Technology Blog

Our Networks prof, Dave Beazeley , briefly mentioned a paper called “Worse is Better“(excerpt, full story) by Richard Gabrial, when discussing how the ISO-OSI model lost to ARPANET, even though ISO-OSI was better engineered, planned, etc, etc.

I had some time to kill last night, so I read up on the papers. The basic idea is that, when writing software (or anything else), there are two ways to approach it. One way is to plan, architect, and engineer the hell out of it so that it’s “done right.” The other way is to shoot for simplicity, even if it sacrifices completeness. Gabrial argues that C became more common than Lisp because C was easier to write a decent compiler for, allowing it to spread more easily.

What’s controversial (and this is something Gabriel himself apparently can’t decide either) is whether Worse is Better is actually better or worse. At the very least, the success of Open Source seems to vindicate Worse is Better to some degree. After all, “release early, release often” assumes that you can make good software by releasing something incomplete and improving it over time. Although this may depend on which area of the software industry you’re looking at, the rapid pace at which it moves probably favors those who deliver a solution that’s “good enough”, over those who deliver over-engineered solutions way too late.

At the end, I doubt there’s any straight answer to whether or not Worse is Better is better, any more than there’s an answer to the question: What’s the best programming language? In software, I think there are two quality measures: unusable and good enough. It’s really just a question of where you draw the line between unusable and good enough, and whether or not the Worse is Better approach can get you into the realm of “good enough”.

source: “Worse is Better”

Waxy says Wordpress had some major ad-mining operations going on … until someone blew the whistle on them and prompted Google to do a little dance around the bogus ad-phishing posts:

I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.
[ Wordpress Website’s Search Engine Spam ]

Say what? One of our own, fallen to absestos mining? Wait, it gets better, or worse, depending on your sense of righteousness and irony, and it’s not just because the Wordpress crew have taken to hiding the links behind negative CSS and remaining unrepentant about the practice, it’s because someone has made adsense-phishing into a 9-5 start-up …

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he’s paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money …

source: But the money …

source: Fifty Quid Guy

Some information about digital rights management systems used in computer games may be found here.

source: DRM in Gaming

One of the great dilemmas of online networks is what does a ‘link’ mean? Orkut offers several levels of ‘friendship’, whereas Friendster and LinkedIn just offer the binary option: yes i am your friend, no I am not. In several conversations with the LinkedIn team, I have heard them say very strongly that they want to promote a culture in which linking is meaningful–it indicates that you would actually pass on a request from the person to whom you link. Which, after all, is the whole point of LinkedIn and similar systems.

I agree 100% with this. When I get link requests from people I barely know, my standard response is:

I’m sorry, but I have a policy of not linking to anyone on LinkedIn with whom I haven’t developed some sort of significant business/personal relationship. This is nothing personal against you; this is a general policy I have to prevent me from getting deluged with requests and to keep consistent with the LinkedIn philosophy. I’m happy to get to know you in other contexts. I hope everything is well with you!

However, cultural realities — the desire to appear more popular and connected—may make it hard for LinkedIn to hold by this idealistic position. On their home page is this ad:

Get Exposure with CV Advantage
Is your resume lost in a sea of 1-2 page resumes?

Which leads to http://cv-advantage.com/CVA_LinkedIn/
, which says on it:

Don’t forget to send us LinkedIn invitations if we’re not already connected!

This is an invitation to the most promiscuous possible linking. If LinkedIn wants to make their system functional, and not have it drown in a sea of spam and unwanted requests, I suggest they make a stronger effort to discourage this sort of approach.

Which leads to a broader question: how can LinkedIn and similar systems create a culture and design a system to prevent such activities? by imposing a maximum number of connections? by grading people on % of requests which they accept? other?

This post was written by David Teten, source: Selective vs. promiscuous linking

Marc Hedlund eloquently analyzes Yahoo! 360 through “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”, and I agree with his key points: walled systems stifle innovation and offer an inferior user experience for power users—but may offer a superior user experience for regular users.

That said, in the long run regular users can become power users. Many people (like my mother ) started out within the AOL walled garden, but have since graduated to more open and sophisticated platforms—e.g., from an @aol.com address to my mother’s personalized @DanceTimePublications.com address. An effective service has to allow people room to grow.

Via Clay Shirky

This post was written by David Teten, source: Reading Yahoo! 360 through Lucasfilm’s Habitat

The first issue is centered on the fact that the duplex contract example that I pointed at is not truly peer-to-peer. And, I would have to agree that the example is not a true peer-to-peer pattern. However, the intended purpose of the link was to direct individuals to a great example of a powerful Indigo feature that can enable peer-to-peer communication. Although, the example was not peer-to-peer it does provide some insight into how the duplex contracts work.

The second issue focuses on the semantic mismatch between Indigo’s object oriented service view and the pristine service oriented perspective. After, attending events such as PDC’03, Indigo Day, and the SDR, I have witnessed Indigo mature from a quantitative product to a qualitative product.  IMO, initially Indigo focused on features, features, and more features and Microsoft now has realized it is more important to release a product that is of high quality and very usable for the “average joe” object oriented developer then focus on the features. Unfortunately, this means a lot of cool and interesting features have been dropped from Indigo V1. But as a result of this context switch we will get a very clean programming model that abstracts away the underlying WS-* goop, yet still allows plumbers to play around with the pipes. And, I also believe Indigo’s object oriented model is now prepared for the inevitable inception of service oriented development languages. I can envision a service programming language or maybe even a domain specific language mapping cleanly to the Indigo programming model. Although, today you have to program Indigo in your CLR language of choice; I believe tomorrow it will be a completely different story.

Indigo is a marathon and the race is only beginning.

This post was written by Dave Bettin, source: The Indigo Marathon

The 711 unique comments submmitted to the Copyright Office on the “Orphan Works” question have been posted. This is a fantastic response. The comments of Creative Commons are posted here. Thanks to the Free Culture Movement, EFF and PublicKnowledge for running the Orphan Works site.

Now maybe we should get a wiki going to have a collaborative analysis of the comments?

source: Comments to the CO

source: YAMSE: Yet Another Mobile Search Engine

One of the classes I might take this quarter is called “Workings of the human brain”, and for the first lecture, one of the past TAs for the class did a very brief lecture on the history of human perception of the brain. One thing that caught my attention is that, common beliefs on the nature of the brain was dominated for centuries by theories put forth by the likes of Aristotle and Gall. It wasn’t until some 1700 years later that Da Vinci came up with the brilliant idea of actually cutting open a corpse to see what the hell was really going on in there.

Now, having been raised in the modern era of science and all, I think it’s bloody obvious that if you don’t know what’s happening, you just find out. That is, if you don’t know what’s inside someone’s head, the obvious way to find out is to cut it open and look inside.

Or so you’d think. But really, this emperical approach revolutionized society not because people before then were so dumb, but simply because it’s an approach that actually is quite counter-intuitive. Working with beginning computer science students, I’ve seen something similar in the lab. A typical “tutor helps 1st year CS student” conversation goes like this:

Student: My program doesn’t work
Tutor: What doesn’t work?
Student: Well, my program does A, then B. Then it does stuff with A and B to produce results C.
Tutor: …and?
Student: It doesn’t produce the correct results for C.
Tutor: Does it do A and B?
Student: Well, it’s supposed do…
Tutor: Well, does it?
Student: Hm… so I should check that?

From what I’ve seen, the problem is that students build up some intuitive model on how to solve the problem at hand, and get lost when their programs’ behaviors deviate from the intuitive model. They seem to get caught up in how the program ought to work, and don’t realize that the key is to see what the program is doing.

At the end, I think humans are lazy thinkers, rather than adventurous seekers of knowledge. The poster behind Fox Moulder’s desk didn’t say “we want to know”. It said: we want to believe.

source: Intuitive vs Emperical

source: Random Browsing

The main point of my testimony today is to make clear the
extraordinary urgency of addressing the unregulated sale of personal
information in the United States and how the data broker industry is
contributing to the growing risk of identity theft in the United
States. Whatever your views may be on the best general approach to
privacy protection, Choicepoint has made clear the need to regulate
the information broker industry.

The Significance of the Choicepoint Matter

With all the news reporting of the last several weeks, it has often
been difficult to tell exactly how a criminal ring engaged in identity
theft obtained the records of at least 145,000 Americans.
According to some reports, there was a computer “break-in.
“Others described it as “theft.”
In fact, Choicepoint simply sold the information.
This is Choicepoint’s business and it is the business of other
companies that are based primarily on the collection and sale of
detailed information on American consumers. In this most recent case,
the consequences of the sale were severe.

From [www.epic.org]
via [www.schneier.com] ; my italics.

[Comment Link for RSS]

source: The Significance of the Choicepoint Matter

Orchestrated by ace blogger Joe Clark, PR-otaku takes William Gibson to task on matters from whether Damien is Cunningham to why a digital video player would have a ‘replay’ button, on earlier adaptors and Abraham Zapruder and a host of other factoids, fictions, goofs, subtexts, sidelines and slipstreams running throughout Pattern Recognition, with more than enough fodder for ten thousand cocktail parties, but more to the point, Joe’s blogosphere has wrenched Gibson’s book from it’s meaning by recursively applying the plot to itself, turning loose the real-world footage-fetishist forces of bloggerdom on the art and fabric of the novel. Only, unlike Gibson’s fictional detectives, Joe’s crew show us empirically how real humans in a networking become a creative and constructive force …

the entire narrative of Pattern Recognition disproves the leave it out on the windowsill and somebody’ll come along and improve it theory. Dozens (and, after the newbies hit, hundreds) of footage fetishists labour endlessly to discover the true nature of the footage, but cannot. The footage, deliberately left out on the windowsill, is impervious to explanation.

That’s not supposed to happen. There are suppose to be enough minds out there in the hive to improve on anything — or to solve any problem. We even have a name for the latter: The LazyWeb.
[ PR-otaku ]

Those into the musical networks and the Creative Commons already know about all this, it’s a fact of life. Your rough raw footage goes out, gets mashed, reworked, renewed and revamped, round and round until what comes back surprises everyone. Lee Perry at Studio-One knew this, as did the Grateful Dead and early U2, Great Nature Theatres one and all. Traditional music players of most any ilk all know this too. Yet Gibson postulates a throwback breakthrough, a Chrysalids-like she’s so special reclusive star-child stone alone, another Asimov Mule Mutant genius as our Next Big Star. But the collaborative collectives of the real-world net all know the otherwise: We got the power.

source: Annotating Gibson

So, today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases that may profoundly shape U.S. cyberlaw and may also affect cyberlaw in other countries. For more information, see here.

source: Supreme Court

An insanely poor editorial by the NYTimes about Grokster.

source: never have I seen the New York Times get it so wrong

I’ve been playing with apps and javascript, and trying to tool up to commit to more immediacy and pertinence in blogging (and not go insane in the endeavor) . One find (thanks Tony Gentile) — SharpReader — has brought tangible progress already, in popping up to report that Ted Shelton just blogged that Orb is Now Free. Ted says:

Yes, there will be advertising in the future — but we know that this must be done the google way — advertising that is unobtrusive and adds value without inhibiting the core use of the service. And more importantly there will be content subscriptions coming soon — all kinds of new content that you can purchase through Orb…

But even if you never click on an advertisement and never purchase content, our core philosophy will guarantee you free access to your own TV, your own videos, your own audio, and your own photos… anytime, anyplace, any device.

This is a great move from Ted and the guys at Orb Networks, and should help drive adoption of mobile content - opening up new usecases and user communities. With my lagging-adopter experiments with Yahoo!’s Lauch music videos a couple weeks ago, I found that short advertisements did not mar the experience.

I’d love to use Orb to access my content (my Treo 650’s 1GB SD gives me an adequate daily soundtrack), but I still believe the killer hookup is between Orb and OurMedia (which launched last week to fanfare from all but me - belated congrats to JD and Marc!). Orb would make a fabulous engine to access OurMedia pieces - where the serendipity of boredom will drive user exploration of OurMedia’s quirky contents.

This post was written by eleanor, source: Free media - Orb now free

Who says that Indigo doesn’t do peer-to-peer communications? Check out Steve Maine’s entry on Duplex contracts in Indigo.

The post really resonates with me as I just got home from a loooong 3 days in Vegas and spent a fair amount of time interoperating with the IDealer service. Only if I could have found a security hole.

This post was written by Dave Bettin, source: Peer-to-Peer.. Indigo Style

source: Proposal: personal object pager

A cool new (or I think they’re new) organization, outragedmoderates.org has posted a BitTorrent link of all the briefs filed in the Grokster case.

source: Grokster Briefs demonstrating the point of p2p

I had a job interview with Mark Fletcher for a position at Bloglines today. This is just a follow up to some of his questions (obviously, for my own sake).

source: interview