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Someone asked me what I meant by "amortize" in my thoughts on Balancing the Swinging the Seesaw. Since I'm fond of metaphors, I dragged yet another one (home mortgages) into play.

Amortize: "To write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period."

When I think about an application, there's a certain expenditure one must make with respect to design. I can do it quick and cheap now and incur most of the cost later when I'm confronted with issues of scalability, interop, and extensibility. Or I can spend a time at the start by modeling and designing for flexibility and extensibility, and consequently avoid compound interest in the future. Think of purchasing an old fixer-upper home: you can select from a couple of properties on the market. First, you want something with the a sound footing and an inexpensive price. Also, you'll probably need a mortgage. The smaller the down payment, the larger the total cost. So ideally, you want your down payment to be as large a portion of the total price as possible. But, your initial cash reserve is limited, so you commit to your down payment and then you can at least move in and start fixing the house and increasing its value. Same thing with applications! In the end you want to move in and improve where most needed, but you also want something with a sound architectural footing. That's a balancing act, though sometimes there's design principles and technologies that lessen (win/win) immediate and future costs. RDF has a great architectural footing those who don't like it are doomed to reinvent it poorly but an immediate/localized cost of comprehension. For example, in RSS 1.0 the order semantic of RDF sequences imposes a cost without much benefit. It's a sequence, but you don't know what sort of sequence: a mandatory RDF artifact for an optional feature doesn't make much sense to me.

Plus, in the great marketplace of ideas, no single design/technology is guaranteed to succeed. Spending too much time on any single technology at the start might be an unwise investment. (Torvalds' theory on design and project management is useful reading on this note.)

Someone asked me what I meant by "amortize" in my thoughts on Balancing the Swinging the Seesaw. Since I'm fond of metaphors, I dragged yet another one (home mortgages) into play.

Amortize: "To write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period."

When I think about an application, there's a certain expenditure one must make with respect to design. I can do it quick and cheap now and incur most of the cost later when I'm confronted with issues of scalability, interop, and extensibility. Or I can spend a time at the start by modeling and designing for flexibility and extensibility, and consequently avoid compound interest in the future. Think of purchasing an old fixer-upper home: you can select from a couple of properties on the market. First, you want something with the a sound footing and an inexpensive price. Also, you'll probably need a mortgage. The smaller the down payment, the larger the total cost. So ideally, you want your down payment to be as large a portion of the total price as possible. But, your initial cash reserve is limited, so you commit to your down payment and then you can at least move in and start fixing the house and increasing its value. Same thing with applications! In the end you want to move in and improve where most needed, but you also want something with a sound architectural footing. That's a balancing act, though sometimes there's design principles and technologies that lessen (win/win) immediate and future costs. RDF has a great architectural footing those who don't like it are doomed to reinvent it poorly but an immediate/localized cost of comprehension. For example, in RSS 1.0 the order semantic of RDF sequences imposes a cost without much benefit. It's a sequence, but you don't know what sort of sequence: a mandatory RDF artifact for an optional feature doesn't make much sense to me.

Plus, in the great marketplace of ideas, no single design/technology is guaranteed to succeed. Spending too much time on any single technology at the start might be an unwise investment. (Torvalds' theory on design and project management is useful reading on this note.)

Someone asked me what I meant by "amortize" in my thoughts on Balancing the Swinging the Seesaw. Since I'm fond of metaphors, I dragged yet another one (home mortgages) into play.

Amortize: "To write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period."

When I think about an application, there's a certain expenditure one must make with respect to design. I can do it quick and cheap now and incur most of the cost later when I'm confronted with issues of scalability, interop, and extensibility. Or I can spend a time at the start by modeling and designing for flexibility and extensibility, and consequently avoid compound interest in the future. Think of purchasing an old fixer-upper home: you can select from a couple of properties on the market. First, you want something with the a sound footing and an inexpensive price. Also, you'll probably need a mortgage. The smaller the down payment, the larger the total cost. So ideally, you want your down payment to be as large a portion of the total price as possible. But, your initial cash reserve is limited, so you commit to your down payment and then you can at least move in and start fixing the house and increasing its value. Same thing with applications! In the end you want to move in and improve where most needed, but you also want something with a sound architectural footing. That's a balancing act, though sometimes there's design principles and technologies that lessen (win/win) immediate and future costs. RDF has a great architectural footing those who don't like it are doomed to reinvent it poorly but an immediate/localized cost of comprehension. For example, in RSS 1.0 the order semantic of RDF sequences imposes a cost without much benefit. It's a sequence, but you don't know what sort of sequence: a mandatory RDF artifact for an optional feature doesn't make much sense to me.

Plus, in the great marketplace of ideas, no single design/technology is guaranteed to succeed. Spending too much time on any single technology at the start might be an unwise investment. (Torvalds' theory on design and project management is useful reading on this note.)

http://goatee.net/2003/07#_02we-a

Design By Committee: "...Yes, you understand me correctly, I'm more worried about the size and character of the community than the actual technical issue."

http://goatee.net/2002/03.html#_19tu

"Deployment Vertigo: the rapid advancement of the leading edge of technology (e.g., Moore's Law) when combined with conservative adoption (e.g., Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003) induces a sense of vertigo akin to Hitchcock's famous track-out/zoom-in shot....."

I'd like to see a way of cleaning up and populating my reading list using the Amazon API, so I've written a small python script that works in straightforward cases -- no heuristics for correcting mistaken titles or author names and such. fun with xml and booklists

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

One of the most immediate ways you can help is to stop perpeutating the linguistic fraud.

http://goatee.net/2002/03#_26tu

02.03.26.tu | propaganda (part 3)

Honestly! I had not intended to return to the frustrating
topic of copyright for some time but Michael Eisner's commentary in
the Financial Times has provided an opportune example of the
misleading usage of the "property".

Abe Lincoln and the internet pirates: The great Emancipator's
forthright defence of intellectual property rights holds true
today.

What was that forthright defense? The statement that the restriction
of speech and ideas, "secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the
exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest
to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and
useful things." I do not disagree with Abe Lincoln, but I do disagree
with Eisner because while he may laud the principle he has distorted
and abused its application. And those of us that get fed-up with
Eisner and his ilk sometimes lash out at the whole artfully
constructed facade. This is a dangerous position for us to be in; as I
wrote two years ago, "... it's difficult to voice this opinion because
the small encroachments of copyright and patent that led to the
present system are largely unseen. It's a creeping heaviness, but to
complain of the invisible weight is thought to be unreasonable."
However, my own reason does begin to fray when presented with a
continued discrepancy between noble principles and unprincipled
action: the perpetual extension of the original 14 year copyright term
, the censoring of research, the theft of authors works via an
underhanded amendment making all recordings works-for-hire, the
acquisition of mp3.com by Universal which then slashed artist pay by
80%, the decreasing costs of producing CDs but the increasing price of
purchase, the debt many artists are saddled with when producing an
album, the likely destruction of small Internet radio feeds, and the
royalties we all pay to the recording industry when we buy a blank
CD-ROM (regardless of its use!). At times, in exasperation, I think
that the likes of Eisner are not capable of honest argument: they
mouth the words, "freedom, author, consumer, innovation", but their
actions call out, "money and power." (In an ironic twist of naming
duplicity, the law that I wrote my senator about a week ago was
introduced this week as the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television
Promotion Act!) But I digress, I've said all this before, it'll
probably get worse before it gets better, and my goal is to look at
how Eisner effects his spin.

In asserting the importance of physical and intellectual property
rights in a democracy, Lincoln echoed the views of 17th-century
thinkers such as John Locke, whose phrase "life, liberty and
property" inspired the Founding Fathers.

Sorry Mr. Eisner, our Founding Fathers did not equate these limited
monopolies on thought to "property." They approached this topic with
care and concern: a limited monopoly (a detriment) balanced against a
requirement to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts"
(a benefit). Evidence of that care can be found in our Declaration of
Independence in which Jefferson wrote of, "Life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness."

It is as American as the apple pie that one may not take off a
neighbour's kitchen ledge.

But ideas are not apple pies. They are more like recipes that can be
exchanged between friends and improved upon: "why fight over a slice
of pie when through cooperation we can double its size?!"

AvantGo fragments the Web and encourages sites to remove their Palm accessible content in favor content available only through their propietary interface. Read about it at: http://goatee.net/2000/06#19mo

http://goatee.net/2000/07#_10mo

Come on, Deckard, show me what you're made of.
Proud of yourself, little man? My turn.
I'm going to give you a few seconds before I come. I'm coming.
Four, five, try to stay alive. Come on, get it up!
Unless you're alive you can't play. And if you don't play .... [you're dead].
Six, seven, go to hell or go to heaven. - Roy, Blade Runner.

BBC news is reporting that in an upcoming Channel 4 documentary, Ridley Scott acknowledges that Deckard is a replicant. Anyone familiar with the film knows this to be the case, but Scott's refusal to address the question fueled the most salient ambiguity of the film -- it's the door way to other fun speculation and analysis. In Parting of the Mist: Analysis of Blade-Runner [Italian translation], I not only presented much of the evidence that Deckard is a replicant, but argued that the film portrays the interaction of Deckard (who does not realize he is a replicant) and the other replicants (who do). While their interactions are apparently violent, it is ultimately a form of marriage, transference, and an exhortation by the dying for Deckard to carry on.

I'm not sure what the documentary will offer over Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, but I look forward to seeing it.