Random Web Cards

Scott Rosenberg on Media Titans

Blog Slog

In a piece entitled The media titans still don't get it, Scott Rosenberg goes off on boardrooms and blogs. And for someone who's usual work is better, he's mostly half right and all wrong in this one. What he's right about is that lots of media titans are rich (or formerly rich) idiots who can't tell a good idea from a pile of smoke (ever try to pile your smoke?). What he's all wrong about is that users care much. We've seen the high water mark. The Net reminds me of Disneyland. So huge and wonderful at first encounter that it seemed to be a new world in itself. Then, with each successive encounter it shrunk and turned out to be only a few square blocks of downtown Anaheim. But that's a story for another time and place.

Scott's Blah-ther

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20020813 174100

Lileks' War

Midwestern Minds

Does anyone know the story on Lileks? I started out loving his stuff---principally I suppose because it is about my hometown, and because he has an (apparently) terminally cute daughter (so do I, although since she's in her mid-20s my stories are a bit different these days). But then Lileks started to go off on the war in a way that seems both ignorant without substantive thought or contribution. I'd be interested to know what in his military service managed to give rise to his approach to our current middle-eastern problems. Sounds like some creeping mid-westernism to me.

The Bleat

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20020813 180900

Journalists as Crimefighters

Mistaken Notions

There seems to be a misapprehension floating around that journalists have some special responsibility for the truth. It seems to me, instead, they are simply people with jobs that range from the sycophantic panderer of a local newspaper reporting on a church supper to sophisticated analyst who understands the culture and history of those he/she reports on. As such I generally don't expect them to be of any particular disposition, ethical or otherwise. Where is Randolph Hearst now that we need to cook up a war?

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20020814 030700

iMac: Junk Design

Apple Crapple

I guess some find the 2002 iMac design beautiful and innovative. I find it neither. First, it was an open opportunity to connect the mouse and the keyboard with a wireless link (these have worked fine on Windows machines for a long time, and I can't imagine any reason they wouldn't work on Apples). Second, the design of the Sno-Cone base strikes me as not only ugly, but not a form suggestive of any function that it performs.

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20020814 030700

Sic Transit Disneyland

A Concept

Sometimes we cross over the top of the mountain and begin our descent without realizing it. That's where we've been with the Net. We came and explored. And the explosive growth of the net promised that not only were there caverns to be explored, but there were so many more of them each day that we could spend all our hours just investigating them. But a funny thing happened down many of those paths. They turned out to be full of mistaken `facts', bad ideas and an increasing number of dead links. And as the interest begins to wane, the money leaves the field and dead wood begins to accumulate. I suppose the good news is that with so many `net people' unemployed, we might expect a bump in traffic.

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20020814 030700

XP: eXit Please?

It's MacroHard to like MicroSoft

For reasons that are unclear to me MicroSoft apparently thinks that customers will be happy to turn the operation of their computers over to them. This will allow MicroSoft to manage your software registrations and allow them to sieze control of your machine if you offend them in some way. Like turning off your OS just as you leave on the month-long trip to the Far East. Why anyone would be willing to do so is unclear to me. I'll continue to use Windows 2000 till they pry the shiny CD from my well-worn drive---or until I feel I am better off with Linux. Whichever comes first.

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20020814 030700

Apple Innovation: An Oxymoron

Apple Crapple

Apple seems to me to have a much larger role as a follower than as an innovator. Why it has a reputation as an innovator is completely unclear to me. Apple followed Xerox into the world of the icon based interface, and it regularly follows Windows machines in everything but low prices (for example, this year's iMac is pale version of a machine I had more than 12 months earlier) and now it is following Unix into an uncertain future. How this adds up to a record of innovation remains unclear to me.

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20020814 030700

VC's as the Devil in Disguise

Even when they say `It's not the money...'

Venture Capitalists are regularly beaten on in lots of discussions on the Net. It is not clear to me why. Apparently many VC critics feel that the VCs should have just given them the $10m or $50m (you fill in the amount) and then left them to their own devices. Sounds implausible to me. My father said If you take their money, they'll likely expect something for it..

20020820-073158-000018-DNess

20020918 061200

Improving Productivity: The Final Solution

Hardware Sales continue to Slide

It appears to be slowly dawning on some managers that the principal use of employees' network access is for personal entertainment, communications with friends and making private travel plans. In such cases, instead of improving productivity with expensive software, there is more improvement simply getting rid of the computers themselves. In any case, the need for increased hardware to access the net is quite limited, and old hardware---already loaded with adequate software that has been completely paid for---may provide a perfectly acceptable alternative. Along with lower cost comes less access and correspondingly improved productivity.

20020820-073158-000019-DNess

20020814 030700

The Imputed `Value' of Software

Fallacy of Composition

The equation seems to be Value of `stolen' software = Number of Copies * Retail Price. But that's like claiming the `value' of a company is the number of shares outstanding * the price of the last share sold. You can probably sell 100 shares at something like the current market price. But it's unlikely that you can sell 10m shares at anything like the current price. With software, I'd argue that a very great majority of the `stolen' software is largely unused, and has a marginal `value' that pretty much approximates zero. The software can probably be `sold' at this price (zero), but not at anything like list.

20020820-073158-000020-DNess

20020814 053700

Apple Ads: Another Short-Lived Campaign

Apple Crapple

What has happened to those highly touted Apple ads that were such favorites---at least among people who already had Apples, and therefore were not in the demographic that the ads were designed to appeal to. If current sales figures are maintained, then not much seems to be happening at the cash register. Anyway, the ads came back in a brief second run, but aren't playing much in my neighborhood. Are you seeing them in yours?

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20020918 061200

Computers in Education: Too Little or Too Much

Just Whistling Dixie

A lot of money has been poured into Computerizing our Schools with---at best---scant evidence that it is anything much more than a distraction to the educational process. It is easy to be impressed by the capability of the computer if you are largely ignorant of it. As your sophistication grows, however, it seems less and less impressive. Today I hear disturbing arguments about the efficacy of particular computing tools replacing arguments about `The Civil War'. Focussing on the form has all too often replaced focussing on the content. We are likely to turn out people who can really cut-and-paste to beat the band, but won't have a clue what they are cutting and pasting about.

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20020814 030700

Computer Productivity

Less than meets the eye

A lot of strategies, and a whole stock market `boom' have been built on the very shifting sands of a notion that computers have contributed to high productivity. This is largely a phoney productivity, self-defining and self-referential in most respects. Doing a task at a lower cost isn't very productive if the task shouldn't be done at all. For example, if you make production of spread-sheets `more efficient' you may end up by wasting lots more management time looking at irrelevant spread-sheets. So productivity judgements and measures are difficult at best.

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20020814 030700

Mind Maps

Technology in search of problems

Mind Maps are a wonderful example of technology in search of a problem. This is a superficially attractive idea, but I have yet to see even the hint of an example that actually communicates anything interesting. I guess this isn't surprising if you think about the representation of ideas in a two or three dimensional world. Ideas have hundreds or thousands of dimensions, so their projection into a two or three space is pretty much bound to be pretty `flat' in comparison with the realities.

One Example

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20020814 030700

PIMs

Theory vs. Practice

Personal Information Managers are particularly attractive (a) if you have the time to use them; and (b) if you want to take pleasure in well-organized schedules. One needs to understand, however, that for most people the problem is having enough time rather than how that time is accounted for. PIMs are like the check registers. I may be nice to have an accurate one, but for most of us the problem is having the money not accounting for the little we have.

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20020814 030700

Outlines

Theory vs. Practice

There's lots of stuff on the net that is designed to support outlining. And lots of people think that it is a wonderful way to write and to exchange ideas. It seems to me that the verdict is out on that one. Most of the stuff I see outlined is boring and tedious, but that isn't proof that it wouldn't be more boring and tedious without being an outline. My guess, however, is that outlines appeal to the overly pedantic who mistake well organized thoughts for good thoughts.

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20020814 030700

The Hawthorne Effect

Or, Heisenberg made simple

Web `experiments' seem to be particularly prone to The Hawthorne Effect. Yet this effect is rarely, if ever, mentioned. So I'll mention it. Briefly put, the effect says expect things to change if you bother to fuss with them. The gruesome details of the discovery of the effect come from the Hawthorne Plant of Western Electric, but aren't relevant here. What is relevant is to note that one would expect even lousy ideas to have some beneficial short-run effects. Thus, most of the initial data reported about Web experiments is highly dubious. At best. And, at worst, it is quite likely to be wrong.

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20020814 174200

Is `Perfect' a synonym for `Dumb'?

Doc's Dictionary

At first I thought that `Perfect' must be a synonym for `Dumb' in Doc's Dictionary. But then I realized that it simply is a synonym for `agrees with me instead---a wholly more charitable and straightforward view. Doc says: Cory [Doctrow] has a perfect response to an absurd but thankfully isolated law enforcement response to wardriving, warchalking and stuff like that.. Actually, Doctrow's response is woefully under-thought. The fundamental issue with warchalking is whether it is being a Peeping Tom or not. I take---at this time---no particular position on that issue. However, it is not a trivial issue, to be easily resolved by simply assuming that it is ok.

More Doc-u-drivel

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20020814 030700

Shills, Panderers and `Journalism'

If the shoe fits...

Lots of Web sites spend considerable time and electronic ink on the subject of objective journalism. These same sites are often, however, relentless shills and panderers for other sites that come wandering along with half-baked ideas. The critical gaze that they apply so readily to supporters of the Copyright Laws or people who want to tax internet radio never seems to be applied to sites that suck up to them. This is no surprise, by the way, it is time honored tradition. But it also makes most of the `touts' guilty of just what they decry.

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20020814 153100

This Experiment

Wants and Needs

This experiment is only beginning. The next stages will involve such things as figuring out a client side storage mechanism that will allow the `state of the desktop' to be stored and recovered by the client. Also `display folders' need to be implemented, and drawers and cabinets need an implementation. Technology to handle the `stacks' of cards is just beginning to fall into place, and multiple stacks of different kinds of cards are a tantalizing possibility.

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20020814 153100

West Coast Wisdom: A Passing (non) Thought

Doc's Drivel

Dave [Winer], inspired by Woz, waxes wise [perhaps thru the Blue Haze of a West Bay Evening] on the subject of governance: He [presumably Woz] said something smart. "If the govt wanted to stop spam, they could." I guess that's what passes for `wisdom' on the Left Coast. Would it be `wise' if he said `If the govt wanted to stop cancer, they could?' I dunno, whatever it is, it doesn't strike me as `wise' unless your standards for wisdom are pretty low. But maybe, in this case, they are. You be the judge.

More Doc Drivel

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20020815 212900

`Remote Services' Just Don't Get It

Gotchas can Getcha

Several new `remote services' have sprung up. Many of them have the property that they store your data for you. Some of these have it on their development fast-track that they will provide a way for you to get, or locally manage, copies of your own data. Clearly, anyone who'd use such a service without (at least) this kind of promise would be an idiot. Otherwise, when the remote service dies (if Enron, WorldCom and USAir can disappear, what does it say about your local ISP or some tiny Silicon Valley start-up) so will your data.

20020820-073158-000037-DNess

20020819 185900

Dave `Does It' Again

Copyrights and Wrongs

Dave is beating on Larry Lessig again. No surprise, I suppose, that someone who sells software would take his position. But the logic is often nonexistent: ... If the customers placed a sufficiently high value on having access to source code, or if they felt our copyrights lasted too long, of course we would have to do what they want us to, or retire from the market. So the proponents of this plan are trying to legislate what they haven't been able to gain in the market. It's a weak position for that reason.

Dave's Dribbles

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20020822 144600

What's Up Doc? or, Don't mess with `my' market

Who do you Trust?

This is just fucking nuts. The Librarian of Congress is saying "We steamrolled a whole new marketplace by regulating the living shit out of it before it even had a chance to establish itself, and we're not gonna let the pioneers we priced out of the proceedings come in and petition their government for a fair shake to exist."
I've heard Billington speak many times, and this kind of unintelligent garble is way beneath him. Looks more like `The Doc' talking to himself, if I catch the tone. But then, given how interesting he apparently thinks he is, it wouldn't be a surprise to catch him talking principally to himself.

Never trust a Princeton/Harvard Scholar

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20020823 050400

The Garbage Compactor and the Airline Club

A Modern Fable

A European friend once suggested to me that only in America could you sell a device like a Garbage Compactor. After all, what it principally did, was convert 30 lbs. of garbage into 30 lbs. of garbage.
That's what Airlines Clubs do. They turn bad days in airports into bad days in airports. When airports are uncrowded---which a lot of them are these days, most places in the airport are pretty comfortable if you're not waiting in line. The hard part---doing the security checks---you do whether you go to the club or not.
Quoting an elitist Doc, as he shows his contempt for we `proles': All of which was fine until about an hour ago, when I discovered that the Red Carpet Clubs here in the all-United B Concourse at DIA are the ONLY places I can find where there is no wi-fi signal whatsoever. Not acceptable.
So here I am, back with the rest of the proles, jacked into a power outlet on a roof support column, bathed in full-strength free wi-fi, giving the airport some free PR..
If where you can find a wi-fi signal constitutes `discussable news' don't be surprised if some of us have a bit of contempt for blogs as journalism.

Up in the Air, Junior Birdman

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20020823 051400

Lileks needs a vacation

Over the Edge

No doubt it's just me but talking about `Ein Reich, Ein Volk' is jarring. As jarring as it would be to talk about the American Flag as the good old `Red, Blue and White'. I mean the words are ok, but if you're going to use them, you need them in the right order. And then there's but if you think this nation is trending towards some sort of government-enforced ethic purity, you really need to get out of your suburb more, and visit me in the city. Black people! Brown people! Yellow people! Mingling and living with impunity! (: This is said on the very day that there's a nasty race-related near riot in the heart of Lileks own City, where Police mistakenly shot a black child as they were going after a pit bull. I'm not sure it ranks high on the living with impunity scale.) After reading him for a while now, and being a former resident of Minneapolis, I thought I `could see his house' in one of the nice neighborhoods somewhere around Minnehaha Creek. Didn't look much like The City to me when I lived there. Not quite the same polyglot communities I've lived in in Brooklyn---in my part of Minneapolis we might have heard a brief Norse curse if someone dropped the Lutefisk, but that was about as polyglot as it got. But, I suppose times may have changed.
This is followed by some odd stuff that leads up to: When children start the day with the Todd Beamer Song, sung to the tune of �Horst Wessel,� you�ll have a point. Again, wrong words. "Horst Wessel" is a person, not a song. The song is `Die Fahne Hoch' (I assume) and it is often called `"Horst Wessel's Lied" (Song). Obviously not a serious problem, but it has a sloppy, slipshod sound. Would Glenn Miller have been happy if you called `Elmer's Tune' "Elmer"? I sort of doubt it.
Then there's Note to the dim: �Horst Wessel� is not Lt. Chekhov�s way of describing a spaceship owned by a famous Minneapolis hairstylist. I have no clue what this is about. So I guess I'm dim. Or don't know `famous' Minneapolis hairstlyists. In my day that was an oxymoron.
There�s more, but it�s late and I�m tired.Yes. And it's beginning to show. Write less, think more. Play with your kid.

Taking Leave (of his senses)

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20020823 063400

Doc's Hardware: Doing Hard Time

Apple Crapple

I'm finally up at Gnomedex. For reasons unknown, every laptop but mine got on the Net over the wi-fi kindly provided by Proxim. It was frustrating while it lasted, which was all morning.
Later, we get: A few of us seem to be able to connect only downstairs in the main auditorium (which is cool: it's where we're supposed to be anyway). Upstairs, where the other access point is, we can't. This is true for all of the Macs running OS X.

What's not up Doc? Your Apple?

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20010823 185000

Dave needs Prozac, or Vallium, or Viagra

Not that I'd prescribe without a licence, but ...

Dave is clearly angry. Lots of (unnecessary) intemperate language that looks like it serves for cover-up of poor thinking. And the poor thinking abounds: Happy Friday, one and all. Thinking about Lessig's Hemingway story. Also wondering why Lessig's book isn't on the Web, so we can read his code. So many mealy-mouthed advocates for this guy. That's kind of a clue. They believe in Free Software. All of them paid $21 to read Lessig. Let me know when you get that to parse. Gee, Dave. Books aren't code. I believe in paying if they can make you. And not paying if they can't. And never paying more than it's worth. That's the reason I don't buy Radio Userland. Sure it's cheap, but it isn't even worth that---at least to me.
That's what I don't like about Lessig and his followers. They don't do, they just talk. It would be as if I told Bowie or Elvis Costello or Sting how they had to make music for me. Well fuck that shit. I want the music that comes from their creative process. If they want to give me the source, so be it. If they don't that's okay too. Lawyers. Plug in every lawyer joke here. No, Dave. I've gotten lots of pleasure from Bowie, Costello and Sting. And I've never (literally) given any of them a dime.
And if you need a textbook example of absurdity, find me the person who thinks that they're seeing `all the art in the world'. If you think I haven't been generous enough, check it out. What a crock of shit. It's like the visitors to an art gallery thinking they're seeing all the art in the world. For once I'd like to see the artists get to blow away the critics. Perhaps that's what the Internet makes possible.`Fuck that shit', `Crock of shit', `Blow away' ... Take your meds, Dave. Looks like you're skipping them.

20020823-192502-000001-DNess

20010823 190300

Single Issue Candidates: Don't ask for a Recount

Politics and The Net

It looks like `Warblogging' is turning into `Voteflogging'. Several recent pieces on the net start to beat the drums for the forthcoming election. The suggestion is that `net friendly' candidates be sought out and supported. This is a dangerous strategy for at least two reasons. First, it is not clear that American Democracy responds well to single-issue candidacies. Going after Joe Biden because you don't like his `net stance' seems a little silly. If Strom Thurmond decides to become very `net friendly' should his stance on guns, abortion, tobacco, ... just be neglected? Sounds like a bad idea---quite independent of particular liberal / conservative dispostion---to me.
Second, and maybe more interesting, is when you hold the meeting of the NFP (the Net Friendly Party) and only a half-a-dozen party-goers show up, you may end up exposing your weakness instead of your strength. That's my guess here.

20020823-192502-000002-DNess

20010823 191500

The Apple Falls not far from the Tree

Apple Crapple

For reasons that are completely uncelar to me, Apple has apparently announced that they are opening a new store in Edina's (Minneapolis) Southdale. The odd thing is that this is about 4 miles from their store in the Mall of America. Given the (lack of) crowds at the MoA store every time I have been there, I can only wonder why? PS: I recently visited the current store and the new site. There is a lot of unsold inventory `on the floor' at the Mall of America site, but otherwise it looks fairly normal. The Southdale site does have a sign indicating that an Apple store is coming, but it doesn't indicate any particular date/time.

Road Apples

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20020813 183000

Bad Taste from Good People

Some jokes just aren't funny

Given the addressee list, it is reasonably likely that the note from Linus Torvalds is genuine. If so, it seems to me to be in bad taste. I recognize that `whack the stupid git' is probably indended to provoke a smile, rather than to serve as real advice. But The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git[emphasis added]. strikes me to be in very poor taste. There ought to be other ways to accomplish some reasonable humor without making fun out of killing others.

Linus' Ugly Words

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20020824 020200

Moron on Less(ig)

Copyrights and Wrongs

Charles Cooper's CNet piece makes a good point: Lessig is against long Copyrights. Other than that, the piece contains nothing useful. Nothing useful that is comprehensible, that is.
Software wasn't around when Madison, Hamilton and Jay were arguing in support of a constitution in the Federalist Papers, and it's hard to know what the founding fathers would have made of all this (though my bet is they would have been Mac guys, not PC guys). But would they have preferred Buffy to Carrie Bradshaw? Equally idle speculation I'd say. And equallly relevant.
At least returning to something near the topic at hand: But considering the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs created through software development over the last couple of decades, it's hard to argue there has not been considerable community benefit to letting software developers retain copyright control over their code. Open source has its place, but it's not the answer for everything. But this is hardly an argument. Pornography has surely created billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, and yet I'd have little interest in providing it with particular copyright protection.
At this juncture in the history of the software industry, more so than ever before, 10 years doesn't amount to a hill of JavaBeans--not when you're attempting to build up brand, distribution and customer loyalty in an increasingly fragmented and competitive market. But what does this have to do with software? Copyright isn't given to a `brand', and 10 year old software is likely to have little value worth protecting. Need a copy of CPM? You probably can find one somewhere.
How long should society give the creators of code to enjoy the fruits of their labor before lifting copyright controls? If we want to maintain the flow of software innovation, it better be for a fair chunk of time. Otherwise, you're going to wind up with something like Albania, circa 1975. I freely admit that I know little about Albanian software development in the 1970s. And I'm not quite sure how Enver Hoxha fits into the picture of software development, is he the Bill Gates? Eric Raymond? Richard Stallman? Larry Ellison? How? Where? What? Who? Why?
Got the picture? No, I sure don't. But if Cooper ever had the picture, unfortunately it got lost in the darkroom of his brain, and lies around, undeveloped, somewhere.

A Clunk from Cooper

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20020824 135700

It's the Cracked Pot that Boils

Elections and The Net

The FreNETics seem to think that the appearance of some candidates in the next election on the net is a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps. But their glee at the prospect of this new `exercise of democracy' has beclouded their thinking enough to cause them to miss some of the negative aspects. First, there may be information in the fact that the `early adopters' are far from the political mainstream. And in politics there are lots of `cracked pots' wandering around pushing their own odd ideas. Second, given the nature of lots of net discussions, it may well prove that exposure on the net is just the kind of exposure that no sensible politician would want, i.e. more or less completely focussed on marginal odd trivial issues. Like lots of the debate already on the net.

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20020918 202520

Doc's Hardware: The Saga Goes On

Apple Crapple

Doc has managed to lose---according to his testimony---about a quarter's worth of his personal information by what is really a comic episode wherein bad hardware combined with bad software and a number of bad decisions end up producing a disasterous result. I don't think I've ever encountered anyone who had so much trouble their computer as `Doc' (what is he `Doc' of, anyway). For someone who apparently thinks they are `in the business' this is nothing short of really funny. The curious thing is that none of it ever seems to raise questions about the possibility that this might have something to do with the equipment itself. Doc appears to blithely go on without ever considering that somehow this might be related to the fact that he uses an Apple. Oh well. There doesn't seem to be much correlation between Blogging volume and IQ, and Doc is nothing if not a prolific blogger...

Gored to the Core by another Apple?

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Working Notes