news

d: Personal events

For a long time now I’ve been interested in “eventing” systems. This system needs to tell another (or many) what’s going on (“Hey, I’m done processing that data”). It’s a a way of decoupling the systems so that one system isn’t “waiting” for another system.

Now think about twitter in its best case (from this perspective). A bunch of people listen to me. I send a message. And those folks can act on the message or not.

What if that sort of eventing were built into everything? What if we agreed about expected actions triggered by an event? (You event “go” and I event “where” every time I care to.)

Other folks are working on and thinking about this. I don’t always agree with the model because I think the basic interaction is far simpler. If I need a delivery service I don’t send out a bid, because it probably doesn’t matter enough to save a few cents on a single transaction. Most likely, simplicity (excellent delivery record, easy to drop off, and then reasonable cost are more likely, until I’m shipping many items.) But that’s a nit. And a lot of this can happens today, all that’s not the way the systems are thought about. And that changes everything.

Intent Doesn’t Matter

Intent Doesn’t Matter:

I don’t think Apple plans to restrict anything but its own .ibooks format. But that doesn’t matter because, as Mike Ash puts it, “Unless we’re friends, your intentions don’t matter to me at all, only your actions.” Apple isn’t anyone’s friend but Apple’s, and its actions so far are to reserve a broad swath of rights pertaining to everything iBooks Author is capable of “generating” (whatever that means).

Even if we’re right and Apple doesn’t care about PDFs or plain text files, that’s still the Apple of today. The Apple of 20 years from now might turn out to be a completely different company, and this EULA has no expiration date. That’s a dangerous situation for authors and publishers who care about long-term distribution rights. It would be best for Apple to clarify the terms now — and, I hope, loosen them — rather than prolong the uncertainty.

[Lawyers.]

Source: venomous porridge

The enemy of my enemy

The enemy of my enemy:

People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and any publisher is far better off working on ways to make sure that customers can legally get what they want as easily as possible with the fewest restrictions. That should be the lesson that media moguls take away from iTunes

[Which was the lesson of iTunes from my perspective.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Don’t mess with The Dodd

Don’t mess with The Dodd:

What’s amazing is the notion that we may actually be doing something about it. As Matt Yglesias wrote, public engagement matters: “SOPA/PIPA opponents actually got in the arena and did politics instead of complaining about how this showed that politics is corrupt and stupid.” The problem with our political system isn’t that it’s unresponsive—it’s that it’s usually responding to the wrong things. But if we let that be a rationale to just write the whole thing off as a lost cause, then we’re doing what the real cynics in the system—like, for example, former senator Chris Dodd—want us to: nothing.

[He does seem to have completely lost his way, assuming I ever knew about him to think that he was useful in the first place.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

An appreciation: Dave Alvin remembers Johnny Otis

An appreciation: Dave Alvin remembers Johnny Otis:

He was a huge force in R&B on the West Coast and in the Southwest, from Central Avenue in L.A. to Houston and Memphis. In his way, Johnny was as important as [Sun Records founder] Sam Phillips or [Chess Records co-founder] Leonard Chess in discovering new talent, both as a bandleader but also as a record producer — everyone from Little Esther to Johnny Ace to Little Richard to Big Mama Thornton and so many more.

Not only was his music a gigantic influence on me, his political and sociological views always forced me to think outside the box. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, I agreed with a lot of it.

Johnny Otis made me think while I was rocking. Not many artists can do that.

Damn. This is really sad.

[Incredible career. I believe he played drums on the original recording of Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog. If you want to learn how to absolutely send it, check her out with Buddy Guy.]

The next SOPA

The next SOPA:

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

They use our support to buy these laws.

So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.

[The one thing that is clear is that if this has died now, it won’t be dead for long. SOPA/PIPA were not the first attempt at this. It has been going on for 20 years. Marco’s suggestion is good for for more reasons than this… but this is enough of a reason.]

What Happened to all the Snow?

What Happened to all the Snow? – NASA Science:

First of all,” he explains, “we are experiencing a La Niña pattern of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. This pushes the jet stream and the cold arctic air northward.”
“On top of that, this year’s Arctic Oscillation has been stronger.”

The Arctic Oscillation is a see-sawing pressure difference between the Arctic and lower latitudes.  When the pressure difference is high, a whirlpool of air forms around the North Pole. Last year, the whirlpool motion was weaker, allowing cold air to escape from the polar regions and head southward to the US.

“This year the whirlpool has been more forceful, corralling the cold air and keeping it nearer the pole. That has reinforced the La Niña impact.”

[“It ain’t over till the Siberian Huskies sing.”]

Source: Lennard Zinn

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look:

NoSQL has, as a category, crossed the chasm from interesting science project to alternative data persistence mechanism. But while NoSQL tools like Cassandra and Riak are available in managed form via providers like Joyent and Heroku, DynamoDB is, in Popescu’s words: “the first managed NoSQL databases that auto-shards.”

It is also possible that SSD pricing contributed directly to the launch timing, with pricing for the drive type down to levels where the economics of a low cost shared service finally make sense.

SSDs

One underdiscussed aspect to the Dynamo launch is the underlying physical infrastructure, which consists solely of SSDs. This is likely one of the major contributing factors to the performance of the system, and in some cases will be another incentive to use Amazon’s platform as many traditional datacenters will not have equivalent SSD hardware available to them.

[A good analysis.]