Gary Robinson's Rants

Microsoft adding blogging

A Microsoft Research project called 'Wallop' has weblogging and document-sharing features and will be integrated into the next-generation Microsoft OS. [SlashDot]

This will obviously detract from the advantage accrued by Google in its acquisition of Blogger. $15 Billion valuation for Google? No, I don't think so.

Google and MS, sitting in a tree, NOT

There have been headlines in the last 24 hours about Microsoft's having approached Google about a possible takeover.

Of course. For Microsoft, it's a simple build-vs.-buy decision. If they could buy Google for the right price, that would be cheaper and easier than duplicating Google and pulling a PointCast on them, which will probably take a few years.

For the wrong price, they are better off building their own high-performing search engine.

The right price from Microsoft's point of view is unlikely to be the $15 billion Google apparently expects to be valued at after an IPO.

But it costs MS little to make an offer, so they did. And Google's VC investors, who see more money coming to them from an IPO than from an MS takeover, did not agree to the lesser price MS could and should offer, since they can simply take the money and run immediately after the IPO.

So, it made perfect sense for MS to give it a shot, and it makes perfect sense that nothing came of it.

The Economist gets it about Google

For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead. In contrast to a portal such as Yahoo!, which also offers customers free e-mail and other services, a pure search engine is always but a click away from losing users. [Economist]

This is the first time I've seen someone besides me sound clear warning bells about Google's future. The Economist totally gets it. Their article is highly recommended.

Anybody who buys into Google at a valuation of $15 billion is a fool, IMHO. But there are plenty of fools out there, and the VC's who invested in Google are likely to do exceedingly well.

Warning: The rest of this post is nothing but me pontificating about an abstract philosophical point. Don't hold it against me if you read it and find you have no interest -- if you don't want to read someone's pontifications about abstract philosophical points, don't! :)

When I make assertions such as my negative ones about the value of Google stock, I try to keep one thing in mind. It's human nature to make predictions and then tie one's ego to being right. But in reality, to win you don't have to be right all the time, and no one is -- you just have to be right more often than the other guy. That means knowing, all along the way, that you may be wrong, so that you are open to refining or even changing your opinion as more information arrives. Ironically, whose egos are too invested in being right are endeavoring under a handicap that will tend to make them wrong more often than if they were not so invested.

That process is far more interesting to me than any individual question of being right on any particular issue.

The challenge is in making the effort to try to come up with a correct analysis, without that history of effort causing me to be ego-invested in my conclusion. Any salesperson knows that once a potential customer has invested his time in hearing about a product, he's more likely to buy, because unconsciously he doesn't want that time to have been wasted. I think something very analogous happens with those who spend significant amounts of time trying to predict the future, with the result that their egos are invested in their predictions even if they never make them public. And if they do make them public, it's a double-whammy because they don't want to be seen as wrong.

So -- back to Google. To be more rigorous, I'll just say that there is a probability distribution of possible outcomes for Google. One class of possible outcomes involves them performing so brilliantly that they will find ways to maintain their lead despite the challenges they face. That is definitely a class of possible outcomes, particularly after an IPO which makes huge amounts of cash available to them. (You'd also be able to do cool things with billions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in your pocket -- at least I hope so.) So it would be moronic to flatly say that Google will not maintain their IPO valuation.

However, I think there is a discrepancy between the likelihood of that outcome, and the price people are expected to pay in an IPO, that makes it unwise -- very unwise -- to invest at that kind of valuation.

Man Arrested in Australia Over Nigerian E-mail Scam

"A 39 year old Sydney man has been arrested over the Nigerian Scam. Simultanious raids were conducted in two homes by police, who siezed computers and documents. Over the last 6 months, Australian police have tracked about 1.5 million dollars. The man faces Dubbo Local court today, charged with 17 offenses." [SlashDot]

Now that's the kind of news I like to read first thing in the morning. ;) Nigerian scams can be expressed in enough different ways that they have a higher false negative rate than most kinds of spam. So I have a particular dislike for them. The good news is that they are clearly criminal activity even without anti-spam laws, so their producers can be caught and locked up.

Best computer art yet?

Without a doubt, this is the most interesting "computer art" I have yet encountered. Thanks to Justin Mason for pointing it out. The artist is Jason Salavon.

Examples:

27 cover versions of Paul McCartney's Yesterday. Everything from James Taylor to the Warsaw National Philharmonic, in 4 minutes and 42 seconds.

Every Playboy centerfold, averaged together by decade.

Here's the whole gallery.

I find much of it strangely beautiful.

Try the gender genie

A new computer program can tell whether a book was written by a man or a woman. The simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction.

The program's success seems to confirm the stereotypical perception of differences in male and female language use. Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships.

Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program's developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).[Nature; hat tip to Andrew Sullivan]

You can test a simplified version of the algorithm on your own prose here. It worked for me.

Today's solar flare

Smaller than yesterday's, but still huge. Great pic at space.com.

The W3C is asking the PTO to re-examine the Eolas patent. [NYTimes]

This is a process by which a patent can be revoked as not having been properly granted in the first place.

Security reason to get Panther

According to [an] advisory, some applications are installed on Mac OS X systems with insecure file permissions, so "many of the files and directories that compose various applications are globally writable." The problem with that, according to @Stake, is it allows attackers with limited access to the system to replace program files with files of their choice, thus obtaining "additional privileges from unsuspecting users who may run the replaced version of the binary (file)."

"These Trojan binaries would escalate the privileges of the attacker to the privileges of the unsuspecting user who ran them," the advisory explains.[News.com]

Panther is reportedly not vulnerable to this issue.

Ha! Google is indeed trying to get into the act

Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online, according to a report this week from Publishers Weekly's online site. Google spokesman David Krane declined to comment. But such a service would likely allow people to query a database for keywords and then view exerpts from books where those keywords appear, according to the report. So far, Google has made agreements that give it the ability to scan as many as 60,000 titles, the report said. [News.com]

I need to reconsider what I said before. Amazon has a clear advantage at doing this kind of thing. The fact that viewers of books on Amazon can immediately buy them with one click gives publishers powerful inventive to making book content available to Amazon. Google, at least on its own, cannot do that, and therefore publishers have less incentive to make such deals with Google as with Amazon. That may be the reason why Google currently has permission for 60,000 books while Amazon currently has permission for 120,000. If that trend continues, Amazon will always have the better book search service.

Would it make sense for Amazon to enable one-click shopping through Amazon on the Google site for the currently-viewed book? Then, from the perspective of publishers, Google would be as good as Amazon, and Amazon would arguably get more sales because they would draw in Google users. On the other hand, Amazon has reason to want Amazon to be the world's first choice for searching though books, and that would mean not doing such a deal with Google.

Barnes and Noble could do such a deal with Google, but it would possibly violate two of Amazon's patents.

This will be an interesting competition to watch.

Awesome solar flare video

Check out this awesome video showing yesterday's solar flare which spewed two billion tons of solar material our way. [Thanks SlashDot!]

Also check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Tonight and tomorrow night there may be fantastic auroras for those far enough north (or south) and whose skies are not cloudy. Here in Maine it's raining today but I am hopeful because fair skies are predicted for tomorrow!

Update: here's another great set of images, also with a hat tip to Slashdot.

Another leap forward for Amazon

Amazon has scanned 33 million pages from 120,000 into their search engine. You can now search right into 120,000 books the way you can search Web pages on Google.

This is a great leap forward, not least of which because there is no reason to think they will stop at 120,000 books.

I had my first eye-opening experience of the magnitude of the breakthrough this morning.

I'm a great fan of Shirley Hazzard's novel "The Transit of Venus," which is easily one of the best books i've ever read. (If you check out the reviews you'll see I'm not alone in feeling that way.)

It's a novel that demands you play very close attention. In fact, a moment's lapse of attention, one sentence not considered carefully, and huge plot elements may be missed entirely.

On page 12 is the pair of sentences "In fact Edmond would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city and not for many years."

I remembered enough of those lines that I could type what I remembered into Amazon and immediately bring up the correct page.

But I had been wondering about those lines for several years. Nowhere else in the novel is the character's suicide mentioned. In fact, at the end of the novel, on the surface, he seems to be doing quite well. So it seemed odd that there was this one sentence that said he would be a suicide, and no other explanatory material. But the book is so exquisitly constructed on so many levels that I felt that probably, just as I could imagine not quite processing those lines on page 12 in the first place, maybe there was something else hidden away in the novel that would give an explanation. In fact I was planning on reading the novel again, not only to savor it again, but to solve that mystery.

The first thing I did upon hearing about Amazon's text database was try to see if I could find out more about Edmond's fate. To my pleasant surprise, it not only found the original sentence in the novel, but also an excerpt from a book about literary technique, where that books author explains that 40 pages from the end of Transit of Venus there is a single sentence that, though of any obvious significance in itself, when put together with one other sentence near the end of the book clearly explains the fate of one of the other major characters. This fate would not be knowable, even upon reading that sentence near the end, if the reader didn't remember the seemingly-innocuous sentence from 40 pages before. I didn't.

But the fate of this character is quite intertwined with that of Edmond, and putting two and two together, we not only know exactly why and when he committed suicide, but also can determine the identity of the "northern city" from the quote above.

The whole process took maybe two minutes of exploration using the new search feature.

So, in my humble opinion, Amazon is making a very significant leap forward, not only for them, but for us. This is something that not a lot of companies can compete with... it takes a lot of effort to scan 33 million pages, and a lot of storage and CPU power to search through them. Google has the resources to do it, but Amazon could duplicate the whole of Google a lot more easily than Google could duplicate the whole of Amazon. Moreover, Amazon can get permission from the publishers to do it, in order to sell more books. It would be a lot harder for Google or any site other than a book retailer to get such permission. Barnes and Noble may duplicate the feature one day, but they are well behind Amazon in market share and it isn't likely that copying one more Amazon feature is going to enable them to come back from second place.

This is going to help Amazon sell a lot of books. If you find an excerpt of text that you want to know more about, you have reason to buy the book. So Amazon has a very clear profit model attached to this advance. They're going to make more money.

I've written in the past that Google is facing major challenges if it is to hold onto its dominance in search. I've also written that Microsoft is facing major challenges if it wants to remain a company with the income it has now.

But I think the future is looking brighter and brighter for Amazon.

As an aside, one additional feature I'd really like to see on Amazon is a discussion board for each book. This would be different from the reviews. It would rather give a place for people who have read a book to discuss it. For instance, the literary technique book didn't mention how the bit near the end and the sentence 40 pages earlier also explained Edmond's fate. Maybe the author didn't make the connection. It would be great if there were a single place for this kind of thing to be explored, and bringing people to that place, if it were on Amazon's site, would be another competitive boon to Amazon.

George Orwell on war critics

Quoted and commented upon by Andrew Sullivan:

"It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." - from Notes on Nationalism. It's a helpful quote when slogging through yet another left-liberal column on why we can't win in Iraq. [Andrew Sullivan]

Panther problems

Besides the problem with Synergy (while running it ate all "a" characters typed on the keyboard in any app), I've encountered some other issues.

OmniOutliner seems about 10 times slower than under Jaguar, and one time it wouldn't close a file and I had to kill it, losing my changes. OO was very stable under Jaguar, but is unstable enough under Panther that I'm beginning to convert outlines to Circus Ponies Notebook by exporting/importing them as OPML.

Backup 1.2.1 fails with an unrecoverable exception upon launch. I am downloading the 2.0 beta in hopes that it will work better. Update: it does.

I have not encountered the corruption of FireWire disk drives that a number of people have reported.

There seems to be a problem with the battery or the battery indicator. Although I have been charging it for a couple of hours now, and am still charging it, the indicator has settled down to a reading of 0:28 remaining until a full charge.

Two informative Panther Reviews...

The first is geared at long-time Mac users.

The second is geared at technically-minded Mac users.

I'm running Panther

It works. The new Finder, at least, is a real improvement.

I had a bizarre glitch immediately after upgrading: I couldn't type a small "a"! I could type a capital "A" by holding down the shift key, but not with caps lock. This occurred on two different keyboards so I knew it was software. Eventually it turned out that it was one of my "Login Items". I disabled them all, and am adding the ones I care about back one by one, so I don't know which one was responsible, but it works now.

NetNewsWire's connection to TypePad is completely broken under Panther. It was flaky before; there were several bugs I've reported on the NetNewsWire mail list. But I can't login to TypePad with NNW with Panther, so it is now unusable for posting. I hope it will be fixed before long because I like the program quite a bit. It worked seamlessly with Userland Radio and I hope that will be true of TypePad before long.

I won't give a full review of Panther here because other excellent reviews already exist.

Update: The problem with the letter "a" was Synergy.

Panther arrives!

I received OS X 10.3 Panther today. I'm going to throw caution to the wind and not wait until 10.3.1 before upgrading.

I'll report back here on the results.

In the meantime I'm going to put in a plug for a great product: Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes a bootable copy of your hard drive very quickly, and costs all of $5, but you can try it for free. Great software. A very good thing to run before upgrading. (I have no relationship to the guy that makes CCC.)

How do these people figure out how to get out of bed in the morning?

Andrew Sullivan linked to an article that is representative of the way many people can take their brains out of the loop in order to have the satisfaction of experiencing unadulterated, complete, moronic hate:

One of my friends is a guy I met in grad school a few years ago. He's a lawyer that practices IP law and was pursuing a MS in Computer Science to further his knowledge of programming. He is brilliant. Went to U of Chicago undergrad, then Northwestern University Law. He works for one of the biggest law firms in the world. He is from Pakistan. His name is Masood.

...

Masood, surprising the hell out of me [said]: "Just like 9-11."

Me: "What?"

Masood: "Just like 9-11 where the Mossad flew planes into buildings." [Blackfive]

I recommend you check out that very scary article.

I don't get the kind of person represented by Masood. They hear Al Qaeda claim responsibility, but continue to believe what they want to believe, which is that the Mossad did it. How do their minds work? How do they figure out how to brush their teeth, get out of bed? How do they function at all in the real world?

It's really a mystery to me. I assume they "compartmentalize" so that they can deal effectively in some aspects of life, while indulging in fantasy in others.

All I know is, such people are dangerous because they hate, and can't be reasoned out of it. In that sense it's not much different from dealing with a highly capable machine which has no means of input, but does have plenty of means for causing great suffering. The machine will do what it is programmed to do, and that's all. If that programming carries a mutation involving concepts of violence, watch out.

One question that is interesting to me is the question of whether current technology could be used to enable the collaborative construction of benevolent meme-complexes which might eventually be so compelling and powerful that people like Masood would choose to accept them -- overwriting, as it were, the dangerous meme-complexes they are choosing to host now.

Oh, and it's free

Apple's iTunes for Windows has both the Apple-traditional advantages of a superior user interface and the sexiest brand name as well as the Microsoft-traditional advantages of (1) tying the product to another popular product and (2) being a free product competing with products that need to make money for their makers. How brutal. [Michael Swaine]

Michael nails it exactly, but doesn't mention the fact that people won't want to be tied into buying Apple's hardware.

Having reflected on it for some time, however, my guess is that Apple will be totally pragmatic about that issue. To the extent that people reject iPod/iTMS because they are proprietary, Apple will open it up, rather than pull another Mac vs. DOS/Windows disaster. Steve Jobs has been through too much, between Apple, NeXT's failure as a hardware company, and resurrection at Apple. He's not stupid, and he's not unwilling to learn. Quite the opposite.

Who's responsible for the SCO lawsuits?

According to this article, Sun and Microsoft:

Still, launching a major legal action entails major money, and SCO didn't have it. But in February 2003, Sun quietly bought a Unix license from SCO. In early March, SCO launched its IBM lawsuit. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Why would Sun do this? First, IBM's AIX and pSeries servers are major competitors to Sun's Solaris and SPARC systems. Remember: At the start, this was SCO vs. IBM, not SCO vs. Linux. Secondly, Linux on Intel has eroded Sun's vital Solaris/SPARC market far more than Windows has. The more trouble SCO can cause IBM and Linux, the better it is for Sun.

...

In short, SCO started the fire, Sun supplied the lighter fluid and Microsoft and Sun together are adding the firewood. There is no smoking gun, but there is a fire and smoke. That may not be enough for some people, but it's enough for me. [eWeek]

Walter Mossberg Reviews Music Sites in WSJ

He likes iTunes best.

I'm sure all three services will evolve and get better, and others will enter the fray. But, for now, iTunes is the best choice on Windows.[Wall Street Journal]

Memetic replicator gene? Science writer...

Re-posted without editing from Due Diligence:

Science writer Carl Zimmer went on the blogroll recently without much explanation. If your usual blog diet is information tech, or business punditing, consider a visit to expand your horizons. Here's a great, thought provoking post on the detective work in discovering part of the genetic basis for language. Turns out that it's a mechanism that lets us be efficient copy cats. And that is part of how we have moved largely from the genetic evolutionary track onto a memetic evolutionary track. The verdict on that experiment is, of course, still unknown. Fascinating. [Due Diligence]

Why does this matter? There's a theory that basically says that the meme-complexes we contain and carry forward have co-evolved with us to such an extent that that co-evolution may actually be the foundation of our status as conscious entities.

Evolution occurs through a process of copying -- copying with some errors so that evolution can make use of mutation -- but still copying that is accurate enough that the parent is mostly the same as the child.

So, finding a genetic basis for being "efficient copy cats" is significant and has implications for the validity of that memetic theory.

Open Source Everywhere Open Source Everywhere

Wired has an interesting article about open source techniques being used elsewhere than in creating software. I've long felt that the open source concept could be extended to other areas, which is the idea behind my company's creation of Emergent Music. It looks like the idea is catching on, because the evidence is irrefutable. Probably the best example is Wikipedia. From the article:

This summer, Wikipedia surpassed Britannica.com in daily hits, according to Web traffic monitor Alexa.com. Wikipedia's popularity is all the more extraordinary because, like Linux, it started as a small-scale experiment. But the result challenged Britannica, a 235-year-old institution.

There's some satisfaction in the fact that the technology behind Wikipedia is the same one that's baffled Britannica for years. The old-guard encyclopedia has never figured out how to adapt to the digital era. In 1998, Britannica stopped updating its print version and focused on its CD-ROM, then last year revived the print version. In 1999, it launched a free site online; two years later, switched to a paid version. The struggles aren't unique, but they illustrate how a proprietary model built on traditional notions of intellectual property can be undone by irresistible forces.

Now Wales [founder of Wikipedia] is thinking big. He wants to square off with Britannica not just online but in print and on CD-ROM. Next year, he hopes to release Wikipedia 1.0, a peer-reviewed and peer-edited compendium of 75,000 entries, available to anyone, for commercial or noncommercial purposes. [Wired]

Strong debut for iTunes for PCs

Music fans have bought more than a million songs since the service for Windows users was launched on Thursday.

...

"We're off to a great start, and our competition isn't even out of the starting gates yet," said Apple boss Steve Jobs.

Apple has another cause to celebrate. More than a million copies of the Windows version of its iTunes music software have been downloaded in the past three days. [BBC]

Stereophile's review of the iPod.

Stereophile's review of the iPod.

Interview with Steve Jobs re iTMS

An interesting and quite short interview with Steve, so you can afford to read it even if you're busy. One item:

LEVY: You say that that the online music retail competition will boil down to Apple and Microsoft.

JOBS: Eventually. [But] we’re trying to be nice to the Windows world. We turned out one of the best products on Windows that’s ever been made. So maybe Microsoft will decide not to [sell music online]. They don’t compete with eBay, they don’t compete with Amazon, they don’t compete with a lot of people. Maybe if we’re lucky Apple can be the Amazon or eBay of downloaded music. [MSNBC]

Day 3 at PopTech

Sally Stansfield of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave a very powerful presentation about the need to do more to address health issues in developing countries.

I'm as much oriented toward using non-Microsoft software as many people in the Mac and open-source communities. But it's an interesting thing that Bill Gates has been able to personally accumulate so much money that his foundation is a real force.

I think the claim that Bill Gates has done more good in the world than Mother Theresa is absolutely true. It takes a lot of money to do a lot of good.

Some people have criticized the GAMGF for not diminishing in size from year to year. It should be spending its money, right?

Wrong. It should be investing it, and spending what it can, leaving enough that the overall capital does not diminish over time. That way, it is a perpetual money generator and will do far more good in the long run than if it quickly spends its capital.

Apple and AOL

...this deal has more about what AOL won't be doing. The obvious point that most of the mainstream media coverage seemed to miss this afternoon is that AOL has not only decided not to compete with iTunes, but to give it free advertising on top of it all. So all those naysayers who had already amassed a list of companies that would ensure Apple's failure in the Windows music download market can go ahead and cross AOL off that list. What's more, AOL will not be entering into a music download partnership with Dell or Microsoft, and AOL will not be endorsing downloads in Windows Media Format. And let's not forget that this kind of deal opens the door for iTunes to be bundled with future versions of AOL. And oh yeah, AOL just happens to own one of the five major record labels. So even though AOL happens to be the provider of the world's worst Internet solution, they're kind of, you know, important to Apple.. [Bill Palmer]

Yeah, it kinda sounds look a good deal.

It's no accident that Steve Jobs is the guy that negotiated a (roughly) 50% split between Disney and Pixar, which has hitherto been unimaginable for a company dealing with Disney, or the deal between Apple and Pepsi that was announced simultaneously with the AOL deal. More from Bill Palmer:

What's amusing is how much Apple gains from this deal, and how little is has to contribute. I guess that's what happens when you're in a position of power. In other words, Pepsi is looking to cash in on the impending popularity of the iTunes Music Store, and is apparently willing to spend as much as $100 million to make it happen. Let's see: Pepsi pays for a SuperBowl ad centered around iTunes, and then gives iTunes free advertising on three hundred million Pepsi bottles and cans, a third of which will enable the drinker to download any song from iTunes for free, and Pepsi is going to pay for the cost of the downloads.

Wait a minute -- does Apple actually have to do any work here at all?

Swaine on Windows iTunes

Michael Swaine thinks iTunes for Windows had a good launch:

So the iTunes Music Store is already the leading source for downloaded tunes, even though it has had to achieve this from inside the 3-percent Mac marketshare? And Apple's now opened it up the other 97 percent, plus getting AOL and Pepsi to shill for them? Shall we also note that early Windows users are blown away, saying that iTunes is now their favorite Windows app? Is this, like, a successful launch, or what?

(You may wonder why I haven't blogged anything from Pop!Tech today. Truth is that most of it hasn't been too interesting to me so far today, and I've been websurfing.)

Short People Earn Less Than Tall People

Judge's study found a direct correlation between height and earnings. Every inch of height amounted to about $789 more a year in pay. A person who is 6 feet tall, versus 5-5, could be expected to earn about $5,525 more each year. That could mean a huge difference over 30 years of work, he said. [AP]

Clay Shirky is up...

...talking about blogging. I see a large number of open laptops in the audience. I assume that many or most of them are doing exactly what I am doing and posting that fact to our blogs.

Day 2 begins....

Yesterday was fantastic. I brought my wife Deborah this year. She's a retinal surgeon in Bangor, ME. Some of what was discussed yesterday may have relevance, in the future, to her medical practice.

That is the possibility of using cloning technology to make embryos from which stem cells may be harvested which then may be differentiated into retinal cells and implanted into the eye to replace cells dying from retinal degeneration. (This is with reference to Michael West's talk.)

Unfortunately, under the law President Bush signed which prohibits federal funding for research that isn't based on the few existing lines of stem cells that existed in the country at that time, this research can't be federally funded. The problem is that our bodies would reject retinal cells from the existing lines.

Immortality

Pop!Tech has been absolutely fascinating so far. For me, the most fascinating speaker was Aubrey de Grey, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, who believes that it is more than merely conceivable that many people living today will be made effectively immortal through advances in medical "engineering."

According to him, no new forms of damage due to aging have been discovered in the last 20 years, and feasible solutions are now known to every form of such damage that is now known to exist -- a list of kinds of damage which is amazingly short (if I recall correctly, there were seven types).

Therefore, he thinks that it is quite possible that within the next 10 years of so, those findings may be applied to a 2-year old mouse to double (or was it triple?) its lifespan. He thinks that this event will galvanize public attention, starting a serious and extremely well-funded "war on aging" that will have the effect, during the lifespan of many people who are middle-aged today, of generating the advances necessary to enable us to repair people in a perpetual way, just as houses can be pretty much perpetually repaired.

The thing that made de Grey's talk especially fascinating to me is that he convinced me that he actually may, conceivably, be right. And that is an amazing change in my view of life. That is, he convinced me that there is some (albeit small) chance that I, my wife, my kids, my friends, and you, may possibly live to be a thousand years old.

If you want to help make this possibly happen, see The Methuselah Mouse Prize. The guy is serious. It appears that it may, possibly, actually be doable. If so, the trick is to get the funding, and that will come through getting attention, and the mouse trick would arguably get the attention. And the mouse trick, de Grey believes, will happen sooner if there is a prize for achieving it. Hence, The Methuselah Mouse Prize.

Pop!Tech Nanotechnology and the risk of ruin

I'm home after a fascinating day at Pop!Tech.

Christine Peterson talked a lot about nanotechnology, since that's what her company does. She referred to Bill Joy's Wired article in which he warns of grey goo, nanomachines which can replicate themselves from the materials at hand, everything and everyone into more of the machines, resulting in uniform grey goo everywhere.

Christine suggested that researchers focus on "defensive" applications of nanotechnology instead of "offensive" applications.

Other speakers seemed to have a similar idea, that in the past we've dealt with great dangers, and met the challenge, and therefore we can just continue doing that, and everything is likely to be fine. They felt that humankind's research in such areas as nanotechnology is inevitable, and therefore we just need to deal with it effectively.

I believe there is an error in this way of thinking. To see the error, we need to look at the concept in which, in the worlds of gambling and investing, is known as the "risk of ruin". This is a different concept from estimating the average of all possible outcomes, or the "expected value".

The expected value of a series of possibilities is a very useful concept. For instance, there is a general average rate of return of certain types of investment. In the short term, the value of the investment will fluctuate. It will go up and down. But in the long-term, if you are willing to hold onto your investments, things often average out and there is a degree of predictability. That's why it makes sense to put a significant proportion of your retirement money in the stock market, or in bonds, etc., each one of which has a different expected rate of return which is greater or less, based upon its risk.

The concept of risk of ruin complements this one. An investment may become zero. Then, it can't go up and down any more. There isn't anything left to go up. It's all over when that happens.

If you make enough risky-enough gambles, ruin will come at some point. The more such gambles you make, the higher the probability of ruin becomes. The only solution is to choose to make less risky gambles. That's why people don't routinely bet all of their money on highly leveraged market transactions. If they did, their fortune might go way up, and also might become nothing, and if all of one's capital is bet in every transaction, eventually it will become nothing.

We need to look at risks like "grey goo" in this light. This is not the same kind of thing as the challenges the human race has handled successfully before. The stakes are far greater than they were before. Total annihilation of the human race wasn't a reasonable possibility before. The nuclear age was the first inkling. Nanotechnology is another. There will be others.

In the past we could indulge in technologies that might do good and might do harm, with the realistic faith that overall, our fortunes might rise and fall, but on average would rise somewhat.

But with these new threats, the situation is different because a significant risk of ruin exists. If we keep taking enough of these kinds of risks, and nothing happens to completely change the nature of the game, risk of ruin eventually will become so statistically likely to occur as to be virtually inevitable.

Looked at in that light, the path that Bill Joy suggested, that we steer away from building this kind of technology, becomes more sensible. Such a path may, of course, fail. For instance it may be impossible to steer suicidal bad guys away from building grey goo devices, so doom may come despite our efforts.

However, according to the risk-of-ruin argument laid out above, the chances for annihilation if we do allow these kinds of potentially hugely destructive technologies to be developed, is arguably so great that it isn't reasonable to suggest that annihilation will never come. This is simple statistics, based on probabilities, given a large enough number of large enough risks.

In contrast, the path of not building such technologies in the first place arguably has at least a chance of working.

I'm not saying that the ideas laid out in this post are the only way of looking at the problem. However, I do think that simply assuming that these new risks can be managed the same way that old risks have always been handled is naive, because it is clear that the risk of ruin is greatly higher than it was in the past, and that that fact has real implications. The question of whether these technologies should be suppressed needs to be addressed.

Yes, it seems that it is inevitable that humankind will build these technologies, but I would argue that that may only be true because humankind has not fully faced the statistical implications of that choice; if the reality were faced squarely, if people really understood it, it might not be so inevitable. I would argue that people who think that this research is inevitable might be no different from people 100 years ago who couldn't imagine a time when industrial waste wasn't freely dumped into our skies and oceans.

The real number of hours per patent

At Pop!Tech: Christine Peterson, President of the Foresight Institute just now mentioned that she'd heard that it is not true that examiners spend an average of 6 hours per patent. No, they spend 4.

Pop!Tech

Well, I'm posting via wi-fi this from my conference hall seat at Pop!Tech 2003 in beautiful Camden, ME.

Am I going to blog this event in real-time? I have no particular plans either way. We'll see if anything comes up that seems like you'd be interested!

AOL, Colored Sugar Water to Promote iTunes

...Under the agreement, by the end of 2003 AOL users will be able to preview and purchase music from the iTunes Music Store just as any other registered iTunes user...

...In addition, Apple is teaming with Pepsi—once famously characterized by Steve Jobs as a provider of "colored sugar water"— to give away up to 100 million songs via the iTunes Music Store... [TidBits]

Of course those free songs can only be played on iPods.

Apple unveils iTunes, Music Store

"Apple unveils iTunes, Music Store for Windows" [MacCentral]

"'Second generation' iTunes Music Store debuts" [MacCentral]

400,000 songs by the end of October (up from 200,000), 200 independent labels...

"First Napster 2.0 Review" [SlashDot]

Quite buggy and unstable, they say.

Beauty Contests and Venture Valuations

A fascinating, and well-informed view of venture capital valuations from Kevin Laws:

There is no benefit to any individual player improving their valuation metrics. Let's say that I decided that I should use fundamental analysis (and overcame the uncertainty issues involved). If my calculations came out lower than the simple metrics everybody else was using, I would get shut out of the deal. Since the buyers are also using those metrics when buying, I would be shut out of a potential profit as well. [VentureBlog]

Tower Records vs. IBM: The Death (and Rebirth) of Online Distribution

"One study I did for a major music distributor concluded that when you purchased a CD for $17.99 at Tower Records, the record label only got $3 - $5. Out of that, they paid the artist and their own expenses and profit. Count the additional sales you could get for a lower price, and the label makes more money from an online price of $3.99 than a store price of $17.99." [Kevin Laws via Tim Oren]

Matt's Review of Puretracks

Matt Goyer has a review of the PureTracks iTunes Music Store clone which launched today in Canada.

A review of downloadable music stores

Key quote:

I wonder: will people ultimately take to forfeiting ownership of their music in this way? Whether consumers will ever be willing to switch from free is an open question, but at least we know that at some point consumers did regularly pay for their music. They've never really had to pay for space-shifting their CDs, and getting locked into "approved devices" might be a nuisance. [A Copyfighter's Musings, thanks to Dave Winer]

To me, the issue of lock-in is like the proverbial elephant in a room that nobody talks about.

Suppose you spend $1000, or $10,000, on music from the iTunes Music Store, and Apple uses its DRM to keep those songs from being easily playable on non-Apple hardware. Then you're an Apple hardware buyer for life if you don't want to give up your music investment.

This is a Big Deal!

I think that is ultimately the reason the iTunes Music Store is of strategic importance for Apple. Even if they do eventually allow songs to be played on other hardware, you can bet that those manufacturers would be required to pay a hefty license fee.

Note, it is possible to burn iTunes Music Stores songs to CD or DVD. This can be as a regular audio CD, or with the files in ".m4p" format. Apple says that the .m4p's won't play in all other players. I don't know how portable those files are. In any case, it seems that with some effort and possible loss in sound quality, it would be possible to convert iTunes Music Store songs to play elsewhere. But the question is, would it be worth the bother, or would a typical user stick with Apple hardware as long as it's pretty much competitive in terms of performance for the money?

I know I probably would.

Kazaa, BitTorrent, and Central Server-Based Systems

"Kazaa backs plan that could spell an end to the days of free music:"

The world's most popular song-swapping network, Kazaa, has thrown its weight behind a plan to start billing song swappers for their music downloads.

The proposal, which could finally end the days of the free lunch for millions of music fans, has been put to big US record labels at the same time as a new legitimate version of the former file-swapping giant Napster is launched in the US.

The idea is to phase in a billing mechanism for peer to peer networks, such as Kazaa and Morpheus, that allow users to copy music directly from each other's hard drives. [The Age]

It's hard not to be quite skeptical of such a plan. The reason peer-to-peer systems have flourished is because it was the only way to get easy access to large numbers of music files. There was no legal way to get them, and hugely expensive central server-based systems couldn't take the risk of making illegal files available.

Now that the legal agreements with the major labels are falling into place, central server-based systems can serve them. So the main reason now for peer-to-peer networks to exist is that they enable files to be shared at no cost. Once they start charging, their purpose in life won't be so clear.

At one point during Napster's original heyday, one of the managers at the company looked toward the future and said that the real reason for a system like Napster was collaborative filtering -- using the large numbers of people involved in such a system to form implicit communities to make recommendations to each other. For instance, everyone can see what is in everyone else's library. If you find someone whose tastes are like yours, then you may benefit from sampling items in their collection that you haven't heard yet.

In the end, this manager was right about the value of collaborative filtering, but confused about what it meant for peer-to-peer networks. Systems like AudioScrobbler let you see what other people have in their collections, but without caring how you got the files. The files can come from a central server -- it makes no difference where they came from. So the concept that peer-to-peer file sharing is justified by collaborative filtering makes no sense.

In the end, the advantages of stable, ultra-high bandwidth central servers will make peer-to-peer file sharing moot, except for that percentage of the population that continues, for one reason or another to choose not to pay for music. But that population won't be served by Kazaa under Kazaa's new plan.

There is one niche where legal, peer-to-peer sharing of music files may have a role to play in the future. This is in the sharing of legitimately free music -- music from artists who release some material freely in order to get people to pay for other material, and from artist that choose to make a living from concert ticket sales or who do it as a hobby and don't make money at all.

File sharing mechanisms such a BitTorrent make file sharing both speedy and reliable by sharing the load among a large number of peers. If one computer goes offline while it is serving a file, it doesn't end the transfer. The transfer continues from other computers in the network. That makes peer-to-peer comparably reliable to central server-based systems. There is still a disadvantage to something like BitTorrent, because each end-user computer shares the load of sending out files. In a central server-based system, the server carries all the load, and so there is less load on end-user computers. So BitTorrent-type systems will only flourish where there is a counterbalancing advantage compared to central server-based systems.

And indeed there are disadvantages to central server-based systems, even for serving legal files. A central server-based system will need to pay for the hardware and bandwidth to serve potentially huge numbers of files to potentially huge numbers of people. It will need to make a very large amount of money just to pay the overhead, and then it will want to make a profit on top of that. So its needs and the needs of users who just want the best free music are different. Such a system will have to either charge a sizable flat fee to pay for the overhead, or it will be inevitably try to convince people to buy more music when they would have been just as happy listening to a higher proportion of free music. Users will, of course, be able to choose to listen to large amounts of free music anyway, but the environment set up by the server-based system -- the content, the way the user interface works, etc. -- won't be particularly friendly to that choice. It will be a little less comfortable for people who are oriented toward free music than such people would like.

A reliable peer-to-peer system (such as one based on BitTorrent) could be set up that would be a perfect match to the needs of people who enjoy and care about free music. It wouldn't have to pay for the overhead of a central server-based system, so it wouldn't need to try to convince people to buy music when they would be just as happy with free music, and it won't need to charge high subscription frees to pay for bandwidth and hardware.

In fact, it fairly likely that a service will emerge that serves the needs of people who care about free music, and that it will be a peer-to-peer service. Kazaa has the opportunity to fill that role, but it sounds like Kazaa is a little too envious right now of the profits being made by the iTunes Music Store, and that will be made by other such stores, to see their opportunity. That may change in time.

(Of course the above assumes that Kazaa would prefer not to continue to base its business on the sharing of files that aren't legally available for that purpose. The fact that they are making moves toward establishing relationships with the labels is a strong argument that, in fact, they would prefer to make that change.)

A test of the hypothesis laid out above: will we ever see Amazon.com or the iTunes Music Store treat the needs of people who care about free music with as much priority as they treat the needs of paying consumers?

SunnComm and Apple -- similar approaches

An interesting piece from Hiawatha Bray at the Boston Globe, pointing out that SunnComm's technology was not meant to be perfect, but was meant to provide some measure of a barrier that is not overly odious. This is exactly what the iTunes Music Store does.

In light of Hiawatha's article I think that I, and others, were overly critical of what SunnComm tries to achieve with its technology. However, it's still true that the threat to sue the grad student based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was absurd and odious in the extreme, and that was the ultimate basis for my response.

Hiawatha's piece is worth reading if you're interested in following industry trends with respect to DRM.

SunnComm backs off

"Threat of lawsuit passes for student... SunnComm backs down from lawsuit against a computer science grad student":

"I don't want to be the people my parents warned me to stay away from," said Jacobs of his decision. "It's 10 million bucks, but maybe I can make it back, and maybe [Halderman] can learn a little bit more about our technology so as not to call it brain dead." [Daily Princetonian]

Jacobs is President and CEO of SunnComm, and clearly a natural-born comedian.

The Apple Advantage

Many music stores are emerging and will be emerging soon, some of them surprising in the fact that they are copying iTunes' purchase model as opposed to the previously dominant cable TV model where you pay by the month for all you can eat.

Apple is in an enviable position, because as this market begins to compete on price, Apple can undersell all the music stores that don't sell their own hardware, since Apple can make its money off hardware.

Dell would seem to be in the same position, since it will reportedly soon be opening its own store, but in fact they will be doing so as part of an agreement with MusicMatch. And other stores have deals going with other hardware manufacturers.

Sony, of course, makes hardware and sells music. But it has a conflict because it's also one of the leading record labels. It may have a real problem in dealing on equitable terms with all the other labels. Certainly, in the past there have been a lot of politics about music within Sony -- and that political conflict is, in fact, what has precluded their release of an MP3 player to date.

Apple is, as far as I know, unique in its position of being able to sell all brands without favor and, but profit off hardware. That is a deep structural advantage for Apple.

We'll see how well they parlay that advantage into a strong position in the industry as a whole. My guess is that they won't actually use it to try to beat everyone else on price. Their pricing will be competitive, but most of the money that could be passed on to consumers as savings will in fact be used to try to create the world's best user experience for music downloading (UI, reliability, etc.).

Shift key, mescalin connected

This didn't happen to me:

A STORY on forbes that we read with some disbelief makes us think that maybe someone has slipped mescalin into our morning coffee.

A student that pointed out copy protection software could be blocked if people used the SHIFT key when they inserted a CD, will be sued by SunnComm, company motto "Light years beyond encryption". [The Inquirer]

...because I heard the story last night. I figured it was food poisoning from dinner.

Email no longer workable?

More on the presently trendy meme of dismissing email as no longer workable. VentureBlog quotes Salon:

Filtering on the content is generally a bad idea. If you're actually going to really mail someone about Viagra, I don't know how you'd get that through. I'm sure the Nigerians are facing the same problems.

My response: I don't want any emails about Viagra from someone I don't know, or from Nigerians I don't know. If such a person absolutely really wants reach me they can expend their own resources to do so, such as sending me a snail mail letter or picking up the phone.

SpamSieve automatically places people I have corresponded with on my whitelist, so people I know can write me about anything they want without fear of being filtered out, and I can add anyone to my whitelist just by adding them to my Address Book, without having received or sent an email to them.

I just don't see it as a "bad idea" to treat email this way, and I think email would remain very useful if it always had to be treated this way. Of course, there's nothing wrong with even greater levels of performance, and so something like Brad Templeton's two-camp approach will be welcomed when it arrives, as it probably will. (Templeton is one of the authors of the aforementioned Salon piece.)

I just wanted to point out that filtering, when done right, isn't a "bad idea".

My first post using NetNewsWire

My first post using NetNewsWire rather than TypePad's Web interface.

First post

This is my first post to my TypePad blog. If you can read this, it worked.