Marc Canter points out that Laszlo Systems has a new non-commercial license that allows you to develop media-rich apps without a licensing fee.

Once again, Marc. I don't get Laszlo. What am I missing? Instead of direct manipulation of graphical objects to create pleasing interfaces, i get to write XML code (with its extreme overhead burden) to describe how I want the graphical experience to look and feel. And that's a good thing because...???

I don't get it. Does anyone else?

While everyone has been lining up on one side or the other of the argument over whether the EU went too far or not far enough in fining Microsoft for its anti-competitive practices, The Register Online points out a possible huge boon to the Redmond monopolist.

By allowing MS to charge rivals for access to its APIs, the EU may have done more to help the company than hurt it, the article says, citing Samba's Jerry Allison as the source of this insight.

This is a side effect of asking the government -- any government -- to regulate a monopolist who is so out of control and well funded that it can literally oppose anyone it chooses with impunity. But if not the government, then who? The market? That's a joke.

I love it. Marc Canter reports that Brewster Kahle, Internet archivist extraordinaire, has filed suit against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft charging that extensions to copyright law are illegal.

Go get 'em, Brewster!

The Democratic National Committee is running a cartoon ad on the Internet that FactCheck.org says gets some things right, several things wrong, and "fails the logic test."

Frankly, even if only those things that FactCheck.org finds correct are true, there's ample reason here to look forward to Regime Change in America this year.

In this piece on the Guardian Online's blog, Marc Andreessen is quoted as saying that it is a good thing for "third world countries" (isn't there only one world?) to gain technical ascendancy because the interdependence it creates reduces the likelihood of war.

I agree wholeheartedly, though I don't necessarily agree that the current outsourcing stampede is a good example of that truth.

More than 20 years ago, I wrote a piece on what I modestly titled "Project SWEET: Saving the World by Education in Enabling Technologies." My point then was that if the U.S. outsourced the development of software components to countries whose linguistic architecture lends itself well to object thinking, we and they would benefit. A big part of my premise then was that economic interdependence reduces the threat of war. Not a new idea, to be sure, but one I still find fascinating.

Interesting stuff. The Open Voting Consortium (OVC), an open source development project, will demo its verifiable electronic voting system April 1 in Santa Clara, CA. You can run through a demo ballot online. You vote on screen, get a barcode-identified printout which you place in a security envelope, and then you can don a pair of headphones, scan the barcode and listen to an audio replay of your choices for confirmation.

Very cool. I wonder if this would satisfy Dan Gillmor's skepticism about electronic voting. It seems to from here.

The panelists discussing the e-mail meltdown at PC Forum have talked about lots of solutions to the various problems with the medium, notably spam and the overall difficulty of making e-mail work right for all the uses we've created for it.

But there wasn't even a mention of RSS, which could solve many of the problems. Sheesh.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Dan's right. I've been writing about this for some time. RSS with a simple publish-subscribe model would virtually eliminate spam overnight. Some re-education required but if even industry pundits don't get it....

In a story on Newsfactor about potential vulnerability of OS X, one of those "analysts" who is obviously over-paid for very little useful knowledge made a completely stupid remark at Apple Mac security historically.

OS X's Unix underpinnings mean it is "probably far more secure" than earlier Mac OSes, Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg told NewsFactor. "Previous Mac OSes were not overly robust in terms of withstanding attacks. If you tried to attack a system 7 Mac in its heyday, it would probably have crashed before you got into it."

Anyone with a half brain knows that the Classic Mac OS was all but impervious to remote attack and hacking because of its complete lack of a command-line interface. You had to be sitting in front of an old-style Mac to hack it. Tens of thousands of people tried to crack Macs, in an effort to win a number of contests set up to demonstrate the systems' invulnerability. As far as I know, nobody ever succeeded.

Apple may have made a great decision building OS X on BSD but the fact is, a once absolutely secure machine is now vulnerable to many of the same attacks that have plagued Windows over the years. I'm not sure that doesn't qualify as a catastrophic improvement.

No big surprise, really, given the Bush Regime's track record, but Mr. Bush has once again lied about Sen. John Kerry's voting record. This time he's echoing a blatantly false series of statements by his aides that Kerry voted for higher taxes over 350 times in his 20+ years in the Senate.

Closer examination reveals that the vast majority of those votes were for leaving taxes unchanged or for reducing overzealous GOP tax cut proposals, not for higher taxes.

I'm thankful to FactCheck.org for always investigating these kinds of things.

In the March issue of Scientific American, Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin propose a change in the way elections are conducted in multi-party situations. Citing the outcomes of the recent U.S. and French presidential elections as examples where a majority view failed to hold sway, these two researchers say that a system wherein voters rank order their choices rather than vote for only one preference would have resulted in fairer outcomes.

The article contains a good survey of various alternatives to the pure majority rule, which works well only in a two-candidate race. It suggests that rank-order voting in which voters rank their choices stands a better chance of achieving a majority-rule outcome when more than two candidates are in the race. They would modify rank-order voting by declaring that if no one candidate obtains a majority against all opponents, then the one with the highest rank-order score is declared the victor.

The crux of their recommendation is highlighted in their analysis of a Gore-Bush-Nader race. If, they say, every voter ranks the candidates as either Gore-Bush-Nader or Bush-Gore-Nader, voters' views of Nader will not affect whether Bush or Gore wins the rank-order election. But if we add a third rank order of Gore-Nader-Bush, then things are quite different. If 51% rank Bush above Gore above Nader, and 49% rank Gore above Nader above Bush, then Gore will win. But if the second ranking is Gore, Bush, then Nader, Bush wins even though that 49% has the same Gore-Bush ranking in either case. Nader's presence thus tips the election.

I do think that the system of one choice needs to go away. Ireland and Australia already use the rank-order system. If we adopt it, I'd like to see one of the choices be "None of these" so that if that alternative wins, the parties have to go back and pick new candidates, with those in the recently held election perhaps ineligible to be selected or something.

A couple of days ago, my friend and San Jose Mercury-News tech columnist Dan Gillmor wrote another in a long line of anti-Microsoft polemics. His main message was simple: don't expect Microsoft to change voluntarily.

Today, another friend, Microsoft evangelist and A-List Blogger Robert Scoble takes issue with Dan and cites a number of ways and places he says Microsoft has changed and is is changing. Some of what Robert shared was news to me. Much of it I have to take Robert's word for, but I've come to trust Robert over the years (I knew him before he was a blogger, before there were blogs, even).

The thing that concerns me most about Robert's defense is that, just as Dan didn't address any areas where Robert feels Microsoft is making progress in terms of its socio-economic policies, so Robert didn't address the huge and very public areas where it clearly is not. The European Union has found, just as the American government and courts have, that Microsoft is a monopolist. It would be extraordinarily simple for Microsoft to remove that stigma. All it has to do is stop acting and thinking like a monopolist. Its battery of lawyers knows better than any outside agency how and where the company behaves in a monopolistic way. Stop it. Hire an outside organization to help define the 10 or 20 behaviors that are most repugnant to your customers and to the governments that represent them and just pull the plug. You have billions of dollars in reserve. You can re-direct and reshape the company at whatever level is necessary.

So while I appreciate Robert sharing those advances with us (and some of them do seem real, for sure), I suggest that it's a case of far too little, far too late. Major internally motivated change is what's called for here. If that kind of wholesale change isn't forthcoming, Microsoft's shareholders will be hurt in the long run. Gates, Ballmer, et. al need to take a longer view of what's best for their shareholders even if their shareholders scream and yell in the near term.

At least that's how I see it.

Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen provides 12 reasons why Open Source Will Boom. It's as cogent an analysis as you're likely to find. I found his reasoning that Open Source thrives on anti-American attitudes to be particularly appropriate.

(Thanks to Slashdot for the pointage.)

Fourscore and seven years ago, God brought forth on this planet a great man. A wise man. A compassionate man. A spiritual leader and teacher of the first rank. A philanthropist. A man I was greatly privileged to know and to call "Daddy".

William Albert Hunton died two weeks ago today, on March 8, 2004, after a very brief illness. Despite his advanced years, his passing was unexpected. He'd been in the hospital a few days but seemed to have made a full recovery. By all accounts, he spent his final hour singing the songs he loved (which were almost the only things he remembered any more), eating a hearty meal, and flirting with the nurses. Then he lay down and made his transition. What a way to go, Daddy. He left the world like he lived his life: joyously, uncomplainingly, and straight to the point.

Daddy was, for me at least, primarily a teacher. Not just by the wisdom with which he read and explained the Bible that was so near and dear to him as a lifelong leader in the fundamentalist Church of Christ, but by the way he lived his life. :I was continually astonished at the way he was able to mix compassion with a belief system that seemed to me so often to be devoid of that practice. At his funeral, my wife met a woman who said Daddy had literally saved her life. When she was divorced and subsequently excommunicated by the church where Daddy was an elder, he was, she explained earnestly to my wife, the only person who didn't outright condemn and shun her.

He and I had many debates, though not nearly as many as I'd have enjoyed if time and distance hadn't conspired to keep us from spending more time together. He was a staunch supporter of a literal interpretation of the Bible. But he was also willing to listen, to allow that someone who had a different take might have a valid point or two, to be more malleable than most who knew him slightly would have thought possible.

He was a generous man who started life with little and built a personal fortune by hard work and smart choices. He always wanted to give those he loved more than they were necessarily comfortable receiving. That was most true of his lovely wife, Mary Lee, who preceded him into the next life by some eight years. How many delightful gifts he bought her that she would tell him to return because she felt unworthy of their grandeur I'll never know. But it was more than a few.

My wife's sister, Marilyn, and her husband, Wayne Mann, lived on the adjoining property to Daddy's and to them fell the task of caring for him during the last seven or eight years of his life as Alzheimer's slowly robbed his great mind of its wonderful memories. They are an amazing couple who never wavered in their love and devotion. Daddy was lucky to have them. And so were we.

I don't know if a greater tribute can be uttered than for me to say Daddy had a big part in raising the most wonderful and perfect woman I've ever known. I'm glad she found me. And I'm glad that through her I got to know Daddy. I'm a far, far better person for the experience.

"I've published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies. But I've made almost no money and had my heart broken. Here's everything you don't want to know about how publishing really works." [Salon]

This is a great read about a subject with which I'm all too familiar. While I've written non-fiction -- which at least usually has some rationale for why a book will sell or not -- I've still experienced the pain and suffering and joy and anticipation and worry and doubt that the author of this piece has. I've written dozens of books. About five have "earned out" and only one produced a substantial amount of ongoing royalty.

In the computer book publishing industry today, publishers are looking not for writers but for subject-matter experts whose words their poorly paid in-house editors can turn into marginally readable stuff. My current book project -- a 3-volume set on Runtime Revolution -- is a pure labor of love. The software publisher is producing the printed works. But even if every single Rev user in the world bought one -- and they won't, not by a long shot -- I'd never make any real money on the books. I'm writing it for two reasons: (1) writing forces me to learn the product reasonably well while making at least a little money for the learning curve; (2) I want to give something back to the community that supports this tool as well as or better than any commercially supported product.

I frequently get emails from would-be authors asking me for advice. Though the frequency has declined substantially in recent years, I'm amazed these people still find me. I always say the same thing. Don't write unless you can't not.



http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist

Great new piece by FactCheck.org on how to identify lies you get in your email from friends whose political persuasion or religious fanaticism causes them to send you notes that are just not true.

This is one of the best pages I've read in a long time. Direct quotations from the bastion of the Right.

Read 'em and weep. And then vote what your mind tells you.

Sheesh.

(Thanks to Loose Democracy for the pointage.)

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Amen

CrowGirl at Magpiepoints to the rolling dismantlement of baldfaced press spinnage by the Bush Administration, on behalf of the new Medicare law and other matters. Seems some local stations got faked into running phony "news segments" praising the law. The real nonstory, of course, is that TV news has been abasing itself for a long time. Take a local half hour newscast. Subtract out the advertising, the pro forma sports and weather, the now-required promotion of network programs (as news!), and whaddaya got left? Five minutes of actual news, maybe. Substance-wise, it's an itty-bitty fragment of what you get from scanning a newspaper, presented in capsule form. Like a drug.

[Doc Searls]

Yep. "Real" news on TV died an agonizing death years ago when networks decided that next-day interviews with stars of network shows were news when they clearly weren't. I read two newspapers and several newsy Web sites a day and never watch TV news any more. I'm a tiny minority, but it works for me.

Being an informed participant in the democratic process should be worth spending some time and brain cycles, not just sitting dumb and dumfounded in front of a boob toob passively absorbing the crap the networks hand out.

Salon.com's Managing Editor and longtime technology editor/columnist Scott Rosenberg has announced that he is about to take half of a leave of absence to write a new book about programming and writing. I envy him the opportunity. The intersection of these two creative art forms -- software development and writing -- has been the focus of most of my adult life. I will be anxiously awaiting Scott's insights, which are sure to be cogent and well-formed.

In a column where he tips his hand a bit toward what he plans to write, Scott reports on a gathering of seven famous programmers, all of whom were subjects of a fascinating 20-year-old book called Programmers at Work. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from that column:

'[Charles] Simonyi believes the answer is to unshackle the design of software from the details of implementation in code. "There are two meanings to software design," he explained on Tuesday. "One is, designing the artifact we're trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles -- the subject matter expert and the software engineer."

Giving the former group tools to shape software will transform the landscape, according to Simonyi. Otherwise, you're stuck in the unsatisfactory present, where the people who know the most about what the software is supposed to accomplish can't directly shape the software itself: All they can do is "make a humble request to the programmer."

FWIW, I really agree with Simonyi. It's one of the reasons I have been touting and defending the people I call Inventive Users for the past 20 or so years. Subject matter experts, given accessible software shaping tools, can move the marker so much farther down the road toward useful programs than they can when all they can do is go hat in hand to the Priests of the Order of Software.

Rosenberg also quotes virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, whom I interviewed for my book Silicon Visions about 20 years ago: "Making programming fundamentally better might be the single most important challenge we face -- and the most difficult one." Today's software world is simply too "brittle" -- one tiny error and everything grinds to a halt: "We're constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe." Nature and biological systems are much more flexible, adaptable and forgiving, and we should look to them for new answers. "The path forward is being biomimetic."

It's time someone of Rosenberg's intellect and depth and, yes, skepticism, shined a bright light on the social, human, and technical issues of programming and its importance to the future of us all.

Scott Rosenberg at Salon.com has the most cogent assessment I've seen of the recent Spanish elections that ousted a pro-Iraq War regime in favor of a socialist group bent on withdrawal of that support.

Countering the condescending cries of the New York Times' increasingly strident conservative columnists (a phrase that is becoming repetitively redundant in its own right), Rosenberg points out the reality behind the vote and what led to the defeat of the incumbent regime. The lesson, Scott says, is simply, " if you're trying to lead a democracy in a war against terrorists, your first duty is to tell the truth." He wonders aloud whether the White House is listening.

It's a rhetorical question whose answer can be seen in the ludicrously false and misleading anti-Kerry ads the Bush Regime is running these days.