Gary Robinson's Rants

I'm going on vacation

I'll be away until the 23rd. For the first time in (possibly many) years, I'm not even going to take a laptop with me. I want to focus on my family rather than email, blogging, or coding. See you when I return!

It's hard to prognosticate

At dinner last night I gave my usual schpiel about how DaveNet started, and since I was dining with Microsoft people I emphasized the early piece I wrote about Bill Gates, and his response. I quoted Bill saying that the Internet wouldn't mean less sales for Flight Simulator or Encarta, and I said he was right but that wasn't the point. One of my companions stopped me there and said wait a minute, the Internet did mean less sales for Encarta. I was shocked. That's correct, and Gates got it wrong, and I wasn't enough of a visionary to see it. I got it wrong too. Who needs an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM when you have the Web at your fingertips? Someday some kid is going to ask you What is Encarta? That might be where you end up going today. [Dave Winer]

This makes me think particularly of Wikipedia. Dave's right. But way back then, it was hard for even the brightest and best-informed to see.

The power of people to band together on the Internet to create free (as in both beer and speech) projects such as Wikipedia or Linux is an incredible and unforeseeable development in the world. It's truly an emergent phenomenon -- it couldn't be predicted until the substrate and numbers of agents were actually in place to make it happen.

OK, maybe there were some who did predict it. You can always find somebody who "predicted" almost anything by random chance alone. But the fact is, in those early days, not even Linus Torvalds predicted what would happen.

Free song for a lucky reader

I got a free song from iTunes/Pepsi today. Key is L7XTR FHN7R if I'm reading it correctly.

My gift to the first reader who types it into the iTunes Music Store "Redeem Song" area. Just email me and tell me what you got. ;)

May I suggest you check out Crossroads of America by my friend Allen Shadow. :)

Woman marries dead boyfriend

Demichel told LCI television she was fully aware that "it could seem shocking to marry someone who is dead", but said that her fiance's absence from her life had not dimmed her feelings for him.... Before the ceremony can take place, it must be approved by the French president.[SMH.com.au. Another hat tip to Andrew.]

In France, they apparently truly believe in equal marriage rights for all.

Self-contradiction in the NY Times

It would be one thing if they said they'd changed their minds. But this doesn't seem to be that. I always find these instances of self-contradiction to be interesting.

"Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies." - New York Times editorial. February 9 2004.

"Yesterday's unanimous vote at the United Nations Security Council sends the strongest possible message to Baghdad...This is a well-deserved triumph for President Bush, a tribute to eight weeks of patient but determined and coercive American diplomacy…Only if the council fails to approve the serious consequences it now invokes -- generally understood to be military measures -- should Washington consider acting alone." - New York Times editorial, November 9, 2002. [Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan]

Even so, nobody can beat Kerry for self-contradiction.

Apple has 10% of computer users??

Naysayers have been calling for Apple's demise for years. But Apple not only has survived but thrived, it seems, at least partially by the sheer force of Jobs' will and his ability to maintain the ferocious loyalty of Apple's users, who still account for 10% of the world's computer users, while its sales usually account for about 3% to 5% of the world global PC market. [Forbes]

Is this true? And how could it be? Here's what one article says:

Macs last longer than Windows PCs. If Mac users replace their Mac every 4 years and PC users replace their every 1.5 years, what does that do to quarterly market share numbers? Not to mention, what does that do to landfills? The important number to analysts, marketeers, software developers, and others should be how many people out of 100 use a Mac? The answer is closer to 10 people out of 100 or 10 percent. Not 3 percent. We get tired of having to point this put, but we'll never stop doing so until the "3 percent myth" is destroyed. [MacDailyNews]

Tower Records headed for Chapter 11

The retail music channel continues to implode. They spent too much time fighting the advent of digital music, and not enough reinventing themselves. Now the only question is whether the labels follow them down the toilet. [Tim Oren]

Spam filtering: Training to Exhaustion

A couple of months ago I had an interesting email exchange with Boris 'pi' Piwinger about the "training-to-exhaustion" spam filtering technique. He contacted me with these ideas. I helped to write up some instructions, but other than that this is all his work. I promised I'd post the results to my blog, but so many things have been going on with Goombah and our NSF grant that I've had to put it off -- I just had other priorities I had to deal with.

The Bogofilter site on SourceForge gives the following definition of training to exhaustion, based on "training on error":

"Training on error" involves scanning a corpus of known spam and non-spam messages; only those that are misclassified, or classed as unsure, get registered in the training database. It's been found that sampling just messages prone to misclassification is an effective way to train; if you train bogofilter on the hard messages, it learns to handle obvious spam and non-spam too...

"Training to exhaustion" is repeating training on error, with the same message corpus, until no errors remain.

Test results are available.

Note that concerns have been expressed about possible theoretical issues with the approach. Another quote from the Bogofilter site:

A basic assumption of Bayes' theory is that the messages used for training are a randomly chosen sample of the messages received. This is violated when choosing messages by analyzing them first. Though theoretically wrong, in practice "training on error" seems to work.

Frankly, there are fundamental theoretical violations even in mainstream filters such as those based on the frequently-used "naive Bayes" approach or on my own work, because there is a theoretical assumption of statistical independence (not the same as the randomly chosen sample issue) which is violated by most of these techniques. But it was long ago experimentally shown that naive Bayes is actually robust against such a lack of independence. Eventually proofs were created to explain it, but they came after-the-fact. Later, my own technique was experimentally shown to be similarly robust (although I do have a technique "in the lab" to make it a bit more robust against that particular violation of the rules).

The bottom line, as far as I am concerned, is: what works, works; what doesn't, doesn't. The difference can be best determined by testing. In testing to date, training to exhaustion appears to work very well.

The exchange between Boris and me resulted in a set of simple instructions for how to do training-to-exhaustion, which may be of interest to anyone who wants to try the technique.

Update: In a response to this entry, Liudvikas Bukys thinks that training to exhaustion may be a "less-general" form of AdaBoost. I want to state that I personally make no claims for training to exhaustion relative to other approaches. I do see that it has done well in the testing that has been conducted so far by Boris and therefore seems to me to be of potential interest to the community, particularly since we have an accompanying very simple set of instructions making it easy for anyone to test. I think implementation simplicity is a real potential benefit of this technique. If it turns out that there is further discussion about the relative merits of training to exhaustion vs. other techniques through comments and/or trackbacks that would be great and could help clarify the relative value of the technique.

A Judge tells the RIAA what its problem is

From GrokLaw, which usually focuses on the SCO case, but today has a great entry about the RIAA case. The RIAA case is currently being heard in a federal appeals court:

One of the three judges told the RIAA attorney to stop using "abusive language", such as calling file-trading "piracy".

Here's the exact language the judge used, which Copyfight transcribed and TechDirt brought to my attention (thank you Copyfight for the transcript. EFF has an mp3 of the arguments in court, by the way also. Say, I think Groklaw started something.):

"Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language."

The whole piece is worth reading. Another enlightening quote from the transcription of the oral arguments:

"One academic study found that 90 percent of the content exchanged on file-sharing networks is copyrighted, [RIAA lawyer] Frackman noted.

"[Judge]Noonan pressed further, asking whether the authorized exchange of 10 percent of an estimated 750 million swapped files -- games, live recordings and public-domain works such as Shakespeare -- met the criteria the Supreme Court set forth in the Betamax case. 'That sounds like a lot of non-infringing use to me.'"

It sounds like a lot to me too... It would be hard to argue that 75 million files is not a significant amount of non-infringing use.

Monetary approach to defeating spam

Yahoo! and Microsoft are giving serious thought to the idea of e-mail "postage" that costs senders a small fee, company officials said.

The admissions come in the wake of Microsoft founder Bill Gates' January comments in Davos, Switzerland suggesting the spam problem will be defeated by a number of different solutions, but "in the long run, the monetary method will be dominant." [InternetNews]

I've occasionally collected flak from people who love the Bayesian filtering approach for asserting that the monetary approach could be a workable solution. But I have thought and continue to think it makes sense. It's just a matter of getting a critical mass of businesses to implement it. Yahoo and Microsoft together qualify as critical mass, I believe.

Essentially the idea is to either charge for all email (in which case spammers couldn't afford it) or only charge for emails rejected as spam. This can be done with "real" money, or with a currency based on expenditures of CPU cycles.

There are a number of other feasible approaches than cost-based. The main thing is some solution or set of solutions reaching critical mass followed by broad adoption by the industry. Spam is going to be all but eliminated in the next couple of years, as that critical mass is reached.

Eisner vs. Jobs

Two interesting articles, in Sunspot and BusinessWeek on the dynamic between Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner. There's a thesis that the Disney/Pixar split had as much to do with egos as anything else. (Thanks to Rants reader Lisa Langsdorf for the pointer to the BusinessWeek article.)

From Sunspot:

But sources close to Eisner and Apple Computer Inc. founder Jobs said the stunning split was less about the math of the deal than the equation of the personalties. Associates say the two corporate titans, both famously strong-willed, let their personal differences cloud their objectivity in a partnership in which the spoils were evenly split.

It will be interesting to see if they end up going back to the negotiating table, or if Jobs cuts a better deal elsewhere.

Forrester music industry predictions

If you're interested in music industry trends, this is worth checking out. One prediction:

CD sales continue to rebound. We stand by our projection that 2004 will be the first year of growth for CD sales since 2000. But in the long term, as downloads and subscriptions grow and soak up dollars, CD sales will start shrinking again in 2007. As we said at MidemNet, music labels should get out of the plastic business: Spend less energy on manufacturing and distributing a shrinking number of CDs, and focus more on the new source of growth--downloads and subscriptions. [Forrester via News.com]

802.11 underhyped?

A venture capitalist argues that 802.11 (the wireless standard behind, for instance, Apple's Airport) is underhyped. The basic argument is that once critical mass is reached, a standard exists and usually comes to dominate, as did Ethernet and Intel microprocessors.

Once a single interoperable standard gains the acceptance of multiple vendors in a marketplace, a consumer bias toward compatibility and scale economics create an increasing returns phenomenon that is nearly unassailable.[J. William Gurley on News.com]

Mission Controllers Revive Spirit's Memory

"Spirit made incredible progress over the weekend," said mission manager Jennifer Trosper. "Today we are doing science on Spirit. She is back to the state she was in on Day One." [LA Times -- signup required]

Yay! That's great. Apparently they fixed it by deleting more than 1,700 files. It still seems to me that it is quite strange that with the money they spent on this system that they ended up with an OS and file system that would crash and reboot as the number of files increased. I mean, given how much was riding on the software working, how could they never have tested having a realistic number of files? But at least they're able to deal with it. And being able to do so from Earth when we're talking about a computer on Mars is still an amazing accomplishment.

There's more free art in our future

The question of whether file-sharing software providers are legally culpable for copyright infringement is back in the courts. This essay will use the current court case as the jumping-off point for a discussion about the future of free art online.

Here's where things stood in the legal proceedings as of April, 2003:

"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his April opinion. "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights." [news.com]

Now the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing that decision.

My personal opinion about this issue is changing. Previously I thought that it was obvious that P2P networks had no other real reason to exist than to swap files illegally, because legal files can be more easily retrieved from a central server. If they aren't available on a big public server like mp3.com, it's only because they are illegal, I thought. So, to me, the issue appeared to be very different from VCR's, which people mostly bought for legal use. There was no strong legal reason to use P2P file sharing, I thought.

My viewpoint has changed. Now I can think of a good legal reason why people should use P2P. And that is based on the fact that central servers cost money.

Somebody has to pay for all that hardware and bandwidth. So companies that supply those central servers need to skew their services in the direction of making money. It wouldn't make sense for a central-server-based site that supplies things like the Paris Hilton sex video for free -- the hardware and bandwidth requirements would just be too much. So they are commonly shared by P2P means. That sort of thing seems to me to be a legitimate use, but more importantly, it points in the direction of a much larger and more subtle issue.

Central-server based music and video sites (not just porn ones) will need to make a lot of money to pay for bandwidth and hardware, and therefore they will never serve two communities optimally: a) the community of people that care about and enjoy free music and video art, and b) the artists who produce free music and video art.

For instance, the iTunes Music Store could very easily offer free music as well as $.99-per-track music. But it would lose money on such tracks due to bandwidth and hardware needs. So, it won't offer such music. And even if it did, for instance as a way of getting good PR, it would not emphasize them so that they were as easy as $.99 tracks to find and download. Rather, it would issue a press release about the free music it supported, get articles written about it their wonderfulness for offering such music for free, and then on their actual site they would do everything they could to pull people away from that music and toward the $.99 per-track-music. Ultimately, free music would continue to exist on the margins.

But I believe that in the coming years, many people will care more and more about free music. Free music isn't lesser music. Many great artists supported themselves with "day jobs" while making their greatest art. The great poet William Carlos Williams, a doctor, is one famous example. We don't hear about such cases in the music world very much because we tend to only know about mass-marketed music, and that music is supported by expensive marketing, and the money to pay for that marketing had to come ultimately from the consumers. So, if we know about it, it almost certainly isn't free.

But there is plenty of great music out there that is almost completely unknown because no one chose to mass-market it. Much of it is made by people with day jobs. Many of those people care more about having an enthusiastic audience than they do about money. They'd very much like to make money from their art, of course, but making enough to really matter may unfortunately not be an option because their potential audiences may be too small to support mass marketing. A representative of BMG recently stated that a major label needs to sell 2,000,000 copies of an album to break even.

It is very possible for artist to be great without appealing to that many people, and without having any potential to appeal to that many people. People may simply not be ready for the art (as the world was not at all ready for the art of Vincent Van Gogh during his lifetime, resulting in his penniless death while every painting he ever made is now worth millions). Or it may be that the art simply appeals only to very particular tastes. That doesn't make it lesser as art -- it may in fact enable it to have the deep resonances with its audience that makes it really mean something, because it is very unusual to have deep resonances while appealing equally well to everyone.

William Carlos Williams wrote his poetry even though the money he made from it meant little if anything to him. It was a very small amount compared to his "day job" of being a doctor. A girl with guitar can make similarly great music without giving up her day job. Due to modern technology group of friends with a video camera and a macintosh can make great video art without giving up their day jobs.

A question may be raised at this point in the discussion: why would this art be free, rather than simply low-cost, as in micropayments? Well, are you paying anything to read this blog? Do you pay anything to read any blog? Do you pay anything to read the news sites you read online? Other sites? As Clay Shirky has written:

[The micropayment] strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.

(The whole Shirky article is well worth reading on this subject.)

Once there is some readily available free content, any for-fee content must compete against this "mental transaction cost" and the result is inexorable pressure forcing virtually everything towards zero cost.

In summary, P2P networks have the potential to enable this kind of free art to become known and to prosper alongside the Britney Spears' of the world. Frankly I think it's possible that, in a world where distribution expenses are essentially zero, the free art world may, in the long run, produce more great art than the paid art world. It's not knowable yet whether that will happen, but it could.

Of course, current P2P technology doesn't solve this problem, because people only tend to download music and videos they know about through mass-marketing. So ultimately, P2P systems today really are primarily about pirating, and current usage patterns are, ironically, ultimately dependent upon mass-marketing.

But that may change with the addition of new technology into the mix that will take the role of replacing mass marketing for making music known. The P2P networks are effectively replacing the distribution piece--the piece of the music industry that involves making physical objects that contain the art (such as CD's and DVD's) and transporting those physical objects into stores. Now we need something to replace the mass marketing part of things, and there will be the opportunity for real revolution to potentially occur. And even if there isn't a complete revolution -- even if most art still costs money -- I believe that the balance between free art and paid art will change dramatically. There will be a lot more free art that is known and enjoyed by a substantial number of people than is the case today. And I believe the world will be enriched by that fact.

In the meantime, I think there is a real argument to be made that P2P software has the ability to enable legitimate activities that promote the general well-being of the population, arguably even more than VCR's did. So I think the idea that such software should be legal is defensible in the courts, even though, today, 90% of the use of such networks has been reported to be illegal.

Shift in balance of power

This strikes me as a worthwhile observation about an industry power shift that is slowly but steadily progressing:

The decision by Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios, to walk away from his partnership with Michael D. Eisner and the Walt Disney Company is the clearest indication yet that Mr. Jobs is becoming the personification of the digital media mogul.
  The collapse last Thursday of the Disney- Pixar negotiations over a new distribution agreement appears to have been a clash of egos and business interests. But it was also very much a sign of the changing balance of power between the conventional media giants and the entrepreneurs wielding digital technologies that are rapidly changing the way media content is made and distributed. [NY Times, by way of MacInTouch]

Google IPO cancelled, at least for now

Google fans and potential investors will be disappointed to learn that they must wait a while longer before they can own a piece of Google. TheTimes of London's James Doran reports that Google's IPO plans are on hold. CEO Eric Schmidt appears to think that market conditions are not right. When pressed for details about the delayed IPO, Schmidt said, "An IPO is not on my agenda right now. [Slashdot]

I think the reason is more that he's afraid people will figure out that Google doesn't presently deserve a multibillion dollar IPO. If they can find a way of getting a huge captive audience, then it will, but it isn't there at this point. It's possible. But it just hasn't happened. They just haven't offered anything compelling enough.

For example, many of the latest blogosphere murmurs on Orkut aren't too positive.

(Google can bring up my previous comments on the subject here. Thanks, Google! I love Google, I just don't think it's worth billions of dollars.)