John DeLorean, RIP

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John Zachary DeLorean, a handsome chap who gave innocent amusement to millions (and relieved the British taxpayer of quite a lot of dosh), has died at the age of 80. His company, DeLorean Motor, produced only one model, the DMC-12, but it made a lasting impression as an unpainted, stainless steel-bodied sports car with gull-wing doors. (It was the car in the Back to the Future movies.)

DeLorean Motor corporation had a hectic but brief life. Its founder set it up in Northern Ireland during the height of the ‘troubles’ when nobody would invest in the embattled province. The UK government, unable to believe its luck, gave DeLorean massive subsidies and tax-breaks to come to Northern Ireland. He produced about 9,000 cars before going bankrupt in 1982. Soon afterwards, US authorities charged him with selling cocaine to prop up its finances. This led my fellow-countrymen to propose a new marketing slogan for the company: “Things go better with Coke”. (JZD was acquitted in 1984 after a sensational trial.) The taxpayer may be richer as a result of his passing, but the world is poorer! The NYT says that restored DMC-12s sell for $30k. Wonder if there’s one on eBay.

Picking up the tab

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One of the nicest things about modern browsers (like Safari and Firefox) is that they enable tabbed browsing — enabling you to open a tab on an existing page for a related link, rather than having to overwrite the page or open a new window. Like all great ideas, it’s astonishingly simple. But where did the idea of tabs originate? Ed Tenner (author of several thoughtful books on technology) has written a nice essay on the history of this great little idea. Sample:

The tabs story begins in the Middle Ages, when the only cards were gambling paraphernalia. Starting in the late 14th century, scribes began to leave pieces of leather at the edges of manuscripts for ready reference. But with the introduction of page numbering in the Renaissance, they went out of fashion.

The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card. Libraries had previously listed their books in bound ledgers. During the French Revolution, authorities divided the nationalized collections of monasteries and aristocrats among public institutions, using the backs of playing cards to record data about each volume.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

Software patents — the sordid reality (contd.)

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Owen Barder’s Blog pointed me towards an instructive post in Groklaw. It concerns the pressure Microsoft allegedly applied to Denmark’s Prime Minister in order to soften his government’s opposition to the European Commission’s Directive on software patents. Groklaw runs this translation of an article in a Danish newspaper.

The founder of the world’s largest software company, Bill Gates, is now ready to shut down Navision in Denmark and move around 800 developers behind Denmark’s biggest software success to the US.

The Microsoft leader made that clear, when he meet with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Economic and Business Minister Bendt Bendtsen and Science Minister Helge Sander in November.

The threat risks being executed if part of the IT business manages to block the disputed EU directive on patenting software, that Microsoft wants so dearly, but time and time again has been postponed thanks to efficient lobbying by anti-patent opposition.

“If I am to keep my development center in Denmark, I must have clarity on the rights issue. Otherwise I will move to the US, where I can protect my rights,” said Gates according to to Microsoft Chief Attorney Marianne Wier, who also attended the meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

If this is true, the results were mixed. On the one hand, the Danes did back off; on the other, staff in Microsoft’s Danish operation started to panic over the future (or otherwise) of their jobs. This prompted an emergency email to all staff from a senior Microsoft executive which (according to a leaked copy) reads:

Dear all,

  You may have seen the front page article in Børsen today with the headline: Gates threatens to move Navision. The article outlines how the current EU disagreement over software patent protection endangers our development centre here in Vedbæk. Let me be very clear about this:  

Microsoft has absolutely no plans to move the centre.

We are completely committed to Vedbæk and its current location.  

The journalist has linked Microsoft’s known and outspoken attitude towards patent protection with some internal disagreements in EU regarding this software patent.  

Microsoft is very much in favour of software patent protection – we believe this is the only way to ensure innovation and development of state-of-the-art software. Bill Gates has spoken of this numerous times in different situations. And yes, he has also made our opinion very clear to the Danish government. Let there be no doubt that Microsoft believes patent protection is necessary in order to protect our innovative work. We will continue to argue in favour of this but it is not the only aspect which we consider when investing in R&D.  

If patents were the only thing determining where we locate our development sites then we would probably not have a site in China or in India.  

I just wanted to briefly reassure you – you have absolutely nothing to worry about in terms of Vedbæk’s future. We are in dialogue with the journalist whom we hope to be able to present a more nuanced picture of the situation.

Don’t you just love the word “nuanced’! Note the clue that the boys in Redmond regard the Indians and the Chinese as a bunch of no-good pirates. And isn’t it interesting to learn that Microsoft intends to break the habits of a corporate lifetime and take up “innovation”?

Quote of the day

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We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositons that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

Bill Moyers, “Welcome to Doomsday”, New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005.

The end of the IRA?

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Great piece by Robin Wilson on Open Democracy.

For thirty years the leadership of the IRA has managed to withstand everything – from internment without trial to Bloody Sunday to the blandishments of Tony Blair – the British state has thrown at it. Now, a vigorous campaign for justice by a group of five women from a tiny Catholic ghetto in east Belfast, Robert McCartney’s sisters, has the seven men of the IRA army council running around like headless chickens. In a second wonderful irony, their leading member Paula McCartney is a women’s studies student.

In a metaphorical sense, it is like the falling of the Berlin wall, when all the old political strategies became redundant overnight and the exponents of “newspeak” start to look shabby and discredited. Yet Blair (something of an expert in newspeak himself) continues to engage with Adams and McGuinness, via his private emissary Jonathan Powell, as if nothing had happened.

The government in Dublin, especially the justice minister Michael McDowell, has adopted a much stiffer, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you, stance. The Republican leaders, previously feted as peacemakers and statesmen, are finding doors slamming in their faces in Washington, even amidst the St Patrick’s Day schmaltz and shamrockry. The hitherto Sinn Féin-friendly Guardian has scuttled sharply away from its fellow-travelling op-ed pages; the Boston Globe has compared the IRA to the Mafia; and the Republicans’ strongest Congressional supporters, Peter King and Edward Kennedy, have advocated the IRA’s disbandment. In a third spectacular irony, it is the McCartney sisters (Paula, Catherine, Gemma, Claire and Donna), as well as Robert McCartney’s fiancée Bridgeen Hagans who are being welcomed to the White House while Adams is frozen out.

Defining childhood

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One of the books that shaped my thinking about media was the late, great Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood in which he argued that ‘childhood’ — viewed as a protected period in a human being’s life before s/he was deemed fit to play a full role in society — was a social artefact rather than a fact of life. Postman argued that childhood was effectively extended by the invention of printing, because it took longer to get kids to the point where they could fully participate in a print-based society, whereas in an oral society full competence could be achieved by about the age of seven. (Which, incidentally, is probably why the medieval church defined the ‘age of reason’ as seven. When I was growing up, this was the age at which one made one’s First Communion.) His book was mainly about the social impact of broadcast television, which he argued was pushing down the age of competence to lower than medieval values. In a memorable passage, he claimed that American children had become ‘competent’ television viewers by the age of three (which was why one never saw remedial classes offered in television viewing!)

What brought this to mind today was an interesting review by Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary Supplement of HUCK’s RAFT: A history of American childhood by Steven Mintz (Harvard University Press). If I didn’t already have a pile of books-waiting-to-be-read a yard high, I might even buy it.