Ideas & Analysis

Discussions of various issues including suggested solutions to problems and pure speculation

10,000 Pirated Ebooks

Ebook-related items have been gathering in my notefile lately, and this is a good time to begin spilling them out where we can all see them. The triggering incident was a note from the Jolly Pirate, telling me that one of my SF stories was present in a zipfile pirate ebook anthology that he had downloaded via BitTorrent. That people are passing around pirated versions of my stories is old news. “Drumlin Boiler” was posted on the P2P networks a few months after it was published in Asimov’s in 2002, and my better-known shorts have popped up regularly since then. No, what induced a double-take was the name of the pirate anthology: “10,000 SciFi and Fantasy Ebooks.”

10,000? You gotta be kidding!

But I’m not. Jolly sent me the 550K TOC text file, which is 9,700 lines long, with one title per line. Not all are book length, and many, in fact, are short stories. Still, the majority of all book-length SF titles I’ve read in the last thirty years are in there, and so was “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” albeit not under my byline. (I wrote the story with Nancy Kress, who is listed as sole author.) The only significant authors I looked for but did not find were George O. Smith and Charles Platt. (One howler: Bored of the Rings is said to be by J. R. R. Tolkien. Urrrrp.)

The collection is 4 GB in size. The Jolly Pirate said that he had downloaded it in just under three hours. He attached the file for “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” which was a plain but accurate 57K PDF. Intriguingly, the date given under the title is January 28, 2002. The damned thing has evidently been kicking around for at least seven years, if perhaps not in its full 4 GB glory. This suggests that the anthology is not entirely ebook piracy but mostly print book piracy. (“Borovsky” was never released in ebook form.)

Some short comments:

I verified the existence of the anthology from the Pirate Bay search engine. It really does exist. (So, evidently, does the Pirate Bay, which surprised me a little, considering recent efforts to take them down.)
10,000 ebooks do not take a great deal of space by today’s standards. (Admittedly, better files with cover scans would be larger.) No one will think twice about a 4 GB download for size reasons, when 750 GB drives are going for $69.95.
The PDF is ugly. The lines are far too wide for easy readability and (since this is not a tagged PDF) not reflowable. That said, I did not find a single OCR error.
The Windows pathname of the text file from which the PDF was generated is shown at the top of every page. The pathname includes the full name of some clueless Dutch guy, from whose Mijn Documenten folder the file came. Ebook piracy clearly belongs to the common people, not some elite cabal skilfully dodging the **AA.
I’ve used a scanner to rip a couple of print books (plus ten years of Carl & Jerry print stories) and it is horrible hard work. However, the anthology demonstrates that if print is a form of inadvertent DRM (which I have long thought) it is not a particularly strong one. After all, as Bruce Schneier has said about DRM systems generally, they only have to be broken once.

This last item is key. A printed book is a worst-case challenge for an ebook pirate. Compared to cutting off the binding and making sure the paper pages all feed straight through the scanner ADF and then fixing the inevitable OCR errors, stripping out an ebook’s DRM is trivial. If ebook piracy is not yet a big deal, it isn’t because it’s difficult. It’s still because reading ebooks is borderline painful. I may not be typical, but if I can buy a used copy of a recent hardcover of interest for $10 or less, I’ll choose the hardcover rather than an ebook at any price. Sooner or later the readers will catch up to paper, and by then, well, we may see a 4 TB file called “10,000,000 EBooks About Everything” on the file-sharing networks, and it won’t even take an objectionable chunk of our 80 TB hard drives.

You think I’m kidding? Let’s compare notes in five or six years.

Some Good Juju and Some Bad Juju

Dec 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Bad juju first: When I woke up this morning it was 0, and we had six inches of new snow on the ground. Carol had a physical scheduled for 10:00, so we were out the door extra early, slithering (even in 4WD) in a winter wonderland. We got there and back intact, but it was snowing again when we pulled into the driveway, and the Weather Channel radar indicates that it may be snowing for some time. Given that six inches is close to the limit my little snow blower can handle at one gulp, I decided to get rid of what was there to make way for what was clearly coming. Not too difficult, and I was mostly done when I slipped on a patch of black ice on the driveway and went down hard on my right arm. Here’s hoping an Aleve will minimize the swelling, but I’m expecting some exquisite bruises on that arm, albeit bruises no one will see except Carol given that long-sleeved shirts are the order of the season. Winter began here in early October, and may we be so bold as to demand that it be gone by February?

Probably not; that promising sunspot that popped up for a few days on the far side of the Sun is now gone, and our hundred-year solar minimum continues with no end in sight.

The good juju comes to us mostly from the Engadget blog. A very perceptive post from Niley Patel on Saturday exposes Michael Arrington’s wrath over the Crunchpad coup that supposedly killed the tablet stone dead a week ago. And today several people wrote to tell me that what had been the Crunchpad is now the Joo Joo Tablet, and Arrington’s erstwhile hardware partners Fusion Garage intend to go it on their own. More details over on Gizmodo.

Saturday’s post suggests that Arrington was careless about defining contractual relationships between his firm and Fusion Garage, which is peculiar, considering that Michael Arrington was a lawyer long before he was a blogger or a tech enterpreneur. He registered the trademark for “Crunchpad” only at the end of November, after calling it by that name for well over a year. And now, wowzers, Fusion Garage claims that he never had much to do with the technical development of the device to begin with.

Arrington is threatening wholesale litigation, and the whole thing is starting to smell like greasepaint to me. But think: What better way to launch an unlikely dark horse in the tech world than to foment a media circus? Everybody loves a fight. I see a possible business plan that puts the Underpants Gnomes to shame:

Phase 1: Talk for a year or two about a fantastical device and see if anybody notices.
Phase 2: If nobody notices by the time the device is ready to sell, pretend to have a riproaring legal fight over who has rights to what.
Phase 3: Harvest endless millions of dollars’ worth of free PR while taking pre-orders.
Phase 4: Have a group-hug videocast to settle conflicts that never really existed.
Phase 5: Profit!

The problems could be real, too, obviously. But there’s something funny going on somewhere, and whereas I won’t order one until I see that it can be configured as an ebook reader (and ideally let somebody else try it first) I still have high hopes. Let’s watch.

Update 12/8/2009: Engadget has a little more detail, and a hands-on video.

Think Before You Click!

Nov 29th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I have a stray hour this morning, and I’d like to work in some notes on a few deceptive online mechanisms of various species that came to my attention all at pretty much the same time.

The first of these is Fanbox, which is a spinoff from a site called sms.ac a few years ago. I’m getting emails daily that claim to be from Facebook friends telling me that “Rodney Hornswoggle thinks you will really like this YouTube video. [Click here to] Check it out.” Even though I do know Rodney and he is on my friends list, a pitch like that smells to high heaven, and I’m not dumb enough to click on it. I researched it online and got a faceful. The emails were sent by something called Fanbox. Fanbox is a Facebook service that does various things, but, almost incredibly, it works by asking people for their email account and password, so that it can begin spamming everybody in the hapless users’ address books.

I boggle at the notion, but in fact this is not a new phenomenon. Fanbox’s corporate parent sms.ac has done this sort of thing for years, to the huge annoyance of a great many people. As with other things of this sort, the full story is complex. Google on “sms.ac scam” or “fanbox scam” and you’ll begin to get the idea. The takeaway here is obvious: Don’t give your email account password to Facebook apps. Or anybody else, for that matter. Geez.

Next is Video Professor, which is (again) not a new idea: Selling tutorial DVDs via “negative-response billing.” This is illegal in Canada but not the US, and hearkens back to the “book of the month” clubs or “record of the month” clubs in years past, in which you agree to accept (and pay for) an item every month until such time as you cancel the membership. At least with those ancient systems you had some reasonable idea of what it would cost you. Details of how much you end up paying Video Professor for a number of tutorial DVDs ($290!) are obscure, and present only in some very, very small print. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote about it in the Washington Post , after which Video Professor tried to intimidate both Arrington and the Post with legal threats. It didn’t work, and the effort spawned a great deal of negative publicity for Video Professor. However, they’re still out there, selling DVDs using what I consider an extremely deceptive pitch. Stay well back.

Finally, while we’re talking stuff-hidden-way-down-in-the-fine-print, there are “online loyalty programs.” (More here.) The scam works like this: An online retailer takes your credit card information during an order, but just before the order is completed, you’re invited to join a loyalty program to receive coupons or discounts or something. The program costs $9-$12 per month, but (as always) that’s way down there in the fine print, which authorizes the online retailer to give your credit card information to the loyalty program operator, who then bills your card and kicks backs funds to the online retailer that originated the lead. As with rebates, most of the coupons and other “rewards” are never redeemed, so it’s basically a free monthly slurp out of a great many credit card accounts. Online merchants who use such systems should be avoided. Here are a few mentioned in the article: Priceline (you’re old, Jim!), Orbitz (how d’ya think they could afford that hovercraft?), Buy.com, Fandango, 1-800-FLOWERS, Continental Airlines, and many others. (I printed out the full list included in the article as a guide to my personal boycott of anybody offering such programs.) And wow! Our old friend, Classmates.com, pocketed $70M through its partnerships with the loyalty progam operators.

Don’t be a victim. Think before you click. Read it all, especially on second or third-tier sites that you haven’t dealt with many times before. Check every line on your monthly credit card statements. Google for the name of the site and “scam” and see what others have said. Paranoia isn’t always a mental illness these days, especially online.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 5: Crossover

Nov 21st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

11 comments

There have been several attempts down the years to make Windows unnecessary. The most audacious is doubtless ReactOS, which cuts to the heart of things and wants to be a complete Windows XP-compatible OS. Needless to say, this is no small project and will take a long time to complete; right now, I’d call it somewhere between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs Skype, at least.) I’m also concerned that if they ever do get it anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.

That’s certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs. If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you don’t need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and all.

And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing projects in open-source computing: Wine, begun in 1993 by Bob Amstadt and Eric Youngdale. Wine provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app. This is easier than implementing a whole OS, with the further advantage that if done properly, Wine can act as a Windows compatibility layer over several Unix-like OSes, rather than only Linux. Currently, Wine can operate over Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD Unix, and x86 Solaris.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment/management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob-friendly. (Naked Wine is pretty stark.) Codeweavers also tweaks Wine itself to improve app compatibility, and contributes those tweaks back to the Wine project under LGPL. Some financial support is also provided to the otherwise volunteer-based Wine project. Wine’s founder, Alexandre Julliard, is an employee of Codeweavers, where he works full-time on Wine development.

Codeweavers focuses mostly on big-market apps like Microsoft Office, and doesn’t officially support apps beyond a relatively short list of “gold” software. However, I’ve found that a great many Windows apps install and run just fine under Crossover whether they’re on the list or not. InDesign 2.0 is listed on the site as “known not to work” but apart from a minor display glitch, it seems to work as always. (I haven’t tested it deeply so far.) Most Microsoft apps work beautifully (especially older ones) and I’ve been using Office 2000 and Visio 2000 under it without incident since last fall.

Wine implements a sort of runtime environment emulation for Windows called a “bottle.” More than one bottle may be created on a single host OS, and each bottle has its own emulated C: drive and Registry. By giving each Windows app its own bottle under Wine, apps are prevented from interfering with one another in the dreaded “DLL Hell” effect. Because it’s not a VM, the performance hit for running Wine/Crossover is very small, and most important, you do not need to have a legal copy of Windows running in the VM. On the other hand, a bottle looks enough like Windows to be infectable by Windows malware, though one bottle probably can’t infect other bottles on a Linux system, or the underlying system itself. (From what I’ve heard, the low-level system tricks played by many malware packages keep them from running or at least running completely.) There are known conflicts between WGA and Wine, so don’t install WGA if you can avoid it.

Bottom line: If Wine supports all the Windows apps you absolutely must use, you do not need Windows at all. I haven’t tested all the Windows packages that I use here (next up is MapPoint 2004) but for Office and Visio 2000 it’s been nothing short of magical, and I’m guessing InDesign will come along eventually. In a mature software market, time works in our favor: One by one, existing apps will be installable under Wine, and each time that happens, Windows slips a little bit deeper beneath the waters of irrelevance.

Next up: For the hard cases, there’s always virtualization.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 4: Format Lock-In

Nov 18th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Computing certainly isn’t about operating systems. Nor is it really about apps. It’s about files. Data is what we create, modify, store, and distribute in electronic form, and the ways that our data is stored give shape to almost everything else we do in computing. Being able to move from one platform to another thus depends almost completely on whether or not we can bring our files with us.

I’ve been working in front of a personal computer on an almost daily basis since May of 1979, and over the past thirty years I’ve accumulated thousands of made-by-hand files. Much of that is text, and I’ve had almost complete success bringing document files forward down the years, bouncing from one word processor to another by using various format-conversion tools. SF stories I wrote in CP/M WordStar in 1980 have passed through WordPerfect for DOS and several major releases of Microsoft Word and still live on my writing projects thumb drive. I keep a commercial Windows utility called Quick View Plus on hand to extract text from extinct file formats when necessary, which has been pretty rarely in recent years. Still, it’s there if I need it.

It’s a lot tougher once you get away from text. There are no conversion utilities for Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Visio, and as best I know nothing will import files created on either app. This is probably also the case for QuickBooks, and probably a great many more major applications that I’ve simply had no need for and no experience with.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this kind of file format lock-in is the only thing keeping some of these companies profitable, or for some of them simply in business. Computing is mature in terms of the basic mechanisms we use to manipulate data: text editing, page layout, spreadsheeting, presentation, raster drawing and vector drafting, image processing, and database query and display. Small points may be patentable, but the fundamental machinery is now older than any surviving patents. Building an app that could load and edit an InDesign layout file would take some work but no genius, and if done would be a major competitor to InDesign, not only in new projects but (crucially!) in existing projects as well. Adobe guards its file formats with its life because its file formats are its life.

Alas, my files are my life too. And when Adobe’s IP rights bump up against my IP rights, who wins? Adobe, of course. Hence my hatred of activation: I don’t use newer versions of InDesign because Adobe can turn them off remotely and basically hold my work hostage if they choose to, perhaps because they’re too stupid to tell a RAID from a separate machine, or because they’re hungry enough to want to force me to pay for an upgrade that may have no new features that I need…and maybe no new features at all.

I have no general Stallmanesque animus against commercial software. I have a fortune in boxed apps on the shelf, and have never minded paying for them, even when they were upgrades. However, upgrading must be my choice, and migration of software to newer machines as time passes must not require new licenses.

Even commercial software that doesn’t require activation often demands a service and a tray icon, constantly popping up notifiers trying to upsell me to something I neither want nor need. In a mature market, there’s less demand for upgrades, and people can be happy using software for a long, long time. I can understand the vendors’ perspective and their need to be selling all the time to stay alive in a mature market. I think they should recognize my right to find it annoying and turn to software that doesn’t yammer so much and waste my cycles.

The bottom line here is that some apps are difficult to move away from; for me, the two killers are InDesign and Visio. Yours may be different, but I think most people who do creative work at the keyboard have a few. The difficulty lies entirely in proprietary file formats, and leads me to the infuriating conclusion that Windows is necessary only to allow me access to my own files.

The good news (for small values of “good”) is that there are tricks to be played. More in the next installment.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 3: Apps

Nov 17th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I came down with a monster headcold the last couple of days, and whereas this entry was in the can since Sunday, the remaining entries may be a little slower in coming. Bear with me…

We don’t use Windows because it’s Windows. (Most of us use it because it came on the machine and, well, it’s paid for.) Windows is just an operating system, and an OS is a troll living under a bridge. Applications with specific missions lean over the railing and shout orders to the troll, who (mostly) does as they say while keeping order up on the bridge. An OS is 80% facilitator and 20% bodyguard. Our real work happens in the apps. If the apps we use can be run without Windows, then Windows isn’t necessary at all.

There are three ways to break free of an application’s dependence on Windows:

Find a version of a Windows app that runs on your OS of choice;
Switch to a similar app that runs on your OS of choice; or
Coerce a Windows app to run somehow on the OS of your choice.

I’ve done all three, and for the sake of further discussion here, the OS of choice is Linux. Mac OS/X is another worthy option, and all three of these methods are available there too, but for several reasons I hesitate to give Apple my money. (We’ll talk of this at some point; people who know my deep history will understand.)

There is a lot of very good free software to be had for Linux, and it can be had very easily. The Ubuntu Software Center allows easy search for apps via category browsing or keyword search, and any selected apps are downloaded from trusted repositories and installed without further intervention. The Software Center can tell you what packages are already installed, and can uninstall packages you no longer want. This is so uncharacteristic of the ancient Unix culture of pain that I still giggle sometimes when I install something. (“This is easy. Too easy…”)

I was a little surprised at how many Windows apps have almost identical versions running under Linux. This is true of some commercial apps as well as free apps, but free apps are much more likely to have Linux versions. I use the following apps almost identically under both Windows and Linux:

Firefox Web browser
Thunderbird email client
Skype VOIP/IM client
Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor

This represents a good deal of what I do in front of the keyboard. (Maybe a third.) I’ve heard that Google Earth can be had in a Linux version but haven’t tested it yet. It’s not available through the Ubuntu Software Center.

Switching to a similar Linux app takes more doing, but for some sorts of work it isn’t difficult. I don’t use newsgroups very much anymore, but using Pan under Linux was relatively pain-free, even though it’s quite different from Forte Agent in many respects. There’s a very useful site called Open Source As Alternative that provides suggestions as to what free apps are reasonable alternatives to many commercial Windows apps. Definitely spend some time there if you haven’t already; the real trick in open source software is often just knowing that it exists, absent pervasive ad campaigns. For example, I’ve known about the Gimp for ten years, but never heard of GimpShop (Gimp reworked to have a menu structure more like Photoshop’s) until I read about it on OSAlt.

KOffice is probably the best of the open-source office suites, though not all the several apps are equally powerful or polished. OpenOffice is even better functionally, but it has some weirdnesses (font management first among them) that probably stem from its Java-centric design. It used to be the only one of the open source word processors I know of that will load a .docx file, but the latest Abiword will do that now. Note that OO will bog anything less muscular than a 2 GHz Pentium, so don’t install it on older machines, and max your memory before you install it on anything.

For generating raw text and editing old Word 2000 files, I now use Abiword routinely. I don’t do much spreadsheeting, but my fairly simple PlanetPlanner spreadsheet loads and runs on Gnumeric, and that’s good enough for me.

Alas, once you get away from the most simple and widespread categories of apps (like word processors and spreadsheets) the news is mostly bad. The real problem with similar-but-not-identical apps isn’t the work it takes to learn them. It’s a phenomenon called file format lock-in, and in some respects is the key issue in this discussion. More about that in the next installment, probably when my nose stops dripping into my keyboard.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 2: Ubuntu

Nov 15th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

In the past two week’s I’ve installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala) three times: twice as upgrades, and once as a clean install from a CD. The combo LiveCD/installer ISO came down with uTorrent in 8 minutes 5 seconds (!!) and has given me trouble only once, and that with the partitioner: I tried to install 9.10 on Carol’s old HP laptop, but the partitioner could not determine the size of the existing Windows partition, and thus the resizer slider would not appear. On an SX270 with a similar size hard drive and an existing XP partition, the partioner resized XP without any trouble. (I’m wondering if there’s some weirdness in the HP BIOS, but have not gone after it yet.) I’ve spent a great deal of time in Ubuntu in recent days, and beyond that one little glitch with the laptop, I’d say Karmic is the best one yet.

Apart from its contrarian (and purely optional) brownness, Karmic’s default GNOME desktop is a great deal like Windows XP. The taskbar functionality is divided between two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom. Now that 20″ displays are common, I use two lines for the Windows taskbar as well and don’t begrudge GNOME the extra line–and you can put both panels at the screen bottom if you want to. The Home folder stands well for My Documents, with familiar subfolders for documents, music, pictures, video, and downloads. Nautilus looks enough like Windows Explorer to pass, especially given that most of us custom-configure Explorer after awhile and not everyone’s configuration is identical. Left mouse button selects, right brings up context. In short, all the basic ideas of the Windows UI are present, in recognizable form. There’s some bumping-up-against-habit in switching from one UI to another, but after even a little time exploring in GNOME you won’t be lost anymore.

The Control Center is a great deal like Control Panel, with applets to manage most configurable options. One gripe about the Control Center is that there is a perfectly good applet to manage grub’s boot options, but it’s not installed by default and I only came across mention of it online by accident, while looking for something else. If you want it, go into the Software Center, and search for Startup-Manager. Install it, and you can specify grub’s default OS, the menu time delay, a splash background, and other things. I take back the grouchiness expressed in my entry for November 7, 2009, with the exception that Startup-Manager needs to be installed by default.

I still have a gripe with Linux generally that goes back a long ways: It needs centralized font management. Unless I’m missing it (and I looked pretty hard) no such applet exists for Control Center, and installing fonts is much more fussy than it needs to be. This may not matter much if you’re not a publisher or a graphic artist, but it matters a lot to me. I have a set of expensive Type 1 fonts that I bought in 2001 and use in all of my Copperwood Press books, but getting them into Linux was non-trivial, and not all apps that should recognize them do. Scribus and poor little Abiword picked them up immediately, but OpenOffice still can’t see them and I still can’t figure why. I know that X11 makes font management a little more complex than it is in Windows, but that’s no excuse for not having a font manager in Control Center.

Beyond that, few complaints. There is now a Safely Remove Drive context menu item for thumb drive mount icons that I don’t remember seeing in earlier versions. Videos that play without sound in Windows (due to obscure codec errors) play with full sound in Karmic. Bottom line: Ubuntu 9.10 implements all the fundamental GUI machinery that Windows does, and does it with enough similarity not to drive a newcomer to distraction. From that standpoint, Windows really isn’t necessary at all…but alas, GUI machinery is only one small piece of the larger Windows pie. More tomorrow.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 1: Overview

Nov 14th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

19 comments

Still dealing with neck problems here, but in the background I’ve been pursuing a long-term, low-intensity project aimed at discerning how necessary Windows is for my daily operations. Back in 2001 or so, Keith and I considered publishing a book called Dumping Microsoft, but after I looked closely at the Linux releases of the time, decided it would be premature. Windows 2000 was mighty good, and Linux had yet to break out of its all-hail-the-console, pain-is-good hacker culture. It may be time to reconsider the necessity of Windows (and perhaps that book) which is what my upcoming series here is about.

I’ve changed operating systems often enough in the last 30 years not to get too attached to any of them, and have no tribal/emotional investment in Windows 2000 or XP. An OS is just a workbench, after all: It does very little work by itself, and exists almost entirely to help applications do what they must do in the most productive way possible. Too much of modern OS versions is just gratuitous glitz, which eats machine cycles and doesn’t get a page laid out any faster. My reaction to Windows Vista was pretty simple: What’s in all this for me? The primary purpose of Windows Vista was to make itself harder to steal, which is something of a fetish over there–and all the glitz was tossed in to persuade people to upgrade. Furthermore, the damned thing was slow. No sale.

You’ve heard me say many times here that personal computing is mature. I help out people at our parish with their computers, and an astonishing number of them still use Office 97. They may use the latest IE or Firefox, but they haven’t seen the need to spend more money on word processing or spreadsheets. That’s because the need isn’t there. Office ’97 probably has 90% of everything useful in an office suite; if you want the rest, get Office 2000, which I myself have been using for almost ten years now.

It’s taken Linux longer to reach parity with Win2K/XP because it’s written by volunteer programmers and not highly paid engineers on continuous death-march. It’s also required the vision of a consumer-oriented distro firm to package up a version of Linux amenable to non-technical people. The testing I’ve done over the past year (in parallel with revising my assembly language book for Linux) tells me that Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux is ready for ordinary users, and if it were widely available as a preinstall would be considered no geekier than Windows. (Installing Ubuntu from CD is actually loads easier than installing Windows XP. Microsoft would be perhaps a third its current size if not for Windows preinstalls.)

What makes it urgent now is a creeping suspicion I have that Windows malware is unstoppable. I see articles on tech sites several times a week describing new and increasingly clever exploits of flaws in Microsoft and Adobe software. This is troubling on many fronts, from the technical–Why in hell do we still have buffer overflow exploits after all these years?–to the purely political: How do we know that exploits in closed-source software have really been fixed? Linux is not immune to infection (it’s secure at least in part because of its rarity) but the fact is that infections are difficult and rarely seen in the wild. I want to take advantage of that security, whatever its origins.

Hence the current project. I’ve talked about bits and pieces of it here and there in the past year, and it may be time to present what I’ve learned in more detail. Stay tuned.

Bring Your Priest and Your Prayerbook. That’s It.

Oct 24th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Just the other day, Good Pope Bennie opened a door for conservative Anglicans to become Roman Catholics without completely abandoning their Anglican traditions. (Links to more discussion here.) The Roman Catholic Church will be willing to create Personal Ordinariates for converting Anglicans, which is jargon for establishing non-territorial dioceses in which members retain a distinctive liturgical style different from that of the RCC as a whole. This has been done before on a very small scale, though it’s a complex business and not everybody within the RCC agrees that it’s a good thing.

Basically, conservative Anglicans will be received into custom-built dioceses with their own priests and prayerbooks (what Anglicans call missals) and report directly to the Pope, rather than to an RC archbishop in a particular city. They’ll be able to continue using their liturgies and occasional ceremonies pretty much as they have before. The big win for them is that they will no longer have to cope with women priests or demands for gay marriage. However, there’s a downside, and I wonder if it’s dawned on potential crossover Anglicans what they’ll have to leave behind:

Birth control. Even conservative Anglicans in my experience have no particular issue with contraception. (Abortion is another matter entirely.) In the Roman Catholic Church, procreation is the primary reason for marriage and the only permissible reason for sexual activity or even sexual thoughts. Contraception remains a mortal sin. There’s no indication that Personal Ordinariates trump Papal teachings at this level.
Divorce. This was, after all, the whole reason for Anglicanism to begin with. While divorce is treated less casually among conservative Anglicans than among liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is nonetheless embraced reluctantly when necessary. Crossover Anglicans will have to agree with Rome that divorce is impossible.
Their bishops. Male Anglican/Episcopalian priests have been accepted into the RCC in the past, but married bishops are considered off the table. The problem here is that every prominent Anglican bishop I’ve ever heard of has been married, primarily because nearly all Anglican/Episcopalian priests are married. So crossover Anglicans will have to accept episcopal oversight from Roman Catholic appointee bishops, or bishops newly consecrated out of the ranks of (the very uncommon) unmarried priests.

I don’t think this will work, and here’s why: In my view, a religious culture is more than a set of prayers and ceremonies. It’s a way of seeing Earth as well as a way of seeing Heaven, and in my own research the Roman Catholic and Anglican Catholic undertstandings of the physical world, the human person, sex, and marriage stand out as radically different. There’s some serious question in my mind as to how many Anglicans will embrace Rome once they completely understand what Rome will demand of them–and whether those who accede will continue to be Anglicans in any honest sense of the word.

All The Forks That We Need

Oct 17th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

23 comments

Carol and I have been married now for 33 years. Back in the summer of 1976 my mother threw us a bridal shower, and among the many gifts we received were two sets of Ecko Eterna Corsair stainless steel flatware, for a total of eight place settings. We still have them. In fact, we have been eating with them for all 33 of those years. (At left is a 33-year-old daily-driver fork. “Eterna” is fersure. ) They’re all still in the drawer.

Well, almost all of them. Flatware eventually goes missing, like protons, though with a much shorter half-life. Over the years a couple of spoons and forks have probably followed us to potlucks and never come home. I have no better explanation. When I was a toddler I used to drop flatware down the cold air return, which I know because when I was 14 I helped my father tear out the old sheet-metal octopus that heated our house, and found most of a place setting at the bottom of the big pipe. As an adult I have no such excuse. I only know that we run out of clean forks before we run out of clean tablespoons.

I got irritated enough recently by our fork shortage to look on eBay, where I scored three Ecko Corsair forks for $10–and five spoons for $12. The forks were unused, and when I got them, washed them, and dropped them in the drawer, it struck me that there wasn’t much difference in appearance between the brand-new Corsair forks and the forks that have been faithfully stabbing our steaks for 33 years now. We have a full drawer of flatware again, and all the forks that we need. Better still, if we ever need more, we know where to find them.

I had an insight when the forks arrived that Carol and I are not and will probably never again be in the market for new-build stainless steel flatware. Why should we be? Our set works perfectly, and still looks like new. Spare parts are available, cheap. This isn’t good news…if you make flatware.

And I also wonder if our auto industry is in trouble at least in part because cars are lasting longer and people are trading them in far less often. I got my first car in 1970 when I started college. It was a bare-bones 1968 Chevelle 300, and even at two years old the door panels were growing significant rust spots. By 1974 the body was mostly rot and the engine disintegrating, and rather than pony up for a valve and ring job, I dumped it and bought a brand-new Honda Civic. The Civic lasted until 1982, when its brake cylinders started going out repeatedly. I had a Datsun pickup for a year and decided I didn’t like pickups; I traded it for a 1984 Chrysler minivan, which I owned uneventfully until 1995. That year I traded the old minivan in on the newest version of the same minivan–and we still have it, a little tired but entirely functional. The Toyota 4Runner that we bought in 2001 will flip over 100,000 miles today or tomorrow, and has never given us a lick of trouble. No rust, no wiggles, no funny noises, no problemo nada. I expect to be driving it happily ten years from now.

Draw the curve here. Cars that used to implode after 5 years are now lasting for fifteen or more. Is it any wonder that we don’t need as many cars as we used to? A great many of our economic problems today may stem from simple overcapacity: factories cranking out stuff like it’s 1968, simply because that’s what they’ve always done and the spreadsheeters require it. (Publishing certainly has that problem, though for different reasons.) We are the victims of our own success, in that there is less work than there are workers, because we’re making better forks…and much better cars. We may not need a Big Three for making cars. A Big Two may be sufficient. (I’ll leave the eenie meenie mynie moe part to someone else, thanks.) And if that’s the case, we have to be extremely careful about protectionist economics, because the export market is all that’s left, once Americans have all the forks that they need.