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California’s energy drain

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One of the problems with the news media today, even when they do their job properly, is a failure to make connections, even when they’re obvious.

There is an unfolding story in California that your newspaper will typically cover as two separate stories. One story is a tale of budgetary woe, in which the state, suffering under a tenacious recession and stymied by its own political logjams, struggles to figure out how to close a gap of many billions of dollars in its budget. If it can’t, we Californians will discover very quickly that just as the federal government cuts our taxes (a little bit if we’re middle class, a lot if we’re rich), the state will either raise our taxes or cut our services and schools (or, if we’re really lucky, both).

This is a big story. Meanwhile, in the other story, the state of California tries to persuade federal energy regulators that it should be able to abrogate exorbitant energy contracts it signed at the height of the energy crunch in 2001. It is now a matter of public record, established by those same federal energy regulators, that California’s energy prices jumped through the ceiling because energy companies were illegally manipulating the deregulated market. (Though at the time the much-reviled Gov. Gray Davis was sneered at for suggesting as much, his claims were dead right.) But, strangely, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which thinks those prices were illegal enough to be bringing “enforcement actions” against 60 energy companies for gaming the California energy market, nonetheless thinks that they are still legal enough that the state — and citizens — of California should have to pay them.

It seems completely obvious to me that these two stories are closely connected. Californians, your billions can go to (a) buying energy at prices that were “Insane!!!!”, as Crazy Eddie used to put it, and illegal too (as Crazy Eddie turned out to be); or (b) keeping your classrooms open and your state services running.

Instead of wasting our time recalling the governor, we should be impeaching the FERC.

Linux: Cheap, reliable, but fast?

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Paul Boutin (who has written for Wired, for Salon, and now for Slate) generally knows what he’s talking about, but I think he got one thing wrong in his otherwise smart analysis of a report that Linux will soon overtake Apple’s Macintosh system, measuring by number of desktops in use.

  Linux is fast, cheap, and reliable, in defiance of the old engineer’s adage that you can only have two out of three.

That sounds good. And yes, Linux is a fast operating system. But the way I’ve always heard this adage applied, “fast” meant how quickly a piece of software can be developed, not how speedily it ran. (I was first introduced to this saying years ago by Dan Shafer, Salon’s first webmaster.)

And Linux, in truth, has not been “fast” in that sense: Like most good software, it has taken years to grow and evolve and build its strength, from the early ’90s, when Linus Torvalds wrote the earliest versions, to the late ’90s, when it became the cheap Web server of choice (and Salon moved its entire server platform to it), to the present, when the desktop-user side of things is just beginning to come together. One constant theme of Andrew Leonard’s superb coverage of the open source/free software movement for Salon since 1997 has been this: that its developers, whether of Linux or Apache or Mozilla, take their time; they’re not rushing to market to meet a corporate deadline. They’re iterating, as programmers like to say — putting some code out, weeding out the bugs, building some more code on top, and gradually assembling something great. Cheap and reliable, yes, but hardly fast.

On the larger Linux vs. Apple point: Yeah, I imagine Linux will surpass Macintosh in sheer numbers of installed desktops at some point. As Boutin says, free is hard to fight. What I find interesting — and what Boutin doesn’t really acknowledge or deal with in his article — is how effectively Apple has rekindled developers’ interest.

At geek conclaves like the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, where once you’d see Macs only in the hands of the occasional journalist or graphic designer, it’s the programmers who are now sporting PowerBooks and showing off their tricks on Apple machines. By rebuilding the MacOS on a Unix base, Jobs managed to stoke some serious geek energy. For the first time in years, there are interesting new applications — media tools, outliners, odd little programs — coming out for Macs that Windows users can’t get. That’s an amazing comeback, whatever the consulting firms say about desktop market share.

If it quacks like a quagmire…

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Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:

  In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.

The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era.

Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:

  “You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”

Something tells me this serviceman — unlike the armchair warriors who stoked this war with bloated rhetoric and false evidence — might not find the word “quagmire” so objectionable.

Bringing up the rear
SIDE NOTE: My jaw dropped to read that word “asses” on the Times front page, given the paper’s tightlaced history. My own, now-ancient experience as a freelancer with the Times had led me to believe the paper was much more careful about such posterior references.

Back in the mid-’80s I’d interviewed Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo and written it up for the Times Arts and Leisure section. In the course of the article I needed to refer to a particular scene from Fo’s signature work, “Mistero Buffo,” a solo comic performance drawn from the iconoclastic commedia dell’arte tradition. There is a moment in which Fo plays a Pope who gets a kick to his, if you’ll pardon me, butt. I knew “butt” was out of the question for the Times, so I wrote “rear,” figuring it was sufficiently innocuous. But I got a call from the Times copy desk: “rear” didn’t pass muster. Hmm, I thought, OK; er, how about “behind” — who could possibly object to that? The copy editor sounded only partially mollified but we left it there.

When the article was published, if I remember correctly, the Pope’s bottom had become a “backside.” I could only marvel at an institution whose sense of propriety had such infinitesimal gradations.

O’Reilly vs. the ants!

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Bill O’Reilly, the Fox Network’s resident blowhard, went off on the Internet yesterday in a comical tirade. O’Reilly’s comments mostly speak for themselves. But I think anyone who has watched him bludgeon the guests on his show will be able to read what’s really on his mind, between the lines. Something like the following:

 

Sex, lies and videotape on the Internet, that’s the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo. Nearly everyday, there’s something written on the Internet about me that’s flat out untrue. (I know, because I ego-surf every night, to see just what lies people are posting about me.) And I’m not alone. Nearly every famous person in the country’s under siege. (As for the rest of you non-famous people, who cares?)

Today’s example comes from Web sites that picked up a false report from The San Francisco Chronicle that said a San Francisco radio station dropped The Radio Factor. If anyone had bothered to make even one phone call, they would have learned that Westwood One made a deal with another San Francisco radio station, weeks ago to move The Radio Factor. (And will someone please shut up that program director who had the nerve to say I don’t have “lightning in a bottle like Rush”?) Thus the word “dropped” is obviously inaccurate and dishonest. (True, you can no longer hear me on that radio station — but it pisses me off no end that anyone would actually report this using a good, plain word like “dropped” to describe what happened.) We’ll see if The Chronicle runs a correction, but you can bet you won’t be seeing many corrections on the net. (Thank God I’m on TV, which nobody expects to run corrections.)

The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. (They’re ignorant slobs without jobs. How dare they think they have a right to speak out?) They put stuff up with no restraints. (Unlike the guests on my show, who I can drown out or tell to shut up if they cross me.) This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming. (Freedom of speech — how un-American can you get?)

…The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit. (If we could just stop evildoers from reading about or talking about Bad Things, the Bad Things would go away!)

Talking Points noted with interest the hue and cry that went up from some quarters about the FCC changing the rules and allowing big corporations to own even more media properties. But big corporations are big targets. (Big corporations pay my salary, too.) If they misbehave, they can be sued for big bucks. (And they can afford big-bucks lawyers to defend themselves. And they can pay lobbyists to write the laws to suit them.) These small time hit and run operators on the net, however, can traffic in perversity and falsehoods all day long with impunity. It’s almost impossible to rein them in. (In China, on the other hand, they really know how to keep those Internet crazies in line.)

So which is the bigger threat to America? The big companies or the criminals at the computer? Interesting question. (Especially the way I just stacked it! Now, where did I put that “no-spin zone” sign?)

Windows Media circus

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The Digital Storytelling Festival was a blast — more on it later this week. But here’s a sad little technical sidelight.

I wanted to view the little video snippets that Don Wrege had posted, in which he interviewed various presenters at the festival. (In the still on that page you can see just how little sleep I was getting last week.) The clips didn’t work using my normal browser (Opera 7) so I tried IE. No go, either. Then I saw his note that you needed Windows Media Player 9. OK, sooner or later I’d need to upgrade anyway. I don’t like Windows Media Player — I prefer using MusicMatch for my music and Quicktime for my videos — but one needs all these players these days.
So whatever; over to Microsoft, time to download.

Weirdly, Windows Media 9 would not — and still will not — install on my Win2K box. First time the installer actually hard-crashed my system — no warning, no system shutdown routine, just black screen, reboot. I’ve had better luck with Win2K than with any other Microsoft OS I’ve ever used; this was really bizarre behavior, the sort of thing I’d expect from some renegade plug-in provider, not MSFT itself.

OK, I thought, maybe it’s because I need to patch my Win2K up to date with all of those endless Windows Update downloads that I have avoided because I remain a firm believer in “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and because we have a pretty good firewall. So a half-hour later I’ve installed the Service Pack 3, the Security Bundle, and more, a total of 30 megabytes worth of patches. My operating system has now been patched within an inch of Bill Gates’ scalp; surely Windows Media will now be a happy camper and I can install it and watch my videos.

No way! As of this writing, all attempts to install Windows Media 9 (and yes, I downloaded the version specifically tagged for Win2K, not the one offered for WinXP) have failed. I get a variety of error messages. (I finally saw the videos on my laptop, which has Windows XP.)

It’s funny. You think, hey, computing has come a long way, Microsoft has cleaned up its act, things really do work better these days — and then an experience like this conks you on the head and reminds you how bad it still is out there.

Microsoft, we’re told, is counting on Windows Media to be its wedge into the digital-home-entertainment future. All I can say is, my stereo doesn’t act like this, my TV doesn’t act like this, and we shouldn’t accept our software working like this, either.

Why?

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Question of the day: One of my three-and-a-half year old sons, Matthew, has a query for his parents that he has repeated on several occasions, and each time it has stumped me, so I am throwing his inquiry out on the Net waters to see what responses it might evoke.

Matthew’s question: “Why are we people?”

From the Digital Storytelling fest

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If you’re reading this, I’ve successfully posted to Radio using the
mail-to-blog tool.

I’m here in Sedona at the Sixth Annual Digital Storytelling Festival. I was here once before — nine years ago, on my honeymoon — so it’s incredible to be back, with my whole family now. (It must be said that attending a festival and trying to help take care of two rambunctious three-year-olds is a bit of a juggling act.) The rocks are as beautiful as ever. The town has grown like crazy; lots and lots of development. I met Mike Pence of Red Rock Blues, too.

I delivered a talk yesterday morning tracing a little of the history and the ideas behind the digital storytelling movement. At some point when I have time I will post some notes and links from it.

The festival has its own group blog here.

On the road

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I’ll be traveling the rest of this week — off to the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, AZ, where I’ll be speaking on Thursday. Depending on how crazy things are I may or may not be posting from there. There’s supposed to be a group blog for the fest too, I’ll link to it once it’s going.

Those Linux cavaliers

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As far as I’ve been able to tell, the SCO suit against IBM — claiming that Linux is somehow tainted by code that SCO owns the rights to — is an absurd joke, a last-ditch effort on the part of a failing company to somehow extort some money on the basis of its copyrights and patents. Farhad Manjoo wrote a definitive piece on the subject last week in Salon.

Yet listen to this “analyst”, as quoted in a Steve Lohr column in today’s New York Times:

  “It’s a real problem for the future,” said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. “The open-source community has been pretty cavalier about this. You’ve got to respect intellectual property.”

“Cavalier,” dictionary.com says, is defined as “(1) showing arrogant or offhand disregard; dismissive… (2) Carefree and nonchalant; jaunty.”

I can’t think of a stupider statement on this subject. If you know anything at all about the history of Linux and the open source movement, you know that it is precisely the opposite of cavalier on this issue.

What we call Linux today is an assemblage of parts — including building-block components created by Richard Stallman and cohorts at the Free Software Foundation, and the kernel first written by Linus Torvalds — put together, with great care and effort, across nearly two decades of development. Each part has been written from the ground up and protected by open-source licensing.

The GPL (GNU Public License) has its devotees and its detractors — and there are competing models within the open-source world. But that just shows how much thought and, indeed, respect these programmers pay to thinking through the complex aspects of intellectual property as they relate to ownership of software code.

Linux’s architects have been the opposite of “dismissive” or “carefree” on these issues. Their whole project is a thoughtful, careful, “slow and steady wins the race” approach to creating a new model for the intellectual-property basis of software. To call this effort “cavalier” is just stunningly wrong.

Sure, that new model may not be to the liking of many in the commercial-software world. But it “respects” traditional notions of intellectual property even as it tries to reshape them — and that’s one reason it’s proven so enduring and effective, and why Linux will continue to prosper while SCO is likely to end up as a footnote.

Cleaning up behind the bleeding edge

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“Bleeding edge” is the label for people (“early adopters”) who buy new technologies so early that they have to deal with all the bugs and problems that the technologies’ creators failed to solve in their rush to market.

I have always tried to avoid the bleeding edge, but I’m also interested enough in new technologies that I itch to toy with them. Usually, I grab semi-new technologies a generation or two after their introduction, once there’s been a little time to iron out the glitches and bring the prices down. (On the same theory, I will never buy a computer with the fastest processor — you can always save money buying one two or three notches slower than the fastest around, and you’ll never notice the difference.) I think this puts me at the trailing edge of the bleeding edge — the scabby edge, perhaps.

So it is that, a year or two after the 802.11b/WiFi revolution took all geekdom by storm, I have finally joined the bandwagon — with a little help from a book I’m happy to recommend, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman’s “Wireless Networking Starter Kit.” (Engst’s “Internet Starter Kit” was the book I used to put my Macintosh on the Net back in 1994, so this all felt right.)

What has amazed me, as I added wireless to my existing home network with its DSL connection, is how absurdly cheap the hardware is. I got a perfectly good Netgear wireless router box for $70 with a $20 rebate (and I see that in the two weeks since I bought it its price has gone down another $10); the PC card for my laptop was even cheaper — $80 but with a $50 rebate. OK, I know all this 802.11b gear is being dumped because a new generation of faster, backwards-compatible 802.11g wireless equipment is coming on the market and the manufacturers are unloading the less desirable old stock. I don’t know how any of these companies are making money, but in the meantime, there are tons of amazing bargains out there. The wireless equipment doesn’t cost much more than the ethernet cabling and hub you’d use to build a wired equivalent.