Anil Dash puts the career of Bill Gates in a wonderful context:
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.
Looks like one of the larger effects of globalization is to decrease the reliance of other countries on the US economy, relative to the overall pie.
One issue that’s been percolating in the Presidential election is the fact that John McCain isn’t an Internet user. For example, here’s former John Edwards blogger Tracy Russo questioning McCain aide Mark Soohoo yesterday on the subject.
The original event that led people to start questioning the idea of having an Internet-illiterate President was McCain’s statement on this video from a few months ago that he doesn’t use a computer. Matthew Yglesias weighed in on this matter today.
It’s tempting to apply George W. Bush’s famous soft bigotry of low expectations and assume that McCain’s an old guy, and old guys just aren’t computer users. However, I have an anecdote that should undermine that assumption.
Back in 1997 I worked for an IT consulting firm that built Web sites, set up email systems, designed networks, and so forth. One of our clients was the George Bush Presidential library in College Station, Texas. The company was responsible for setting up the LAN for the library, getting email up and running, and so forth. One of the tasks on that project was setting up email accounts for President Bush and his friends (folks like Brent Scowcroft), generating PGP keys, and teaching them how to use them.
President Bush has a good 12 years on John McCain, and he had his own laptop, email account, and PGP key ten years ago. He even had his own humorous domain name, which I won’t divulge for the sake of the former President’s privacy. (I checked it out in whois not long ago and he’s still the owner.)
If President Bush was handling his own email a decade ago even though he has staffers who can take care of that sort of thing for him, why isn’t John McCain doing it now? I find it troubling when anyone isn’t be curious enough about this whole Internet thing to try it out in this day and age. It’s kind of a big deal.
Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project is a catalog of media formats that are no longer in use. In many cases, media stored in these dead formats can no longer be read because there aren’t readers are no longer available for them.
The project came to mind when I read about some trouble my friend Andrew Brown ran into trying to access old archives of The Independent newspaper. The archives were distributed on CD (not yet a dead media format) and can only be accessed using a program that’s installed by a batch program that runs only under MS-DOS 5.
I know it’s been said before, but I think this is the real legacy of DRM, whether it’s protected music files, e-books for the Kindle, or movies you download from the iTunes music store. At some point, even if you have the hardware you need to read the bits, you won’t be able to set up the proper software to access the content.
Back in the day, game companies used to augment their copy protection by distributing code wheels with their games. You were required to look up numbers on the code wheel and enter them in the game in order to proceed, so people who didn’t buy the game were unable to play. My friends and I became very good at dismantling the code wheels, photocopying them, and then building new code wheels from the copies using scissors and an X-Acto knife.
Other games used protection schemes that relied on specific quirks of the hardware they ran on. So not only could you not copy certain games, but you also couldn’t play them unless you had, for example, the Commodore 1541 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive.
The more serious software pirates would crack the games and modify them so that you could play without the code wheel, the required hardware, or whatever else the game creators did to stop rampant piracy. Software companies saw the pirates as evil, but they are the only reason most of the games from back then can still be played today. You can still download those games and play them in emulation mode now, but only because somebody bothered to remove all of the impediments that would otherwise relegate them to the dustbin of history.
I’m sure that it seemed like a good idea at the time to put these newspaper archives in a format that only worked with a specific reader, but now even paying customers can no longer access the content that was once available to them. It’s something to think about next time you’re going to download some content protected by DRM.
Andy Baio interviews Alan Taylor, the creator of The Big Picture, the new photography blog at Boston.com that lots of people are talking about. He explains how he got permission to build the blog and how he runs it on a day to day basis.
One of the first entries that really demonstrated how the site is fundamentally different than most journalism and every other blog was Indigenous Brazilians Protest Dam. The photos themselves are stunning, and illustrate a topic that I knew absolutely nothing about.
One question in the interview is why other sites haven’t experimented with presenting very large images to users right off the bat. I suspect that as much as anything, it’s concern about bandwidth that in part goes back to the earliest days of Web design. As both Andy and Alan point out, most newspaper Web sites present relatively small images, but that’s also true even of photo sites like Flickr. To get a nice, large image on Flickr you have to drill down pretty far, and it’s an incredibly popular site built explicitly for the purpose of viewing photography. I think that it was Alan’s willingness to cast aside the conventions of the profession that enabled him to take this relatively minor but incredibly significant step. I know that when I view photos in iPhoto or Picasa, I look at them in full screen mode. It makes sense that we’d prefer to view them that way online as well.
Here’s something bloggers should probably be paying attention to. Rogers Cadenhead’s site The Drudge Retort ran afoul of the Associated Press by using headlines and excerpts of its stories and was rewarded with a DMCA takedown notice.
In the process of responding to the AP’s demands, Rogers was put in touch with Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association, who volunteered to mediate on his behalf in the dispute based on prior experience working with the AP on something else. Until this week, I had never heard of the MBA, and apparently neither had Roger, who posts his own explanation of how Cox came to be involved in his dispute with the AP.
Cox’ involvement has prompted a pretty strong backlash, for what appear to be two reasons. The first is that media coverage of the controversy has portrayed him as being a spokesman for bloggers in general, which he in no way is, and the second is that some of the other things are, to put it mildly, controversial. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an exhaustive post on Robert Cox and his background that’s worth at least skimming to get an idea of why his involvement irritates people. Scott Rosenberg posts in defense of Cox.
New York Times designer Khoi Vinh has a little advice for Google on the use of white space in Web design. I’m linking to it because I think a lot of Web developers would do well by taking it to heart. It is funny to me that all of Google’s applications have that “designed by a programmer” aesthetic. It sort of makes you wonder how Google is utilizing the talents of the brilliant Douglas Bowman.
The American Red Cross disaster relief fund is tapped out, and the organization is borrowing money to fund its response to the floods in the midwest. In other words, now’s a good time to donate.
The Big Picture posted some astounding photos of the flood waters today.
Tyler Cowen gives a very strong recommendation to Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe. The topic is ethically eating seafood in a world where the seafood supply is dwindling rapidly. I’m going to buy it tonight.
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Embargoed for one year
I’m thinking of trying a new experiment. Since I don’t have an anonymous blog, it’s rather difficult for me to post stories about what I work on, people at work, and other related topics. Once, a coworker posted at length about a conversation we’d had, and I found it slightly strange. I wouldn’t want someone I work with to learn what I thought of them through a blog post when I haven’t made those feelings clear to them in person.
I’ve been thinking about composing posts and then just sitting on them until some sort of internally imposed statute of limitations runs out. Any ideas on how long that should be?