Loud

I made this here comment on Mike Cane’s post on the cloud, chromebooks and that whole malarkey. Preserved here for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, you’re making a classic extrapolation mistake here: You’re looking forward on one branch of tech while ignoring the possibilities of the other.

Namely, you’re assuming that client-side software will stand still and that cloud-tech won’t turn into a clusterfuck of mistakes and greed-driven idiocy.

Which it will.

Web apps are and will be great for certain apps, but is worse than ‘native’ apps for some things. This will continue because as web tech evolves and improves, native apps will as well. There are a lot of low-hanging fruits for improvement of the native APIs of iOS, Android, and even the Mac, and, unlike most of the tech the cloud/web industry is based on, they aren’t designed by a committee of infighting autocrats who are completely disconnected from actual, on the ground, use cases (HTML5, I’m looking at you).

So, in short: ‘Native’ apps are better than web/cloud apps at some things today, and they will continue to be better at them tomorrow, because this is a race where they’ve got a 40 year head start and they’re not giving up their lead.

Fun fact: the web is over twenty years old, we’re in the middle of the birth of a new generation of web tech (HTML5 and related standards) and we still don’t have any way of doing usable rich text editing on the web. The only thing done by HTML5 on the text editing front is standardise the crap that’s already implemented. Assuming that this will be solved is daring, to say the least.

Cloud tech also disregards some of the basic concepts of what made the internet powerful: The end-to-end principle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle ) and the Rise of the Stupid Network ( http://isen.com/stupid.html )

A dumb network of smart clients will always outperform a smart network of dumb clients.

The Cloud is also much more vulnerable to disasters, mistakes, failures, and any other sort of Black Swan event that can’t be accounted for.

So, the cloud: Good for some things, better than native for others, worse than native for most. It’ll be a big part of some corners of the industry, but don’t expect it to take the board.

I added this here comment as well:

Another point: Any piece of cloud tech is a bitch to scale to many users, costs a fortune and consumes an ungodly amount of resources. A native app that performs the same task can be made by a small team of people and only needs a dumb server to sell and distribute, scaling up to many users is relatively cheap, and you’re not tied to any piece of infrastructure or capital expenses.

The following are a few points on piracy as from somebody whose been in the software industry for a few years now(that’d be me). I also tweeted these notes and collected the tweets in a keepstream.

1. The only people who will pay for software are those who want to pay. You can’t stop the rest from pirating, just delay them.

2. Revenue loss from piracy is impossible to measure, but you can measure the ROI of countermeasures (like DRM). Do sales go up or down?

3. The ROI of DRM is generally so low that anything too complex will just cut into your margins. Choose simple and cheap over unbreakable

4. If your sales are front-loaded (most of the sales are in the first few weeks) then more complex DRM to delay piracy makes a lot of sense

5. Given point 1, you limit piracy by making more people want to pay (as opposed to having to): Lower prices, make them care, or both

6. Some of the best piracy countermeasures are on the business model level: Subscription-based services/updates. Web Apps.

7. You can develop a software product that is rampantly pirated by your target market and still make a profit (see point 1).

8. Some folks have a crazy sense of entitlement to piracy. Engaging with them is soul-sucking. They love the work and hate the creators

9. Piracy thrives on community, all major forms of it (torrents, websites, forums) can’t exist without it.

10. The best way to prevent piracy is to sap the community around piracy: Fix major grievances. Address price and availability concerns.

11. Anything that adds to that community’s list of grievances feeds it and promotes piracy. That’s why aggressive DRM increases piracy

12. Once a strong piracy community has developed around your product niche you’re sunk and your only customers will be the naturally honest

13. The effectiveness of lower pricing in countering piracy depends on the market. Works well for impulse buys, less so for niche products

14. Piracy isn’t marketing. Controlled free offerings are. The two are completely different, but free obviously diminishes the piracy drive

15. Piracy can and has destroyed a product’s viability. Products that aren’t viable at lower prices but have mostly casual users

16. People who claim that piracy isn’t an issue don’t have loans to pay or kids to feed. It is, however, a very misunderstood issue

17. Alienating pirates isn’t smart in the long-term. If you aren’t an arsehole about it some of them start to pay when they have money

18. If your work adds no value to the world when free & pirated, if its only meaning is to pay your bills then you’re as bad as the pirates

19. That doesn’t excuse piracy in general, just that some software cos are evil scum-suckers and piracy’s the least of what they deserve

20. The software market isn’t a single homogenous market. Different segments require different business models and tactics.

21. Talking as if the software (or ebook) market is homogenous is really stupid. It’s markets (plural) and they are all different

I’ve been debating some issues on metadata, authorship and publishing on twitter today and it seems the right thing to do is to clarify my thoughts by noting them down somewhere.

First of all, this is all mostly based on my experience, which as everybody knows is an extremely unreliable way of learning, full of magical thinking, superstitions and misunderstandings. Also, these are half-random thoughts, with no particular order. Most of it is likely to make little to no sense.

With that caveat…

The first issue is that there’s metadata and then there’s metadata. On the one hand you have metadata on the work as a whole, and on the other you have in-content metadata, which is a form of structural markup. Those two groups of metadata require two different approaches in terms of authorship.

The second issue is that any metadata left to the publisher is likely to be outsourced to an underpaid data-centre in India, or left to an unpaid intern, or overworked librarian/information architect and be full of errors.

The third issue is that any metadata the publisher leaves to others (like libraries or distributors) is likely to be outsourced to an underpaid data-centre in India, or left to an unpaid intern, or overworked librarian/information architect and be full of errors.

All joking aside, my argument is that while metadata on the work level can be authored by anybody integral in the production workflow (i.e. anybody on the publisher level), in-content metadata has to be done by the author.

In-content, structural markup metadata is a way of exposing the author’s understanding of the text via commonly recognised conventions. Marking up the references or which piece of dialogue belongs to who is no different from the markup that indicates where a chapter begins or ends, or which part is a header, or which part is a blockquote.

One hypothetical example would be marking up the text of a novel so that every piece of dialogue has a known speaker who is identified via some sort of markup convention.¹ A ‘specialist’ in metadata who is given the task of marking this up (AKA The Intern) would have no understanding of when the author wants the identity of the speaker to be ambiguous.

So, to summarise: Metadata is a way of exposing the author’s understanding of the text via conventions and if the author isn’t in charge of metadata, every instance of ambiguity will be replaced by the publisher’s, editor’s or intern’s interpretation. IMHO, obviously.

Which brings me to the issue of metadata formats. In-content metadata formats can go two ways. One way is for them to be geared towards easy integration in text-based markup formats like Markdown or RestructuredText², easy hand-coding, or easy integration in the thoroughly dumb template systems that dominate the web.

The second way is to integrate them in GUI software applications, word processors, outliners, etc..

The first way needs simple formats that rely on markup conventions. Microformats are a pretty exact match to the problem.

The second way needs a highly structured format that is transformable between formats, easily extracted and comes with widely deployed, well tested tool-chains. RDFa is a pretty exact match to that problem.

This is a late response to Jonah Lehrer’s post on his blog over at Wired: Why Alcohol is Good for You. Posted here because, for some reason (possibly due to the uncharacteristic dumbness of Lehrer’s post), comments seem to be disabled on his post.

First of all, the study he refers to is scientifically indistinguishable from fiction. It has no predictive power. It cannot be repeated. It doesn’t account for even a fraction of the causes for the various distributions of life expectancy and it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the life and lifestyle of anybody born before WWII is useless for predicting the life expectancy of somebody born in an era of pervasive media and communications (changes the loneliness equation), deteriorating healthcare infrastructure, no smoking, universal contamination with a smorgasbord of trace chemicals and a host of other factors that change everything the study is supposed to … well, study. Longitudinal studies measure. They tell us what has happened, not will. The conclusions of a study of this kind are also not transferable between cultures because drinking cultures vary dramatically from country to country.

Besides, it doesn’t account for all of the heavy drinkers who croaked before they turned 55, which you could reasonably argue is a relevant data point.

That said, it’s also clear that most of the commentators on the study in question – a study where those who were heavy drinkers outlived the teetotallers – don’t come from families with heavy drinkers and alcoholics.

People who come from families with a history of alcohol abuse tend to be either non-drinkers or abusers. The non-drinkers have to live with the suffering, anxiety and stress caused by the heavy drinker. Which would mean that a possible explanation for why the non-drinkers in that study, especially when you consider the generations involved, were out-lived by the heavy drinkers, they were killed by the stress induced by the heavy drinkers.

Even if that were not the case, the damage caused by heavy drinkers to those around them is extensive, permanent and spans multiple generations. That the heavy drinkers might just live longer than their victims just adds to the injustice.

Just had a go at exporting my old, old PhD to epub using the new export feature in Pages 4.0.4. It sort of works. After spending a few minutes importing and matching the styles the massive thesis document works better in iBooks than it has any right to (and no, I’m not going to offer it to download, the content still sucks).

However, a few niggles, some major, some minor:

• It doesn’t export paragraphs. Everything is a goddamn div as far as I can tell. I suppose this is a way to get around ibooks’s bugs with styling (or not) paragraphs. The problem is that some of us want that behaviour. I may well want the body text to use the reader’s defaults and I don’t see a way of getting that behaviour via Pages.

• Footnotes become endnotes with links back and forth. This is probably the only way to do this.

• I don’t have a way of testing this on a kindle but it looks like these epub files would be incompatible with Kindlegen. I’m specifically thinking about the fact that Pages exports a self-closing span as link targets rather than anchors. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of other subtle incompatibilities that rendered the Pages output unusable for generating epub that’s both for ibooks/stanza et al. and as a master file to generate a Kindle book using Kindlegen. In any case, you would have to do a lot of testing to figure out just how to avoid those incompatibilities.

• Seriously, it’s just a mess of divs. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this in years. ETA: When I say just I mean just. Haven’t seen a single header tag either, and everything’s wrapped in a single div that has the class “body” and an inline style of “white-space:pre-wrap”.

Despite these niggles it’s promising as a epub development tool because replacing the CSS file is easy for anybody technically competent, but that does mean that it’s not quite ‘there’ yet in terms of easy epub publishing for those non-technical. ETA: I’ve changed my mind. The more I look into these files the clearer it is that they are devoid of structure, which is surprising since the ePub Best Practices styles are clearly structural in nature. It shouldn’t be difficult for Pages to convey that structure in the epub files it exports.

IMHO, as usual.

ETA again: I tried this again by exporting the Epub Best Practices for Pages file itself and got the same result there. If I’m doing something wrong it’s a non-obvious error to me.

From Apple patches iOS PDF flaw that allowed Web-based jailbreak:

A flaw in the open source FreeType library, used by iOS’s PDF rendering engine, could result in a stack buffer overflow when handling CFF font data. A specially crafted PDF, such as the one at jailbreakme.com, could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code.

I linked to Why NoScript Blocks Web Fonts in March which said this here thing:

It really worries me that the FreeType font library is now being made to accept untrusted content from the web.

The library probably wasn’t written under the assumption that it would be fed much more than local fonts from trusted vendors who are already installing arbitrary executable on a computer, and it’s already had a handful of vulnerabilities found in it shortly after it first saw use in Firefox.

Freetype is used in Firefox, all linux desktops, iOS and more. It’s not designed for this kind of exposure to the open web, whether via PDFs or @font-face. We’re going to see this attack vector again.

The same is true of art. Consensus is that van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Da Vinci, for example, were true masters. But that hasn’t stopped your neighbor from painting and trying to sell his or her artwork. The great artists were represented and their works competitively sought after by galleries that acted as gatekeepers. The gatekeepers began the separation of run-of-the-mill art from great art. (eBooks & the Downfall of Literature: The Great Debate – An American Editor)

It’s ironic to use Van Gogh as an example. Not because of the widely repeated myth that he never sold a painting in his life (because he did) but because his life, as documented by the letters between him and his brother, was marked by a constant struggle against the very gatekeepers that are raised here on a pedestal. The ‘no painting sold while alive’ myth has a grain of truth in it as the field and the gatekeepers of the art establishment didn’t acknowledge the quality of Van Gogh’s work until after he died. That Van Gogh’s paintings exist at all and are as respected as they are, is in spite of the gatekeepers, and are the sole result of Van Gogh’s passion and love for his art. If it were left to the gatekeepers of his time, we’d never have seen any of his works and he would have gone back to the priesthood. I’d also like to suggest that Shakespeare isn’t being read today because he’s good, but because he’s always been very, very popular, in his lifetime and among the romanticists. The gatekeepers didn’t acknowledge Shakespeare as great until romanticist ideas achieved dominance in the field of drama and literature.

The very idea of great literature is problematic. If we assume that literature is a result of objective qualities in a text and that the definition American Editor (the blog post’s author) puts forward is correct (both, as I said, assumptions which I personally disagree with, I tend to prefer Tolstoy’s definition of art) then it should follow that those qualities are orthogonal to the gatekeepers who filter and select after production. We would also have to assume that what gets categorised as literature isn’t affected by random chance and happenstance and that books don’t get put on a pedestal just because they were published in the right place and at the right time. Furthermore, we’d have to assume that most of it isn’t actually pap that caters to the values and sensibilities of specific classes (like Wagner for example, show me a Wagner fan and I’ll show you a snob with more time than sense).

But let’s ignore the problems I have with the premise and assumptions, for the sake of the argument.

It would follow from the premise in the post that the capability of the gatekeepers to sift through the volume of produced works to find great literature is independent of the actual number of produced great literature. The problem would not be the downfall of literature but rather the downfall of literature reading, which is a completely different problem that should be discussed and debated in a different way from the problem of producing ‘literature’ (scaryquotes rule). What American Editor is saying, then, isn’t that there’s any less literature around but that the gatekeepers will have a harder time of finding gems in the growing mass of indistinct muck that passes as modern day publishing.

The problem I have with that (beyond the otherwise faulty foundation we’re building on) is that gatekeepers throughout the ages, the galleries and art societies of Van Gogh’s time, publishers and critics in publishing, are hardly, if ever unanimous and their criteria for what is good is dominated by social intrigue, politics, economics, nepotism and snobbery. If they have a problem with dealing with the growing mass of works being made today, their incompetence and inefficiency is more to blame than anything else. The rational thing to do is to invest in better gatekeepers rather than to indulge in hair-pulling about the barbarians at the gate. (Otherwise known as the “shoot ‘em all and let God sort them out” method of solving the publishing problem.)

So, out of the 1 million books published in 2009, name the novel that is today’s equivalent of Catcher or Mockingbird. Perhaps there is one, but I admit I don’t know of it. (eBooks & the Downfall of Literature: The Great Debate – An American Editor)

Asking us to name a novel from 2009 that will withstand the test of time is dishonest sophistry because it’s an impossible task. If you had asked an intellectual in 1890 which was likelier to withstand the test of time, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Tolstoy’s religious writings, they would have chosen the religious writings every time. The history of publishing is littered with books universally hailed as literature that didn’t stand the test of time. The ‘gatekeepers’ get it wrong, something American Editor is obviously aware of, because otherwise he wouldn’t have said “I do not use literature to mean popular or fashionable or award winning”.

If being popular among the gatekeeper class doesn’t make it literature, receiving awards from the gatekeeper class doesn’t make it literature, being fashionable among gatekeepers doesn’t make it literature, then what role, exactly, do gatekeepers play in discovering and defining great literature? Great literature is beginning to sound more like a mythical beast than a valuable part of our intellectual and cultural heritage. George Orwell wrote (in a response to/repudiation of Tolstoy’s view of Shakespeare, incidentally): “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.” If that’s true then gatekeepers play a precious little part in the process. And if literature came about by building a ‘societal consensus’, then either American Editor actually does ‘use literature to mean popular or fashionable or award winning’ — all indications of societal consensus — or he’s using some personal and vague criteria for deciding exactly what parts of society have opinions that matter because you’re obviously not acknowledging ‘majority opinion’ as societal consensus.

So are ebooks causing the downfall of Great Literature? No. But that’s mostly because there’s no such thing as Great Literature. Are ebooks causing the downfall of Good Books? (A more valid and less woolly question, IMO.) The answer to that would have to be: No, but you might have a harder time finding them. The only question worth asking, however is this:

Will ebooks make it easier for you to find a Good Book, a piece of Great Literature and enable you to fill your reading list with fantastic things to read from now ‘till your last dying breath?

Well – obviously – that’s a yes.

I wasn’t going to comment on it but Tom’s post kind of got me started.

The Belle/Brooke story touches on several issues, most of which are, of course, either completely misrepresented or idiotically covered by the media but deserve a thought or two.

None of them address the issue with the blog/book itself, namely that it still reads like fiction. The outing of Brooke should give the story that added veritas but it just gives you the feeling that she was using it as a form of self-justification/cheap psychotherapy because it dovetails too nicely with the romanticised hooker with a heart of gold stereotype that dominates media.

Tom points out another issue that is missing from the media’s discussion of the Belle/Brooke fandango and that is the fact that she needed to find some way to fund her education. As he said:

But if you want to pursue that further, if you want a doctorate, even in the sciences (where a model of funded research is far more established than in the arts), then maybe the question we should be asking is not whether what Dr. Magnanti did was morally right, but why she had to do it at all.

It also show that even in these ‘enlightened’ times the Dr. Brooke Magnanti story shows us that no matter how educated, intelligent, eloquent, witty or distinguished a woman is, she’s still worth more as a casual fuck for businessmen¹ than as a productive member of society or a contributor to scientific progress.

What’s also missing from the discussions is just how bloody messed up most western education systems are. It’s not just the expense but the incentives and structure of the very thing itself. The only benefit of a lot of university degrees is that it keeps kids off the streets for three years. They tend to learn more about the craft of their chosen profession in the first six months at the job. That’s assuming they get a job in their chosen profession, which is far from a certainty given the UK’s growing emphasis on deskilled service industry jobs. The education industry in the UK has greater economic value as job creation for the administrators, teachers and service people than it does in terms of enabling productivity, training or innovation.

Most of the pressure on people in the UK to go to university doesn’t come from increasing levels of education or easier access to education (which are in all probability going down, people are learning less, more slowly) but from degree inflation: industries which before only required a diploma (as a lot of the required skills can only be learned on the job) now have been turned into degrees with an additional year of ‘padding’ and no real added teaching, learning or training.

Overall, beyond a few select degrees, UK education costs more, is worth less and takes longer than it did a few decades ago.

This is a massive betrayal of the entire idea of social mobility, the working class and lower middle class are facing greater and greater financial pressures to ‘educate’ but the system has been devalued to such an extent that they are getting very little for their added time and investment.

This is not unique to the UK, Iceland has followed almost exactly the same playbook with largely the same results.

I’ve gone as far through the education gauntlet as can be reasonably expected and, even with my PhD, I still doubt the value of the entire process. I’m convinced that if I hadn’t done my PhD or Masters I’d still be roughly where I am in terms of intellectual development and I’d be more experienced at my job.

I also wouldn’t have wasted as much time on the ridiculous nonsense that is most of what passes as critical analysis in the humanities and narrative theory.

I finished junior college when I was twenty (with a heavy emphasis on science, physics and math) and that was the end of my schooling. The rest is largely autodidactic. I have about as much time now to study and read and broaden my mind as I did when I was in academia.

As an industry, the academia that I witnessed was more obsessed with bureaucracy, infighting and dogma than honest intellectual development and scholastic curiosity. Most of the time sincere curiosity seemed to be more of a handicap than an asset.

If the value of university education isn’t self-evident to somebody with a PhD and several years worth of teaching experience, then the industry has more than just a PR or finance problem.