XFree86 is a client-server windowing/graphics display system. Its confusing as hell, but basically the “client” spits out the windows, and your “server” puts them on screen. Therefore, I can run a program in, say, France (or Freedom, if you wish), and it can display on my laptop in Portland, Maine. Its not incredibly efficient, mind you — it has to actually send all of the “widgets,” i.e. arrows, buttons, etc. over the net, but it is useful because you can run things remotely.

But most people don’t.

I was just saying to, I think, Jeremy, that X really needs some work — a new approach that is more efficient. If its running on the local computer, drop the client-server model. If its not, offload most of the work to the server and have the client just spit out commands like “draw a button here” instead of “draw this button defined by this graphic here.”

Apparently, this debate is happening in the X development community itself! Not along my lines in terms of a better client-server model, but more of a, “get direct rendering to work well, then worry about remote display” model. Developers are choosing sides, and heavyweight player Alan Cox has recently stated that, “X has to evolve, X has to do cool stuff, X has to let people break stuff, X has to delegate trust to driver maintainers far more. To me it doesn’t matter if Keith and friends spin off an ‘Xperimental’ or XFree itself changes, but that change is vital to the future of X11.”

Yesterday Jeremy, Peter, and I went to the alumni ice cream thing put on by FAB. Realizing quickly that we were out of our element, we left and took a stroll in Sacher woods. The area Brandeis owns goes on for quite a bit, walking-wise, and of course it was dark and foggy, so it was a very, very cool walk. Eventually we got back to where we had started, with only a few almost-trips along the way on leftover frost and snow. I would have loved to have had a flashlight.

Tonight, I walked in place, courtesy of the new exercise equipment in Rosenthal North. Far less satisfying. First off, my dumb old iPod died when I hit the play button, despite saying it had a full battery. Second, a girl was in there watching that idiotic Sandra Bullock watch-me-pretend-to-be-clumsy movie, so after 36 minutes (and 1.6 miles) of trying to read my book and block out the noise, it became unbearable and I left. I was hoping for at least some commercial breaks, but no deal, it was a video, i.e. someone actually bought the darn thing. Sigh.

IMDB reveals that the movie was Miss Congeniality. Hardly.

All I can do is sit here and shout obscenities and repeat over and over to myself, “it is not over.” Because the end of the episode was…death, vaporization, a longing shot of a diamond wedding ring in the wreakage, and then a “To Be Continued…” And then a “thanks” from SciFi for four great years. I’m not even going to warn about what I’m about to say next. Thanks? For a novel published without the final chapter? For a play missing the final act? Thanks? Yeah, fuck you SciFi.

I’ve tuned in to Fox and CNN and ABC, and the war seems to fake and contrived…like a garish reality show complete with spinning graphics and brash patriotic tones. War, peace, its all just a made-for-TV pseudo-event occuring in a world without consequences. Then I watched 24, and saw a nuclear bomb explode. Underplayed, grainy, a mushroom cloud from far away. Quiet, final, no closeups of flesh exploding and trees collapsing. Dramatic, sure. Powerful, even. And it seemed so much more real.

What does this say about me? But more importantly, what does this say about us?

I just finished reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and I really enjoyed it. I basically agree with the NY Times review that several of the characters were somewhat underdeveloped, and the novel was a bit slim, but the society it envisions is just amazing to think about.

What we’re looking at is technological change that has brought about the end of scarcity and death, the two things that basically drive our capitalist society. Anything can be made almost instantly at very little cost, and everyone lives forever. We move to a reputation-based economy, where everyone’s wealth is based on their Whuffie score, a measure of the conscious and subconscious feelings of everyone in the world. Since everyone is hardwired into a wearable, no, an implantable, a computer in their brain, they are all interconnected in a massive peer-to-peer network. There are goods and bad to this, as the author Cory Doctorow talks about in this absolutely fascinating O’Reilly interview.

He talks about the book and the future, but mostly about how the ideas of the book are reflections of dot-com ideals and the changing markets of today. One choice quote:

[T]he recording industry has a story of, “We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists.” But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn’t for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn’t have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.

It’s a good read, and goes to my earlier comments about copyright. Doctorow is optimistic, and I am too.

In fact, the whole issue is pretty good. Check it out. (For the registration just put in “justice@brandeis.edu” under returning visitors)

I don’t know what I started with, but somehow in the great dot-com heydey of mid-2000, my stock portfolio was up to $36,000. Wow…the number boggles the mind when compared to where it is now (I hadn’t even looked at it for the last several months): $6,000. That’s 1/6 the 2000 value, for those of you who like numbers.

So much for this whole “college” thing. And Brandeis is raising their tuition again. For shame.

President Bush’s address was detestable because it was filled with lies. I’m not just using rhetoric — he was lying. Specifically, he said that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. With forged documents, overinflated rhetoric, and, lets face it, other and more blatant lies, misrepresentations, and mistakes, the Bush administration has done nothing to support that assertion. Does Saddam have weapons of “mass destruction,” i.e. weapons that can be dispersed over large distances and cause huge, devestating, and lasting effects? Not that I know of.

Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent, and tonight, as we have done before, America and our allies accept that responsibility.

Apparently, despite what the popular movement says, President Bush is acting “in my name.” Can I sue him for libel?

Interviewed about file trading on campus, Rich said that, “one benchmark is whether you can explain why what you are doing is morally right without legalistic obfuscation. I’m afraid Danny is starting to fail that test.”

Here is an interesting Slashdot post with a pretty insightful analysis:

no blood, no foul – by fermion (Score: 4, Insightful)
U.S. Downloaders Do So To Sample Music, And Believe Their Activities Are Benign

I think that is they key statement. In the U.S., most of the time the things we think are wrong are the things that harm the innocent. We have no problem breaking all sorts of laws when we drive, because we do not think it is likely we will do harm to innocent victims. Industry and government knows this which is why they try to show, for example, the damage that drunk driving causes, or link illegal drugs to terrorism. Of course, some of these links are more valid than others, and such ads do backfire when the assertions are bogus.

Which is of course what is going on with the music industry. The industry wants us to believe we are stealing from artist, even though the artists I talk to say most of the money is made off t-shirts and sometimes concerts. They want us to believe we are harming the local retailer, even though the local retailer is harmed more by Wal-Mart and online sales than by copying. They have thus far resisted the urge to tell us that the high level executes are going to forced to sell their Escalades and give up their trophy spouses if we continue to trade music. They might have a better chance by citing the number of people the industry employs, but in a time when unemployment continues to rise with no end in sight, and no leadership to control it, I do not see that even that will get much sympathy.

I legally “obfuscate” because I have been worried about the legal arguments, not the moral ones. I am comfortable running a service that allows people to download “illegal” music if they so choose. I know that what I am doing is not wrong.

Here is what I told the Justice: “Boogle is just a means to an end, everyone has to decide what they consider to be moral and just behavior. I don’t advocate that people steal files, but there is a very broad and fuzzy line between what is fair use, what is good and productive use, and what is potentially harmful or illegal use.”

The story will be published on Tuesday, and if its any good, I’ll link to it.

Farscape’s cancellation comes at a great terrible time in television history. In the UK 50% or more of content on TV is “reality” based, in the US we’re slightly behind but catching up fast. And it makes sense, of course — so-called reality shows are incredibly cheap and quick to produce, bring in potentially huge ratings, and are just as easy to change, kill-off, or re-envision with another twist to keep viewers interested should they start to decline.

This is not sustainable.

I predict right now that within 18 months the television industry will report major losses, reality will be gone, and they’ll be scrambling to fill the gap in sensible, intelligent, well-written programming. Yes, more expensive to produce, yes hard to franchise, yes less certain, but far, far better for all of us.

Also, the Farscape model will catch on. They make it cheap in Australia, SciFi paid for 50% and the rest was paid by Henson and a consortium of others who showed it in Germany, England, and a few other places. TV will become more international, I predict, and we’ll see how that works out.

Of all people, Steve Forbes has weighed in on the side of Eldred:

The Supreme Court recently ruled that congress’ extending copyright protection for yet another 20 years does not violate the Constitution. The extension was pushed primarily by Disney, which didn’t want any of its old Mickey Mouse cartoons entering the public domain. Now artistic works are protected for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years; for companies, 95 years. Maybe Congress should just be done with it and declare that a copyright is forever. Disney, of course, hasn’t hesitated to help itself to characters or works in the public domain, such as Pinocchio, Cinderella and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

The Disney situation is unusual. Only about 2% of copyrighted work between 1923 and 1942 continues to be exploited commercially. Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has proposed a sensible compromise. Borrowing a page from patent law, wherein holders have to pay a fee every few years to keep their patents current, Lessig would apply that principle to copyrights: After a certain number of years, copyright holders would have to pay a nominal amount of money to maintain protection. If the holder didn’t pay the charge for, say, three years, the work would go into the public domain.

Lessig, who has represented clients who tried to overturn the extension, points out that his compromise would still “make available an extraordinary amount of material. If Congress is listening to the frustration that the court’s decision has created, this would be a simple and effective way for the First Branch to respond.” He’s absolutely right.

Honey, guess what I did at work today? I wore a bomb. A nuclear bomb in a field of flowers. I could get lucky…tomorrow, I could have a bigger bomb. I could kill more people. Maybe they’ll be innocent people. Children, maybe.

One more episode, and it is all over. The most thoughtful series on TV. Save Farscape, please.

I haven’t yet gotten a single deal in my Amazon.com Gold Box that I’ve wanted to purchase. Today my number-one item was the “Misto Gourmet Stainless Steel Olive Oil Sprayer” for $17.59.

Huh?

There has been a lot of talk about Apple’s rumored new music service. If anyone can get it right, it’s Apple, but I don’t see how they can do it with the terrible mess that is music rights — you have to get things cleared three times and it is incredibly slow going, meanwhile the pricing models are just silly and not sustainable, and the incredible DRM encumberment makes the services even less desirable.

All that said, BusinessWeek seems to think they can pull it off, and, if BW’s predictions (more like rampant speculation) are true (and they can’t be, can they?), Apple would unveil an amazing music service. We can only wait and see what comes forth from Cuptertino…

Aaron Swartz on his trip to the sunny coast:

Despite getting lost several times on the way to Bab5, not getting anything to eat or drink, being too tired and hungry to keep up conversation, being shyly afraid of all these people I didn’t know, wearing new shoes that don’t really fit quite right, and staying in a dumpy hotel, I’m having the time of my life. I think the lesson here is that pain doesn’t keep action from being uplifting and comfort does little to keep blandness from being depressing.

Or maybe it’s just California.

I went back in the archive to see what my original response was to Sept. 11. Well, the posts from Sept. 1-19 are gone, so either I didn’t post anything (unlikely), or that important span of time was sadly lost in the Great Blog Recovery of 2002. That’s disappointing.

I actually was poking around because I’m trying to decide if I really like this design or not…I think at least the title bar things need to change, because they are too much like Wired News and not enough like a blog.

Update: Apparently there is something very wrong with the script that runs this blog, because the entries are in the database but have not been showing up on the page. I don’t know which upsets me more, that so many of my old entries have been hidden, or that no one noticed. 🙁

Additionally, you can check out the old design (and old entries) at a site I’ve just set up for that purpose.

Tom Tomorrow quotes and comments on Gary Kamiya’s Salon piece. First Gary:

I propose the following axiom: Those who did not believe and publicly state before Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein represented an unacceptable threat to the United States have no credibility when they now argue that he does.

The reasoning behind this axiom is simple: The events of Sept. 11 have no relevance to the threat posed by Iraq, nor has any new information been unearthed since then about Iraqi threats. Therefore, all those who are only now calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq are basing their change of heart purely on an emotional reaction to Sept. 11, not a reasoned analysis of risk factors. This is an argument made in bad faith. For 10 years they were not afraid of Saddam Hussein. What changed their mind? The fiery spectacle of Sept. 11, they claim. Bush has invoked the date repeatedly as he has tried to scare Americans into supporting his war. But try as they might, none of these hawks in or out of the Bush government has been able to prove a connection between Osama bin Laden’s spectacular assaults and the Baghdad regime.

That this obvious point has scarcely been raised indicates the extent to which emotion, not argument, has come to dominate public discussion of this issue. The patriotic intimidation, the groupthink, the shunning and shaming of those who dared to raise unpopular perspectives — these reflexes still govern the national dialogue on Iraq.

Now Tom:

There’s more, and it’s good, so stop whining and go get a day pass.

Of course, if the administration were honest, if they treated us like growups, they’d acknowledge that most of the key players here–Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, et al–actually have been clamoring for a second gulf war since the mid nineties. But then they’d have to admit that this isn’t a response to 9/11, abandon the useful emotional argument. Because arguing that the Saudis are an untrustworthy ally and we really need a more secure foothold in the region to ensure control over certain vital resources of which Iraq has a plentiful supply–well, somehow that sort of strategic geopolitical gamesmanship may not be quite enough to convince Americans to send their loved ones off to kill and die.

Well, my internship at MP3.com has finally ended. Yes folks, its over.

I came to MP3.com nine months ago after having read this great review by Tim O’Reilly. Tim was really impressed with the shop — it was well laid-out, there was great communication, the office was structured like a community, there was leisure and there was work, and everything was written in Perl with MySQL, everything was custom and scalable, and MP3.com’s aim was to be as powerful as possible, adding 10 to 15 little features a day to their system. Beautiful, scalable, open, expressive, and, most importantly, groundbreaking.

Yes, groundbreaking. MP3.com was not working with the simple goal of getting rich (although that was a major motivating factor). No, they wanted to Change The World ™. I mean literally, change the way the world worked with respect to music. Put music everywhere. Lay the pipes and the groundwork so that they could be the water company of music. (Ironic, but more on that later). Yes, MP3.com was to be the pipeworks of music, delivering it on-demand to every part of the networked world. They were visionaries.

They were democratizing music. Allowing anyone to be promoted online, to set up a free site back when it was hard to get free sites, to host their songs and look at play stats and ask for contributions or charge for tracks. Their most wonderful gift was the My.MP3 service, a groundbreaking idea for music delivery. Their thought: buy a copy of every CD, rip it to mp3 format, and put it online. Let anyone, anywhere in the world put the CD they’ve bought into their CD-ROM drive, “beam-it” in seconds to the server, and then instantly be able to stream that music from anywhere to anywhere. This is when broadband was kicking off and spreading, this is when ripping MP3s was still difficult for the consumer. And this was a great service.

Ah, but I wasn’t at MP3.com then. I got there later.

MP3.com was floating on the internet bubble, but their business plan was viable. Like others they had squandered money like it grew on the trees of San Diego. But in the process they had built an infrastructure: one of the best Perl shops around. Case in point, and this isn’t common knowledge: PressPlay, the first of the RIAA’s DRM-encumbered music services, was written by MP3.com engineering staff in two weeks as a proof-of-concept to a few record labels. It was never even meant to be used. And yet it worked so well that tens of thousands of people used it, for a time, until MP3.com marketing dumped it to move on to better things.

Ah yes, marketing. I could have gone to work for the engineers, but I didn’t trust my computer skills yet. I decided to take a middle ground — not the vapid part of the business, and not the hard-core part: I was going to work for Product Development.

Product development — thinking up all those cool things that they think up there. Figuring out how they will work and tie together. Making plans and requirements documents and then getting back a finished product. I was promised that through one summer I would see a project from concept to completion. I was going to help bring about change.

And then I got there.

You see, in mid-2000 MP3.com launched their My.MP3 service, and one week later the RIAA sued them for $67 billion. Yes, billion. And the visionary founder of MP3.com responded:

“The RIAA’s action tells all of these thousands of consumers that they are not entitled to take their music into the digital age,” Robertson said. “Our service is nothing more than a virtual CD player. It is a new and innovative technology that lets people listen to their music. We have every intention of fighting [the RIAA’s] efforts to dictate the way people can use their music.”

New, and innovative, and thus a threat, and thus fodder for the RIAA, and thus subject to a lawsuit that destroyed the company, collapsed it in upon itself. In one move the RIAA had taken the most innovative music company in the world and utterly demolished it. And not long after, Vivendi, the French water company, bought MP3.com’s tattered remains.

When I got to the company Robertson, with all of his vision, had left. The engineering office I toured was teeming with new recruits as MP3.com’s engineering arm was in the process of becoming the one-stop web shop for all of Vivendi/Universal. And the original building, the one in which MP3.com was born, was a wasteland.

The remnants of the dot-com age were still there. Awesome metal cubicle dividers and fish netting, beautiful murals, recording studios, an arcade and lunch room, nice conference areas, Aeron chairs. Beanbags. Lots of beanbags. I sat on a beanbag one day while using my laptop to surf the net wirelessly. The other employees looked at me like I was insane. You can’t sit on beanbags and surf the web when your job is at stake.

The skelatal marketing crew (and product development seemed to basically be the same thing as marketing) was constantly working, typing, meeting. Lots of meetings. More meetings then work, really. And, as a consequence, no one could give me something to do.

They couldn’t even give me a computer.

Eventually I went downstairs and built one myself from spare parts, then had to finagle a monitor out of the equipment guys, then had to get a keyboard and mouse. They didn’t want to give me one of the expensive optical mice — the finance people didn’t like it when they gave those out to anyone but artists.

So I came to work each day, sat at my cube, surfed the net for a while, hoping someone would notice me. Checked out the bulletin boards and saw occasional postings from the engineers. Admired the backend architecture they had built, an easy and functional intranet that I sat around poking through while I waited for something to do.

Eventually I would ask someone for something to do, and would be redirected to someone else or told to come back later. Everyone was always working furiously or rushing off to meetings. Eventually I got a job under Andrew, who wrote the reviews among other things, and I got to write a few reviews. I got a free CD player. My reviews were too long for them, too in-depth, and too negative. They asked me to clean them up.

And then one day Andrew was laid off. And he was gone, his cubicle entry.

Once again I had nothing to do.

Eventually I stopped showing up. No one noticed. For all I know, my cubicle and the computer I built are still sitting there.

And now we get to why I am writing this entry finally, nine months after I began my internship. It is because I found out today that it is over. Over, kaput, kaplooey, ended, done, smack, dab, finished. I am out of MP3.com< Well, not out. I'm sure my ID card still works, and I could go inside any time i wanted. But I'm out of their online world, and thats all that was making my internship continue. No longer to I receive the inevitable weekly emails cancelling the communications meeting -- the time when random people can comment on whats going on with the direction of the company. I don't think they've had one in the entire time I was there. No longer can I check the stats and see how many people are visiting MP3.com, and how much they pay their artists, and how much it costs to run the various things. No longer can I see the crazy spreadsheets comparing the BBC to MP3.com in terms of features and other such marketing nonsense. No longer am I dsilverman@mp3.com And it isn't because anyone cut me off. It isn't because they realized I'm not there anymore. It isn't because someone finally cared enough to do something. It is simply because every few months the system sends you a reminder to change your password, and I got one in November, and I never got around to changing it, and now I'm locked out of the system. Their intranet is called Gotham. I am in it, along with the picture, same as on my ID card, my cubicle is hilighted with a dot on the map of the second floor of SD1. My position is "Non-Employee," their term for contractors and interns. My information is still listed. My account is still there. Twenty years from now all of the staff will have been laid off or fired or will have left or been replaced, and I still will be in Gotham, in that empty and dreary and dark database. The last remaining survivor of that once-wonderful notion that was MP3.com. I survived because I got sick of it, I got up and left, I left before my passion could be destroyed by the wreck of a company I once loved. My profile sits in Gotham, a testamant to what might have been, but now cannot be. It is lonely in here.

Wonderful news. All the nay-sayers were able to get the $50 million initiative down to $37 million, but they weren’t able to stop it from going forward, and now every seventh and eight grader in Maine has a laptop, and the effect has been astounding.

The New York Times article is decidedly upbeat, with one particularily good quote:

“We don’t have a pencil lab or put eight pencils in the middle of the room and have kids take turns using them, Computers are tools, and when every child in every school has one, it levels the playing field.”

So many schools do have “pencil labs”: at Foothill we had 1 or 2 computers per classroom — very useful. Our mobile lab had enough computers such that there was one per two students, and precariously balancing them on tiny desks inevitably led to breakage.

In Maine they told the children to take the computer and make it their own, to respect it and use it and take it home and bring it to school every day like a binder or a notebook. But this is the best notebook these students have ever had — one that is interactive and can access the internet wirelessly and lets you email your assignments to the teacher. Give the kids the tools they need, and the results can be astounding.

A suprisingly good 60 Minutes this week didn’t do any hard-hitting investigation, but had a nice report on Saddam’s finances followed by a fun report on SUVs. Fun, but not necessarily “balanced,” although I don’t know who they could have talked to representing the pro-Hummer crowd. I liked this report in particular because it looked at why people are obsessed with SUVs, instead of just stating that they are. Surpisingly, some of the reason could have to do with terrorism. SUVs make you feel strong, unconquerable, etc. Interesting.

The last report was about IIT Bombay, which they continued to just call “IIT” even though there are several branches…that was a bit confusing. Later they started talking about the rest of the IIT system. Anyway, this report on the India Institute of Technology, which Leslie Stahl compared to “Harvard, Brandeis, and MIT combined,” (no, just kidding, she said Yale), talked about the incredible workload on children hoping to go there and then getting in and then leaving India for more fertile grounds in America. There is a nationwide entrance exam and those who pass get their pictures in the paper.

One guy’s kid couldn’t get into the CS program at IIT, so he went to his backup school — Cornell.

Again I liked this report, because Stahl asked people why they were there and what they wre doing. There were some interesting revelations:

• Everyone who goes to IIT knows that they are the best and were chosen to come, so they work hard — there is no “corruption,” as they called it, no greasing the wheels and no trust fund kids getting into the school. It is all based on the six-hour test that children will study for for 4 hours a day starting at the age of 10.
• Students control a lot, from how the dormitories are run to sports teams to the cafeterias.
• Basic engineering skills are essential and required, liberal arts are ignored.
• Tuition is cheap, only about 1/5 the actual cost of attending — the Indian government picks up the rest.
• Only 3000 people are accepted each year, in a country of 1 billion, so you can bet they better not disappoint.

The one word that describes these people is “driven.” When you know how hard it is to get into school, it becomes a much more precious commodity. Maybe we need more of that here…the difference here is that college is no longer a treasured priesthood, now it is required for everyone. I wouldn’t say that is a bad thing, things just happen differently here, and we don’t necessarily learn all that we should. And on that same note, we aren’t all laser-focused on engineering. There are other things in the world.

All that said, I’m impressed with what they are doing in India.