BurningbirdIf you’ve read this weblog for any length of time than you know I’m rather partial to San Francisco.
Unfortunately, it looks like I’ll be having to move. San Francisco is now known as the most expensive city in the US. It’s also a place where every technical contracting position has 200+ applicants. These two facts aren’t necessarily mutually compatible.
What a bitch.
I could be more eloquent, but “what a bitch” sums up the situation quite nicely.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Shannon recently switched from a Blogger weblog to Movable Type, and did a nice, neat job of it, too.
And then I was tripping through the Plutonians and found that Phil Ringalda has moved to Movable Type. That one floored me. If you’ve worked with Blogger, than you know Phil — he’s helped most of us resolve problems we’ve had with Blogger. To see him come over to the MT side was a shock.
Why damme, that MT is bustin’ out all over!
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Internet Radio is at risk due to CARP — the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. There’s also a new bill being put forward before Congress that would make copying watermarks and holograms illegal.
Dallas News is issuing “cease and desist” orders against online sites for deep linking.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation — the main watchdog against copyright abuses is working overtime just to keep up with all the attacks against free speech.
Personally, I splurged and bought myself a CD, which I can’t afford, and then proceeded to find that I can’t play it on my computer because it’s one of the new copy-protected CDs.
Motion Picture Industry. Disney. The recording industry. AOL Time-Warner. Newspapers. Magazines. Cable. Sony. Television. Pieces of the creature we know as The Media Monster Machine.
And to fight this we’ve had a day of silence on Internet Radio, letter writing campaigns to congress, and discussions of a march on Washington.
I’m curious — what would you be willing to give up to fight for a more balanced viewpoint in regards to copyright law implementation? What would you be willing to give up to send a message to The Media Monster Machine?
Would you be willing to give up movies? Including Spider Man? Star Wars? Would you be willing to give up Radio, traditional or Internet-based? How about TV, would you give up sports and movies and Six Feet Under or Buffy or Sex in the City? Would you be willing to not buy that new CD, DVD, or VHS? Would you cancel your newspaper and magazine subscriptions?
What would you be willing to give up?
When you consider that people actively fighting any of the copyright legislative abuses add up to less than 5% of the total population of the country, marches and letter writing won’t have much of an impact on a congress whose main interest is in being re-elected to office.
However, when you consider that this same 5% of the population is made up of people representing a major purchasing power, particularly when it comes to cable, electronics, music, movies, and other items dependent on a larger than normal discretionary income matched by a larger than normal interest in entertainment and gadgets — then you begin to see the shadows of a hammer strong enough to beat against the box the media industry is trying to create.
The question is, though — what are you willing to give up?
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
There’s been discussion throughout weblogging about whether people would vote for Bush again or not. Many of the postings I’ve read said that the webloggers would primarily because of his policies regarding Israel, and his “handling of terrorism”.
To vote for Bush solely because of terrorism ignores so many other issues that are critical to this country. Issues that also cost lives, daily.
For instance, there’s the issue of health coverage in this country. My friend Chris recently posted some statistics about American life at his weblog. Among these was one that I felt was particularly relevant to my own situation — the fact that 40,000,000 people in this country don’t have health insurance.
If you want something to back up this statistic, then will a press release from the US Census Bureau do? According to the press release, we’re actually improving our lot in life, as the number of people without health insurance coverage in our country dropped to “only” 38.7 million in 2000. However, this number has changed drastically due to the current recession and higher unemployment. Other publications now put the number at 44 million.
This is only about 15% or so of the populace, but considering that the US is the richest country in the world, wouldn’t you all agree that any amount over 0% is a cause for shame?
Instead of dealing with the health care crises effectively, George W Bush tries to put through a health plan based on tax credits, an approach that’s been proven ineffective in the past. In addition, Bush also wants to put through an “intermediate” pharmacy discount plan that could, at most, reduce prescription drug costs by only about 10-25%. With prescription costs exceeding thousands of dollars a month for some illnesses, saving a few hundred dollars is not going to make a difference.
I have a close friend in Oregon who works for the Job Corps, teaching carpentry to displaced kids. He doesn’t make the bucks a master carpenter would make in the public sector, but he loves his work. He’s past retirement age, though, and needs to think about quitting. He isn’t able to because of health care coverage.
My close friend’s wife has severe emphysema that requires drugs costing thousands of dollars a month to keep her alive. If he quits, he loses his personal health care coverage, and Medicare doesn’t provide coverage of most of the costs of the drugs. If he quits, he’ll quickly go through all of his savings in order to buy the drugs his wife needs to stay alive.
This is a real person. He goes by the name of “Red”. He has a wonderful smile, a great sense of humor, an enormously huge heart, and he used to be my father-in-law. And if he retires, which he’ll have to someday, he’ll be financially destitute within one year.
I suppose, though, he could get “lucky” and his wife will die before he’s forced to retire. By the way, she goes by the name of “Bert”. She’s firey and tempermental, with an incredible laugh. She loves her kids and her grand-kids and she loves to travel. With adequate medication, and some restrictions, she can still travel.
She and Red had always planned to travel when he retired.
Without health insurance coverage, people in this country are making decisions daily that result in early or immediate death. They’re literally gambling with their lives because of the cost of medical care.
How many people are dying because of inadequate health coverage and care? I couldn’t find a statistic on this, but as a conservative guess, if only 1 percent of those uninsured in this country die because of lack of easily accessible medical care in a year, thats over 400,000 people a year. And that’s over 1000 people a day.
To be blunt, you’re more likely to die in this country because of inadequate medical coverage and care than you are from being killed by a terrorist. Regardless of your religion, race, sex, or any particular orientation.
You might want to consider this the next time you say you want to vote for Bush primarily because of his handling of terrorism.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
In the previous posting, Dave attached a comment that returns us to the conversation about centralization. However, I don’t expect that we’ll generate any definitive answers to “what is centralization”, as the folks who are interested in distributed systems and P2P have been working this issue for years, with only qualified success.
Centralization hasn’t as much to do with technical points of failure or with issues of deployment as it has to do with control. Centralization implies a single point of control residing in an authority other than yourself.
Is weblogs.com centralized? Yes, from both a control as well as a technology perspective.
Webloggers can automatically invoke the weblogs.com web services, or use the weblogs.com form to invoke the services manually. If the weblog has changed, the blogname and URL are added to the publicly accessible changes.xml file, and eventually to the weblogs.com HTML page. It remains on this page for three hours.
Both the HTML page and the associated XML file and supported services provide a single location to check for recently updated weblogs — a useful technology. However, this single location also leads to the service’s vulnerability.
If the server goes down, weblogs.com is no longer accessible. Dave provided a temporary backup location but if you’re dependent on automated processes to look for the updated information the temporary location didn’t work for you (not unless you wanted to modify your application to point to this new location).
The downtime with weblogs.com last week demonstrates a technical point of failure for a centralized application. There are mechanical methods one can take to avoid this such as the use redundant backup servers, as well as the use of banks of servers. However, as we’ve seen with DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, if there is a determined foe any centralized service can be brought down.
The possibility of technology failure doesn’t concern me in regards to centralized services, as for the most part, this isn’t an issue. As we’ve seen, weblogs.com has rarely been down in the past and the only reason we’re more attuned to the issue now is because of the rather lengthy downtime of the service this last week. Redundant backup servers would have prevented this, but as Dave has said, Userland is a software development company not an ISP. Backup servers are expensive and weblogs.com is a free service.
What does concern me about weblogs.com is the control: Userland has complete control over who shows on this list. And Dave has written filters for this list, as he’s discussed, openly, at Scripting News. (Though these filters may have been removed.)
That’s the danger of centralization.
Are there alternatives? Sure, there are other centralized locations of weblog updates. However, these are also subject to the same technical point of failure as well as issues of control.
Trying to decentralize a service such as weblogs.com would require a new infrastructure overlayed on top of the existing Internet to support the concept of centralized services that are decentralized — in other words to support supplying and consuming information about recently updated weblogs at a single point, the location of which can change from day to day, minute to minute.
Semi-decentralized applications such as Kazaa and Napster don’t provide the technology to solve this problem; they aren’t providing access to centralized resources, they’re providing access to files that can be located on any number of machines.
Until such an infrastructure is in place, we’ll continue to use weblogs.com and benefit from the service, while understanding the limitations inherent with centralized services such as this.
Returning to the comment in the previous post, Dave also mentioned the hypertext link. Now the simple hypertext link truly is a decentralized technology.
Anyone can put a link into their weblog. There is no authority controlling what you can and cannot link to unless you pay attention to the ridiculous and unenforcable “rules” that some web sites publish about deep-linking. Web sites may require permission to access certain pages, but you can place the link on your page — it’s up to the person clicking the link and the web site to negotiate actual viewing of the page.
And if you have a weblog, there is no authority controlling who links to you.
Weblog A links to you and you link to Weblog B, creating an indirect link from A to B. Continuing this process, weblog B links to weblog C and C links to D and D links to E and so on until you have an unbroken chain of weblogging circles forming a living, dynamic community that cannot be controlled and cannot be stopped — not without taking down the Internet, itself. And though some have tried, the Internet is too vast now to be controlled by any one authority.
Centralization. It’s all about control.