When I was a teenager, I was a BBS enthusiast. I ran a BBS of my own for most of my adolescence. It was text-based and required peer-to-peer modem connections. I envisioned a global, graphical BBS, and when it came out, I wanted to be working at a company that was at the cutting edge. When I discovered the internet in 1995, I knew this was my dream come true.

A lot has changed since then. I'm still devoted to the same principles, the free exchange of information, and community-based software, but technology is shifting again. The old model of the desktop computer is becoming obsolete, as technology becomes smaller and faster. Mobile computing and internet connectivity is becoming very widespread. Now I have a new dream of where I think this is headed, again based on my principles of free exchange of information and community-based software.

USB keys can store so much data that it's possible now to fit an entire operating system and a set of applications on one. As these are able to store more data, I think it will become commonplace for each person to have their own personal system on their USB keys, which they can put into any machine and be able to access.

As computers get faster, boot times are shrinking. We're starting to see computers that can boot into a usable system within seconds. Eventually, we can make these boot times relatively instantaneous. That will facilitate this system-on-a-key, allowing anyone to stick their USB key into a computer, and immediately use their own personal system.

Desktop computers will become terminals. Anywhere you go, homes, shops, gas stations, restaurants, you'll have access to such terminals which can boot your personal system. They will become more common than pay phones used to be.

The same will be true for mobile devices. You'll plug in your key and your personal system will appear, and you can do your thing. With such devices so commonplace, the only reason for the larger terminals would be the larger interfaces. No matter how fancy mobile technology becomes, they're necessarily limited by their unintuitive interface size.

Every technology starts as proprietary and closed, but eventually they become commoditized and based on open standards. Then the costs start to drop significantly. Hardware will become cheaper. I believe most software will eventually be open source. Using anything else will make about as much sense as buying a telephone that requires its own proprietary phone lines, and paying more for it.

The biggest issue that needs to be worked out is security. USB keys with a lot of personal data on them can be very vulnerable. Sticking them into any machine without some guarantee of trust and protection would be like having unprotected sex with many anonymous partners. Dangerous. But unlike sex, I think it's easier to make these guarantees in user-friendly ways.

For years, my approach to finding contractors was to just do an internet search and pick a local company that seems well-established. With this approach, I've dealt with quite a range of quality. Last year, I had endless plumbing problems, and decided to take a new approach: get references for good contractors, and create an on-going business relationship with them. They benefit from having a regular client, and I benefit from good service by someone who knows my situation.

So I created an account on Yelp.com and carefully perused the reviews. I was amazed at how much time and thought people put into their reviews. Imagine. Real customers, not paid actors, carefully instructing future potential customers about the relative merits of various services. That's better than money in the bank. It's not something a company can buy. They have to earn it, from years of good service.

I now have an electrician who impresses me with his competence and efficiency. I recently found a carpet cleaner that had 41 reviews with an average of 5 stars! They came out and did a job ten times better than my last carpet cleaning, for less cost. I reviewed them on Yelp, and gave them 4 stars:

Our carpets were awful before Genesis came out. They were friendly but got right to work, and worked very hard and efficiently. Their rates were very reasonable. They charge by square footage, not by severity, so I gave them a tip. They were an hour late, partly because they had trouble finding the place. There was one stain that came back after it dried, but the rest of the place looks great.

radven

I absolutely love this xkcd comic about DRM:
( Comic within )

This really gets to the heart of what is wrong with DRM. It's not just an ideological debate. It really is a very practical issue. A few DRM services have shut down already, leaving their customers with music they can no longer access. This is unfortunate for them, but inevitable, so luckily it happened sooner rather than later. Maybe now we have a real chance at customers being more critical of DRM, earlier on, when the vendors are more likely to listen.

Something that is often glossed over is that DRM is far more pervasive than people think. Windows and a lot of its software are DRM, for example. Windows has to "phone home" in order to operate, home being Microsoft. If Microsoft went out of business (it's inevitable someday, but anything is possible in this economy), then some things about your machine would stop working. I experienced this recently when I refused let it "validate" itself, and Windows Media Player stopped working in my Windows partition. Fortunately, I only boot into Windows about once or twice a year.

DRM is really just a recent attempt by software makers to lock their consumers out of their purchases, enforcing a monopoly above and beyond what copyright already provides, but causing problems for the users. The obvious practical issue of this is security updates, especially since Windows is so insecure. Security updates come like floods, but if you turn off the connection to Microsoft, the flood would stop, leaving your machine vulnerable. In an open source operating system, where anyone can see and modify the source code, if a vendor goes out of business, another vendor can fill the niche and continue providing security updates.

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are great for new users, but I'm not a new user. I'm not trying to be snobby, and I don't think I'm better than anyone else; I just have different needs than most people. I don't want polish. I want to see and work with the guts of my operating system, because I like to be in total control of my computing experience. I don't like my hand to be held. I'm not extreme about this. I like user-friendly things as long as they don't get in my way, or cover up what I want to see. Debian makes everything as easy as possible without getting in my way, holding my hand, or hiding the details.

I also value different things than most people. I don't want the latest bells and whistles, pretty graphics, or fancy features. I want stability and commitment. I hate when vendors take liberties with my computing experience for their own nefarious ends. I hate bugs, crashes, upheavels, insecurity, and having my privacy disrespected. Linux in general tends to be refreshingly free from many of these, but Debian takes it all a step further.

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I recently discovered a Linux distribution that's better for new users than Ubuntu. It's called Linux Mint. It's becoming extremely popular, and I started wondering why, so I decided to check it out. Their website is beautifully designed, with the awesome idea of having a scrollable series of screenshots at the very top. By the screenshots, it certainly looks pretty, but I didn't see anything that makes it stand out much otherwise.

I'm a devoted Debian user. Ubuntu is based on Debian (meaning that it has everything Debian has, but is polished and made more presentable to new users). Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. It looked like all they did was change the polish around a little, added some proprietary software and codecs, and called it Linux Mint. But after I installed it, I found that they added a lot of their own polish.

I installed Ubuntu recently, on a spare partition, just to play with it. That's something I hadn't done for years. It has worked pretty well for everyone I've installed it for, so I was pretty disappointed that it didn't detect my soundcard. To make things worse, one of their programs locked up on me, and when I tried to change my keyboard binding to Dvorak, I was given an error message which popped up everytime I logged in. This is unacceptable, and I was ready to go back to thinking that Linux is indeed not ready for the masses.

But I tried a couple other distributions. One was PCLinuxOS, which is also quite popular these days. It wasn't quite as polished or pretty as Ubuntu or Linux Mint, but it worked really well.

Then I tried Linux Mint. Right off the bat, I was impressed that everything that went wrong in Ubuntu was fixed in Linux Mint. Then I saw several added features in their system. One was their "mintMenu" which is like the Windows start button, but very cleverly designed to be intuitive and easy to find what you're looking for. They also had their own configuration, updating, and software installation systems, which all seemed better than Ubuntu's.

I don't like proprietary software, which Linux Mint is rife with, and I wondered if they had an easy way to remove it. I was over-joyed to find that they have a "Light edition" which is a version of Mint without any proprietary software or codecs. I was tempted to use it myself, but there are certain characteristics of Debian that I can't live without. The reasons for this are plentiful enough that I think I'll devote a whole LJ entry to it.

I just finished reading about Google's new open source Chrome browser. I'm really impressed. At first I was afraid that the comic book format would be a childish, dumb-you-down, Microsoft-style campaign, and I was afraid the browser would just be a re-branded version of Firefox. I was wrong on both counts.

The comic book does talk in mostly layman's terms, but they don't shy away from talking about the details of software engineering, and the design principles they used in creating the browser.

The browser itself is practically the opposite of a re-branded Firefox. It seems mostly to be a total re-vamp of the internals of a browser, which I agree have been severely problematic for quite some, as JavaScript and bloated web sites became more popular. And web security and privacy is just abysmal. However, I'm a little concerned about Google's multi-process approach becoming unwieldy.

I love some of its features, things I've been wishing for for a long time now, and some I've never thought of before but think will be really helpful. I like that they're so focused on tabbed browsing, and that they've made the address bar (stupidly named "omnibox") far more powerful and clever. That was something Firefox started on but never fully followed through. I also like the idea for the default page when creating a new tab. They got it right: blank is better because it's fast, but ideally it would be something both fast and useful. I also like their new way of handling pop-ups.

I read an article that mentions fears that it will just be a way for Google to collect more data about their users. This is a sign of not understanding about how open source works. Sure, Google could do something evil with the browser, but if they did, the whole world would know about it. Compare this with, say, everything that Microsoft makes.

I love Firefox, and I'm grateful for all Mozilla has done to bring the web out of the IE dark ages. But I think Firefox has been needing a better competitor than IE. Ever since 2.0, Firefox has been getting slow and bloated. And Mozilla has a fascist trademark policy that is not true to open source tradition, which pissed off a lot of people, including me.

Here's my favorite line from the comic strip. It's a good summary about my attitude toward technology in general:

"I don't care if there's one fewer cool feature. I just want this product to be rock solid."

But, I tend to stay well behind the curve, so while I will be interested to read and hear more about the progress of this browser, I probably won't use it myself for a couple years. Knowing Google, it will never come out of "beta."

Has anyone downloaded it yet? What do you think?

5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G

Here's a couple more reasons:

* It's way over-priced.
* It's unreliable.

The Debian Project, which maintains the operating system distribution that I run, recently elected a new project leader. The announcement mentions a few things about the project that I think are really cool.

Debian elects leaders using the Condorcet system. How they calculate the elections is spelled out here. Debian's governance system includes a social contract and a constitution, which promises certain things to its users and developers. These are big reasons that I trust this distribution. I'm so tired of being jerked around by companies that want to manipulate my computer for their own nefarious ends. I trust Debian.

The announcement says: "The evolution of the Debian Project's system of governance was thoroughly studied by Siobhán O'Mahony, Assistant Professor at the University of California's Graduate School of Management, and Fabrizio Ferraro, General Management Professor at IESE. You can read more about it at this page, which includes a link to the complete scientific study with detailed research data and analysis."

Debian calls itself The Universal Operating System. This means that it's designed to be all things for all people. It's so universal that it offers three other kernels besides Linux. From the announcement: "Debian GNU/Linux is one of the free libre operating systems (GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, GNU/NetBSD, GNU/kFreeBSD), running 18733+ officially maintained packages on 15 hardware platforms, from cell phones and network devices to mainframes and supercomputers, developed by more than two thousand volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the internet on the Debian Project."

I'm amazed by the sheer scale of this project.

Of course, the goal of being all things for all people means that Debian can't specialize or be particularly good at a certain niche. You could even say that this goal makes it subpar for any specific need. Usability, for example. That's why I recommend Ubuntu for new users instead, since it's based on Debian and specializes in desktop usability. But I find Debian ideal for my own needs. I want flexibility, stability, and trust more than whizbang and ease.

The other day I heard a Mariah Carey cover of Def Leppard's Bringing On The Heartbreak. I was astonished. I wondered how many teenie boppers were humming along to this song, and I wondered how many of them have ever heard the original. I wondered if they've even heard of Def Leppard.

Def Leppard was the Mariah Carey of their time. They got constant airplay on MTV, rock stations, and even pop stations. Did you know Def Leppard is still plugging along, actively putting out albums and touring? The same five guys, including their one armed drummer, but a new guitarist, Vivian Campbell (a legend in his own right), who replaced Steve Clark when he died in the 90's. But Def Leppard is still alive and well, and nobody cares.

The mediums changed too. MTV is just a regular TV station now, not a music station. Radio is going the way of the dodo bird, quickly being replaced by the iPod. CDs almost seem quaint by comparison. Our telephones are completely mobile and pathetically unreliable, but hey, they can take pictures, play music, play games, track our lives, send messages, and surf the web. I can't seem to participate in culture anymore without such a buggy contraption with absurd contracts. Working pay phones are becoming harder and harder to come by. Everyone assumes I have a cell phone for coordination purposes. I finally broke down and bought one, a pay-as-you-go plan only for emergencies and coordination.

What's next? I'm still on dial-up, which was fine until very recently. Video and sophisticated AJAX are quickly becoming staples of the internet. It's not enough to just a regular static web page anymore. Now it's all AJAX, YouTube, and Flash animation. A 10 minute video takes several hours for me to download.

I can't rent from a video store anymore. Months ago, I finally just bought off several dozen VHS tapes from the local video store for a buck a piece.

Keeping up with all of this proprietary and locked down technology is expensive and unnecessary. Seriously, land lines work better. They just do. AJAX is so often unnecessary, cluttersome, and circumvents browser functionalities I have come to rely on.

I'm not a big fan of planned obsolesence. This stuff isn't cheap, and the environmental cost is even higher.

For years, I've been fascinated by alternative economies, corporations, and organizations. My favorite author, Daniel Quinn, showed in his books that the core of a people is in how they make a living. That's not the same as making money, but happens to be so in our culture. This led me to several other books on the topic.

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There's a certain brand of skeptic that is obsessed with data, who believes that if there's no scientific research supporting something, then it's bullshit. Science is a religion to them. They use science as their ethical system, and believe they should only do things that research supports, and nothing that research rejects.

There are a lot of problems with science as a religion.

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That's a word you'll hear in every conference room, see in every press release, hear in every shareholders meeting. Whenever something doesn't seem like it's strong enough to stand on its own, just sprinkle the word "innovation" liberally into your speech.

Why, everyone is so busy talking about innovating that nobody seems to be doing it. Sure, there's "incremental innovation," but how hard is it to take something that someone has already master-minded and tweak it here and there, make it a little more efficient, a little cheaper to build? I don't care about better mouse traps. I want to not need mouse traps in the first place.

I'm talking about stuff that transforms entire industries, entire cultures, entire lifestyles. I'm talking about the internal combustion engine, the cotton gin, the light bulb, the personal computer, the internet. We finally have the freedom of mobile phones, except that they're much less reliable than traditional phones. Do you realize that most people are still driving around in cars that haven't evolved much since 1910? I've long ago given up waiting for my flying car. At this point, I'd be happy just to not depend on fossil fuels.