Media - Aldoblog

Software McCarthyism

Reading an article on CNet today, about the SCO Group’s latest moves in their infringement case against IBM, I came to a sudden realization: the SCO Group is engaging in “software McCarthyism”. And Microsoft is paying them to do it.

Reading an article on CNet today, about the SCO Group’s latest moves in their infringement case against IBM, I came to a sudden realization: the SCO Group is engaging in “software McCarthyism”.

For those that don’t know the details, SCO alleges that IBM misappropriated trade secrets and other intellectual property from SCO and added them to Linux, thereby ruining SCO’s business. They want $1 billion.

Their lawsuit is not much more than a series of wild accusations, none of which is backed up with substance. Their senior executives have been giving quite a few interviews, where they talk of “clear evidence” of “hundreds” of infringements that they will “reveal soon”, but can’t right now.

In reality, the evidence is overwhelming that SCO didn’t have anything worth stealing, and that IBM hasn’t stolen anything. But that’s not stopping SCO from pounding the drums. It’s textbook McCarthyism, wave around wild claims but keep changing the specifics, so people are wondering, “Are there 232 infringements or 487 infringements?” and not “Is there any merit here at all?”

I don’t understand SCO’s motivations. They wanted to be acquired, and thought the lawsuit would put pressure on folks to buy them out. But IBM has stated publicly that they will “blacken the sky” with lawyers, and the lawsuit itself is riddled with factual inaccuracies, to the point where some are suggesting that SCO’s suit is knowingly deceptive to a degree that they should be sanctioned under Federal civil procedure. The industry-wide (excepting Microsoft) resistance to SCO can only be toughing their opponents’ resolve. So there is no way this is going to work out well for SCO.

It is working out well for Microsoft, who is using this opportunity to continue to sow the seeds of FUD around Linux, in the hopes of slowing down the erosion of their server business (which is getting killed by Linux). Microsoft recently paid SCO a bribe to continue the lawsuit. I wonder if there is an appropriate metaphorical link from their role here to the original McCarthy.

Channel-Specific RSS Feeds

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds.

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds:

Life		Tech
Self Rochelle Food Travel The Cats The House The Job Haightlife I Like Politics & Law Media Miscellaneous		Mac OS X Anti-Spam Technology About This Site

Stop Stealing Feed

Not too long ago a big media executive whined about how people who used TiVo were stealing. I love my TiVo, and I skip stupid commercials, so I guess that makes me a thief. There’s a way to stop all this larceny: make better commercials.

Not too long ago a big media executive whined about how people who used TiVo were stealing. I love my TiVo, and I skip stupid commercials, so I guess that makes me a thief.

There is an antidote to that, for the networks and their advertisers. Stop showing stupid commercials. Show good ones instead. A new Honda ad is a great example. This commercial is so good, the opposite of skipping it is happening. I’m recommending it here, and in e-mails to friends. And I’m not the only one.

So stop your stinkin’ whining, Mr. Kellner, and start turning out stuff people want to watch.

DHI 51-54

Daily Home Improvements: Computer hardware installation, software installation, a little home safety, and a little world safety.

DHI 51: We ordered a new LCD display for Rochelle’s PC, but to make the most of it, you need to connect it to a digital video interface on the graphics card. Rochelle’s existing graphics card was too old to have even heard of DVI, so I bought her a new one off of eBay. It came today (before the new display!), and I installed it in her PC. So now she can use her computer in 800×600 pixels, at 16 colors (that’s colors, not bits), and 60Hz refresh rate.

In other words, it currently sucks to be using the new card. I am trying to download the correct drivers from the ATI Technologies web site, but they’re totally fucked up, and every download link gives the same two-word error message: “Not Found”. Not helpful. Not impressed. ATI sucks. (For now, anyway.)

DHI 52: More computer work for Rochelle, installing Quicken 2003 onto her system. Another DHI will surely be getting together this weekend to work on initial configuration of our accounts, especially for online access and automatic downloading of information.

DHI 53: I reattached the smoke detector to the wall. We had detached it for the paint stripping work, because the heat gun kept setting off the alarm. We’ve been done with the paint stripping for weeks, but only this morning remembered we’d detached the detector. Oops.

DHI 54: I made a contribution to fund ads advocating inspections over war. If I help improve our country, my little corner of it will be better, too.

I’m not done with the week, yet, but wanted to post the link to MoveOn.org earlier, in case you wanted to help fund those ads, too.

DHI 44-50

Daily Home Improvements: The water closet is finished, a VCR hookup, debt service ends, this blog officially moves, window washing, and undoing a previous DHI.

DHI 44: I moved a few dozen books from other bookcases to the new shelves in the water closet. We’ve decided on themes for two of our three shelves, but neither theme completely fills its shelf, so there will need to be some rethinking done.

DHI 45: I connected the TiVo and the VCR, so that we can transfer shows off of the TiVo to tape, for long term storage. Strictly for personal use, of course.

DHI 46: I paid $300 to the MasterCard, which sounds like a daily chore, except we just transfered all bill-paying responsibilities to Rochelle, and that $300 will completely pay off our credit card, leaving us with no non-real estate debt for the first time since our wedding/honeymoon/bathroom remodel (which was followed closely by the stock options fiasco/stock market meltdown, which was followed by 3 months of unemployment each). Now that’s a home improvement!

DHI 47: I finished moving this weblog to aldoblog.com, moving the appropriate files from one location to another, and setting up some redirects in Apache to make links to the old site continue to work. In the process I discovered I had not completed the DNS configuration for the aldoblog.com domain, so I finished doing that, too.

DHI 48: I collected more books to move into the water closet, this time all of our travel books. I found a couple more SF and food books to move, too.

DHI 49: I stripped off an old photo that had fused to our front window, cleaned with Windex, and then scrapped off the glue residue and the accumulated grime of 11 years on Haight Street with a razor blade. The front windows are now about 90% more clear — I can’t wait until tomorrow afternoon when the sun is shining through them, and I can see the improvements the best!

DHI 50: After much research (scanning log files), and even more dithering, I turned off my server-side spam filtering software, because it is apparently occasionally dropping random messages. This basically undoes one of my prior DHIs, where I implemented the anti-spam measures. Which kinda sucks, but then, how often do you get every home improvement right the first time?

Neurons in the Internet

I’ve written before about the interesting things that are taking place on the internet today. Two articles over the last two weeks made me think that the links that are spontaneously happening between the many active websites (mostly blogs) are similar to the formation of “neuronal paths.” We are building a giant, global brain.

I’ve written before about the interesting things that are taking place on the internet today. In one of the prior postings, I referenced an article that compared the structures forming on the internet to the trails that ants lay down when hunting for food, which eventually build up very sophisticated (and efficient) food gathering behavior.

But two articles over the last two weeks made me think of something different, namely, that the links that are spontaneously happening between the many active websites (mostly blogs) are similar to the formation of “neuronal paths.” We are building a giant, global brain.

The first article was Ben Hammersley’s Trackback in the Saddle Again, which describes quite a number of different ways that articles can semi-automatically form linkages to each other. The second was an interview with Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, and in particular his Social Network Explorer. Both articles illustrate how complex structures are being formed in the nodes (sites) and paths (links) between nodes.

So my thought today was, blogs and news sites are the neurons. Links from one to another are the neuronal paths, or connections between neurons. (TrackBack and its ilk are especially cool here, because the connections are two-way.) And services like Blogdex, Daypop, Social Network Explorer, and especially Google, are how the paths are reinforced to create “preferred” pathways through the internet, which alter future queries and explorations by making those paths more likely to be reused.

What’s especially neat about some of the services like Daypop is that the pathways are reinforced not only by people publishing on the web, but also by people who are just browsing the web. That is, when you follow a link off the Daypop Top 40, it records it, and that will influence how popular that link is, and therefore how many other people will see it, how long it will be around, etc.

These structures are certainly influencing how people think, if only because news stories are now frequently emerging in the blogsphere first, and once they’ve become sufficiently interesting and widespread, they cross over to the mainstream media. One could make a case that that’s how Trent Lott fell from grace.

Powerful stuff, but it’s a long way from having a giant brain. But that’s OK, on the scale of things, websites vs. neurons, there’s not enough nodes on the internet yet. Google indexes about 3 billion web pages today, but most of those don’t participate in the kinds of services described above. Blogdex and Daypop each index less than 20,000 blogs or news sites. So we’re talking pretty small numbers, today. There are thought to be 100 billion neurons in a human brain.

So our “giant” brain probably won’t be waking up and taking over the world tomorrow.

Quotation of the Year Candidate

“Microsoft sees IBM spending money on Linux, making Linux more robust, getting in the way of their aspirations. I think it makes them very unhappy,” said Steve Mills [senior vice president of IBM’s Software Group].

This rather understated quotation was in the context of a CNet article about how much money IBM is investing in Linux:

“Microsoft sees IBM spending money on Linux, making Linux more robust, getting in the way of their aspirations. I think it makes them very unhappy,” said Steve Mills [senior vice president of IBM’s Software Group].

Competition makes the industry better, so anything that makes Microsoft unhappy has got to be a good thing. Go Steve!

DHI 27-33

Magazine reorganization, another basement disposal trip, long efforts on the computer, sanding, and more.

DHI 27: I pawed through my stack of unread technical magazines, unwrapped all of them from their plastic, threw out all the ad inserts and CDs, and grouped and sorted them. They’re back in the same bin that held them previously, but there’s less stuff there, and it’s at least organized. Culling out the junk will have to wait another day.

DHI 28: Rochelle and I took a large sheet of particle board down to the basement (we had been using it to firm up our bed a bit, to see if that would help my back problems; wasn’t helping, don’t want it in the house).

DHI 29: More magazine sorting and purging, this time from the pile under my nightstand.

DHI 30-31: Long, long efforts spent on troubleshooting my MySQL database installation. I finally resorted to downloading the binary installation from the mysql.com web site, and replacing my existing installation with the pre-compiled version.

DHI 32: Migrated the database for this weblog from my desktop Mac to the server, so that I can actually shut down my Mac without disabling my weblog.

DHI 33: I spent 45 minutes doing the “polish” sanding on the wainscot in the water closet, as my (very minor) contribution to Rochelle’s efforts to finish that project.

Phoenix From the Ashes

Lawrence Lessig appears to be taking the Eldred vs. Ashcroft defeat and turning it towards victory, with a proposal that would move the great majority of material affected into the public domain, while still allowing copyright holders who are actively using their rights to publish commercially valuable works to keep those copyrights. There’s a FAQ about the proposal, and I’m exceptionally proud to have suggested question #3 to Prof. Lessig.

If you’re familiar with the ongoing debate over copyrights, you probably know that the Supreme Court ruled, in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, that Congress could extend copyrights essentially indefinitely. This is a case that a lot of people wanted to win.

The lawyer who lead the case, Lawrence Lessig, appears to be taking the defeat and turning it towards victory, with a proposal that would move the great majority of material affected into the public domain, while still allowing copyright holders who are actively using their rights to publish commercially valuable works to keep those copyrights:

Here is something you can do right now. In this NYT op-ed, I describe a proposal that would move more work into the public domain than a total victory in the Supreme Court would have. The basic idea is this: 50 years after a work has been “published,” a copyright owner would be required to pay a copyright tax. That tax should be extremely low–this proposal says $50, but it could be $1. If the copyright holder does not pay the tax for 3 years, then the work is forfeit to the public domain. If the copyright holder does pay the tax, then its contacting agent would be made a matter of public record. Very quickly we would have a cheap, searchable record, of what work is controlled and what work is free.
If Justice Breyer is right that only 2% of the work from the initial period affected by the Sonny Bono Act continues to have any commercial value at all, then this proposal would mean that all but 2% will move into the public domain within three years. And as the proposal applies to all work that is more than 50 years old, it would apply to a much larger range of work than would have been affected had we prevailed in the Supreme Court. This could give us (almost) everything we wanted–98% of the public domain that our framers intended. Not bad for government work.

It’s a great proposal, and one that deserves broad support, even from the giant media companies that fought so hard to extend their copyrights. There’s a FAQ about the proposal. I’m exceptionally proud to have suggested question #3 to Prof. Lessig. (I do not know if I was the only one with that suggestion, but it’s exciting to have made a contribution, no matter how small.)

Ads I Actually Like

In the course of shopping for various things this holiday season, I had occasion to use Google quite a bit, searching for information and vendors. One of the things I noticed was that for some queries the ads served with my results were actually more valuable than the search results themselves.

In the course of shopping for the parts for my replacement server, I had occasion to use Google quite a bit, searching for information and vendors. One of the things I noticed was that I occasionally found more useful pointers in the ads than in the results, I was actually clicking on the ads to learn more.

And then I was shopping for, of all things, popcorn. Not just any popcorn, mind you, but the popcorn, oil, and seasoning packs to go with our Whirley Pop popcorn popper. The combination produces popcorn that’s infinitely better than microwave popcorn, and virtually identical to movie theater popcorn (of which I usually eat two bags when I see a movie).

I had started at Amazon.com, which carries the popper itself, but not additional popcorn packs. So I searched Google for “whirley pop popcorn” and got a slew of results, none of which was actually useful in finding a place where I could buy the packs.

Ah, but the ads! Of course, the ads are from people who want to sell me something — something I want to buy! And indeed, there were about a dozen ads from different popcorn supply companies. I clicked through a few of them, looking for the right package, and placed an order at the third store I visited.

It won’t be every day that the ads are worth more to me than the results, but I sure am glad that someone has figured out how to make advertising valuable to those viewing it, instead of a pain in the ass to be avoided any way I can think of. Kudos to Google!

A Funny Kind of Sandwich

I was on News.com the other day, and noticed in their Video section an interview with Ken Bereskin, director of marketing for Mac OS X at Apple, talking about Jaguar. There were commercials before and after the video. Guess who was the advertiser.

I was on News.com the other day, and noticed in their Video section an interview with Ken Bereskin, director of marketing for Mac OS X at Apple, talking about Jaguar. Of course I couldn’t resist, and after choosing a video format, I saw David Coursey introduce the clip about to be played. Then there was a commercial, then the six and a half minute segment with David and Ken talking about Mac OS X 10.2, and then another commercial.

The funny — or not so funny — is that both commercials were from Microsoft.

Hello, MacDevCenter Visitors!

Um, gulp! These little postings have been put on the front page of O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter, one of the premier technical news sites for Mac OS X. I can see the results in my Apache logs as I type this! Hello, MacDevCenter visitors!

Wow! These little postings have been put on the front page of O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter, one of the premier technical news sites for Mac OS X. I can see the results in my Apache logs as I type this. Gulp!

Hello, MacDevCenter visitors!