Inventing the Future:
Brie Demos

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I gave a demo of Brie at the OOPSLA Croquet workshop in October, and Julian gave one a couple weeks ago at C5. Alas, no video, but the Brie papers are here and here.

This terrific video of the Alternate Reality Kit was made at Xerox PARC in 1987. So, of course, it’s not actually Brie, but it does give a lot of the feel of what we’re going for. There are a few UI differences and the ARK is only 2D, but the main thing is that Brie is synchronously collaborative, and therefore eminently shareable.

Another related thing (without a cool video) was PARC’s Thing Lab.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Globalization in convenient movie format

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Well I saw Syriana last night and I must say I liked it an awful lot. It’s about the global implications of addiction to oil, and includes a world-weary CIA operative right out of Graham Green taking “joy rides” in Teheran and Beirut, rich sheiks of Araby, power lawyer-lobbyists of the Georgetown set, and an idealistic dreamer in the body of a handsome hedge fund trader. As an added topical bonus there’s even a scene featuring a Texas oliman indulging in gunplay on a ranch stuffed with imported “exotics.” One almost expected a drunk Vice President to make a cameo! This is that film done by what’s his face, Gaghan, who also wrote the screenplay for Traffic, another film about addiction and globalization.

I remember when I was a young man back there in seminary school in the department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue (1978) and chanced into some Milton Friedmanites of the most doctinaire kind (is there any other?). Well they would go on and on spouting their religious beliefs concerning “free” trade and so forth, under the delusion that they were talking about empirical things and not metaphysics. (This type is given a royal send-up in Syriana, in the character portrayed by Tim Blake Nelson, last seen with George Clooney in Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, in which he played one of the dimwitted Foggy Mountain Boys in a fake beard and clownish hayseed atire.) And they would prattle on about how, left unfettered, capital would magically find its way to its most efficient use (kinda like how Lassie found her way home all the way across Scotland without a map in the 1943 classic). The point being that American capital, among others, needed to be free to find its best use in Peruvian jungles or Saudi deserts or Indonesian forrests. Capital knows best.

Well, I would say, that’s fine. But If we send our capital there, unfettered, then presumably the capital of the poor peoples of those regions should be free to come here. Absolutely! they replied. Only ha-ha those people do not have capital. That’s their problem! Poor capital formation!

You miss my point, I rejoined. Their capital is human capital. It resides in their noggins and perforce their bodies.

Ah, I love the smell of capitalism in the morning! It smells like a vast technologically-based unfathomable dark conspiracy! But enough for now, I need to go earn my paycheck.

Inventing the Future:
What the Dormouse Said

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Everyone’s been waiting patiently for Hedgehog. There’s no way to know when the next step of David Reed’s Tea Time will be available. As David Smith and Andreas Raab began working on Simplified Tea Time for Hedgehog, there was no way to know when that process would produce results.

The Croquet group at the University of Wisconsin is not in the Computer Science department. We’re not driven by the theoretical concepts of Croquet for its own sake. We are in the Academic Technology department of the Division of Information Technology, and our interest is in building educational applications in Croquet. Adding stuff to the Croquet core is fun, but what we really need is to build learning environments with faculty. Last summer, we had the opportunity to just that, and we took it, even though we knew that the existing Jasmine proof-of-concept version of Croquet would not meet our needs. What to do?

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My Thoughts Exactly:
A useful chronology

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See here for an easy-to-read illustrated guide to some actions by the administration that claims it needs to void the constitution of the United States of America in order to protect us from the boogeyman. (A boogeyman who evidently still resides in the cave (in the rabidly mysogynistic, institutionally antisemitic, nuclear-bomb duty-free-shopping-zone and “partner in the war on boogeymen” known as Pakistan) to which he retreated after the adminstration gave him a free pass out of Afghanistan).

[update: editted for slightly enhanced readability.]

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
STOP THE WIFI TAX RUMOR

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Freaking trade press should know better, or at least learn to read more carefully. There is a steady drum beat of reports, starting I think with this one at RCR Wireless News that the President wants a “wifi tax.” This is, bluntly, a misreading of the plain language of the President’s budget proposal.

Lord knows there is plenty in the proposed budget not to like, but there’s no “wifi tax.” My analysis (and a little context) below.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Did the Bells Rip Off America? and Is There An Alternative?

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I want to put two pieces side by side here: Bruce Kushnik’s magnum opus The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal, accusing the Bell Companies of ripping off the U.S. public to the
and Bob McChesnney’s and John Podesta’s visionary Let There Be Wi-Fi talking about the power of unlicensed spectrum as a broadband solution.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Memo to RIAA: It's not the “piracy” — your music sucks

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For about five or six years now, I’ve been hearing the music industry folks piss and moan about how downloads are killing their profits. My usual response has been to observe that (a) while true that CD sales declined in 2001-2004, those were also years of general economic recesion and it was no surprise sales dropped (the music industry has been pretty quite about this since the CD market rebounded along with the economy in 2005); (b) if you put out an over-priced crappy product, the market will respond.

The problem is that most executives in the entertainment industry have enjoyed their monopoly status for so long that when the market finally responds, they get caught completely by surprise and usually enter a state of denial. (This is equally true for broadcasting and movies and cable, al of which have spent the last ten years or so busily consolidating and producing predictable products. Eventually, sales and ratings decline. And these guys are are surprised and looking for some regulatory fix they can plug to solve their “problem” — like broadcast flag or limits on satellite radio.) As a result, they don’t want to hear that they need to stop abusing their customers and work for a living.

A recent poll provides one more piece of evidence which I predict the music ndustry and their lap dogs in Congress will continue to blissfully ignore. A recent poll shows that most music fans don’t “steal music” and are very happy to pay for quality products — particularly things like downloading that really suit their needs. But music lovers are tired of being treated like trained seals expected to buy whatever the music industry offers at whatever price they chose to sell it in whatever format the music industry insists on providing.

Why this trend is so shocking in the music industry when we see it in a variety of other industries (have YOU driven a Ford lately? Probably not, because they offer crappy behemoth-class cars instead of better fuel efficient ones) I have no idea. I guess being a cartel gives you such a sense of security you forget about that whacky free market you’re always praising in Washington.

Stay tuned . . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Adelphia Transaction Advances

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Lost in the hub-bub of yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to approve the proposed division of Adelphia between Comcast and Time Warner and accompanying system swaps. What surprises me is not so much the result (getting conditions in this administration, particularly on a cable merger, was always a long-shot) but the timing. The FCC is still chewing over the data request it made in December, and the Adelphia Bankruptcy proceeding has been rescheduled for mid-March. It smacks annoyingly of a political favor done for a stalwart Republican (did we mention Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, is a big Bush supporter and fundraiser?) than the careful reasoning of the anti-trust agency charged with protecting the public. But that’s probably just my imagination post-State of the Union grumpiness combined with discovering how many big companies are spying on us for the government.

My analysis below . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Cable Market Power For Dummies

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Most folks outside of Washington DC still find their cable company an obnoxious monopoly, despite the presence of competitors like DirecTV, Dish Network, and the occassional overbuilder like RCN. But, despite the fact that customers express far more satisfaction with satellite and overbuilder service, most folks remain subscribed to cable. What gives? And how does cable get away with raising prices and favoring affiliated programming in the face of this “vigorous competition.” Needless to say, the cable folks respond with a host of fancy economic papers that they file with the FCC and present to members of Congress.

My own impression, having spoken with a number of economists, is that the Cable Cos use economics the same way Creationists use intelligent design. The point isn’t to engage in real scientific inquiry. The point is to throw enough scientific sounding stuff out there to confuse the issue and make people believe there are two equally valid sides to the debate. My problem is that the FCC and Congress usually end up playing the the Dover School District Board rather than Judge Jones.

Anyway, in an attempt to cut through some of the nonesense, MAP released a white paper of my authorship yesterday: “The Switching Equation” and Its Impact on the Video Proramming Market and MVPD Pricing. As you can tell by the title, even an attempt to write a simple, plain language version of this ends up more complicated than I’d like. (Sad fact is, economics is hard.)

So here’s the short version — most people find it such a pain in the butt to switch from one service to another that they will put up with higher prices, worse programming, and worse customer service rather than kill two days futzing with unsubscribing to cable and resubscribing to someone else. As long as cable doesn’t stink too badly, they can keep enough market power to make it even harder for competitors by cutting exclusive deals for regional sports programming and jacking up the price of video on demand to competitors (Comcast and Time Warner own 78% of iN Demand, the leading supplier of VoD). If we want real competition, we need to have rules that actually address market power and make it easier for people to switch to competitors. Otherwise, we get a lot of empty rhetoric about “level playing field” and “free market” and blah blah, and we still pay ridiculously high prices for cable and broadband service that still suck.

You want proof? Go read the paper.

Stay tuned . . .