Gary Robinson's Rants

CNET to launch indie music service

Shortly after buying the MP3.com domain name and announcing that its sprawling music archive would close, CNET Networks said Wednesday it will start its own free service for independent musicians online. [News.com]

I'm not commenting more cuz I'm just very, very busy.

I probably won't post again for a day or two, so... if you live in the U.S., or are traveling and celebrate Thanksgiving wherever you happen to be, have a great one!

Can Google Grow Up?

Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. [Fortune]

Why patent

CEO's of small companies are responsible for their shareholders and need to do what they can to protect themselves from the simple fact that any innovation can be very easily copied at almost trivial expense by any of the huge software companies, such as Microsoft, and now Google.

This copying is completely predictable. Business plans must account for it from the beginning. If you can't expect to grow fast enough to become an independent company on your own, or to have such a huge user base that you are a very strong candidate for acquisition, you need to at least have fundamental patent protection.

In a recent Boston.com article, Dave Winer responds to Google's acquisition of Blogger:

Consider Google's acquisition of Blogger, one of the companies that launched the personal weblog craze. It's got Dave Winer climbing the walls. Winer, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School, founded UserLand Software Inc., maker of the blogging program Radio Userland. Winer says that Google may crush rival blogging systems like Radio Userland.

He points to the popular Google Toolbar program that's attached to millions of Web browsers. The toolbar makes it easy to do Google searches and block pop-up ads, but it also contains a link to Google's Blogger service. Microsoft's critics once warned that the company would use its browser toolbars to steer people to Microsoft products. Winer sees Google trying to pull the same stunt.

"Do they have a right to do it? Absolutely," Winer admits. "But I also have a right to hate them."

Yes, he has that right.

But "hating" isn't an effective way to protect shareholder value.

On the other hand, given Winer's very early position and history of contributions to the blogging field, he also had the right to protect his shareholders by filing patents. If I was a shareholder, I'd be more interested in a CEO that protected my interests rather than one who hates large competitors who are only doing the obvious, utterly predictable and and completely inevitable actions that large companies always do. Hating inevitable realities is not an effective means for increasing the book value of a company.

He wouldn't have to sue Google -- and given Google's resources it would probably be foolish for him to do so outside of the context of a relationship with a well-heeled partner. And he wouldn't have to attack open-source blogging tools or other small companies if he does not feel it is ethical to do so. But the simple fact of the patents' existence would increase the value of Userland as a company. It would make such potential partnerships much more likely to occur, it would make investors more interested in investing, and it would raise the price of any possible future acquisition.

It would help protect shareholder interests.

I'm back

I haven't blogged in a while because I've been visiting Disneyland with my wife and 2 and 5 year-olds. Very important family time for us -- because both my wife and I work long hours, we just don't have as much of it as we want.

One thing I didn't expect. There is so little excellence in the world, that it was truly refreshing to go to a place like Disneyland, where half the lights aren't burned out on the rides as they are in most amusement parks, and everything seems to be done with a high level of quality. On the surface everything is fun and light, but I'm sure that under the covers there is enormous discipline making it all work. I was really glad to see that. It's the exact opposite of the scene Ayn Rand describes at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged, where the building walls are unpainted and cracking, the public clocks don't work, etc., which is all too common to see in the real world.

Even if you go into some of the best and most expensive hotels in New York, you'll find that the big clocks over the registration desks, often built with high style a number of decades ago, usually are no longer functional. And they don't have the pride to fix them, while charging hundreds of dollars a night per room. It's worse than sad. It's truly depressing.

So while it was an enormous pleasure and of real importance for us to have this family time, an unexpected side-benefit was the pleasure of seeing the rare phenomenon of excellence.

Gates denies Microsoft talks

Gates denies Microsoft had talks with Google in any form.  As an officer of the most watched public company in the world, I believe him.  Google's KPCB hype machine must just be clearing its throat for the IPO.  At this point, I distrust Silicon Valley VCs more than Microsoft (by a substantial margin) and have no desire to see the same personalities fleece the investing public one more time. [John Robb]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Robb is exactly right.

What a set of space pictures!

...but does it look to you like somebody is giving us the finger in the upper left? See this National Geographic page.

Sun + China = #1

McNealy said that Sun has signed a deal under which the China Standard Software Co. (CSSC), a consortium of companies supported by the Chinese government, will use Sun's Linux desktop software, called the Java Desktop System.

"We're going to immediately roll out the Java Desktop System to between a half million and a million desktops in 2004," McNealy said. "It makes us instantaneously the No. 1 Linux desktop player on the planet." [News.com]

Microsoft vs. iTunes and the rest of the music world

In a move likely to send waves through the growing online music market, Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer Inc., Roxio Inc.'s Napster and others.

A spokeswoman for the Redmond, Wash., software company confirmed that Microsoft's MSN Web site will offer such a service in 2004, but declined to provide further details. Microsoft executives previously have said the company was considering selling music online; the company's latest comments represent the most concrete statement yet of its intentions. A person familiar with the matter saysMicrosoft has been in regular contact with major music companies to discuss plans for a service.

"They're definitely getting into the business," this person says. [Wall Street Journal; you may need to be a subscriber to access it though.]

Obviously, they will be using their monopoly in OS's to try to get a similar position on music downloading if they can; of course the courts will do nothing about it. Unless, maybe, Massachusetts's holding out from the settlement will provide a wedge.

SpamAssassin and HashCash

I've been assuming, and still assume, that although a hashcash scheme could solve the spam problem, and is arguably the easiest way to do it (despite some superficial, addressable challenges), it won't be solved that way. There are other feasible solutions which essentially have the advantage of not seeming so... strange and unlikely... to those who haven't studied the idea in depth, and in a world where who-gets-to-critical-mass-first usually determines what is and isn't adopted, such perceptions can be a killer blow.

I was interested to see this on Justin Mason's blog: "we do plan to add [hashcah] to SpamAssassin (eventually!)"

I followed a link to SpamAssassin's BugZilla bug 796, and one of their developers is planning to add it in the next major release. There is an active ongoing discussion in the comments section about how best to do it.

So that's a start toward hashcash possibly getting to critical mass. I still won't bet on it, for the reason mentioned above, but it does seem a bit more possible now.

Patent News: Prior Art + Outcry = Holy Cow, It Worked!

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to re-examine the Eolas patent that Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser was recently ruled to have infringed, after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) presented the USPTO with examples of prior art and asked them to re-examine the issue.

"'A substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry has essentially raised a question of patentability with respect to the 906 patent claims,' Stephen Kunin, the USPTO's deputy commissioner for patent examination policy, wrote in his order for re-examination. 'This creates an extraordinary situation for which a director-ordered examination is an appropriate remedy.' . . .

"'The thing that's exciting to me is that the (US)PTO sort of made the ruling on the basis of how much interest there is in this issue on the Internet,' said Dale Dougherty, a vice president of online publishing and research at Sebastapol, Calif.-based publisher O'Reilly & Associates, who posted news of the USPTO's decision on the O'Reilly Web site. 'And it seems that they felt they had to respond to it.'" [GrokLaw]

That's good! My patent lawyer and I have talked about trying to get a re-examine on a particularly troublesome-looking patent once or twice, but this is the first time it's actually happened.

My guess is that the re-exam will succeed in overturning it. If so, that will mean that there really is a mechanism for the software development community to protect itself from at least the most problematic patents as long as their really is prior art and/or a strong obviousness argument.

Study Finds Differences in 2 Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs

Progress in understanding heart attacks:

Researchers say they only recently came to understand how plaque in artery walls can kill. They used to think that the danger period was when the tumor-like plaque narrows arteries. Now, said Dr. Peter Libby, the chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, they realize that the danger occurs long before that.

Plaque grows from the inner wall of the artery out, Dr. Libby said, making the artery thicker but not narrower. Only at the very end of this process does the tumor-like plaque start to grow inward, narrowing the artery. But most fatal heart attacks, Dr. Libby explained, occur when one of the earlier stage plaques, one that has grown inward, pops open. Blood pours out, clots, obstructs the artery, blocks the flow of blood to the heart, and a heart attack ensues.

"The blood clot forms where the plaque opens," Dr. Libby said. "It's revolutionized the way we look at the disease." The idea of looking at heart disease by looking at the diameter of an artery, he added, "is like trying to learn about a donut by looking at the hole."[NY Times]

And progress in treating them:

At the study's start, the middle-aged, mostly male heart disease patients in the study had levels of low density lipoproteins, or L.D.L., of 150, on average. L.D.L. carries cholesterol to arteries. Atorvastatin lowered participants' L.D.L. levels to 79 while those taking pravastatin obtained L.D.L. levels of 110, on average.

After 18 months, the atorvastatin patients had no change in the plaque in their arteries. [same NY Times article]

Eolas patent reexamination ordered

The USPTO Director has ordered reexaminations of the infamousEolas Distributed Hypermedia Method (discussed earlier(1) on Slashdot) and SBC Structured Document Browser (discussed earlier(2) on Slashdot) patents. [Slashdot]

Very good news.

Time Magazine calls the iTunes Music Store the Coolest Invention of 2003

Other inventions this year may have more altruistic intentions (like Dean Kamen's water purifier) or be more visible on street corners (like those ubiquitous camera cell phones). But for finally finding a middle ground between the foot-dragging record labels and the free-for-all digital pirates and for creating a bandwagon onto which its competitors immediately jumped, Apple's iTunes Music Store is Time's Coolest Invention of 2003. [Time, hat tip to MacInTouch]

99 cent downloads from MusicNow & Best Buy

The company tailored its service to be compatible with a range of portable digital music players from companies like Creative, Rio, Digitalway and iRiver.

Apple and Napster have touted their own devices -- the wildly popular iPod and the new Napster Samsung player -- for use with iTunes and Napster, respectively.

"The reason that we're adding MusicNow is that we carry a large variety of other (digital music) devices and there really wasn't a music service designed for them," said Scott Young, vice president of digital entertainment for Best Buy. [Wired]

Some quotes on individuality and freedom

Posted by JarheadDad:

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." [H.L. Mencken]

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." [Samuel Adams]

"Fascism finds it necessary, at the outset, to take away from the ordinary human being what he has been taught and has grown to cherish the most; personal liberty. And it can be affirmed, without falling into exaggeration, that a curtailment of personal liberty not only has proved to be, but necessarily must be, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Fascism." [Mario Palmeiri]

"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." [Adolph Hitler, 1933]

"All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all." [Vladimir Lenin, as quoted in Not by Politics Alone]

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society." [Hillary Clinton, 1993]

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." [Ayn Rand]

"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?" [Henry David Thoreau]

"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" [Dosteovsky's 'Grand Inquisitor'] [Citizen Smash]

November 10, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 07, 2003

Consumers deleting music files from PCs, report saysConsumers deleting music files from PCs, report says

New York-based researcher the NPD Group Inc. said this week that the 1.4 million households it tracked deleted their music files in August, compared to 606,000 in May. The file deletion frenzy reflects the success of the recording industry's latest antipiracy push and related media attention, according to NPD. [news.com]

November 7, 2003 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 06, 2003

Music merger to create new giant label

Showing signs of a music business struggling to adapt to new digital realities, Sony Music and the Bertelsmann Music Group agreed Thursday to create a new joint venture, merging the second- and fifth-largest record labels into a single entity.

The deal comes amid reports that EMI Group has secured funds to bid for Warner Music. If both deals were to go through, just three entities would control close to 80 percent of the music sold in the United States, and they would dominate most other major music markets.[News.com]

Talk about consolidation.

November 6, 2003 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

Required Reading -- The Will To Endure

THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS in Iraq have been tough. Taking a page from Ho Chi Minh’s playbook, the enemy has launched a Ramadan offensive – perhaps hoping to spark comparisons to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Sunday was one of the bloodiest days for the US military in Iraq since April, when a Chinook helicopter was shot down, killing 16 and wounding 20. Many of those who were killed or hurt were on their way home for a couple of weeks of hard-earned leave.

Those of us who went in to this conflict with our eyes wide open fully expected that there would be days like Sunday. There are always death and casualties in war. Only a fool would assume that we could occupy a foreign land without paying a price in blood. As of this writing, the US has lost 381 soldiers since the beginning of the war; the British have lost 53; the Spanish, Poles, and Ukrainians have lost one soldier each. The US has also reported some 2200 wounded (precise casualty figures for other nationalities are not available). These figures include fatalities and casualties from combat and non-combat related incidents, including suicides.

But let’s put this in an historical context. The US military has had “bad days” before. Take, for example, September 17, 1862, when the Union and Confederate Armies, meeting in battle near Antietam, Maryland, suffered 22,720 casualties – including 3,650 confirmed fatalities. That was a bad day.

Or consider June 6, 1944, when American, British, and Canadian forces suffered almost 9,000 casualties – including 3,000 dead in the first day of the Normandy Campaign. Why are these numbers so approximate? Because they didn’t have time to count and bury the dead until a few days later. Imagine the horror of the survivors.

Or how about the month-long battle for Iwo Jima, February – March 1945, when the US lost 6,821 killed, 19,217 wounded, and 2,648 suffered from combat fatigue – in other words, they were so “shell-shocked” that they were permanently relieved from combat duty. That was a really bad month.

It’s important to remember, however, that in each of these cases, we carried on undaunted in our mission, and ultimately achieved victory. Every soldier’s death, whether in war or peace, is a tragedy for those who are left behind. But no single loss should deter us from completing our important work.

There will be more days like Sunday. [Citizen Smash - The Indepundit, hat tip to Due Diligence]

Go to the source to read the rest.

November 6, 2003 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

iTunes remaining closed

In a conference call with analysts Wednesday:

Jobs also indicated that Apple would focus its engineering on continuing to improve the iPod and iTunes, rather than extending either the music player or the music service to work with third-party software or products respectively. [MacCentral]

Update: I just now listened to the Q&A section of the conference. When directly asked whether they would open iTunes and iPod up to other players and software, the immediate response from Steve was "We don't know." Then he went on to describe the fact that Apple is in the lead now, so there isn't currently much pressure to do so. "Why should we work with another music store -- when we're working with the Microsoft of music stores? (laughter) -- I'd rather spend our engineering resources on enhancing the iPod and enhancing the music store."

But it seems clear that if there is more business reason to open iTunes and iPod in the future, that will be considered.

November 6, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple: iTunes outsells Napster five to one

On the heels of Roxio Inc.'s news that its recently relaunched Napster 2.0 commercial music download service sold 300,000 songs during its first full week of operation, Apple offered up news of its own: The iTunes Music Store sold 1.5 million songs during the same period, five times more than Napster. What's more, Apple also said that market research firm Nielsen SoundScan registers the iTunes Music Store as having more than 80 percent of the legal download market last week. [MacCentral]

November 6, 2003 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

China "throw its financial weight behind Linux"

The Chinese government plans to throw its financial weight behind Linux-based computer systems that could rival Microsoft Corp's Windows in one of the world's fastest-growing technology markets, an official said on Wednesday.

China would build a domestic software industry around Linux -- a cheaper software standard that can be copied and modified freely -- said Gou Zhongwen, a vice minister at the powerful Ministry of Information Industry. [Reuters via CNN.com]

Yes, Microsoft has an incredible amount of money to spend on Longhorn. Many, many millions of Office and Windows sales add up. But if you add up the resources of all non-Microsoft businesses and governments that have an interest in contributing to an open-source alterntative, that sorta adds up too.

During a 1998 meeting an associate of mine attended, Bill Gates spelled outs his vision for continuing growth of Microsoft, and it was letting countries like China get "sort of addicted" (Gates's exact words) to Windows by means of illicitly copying it, after which MS would start charging when it had good enough DRM.

Sorry, Charlie.

Now their hope for continued growth is to create something so great in Longhorn that people will buy it despite the alternatives. They need to try that, because now they can't simply rely on their monopoly extending in an unlimited fashion due to monopolistic forces alone. They have no choice. They have to spend billions of dollars to try to actually to innovate -- innovation being something they have never done before. It's a gamble they probably wouldn't have tried if it weren't for Linux. It may succeed, and may fail -- they may or may not create something compelling enough for businesses and governments worldwide to buy Microsoft software at the huge scale that is required for Microsoft to still be Microsoft. But they have no choice but to gamble on it at this point.

November 6, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 04, 2003

A bit of family stuff

My wife's a retinal surgeon who uses the Eastern Maine Medical Center operating room. We have two kids, Isaac and Noah. I've gotta attach some family pics to this blog in the sidebar!

November 4, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google vs. eBay?

Meg Whitman, chief executive of online auctioneer eBay, on Monday downplayed speculation that its chief business partner, popular search engine Google, was poised to become its biggest rival.

Talk is rife that Google is seeking to diversify its business after it emerged late last month that the 5-year-old search engine is considering an initial public offering of shares in a flotation that could value the company at $25 billion. [News.com]

That's Googles best hope to actually become worth what it could be valued at in an IPO. But why assume a company with no experience or track record in being a seller of goods could surpass the existing leaders? It makes no sense. It might happen, of course. Google could concievably execute their plan with such precision and excellence that it could come up on top. But why assume they will when it is simply not in their background or infrastructure at all? You might as well look at ANY company with a lot of cash, and that would like to beat Amazon and eBay, and assume it will.

November 4, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patent on selling downloadable music (and other media)

If a jury decides that SightSound has a right to enforce the patents, it could affect almost any business that sells downloadable music or video online, including the major record labels and music studios. This is increasingly important, as a number of download services emerge to offer people a legal way obtain video and music content online. [News.com]

November 4, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Internet servers: MS losing to Apache

For a while, it seemed like Microsoft IIS was inexorably gaining market share and that it might seriously threaten the open-source Apache server. But the trend has reversed, and Apache has around 2/3rds of the market and gaining. See this interesting chart. [Thanks to SlashDot]

Clearly, the open-source model is exceedingly robust in a world where it is so easy for large numbers of far-flung people to work together to build something of mutual interest to all of them. This will have more and more ramifications beyond the world of software creation, Wikipedia being one great example.

November 4, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

This should make all thinking people very frightened

Andrew Sullivan quotes an email he received:

...this educated doctor, a US citizen, told me in all seriousness how there was a detailed Jewish plot that if Al Gore had become president, he would have been assasinated so that Joseph Lieberman could assume the presidency of the United States. Since the Jews knew they would never get a Jewish president elected directly, the Lieberman VP bid was a Jewish conspiracy to gain control of the presidency by underhanded means.
I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. What was really worrying was he felt safe to say what he did in a gathering of middle class physicians in a wealthy neighborhood of Los Angeles. [AndrewSullivan]

Again I ask you: how can these people figure out how to get out of bed in the morning? There is no specific evidence in favor of the described plot, but the speaker finds it convenient to believe, so he believes it. Reason need not intrude; belief and reason are totally separate things. If he found it convenient to believe that [put in a randomly chosen minority here] are subhuman, are in the way of the interests of his ethnic or peer group, and therefore should all put to death, I see no reason to assume that he wouldn't be equally able to believe that. After all, many, many did "think" that way in Nazi Germany, and many still do elsewhere in the world.

And again, I must ask, is the answer memetic engineering?

November 4, 2003 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 01, 2003

Amazon's "search in book" controversy

Amazon has just made finding books that treat certain topics much easier. This is a good thing, right? After all, Amazon is tracking the usage of the service by requiring a credit card. The Author's Guild doesn't see it that way, however. Amazon apparently had received clearance from publishers, but not from the authors themselves. The Guild was alarmed when they were able to "exploit" the service to nefarious ends.

...

The service appears to have been revamped to eliminate the possibility of printing pages displayed through the system. If you print a page with an image of the text on it, the text won't appear. You can't right-click and save the image, and you can't save the page with the image in it. [ArsTechnica]

If Amazon was aggressive about patents, which they are, they would try and patent some of these techniques in the context of displaying book pages, and that could present another barrier to the likes of Google.

November 1, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (0)

NY Times on the Methuselah Mouse Prize

Wouldn't you like to live a lot longer? Aubrey de Grey:

"Aging really is barbaric," he said. "It shouldn't be allowed. I don't need an ethical argument. I don't need any argument. It's visceral. To let people die is bad." [NY Times]

I'm a proud donator to the Methuselah Mouse Prize. Please donate too. Then 150 years or so from now, maybe we'll have a chance to discuss whether it was worth it.

November 1, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (0)