Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Copyright and the Evolution Wars. Copyfight: the politics of IP

Cory Doctorow thinks that the recent move by the NAS and NSTF to ban the use of their copyrighted materials as part of the Kansas standards is ill-conceived and poorly motivated. He says:

I don’t think this is a proper use for copyright. Copyright is not about endorsement or agreement, and its not a right to stop criticism, even ill-considered criticism. Quotation can be fair use even in a context the original author abhors — that’s precisely when we need fair use most, we on all sides of the political debate.

I agree to a small degree, but disagree in the big picture.

Copyright is at its core a legal right: it establishes a monopoly on derivative works for the creator, subject to certain rational provisions which have been established by case law. One of these provisions is the doctrine of fair use. If the Kansas BOE’s use of NAS and NSFT materials is a fair use, then they do not need the permission of those organizations to include their materials in their standards. If their uses are not fair use, then they do. That’s just what the law says. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) fair use rights have been rather flexibly interpreted over the years, and have been very strictly interpreted in certain cases, and rather loosely in others. What is certain is that if the Kansas BOE moves ahead without removing the offending material, the NAS and NSFT could file for an injunction to halt their distribution, and we will have to answer this “fair use” question in court.

It is entirely within the rights of a copyright holder to keep derivatives of their work being created which are not fair use, and they can do that for any reason whatsoever. The NAS and NSFT are merely trying to keep their mantle of respectability from being adopted by organizations which do not hold the same goals or aims that they do using their rights under the law.

I see nothing remotely incorrect about that.

Why Microsoft Sucks for Programmers

Charles Petzold has some interesting thoughts in his essay Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, but for me, it’s really this which illustrates why Microsoft is sapping all the allure out of programming:

Today we are ready for the official release of the .NET Framework 2.0. Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000 public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods and properties that are inherited and not overridden. A book that simply listed the names, return values, and arguments of these methods and properties, one per line, would be about a thousand pages long.

If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a little description of what it did, you%u2019d have a stack that totaled 40 feet.7 These 60,000 cards, laid out end to end %u2014 the five inch end, not the three inch end %u2014 can encircle Central Park (almost), and I hear this will actually be a public art project next summer.

Whenever I try to use Visual Studio and code any significant applications for Microsoft, I’m always shocked by all the bits of code that seem to have to be constructed which have nothing to do with my application whatsoever. Such programs are what I refer to as “densely annoying” and “sparsely intelligent”. It is actually an intensely bad thing that Microsoft has this “friendly” environment to write all this code for you, to try to remind you of the sixteenth argument to version two of some class that will probably be obsoleted with the next release of Windows: it prevents them from having to actually think about just how poorly the overall system is designed and actually going through the labor of fixing it. Streamlining it. Making it something that a programmer doesn’t get a headache from just thinking about, and muscle aches from carrying the books and manuals around.

Oh, and just in case you Linux guys get to feeling smug, you are marching down this path too. Microsoft just has a decade or so head start in becoming a bloated behemoth. There may be hope for you, but only if you turn back from the dark side now.

Thanks Dan for bringing this one to my attention.

Principal says students can’t keep blogs or MySpace profiles

Wow, it’s hard to imagine a more idiotic or wrong-headed school policy than this one. At Pope John XIII Regional High School, principal McHugh decided that students should not have blogs, and have threatened those who oppose the ban with suspension.

The primary impetus behind the ban is to protect students, McHugh said. The Web sites, popular forums for students to blog about their lives and feelings about their teachers and schools, are fertile ground for sexual predators to gather information about children, he said.

Can anyone else spot the irony of this statement? Anyone?

Said EFF attorney Kevin Bankston:

“It’s an incredible overreaction based on an unproven problem,” Bankston said. “If they’re concerned about safety, they could train students in what they should or shouldn’t put online. Kids shouldn’t be robbed of the primary communication tool of their generation.”

Amen.

Verdict: I think its a stunt…

Wow, just when you think it couldn’t get any stranger in the Scobleized universe, we get this posting, quoting:

Personal note to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates: can I have some money to get Microsoft a significant entry into the Web 2.0 market? A little more than it cost Yahoo to buy Flickr but far less than it cost eBay to buy Skype?

I have an acquisition I’d like to make.

If you give me your checkbook you’ll get permanent invites to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conferences for a very long time. Sorry, I can’t identify what I’m thinking of here, but promise you, it’s a big deal and will help solve some things we aren’t going to solve in Windows Vista, either. Gotta move fast, things are gonna happen at the Web 2.0 conference, next week, that will make the deal harder to make happen (and will make you look less brilliant if you do the deal afterward than before).

Call me. My cell phone is 425-205-1921.

It’s a nice touch, adding your cell phone number. But it’s a stunt.

We are to believe that this is the decision making process that Microsoft goes through in acquiring new companies: that a technical evangelist merely makes a plea on a public bulletin board, asking for money so that he can make a bid on some unnamed company, and that Gates or Ballmer should call him back, so that Scoble can write the 50 million dollar check.

Uh huh. Right.

Here’s what I think. I think it’s a stunt. It’s a stunt designed to make Microsoft appear transparent, to make Microsoft appear to move quickly, to make Microsoft respond quickly to new technological innovation by purchasing technology which they can deploy in their as yet unshipping next generation products.

Scoble tried to respond to the question why not go directly to the execs, but I think the reasoning is strange:

Now, there are risks of doing this in public. The company I want to work with us might get bigger egos and raise their price. Our competition might figure out who I’m talking about (they will anyway come this week). Or, other artifacts might show up. Personally the negotiations on the pricing probably won’t be driven by me anyway (and probably, even, aren’t driven by the company I’m thinking of).

Indeed Robert. Those are excellent reasons why negotiations of this type are not typically carried out in a public forum. Robert lists the benefits, that the company that he wants to acquire would see Microsoft as straight shooters, that his co-workers would be notified, that steve might just hand him a check, and most interestingly, that:

Folks on the outside can watch and can give us advice (as has already happened). It’s very probable that an even better company is out there being formed. If we do everything in secret no one would know to speak up.

Hmmm. Sorry, it just doesn’t ring true to me.

Consider another possibility: Scoble, in his efforts to serve his soulless robotic masters, finds that a competing company is negotiating responsibly with a small innovative company. A company that perhaps Microsoft doesn’t want to go to their competitors. Why not start a rumor that Microsoft might actually be willing to pay more for this company and disrupt their negotiations by pretending that they are in the market, and may even pay more? You don’t need to actually make it official, you could just start the rumor on your blog. Then perhaps the company to be acquired stalls, rethinks their position, raises their price, or just generally slows down the process. Perhaps this has effects even beyond the acquisition that Scoble had in mind, as other companies who are trying to market themselves to Google, Yahoo! and the like consider the possibility that maybe Robert was speaking about them.

Do I know that this is behind his posting? No, of course not. In fact, I think it’s rather unlikely. I think it vastly more likely that Scoble was merely trying to stir things up, to get people to link to him and to comment on him, while trying to take actions which make his alien overlords appear hip, fast-moving and clever. The problem is that it is much easier to explain as a stunt than as a serious move by a serious company which is ready to spend $50 million dollars.

Brainwagon Radio: Comments on Scoble and Specifications

Twice in one day…

Scoble responds to lots of criciticism that he’s evangelizing a crappy format, and really misses the forest for the trees. Actually, he misses the trees too. Earlier today I recorded this podcast, which I wasn’t going to post, but if Scoble’s going to go on, I think it actually merits it.

Scoble writes:

See, as a user, I really don’t care about the spec. I can’t read them. I don’t appreciate them. And, all they seem to do is lead to religious arguments one way or another.

I’m a user. Shoot me.

But what Dave did was give me an application. It works. And, as a user, I wonder “if the format is so crappy, how did Dave get it to work in his own application?”

And, as a user, I wonder “why can’t the developers just get their OPML to work with Dave’s application?”

The reason that developer’s just can’t get their OPML to work with Dave’s application is because the specification sucks. There is simply no way for anyone to tell if the OPML file generated by their application is really compliant with what Dave’s editor implements, or only just happens to never tickle a bug or an ambinguity which wasn’t specified.

It’s really not that hard to write an application: the trick comes from interoperability. To be useful, these files must be able to be routinely exchanged between applications written by different people, and that simply isn’t feasible without a clear, complete specification of what the format actually entails.

Scoble concludes:

The crappy format is good enough until someone comes up with something better. And that’s what you’re all missing.

What Scoble is missing is that currently he’s in a position to help dictate what gets adopted and what users are going to be seeing for the next five, ten, or even more years, and if he had any concern for those users, he’d work to ensure that the technology underlying that growth is as robust and reasonable as possible. OPML doesn’t qualify. RSS doesn’t even qualify. Did we learn nothing from the whole HTML standards process?

Some one has to say it again…

James Robertson doesn’t much like OPML or RSS as file formats, and tells us why:

Ye gods, it’s time someone came out and said something. OPML is a really, really crappy format. Really crappy. I had massive headaches implementing OPML support for import/export in BottomFeeder. Why? Because there’s no real specification. Like everything Dave Winer has ever been involved with, the specs are all in his head, and it’s up to the rest of us to figure out wtf he actually meant. Here’s the “spec” – and look at all the meaningless crap in it (windowRight? Why is there something specifying the number of pixels for the margin?).

I had to add tons of hacks to the OPML support in order to support the export formats of various tools. The problem? Everyone implemented it a little differently, because the spec is incredibly unspecific – about just about everything.

I couldn’t agree more. Take for example Mark Pilgrim’s comments:

I just tested the 59 RSS feeds I subscribe to in my news aggregator; 5 were not well-formed XML. 2 of these were due to unescaped ampersands; 2 were illegal high-bit characters; and then there’s The Register (RSS), which publishes a feed with such a wide variety of problems that it’s typically well-formed only two days each month. (I actually tracked it for a month once to test this. 28 days off; 2 days on.) I also just tested the 100 most recently updated RSS feeds listed on blo.gs (a weblog tracking site); 14 were not well-formed XML.

The reason just isn’t that programmers are lazy (we are, but we also like stuff to work). The fact is that the specification itself is ambiguous and weak enough that nobody really knows what it means. As a result, there are all sorts of flavors of RSS out there, and parsing them is a big hassle.

The promise of XML was that you could ignore the format and manipulate data using standard off-the-shelf-tools. But that promise is largely negated by the ambiguity in the specification, which results in ill-formed RSS feeds, which cannot be parsed by standard XML feeds. Since Dave Winer himself managed to get it wrong as late as the date of the above article (probably due to an error that I myself have done, cutting and pasting unsafe text into WordPress) we really can’t say that it’s because people don’t understand the specification unless we are willing to state that Dave himself doesn’t understand the specification.

Here is another small example: there is genuine confusion to this day about the support for the enclosure tag. Are you allowed to have more than one per item or not? People do generate them. By default, WordPress creates enlosure links for every mp3 that you link to in a post. It’s probably wrong, but lots of things like it just fine. Occasionally someone complains and asks for clarification, but no one ever really reaches a definitive answer.

Scoble likes to champion first RSS and now OPML under the claim that they are good for users. What would be good for users is for the deficiencies of these formats to be absent, or at least invisible. They are not. They manifest themselves in all sorts of edge cases which prevent interoperability. I’ve spent a great deal of time reading RFCs for various networking protocols and formats, and by comparison the RSS and OPML “specifications” are scribbles on napkins.

Scoble’s attitude reflects what I think of as the Microsoft way: it doesn’t matter what’s underneath as long as what’s on top looks shiny. Sure, it will belch smoke, require servicing by a third party every three thousand miles and occasionally make strange sounds that will puzzle and worry the owner, but look how shiny it is.

I use RSS every day. It does fulfill a need. But it does suck, and we would be better off if we all recognized that and worked to something better.

“We’ll teach this elephant to dance. Really!”

I know, bashing Microsoft is becoming a theme with me over the last few weeks, but I keep reading stuff on the news and blogs, and I can’t help but comment.

Today’s big news is that Microsoft is reorganizing: here is their press release.

There has been criticism of late from both inside and outside that Microsoft simply isn’t very innovative. It’s big. It’s bloated. It’s less profitable. Groups within Microsoft find it nearly as baffling to navigate their hierarchy as customers do when they call for support.

Now, a reorganization. It’s probably needed. But ask yourself: look back on all the announced reorganizations of all the companies you’ve ever dealt with in the past. How many have really enhance your relationship with them as a customer? How many have actually rejuvanated the company into releasing better products?

The fact is that dancing is done by lithe young people who don’t eat very much, not by lumbering pachyderms. I’m simply not convinced you can teach an elephant to dance, and you can’t change the facts: Microsoft is an elephant.

How to tell if you’re a racist…

Some stories just make you shake your head.

“I’m not racist or anything,” he said. “It’s just, some people I hate, some people I don’t get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they’re better than everyone else.”

How can you tell if you’re a racist? If you have to explain to others why you’re not a racist, you probably are one.

TiVo turns to the dark side…

Sigh. I’ve been flaming Microsoft for not listening to its customers, so it is sad to see that TiVo has decided to screw their customers at the request of copyright holders. Previously, you could store whatever programs you recorded for as long as you like. Now, if the copyright holder requests it, TiVo will refuse to allow you to keep your programs as long as you want, and will keep you from saving them out using TiVo2Go.

Sigh.

Tivo, I wonder just why you think customers should be happy that you’ve removed features from your product, or that you’ve placed the desires of copyright holders (who, I assume, don’t pay you) over the desires of consumers who are merely exercising their rights to time shift their material.

I guess I won’t be buying another TiVo either. Hello MythTV.

Addendum: It appears that this was mostly a bug, the flag was only meant for PPV broadcasts (which is slightly less bad, but not entirely great either), and was triggered by accident.

PDC Scorecard

Robert Scoble thoughtfully provided a list of all the revolutionary stuff he thinks is being introduced at PDC. To his credit, he includes links to at least on detractor as well as a couple of cheerleaders.

I said last week that I’d probably not be all that enthused about anything that they were releasing, and Scoble said for me to wait. Well, I thought I’d work through his list and tell you what I think about it.

  • Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and UI.
    I don’t use Office. In previous years, it was simply too expensive for me to justify for personal use, now open source alternatives are at least credible and, well, they are free. I have used individual applications in Office from time to time, and I think they are quite good on the whole, but it takes more than shiny new buttons to enthuse me about applications in this arena.
  • Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including new search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar.
    Get back to me when it ships.
  • LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Cool database stuff for .NET developers. This does sound like a good deal to me, it’s a pity that I don’t like to lock myself into proprietary platforms when designing applications.
  • Windows Presentation Foundation/E. “E” is for everywhere. I’d be more impressed by improvements to IE that would fix their broken implementation of the box model. That truly would allow web pages to be viewed everywhere.
  • Start.com updates released. What’s start.com? Oh, portal. Gotcha. Yawn.
  • Atlas (our AJAX Web development toolkit) demoed for the first time.
    This does sound like a good deal to me, it’s a pity that I don’t like to lock myself into proprietary platforms when designing applications.
  • Microsoft Max. A new photo sharing and display application. Yawn.
  • Digital Locker. A new place to find, try and buy software. Double yawn.
  • New sidebar and gadgets and new Microsoftgadget site. Hey! We have these new things called gadgets! Aren’t we innovative. No, they don’t look like something our competitors created. No, really.

Okay, to be fair, I’m one of those long haired hippy freak Open Source/Unix hacker/communists, so it really would have been difficult for Microsoft to wow me. But really, none of this is all that inspiring. It’s not that I don’t like new eyecandy, or sharing photos, or good internet portals. It’s just that while providing candy, Microsoft isn’t providing the meal. What I’d like to see…

  1. Security. Number one. No eyecandy will make me happy when I can’t hook my computer to the internet for fear of spyware, adware and viruses.
  2. Browsing technology with exemplary adherence to web standards. Focus on technologies that support users, rather than support companies trying to annoy users.
  3. Add value. While most desktop versions of linux are admittedly a little bit rough around the edges, they are improving quickly, and come bundled with many options that are extra cost items in the Windows world. This includes word processing, network apps, audio and video, and web servers.
  4. Performance. Deliver the raw performance of the box to the user. My experience with XP and its predecessors is that they simply don’t. Applications require more memory and more processing power to reach acceptable performance levels than their open source conterparts.
  5. Simplify. Developing for the Microsoft platform (and I’ve done it off and on since the days of 3.1) has increasingly become like decoding Chinese with only a single small pocket dictionary. It’s all about the API du jour, some of which are obsoleted by the time your product hits the market.

    6. Well, that’s enough of a rant for the morning. Time to shower and go work to pay the bills.

Platitudes Reach High Altitudes

I’ve been following the PDC blogging a bit this morning, and I can’t help but think that there is very little meat that is actually being blogged about. Here’s a great for instance:

Light up on Windows Vista: The “Top 10” List

What are these top 10?

  1. Follow the Windows Vista style guidelines
  2. Enrich the user experience
  3. Enable users to visualize, organize and search
  4. Run securely
  5. Design for reliability and manageability
  6. Establish a customer feedback loop
  7. Build for connected systems
  8. Bring data to the user with RSS
  9. Make document data accessible
  10. Build for mobility

Wow. I could condense that list into simply….

  1. Do a good job on developing your products

This list strikes me as so obvious as to be useless. I’m not sure how platitudes enhance the quality of your product development.

Addendum: Okay, okay, I’m acting like someone pissed in my cornflakes. I’ll at least provide a link to the official Microsoft page which provides a bit more detail. In fact, it appears that each of the ten bullet items is supported by a good half dozen new APIs or technologies. I have a different rant for that topic, but I’ll spare you all.

I won’t be buying an Xbox 360

It’s just not that I bought an original Xbox that died a month out of warranty (so Microsoft decided I needed to send them $129 to fix it), scratched every disk that ever went in it, and generally was a pain in the ass. But Microsoft seems to have not learned something important about Xboxes: people like them because they are hackable. Never willing to actually take a hint from consumers about what they want, Microsoft has decided that it’s worthwhile to keep people from using their machines as they see fit.

Console manufacturers out there listening? If you make a machine that is hackable, I’ll buy one, just on the principle of the thing. I’ll buy games for it. Heck, I’ll write software for the thing. Stop treating your customers like crap.

More on Scoble…

I must admit, I find Robert Scoble to be a fascinating blogger. I think it is because I see him just as a person who is in most respects intelligent and thoughtful, but whose thought processes are significantly hindered by a desire to be good at his job, and his job is to promote Microsoft and make it look fashionable to the world. He was kind enough to reply to my teasing of Microsoft, and (predictably) still trying to promote optimism about Microsoft.

He begins:

Yeah, we still have tons of problems to work through (yes, Mini Microsoft, I am reading you) and yes, we’re a big company with our politics, our slow-moving groupthink, our bureacracies and fiefdoms. Yes, we have given everyone lots of reasons to throw insults our way. Treated our customers and partners horribly. Yes, it’s been a while since we’ve shipped something significant. Yes, we have missed out on several new trends like the iPod and search. Yes, Steve Jobs’ accusation that we’re just copying his company has looked pretty true.

Yes Robert. And yet, you assert that next week, we will all be kissing and making up? Don’t you think that’s the teensiest bit presumptuous? It’s like saying to your spouse “Yeah, I cheated on you. I slept around, spent your money, got drunk and generally made an ass out of myself, but just wait until Monday. Monday, you’ll love me again!”

Yeah.

I’ll make my bold prediction for next week: nothing that Microsoft will announce will be of even the remotest interest to me. I make this prediction confidently because Microsoft has shown a remarkable constancy in their actions which directly oppose the interest of both software developers and consumers.

For instance, computer security on Windows has been a genuine nightmare. Don’t think so? Then why has an entire industry been created to generate software whose sole purpose is to keep my machine from getting infected from the virus or spyware du jour? Why do some people consider throwing away their PC rather than try to delouse it?

Of how about IE? The browser that has a broken implementation of the box model, which it steadfastly refuses to fix, causing web designers the world over, countless hours of trying to exploit other bugs in the implementation so that they can make a webpage behave the way they wish?

Or how about it’s shameless war against consumers in promoting technologies like HDCP, which obsoletes people’s old monitors, and interjects cryptographic negotiation in every interaction between a computer and the screen to which it is attached?

I could go on: the predatory business practices, Windows Me (shudder), or the pollution of the Internet with faulty DNS implementations. To be enthusiastic about Microsoft requires the excusing of dozens of evils, be they political, economic or technical. I doubt that some video on Channel 9 is going to change that.

Addendum: One more prediction: whatever Microsoft is announcing, it won’t be anything which is ready to ship to consumers. They probably won’t even have a release date planned (although given the Longhorn, errr… Vista fiasco, it’s not clear we’d believe any date they tossed out either). One positive thing about Apple: when they announce a product, typically it’s ready to be purchased. You can decide right then whether you want the product, and you can act on it immediately. Google has found this basic strategy to be useful as well. Bam, Google Mail. Bam, Google Maps. Bam, Google Talk. Microsoft begins talking about things months if not years before anything is ready to ship, and therefore, they diffuse any possible spin that anyone could have to be spread out over the same time period.

I’ll tune back into Channel 9 next week, and see how I did in my predictions.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Scoble…

Robert Scobe writes:

Of course, I should be thanking Steve Gillmor. He has lowered expectations of Microsoft so low that our customers have even stopped making really creative guesses of what we’re going to show next week at the PDC.

Robert, has it ever occurred to you that nobody is making really creative guesses because Microsoft hasn’t shown themselves to make creative products?

Today everyone is talking about the Rockr and the Nano. Next week, Microsoft will introduce something or other, and people will be talking about…

The Rockr and the Nano, most likely.

On the Free Software Ecosystem

Apparently some people concerned that recent donations to the Drupal project are being used to buy computers from Dell, an operation which has done relatively little to support open software. One of the Drupal-ers responded with a pretty coherent explanation of why they went with Dell, and the basic reason is simple:

Dell makes decent servers at a lower price than vendors like HP, Sun and IBM.

To me, it seems like they are pretty good stewards of the generous money donated to them: they made a good faith effort to buy the greatest capacity with the best reliability that they could afford. Computing power is a commodity item, and Dell would seem to be awfully hard to beat in that space. It would be a poor use of donations indeed to buy less capacity and less reliability, wouldn’t it?