Ideas Posts

• 05.22.09 Apple Never Promised Us It Wouldn’t Be Evil (Ideas, Computers)

  Here is the latest absurdity to come out of Apple’s deeply, endemically fucked-up App Store approval process: Jamie Montgomerie’s Eucalyptus app, an e-book reader that can download public-domain books from Project Gutenberg—about the most innocuous thing you could imagine, right?—gets rejected not once but three times for containing “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content”.

  Leaving aside the issue of whether Apple has any business deciding what constitutes obscenity (a task that’s driven grown Supreme Court justices to drink)—
  And leaving aside also the fact that Apple’s censors have three times now been too dim to comprehend that the application does not contain any books, obscene or otherwise, but downloads them from the Internet much like Safari—
  No, the really outrageous issue is that the supposed obscenity here consists of a text-only English translation of the Kama Sutra. Apple specifically called out some pages of steamy advice for “when a man wishes to enlarge his lingam“. (No, really .)
  … MORE

• 05.03.09 Open Source Good, Giving Away Art Bad? (Ideas)

  I just discovered that a number of commercial artists are really insulted that Google approached them to create artwork, without offering to pay for it. This did seem unreasonable to me … until I read further and saw that this is for the Chrome browser.

  Now, Chrome is open source. (Technically the open source project is a separate thing called “Chromium”, but that’s mostly an organizational detail; the code is the same.) So when I compared this controversy to the rather different attitude of the many programmers who’ve gladly contributed to Chrome and WebKit (and thus also Safari) without pay … I went “hmm”.… MORE

• 04.21.09 The Assassination of J.G. Ballard Considered As A Metafictional Homage (Ideas, Humor)

  “Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.”—1998

  Abstract.

  Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing the author J.G. Ballard in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the award-winning novelist.… MORE

• 02.25.09 Adding Value = Theft! (Ideas, Humor)

  Roy Blount, president of the Authors’ Guild, writing in the New York Times, attempts to defend his groups screwball assertion that the Amazon Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability is cheating authors out of audio-book royalties:

  What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.

  And that assertion makes no sense. The creator of an item does not have a right to impose an arbitrary tax on anyone who adds value to the item. Otherwise we’d be open to all sorts of nonsensical scenarios, like… MORE

• 02.24.09 Music, Alone (Ideas, Me, Music)

  The feelings created by music are so strong, for me, but so ineffable. The problem of perception is usually described using color — how can we know if the visual sensation I call “red” is anything like the one you call “red”? — but only gets worse as you ascend to higher order perceptions, where even names become harder to apply. What do you call the feeling incited by “Guernica”, and even if you find the same words I would, is it the same feeling? And yet vision is our strongest, highest-bandwidth, most describable sense. We struggle to describe sound without using the technical terms of musicians, or vague metaphors.

  It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.… MORE

• 02.15.09 What will Web 3.0 be? (Ideas, Social Software, Web, Computers)

  So, Web 2.0’s heyday is over, and somewhere out there, Web 3.0 is slouching toward us waiting to be born. What will it be?

  There’s really no such single thing as “Web x“, of course. And all predictions are really just wishes. That being said, my wish is that Web 3.0 will be about distributed systems. To oversimplify:

  Web 1.0 built up big brand-name websites with their own content—things written by them, or repurposed from the media companies that owned them, or stuff to buy.

  Web 2.0 embraced “user-created content” and interaction between users. The content creation has become less centralized, outsourced to whomever wants to register an account and post stuff, but the sites managing, storing and serving the content are still centralized.

  Web 3.0, I hope, will take the decentralization to the software, and the storage. Monolithic web apps run by huge server farms—Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.—will be at least in part supplanted by apps that users run locally (or at least ‘nearby’) and which share data among each other.… MORE

• 07.04.08 Doing application updates via version-control (Ideas, Computers)

  I just had an interesting idea, brought on by a post to an Apple developer list asking about software-update mechanisms for Mac applications. The library everyone uses for this is Sparkle, which is wonderful in all ways except bandwidth usage: it updates the app by downloading an entire zip archive of the new version. With many apps nowadays being 10MB or even 100MB downloads, that’s pretty significant.

  This could clearly be improved a lot by downloading a delta instead, then using that to patch the current copy of the app. And this is done on some other platforms. But then an even better idea occurred to me…… MORE

• 04.15.08 Cloudy Identity (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

  At the root of Cloudy is the means for creating and establishing identity. A lot of peer-to-peer systems treat the peers mostly as interchangeable anonymous nodes, often deliberately so, but Cloudy is a social system. Your Cloudy identity is simply a public key, currently 2048-bit RSA, generated the first time you launch the program. (The matching private key is stored securely in the Mac OS Keychain.) From then on, that public key uniquely identifies you.… MORE

• 03.27.08 “Sci-Fi Mavens Offer Far Out Homeland Security Advice!” (Ideas, Humor)

  Speaking of Arthur C. Clarke, another of his achievements was to live a long life without making a complete ass of himself. A goal we should all emulate, but one that’s eluded too many other SF writers.

  For example! Take Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, having ceased putting any mental effort into their writing at least 25 years ago, now have the free time, in their dotage, to advise top government officials on … MORE

• 03.18.08 The Origin Of The iChat UI (Ideas, Social Software, Me, Computers)

  I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.
  … MORE