But… it’s just ridiculously awful!

Thoughtful and laudably restrained response from Kosmograd to the unveiling of this hideous tower that is apparently going to be built for the London Olympics.

The Insert Name of Steel Company Orbit

Sex, Youth and ACTA

[Disclosure: The Amazon links in this story may earn me enough money in book tokens over the next several years to purchase a well-thumbed copy of The Kama Sutra]

I’ll admit I couldn’t finish Peter F. Hamilton’s execrable book Misspent Youth. Like I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, it presents the idea that an elderly man can be rejuvenated, and explores the consequences of this rejuvenation. In Heinlein’s case the return to youth is achieved by hacking off the patient’s head, scooping out the brain and sticking it in the head of a young, beautiful woman – the patient’s secretary as it happens. My favourite bit about Heinlein’s version is the doctor’s “explanation” for how it all works: apparently you can just glue the two spinal columns together and somehow the nerves just work it all out. Wow! In Hamilton’s case, there’s a lengthy hospitalisation during which various things are done to the patient to rejuvenate tissues. Boringly, there’s no head-hacking-off, and no body-snatching.

In both books however, “exploring the consequences of this rejuvenation” seems to consist of the recent rejuvenate and his youthful peers alternately whinging, fucking and then whinging about the fucking for hundreds of pages. Being in your twenties, it seems, is just not that interesting. As Glenn Robbins once remarked, “When I was in my twenties, I spent most of my time wandering around, scratching my arse and bumping into things.” But perhaps this area of writing about yoof is just a little fraught. Even my once favourite author, Vernor Vinge, managed to jump the shark with the annoyingly un-apostrophised Rainbows End which also featured Young People Having a Bit of a Whine About Stuff, and which I also consigned (in hardback) to the rubbish bin after a hundred pages. Which was tough, because his earlier books A Fire Upon The Deep and Across Realtime were truly excellent.

All that aside however, one of the futurisms in Misspent Youth relates to technology defeating intellectual property. Supposedly a method is invented of cheaply storing massive amounts of information at great density, and this leads to a collapse of copyright and intellectual property because of the incredible ease with which content can be copied and illegally distributed. Once profitable auteurs are featured reminiscing about the time when they could make money from their craft, and the great films, novels, albums and images are all firmly in the past.

It seems this is the future feared by those responsible for ACTA (the secret international copyright treaty currently in negotiation). So much do they fear it, apparently, that they are prepared to embody in a treaty the right for border guards to search your iPod for illegally copied material. If a traveller is suspected of carrying illegal drugs, so goes the reasoning, then we allow our border guards to perform a body cavity search. Why not a similar, far less intrusive measure for travellers suspected of carrying illegal music? Seem reasonable? Well, it might seem reasonable to, say, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair, or any other person of consequence who in the last decade has spent thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars dismantling our personal freedoms and our human rights in the name of fear.

And so could it have been but for the publicity being created around the secrecy of the ACTA process by people such as Michael Geist and Cory Doctorow. That publicity led to an apparent mad scramble on the part of the treaty participants to avoid caving in wholesale to the demands of the copyright industry. As Geist notes:

The leak of the full consolidated ACTA text will provide anyone interested in the treaty with plenty to work with for the next few weeks.  While several chapters have already been leaked and discussed… the consolidated chapter provides a clear indication of how the negotiations have altered earlier proposals… as well as the first look at several other ACTA elements.

For example, last spring it was revealed that several countries had proposed including a de minimis provision to counter fears that the border measures chapter would lead to iPod searching border guards.  This leak shows there are four proposals on the table.

The revisions are principally about the exclusion of “goods of a non-commercial nature” and “goods in quantities reasonably attributable to the personal use of the traveler”. Similarly, in other sections, reference is made explicitly to “copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale”.

Doctorow mentions his continuing concern:

…every time I cross the US or Canadian border, they tell me my laptop is “commercial goods” because I do business with it.

but I think this is possibly a bit wide of the mark. He ought to be immensely satisfied with the results of his campaign to publicise the single greatest element of concern around these ACTA negotiations: their secrecy. Without that campaign, it’s unlikely any waterings-down would have been included in this latest draft, and the world would awaken one ugly morning to the news of the arrest and detention of a teenager in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo trying to smuggle an MP3 player full of Rick Astley songs through border control.

Certainly it is wrong that these ACTA negotiations are taking place in secret. But is it wrong that there be an attempt to improve global treaties on the protection of intellectual property rights? Do we really want a world where it is not possible to aggregate sufficient royalties to sustain a business? Do we want a world where all content creators are forced to fund their work through advertising, and to develop content correspondingly cheaper? Do we want a world where product placements are more vital to the movie industry’s revenues than box office takings, where…

Oh. Right.

Fool Me Thrice

There’s been a lot of discussion about this news of Apple filing suit against HTC for patent infringement. The consensus amongst the hacker community seems to be that this is wrong, this is Apple turning evil, that patents should only ever be used as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one, and that the whole US patent system is broken for allowing this to even occur in the first place.

I think that’s all very interesting, but fundamentally a side issue. I think this suit is actually all about the iPad.

Apple is an extraordinary company. They completely revolutionised the computer industry not once, but twice. In 1977 they brought the desktop computer to the masses. For the first few years of its existence, the Apple II was dominant. It had by far the most market share. This was a result of three factors working together. Firstly, the platform. There’s no denying the originality of their invention. Steve Wozniak wrote of the game-changing concepts begun with the Apple I and continued with the Apple II in his biography, iWoz:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that day, Sunday, June 29, 1975 was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on the screen right in front of them.

Secondly, the programs. With Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, all of a sudden here was a unique use for these things – the world’s first personal spreadsheet – that would justify the cost. A function you couldn’t perform any other way than with an Apple II running Visicalc. The final factor that contributed to the dominance of the Apple II, for a time, was the lack of serious competition. IBM was just too slow getting their act together. Of course once they did they screwed it up, and a collection of “PC compatible” knock-off merchants running MS-DOS became the dominant platform. Once that competition was in place, the Apple II was just too expensive, and Apple couldn’t make it any cheaper. They tried releasing successors, but they all, essentially, failed.

Interestingly, this is what Woz has to say on the subject of the Apple II patents:

We ended up with five separate parts of a patent. It was a good, secure patent that was going to wind up being one of those patents in history that become very, very valuable. It was going to be the heart of lawsuits to come. For instance, it would come in handy when people tried to copy, or clone, the Apple II and other products after that.

But with the advent of the PC – based on entirely different hardware and running an entirely different OS – these specific hardware patents were no defence.

Then in 1984, Apple began another revolution by championing the idea of the user experience. Once again, with the Mac they brought out a fantastic platform that – although it was not in itself unique, since they had “imported” the concept of a mouse-controlled desktop and icons from Xerox PARC – what it did bring to the table was programs. Uniquely, on a Mac, at least until Microsoft woke up, you could create documents with vector-drawn fonts. You could connect a laser printer and output “print-ready” artwork. You could publish a magazine right there on your desktop. Oh, and incidentally, you didn’t need to be a computer geek to make it work. You could even set up a basic LAN network without really needing the assistance of a tame geek. These were all extraordinary firsts. But again, once Microsoft eventually brought something to the table, and once its legions of cheap hardware manufacturers got hold of the idea, no matter how inferior it was in terms of user experience the basic fact was that it was cheaper. Apple simply couldn’t compete on price, and once again the market share went to the PC. Apple retained a certain cachet amongst the creative community where the higher price of the Mac could be justified. Even today, despite more competitive pricing, Apple is a premium brand.

Fast-forward to the iPad. On the very cusp of being released is a device which allows the user to perform complex computing functions without ever being aware of the computing. The platform is so good that for the first time we have a device that requires no computer knowledge. The user doesn’t even need to know how to install things. And while we’re on the subject of installing things: the App Store. Coupled with this device, we have both a library and a method of installation of software the like of which we have never seen, and which completely changes things for both developers and users. Apple is without doubt revolutionising the computer industry for the third time.

But this time, they’re making sure the perfect storm is not thwarted. This time, they have the platform, the programs and the price. But they can only have that third vital element for so long as the cheap knock-off makers can be held at bay. They know they’re secure on the hardware – no competitor in their right mind would try to create an “iPad-compatible”. What they need to defend is the software, or more specifically, the user experience. And today, instead of Microsoft there’s a new kid on the block. We’re not far from a world where there is a functional-if-shit Android tablet OS, just like there was a functional-if-shit Windows OS, running on commodity hardware, connecting to a Google app store. Google might make the same mistakes, suffer the same early hiccups and late-to-move errors as Microsoft did with Windows, but they will get there in the end, and history tells us they will win if they’re cheaper.

So I think this time, this time, Steve is not going to let the party be spoiled. This time it’s going to be Apple with the dominant market share – that’s the legacy Steve will want to leave behind. So the HTC thing – it’s a warning shot. Others have likened it to a nuclear first strike. OK, maybe so, but like the Little Boy, it’s going to be a first strike that ends the war.

This time, Steve is bringing the perfect storm: platform, programs, price and protection.

Sort By Magic

Just noticed this gem in Google Reader. I have no idea what it does, but it reminded of this geek legend.

Innovating to Zero

Bill Gates has got the right idea:

I especially like:

My dream here is that if you can make it economic and meet the CO2 constraint, then the skeptics say, “OK, I don’t care that it doesn’t put out CO2, I kinda wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I’ll accept it because it’s cheaper.”

Private Wire a Minefield?

Further to my earlier posts about neighbourhood generation, an interesting collection of posts from Casey Cole over on the CarbonLimited blog.

I’m getting educated:

Just to be clear the ECJ ruling doesn’t make private wire illegal. It does require that private wire networks allow third party access. In other words, if I operate a private wire network I have to allow other electricity suppliers access to my customers.

China on the Moon? Been There, Done That.

From Jeff Foust on the Space Politics blog:

One person who doesn’t find the idea of a Chinese human mission [to the Moon] worrying—although for an unconventional reason—is Norm Augustine, chair of last year’s Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee. “I worry less about that,” he said in an after-dinner speech Tuesday night at an event hosted by the MIT Club of Washington. “If the Chinese go to the Moon, it will certainly be a wakeup call, but it will also be, ‘Well, we did that 50 years ago.’”

“My worry,” he continued, “will be that the Chinese will land on an asteroid and scare the hell out of us, as they could do relatively soon if they decide to do it. Maybe if they’re smart they won’t do it, because it probably will wake us up like Sputnik did.”

Foust also links to an article by Dwayne Day on the Space Review blog, where he points out there’s actually no hard evidence of the Chinese planning a manned mission to the Moon anytime soon.

Space: Yesterday’s Frontier

America has changed.

The recent, yet to be fully detailed changes to the US space programme speak of a great difference in the nation’s outlook and sense of itself.

This change is not recent. It began, I think, in the eighties and has been building to a turning point that was catalysed by the financial crisis. From Apollo to Shuttle to Constellation… nothing? NASA is now to be focussed on “capabilities rather than destinations”. One could argue that the space station is not much of a destination, being only a few hunded kilometres above the Earth’s surface. So in reality the Shuttle program was little more than an expensive holding pattern, making a loss at commercial satellite delivery and providing questionable scientific benefit. Maciej Cegłowski wrote a great essay on this subject back in 2005.

Meanwhile India and China have made extraordinary advances and have both announced Lunar expeditions. Whilst the cold war fuelled a space race that was no doubt inflated beyond what the US would have done alone, the relative space ambitions of today’s nations seem still to reflect their superpower status on the world stage. China and India are in the ascendancy, Russia is competent, workmanlike but essentially static, and the US is in decline.

What will become of the American identity without a frontier?

Neighbourhood Power Generation

A while back I began a rant about innovation in the power sector. I’ll spare you the joy of reading that post in its entirety; here’s the gist: Power generation is an industry ripe for disruptive change. Much as innovative companies like Apple were able to revolutionise the computer industry by distributing the processing power away from large, central facilities with hundreds of users to millions of desktops with one or two users each, the time is right for a company to come along and move power generation away from large fixed facilities upon which hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses depend towards small supply facilities serving one home or a neighbourhood of homes.

For the sake of brevity, let’s call this neighbourhood power generation, or n-gen.

Now, it’s all very well wanting to save the world from global warming, but the technology isn’t quite there yet to allow us to power ten or twenty homes from a solar array and make a profit – not unless someone can set a robust price for carbon, which seems ever more unlikely after Copenhagen. Nor will the average council be particularly keen to shout down residents’ complaints regarding the erection of large wind turbines right in the middle of dense housing. However, the immediate goal is to disrupt the grid and the commercial model that underpins it; we can deal with the carbon footprint at a later date. Of course, since we’re removing the losses incurred in hundreds of miles of overhead transmission lines, we’re naturally reducing our overall energy demand by about 7% (energy losses in the U.S. transmission and distribution system were 7.2% in 1995).

I mentioned in my earlier post that this is already happening. There is a large project which has been running for some years in Woking, England. Here’s an iTunes link to an Open University program which talks about the Woking “private wire” network (the episode is “Power Generation in Woking”). It’s just over 13 minutes long, and well worth a watch. Of particular interest are the figures quoted on profits made by Woking Council operating as a power supplier.

In the UK, it’s the Councils (local government) who are responsible for granting licences to run cables under the street. This seems to be the only potential barrier to a successful business. The technology exists to generate the power using CHP (combined heat and power) as in Woking, or other systems powered by wood chips or natural gas. The cables can be run in a private wire configuration, as Woking Council has demonstrated. The business is profitable – not least because of a direct-to-customer supply model, avoiding the 40-60% cut that the electricity retailers take. In fact, Woking Council ploughs the profits back into renewable energy projects, such as solar arrays.

It’s surprising that Woking seems to stand alone in having implemented a system like this.

Neil Gaiman Could Be a Coder

Read a great article in the Guardian today. It’s one of those list-of-lists sort of deals, with various successful authors offering “ten rules for writing fiction”.

On reading Neil Gaiman‘s list, it immediately rang true not only for writing fiction, but for writing code. Particularly for the indie developer looking to “make it” in the industry. Indeed, the parallels between authors and “freelance hackers”, if I might borrow a phrase from Neal Stephenson – another great writer, are significant and worth paying attention to. Here’s my paraphrased version of Mr Gaiman’s list:

1 Code.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you’re coding. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Use your program pretending you’ve never used it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to build the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Be proud of the good code (actually – NG here said “Laugh at your own jokes” – I think everyone should put a good joke or two in their code. For some reason I’ve noticed .NET programmers never do this).

8 The main rule of coding is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for coding. But it’s definitely true for coding.) So code your app as it needs to be coded. Code it carefully, and code it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

With deference and respect to NG, who is a far better writer than I will ever be a coder!