The more they hyped, the lounder they whinge
Terriific “NYT” piece exposing the whingeing hypocrisy of a departing telecoms analyst.

“JACK B. GRUBMAN, the former star telecommunications analyst who resigned on Thursday from Salomon Smith Barney, wants your sympathy.

Sure, he made $20 million a year urging investors to buy untested telecom stocks even as they nose-dived. And yes, he is walking away with almost $32 million in cash and stock even after most of the companies he followed are in tatters. Still, Mr. Grubman wants you to know that he, too, is a victim.”

Grubman, for example, advised investors to buy or hold WorldCom stock in the fall of 2000 when shares stood at $25, predicting that the price would hit $87. WorldCom shares closed on Friday at 12 cents. I’m always astonished that people take these analysts seriously.

My friend, Elias Bredsdorff, is dead

http://www.slagelsebib.dk/forfatternet/billeder/eliasbredsdorff.jpgNice obituary in the Guardian by a mutual friend, Dorothy Wedderburn. Elias had an amazing life. He became famous as the definitive biographer of Hans Christian Andersen, but in a way that was the least interesting thing about him. He was in the Danish Resistance during the war and was the only man I knew who had known both Leon Trotsky and Bertrand Russell. My children loved him because he was tall and elegant and courteous in an old-world way, and they recognised immediately that he was, in some way, genuinely distinguished. To this day, every time we pass his College — Peterhouse — they sing out “Elias’s college!”

Bill Atkinson on what might have been

In my book, I have a piece about the significant of HyperCard as a precursor to the Web. Essentially, Bill Atkinson — the inventor of HyperCard — had the entire associative linking concept, except that he thought all the links worth making were between things on your own hard disk. Now, in a poignant Wired piece, he ruminates on his mistake.

“I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard,” he said from his studio in Menlo Park, California. “I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I’d grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser.”

HyperCard was conceived and created in the 1980s, almost a decade before the explosion of the Internet.

“I thought everyone connected was a pipe dream,” he said. “Boy, was I wrong. I missed that one.”

Atkinson recalled engineers at Apple drawing network schematics in the form of a bunch of boxes linked together. Sun engineers, however, first drew the network’s backbone and then hung boxes off of it. It’s a critical difference, and he feels it hindered him.

“If I thought more globally, I would have envisioned (HyperCard) in that way,” he said. “You don’t transfer someone’s website to your hard drive to look at it. You browse it piecemeal…. It’s much more powerful than a stack of cards on your hard drive.

“With a 100-year perspective, the real value of the personal computer is not spreadsheets, word processors or even desktop publishing,” he added. “It’s the Web.”

Excellent Salon piece on the dogged obtuseness of the record companies

“The Berman bill could be seen as a new low for the industry — further indication that it sees the fight against MP3s as its defining cause and will go to any length to pursue it, no matter how outrageous. During the last three years, the battle against file sharing has become the entertainment industry’s version of the War on Drugs, an expensive, protracted, apparently ineffective and seemingly misguided battle against a contraband that many suggest does little harm. The labels’ main strategy — busting the biggest dealers in an attempt to strangle the supply of free MP3s, while offering few palatable solutions to stem the demand — is a classic tactic from the War on Drugs book, and it has failed just as clearly. Despite the RIAA’s recent settlement with AudioGalaxy — in which the trading service agreed to make available only those songs that it had formal permission to list, an agreement that renders AudioGalaxy useless — researchers believe that more people are trading music than ever before…”

[ More.]

The piece also includes a really useful quote about the Berman bill:
“It’s not that different from making it legal to break into someone’s house to make sure they don’t have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall,” says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application.

The Berman bill provides a vivid illustration of who imbalanced things have become. It treats IP as an absolute right rather than a community-bestowed one, and seeks to justify appalling behaviour in defence of property. Well, there was a time when owners of land were allowed to behave like that. But, at least in the UK, one is no longer allowed to shoot or injure someone just because he is trespassing on your property — or even (c.f. the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for shooting a burglar) someone who is breaking into your home. That’s because over the centuries, British society evolved a balance between (i) the rights of property-owners and (ii) reserving the right to exercise force to lawful authorities.

My Observer column about Cambridge’s proposed new policy on intellectual property is on the Web.

BlogTree.Com is “the blog genealogy site. You can register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation. You can also search for existing blogs and view which blogs they in turn inspired.” Great idea! [Scripting News]

Paul Boutin explains how to record vinyl on a Mac.

Useful review of PressPlay

by Steve McCannell.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘Politics of Control’ Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act. Q&A with Benjamin G. Edelman. There are a few specific examples that make it all fit together. Certainly, this filtering is an example of control, someone getting between you and where you want to go. You want to read about breast cancer, N2H2 says that that’s pornography, and so they won’t let you. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Really good review of Larry Lessig’s Future of Ideas

Reviewed by Arthur Morin.