Scheduling Problems

Fellow analyst Stephen O'Grady asks "Why is Scheduling Still So Damn Hard?"

Think about how you schedule meetings with folks outside your own calendar system:
* Step 1: Determine your own availability
* Step 2: Communicate that availability to an external party; typically means cut and pasting or manually writing some openings into an email
* Step 3: If you're lucky, some of these work, and you receive a reply which requires you to create a new calendar entry
* Step 4: If you weren't lucky in Step 3, the available slots didn't work, and the external party has proposed some alternatives so you're back to Step 1. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Certainly one root of the problem is the lack of appropriate protocols and mechanisms to selectively open up our calendars beyond the firewall. Yet just another example of the horrible state of collaboration, Microsoft Office 2003 dinosaur ads notwithstanding. Yes, it would be nice to do the same sort of group scheduling we can do with Outlook/Exchange with folks at other companies--or indeed could do with proprietary office automation products like Data General's CEO, fifteen years ago. Yes, that would be a good start. But we should also set our sights higher because the Outlook way of doing things isn't all that scalable either. The ultimate goal should be to have the system able to make intelligent decisions for us rather than just present us with a bunch of out-of-context data.

The real problem here is that computers are so bloody literal. They can schedule a block of time around already scheduled blocks of time, but that's about it. But scheduling is more complex than that. This isn't new. Consider the following from The Digital Deli, a marvelous look at PC culture circa 1984.

Next [in the list of computer applications to avoid] we come to the computerized electronic calendar. It doesn't let you make dates; you have to make "events." Can you imagine saying, "We fell in love on our first event"?

Worse, it suffers from that picky literal-mindedness of machine-think. For me, as for most folks, time unravels in a drinks-with-Chris-late-next-week sort of way. Electronic calendars are not that loose. To them, "late next week" means nothing. "Noonish" means nothing. They don't know about "happy hours," and they've never even met Chris. But "07-08-83, 6:00 P" they understand. No wonder we don't get along.

The electronic calendar also wants me to tell it just how long the "event" will last. The program divides the day into fifteen-minute blocks and has to know how many of those will be filled by my event with Chris. Now, I usually know roughly (within a half-hour, say) how things will go, but one has to be flexible on this sort of thing. Maybe an old mutual friend stops by the table, or we suddenly decide to go see a movie. Or there's a full moon out and it's a warm night ... You get the idea. Well, in electronic date-books, it's not enough to write "Chris" at 5:00. They want to know where you'll be at 5:15, 5:30, 5:45, 6:00. Sometimes I get the feeling this program was designed by somebody's mother.

I want a way to describe to the computer that I'd prefer to not have three meetings in a row, that I prefer not to have a call at 5pm but I can if there's no other choice, that I've got three hours blocked off for writing but I can take a call during that slot if it's important enough, and so forth. I'm not so naive to believe that we can easily get a computer to actually grok all our preferences and options, but we should at least have such considerations in mind as we tackle the nearer term mechanical problems.

Losing Money on Volume

A few weeks ago I suggested that

at least relative to the Harry Potter books of the world, there's a bit less discounting competition on the Long Tail which should at least partially offset higher costs associated with lower volumes. With purely digital goods, the Long Tail comes even closer to pure gravy.

It turns out that for the blockbuster hits, discounting can hit profitability hard. That's because a "big box" reseller like Best Buy uses hot new DVD releases as loss leaders to bring customers into the store. It may, in fact, sell new DVDs below cost for a time. This practice presumably works out for Best Buy (otherwise one supposes they wouldn't do it) because enough people who come into Best Buy to buy the latest Star Wars DVD also buy another non-sale DVD, a CD, or an ink cartridge. However, in the process, Best Buy pretty much destroys (or at least greatly reduces) the profitability of new blockbuster hits for everyone else in the process. Stores, both online and bricks-and-mortar, that drag less other business along in the wake of the bestseller can end up making relatively little money on their highest volume titles as a result. By contrast, smaller titles may have somewhat higher stocking and inventory costs, but tend not to be exposed to loss leader discount pressures from the big retailers.

Code From Books

Dan Bricklin's latest Software Licensing podcast is with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly media. A chunk of it deals with a topic that was once very relevant to me That's the question of what's allowable use for the code in a programming book.
Tim O'Reilly's short answer on his Web site is this:

You can use and redistribute example code from our books for any non-commercial purpose (and most commercial purposes) as long as you acknowledge their source and authorship. The source of the code should be noted in any documentation as well as in the program code itself (as a comment).

He then goes into a bit more detail. The bottom line is that using the code as part of a larger project is generally OK so long as proper credit is given. Competitive uses-for example, publishing a CD with the code snippets or including them in another book are not. It's got some elements of the original BSD license (with advertising clause) with the important caveat that O'Reilly will frown upon uses that directly undercut the market value of its own (or the author's) products or services.

O'Reilly's position seems quite commonsensical. It also somewhat codifies what's long been common practice. My personal interest is that I once developed and sold a DOS file manager, Directory Freedom, which (to quote the docs):

originally grew out of a variety of programs which owe their "look and feel" to Michael Mefford's DR and CO utilities in PC Magazine Volume 6, #17 and #21. DF was most directly adapted from Peter Esherick's DC (Directory Control) version1.05B. Peter helped get DF started by making the source code for DC available to me and has also shared some fixes which he has made in subsequent revisions of his program.

This type of reuse and adaptation was fairly common on a small scale in the days before today's Open Source hit in a big way. (I'm talking roughly the mid-eighties to mid-nineties here.) Code in magazines like PC Magazine, Dr. Dobbs, and PC Techniques was certainly copyrighted, but it basically existed to sell the magazines, as opposed to being commercial software in its own right. In practice, it was generally assumed by just about everyone that most uses of the code were proper, even if good manners suggested giving credit where credit is due.

One interesting aspect is that this code, while not licensed as Open Source, can in practice be used more flexibly than true Open Source licensed under a "viral" license like the GPL which requires that derivative works be likelwise licensed under the GPL. In fact, my Directory Freedom could not have been a shareware product had the PC Magazine utilities been explicitly under the GPL rather than the implicit loosey-goosey de facto BSDish terms under which they were actually published and used.

NPR On Demand?

Podcasting and related technologies have been called the "End of Radio." I haven't been buying; at least for the most part. Given that podcasts have to be consumed in real time, a person can consume far less audio content than is the case with inherently skimmable written blogs. As a result, I've previously argued that:

as professional broadcasters like the BBC start putting content on the air, (e.g. "In Our Time") many--probably most--people will largely devote their limited audio-listen minutes to professionally-produced broadcasts. Call this podcasting if you like, but it's really just on demand radio as you can record more crudely today with software like Replay Radio.

Conspicuously absent from such on demand radio has been NPR which, like the BBC, would seem to have many programs tailor-made for the purpose-both highly topical and less so. (I'd argue that the current state of the technology in which several manual steps are needed to sync a program, for most people programs that can be listened to a week or a month after broadcast are preferable.)

Well, it looks as if NPR may not be totally clueless after all. It's apparently decided not to renew its contract with Audible, the maker of lame, proprietary audiobooks and the like. (In all fairness, Audible was long about the only game in town.)

As we formulate a more comprehensive strategy, we chose not to renew our agreement with Audible when it recently expired. We are now developing a new strategy for making NPR content downloadable and portable. Once the plan is finalized, we will announce it publicly.

via O'Reilly Radar

Dan Bricklin on Software patents

Dan Bricklin weighs in on software patents in this post.

Dan has some history here. As the creator of VisiCalc, he's previously written about why he didn't patent that software. His latest rejoinder is in reaction to:

Russ Krojec's blog entry "What if VisiCalc was Patented?" Russ argues that since VisiCalc wasn't patented competitors found it "...safer to copy the currently winning formula and avoid having to innovate. In this case, the lack of patents brought innovation to a standstill and we are all running spreadsheet programs that still operate like 25 year old software."

Dan correctly points out that Russ' position just doesn't square with historical facts--and demonstrates thereby the value of having an understanding of history. Back in the DOS days, I clearly remember any number of programs that were perhaps inspired by the spreadsheet metaphor but deliberately took different paths. There's some discussion of different approaches and programs here. A number of the alternatives were more explicitly multi-dimensional or iterative or capable of solving more flexibly-designed equations than conventional spreadsheets, but none were particular successes. Products that were very direct VisiCalc successors (basically Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel) ruled instead, but it wasn't because there weren't alternatives. How come?

One reason that I'm pretty confident in giving is that, as the PC became more widely used outside of hobbyists and specialists, this forced a certain regularization of applications, for lack of a better term. Suddenly, the computer unsavvy needed to use these apps. A whole ecosystem of specialized training classes, books, and support systems sprung up. This tended to marginalize mainstream software that broke with established models. It was hard enough to teach people new command codes (which were highly irregular in the days before Windows), much less radically different mental models for how softrware worked.

Another reason is a bit more philosophical and I'm correspondingly less sure about it. But, perhaps the spreadsheet was just a metaphor and model that really worked and connnected with people--and the alternatives were just more copmplex variations on a theme that generally detracted rather than improved. In fact, most of the "innovation" around spreadsheet replacements has since been replicated in mainstream spreadsheets (e.g. for multi-dimensional, think pivot tables). And a tiny percentage of spreadsheeters use any of these capabilities-at least on a day-in, day-out basis. Furthermore, like word processors, the spreadsheet had a familiar physical analog--the accountant's ruled sheet.

I'm not convinced that software patents are bad in toto, however flawed the current system may be. But to say that more patents would have spurred greater invention in desktop productivity software just doesn't have a historical basis. And, indeed, at least with the reality of today's overly broad patents, it seems likely that just the opposite would have been the case with every remotely-related product litigated.

The Web 2.0 Debate

Overheated blog conversations often get more wrapped up in the terminology than the "thing" itself. I've written about past transgressions like folksonomies. Tim Bray tackles the debate around Web2.0. Spot on. There's meat here but lose the freekin' buzzwords.

The Four Seasons and Generic Luxury

I like reading reading View of the Wing, even if (fortunately from my perspective) I'm not a serious enough road warrior to appreciate or take advantage of a lot of my advice. Sometimes I have to laugh out loud though:

Clearly this is a Four Seasons, but which one? In their zeal to determine what Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom might have looked like if he had had electricity and modern plumbing, Four Seasons has stumbled into the sort of routinized design philosophy embraced by mid-market chains with out the wherewithal to spend tens of millions building a hotel. I can only assume that the Four Seasons interior design team was let go in a corporate downsizing and their last cruel act was to commit the company to a 20 year supply of fake chesterfield TV cabinets fitted with mini-bars.

To the list of really good Four Seasons properties, I'd add The Olympic in Seattle. (Especially nice after a week of climbing or backpacking. The last time I was there, I drove up with this dust-covered rental car. I'm sure it took all the doorman's poise to not back away and avoid messing up his nice uniform.

Risks of Blogging

There's a good interview with Sun's Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies, and Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist (Love that title!). Tim says in response to a question about the risks of blogging:

Yes, there are potential risks. But at the moment, a year into this, I would say that we are seeing almost all reward and no downside, so whatever potential risks there are, none of them have come forth yet. As one of our smart legal staff pointed out when we were starting to work on the policies, if we had come to a lawyer 15 years ago and asked him what he thought about e-mails he would have been horrified at the idea!

Many in the computer industry have been using email for longer than that; when I joined Data General almost 20 years ago, CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office--a minicomputer-based integrated email/word processing/calendaring package) was already an ingrained part of the culture. However, in my previous job in the oil drilling business, there was no email and every memo-which is to say pretty much all written communications--had to be signed off by the appropriate level of authority. So, I certainly agree with the sense of Tim's comments. There's been a lot of loosening up just about everywhere. The convenience of email is too great and it basically doesn't work if it has to always go through channels.

That said, a lot of these discussions take place in the context of the technology industry and the Coasts. This SF Chronicle article, for example, is generally very upbeat--but most of the cases that it discusses are in the Valley where companies are often looser than elsewhere. I'm not about to argue a "blogs are risky" meme, but counsel that the standards of the tech elite don't necessarily applky elsewhere.

The Long Tail For Quants

As regular readers know, I studiously avoid a lot of what I consider to be "blogosphere" hype - including the term blogosphere and such favorites as folksonomies and tags. However, the "Long Tail" remains a particularly powerful concept for me, in part because it ties directly into the business models of the likes of Netflix and Amazon rather than just a generic "linkiness is good." Yes, the partilly ego-boo-driven reviews on IMDB, and Amaon, and Netflix are part of what make the Long Tail possible - as Irving Wlawdawsky-Berger describes in the comments to this post - but it's the sales themselves that are the Long Tail.

That makes data like this which quantizes the Long Tail particularly valuable. Individual data points that are arrived at in indirect ways are always a bit suspect, but there's an increasing body of research that indicates a Long Tail at online retailers like Amazon - in this case meaning titles ranking below the top 100K (or roughly comparable to large brick-and-mortar inventory - of in the vicinity of a quarter to a third of total sales. The latest data corrects earlier figures which indicated a possibly (much) higher number, but even a quarter of Amazon sales is still a substantial number if they can be delivered with modest incremental per-unit cost. (I also suspect that, at least relative to the Harry Potter books of the world, thee's a bit less discounting competition on the Long Tail which should at least partially offset higher costs associated with lower volumes. With purely digital goods, the Long Tail comes even closer to pure gravy.)

10 Years That Changed the World

It's a bit ironic that, these days, Wired remains one of the few magazines that I still receive in dead tree form. I like the mix of story and item content and length. And its sense of style helps keep me from just going online. This month's cover story, 10 Years That Changed the World, is written by Kevin Kelly who helped found Wired and was its first executive editor. It's one of the best single pieces that I've read about the years since Netscape's IPO, in part because Kelly crystallizes certain underpinning concepts and dynamics of the Internet and the Web with considerable clarity.

For example, on the way that the Web turned the creation of content on its head:

Problem was, content was expensive to produce, and 5,000 channels of it would be 5,000 times as costly. No company was rich enough, no industry large enough, to carry off such an enterprise. The great telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital revolution, were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the Net...Netscape's public offering took off, and in a blink a world of DIY possibilities was born. Suddenly it became clear that ordinary people could create material anyone with a connection could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer needed ABC for content. Netscape's stock peaked at $75 on its first day of trading, and the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the start of something new?

And he has some marvelous turns of phrase:

But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible.

For an industry so accustomed to hype that almost every announcement is and was a bew paradigm and a world-changing event, this is why the mainstream Internet and the Web caught many of us unawares. So much seemed impossible. For lack of a better hook, the Netscape IPO was a "Day the Universe Changed" to use the title of James Burke's old BBC series.

Wikipedia Data and Anecdotes

I like both data (that is generalized data from lots of people) and anecdotes (specific data from a few). Her's a bit of both about a topic that I follow with interest-Wikipedia. Why the interest? Well, for one thing, I find it a personally useful resource. For another, I consider it a bit of a bellwether of interactive collaboration.

Here's the home page for the stats. Diving down a bit, it looks like there might be at least some suggestion that the rate of new articles generation is slowing (at least in English) although I'd hesitate to draw any real conclusions before seeing more months of data.

On the anecdotal side, Tim Bray points some of the usual problems:

Dave Winer's right, the Wikipedia's article on RSS is a crock. Dave's gripe is that it's "highly political", mine is that it's just wrong: for example, the introductory bit suggests that full-content feeds are impossible. Also, it's badly-organized. Dave's problem is going to be harder to address because RSS itself is highly political; but at least the political narrative should be coherent. Anyhow, it would be nice if someone level-headed were to take responsibility for it. I currently ride herd on two or three other articles and that's all my Wikipedia cycles. It's not as hard as you might think, and here's why: the kinds of people who want to put stupid, irrelevant, badly-written junk in the Wikipedia in my experience are easily discouraged. Just hang in, keep on fixing things they break and explaining why in a calm tone of voice on the Discussion page, and pretty soon they go away.

I'm not sure I fully share Tim's "it will work out" faith. That said, I think it reinforces the view of Wikipedia as a valuable resource-but not a totally dependable one.

Some More on Digital Archives

Although not directly on the point to the current Internet Archive case, this piecewritten by Adam Mathes, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has some interesting discussion about archiving software programs for preservations purposes--as well as current exemptions to the DMCA that aid in that effort.

In addition to processing issues, this brings up some of the legal issues involved in the collection. The mere act of copying these digital works, especially for the eventual purpose of enabling access on a different hardware platform, should arguably be considered a fair use. However, if these disks have "copy protection" schemes, even outdated ones that can be bypassed, care must be used to make sure the collection does not run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Although recently Archive.org was given an exemption for particularly this reason it presents a considerable barrier and must be dealt with. (1) It may be helpful to amass multiple copies of the works in many formats to further bolster the legal backing to shift and archive the materials.

See also this reference:"Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption To Help Archive Vintage Software." Internet Archive. 2003. February 23, 2004.

The Internet Archive continued

In response to my last post, fellow analyst James Governor speculates that perhaps libraries like the Library of Congress might not be one possible analogy.

If, for purposes of argument, we consider the Internet Archive a library, that could well grant them some exemptions to the rights conferred to content creators by copyright law. Consider this from Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act:

§ 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if—
(1) the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(2) the collections of the library or archives are
(i) open to the public, or
(ii) available not only to researchers affiliated with the library or archives or with the institution of which it is a part, but also to other persons doing research in a specialized field; and
(3) the reproduction or distribution of the work includes a notice of copyright that appears on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section, or includes a legend stating that the work may be protected by copyright if no such notice can be found on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section.

See also here and here for various pointers about copyright law as it applies to libraries. (By the way, nothing in there about the content creator having to give permission or being able to withdraw permission--count another strike against robots.txt having any significance in this case.

However, as with many things digital, I'm still a bit suspicious of physical world analogs. Not just because of the different nature of the media, but also the nature of the institution. We can all agree that the Library of Congress is a Library and that Widener at Harvard is a library and even little Thayer Library in my town of Lancaster is a library. And it's perhaps not too much of a stretch to see the Internet Archive as a form of library. But what if I were to declare my own little web site a library and compile Dilbert cartoons there? (I picked this as an example of content that's posted publicly but only for a limited time.) My guess is that Scott Adams might not approve. Yet, what makes the Internet Archive different in any fundamental way?

Thoughts on The Wayback Machine Kerfuffle

The Internet Archive a.k.a. Wayback Machine is being sued by a firm called Healthcare Advocates for storing copies of old web pages. (See Good Morning Silicon Valley, for example.) These archived pages are causing the company heartburn in a separate trademank dispute so it's unhappy. Further, for some reason, the pages were allegedly stored in spite of being flagged with a "robots.txt" file to not be archived, cached, spidered, etc.

The case has generated the predictable throwing up of hands in disgust throughtout the online world. As Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Paczkowski succinctly puts it: "Uh, you published that information to a public medium ..." Now I'm certainly sympathetic with the Internet Archive here. At some level, the archiving and caching of publicly-displayed web pages seems almost part of the fabric of the Web and the way it works. However, I'm less convinced than some others that this is Much Ado About Nothing. I preface the following comments and observations with a standard "I Am Not a Lawyer"--and would welcome any on point case law that might be relevant here.

I think we can all stipulate that web pages and such are copyrighted material and freely displaying them to the public doesn't reduce or eliminate that copyright in any way.

I do agree with John that the robots.txt angle seems a wit wacky.

Why? The robots.txt protocol is purely advisory. It has no legal bearing whatsoever. "Robots.txt is a voluntary mechanism," said Martijn Koster, a Dutch software engineer and the author of a comprehensive tutorial on the robots.txt convention (robotstxt.org). "It is designed to let Web site owners communicate their wishes to cooperating robots. Robots can ignore robots.txt."

Ignoring robots.txt may be bad manners, but it's hard to see the legal significance. (There are perhaps analogs in physical trespass laws--posting your property and the like--but my understanding is that the details of such as typically goverened by explicit state and local laws.)

However--and here I perhaps stray into less charted territory--what exactly gives the permission to copy and archive web sites anyway? Certainly, there's no explicit permission like a negative robots.txt file that affirmatively gives the right to replicate, store, transmit, archive, etc. web pages. I suppose the theory is that there is some sort of implicit permission based on custom and social contract. Which seems a rather loosey-goosey state of affairs.

I can't think of any really good analogs here. Yes, I can record TV and radio--but only for my personal use. It's quite well established I can't put those recordings on a server for all to access. Usenet postings might be the most analagous situation; they're now archived as Google Groups and in more fragmentary form elsewhere. However, as far as I know, the legal status of Usenet and other types of online postings doesn't have much case law underpinning it. Furthermore, I think one could easily argue that such postings have a more explicit element of transmission of content out into the world--with the full knowledge that said content will be forwarded and stored for at least some interval--than Web pages which reside on a controlled site.

Nor can I see the exemplary historical service that the Internet Archive is providing with its activities having any bearing. "Preservation of the past" may be a social good, but it's got little to do with copyright law. After all, Abandonware has the same legal status as any other warez in the absence of the copyright owner's explicit permission to release it into the wild.

From where I sit, robots.txt certainly seems like a red herring in this case--given the lack of laws compelling its observence. But there's a much larger issue of caching and archive that seems to rest on very sandy foundations.

Podcasting Redux

Podcasting continues to be a beloved trend of the plugged-in elite. I've commented rather dismissively about it before. Since then I've spent more time checking out the various podcasting options--both software and content. Have I revised my opinion? Not really, I still think that there are some fundamental reasons why podcasting won't have the impact of text-based RSS. Which is not to say that podcasting doesn't have merits within a limited scope.

Chris Anderson at The Long Tail gives three reasons why podcasts aren't a big deal (yet).

1. They don't have internal permalinks to section and subjects, so they don't get much link-love.


2. They aren't searchable. How hard would it be for some service to run podcasts through a quick-n-dirty voice recognition program to autogenerate transcripts? They don't need to be exactly right; 80% accurate search is better than the 0% we've got now.


3. They're meant to be consumed linearly, and pretty much at the (agonizingly slow and amateurish) pace they were created. Who, aside from trapped commuters, has time for that?

These comport with my impressions, but it's the linear consumption that's the real killer. David Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 specification, described the web as a "skimming" medium on this Steve Gillmor podcast and you can't really skim audio feeds effectively. As a result, you end up selecting a few favorite programs that you might listen to during audio-friendly periods--which is to say, typically driving in the car. And, guess what, as professional broadcasters like the BBC start putting content on the air, (e.g. "In Our Time") many--probably most--people will largely devote their limited audio-listen minutes to professionally-produced broadcasts. Call this podcasting if you like, but it's really just on demand radio as you can record more crudely today with software like Replay Radio. (By the way, NPR, get with the program!)

So when are podcasts good? I can think of a few things, both based on my personal experiences and things I've read about.

Business uses--for example, a weekly "broadcast" to a sales force. This is sort of a special case of the "content to listen to while commuting/driving.
Certainly, interesting interviews with the sort of specialists which don't make it onto mainstream broadcasts in any depth are interesting. Steve Gillmore and Dan Bricklin's podcasts are good examples of this. Talks at conferences are another good example--as at IT Conversations.

Thus, I certainly don't argue that podcasting is "bad" or useless. I like on demand listening and RSS syndication provides a handy mechanism to more easily (if hardly automagically) get updated audio content from favored sources to my car. But I'll continue to argue that it remains a largely peripheral trend rather than the "end of radio."

A New Age For Movies

Irving Wladawsky-Berger at IBM has recently posted a couple of eloquent blogs about how the Internet has made movie-watching just that much more enjoyable. First of all, there are all of the reviews and the commentary--such as as IMDB. Like Irving, I find Roger Ebert's reviews on target (alomost all the time). In fact, though it would probably horrify many in the "Ivory Tower," I think Roger Ebert may well be one of the best essayists writing today. There's something nice about, not only getting input on which movies to see, but after watching a film that really connected having a virtual "discussion" on various aspects of the film. What did such and such mean? How did other people react? It doesn't even require active participation.

Then there's Irving's discussion about Netflix. Walmart is out of the game as I wrote about earlier. The latest buzz is that, although Amazon has a movie rental business in the UK, they won't be following up with a US version. In any case, Netflix provides a great way to invite almost every available DVD into my house, without fuss and without muss. It's partly about eliminating "stuff" from my things-to-do list. (II'll be posting on Getting Things Done one of these days. Don't worry: I'm not evangelical about it.)

But it's also about being able to easily depart from mass market tastes and indulge an exploration or an oddball interest. It's The Long Tail if you want to be jargonny about it. But it's ultimately "On Demand"--when you want, what you want. (Which, perhaps, is why Irving is so fascainated by it.)

Another Wikipedia Data Point

Although I've picked and probed at Wikipedia here and here, I find it a useful tool. But I think it important to understand its limirtations and boundaries. An interesting post from Nathaniel Ward at Dartmouth in that vein:

While doing research for the upcoming issue of The Review, I proposed to Executive Editor Scott Glabe that Wikipedia, a free communal encyclopedia, is a terrible resource. Since anyone can change any entry, a user cannot know whether the current version is accurate. Scott retorted that the encyclopedia's communal nature meant that all errors would be corrected in minutes.

It turns out I was right: it took almost 24 hours for users to notice and correct a deliberate error that made out Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of the printing press.

Although I have somewhat mixed feelings about Wikipedia "vandalism" even for valid research purposes and calling it a "terrible" resource seems overstatement, the data point still seems valid enough. (The "vandalism" in question inserted a common incorrect answer from The Dartmouth Review's recent poll of Dartmouth students about various Western cultural questions.) The highly democratic Wikipedia community implies both profound strengths and significant weaknesses.

Dartmouth Review 25th

This will be about as far as I get from IT here. But, given that it's the 25th anniversary of The Dartmouth Review, a newspaper I helped found, and that Dartmouth has just had a very significant trustee election, I guess I should say something.

TDR wasn't the first of the alternative right-of-center or libertarian college newspapers of the early eighties, but it became one of the more influential, if not one of the better mannered. I got involved with the founding through a friendship with Greg Fossedal who was the an editor of The Daily Dartmouth, the campus daily. I wrote about it long ago here. The precipitating event was the election of an "unoffical" trustee candidate. It's thus perhaps more than a bit fitting that we've just seen Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson elected as the latest slate of trustee candidates running in opposition to the official ones. (T.J.Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor was elected in opposition to the administration in 2004. It has not been a good couple of years for the official slate.) Their positions haven't been political per se. Rather, they've spoken to directions that Dartmouth should take and principles that Dartmouth should have.

I won't go further into the arcana of Dartmouth governance and policies here. Trustee disputes at Dartmouth go back to the Dartmouth College case, argued by Daniel Webster, and a seminal US Supreme Court case in contract law. Suffice it to say that it's somewhat satisfying to see an institution like TDR still involving students 25 years later. It's never been about shadowy outside funding sources-rather TDR has always been supported primarily by Dartmouth's own alumni-but, rather, about students thinking and writing and questioning conventional wisdom. Which seems for the good. Wah-Hoo-Wah.

New PVR Blog

As some of my readers know, I've been fooling around with building up personal video recorders for quite a while now. In general, I still prefer my TiVo, which just takes less mental energy to use on a day-in, day-out basis than PVR software running on a general purpose computer. However, that said, BeyondTV from Snapstream has matured considerably and is now quite stable and functional. I still don't find it to be the "just works" experience that my TiVo provides but it's a good, if not great, PC-based alternative and is, in any case, the best PC PVR software I've run across.

Snapstream now has a company blog, which is worthwhile viewing if you have an interest in PVRs and, certainly, if you're a Snapstream customer. PVRblog is must reading for more general coverage of the topic.

Now That's An IT Failure!

Not traditional IT to be sure, but an automated system nonetheless--the infamous Denver baggage-handling system. I still remember the first time I travelled through Denver aurport with its new system. You had to find a special line to stand in if you had odd-shaped luggage. Odd-shared luggage like... skis. In Denver. Hmm.

Well, it's no more.

United Airlines has decided to stop using its controversial automated baggage-handling system at Denver International Airport, reverting to a conventional manual system by the end of 2005. The automated system (which began operation in 1995) never lived up to original expectations. It had enormous difficulties in its early days, including construction delays, cost overruns, lost bags, damaged luggage, derailed cars, traffic jams, upgrade problems, political battles, and so on. (For example, see RISKS-17.61 and 18.66). United is apparently obligated to pay $60 million a year for another 25 years under its lease contract with the city of Denver (which owns the airport). However, United expects to save $1 million a month in operating costs by NOT using the automated system. The airport cost $250 million to build (BAE Automated Systems of Dallas, no longer in existence), and the city reportedly put up another $100 million for construction and $341 million to get it to work. [Source: AP item, 7 Jun 2005; PGN-ed] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8135924/

via RISKS Digest

Recovery through genocide?

Good freakin' Lord. Why not just lay everyone off while they're at it? History may or may not show Sun's acquisition of StorageTek to ultimately have been a good move. I think it's potentially a significant win but won't be easy to pull off. (See my comments at IBD and ZDnet. My Illuminata colleagues have also posted in a similar vein.) But, whatever the doubts and concerns about the StorageTek approach, getting rid of all Sun's employees hardly seems a viable recovery strategy either.

"We do question the rationale of a transaction which reduces Sun's cash hoard by 40 percent, and does nothing to re-ignite revenue growth or profitability," Steven Fortuna, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group, said in a research note. "We would rather have seen the company buy back a billion shares and fire 10,000 people."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/02/ap/business/mainD8AFO1JO0.shtml

Taking Notes

Not to, in any way, equate myself with Fischer Black (of Black-Scholes option pricing fame), but I was struck by a recent posting in Marginal Revolution about how he took notes:

He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative emmory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the data base that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips to paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion, and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly. While he was on the phone, he was typing. While he was talking to you in person, he was typing.

I'm not quite back at the ThinkTank stage--even if I remember the program (a "terminate and stay resident (TSR) outliner that essentially simulated multi-tasking in a single-tasking world)--although my sometimes preference for text editors over Mind maps may seem in a similar vein. However, such assidious notetaking does reflect how many of us work as we transition to a world in which our role is increasingly to synthesize vast amounts of data. It's really handy to have this sort of external memory in accessible and searchable form.

When I started as an analyst, I took old-fashioned longhand notes. I'm an enthusiastic convert to the electronic sort. t's just so handy during a briefing to pull up the notes from a peior meeting and ask: "So, when we last met, you said that XYZ was going to be the next big thing. Whatever became of that?" :-)

Convergence

The term "convergence" may be passe these days, but the question of which devices will fold into other devices is still of immense interest to a lot of people. Especially because it's all more than a little bit mysterious. I suspect that's in no small part because the (in many cases) engineers trying to figure all this stuff out are being entirely too rational about it. They tend to ignore style and fashion, which aren't exactly rational after all.

Let's look at a concrete example. Why haven't MP3 players folded into cell phones in a bigger way. After all, cell phones are ubiquitous and you don't need more than a bit more memory and another chip or two to make them do double duty as an MP3 player. Sure, there are some business issues--the carriers subsidize cell phones and aren't going to be exactly thrilled about subsidizing other types of gear that doesn't bring them services revenue. And some practical ones--does everyone want to drain their phone's batteries playing songs?

But we're heading down the rational path. I was informed by a college freshman of some much more fundamental reasons this past weekend: iPods are cool and small cell phones are cool. The mathematical corollary, I suppose, is that big cell phones playing MP3s are decidedly not.

Q.E.D.

Folksonomies?

John Dvorak's been writing about computers since the early days of PCs. Does he like to be controversial? Sure. That's his thing. And is he sometimes WAY off base? That too. But that more or less comes with the territory when you've been writing for a long time about a wide span of topics--at least some of which you aren't exactly an expert in.

Dvorak's been heating up the Linux zealots of late with his reportage of the PJ-O'Gara tiff. Seems pretty accurate, if a bit over the top. However, it's his latest critique of "tags" that really caught my eye. With all due respect to all the fans of high-tech "blogosphere" linkages, but John nails the hype.

The "folksonomy" notion is the bloggers' last hope of invention, although it's a rewrite of the prebubble "semantic Web" technology at best. And it too is doomed to failure. The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, übertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular. Then would come the tags about "Online Casino!" One site promoting folksonomies is the darling of the bloggers: Flickr.com—an excellent photo-sharing site where being in perpetual beta is a marketing tool.

Interestingly, the ever-insightful Clay Shirky seems to at least sort of endorse the idea of tags in a recent post although he has skewered the "semantic web" in the past. I suspect that there's a bit of a definitional issue going on here. But that's the problem isn't it? When tags become both everything and essentially nothing (i.e. keywords), they lose much of their significance.

My current feeling is that extensive linking and the fact that digital documents have no need for a single physical place means that keywords are preferable to rigid hierarchies. But to extrapolate from there to deep physical meaning for those keywords across individuals and communities seems a bit much. Keywords (or tags if you prefer) yes. Folksonomies, no.

BBS Documentary

For the young 'uns that's Bulletin Board Systems.

Before the Internet was democratized, there were BBS's. At their largest, they were big multi-line operations. My service of choice was Channel 1 Communications in Cambridge, MA. Communications software like Telix and off-line new readers like Qmail let people snarf the contents of various discussion forums onto their PCs. After all, telephone rates were higher back then. BBS's were also where Freeware, Shareware, and less savory files and programs were exchanged. (Mostly legal in the case of the big operations, less so in the case of smaller and shadier ones.

Compared to today's Internet, BBS's could be much more intimate and could even be the hub of a sort of local community given that the reality of phone costs tended to keep a lot of the membership relatively local. (The larger BBS's also participated in various networks of discussion boards but they also had non-networked boards strictly for the "locals"--i.e. those who dialed in directly.)

There's now a documentary out about those days. I haven't seen it and haven't heard any reports, but if it's any good could be quite the nostalgia trip for some of us. I've thought of doing a book on some of the social communications history of the computer age but I haven't made any real progress on doing so.