Johnny Cash, RIP. You have your favorites and then you have your favorites. And Johnny Cash has been one of the latter ever since I was a little kid.

Kevin Kelly wrote up a good recommendation of the two PBS back in time documentaries, Frontier House and 1900 House. I watched both of them and agree with him completely. Whenever I see environmentalists and anti-globalization activists talking about the glory and dignity of subsistence farming, I think back on these shows and wonder if they really have any idea what they’re talking about. (Neither of them featured farming, really, but both depict the trials and tribulations of life not that long ago.) Watching these shows gives you an idea just how freeing the conveniences of modern life are in terms of letting us pursue the activities that bring us joy. Kelly doesn’t mention Manor House, another documentary in the same vein. It was excellent as well, and focused mainly on the class structure of Edwardian Britain. In 1900 House and Frontier House, women made up the lower class, and were subjected to a life of nearly constant labor. In Manor House, there’s a set of servants that do incredible amounts of work to enable the genteel lifestyle enjoyed by the family chosen to portray the manor born. (Original link via Kottke.)

Update: Rebecca Blood catches me in a bit of sloppy writing with regard to subsistence farming, and distinguishes between sustainability and subsistence. The point I made above was extremely unnuanced. Obviously sustainable agriculture (and manufacturing, and energy production, and living in general) is essential if we’re to have a future as a race. I had a more general “anti-progress” sentiment in mind when I wrote that, and I agree that it’s not that widely held by environmentalists.

Much attention has been paid lately to the supposed benefits of letting the value of China’s renminbi float against the dollar. China has kept its currency stable against the dollar for the past decade or so, and if it were to let it float, it would probably appreciate by around 25%. This, of course, would make imported goods from China much more expensive (and could potentially prevent China from continuing to buy up heaps of US debt, something the Bush administration wouldn’t want). Brad DeLong mentions today that revaluing the renminbi would lower US unemployment by 0.1% of over two years. Blaming China may make people feel good, but it’s not going to put Americans back to work.

I don’t have a whole lot to say today about what happened two years ago on this date. A few days ago I watched 7 Days in September, a memorial compiled from video taken by 29 professional and amateur film makers at the time of the event. What I learned is that the wounds are still very raw for me, more so than I would have expected.

The SCO v Linux battle seems to have devolved into a war of open letters. Darl McBride wrote an annoying open letter to the “open source community” the other day that I didn’t bother to link to, and now Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Linus Torvalds have all responded.

eclipse.org: PDE Does Plug-ins. An introduction to developing Eclipse plug-ins.

Matt Haughey has some suggestions for improving Wikis. I like Wikis an awful lot, but I confess that I’ve never used one that was also being used actively by many (or even a few) other people. However, I have one set up that only I use, and I find it very convenient for note taking and brainstorming. I’m still waiting to be a member of a team where everyone really takes advantage of the Wiki for creating design documents and so forth. For that to happen, I do think Wikis will have to improve.

At the dentists office earlier today, I was reading Business Week and came across a short interview with Scott McNealy about the future of the IT business. He compared data centers to airplanes, and basically made the point that companies don’t build airplanes, they rely on plane manufacturers to do so. It just so happens that when I got back to work I saw a weblog entry discussing McNealy’s point: Pre-Integrated Airplanes. I don’t think the analogy holds up very well, but that being said, I think we are seeing a trend in the industry toward turnkey manufactured, integrated systems. How this is playing out is bad news for Sun.

What we’re seeing is that people are using commodity hardware, and more and more often, commodity software to abstract away everything that doesn’t provide business value. For example, I recently encountered a company that is in the business of making software to provide a specific network service. A big chunk of their product is a Web application written in Java. They don’t sell a WAR file though. What they sell is a rack mountable Linux box running Apache, Tomcat, webmin, MySQL, and a bunch of other open source packages and a few hundred kilobytes of code that they produced themselves. So if you want to deploy this service in your company, you buy their box, give it power and network connectivity, and you’re off and running. If you’re Microsoft, Sun, or Oracle, I don’t see how such services are good news.

Open source software is the commodity software part in this stack of components. It’s free, it’s totally hackable, and you don’t have to sign any kinds of licensing deals to use it, as long as you abide by the license for the software itself. An alternative to appliances like these are Web services and Web applications, which are also often built on a foundation of open source software. My advice to Scott McNealy would be to be careful what you wish for.

Fred Kaplan: Bush’s Many Miscalculations

Painful as it is to recall those planes smashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon two years ago this week, it’s nearly as heartbreaking to think back on the moment of nascent harmony that ticked in the wake of the attack–until President Bush decided to reject the opportunity that History thrust before him.

Remember? The French newspaper Le Monde, never one for trans-Atlantic sentimentalism, proclaimed, “We are all Americans.” The band outside Buckingham Palace played “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a changing of the guard, as thousands of Londoners tearfully waved American flags. Most significant, the European leaders of NATO, for the first time in the organization’s history, invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling on its 19 member-nations to treat the attack on America as an attack on them all–a particularly moving gesture, as Article 5 had been intended to guarantee American retaliation against an attack on Europe.

But the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures–and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself.

Phil Carter has pointed out recently that the reason the public doesn’t like the Patriot Act and resists new administration requests for legislation giving it additional power to “fight terrorism” is that people don’t really trust it on the civil rights front any more. Regardless of the invasiveness of the proposed legislation or the benefits it might provide, people generally oppose it because the administration has squandered all is credibility on the civil rights front. I think we’re seeing something similar with Ticketmaster’s new plan to sell some event tickets via auction. Everybody hates Ticketmaster, so anything that Ticketmaster does must therefore be bad, right?

Contrary to the widely held view, I think that their idea for auctioning concert tickets is a darn good one. The only people who seem to be able to accurately price concert tickets are scalpers. Concert tickets go on sale for a certain price, a large number of them are snapped up by scalpers, and are then sold to the public at a price often several times face value. If people are willing to pay $250 for a concert, why should the people putting on the concert get $50 bucks and some guy who’s willing to flood the phones or pay homeless people to wait in line get the other $200? I’m not in love with the idea of Ticketmaster raking in more cash, but it sure beats supporting a cottage industry of ticket hoarding scumbags that add no value to the system and yet scrape large profits out of it.

In fact, as a long term trend, if artists are able to make more money from people willing to pay huge amounts to sit close to the stage, maybe that could subsidize the concerts to a certain degree for the people who have worse seats by reducing the rate at which their ticket prices go up. The article proposes that all seats be sold in an auction format rather than just the good seats. I imagine that might happen if the auction for the good seats works out well.