Joel Spolsky - Google+ - Two things about SOPA/PIPA and then I'll shut up :) (1) …
(1) The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.
The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It's time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we've got. Let's force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for:
- Elimination of software patents
- Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits
- Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?
- Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech
- And ponies. We want ponies. We don't have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the "compromise" position.
Mr Spolsky is expressing thoughts that all of us should be thinking. In fact, I've partially expressed some related concepts before. Only, now that they've been expressed, we need to discuss them, modify them as needed, and then implement them. I encourage you to go to his post on GPlus and read the whole thing.
2010-09-10: Searching ...
By now, everyone (except for a few G-paranoids) has tried out Google's new "instant search" feature. My first impression was that it isn't anything new, but then someone reminded me that I'm used to the browser search box in Firefox and Flock, where search suggestions are generated from your default search (and in the case of Flock, other engines in your list) as you type.
This will force competing search providers to do the same, which could wind up placing a heavy load on the back-end servers for bottom-rung competitors like Ask and Cuil. In order to pull instant search off, a provider must (if I understand it correctly) use AJAX/JSON to send keystrokes back to the server, match those keystrokes with patterns stored in the database, and retrieve searches whose patterns were matched, sending the list of searches back to the user quickly enough to offer useful assistance.. I don't see the guy with a server in his garage connected on a DSL line as being able to offer anything like that kind of interactivity.
Now, Microsoft's Bing (and by extension, Yahoo, which gets its results from Bing) can definitely afford the server power to compete. AOL is using Google for much of its back-end processing, so it may also offer similar functionality. But what of Ask, Cuil, Wolfram Alpha, and other small search providers? What of DuckDuckGo, which relies on Yahoo/Bing for much of its resultset?
Actually, I just tested some sites. I went to the following sites and started typing "Dodgers" to see how quickly results came up and whether the results reflected queries someone might make about the team.
| Site Name | Site Results |
| AOL | Very little delay; search queries pretty accurate |
| Ask | Works, but has a visible delay before it starts. By the time it came back with anything related to baseball, I had finished typing the team name. |
| Bing | This engine was late to start with results, but lightning fast with its response. I was almost finished typing "Dodgers", but the baseball-related queries were fully populated before I could finishe the word. |
| Cuil | Cuil does not yet offer a predictive search feature. |
| DuckDuckGo | DDG does not yet offer a predictive search feature, although they have other features to recommend them. I use DDG as my alternate to Google. |
| Quick, relatively accurate dropdown list of search queries | |
| Yahoo | Quick to start filling in, but by the time it realized I mean the baseball team and not the brand of trucks, I was one letter away from finishing the team name. |
| Wolfram Alpha | Alpha does not offer any kind of predictive search, but if you finish the word and hit enter, you see many of the important facts you'd want to know right there on one page. |
All in all, I think predictive search is going to help separate search engines into the big guys and the little guys.
I keep trying Bing, and I'm back with my Google-DuckDuckGo-Yahoo sequence within a day. Actually, I rarely have to go to Yahoo anymore. If bigG doesn't have the answer, DDG has it. If DDG does not have it, the answer is buried several pages down in Yahoo's results or not present at all.
Incidentally, Yahoo's Japanese search company is using Google as its back end.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share
As we watch Yahoo get digested, will someone else rise up to challenge Google? Bing is clearly inferior, even though they have greatly improved since the Live.com days and before.
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2010-01-18: Yahoo Continuing To Surrender Its Assets
VMware's acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It's one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market.
The acquisition shows how VMware is seeking to do more than provide virtualization technology. By packaging Zimbra's popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a more enhanced service, one that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications.
Looking at the behavior of Yahoo!, one can only surmise that someone in company headquarters is wanting to get back at the company for some (real or imagined) slight. First, they took the second-best search engine and agreed to throw it away. They aren't doing so well with their plan of reassuring searchers that their current engine's content is good enough, while still justifying the company's upcoming dependence upon Microsoft's "Bing" search engine for results.
Then, we read that Yahoo is disposing of its offerings. Things like GeoCities (which was like Angelfire or Tripod with bigger traffic, until Y! stopped improving or promoting it), Zimbra (the primary open source competition for Microsoft's Exchange communications server), and Yahoo! Shopping (and the corresponding API that allowed access without going through the site). It is almost as if someone near the top of Yahoo! decided that they could no longer compete successfully, so they are giving up.
Sad, really. Yahoo has long been a user and supporter of open technologies such as FreeBSD, Linux, PHP, and Perl. It is sad when corporate mind rot afflicts such a company. I'd really like to see them recover the "we can do anything" attitude they had several years ago (not the "we're superior to you" attitude that the Y! workers had when I worked downstairs from them in 2004-2006).
Will someone come in and reawaken the Y! spirit? Or will they join a long list of formerly great companies in the dumpster?
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2009-12-08: Truth Will Come Out
With the Climategate scandal and the Econolypse, we now have two major issues in our society where hidden activities were revealed. In the case of the economy, the schemers in the financial industry were surprised when their "sure thing" collapsed, leaving an expensive mess for the rest of us to clean up. The administration (both President Bush's administration and President Obama's administration) acted to protect the banks and insurance companies, which (not coincidentally) helped them avoid the full brunt of the collapse they spawned.
Not that I am claiming administration misconduct. Not at all. The government has relied upon a fairly small and intimate group of financial leaders for much of its economic intelligence for some time. Because those leaders are known and trusted, their advice was solicited--and taken--even as outsiders shown the light on the flawed assumptions and the ethical lapses which may have contributed to the problem. The effect, however, is stil the same. Financial executives avoid prison, some of them even get to keep their bonuses, and you and I will spend the next thirty years paying off the loans (mostly from China) taken out to finance the bailouts.
In the case of the economy, those of us outside of the core financial group know that what those within the group say is unreliable and self-serving. That is, the advisors who are telling the government to prop up badly-managed commercial banks, investment banks, credit card banks, and insurers, happen to be mostly those who currently or recently ran those very companies, and whose actions contributed to the crisis. When everyone else in the country knows or should know that lenders were persuading borrowers to take on more debt than they could handle, the government still believes that the problem was caused by greedy and lazy borrowers!
Similarly, we are being asked to give up the energy use which has lifted us in one hundred and fifty years from dependence upon human and animal labor for almost all of our economic activitiesto much of the world becoming a push-button society. I press a key on the keyboard and a letter appears on the screen. After a few hundred or a few thousand such keypresses, I press another set of keys and the text is submitted to a server. You press a few keys and you can now read what I wrote.
The problem here is that Climategateisn't just some "hacker" breaking into a government site and posting a few e-mail messages. There are around 1,100 e-mails, plus thousands of documents, including computer program source code, apparently taken from some kind of internal investigation or storage. (FOI folder... Freedom Of Information? Maybe these were relevant to one or more FOI requests and were about to be deleted instead?)
Yes, once again, the administration is going to avoid acting on allegations of possible ethics lapses in the pursuit of a goal. This time, the goal is restrictive controls on energy use, particularly on energy uses which emit carbon dioxide, a gas which stimulates plant growth (and enables us to eat when photosynthesis changes CO2 and H2O into sugars). Now, of course, it isn't government wrongdoing so much as it is continuing to rely upon information sources that are and have been believed to be reliable. One of the arguments they use for relying upon the same advisors is published, "peer reviewed" studies, one of the areas that Climategate reveals that leading climate researchers used pressure to prevent publication and funding of contrary research.
Likewise, those who try and understand what CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) is about, who try and understand the science and the evidence behind it, soon start to wonder about the CA part. Yes, the globe is warming. I thank God for this, because I recall reading that the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts were reduced to five grains of corn (maize) per person per day one Winter. Why? The cold Northeast Winter caused their imported Englishcrops to fail, and they hadn't yet fully converted over to domestic (cold-hardy) plants. The warming is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how much warming there is, how much of that warming is due to man's activities, and how much of that "anthropogenic" warming is actually due to carbon dioxide emissions, rather than land-use and other issues.
When people attempted over the past several years to obtain the data used to formulate the presentations of doom and gloom, the "climate science" establishment has dragged its feetand refused to produce it. When the data does finally come out, it very often isn't sufficient to support the pronouncements made from it. For example, one study used tree ring data to show the now-familiar hockey-stick shape. It turned out that there were twelve trees in one area of Siberia that were used in the blade of the stick, and much of the warming was from one tree out of twelve.
Despite questions about things such as whether a "global" temperature model should depend upon trees in every part of the world and whether the enhanced growth rings are truly proxies for temperature (versus, for example, available soil moisture or available sunlight), leading climate researchers built their speculations upon these tree ring studies, and then (according the e-mails in Climategate) altered the results of some studies to hide prior natural climate variations and the recent decoupling of tree ring growth from published measures of temperatures (a decline that had to be hidden, again according to the e-mails in Climategate).
In all these things, we see the government continuing to rely upon information sources now known to be unreliable. Is human activity causing potentially-catastrophic global temperature changes? Well, we do not know that for sure. What we do know is that ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the last ice age ended, and the temperature has been gradually increasing ever since. Not in a smooth line, however, but more of an undulating up-and-down motion, with warm periods tending to get warmer than prior warmer periods and cooler periods also tending to be warmer. We also know that there has been little or no measurable warming since the 2000-2002 period--not that such a short time period indicates the end of the warming--and that there are some troubling issues (nearly all of which bias measurements toward the warm side) with a large number of the measuring stations used in climate studies. (And, of course the unexplained "boost" that the computer programs add to recent temperature measurements and the corresponding "cut" that is applied to older measurements, which often adds up to just about the entire measured increase over the past fifty to one hundred years.)
We also know that there are Viking cemeteries on Greenland which were formerly within thriving farming communities.These are now permafrost areas. This indicates that the Medieval Warming Period (prior to the Little Ice Age) was warmer than today. This natural variation is one reason we should not lose our heads over "climate change". Just a few hundred years ago, it may have been warmer than now, and there is no way to pin that earlier warmth on human CO2 emissions.
Now, the point I am making is not really about the climate, and it is not really about the economy. If you are a thinking person at all, you will soon realize that the global media are leading people around by rings in their noses, and that one should not be foolish enough to believe everything that the mainstream media (MSM) tells you. In other words, this is not news to thinkers.
My point is this: there are a lot of commonly-held beliefs out there, beliefs that are promoted by the media and which are organized by and benefit particular organizations. The truth will come out, and many of us will see the emperor's new clothes are imaginary. Whether that belief is that people only want to use Windows (or that Windows is more-familiar and easier to use than <pick-an-operating-system>) or that the solution to warmer climate is returning us to the age of animal labor (with the attendant starvation and freezing deaths of billions of people), many of us will eventually see through it. We may not be able to overcome the entrenched economic and political interests backing said beliefs, but we will know those beliefs to be false.
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2009-05-23: Browser Monopoly
Google polishes Chrome, Microsoft calls foul | csmonitor.com
Google has done a lot to buff its browser recently. It regularly talks up the program?s speed, helpful updates, and growing developer community. But despite plenty of buzz among early adopters, Chrome holds a measly 1 percent market share.
That statistic could skyrocket if the European Commission has its way. A recent proposal would force Microsoft to include competing Web browsers with every copy of Windows. The EC hopes the additional options would break any potential monopoly that Microsoft could leverage by bundling Windows with its own Internet Explorer, which enjoys more than 90 percent worldwide market share.
Microsoft strongly protests the measure. According to its lawyers, the EC proposal would prevent one potential monopoly by promoting another. This argument ties back into how Google got its billions.
It is a poor argument. Having a monopoly is not illegal, assuming it wasn't obtained through illegal, anti-competitive actions. What is illegal is misusing a monopoly to restrict competition or consumer choice in another area.
In this case, including the browser with the operating system that comes pre-installed on over 90% of desktop computers sold is anti-competitive, because it makes it more difficult for the makers of other browsers to compete. Adding competing browsers breaks the monopoly by creating an oligopoly instead. This is slightly better, as "NotW" said in the comments, but does not solve the market competition and consumer choice problems that are caused when the monopoly-share operating system vendor pre-installs a non-OS application.
"walterbyrd" says in the comments, "Why is it okay for msft to have a monopoly, but a disaster for anybody else to have a monolopy[sic]?" This strikes at the heart of Microsoft's objection. Microsoft's fear is that Chrome (and Firefox) both come with Google search as the default, and this may help their search engine shoot even further ahead of others, making its advertising network stronger than it already is. This neglects the way that every user on every machine gets Windows Live Search as the default now, but its inferior results drive people to pay the neighbor's 13 year-old to switch it to Google. Having a choice of browsers merely means that people won't need to pay for a switch--they can just use a browser that already gives them good results for searching.
I have said it before: Microsoft is a powerful competitor and makes some pretty good (and some pretty bad) software. Their problem is that they fear the competitive market, the level playing field, and they do whatever they can to prevent having to live in that market. Personally, I believe that Microsoft will become smaller, nimbler, and even harder to beat once it sheds its evil monopoly-monster personna and allows its pieces and products to compete openly and without choice-restricting product-tying.
The key is getting the company to drop its anti-competitive and anti-user activities and get back to building software that knocks our socks off. That is the direction that the world is moving toward, so I encourage Microsoft to join the tide of freedom that is moving forward around the world. I encourage the EU to follow NotW's suggestion. Failing that, the top five browsers (as enumerated by NotW) should be pre-packaged with Windows.
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According to a report in the Business Insider, the search scene is showing some unexpected changes.
- Yahoo! up for six consecutive months. The former leader is now carrying about 21% of all US searches.
- Google down half a point to 63% of US searches in December.
- MSN up two-tenths of a point to 8.5% of US searches in December.
No word on whether MSN's numbers include Microsoft-owned Live.com.
Over the past year, a number of people had written Yahoo! off, claiming that the company had no future apart from Microsoft. And yet, those who watch Microsoft are calling for the company to dump its failing search businesses and open source Windows. After pouring billions of dollars into search, tying its market-leading Internet Explorer browser to MSN/Live search, and even paying users to search on their sites, the company is still not even garnering 10% of domestic searches. Yahoo! is getting double that quantity, without the subsidies, the legally-questionable product-tying, or the bribes.
One would have to be a complete moron to believe that merging Microsoft's MSN/Live unit with any part of Yahoo! will result in anything other than complete dominance (possibly over 90% share) for Google. The same incompetents who couldn't make it with the backing of one of the richest companies in the world are supposed to suddenly marry a completely different culture, a completely different set of technologies, and a completely different set of search techniques into their failed company without chasing away the bright minds at Yahoo! that make it what it is? Utter foolishness, I say.
Hat tip: Jim Robertson.
The Federal Government of Germany [has decided] to implement use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). According to the plan, German federal agencies will be able to receive, read, send and edit ODF documents beginning no later than 2010.Germany Joins Growing Ranks of Governments Adopting ODF | Open Document
It is encouraging to see the continued onward march of truly open standards in the face of corporate influence. I am looking forward to seeing renewed proposals to standardize on ODF here in California, in Texas, and other states.
To be sure, some issues remain to be solved. How can the government continue to make use of existing software and processes with the new formats? Which documents presently stored in older formats should be converted to the new formats? How should the conversion be accomplished? And most importantly, which copy (old format or new) is now the legal record?
Truth be told, these same issues were already ahead. Remembering that the market-leading office software changed file formats in the 2007 version, every government agency, world-wide, should be asking these very same questions about now. One does not know how long support for the former formats will be available in the market leader's products. It wasn't too long ago that a "security" update removed support for older versions of those same formats. (Which was a lot of fun for those of us who support users. Suddenly, they had documents/spreadsheets/presentations that they had been using for years, but they could no longer open. After some outcry, the vendor released a fix that rolled back the changes, but we had to manually apply it.)
The point is, government documents are the property of the people. Proprietary formatted documents, even those which are supposedly open (but really proprietary formats in drag) require citizens to purchase the proprietary product or face a loss of fidelity. In some cases, the document may be unreadable without the proprietary vendor's product.
This is why we must continue to work to spread openness throughout government.
Open source, open standards, open government. It just works better.
Tags: ODF, Open Standards, Government
I can now report that Hotmail works with Firefox and Epiphany, but not SeaMonkey, Galeon, Konqueror or Opera. I haven't tested K-Meleon, Safari, Chrome, or Camino.
As an aside, I think there is something in ASP.Net that causes non-standard markup to be emitted. Both CareerBuilder and Monster have problems with users of the standards-compliant Opera browser. Is it intentional, or is it another coding error?
With Internet Explorer continuing to lose market share (currently at 68%), the use of IE-specific extensions can only cause ASP-powered sites (such as the MSN/Live family of sites) to also lose share to their more standards-friendly and multi-browser friendly competitors. This can only be good for the Web, since it reduces the ability of any particular entity to control users' access or experience.
We salute the end of single-browser dominance and continue to announce and proclaim the free and open Web. Openness wins, in the end. We all know it, even in the halls of Redmond and Cupertino. Openness (free / libre and open source software) will be the dominant software development model. Openness (open standards) will be the dominant way to choose file formats and network protocols--and the software that uses them. Openness (user-friendly data-collection, data-retention, data-dissemination, and data-destruction policies) will be the dominant way that government agencies and Web sites operate, as well.
We consider several implications of these results including the lack of perfect compatibility between implementations, the lack of good implementations outside of Windows, and the surprisingly good overall performance of OOXML implementations. The interoperability issues are troubling and suggest the need for improved interoperability testing for document formats. The results also highlight the importance of interoperability for open standards in general. Without interoperability, governments will be locked-in to the dominant implementations for either standard and in the process lose many of the benefits that might accrue from adopting an open standard in the first instance.
I would note that there aren't really many implementations of OOXML yet. Microsoft Office 2007, plus its conversion pack for Office 2003 and earlier are one implementation. WordPerfect would be a separate implementation. AbiWord would be still another implementation, and finally the implementation that Novell brought to OpenOffice.org, which is based on the ODF-OOXML conversion plugin project. While there isn't a list in this study abstract, it would three of the five mentioned are either Microsoft code or performed with Microsoft funding and technical assistance. I would like to see how well AbiWord, WordPerfect, and ThinkFree comply with the standard and how well they interoperate with other implementations including Microsoft's.
On the other hand, ODF implementers are fully aware that they have a long way to go. I personally utilize KOffice and OpenOffice, frequently noticing that they do things differently. I used to use AbiWord, but version 2.4.6 (the one I have) crashes so often that I cannot do any work with it.
The study (or at least the abstract that is available) does emphasize the need to have multiple, interoperable implementations--working code--for any open standard before we can expect many of the benefits of such a standard.
This paper suggests that governments seeking the benefits of open standards need to consider the role of interoperability. Without multiple interoperable implementations, i.e., "running code", users will not gain the advantages of competition and substitutability. To highlight the issues around interoperability, we examined the interoperability issues around ODF and OOXML.
Anyway, it is great to see that the academic world too is starting to take interest in openness--open standards, open source, open access. This is a growing trend that will eventually sweep away corporate-centrism and government cronyism. The days of the corporate-government alliance holding citizens at bay is ending! And while they'll fight like they are facing doom, they will be as happy as can be once there is no more ability to use abusive tactics to lock their hands in our wallets.
2008-11-13: If Your Browser Continues Losing Share, Cheat
After Hotmail upgrade cannot send/reply messages anymore with Firefox
Since Microsoft upgraded their Windows Live Hotmail service last night (30-10-2008) I cannot write new messages or reply to messages. The message body (where I want to write) is greyed out. Restarting did not help. I assume this is a Microsoft problem but I post it here anyway.
It is not plausible that this is anything but intentional. With 1 in 5 users running Firefox (and it would probably be much higher if it weren't for corporations and their reluctance to switch), it is inexcusable not to test with Firefox and to make sure the site works.
I have a Hotmail account. I have had it for years. I kept it during the difficult transition when Hotmail moved from using FreeBSD to using Microsoft Windows servers. I kept it during the dot-bomb crash, when they were cutting size limits and requiring that you log in regularly to keep it active. The company has been known to push users to go with IE, but this goes beyond what I've seen before.
Maybe Microsoft fears that the browser share for IE is about to plummet. Whatever the reason, it is a dirty trick to pull, and one that can only cause their money-losing MSN/Live unit to fall even further behind. I wonder whether we can nominate the MSN/Live unit for a Darwin award?
A loud razz for Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail, which is chasing away its users.
