Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of the panels at BloggerCon concerned blogs and education, mostly for full-time K-12 and college students.  Whenever people talk about education it seems inevitable that debates will break out concerning what to do about public schools: “Why shouldn’t a kid in the ghetto have the option [vouchers] of attending private school, the same as George Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s children?” and “I worked in the U.S. Air Force for four years before moving to the San Francisco Public Schools and let me tell you that, for a government agency, schools are remarkably efficient.”

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This weekend is the BloggerCon conference at Harvard.  A young audience member had the courage to ask “What should I say when someone asks me what the point of having a blog is?”

Indeed this is a variant of the early 1990s question the first personal Web sites went up “What is the point of having a personal Web site?”

What then IS the point of personal Web site or blog?

Let’s go back to the beginning.  The commercial publishing world supports basically two lengths of manuscript: the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads; the 200+-page book.  If you had a 20-page idea and didn’t have access to the handful of “long-copy” magazines in the U.S. (old New Yorker, Atlantic, etc.), you could cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimize size to fit into the book distribution system (cf. any diet book or business bestseller).

Personal Web sites are interesting because they support 20- or 30-page essays beautifully, with search engines directing interested readers to those essays right at the moment that they’re curious about that topic.

Blogs are interesting because they support the 2-paragraph idea.  It is sort of ridiculous to create a separate .html file for every little aphorism or fleeting thought and it would be a shame to clog search engines with pages that have such a high machinery-to-content ratio.  Blogs and the RSS format make it work.  Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book.

Of course there remains the question of why write at all.  You don’t make any money from writing and wouldn’t it be more pleasant to concentrate on getting full value out of your digital cable TV subscription and luxury SUV?

What did folks at the conference have to say about this topic?  One panelist noted that Benjamin Franklin was an early blogger (personally I prefer Marcus Aurelius as an example).  Emerson, a Harvard alumnus (just like Ted Kaczinsky) was dredged up.  He would have loved blogs (“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”).  The journal is a well-respected literary form and the blog is simply a more efficiently available journal.

Some panelists seemed insanely optimistic.  One guy noted that the nation-state wasn’t working.  We are afflicted with racism, wars, etc.  We need a new way to aggregate the wisdom of people and blogs are the answer.  Listening to this, I was struck by a horrifying thought:  George W. Bush must represent the aggregated wisdom of the American people, i.e., us.  Adam Curry compared the Weblog to the telephone in its potential to revolutionize society.  If the early results are mostly lame he related that “the telephone was first used to call ahead to say that a telegram was on its way.”

My personal answer:  my main site (philip.greenspun.com) is there to relate things that I’ve learned so that others don’t have to repeat my mistakes; this blog is here to entertain friends and if other folks stumble across it and are entertained or find their thinking sparked in new directions, that’s gravy.

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According to this New York Times article, Sun seems to be losing a few $billion.  This has caused the stock to crash.  Sun has roughly $6 billion more in the bank to lose, so don’t look for them to show up in bankruptcy court anytime soon.  Still, perhaps there is an analog here.  The record companies are suffering because the only thing that they have to sell is the CD, which was introduced more than 20 years ago and which is a derivative of the 125-year-old Edison cylinder.  Sun is suffering because its main product is a 33-year-old operating system, Unix, that has been only incrementally improved, and the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), developed by IBM in the late 1970s.  What else does Sun have to sell?  Java, which is kind of a strange mix of 1970s ideas (from C and Smalltalk).  When your products are this old it is easy for competitors to build cheaper knock-offs.  Sun has been remarkably unlucky in that the knockoff, GNU/Linux, was built mostly by volunteers and that its price is $0.

In the case of recorded music the solution is pretty obvious, i.e., some sort of subscription service that delivers music conveniently to the consumer wherever he or she happens to be.  The details might be intricate but it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to believe something could be built that people would want to buy.  Can we say the same for Sun?

The market for “solutions” to the IT problems of rich and confused big companies would seem to belong solidly to IBM.  The market for complex desktop applications and professionally-configured desktop operating systems would seem to belong solidly to Microsoft.  Slugging it out with Intel in the hardware market seems like a losing game.  In fact, Sun appears incapable of competing in any current computing market.

What does that leave?  How about a completely new infrastructure for computing?  No user would ever have to configure his or her network (a friend went to a dinner party last weekend in which a 70-year-old woman related her 3-hour support call with the cable modem company; “I did a lot of pinging”).  No user would ever see a hierarchical file system with directories or folders.  No user would ever be asked by an application program whether he or she wanted to “save changes?”  People would have access to their data and computing power from wherever they happened to be.  Sun could sell the devices (handheld, desktop, laptop, in-wall).  Sun could sell the servers that made it all work.  It would all be 100% proprietary so that Sun could make some profit.  That’s my best idea.  WinXP, Unix and the MacOS all look extremely similar when you step back a bit from the problem.  The people for whom these are acceptable systems already have bought as much computer as they need.  The big untapped market is among people who aren’t willing to devote a big part of their lives to the care and feeding of this style of operating system.

Perhaps the process would start with Sun buying a cable TV and a cellular phone company in one city and writing code until half of the businesses and citizens in that town were hooked.

Let’s see if the comment section yields some better ideas for Sun…

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Here’s an unusual story involving two countries, Japan and China, that I visited in September 2000.  My trip was a bit different than the one described, as you can see from the photos:  Japan (click on Tokyo and then on the fish market series); China.

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Hmm…, the Let’s Bash Microsoft posting seems to have served its function (135 comments and counting!).  Perhaps today would be a good day to bash the RIAA, a reprise of the comprehensive CD industry bashing posting of September 5, 2003….

A simpler formulation of the troubles of the record industry:  the CD is a direct descendant of the Edison cylinder circa 1877.  I.e., the record industry is demanding growing revenues from a product that is 125 years old.  In 1909 a consumer might have been delighted at the idea of purchasing a Grand Opera Amberol, taking it home, and spending the rest of his life devoting storage space in his home to the physical manifestation of the audio stream.  A consumer in 2003 might, however, be forgiven for insisting that paid-for music arrive ethereally, on-demand, and, if there is physical management to be done that it be done by a commercial enterprise at a remote location.  This explains why Sirius and XM are gaining customers while the market for physical CDs is shrinking.

[I’ve talked to a bunch of people who own MP3 jukeboxes.  When asked “Would you have paid $200 extra to have the machine preloaded with high-quality music from your choice of genres?” all said “Absolutely.”  But the product doesn’t exist so these folks resorted to ripping their old CDs (not downloading; they are all too busy) rather than giving the recording industry any new revenue.]

America is still the world’s greatest Corporate Welfare State but really how is it possible for the government to help an industry that refuses to abandon a 125-year-old product that consumers don’t want anymore?

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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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