Thursday, July 25, 2002
Gummint
At a panel on government. Phillip J. Windley, the blogger and CIO of Utah, is up on stage, with a bunch of other folks, including Miguel De Icaza, who is interpreting for Edgar Villanueva, the Peruvian government IT guy who is leading a variety of battles there.
Windley just talked about the power of lobbyists, which serve an educational role — meaning that lobbyists are the sole sources of all kinds of information. He insisted that companies hire lobbyists and put them to work, and that we get in the faces of legislator, or we'll "lose every argument" by default.
Spreading the blove
My friend Jon needs a blog. Maybe he'll have one in time to join Buzz and David at PopTech, which I'll miss. Bastards.
Dysnia
In his keynote Larry Lessig talked about how the insanely litigious and rights-obsessed world of Hollywood — where a huge percentage of the cost of making anything is "clearing" rights for all kinds of wacky things, most of which have their own costs — was until recently entirely contained inside The Industry's own strange reality distortion field. The Net, and pretty much everything else, was blessedly free of it.
Larry went on to say that the Hollywood world view — one which gives maximum employment to intellectual property, patent and trial lawyers, and presumes an ideal reality that is hyper-regulated and the exact opposite of the pragmatic libertarianism on which the U.S. was founded — controls the lawmaking and regulatory conversation in Washington right now. We may joke about Michael Eisner, Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenti; but they won with the DMCA, they won with the CARP/LOC process, and they're going to win a lot more fights going forward because they have no real opposition in the trenches.
We're suffering from creeping Disneyism: Dysnia.
Listening to Carl Malamud talk (below) brought that fact home in a huge way. Whoa.
So I have a job to do, on top of my day (and night) job. It's with AOTC and GeekPAC. And I need your help too. More about that later.
Meanwhile, dig Donna Wentworth's Copyfight, on Corante. Lots of breaking news there.
Set top hell
Carl Malamud of Mappa Mundi is giving a session on NetTopBoxes (here's a link). I had no idea what a patent hell this zone is. He paints a bleak picture. GemStar, for example, is best nown for the VHS+ codes you see in TV Guide. They are pernicious. Their whole existence (see the news on their home page) is in the legal dimension. They have 800+ patents. They have a patent on Grid, and on touching a box to make a channel change. They sue every potential customer, including the biggest media distributors (satellite, cable, whatever) you can name. They get 85% of ad revenues in some situations. He goes on:
Forrester sees a $5-10 billion business in ITV/IPG/EPG for streaming media. Controlling media through more and more "intelligent: boxes. "You don;t need to worry about those pesky user interface issues since professionals have that under control.
"DRM is a serious issue, but a corollar is you already hve too much media to sort through. We ingest media based on recommendations from people: mavens, critics friends. You'll never get that kind of multimedia, realtime IM-aware guidance from corporate America."
About universal remotes, he suggests IR hacks. Erroneously says "every PC has an IRDA port on the back." Mine does, but it's a year old. The new version of the same laptop doesn't have it. Not enough people use them. Bluetooth is the hip new low-range file transfer system. Rendezvous will be even more cool, once it happens. One-liner:
"I just want an old laptop running Linux next to my TV, taking care of business."
He sugggests visiting RemoteCentral.com.
Best remote: Harmony.
Rewriting code: The problem is legal, not technical. He outlines four attitudes toward GemStar, which owns the patent minefield. Horrible that he even needs to think about this shit at all.
Where they're heading:
Legal fight is important, but we prefer writing code you can parse and compile.
Action links:
Spacemapper mailing list: smacemapper-requestATmappa.mundi.net
ScheduleScarfing: epg-requestATmappa.mundi.net
General NetTopBox discussion: nettopbox-requestATmappa.mundi.net
I left the @ symbols out of those so they don't get harvested by spammers. Sucks, but that's life in the sluice.
One more: Invisible.net and .org is a public trust.
Coincidence: just got an email from Don Norman pointing me to this piece by David Pogue in the NY Times.
(Way) out to lunch
Sitting with Greg Elin, Steve Mallet, Mathew Langham, Jeremie Miller, maddog and others... Here's a photo of Piers Harding's hands removing Jeremie's head in front of a startled Greg Elin:
Steve is doing major Geekchalking on everybody. He just did me and maddog.
Now I'm at an OS X open source session, sitting with Dan, who just introduced me to Blogapp.
First blog: "Where's Bernie?"
Worldcom (yes, that Worldcom) has an article about blogging. Thanks to Blogroots for the link.
Attention Deficit Theater
Sitting in the back of a lecture room, half-listening to Larry Rosen talk about licensing, and getting a terrific live education in way cool stuff (like recording conversations directly on the laptop through its microphone -- using it like an unseen tape recorder... sneaky) from Leonard Lin, who knows major shit. I just learned how to do IRC from inside Mozilla. Way cool. There's an IRC channel happening here at OSCon.
Here some of are Leonard's notes about the conference, with links to his own MP3 recordings.
Larry Rosen knows more about software licenses than just about anybody. Very interesting talk, but the subject makes me sleepy, even though I actually got some rest last night (superslow bandwith removed my main late night distraction).
Unrelated: about 4/5 of the laptops here are Apples.
People are still talking about Larry Lessig's keynote. Here are Aaron Swartz' realtime notes.
Bummer: Dave won't be here tomorrow. A lot of people have been hoping both ways about that: we really want him here, but we also really want him to be healthy. We'll miss him, though. And it's an excuse to leave early. Since I need to drive back to Santa Barbara through San Diego, Orange County and L.A. traffic...
The Slashdot guys are up now. They get 500 stories submitted a day.
Loose lips
Unclassified overheard dialog at OSCon:
He's like the electic eye in a toilet... he only notices when you leave.
I hate a wet handshake. It's worse than a wet doorknob.
For the sake of consistency, I suggest we all use the middle initial "H."
I'm feeling unlucky
I'm #2 to the Department of Commerce again.
Beebchalking
Matt Jones' warchalking has made The News on the BBC (RealMedia).
And here at OSCon, D.J. Adams and Piers Harding are walking around with warchalk t-shirts. Kinda like these kids are wearing here. I want one.
Wonder if Ben is here.
Rage On!
Hey! Chris Locke is being interviewed on KPBS/89.5 here in San Diego. He sounds great. It's the Marketplace Morning Report. A national show. Cool.
Reality shifts.
Getting ready for Day 2 at OSCon. Nice to have high speed access in my hotel room, but that's not what I'm actually getting here. The actual speed is too slow to I spent much of yesterday afternoon hanging out with folks from RealNetworks, including a good hour or more with Rob Glaser. Good guys. I was impressed.
What they're doing with their open source strategy is such a complete and radical departure from the company's entire past that I told them it was like "watching a corporate sex change." Most of them laughed. Rob didn't, but he got it, and appreciated it, I think. What he appreciated more was getting into a deep discussion about creating common Internet infrastructure, and how their strategy appeared to be what Craig Burton calls "causing anarchy." Later, when I interviewed Brian Behlendorf (of Apache and CollabNet, which is collaborating with Real on its source-opening project), he said the better word might be "disruption" or "chaos," because anarchy means an absence of rules, and clearly there are strategic rules involved. (Those programmers are so damn precise.)
Anyway, I'll have more about it later (mostly at Linux Journal, hopefully by this afternoon). Right now I need to get over to the conference (my hotel is elsewhere in town).