Monthly Archives: August 2004

Things CPU Architects (and others) Need To Think About

Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and a half watching the video download, and thought it was an interesting look into where CPU design is going, not going, and what that means for products.

I’m not a huge hardware guy, but the level is pretty straightforward, I had no problem following his presentation.

The points that really struck home were really about complexity. At Pixar, I spent well over a decade working on RenderMan, Pixar’s core renderer that we have used for all our films. Many of the criticisms that Colwell had for later architectures (increasing fragility, difficulty in extension, maintaining backward compatibility, shrinking ability to keep track of all aspects of the design) are common in large software projects as well. When I finally left the RenderMan group, I suspect that I understood about 85% of the renderer really well, which was probably just about as high as anyone, but it was clear that there were many subtle interactions amongst features which led to confusing performance variations. Often trying to tune these variations was like moving piles of sand: you move some sand, but you always leave a little behind and pick up some dirt too.

Colwell ultimately is concerned that that if CPU manufacturers continue to try to play the “more transistors, more die, more speed, more heat” game they’ve been playing, then they will have only a dead end architecture that they can’t sell because nobody wants a processor that dissapates 2KW.

Good stuff.

Au Revoir, Julia

Julia Child, 1912-2004The great legend of cuisine, Julia Child, passed away today in her sleep. She was three days short of her 91st birthday.

In the last half century, it would be hard to pick anyone who has had a greater influence on cooking and food than Julia. Her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking introducted a generation to French cooking, and her early appearances on public television helped to further expand the culinary notions of a country for whom meatloaf and boiled vegetables were all too common. She always retained a sense of humor, and was eager to promote good food as something you shared with family and friends. I have recently enjoyed watching her interact with other chefs in her Master Chef series, as famous chefs interact with her she showed no fear in in expressing her opinions, and most would defer to her judgement.

I suspect the angels are dining well tonight.

Radio Tidbits

A couple of quick items regarding radio, that incredibly passé form of media that nonetheless seems to occupy a great deal of my time. Nerosoft is coming out with a $20 program called TimeTrax which records songs and programming off the$50 XM PCR Satellite Radio, and stores them as MP3 with appropriate tags and all. Leave it running over night and you could have hundreds of songs, all ready to download to your iPod. That’s very cool. Gizmodo expressed the concern that the RIAA probably has lawyers by the truckload ready to squash this, but frankly it wouldn’t be difficult to write an open source version of this: a brief google on the web revealed most of the information that you need. Basically the XM device looks like a USB serial device, and a lot of the protocol has been reverse engineered. Cool stuff.

I’m mostly interested in doing this not for songs, but rather for sports: I’d like to be able to record and timeshift baseball games. It’s not clear to me if you can get local games via XM radio, but there is the possibility of using Griffin Technology radioShark. There are two small problems with it: it’s not available yet, and as yet they only seem to have software for the Macintosh. Still, I’ll keep my eye open, since it records both AM & FM.

International: Isn’t 50 years of copyright enough?

The Index of Free Expression asks Isn’t 50 years of copyright enough? The recording industry is lobbying the EU to extend their current term of 50 years for perfomances to keep control over recorded performances by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and ultimately, the Beatles.

The recording industry thinks that the expiration of copyrights is “a loophole”. One industry’s bug is a society’s feature, I always say.

void && NULL

While driving in this morning, the airwaves were abuzz with the news that the California Supreme Court had ruled to annul 4000 same sex marriages that were performed in San Francisco. The court chose not to rule on the constitutionality of the law which defines marriage as a union between man and women, but instead chose to rule on the much narrower issue of whether the mayor had the right to grant marriage licenses in violation of that law. It was found that he did not, and the court then ruled that all marriages so performed were void.

There are of course lawsuits pending that will ask the court to address the broader issue as to whether the equal protection provisions of the California state constitution nullifies bans on same-sex marriages as discriminatory. It will be interesting to see how the California Supreme Court deals with the issues raised here but tabled without comment.

To the 4000 couples whose marriages were declared null and void, keep your chins up, and your formal wear pressed. I suspect that ultimately you’ll be needing them again.

Snitch, the Copyright Ferret

BSA's new copyright mascotNews.com is running a story about the BSA’s new mascot, a ferret who lectures children about the perils of the copyright infringement. Children will play games where they destroy pirated software and collect licensing agreements.

Oh good lord.

How about teaching them the real facts of our absurd copyright system? That if they go into a record store and steal a cd, they may be arrested and subject to a fine of up to $1000, but if they are hit by a lawsuit from the RIAA, they could be fined for millions in damages? Try to explain to them that taking an intangible object is worth thousands of times more than taking the same object in tangible form.

Why not teach them about the public domain, and all the resources available to them which are in the public domain?

Why not teach them about the Creative Commons and the culture which promotes sharing and collaboration rather than ownership?

It’s simple: because the BSA is simply about promoting fear, not education.

No thanks to Snitch the Weasel.

Stairway to Heaven, Orchestral Variations

For publicity, the University of New South Wales commissioned orchestral variations on the classic Led Zepplin tune, Stairway to Heaven. Each segment is done in the style of a different composer. The Holst’s Mars, Bringer of War was funny enough that it made me laugh. The segments in the style of Bizet and Glenn Miller are quite good as well.

The idea isn’t that new. An Australian TV show once ran a contest asking for submissions for as many variations on Stairway to Heaven as they could. The result was an album with 22 tracks, most of which are deliciously absurd. How do I know about it? My friend Tom Duff has every absurd CD ever stamped.

Enjoy Tom!

How to ameliorate the outcome of Eldred v. Ashcroft

Your Government at WorkI’m nearing the end of Lessig’s Free Culture, and am at the point in the book where Lessig describes his loss in Eldred v. Ashcroft which challenged the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is very interesting on many levels: to see how Lessig strategized, to see what arguments were made and how the justices responded. It’s even somewhat moving to hear his description of his disappointment with the Supreme Court in their ruling, which was contrary to their finding in Lopez, and failed utterly to discuss the merits of Lessig’s argument.

Many of Lessig’s supporters wrote him to tell him that he never had a chance: the Supreme Court simply wasn’t ready to reverse Congress on this matter. So the burden shifts between trying to convince the Supreme Court to trying to convince Congress.

We’ve got a tough row to hoe. The entertainment industry is a powerful lobby and contributes a great deal of money to preserve the monopoly power that long (or practically infinite) terms grant them. It’s hard to see how your average yutz can go toe-to-toe with their interests and come out ahead.

What can we do then? Well, we could try taking a cue from the Open Source world. Open source exists solely because people choose to donate their works to greater the common good. People give up their rights to maintain exclusive rights so that people can build on their work and expand its scope and utility. The Creative Commons provides a useful framework for giving up some of your rights (or all of your rights) and making them available to all. By granting people specific rights under a Creative Commons license agreement, you are saying “I don’t need all the rights granted to me, I’m happy with less” and you encourage others to build upon your creative work.

Another thing you can do is help educate others on the power of public domain resources. For instance, consider the following list of 100 great books in the public domain. You’ll see many familiar books there. How many have you read? (I’ve read 29 of them, 30 if you could the Bible). All of these books are available on Project Gutenberg. Moreover, most of these books are still in print because publishers don’t have to pay royalties for their use. Publishers like Penguin Classics or Dover are free to republish these, often in inexpensive editions which are terrific. If they still had to pay royalties, many of these works would be out of print.

Don’t believe me? Let’s examine a book which is in the public domain, like Alice in Wonderland. Searching on amazon.com, we find that the Signet Classic edition of this book runs for $3.95. Actually, that’s a pretty good buy, because it includes the book Through the Looking Glass as well. Compare this to The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925 and is therefore still under copyright. We see that the cheapest edition of this book is $9.06, with a list price of $12.95. The Puffin Classic edition of The Three Musketeers costs a whopping $4.99. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (still under copyright) lists for $10.40, with a list price of $13.00. You could work out the cost of the CTEA by multiplying the number of years by the average increase in cost for a book like The Sun Also Rises and the number of copies, and see what that total is. This particular book ranks 2,333 on amazon.com, so you’d imagine that it’s still selling pretty well. Let’s assume it sells ten thousand copies a year, the terms were expanded by twenty years, and the average cost is $2.00 more per copy. The cost (not assuming any kind of inflation) is then $400,000. The CTEA robbed the public out of $400,000 worth of value to perpetuate a monopoly for the copyright holders. Try multiplying that out by all the books which had their terms extended, and you see that Congress handed millions and millions of dollars to copyright owners. The Sun Also Rises would have entered the public domain twice in the last few years except for the laws enacted by Congress to extend terms for which the public at large derived absolutely no tangible benefit. The CTEA was nothing more than the extension of a monopoly for which we all pay.

This message can be brought home by reiteration (perhaps even better and more clearly expressed than I can), but also by making good use of available public domain resources. For instance, if I want to know which Shakespeare play contained the words “If the cause be not good”, I can access a Shakespeare search engine, and find the speech by Williams in King Henry V. This search engine exists because someone saw a need, and there was no need to license the underlying work to achieve it. Try to find a Hemingway search engine. Go ahead.

Well, I’ve run out of steam for today, so I’ll just sum up. What can we do? We can carry on, using the resources that are available to us, and we can choose not to pursue the culture of exclusivity and ownership that current copyright practice promotes. In other words, we change society not by legislating the change, but by changing ourselves.

Addendum: the image illustrating this entry came from Project Gutenberg.

Rick Boucher, Guest Blogger on lessig.org

Congressman Rich Boucher is guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. Congressman Boucher is fairly rare amongst politicians in that he actually seems to understand many of the issues related to intellectual property rights. He is working to amend the DMCA to restore fair use rights to digital media, and is the author of the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act. His opening entry is a request for comments regarding the Induce Act, and the discussions are quite interesting, including postings by Andy Greenberg which I thought were enormously clear and which apparently have struck a chord with Boucher.

I’ll be reading throughout the week.

Tough Weekend for Would-be X Prizers

There were two failures of launch vehicles this weekend. The 48 inch launch vehicle of Armadillo Aerospace crashed, leaving what was described on their website as “$35,000 of rocket is now a whole lot of primo Armadillo Droppings”. Why the failure? Ran out of propellant. Doh! I’m told there are pictures and video on their website, but since Slashdot is running this story, I suspect it will be several hours before I’ll be able to have a peek.

Eric Meier and Phillip Storm of Space Transport Corp, a much more modest and low budget affair, also had a vehicle failure when their rocket engine exploded at 100 feet. The parachute failed to deploy, and the rocket crashed to the ground.