Posts

The metaphor of the bike shed discussion has served me well over the years. Here’s a theory of how it applies to politics: In the book “Stealth Democracy” (which I previously blogged on here), John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that voters have very weak policy preferences. Indeed, you can get a lot of people to change their mind on policy by asking them whether, thinking through the potential consequences of that policy, they’d like to change their mind. You can get even more of them to change their mind if you pay them a compliment first. ...

Jessamyn West on the value of libraries: My Jessamyn corollary to this is “With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. Be sure to read the whole thing. It reminds me of a 2002 piece by Tim O’Reilly that made an impact on me, Piracy is Progressive Taxation. ...

I beat up on the Republicans a lot, but I want to point out the alternative budget proposal put forth by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. His proposal eliminates the deficit and takes care of the entitlement crisis. It does so by eliminating Medicare and giving seniors vouchers they can use to buy health insurance. If health insurance premiums go up at a higher rate than the voucher amount, it will fall to seniors to make up the difference. His proposal is not something I’d support, but it is an honest attempt to engage with the budget problems the country faces long term, which is more than you can say for most of what Republicans put forth. He argues in favor of his proposal in this interview with Ezra Klein. ...

Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. ...

People are weighing in since Amazon “capitulated” (their words) to Macmillan yesterday. The most entertaining rundown was written by John Scalzi. The most insightful was written by Tim Bray.

Author Charlie Stross explains the business reasons why Amazon pulled all Macmillan books from their online store last week. It’s the best overview of the dispute and why readers should care about it that I’ve seen. Also check out this post by Jim Henley, in which he links to a bunch of reactions and runs some of the numbers in the dispute, and explains in concise terms exactly what’s at stake: There are $7-8 in incremental costs coming off of every hardcover book as we move from print to bits, with some small new incremental costs for ebook production. So call it $7 a book. ...

Ted Leung points out some parallels between the iPad and Oracle’s new strategy integrating Sun’s hardware: I spent most of yesterday watching the Oracle/Sun strategy webcast, and a major theme was the way that Oracle plans to tightly integrate Sun’s hardware, and to optimize the entire hardware and software stack. The Oracle Exadata database machine was repeatedly touted as an example of this kind of integration. If the benchmarks and early customer experiences are indicative, this integration has paid off handsomely, as it has also with the Sun Storage 7000. ...

In November I posted an item on Phil “Red Rock Eater” Agre, who had been missing. He’s been located and is apparently fine.

There’s a ton of interesting writing about the iPad floating around that you may have already seen. Steven Frank writes about Old World and New World computing, and explains that the exemplars of the new world are the iPhone and the iPad (and their competitors from other companies). I agree. The first thing I thought when I saw the iPad was that it would be the perfect device for my wife. She uses her computer to read email, surf the Web, and do some basic productivity stuff. She hates laptops, and she’s not a fan of the complexity of desktop computer operating systems. She’s ready for New World computing. (I, on the other hand, want a 27" iMac and the opportunity to steal the iPad when she’s not looking.) Steven’s piece is really great, full of astute observations. You should read it. ...

Efforts to stop people from using their mobile phones while they’re driving are stepping up lately, thanks in part to Oprah Winfrey’s efforts to warn people of how dangerous it is. She did an episode on the topic last week, and it’s up for free online. Today, she asked people to celebrate her birthday by taking her No Phone Zone pledge. The science would appear to be on Oprah’s side. Researchers have found that people talking on the phone are four times more likely to crash their car than they would be otherwise, but neither the increasing use of cell phones nor subsequent bans have had any measurable effect on overall crash numbers. ...