Here’s an interesting thing I found while out in Santa Cruz a couple of days ago. A “graphite object”, it’s made by San Francisco artist Agelio Batle from natural graphite and “smudge-resistant compounds” fused at extremely high pressure into a variety of shapes. Beautiful, and (at least arguably) useful.
image courtesy ezjester
Once again, the Free Software Foundation has done its best to put stumbling blocks in the path of getting GPL-licensed software onto the iPhones, iPods and iPads of some fifty million Apple customers. And while the last time—over a not-terribly-good app for playing the Japanese game of Go—was a tempest in a teapot, this one will have rather more impact, I suspect.
This time, the fracas is over an iOS version of the free software media player, VLC. A Paris-based software developer, Applidium, released a version of the application for the iPad and iPhone a while back, which has apparently achieved a little popularity. However, one of the developers of VLC, Rémi Deni-Courmont, has taken extreme exception to that, calling it a “copyright violation” and demanding that the app be removed from the iTunes App Store.
The discussion around this has shown that there’s a great deal of dissension over this issue. So, far—despite predictions to the contrary—the app still seems to be up in the store, and I personally expect it will be staying there for a while. Here’s why:
VLC is not a project which asks that contributors assign copyright, so strictly speaking Deni-Courmont only has a direct interest in those portion which show his copyright. Apple, however, doesn’t look at sources. Since the application say “© the Videolan Team”, short of changing his name, it’s going to be difficult for Deni-Courmont to demonstrate his own interest in it.
I’m figuring that Apple’s response to Deni-Courmont’s complaints is going to be, “If you’ve got a beef with someone, it’s with Applidium, not us. Go sue them, and when you win, let us know, and we’ll take the app down.” This would seem to be in line with a tweet from the official Videolan account, suggesting that Gizmodo’s claim that VLC for iOS was going away soon was “FUD”.
The FSF, in their ever-present haste to paint Apple as a villain whenever possible, has taken Deni-Courmont’s side in this, and weighed in on the issue with some very sketchy reasoning, both on their web site and on the VLC discussion list.
The reasoning given by Brett C. Smith, the FSF’s Compliance Engineer, runs as follows:
1. Apple’s End User License Agreement applies to all apps on the store. This is incorrect: in the absence of a specific third-party EULA from the developer, this is the case, but the developer’s EULA overrides Apple’s, if they conflict. Applidium could easily provide a EULA to circumvent this issue.
2. The App Store terms impose strict usage rules on all software. Perhaps, if they apply—but in any case, this is immaterial. To quote from the GPL v2, §0: ”Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.” [My emphasis]
The GPL does not cover “usage rules”, and explicitly so. In any case, the “usage rules” to which Smith is objecting are the restriction that a downloaded app “cannot be used commercially”, and that an app can be installed on no more than five iOS devices under a single Apple Store account.
Clearly, both of these “restrictions” exist solely to protect commercial developers and to protect their ability to make future sales. Neither of them has particular meaning in the context of a free (in the sense of “available at no charge”) application whose source code is available under a free software license. Smith is straining at gnats and swallowing camels to find problems here.
3. The GPL prohibits these restrictions. No, it doesn’t, and it says it doesn’t. The closest Smith can get is the inability to have the app on more than five iOS devices—a fairly unrealistic scenario to begin with—and one easily remedied by setting up an additional Apple Store ID to cover the 6th through 10th devices.
It seems clear that the FSF, Smith and Deni-Courmont are looking for excuses to press their own political agenda—Apple as freedom-hating villain—on the rest of the world, and over the apparent protests of many other participants in the VLC project. Jean-Baptiste Kempf has presented his own thoughts on why the reasoning presented is full of holes, and there’s been increasingly strident disagreement over this on the list.
It looks like the FSF and Deni-Courmont will keep complaining about this but—as of a moment ago—it was still up there, still freely available. This may turn out to be a watershed moment for the free software movement. It would have been a lot better if they’d found a way to work with the mobile space and with companies like Apple, but they’ve refused to. Next stop, irrelevance?
In addition to Steve Jobs’ irrational hatred of pixels, and Keith Stattenfield’s approach to soliciting input, the occasional “expertise wars” at Apple could be entertaining.
Back in late 1999, when we were working on the upcoming release of Mac OS, a sort of strident “discussion” broke out during a meeting in my VP’s office with the EVP of software. Apparently a friend of his “alerted” him to the fact that 2000 was showing as a leap year, and, “of course”, leap years are any year that’s divisible by four unless they’re also divisible by 100! “What are you people, a bunch of idiots? Don’t you know this stuff? Why am I getting calls from my friends to correct your work?”
“We know it,” I said, “it’s your friend who doesn’t. The rule for a leap year is any year that’s divisible by four, unless it’s divisible by 100, unless it’s divisible by 400 as well. 2000 is the exception to the exception. Tell your friend to check his ‘facts’.”
The EVP stared at me for about fifteen seconds. Then he said, “What are you, some sort of calendar expert?”
“Try me,” I replied.
He stared at me for another ten seconds, then stared at my VP, who shrugged. “He is,” he said. The EVP then got up and stomped out of the office. That was actually the last we ever heard on that particular “issue”.
I’ve just finished reading William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, which is a wonderful and well-written guide, by the way, and—having recently become nonconsensually self-employed, and being in a position to sit down and take a good look at what was going on and what I wanted to do next—found myself very happy to rediscover Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and others that I hadn’t really thought that much about since college.
We’ve come to think of “stoic” as meaning “grim” or “emotionless”, but—as Irvine makes clear—the ancient Stoics were not above emotion, though they had interesting ways of working with it. Philosophies like Stoicism—one of a number of competing schools in 1st Century Rome—were about promoting methods to enhance everyday life and make us better people, not about abstractions like “the nature of reality”. Each school had its own viewpoint on the matter, and its own idea about what the “highest goal in life” should be. For example, the Hedonists valued pleasure above everything else, which is how the word “hedonism” entered the English language, along with “stoicism”.
The Stoics, however, valued serenity. They recognized that we all feel emotion, we can’t help doing so, but they asked what was the best way to react in response to the emotions we felt, particularly the negative ones. We all face situations which will make us angry, or sad, but we also recognize that allowing anger to become rage, or sadness to become unrestrained grief is neither healthy for us nor those around us.
As a citizen of The Future, I find myself facing these same problems, and—in a time when world economies are changing around us, and the ever-upward growth of consumerism seems unsustainable—I also find myself wondering at the ever-present impulse to buy another book, another DVD, another shirt, another computer, another car…
Why do we do this? As Irvine points out, it’s evolutionary: in our development as a species, food, shelter, and other necessities would be scarce more often than not. Those of our primate ancestors who had more acquisitive behavior, and were better at collecting and hanging onto more food, a better shelter, better tools, etc., had a higher chance of reproducing, thus winning the big prize in the “natural selection lottery”.
The way this manifests in our consumerish lives is that getting something new feels good. This is why people love to shop for things: we go to the mall in the hopes of finding something that will impel us to spend some money in order to get that “rush” we find in something new. Unfortunately, there’s a psychological effect that works against us, called “hedonic adaptation” (there are those Hedonists again!) This simply amounts to “getting used” to something. While we love, love, love our nice new car for at least the first three weeks, we simply don’t get the “kick” we used to get out of having it after a while, and then we’re off in search of the next big-ticket item. It’s very much like an addiction (and, in fact, people do become shopping addicts).
We’re not much different from ancient Romans, who had no shortage of things to consume themselves, and the Stoics looked at this tendency as well. Their solution to both of these problems turns out to be the same: Irvine refers to it as “negative visualization”, but I think of it as “It Could Always Be Worse!” The basic idea is that, from time to time, you looks around at some concrete thing which you value in your life: your car, your house, your TV, etc., and you consider what it would be like if that were suddenly gone from your life. In effect, you mentally rehearse its loss. While this may seem a little odd, if you do this correctly, it can help you value the things you already have in your life, but which—because they’re familiar—you’ve allowed to recede into the background and take for granted.
I had a perfect opportunity for this yesterday as it happens. It’s just the beginning of rainy season here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and my cat, Lily—who actually hates the rain—ran outside first thing in the morning. This isn’t unusual, but given the weather, the fact that she hadn’t shown up at the door again in an hour or two, demanding to be let back in out of the rain, was unusual.
After several hours, she still hadn’t turned up, and I was starting to worry a bit: there are enough raccoons, occasional coyotes and such—we had a bobcat living in the ravine back of the house for many years—that it was possible she might have run into something unfriendly. She could have gotten hit by a car. I went out several times and called for her, but there was no sign.
So, what to do? I could become increasingly distressed, certainly, but that doesn’t seem terribly productive. Instead, I considered the situation. Cats don’t live forever, under any circumstances, and there will come a day when Lily may well go out and simply not come back; it’s happened before (with a 14-year-old cat who simply took off to find a place to curl up and die, apparently: we found what was left of her the following spring).
That would be sad if it happened, certainly—and some day it, or the equivalent, certainly will—but it won’t change how nice it’s been to have Lily around for the past three years or so, or however much longer she does stick around. No matter what happens to her, or when, I still have the positive value she’s brought into my day-to-day life, and that can’t be taken away. I can ignore it, if I choose, and focus on what I’m lacking now instead, but I would be doing so at a cost of ignoring whatever else is also going on now, which might have made me happier if only I were paying attention to it.
Late in the afternoon, Lily wandered nonchalantly back into the house, certainly none the worse for wear. I was, obviously, quite pleased to see her, but the key is that I was even more pleased to see her for having spent a minute or two here and there during the day contemplating what things would be like if I never saw her again. I appreciated her presence all the more for having considered her absence.
This is a practice that can be applied to anything in your life you value, and practiced regularly, can change your life tremendously. It’s a way of bringing not only a concrete sense of gratitude into your daily life, but also—by increasing your satisfaction with the good things you already have—can reduce your unceasing desire for new things you don’t really need.
And that can really change your life for the better.
image courtesy James O'Malley
In spite of our having very different viewpoints, I’ve had pretty consistently cordial relations with Tim, aka “Goblin”, who blogs at OpenBytes, and we’ve had some interesting discussions. I’ve been following the LimeWire story—which is finally down to its last, gasping breaths—and Tim has had some commentary on it there as well (which I encourage you to read, for context). I was putting together a response to his response to my comment, but it seem involved enough to merit a posting in its own right.
In response to my suggestion that this was a pretty foreseeable outcome, Tim says, “I think this could set a worrying precedent. Where does responsibility end?”, citing, for example concerns that Google might be held liable for links to infringing materials that turn up in search results.
Well, the question is more where does the responsibility start? If an actual problem exists, someone’s committed an act of infringement somewhere along the line. You can’t have copyright law that works both ways, coming down hard on GPL violators while turning a blind eye to folks swapping current movies and music. Choose your poison.
“…copyright holders were quite happy to stay quiet about infringing material on sites whilst having law firms chasing the blissfully unaware sharers…”
Well, perhaps. You can only chase after what you’re aware of, and I don’t know what’s in other people’s minds. In any case, I’m not sure there are too many “blissfully unaware sharers” here, at least other than in the sense of “my mom was unaware that I was sharing files via our home network, and since I’m a minor and she’s not, she’s the one on the hook”. If a 16-year-old sneaks out with the car keys, and runs over someone’s cat, his mom’s legally “responsible” for that, too.
Maybe Tim can clarify who’s “unaware” here—surely no one is starting up Limewire in their sleep, and they had (as “reasonable people”) to know that those files were coming from someplace…
People in the community like to hate on the DMCA, but there are some very good points in it, from the point of view of people who hold copyrightable material as well as services providers (like Google, in the instance you mention). It both establishes a standardized procedure for making a notification of an infringement as well as defining “safe harbor” provisions for service providers, so long as they respond in a timely and proper fashion to the infringement notifications they receive.
Certainly, this can be abused: a “free software advocate” of our mutual acquaintance repeatedly infringed on my copyrights (and those of another photographer) by republishing mutilated versions of some of our photos (and when I say “mutilated”, I mean with added free suggestions of drug abuse and pedophilia).
I was able to get those infringing photographs taken down quickly and easily using the DMCA. Before the act’s passage, getting any action in a situation like that, short of actually hauling someone into a courtroom, would have been extremely difficult. I’ve found the DMCA to be a tremendous help in being able to control how my own copyrighted works are used, and I’m certain that many other—particularly photographers, graphic artists, and the like—feel similarly.
We’re at a transitional phase: copyright was developed in the context of books which required considerable investment in infrastructure to publish, and music which required an orchestra for its enjoyment. People who demand the summary abolition—rather than the thoughtful evolution—of the current system need to spend some time considering the Law of Unintended Consequences.
You can’t keep companies from having trade secrets—after all, a century since its introduction, no one outside of literally six or seven people at the Coca Cola Company really knows how to make Coca Cola. That’s the alternative if you pull the legs out from under copyright, and that will mean more proprietary software, a lot more, not less.
Another point worth noting is that “unfair” legal stuff happens to people all the time. It’s a consequence of having the “fair” legal stuff happen, but a lot of this is in the eye of the beholder.
While Tim may be a perfectly nice guy—in my experience he is—if someone is passing along the (public) sidewalk in front of his house, and his (unrestrained) dog chases them in a fashion suggesting it’s inclined to do them an injury, and in the course of attempting to avoid it, they step on his front walk (which is negligently covered with ice), slip, and break their back, subsequently getting mauled by the dog, if Tim don’t have a pretty good insurance policy, he’s looking at a world of judicial hurt, no matter how nice a guy he is. He could well wind up “owing” them millions of dollars.
Is it “fair”? I dunno. I didn’t get paralyzed and mauled, or bankrupted, so I’ve only got an academic sort of interest in the situation, not a commitment to it.
Similarly, proponents of completely unrestrained file sharing (and the FSF is among these) bend over backwards and perform other unnatural contortions to justify freely sharing KISS’ music (over the objections of Gene Simmons, and perhaps others) with their neighbors. At the same time, they completely fail to address how it’s somehow not equally okay for me to scan and OCR Stephen King’s latest best-seller, and start “freely” distributing my own copies, via p2p networks, mechanical printing presses, or other means. If Mr. King and his publisher showed up to sue my ass into financial oblivion, I doubt anyone would feel particular surprise or sympathy.
The community consistently attacks the wrong end of the problem. If copyright law is not working right, then work to change copyright law. Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or that its working against what one wishes one could get away with is “unfair” while its working in favor of what one supports is simultaneously just fine. There’s no notion of the ends justifying the means under the law, and there shouldn’t be.
The chicanery of the FSF’s conducting a “GPL Enforcement Action” against the iTunes App Store is precisely the kind of self-defeating behavior I’m referring to here. At worst, Apple was a contributor to a case of copyright infringement for which the developer of GNUgo for the iPhone was responsible, and the appropriate remedy would have been to provide Apple with a proper DMCA infringement notification. The outcome would have been the same—the offending app would have been removed from the store—and the self-serving attempt to publicly flay Apple for failing to adhere to a “license” which it never agreed to observe could have been avoided (along with its subsequent likely fallout—according to the lead of the LLVM team at Apple, there’s, quite suddenly, no longer an “internal procedure for assigning copyright to the FSF” at Apple! Go figure, huh?)
Tim and I seem to agree completely on this much, for sure: the free software movement isn’t doing itself any favors by conducting or supporting online attacks against the RIAA. In any event, it seems as if “Operation Payback” has lost interest and is going after Gene Simmons of KISS now. Well, he dared ‘em.
or “The Dawn of the Day of the Living Undead Desktop Platform”
Even in death, life goes on invisibly. (Image courtesy of Sarah Caulfield)
This seems to be the week for either stating that Linux is “dead on the desktop” or for insisting that it’s not. Being a believer, as I am, in the Taoist Theory of Management, I know a good parade when I see one and am therefore impelled to try to get in front of it. (Thom Holwerda over at OSnews, believes it’s moribund, Katherine Noyes at PC World feels it’s not yet “pushing up the daisies”…)
Is the “dream” of Linux of the desktop “dead”?
The Honest Truth
Well, no, not really “dead”: it is, however, most certainly “pining for the fjords”, as it has been for many years. If it ain’t dead, for the vast majority of users of computing devices, it might as well be, and they’d never know the difference. Linux-based desktop OSs—as opposed to use in servers and the like, where they’ve been quite successful—are strictly a niche product, appealing to a small cadre of technology geeks and “free software” fans for the most part.
The market share of Linux in the desktop space seems to be no higher than about 3%, and that figure seems on the generous side. Wikipedia’s article on usage of operating systems given a median share of 1.08% for “mainstream Linux” (i.e. excluding Android)—in a range from a low of 0.53% to a high of 1.57%—versus a median share of 1.40%—based on estimates ranging between 0.99% and 2.38%—for iOS, which runs strictly on mobile devices manufactured by Apple! And OS X, itself rather a niche product, clocks in at a median of 6.82%, with estimates ranging from 5.03% to 11.59%.
In spite of all of this, the main “marketing efforts” (again to be charitable) have been couched in suggestions that “Linux is just as good” as Windows or OS X (and, for many purposes, this turns out not to be quite the case in practice). There’s no recognition that users have an investment in learning to use a system, and to ask that they abandon that investment and undertake a whole new learning curve (especially when there’s no clear advantage to it—”just as good” isn’t a strong selling point) is completely unrealistic. As a result, most efforts at promoting Linux-based desktop system have been most effective at persuading existing users of such systems that they’ve been doing the right thing all along, as opposed to actually gaining new users.
So, What Happened?
Free software partisans routinely blame Microsoft for their own failings: it can’t be that the message is completely off the mark! Microsoft must somehow be clouding people’s minds and keeping them from hearing something which is so logically obvious!
“Free software” started out as a model railroading club at MIT, and in terms of its ability to create appeal among average users, it’s never moved very much beyond that point. But the goal of making Linux a “mainstream” desktop choice has a bigger problem.
The “Desktop” is, for more and more people, becoming less and less relevant in their day-to-day use of computers and associated technologies. People are increasingly more likely—as is already the norm in many places outside of the US and the EU—to surf the web from their phones rather than from a desktop system, and to perform functions that were once squarely within the province of the “desktop” within a browser, “in the cloud”. I’ve said many times that the desktop computer is like a Swiss Army knife: it can be used as a stand-in for a variety of tools, but it’s not a terribly good example of any of them, and that certainly applies here.
And while the Linux kernel may benefit from its inclusion in efforts such as WebOS and (perhaps) Android, that’s not going to help mainstream desktops like GNOME or KDE, much less the GNU Project or the FSF, in the slightest degree. (Ironically, it turns out that the terminology “GNU/Linux” finally has some actual utility, although not at all what the FSF had in mind: rather than distinguishing “GNU/Linux” from “GNU/HURD” or “GNU/something-else“, it’s useful to distinguish “GNU/Linux” from “webOS/Linux” or from “Android/Linux”, which uses a different fork of the Linux kernel entirely.)
The best hope for mainstream community efforts, at this point, is MeeGo, which leverages many community projects, but which is giving every appearance of being deeply in trouble as far as actual phones go. A single OEM, Nokia, is offering a fairly half-hearted level of support on a single device at this point, and the main proponent of the MeeGo platform there has just departed to join competitor (and promoter of the competing WebOS platform) HP. It’s very unclear that MeeGo stands any chance of gaining traction as a consumer mobile platform.
How Did Things Come to This?
There are a lot of reasons for this. The core ones all stem from a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of those who would promote Linux to those not currently using it: hardly anyone selects an operating system based on its price, and even fewer select one based on its “freedom-enhancing qualities”. People want a platform they can use to do the things they want to do, and they’re not willing to spend a bit of extra effort unless there’s some tangible payback to it. Linux-based OSs—even the best of them, like Ubuntu or Linux Mint—don’t provide that so far.
Linux-based OSs are smothered on what remains of the desktop—and that is surely going to be increasingly supplanted by ever-more-capable phones and tablet devices—by Windows and OS X. They’re smothered on phones by Android and iOS; I expect webOS to be taking an increasing chunk of this as well in the coming year or two, thanks to the much-deeper pockets and much-broader product line of HP. On tablets and netbooks, mainstream Linux is going to be facing an uphill battle against not only iOS, webOS, and Android, but Chrome OS as well. “As good as” isn’t going to be nearly “good enough”, I fear.
Mainstream community Linux platforms had their best chance at actual relevance going on four years ago now, with the announcement of the “GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative”, which captured a lot of attention at the point at which it was initially unveiled. Sadly, that was about the last bit of positive and productive work that ever got accomplished there.
For the next two years, the particular GNOME Board member who’d asserted control over the entire project—who will remain nameless here, not to protect the guilty, but since anyone to whom the name would mean anything already knows exactly whom I’m talking about—managed to make himself both a stumbling block in every single critical path, as well as completely inaccessible and unreachable by any normal means.
Various efforts were half-begun and stalled thanks to this individual’s unwillingness to either cede responsibility in some area, or actually do something to move it forward. This went on for two years, with a rising level of frustration and complaints to the GNOME Board. These pleas that something be done went completely unheeded for two years—the Board kept saying that we should “give things a little more time”.
By the time this person was both relieved of responsibility for GNOME Mobile, and also thrown entirely—bodily, as it were—off the Board, it was too late: Android phones were already shipping, rather than a coordinated effort on “GNOME Mobile”, we had MaeMo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and Moblin, all of them going in vaguely different directions, none of them ready for prime time, and none of them “consumer-ready” by the remotest stretch of the imagination.
So, when people say that the dream of Linux on the desktop is dead, they’re just saying that they woke up to the actual reality of the situation: Linux platforms started out as a hobby, and those most involved in their development and direction have—sometime knowingly, more frequently unthinkingly—worked very hard to ensure that they’ll stay that way.
Patents are much in the news lately, between Google and its Android-shipping tributaries being sued by much of the known universe, Apple included, and now, a big judgment against Apple for infringing the patents of David Gelernter (who is also known for having been one of Ted Kaczynski’s victims), $625.5 million. This isn’t quite the largest patent judgment ever—it’s the second-largest this year, and the fourth-largest in history, though.
I got into a discussion of sorts—okay, it was on Twitter, call it a micro-discussion—last night with Adam Banks and Craig Grannell about this, and (I believe) I was able to clear up a few misconceptions about things. This seems like a good opportunity to provide some background, for those who are interested.
David Gelernter is a fairly prolific inventor. He seems to hold some twenty-odd patents, most of which were issued in the mid- to late-90s, all having to do with various aspects of computing and networking. The patents which are at issue are some later ones, however, granted in 2003 and 2004. Specifically, we’re talking about patents 6638313, “Document Stream Operating System” and 6725427, “Document Stream Operating System with Document Organizing and Display Capabilities”. Briefly, Gelernter describes a way of architecting an operating system that is organized around the documents stored on that system, whatever their type, displayed—as described in the patent—in a chronological order, with a specific method described as well for viewing, browsing and searching through them.
There are differences from Cover Play here, but—speaking as one “skilled in the art”—I can certainly see how one might use an alphabetical ordering rather than a chronological one, and only show the “document” immediately before and immediately after the “focus” document, which pretty much gets you from Gelernter’s patents to Cover Flow. “Obvious”, as they say. (I suppose, were I hauled in as an “expert witness” for the plaintiffs, Apple would likely have felt obliged to drag one of their engineers in to swear under oath that it would never have occurred to him, on the basis of Gelernter’s invention, in a million years.)
Now, the history of Cover Flow begins around 2006, when a method of display which they called “FlipTych” was proposed by Andrew Coulter Enright and subsequently implemented by Jonathan del Strother in a shareware application called “Cover Flow”. This application was purchased by Apple in 2007 and incorporated into iTunes and later, into things like the iPhone as well.
Mirror Worlds, Gelernter’s company and the assignee of the patent, brought suit against Apple in 2008. We have no way of knowing precisely what happened between 2006 and 2008, but given the way things work, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the better part of two years could have been burnt up in letters back and forth between Mirror Worlds’ attorneys and Apple Legal, before things got to a point where Mirror Worlds apparently felt it had no recourse but to take Apple to court in 2008.
The broad beams of the events are covered at Bloomberg. Apple is, of course, appealing the verdict on a number of grounds, including “That’s a heckuva lotta money!”, and it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out. For the folks out in free software land who are hoping this might nudge Apple in the direction of becoming patent-unfriendly, I wouldn’t bet on that at all. I’m confident that, overall, Apple is quite happy with the way the patent system works, in spite of its working to their detriment from time to time. Cost of doing business.
This is actually the way things are supposed to work: patents exist to allow inventors to trade disclosing an invention publicly for having a limited monopoly on the invention’s use for a while. A rather similar case—although I don’t think the folks who came up with FlipTych had any particular knowledge of Gelernter’s invention when they came up with the idea—is that of Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, tried to license it to Ford and Chrysler, was rejected, and ultimately found himself obliged to sue both companies when they started installing them in their cars anyway. Kearns’ lawsuit against Ford is the subject of the film Flash of Genius, which is a pretty good movie, and the only one I can actually think of on the subject of patent infringement suits.
In contrast, I can think of two movies about Japanese noodles.
I’ve been waiting to write this post for a couple of months now, and since everything is finally settled (as far as I’m concerned, anyway), it’s past-due time for this update.
First, the facts: on June 30, my then-employer, ACCESS Systems Americas, as a particular result of the lack of uptake on the First ELSE phone as well as a general lack of return on the mobile platform business, decided to stop development of the ACCESS Linux Platform, and laid off 35% of their staff—myself included—as a result.
As required by Japanese securities laws, this “reduction in force” was promptly announced—in a Japanese PDF on the main corporate web site. There has, to date, been no announcement of this in English, nor mention of it on the English-language site, to the best of my knowledge.
Some of my ex-co-workers have, happily, already found themselves new positions. Many are still looking, in a very tough economy, and I wish them the very best of luck, and offer to them any assistance I am in a position to render. I also wish those folks still at ACCESS the best of luck with the initiatives they’re pursuing.
There’s definitely a blog posting to be had in why mainstream open source has been a consistent and habitual failure in the mobile space, and will most likely continue to be so, in spite of some very promising beginnings going back to the “GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative” several years ago, but that’s a subject for another day.
For my part, I’m submitting resumes when I see positions of potential interest (so feel free to let me know if you have one), but—since I’ve got the ability to do so, and I’m at a point where I’d prefer to suffer from my own errors than those of others—I’m chiefly working on a new venture. My company is twostones, and, in addition to some specific development projects, we’ll be offering a variety of strategic and design services, including
I seem to go about ten years a job. Apple was ten years, and an adventure. Palm, PalmSource and ACCESS were about ten years, and an even bigger adventure.
I’m lucky to have a new, and potentially even better adventure placed before me, and I look forward to getting up every morning to work a little more on it. Being interested in things like Japan, social media, videography, “nomadic working”, blogging, writing, web design and such, I’m in a good position to play around with all of those in the course of this venture.
Life’s changing, as it typically does. And change is good.
One of the things I’ve run into occasionally when I’ve been on the road has been wishing I could get hold of some file or other I left at home. I can’t carry everything around with me, even with a terabyte pocket drive (yes, Virginia…)
The Pogoplug
I also frequently need to share large files—video footage-large—with folks at work or with clients, and asymmetrical DSL being what it is, uploading things takes longer than downloading them: if there were a way that these files could be pulled down directly off a server on my home network, where I could upload them directly on my home 802.11n network, that would be a lot faster for everyone involved.
The Pogoplug offers a nice solution to both these issues, and more. The Pogoplug is essentially an ARM-based diskless NAS with a USB hub and an Ethernet port built in, more or less a prettied-up SheevaPlug with Pogoplug’s own software on it.
Setting up the Pogoplug (which comes with absolutely minimal printed instructions, although those turn out to be all that’s needed) is quite simple. The instructions basically direct you to go to my.pogoplug.com, and the web site takes you through the process step-by-step.
You attach the device to an internet-connected Ethernet port, attach a USB drive (or USB stick)—and the Pogoplug fully supports a usefully wide variety of disk formats, including OS X Extended (with journaling)—and plug in the power cable. The web site, using information collected from your http requests, gets into communication with the Pogoplug and configures it. Mine downloaded and installed a firmware update in the course of setting it up. That’s basically all there is to it.
You can access the Pogoplug in two basic ways: either via the web interface at my.pogoplug.com (great for use on the road) or via an application which mounts the Pogoplug’s attached disks on your desktop. There are versions available for OS X, Windows and Linux, and they’re downloadable through the web interface. The desktop application may or may not work while traveling, depending on the vagaries of proxies and firewalls, but the web interface should work from anywhere you can get onto the web. If you have an iPhone or Android device, there are apps for those platforms as well. The iPhone device works fine, which could well come in handy on a future trip; I haven’t tried the Android app so far.
The Pogoplug Web UI
When first set up, or when a new disk is attached, the Pogoplug will automatically generate thumbnails of photos and videos, which initially slows access to the device but allows you to get a better idea of what’s on there once it’s run its course. You can stop the thumbnail generation manually if you prefer not to wait.
A great feature which addresses my “big file upload” problem quite nicely, is the Pogoplug’s “sharing” ability. I can put video footage into a folder on the Pogoplug’s disk and use the web interface to specify—by email address—people whom I want to be able to access it. The Pogoplug generates an email with a URL which will enable them to get at the contents of the folder. Users can either have read-only access to the folder or full read-write access. It’s simple to use, and it seems to work quite well.
With the latest firmware, it’s also possible to upload files to your Pogoplug by attaching them to an email and sending them through the Pogoplug “cloud”. Additionally, the Pogoplug can create slideshows, generate previews of a variety of document types, create RSS feeds of new uploads, and share things directly with Twitter, Facebook and other social media services.
Good points: The utility of the device speaks for itself. This is something that’s immediately and easily addressed two long-standing issues I’ve had.
Beyond that, I’m extremely impressed by the Right Attitude being displayed by the Pogoplug folks. I’m referring to the impressive amount of detailed documentation on how web developers, Linux developers (the device runs a fairly minimal Linux OS), and others can extend the device’s capabilities. In addition, Pogoplugged site—which seems as though it must receive a fair amount of support from the creators of the Pogoplug, CloudEngines, which is a terrific thing—is dedicated to not only supporting the base device for end-users, but for supporting any intrepid developer-types who want to either add functionality to the basic software, or completely replace the platform on the device. This is a terrific resource for those who want to play.
Not-so-good points: The Pogoplug doesn’t seem to do SMB shares, and while it can be accessed from OS X, Windows and Linux desktops, it requires a special application to do so. Nor does it appear to support DLNA, so it won’t show up as a shared library in iTunes.
The speed is okay, but not fabulous. It’s certainly a lot faster than my trying to upload a gigabyte file over the slow side of an ADSL connection.
When things don’t work right—and in my case, the only time where that’s happened turned out to be my own fault, I’d kicked out an Ethernet cable without realizing it—neither the device, nor the desktop app, nor the web interface provides much in the way of diagnostic information. That said, aside from my own pilot error for a couple of hours, the device has worked flawlessly.
The Now-Vanished Apple "Icon Garden" (courtesy maddi)
or Steve Jobs and the Mystery of the Disappearing “Icon Garden”
There’s been a recent pseudo-controversy over the statement made by Steve Jobs at the iPhone 4 introduction during his WWDC keynote this week. Steve said, (as quoted in Wired)
It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels.
Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies took some issue with that, but a good article in Discover Magazine clears things up, so to speak.
But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about the way that Steve hate pixels. He’s hated ‘em ever since he came back to Apple, at least, and possibly longer.
A bit of history: When Apple first built the “Infinite Loop” R&D campus in Cupertino, they cut a deal with the city to create a “park”, with some “art” in it, on the property. What they created was a patch of grass populated by gigantic versions of the standard Mac OS icons, in all their 32 pixel by 32 pixel glory. You can see them pictured above. The tallest was maybe ten feet high.
When Steve became “iCEO” after the hasty departure of the unlamented Gil Amelio, we were in the beta part of the development cycle for Mac OS 8.5. We came into work one day to discover that, where the icon garden had been only a day before, there was now a bare patch of grass, with only a few circles of dirt to show where the icons had once stood. Clarus, the DogCow, “moofed” no more. There was no explanation from management or HR about it.
The persistent rumor was that the icon garden had been removed at Steve’s direct order, but no one was entirely sure what it was about the garden that had bothered Steve.
Someone actually opened a bug against the Mac OS “Icon Manager”, stating, “I installed the latest build of Mac OS 8.5, and when I came into work the following morning, the icon garden had disappeared.” This bug report got passed around and commented on, despite persistent efforts of management up to and including Avie Tevanian (EVP of software) to kill it, by three hundred or more people.
Steve finally fessed up at a comm meeting and admitted that he was the one who’d ordered the icon garden removed. “I hated them!” he said. “They were so pixellated!” He actually offered to sell them to one of the engineers, but the offer was rescinded before we could raise money to follow through on that. Presumably, they’ve either been melted down for scrap, or are residing in some Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse in Cupertino.
At any rate, Steve hates pixels as much as he apparently hates porn. I guess he’s gotta feel as though he’s winning on both fronts there.
