Re: Entelligence: Have we demonized DRM?

In response to:
Entelligence: Have we demonized DRM?

New business models that couldn't exist otherwise? If a business model has to assume that every customer is a potential criminal that cannot be trusted in order to get the executives to sign off on it, maybe that business model has no business existing, or maybe those people in suits need to move on and understand that business models that strive to redefine reality always fail in the long term.

My problem with DRM is not so much the restrictions on content that demand that I pay for it. I understand people want to be compensated for their work, and I do so whenever possible but it is simply the right thing to do and often (but not always) the easiest thing to do. However all these restrictions come with bad side effects, like invasion of privacy, elimination of choice, and eventual forced obsolescence.

Engadget sits at an interesting crossroads. A blog that promotes technology that is owned by a content company (Time Warner) that is trying to figure out how it will exist in this new networked world.

My advice is don't treat customers like criminals, make your content easy to get to in as many ways and places as possible, realise the new opportunities technology can provide, and don't whine about the bonanzas of the old way which the new reality just can no longer support. Yes, for people with MBAs this can be damn scary, but business is about risk and reward, so start thinking harder and take some chances.

Health care letter to Lieberman, Dodd, and Murphy

I am writing because I feel a public option is an essential part of the current effort to draft health care reform legislation, and as my representative, I ask that you work to be sure a bill that includes this becomes law.

Some background. I am a self-employed computer programmer. When I was looking for an individual health policy, my applications to several companies were all rejected due to "build", or a nice way of saying I weigh too much for them to want to do business with me. I then found that Connecticut has a health reinsurance risk pool I could join to get coverage. Its expensive coverage with a large deductible. I hope it will be there for me should there be a large emergency, but in terms of preventative care, it doesn't do much. My biggest issue though is that in my situation I have no other choices.

The plan is operated by United Healthcare, and in many ways resembles the sort of "alternatives" that are being floated to a public option. If I want any health insurance, I have no choice but to pay high premiums for low service to a company that uses some of my money to work against my own best interest. I hate that in order to be protected in case of an emergency, I am funding lobbyists, lawyers, and executives that manipulate government to be sure I cannot get anything better. To add insult to injury, the state sponsors this privatized plan, directing money to a company that is working against the interests of the state’s citizens. I worry some of the proposed alternatives for the federal health care bill will do just that, but on an even larger scale, being essentially a "gift" to those that continue to manipulate the system, making any chance for real change that much harder.

I want a way I can opt-out of the current system and get health insurance without paying for lobbyists or executives that work against me getting the best care I can. I understand a public option isn't free. I make good money, so I wouldn't be surprised to pay more than others that cannot afford as much. What I want is a choice that gives me a voice as an individual. With government I have a voice and I have a vote. That I am writing this letter exemplifies that.

Lets start to turn back the sham of privatization that forces people to be invested against their own best interests and is leading this country on a race to the bottom. Health care is just one area where this needs to happen, and its a big first step to realigning power back to individuals. This country is greatest when individuals can shape the system according to their own best interests, and the so called conservative forces that purport to do that have sold us a false bill of goods in unethical, established corporate systems we cannot escape or effect. It is up to our representatives to give choice and power back to the individuals of this nation when the systems that have propped themselves up artificially have failed us.

Please vote for and support a health care reform bill that includes a public option.

Which laptop?

My iMac at home is over 3 years old now. The Applecare is up and most importantly, it is maxed out at 2gb of RAM. While I don't do anything too processor intensive, I do keep lots of apps open to do my work, and this quickly eats up all the memory. If I want to run Vmware to test something in Windows, then everything comes to a crawl, or I have to quit several apps. Plus, I would like to get a laptop so I have some flexibility about where I do my work.

I do have an Acer Aspire One netbook, and its great, I am using it right now, but with its 1gb of memory and small screen its not great for working on for long periods, or on anything too complicated.

Apple's MacBook Pros are beautiful. I could easily transition all my stuff from my current Mac over to one of those and be up and running smoothly. However they are very pricey. The reality is, if you consider inflation, the cost of Mac laptops is about half what it was 6-7 years ago, but the cost of laptops in general is about a quarter of what is was. Although pricey, I know I'll get at least 3 good years out of a Mac. With a PC, for less money, I can get a lot more power and features, but the battery life, size, weight, and build quality won't be there. From all I have looked around, the price difference between eqivalent or better PC laptops (save the above issues) is $500 to over $1000 over a similar Mac. This is especially apparent with Sony's new FW series which seriously beats out the 17" MacBook Pro for around $1500 compared to $2300 or more.

So my Mac still would work great for non-work stuff, where it has what is still reasonably good graphics and processor. For work, what I need most is memory, to keep a lot of stuff running at once, and to get PC with 4GB is a pretty easy to find. So I'm also looking at the Acer Timeline laptops. They go for around $600-$700 and are about the same dimensions as the MacBook Air, but with less of a processor, and up to 8 hours battery life. One of those would be great for portability, and on the wallet, but I probably would want to upgrade it sooner, but at that price I could buy one a year for 3 years and end up spending about the same as I would on a Mac. Running Linux, it could handle all I need for work quite nicely.

So I keep putting off getting anything while I think this over. If only Apple would lower their prices in some serious way. I love Macs, but they have become more fashion than technology, and the pricing proves it.

Social CPAN : Finding the best and most popular modules

CPAN should be a popularity contest. Why? There is tons of great stuff on CPAN, but knowing what is considered the best, most used, most stable, most loved, can be hard. Lots of people use search.cpan.org, but there needs to be better easier ways to capture their knowledge for the benefit of others.

There is a rating and reviews system, but most stuff has no rating or reviews, and you can't sort the results by ratings (as far as I can tell). Also the ratings interface isn't available from the pod doc pages of modules, only from the main page for the distribution, which is looked at less often. The review information for the distribution should be accessible in the right hand bar of all modules in the distribution.

But to get good data on usage and quality quickly, there should be more than that. What if you could create a user account on a cpan frontend website. You could use it to:

• Star distributions as favorites
• Get a homepage listing your starred modules and any news relating to them
• Quickly give a star rating and/or review to a distribution
• Get popularity ratings on distribution based on other user's stars and ranks
• See popularity based on the number of other distributions that depend on a particular distribution
• Include any of the above in searches
• Use a command line tool to submit information about what modules you're using in a given project
• Usual social network stuff, like linking to friends and professional contacts.
• Relate your account to accounts on other perl sites, like this one, so people can find you in all the different corners of the perl universe.

The distro level tools should always be available on module pages, in some mini form in the right hand nav, since those are the pages people are really looking at when they come to CPAN.

There has been a lot of talk about getting some "buzz" going about Perl, and this sort of thing just might help. CPAN is a great resource, but it can be a bit hard to deal with its breadth. I think a lot of great things have been done around annotating things on CPAN so far, and something like the above would just make it better, and help bring it all together, and maybe get some of those tools used a little more.

Posted to: PerlMonks

blogging and toys

Ok, so I am pretty bad about blogging. I do have enough to do, and there is already so much noise on the internet. I do sit in front of computers a lot and I would like to have a little more of that time go into creating instead of consuming.

Speaking of consuming, it seems the last time I tried this I had gotten a new toy, an OLPC. The shine on it kind of wore off, with the kinda odd sugar interface, difficulty in running "real" software, its odd screen, and not so easy to type on keyboard. Still I think its a great project and a bit of a collectors item. What the OLPC did do very well is show that bigger isn't always better. There is a place for smaller, not as fast, not as expensive computers, to fill in those spaces where the big stuff just doesn't fit well.

So that's why I just got an netbook, the Acer Aspire One. Small, under 3lbs, its a go anywhere, easy to whip out and do something useful on sort of machine. The keyboard on it is great, which is all important for actually creating things. And when it comes to consuming it does well too, with a nice high res screen that is good for reading web sites and technical docs on, and it can play back Internet video decently enough. I've gotten a lot of comments on it from "Is that a DVD player?" to "My laptop is too big for me and I'd like something small".

So Apple says these netbooks are a bit of a fad. Well knowing how they are all about changing the playing field, they probably are right. They are just a scaling down of regular old laptops. I think something in this form factor will come along that is revolutionary. Something with a touch screen and great voice recognition and a display that is even more comfortable to read (something reflective instead of light emitting maybe). Apple had this great knowledge navigator video from back in the 90s, and I keep hoping they start actually making one soon.

So new toys have gotten be writing again for a bit. Let's see how long it lasts.

MS to Yahoo, I'm With Stupid

Remember when Yahoo was the internet darling, the site everyone made their home page, what everyone used for their search engine, the directory your site just had to be in? The gay 90's. Its amazing to think its been about 10 years since all the cool kids started talking about Google. Back then search engines changed like fashion, Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista, then Yahoo again.

Yes, Yahoo again. Yahoo pioneered web search, then fell out of favor, and brought itself back with internet apps. Web mail, calendars, photos, profiles, messaging, home pages, news, on and on. These apps sprang up in a world before Flash applications, AJAX, and broadband connections. They had no choice but to keep things simple, to let the web be what it is best, textual.

In this early web all you have is the technology itself, no matter how limited. Slickness and big fancy images and crazy interfaces won't help you because they will take too long to load for anyone to care. The same goes for advertising. Ironically the limits of the technology forced Yahoo into good, clean, simple design people liked.

Forward to today, and everyone is afraid is Google. Google I think succeeds not because of what they do, but what they don't do. They set out to rethink corporate culture and assumptions to center around technology and turn that technology into business, instead of going about it the other way around like everyone else.

The Google apps of today look kind of like the Yahoo apps of 5 to 10 years ago, simple, text based, and uncluttered with unobtrusive advertising. They are not lacking for client side technologies, as they often represent the state of the art for use of Javascipt and Flash. But they don't have slick glossy design or in your face advertising. Even with all of the latest tech, the keep to the mantra "Keep it simple stupid".

Now look at Microsoft. They are dying to be Google, to have that following, that level of usage, but they go about it by being more of a yahoo than Yahoo. MS web apps are the opposite of Google. Showy, large, and impressive, this also tends to make them cumbersome, so that wow factor wears off fast. They are often more concerned with making deals and being able to market their technology than the usefulness of the technology itself.

So now Yahoo will be Microsoft, and will it matter? "Keep it simple stupid" means if you don't, you are stupid. It will simply be a bigger company making more of what people don't want. It might be able to make more and bigger board room deals, which may be bad for competition at least in theory, but in reality, they will continue to make products people just don't want. Unless they can figure out an other way to coerce and lock us in like they did with Windows, the new MS-Yahoo will go nowhere.

The purchase price of Yahoo is so high, an MS is so determined to have them, this just may well be MS building their own coffin. Regardless of what missteps it has taken, MS has always been so flush with cash that it could weather any storm, taking multiple versions to finally get something right, only to screw it up again. Buying Yahoo squanders that safety net, and without a net, Microsoft is much more likely not to survive a fall.

Dangers of Remote Scripting

Came across this article recently: Dangers of Remote Scripting

This does raise an interesting problem that is hard to solve. Partnerships that involve running remote javascript are an important part of a lot of web sites. Its a powerful technology, allowing richer ads, content syndication, and outsourcing of page components, so business logic in javascript isn’t going to go away. It does increase your attack surface because a compromise of any of your partners can effect your site, as it did here.

You can’t really do any sort of validation in javascript, because the logic to do so would be out in the open and easily faked. I think a hybrid approach might be the best solution. Have your server do a “secret handshake” with the partner every so often, and if it fails then don’t display the script tag for their service. The handshake could go as far a cryptographic signing system that requires active support on the partner’s server, or it could be a passive system that checks for the existence of certain hidden urls and that the whois information hasn’t changed.

Any other ideas?