I am struggling with a decision I never imagined I would have to make. Most of those who know me would be surprised at what I am considering. The question that is weighing on my mind is whether I should buy an iMac.

(All the following is NOT derived with scientific rigor. It is merely the ramblings of a floss purist questioning his ideals via personal anecdotes.)

A long time ago I realized that I am not a typical computer user. I use Firefox to surf the web and emacs for everything else. These preferences, which tend towards a positive feedback loop , have brought me to a small isolated area of the Venn diagram.

However, I do have a wife and son and they fall into the larger section of that imaginary Venn diagram. They browse the web, use email (predominantly through the web), IM (again web based), manage photos via f-spot, watch videos through mplayer, play some time wasting games,etc.

Of course my son does a bit more with various tools like scratch.

The core problem and reason for this post is that he wants to do more, but can’t. Editing videos on linux is near impossible. Cinelerra is about as useful to an impatient ten year old as mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. Kdenlive looks promising, but crashes constantly with segfaults and other weird errors. After hours or days of stubborn persistence his natural response it to give up. I don’t blame him.

The core philosophy of floss is freedom. Freedom is a hollow concept without pragmatic consequences. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, thus for popular systems at least stability is approachable. Of course there are caveats and other problems with this which I will punt. With FLOSS one also has the ability to make an application do what they want (the freedom part). If a package comes close, but not quite, then you have the ability (whether you do it yourself or higher it out) to get the feature you need. This saves you writing a system from scratch.

Non-free systems in the floss view are bad because you can become entrapped in that system. In order for Digital Restrictions Management to ‘work’ it has to be infused throughout the system from the hardware level up to user level apps including network services. Enforcing whimsical industry group policies through fallible systems is always a poor judgement call.

Expanding closed systems through undocumented, broken api’s is an exercise in frustration. While there are exceptions they are exactly that, rare exceptions.

One can easily observe some real world consequences that are surprising for a floss purist. Floss tends to be a copycat of the closed giants. One can easily argue that the closed giants also copy each other.

Another observation that contradicts the philosophy of floss is that the media apps tend to crash. Sure, mplayer and co. will play most codecs perfectly fine. Creating or manipulating media is a different experience entirely.

A naive observer would be forgiven wondering what benefit there is to all this freedom when innovation is not the de facto emergent property.

Bringing all these tangents together I am back where I started: Do I buy an iMac so my son can create media with relative ease or do I hold onto ideals and contribute to an immature ecosystem? In other words do I side with short-sited pragmatism or hold out for potential long term rewards?

We of course had the first infamous cold war. There is a second one occurring with tech companies, also known as the patent war. I am not going to bother outlining all the details of this, mainly because you should already be aware of it. If you aren’t, read Groklaw. Suffice it to say, the patent war is much like the cold war, in that no one can win, everyone loses and you have to play. (of course if you are too small, then you just get splatted on the patent windshield).

I am wondering if there is yet a third cold war going on. One in where no one really wins. You have all the large players showing up with great new services, giving them all away for free in an effort to attract attention. These services like google maps, require an expensive license for the core content.

You have other services like craigs list that got in early, give the most valuable markets away for free and nickel and dime the smaller ones (long tail abuse). No one can reasonably enter the classified ad space and hope to compete now.

Of course you can’t talk about this stuff without mentioning ebay. I think ebay will either have to change or die. Their model doesn’t match with the new way of things. They still charge for their core service. While they are the 800 pound gorilla of the auction space, there is room for someone to step in and take over. By setting up a more reasonable auction interface, give it away for free, grant more control to the users and sellers… you can simply walk over them. However, I think ebay is adaptive enough to stop anyone from doing that.

Of course, what all this means is that there will be monocultures galore. We have already seen what happens with you have a search monoculture (blog spam).

The only question for you to answer is what is left to be monoculturized? What space is there that either has too many offerings with varying price tags that simply confuse users. What space is left that either has no suppliers or the ones that are there haven’t adopted the “give it all away for free and charge for the long tail.”?

ok, maybe not spreading, but at least others are having a similar reastion to this web2.0 thing. its nice to know that I am not alone

I asked a friend who is a couple steps ahead of me in lisp about i18n support. And he pointed me to http://nolan.eakins.net/node/150

And we wonder why unicode has taken so long to catch on.

There are quite a few people throwing the “less is more” argument around. Then there are the ones who argue that less is indeed less.

You take a basic meme (sorry for using that word) like writing a howto, or documenting something for the public… i.e. sharing information. Then constrain it to a specific format, both UI wise and backend (xml in most cases).

The constraint gives it the ‘less’

The ability to predict what will be there and then write apps to use that knowledge, gives it the ‘more’

So you take any meme, constrain it, provide a central clearing house, give it all away for free

you have web2.0

So here is some more:

• reddit.com
• kiko.com

Of all these, I like reddit the best. Its the only one that provides a service that I couldn’t just slap together on my own system. Most of these new sites seem to be slicing the desktop app up into small digestable chunks and then ajaxing them. No thanks.

so I have been trying to figure out this web2.0 thing. trying to
separate the wheat from the chaf. When people say things like, “The
engineers who built the Web believed that if they presented the
‘right’ answer, intelligent humans would be pleased.” What? Does that
even mean anything?

Wading through nonsensical statements like that make web2.0 appear to
be nothing but hype.

It seems that this new view is about delivering meaning to the net. In
other words, take a bunch of data, mash it together, provide both a
computer parsable structure and a constrained UI, produce and deliver
it for free.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to be going down the panacea route. RSS
is the defacto ‘structure’. Everything is being crammed into rss via
microformats. Use tags to label and categorize linkable entities. Of
course all of this is going over http.

When square pegs are forced into round holes, one has to at least
raise an eyebrow.

There are things happening out there which are interesting and/or hype. Well, they are mainly interesting because they are so hype-ish.

• ning
• rollya
• zvents
• fundable
• eventful

of course there are many more out there. ones that have started it all…. like delicious, pubsub, etc.. and I will post them as I find them.

It seems this hyped web2.0 thing can simply be defined as Open Source (as in the original definition) applied to http. Open, transparent, freedom, etc. Basically its the webheads finally getting it. However, you can tell when a concept/meme is in a downward spiral of hype and misuse when CEO’s start attending conferences.

edit: fixed links

Peter St Andre talks about living without an ID. I have a fantasy of doing exactly that.

The question I have is if you do not have any form of government issued ID, how would you leave the country? And if you did, how would you get back in?

People are constantly babbling about ‘ease of use’ and ‘intuitive software’ (at least to me when I mention linux and foss). I point out to them what they really mean is either ‘more windows-like’ or ‘easy to learn’, not necessarily easy to use.

There are two kinds of easy which are mutually exclusive:

• easy to learn
• easy to use

There are applications out there that are easy to learn, you look at them and instantly know how they work. Problem is that these types of applications are extremely limited in either their functionality or flexibility. Their learnability becomes their downfall.

Then there are applications that are easy to use; emacs|vi. Their learning curve is often referred to as a cliff. However, they are the hacker’s preferred environment because they get out of the way and let you get stuff done.

There are other environments which are both difficult to learn and difficult to use (the MS IDE, Visual Studio comes to mind). However, I have yet to run across an application which is both easy to learn and easy to use. They seem to be mutually exclusive traits.

Seeing as how our resident HCI expert, Julian, responded so well to my previous post I am looking forward to his response on this.

For the first time in a looong time I looked at a bill before it was passed. This was the result of a friend asking me how he could find out who is rep. is.

So I looked at S.5 which has something to do with the class action law reform. I just find it entertaining that the only amendment that passed, was the one exempting the government (in the form of Attorney General) from the new restrictions.

Note: IANAL, but what does it mean when government so blatantly exempts itself from its own rules?

We have all dealt with the clueless user that is beyond help. They are the developer’s nemesis, an entire discipline of computer science has evolved to help us deal with them, Julian is a student. In fact we have become so frustrated with this phenomemon that we even named it, Aunt Tillie

My question is; what have we named the geek?

Update:
Sneakin has scoured the jargon file index for J Random Hacker and Jeff K as the evil version.

Update 2:
Sneakin has pulled through again and points out the Real Programmer and Mel Kaye

I was reading Queue’s interview of Alan Kay and ran across the word Agglutination. Of course I had to look it up.

In the definition it says, ” (For example, one of the longest words in Hungarian is ‘meg˙szent˙seg˙telen˙it˙het˙etlen˙seg˙es˙ke˙des˙ei˙tek˙ert, derived from the word ‘szent’ [saint]. However, this word is never used.)”

Which begs the obvious question, if a word is never used, is it still a word?

If philosophic disciplines inevitably transform into science then what is contemporary philosophy?