Mike Linksvayer

On a mailing list I’m on someone just pointed to no-www.org. It’s been awhile since I’ve run across that site (or, before it existed, Slashdot commenters condemning use of TCWWW — The Cursed WWW), but I strongly agree — www. in a domain name is pointless.

Even worse is index.php in the path. You’ve taken the time to publish a website, now take a few minutes to make its URLs less ugly. I’m not going to bother setting up no-index-php.org, but someone should. However, in the spirit of no-www.org, here are a couple resources for removing index.php from popular software installations:

• WordPress Codex on using permalinks — in many cases WordPress will produce the right .htaccess file automatically, but if you have to fiddle, the default behavior of identifying a post in the querystring with an integer (e.g., ?p=1913) has a strong appeal, while the “almost pretty” option is extremely ugly.
• MediaWiki Manual:Short URL — when this page lived on meta.wikimedia.org, it was appropriated called Eliminating index.php from the url.

Please remove index.php from your URLs, or signal that you have no taste, no technical abilities, or both.

Thanks!

April 23 I saw Gene Healy speak in San Francisco on his book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power. I’d noticed recently that Tim Lee thinks Healy is great, I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea that the temporary dictatorship is a problem, and the event was held on the top floor of (sadly) San Francisco’s second tallest building, with great views.

I found the talk pretty uninteresting, consisting of too many quotes indicating people expect the U.S. president to be a parental figure and warlord at the same time and a standard libertarian critique that simply says presidents who do a lot are by definition bad — Healy likes Harding and Coolidge. I tend to agree (though I favor Cleveland), but none of this is remotely news. Healy used a cute name for partisan interpretation of rules — “situational constitutionalism” — but didn’t bother to spell out why he thinks partisanship leads to the expansion of executive power rather than (or at least more than) a check on it.

Overall I got the impression Healy knew a whole lot of facts about the U.S. presidency and its baneful impact on the polity and culture, but not much more. His responses to questions from the audience indicated he hadn’t really thought about excessive executive power relative to judicial and legislative abuses, executive power in other jurisdictions, nor any approach to limiting executive power, each of which is many times more interesting than any particular collection of facts about any U.S. president or the presidency. To me.

I hope the book does very well and is read by many people who either don’t think the U.S. presidency is too powerful or is only too powerful when their preferred party is not in power.

Jim Lippard blogged about Healy speaking in Phoenix and had a more favorable impression.

View from 52nd floor of 555 California, looking southeast.

Gene Healy speaks.

So are Clinton and McCain. They all consider themselves worthy of the temporary dictatorship.

If I took a more sanguine view of the U.S. presidency I would demand only elite candidates. The most abominable, I mean powerful, person in the world had better be the smartest and wisest possible person available.

The alternative to demanding an elite is demanding a demagogue. It never fails to stun and embarrass me to see the preponderance of discourse demanding the latter, while politicians comply by running away from any charge of elitism while reveling in demagoguery.

This weakness is one reason I try to only follow electoral races in highly digested form, though it is hard to avoid reading headlines, thus this post.

A post about a child’s reaction to a party at which people apparently mentioned their blogs a lot reminded me of a name that last summer Jon Phillips and I gave to people who don’t talk about their blogs but do sound as if they were reading their blogs aloud — and every “conversation” with them sounds like this.

Of course these people existed before blogs and were perhaps simply called insufferable.

Although it isn’t nice to call someone insufferable and “blog reader” is snarky, I have some admiration for these people. At least they have something non-generic to say and with aggressive questioning one can learn from them.

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) Health Savings Account was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on Mono (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on OpenSolaris were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on Banshee, showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an enterprise desktop linux product.

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.

Wendy Seltzer / CC BY

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0′ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

Red Hat on What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems? An Update (emphasis added):

we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future

Somehow Slashdot reads this as Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough.

Obviously not true, as the Red Hat post goes on to say they have an enterprise desktop product, a community supported desktrop distrubution, and an upcoming desktop product for emerging markets.

More importantly:

Other desktop related projects where Red Hat has been the primary developer, or a major contributor, include:

• X Revitalization effort (kernel modesetting, randr, dri2)
• Screen size control panel
• PolicyKit & ConsoleKit
• Gnome (screensaver, gvfs/gio, GtkPrint, etc)
• Liberation Fonts (with sponsorship of the Harfbuzz font shaper project)
• Theora encoder improvements
• Sponsorship of Ogg Ghost (successor to Ogg Vorbis)
• NetworkManager and Network driver work - developed by Red Hat
• OpenOffice.org 64-bit port
• OpenOffice.org integration into the rest of GNOME: Port to cairo, dictionary unification, print/file dialogs
• PulseAudio
• Bluetooth file sharing
• Ongoing hal maintenance and revitalization
• DBus and DBus activation
• Multiple power management activities:
  • Tickless kernel
  • Gnome power manager and the quirks list
  • Suspend/resume enhancements
  • Laptop backlight intensity autocontrol
  • www.lesswatts.org project support (such as Powertop)
  • CPUfreq
  • AMD PowerNow!
• and of course, lots and lots of bugfixes!

Although I think 2001-2002 is the only time I’ve primarily used a Red Hat desktop (before I used Slackware then Debian, since I’ve used Mandrake then Ubuntu), I’m certain that many of the things that make using a free software desktop (any distribution) so nice today have been built by engineers at Red Hat. Thanks!

Richard Stallman in Gnu’s Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1986:

There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.

A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware.

The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers.

People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.

Users with related needs can form users’ groups, and pay dues. A group would contract with programming companies to write programs that the group’s members would like to use.

In the intervening twentysomething years much practical experience has been gained, evidenced by large businesses employing many programmers following these models. Well, except for the last one, which has turned out to be insignificant so far, though perhaps there remains lots of experimentation before it plays out.

What the above misses is that most software is not created for licensing (commercial or public) and most programmers’ jobs do not depend on licensing, much as most musicians are not in the pay of the recorded music distribution business.

LugRadio Live comes to San Francisco this weekend. Only $10, has something for anyone interested in open source, open content, open media, etc., Saturday evening drinks on Google. I’m speaking Sunday.

Next Thursday evening I’ll be speaking to presumably a very different audience at the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California on Copyright in a Hyper Digital Age: Copyrights? Copyleft? What rights are left?, also open to the public and cheap.

Next month, should anyone in Boston read this, I’ll be at Berkman@10.

In July I’ll literally be speaking at a Linux User Group meeting — BALUG, free or cheap with Chinese food. The amusing thing about this is that their lineup for the rest of the year is a who’s who list of open source — mine is the only name that requires any affiliation.

Doug Cutting on Cloud: commodity or proprietary?:

As we shift applications to the cloud, do we want our code to remain vendor-neutral? Or would we rather work in silos, where some folks build things to run in the Google cloud, some for the Amazon cloud, and others for the Microsoft cloud? Once an application becomes sufficiently complex, moving it from one cloud to another becomes difficult, placing folks at the mercy of their cloud provider.

I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services. But how can we ensure that?

If we develop standard, non-proprietary cloud APIs with open-source implementations, then cloud providers can deploy these and compete on price, availability, performance, etc., giving developers usable alternatives.

That’s exactly right. Cloud providers (selling virtualized cpu and storage) are analogous to hardware vendors. We’re in the pre-PC era, when a developer must write to a proprietary platform, and if one wants to switch vendors, one must port the application.

But such APIs won’t be developed by the cloud providers. They have every incentive to develop proprietary APIs in order to lock folks into their services. Good open-source implementations will only come about if the community makes them a priority and builds them.

I think this is a little too pessimistic. Early leaders may have plenty of incentive to create lockin, but commoditization is another viable business model, one that could even be driven by a heretofore leading proprietary vendor, e.g., the IBM PC, or Microsoft-Yahoo!

Of course the community should care and build the necessary infrastructure so that it is available to enable a potential large cloud provider to pursue the commoditization route and to provide an alternative so long as no such entity steps forward.

Cutting has been working on key parts of the necessary infrastructure; read the rest of his post for more.

The ACLU has filed a brief (pdf) in the U.S. patent case called Bilski (a case I understand the End Software Patents project is watching closely) making a free speech argument against the patent in question.

I’m especially pleased that the ACLU brief makes two obvious but rarely stated points. One:

At the most basic level, it is apparent that because the First Amendment post-dates the patent clause in Article I, it modifies the patent clause.

Patents and copyright are covered in a single clause, which for reference says “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Two:

Thus, the definition of “useful arts” clearly excludes music, art, and literature, all of which represent unpatentable matter clearly also protected by the First Amendment.

Unpatentable, but why not uncopyrightable too?

Via Gavin Baker.

I have very low expectations for Apple, so them installing software without the user requesting it doesn’t surprise me.

But I’m mock-horrified that there are users who make two bad choices — first, running Windows, second, running Apple software.

Of course users are a combination of stupid and rationally ignorant and install malware all the time — a primary reason a consumer-friendly software vendor should not make a practice of defaulting users into installing unrequested software.

It’s a short step from installing unrequested software to installing unrequested software that makes your computer less useful, i.e., malware.

Addendum 20080327: Safari 3.1 For Windows Violates Its Own EULA, Vulnerable To Hacks

As much as I love to see an abominable person destroyed, Spitzer’s fall is unwelcome due to how it came about: privacy is dead. And of course prostitution should be legal.

You may continue cheering. (I read somewhere that traders on the floor of the NYSE cheered when the news hit, but I can’t find it.)

Previously: Spitzer shits to music.

Somehow apropos to SXSW going on now and the absurd name of the prostitution ring, last year I noticed there’s a street in Austin called Bold Ruler Way. Update: A commenter notes that Bold Ruler was a horse.

In lieu of going to SXSW this year, I recommend you check out the best session from SXSWi 2007.

If you are at SXSW this year, see (other) Creative Commons people at the tradeshow, parties, and panels.

The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.

The ultra deluxe success seems to me to validate the encouragement by some to pursue large revenue from rabid fans and collectors willing and able to pay for personalization, authenticity, embodiment, etc., rather than attempting to suppress zero cost distribution to the masses.

Speaking of distribution, click on the magnet to search for a fully legal P2P download of Ghosts, assuming you have the right filesharing software installed.

nin_ghosts_I-IV_mp3.zip (283.7 MB)

I strongly prefer voluntary action. However, software patents are not amenable to workaround and so must be attacked directly through less savory legal, legislative, and electoral routes (though if software patents are toxic to free software, the opposite is also true, so simply creating and using free software is a voluntary if indirect attack on software patents).

Software patents are the major reason multimedia on the web (and on computers generally) is so messed up — few multimedia formats may be implemented without obtaining many patent licenses, and amazingly, this is sometimes impossible:

[The MPEG-4 framework] is so patent-encumbered that today no one really knows who has “rights” to it. Indeed, right now, no new MPEG-4 licenses are even being issued.

As the End Software Patents site emphasizes, software patents negatively impact every sector now that everything uses software.

My only problem with the ESP site (and many others, this is just a general peeve of mine) is that it does not even link to similar resources with a non-U.S. jurisdiction focus. For example, the What Can I Do? page might state that if one is reading the page but not in the U.S. (because that never happens), please check out FFII (EU) and similar.

In any case, please join the effort of ESP and others to eradicate software patentsweapons of mass destruction. Ars Technica has a good introductory article on ESP.

At today’s very well produced SanFran MusicTech Summit on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage” Mike Godwin said that the existence of a recording industry protected by copyright is a very recent phenomenon and conjectured that one could take the position that all of the music created to this point is enough. I don’t recall whether he spelled it out, but the implication being that all music should be available for free and we shouldn’t worry about the creation of more music.

This really upset someone in the audience who identified themselves as representing songwriters for decades. This person righteously stipulated that music has value, musicians must be paid, and that if recording copyright is recent, so was the abolition of slavery. It is really too bad he didn’t make reference to Nazis instead of slavery. Hmm, they did use slave labor.

Unfortunately Godwin said he did not agree with the conjecture and agreed with the vacuous statement that music has value (duh, consumers spend valuable time listening to music). But if the conjecture is not plainly correct, it is at least extremely weighty. Given that a vast amount of music exists and much more will be created regardless of protection, any harms done (e.g. to free speech and innovation) in the name of incentivizing marginal additions to this vast supply must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

There are basically two perspectives in the ‘Music and Technology‘ conversation. One’s priority is to ensure copyright holders are paid, with a strong preference for protecting existing revenue streams, and the other’s priority is to build cool stuff with new technology. Both were present in every part of this conference that I saw.

Probably the most significant example of the latter present was Lucas Gonze demoing the Yahoo! Media Player, which does a great job of playing media linked on a web page, with nice affordances for that environment.

Three times I’ve linked to the 2005 column If pirating grows, it may not be the end of music world about the music industry in China.

1: Witness massive production of art where expected profit from sales of copies and licensing is nil, both outside the content industry and where restrictions on copying are not enforced.

2: There is some very imperfect evidence from China that without copyright mass culture will still be star-driven and repulsive.

3: But we can also look to markets that started from a very different place, e.g., China.

A new BBC story, ‘Chaos’ of China’s music industry also says that pop stars earn through sponsorship:

The singer made about $2000 (£1,000) a month from music royalties and live shows with her band Mika Bomb when she lived in London.

But in China, her band Long Kuan Jiu Duan can almost double that by singing just one song at a commercial gig.

At these gigs, artists get paid a set amount by companies or promoters regardless of how many tickets they sell.

I assume a “commercial gig” is some kind of promotional event, but I’d like to read a more in depth look at the economics of pop music in China. (I have little doubt that the economics of music worth listening to is little different than in the U.S. — made for love at a financial loss or sometimes subsidized by grants or academic employment.)

This post is also an excuse to link to Let’s Do Like Them, which expresses one of my top peeves.

There are a number of fun things about a sketch of Uberfact: the ultimate social verifier. The first is that the post could be written without mentioning distributed revision control. The second is that the proposed project is a nice would-be example of political desires sublimated entirely into creating useful and voluntary tools. Third, Mencius Moldbug is a fun writer.

Something like Uberfact should absolutely be built, though I’m far from certain it would hit a sweet spot. It may be too decentralized or too centralized or both. All points from enhancing Wikipedia to the Semantic Web (with Uberfact somewhere between) are complementary and well worth pursuing, particularly if that pursuit displaces malinvestment in politics.

Relatedly, but no time to explain why:

• Imagine decentralizing Wikipedia with Codeville
• Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia
• Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
• Most important software project
• Free software and social revolution
• We R Independent

Some of the best points are blindingly obvious. Will Wilkinson on good peopleracists who advocate apartheid:

Presently, whites are well less than half the Cailfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

More data: California population born in a non-U.S. jurisdiction: 26.9%, entire U.S.: 11.8% (excluding California should be about 9.8% for the proper comparison).

Some people do think California is a giant burning parking lot, but that isn’t remotely true, even relatively. There are things to dislike about California (e.g., San Francisco is a pathetic parochial town instead of Sanhattan, Scientologists in LA), but approximately none of them have anything to do with the presence of non-U.S. citizens. I’ll take California over Oklahoma (4.2%) any day.

Where have the immigrants gone? in the Chicago Tribune on the impact of Oklahoma’s new apartheid law, HB 1804, the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection[ist] Act:

“You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state’s economy, but we found a way,” said state Sen. Harry Coates, the only Republican in the state Legislature to vote against the immigration law. “We ran off the workforce.”

No, they didn’t run off the workforce, they kept the American citizen race pure:

Carol Helm, director of Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now, says the Oklahoma law was necessary to stop a burgeoning population of illegal immigrants from “multiplying faster than the American citizen race” and overwhelming the state’s social services.

I’d like to offer Helm amnesty.

According to the article, HB 1804 does the following:

• Makes it a felony to harbor, transport, conceal or shelter unauthorized immigrants
• Restricts access to driver’s licenses and identification cards
• Terminates several forms of public assistance
• Expands authority of local law-enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law
• Requires verification of employment eligibility using a federal database