Off and on I wonder a bit about how quickly standards can change, and what it would mean if we could change them very quickly. My usual example for this would be highway speeds. There isn’t much point in driving 70 mph 15 miles down the highway just to join a 3 mile blockage of [...]
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Here’s a thought provoking example of a exchange standard along with an short informed essay about the effects it has on the adjacent parts of the system. The example is the trash chute in an apartment building. In my experience, at least in NYC, much of the trash is broken up into units the size [...]
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
I have an affection for the stories about great standards battles, like the ones around the battle betwen AC and DC (including particularly the electrocution of an elephant). I also have an affection for all the plumbing we build to convert between forms. The adapters from this to that. I particularly love the attachement for [...]
Thursday, December 20, 2007
My thoughts keep turning to this effort by the publishers to update the robot exclusion protocol, i.e. ACAP. The current situation with the robot exclusion protocol certainly doesn’t look stable. We are going to get a revision, or substitute to that protocol. But who has the market power, the legitimacy, the technical and legal chops [...]
End to end encryption should be the default, but it’s not. So, I find it interesting to look for the drivers that might change that. What will create strong enough demand that it will become unacceptable to ever allow any data to move thru public networks in the clear? Fear of identity theft is one [...]
Saturday, December 1, 2007
This is a delightful sentence: I have a T-Mobile cell phone, which uses GSM technology; it works all over the world — and in parts of New Jersey. – Paul Krugman It’s delightful, of course, because New Jersey is the home of Bell Labs. Paul’s posting is a short musing on the current state of [...]
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Markets are the friend of the plutocracy. In the market the votes are per dollar rather than per person. Which is, in passing, one reason why “market choice” isn’t synonymous with democratic freedom. Progressive governments do assorted things to counter the pro-plutocracy tendency of markets, for example creating public goods that raise the foundation the [...]
Monday, September 10, 2007
I found myself sitting next to a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” recently. I’d forgotten how much raw clarity and passion ran through the movements (anti-war, civil right, black power, feminism) of that era. Curious that having lived in that time one would forget. There is a very sweet, though deeply sexist, section [...]
Sunday, September 9, 2007
I like this quote. If a majority of the population is well accustomed to certain basic rules and if these rules work reasonably well common people even tend to stick more to these reliable rules than members of parliament and government would do – even if these rules are very unjust for some individuals or [...]
My recieved wisdom is that patent pooling was invented to solve a deadlock problem. As I understand the story the sewing machine makers all acquired assorted patents during the early years. Then in the 1850s they sued each other. The courts forced them all to stop production bringing the entire industry to a halt. Shortly [...]
Fresh Links…