comprehensive explanation of why the music industry didn’t see the opportunity.
Flann rides again!
Well, well. An amazing report on BBC Online on how a fleeting placement of Flann O’Brien’s surreal novel, The Third Policeman, on the cult TV series, Lost, has led to an upsurge in sales.
More than 15,000 copies were sold in the three weeks following the Lost episode airing in the US – equalling sales of the previous six years.
O’Brien (whose real name was Brian O’Nolan) played a big role in what might loosely be called my literary development, in that I was once thrown out of the National Library in Dublin because I had been reading back numbers of his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times and was overcome with uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. A stern custodian escorted me to the door. I had been obliged to resort to the National Library because my mother regarded the Irish Times, the house organ of the Protestant Ascendancy, as a publication of the devil, and would not — as she put it — “have that heathen rag in the house”.
There are two good Wikipedia pages on O’Brien — one about his novels, the other on his newspaper column, but by far the best online reference is Carol Taaffe’s splendid essay.
For such an outrageously funny and original man, O’Brien seems to have had a pretty miserable life — as captured in the title of Anthony Cronin’s workmanlike biography — No Laughing Matter: the life and times of Flann O’Brien. He died in 1966.
How to deal with a DOPE
Hilarious piece by David Pogue in the NYT. Sample:
Eventually you will get to a person. You will tell him/her why you are calling, and most likely you will be told you have to call someone else. They will offer to transfer you, but before they do, GET THE EXTENSION NUMBER. This is very important, especially when (not if) you get cut off. Note that it is a seven-digit extension number.
While waiting, pause and ponder the size and complexity of a company that needs an extension number the size of your phone number.
Now you are getting close. You will eventually get to someone who after getting your name, address, problem, and again, Express Service code, will say the magic words, “I can help you with that problem.” You have now contacted a Dell Offshore Personal Expert – a DOPE.
Some notes on this part of the process:
* The DOPE will probably call you by your first name, because he/she wants to be your new best friend.
* He/she will profusely thank you at every step of the way for the same reason.
* He/she will have a notable American name like Patrick, Matthew or even a Shaun. Do not react to this.
But congratulations; YOU HAVE REACHED SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING TO HELP YOU! You reached the ninth circle, and all you have to do is return.
Dave Winer on Google Page Creator
Pithy comment by Dave on Google’s latest (rather feeble) brainwave…
This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.
Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities.
Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.
Score: C.
Hmmm… Just tried to use it. Got a message saying that due to overwhelming demand it wasn’t available right now.
Wi-Fibre
From Technology Review…
Atop each of the Trump towers in New York City, there’s a new type of wireless transmitter and receiver that can send and receive data at rates of more than one gigabit per second — fast enough to stream 90 minutes of video from one tower to the next, more than one mile apart, in less than six seconds. By comparison, the same video sent over a DSL or cable Internet connection would take almost an hour to download.
This system is dubbed “WiFiber” by its creator, GigaBeam, a Virginia-based telecommunications startup. Although the technology is wireless, the company’s approach — high-speed data transferring across a point-to-point network — is more of an alternative to fiber optics, than to Wi-Fi or Wi-Max, says John Krzywicki, the company’s vice president of marketing. And it’s best suited for highly specific data delivery situations.
This kind of point-to-point wireless technology could be used in situations where digging fiber-optic trenches would disrupt an environment, their cost be prohibitive, or the installation process take too long, as in extending communications networks in cities, on battlefields, or after a disaster.
Don’t you just love the way a battlefield application is sneaked in?
Why does the content mouse terrify the technology elephant?
One of the things that baffles me is why the relatively puny copyright industries (movies, music, publishing) seem to terrify the massive computing and telecoms industries. Thanks, then, to Bill Thompson for pointing me to this post. Excerpt:
The total cost of Peter Jackson’s King Kong was somewhere north of US$200 million. That’s quite a bit, but such big-budget blockbusters are rare, and you can make and market a Hollywood movie for well under half that figure. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain had a production budget of only US$14 million.
In the tech industry, the price of a new fab is currently around US$5 billion, a price that puts such facilities out of reach for all but the biggest players like Intel and IBM. Still, that’s 25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 five million dollar episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos. My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world. Or, for the full price of a fab, they could fund almost a decade worth of low- and medium-budget content to give away as an inducement for people to buy hardware.
Intel, IBM, and other tech companies with large investments in Linux know full well that you can sell a lot of hardware by giving away the software. Why not give away the content too? How many dollars worth of media center, home networking, and home network attached storage hardware could you sell if consumers knew that there were terabytes of free, unencumbered, high-definition, processor-intensive, storage-hungry, bandwidth burning, digital content awaiting them on the Internet—content that they could copy, share, and shuffle around among as many newly purchased media devices as they like?
Tor
Interesting application of net technology — Tor.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.
It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor’s hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.