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Thursday, December 19, 2002
Only five smiling days until Christmas 
Camp Dubya
| | I remember after the arrests following 9/11, the Japanese-American community made a public comment condemning the unfair imprisonment of Arab-Americans. This is really the 1940's all over again. And I was just starting to think about moving back to the US again. When are the American people going to wake up, read history and realize that they're headed down a pretty well trodden and terrible path? I complain a lot about the Japanese people being apathetic and unaware, but I wonder if this might be better than thinking you're aware and wishing for war and treating immigrants as if they were "enemy combatants" with no rights. Amazing. |
Blog more and save
Click on
| | Here's Andrew on Spring and DesktopX. Others had pointed me to Spring recently, but I moved on when I saw the sidebar roster of essentially commercial purposes for which I, as a "consumer" could put it to use. "1-Click and 1-Drag Evites," "Effortless AIMing," "Visual Amazon Products," "1-Drag Personal Intros." Not my cup. |
| | But hey, maybe it merits a look. A lot of people I respect, including Andrew and Brent, seem to like it. |
That giant sucking sound...
| | Driving to L.A. yesterday I kept hitting SCAN in faint hope that something interesting would come up. There were a few things, but the substance and humanity that used to animate commercial radio has been almost entirely replaced by the stuff of body snatchers. Not every station is a pod, but it's pretty darn close. The bottom end of the FM dial still has its moments, but even that ain't what it used to be. |
Did you notice that the DMCA is going down? Well, it is.
Debate, cont'd
| | ...though most things within the Net start with some level of ownership (no matter how complicated that might be), the net itself moves all things toward a commoditized state.....ie, the infrastructure (slowly) subsumes more and more into its public domain. In other words, the lack of scarcity that is the net expands to envelope all things.....(though i'd argue this happens at plate tectonic speed)..... |
| | As such, things like Open Source *do* end up "winning" against proprietary stuff over time.....but mostly because they help to commoditize (ie they accelerate) the process that the Net naturally causes. |
| | True, but why frame everything in terms of ownership? The Net is a basically public place. You can ignore that fact, or take advantage of it. If you want to own market share, it's smart to ubiquitize foundational stuff for the whole market, and then build proprietary stuff on top of it sooner, and better, than the other guys. Like Apple did with FireWire and is doing with Rendezvous. Like IBM is doing with Linux and UDDI. Like Microsoft and Userland did with XML-RPC and SOAP. Like Jabber, Inc. is doing with Jabber.org. Like PingID is doing with SourceID. |
| | I doubt we have disagreement there. I know we do here: |
| | the question remains: if we're using the history of the Net and computing to construct an analogous generalization, then we have to realize the steps go: |
| | - begin in state of ownership
- have lack of scarcity drive that piece toward public domain
- reach public domain -- become infrastructure
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| | I don't think that order of movement is insignificant -- and i'm not convinced you can simply start at #3...... |
| | To me that's like leaving out gravity and the mass that accounts for it. The Net itself is a pile of protocols, all of which would have never achieved their ubiquity-derived mass if their inventors had asserted ownership of them. In other words, their success owed nothing to the proprietary nature of their origins (whatever those may have been) — and everything to the nonproprietary natures of their uses in the world. Everything that successfully improves the Net's infrastructure does so because there is little or nothing proprietary about it — even though a growing pile of it comes from commercial software companies. |
| | The wonderful irony, of course, is that every new addition to the Net's public domain geology enlarges the marketplaces for stuff (proprietary and otherwise) that can be built on it. |
Only five more procrastination days until Xmas Eve
| | I haven't shipped shit yet. Getting to the expensive/risky point. Gonna do my first and last serious shopping today. |
| | Yesterday I went to Costco in Goleta to get the bald tires on the front of the Subaru replaced. At 10:06 I looked at my Handspring PDA and saw that my 12:30 appointment in Ventura, about an hour away, was actually at 11:15. So I pounded back home, dropped off a very disappointed kid (we were going to shop while the tires were being done), and hauled ass to Ventura to arrive late. After that as over I got lost again looking for Costco down there (listed with a Ventura address in the yellow pages, when it's actually in Oxnard... at least according to my notes, which were probably wrong). Got the tires: Bridgestones, since Michelin doesn't make tires for my size wheels any more, the guy said. Then I spent way too much time looking for other stores and not finding stuff I was looking for when I found the stores. Then I drove to LAX to meet my daughter's flight, which was then delayed for about two hours, which I killed wandering around and (incredibly) not buying much at Fry's. |
| | Oh, an in the middle of this somewhere I went through a red light right in front of a cop. Procedure: 1) note cop in rear view mirror; 2) observe left turn signal going green; 3) proceed forward against a red light, dumbly assuming the left signal meant green for everybody; 4) observe cop lights flashing before even getting through the intersection; 5) marvel that I wasn't killed. I told the cop I was looking for the Camarillo Airport, and just, well, screwed up. Dumb mistake. He agreed, told me to be careful, and pressed on. Close call. |
| | Back to the shopping. I found myself thinking about what would become of everything I saw in every store five years from now... all those TVs, computers, games, DVDs... I decided the most durable items were the flashlights. Pretty much everything else was crap on a belt. |
| | Proves I can rationalize not buying shit as easily as I rationalize buying it. Progress, I guess. |
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