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| Saturday, March 1, 2003 |
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Aw Fuck, part N 
| | So I used copied everything off the bad laptop — my main machine for the last two years — to a backup drive. Then I cloned the computer I'm using now, a near-twin, over to the bad laptop. |
| | It didn't work. I've cloned back and forth between various TiBooks like this four or five times now, and never had a problem, but now I do. The machine won't fully boot. I ran fsck and it got a bit farther, but still doesn't fully boot. Now I'm running DiskWarrior, which failed the first time when "the finder unexpectedly quit." |
| | It gets worse. After going to all the trouble to rescue the drive of the bad laptop, and back it up, I didn't check to make sure everything was backed up. I should have. For no reason that makes any sense, it backed up everything but the documents directory in my user directory. I have no idea why. That's never happened before either. Everything that matters to me was in that directory. |
| | It gets worse. To make room for this backup, I had to wipe out the old backup, made a few days ago. |
| | The result: the last backup I still have is from December 27, 2002. I'm missing most of everything between that date and when the laptop disappeared, and everything since I got it back. In other words, all but about a week in early February. Everything I've been working on for the last two weeks: gone. Articles, speeches, photographs... all of it. |
| | I once had a friend who was a pilot for USAir. We were talking deep aviation trash one day at the beach when he asked me why I wasn't a pilot, since I knew so much about the subject. |
| | "I make mistakes," I replied. |
| | He nodded and said, "Yep. Then maybe you shouldn't be a pilot." |
| | The problem is, I have no choice about using a computer. |
| | If any of you have sent me emails that matter during the last few weeks, please send them again, okay? Thanks. |
It works now
| | Listening to the Spectrum thing. Watching in Real works well too. Getting very clear 225Kbps audio/video. On two boxes at the same time. Love that broadband. |
In case you forgot
Be there now
| | I'm trying my best to crash today's Spectrum Policy thing by listening in at a distance, over the Net, using these links here. But they don't seem to be working. Only the first two links point somewhere, but nothing happens. |
| | [Later...] Now it just says "404 not found" for the QuickTime, and nothing at all for the Real. The MP3 stream has a link back to the same page it's on.... And now the page seems to have been updated, but the links still bring up nothing. Hmm... |
| | Okay, its past 10:15 am now, and the conference has been happening for neary two hours, and still no feed. I think I'll give up. (11:15 now, and it's still not there.) |
| | BUT: I will make it there for tomorrow's session, and the party later. I may need to leave at 3am to make it, but I'll be there, whether or not I can get various machines working right. I'll definitely have the new Linux laptop with me. It's hard to type on a keyboard that small, but the rest of the package is pretty darn slick. And maybe some of my pals can help me get WiFi working on the thing. |
And the answer is...
| | I was able to back up the most valuable data off my laptop before running Alsoft DiskWarrior on it. After making the recmmended directory replacements, I'm waiting to see if the mother starts up and looks okay. Right now I'm getting a GSOP: Gray Screeon Of Purgatory. Shit. |
| | Now. I'm running fsck from the command line. It says the volume appears to be okay. |
| | Now I'm restarting in safe mode... which works, good... logging out and logging in as myself. That works. |
| | Now I can survey the damage. Uh oh. Lots of apps, prefs, library items, resources and cached data has been put in a huge directory of Resuced Items. System Preferences doesn't work at all. |
| | I think I need to put it back in FireWire target mode, Carbon Copy clone the machine I'm using now (itself a clone of the one I rented while the busted one was gone for a week), and then use the backup of the busted one to fill in the blanks. Seems the best approach. |
NEA, cont'd
| | Eric Norlin: The Game Heats Up. The internet, in its current form, moves everything that touches it toward the public domain, he says, adding |
| | The reason is simple: what amounts to ubiquitous access. Notions of economic distribution channels (upon which little things like Business Models and Marketing plans are based) are centered upon one element: the ability to control access. Whether we're talking a copy of a company's software, a movie in a controlled access theater, a cd from Justin Timberlake, or million dollar consulting from KPMG -- its ALL built on access control. The internet (in its current form) provides what amounts to nearly ubiquitous access to everything that touches it....ie, it rips apart the distribution channel BECAUSE it moves everything toward the public domain. |
| | For some context, let's look back at something Kevin wrote in December. Business is not based exclusively on controlling access, or on controlling distribution. As Kevin says, it fundamentally involves creating value through exchange. One of his points: we need to break away from understanding business exclusively in terms of distribution, and from the big distributor's perspective. |
| | The problem here is metaphorical. Like the Hollywood folks, Eric frames his arguments in terms of distribution, and keenly feels the Net's "threat" to incumbent distribution systems (or at least the digital ones). |
| | The metaphorical bridge out of this dilemma appears in Eric's last sentence, where The internet ... rips apart the distribution channel BECAUSE it moves everything toward the public domain. What's ripping apart the channels for distribution of digital "content" is nothing more than a gravity those systems have never experienced before. That gravity is exerted by the Net. |
| | See, the Net is more than a vast new commons. It's a whole new world. It pulls everything toward the public domian much as the Earth pulls us all toward its core. |
| | While gravity accellerates us constantly toward the center of the Earth, this isn't a problem, since we've adapted nicely to conditions on the world's intervening surface. Our challenge now is to adapt to conditions on the Commons, which is the surface of the World of Ends we call the Net. Like the Earth's surface, the Commons is a fundamentally a public place. Adaptation, however, requires an awareness of something deeper: the Net's end-to-end nature. That awareness needs to be of opportunities and not just of threats. |
| | This is where I was heading last December when I set Eric (and others) off by calling the Net's new world "a commie kind of place" (a herring that was a bit more red than I had intended). It would help to revisit that case and the arguments that followed. Here's some context in Grounds for Identity, which I wrote right after DIDW last Fall: |
| | Today big business operates by the grace of the Net. The creators of the Net — the makers of ubiquitous protocols that are as central and beyond ownership as the core of the Earth--are the gods behind the primal forces of today's business world. Those gods still have work to do, as veteran Byte editor John Udell explains: |
| | The connected computer is fast approaching ubiquity. We've created cyberspace, but we haven't yet really colonized it because we lack the organizing principle to do so. Having abolished time and space, nothing remains but identity. How we project our identities into cyberspace is the central riddle. Until we solve that, we can't move on. |
| | Project is the right word, not protect. |
| | If we create the protocols, APIs and other standards that let customers relate at full power with the companies they choose, consumer becomes an obsolete noun. The companies now in full charge of the identities they confer on each of us will no longer have full control, because now they will have to relate and not just distribute. But because we show up as customers rather than as consumers, the range of business possibilities is much larger. The trade-off is a good one for both sides. |
| | For that we need something destructively cool: an invention that mothers necessity. That's our real challenge here. |
Until supply and demand respect each other equally, we're stuck
| | Kevin: DRM vs. Decmocracy. No-one seems to be making the 'DRM Destroys Value' argument, he says, and then makes it: |
| | It is demonstrable fact that customers will pay far less for locked up media than open media, so moving to locked media hurts your bottom line directly, far more than the 'leakage' of copying. |
| | When combined with the fact that DRM is readily circumvented by the determined, but an annoyance to the purchaser, you have avery odd reward curve at work - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot. |
| | Instead, mediAgora proposes an incentive scheme for those who encourage sales of what customers really want - rights in perpetuity to unencrypted, high quality files. |
| | A thought: mediAgora's principles will best be served by a strong personal identity scheme. What Kevin proposes with mediAgora is a marketplace where Demand, on an individual basis, has relationship-determining power equal to Supply. We don't have that yet. DRM arguments are still all framed far too deeply in maintaining a power imbalance that locates far too much of it on the supply side. |
| | And they won't give it up, folks. We need something disruptive to take it from them and then give back far more than they lost. That's what Tier 1 Mydentity is about. Infrastructure not so much from the bottom up as from the customer to the marketplace. |
Hate to butt in, but...
| | This actually showed up in a Google search result. |
And you don't stiff suppliers for millions when your "company" disappears without a trace
| | A blog is a slate and chalk — a drawing board for innovation. A wonderfully forgiving, fluid, networked place to think and collaborate with colleagues. Is it any surprise so many entrepreneurs and entrepreneuses are using this interface to create new ways of working and thinking and sharing information? |
| | One advantage: you don't have to subordinate your dream to your investors' need to make money off it. |
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