Gary Robinson's Rants

$2,500 in illegally traded files called criminal

I wasn't sure what it would take to be the subject of a criminal prosecution for file trading, but this Washington Post article, describing new government policy, has the answer:

Now, high-volume file-sharers with more than $2,500 in illegally traded files face the prospect of criminal prosecution.

This is kind of funny

This.

HP iPods

It appears to be the same thing as Apple's, except:

New HP Printable Tattoos allow consumers to personalize the look of their iPod with album cover art from top bands and recording artists, as well as to create their own personalized artwork and photos printed on Tattoo media via an HP color printer.
  The ultra-thin HP Printable Tattoos are easy to apply and remove from the player's exterior. They are durable and water-resistant, which helps protect the iPod from scratches and scuffs as music lovers carry it around. HP is working with industry recording studios to offer consumers access to the latest album art from the newest releases.

Here's the press release. Doesn't excite me personally, but does seem like a smart business move for HP -- "synergy" and all that.

Noticeably lacking from the announcement is the Windows Media capability that was rumored earlier.

Google browser

Last summer, Anil Dash suggested that it would be a good move for Google to develop a Google browser based on Mozilla. Give that kid a gold star because it looks more than plausible. Mozilla Developer Day 2004 was recently held at the Google Campus. Google is investing heavily in JavaScript-powered desktop-like web apps like Gmail and Blogger (the posting inferface is now WYSIWYG). Google could use their JavaScript expertise (in the form of Gmail ubercoder Chris Wetherell) to build Mozilla applications. Built-in blogging tools. Built-in Gmail tools. Built-in search tools. A search pane that watches what you're browsing and suggests related pages and search queries or watches what you're blogging and suggests related pages, news items, or emails you've written. Google Toolbar++. You get the idea. [Kottke]

Now there's a possibility I haven't thought much about. But now I'll give it some thought. It would answer some of the objections I have to Google's insanely high market cap. If Google produced such a browser, and did it soon, then they would perhaps have a chance of displacing significant share from IE. And the result is that they would have their own highly popular, cross-platform desktop app, possibly eventually being as convenient to use as other desktop apps such as Outlook, while using Google's facilities on the back end for searching and storage.

The existence of such a cross-platform app could even make Linux a better alternative as desktop OS than it is now.

Hmm...

Christopher Allbritton in Iraq

Christopher Allbritton is reporter and blogger who gathered contributions, through his blog, to enable him to go to Iraq and pay for food to eat and a place to sleep. After a while he got some major media gigs there too -- for instance he conducted an interview with Allawi for Time mag.

In the last couple of days, as well as other times, he's been seriously risking his life -- not only the risk of being yet another kidnapped "journo" but also of simply being shot out of the blue by a snipper or exploded by a morter shell.

His is the best writing I've seen coming out of Iraq, IMHO. Most valuable for me recently is the fact that he is interacting, and actually being protected by, members of al-Sadr's Mahdi army in the Shrine.

I don't know about you, but from the mainstream media I get the impression that the Mahdi people are religious fanatics backing a "leader" with little actual support in the Muslim community and obstructing the legitimate (or at least, in-power and internationally supported) Iraqi army and U.S. forces from their job in bringing Iraq under control. So, I found myself "rooting" for the "good guys" in waiting for the Mahdis to get out of the Shrine or get obliterated.

The impression one gets from Chris is that the Mahdi army consists of normal, friendly people, human beings like you and me, who I gain enough knowledge of that I end up caring about them. In contrast, one also gets the feeling that the New Iraqi Army is "like the old regime, only less disciplined" (quoting from Chris). While Chris has his own (anti-war) political slant, this different impression seems to be more because Chris is really there, telling us about his interactions with these individual people, and directly experiencing the way they act in the world, rather than providing sound-bites based on "analysis" conducted on another continent.

Anyway, his blog is well worth reading if you want to know what's really going on in Iraq.

I was one of the people who contributed financially to his being able to go there, and I've had a few interesting and enlightening email and blog discussions with him. I feel personally connected. Man, I hope he doesn't get killed.

Justice Dept. Raids Homes of File Swappers

"Reuters is reporting that the Justice Dept. has raided the homes of 5 people in several states for trading music on p2p networks. The traders were, however, not arrested. 'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said. The Reuters story says that the 5 'were people operating hubs in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software,' and who had provided between 'one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs.' 'They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen,' said Ashcroft." [Slashdot]

That sounds like a criminal case. That would be the first case not to be a civil lawsuit, wouldn't it?

This Wonderful Life

This computer-generated video is a "true little masterpiece." Truth be told, it brought tears to my eyes. Check it out for a pointer to the future of video. One person and one computer can make an beautiful work of art, as moving as anything released by the major studios. And the necessary tools are only going to get easier and easier to use, so that in the future, you won't have to be both a technical wizard and an artist to make something like this. Being an artist will be enough.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the artists will do.

Google: I misunderstood

I had thought that the plan was for Google to have a $2.7B market cap after going public. I thought that seemed fairly sensible. But I should have noticed that was just the "offering": the total values of the shares in public hands.

But the reality is that the shares in public hands are a small portion of the total shares. And the real market cap is now $29.7 billion.

I have trouble believing that that is anything other than absurd. Sure, Google has a lot of "eyeballs" viewing it every day, just as most of the companies associated with high-flying stocks during the Internet bubble did. But as soon as Microsoft comes out with a comparably good search engine and builds it into Windows, many or most of those eyeballs will be looking there instead. And it will happen before too long.

Sure, gmail is a great Web-based email client, but it's never going to be as convenient as a great client-based app once better indexing is built into those apps (both Microsoft and Apple plan advanced indexing in their next major OS releases, available to application programs like email clients). Sure a gigabyte is a lot of email storage, but any other web mail service can match it by changing their policies.

I do believe that Google has great people working at it, who will do as well as anybody could with the assets they have. But those assets are not all they're cracked up to be, in my humble opinion.

$29.7 billion? On what basis would a rational person assume that Google is going to maintain such a value? I don't get it.

42% report 4G iPod audio problems

On July 26, 2004, iPodlounge first reported the audio defect, which causes several seconds of static and hard drive sounds to overlap music played back through the 4G iPod's headphone jack....

Two days later, after iPodlounge provided two defective iPods to Apple at its request for testing, an update to the original story was posted, noting additional findings and addressing reader concerns. At the time, iPodlounge noted that 36.5% of responding readers had discovered the same problem with their new 4G iPods, while 63.5% reported no problems.

iPodlounge asked users with 4G iPods to post comments to these earlier stories indicating their positive or negative test results. Of the hundreds of responses received from users around the world, approximately 42% reported the audio defect in one or more of the 4G iPods they purchased or received in exchange. [iPodLounge]

I think I'm going to hold off on buying a new iPod.

Real: Can you say, "desperate"?

Real Networks will be offering songs at $.49 a pop. Only problem is they'll be losing money on each song. But hey, they'll make it up in quantity. ;)

The fact is that they know that their market share is going to be going down, down, down, and this is the only way to temporarily flood the tide. But it's a strategy that can only last so long; so they have to be hoping to get to some kind of critical mass that forces Apple to work with them. It seems unlikely, but they have nothing to lose at this point -- except a few cents per song.

John the Baptist

Obviously it may be an error or hoax, but it also appears quite possible that the actual cave of John the Baptist has been discovered. See the article at CNN's site. Pretty cool.

The Dutch tulip bubble wasn't so crazy after all

Sounds like a bubble. But it wasn't, asserts Thompson, who is working on a history of bubbles. Tulip-bulb investors were neither mad nor delusional in 1636 and 1637. Rather, he says, they were rationally responding, in finest efficient-market fashion, to overlooked changes in the rules of tulip investing. [Slate, thanks to Ben]

A very interesting and fact-based argument that the tulip craze, usually considered to be the world's most ignoble predecessor to the dotcom bubble, was not a bubble at all but a completely rational economic response.

Apple's mistake in not licensing the Mac OS...

OK, it's already been slashdotted. But it's such a great post that I'm pointing to it too.

This idea has been repeated so often by so many sources that today, most people, even Mac users, simply take it at face value: If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh, they could have been Microsoft.

But this is not a fact. It’s conjecture, and barring a time machine, it can never be proven. But even if you could go back to 1984 and show Apple’s then-executives a glimpse of the future and the Mac’s eventual market share — merely “licensing” the Mac very likely would not have made a difference. In fact, in an alternate universe where Apple had licensed the Macintosh or Mac OS in the mid-80s, things could have ended up worse for Apple, as in bankrupt-and-out-of-business worse. [Daring Fireball]

This is a very strong, fact-based and very rational analysis.

The key point is that at the time, licensing the Mac OS wouldn't have been enough. Diskettes weren't big enough to hold the necessary code that Apple supplied in hardware via the Mac ROM, screens were character-based, and generally, PC's just couldn't run anything remotely like the Mac OS. They were able to run MS-DOS and other simple character-based OS's. If Apple really wanted to compete by licensing, they would have had to market something like MS-DOS, most logically something based on the Apple II, and not very much like the Mac.

This is an important article, in my opinion, for understanding what did and what could (or could not) have happened in the evolution of the computer industry in the 1980's.

Elegance vs. good code

Derek Sivers asks:

How do you know when you've found the right solution? Is the ugly solution ever the best solution?
...
Which got me wondering how other programmers handle this situation: when you've written something that WORKS, but goes against your good taste in design. Is the ugly solution ever the best solution? Is it not right until it's as simple as possible? I keep thinking that ugly solutions are always a sign of the wrong approach. Is anything that works "good enough"? Or do you strive to find the truly beautiful solution to everything? Thoughts, anyone?

I've been programming professionally for about 25 years.

At the beginning I was very big on the concept of elegance. I would do things the elegant way, because I had faith that that was the way to write great code. It was a kind of magic guide. Except, gradually I noticed that sometimes if I had done things less elegantly, but with more attention to certain other factors, I would have avoided a bug or the code would have been easier to maintain. The downside usually was that an "elegant" solution tends to solve problems in such a perfect, simple way that sometimes it's not even obvious what problems are being solved. That is, the elegant solution is sometimes so concise and brief, serving more than one purpose at a time, that there is no explicit and readable statement or what purposes are being served. So, people working with the code later may not understand everything that is happening in the elegant solution, and may unknowningly make a change that alters some of the necessary behavior. Also the elegant solution is sometimes bug-prone in its original form -- due to its conciseness it doesn't necessarily handle every possible situation in a very explicit way, and so there is a somewhat greater tendency to leave some combination of circumstances uncovered, leading to unpredictable behavior when that combination appears at run time.

Gradually, I have come to the conclusion that elegance is much less important than it often appears to be to young programmers who have a natural love of programming. (I would assume Derek Sivers is in the category -- as I understand it, CDBaby was his first major programming effort, and that wasn't that long ago. And it is obvious that he is very talented, which usually implies having a love of the craft.)

In fact, at this point, elegance is fairly low on my list of properties that make for a good programming effort. The highest property is readability. But a very close second is encapsulation -- making little units of code that perform some work without variables or other things hanging around that could cause problems. For instance situations where a variable is available and appears to have a certain use is dangerous if there are hidden occasional conditions when that use cannot be relied upon. It's better to encapsulate so that programmers working on other aspects of the code are not able to access that variable and are therefore not in danger of misunderstanding it. (That doesn't always mean creating a function or class to carry out that work. For instance, sometimes it's simply a matter of consciously striving to make sure that every relevant aspect of a variable is easily understood from its name. Also, some modern languages such as Python support "functional programming" constructs such as "list comprehensions" that enable you to write a line of code that is encapsulates meaningful work.)

There is sometimes a conflict between readability concerns and functional programming concerns. And there are many other factors as well. It is an intuitive integration of the various factors which can seem esthetic -- a matter of one solution being more "tasteful" than others. Elegance may be the sugar of programming taste. When you're young, it seems very important. And indeed there is real value in it. It's arguably the first meaningful guidepost that is available to intuition. But when you're older, and have the benefit of many years of hard-won experience, other more subtle taste factors, with greater nourishment value, rise to the fore and tend to predominate.

Virgin suing Apple over iPod

French online music store Virgin Mega has filed a complaint against Apple Computer, claiming that the company's refusal to license the copy protection technology used in its iPod is harming competition.

...

According to the filing, the online store, part of the Virgin family, is seeking various unspecified "interim measures," pending a decision on the merits of the case. A hearing on that request is expected in either October or November, Apple said in the filing. [CNet News]

Boy, that sounds awfully lame to me. First of all, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on music players or on DRM technology. Secondly, even if it did, that would be OK, because it's not illegal to have a monopoly -- what's illegal is to leverage a monopoly in one business domain to create a monopoly in another.

Maybe the laws are different in France. A lot of things seem to be.

Patentable BECAUSE obvious...

"Sometimes it is possible to patent a technique that is not new precisely because it is obvious--so obvious that no one would have published a paper about it." [From the article Against Software Patents by the League for Programming Freedom, quoted in a discussion between Tim O'Reilly and Richard Stallman]

This strikes me as a interesting and correct insight.

An insight about obvious patents

"Sometimes it is possible to patent a technique that is not new precisely because it is obvious--so obvious that no one would have published a paper about it." [From the article Against Software Patents by the League for Programming Freedom, quoted in a discussion between Tim O'Reilly and Richard Stallman]

This strikes me as an accurate insight about a simple fact.

And yet elsewhere Tim says about a discussion he had with Jeff Bezos:

...what Jeff told me was that Amazon would indeed continue to file for patents, but that they'd think twice before using them again offensively, as they did against BN.com. Obviously, the PR backlash alone would make that a prudent move, but I believe that Jeff also understood my argument that it's unwise to stop the game of open innovation on the web that has been so much to the benefit of Amazon. Jeff went with me to Washington to lobby for change to the patent system (see my talking points for the visit to D.C.), but he also made very clear that as long as that system was in place, and competitors were filing patents, Amazon would also continue to do so.

If I were in his shoes, I'd do the same thing. Even Richard Stallman and other free software leaders have argued that free software and open source developers ought to file some patents, since having your own patents is one way to defend against lawsuits by other parties. [ See Stallman on the Harm of Patents: An Exchange Between Richard Stallman and Tim O'Reilly. ] That's in fact the patent game that is played by large companies, with the companies that have smaller stacks of patents typically paying license fees to make up the difference.

So Tim feels it's OK to get patents as long as you only use them defensively.

I go back and forth a lot on this. My own perspective is different. I'm a software entrepreneur. I've freely contributed ideas such as anti-spam mathematics to open-source projects including SpamBayes, Bogofilter, DSPAM, SpamAssassin, and Mozilla, and even to commercial projects like SpamSieve. In most cases the only benefit I get is a degree of recognizition.

On the other hand, I have expended large amounts of personal resources in building software. One thing that is not brought up much in these debates is that, just as software inventions are arguably easier to invent than many other forms of invention, they are also easier to copy.

For instance suppose someone spends about 20 years thinking through the best ways to facilitate new artists become known to their natural audiences without resorting to mass-marketing. (I am such a person.) Suppose that the best approach is essentially a business method that takes a lot of things into account, very subtle factors about the technical and cultural environment. But that it took a lot of work to figure it out -- in my case, including being engaged in New York City's Greenwich Village songwriter community for a few years and seeing what happened there.

Now suppose I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money building a product that implemented that vision (I have).

The fact is that any company with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare could copy it relatively quickly. Some players in this space have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare.

And because the open-source community routinely provides the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars of development effort by means of volunteers, it could copy it too. (Linux possibly represents billions of dollars of developer effort by now.)

So, unless I am willing to take a huge gamble that no one will copy me, it would make little sense for me to make that kind of effort.

Again, the key here is that I am not protected by the volume of code or the effort it takes to implement the idea. The barrier is in the many years of work and experience that it took me to feel that I knew what I was doing in this space. Work and experience that, if I am correct in the conclusions that are derived from that work, will be of significant help to artists and consumers when the full product is released. (I may not be correct, but that is a risk I am willing to take.)

But as soon as the full product is released, everyone who observes and uses it, and sees how successful it is in the marketplace, will have full access to the fruits of all that work and experience. If the judgments borne of that work and experience are correct, the product will be successful. Anyone with the means to bring together 6 digits of developer effort can then observe that fact, and copy the product.

I believe that my company, and those who work for it, and those who work at other companies built on ideas, deserve to be rewarded for the work it took to come up with those ideas.

On the other hand, I fully agree with people like Tim O'Reilly who feel that patents have the potential to do more overall harm to progress than good.

Tim's take on how to resolve that issue with software patents is to only use them defensively. I would go a step farther, to a more nuanced view: patents should be used in a moral way. I don't think the moral boundary is necessarily always at the boundary between defensive and offensive use.

A little background before we continue the main thread of this discussion. There are many ideas which emerge at a particular time that would have emerged soon after they did even if the first inventor didn't exist. For many such inventions, it's largely a matter of "the time being right" for a particular invention to emerge.

The telephone is such an invention:

On February 14, 1876, Bell's telephone patent application was filed at the United States Patent Office; Elisha Gray's attorney filed a caveat for a telephone just a few hours later. On September 12, 1878, patent litigation involving the Bell Telephone Company against Western Union Telegraph Company and Elisha Gray began.

In such cases, in an ideal world, all who were at the forefront should be rewarded. Elisha Gray probably would have shared Alexander Bell's reward, because he did similar work and achieved similar results at nearly the same time.

But it would simply be too impractical to try to build a patent system on such a principle. It's hard enough to maintain the patent system as it is, without adding the complexity of trying to divvy up the profits appropriately even to those who almost came first.

So the patent system is, to a degree, a lottery, even for such hugely significant and universally respected inventions as the telephone. You do an enormous amount of work over hears, and it may be just a day later than someone else, and he wins and you lose. In an ideal world, things wouldn't be that way.

But patents aren't really about the inventors. They are about contributing to the public good by motivating inventors to create. A chance at winning the invention lottery is enough to provide that motivation.

So, we've established that there are significant cases where "the time is right" for an invention, and it is "unobvious" enough that someone else might be inventing the same thing at about the same time, and only one is rewarded that is okay. It's not okay in an ideal world, but the world simply isn't ideal. Like democracy itself, it's a good compromise, and perhaps the best that can be made under real-world circumstances, although there are plenty of problems with it.

In the software world, it is often the case that an idea emerges which at least other similarly-situated developers could also think of. One of them patents it first, and only he is rewarded. That seems wrong to many, or most, people in the software business. But in reality it's not qualitatively different from the circumstances surrounding the invention of the telephone and many other universally-admired inventions.

However, there may be a quantitative difference. There may have only been a handful of people who were anywhere near the point of being able to build a telephone at the time of Graham's patent. There may have only been two, in fact. And in software, there are cases where they are many thousands of people who would be capable of creating something like "One-Click Shopping" if they were simply asked to do it.

This is reflected in the concept of "obviousness." An idea is considered to be too obvious if many thousands of people could immediately invent it if asked to.

BUT MY POINT IS THAT THEY AREN'T NECESSARILY BEING ASKED TO! I NEED TO BUILD ON THIS.

Using iMovie to strip FairPlay DRM from iTunes songs

Apple's iMovie can be used to strip the FairPlay digital rights management protection (DRM) on iTunes songs, according to a report by German news site Macnews.de. The site reports that Apple's own video tool can be used to create unprotected song files that be played on any computer without recompression, circumventing iTunes' DRM protection. iMovie users can use the "Share" feature of iMovie to export any imported (protected) song from the iTunes Music Store. The exported songs can either be stored in the un-protected AAC file format (used by Apple at the iTMS) or in the raw WAV file format; both of these formats are supported by iTunes. [MacNN]

To recap the popular trojan

To recap the popular trojan horse meme, remember that when the iPod was first released for Windows, Apple went and incorporated a 3rd party piece of software for Windows to sync and connect. This worked reasonably well, until iTunes for Windows was ready to ship. After using the mac base as beta testers for their software to reassure the music labels giving mac users first crack at the store, iTunes for Windows was released with great fanfare.

The iTunes Store wasn't really aimed at those downloading gigabytes of music from Kaaza, but rather those who were sick of doing it due to the lousy experience it can offer and those who really didn't do it at all. Make it painless... short and sweet, and they'll load up on those FairPlay-DRM'ed AACs. Eventually they'll want to take them with them, and the only thing that plays FairPlay AACs is the iPod. Cha-ching, they're feeding off each other, with the low-margin iTunes store as a loss-leader for the high-margin iPod.

...

RealNetworks' Harmony tech (or just opening the iPod) doesn't clash with this meme at all; it only reenforces it and helps sell iPods, and its arguably the only thing keeping their market cap from equaling their cash hoard. Apple could simply just being overzealous in wanting to control everything, but considering their screw up over not opening the original MacOS is held as a staple example in Business 101 of what not to do, I really doubt anyone there wants to be the responsible for repeating it with the iPod.

...

Most people believe that opening up the iPod is going to be in its future due to past history and simple economics, and Apple has even hinted that provided that the other Stores start getting some serious share they'll look at doing it. If things turn really bad with Real, they could simply issue a software fix and make things pretty miserable for them while selling iPods all the way. So why would Apple be so... vehemently... against it? [DrunkenBlog]

A very good question -- indeed one that I've been asking myself lately. And DrunkenBlog may just have the answer. If he's right, the popular trojan househorse meme is really not a horse but a herring -- a red one.

I won't even say here want the proposed answer is, because then you might not read this fascinating article. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should read it.

iTunes on Linux

CodeWeavers, which specializes in software that lets Windows programs run on Linux, said on Monday that it has a new version of its software that adds support for Apple Computer's iTunes. [CNET News]

CodeWeavers CrossOver Office Standard costs $39.95 and lets you run a number of Windows apps, including MS Office, on Linux. I wonder how many CodeWeavers users there are.

Linux's patent vulnerability

Last week we heard that Munich is slowing its switch to Linux in light of potential patent issues. And today we hear that:

A total of 283 registered software patents, including 27 held by Microsoft Corp. could conceivably be used as the basis of patent lawsuits against the Linux kernel, according to a study of U.S. software patents scheduled to be released Monday. [Infoworld]

The Infoworld article goes on to say:

"There is a nontrivial risk of patents being asserted against Linux," said Ravicher, who added that his findings should not come as a great surprise given the broad scope of the Linux project. "The conclusion we came to is not that Linux is doomed and that this is horrible," he said. "It's very similar to the result you would get if you investigated any other software program that's as successful as Linux."

On the other hand, it concludes:

Jeffrey Norman was skeptical about the effectiveness of such a study, given the vastness of the code in the Linux kernel and the large amount of software patents that have been issued. "I don't think that you could identify all of the patents that were possibly relevant to the Linux kernel," he said. "The only way you could do it was if you were a kernel developer."

Pretty nice arrangement for SCO's lawyers

The bounty-hunting terms of SCO's retainer agreement with Boies are yet another cause for raised eyebrows. Boies's firm and the others working with him are billing SCO at discounted hourly rates, but in return they stand to receive 20% of any judgments or settlements that result. What's unusual, though, is that the contracts specify that if SCO is acquired during the litigation—imagine, say, IBM buying SCO to make it go away—SCO's lawyers will take 20% of the company's sale price. The lawyers even receive 20% of any financings SCO receives during the litigation. For instance, when SCO got a $50 million private placement in October 2003, SCO's law firms immediately banked more than $8.9 million, including $1 million cash. [Fortune.com -- altho you may have to subcribe to the magazine to read it]