Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

This just in from my friend Arthur, one of the energetic crew that keeps Google amazing us all, a bit of nerd solace for turning 40:

“Happy birthday, and remember than next year, you’ll be in your prime again — 41!”

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Back on June 20, this blog entry about the impact of Chinese cars that might be imported to the U.S. 10 or 20 years from now stirred up 25 comments.  Today’s New York Times Magazine carries an article on the same topic.

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From The Wright Brothers Legacy, a 40th(!) birthday gift from my friend Gary, underneath a photo of Orville Wright and a big St. Bernard:

“Orville was extremely fond of Scipio, the puppy that he found in the baggage room of the Dayton railroad station in 1917.  Scipio died in 1928 but when Orville died in 1948, he still carried a picture of Scipio in his wallet.”

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AtStake’s firing of Dan Geer for his authorship of a report that Microsoft’s worldwide monopoly on desktop software makes it easier for worms to flourish (aside: was the report for Duh magazine?) serves as a useful reminder that “free speech” is a right only for publications that don’t depend on support from advertisers and for individuals who don’t depend on their employers’ paychecks.

Complaining about Microsoft is about as useful as complaining about an atmosphere that is 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen.  You might not like it but that’s what you get on Earth.  You could escape the ratio and Microsoft’s monopoly by moving to Mars but the trip would be more expensive than the license fee for Windows 2005 or whatever.  A company focussed on medium-term profits would probably not want its workers wasting time complaining about something that isn’t going to change.  (My own lame attempt was to encourage the federal government, which created the monopoly to begin with and sustains it as Microsoft’s largest customer, to switch to open source software.)

So in solidarity with Mr. Geer, let’s fill the comments section with Microsoft hatred.  I’ll start off with the things that I hate about Microsoft, some big and some small…

1) I hate the fact that Windows doesn’t support JPEG2000 files with 16 bits of luminance information per color (instead of the standard 8-bits-per-color old-style .jpg files that always have washed out highlights and no shadow detail).  Some of the fancier digital cameras put out “RAW” files with 10 or 12 bits of scale but they can’t be processed or viewed except with proprietary software that nobody has.  Because Windows doesn’t support this format directly in MSIE and the file explorer, none of the digital camera companies bothers to make cameras that output the new standard.

2) I hate the fact that Microsoft copied Ninetendo and Playstation with Xbox.  For a company with infinite money to sit and say “Here are all these teenagers getting fat sitting on the sofa working their thumbs with Playstation, let’s make an exact copy of the device” is an outrageous parody of what the electronics industry is supposed to be about.  Where are the Microsoft-approved exercise bikes and other fun fat-burning machines that interface to Xbox?  Why can’t you play a Microsoft game with your whole body instead of your thumbs.  (I think some of the Japanese folks, including Sony, are actually moving in this area, but they’re not the ones with infinite cash.)  The most ironic part here is that, after delivering zero innovation to the market, the Microsoft executives fret that they aren’t making a huge profit off Xbox.

3) I hate the fact that the file formats for Microsoft Office aren’t documented.  (It would be nice to see a little tiny bit of competition in desktop software and it will never happen until a public programmer has free and full access to Office file formats so as to build extensions and maybe competitive pieces for components.)

4) I hate the fact that, after all the hype about .NET, the only languages that you can realistically use with .NET are C#, VB, and maybe COBOL.  .NET had the potential to eliminate the language wars that have disgraced computer programming as a profession (nerds calling each other losers for using [Perl, Python, Java, Lisp, whatever] instead of solving a customer problem).  You were supposed to be able to use Language A and invoke methods on classes defined in Language B.  I guess this works for VB and C#.  But the runtime isn’t sophisticated enough to support dynamic languages such as Common Lisp Object System and Microsoft isn’t reaching into its cash pile to pay third-party language vendors to stand behind .NET versions of the really nice computer languages (ML, Haskell, Lisp).

5) I hate the fact that PCs are all so ugly and noisy.  In a market with 1000 vendors you might expect that 995 of the products are cheap, nasty, and ready for the shelves of Walmart but you’d expect at least 5 vendors of products that would cost $250 extra and (a) be cooled with liquid and heat sinks (i.e., be silent), and (b) look reasonably nice in a home setting.  But just as with my posting on why aren’t there a handful of single fathers to go with the single moms, it seems that we end up with a Gaussian distribution, centered on “ass ugly and friggin’ noisy”, with a standard deviation of 3 dB on the noise and 0.05 ass on the aesthetics.  It might seem unreasonable to blame Microsoft for the ugliness of hardware that they don’t, after all, manufacture.  But one of the burdens of monopoly is that people blame you for everything!  (And I bet if Bill Gates said to Michael Dell “would you mind building me a silent not-too-ugly PC” it would happen.)

6) I hate the fact that Windows XP doesn’t tolerate hardware failure or flakiness.  I only see the blue screen of death once every 6 months or so (flakier than Solaris, better than GNU/Linux in my experience) but WinXP machines seem to freeze if something isn’t quite right with a PC Card slot, a CD/DVD drive, or whatever.  As long as the CPU is still alive, why can’t it log something and then tell me “you really need to check the cabling on Disk F:”?

7) I hated the iPaq PocketPC for the month that I had it and for the 15 minutes of function that it provided between overnight battery charges.

8) I hate the fact that capable people who want to build end-user oriented software basically have no alternative but to work at Microsoft.  Among big companies in a sprawling suburb where it rains all year, Microsoft might not be that bad, but not every capable person will thrive in such an environment.

Okay, that’s all the vitriol that I can summon, typing as I am on a Microsoft Natural Keyboard using a Microsoft any-texture optical mouse (invented in Redmond in 2000; copied by Tom Knight at Symbolics in 1984) in MSIE on XP…  To keep this focussed, I’m going to delete any comments that aren’t on-topic.  It is okay to say “I hate MSFT because they don’t have Feature X from the Macintosh” but a comment that is primarily about the Macintosh or Unix will be liquidated.

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A reading of The Prize, aside from teaching one quite a bit about the history of the oil industry, makes it clear that creating a non-violent society in Iraq is going to be a challenge.

“In July 1958, [Iraqi Army] officers plotting a coup told their troops the far-fetched story that they had been ordered to march to Israel and surrender their weapons.  That was sufficient to get the soldiers to support a rebellion.  The coup that followed set off an explosion of violence and savagery.  Crowds surged through the streets, holding aloft huge photographs of Nasser [the Egyptian dictator and pan-Arabist] , along with live squirming dogs, which represented the Iraq Royal Family.  King Faisal II himself was beheaded by troops that stormed the palace.  The Crown Prince was shot, and his hands and feet were hacked off and carried on spikes through the city.  His mutilated body, along with those of a number of other officials, was dragged through the streets, and then hung from a balcony… ” — page 508

Life next door in Iran isn’t a whole lot more pacific.

[One of the last Westerners in Iran around the time it switched to an Islamic government was an Irish petroleum engineer named Jeremy Gilbert, hospitalized in Tehran with hepatitis.]  “Very weak and hardly able to move around the ward, Gilbert was mistaken by the Iranians in the hospital for an American.  A group of nurses took to gathering outside his window to chant ‘Death to Americans.’  Another patient without warning began beating Gilbert on the head with his crutches.” — page 683

And it is easy to forget that the interaction between Iraq and Iran has not been entirely peaceful in recent times.

“The Iraqis were unprepared for the ‘human wave’ assaults they encountered on the battlefield [of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War].  Hundreds of thousands of young people, drawn by the Shiite vision of martyrdom, and with little thought for their own lives, advanced on Iraqi positions in front of regular Iranian troops.  Some of the young people arrived at the front carrying their own coffins, exhorted as they had been by Khomeini that ‘the purist joy in Islam is to kill and be killed for God’.  They were given plastic keys to heaven to wear around their necks.  Children were even used to clear minefields for the far more valuable and much rarer tanks, and thousands of them died.” — page 711

This earlier blog posting looks at what we could do domestically with the $100+ billion that we’re investing in Iraq.  Those who’ve read The Prize will probably be skeptical that $100 billion will be enough to end the violence.

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My friend David is a composer and philospher.  One of his favorite puzzles to pose goes as follows:

“Philip, what if I were to give you $100.  Would there be anything illegal about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, how about if I asked you to sleep with me?  Would that be illegal?”

We were in New York City so I answered “No.”

“Well then, why should it be illegal for me to ask you to sleep with me for $100?”

After assigning an in-class exercise of normalizing a data model for an MP3 file sharing system, I asked the students present a few questions:

“Is it legal to hook up a tape recorder or CD burner and make copies of CDs that you own to play in your car?”

Nearly everyone thought this was legal.

“How about if you go over to your friend’s house?  Is it legal to hook up your recorder to his stereo and make copies of his CDs?”

Nearly everyone thought this was illegal.

Let’s step back a moment and look at the law.  There are a lot of special laws that were passed at the request of the record companies.  Some time in the 1980s they got Congress to make it illegal to rent music CDs (USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 109).  This is why you can find a corner video rental store but not an audio rental store.  (This statute applies only to commercial rental, which is why you can find CDs at the public library.)

Home taping was always in legal limbo.  Record companies claimed it was costing them $billions.  Most consumers thought it was fair use.  Record companies hadn’t yet developed their brilliant business strategy of suing 12-year-olds and therefore there was no judge to establish a precedent.

Then came the early late 1980s and the new threat of digital audio recorders.  The record companies wanted the Federales to collect a tax on all the blank digital audio tape sold and give them the money.  Never mind that 99% of the DAT tape sold was used by artists recording their own music or computer owners backing up data.  Congress and George H.W. “No New Taxes” Bush gave them the new tax.  However, in order to avoid the appearance that the U.S. Congress was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Records, they slipped in a note clarifying the status of home taping:

“No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.” — US Code, Title 17, Chapter 10, Subchapter D, Sec. 1008 (also see its legislative history).

You could tape away to your heart’s content as long as you weren’t doing it for money.  You could make a tape for your friend, even an analog tape that wasn’t subject to the new tax.

Napster tried to defend itself under Section 1008.  Its users were sitting at home making audio recordings for personal use.  They got slammed by the courts because the devices being used, desktop PCs, were held to be not covered by this statute, i.e., a PC is not a “digital audio recording device”.

In the bad old days of Napster you kept your MP3 collection on your desktop.  Today, however, an MP3 jukebox with enormous capacity can be purchased for $200.  It won’t be long now before average people carry around their entire music collections on their cell phones.

Consider this scenario.  You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend.  He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks.  You walk across the street.  Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets.  He says “Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song?  It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky’s innovative tonality.”  You haven’t?  Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up.  Any tracks that he had and you didn’t you now have.  You’re using a digital audio recorder; the device won’t do anything except record music.  You’re not paying each other so it is noncommercial.  Under Section 1008 what you’re doing is perfectly legal in the United States.

Imagine having a party at your house in which 30 people show up.  By the end of the evening every person has the union of 30 personal music collections.

What is the point of Internet file sharing when people can, perfectly legally, copy as much music from each other as they could reasonably want?  Only a person with zero friends would want to bother with file sharing.  Which is why we can now say that the RIAA is the world’s leading promoter of friendship!

[Now that most of Korea and a handful of Americans are hooked up on broadband it is time to ask why people don’t simply email their favorite songs to each other.  The last thing that I would want is to be dumped into Napster or its spiritual descendants.  I don’t know anything about pop music.  What I would want is for my friends who know music and my taste to email me a song every day.  If I have 10 music expert friends sending out their favorite song of the day, after a year I’ve accumulated about 200 hours of music.  Prediction:  RIAA will get a law passed making it illegal to email sound recordings.  To enforce the law the RIAA will have the right to read anyone’s email at any time.  Encryption of email will need to be outlawed so as to thwart terrorists and music thieves.]

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We had some heavy rain here in Boston yesterday, which always creates foot-deep lakes across Storrow and Memorial Drives (these follow the Charles River out from downtown Boston).  Alex and I got stuck in a bit of a traffic jam behind one of the lakes.  Thousands of Hyundais, Kias, Chevrolets, etc., had made it through the lake without incident.  However, a brand-new gleaming silver BMW sedan had expired on the other side of the lake and was blocking traffic.

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An unusual NY Times article today:

“An Air Force translator at an American prison camp for captured militants and suspected terrorists at Guant

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Okay, maybe Baldwin is a touch cuter in this photo. 

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