OneAndOneIs2

There was a discussion at last night's LUG, started by the resident loudmouth, about how the emphasis on computing has gone in its time from hardware (Remember soldering a motherboard together? Me neither, thank God), to the OS (Microsoft. 'Nuff said.), to applications (Firefox), to services (Google) and therefore the Next Big Thing will be a focus on content & information itself.

So, with that in mind, I started thinking about interfaces and how a bunch of new developments in technology, along with some new ways of using existing things, might work with computers that are designed solely around manipulating ubiquitous-format-based content.

Then I started plugging away with Gimp because there was no way I could do this post without illustrating it. Hence this post has taken a while to write. With any luck it was worth the wait.

So, we start with the next-gen computer. It has a single interface, none of today's separation. The typical mouse-keyboard-monitor combination is replaced with a multi-touch screen. You'll need to watch this video if you're not familiar with multi-touch.

So the mouse is eliminated by a touchscreen, and the keyboard becomes virtual and can thus be tailored to your exact requirements - such as Optimus keyboard-like application-specific key-reassignment; moving the Caps Lock key from its moronic current location; and spacing the keys to suit your hand size, etc.

(As ever, click to enlarge image)

So let's say you want to create a document. You press the "Create a paper document" button and a piece of paper appears on your desktop. The key point of the new interface is that there is just THE interface: You don't have a separate Word Processor interface just to create a document. You just have a piece of paper on your desktop. Touch the paper to give it focus, then start typing on your virtual keyboard.

You have created your document. Now for the fun bit: Moving it to another computer. This is where the interface gets substantially different from the current norm, and much more intuitive.

We're still going to use flash memory to move our files, but in a totally different way. Right now, the two big problems with flash drives is that they all look the same, which can make it hard to find the desired file when you have multiple drives; and the fact that they always maintain a degree of separation from the host computer: They're always a different drive (Windows) or buried in /mnt or /media (Linux).

We're trying to make content ubiquitous: We want to dissolve these separations. If I move a physical document from one desk to another, I just pick it up and move it: I don't make it vanish and reappear.

So with that in mind, we have our new flash drives. No longer thumb drives that plug into a USB socket, but instead a convergence of Wireless USB, wireless power (such as electromagnetic induction maybe), the new paper-thin flexible transparent screens, and the power-free persistence of imagery found in electronic paper.

Sounds complex? For the moment, ignore all the funky technology and just focus on what you'll appear to have: A thin flexible piece of clear plastic. Nothing exciting to look at.

Yet.

We now put our piece of plastic onto the only interface we have: The screen. No plugging anything in: The whole point is that in the future, there is one interface for the computer. Absolutely everything goes through that single interface: The screen. So here goes:

Exciting stuff, eh? We're now looking at part of the screen through our transparent bit of plastic.

Bear with me, this is where it gets complex. So I'm going to continue using illustrations, with the "What you see" information on the left, and the "What actually happens" information on the right.

You put the plastic onto the screen

The flash memory within the device is mounted by the PC

You see a bit of text you want to delete from the document: You touch the screen at the start of the text and slide your finger along to the end of the text, selecting it. Then you hit "Delete" and the text is gone

The screen interprets a single-finger movement like a "mouse click-and-drag" (Finger-movement depicted in blue)

You want to resize the document for a closer look, so you put two fingers on the document and move them apart, zooming in on the page

The screen interprets a two-finger movement as a resize/zoom control (Finger-gestures shown in violet)

You want to move the document from your PC to the flash memory: You place two (or more) fingers on the piece of paper, drag over to the clear piece of plastic, and let go

The screen interprets a two-finger drag as a "move object" command. Upon the document being placed over the location of the flash memory, the file is copied to the flash via wireless USB, in the same way as dragging a file icon to a USB drive icon on a current desktop copies the file.

The piece of paper shrinks to fit on the piece of plastic

When the file is copied to the flash, also transferred is information about what the file contents (in this case a document) should actually look like. This image is resized to fit on the device's own resolution, and the device, powered by the wireless power supply, updates its previously-blank transparent screen with an image of the document.

You pick up the piece of plastic and the document goes with it

As the device is removed, it is unmounted from the PC and the document is no longer resident on the host machine. The image of the document on the device remains in place without power, electronic-paper-like, making it easy to locate the file when you have a multitude of identical flash devices, and also making it possible to access information from a file without even needing a computer: An image file, for instance, could be examined visually, with no need to mount it and view it on a monitor

You take the device to another computer and drop it on the screen

The flash device is mounted as usual on the new computer and the file(s) on it are now accessible.

To copy (rather than just move) the file from the flash to the PC, you place one finger of one hand on it, and hold it in place, whilst touching it with two fingers on the other hand and dragging it off the device and onto the screen.

The screen interprets the combination of a "holding in place" (blue) gesture with a "move it" (violet) gesture as a "copy the file" command, copies the document onto the desktop and opens it.

You want to make this document the first page of another document, so you drag & drop it on top of another document. Then you swipe across the top-left corner where a staple would usually be on a real document.

Each page of a document is a separate file when scattered around the desktop. "Stapling" two (or more) pages together with the corner-swipe gesture links them together into a single file with each page in the order it is arranged on the desktop.

You want to turn the page, so you hold the bottom-right corner in place with one finger and turn the page with a swipe of the second finger

The screen interprets the hold (blue) and swipe (green) as a "turn the page" command

You want to annotate the document to suggest changes, so you drag a post-it note onto the page and write the relevant text on it.

The post-it notes enter metadata to the file in the same way as commenting in a word processor does.

You want to send the document to one of your collaborators without messing about with flash drives, so you drag it onto his icon and release it.

The file is transferred over the network to your friend's desktop

You decide to add a graphic to the document. You pin the document in-place with one hand and navigate to another desktop with the other hand. The file is moved to the new desktop.

Every folder is a desktop: holding the file with a (violet) finger-press whilst dragging in a new desktop (blue) essentially moves the file to a new folder.

The document file is moved to the new desktop, where your images are stored.

You have moved the file to another folder, and the other files contained in the directory are displayed, already-open and ready to manipulate, courtesy of the clever interface.

You drag an image onto the document

The computer embeds the image file into the document

And so on and so forth. I'm sure you get the idea. The main point is that you don’t have a word processor environment to edit a document, you don't use a file manager to move a file to a new location, you don't open a graphics program to view images, you don't plug your flash drive in to anything in order to use it. Everything is done through a wonderfully-intuitive single interface that works exactly the way you expect it to.

Obviously, applications are still there - you would still need a word processor installed in order to create a document. But it's hidden from you: All you see is the piece of paper. You don't navigate through toolbars and dialogue boxes to embed a picture, you just grab a picture and drag it into place. You don't mess about with an IM client to send a file to somebody over the 'Net, you just drag & drop. You still have file systems on your PC and flash memory, but you don’t see them: You just see the flash device as fully-interactive part of your interface. And so on.

All you applications are integrated silently into the interface. All your hardware is integrated silently into the interface. No buttons, no cables, no inconsistent GUIs. In many ways, as far as the user is concerned, no OS, no applications, and no interface at all.

All you have is content, and ways of manipulating it.

So that's my view on the "Next Big Thing" discussion. It's not about "killer apps" - it's about hiding the apps altogether and giving the user constant, direct access to the content itself.

The USA has been behind Europe in terms of mobile/cell phones pretty much from the start. I'm told it's because pagers caught on in a big way there and delayed people buying phones, or some such.

It seemed like they might at last catch up with us when the iPhone was launched, with an array of new features promised to revolutionize the whole phone experience.

It comes out today. People have been queueing outside Apple shops for the last few days, I'm told.

I've heard from a number of sources that the European version of the iPhone will be announced on Monday.

Unlike the American version, which has only a single carrier and uses 2G technology, the European phone will be multi-carrier and use the more-advanced 3G.

Ah well. America gets a few months of bragging rights, I guess - let's hope they enjoy it while it lasts :o)

(I should perhaps add that I personally find most 'advances' in phone technology lately to be worthless and annoying rather than grounds for boasting - my own phone is the cheapest Nokia available in the store and doesn't even have a camera. But there ARE people out there who seem to genuinely care about these things. Hey ho...)

I just got an email.

Please, try to contain your shock. It's not actually a very rare occurrence.

What's unusual is that this email was from somebody who grabbed my address from my website and was contacting me with what amounts to a job offer. The most pertinent passage:

We are looking for an author for a white paper that compares Linux Distros. The client for this white paper is Microsoft.

Isn't that interesting?

Sadly, it was scheduled for the period in which I'll be in the middle of that career change I've mentioned before - not a time in which I'll want the burden of writing a professional piece. For that and, admittedly, other reasons as well, I've turned the opportunity down.

But I'll keep my eyes out for this particular white paper, when it's written. My curiosity is most definitely aroused.

If nothing else, I hope that my month off in August will let me catch up on my reading. I haven't been getting much C done lately, and a book I pre-ordered so long ago that I'd forgotten it just turned up. The new Blender book.

Blender's a powerful bit of kit, but it's not the easiest to learn. Hence the need for a book. If I ever manage to read it, I'll post a review!

I work (Until July, at any rate) for a pharmaceutical company, processing reports from human drug trials.

There are two completely separate databases that safety information is entered onto. One, which I work on, is composed of data from "immediate" reports - supposed to be sent to us within 24 hours of any adverse event occurring. The other is a more leisurely affair - made up of periodic reviews.

The idea is that by having (what should be) the same information coming in through two separate channels, you can compare the two and make sure that they agree, thus eliminating mistakes. Works pretty well. Usually.

A while ago, one of the biggest trials in the department, which I handled almost single-handedly, came to a close. It was time for the databases to be locked. And the people running it suddenly realized that now would be a good time to do that whole "reconciliation of the two databases" thing, because they hadn't bothered throughout the entire lifetime of the trial.

And naturally, they found dozens of little mistakes - "1" instead of "7" in this field, "ACB" instead of "ABC" in that field, and so on. Along with a bunch of reporting mistakes as well.

They all had to be reported and fixed, and they all had to be done before the databases were closed. In a sudden last-minute panic, myself and my immediate superior for that trial were dumped upon with a huge number of change requests.

That would have been bad enough. But the people who had neglected to reconcile at any point prior to the end had also failed to read the guidelines on how to make corrections. Instead of sending us "Change THIS to THAT please" requests signed by the original reporter, they had asked the original reporter to simply refax everything he had ever sent us.

Dozens of pages per report came screaming through the faxes, and did absolutely nothing to allow us to correct any of the reporting errors, as the re-faxed reports still contained the errors. A small forest at least was depopulated to make the paper for all the utterly useless faxes we were barraged with.

Left to ourselves, we might have just ignored the whole sorry mess and gotten on with some real work. But that was sadly not an option: The changes HAD to be made, incompetence notwithstanding.

So, almost entirely alone because of the sheer complexities of making these simple changes courtesy of the excess paperwork, I made them. All of them. On time.

That was three months ago. This afternoon, a bright orange piece of paper arrived on my desk: An "Above and Beyond" award for getting the work done.

Makes it all worthwhile.

Really.

But I'm still quitting in a month and a half's time

Remember a few years ago, all the press MS got for its "Get the Facts" campaign, in which they misrepresented huge numbers of facts in an attempt to convince people that Linux was more expensive overall than Windows?

It never really got anywhere. But now they've got yet more Facts they want the consumer to Get.

And the fact is, they're on their knees begging you to buy their new, cosmetically-improved, DRM-crippled XP upgrade. AKA Vista.

Don't wait for the Service Pack, pleads Microsoft. Buy Vista now! Please! We're haemorrhaging users in every direction!

I hate to see a grown company grovel.

But in this case, I'll make an exception

There's an interesting post on Greg KH's blog about how the enterprise Linux distros manage kernel releases. You might find it worth a read.

Alternatively, if you're a Monty Python fan, you might instead like to read a treatise on estimating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

LXer has an interview with a GNU/Linux evangelist.

I'm a bit baffled. The same guy who says One of the mistakes I think a lot of instructors make, is in the way they approach a class. They most often reinforce users fear my using terms like, "you'll have to learn to........" Or, "OpenOffice doesn't look like Microsoft Office and creates a different format........" This is ignorance! Users know it's different before they even look at it. Why reinforce any fear or negativism? also says that the biggest problem he tends to face is with employees: Once these users get the "word" that there will be an administrator, security will be tight, and no......"you're not going to any software you want on the 'puter that belongs to your employer," then any enthusiasm they may have had for Linux dissipates.

Pot, meet kettle? A faster way of killing enthusiasm than telling users about how much their employer will be able to clamp down on their activities doesn't exist.

We use a very locked-down Windows XP at work. We can't even change IE's start page. It's hugely frustrating. I was very happy when I got Firefox working. Has this bloke not heard of "job satisfaction"?

But that's beside the point. More relevant is: What the Hell is he talking about?? Since when did using Linux stop you from installing & using your own software?

Oh sure, you can be kept away from the package manager. But nothing stops you downloading & installing your own local copy of any given software.

Oh, you hear of the occasional half-hearted measures: Mounting your /home partition without "executable" permissions, for instance. Which works for about 10 seconds, until some bright spark realizes that they can still call "/bin/bash" and pass it arguments.

Where does this attitude come from that employees only work when forced to, and that clamping down on everything is the only way to prevent goofing off? The single biggest frustration I've ever encountered in any workplace has been clueless managers preventing employees from working. Not FORCING them to work, STOPPING them from working.

Stopping employees from installing software or using existing software in ways you don't like is virtually impossible and utterly pointless. Even with Linux. Why is so much time & energy wasted on doing it?

I'm not generally big on following politics - I lean towards the "Don't vote, it only encourages them" school of thought. Although I did vote. But that's beside the point.

Anyway, the Minister of State for Immigration has made a speech. It's already showing up in my email and RSS aggregator (via El Reg), so here's a link to the official text of the speech.

The first line that one notices is Nearly two thirds of consumers now have an internet connection at home.

"Consumers"?? Excuse me? When did we stop being citizens and just become "consumers"?? This is a politician speaking, not a CEO, right?

Last year British residents made 68 million journeys abroad - an amusing boast from a government that recently doubled airport tax using the ever-popular excuse of "global warming" - aircraft produce greenhouse gasses, don't you know. We must tax them for the general good.

It's obviously an expensive business, this global warming. Nothing else can justify charging money for it. It's not like the tax does anything other than make the government money - the planes still run, using the same fuel. One could almost believe that the tax had nothing to do with climate concerns. It seems, rather, to be rather reminiscent of the Duke of Wellington's opposition towards railways: it will only encourage the lower classes to move about

Cheap air travel has resulted in very little contribution to the greenhouse gas production of mankind. It has, however, meant that even poorer families can go abroad for their holidays, something that bothers the richer upper classes no end. Is it any shock that the London Elite want to whomp the prices back up?

Call me cynical...

Anyway, moving swiftly on to the point that he wants to make: The "ID cards are good" one. He explains that today’s online, hyper-mobile world is fraught with peril, and has lead to a cost to the British economy of £1.7 BN a year due to identity fraud - although, bizzarely, he doesn't link this to the earlier-stated fact that the value of British e-commerce topped £92 billion - which makes that 1.7bn cost look rather trivial, wouldn't you say?

Oh well. Keeping things in perspective has never really been a trait politicians were famed for.

Uncannily, my previous reference to the introduction of railways in this country now sees its parallel as he compares the introduction of ID cards to - can you believe it? - the introduction of railways.

So.. when railways were introduced in this country, they were built using an inferior narrow gage (Brunel wanted 7ft rather than 4ft8in.) After creating a huge, sprawling system of railways, Dr. Beeching came along and shut down most of them. And then the government privatised the whole system and flogged it to a bunch of corporations.

And we're supposed to be comforted by the thought that ID cards will be "just like" the railways, are we..?

Nah. I think I'll maintain my position of supporting the No2ID coalition. I like technology as much as the next man, if not more, but if history has shown anything, it's this: Governments are hopeless incompetents when it comes to introducing new technology.

I've been a Dilbert reader for years - I've got all the strips, two copies of most of Scott Adams' actual books, and a fluffy Dogbert sitting on my monitor.

However, it's rare that the daily Dilbert strip actually makes me laugh. I think Dilbert suffers from being a 'proper' comic - published daily, there's a lot of repetition when SA evidently can't think of a new joke. Webcomics in a similar vein, like HelpDesk, that only publish when they have some thing worthwhile to say, tend to do better on this score.

That said, today's Dilbert strip is one of those gems that makes the strip as a whole worth reading. Dogbert's attitude is only a slight exaggeration of far too many people in the media today.

So (so long as you have popup blockers and adblocks installed, because I wouldn't visit it without) if you have nothing better to do, you might like to call into dilbert.com at some point today...

SJVN has an article up over on Linux-Watch on the recent bout of Linux companies making deals with MS.

It's refreshing if only because it doesn't buy into the "We must ostracise these evil companies immediately" hysteria that has been seen elsewhere. But there's one quote from the CEO of Linspire (once Lindows), Kevin Carmony, that a large (and often very vocal) part of the Linux community badly needs to take to heart.

"It's time to move past all of the idea that for Linux to succeed, Microsoft must fail."

I've been using Linux since the mid-90s. I remember the days when a large part of the reason to use Linux was just that it wasn't Microsoft - it was so hard to install & do things with you NEEDED a powerful motivation. "MS is crap, it's all viruses and BSODs, here's something else!" was something worth saying.

That was a decade ago. I can't remember the last time I saw a genuine BSOD, and Linux is no longer so primitive that it needs to point out all the shortcomings of the competition in order to sound credible.

Linux supports more hardware than any other OS. Linux has relatively low hardware requirements. Linux has excellent GUIs, millions of developers, and lots of cool things like wobbly windows.

People are trying Linux now because it looks like such a good alternative. That's the angle we should be pushing now. Smearing the competition just makes us look bad. Nobody is interested in hearing anti-MS rants. They want to hear how good Linux is, not how bad Windows is.

(Well, within reason)

I remember the days when being rabidly anti-MS was a big part of being a Linux user. I remember them because they're firmly in the past, and only dinosaurs still think that the way to make Linux look good is to rant about how crap Windows is.

It's one thing to say "Linux's 3D desktop can do more and has much lower GPU requirements than Vista" - that's useful and factual information. It's a totally different thing to say "Vista's 3D desktop is crap, everybody should use Linux" - that's just ranting.

I don't think it's really the longer-term Linux users that are the problem, tho. It's the newer users who want to try and sound like they've been around longer and know more than they do - the ones who want to seem 'l33t' - and think that adopting a badly-outdated attitude will make them seem like long-established Linux users.

If you encounter these guys, please do at least try to set them straight. They give the whole community a bad name.

Pointing to ReactOS can be a good cure for the real problem cases - As soon as they realize "it's Windows (bad), but it's open-source (good), but it's Windows!" their brains implode :o)

I've been back at work two hours after a week off and I'm already sick of being here. Six more weeks to go before my resignation date. I've been trying not to do any counting because it makes it seem like too far away, but it's not working too well.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll get used to it soon. First day back is always hardest & all that.

Completely changing the subject, have you ever seen the Hubble ultra-deep-field image? If not, it's well worth taking a look at the high-def jpeg available at Wikipedia amongst other places.

It's quite a big picture, given that it's of an area of the night sky smaller than a grain of sand - 1/13,000,000th of the sky. It has an estimated 10,000 galaxies visible in it, some 13 billion years old - the universe itself is reckoned to be only 13.7 billion years old, so it's quite an impressive picture all-round really.

More importantly, it shows a lot of very pretty galaxies in a whole range of colors :o)

Amazing what they can do with technology these days, isn't it? Hard to believe that it wasn't so long ago that we thought the Earth was the center of the universe and stars were fixed to the sphere of the sky...

I'm remembering very clearly now why it was I gave up jogging in the afternoons & switched instead to mornings. It means I don't spend the evenings so damn tired.

As I'm faced with early starts all this week, tho, it's afternoon or nothing, and there's only one thing worse than jogging too late - not jogging at all. I drive myself nuts if I don't exercise enough.

Ah well. I see on /. that Linus is still a bit cynical about Sun and their commitment to FOSS. Nothing new there, but it's interesting to see that one of the first people who disputes the Sun rebuttal is Theo de Raadt - the bloke behind OpenBSD and OpenSSH, who is by no means a Linux cheerleader.

Ah well. A healthy level of skepticism is.. well, healthy! :o) And Sun's not got a spotless record when it comes to FOSS - Microsoft wasn't the only one to fund SCO's attack by buying their licenses. But I think we're all hoping that they prove the cynics wrong - if nothing else, it'd be really good to see things like Java fully open at last. And as Linus points out, despite what MS would have you believe about OSes, Competition is good.

A convergence waiting to happen?

Most programming languages use English words in a roughly-sensible order, after all:

if (apple)
    eat(apple--);
else
    apple = 1;

This is clearly understandable as "If you have an apple, eat the apple. Otherwise, get an apple", and the observant will note that implicit in the fact that you eat the apple is the fact that you're going to have one less apple..

So when you have something like lolcats which puts similarly fractured-yet-logical English into its captions, is it any wonder that somebody decided to make a programming language out of it?

I'll put it on my list of languages to learn, right after C and Python are out of the way.

In the meantime, here are some of the lolcats I rather liked:

I'm so sick of people saying that Windows is so user-friendly and intuitive and anybody can use it - when my experience is that just about everybody still has problems with it.

At my place of work, we use Windows XP SP2 - i.e. a modern widely-used Windows version. Everybody I work with has at least a science degree, possibly MScs and PhDs as well. Ages range from early 20s to just shy of retirement. In other words, a group of intelligent people in a wide range of ages. Everybody should be able to use Windows without any issues, if the Linux sucks because not everybody can use it for everything brigade have a leg to stand on.

So, this post recurs, and the list below grows. All entries are genuine problems that people have asked me (as resident geek) to solve.

But only programmers will get it.

C++ /* Makes C bigger but returns the old value */

After witnessing the huge backlash that Novell suffered for daring to partner with MS and agree to a patent covenant, one can't help but wonder what could have lead Xandros to make a similar deal.

Looks like this one is just an inter-operability deal though.

One also has to wonder what lead Microsoft to make another deal - when their Novell arrangement may well have cost them their ability to make patent threats against FOSS as a whole, you'd expect them to back-peddle and rethink things, or at least wait until GPL v3 is released.

Perhaps it's as simple as MS has realized that the world is switching to open standards, and they have no choice but to open up or fade away? The EU court case is still determined to make them open up their standards too, don't forget.

That being the case, it would be perfectly in-keeping with MS' usual tactics to solve the situation by convincing people to pay today for what it's going to be forced to reveal for free tomorrow anyway.

I'll be interested to see how the community reacts to this one..

water is wet, it gets dark at night.

Oh, and TiVo says that the GPL version 3 might adversely affect them.

This is the license that has clauses in it specifically to prevent "TiVoization". TiVo is worried that a license written to close the loopholes they use will, in fact, close the loopholes they use.

And this is considered news?

One can't blame TiVo - not for saying that the GPL v3 might cause them problems, anyway - the use or misues of GPL'd software, whichever you think it was, is a different argument. They only mentioned in in a report to their investors, as indeed they should. It was the various news sites across the web that have been splashing this fact about.

Next thing you know, they'll be reporting that proprietary OS sellers don't like the GPL because it might make it harder for them to extort money out of Linux users under vague threat of unspecified IP infringement...

I don't own an iPod, nor have an account at iTunes. Nevertheless, I am outraged, outraged to know that if I *did*, the tracks I would download would have my name and email address embedded in them, amongst other identifying information.

Make sense to you?

Me neither. But it's about as logical an argument as the furore that's been kicked up by the announcement that Apple's DRM-free iTunes tracks contain identification tags.

The fact that every DRM'd track you might have bought from iTunes will also have had this information in it has apparently gone unnoticed.

So too does the fact that DRM-free music does not equate to "Music you're allowed to share with other people" - the removal of DRM is there to allow you to move music you've paid for to other devices, not to make it easier for you to shove it onto P2P.

If you don't plan on illegally sharing your music tracks, why should you care that your details are embedded in it? Nobody but you will see them. And if you *are* planning on sharing, again, why should you care?

The information in the tracks can be easily stripped out or otherwise tampered with. Techniques for stripping the DRM out of iTunes music have been around for years. If you really want to share your music, nothing stops you from stripping out the relevant information. And you're not going to find yourself in court because somebody else maliciously put your details into a music file they then shared with other people, for the same reason that a burglar can't frame you for a crime by leaving a note saying "It was me, I did it" signed with your name.

Talk about your storms in a teacup... the only explanations I can come up with for this one are:

- Nobody's outraged, but the media thinks we will/should be and is hyping like crazy

- All the juvenile muppets that have been drooling about showing their l33tness by pirating their DRM-free iTunes music are crying to mummy because the nasty Apple store hasn't made it quite so easy as they wanted.

They've tried to make it seem ominous by pointing out that Apple hasn't said how it will be using the information embedded in the tracks. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I suspect they'll either do nothing at all with it, or just use it on occasion to find out what percentage of music present on iPods doesn't have the owner's details in it so that they can give rough reassuring estimates to a very anxious, DRM-loving music industry.

At last night's LUG meeting, the theme was "Bring a gadget"

I took my Samsung YP-U2 - AKA my MP3 player.

It's a smallish portable player, which plugs directly into a USB socket. Its battery is charged via USB, and I can't honestly tell you the battery life because it's never actually run out of power on me yet.

Any modern OS will see it as a generic storage device, and naturally it's FAT-formatted so any OS can read & write it. It can do playlists (which I don't use) and has a "Play at random" option (which I do).

It has unusually good quality audio playback, and a range of preset equalizer settings. It has a very small screen and a blue LED at one end.

In short, it's a nice little music player that does just about everything I'm ever likely to want it to do.

Doesn't really sound "gadgety" or "geeky" tho, does it?

It isn't, to tell the truth. But I get so tired of people telling me that it's a class of gadget that doesn't exist. Because they're still out there: The people who claim that you can't buy portable media players that have support for Ogg.

Even when I tell them I own one, and link them to the places they can buy the damn things, they refuse to believe it. They're so determined to argue that "Ogg might be technically better but you can only use it on PCs." It's crazy.

Samsung seems to be pretty big on Ogg support - lots of their devices play them. And why not, it's a free format, no royalties to pay. A big reason I've not bought an iPod is that most of my music collection is Ogg.

There are a number of good, inexpensive MP3 players that also do Ogg. They really do exist, I know because I own one and Lou owns another. If you see anybody arguing that MP3s are better than Ogg because they're more portable, slap them.

And speaking of portable, one thing that makes my player a little geekier than most is that I've installed the portable version of the Windows VLC player on it - so if I happen to be sat at a Windows PC, I can play my music on it even though Windows is so amazingly primitive it doesn't have out-of-the-box support for Ogg.

...when you start working out how to make a program to output the "10 green bottles" song.

(That's the UK equivalent of the "bottles of beer" song, if you're American)

And you know you're REALLY bored when you look up the bash codes so the word "green" is coloured green.

Dread to think what I'll do to it next.

Friday afternoons, eh?

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If you've not come across it already, there's quite a good talk by Linux Torvalds on YouTube that he gave at Google on git, the software that manages the Linux kernel.

One of the big things it highlights is that the Free Software zealots were wrong about the whole bitkeeper thing.

For those not familiar with it, basically it boils down to this:

The kernel was managed by software called bitkeeper, which was (shock horror) proprietary software that the kernel devs were allowed to use for free. Right from the start, RMS & co. claimed this was a Bad Thing (TM).

Some years later, for various political reasons, BitMover (the owners) withdrew the free-as-in-beer status. Cue a smug round of "We told you so"'s from the FS brigade, who hammered home repeatedly the point that if you use proprietary software you run the risk that support for it can be taken away at any time.

This, they claimed, was yet another reason why you should never use any kind of proprietary, non-free software. It's still not uncommon to see people citing BitKeeper as an "RMS was right all along" argument.

Thing is, they're completely wrong.

Why?

Unless you happened to see the story reported on the various news sites, you would never have known anything had happened: Linux kernels continued to be released and updated without any significant pauses or problems. I guarantee you never saw any headlines about distros shipping the same kernel two releases in a row because the sudden loss of BitKeeper caused huge kernel issues.

The replacement for BitKeeper, git, was written by Linus from scratch in a matter of days. From Wikipedia: The development of Git began on April 3, 2005. The project was announced on April 6, 2005, and became self-hosting as of April 7, 2005. The first merge of multiple branches was done on April 18, 2005.

Bitkeeper was replaced in no time at all. Its loss was a bit of a nuisance, but nothing more.

Essentially, Linus was faced with a choice all those years ago: He could use BitKeeper, at the time the best available tool for the job, and have the risk of having to write git hanging over him the whole time; or he could write git right from the start.

FS advocates would have you believe that the former choice was a bad one. They ignore the fact that the git Linus could have written back then would have been written with far less experience of managing the kernel development and with no experience of a tool well-suited to doing the job.

By using BitKeeper whilst it was available and then writing git, the result was a far better git right from the start. The cost? An effectively unnoticeable hiccup in the kernel development as everybody migrated.

Either choice would have required git to be written. By delaying its creation by several years, he ensured that when it was written, it was written well. It does clever things and performs well and is uniquely suited to managing the kernel development. Using BitKeeper was a beneficial move, not the disaster that FS advocates would have you believe.

The important distinction, I think, is in the replaceability: Specific versus generic. Bitkeeper was just software that did a job: Any skilled coder could come up with an alternative system. It's a generic "manage this" task.

Proprietary formats, however, are different, because you can't just sit down and write a WMV player or .doc reader. These are specific tasks that can only be solved one way.

It's the difference between "You shouldn't use MS Word to write letters" and "You shouldn't use MS Word to save documents" - the first argument is not valid, because any word processor can be used to write letters so you can switch to OpenOffice or whatever at any time. The second is valid, because even OpenOffice isn't 100% reliable at .docs yet, so you're locked in.

Refusing to acknowledge the difference in the two types of proprietary software undermines the very argument you try to make. "BitKeeper was proprietary, and it was taken away" is not a valid argument for avoiding proprietary software, because it can instantly be countered by "But it was replaced in no time at all by a superior system that was only possible because BitKeeper was used in the first place."