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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Oh no. 
| | I just learned that Galen and Barbara Rowell were killed in a plane crash. What horrible news. Happened on the 11th. Somehow it passed me by. Galen was our greatest living outdoor photographer, and an awesome guy. |
Shredding some light
| | I guess the tongue in my cheek was less than apparent. |
| | For what it's worth, there was a context: a trialogue of sorts between myself, Dawn and Moxie. Fun stuff. Maybe not enlightening, but certainly good for lightening up a bit. |
| | Which I think we sometimes need around here. |
Weighing Wil
| | Will Wheaton's speech also includes the following words: |
| | [Copyright law] exists to protect and promote artists. Don't ever forget that. |
| | This is wrong. Copyright law exists to enlarge the public domain. That's all. Don't you forget that, Will. |
| | Timothy also quotes copyright law specifically. Interesting. |
Out weighing
| | Since I started the Atkins diet three weeks ago, I'm down eleven pounds and a belt notch or two. I started at 187, and now I'm at 176, which is where I started the last time I went on a diet, about seven years ago. That was the MacDougall vegetarian greens & grains diet, whcih I kept up for two years before I fell off the wagon and ballooned up again. |
| | That time I got down under 160. My goal is 155, which is what I weighed when I was 21. |
| | It's a bitch not eating bread, ice cream, beer and caffeinated coffee, but it's nice being able to tie my shoes without feeliing like I've got to bend around this beachball under my belt. |
| | Ordering food can get weird on this diet. "I'd like the pepperoni pizza. Hold the crust." The other night I had a big steak in DesMoines with Ev, who is as skinny as I once was and wanna be again. It was a great steak, too. |
| | By the way, Ev is clearly in a good mood now that Blogger is staying in business, and even growing. "We're still flying close to the ground," he said. "We're just flying faster." |
Nutshelling
Your friend the telco
| | Here's Declan's precipitating interview with a Verizon guy. |
Grasping at tubes
| | "For a long time, we kept asking cable operators to let us import our traditional business model into the broadband arena," said Lisa Hook, who oversees America Online's high-speed, or broadband, business for AOL Time Warner. "We kept saying, `Sell us wholesale access to your network and we will have the direct relationship with the customer,' " Ms. Hook recalled in an interview last week. "It became clear that that was really unknown in the cable industry, and we've realized that moving more toward an HBO model for carriage makes a lot of sense." |
| | The idea: make AOL a source of "content" like ESPN or HBO. The problem: all the content worth having on AOL is either available over any other ISP or headed that way (the closed IM systems, popular as they are, can't last without interoperability over the Net). |
| | What if both AOL and the cable operators are wrong? Maybe the Net is more than just a new form of content, to be slotted into someone's traditional business model. Maybe, just maybe, open communication and new applications are what people really want from broadband, rather than snazzier Web programming. Maybe business arrangements and government policies will allow the real Internet to stand up. Is that too much to hope? |
| | Kevin's blog just gets better and better. More of a must-read every day. |
Just rethinking out loud
| | Nearly every item I've written today has been a public response to a private email. |
Going deep
Nice guys blog first
Best fuck-off post of the Day
Random items
| | I thought Beth Goza didn't have a blog. Sorry: she does. Really enjoyed hanging with her (among many others) at Gnomedex. |
Blog du jour
| | One quibble: He blames Apple and Microsoft for not making the situation better: |
| | Even though connecting to your home computer from anywhere is a great feature, broadband providers, if they mention this at all, generally couch it in protective terms. ³We¹ll provide you with a firewall, so that nobody can get into your home PC,² they promise. What if I want to get in? Software companies such as Microsoft and Apple seem very reluctant to write the software that would make setting up your home computer as a server a snap. Of course, Microsoft owns Hotmail, and Apple charges for all those .Mac services. Maybe they do not appreciate competition. Especially from the likes of you. |
| | In fact both Microsoft and Apple do have easy-to-use software for at least some of that stuff (setting up a Web server for example). |
| | True, they could do more; but the main fault still lies with the cable and DSL providers. And the situation won't change until we reach a critical mass of unserved photo albums and amateur movies sitting on hard drives in homes, wanting a way to show themselves to the world. |
| | [Addendum...] Barry Cohen adds this. |
Destiny with Rendezvous
| | I just heard that there is a Rendezvous demo in which a Mac detects a Linksys wireless router and realizes how to configure it. I understand Stuart Cheshire, the architect of ZeroConf (now Rendezvous) gave the demo. I'm sure he and/or Apple would be glad to give Linksys all the code they need. |
| | [Later...] When I read about Rendezvous (generic name: Zeroconf) however, I suspect they need no firmware at all: |
| | The charter of the ZEROCONF Working Group is to enable Zero Configuration IP Networking. That means making it possible to take two laptop computers, and connect them with a crossover Ethernet cable, and have them communicate usefully using IP, without needing a man in a white lab coat to set it all up for you. We're not limiting the network to just two hosts, but we want to take that as the starting point. |
A stand up act
| | Guess it's too late to audition. Still, it's fun to rehearse anyway. |
The copyright conversation, cont'd
| | Dave Sifry weighs in with his thoughts about copyright, trying to reconcile Dave and Larry's differing points of view. Interesting stuff (read all three links). He's trying to move the conversation forward, and I like that. |
| | My own feeling goes like this... |
| | You're a commercial software developer. Doesn't matter whether you're big or small, you've still got X amount of energy. You want to write good software that people will buy, because if they don't buy it you won't make any money and won't write good software. |
| | You can spend your energy writing great code and making great software, or you can spend it talking and thinking about the legalities of it all -- what licence you'll use, what the copyright and patent issues might be, etc. |
| | The unpleasant fact is that you do have to care about all of the legal stuff. It's just that caring about that stuff is doing something other than making software. |
| | One pleasant fact, however, is that markets also grow by what commercial suppliers give away. Examples in the software business are protocols, tools and technologies that give everybody more ways to make great stuff, or that create increasingly supportive common infrastructure. |
| | These things should not be at odds. They should be obvious and straightforward choices based on commonly held values. |
| | But right now we've got a bunch of values that drag us down. Mostly they're rooted in notions about property (on the one hand) and in the goodness and badness of open, closed and free source code (on the other). These all feel a bit red herringy to me right now. Not that we shouldn't talk about them; just that they're a bit off the bigger topic, which is the software market. It's still new. It's still being born. |
| | It's come through some wild distortions in its brief two decades of existence. Isolated development on multiple platforms, dominance by a giant mutant company, the dot-com madness... It all looks primordial to me. Maybe even pre-natal. |
| | In this pre-natal state, I believe there is something about the nature of software that both commercial developers like Dave Winer and free software developers like Richard Stallman both sense and both value — something intrinsic to software, to code, that makes it indescribable in terms of any of the metaphorical systems we've been using to scaffold our understanding: publishing, real estate, property, natural resources... |
| | I'd like to see more thinking going into what makes software intrinsically valuable, both as commercial products and as public domain infrastructure. I believe it's many different things, and that the few things we've been arguing about over the past few years are just small parts of a whole that won't finish clarifying itself for another 30 or 40 years. |
| | Or so it appears to my bleary brain at 1am. |
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