My Thoughts Exactly:
My David Mitchell Cloud Atlas Problem

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Picture of a Russian nesting doll

The Structure of Cloud Atlas

I see that the Wachowski brothers are making a movie from David Mitchell’s metafictiony novel Cloud Atlas. From PurpleRevolver:

Based on David Mitchell’s best-selling novel, Cloud Atlas is an epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future.

One soul is shaped from a murderer into a saviour and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution.

The independently financed film will be co-directed and written by the directors/writers of the hugely successful Matrix trilogy, Andy and Lana Wachowski and Perfume director Tom Tykwer.

The guys who made the Matrix movies, which are all about Philip K. Dick-type reality-within-reality-within-reality self-referential story-systems, taking on Cloud Atlas seems to me perhaps a pretty good match (so long as there are no techno-orgy scenes). But the prospect still makes me a bit antsy. (Even setting aside the elephant-in-the room Keanu question.) Will they find the emotional heart to the heart of the story, or go for the whiz-bang-slo-mo-bullet-dodging effects?

Mitchell’s book, which I enjoyed, is structured like a matryoska doll. It’s got six or seven narratives, each written in a different style, that enclose each other like parens in a Lisp program. The first (and last) story is in an archaic faux Daniel Defoe style; it gets interrupted midway through, where the next story, an epistolary novelette told in letters written by a jaded modernist English composer and leech living in Belgium between WW1 and WW2 begins; that tale gets cut in the middle & succeeded by the first half of hard-boiled Raymond Chandler-style noir detective story. There’s also a far-future science fiction tale, a surreal Kafkaesque fable and one told in a kind of pidgin.

There are hundreds of reviews of Cloud Atlas out there on the net that will tell you all you want or don’t want to know about the near-virtuosic literary technique Mitchell employs (or shows off) in the service of his tale.

Below the fold, my David Mitchell Cloud Atlas problem. Continue reading

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
AT&T’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day In Court

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Today AT&T and the Department of Justice met to have a status conference with Judge Huvelle on the pending litigation. It unfolded very much as I predicted last week, but even better than I could possibly have imagined.  Most of the news coverage has been surprisingly anemic and failed to capture how Judge Huvelle spent 45 minutes racking AT&T Counsel Mark Hansen over the coals. (Cecilia Kang at Washpo and Brent Kendall at Marketwatch being the exception, but even they cannot capture the utter savageness of the beat down Judge Huvelle gave). Mind you, Hansen did not help himself with his “nothing to see here judge, move along” attitude. Also, when the judge says: “I think I should hear from the government now” that is not the time for you to make the same argument she just dissed again. You shut up and sit down.

Some rapturous details, indecent gloating, and a few further predictions below . . . .

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Inventing the Future:
Mostly Reliable Performance of Software Processes by Dynamic Control of Quality Parameters

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[I wrote this just over four years ago for a conference I never went to. I’m submitting it now in the sprit of my “Disclose This” entry, in which I promised to disclose ideas that I’d like myself and others to be able to use, and not be prevented from doing so by software patents.]

Abstract

We have a complex software application with a number of multi-media subsystem processes. We would like the application to meet certain minimum overall performance criteria. Many of the subsystem processes can be executed at varying quality levels, and these have various effects on system performance. The situation is complicated by the fact that system performance is also dependent on factors outside the software application itself (e.g., processor and network load from other applications). We apply a number of independently-operating standard industrial process-controllers to vary subsystem quality as needed so that performance criteria is met or exceeded when possible.
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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
That Was The Week That Was For AT&T/T-Mo. Is There A Next Week?

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It’s been a fun few days in AT&T/T-Mo land to say the least. I swear, this has become my favorite telecom reality show since Death Star Reborn: The AT&T/BellSouth Telenovella finished its series run back in December 2006.

With even the German government, Deutsche Telekom’s largest shareholder, resigning itself to the deal unwinding, the only question that remains is how long AT&T will resist the inevitable. A review of this week’s developments below . . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
The Republican FCC Reform Industry Doesn’t Want.

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You haven’t seen a lot of industry lobbying to support the FCC Reform Legislation pushed by House Republicans on the Energy & Commerce Committee. One would think that a bill which requires the FCC to spend three years building up to adopting a rule, imposes all kinds of new burdens on the FCC before adopting a rule so that rulemaking will be even more burdensome and less likely to occur, and generally tries to limit the FCC from regulating or imposing conditions on media and telecom mergers would generate loud applause from industry players supposedly chaffing under the terrible yoke of the FCC. But we haven’t, and we won’t. Oh, Republicans may lean on industry trade associations for some perfunctory applause and ritual chanting about “the burdens of job killing regulation” blah blah Amen. But their heart won’t be in it.

This may surprise those who think that the proposed Republican FCC Reform Bill is an industry fantasy crafted by high-paid industry lobbyists and pushed by their wholly owned subsidiaries. The bill contains everything industry always claims to want, so where the heck is the industry cheerleading squad? Why haven’t they shown up to cheer its passage with any enthusiasm? Why aren’t industry lobbyists busy writing op eds about how this wonderful FCC reform bill will make your cell phone bills cheaper, bring us better broadband, and give you free cable? And why are Republicans so determined to push it if no one in industry really wants it?

I explain below . . . .

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Neutrino:
Writing Patterns

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The corners of the Internet that I frequent are thick with writing advice, and I recently came across a few really good “what not to do” posts. It sent me trolling through my old bookmarks for posts in a similar vein, and when I started thinking about putting a set of links together for a post on Wetmachine, it occurred to me that (keeping in mind one of the purported themes of this blog, the intersection between writing prose and developing software) one of the reasons they are so appealing is that they are in a sense, a set of anti-patterns for fiction.

Design Patterns is of course the seminal work by the so-called “Gang of Four” that described a small set of elegant solutions to common software problems. It’s somewhere between a box of assorted legos and one of those kits that comes with exact instructions for how to make some complicated model — or perhaps more accurately, it’s a set of base folds for software origami. Anyway, it created a vocabulary for certain useful software designs and has not only provided fodder for more than a decade of entry-level interviews but also spawned the idea of the anti-pattern — the designs that are just as commonly used in the wild, but shouldn’t be.
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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
AT&T’s General Jim Cicconi Surrenders To Genachowski At Appomattox Court House.

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We remember the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Appomattox Courthouse as the end of the Civil War, despite the fact that Confederate forces remained in the field for several weeks thereafter. The announcement by AT&T and Deutsche Telekom (DT) that they have told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to dismiss their application to transfer T-Mo to AT&T “without prejudice” is rather similar. To quote Craig Moffett: “the fat lady hasn’t started singing yet, but she’s holding the mike and the band is about to play.” (We’ll ignore that the fat lady is supposed to be singing opera.) This is reinforced by AT&T informing the SEC for the first time that it expects to pay DT the break up fee, which it values at $4bn ($3 bn cash, $1 bn spectrum) rather than the $6 bn announced last March (the spectrum rights appear to have been devalued $2 bn).

More than you could ever want to know about FCC procedure below . . . .

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Thoughts on an Old Fire Truck of North Caldwell: Time, Ambition, Rust

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My friend and childhood friend Ande sent me a while ago a snapshot of an ancient fire truck rusting in a snow-covered field of weeds.

Photo by Janet Jessel

The hood has been removed and the left front wheel as well; the black blob of the engine sits above the chassis, naked. There is a windshield but no cab: a convertible fire engine! (Who would have designed or bought such a thing? Didn’t they have fires to fight during rainstorms (snowstorms!) back in whatever far-away times this machine was used?) The truck itself is still red, though faded. The town’s name and fire department emblem are still clearly readable on the door. All equipment has been stripped save the hose on a roller, which looks to be scarcely thicker than a garden hose. (Were fires tiny back in those days?) Behind the truck you can see a fence, and beyond the fence some trees and a power line. The photo was taken by Janet Jessel, the sister of Ande’s late first wife Judy, whom I never met.

The photo doesn’t show the back of the truck so you can’t see if there is a platform where firemen could have stood holding on to a rail en route to a fire like they do in old movies. (Note I said ‘firemen’, not gender-neutral ‘firefighters’. There were no women on the North Caldwell, NJ, Fire Department when this truck was in service, I can assure you of that.) Yet I know that that platform is there. For when I was a lad of fifteen I stood on that platform en route to a brush fire on Mountain Avenue. It was April 6th, 1968, two days after the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was my first fire as a volunteer firefighter. My most recent fire was two weeks ago. Continue reading

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Why The Eviction of Occupy Wall St. From Zuccotti Park Raised An Interesting First Amendment Question.

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A bit off topic, but I couldn’t resist. For most folks, the question of whether the recent eviction of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters from Zuccotti Park constitutes a violation of the First Amendment has very little to do with law and much to do with principle. Those opposed to the eviction note that the demonstrators were peaceful, the Mayor displayed clear animus to the protestors and their message, and that the claims of health and safety are mere pretext. Those who support the City’s actions argue that the protesters had essentially co-opted the park to the exclusion of other public uses and that the protesters were in violation of the park rules (usually eliding over the fact that the rules were adopted after OWS began) and that it is privatekly owned space in any event.

After reading the Order upholding the right of NYC and the owners of Zuccotti Park to prohibit tents and, potentially, other sleeping things such as sleeping bags, I believe this raised an interesting 1st Amendment Question for those of us who follow 1st Amendment law. Those interested in why this is actually an interesting question, rather than resolution of the question, can see more below . . .

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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
My Insanely Long Field Guide To Cisco’s War On The TV White Spaces

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Will Cisco’s war against the TV white spaces tank incentive auctions? No doubt this question comes as a surprise to the vast majority of people unaware Cisco was running a war against TV white spaces (TVWS). True, Cisco has mostly tried to stay behind the scenes. But as we get closer to the Super Committee deadline, which include negotiations for incentive auction rules that would let TVWS survive, Cisco has become increasingly willing to go public with its anti-TVWS lobbying efforts.

This blog post on the Cisco blog, followed by this letter from the High Tech Spectrum Coalition (HTSC), finally say publicly what Cisco and its allies have been saying privately since debate over spectrum legislation began last January: “Death to the TV White Spaces.” Instead, argues Cisco, open up a new block of 5 GHz spectrum to “replace” the white spaces. But with spectrum legislation in trouble – as evidenced by CTIA’s non-stop radio advertising here in D.C. and it’s recent ‘we love unlicensed, can’t we all get along?’ letter to the Super Committee – Cisco’s continued opposition to white spaces threatens to tank any hope of getting incentive auctions passed either in the Super Committee or elsewhere.

Incentive auctions, while popular as a revenue generator, were always a tough sell because of broadcaster passive/aggressive opposition. Adding D Block reallocation made it even more difficult. Cisco’s war on the TVWS threatens to be the final straw that makes this lift just too heavy. It splits a tech community that would otherwise wholly support incentive auctions, while simultaneously pissing off key members of Congress who helped get TVWS done in the first place.

So the time has come for Cisco, CTIA, and others who really want incentive auctions, to ask themselves whether it’s worth it to risk incentive auctions just so that Cisco can keep Microsoft, Google/Motorola, Dell, and others from bringing a competing product to market. The Hutchison/Rockefeller Bill, S.911, was a compromise that kept spectrum for TVWS, gave Cisco the 5 GHz block it wants, and made sure that a minimum threshold of 84 MHz would be auctioned before allocating any recovered spectrum to replace white spaces lost by auction or repacking. While not great from my perspective as a white spaces supporter (and I’d still like to see it tweaked some), it was at least a livable compromise. Cisco’s anti-TVWS campaign already backfired once, with the Republican discussion draft to require auction for all unlicensed spectrum. Will Cisco and CTIA fail to learn just how easy it would be for them to blow this for everyone? Or will they settle for the compromise that got a bipartisan bill out of the Commerce Committee?

Why Cisco has been gunning for the TVWS, the quiet little war of the last ten months, and how to get out of this quagmire before it’s too late, below. . . .

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