January 2003 Archives
In my quest for the divorce of content and presentation comes the Serendipitous Web from Matthew Thomas. In a world where people don't mind sending you emails without titles, filing documents with helpful names such as "untitled.doc" and where there are still more than 50,000 pages titled "Welcome to GoLive" on the web (Adobe fans will appreciate), the semantic web is "a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities".
Now before Tristan and Karl start blogging about my supposed despair, I am still happily riding my way to web standards. But this requires some acid test to find the right trade-off between the careless tag-soup and a perfect technofascism.
When I wrote this two years ago, I was already struggling with the gap that exists between a technological ideal and the reality. It's not an instant and easy ride, and some gap will always be there. Especially if standards set the bar too high.
The web standards masters have done a brilliant job to convince us that XHTML2 is not harmful afterall, and they are right. Except that at this stage, all of them are able to code their pages manually. The people I deal with couldn't be careless about XHTML. They do not interface with technology. They demand simple interfaces. And until we have user friendly interfaces that screen the user from the underlying technologies in web standards, we will see and eat even more tag soup everyday.
Last week we learned about SBC Communications claiming they own a patent they want to enforce on sites that sport a fixed navigation. I wrote that it would promise to either make a big fuzz, or a ridicule flop. It may soon be both.
Everyone can worry about the efficiency of the US patent authority:
In practice, the system is in trouble -- and so is innovation in America.
The patent examiners are overworked and under-knowledgable. They grant ridiculous patents, and take a polluter's stance: Someone downstream will clean up the mess.
writes Dan Gillmor who recalls us that SBC was itself the victim of the (in)famous BT claim on hyperlinks. He also has evidence of prior art. So has The Register from where I picked this.
Back in the time where I had to frequent IP specialists I learned that for a patent to be valid once had to demonstrate a real innovation that not only was a première but also couldn't be infered from existent knowledge by others. E.g. in the case of SBC and with respect to European rules, their claim would be void on any system based on the fact that persistent navigation mechanisms existed way before the creation of web browsers.
If you want more evidence that there is something wrong going on in the IP world, take a look on the more worrying cases of genes patents. Besides the question of the patentability of the human genome (which is a sequence of raw, natural data, pretty much equivalent to common words which are not patentable), this article reveals another wrongdoing of the patent office:
The patent office's requirement that an inventor show that the new discovery has a real use went unenforced.
So, for years, ''People were just filing patent applications as fast as the printer would spit out paper.''
The SBC case sounds funny (except for those who have been hit), now move that to the biotech world. Are we going to see companies going after us claiming that they own a patent on our genes?
I've just received an email that looked like spam asking me to check the just relaunched silicon.com site. It goes like this:
yada yada yadada award winning top quality news yadada If you have accepted a cookie you're cooked yada yada we've trashed the old crap and reinvented the wheel with a proprietary platform yada we've discovered that tab navigation can improve your browsing [Note to self: warn SBC about that] yada dayada...
The email does not even sport the site URL in a clickable way. It provides an email contact for feedback though.
OK, I gave it a look. In terms of design, it doesn't ring a bell, actually it looks undistinguishly like any news portal. They are still on the blue + flashy green combination that marked a generation of 30-something instant millionaires. But, hang on, don't you recognize this sarcastic tone of the headlines? That's right, directly copied from El Reg :). The liberty of tone seems to end at the home page though, so you may prefer to stick to the original.
[Update] A very authorized source in this matter tells me that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm no one to contest that. I'm also a big fan of news sites, so vive online journalism!
Now you can get instant spam via Windows Messenger, according to El Reg.
Just when you thought that the light at the end of the tunnel was a way out of email spams, it's actually the front light of the spammers' train coming at light speed to bombard you with crap on anything you can connect to the net.
On n'arrête pas le progrès.
[update] and if you believe they will reduce pace, check this trick (from More Like This). Really scary, I've actually seen this before.
AOL Time Warner posts record $99bn loss.
What follows is pure speculation. It's probably worse than Opera on Mac. It may even hurt my good relationships with a few former Netscape colleagues. What if Apple had weighted the risk of AOL going tits up and throwing Netscape with the water bath before making a move towards KHTML? Again, it might be bullshit, although I can't believe that Steve Jobs did not at least think about this business risk before making a decision.
Hold on, isn't Mozilla an open-source project that has a life outside AOL? Yes, sure. But read what Dave Hyatt has to say about AOL:
[...] AOL would not support Chimera. It could only have ever been a "spare time" project, and AOL was increasingly drawing me away from Mozilla and into lame AOL initiatives that I had no interest in.
When your own company won't even support your browser, that isn't much fun. [source]
I was at Netscape when Mark Andreesen announced us that the browser would go open-source (under the name of our mascot, Mozilla). I thought that this was a sound decision (the browser war was raging, we were loosing money, many were thinking we had no chance confronting Microsoft). Many years later it's easy to say that this was what saved Netscape from being obliterated by IE, it wasn't obvious at the time.
I might be completely wrong, but I still have the feeling that Mozilla is in jeopardy, should AOL vaporize Netscape and throw key Mozilla volunteers out of payroll. Actually, I sincerely hope that I'm wrong. I've just seen too many companies going bankrupt in a blip and I work in IT, nothing to help being overtly optimistic those days.
Dave Winer asks this:
A question for CSS design gurus. What's the best you can do with a table that has three columns like the one on Weblogs.Com. Let's see an example. I'd like the page to look good and load fast. Postscript: No one seems to understand -- I want to do weblogs.com without a table. Column 1 is the number, column 2 is the name of the weblog. Column 3 is the time it last updated. Look at the page.
Just followed by this:
People say "But it's a table, that's what tables are for." I understand and usually agree -- but in this case -- the table is so long that some other way of displaying it might be much more usable. It's something of a scaling issue, not a religious or philosophical one.
Which is necessary, as I'm amongst those people who are told by the semantic masters that Thou shall use tables for holding tabular data and not for sinful presentational witchcraft.
As a modest padawan learning his way into CSS and the semantic web, I watch the CSS masters nail this more easily than cutting butter with a laser saber. There is Gary Taylor, Dave Polaschek, Simon Willison, and Douglas Bowman which seemed to have won the contest.
So is the padawan watching the masters' exploits (in sheer fascination) but remaining suspiscious that some sort of semantic sin has been committed in the altar of rendering speed. Waitaminit' isn't an ordered list semantically acceptable for this specific situation? Well, since nowadays an acronym is a sort of abbreviation, it's no big deal, is it?
So, Jason was really trying to destroy his visitors' sight. I still belong to the 5-10% of folks for who this won't work anyway.
The rumor starts here and is quickly cloned by Rael. Then the dream makes waves at O'Reilly!
If this is true, then that would be the biggest stone ever thrown by Apple into Microsoft's garden. Yummie!
The RIAA website has been hacked again. I guessed right last Friday :). And it's still looking unavailable to me, so I shouldn't bother to link to a dead site, should I?
Apparently they come in waves. The blogosphere is waiting for no less than two new blog systems. There is Textpattern from Dean Allen. And there is Postmaster by Dan Benjamin.
Textpattern promises to be simple, easy to install and packed with lots of text editing goodies to ease your writer's life. Postmaster compares itself to, simply, the three best known blogware in an intriguing road map: it will first run as a hosted service (à la Blogger), then as a desktop application (à la Radio) and eventually as a complete server software (à la Movable Type). With such parenthood, it better be good :).
Still looking forward to a weblog editor done in Flash though.
While world + dog is speaking about a news safari, Mark Pilgrim is testing the next big thing in blogging: the blog entry generator.
Jason Kottke plays with stereographic photography. Impressive bibliography provided for your own amusement, and a personal shot for your eyes pleasure. However, after looking at his sample, I can't decide if the purpose of this is to give you a big headache, badly wrist your eyes or if I belong to the 5-10% of folks for whom this won't work.
Dave Hyatt (lead developer of Safari, former lead developer of Chimera) explores the idea of adding a news aggregator capability to the web browser, e.g. mixing NetNewsWire with Safari.
On the pro side we have:
- integrated browsing experience: no switching context between applications. Jason Kottke illustrates this.
- intelligent bookmarks: clicking on a RSS link would bookmark the feed and the bookmark would display the number of new articles
- the feed's HTML is rendered in the web browser (note that nothing prevent a news reader to have equally good HTML rendering)
- bring news feeds into mainstream: regular users would subscribe to news feeds if they were as easy to use as bookmarks (vs. the geeky/news whore community who don't mind downloading a separate application and do lots of URL copy/paste)
On the con side we have:
- bloated web browser
- news
readersaggregators have more features than "just the news": e.g. NetNewsWire allows me to edit my blog, something I don't want to see in the browser (except for the ultimate Flash interface) - no browser independence: like for bookmarks, you're stuck if/when you need (or prefer) to use a different browser to read the news
I've seen other arguments (look at the long comments list on Dave Hyatt's blog), but they can be interpreted in various ways:
- It's better to parse news with a separate application, click on the interesting ones and stack them using tabs (obviously in a Mozilla-based browser as Safari doesn't do tab browsing). I don't see what would prevent Safari (or another browser) to provide an equivalent, or better experience.
- It would slow down innovation. There are two sides on this argument: Apple (or any similar editor of a web browser) would never be as responsive as an ISV and it would kill the small ISVs producing news aggregators. I think both sides nullify the argument. Apple would have to provide the best experience to its mainstream users, while ISVs would continue to innovate and provide independence and features not found in browsers (such as blog editing). As for the parasitic approach, it appears that it's normal life on the software world, and the simple news aggregators are free anyway.
- Better see recognition of RSS (sent to a handler application) than integration within the browser. Again, I don't see why one prevents the other (we should have both, like for viewing a page's code).
With other nice ideas, such as the ability to "dress up" the aggregated news feed with your own CSS, Dave Hyatt shows he has given this approach more than a simple thought. I think that Apple has the capability to do it and further improve the user experience. Actually I don't see any reason why they should not give it a try. At the same time, I wish ISVs such as Ranchero continue to innovate, may be by focusing on the "power bloggers".
[Update] in my initial post, I left one mention of "news reader" among three of "news aggregator", which seems to generate confusion regarding the usenet news readers. It's gone. Usenet/news are of course a different thing altogether and have been happily running since the quaternaire age of the Internet on their own protocol (NNTP). Still, I bet that the more news aggregators will have HTML rendering capabilities or be fully integrated into web browsers, the more people will refer to them as news readers. Aggregators, feeds, usenet, RDF, NNTP are geek terms that regular users don't want and don't have to learn.
NetNewsWire from ranchero software is a little addictive software sweetie that news whores and blog hunters can't live without. It's simple, sleek and easy. It stands by its signature: "More news, less junk. Faster".
There is a Pro version coming (that you can test in beta, which stability is good enough for me). This version adds a weblog editor with which you can manage your weblog online and offline. Bloggers using Movable Type, Radio and Blogger will be happy to discover that the latest version (1.0b13) now allows them to set categories, which was the only reason why I was not using it to edit my blog before.
Kuddos to Brent Simmons for this web jewel.
Wintel users who are not yet ready to discover that there is a life outside Microsoft may check Syndirella for an equivalent news reader.
The second after I saw Flash 6 for the first time, I thought it was going to become a GUI for applications, before the Macromedia rep. started to talk about RIA. Two seconds after that, I thought about exactly this.
I've become highly frustrated by the poorness of text editing features that you find in today's CMS, from the free blog to the zillion bucks system. When they have something, it's always limited to Windows if not just MSIE on Windows.
So am I adding my voice to many others: a rich text editor in Flash is what we, content workers, need. And it's so insanely matching our needs with the possibility to get a cool UI that works with our computers of choice (or anything that runs Flash), that this is an obvious killer application.
As for the price, anything that handles simple XHTML with the mere B (strong), I (em), links and image must be free. I'm ready to pay for something that nicely handles my structural XML tags described in my schema or DTD. Oh, and I want drag-n-drop and offline editing with that :).
NathanShor.com has a bold signature: Powered by Creativity. Compared to the original, it's creativity as in "steal with pride". (from Michael)
Robin Gross, former Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, is launching a new watchdog group called IP Justice. Gross is stressing that IP laws are an international issue and that it might be helpful to think out of the box and seek help abroad before it's too late. In a CNET interview, Gross pointed at good old Europe:
[...] there are a lot of countries that are trying to put forth some resistance to this maximalist IP agenda that Hollywood is imposing on the rest of the world. I think there are groups in Germany and France that are working hard to stop similar laws that are being pushed there, but it's too early in the game to see what's effective and what's not.
Those days, I find it refreshing to find people in Almighty Hyperpuissance who are able to bring that there are other countries out there, with their own laws. Likewise, I wish that citizens in those countries would watch their governments and in particular some bigger institution, to protect them against some local pigopolists. Sorry, I can't get to the RIAA site, it seems to be down. Or under attack, again?
Mr Rumsfeld last ranting about old Europe has generated unanimous protestations across french media which flagged his speech (and the guy for some) as ignorant, arrogant, aggressive, plain stupid -- and I shall stop here before this blog gets PG rated. A significant number of analysts came to the same conclusion: Rumsfeld did a very good job in fueling an anti-American feeling in France (and probably in Germany too). One excerpt from Pierre-Luc Séguillon (LCI):
And for the first time, a US government exec clearly displays a vision where Europe is assimilated to the NATO, seen as a federation of vassals of the American suzerain.
It did not take long for the US government porte-parole to calm things down, and remind world plus dog that France is -- and has always been -- a US ally. And to unveil yet another change in discourse, since now Bush and beloved Blair are willing to give more time to the UN inspectors in Iraq. Last week Bush congratulated himself to lead a democracy where people can freely protest, but did not say that he had to listen anyway. He finally might be.
I used to think the French anti-Americanism was a cliché. Now you can pretty much feel it. Hopefully, the vast majority of those who express concerns about the US are able to distinguish the people from its current government. By the way, what's up with North Korea, Enron, petrol, the death penalty and the vice-president?
The Traité de l'Elysée is 40 years old today. It marked a cornerstone in the relationship between France and Germany, definitively burrying the hache de guerre between the arch-rivals after three bloody wars (including two wordlwide ones). The 900 representatives of both the German and the French parliaments gathered together at Versailles (the very same place where the Traité de Versailles crushed Germany and set the path to the second world war twenty years later). The two countries' governments also sat together for a joint session.
This couple seems to piss off the US governement big time. The va-t-en-guerre Donald Rumsfeld said today that the Germany-France axe is the "old Europe". His point was that European members of the NATO where not going the French or German way, but the American way against Irak.
A few months ago, after the German elections, the just re-elected Chancelor Gerhard Schröder went straight to London to see his friend Tony Blair -- who supported him during his campaign -- and hence sent a clear message of coldness to the just re-elected President Jacques Chirac who supported his opponent. It is worth noting that just a few months later, now that Tony Blair is more pro-Bush than any American could ever be and that the majority of European citizens are against a war in Irak, the Schröder-Chirac relationship has never been better.
France has coined a word to describe the USA: hyperpuissance. Hopefully France is not the only country in the world wondering how far the US can go alone and ignore the U.N. France has a veto right in the U.N. security council -- there are millions of people, including Mr Rumsfeld, wondering how it will use it. May be that is the point of Mr Rumsfeld's ranting, not just a blatant ignorance of Europe's history.
Usually when American politicians rant about Europe, it means Europe is going the right way.
Lawrence Lessig continues to dig into explanations of why he lost the Eldred case. The American Open Technology Consortium has one:
"The Commons" and "the public domain" might be legitimate concepts with deep and relevant histories, but they're too arcane to most of us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing kinda rubs him the wrong way. Communist and Commonist are just a little too close for comfort. Too social. Not private enough.
Or as Lessig sums it up (emphasis is mine):
On such a simple scale, it was clear how the majority of the Court would vote. Not because they are conservative, but because they are Americans. We have a (generally sensible) pro-property bias in this culture that makes it extremely hard for people to think critically about the most complicated form of property out there -- what most call "intellectual property." To question property of any form makes you a communist.
When I wrote about Creative Commons I pointed to this idea that we miss the equivalent of environmentalism for encompassing the concepts of commons and public domain. For strictly ethymologic concerns I had one word in mind... communism. Too bad the word has such a heavy history, we need to be more creative.
If you think this means Content Management System, then you'd better check this: Combat Management Systems powered by Windows for Warships. The Register is running a follow-up story indicating that the UK Defense Secretary is not necessarily found of this U.S. cocktail. Any fear of BSoD while at sea?
"Captain, how do we cast the anchor?
-- Press ctrl-alt-del.
How do we weigh it then?
-- Reboot her."
Now this promises to either make a big fuzz, or a ridicule flop. Excerpt from the Museum Tour web site:
We received a 40 page package from SBC Intellectual Property today informing us that our web site which has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site but does not lose the left side navigation links was in violation of their Structured Document Browser Patent.
Can I transfer the claim to Ben and Mena if I get a letter?
On January 16th, the Supreme Court of the U.S.A rejected a challenge of the Sonny Bonno Act, which now allows the US Congress to extend copyrights (by 20 years to begin with), and as much as it wishes, according to prof. Lessig. The New York Times runs an editorial titled "The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity" (through Boing Boing so you don't have to register).
Who did bring this in the first place? A mouse called Mickey, who was supposed to enter the public domain in 2004, to the eternal grief of Disney. Disney apparently lobbied the US Congress to extend the copyright period significantly, hence diminishing or nullifying the effects of the limited period before a work enters the public domain for reuse (see my post on Creative Commons and the definition of property, which encompasses both private property and the commons.)
Mickey Mouse responded to this ruling.
Last time I checked, a mouse was still considered as a nuisible rodent in Europe. It looks like it's the same in the US. Let's hope the EU doesn't import the pest back.
So you loved this book so much that you decide to share it with your friend Bob (or Jan, or Cunégonde, mind you). Along with that CD of Domenico Scarlatti (because you love baroque music and want to convince your friends that clavicord music can sound much better than the robotic interpretations of Bach they're used to). And everybody's happy with that (don't forget to return the book and the CD please). It's legal, it's part of the fair use of an artwork you paid for. Actually it's so natural that you don't even think about the legal aspects or what fair use is about. And the artists who produced those works (may be to the exception of Scarlatti) aren't going to object that you're doing anything wrong.
Now take a step forward into the future -- err, sorry, into today. Take iCommune, a Mac, iTunes and an internet connection. With this combination (or some equivalent on the wintel world), you can share your legally bought music with your friends anywhere you both happen to be connected (plus they don't forget to return the CD). Think you're not doing anything wrong? I bet you are, since what you're doing is no different than lending legally acquired artwork in fair use. Only the media changed. Of course you could be broadcasting the music to multiple listeners, but that's as wrong as photocopying a book or making copies of a CD. The media is not the problem, unfair use is.
The pigopolists are scared to death about the present situation, and their only solution to preserve their current business model -- instead of evolving or simply demonstrating that they have an added value in the current system -- is to do whatever they can to prevent you to lend anything, in any form, any further.
For some reasons Apple is also bothered about iCommune. According to Todd Dominey, it might just be because Apple is preparing a similar feature for iTunes 4. I prefer to wait and see.
By the way, it reminds me of a startup that had a very simple and innovative business model: linking directly artists with their audience. This was Music Boulevard. Now, it's a 404 page on Amazon, they're not even able to route a domain name properly.
On the previous post, I ranted that the web is not forgiving about one's past. I had to return to the dentist today to finish the work started last week. Today's dental techniques make heavy use of photopolymers, the very same materials I worked with during seven years (except that we would not stuff them into people's mouth at that time). For the long story, check the cv.
I'm glad I turned to the web, but I liked everything (or close) of what I did before.
While doing a bit of ego surfing -- actually trying to find why AllTheWeb hasn't indexed my site after a month when Google did it within 24h -- I stumbled on this post I did in 1996. Scarry, isn't it?
Slashdot is running a story on the crappy marketing techniques that Real Networks is using to fool you into not opting out from mailing lists. I sometimes wonder how long it takes for people to realize things like that, since Real has been accumulating these tricks for years. Specifically:
- preventing linking to the free player download page: you must go through the home page so they can sell ads on it
- tricking you with "Free download" messages but carefully hiding the free player in favor of the pay-for one. Burry the free player behind at least two more pages, on which the link to the free player is always replaced by a link to the pay-for version, the free one being reduced and moved elsewhere than where the mouse stands, preferably out of sight
- ask for email addresses twice, once before download, once when configuring the client, just in case the user has changed in between (note to self: webmaster@real.com doesn't work anymore, I guess s/he had enough having Real spamming this address). Use system tricks to find out the user's real email address on the computer
- carefully hide the important opt-out check boxes within a combo box with scroll bars. Average users (read the vast majority of them) will notice only the first four choices that are not checked by default and be happy to see that Real is an "opt-in" shop while it's precisely the contrary if you scroll below the first visible choices to discover plenty of checked crap that you have to opt-out from
Five years ago, I said to a former Netscape colleague who was being interviewed for a marketing position at Real that they had the worst marketing techniques on the Internet. I think they've just improved on that over the years.
Seen at Kottke.org, this cute opinionated baby.
Every so often, someone tells me I'm a geek, something I refute as firmly as me being a webmaster. I'm not a geek, otherwise I would know what this is about.
The web standards microcosm is shaking, after Mark Pilgrim's coup de gueule à propos XHTML 2.0. According to Zeldman's scale, it's a small web-quake. Tantek Çelik asks why XHTML? and wishes the W3C would spend more time in cleaning after itself in HTML4 and XHTML1. He made the point to the W3C html public list, and the still growing thread that resulted, along with new comments from Eric Meyer, and past comments by David Glazman, show that there are strong divergence of opinions about the future of HTML.
Before you rank this as geek fights or much ado about nothing, consider this: in your digital life, semantic markup is eventually going to be around all your content. This is comparable as a standard body defining the format of Word/PPT/Excel documents as the standard office file format and all office suites out there have to use it and align their features on it. On an average year, I produce only a dozen documents using an office suite, but about 10,000 documents formatted to some sort of Internet standard (I include email in that) pass through my email clients, web browsers and web authoring tools. The standard format has to be darn good!
However, the level of this debate is rather depressing, with irreconcilable views such as deprecation vs. no forward compatibility, or tech purists despising brainless content authors (spot the geeks in the W3C list). I hope it gets clarified before a new standard is cast in stone. Even more depressing is seing Mark going back to HTML4.01!
I knew that moving from HTML4 to XHTML1 would not be a long fleuve tranquille. Mainly because for the first time in my little web experience, the new standards were not backward compatible with the "old" HTML, and I had to rediscover things pretty much like a decade ago.
Well, the journey sounds even more interesting now with the next station, and Mark Pilgrim has a colorful description of the level of forward compatibility one may expect from standards:
Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.
I’m migrating to HTML 4.
Ahem, there will surely be followups to his post in blogspace...
As I suggested in my review of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld SFO, Apple is clearly throwing stones into Microsoft's garden. This is brilliantly nailed down by Robert Cringely.
Now, er when all the announced goodies will be available and not in beta versions, one can get to do a whole bunch of stuff on a computer without a single Microsoft software. It's time to do some math, but considering the price of MS Office alone, I bet there are now more viable scenarios where the TCO of a Windows PC is significantly higher than of the Mac.
Out from the dentist. Pain. Back to work. Hopefully I'm not using my teeth too much at work those days :).
The American DMCA is once against used as an anti-competitive tool, largely outside its original goal of limiting Internet piracy. Cnet News is running a story where Lexmark invokes DMCA in toner suit against Static Control, a chip maker that reversed engineered the chips and protocols that Lexmark embeds into its cartridge as a barrier to prevent third parties to produce refill cartridges at lower prices. Without DMCA, they would have little chance to win this case, as reverse engineering done to favor interoperability is considered as fair use and a legal practice.
There are other interesting examples showing the versatility of the DMCA. Last month, Dow Chemical used DMCA to take down a parody site. And in November 2002, seven US retailers used DMCA to prevent Fat Wallet to operate its online price comparison service (seen on The Register which has a follow-up).
While the European Union is blindly rolling-out its own DMCA into the EU Copyright Directive, it's also working outpassed a directive that would outlaws the aforementioned printer manufacturers anti-competitive practices, and force them to stop shipping printers that have more security controls against third parties' cartridge than airports have against pirates.
About six month ago I discovered an exciting idea by James Boyle exposed by the CBI. What caught my eyes was that we miss a common language to describe the over-propertization and the frontiers of property. Boyle looks back at the environmental movement of the 1940’s and 50’s and points out that the invention of the term environmentalism was able to tie people together and help them move further on ecology matters (the CBI article incorrectly mentions "environment" which appeared in French in 1300.)
Like environmentalism led to ecology movements, we miss the semantic tools to build an equivalent movement that would work on subjects such as anti-monopoly, public domain, private property vs. commons. According to Boyle, the dimensions of property (as private property and the commons) are (cost vs. no cost) x (control vs. free) x (individual rights vs. collective rights).
James Boyle is a co-founder of Creative Commons, which promises to do to creative works as much wonder as did the GNU GPL to software. A definitive must see to whoever is conscious about Intellectual Property matters.
As usual when Steve Jobs is delivering a keynote outside Paris, I'm watching the webcast live (redif). Since the move to MPEG4 and with the PowerBook hooked on the TV and HiFi sets plus cable modem, it's almost like being somewhere in the back seats, except my couch is much more confortable :). It's so cool that I wonder why I need the computer to do that, I guess it's just a matter of time before home video systems will be able to catch a video stream from a URL.
Here are the key things I skimmed out of this MacWorld keynote, for lust and bitching.
Apple is integrating all its iApps together, every kind of mix you can do with music, photos and videos, you can burn on CD and DVD with what looks like the first personal multimedia suite. Jobs compared the integration of multimedia with iLife to be what Microsoft did with Office in business automation. I hope they'll do it better. I must say the iDVD demo was appealing and looked so easy that it gave me envy to explore a new field. The separate apps where previously free to download, the iFile bundle is now sold for $49 (and will be included with all new Macs). It's much better value for money than the .Mac services.
If you are fed up with PowerPoint to create your presentations, here is Keynote, the application tailored for Steve Jobs' keynotes.
In what looks like another move into reducing reliance on Microsoft and insisting on its innovation capabilities, Apple introduces its own web browser. At first glance it's small, fast, good looking and has some interesting new features. It misses tabbed navigation (a highly addictive feature of Gecko browsers that made me ditch IE in favor of Chimera). It's a beta and the web standards knights army is already putting it through acid tests on the latest W3C standards. It's based on open source for its rendering engine, surprisingly not on Mozilla but on KHTML (like Konqueror). Less than two hours after its release, the growing list of bugs and shortcomings published around shows it's not ready for prime time yet. But it's a beta, and the prominent bug report button makes reporting bugs a snap. If Apple listens to the beta testers and fixes all the standards related bugs it can be a nice browser, otherwise it will become a designer's nightmare as you can bet it will be the standard browser on all Macs.
Normal Apple whores (those who are not brand whores) were all waiting for news about higher processor speeds or even a new processor to catch up with the dark side speed lust. Now people, watch Steve Jobs' reality distortion field in action: your desktop machine is so out, the future lies in notebooks. Apple has been making the best notebooks in the universe for years (I'm not making that up, I guess Steve sees through the entire universe when he activates his field) and voilà, two brand new PowerBooks that promise to shield competition for another round. They sport (sometimes as an option) about anything you can dream about in terms of connectivity including Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, the latest WiFi 54 dubbed as AirPort Extreme and FireWire 2 (800 Mbps). I expected USB2 but I guess it's been sacrificed on the altar of FireWire 2 and that it won't be missed that much anyway or be included later. The difference is in the size, both extremes with the biggest portable screen ever released (17") and the smallest G4 portable (12"). The automatic backlight on the keyboard is great. I have been working on the 15" model for about two years and it's still beating most PC notebooks sold today, but the 17" is clearly ahead!
In a somehow funny flashback into crazy new economy (where people predicted we would all be wearing "intelligent" clothes), here is a jacket designed for the iPod. Batteries, er sorry, iPod not included :).
I spotted a little pearl hidden in the marketing video of the 17' PowerBook in this sentence from Johnathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) highlighting Apple's philosophy: The simplicity of the solution completely belies the complexity of the problem it's actually solving.
Warning: this is true, and abuse of amazing brand values can turn you into a brand whore.
This keynote adds another milestone into the consumer part of Apple's current market targets. For new high-end machines, I bet traditional professional users will have to wait until Quark finally releases XPress for OS X (which will probably be demanding huge processor resources) or, at worst, the next WWDC in May where Apple can't face its developers without real good news on the GHz war.
This is a stone in the Pigopolists garden, a norvegian court has ruled that its legal to use DeCSS code to watch legally obtained DVD films, at least in Norway.
Since common sense has no longer droit de cité in the Pigopolists' world, something as basic and simple as fair use -- which is perfectly legal today -- is going to be illegal tomorrow, unless something (like a court) or someone (like you) prevent that to happen.
Today you can buy a CD (usually for a rather expensive price) and enjoy it on your hifi set, on your computer, on your MP3 player or whatever device of your wish. You pay the artist (a little) and intermediaries (a lot) for the right to listen to an oeuvre in fair use. Same for other oeuvres in other forms, e.g. it is perfectly legal to share a book that you own with other people. At least today.
Tomorrow, if Pigopolists win, all of this will be illegal, or impossible. Some CDs sold today already sport weird hacks that prevent them to work with computers CD players. The law in the USA (DMCA) and in Europe (European Commission's Copyright Directive) is making this trouble-free for the industry, i.e. you -- the consumer -- will not be able to complain or even get a refund because the CD you bought does not play where the editor does not want you to listen to it, and you'll get into jail if you try to get around to recover your past fair use rights. And if you think I'm a bit paranoid about books, it's time to watch what's going on with ebooks.
Paris is white. It's snowing big time since a few hours and it sticks (5-10 cm). Folks returning from the winter holidays can now enjoy the snow in a probably gigantic traffic jam.
France's south-west beaches are black. The Prestige oil spill has come to us and is coloring our land with the color of global liberalism. Our president calls responsibles with colorfull names such as "rascal businessmen" and "vandals of the sea". I wonder how long will politicians keep talking without acting. Oh, pardon me, they're acting? Yes, they've just reduced the budget of the coastal guards, the very same people who watch after those vandals...
Do you find that your IT involvement cuts you off from people? Has it affected you in any way?No, not really. I have noticed that until the Internet became popular in the mid-90s it was social death to admit to any interest in computers, and it was certainly not acceptable to talk about them at parties. That's changed now. It's still considered "geeky" but it's not the unforgivable social crime that it once was. You still have to pretend not to know much about computers, but these days it's so you don't waste the entire party solving someone's computer problems for them.
Excerpt from Life in the trenches: a sysadmin speaks
:)
or... Happy New Year! (as they say out there.)
