Gary Robinson's Rants

What a classic piece on the traitors to the Left!

I've always voted Democratic. I've always identified far more with left-wing views than right-wing views. And now despite the fact that I fear that Bush is fiscally insane and leading us all down the road to financial ruin by overspending, I may well vote for him in the coming election. Why?

This piece by Paul Berman spells it out almost miraculously well. It is an amazing piece on the real betrayers of the left. I find it difficult to even quote from it because it is all just so great, but I'll pick one point at random:

The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs. [Dissent]

Read the whole thing. Really.

Kerry's incredible self-contradiction

Check this out for the most extreme example of self-contradiction I have ever seen from a politician. Two letters, written to the same constitiuent, 9 days apart in 1991, claiming exact opposite positions on the Gulf War. I guess he didn't notice that he was writing to the same guy:

"Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition ... to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On January 11, I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president the immediate authority to go to war."

--letter from Senator John Kerry to Wallace Carter of Newton Centre, Massachusetts, dated January 22 [1991]

"Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."

--Senator Kerry to Wallace Carter, January 31 [1991] [The New Republic, thanks to Andrew.]

Commentary from the article:

Will someone PLEASE put this guy out of his misery? Please?

At least I get the impression that Dean means what he says.

We have a winner

We promised a $50 iTunes gift certificate for one of the people responding to our Goombah poll, and we have one! I don't think I can reveal who it is due to privacy concerns without his permission. I'll ask. :)

Update: the winner is: Tim Meesseman. Congrats!

Oh man, the patent system is berserk.

New patent, brought to my awareness by Slashdot. Claim 1 says:

1. A method for assigning URL's and e-mail addresses to members of a group comprising the steps of:

assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"; and

assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@subdomain.domain;"

wherein the "name" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same and unique for each particular one of said members such that an only difference between said URL and said e-mail address for said member is that in said URL the "@" symbol of the e-mail address is replaced with a "." and wherein said "subdomain" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same for all members of said group. [USPTO.gov]

The Slashdot commentator says:

This is nonsense. My friend who ran for political office in 2000 used this exact naming scheme for his web site. All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?

He's right that it's nonsense. It once again shows that the PTO is completely incapable from telling what is blatantly obvious from what is not. Unfortunately his friend doesn't count as prior art, since the patent was filed for in 1999.

It does seem quite likely that some prior art will show up. But really, as a matter of principle, this should be overturned based on obviousness alone. Otherwise it is really scary -- it means that the courts are also incapable of distinguishing the obvious from the nonobvious. And if that is the case, the patent system will unavoidably do more harm than good, because it is not fulfilling its reason for existence: reward those who come up with truly novel ideas for the work it takes to come up with them and to make them known to the world (and freely available to the world 20 years later) through patents. How can it do that, if it can't distinguish what is novel? It can't, period.

Goombah in the press

Goombah just got a fair amount of page space in The Independent (a U.K. newspaper). It's based on a response I sent to some questions from the reporter, Charles Arthur, who has a technology column there. Thanks, Charles! We appreciate it! :)

News update re Goombah: here at Transpose, through most of January we've been heavily involved in matters relating to our NSF grant, which we have successfully finalized. That slowed down Goombah development considerably.

However, we are now free and clear to concentrate fully on it again, and you can expect things to be progressing fairly rapidly. We're really excited about the potential, obviously, or we wouldn't be doing it. Stay tuned!

The Jobless Recovery

A fascinating article from the Washington Post on the "jobless recovery" (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan). I personally don't feel I have any real understanding of the implications of the offshoring of jobs to countries like India (which is happening a lot recently in my own profession, software), except that it seems very worrying because we need jobs here and they're going there.

The Democratic party is, of course, playing this up as much as they can and blaming Republicans in general and Bush in particular. This blaming has always seemed very suspect to me, because to me it's seemed obvious that it's the Internet and ongoing increases in voice communications capability that are enabling programming jobs and call centers to be moved offshore, not Bush's, or anyone's, politics. For instance, my company is very "virtual" and distributed in a way that wouldn't have been easy to do fifteen years ago. One of the three people involved in the early days of this company lived and worked in Canada all that time, because he was the person we wanted for the job, and that's where he lived. The other two founders are 120 miles apart in Maine and have needed to get together physically infrequently enough that it arguably wouldn't make a huge difference if one of us was in Mexico. We use the Internet to exchange data, email and IM's much as we probably would if we were across the hall rather than across the state. We use an Internet-based phone service with a only-slightly-nonzero flat monthly fee. It's not only possible, but very easy and inexpensive to work in this distributed way. Does this have anything whatsoever to do with Republicans or George W. Bush, or Clinton for that matter? Obviously not.

Still, of course, it's worrisome because if those jobs are outside of the country, that money is going outside of the country, and that has to hurt everyone in the U.S. (particularly those who lost their jobs!)... right?

The Washington Post story says:

This is not the first jobless recovery. In 1991-92 the economy grew steadily, but job growth was almost nil. The reason for such recoveries, as a study by the New York Fed argues, is that the structure of the economy is changing faster than previously. In the 1970s and '80s, unemployment was roughly 50 percent "cyclical": Recessions drove firms to lay off workers and recoveries drove them to hire workers back into the same jobs. Now, by contrast, the "structural" component of unemployment accounts for most job losses: Technological and organizational shifts are driving firms to close jobs down permanently, and laid-off workers are having to look for entirely new work. That takes time. Firms have to create jobs they never had before, which takes longer than re-creating old ones. As a result, the new structural nature of unemployment means that job creation lags in the early stages of a recovery.

...

the bigger question is whether jobless recoveries are a bad thing. They are, after all, the flip side of good news. There is less cyclical unemployment these days, so recessions are milder; fewer jobs are being created now because fewer jobs were destroyed during the downturn. Moreover, a jobless recovery means, by definition, that each worker is producing more. Higher productivity, in turn, is the best promise possible of higher wages and employment in the future. Just look at the past decade: The jobless recovery of 1991-92 ushered in the longest economic expansion of the postwar period, which drove unemployment down to previously unheard-of levels, and fueled improvements in poverty, crime and other social indicators.

If you're curious about this issue and what it means, it's well worth reading the entire article, which has a lot of interesting things to say.

The argument it makes is that, in effect, the U.S. has a system whereby sometimes many jobs are lost because of improvements in technology, but a little bit down the line new, better jobs tend to be created. Sort of like Adam Smith's "invisible hand". According to this view, it's a good that automatically emerges from the overall process.

Maybe it's true, maybe not. I really don't know. But historically there seems to be real evidence that there is at least a significant amount of truth in it. (Just as there is much, but not total, truth in the "invisible hand" thesis.)

One thing for sure: as a country, it would take guts to "stay the course" in the face of this offshoring, give up the jobs in the short-term, and trust that it will all work out for the best in the end.

Hewlett-Packard: No WMA for IPod

Contrary to reports, Hewlett-Packard will not be supporting Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format in its forthcoming HP-branded iPod. [Wired]

This looks like a fairly reliable report.

Bar code patents thrown out

A rare case of justice:

A federal district court judge invalidated patents on bar code products--in a victory over one of the technology's most prolific patent collectors.

Philip Pro, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, on Jan. 23 ruled against defendant the Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation, calling the claims of 14 of its patents--some of which dated from the 1950s--invalid and unenforceable. [News.com]

Too many files in Spirit?

Nasa scientists say hundreds of computer files that have accumulated on the Mars rover Spirit may be the cause of problems that have crippled it. [BBC News]

Well, I won't claim I've never been involved in computer systems that had a problem due to running out of disk space... :) Still, for the money they've spent on the development of these rovers, one would think they would have the resources to test for this kind of thing in advance.

Let's hope "too many files" is the problem, because that really has a decent chance of being fixable from the ground.

Mars Rover's lack of pre-flight testing

Prior to its troubles on Mars, Spirit was being put through its paces -- doing things that were not tested with as much vigor here at JPL before being launched.

Spirit does not have a huge track record of testing, a source said, for fear of damaging the robot and not meeting an unforgiving launch window.[Space.com]

OK, let me get this straight. They were afraid that the operations they planned to do on Mars might lead to "damaging the robot." So they don't test them, and just sent the thing straight to Mars.

Does anyone else see a problem in reasoning there? I mean, there really was, as far as I know, very little that has happened on Mars that was strange or unexpected (like falling off a 5-foot cliff or something). All the rover really did was roll off the lander and roll to a rock, and then test it with its instruments. And we're saying that Nasa thought that testing such operations in a realistic way might "damage" the robot?

Suppose it was true that doing those operations would damage the robot. Does it make sense to wait until the robot is on Mars, where no human hands are available to fix it, to find that out? Or would it make more sense to find that out here on Earth?

If they didn't have time to do that kind of testing (and the subsequent repairing of any problems that emerged) somebody is guilty of some really poor planning.

Software: only for big companies

An interesting interview with Bruce Perens over at the BBC. He's up discussing the role of HP, IBM, et al and the move towards Linux. However, his main point is about software patents and how they are much more of a problem than SCO: "We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software, and it will technically be illegal for other people to do so." [Slashdot]

Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in that. Unless the law changes such that, for instance, software patents last only 3 years.

HP-Apple iPod deal: more info

As part of the iPod deal, Apple is creating tools that will allow HP programmers to tweak the iTunes music software and store so that they can work with features of Microsoft's Media Center, such as a remote control. While Microsoft has made no secret of its irritation over this deal, which will promote Apple's music store and media format, the arrangement will keep consumers on a computer using Windows. [Cnn.com]

The iPod working with Microsoft's Media Center. THAT's news!

HP executives also have cited Apple's unwillingness to support Microsoft's Windows Media player format on the iPod. "We would like to see interoperability," said Tom Anderson, HP's vice president of marketing for consumer PCs, but "that is not in our current plans." [Same source as above]

That report contradicts an earlier one. Time will tell who's right.

"Apple has shown that it will not necessarily be the company to lead the market in trying to drive new trends but that it can be the company to capitalize on clear trends by doing better than its competitor," said Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter Research analyst. "It's a question of when they think the market is mature enough for them to get involved." [Same source as above]

That seems to be true, and is quite a change for Steve Jobs. Most likely a reflection of Jobs' hard-won experience as a manager, in experiences through the original Apple II at Apple, to the Mac, to the NeXT, and back. It probably also explains why we haven't seen a Media Center-like device from Apple yet. "Yet" being the operative word.

Churchill parrot story may be false! :(

Did Churchill's parrot curse the Nazis? Maybe not. (Thanks again to Andrew Sullivan). Sad.

Google spawns social networking service

Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com on Thursday, CNET News.com has learned. [News.com]

Yet another attempt to see if they can get into yet another market to justify a big valuation. Although this is just an experiment at this point -- they'll probably only dive into it in a big way if there is a very positive response. More:

We're going to watch this and see how people react to it," said Google spokesperson David Krane.

So we'll see. But Krane also stressed that the system is staying very informal, somewhat similar to when Google puts a "beta" moniker on products like Google Catalogs or Google Labs projects that may never actually make it into Google as a long-term offering.[SearchEngineWatch]

Execs vow global crackdown on music file sharing

"We believe that the music industry's Internet strategy is now turning the corner, and that in 2004 there will be, for the first time, a substantial migration of consumers from unauthorized free services to legitimate alternatives," said Jay Berman, IFPI's CEO.[CNN.com]

IFPI == International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

Apple's iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator

Check it out.

The Mind of Brian

An analysis of the chord structure of the song that Paul McCartney once said is his favorite, Brian Wilson's God Only Knows. I agree with Sir Paul, it is certainly one of the greatest songs ever written, and not only due to the music. The words are among the greatest too:

...If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me...

Microsoft at CES

As much as I like Apple's iLife applications, I left CES with the clear impression that Microsoft's home experience will once again leapfrog Apple. I guess it's time for me to start shopping for a new home PC.[VentureBlog]

I hope (and assume) that Apple actually has great hardware for working with home entertainment systems still in the lab and due to be released later this year. It really doesn't seem likely that Apple's entire consumer R&D team were doing nothing but developing a smaller iPod for the last year or so.

We'll find out.

More song swappers sued

Another 532 people. They're stepping up the pace.

Mother kills raped daughter to restore 'honor'

I could hardly believe this story:

Raped by her brothers and impregnated, Rofayda Qaoud refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the 17-year-old a razor with which to slit her wrists.

So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would: restored her family's "honor" through murder.

Armed with a plastic bag, razor and wooden stick, Qaoud entered her sleeping daughter's room last Jan. 27...

..."She killed me before I killed her," says the 43-year-old mother of nine. "I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family's honor."[Seattle Times, again thanks to Andrew Sullivan, if "thanks" is the word]

Read the full article, if you have a strong stomach.

Frankly I'll take Dead White Male culture anyday. It isn't actually Dead White Male culture anymore, or course, having been pivotally informed by the Women's Suffrage Movement and the likes of Martin Luther King, though its zygote was dominated by white males for many centuries.

No, what goes by that label has become an engine for learning how to improve people's lives. The real engine is not the culture itself, but the representative democracy system that is at its heart. That is something new on the face of the Earth in the last few hundred years, and it is an innovation arguably more powerful and important than all the technology that has emerged in the same period.

Due to our democracy people can speak their minds without fear, and ultimately move the culture ahead, by means of the constitution that directs the engine, toward greater freedom and compassion for all. Yes, of course, there are terrible iniquities in our world. But merely 150 years ago, many of us in the United States were slaves who could be beaten with a whip at the master's whim. Fewer years ago than that, half the population didn't have the right to vote. Now all adults have that right, women are serving in the Senate and as governors of their states, and it will not be too many more years before one is President. (Britain, of course, has already had Margaret Thatcher.)

Things are not perfect by any means. For instance, our President believes that gays should not be entitled to be married, when it is perfectly obvious, religiously-rooted prejudice aside, that they should have that right as fully as straights do. But that will change. It is completely inevitable. Bush's views on that will eventually be swept away by the tide of our process.

Such changes are never easy. For example, in the U.S. (though not in many other countries operating under a representative democracy), a civil war was necessary to free the slaves. But a process existed which encouraged the necessary ideas to emerge and grow until such a world-changing struggle could occur. The Civil War's purpose was not to free the slaves. But if the ideas weren't extant and well-accepted by most people in the North by the time the war occurred, the slaves probably would have remained slaves.

We have quite some distance to go. But the velocity of forward movement, taken in historical terms, is extremely impressive.

That is why I have come to believe that DWM culture is inherently superior to the fundamentalist Islamic one that is pitting itself against us. Many believe that all cultures equally valid, and that one shouldn't judge another. To do so is arrogance, they say.

But I see our culture as an engine for learning how to improve people's lives and the opposition as an engine for repressing any kind of change, including changes that improve people's lives. That's not a matter of taste or style. That's a fundamental moral difference.

The article quoted above ends:

"My mother did this because she does not want us to be punished by people," Fatima explains with a shy smile. "I love my mother much more now than before."

Palestinian living conditions

Philip Greenspun says:

On foreign policy Howard Dean complains that the Bush Administration has "disengaged" from meddling in the 55-year-old war between the Arab nations and Israel.  His proposed solution?  "The Israeli government will have to work to improve the living conditions of the Palestinian people".  This is a tough goal given that the Palestinians have a 5% annual population growth rate; the Israelis would have to somehow generate more than 5% annual GDP growth among the Palestinians, many of whom are illiterate (a 5% annual GDP growth rate is something that we Americans are unable to achieve for ourselves, despite the fact that we have almost unlimited capital and a well-educated citizenry).

Now that's an interesting point. Is an unhealthily high population growth rate a key factor behind for the poor living conditions of Palestinians?

I personally have no idea what the truth of this is, but I'll be looking out for more information on this in the future.

Microsoft settles music download suit

New York company E-Data said on Tuesday that it has settled a patent infringement suit filed against Microsoft and others, based on music download services in Europe. [News.com]

And what's going to happen with Apple? From the same article:

E-Data is characterizing the suit's settlement as an explicit shot across the bow of other download services--Brodsky specifically cites Apple Computer's iTunes--that are planning to enter the European market.

F*** the Nazis!

Churchill's parrot still speaking her mind at age 104:

Many an admiral or peer of the realm was shocked by the tirade from the bird's cage during crisis meetings with the PM.

But it always brought a smile to the war leader's face. [Mirror, thanks to Andrew Sullivan]

Google's email plans

Rumors are flying that Google is intending to get into the email business, attaching keyword-based advertisements to emails. The Register notes some posts on Slashdot:

"Getting rid of the page rank spammers should be their priority, not expanding into a commodity marketplace where they will have no real niche," writes one poster.

Dave calls the above quote a "gem".

It's amazing how many people don't understand what's going on here.

The fact is that Google knows that they can't hold onto their user base forever with great search technology, because that is replicable. There is no lock-in; another search engine is a click away. Microsoft, for one, is working on great search technology, and you can bet it will be integrated into Longhorn and be easier to access for most users then Google. This will be illegal of course, because you can't use a monopoly in one area (OS's, and now browsers) to leverage yourself into a monopoly position in another area (search). And I'm sure the government will step in and do something about it -- NOT.

Google knows that if they want to justify a big IPO, they have to do anything they can to bring in more revenues and get more locked-in customers. Supplying an email service is a time-tested way to get locked in, profitable customers. My earlier posts on the subject discussed their foray into blogging. Their rumored foray into email has exactly the same basis.

Cell phone ring tone sales hit $3.5B

Sales of mobile phone ring tones, those tinny song recordings programmed into millions of handsets around the world, jumped 40 percent in the past year to $3.5 billion...[CNN.com]

Huh? Wha? $3.5 billion for those ridiculous little beep sequences? How could that possibly be? I must have been transported in my sleep into some bizarre alternate universe!

HP Working to Get WMA on iPod?

A blog post at ipoding.com and the linked story point to evidence.

Go get Maestro

If you're interested in space in general and the Spirit Mars rover in particular, go download Maestro. It's reportedly the same software they're using at NASA to work with images from the rover. When I first read about it I didn't download it because I have zero time to spend playing with new software. But this morning I decided to just give it a try to see if it really would have a learning curve.

I found out that it didn't, at least to have some real fun. It has a wizard with a Next button that takes you through a number of key images and gives explanations. It's great.

It's a Java app with installers for Windows, OS X Panther, Linux, and Solaris.

Update: actually some of the larger images are not being rendered fully on my 1ghz, 1GB PowerBook. Have posted a question about it, and will update here if I get an answer.

Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad

"I've seen a number of examples where individuals have had to take spam-filtering technology into account -- when crafting important e-mail, they have had to put some real thought into content, especially the subject line," said Chris Belthoff, a senior security analyst with antispam and antivirus vendor Sophos.[Wired]

I know that's true for emails I write to people I don't have a pre-existing email relationship with.

File-Swappers May Be Losing Fear Of RIAA

The NPD Group says the number of U.S. households downloading music from peer-to-peer networks rose 6 percent in October and 7 percent in November -- reversing a six-month decline.

...

An official with NPD speculates that the apparent increase in music file-sharing could be seasonal. The RIAA had been encouraged recently by early success for legitimate, industry-affiliated music services, such as Apple's iTunes Music store and a relaunched Napster.[KansasCityChannel.com]

Judge rules Microsoft infringed on Eolas patent

A Chicago federal judge on Wednesday upheld a $512 million patent verdict against Microsoft that could ultimately force major changes in many of the most common Internet software products.

Judge James Zagel said he saw no reason to overturn an August jury verdict that said Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browsing software had infringed on patent rights held jointly by small developer Eolas Technologies and the University of California.

As part of his decision, Zagel barred Microsoft from distributing versions of its Web software that include the potentially infringing technology. However, he immediately put that injunction on hold until an appeal has run its course. Microsoft is expected to appeal immediately.[News.com]

January 15, 2004 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 14, 2004

It's cold!

I live in Bangor, Maine. It's -15 Fahrenheit this morning. That's cold! I think it affects my brain. Evidence: I got a cup of coffee in the gas station, put in some half and half, opened a sugar packet, and was in the course of emptying the sugar packet into the trash when i realized it would be better in my coffee.

January 14, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quicktime Mars Panorama

I'm too busy to blog -- finishing things up for our NSF grant -- but thought you might like this Quicktime VR Panorama, one step up from yesterday's non-Quicktime VR Panorama. :)

January 14, 2004 in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 13, 2004

Mars Panorama

As seen from the surface, colors as a human would see view them when standing there.

January 13, 2004 in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 12, 2004

War fact distortions

As readers of this blog know, I support the war. Saving hundreds of thousands of people from being killed in Saddam's "security" apparatus over the next 10 years or so, which we almost certainly did, was justification enough in my book. Polls show that the majority of Iraqis agree. And there are important strategic reasons why I come down on feeling that the risk -- and it is a big risk -- is justified.

However I don't like being lied to. The news that is emerging is more and more consistent with the thesis that Pres. Bush wanted the war from the day he took office, and used 9/11 to justify it, and further, caused a management environment to exist in which facts were (unconsciously or consciously or semi-consciously) distorted to make the public case for war more compelling.

Suppose in 1935, Winston Churchill, who fully understood what Hitler planned and what could happen if he wasn't stopped, was in a position where, by (unconsciously or consciously or semi-consciously) manipulating public opinion with distorted facts, he could have caused a war to be waged to overthrow the Nazis in Germany before their war machine was fully built.

It might have been a very quick war with an aftermath of ongoing insurgency, in many ways like what is happening in Iraq.

Would Churchill have been justified? The net result would have been approximately 40,000,000 completely innocent lives saved. Would history judge Churchill well or ill if the truth of the distortion of facts emerged?

For one thing, if he had done so, we would never have proof that he had been right in doing so -- because WWII would not have happened. So my suspicion is that Churchill would have been condemned to a degree at least as great as the degree to which many are condemning Pres. Bush -- even in the long run.

One could argue that the situation in Iraq was very different than the situation in Germany in 1935. In retrospect, the degree of horror the Nazis could inflict is obvious. But in 1935, it was FAR from obvious -- few, in fact, would have believed it possible.

I personally think that the case to be made in favor of drawing a line in the sand against governments that have the potential and will to support terrorism in a big way is at least as great as the case against Hitler was in 1935. And I suspect -- or at least hope -- that few would think it wouldn't have been a good thing to take Hitler out early and save all those many millions of lives.

So the thing I am drawn to thinking about today is what would have happened if Churchill been in a position to do what Bush did.

Update: More on whether we did the right thing from William Safire in today's column. Hint: Yes. (Issues of lying aside.)

January 12, 2004 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 09, 2004

Back to the moon

When I was a kid, I watched every minute I could of TV coverage of every space shot, Mercury through Apollo, with rapt attention. And I would be completely fascinated again today if we went back to the moon or even -- wow -- Mars.

But to my surprise I find that I have come to be the kind of grownup who thinks that in the final analysis the money would be better spent elsewhere. In fact, some projects would be an even greater adventure in terms of the forward movement of mankind as a species.

January 9, 2004 in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 08, 2004

Lots of broadband

Nearly 49.5 million Americans, or 38 percent of all home Internet users in the United States, now use a broadband connection to go online, said the report, released on Thursday. That figure represents a 27 percent increase since May 2003. [News.com]

January 8, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0)

HP, Apple harmonize on iPod

Hewlett-Packard will start selling an HP-branded version of Apple Computer's iPod this summer, the companies announced Thursday. [News.com]

January 8, 2004 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

Music stores

I saw quite a negative review of the new Real music store written by Brad Hill on the pho mail list. Excerpt:

RealPlayer10 Music Store is a heinous experiment in proprietary
formatting that, even if it worked as advertised, would harshly
constrain consumer value. Once again, RealNetworks is taking money for
(or through) a broken beta program.

Songs cost $.99 (those that are available for purchase anyway -- many aren't).

The Sony version is "this spring."

Sony said its "Connect" online music service would at first only work with Sony portable devices. It would set prices that are standard for rivals such as Apple Computer's (NasdaqNM:AAPL- News) iTunes and Roxio Inc's (NasdaqNM:ROXI - News) Napster of 99 cents per downloaded song and entire albums for $9.99.[Reuters]

It's amazing the degree to which Apple is leading this industry, even to the point of defining the exact standard price per song. It was Apple, not Napster, that set the $.99 song/$9.99 alum standard.

But can Apple maintain its lead, considering the fact that not everyone wants to get locked into Apple's DRM which mandates only using Apple players for iTunes-purchased songs?

One thing. Apple will almost certainly be making players that are about as good as any for quite some time. Yes, Apple's players will probably always be a bit on the expensive side, but the cost of the players is dwarfed by the cost of the music to run in them. So, being locked into Apple's world is arguably not a great disadvantage.

And by the time it becomes one (due to Apple's going out of business or some other catastrophe), the celestial jukebox, where you can stream any song to portable players, will quite possibly have arrived.

The celestial jukebox will mean that our entire investment in pay-per-song music will have been made moot. But hey, that's progress!

The above is an argument to continue buying CD's rather than buying pay-per-song downloaded music. Eventually, when there's enough bandwidth for the cosmic jukebox, music we buy today on a per-song basis today will become worthless. But CD's will continue to have value, because they will have better sound quality than either a) pay-per-song music we download today, or b) music streamed from the celestial jukebox in (somewhat forseeable) the future. Once we own a CD, we can rip it as many times as we want, at increasing data rates we have the increasing storage to hold them.

January 8, 2004 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 07, 2004

Mars

Check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Significantly cooler than those little tiny pics most of the news sites have been showing.

January 7, 2004 in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 05, 2004

Music piracy fall linked to lawsuit threat

When the recording industry announced last year that it would start suing internet music pirates, critics argued that the record companies' controversial tactics would only alienate the very consumers on whom they depend.

But a study released at the weekend suggests the industry's high-profile lawsuits have dramatically curtailed Americans' online music-sharing habits.

The survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed about 14 per cent of Americans downloaded music files over the internet in the four weeks ending on December 14. That compared with 29 per cent last May, just before the Recording Industry Association of America announced it was preparing to sue people who shared unauthorised music files over the internet.[Financial Times]

Some interpret the data differently. More from the same article:

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet users' campaigning group, noted that data from internet tracking services showed little decline in activity on online peer-to-peer services such as Kazaa.

It is impossible to know the true extent of the decline from the Pew survey. For example, the threat of legal action has made respondents a lot more wary about admitting they download music.

"Calling people today and asking them whether they have downloaded music is like calling people and asking them whether they have broken the law this week," said Mr von Lohmann.

January 5, 2004 in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 02, 2004

Will Longhorn become a Microsoft Linux distro?

New Year's prediction: Longhorn will never ship, but Microsoft Linux will. Even if I'm wrong, it's clear that software development is headed for a new place, and the end game that most observers saw even five years ago -- that MS would win it all -- doesn't seem as likely on the eve of 2004. That said, Microsoft isn't going to go away, in this author's opinion.[Gulker]

Interesting idea. I wouldn't even completely rule it out.

January 2, 2004 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frieda Korner

When my father was four years old, in 1930, Frieda Korner started working for my grandparents. She had emigrated to this country from Germany in 1922, at age. She was 21 years old. She got a job working for my grandparents and had a lot to do with raising my father.

She was also a constant presence in my own early years. She babysat for me, cleaned the house, and was took care of me at least several times a week because my father worked full-time and my mother had many activities she was involved in.

I loved her; she was very much a part of my upbringing and a positive being in my early life.

When my mother died at age 44, I was 18 and on my way to college, but my sister was only 9. Until my father remarried four years later, Frieda ran the house, cooked, etc.

She wasn't the easiest person in the world for many people to get along with. She was a lot more liable to tell you what to do than to share feelings or listen to someone else's point of view. As she got older, she got to be more and more that way.

She lived alone, in a walk-up apartment with steep stairs, until she was 100 years old. She refused to hear about any of the programs programs for the aged like "Meals on Wheels" which could have made her life easier. She felt that once the those programs started to get involved, they would gradually take over until she'd end up in a nursing home being told what to do. And she hated that prospect more than anything else in the world.

My family is distributed around the country. Frieda lived in the suburbs of New York City. I live in Maine. My sister lives in Colorado. My father is in New Hampshire in the summer and San Francisco in the winter. His sister lived until recently in Washington state, now in California. We visited her when we could get to the New York area, but I generally had to try and help only through weekly phone calls. In later years her friends died one by one, until there was no one left, and she expressed her loneliness in our phone calls. She also told me that she thought about me a lot. She had no children of her own, and it seemed clear that my father, his sister, my sister, and I were all experienced by her, at least to some extent, as if we were hers. It pained me, and all of us, to see her become unhappy in those later years but it seemed there was little we could do.

My father arranged for people to help by visiting her regularly. I continued my calls.

At age 100, she fell in the driveway and broke her hip. She was taken to the hospital after lying outside for a number of hours before she was discovered. During her recovery at the hospital the judgment was made that she couldn't handle life on her own any more. No one in my family felt that we could take her in. For my part, I have kids and my wife and I both have very demanding jobs -- finding a workable balance between meeting the demands of being good parents and also "getting the work done" is almost impossible as it is -- we are continually at a very high level of stress just trying to do everything that absolutely must be done. We didn't feel that it was possible to take Frieda in. She was sent to a nursing home.

She was angry and resentful at first. Of course the nursing home would not release her without a legally-acceptable evaluation that was capable of living on her own, and that of course would never materialize. In fact she really wasn't able any more. She could barely see and hear and she was very brittle, and her mind was not the same.

One member of her family from Germany came over and helped with the transition, including clearing out her apartment, without telling her that the apartment was gone -- it was felt that it was better not to let her know.

She got to be very depressed in the nursing home, and was put on anti-depressants. She had been quite lucid up until her late 90's, but had seemed to be very gradually slipping away into more-frequent occurrences of a strange kind of state of remembrance and fantasy. This slipping away increased very rapidly in the nursing home. The last time I saw her there, a couple of months ago, was the first time she had ever seemed to have real trouble knowing who I was, but when she did understand she clearly expressed being happy to see me. In those last months I wasn't able to call any more, because she was unable to hear well enough to use the phone, and

She died on New Year's Eve 5 hours away from seeing in 2004. She was 102.

I am very relieved that her long final ordeal is over. I wish I could have done more for her.

After my mother died, she wrote in a note that my mother would always be with us. I am not religious at all and do not think it is likely that there is any kind of afterlife. But I was moved by what she said, and remember it to this day. Because it is true. The our memories of those who have been important to us do live on in us, and influence how we feel in the world, and what we do, and who we are.

She will always be with us. Godspeed, Frieda.

January 2, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clairvoyance at Princeton

I tend to be quite critical of people who believe things because they want to believe them, rather than because of compelling evidence. In my view, far too many people tend to believe in psychics and psychic phenomena far too readily. It is very possible to fake various "skills" such as mindreading or spoon-bending-at-a-distance well enough to fool an audience, as has been amply demonstrated by The Amazing Randi, among others. So it seems silly to believe those phenomana really exist based on, say, seeing someone bend a spoon. Since it is possible to fake it, ultimately a believer is simply relying solely on the performer's claim that he is not a fake.

On the other hand, I know of no scientific evidence in favor of the hypothesis, "Psychic phenomena such as bending a spoon at a distance or influencing a coin toss with one's mind are impossible."

The fact is that our understanding of consciousness and what separates a human being from, say, a computer, is practically non-existent. And what theories there are are highly controversial. So to rule out consciousness-based phenomena at this point doesn't make sense at this point. We simply don't know enough.

So I have an open mind about it. I don't believe individual performers who say they can bend spoons are telling the truth, because I am not willing to simply accept their word that they aren't just good fakes. That's not evidence, that's hearsay. But enough strange things do happen that sometimes it doesn't seem unreasonable to wonder if every such occurrence is really nothing but coincidence. So, I am very slightly hopeful that at some point, real evidence will turn up in favor of mind-over-matter phenomenon because, for one thing, it would be reeallly cool.

But really it could be much more than that. Think of the years before the "discovery" of electricity. There were various phenomena in which electricity manifested itself, such as lightening and the attraction of objects to one another that can occur when there is static electricity present. But those utterly incomprehensible hints gave no clue to the way our lives would change when electricity was harnessed. Of course, electricity-based technology is literally everywhere in our lives today. It has profoundly changed the way we live.

Would the same thing happen, perhaps in ways that affected our lives far more profoundly than even electricity, if psychic phenomena really existed and we learned to harness the underlying principles?

So I was very interested to read of this research done at Princeton by Robert Jahn, who for 15 years was dean of Princeton's school of engineering:

Jahn said experiments in the PEAR lab have shown that the mind can affect about 1 in every 10,000 random events. That's too small an effect to make anyone a killing in the gambling casinos, he said.

Although the effect is small, Jahn and Dunne have conducted so many experiments that they believe the data have been verified. Jahn said the chance that the results are a fluke is less than one in a trillion -- virtually impossible.

My guess is that their results are probably some kind of experimental error. And yet...?

January 2, 2004 in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)