Explaining free software to lay people

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I’m very interested in finding way of communicating the essence of important technological issues to lay audiences. The advantages of open source software are readily obvious to techies, but opaque to anyone who has never written a computer program.

So when I talk about open source software nowadays I find it helpful to talk about cooking recipes without mentioning computers at all. To communicate the importance of the ‘freedom to tinker’ that free software bestows on its users, for example, I invite people to ponder the absurdity of not being allowed to modify other people’s recipes for, say, Boeuf Bourgignon or fruit scones. I often make BB without using shallots, for example, and just chop standard onions into largish chunks. (It saves time and IMHO doesn’t materially affect the ultimate taste. And if a purist objects, I can always christen my modified recipe “Beef in red wine” and tell him to go to hell!)

Similarly, to illustrate the difference between open source software and compiled binaries I compare Hovis bread-mix (“just add water”)

with a recipe for baking bread.

Most people grasp intuitively that the ‘open-source’ recipe gives you certain important freedoms that the ‘compiled’ bread-mix doesn’t.

Now comes an equally homely way of communicating to a lay audience what a news aggregator does.

A blogger compiled her own table of contents for several fashion magazines, mashing them up to make the one magazine she wanted (instead of the half-dozen ad-filled craptacular glossy anorexia advertisements that she had). If you’re struggling to explain the value of aggregators to offline people, this is a good place to start: magazines are often only 10% relevant to you, so what if you could extract the few good articles from a lot of mediocre magazines to get one really good magazine?

Why the steam media still don’t ‘get’ Wikipedia

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Insightful essay by David Weinberger. Excerpt:

The media literally can’t hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance : If you claim to know X, then you’ve also been claiming that you’re right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree). The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures.

Nikon plans to abandon film cameras

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Sign of the times. According to today’s New York Times,

The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras.

The company, based in Tokyo, is the latest to join an industrywide shift toward digital photography, which has exploded in popularity. Rivals like Kodak and Canon have already shifted most of their camera production into digital products.

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models “one by one,” though it refused to specify when.

A company spokesman said Nikon made the decision because sales of film cameras have plunged. In the most recent fiscal year ended March 2005, Nikon said that film camera bodies accounted for 3 percent of the 180 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in sales at the company’s camera and imaging division. That is down from 16 percent the previous year.

By contrast, sales of digital cameras have soared, the company said, jumping to 75 percent of total sales in the year ended March 2005, from 47 percent three years earlier. Scanners and other products account for the remainder of the division’s sales.

“The market for film cameras has been shrinking dramatically,” the company spokesman, Akira Abe, said. “Digital cameras have become the norm.”

So my lovely old Nikon F3 is destined to become a valuable antique? Maybe, maybe not. From another part of the CES forest, David Pogue (also of the NYT) reports:

In one CES panel, an analyst from InfoTrends noted that cameraphones now outnumber non-cameraphones. She also noted that 78% of under-18-year-olds take a cameraphone picture at least once a week.

Another InfoTrends analyst reported, surprisingly, that digital camera sales have actually peaked, and has [sic] declined since last year. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are feeling the pain: Konica Minolta has exited the Canadian market, Sony and Olympus have cut camera production and workforces, and the Kyocera/Yashica/Contax corporation has exited the digital camera market entirely.

Letter to Apple Support

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From Jason Kottke.

Hello,

I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. “Four to fives times faster,” I sobbed, “a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen.”

My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.

Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,

-jason

Hmmm… Quentin’s PowerBook had a dreadful accident some time back and his insurance company paid up a few days ago. But instead of rushing out and buying a new machine he decided to wait for Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote, and is now looking very smug at the prospect of a major coup in the Gadget Wars! Bah.

No ‘Intel Inside’ outside!

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Surprise, surprise! Apple’s new desktop and laptop computers have Intel CPUs, but according to Silicon.com

they don’t show the chipmaker’s presence on the outside.

Most brand-name PCs that use Intel processors take part in the “Intel Inside” programme, which gives the computer makers marketing dollars for displaying the chipmaker’s logo on their products and in their advertising.

But Apple decided not to sign on to the programme with the line-up of Intel-based Macs that CEO Steve Jobs introduced at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday.

Er, why not? The answer, according to Good Morning, Silicon Valley, is because the ‘Intel Inside’ logo “evokes a gag reflex” in many longterm Apple customers!

A little in-joke for techies

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From CNET News.com…

In a bit of unintended humor, Wall Street closed Apple’s stock Tuesday, the day the company unveiled its first Intel processor-based computers at Macworld, at $80.86.

(Note for non-techies: the Intel 8086 processor was the CPU that spawned the processor architecture of the Wintel PC family.)

Many thanks to Neil MacNeil for spotting it.

Right-wing madness in the NYT

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The incomparable Scott Rosenberg has picked up on something I’ve been wondering about, namely why is the New York Times giving so much op-ed space to right-wing crazies?

Part of his answer reads:

There must be an argument going through someone’s head at the Times that goes like this: Their newspaper is under assault from the right, most recently because of its exposure of the Bush administration’s illegal-wiretap power grab; so it must achieve the impression of “balance” by presenting these op-ed voices from the right. But really, to balance the Cato people you’d have to find some wild-eyed leftist arguing that, say, all oil companies should be nationalized tomorrow.

The greatest achievement of the right over the past decade — oh, setting aside the seizure of “all three branches of government” in the wake of a disputed election, the plundering of the Treasury, and the derailing of the war on al-Qaida — is this: By a wide swath of American opinion-makers, “balance” is understood to mean that the usual welter of mainstream American voices needs to be weighed down by a gang of beady-eyed ideologues on right-wing think-tank payrolls who can barely construct a sensible argument.

US journalism is in a desperate state — and has been ever since Reagan’s time. Part of the problem is the delusion that ‘balancing’ opposing views is a way of avoiding bias. Paul Krugman memorably satirised this delusion in an amusing parable. If George W. Bush said that the earth is flat, the US media would report it under the headline: “Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.”

But the earth isn’t flat, and any journalist with a commitment to the truth has an obligation to say so. Otherwise he’s just lending credibility to nonsense by implying that it must somehow be weighed equally with sense.

“Balance as bias” is also the basis for the lunatic proposition that creationism (aka “Intelligent Design”) ought to be accorded the same epistemological status as evolution in US schools.

Download news

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From Good morning, Silicon Valley…

OK, maybe there’s something to this … what do they call it? … this downloading thing after all. The yuletide season proved a lucrative one for the recording industry. Driven by a plethora of iPods left under tree and menorah, legal downloads achieved a new record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. According to Nielsen SoundScan, legal downloads nearly hit the 20 million mark in those seven days — almost three times the number of tracks downloaded in the same period the year before. That’s a phenomenal spike and one that suggests we’ve undergone a fundamental shift in the way we consume music. And indeed we have: NPD Group recently confirmed that MP3 player sales now exceed CD player sales in the U.S.