Category: Uncategorized
Bizzare Call to Stop Innovating
The best way to ensure nothing new happens is to make that a principle, as Dave Winer has advocated:
Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly. Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it’s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.
Read Winers whole statement here.
As soon as rules outside of the marketplace of ideas are made which guard against innovation, advances stodge and we are stuck with innovations led only by those who advocate conservativism. We are witnessing an effort again now to control change on the web by a few as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s. There is an interesting analogy to a point in legal history in the 1800’s in which logical innovations such as negligence were held back by capitalists who did not want to be held accountable under civil law for the accidents caused by industrialization. The same theme is seen now in the rejection of criminal sanctions for industrial polluters.
A call to control of standards is foremost a call to “follow and pay me” to tell you what you what you can figure out yourselves.
If you want to be led, listen to self-appointed leaders aka “gurus” – a word which should be seen as a slander. If you want the best, unleash the innovative.
George F. Will: too busy with making deposits to notice conflicts.
Sledging
Crazy Carpets matting down the rough
When Rupert the Bear or Oor Wullie slid down hills in the hardcover cartoon annuals sent from Scotland when I was a kid it was “sledging” not “sledding”. Whatever it is called, for those of you worried that we sold the farm when we…sold the farm and moved to the city, this is the view from the from window of the family sleddging.
Earlier: I saw a Northern Harrier – a medium sized hawk identifiable by a white patch above its tail and its habit of flying slowly a few feet above the ground – tracking over ice next door at Elevator Bay this morning. I don’t know if this means the ice mice have moved south or if it had a hankering for fish.
Odd News
This is interesting news, coming from a formerly high-placed White House insider who would have to be an utter liar and nincompop if this is not true:
Jan. 10 — NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it. O’Neill, fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush’s economic team, has become the first major insider of the Bush administration to launch an attack on the president. He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, “The Price of Loyalty.”
Odder still given the news about what the Danes found in Iraq.
Message to principals: when you hope to “make an example” of a smart kid, you prove your own failure.
From Dean’s – I don’t even like dogs but this is lovely.
Snow Sound
It’s been very cold the last few days. When it gets too cold, things happen. People freeze. Can’t snow. The big lake looks like it is coming to the boil. The snow makes a funny noise when you walk. If you click here mov00256-1 you will hear the sound of snow. It may take a moment to run. This is for that guy in Belize who checks in every now and then.
A moment later: Seems like the guy in the projection room got into the rum. This is going to take a minute…
Later still: ok, he is sober now. Should work – but not all at once…get in a line, please.