Think about this: These are people who depend on the products of technology to make their money. They need geeks. They don't know what they're doing. They probably believed it when they told people they had an uncopyable format. They certainly could have used a secure encryption technique. They didn't.
They need us. They need us bad. They are attacking those they need, just when they need coders worse than ever. There are going to be many times down the road when they need more intelligent coders (like Jon) than they've got. And every time they need one, we'll be there. But they'll never know whether they have a coder who's smart enough to know what they need (and, therefore, smart enough to know what they did).
They haven't got a chance.
If you haven't read Frank Herbert's short story "Committee of the Whole," you owe it to yourself to do it now.
Perhaps it is time for us to stand up and say, "I am Spartacus! I am Jon Lech Johansen! I am a coder! I reverse engineered CSS!"
An interesting experiment I tried...
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...many years ago in a college journalism class:
My instructor was also the head of the Journalism Department. And he liked to give little "news conferences" where he would pretend to be a news source (which he almost was) and we would pretend to be reporters (which we almost were). We would ask questions and then write stories based on the pseudo-event.
As I was usually bored to tears, I developed a little game: I would see how much I could change his quotes without getting caught. I never changed the meaning of anything. But I was able to change the actual words almost all the time. Needless to say, this would have been highly unethical in a real-world scenario unless you knew a great deal about how the person being misquoted really talked (his or her style as it is analyzed in this book). An offended quotee might easily say, "I would never say it that way!" But I never got caught because, as a captive audience, students DO get a good chance to learn how their professors speak. I made him sound more like himself than even he did.
I'm sure this story has some relevance to the field of study this book addresses. But I'm not sure what it is.
It would be interesting to know if the author would find it easier or harder to spot faked style examples than the person being faked.
It would also be interesting to know how much of the distinguishing characteristics of a person's prose are stylistic in nature and how much is semantic. (Both seem to be implied by the review.)
It seems like there may be some implications for NPC AIs in CRPGs as well: If one could codify a wide variety of speaking styles, one could give each NPC a distinctive voice with much less design overhead.
BTW, I am the guy whose posts can easily be spotted by the elipses (...) which end most of my subject lines and begin most of my comments.
Technically, this is not a rebuttal of the Findings of Fact, but Microsoft's arguments for what they think should be concluded from the FoF. Of course, they say they "respectfully" disagree with the FoF, but will accept them for the sake of these arguments.
But Robin's characterization is not as far off as it sounds. Since they cannot really get from the facts as Judge Jackson originally ruled to the conclusions they want, they did try to refute the fact the judge ruled they have a monopoly.
This is a hint they are adopting an appeals-based strategy. To insult the judge by disagreeing with the judge on something he has already ruled on (for more than 25 pages, no less) indicates they believe they have no hope of winning at this level. The only way this kind of strategy can work is if -- by insulting the guy who's ruling on your case -- you can provoke him into doing something rash. Then you can get a ruling on appeal by showing he over-reached.
Not likely in this case: This is a conservative jurist who is likely to shade his Findings of Law in Microsoft's favor after shading his Findings of Fact in the government's favor. The result will be an appeal-proof compromise.
The really interesting thing about this filing is the fact that MS's lawyers still don't have the guts to tell a man who's got close to $100 billion that he blew it in his deposition. This is most interesting when you consider that MS shareholder money is being used to take actions which are probably not in their best interest (although breaking up the company -- an unlikely outcome, in my opinion -- would probably be the most favorable outcome from a stockholder viewpoint).
All you guys out there pretenting to be conspiracy theorists get this: I know you're just spreading these ideas (that Bill has been pushed out; that he needed time to monkey with the W2K APIs; that he's getting ready to jump ship; that Ballmer's his fall guy) to throw us off the scent.
The real conspiracy: Bill is really a nice guy who's been tricked through the years into doing evil things by Ballmer (yes, he is the anti-Christ) and Myhrvold (you didn't really believe he retired, did you?). Bill's much-vaunted turnabout on the Internet came when he got out of their clutches for a week, did a little surfing, and realized the truth (but not all of the truth).
The little-known fact: Bill is a bad liar. Ballmer has tried to make up for this through the years by fooling Bill into believing the things he needs to say. This works most of the time because the press needs Bill's cute face to sell magazines or whatever. But get Bill in the same room with a sympathetic pit bull like David Boies and he gets torn apart. (You owe it to yourself to see that video. Bill demonstrates brilliantly just how bad a liar he really is.)
The problem: Ballmer doesn't have the kind of PR face that Gates can put forward. He comes across in interviews as a Yuppie with a crack problem -- a bad crack problem.
The only thing that could save these guys now: the government breaks Microsoft up.
In a certain sense, Digital Research did open up their source at the time. It is my understanding they made their source available to just about anybody who wanted to port it to a new chip.
Their business model required that they get their operating system running on as many different computers as possible. They made their money selling apps for the system. Ironically many developers thought they abused their inside knowledge of CP/M to dominate that market and chose to develop for IBM/MS's PC-DOS instead when it came out.
It was the license indeed (as miniwookie suggests) that was their downfall. It never occurred to them someone would want to fork their code and use it to compete with them. But legal matters were never their strongest suit. Robert Cringely (in "Triumph of the Nerds") suggests their fear of IBM's NDAs was what caused them to pass up the most lucrative offer ever missed.
But don't blame them too much for not using the GPL. In fact, it is my understanding that this is the very deal which led to the open-source movement understanding the need to have a "public license" in the first place.
If anybody knows whether there is a connection there, I would be very interesting to see this confirmed in any way (or contradicted, if my understanding is in any way false).
Remember, too, this is the second settlement MS has agreed to with regard to the Digital Research code. They cut a deal with DRI rather than let a judge compare their source code to CP/M. So, the real thing they probably paid this $160 million for is probably so no court would have to rule on the accuracy of their claim that DR-DOS was "just a clone of MS-DOS" when the opposite was probably closer to the truth.
Remember, a lot of their mystique is based on the idea they were some kind of visionary coders. Their aura of invulnerability would be greatly hurt if it ever came out they stole the code that enabled the whole $400-billion rip-off.
"Fittest" does not mean "best"
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Darwinism doesn't make judgments about anything but "fitness to survive until reproduction." Definitely not "strongest" and maybe not even "most popular."
And that judgment is only made in the context of a particular fitness landscape of a particular time. One should expect that the fitness of a particular species of information would change over time.
Viva non-linear systems.
Proof: Information IS Darwinian & Counterproof
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The proof that Gopnick and Katz are wrong on this one is the fact that anyone who hates Jon can set their preferences so they don't have to see his column.
The proof they are right is the fact that most Katz-haters are too stupid to figure out how to do this.
I originally saw this script in essentially the same form over a year ago. Card tends to do lots of interesting things on the web, including a virtual community in which everybody pretends to be resident's of his Alvin Maker series.
Card suggests he has rewritten this, but I'm not sure how extensive the rewrite has been.
"That's a very interesting question because of how unimportant it is. The great thing about the web, the great thing about the web of humanity is that we're all important.
"And, in a way, a lot of the things which upset society are when we try to put people in order."
I used to think the archetype for pretense was people who used umlauts when writing in languages which do not have them (especially in those languages which use the same symbol for diaeresis). I always enjoyed the umlaut over the "n" in Spinal Tap as a great joke about such pretension in rock-and-roll.
But now I know the true archetype: those who misspell "pretension" when flaming those who are insufficiently pretentious to use umlauts (especially when claiming such is a mis-tmesis-spelling).
If they're not known by a single name, they don't qualify for my list. (OK, you may not know Ignaz Semmelweis by his last name, but you should. Click on the link.) Based on the criteria listed in this post, he qualifies before most of the others.
My only question is whether Einstein should be there, on account of the large number of erroneous things being said about him (even in "Time"). He didn't invent the bomb. (Didn't have anything to do with it, except signing a letter to Roosevelt. He rejected the underlying science to his death.) I use two criteria for including him: the originality of his ideas (although quantum mechanics is equally daring in its willingness to question our deepest-held ideas) and the fact that without him no one else would have arrived at the same conclusions for decades (perhaps centuries).
The Wright brothers probably deserve consideration (but do you count them as one or two on the list?) The same counting problem occurs with the quantum-mechanicians. Once you say "Bohr," you just about have to include Schroedinger and then the floodgates are open.
Based on the criteria given, you'd have to consider Dr. Charles R. Drew, who invented blood transfusion (with others) and who was then died because he was refused a transfusion at an all-white Southern hospital because he was black.
Genetic engineering is neither supremely benign nor is it the harbinger of global famine. It is a complex set of possibilities which include very dire and extraordinarily beneficial promise. It will take a large amount of effort to find the correct answer between the USDA's easy answer and the EU's easy answer.
What is absolutely clear is that if consumers and regulators look the other way the sole beneficiaries will be the agribusiness purveyors. Just look at the "benefits" so far. Fruits and veggies that don't spoil on the way to market. Theoretically this could mean lower prices, but so far it's just been larger profits.
Interestingly, some of the more frightening scenarios involve agribusiness attempts to develop Microsoft-style solutions, which require farmers to adopt techniques that lock them into the technology down the road. It reminds me of an experience from my farming days:
We (along with all the other farmers around us who were also growing alfalfa for hay) by a spraying company. Now, this was a little unusual because there is little reason to spray alfalfa. Cows eat it, but bugs usually don't. Cows are pretty easy to keep out of the fields without spraying.
The sprayer pointed out that we had aphids on our alfalfa. Now, aphids can be very bad on your roses. But they don't really like alfalfa that much. They may reduce your output by a few bales, but it takes a lot of aphids to really slow the growth of alfalfa.
So, we told them we didn't want to pay for the spraying. But our neighbors all went for it.
When the neighbors crops all got sprayed, all the aphids left their fields and came to ours. It was pretty strange. Walking through the field, your boots would get covered with green squashed aphids (aphids are kind of like miniature cows that give green milk).
It turned out that aphids in that quantity really can stunt the growth of the alfalfa. Of course, they would never reach that quantity without the spraying.
So, we hired the guy with the airplane to spray our alfalfa. And all the aphids jumped back onto our neighbors fields. Nobody ended up gaining anything except the sprayer. Of course, if you didn't spray, you risked your neighbors spraying and ruining your crop.
Essentially, the only way you could guarantee you would not get screwed majorly was by agreeing to be screwed minorly.
The implication, however, that the USDA has enthusiastically supported everything Monsanto and the other chemical companies do is simply not true. There have been examples of major conflicts between the two as well as cooperation.
And that's the way it should be. Psycho-libertarians notwithstanding, regulation does have a place from computer software to agribusiness. Anybody who assumes the free market will always advance the general good is easy prey to the Microsofts and Monsantos of the world.
Over-regulation is bad. Under-regulation is bad. Freedom can be taken away by governments. Freedom can be taken away by big corporations. Freedom can be taken away by guys with thick necks. Freedom can be taken away by guys with airplanes and big tanks of strange chemicals.
Freedom is easiest to take away when we are not paying attention. The easiest way to avoid paying attention is to adopt an ideology which gives us easy answers to difficult questions. Such an ideology can be based on the notion that government will always help (Communism). Such an ideology can be based on the notion that government is always the problem (psycho-libertarianism).
I do have the solution for the psycho-libertarians: Let them eat aphids.
I doubt you could make it legally required, but the important thing is to understand is that there is virtually no morally defensible reason not to open-source discontinued products. If you have promoted a product and promised to support it but found it economically unwise to continue, the least you can do for those who believed you is to allow them to continue to use it.
Perhaps the best way to handle it would be to come up with a code of programming conduct (The Code of Coding?) which would require that certain minimum standards be met. Then companies could announce their adherence to the code.
I suspect in fairly short order any company which did not adhere to the code would find it difficult to sell to large corporations. How could anybody justify purchase of very expensive software from a company that was not willing to say, "If we discontinue the product, we will not leave you in the lurch"? Especially if rivals were advertising their guarantees?
My suggestions for the Code:
All source code will be:
immediately released under the GPL, Artistic License, or similar license; or
available immediately if we ever discontinue support for the product; or
available as open source one year after any bankruptcy (excluding reorganizational) if none of the creditors agrees to support it in exchange for acquiring the rights to it.
all APIs for all programs will be published from the start.
file formats for all customer data will be fully documented or under the control of an independent standards body (like XML, SGML or HTML).
The only reason I can see for not adhering to item 1. above would be -- let's just say for the sake of argument -- you had stolen the source code for an operating system, made a few hundred billion off it, and were sure the release of the code would expose you as a felon.
Please note that I am not a lawyer and am sure the above is intended only as an idea, not as the proposed wording for an actual legally-binding document.
The problem with Red Hat et al. is not what they will do to Linux. The problem is not even that they cannot make money. The problem is they cannot make the kind of money Wall Street assumes they can make.
People who think Linux may beat Microsoft are hedging their MS portfolios by buying Linux stocks. What they fail to understand is that the reason Linux has been taking market share away from Windows is because MS charges $85 to $200 for an operating system that's worth about two bucks.
The only way they can get away with this is the network effects and the fact they hide the APIs. Once the public realizes they should never put software on their computers unless the APIs are openly published (even if they never understand the value of open source), no one will be able to rip off the computer-buying public again.
Nobody.
Not Microsoft, not VALinux, not Red Hat.
OSes will cost $2 to $15. Word processors will cost $8 up to a high end of 80 or 90 bucks for a full-fledged desktop publishing system.
A lot of people are just trying to get on the next gravy train. Well, the thing about Linux's success is that there shouldn't be a gravy train. People should not be able to take money from others by encrypting their files (that's what a non-open file format is) and holding them for "upgrade" ransom.
From the Charlie Rose Show on "Time"'s Person of the Century:
TIM BERNERS-LEE: "That's a very interesting question because of how unimportant it is. The great thing about the web, the great thing about the web of humanity is that we're all important.
"And, in a way, a lot of the things which upset society are when we try to put people in order."
Despite the fact that Dvorak likes to pretend there are no Linux Internet Appliances and that Microsoft is out in front on this one, this is the real thing. Still expensive, yes. But this is what the future has wrought. Or God. Or something.
Now, we should show them the true power of Open-Source by making some neat improvements. If TiVo continues to out-user-friendly ReplayTV because their source is open, the world will soon know the truth about Open Source.
I use it at work, where I have an extremely complex setup, using both cable and satellite dish and multiple VCRs as well as audio recorders.
Generally, it is designed to work with a set-top box and it integrates with a wide variety (obviously I haven't tested them all). They seem to imply it will work with cable without a set-top box, but I don't see how this could work since it doesn't seem to have an RF tuner (although it does offer RF output on Channel Three or Channel Four). Has anybody tried that?
The two main integration limitations - the above-mentioned missing tuner and the fact that it cannot switch easily back and forth between two sources (like satellite and digital cable). Admittedly this won't be a problem for most users, but the switching process requires that you go through the lengthy setup procedure each time.
All this feature really does is record things you might be interested in if you have unused space on the hard drive. There is a human element in that their professional TV watchers rate shows according to who might be interested based on similarities of taste.
But community-building is certainly within the scope of the system. Sounds like a good idea, and they have a phone number where you can make such suggestions. Overall, a very customer-oriented company.
You also have the ability to tell it what you like with "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons. Could this make your TV-watching homogeneous? Yes, but only if you only watched what it recommended.
The real advantage here is that, if it notices you always watch "Silicon Spin" on ZDTV and you get held up in traffic one day, it will automatically record it for you. Then you can come in five minutes after it has started and watch it from the beginning EVEN WHILE IT IS STILL RECORDING THE REST OF THE SHOW.
And, finally, you can turn the whole "recording things you didn't ask for" feature off. Then the homogeneity of your viewing habits will revert to whatever they might have been without TiVo.
All in all, having something recommend things you didn't choose will almost always decrease homogeneity more than it increases it.
I have the 14-hour version. It seems to me like the 30-hour version is a bit of a rip-off since you're basically paying double price for just a larger hard drive.
I make my tapes (audio) off the Medium Quality setting and have no problem (I make backups on VHS, but have never been forced to fall back on them).
Overall, the system is extremely user-friendly and the company is as well. They solicit feedback and make periodic upgrades when your system calls up theirs to download schedules. Tech-support seems to be there most of the time (since it's intended for home use, I guess this makes sense; people watch the tube all the time).
Watch out for the hidden costs, though. Salesmen in the stores may tell you the schedule subscription is optional, but it's not. You have to pay $200 (lifetime of unit) or $10/month whether you use the schedules or not.
In an interview on Charlie Rose, Jay Walker suggests his Internet incubator "laboratory" is different from other web incubators because it is only interested in "patentable" ideas. He then goes on to suggest Priceline is a pricing service much like the NASDAQ.
Maybe this means the stock market could sue him.
The MS gimmick is pretty standard in patent law for dealing with patent abuse because a patent won't hold up if it's not original. It's also used by large corporations to monster-truck small competitors who have valid patents. ("You see, your honor, this obscure Frenchman in the 16th century had a similar notion, long before the 'Net was ever conceived." Try disproving that in court without millions of dollars and an armload of experts who claim to be "historians of science.")
Sure, you're right about the lack of any kind of legal validity to Amazon's position. This is like the old "look-and-feel" lawsuits, except on one tiny element (obviously an important one) of the look-and-feel. (Imagine if Apple had sued MS over using mouse-clicks in Windows. They would have been laughed out of court.)
The real damage Amazon is doing is threatening to slow down the growth of the industry whose growth they need more than anyone else.
Those of us who have supported the Internet from the beginning know that we have always been a core of Amazon's business. When they needed the business, we gave them all our business. Because we believed in the web. Not because we believed in Amazon, except to the extent that they seemed the best hope for the web.
Now, they are proving they can act against the best interests of the web. And we have to recognize that the same motivations which once led us to support them now demand that we shop elsewhere.
I'm betting everyone will be surprised how much this boycott hurts Amazon even without organization. People who support the Internet just will not have anything to do with any company who so blatantly puts their own interests before the 'Net.
The repetitive motion damage caused by various devices in my experience: Regular mouse = 9 Regular keyboard = 8 Ergo keyboard = 7 Logitech Marbleman = 3
So, I would argue trying a trackball-type pointing device would be more likely to help than switching window managers.
There are other issues, however, which do argue for a more-keyboard-friendly window manager, specifically productivity. I have managed large numbers of keyboarders for many years and found that taking away mice improves productivity 15 percent if the programs being used can be operated without a mouse. If the programs cannot function without a mouse, switching to a rodent-free program will improve productivity 25 percent.
The reason for this is simple: Although a few operations are more efficient using a powerful mouse-tool-set (think Mac, not Windows), a vast majority are better done from a keyboard (particularly one with programmable power-chording capabilities). But the average user will gravitate to the easy-to-figure-out mouse actions rather than spend the small effort to learn the faster keyboard equivalents. Every efficiency gain of the mouse is lost five times over to pull-down menus.
One hesitates to consider how many millions of man-years have been lost down the black hole of MS Word.
This is a guy who came up with the idea for the digital computer long before the hardware existed to actually build one. He looked at Godel's Theorem and its proof, which mapped all of arithmetic onto integers. Thus Godel (already nominated for this hack) mapped math onto itself.
Turing realized this was useful for a problem faced by adding-machine makers. They could make a machine to solve any particular problem of arithmetic, but they couldn't make a machine which could solve a problem for which it was not designed.
But, if a machine could be made to solve the Godel problem of turning any problem of a logical calculus into an arithmetic problem, then it could also solve that arithmetic problem. Thus he conceived of the digital computer without having any of the equipment needed to make it.
Indeed, we still use his computability theorem today to describe the limits of the machines which he could only work with in his mind.
This is an excellent piece, but I believe the author doesn't have it quite right about the way we used to get sound out of the TRS80. It was not the disk drive motor we used (because most TRS80s did not have a disk drive, but settled for a cassette drive).
The way I remember doing it took advantage of a small microswitch which was intended to turn the cassette machine on and off. If you switched this microswitch on and off in patterns, you could amplifly the signal thus produced to get sound out of the machine which had no speaker.
We also used to record sound off the cassette over files which we had created to "digitize" the audio. These files could then be used to create sounds for our TRS80 games and played over little battery-powered amplifiers we bought at Radio Shack.
The most ingenious use of this sound was in a computer game called "Starfighter." This was published by a company which had been formed by a 14-year-old named Scott Adams (I don't think it's the Scott Adams who draws "Dilbert").
This game contained a number of interesting hacks I had never seen before: windows in the dashboard of your spaceship, first-person perspective, sound effects which told you how fast you were going (on a machine without a speaker), an AI that not only reacted to what you did but also changed those reactions based on how dangerous the area you were in was, sprite graphics on a machine which had no sprite graphics in the operating system, and score-based advance in rank.
The game's author was listed as H.L. "Sparky" Sparks, and I immediately thought, "Oh, no! Not another 14-year-old hacker genius." Indeed, this game would itself would qualify as one of the top 10 hacks, if it were not part of an even bigger hack: Its author was was using this hobby to help convince his boss to produce a personal computer of its own which used non-proprietary hardware so that if they balked at his ideas later on he could just go out and produce a competing model himself.
You see, Sparks was a marketing vice president at IBM and the computer he convinced them to build was what we now know as the IBM PC. Later he did go out on his own and formed Compaq, taking with him much of the team responsible for the PC.
That's got to be the ultimate hack: convincing IBM to finance the movement that replaced them.
Slashdot Mirror
We know who they are, and we saw what they did.
Think about this: These are people who depend on the products of technology to make their money. They need geeks. They don't know what they're doing. They probably believed it when they told people they had an uncopyable format. They certainly could have used a secure encryption technique. They didn't.
They need us. They need us bad. They are attacking those they need, just when they need coders worse than ever. There are going to be many times down the road when they need more intelligent coders (like Jon) than they've got. And every time they need one, we'll be there. But they'll never know whether they have a coder who's smart enough to know what they need (and, therefore, smart enough to know what they did).
They haven't got a chance.
If you haven't read Frank Herbert's short story "Committee of the Whole," you owe it to yourself to do it now.
Perhaps it is time for us to stand up and say, "I am Spartacus! I am Jon Lech Johansen! I am a coder! I reverse engineered CSS!"
...many years ago in a college journalism class:
My instructor was also the head of the Journalism Department. And he liked to give little "news conferences" where he would pretend to be a news source (which he almost was) and we would pretend to be reporters (which we almost were). We would ask questions and then write stories based on the pseudo-event.
As I was usually bored to tears, I developed a little game: I would see how much I could change his quotes without getting caught. I never changed the meaning of anything. But I was able to change the actual words almost all the time. Needless to say, this would have been highly unethical in a real-world scenario unless you knew a great deal about how the person being misquoted really talked (his or her style as it is analyzed in this book). An offended quotee might easily say, "I would never say it that way!" But I never got caught because, as a captive audience, students DO get a good chance to learn how their professors speak. I made him sound more like himself than even he did.
I'm sure this story has some relevance to the field of study this book addresses. But I'm not sure what it is.
It would be interesting to know if the author would find it easier or harder to spot faked style examples than the person being faked.
It would also be interesting to know how much of the distinguishing characteristics of a person's prose are stylistic in nature and how much is semantic. (Both seem to be implied by the review.)
It seems like there may be some implications for NPC AIs in CRPGs as well: If one could codify a wide variety of speaking styles, one could give each NPC a distinctive voice with much less design overhead.
BTW, I am the guy whose posts can easily be spotted by the elipses (...) which end most of my subject lines and begin most of my comments.
Technically, this is not a rebuttal of the Findings of Fact, but Microsoft's arguments for what they think should be concluded from the FoF. Of course, they say they "respectfully" disagree with the FoF, but will accept them for the sake of these arguments.
But Robin's characterization is not as far off as it sounds. Since they cannot really get from the facts as Judge Jackson originally ruled to the conclusions they want, they did try to refute the fact the judge ruled they have a monopoly.
This is a hint they are adopting an appeals-based strategy. To insult the judge by disagreeing with the judge on something he has already ruled on (for more than 25 pages, no less) indicates they believe they have no hope of winning at this level. The only way this kind of strategy can work is if -- by insulting the guy who's ruling on your case -- you can provoke him into doing something rash. Then you can get a ruling on appeal by showing he over-reached.
Not likely in this case: This is a conservative jurist who is likely to shade his Findings of Law in Microsoft's favor after shading his Findings of Fact in the government's favor. The result will be an appeal-proof compromise.
The really interesting thing about this filing is the fact that MS's lawyers still don't have the guts to tell a man who's got close to $100 billion that he blew it in his deposition. This is most interesting when you consider that MS shareholder money is being used to take actions which are probably not in their best interest (although breaking up the company -- an unlikely outcome, in my opinion -- would probably be the most favorable outcome from a stockholder viewpoint).
All you guys out there pretenting to be conspiracy theorists get this: I know you're just spreading these ideas (that Bill has been pushed out; that he needed time to monkey with the W2K APIs; that he's getting ready to jump ship; that Ballmer's his fall guy) to throw us off the scent.
The real conspiracy: Bill is really a nice guy who's been tricked through the years into doing evil things by Ballmer (yes, he is the anti-Christ) and Myhrvold (you didn't really believe he retired, did you?). Bill's much-vaunted turnabout on the Internet came when he got out of their clutches for a week, did a little surfing, and realized the truth (but not all of the truth).
The little-known fact: Bill is a bad liar. Ballmer has tried to make up for this through the years by fooling Bill into believing the things he needs to say. This works most of the time because the press needs Bill's cute face to sell magazines or whatever. But get Bill in the same room with a sympathetic pit bull like David Boies and he gets torn apart. (You owe it to yourself to see that video. Bill demonstrates brilliantly just how bad a liar he really is.)
The problem: Ballmer doesn't have the kind of PR face that Gates can put forward. He comes across in interviews as a Yuppie with a crack problem -- a bad crack problem.
The only thing that could save these guys now: the government breaks Microsoft up.
In a certain sense, Digital Research did open up their source at the time. It is my understanding they made their source available to just about anybody who wanted to port it to a new chip.
Their business model required that they get their operating system running on as many different computers as possible. They made their money selling apps for the system. Ironically many developers thought they abused their inside knowledge of CP/M to dominate that market and chose to develop for IBM/MS's PC-DOS instead when it came out.
It was the license indeed (as miniwookie suggests) that was their downfall. It never occurred to them someone would want to fork their code and use it to compete with them. But legal matters were never their strongest suit. Robert Cringely (in "Triumph of the Nerds") suggests their fear of IBM's NDAs was what caused them to pass up the most lucrative offer ever missed.
But don't blame them too much for not using the GPL. In fact, it is my understanding that this is the very deal which led to the open-source movement understanding the need to have a "public license" in the first place.
If anybody knows whether there is a connection there, I would be very interesting to see this confirmed in any way (or contradicted, if my understanding is in any way false).
Remember, too, this is the second settlement MS has agreed to with regard to the Digital Research code. They cut a deal with DRI rather than let a judge compare their source code to CP/M. So, the real thing they probably paid this $160 million for is probably so no court would have to rule on the accuracy of their claim that DR-DOS was "just a clone of MS-DOS" when the opposite was probably closer to the truth.
Remember, a lot of their mystique is based on the idea they were some kind of visionary coders. Their aura of invulnerability would be greatly hurt if it ever came out they stole the code that enabled the whole $400-billion rip-off.
Darwinism doesn't make judgments about anything but "fitness to survive until reproduction." Definitely not "strongest" and maybe not even "most popular."
And that judgment is only made in the context of a particular fitness landscape of a particular time. One should expect that the fitness of a particular species of information would change over time.
Viva non-linear systems.
The proof that Gopnick and Katz are wrong on this one is the fact that anyone who hates Jon can set their preferences so they don't have to see his column.
The proof they are right is the fact that most Katz-haters are too stupid to figure out how to do this.
I originally saw this script in essentially the same form over a year ago. Card tends to do lots of interesting things on the web, including a virtual community in which everybody pretends to be resident's of his Alvin Maker series.
Card suggests he has rewritten this, but I'm not sure how extensive the rewrite has been.
"That's a very interesting question because of how unimportant it is. The great thing about the web, the great thing about the web of humanity is that we're all important.
"And, in a way, a lot of the things which upset society are when we try to put people in order."
I used to think the archetype for pretense was people who used umlauts when writing in languages which do not have them (especially in those languages which use the same symbol for diaeresis). I always enjoyed the umlaut over the "n" in Spinal Tap as a great joke about such pretension in rock-and-roll.
But now I know the true archetype: those who misspell "pretension" when flaming those who are insufficiently pretentious to use umlauts (especially when claiming such is a mis-tmesis-spelling).
If they're not known by a single name, they don't qualify for my list. (OK, you may not know Ignaz Semmelweis by his last name, but you should. Click on the link.) Based on the criteria listed in this post, he qualifies before most of the others.
My only question is whether Einstein should be there, on account of the large number of erroneous things being said about him (even in "Time"). He didn't invent the bomb. (Didn't have anything to do with it, except signing a letter to Roosevelt. He rejected the underlying science to his death.) I use two criteria for including him: the originality of his ideas (although quantum mechanics is equally daring in its willingness to question our deepest-held ideas) and the fact that without him no one else would have arrived at the same conclusions for decades (perhaps centuries).
The Wright brothers probably deserve consideration (but do you count them as one or two on the list?) The same counting problem occurs with the quantum-mechanicians. Once you say "Bohr," you just about have to include Schroedinger and then the floodgates are open.
Based on the criteria given, you'd have to consider Dr. Charles R. Drew, who invented blood transfusion (with others) and who was then died because he was refused a transfusion at an all-white Southern hospital because he was black.
Genetic engineering is neither supremely benign nor is it the harbinger of global famine. It is a complex set of possibilities which include very dire and extraordinarily beneficial promise. It will take a large amount of effort to find the correct answer between the USDA's easy answer and the EU's easy answer.
What is absolutely clear is that if consumers and regulators look the other way the sole beneficiaries will be the agribusiness purveyors. Just look at the "benefits" so far. Fruits and veggies that don't spoil on the way to market. Theoretically this could mean lower prices, but so far it's just been larger profits.
Interestingly, some of the more frightening scenarios involve agribusiness attempts to develop Microsoft-style solutions, which require farmers to adopt techniques that lock them into the technology down the road. It reminds me of an experience from my farming days:
We (along with all the other farmers around us who were also growing alfalfa for hay) by a spraying company. Now, this was a little unusual because there is little reason to spray alfalfa. Cows eat it, but bugs usually don't. Cows are pretty easy to keep out of the fields without spraying.
The sprayer pointed out that we had aphids on our alfalfa. Now, aphids can be very bad on your roses. But they don't really like alfalfa that much. They may reduce your output by a few bales, but it takes a lot of aphids to really slow the growth of alfalfa.
So, we told them we didn't want to pay for the spraying. But our neighbors all went for it.
When the neighbors crops all got sprayed, all the aphids left their fields and came to ours. It was pretty strange. Walking through the field, your boots would get covered with green squashed aphids (aphids are kind of like miniature cows that give green milk).
It turned out that aphids in that quantity really can stunt the growth of the alfalfa. Of course, they would never reach that quantity without the spraying.
So, we hired the guy with the airplane to spray our alfalfa. And all the aphids jumped back onto our neighbors fields. Nobody ended up gaining anything except the sprayer. Of course, if you didn't spray, you risked your neighbors spraying and ruining your crop.
Essentially, the only way you could guarantee you would not get screwed majorly was by agreeing to be screwed minorly.
The implication, however, that the USDA has enthusiastically supported everything Monsanto and the other chemical companies do is simply not true. There have been examples of major conflicts between the two as well as cooperation.
And that's the way it should be. Psycho-libertarians notwithstanding, regulation does have a place from computer software to agribusiness. Anybody who assumes the free market will always advance the general good is easy prey to the Microsofts and Monsantos of the world.
Over-regulation is bad. Under-regulation is bad. Freedom can be taken away by governments. Freedom can be taken away by big corporations. Freedom can be taken away by guys with thick necks. Freedom can be taken away by guys with airplanes and big tanks of strange chemicals.
Freedom is easiest to take away when we are not paying attention. The easiest way to avoid paying attention is to adopt an ideology which gives us easy answers to difficult questions. Such an ideology can be based on the notion that government will always help (Communism). Such an ideology can be based on the notion that government is always the problem (psycho-libertarianism).
I do have the solution for the psycho-libertarians: Let them eat aphids.
Perhaps the best way to handle it would be to come up with a code of programming conduct (The Code of Coding?) which would require that certain minimum standards be met. Then companies could announce their adherence to the code.
I suspect in fairly short order any company which did not adhere to the code would find it difficult to sell to large corporations. How could anybody justify purchase of very expensive software from a company that was not willing to say, "If we discontinue the product, we will not leave you in the lurch"? Especially if rivals were advertising their guarantees?
My suggestions for the Code:
The only reason I can see for not adhering to item 1. above would be -- let's just say for the sake of argument -- you had stolen the source code for an operating system, made a few hundred billion off it, and were sure the release of the code would expose you as a felon.
Please note that I am not a lawyer and am sure the above is intended only as an idea, not as the proposed wording for an actual legally-binding document.
The problem with Red Hat et al. is not what they will do to Linux. The problem is not even that they cannot make money. The problem is they cannot make the kind of money Wall Street assumes they can make.
People who think Linux may beat Microsoft are hedging their MS portfolios by buying Linux stocks. What they fail to understand is that the reason Linux has been taking market share away from Windows is because MS charges $85 to $200 for an operating system that's worth about two bucks.
The only way they can get away with this is the network effects and the fact they hide the APIs. Once the public realizes they should never put software on their computers unless the APIs are openly published (even if they never understand the value of open source), no one will be able to rip off the computer-buying public again.
Nobody.
Not Microsoft, not VALinux, not Red Hat.
OSes will cost $2 to $15. Word processors will cost $8 up to a high end of 80 or 90 bucks for a full-fledged desktop publishing system.
A lot of people are just trying to get on the next gravy train. Well, the thing about Linux's success is that there shouldn't be a gravy train. People should not be able to take money from others by encrypting their files (that's what a non-open file format is) and holding them for "upgrade" ransom.
Codeslaves unite!
From the Charlie Rose Show on "Time"'s Person of the Century:
TIM BERNERS-LEE: "That's a very interesting question because of how unimportant it is. The great thing about the web, the great thing about the web of humanity is that we're all important.
"And, in a way, a lot of the things which upset society are when we try to put people in order."
Despite the fact that Dvorak likes to pretend there are no Linux Internet Appliances and that Microsoft is out in front on this one, this is the real thing. Still expensive, yes. But this is what the future has wrought. Or God. Or something.
Now, we should show them the true power of Open-Source by making some neat improvements. If TiVo continues to out-user-friendly ReplayTV because their source is open, the world will soon know the truth about Open Source.
Today TiVo, tomorrow the world!
I use it at work, where I have an extremely complex setup, using both cable and satellite dish and multiple VCRs as well as audio recorders.
Generally, it is designed to work with a set-top box and it integrates with a wide variety (obviously I haven't tested them all). They seem to imply it will work with cable without a set-top box, but I don't see how this could work since it doesn't seem to have an RF tuner (although it does offer RF output on Channel Three or Channel Four). Has anybody tried that?
The two main integration limitations - the above-mentioned missing tuner and the fact that it cannot switch easily back and forth between two sources (like satellite and digital cable). Admittedly this won't be a problem for most users, but the switching process requires that you go through the lengthy setup procedure each time.
All this feature really does is record things you might be interested in if you have unused space on the hard drive. There is a human element in that their professional TV watchers rate shows according to who might be interested based on similarities of taste.
But community-building is certainly within the scope of the system. Sounds like a good idea, and they have a phone number where you can make such suggestions. Overall, a very customer-oriented company.
You also have the ability to tell it what you like with "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons. Could this make your TV-watching homogeneous? Yes, but only if you only watched what it recommended.
The real advantage here is that, if it notices you always watch "Silicon Spin" on ZDTV and you get held up in traffic one day, it will automatically record it for you. Then you can come in five minutes after it has started and watch it from the beginning EVEN WHILE IT IS STILL RECORDING THE REST OF THE SHOW.
And, finally, you can turn the whole "recording things you didn't ask for" feature off. Then the homogeneity of your viewing habits will revert to whatever they might have been without TiVo.
All in all, having something recommend things you didn't choose will almost always decrease homogeneity more than it increases it.
I have the 14-hour version. It seems to me like the 30-hour version is a bit of a rip-off since you're basically paying double price for just a larger hard drive.
I make my tapes (audio) off the Medium Quality setting and have no problem (I make backups on VHS, but have never been forced to fall back on them).
Overall, the system is extremely user-friendly and the company is as well. They solicit feedback and make periodic upgrades when your system calls up theirs to download schedules. Tech-support seems to be there most of the time (since it's intended for home use, I guess this makes sense; people watch the tube all the time).
Watch out for the hidden costs, though. Salesmen in the stores may tell you the schedule subscription is optional, but it's not. You have to pay $200 (lifetime of unit) or $10/month whether you use the schedules or not.
TiVo already has an anti-UPN hack. You pick the channels you want to exclude when you do the original setup and that can be modified at any time.
In an interview on Charlie Rose, Jay Walker suggests his Internet incubator "laboratory" is different from other web incubators because it is only interested in "patentable" ideas. He then goes on to suggest Priceline is a pricing service much like the NASDAQ.
Maybe this means the stock market could sue him.
The MS gimmick is pretty standard in patent law for dealing with patent abuse because a patent won't hold up if it's not original. It's also used by large corporations to monster-truck small competitors who have valid patents. ("You see, your honor, this obscure Frenchman in the 16th century had a similar notion, long before the 'Net was ever conceived." Try disproving that in court without millions of dollars and an armload of experts who claim to be "historians of science.")
Sure, you're right about the lack of any kind of legal validity to Amazon's position. This is like the old "look-and-feel" lawsuits, except on one tiny element (obviously an important one) of the look-and-feel. (Imagine if Apple had sued MS over using mouse-clicks in Windows. They would have been laughed out of court.)
The real damage Amazon is doing is threatening to slow down the growth of the industry whose growth they need more than anyone else.
Those of us who have supported the Internet from the beginning know that we have always been a core of Amazon's business. When they needed the business, we gave them all our business. Because we believed in the web. Not because we believed in Amazon, except to the extent that they seemed the best hope for the web.
Now, they are proving they can act against the best interests of the web. And we have to recognize that the same motivations which once led us to support them now demand that we shop elsewhere.
I'm betting everyone will be surprised how much this boycott hurts Amazon even without organization. People who support the Internet just will not have anything to do with any company who so blatantly puts their own interests before the 'Net.
The repetitive motion damage caused by various devices in my experience:
Regular mouse = 9
Regular keyboard = 8
Ergo keyboard = 7
Logitech Marbleman = 3
So, I would argue trying a trackball-type pointing device would be more likely to help than switching window managers.
There are other issues, however, which do argue for a more-keyboard-friendly window manager, specifically productivity. I have managed large numbers of keyboarders for many years and found that taking away mice improves productivity 15 percent if the programs being used can be operated without a mouse. If the programs cannot function without a mouse, switching to a rodent-free program will improve productivity 25 percent.
The reason for this is simple: Although a few operations are more efficient using a powerful mouse-tool-set (think Mac, not Windows), a vast majority are better done from a keyboard (particularly one with programmable power-chording capabilities). But the average user will gravitate to the easy-to-figure-out mouse actions rather than spend the small effort to learn the faster keyboard equivalents. Every efficiency gain of the mouse is lost five times over to pull-down menus.
One hesitates to consider how many millions of man-years have been lost down the black hole of MS Word.
Turing should indeed be nominated, but for what?
This is a guy who came up with the idea for the digital computer long before the hardware existed to actually build one. He looked at Godel's Theorem and its proof, which mapped all of arithmetic onto integers. Thus Godel (already nominated for this hack) mapped math onto itself.
Turing realized this was useful for a problem faced by adding-machine makers. They could make a machine to solve any particular problem of arithmetic, but they couldn't make a machine which could solve a problem for which it was not designed.
But, if a machine could be made to solve the Godel problem of turning any problem of a logical calculus into an arithmetic problem, then it could also solve that arithmetic problem. Thus he conceived of the digital computer without having any of the equipment needed to make it.
Indeed, we still use his computability theorem today to describe the limits of the machines which he could only work with in his mind.
This is an excellent piece, but I believe the author doesn't have it quite right about the way we used to get sound out of the TRS80. It was not the disk drive motor we used (because most TRS80s did not have a disk drive, but settled for a cassette drive).
The way I remember doing it took advantage of a small microswitch which was intended to turn the cassette machine on and off. If you switched this microswitch on and off in patterns, you could amplifly the signal thus produced to get sound out of the machine which had no speaker.
We also used to record sound off the cassette over files which we had created to "digitize" the audio. These files could then be used to create sounds for our TRS80 games and played over little battery-powered amplifiers we bought at Radio Shack.
The most ingenious use of this sound was in a computer game called "Starfighter." This was published by a company which had been formed by a 14-year-old named Scott Adams (I don't think it's the Scott Adams who draws "Dilbert").
This game contained a number of interesting hacks I had never seen before: windows in the dashboard of your spaceship, first-person perspective, sound effects which told you how fast you were going (on a machine without a speaker), an AI that not only reacted to what you did but also changed those reactions based on how dangerous the area you were in was, sprite graphics on a machine which had no sprite graphics in the operating system, and score-based advance in rank.
The game's author was listed as H.L. "Sparky" Sparks, and I immediately thought, "Oh, no! Not another 14-year-old hacker genius." Indeed, this game would itself would qualify as one of the top 10 hacks, if it were not part of an even bigger hack: Its author was was using this hobby to help convince his boss to produce a personal computer of its own which used non-proprietary hardware so that if they balked at his ideas later on he could just go out and produce a competing model himself.
You see, Sparks was a marketing vice president at IBM and the computer he convinced them to build was what we now know as the IBM PC. Later he did go out on his own and formed Compaq, taking with him much of the team responsible for the PC.
That's got to be the ultimate hack: convincing IBM to finance the movement that replaced them.