Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My Handspring Treo (review) died today, its 5th hardware failure in 18 months.  It is out of warranty so the $600 device heads for the trash can and I’m simultaneously deprived of calendar, address book, and mobile phone.  The preceding string of Handspring failures necessitated the purchase of a Motorola GSM phone as a backup so as soon as Margaret gives me back the Moto I can talk.  That leaves the question of replacing the Palm functions.  A year ago the cheapest Palm was $99.  With advances in technology and brilliant new engineering cleverness and Chinese labor the cheapest Palm today is… $99.

Is it time to accept Bill Gates as my personal savior and switch to PocketPC?  Theories in favor of PocketPC:

• lots of aviation software, including things like in-flight weather radar and very good flight planners, for PocketPC
  
• it is a Microsoft world so one might as well adapt now
  
• better syncingwith Outlook (my primary desktop source of info)
  
• can run Excel, which is the preferred programming environment for lots of everyday tasks, e.g., weight/balance for airplane

In favor of the Palm:

• can get a simple slow device that will run for 2 weeks+ on disposable AAA batteries (no need to lug around charger and remember to charge up all the time)
  
• simpler user interface (though I’d have to learn graffiti)

What do the gentle readers think?

The Alaska 2002 trip report expresses amazement that George W. Bush, the most powerful man in the world, would want to lower himself by mentioning Saddam Hussein in his speeches.  How have things changed in the 12 months since that amazement was recorded?  George W. isn’t talking about Saddam anymore… he’s talking about Saddam’s sons.  Is this an improvement?

Saddam was a hero to Muslims worldwide.  He was a self-made man.  He kept civil order in a fractious country.  One might argue, as I did, that Iraq was too insignificant a country to merit the direct notice of the U.S. President but as an Arab leader Saddam was probably above average.

Uday and Qusay are now the names on President Bush’s lips.  What are their achievements?  They chose their father wisely.  That’s pretty much it.  Uday and Qusay have been built up in the Western press as being especially cruel but by modern-day Arab or WWII German standards it is unclear that they are notably vicious.  And even if they were, why glorify their memory with all of this personal attention from the leader of the U.S., the representative of the American people?

Can we not find larger concerns?

Here are some books that I’m packing for a trip to Oshkosh and thence onward to the West Coast:

• The Peloponnesian War
  
• Geek Love
  
• The Importance of Being Lazy
  
• A Confederacy of Dunces (a reread from 20 years ago)

Maybe if other folks on this server start reading now we can have an Oprah-style discussion in September.

This just in from a student at a university in Florida:

Are young people wising up?  And do we really need more bachelors in Business Administration?

Just back from a performance of George Gershwin Alone at the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square.  This is a one-man show by Hershey Felder, who sings, plays the piano, and talks.  It is tough to believe that Gershwin, born in 1898, might have been one of our contemporaries if not for his death from a brain tumor in 1937.  Although many of his Broadway songs and Rhapsody in Blue were very popular, Gershwin endured quite a few setbacks during his short life:  (1) rejection by the critics, (2) rejection by the woman he wanted to marry, (3) massive financial losses from the failure of Porgy and Bess (disliked by the critics), (4) severe headaches, (5) condemnation by one of the world’s most powerful men (Henry Ford didn’t like Jazz and blamed it all on the Jews, specifically Gershwin, and published his theories in the Dearborn Independent), and (6) butchery of his compositions by Hollywood.

Apparently Gershwin had a habit of locking the theater doors in New York to prevent the audience from leaving, then making them stay after a performance to sing along while he played at the piano.  Hershey Felder revived this tradition and made a bunch of the amateur singers in the audience stand up and perform in front of 1000 neighbors.  It was amazing to see the courage of these folks, who’d arrived totally unprepared.

Final note:  Gershwin wrote a song about Boston called “The Back Bay Polka”.  The lyrics include some choice lines:

Strangers are all dismissed –
(Not that we’re prejudiced)
You simply don’t exist –
    If you haven’t been born in Boston.

Think as your neighbors think,
Make lemonade your drink;

Keep up the cultured pose
By looking down your nose;
Keep up the status quos –
    Or they’ll keep you out of Boston.

Email from a reader in St. Louis:

“I enjoyed seeing [the photos of Alex] particularly today as yesterday there was a polar bear scare in the neighborhood around our Zoo. Seems several independent observers called the cops to report a loose polar bear wandering their neighborhood. Yup, you guessed it: turned out to be a lost Samoyed.”

In the July 22 New York Times, “IBM Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas” talks about how upset people are that IBM wants to stop hiring Americans and move jobs to India.  An interesting question, though, is whether the people working at IBM right now are Americans in any true sense.

An American has a First Amendment right to free speech.  A corporate slave, however, generally forfeits his right to write about things that happen in his workplace as a condition of his employment and as a condition of receiving serverance pay after he is fired.  Because the typical corporate slave spends 60 hours per week commuting and working effectively this means that he has no right to write about anything that happens to him for most of his waking hours.  If the slave wants to get promoted he probably is wisest not writing or saying anything too controversial even if it does not regard work.

Americans are supposed to be a creative individualistic people.  See how long someone like that can hold a job in a big company.

An American has a constitutional right to equal treatment without regard to race or sex, unlike in Third World countries where ethnic group and sex determine one’s opportunities.  A corporate slave will be judged by the color of his or her skin and the presence of XX versus XY chromosomes in promotions under various affirmative action schemes.

America as traditionally conceived is a place of middle class opportunity and reasonably equal wealth distribution, unlike Third World countries in which a ruling elite collects all of the cookies.  A corporate slave will take home, on average, 1/500th the pay of his top managers.

Should we be worried therefore that big companies are moving jobs to the Third World?  Perhaps it is not a big a change as it would appear.  In some sense the Fortune 500 have already brought many aspects of the Third World into their cubicle farms on U.S. soil.

[See the book IBM and the Holocaust to learn just how committed IBM was to American-style values leading up to and during World War II.]

Most people don’t care about computer operating systems anymore; they’re happy to run Microsoft Windows and pay Bill Gates an occasional tax.  However, for engineers that build 5000-machine server farms or cheap consumer electronics products it is often essential to have an operating system whose source code can be modified and/or that is free.  That’s the role of Unix, whose most popular current variant is known as “GNU/Linux”.

Unix was developed in 1970 at Bell Labs primarily by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan.  It was substantially improved by University of California Berkeley in the late 1970s.  Richard Stallman and his collaborators in the free software movement, starting in the 1980s, further improved the system and freed Unix from AT&T’s cumbersome licensing restrictions.  Linus Torvalds contributed a free kernel that completed the job started by Stallman.

Through most of its life Unix has represented old ideas, old technology, and an inferior set of features compared to the research and commercial state of the art.  Nonetheless because it was cheap and easy to install on a wide variety of hardware, Unix buried all of its competition except for IBM’s mainframe operating systems and Microsoft Windows.

Under the original 14-year copyright period enacted by the U.S. Congress, SCO’s recent legal attacks against IBM and other Linux users would be impossible.  You couldn’t go to court and say “I want to sit on my butt and collect dividends from this thing that someone else did 32 years ago.”  But copyright today for corporate works has been graciously extended to 100 years, mostly thanks to some Congressmen on the Disney payroll (they didn’t want Mickey Mouse to become a public domain character).  Tim O’Reilly seems to be the only person in the U.S. adhering to the original 14-year term.

Effectively infinite copyright terms are good for Disney’s top managers (and would be good for Disney’s shareholders if the managers didn’t take all of the profits home as salary).  But are they good for American industry?  Microsoft can sit in Redmond making minor improvements to Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, a fairly modern operating system when introduced in the early 1990s but showing its age now, and collect 30% profit on its revenue (one sure sign of its monopoly power; Exxon/Mobil earns about 7% profit by comparison and Toyota earns 5%).    Companies can often make more money by asserting Congressionally-created intellectual property rights in ancient computer programs than they could by building something new and useful.  Being an American corporate manager, swaddled in government-guaranteed rights that never expire, is sort of like growing up in a very rich family.  You could make more money if you tried to work a bit but why strain yourself when you can be quite comfortable without working at all?

(If you want to follow the SCO saga as it unfolds, http://slashdot.org/ is probably the best place for news.)

The July 28 Newsweek contains an article on how much difficulty the citizens of California are having in governing themselves.  If you live in New Hampshire you are forced to deal with one enormous unresponsive and remote government (the Federales) but your state and local governments are reasonably comprehensive and tractable.  California, however, has an economy bigger than France’s, a population of around 36 million (see this study, which notes that population growth in California every year adds the equivalent of the state of Vermont), and a geographic area larger than Japan’s.  What interests does a rancher on the barren plains of NE California have in common with a recent Vietnamese immigrant in central San Diego?  How is the average citizen of California supposed to be able to comprehend a $38 billion state budget deficit?  ($38 billion is enough to purchase the U.S. Navy’s entire fleet of 8 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.)

Wouldn’t Californians be happier if they were broken up into the following states:

1) San Diego and its exurbs

2) Los Angeles and its exurbs, including Santa Barbara

3) Palm Springs and the surrounding desert

4) Central (the Big Sur coast all the way inland)

5) San Francisco/Sacramento and their exurbs

6) Northern California, capital at Chico or Santa Rosa (redwoods, ranches, etc.)

Now we have six reasonable size states in which citizens are usually within a 2-hour drive from their state government officials and never more than a 5-hour drive from their state capitol.

Comments from California readers?

The July 14/21 New Yorker carries “Beneath the Sand”, an article by John Cassidy on Iraqi oil.  According to the article, despite massive reserves production is very low due to a lack of investment in the 1980s and 1990s and recent looting (Iraqis have been stealing massive oil processing equipment and taking it over to Iran by boat then selling it for $50/ton as scrap steel).

Under the most optimistic assumptions it seems that Iraqi oil production will rise to 6 million barrels per day by 2010, which will be worth $55 billion/year at $25/barrel.  The population of Iraq meanwhile is expected to balloon to 30 million people by 2010.  So on a per-Iraqi basis the oil revenue would only be about $1500 per year.  If half of that money goes for the cost of production, as a return to investors who rebuilt the industry, plus maybe some payments on Iraq’s foreign debt, we’re down to $750 per capita.  Let’s assume that income is distributed as fairly as it is in the United States.  The bottom 40% of Iraqis would therefore receive 12% of the income.  I.e., a poorer-than-average Iraqi in 2010 could expect to receive perhaps $200/year or so in oil money or benefits derived from oil revenues.

Having Iraq cranking out lots of oil and holding down oil prices will be good for American SUV owners but even under the most optimistic assumptions it looks as though it won’t do much for the Iraqi in the street.