Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

IF the open-source software movement were an upstart political campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers — the young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors, putting up signs.

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Lonni Sue Johnson

In 2004, Mr. Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean, Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Mr. Dean, the people behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens — and what is owed to volunteer contributors — when an open-source project starts to become successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word.

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In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of techies like Mr. Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate supporters for Mr. Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Mr. Messina, ran on Dec. 16, 2004.

“It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to — I don’t know what the highest was,” he said. “It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean campaign.”

The Firefox campaign has been very successful, according to Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that directs the project.

“The best we can figure, 75 to 100 million people are using Firefox,” she said. “Those people did not get it in a box. That is 75 million decisions, somewhere around the world to put this piece of software on someone’s machine.”

According to outside estimates, Firefox has about 15 percent of the market, Internet Explorer has more than 78 percent, and Apple’s Safari a little less than 5 percent. Mozilla has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing. But a windfall came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. In the last two years, the deal has brought in more than $100 million. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

So far, no one has figured out how to balance keeping an open-source or collaborative project fully financed while remaining independent and noncommercial. Wikipedia, for example, holds occasional fund-raisers, while its leaders debate if it should take steps toward some sort of sponsorship or advertising.

Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year. The foundation plans to increase its work force, and to add some engineering capability. In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, also led by Ms. Baker, mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract. (The foundation’s 2006 tax return has not yet been made public, but Ms. Baker said the Google revenue will remain about the same.)

She described the decision to align with Google as an organic one that predates the official release of Firefox. “We had Google in a beta version for a long time, so we approached them first,” she said.

Mitch Kapor, who is on the Mozilla board, said that accepting a deal with Google was a no-brainer. “Always on my mind, in all my involvement is, how is it going to be sustainable?” he said. “I am a big believer that begging is not the right business model. When it began to become clear there was a business opportunity, in monetizing search in the browser, I saw this as a great opportunity.”

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But with opportunities came changes. By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of “its arrangement and agreements,” Mr. Kapor said. (Google declined to comment for this article.)

Because transparency is one of the principles of the so-called Mozilla manifesto released in February, Mr. Kapor said, there was “some tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.”

Another complication for Mozilla, some critics say, is that it could be perceived as acting as an extension of Google. For example, they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

The exact nature of Mozilla’s relationship with Google has been good fodder for bloggers. When Mr. Messina recently posted a 50-minute video of his thoughts about Firefox development, the comments included a back and forth between Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation, and a commentator on the blog named Corey.

When Corey wrote that “it seems like half” of the top contributors to Mozilla “work directly for Google,” Mr. Dotzler responded harshly, dismissing the claim outright: “No one who has looked at the actual development of Firefox recently could say with a straight face that Google employees are top contributors to Mozilla.”

Finally, there is the problem of what Mozilla should do with the money, at least the portion that isn’t being reinvested in the Firefox. Throwing money around among volunteers can backfire, Ms. Baker said, though the foundation has been quietly assisting contributors who are hampered by poor equipment.

Instead, Mozilla’s solution is to put money into what Mr. Kapor calls “community purposes.” To that end, the foundation is looking for a new executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. “We go out and ask,” Ms. Baker said, “and even the community is not actually clear where large amounts of money should go.”

The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need

By Yoav Ezer on May 10, 2007 at 5:54 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Why Stop Bitching When it is Therapeutic?

May 4th, 2007

Written by Pete Tan on May 4th, 2007 under Problem Solving, Attitude Adjustment.

The Real Story of JPG Magazine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about community-building, it’s this: Do Not Lie. People are too smart and well-connected to believe a lie anymore. So, with that in mind, the story I’m about to tell is absolutely true as I experienced it.

How JPG Began

In September, 2004, Heather and I went for a walk in Buena Vista Park and started dreaming up a community project. The idea was to create a printed venue for all the awesome photographers we saw online. That afternoon I checked: jpgmag.com was available.

A couple months later, we launched the site. We used every available free web tool we could find: Flickr for community discussions, Gmail for submissions, Notifylist for the mailing list, and ultimately Lulu for printing the magazine.

We maxed out a Gmail account collecting submissions for issue 1. After it was published, my friend Paul offered to whip up a backend in PHP that allowed people to submit online. By issue 2, we were using the system he developed.

We created six issues over two years this way, each with a public call for submissions on a theme, and edited by Heather and I. Each one was a labor of love, not just for us, but for the thousands of amazing photographers who submitted their work out of a altruistic desire to participate.

Inspired by the amazing growth of the magazine, in 2006, Heather, Paul, and I began discussing what we were then calling “JPG 2.0.” We wanted to open up the publishing process to the community to let everyone help make the magazine. I came up with a spec for how it would work.

Paul and I had been doing freelance design and consulting work for a while, and had been talking about starting a design firm. We envisioned devoting four days of the week to clients, and using the fifth for our own projects. JPG was at the top of the list.

But once we looked at the spec for JPG 2.0, we realized that, if we built that tool, we could make a magazine on any topic. The opportunity we had before us was really “Magazine Publishing 2.0.” I remember sitting in Heather’s and my apartment, on our big, blue couch, asking Paul, “If you had the choice, would you rather start a design firm or a publishing company?”

For me, the answer was easy. I’d been working in and around magazines and newspapers since high school. I wanted to start a publishing company. Paul wasn’t sure. But all that changed when he met Halsey Minor.

Birth of 8020

Halsey was the founder of CNET. Paul met him through the editor of Surface Magazine, where Paul was a long-time web contractor. Halsey also had been thinking about a participation-driven magazine company. Our ideas seemed to overlap nicely.

The three of us, plus Halsey’s business partner Ron, got together for a steak dinner (I had the fish). I brought a few copies of JPG. We talked about what we’d learned doing it, and how we thought we could expand the idea to multiple magazines.

Conversations continued. A few weeks later Paul and I were in a meeting with Ron, who asked, “Which one of you would be CEO?” The obvious answer, as I saw it, was: “We haven’t discussed that yet.”

“Me,” Paul said.

Discussing it later, Paul assured me. “It’s no big deal, it just means I’ll have some extra stuff to do, but otherwise we’ll be equal partners.” I believed him.

We called the company 8020 Publishing. I suggested the name based on my experience with virtual communities, after the 80/20 ratio of lurkers to posters. Halsey invested in exchange for a percentage in the company.

After 11 years of working at other people’s startups, I was finally the cofounder of my own. It was a dream come true.

Paul and I talked about all the different magazines we’d start, but ultimately decided to begin with JPG. The brand had two years of momentum behind it and a strong community. 8020 bought JPG from Heather and I for a modest sum. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, because I was still the editor, Heather would still participate as much as she could, and I still owned it because I owned a portion of 8020.

We hired an amazing team and, over the course of the next year, we built the system the JPG 2.0 system of my dreams. We began selling subscriptions and advertisements, and distributing to bookstores. The community grew by leaps and bounds. We published four more issues in the new system (the fourth, issue 10, should come out soon). We also participated in two different gallery shows. Getting unknown photographers onto the walls of art galleries is still one of the things I’m proudest of.

Fight or Flight

Unfortunately, issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.

Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry - it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.

In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.

Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.

We had a long meeting with Ron. I tried to compromise. I suggested we add text to the website, explaining the difference between issues 1-6 and the new issues. I wanted to embrace the truth: Tell people how we started, how we grew, and what we were now. It’s the story of how a successful, organic community begins. It’s the story of how authentic media gets made. And it has the addded benefit of being true. Compromse could not be reached.

It became clear that we could not continue to work together with this fundamental disagreement. And because he was the CEO, I was the one who would have to leave. I still own a percentage of the company, so I hope to see JPG continue to grow and prosper. Unfotunately, it will be without its founding editors.

I’m indescribably sad this happened. I invested every bit of my personal and professional capital in this. I spent three years of my life working on JPG. I traveled the world to promote JPG and 8020. I hired my friends and designed the system. I managed the community and we built 10 amazing issues together. I’m very proud of what we made.

What I Learned

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.”
2. Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
3. Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
4. When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
5. Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
6. Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

Ever Forward

I chose to tell this story because I wanted the community I spent three years growing to know that I didn’t leave on a whim. As sad and embarrasing as it is to tell, I put the truth out there because my personal and professional credibility is on the line.

To my friends and colleagues who supported JPG over the years, thank you. You made JPG a wonderful magazine and community. And to the people I hired at 8020, I miss you terribly. This was not your fault.

And to the members of JPG community, thank you for all of your amazing work. I want you to know that I tried to work through a tough situation with honesty and integrity. And, in the end, I left because I could no longer create the kind of authentic media we set out to make together.

I hope that the next venture I start is lucky enough to have participation from people with the same enthusiasm, talent, and genuine awesomeness.

Until then,

– Derek

George and Richard

by Charley Reese
by Charley Reese

        
DIGG THIS

President George Bush's claims about what will happen if we pull out of Iraq is almost word-for-word identical to Richard Nixon's speech explaining why we must not pull out of Vietnam.

A "precipitate withdrawal" would result in a bloodbath, destabilization of Southeast Asia, would embolden our enemies and result in more war not less, Nixon said. And that is what Bush is saying, if you substitute "Middle East" for "Southeast Asia."

Nixon succeeded not in winning the war in Vietnam, but in prolonging it until 21,000 more young Americans died in the jungles and rice paddies. Then we withdrew, and none of Nixon's predictions came true.

To draw a further parallel, we got into the Vietnam War because the people who put us there: (1) didn't know the history; (2) didn't speak the language; (3) didn't understand the culture; and (4) arrogantly assumed that American firepower and technology could overcome any and all obstacles.

The Vietnamese were able to defeat us, despite our superiority in firepower and technology, because it was their country and we were foreign invaders. The people were on their side, not ours. They knew they could wear us down. They were willing to lose millions of people, and we weren't.

The current president, who really does seem to occupy a state of denial, has always refused to accept the fact that most of the opposition to our occupation of Iraq is simply Iraqis who don't want foreigners occupying their country. He has always tried to blame the resistance on outsiders – al-Qaeda or Iran or Syria. There are some outsiders in Iraq, but they wouldn't survive two days if it were not for the American occupation.

The question Congress hasn't asked about the president's so-called new strategy of spreading American troops all around Baghdad is, What's going to happen when they leave, as they inevitably will? The president's strategy is based on the assumption that if we can dampen the violence, Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds will embrace and form one united, secular government.

That is a foolish assumption. Shi'ites were dumped on every day of every year since British and French politicians created Iraq out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. This is the first time ever they have held the reins of power. They are not going to give them up or even really share them with the Sunnis. The Kurds are interested in an independent Kurdistan and don't particularly like Arabs anyway. Iran will help the Shi'ites, and the Saudis will send money to the Sunnis.

Whether we leave or stay, the fighting will go on until one faction or another attains dominance. That means there will be no democracy in Iraq. And President Bush is wrong when he claims that all people desire freedom. They first desire survival and security.

So President Bush will accomplish the same thing Richard Nixon accomplished. He will get more Americans killed, and eventually we will pull out of Iraq. It's not just the casualties that will drive us out; it is the enormous expense, the wear and tear on the Army, the necessary neglect of important domestic problems, and the political divisions at home, which will only grow more exacerbated.

Our present emperor has no clothes. If the American people want to survive with some prosperity and sense of security, they'd better find a new emperor who at least has the brains and intellectual curiosity to play the Great Game on the international chessboard. So far, the wannabe emperors don't show much promise.

April 28, 2007

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
 

 But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.
 

 When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

 I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
 

 Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
 

 Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.
 

 Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

 Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
 

 You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

 Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

 There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
 

 That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

 You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
 

 That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
 

Return to the Bertrand Russell Society Home Page.

How Hot Is the New Firefox Browser?

David Garrett, newsfactor.com Wed Oct 18, 11:48 AM ET

The Mozilla Foundation, a spin-off of former Internet heavyweight Netscape, has released what many believe will be the final version Firefox 2.0, the chief competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The version, called RC3 -- short for Release Candidate 3 -- sports several user-friendly features, including a sleeker interface with buttons that glow when a user positions the mouse over them.

But far more important are the new version's security features.

"Within the browser, managing security, managing phishing, managing trust is a huge issue," said Gartner's Charles Abrams, a specialist in current and next-generation Web strategies.

Security Forefront

Chief among the new version's improved security is antiphishing protection, which steers users away from malicious Web sites by checking them against a database of known phishing scams.

Firefox updates the database when a user goes online, much the same way that most antivirus applications regularly update their databases of known virus attacks.

Other features in the new version of Firefox include souped-up search tools that suggest search terms as users type, better tabbed browsing, and a revamped method of handling Web sites with JavaScript.

The new version also gives users a wider array of ways to read RSS feeds, which are growing in popularity as more companies turn to blogging as a way to build their brands and improve market share.

Who's Winning?

Conventional wisdom indicates that Microsoft long ago won the browser wars, leaving other browsers all but dead and buried. But a seemingly endless stream of security problems and the near constant need to patch Internet Explorer, now in version 6, have left many netizens cold on Microsoft's browser.

Recent research from Net Applications, a company that monitors global Web browser usage, shows that Firefox now has 12.5 percent of the browser market and is slowly but steadily gaining ground.

In the end, Abrams said, Microsoft has the upper hand and will keep it when it releases the much-anticipated version 7 of Internet Explorer. "I still think Internet Explorer, because of the Microsoft base, is going to be the established leader," he said.

He also said that Web browsers will be one of the key battlegrounds in the future of an evolving and complex set of Internet trends. "We have to view the emergent browser wars as not only places to find information," he said, but as "something that can handle trust and identity" as users are jumping around different sites.

The result? The key feature of future Web browsers might be how they handle users' personal data, and not merely the information they pull from billions of Web sites the world over.

木兰词

作者: 纳兰性德

拟古决绝词谏友。

人生若只如初见，何事秋风悲画扇。等闲变却故人心，却道故人心易变。 　　骊山语罢清宵半，泪雨霖铃终不怨。何如薄幸锦衣郎，比翼连枝当日愿。

【赏析】 　　无疑，该阙词章与白氏《长恨歌》皆涉及唐玄宗和杨玉环那段毁誉参半的爱情故事。 　　站在政治的角度，李隆基荒淫废国。 　　从感情的意义上来看，虽然唐玄宗迫于三军众怒，无奈将杨贵妃赐死马嵬坡，从此生死诀别、阴阳永隔，唐玄宗却始终信守当初七夕夜半“在天愿作比翼鸟，在地愿为连理枝”的誓言，纵“天长地久有时尽”，“此恨绵绵无绝期”，这种用情深远的爱情故事，试问谁人不动容？ 　　当然，我们已无法考证这段真挚爱情故事是否属实，权且和纳兰一样，首先肯定这段风流佳话。 　 　　纳兰此词以一失恋女子的口吻谴责负心的锦衣郎。 　　起句非常新奇，本来两情相悦，恨不能朝朝暮暮，然而如若知道迟早分离，倒不如保持“初见”时那种若即若离的美好。 　　然后描绘变心的人往往指责满怀痴情却无端被弃的一方首先变心，失恋女子的爱恨情殇可见一斑。 　　最后引用七夕长生殿的典故，谴责薄情郎虽然当日也曾订下海誓山盟，如今却背情弃义！

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

A speech at ETech, April, 2003

Published July 1, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list.
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This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.

Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

This talk is in three parts. The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.

The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.

And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?

So, Part One. The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.

Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.

There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?

He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."

He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what's going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.

In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.

Now, it's pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like "I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game," it's easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there. But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect. So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I'll use a story from your life. Because even if I don't know you, I know what I'm about to describe has happened to you.

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.

You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.

The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.

You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."

Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.

Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.

So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."

Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

There's a great document called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced "We've gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We're not going to get involved in any of that social stuff."

And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don't remember the exact gap of time -- they come back. The wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say: "What we have learned from you whining users is that we can't do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.

"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart."

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

Part Two: Why now?

If these things I'm saying have happened so often before, have been happening and been documented and we've got psychological literature that predates the Internet, what's going on now that makes this important?

I can't tell you precisely why, but observationally there is a revolution in social software going on. The number of people writing tools to support or enhance group collaboration or communication is astonishing.

The web turned us all into size queens for six or eight years there. It was loosely coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can you get? "How many users does Yahoo have? How many customers does Amazon have? How many readers does MSNBC have?" And the answer could be "Really a lot!" But it could only be really a lot if you didn't require MSNBC to be answering those readers, and you didn't require those readers to be talking to one another.

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

We've had things like mailing lists and BBSes for a long time, and more recently we've had IM, we've had these various patterns. And now, all of a sudden, these things are popping up. We've gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we're getting platform stuff. We're getting RSS. We're getting shared Flash objects. We're getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly.

I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly. It's not that you couldn't have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher. And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.

So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.

We got the weblog pattern in around '96 with Drudge. We got weblog platforms starting in '98. The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it's going to change everything.

The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys weblog, Samuel Pepys' diaries of the 1660's turned into a weblog form, with a new post every day from Pepys' diary. What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now believe, that weblogs will be around for at least 10 years, because that's how long Pepys kept a diary. And that was this moment of projecting into the future: This is now infrastructure we can take for granted.

Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries? I don't know. It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas.

So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.

When you got social software on the web in the mid-Nineties, a lot of it was: "This is the Giant Lotus Dreadnought, now with New Lightweight Web Interface!" It never felt like the web. It felt like this hulking thing with a little, you know, "Here's some icons. Don't look behind the curtain."

A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.

Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern. It's really worthwhile to look into what Joi Ito is doing with the Emergent Democracy movement, even if you're not interested in the themes of emerging democracy. This started because a conversation was going on, and Ito said "I am frustrated. I'm sitting here in Japan, and I know all of these people are having these conversations in real-time with one another. I want to have a group conversation, too. I'll start a conference call.

"But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I'm going to bring up a chat window at the same time." And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said "Well, I've also opened up a wiki, and here's the URL." And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.

So, suddenly you've got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone's like "Oh, can I -- no, but --", everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.

It's very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can't see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi's conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type "Hand," and the moderator of the conference call will then type "You're speaking next," in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. "Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so's work." Or "You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN number." In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- "No, no, no, it's w w w dot net dash..." In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."

This is a broadband conference call, but it isn't a giant thing. It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity. The web has been growing for a long, long time. And so some people had web access, and then lots of people had web access, and then most people had web access.

But something different is happening now. In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.

Now, the Internet isn't everywhere in the world. It isn't even everywhere in the developed world. But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.

And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted. Bill Joy once said "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true." We're starting to see software that simply assumes that all offline groups will have an online component, no matter what.

It is now possible for every grouping, from a Girl Scout troop on up, to have an online component, and for it to be lightweight and easy to manage. And that's a different kind of thing than the old pattern of "online community." I have this image of two hula hoops, the old two-hula hoop world, where my real life is over here, and my online life is over there, and there wasn't much overlap between them. If the hula hoops are swung together, and everyone who's offline is also online, at least from my point of view, that's a different kind of pattern.

There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running. Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress. We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.

The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it's going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.

It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like "Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki. So now you can get at them." It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory. This is new. These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.

Part Three: What can we take for granted?

If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we're seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do? Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?

I think there is. A little over 10 years ago, I quit my day job, because Usenet was so interesting, I thought: This is really going to be big. And I actually wrote a book about net culture at the time: Usenet, the Well, Echo, IRC and so forth. It launched in April of '95, just as that world was being washed away by the web. But it was my original interest, so I've been looking at this problem in one way or another for 10 years, and I've been looking at it pretty hard for the a year and a half or so.

So there's this question "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends." I'm hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.

But I can at least say some of the things it depends on. The Calvinists had a doctrine of natural grace and supernatural grace. Natural grace was "You have to do all the right things in the world to get to heaven..." and supernatural grace was "...and God has to anoint you." And you never knew if you had supernatural grace or not. This was their way of getting around the fact that the Book of Revelations put an upper limit on the number of people who were going to heaven.

Social software is like that. You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.

The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.

There are, however, I think, about half a dozen things that are broadly true of all the groups I've looked at and all the online constitutions I've read for software that supports large and long-lived groups. And I'd break that list in half. I'd say, if you are going to create a piece of social software designed to support large groups, you have to accept three things, and design for four things.

Three Things to Accept

1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues. There are two attractive patterns. One says, we'll handle technology over `here, we'll do social issues there. We'll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we'll have one track here and one track there. This doesn't work. It's never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction." I can do no better than to point you to those documents.

But recently we've had this experience where there was a social software discussion list, and someone said "I know, let's set up a second mailing list for technical issues." And no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between social and technical issues, because the conversation can't be forked.

The other pattern that's very, very attractive -- anybody who looks at this stuff has the same epiphany, which is: "Omigod, this software is determining what people do!" And that is true, up to a point. But you cannot completely program social issues either. So you can't separate the two things, and you also can't specify all social issues in technology. The group is going to assert its rights somehow, and you're going to get this mix of social and technological effects.

So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.

2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."

The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.

Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.

On alt.folklore.urban , the discussion group about urban folklore on Usenet, there was a group of people who hung out there and got to be friends. And they came to care about the existence of AFU, to the point where, because Usenet made no distinction between members in good standing and drive-by users, they set up a mailing list called The Old Hats. The mailing list was for meta-discussion, discussion about AFU, so they could coordinate efforts formally if they were going to troll someone or flame someone or ignore someone, on the mailing list.

Addendum, July 2, 2003: A longtime a.f.u participant says that the Old Hat list was created to allow the Silicon Valley-dwelling members to plan a barbecue, so that they could add a face-to-face dimension to their virtual interaction. The use of the list as a backstage area for discussing the public newsgroup arose after the fact.

Then, as Usenet kept growing, many newcomers came along and seemed to like the environment, because it was well-run. In order to defend themselves from the scaling issues that come from of adding a lot of new members to the Old Hats list, they said "We're starting a second list, called the Young Hats."

So they created this three-tier system, not dissimilar to the tiers of anonymous cowards, logged-in users, and people with high karma on Slashdot. But because Usenet didn't let them do it in the software, they brought in other pieces of software, these mailing lists, that they needed to build the structure. So you don't get the program users, the members in good standing will find one another and be recognized to one another.

3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an

VP Bill? Depends on Meaning of 'Elected'

By Peter Baker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006; Page A19

The prospective presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton has given rise to plenty of speculation about the notion of Bill Clinton as the nation's first gentleman. But what about another role? How about, say, vice president?

Politically, of course, the idea is a non-starter for all sorts of reasons. But that doesn't stop the parlor games, especially on the Internet. The issue came up last week during a chat on washingtonpost.com: What if Hillary picked Bill as her running mate? A Post reporter rashly dismissed the idea as unconstitutional. But that only proved the dangers of unedited journalism. The answer, it turns out, is not so simple.

Could Bill Clinton be Hillary Rodham Clinton's No. 2? He could not be elected president again, but some say he could succeed from the vice presidency. (By Kevin Rivoli -- Associated Press)

A subsequent sampling of opinion from professors of constitutional law, former White House lawyers and even a couple of federal judges reveals a simmering disagreement on whether a president who has already served two terms can be vice president. Some agree with the conclusion that the presidential term limit embedded in the Constitution bars someone such as Clinton from returning to the White House even in the No. 2 slot. Others, though, call that a misreading of the literal language of the law.

As the former president might say, it all depends on the meaning of the word "elected." Under Article II of the Constitution, a person is "eligible to the Office of President" as long as he or she is a natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident of the United States for 14 years. The 12th Amendment says "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President."

Okay, so that means if you're not eligible to be president, you're not eligible to be vice president. Makes sense. What would be the point of electing a vice president who can't succeed the president in case of death, incapacity or vacancy?

But then Congress and the states added the 22nd Amendment in 1951 to prevent anyone from following the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms. That's where things get dicey. "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice," the 22nd Amendment says.

On its face, that seems to suggest that Clinton could be vice president because he is only barred from being elected president a third time, not from serving as president. That's the argument of Scott E. Gant, a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in Washington, and Bruce G. Peabody, an assistant professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. The two wrote a law review article in 1999 called "The Twice and Future President" and reprised the argument this summer in the Christian Science Monitor.

"In preventing individuals from being elected to the presidency more than twice, the amendment does not preclude a former president from again assuming the presidency by means other than election, including succession from the vice presidency," they wrote. "If this view is correct, then Clinton is not 'constitutionally ineligible to the office of president,' and is not barred by the 12th Amendment from being elected vice president."

Others share that opinion. Three former White House lawyers consulted by The Washington Post (two who served President Bush and one who served Clinton) agreed that the amendment would not bar Clinton from the vice presidency. A federal judge, who noted that he has "no views on the matter," said the plain language of the amendment would seem to allow Clinton to "become president through succession."

Kathleen M. Sullivan, director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, said the 22nd Amendment, "as I read it, does not preclude a Clinton-Clinton ticket." She added: "Bill, if elected VP, could become president in the event that President Hillary became incapacitated; he just could not run for reelection from that successor post."

Still, that view is not universal. Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit said by e-mail that "read literally, the 22nd Amendment does not apply" and therefore Clinton could be vice president. "But one could argue that since the vice president is elected . . . should he take office he would be in effect elected president. Electing a vice president means electing a vice president and contingently electing him as president. That interpretation, though a little bold, would honor the intention behind the 22nd Amendment."

Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, also pointed to original intent in addressing the issue in his book this year, "Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism." The amendment, he wrote, "represents a considered judgment by the American People, after Franklin Roosevelt's lengthy stay in the White House, which deserves continuing respect" and "should not be eroded" by a narrow interpretation allowing someone to manipulate his way to a third term.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who was a clerk for Sandra Day O'Connor when she was on the Supreme Court, focused on the broader meaning of the language in the amendment in reaching the same conclusion. "My tentative answer is that 'eligible' roughly means 'elected,' " he wrote on his Web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, this summer, meaning that if Clinton cannot be elected president, he is no longer eligible at all.

One constitutional lawyer not heard from on the issue is William Jefferson Clinton, Yale Law class of 1973. But he has offered thoughts on the 22nd Amendment. Before leaving office and again in 2003, he suggested amending the amendment to let a two-term president leave office and then run again: "Since people are living much longer . . . the 22nd Amendment should probably be modified to say two consecutive terms instead of two terms for a lifetime."

Now, who might he have had in mind?

McCain Challenges Clinton On North Korea

In his first direct challenge to the Democrat he expects to face in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) today alleged that Sen. Hillary Clinton and Democrats fail to recognize the gathering threat posed by North Korea in voting to block a national missile defense program and by supporting an approach to Asian diplomacy that McCain believes is a proven failure. McCain scheduled a press conference late this morning in Michigan, where he is campaigning for Senate candidate Mike Bouchard, to draw a bright line between himself and Clinton on national security, according to an adviser.

In doing so, McCain tethered himself to the Bush administration's foreign policy initiatives on the Korean peninsula, which are supported by a wide range of conservatives, including realists and hawks. McCain's negotiations with the administration over detainee interrogation legislation strained his relationship with many of his foreign policy allies, including Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Ahead of the 2006 election, an adviser said he hopes to heighten the contrasts between policies favored by Democrats and those propounded by Pres. Bush.

McCain, long an opponent of Pres. Bill Clinton's framework approach to North Korea, endorsed Bush's call for tough financial and trade sanctions against the country and for a full, enforceable embargo on arms. The United Nations, McCain said, has the right to interdict and inspect all cargo entering and departing North Korean waters. McCain will urge the UN and US policy markers to punish the North Koreans' "bad behavior." North Korea, McCain said, has received billions in energy assistance through the "framework agreement" negotiated by the Clinton administration in '93 but managed to divert resources to secretly enrich uranium without detection.

"I would remind Sen Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush Administration's policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated was a failure," McCain said.

An adviser to Hillary Clinton, who provided background information on the condition of anonymity, said that Clinton believes the 1993 agreement was largely a success in that it deterred North Korea from reprocessing plutonium. Clinton credits direct diplomacy by members of the administration, who publicly rebuked and privately threatened North Korea in 1994. Through the end of the Clinton administration, North Korea refrained from plutonium enrichment. In this account, it was only when Pres. Bush rejected the framework agreement that North Korea secretly began to reprocess plutonium, which eventually culminated in this weekend's test. Clinton acknowledges that the national security apparatus failed to effectively police North Korea's hidden efforts to reprocess uranium in the 1990s but has concluded that the framework agreement generally contained the threat. [MARC AMBINDER]

But "[t]he idea that anybody can point to the Bush Administration policy and can say it's successful when we see what North Korea has done seems to be defending the indefensible," the Clinton adviser said of McCain. Clinton, on 10/9: "Some of the reasons we are facing this dangerous situation is because of the failed policies of the Bush Administration. I regret deeply their failure to deal with the threat posed by North Korea. And I hope that the Administration will now adopt a much more effective response than what they have up until now."

Bush's approach to North Korea has emphasized multilateral talks and de-emphasized bench marks and bright lines. Bush, who has a visceral dislike of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, refused to negotiate until the country gave up its nuclear energy program.

Sen. Clinton's aide said that Clinton doesn't oppose multilateral negotiations with North Korea but has pressed the Bush administration to take a leader's role and not cede that responsibility to China. Clinton, according to the adviser, believes that the Bush administration's "policy paralysis," referring to sharp differences of opinion between the State Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense, has allowed North Korea to dictate its terms to the world. In an op-ed written with Sen. Carl Levin in 2005, Clinton worried that "time is running out. Either the North Koreans will conduct a test (and transfer nuclear material, technology or weapons to our enemies) or the administration will finally act, using carrot and stick, to stop the clock and bring this crisis to a peaceful end before it's too late."

Both Clinton and McCain worry about a nuclear arms race in Asia and both seem to favor a more robust U.S. role in the six party talks.

Clinton, a member of the Armed Services Committee, has voted in the past to fund research into missile defense initiatives and considers herself an advocate for a scientifically-validated missile shield. She has departed from Democrats - and has been criticized by her party -- in pushing for aggressive shield experiments. But like others in her party, she has refused to support hundreds of billions in spending for shield technologies she considers unproven. Still, in 3/04, she acknowledged that a "deterrent effect" from a system that didn't work might be useful.

Many attempts to intercept missiles in their boost phases have failed, but several recent tests have been judged successful, including a September 2006 attempt to intercept a missile over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Alaska.

The current national missile defense strategy calls for a three-stage deployment of radar, ground-based interceptor missiles and ship-based missiles

In the same press conference, McCain called for a permanent increase in the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a rebuke at Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, who has worked to streamline those services. The Army's Chief of Staff, Peter Shoomaker, won reluctant permission from Rumsfeld to directly negotiate his budget with the OMB.

Stallman on Qt, the GPL, KDE, and GNOME Sep 5, 2000, 12 :33 UTC (197 Talkback[s]) (100575 reads) (Other stories by Richard Stallman)

By Richard Stallman

Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt. It also provides a way to resolve one of the free software community's long-standing problems, the problem of the ethical and legal status of KDE.

The design of KDE was based on a fundamental mistake: use of the Qt library, which at the time was non-free software. Despite the good intentions of the KDE developers, and despite the fact that the code of KDE itself was free software, KDE could never be part of a completely free operating system as long as it needed a non-free program to function.

But the KDE developers were not concerned about this problem, and recruited helpers who shared their views. As KDE/Qt developed, it posed a growing risk to the progress of free software. The risk was that KDE/Qt would become so established that most of the user community would treat it as indispensable--disregarding the fact that this meant using non-free software. Widespread acceptance of one crucial non-free program would encourage a general willingness to accept non-free software, meaning fewer people who might have the will to help replace KDE/Qt with something entirely free. And that job would require catching up with a large head start, just as we did in replacing Unix with GNU and GNU/Linux. To be back in that situation was a discouraging prospect.

But we were not there yet, and it was clear we should take preventive measures before we got there. In 1997 we launched two parallel projects designed to avoid that situation: the GNU desktop (GNOME), which aimed to provide a completely different alternative graphical interface, and Harmony, a free replacement for Qt. The reason for starting two projects in parallel was redundancy: any project may fail, and the risk was big enough to warrant two simultaneous approaches to preventing it.

GNOME caught on, and by 1999 it was a clear success. Then Qt was rereleased under a new license, the QPL, which made it free software. This solved the principal problem of KDE/Qt, the fact that part of it was non-free. But a secondary problem remained: the problem of license inconsistency.

The QPL is incompatible with the GPL, which means that Qt and GPL-covered modules cannot legally be combined, unless the developers of one module or the other grant an exception to permit it. The KDE developers certainly intend their GPL-covered code to be used with Qt, and one can argue that by telling you to link it with Qt they have implicitly given you permission to do that. But they did not formally state this exception in the KDE source code itself, and it is not comfortable to rely on implicit permission for something like this.

In addition, in some cases code was copied into KDE from existing GPL-covered modules whose copyright holders had not given special permission. (Only the copyright holders can give extra permission to do things that the GPL does not permit.) That is a real violation of the GPL. Because of this, and the overall lack of an explicit exception, the legal status of KDE remained clouded.

Qt 2.2 provides the basis to solve this secondary problem, but a certain amount of cleaning up will be needed to fix it thoroughly. Misusing a GPL-covered program permanently forfeits the right to distribute the code at all. Such situations have occurred in KDE, and now they ought to be cleaned up.

It would be a good idea for all of the authors of code in KDE (more precisely, all of the copyright holders) to make a clear statement that linking their code with Qt in the past was done with their permission, thus assuring existing KDE users that they have not forfeited distribution rights to that KDE code.

Also, where code was copied from other GPL-covered programs, their copyright holders need to be asked for forgiveness. To lead the way, the FSF hereby grants this forgiveness for all code that is copyright FSF. More precisely, those who as of September 4, 2000 have used some FSF code in violation of the GPL solely by linking it with Qt, and thus have forfeited the right to use that code under the GPL, will once again have full GPL permissions to use that code upon switching to a GPL-covered version of Qt. I appeal to all the other copyright holders of affected code to grant similar forgiveness and thus help resolve the situation quickly.

Soon KDE should be properly based on a GPL-covered version of Qt, and the Free Software Movement will be able to think of KDE/Qt as a contribution and not as a problem. Meanwhile, I think there is no reason to work on another package which is equivalent to Qt. If you want something like Qt, use Qt.

But GNOME is here, and is not going to disappear. GNOME and KDE will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged in some way. Until then, the GNU Project is going to support its own team vigorously. Go get 'em, gnomes!

Copyright 2000 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted in any medium provided this notice and the copyright notice are preserved.

Related Stories:
Trolltech's Eirik Eng and KDE's Matthias Ettrich on Qt and the GPL(Sep 04, 2000)
LinuxPlanet: Trolltech to Release Qt Under GPL(Sep 04, 2000)
KDE: Official Response to GNOME Foundation(Sep 01, 2000)

Was Einstein Wrong about Space Travel? 03.22.2006 + Play Audio | + Download Audio | + Historia en Español | + Email to a friend | + Join mailing list March 22, 2006: Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he's younger than his brother. This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri—warp 9, please—is a good way to stay young. Or is it? Some researchers are beginning to believe that space travel could have the opposite effect. It could make you prematurely old. Above: Albert Einstein's theory of Special Relativity says that time slows down for fast-moving space travelers, effectively keeping them young. Space radiation acting on telomeres could reverse the effect. [More] "The problem with Einstein's paradox is that it doesn't fold in biology—specifically, space radiation and the biology of aging," says Frank Cucinotta, NASA's chief scientist for radiation studies at the Johnson Space Center. While the astronaut twin is hurtling through space, Cucinotta explains, his chromosomes are exposed to penetrating cosmic rays. This can damage his telomeres—little molecular "caps" on the ends of his DNA. Here on Earth, the loss of telomeres has been linked to aging. Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery So far, the risk hasn't been a major concern: The effect on shuttle and space station astronauts, if any, would be very small. These astronauts orbit inside of Earth's protective magnetic field, which deflects most cosmic rays. But by 2018, NASA plans to send humans outside of that protective bubble to return to the moon and eventually travel to Mars. Astronauts on those missions could be exposed to cosmic rays for weeks or months at a time. Naturally, NASA is keen to find out whether or not the danger of "radiation aging" really exists, and if so, how to handle it. Science is only now beginning to look at the question. "The reality is, we have very little information about [the link between] radiation and telomere loss," says Jerry Shay, a cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. With support from NASA, Shay and others are studying the problem. What they learn about aging could benefit everyone, on Earth and in space. A Lit Fuse Like the fuse of a time bomb, telomeres are long strands of repeating DNA that shorten each time a cell divides. When the telomeres become too short, the cell's time is up: It can no longer divide, a state of affairs known as "replicative senescence." Without this built-in fuse, human cells would be able to continue growing and dividing indefinitely. In fact, scientists believe that cells evolved telomeres as a way of preventing the out-of-control cell growth of cancerous tumors. Because of telomeres, most human cells can only divide 50 to 100 times before the time bomb goes off. Right: Telomeres (white) cap the ends of human chromosomes (gray). Image credit: U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program. [More] One current theory of aging holds that, as the cells of a person's body start to hit this telomere-imposed limit, the lack of fresh, new cells causes the typical signs of aging: wrinkled skin, failing organs, weaker immune system, etc. Whether or not telomere loss actually causes aging remains a matter of debate, Shay notes. The fact that shortened telomeres go hand in hand with aging is well documented. People with shorter telomeres, for example, are known to not live as long on average as people with longer telomeres. But mere correlation doesn't prove whether telomeres are in fact the cause. "It's hard to prove cause and effect in these things. But I think there's a sufficient number of these correlative studies from a variety of different investigators that one has to start believing that short telomeres are a marker of aging," Shay says. Recent research, performed by Frank Cucinotta and colleagues, showed that iron-nuclei radiation (a chief component of cosmic rays) does indeed damage the telomeres of human cells: reference. To prove this, they exposed laboratory dishes containing a kind of human blood cell called lymphocytes to beams of both iron nuclei and gamma rays. Until recently, such a thorough analysis of telomere damage would have been prohibitively time consuming. But a new cell-staining technique called RxFISH (Rainbow cross-species Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization) allowed Cucinotta and his colleagues to look at many telomeres simultaneously. Left: Human chromosomes revealed by RxFISH. Image credit: NASA/JSC. [More] "We had this surprising result that iron particles are much more damaging to telomeres than gamma rays," Cucinotta says. He suggests that this difference might be due to the wider path of damage caused by iron nuclei. Telomere strands wrap into elongated loops, like little knots on the ends of chromosomes. Gamma rays can only strike one side of these loops or the other, but iron nuclei can affect both sides at the same time, inflicting lasting damage on the telomere—possibly causing its complete deletion. This explanation is still speculative, however. The task now is to quantify the risk telomere damage might pose to astronauts, so that mission managers and the astronauts themselves can make informed decisions about the risks they face. In all likelihood, the effects will be modest, Shay says. "We're talking about subtle things. These people are probably not going to wind up in wheelchairs or something like that from being in space," Shay says. For example, astronauts who have had the greatest exposure to space radiation, such as the Apollo astronauts who traveled to the Moon, tend to get cataracts about 7 years earlier than other astronauts, on average. Cataracts are a common symptom of aging. Right: Iron nuclei are especially damaging to telomeres. [More] Of greater concern is possible aging of the brain and spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that brain tissue is vulnerable to "aging" by iron-nuclei radiation--this according to research by Jim Joseph of Tufts University and Bernie Rabin at the University of Maryland. (See references below.) "It is looking more and more likely that this could be a problem for long-term space travel," Cucinotta says. However, if scientists can tease apart the exact ways that iron-particle radiation affects telomeres, they may be able find a way to avoid or correct it. The solution could be as simple as a pill containing DNA-repair molecules. "There are many ways that we can intervene," Shay says. One way or another, NASA plans to keep their astronauts feeling young. SEND THIS STORY TO A FRIEND Editor's note: This story should not be construed to mean that Einstein's theory of Special Relativity is wrong. It is correct. The Twin Paradox was concocted in Einstein's day to illustrate time dilation only. It was never intended to treat all aspects of space travel. The newly discovered effect of space radiation on telomeres is the "paradox on the paradox," says Frank Cucinotta. Author: Patrick L. Barry | Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA References Durante, M., et al. 2006. Chromosomes Lacking Telomeres are Present in the Progeny of Human Lymphocytes Exposed to Heavy Ions. Radiation Research, Jan;165(1):51-8 Joseph, J.A., et al. 1992. Possible "accelerated striatal aging" induced by 56Fe heavy-particle irradiation: implications for manned space flights. Radiation Research, Apr;130(1):88-93 Rabin, B.M., et al. 2005. A longitudinal study of operant responding in rats irradiated when 2 months old. Radiation Research, Oct;164(4 Pt 2):552-5 Shay, J.W., and Wright, W.E., 2001. Aging. When do telomeres matter? Science 291, 839–840. Are Telomeres the Key to Aging and Cancer? -- a tutorial from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah Aging Cells, Aging Body: Fresh Evidence for a Connection Was Einstein a Space Alien? -- (Science@NASA) Dr. Jerry Shay -- home page The twin paradox: Is the symmetry of time dilation paradoxical? -- a tutorial from the University of New South Wales Time Dilation and the Twin Paradox The Vision for Space Exploration

The Procedure

Imaging your Update CD

1. Insert your MacOS X 10.1 Update CD

   

2. Fire up "Disk Copy" from /Applications/Utilities

   

3. Select from the Menubar "Image | New Image from Device..."

   

4. Select your CD-ROM drive's contents from the resulting dialog

   

5. Image it as a "DVD/CD Master" type (this will take a little while)

   

Modifying the CD contents

1. Control-click (or right-click) on the resulting disk image:

   

2. See that it's mounted:

   

3. Navigate with the Finder to System/Installation/Packages on mounted image

   

4. Select the "Essentials.pkg" file...

   

5. ...by right-clicking on it and select "Show Package Contents"

   

6. In the pop-up Finder window, navigate to Contents/Resources/

   

7. Drag "CheckForOSX" to the Trash and close all these Finder windows

   

Burning your new Install CD

1. Go back to Disk Copy and select from the Menubar "Image | New Image from Device..."

   

2. Select the mounted volume you opened up above and make another "DVD/CD Master" image

   

3. Now select from the Menubar "Image | Burn Image..."

   

4. Select your newly modified .dmg file

   

5. Burn it to CD and enjoy:

   

Words for the Wise

Oct 28, 2006 in Internet, Editorials

One of my highest-ranked pet peeves about blogging regards bloggers that don’t take the time to do a bit of researching before posting an article. This is aimed at “A-list” bloggers more than anything. They are usually in such a hurry to beat the crowd and get something published that the accuracy and factuality of their information is left in the back seat.

For example, a few months ago I recall reading a review on TechCrunch where Michael Arrington glorified some service for its amazing AJAX interface - however there was no AJAX in sight. The service in question was nothing more than a Java applet. Someone called him out on that in the comments and then next time I glanced at that article, he had updated the post and deleted the snarky comment.

It can’t take too much longer to double-check what you’re blogging about right? Whenever Apple releases some new product I always make sure to give the specifications page a good reading to make sure I’m not blogging about anything incorrectly. The examples don’t stop with Arrington though. Today, Podtech employee (née Microsoft) Robert Scoble wrote a lengthy rant about a person whom he claimed was an Apple employee. If Scoble had spent even one minute on the “Apple employee’s” blog, he would have quickly known that Chuqui was no longer with Apple. Heck, the blog post title that Scoble linked to even hinted at Chuqui’s job change.

As long as we are on the subject of Robert Scoble, why not mention the time he erroneously accused Elliott Back of spamming and got Google to cancel his AdSense account the same day. Only after looking like a fool did Scoble find out that he was blaming the wrong person and that Elliott had merely written a WordPress plugin that a spammer used for malevolent purposes.

Hold on, I’ve got one more juicy example for you. A ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin wrote a strongly worded rant against Yahoo! employee Jeremy Zawodny. Donna got everything wrong. She claimed Jeremy used Google AdWords when it was clear that he used AdSense, a tool for publishers, instead of AdWords, a tool for advertisers. Donna’s post continued to spew nonsense by getting Yahoo! Search Marketing confused with Yahoo! Publisher Network. You might be interested in Jeremy’s reply.

5 Ways to Retain Your Blog’s Integrity and Reputation

• Get it right the first time. If you are going to blog about someone or their article, take a few minutes to read other relevant posts on their site and at least the about page.
• Not sure about something? Ask your readers if you can’t find the answer elsewhere. Don’t claim something without knowing for sure. Besides, asking your readers promotes user interaction and that’s always a plus.
• Better safe than sorry. The blogosphere is always on top of things. The second a press release comes out people have already blogged about it and are starting to appear on Techmeme, digg, etcetera. If you are one of these people, I ask you to hold off a bit and get all of the facts right. Too many errors are made with people trying to blog something as fast as possible. I can’t count how many times I’ve caught typographic errors, completely ill-formed sentences and various notable inconsistencies on prominent blogs.
• Stop using buzzwords you are totally clueless about. In this whole Web 2.0 bubble, bloggers are quick to talk about buzzwords when reviewing new “Web 2.0″ services. I absolutely hate when people start talking about AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other things like that when it is crystal clear that they have never been coders in their life and have no clue what they are saying. I can come up with at truckload of TechCrunch posts that violate this rule. Even worse is when they say the AJAX interface or what have you sucks and that “it shouldn’t be too hard to fix”… and you know this from your previous experience as a dynamic web application software engineer?

  I was reading a post on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion about the new .Mac webmail where he said the following:

  It’s nice to see Apple start to use some of the same Web 2.0 technologies that others like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been using for some time.

  Grrr. The term as “Web 2.0 technology” does not exist. AJAX did not start out in life as a hybrid of JS and XML purely for Web 2.0 applications. There are several programming languages commonly referred to for their prevalence in many Web 2.0-classified web applications, not the other way around.

• I think you get my drift by now. Just say no to A-list bloggers that have no idea what they are talking about.

The Interface of a Cheeseburger

All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonalds, iPod, Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface is the brand.

No forks, no knives, no language skills

16 columns submenu horizontal, I think, standing at the counter at McDonald’s. I scroll left and right and put a simple cheeseburger in my mental shopping basket. 16 columns, yet so usable. “Cheezubaagaa kudasai” I hear myself say, and glancing at the cashier display and the French fry machine interface, I hold my breath: Wow. Why did I never realize? Being a foreigner in Japan, I decide to go to McDonald’s because at McDonald’s I don’t need to deal with language. I could get much better food in a similar price range if I were ready to think, read Kanji and explain myself. But I’m not, as I’m hungry.

I’ll fill you without any brain stress

McDonald’s is very easy to use, I then think, and then the McDonald’s interface looks the same all over the world. Yes, that is why it is so successful. A simple interface. I don’t need to think when entering, ordering, paying, eating at McDonald’s. McDonald’s doesn’t make me think. That’s what the McDonald’s brand promises the hungry stomach: We’re sweet and we’ll fill you without any brain stress.

Sandwiches can be complicated at times

While checking out (paying), I decide to go through with this thought, and look closely at the cheeseburger, and yes, indeed. The cheeseburger as has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates, no chopsticks. Like a sandwich, but softer and sweeter and above all: Standardized. No alarms and no surprises when eating a cheeseburger. Sandwiches can be complicated at times.

The standardization makes the cheeseburger’s interface a branded one. Only a McDonald’s cheeseburger looks like a a McDonald’s cheeseburger. I unwrap it and look at the bread and the meat and the ketchup mustard color pattern: McDonald’s cheeseburger it is.

I have to print this cheeseburger on my business card

And while I chew, and the sugars start tickling my synapses, all I think is: I have to print this cheeseburger on my business card. I walk home and start typing this article here on my cell phone, going over that claim and reducing it to two words and a symbol, now, standing in front of my house door, I nod, looking at my new nifty claim:

Interface=Brand

if you can see the interface being the brand…

In the mean time, sitting at my laptop going over that little article, I think: Maybe it is just a deformation professionelle, as I deal with interfaces, usability issues and branding all day long. I just can’t help seeing things that way. But then again, if you can see the interface as the brand, the brand being the interface: You might understand the success of modern branding concepts.

Superficial explanations

The superficialists might say, that brands create identity through consistency, which creates trust. Sounds logical, but brands are not logical, they’re emotional… If you see a brand as an interface it allows you to explore the notion of brand experience being user experience. People don’t analyze usability, they enjoy it. For the customer usability is a matter of well being, while using. And being well means not needing to think in order to act.

Other examples

The iPod was and is successful because it’s pretty easy to use. But then: Where is the iPod logo? On the back! The interface makes the brand. The owner identifies with his iPod through it’s typical interface (click wheel plus screen), the 3rd person identifies the iPod through the white ear plugs. And that’s one more reason why the Zune is not much more than a copy. No matter how many features it counts - the Zune doesn’t have its own interface. Not for 1st and not for the 3rd person. It looks like a ornamented iPod with random ear plugs. Copies can kill the original if they’re simpler than the original.

Simpler doesn’t necessarily mean less. Look at the follow-up of the Nintendo Gameboy. The Nintendo DS has two screens. When I first saw it I was irritated. Is that the comeback of the Donkey Kong multiscreen, what’s going on?

Not quite. It’s a different, particular, simple, and extremely usable concept. Play in the upper screen, deal with the options in the lower screen. The DS beats the playstation portable in terms of interface. And don’t even get me started on the Wii against Playstation3 when talking about interfaces…

The list goes on and on: Look at the Dyson vacuum cleaner. A part from being a great performer, it has a unique very usable interface. Star Bucks. It’s a perfect WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Or Lego.

Maybe I should print a Lego brick on the backside of my business card. Or glue one to it. With the claim “Interfaces make brands”. Or maybe I should print that cheeseburger on the back and a little red box on top that says: Interface=Brand. As we’re at it, you might as well teach a nonnative speaker which one works well as a claim:

a) Brand = Interface
b) Interface = Brand
c) Interface creates Brand Experience
d) Interface defines Brand Experience
e) Interfaces make brands

Brand equals interface not surface

That branding doesn’t equal to creating a logo, is an simple truth that brand consultants have been fighting for a long time. Yet it’s never been so clear until recently: Brand equals interface not surface. Recently we get more and more easy to use products. And if you ask the information designer, products become more easy to use, because most consumers are Internet users. The web teaches us consumers to consider usability when buying a product, it teaches R&D how successful a good interface is, and it teaches finance, how profitable usability is, it teaches the marketing department that mere exposure is just a charlatanry that won’t sell products anymore.

And the lesson I learned at McDonald’s? You can have a bad product and still be extremely successful. As long as you have lots of sugar and an easy to use interface when defining your brand identity.

Web design is 95% typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Information design is typography

Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.

Information designers are the typographers of the 21st century

With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. It is the information designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”. Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job that typographers did 30 years ago:

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.

Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance. Organizing blocks of text and combining them with pictures, isn’t that what graphic designers, usability specialists, information architects do? So why is it such a neglected topic?

So why is it such a neglected topic?

Too few fonts? Resolution too low?

The main - usually whiny - argument against typographical discipline online is that there are only few fonts available. The second argument is that the screen resolution is too low, which makes it hard to read pixeled or anti aliased fonts in the first place.

Renaissance: 1 Font

The argument that we do not have enough fonts at our disposition is as good as irrelevant: During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work:

The typographer shouldn’t care too much what kind of fonts he has at his disposition. Actually the choice of fonts shouldn’t be his major concern. He should use what his time gives him and use it at his best.

Choosing a typeface is not typography

The second argument does not much better. In the beginning of printing the quality of printed letters were way worse than what we see on the screen nowadays. More importantly, if handled professionally, screen fonts are pretty well readable. Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.

Treat text as a user interface

Yes, it is annoying how different browsers and platforms render fonts, and yes, the resolution issue makes it hard to stay focused for more than five minutes. But, well, it is part of a web designer’s job to make sure, that texts are easy and nice to read on all major browsers and platforms. Correct leading, word and letter spacing, active white space, dosed use of color help readability. But that’s not quite it. A great web designer knows how to work with text not just as content, he treats “text as a user interface”. Have a look at Kohi Vinh’s website, and you’ll probably understand what that means:

Slightly more famous examples of unornamental websites that treat text as interface are: google, ebay, craigslist, youtube, flickr, Digg, reddit, delicious. Being a hard to dispute necessity, treating text as a user interface is the only parameter for success. Successful websites manage to create a simple interface AND a strong indentity at the same time. But that’s another subject.

Where to start

Web typography
In order to “allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web”, he has “structured his website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS”.

Five simple steps to better typography
The kind of typography he is talking about “is not your typical ‘What font should I use’ typography.” A good read for those who believe websites are usable when leaving font size and line spacing to default while letting the text width expand to wherever.

Khoi Vinh
Co-founder of behaviordesign. Currently design director at NYTimes.com. Extremely talented man.

Rod Graves
Communication designer. Sublime work: “Typography is a definite focus for me. Typographic grids and hierarchies usually form the foundation of the visual languages I develop.”

A List Apart
Communicating via typefaces. Fonts and layout. Designing for readers. Legibility. Typefaces, graphic design. Problems of typography on the web. Controlling web typography: size, font, color. CSS methods, browser problems, user problems, and workarounds.

Association Typographique Internationale
ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) is the premier worldwide organisation dedicated to type and typography. Founded in 1957, ATypI provides the structure for communication, information and action amongst the international type community.

Thinking with Type
The on-line companion to the book Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Typetester
Compare screen type

Typophile
Typophile is a member and sponsor-supported community. Since 2000 Typophile has been guided by open collaboration and the idea that we’re all always learning. We they serve 3+ million pages monthly.

Typohile Wiki
A user-created encyclopedia of all things type and design-related. Users create and edit Wiki entries with the aim of becoming a collaborative, useful, balanced and relevant resource.

The Next Big Thing in Online Type
Bill Gates wants computer users, well, Microsoft users, to have a more enjoyable on-screen reading experience — so much so that he made improving reading on the screen one of his top five priorities.

Books

Emil Ruder, Typographie
Emil Ruder’s Typography is the timeless textbook from which generations of typographer and graphic designers have learned their fundamentals. Ruder, one of the great twentieth-century typographers was a pioneer who abandoned the conventional rules of his discipline and replaced them with new rules that satisfied the requirements of his new typography.

Kimberly Elam, Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type
Although grid systems are the foundation for almost all typographic design, they are often associated with rigid, formulaic solutions. However, the belief that all great design is nonetheless based on grid systems (even if only subverted ones) suggests that few designers truly understand the complexities and potential riches of grid composition.

Muller-Brockman, Grid Systems
From a professional for professionals, here is the definitive word on using grid systems in graphic design. Though Muller-Brockman first presented hi interpretation of grid in 1961, this text is still useful today for anyone working in the latest computer-assisted design.

Want More?

Red Hat downplays Novell/Microsoft deal

11/5/2006 4:18:11 PM, by Ryan Paul

In response to a recent agreement between Microsoft and Novell, Red Hat's corporate secretary Mark Webbink has predicted that Red Hat "will be the dominant player in the Linux market" a year from now, and that "by that time there won't be any other Linux players." In light of Microsoft's partnership with Novell and Oracle's ambitions of Linux support dominance, Webbink's statement doesn't seem all that realistic.

In a recent interview with Search Open Source, Webbink downplayed the new relationship between Microsoft and Novell, claiming that the two companies have "gone off the road a bit" and arguing that Red Hat's approach to Linux support and stronger ideological ties to open source will ensure eventual triumph. He points out that the agreement between Novell and Microsoft involves intellectual property licensing, which he says represents a contradiction for Novell and a deviation from the conventional values of the open source community. Webbink thinks that "Novell has fallen into the trap of allowing Microsoft to do exactly what it wants to do, which is to trumpet IP (intellectual property) solutions and promises." According to Webbink, a company "can be either for freedom and collaboration," or "a different approach," but Microsoft and Novell "are trying to do both." The interview asks some good questions, and it is definitely worth a read for those interested in Novell's agreement with Microsoft. Let's examine some of Webbink's arguments and see how they hold up to scrutiny.

Some of Webbink's arguments sound hyperbolic, but he makes some worthwhile points. Although many will dismiss his argument about freedom as mere rhetoric, it is worth noting that, in many cases, enterprise Linux adoption is heavily motivated by a desire for flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in. Webbink is implying that Novell risks alienating customers if the company's intellectual property agreements with Microsoft lead to limited choice for end-users and decreased involvement of the open source community in Novell's projects. The argument is valid, but is it sound? There is no evidence yet that the intellectual property agreements will have any tangible detrimental effect. The arrangement has certainly created some controversy and uncertainty about Novell's intentions, but it is unclear at this point what sort of impact it will have on Novell's products.

Some are concerned that Novell has entered into this agreement in order to validate inclusion of Microsoft's intellectual property in Mono, the open source .NET interpreter. Webbink points out that community concerns have led the Free Software Foundation's legal advisor to question "whether or not [Novell and Microsoft's] partnership was in violation of the GNU Public License." Mono developer Miguel de Icaza has responded to community concerns by pointing out that the open source .NET implementation does not infringe on any of Microsoft's patents, that the product can still be safely included in other Linux distributions besides SUSE, and that Mono developers will continue to ensure that Mono never includes or infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

Citing Microsoft's attempts to fund SCO's legal assault on the open source operating system, many Linux enthusiasts are convinced that the proprietary software company's agenda is predatory and that its agreement with Novell reflects a divide-and-conquer strategy. While this may be true, I think it's more likely that Microsoft is responding to customer demand for Linux virtualization in a Windows environment. For Microsoft, Novell is the obvious choice for this sort of alliance because the company actively promotes broader adoption of .NET technology by financially supporting development of Mono. I think it would be naive to believe that Microsoft is interested in anything other than competition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the company is still determined to destroy Linux. We have seen numerous changes at Microsoft in the past few years, and it is obvious that the company is at least starting to move towards open standards and interoperability.

How will Microsoft's agreement with Novell impact other Linux vendors? I think that it could give SUSE an edge in the virtualization arena, particularly in enterprise environments where users need to run virtual Linux instances on a Windows host. The partnership could also potentially make SUSE look like a safer choice for some companies that are concerned about intellectual property issues. Red Hat is combating that particular advantage by offering stronger indemnification. Ultimately, I think that Red Hat can adequately compete with Novell if the company can convince customers that its stronger commitment to open source ideals and distance from the patent minefield will provide users with more choice and greater flexibility. Will Red Hat be the only Linux distributor left in one year? Don't hold your breath—an alien invasion is probably more likely.

What is 78 x 23?

OK, a simple question with a complicated answer - what is 78 x 23? No, this isn't really a trick question. I'm not using some obscure mathematical notation in an attempt to fool you. What is 78 by 23? What is seventy-eight multiplied by twenty-three?

Before you read on, please work out the answer. It is very important. I know it is silly, but pretend it isn't. Think of this as an 'interactive' article.

Have you worked out the answer? OK, let's continue below.

What is 78 x 23?
What is 78 x 23?
What is 78 x 23?

The Answer

So what is 78 x 23? It doesn't matter. In fact, I didn't even take the time to work out the answer, because you did it for me.

The real question is - how did you work out the answer?:

1. Calculator application on your computer
2. Physical electronic calculator (desk, pocket, whatever)
3. The calculator built into your phone, iPod, other device
4. Pen and paper
5. Your brain alone
6. Some other method (eg. Google - 78 x 23, Abacus, Slide-Rule, Geometry, etc)

How would you have worked out the answer 10 years ago? 20 years ago? (If you were born back then.) I'm guessing that the majority of you would have used a machine to calculate the answer to the fairly simple multiplication. Does that bother you?

When I was much younger, I was fairly good at mental arithmetic. In fact I was damn-right impressive, if I may gloat a little. But then someone bought me a calculator watch for a Christmas gift. I was a nerd then, as I am now, and I thought the watch was very cool. So I used it every chance that I got and 20 years later I am fairly crap at mental arithmetic. I can still do it, but I am much slower than the 11 year-old Clinton Forbes in 1986. That depresses me a little.

The reality of living in 2006 is that most of us no longer need to be good at arithmetic to get by in life. Calculators and computers are everywhere and they are quicker than we will ever be at this type of mundane work. I am not worried that we are breeding a society of people that can't multiply two digit numbers in their head, but I am a little worried about other side-effects.

The human brain is among the most complex instruments known to modern science. Despite massive advances in medicine the brain is still relatively poorly understood. Is our increasing dependence on computers for mundane calculations making us less intelligent in other areas? Are we producing less Da Vincis, Einsteins, Rutherfords or Mozarts because we are being stimulated less?

Has the advent of Photoshop and Illustrator producing more talented graphic artists or is it allowing mediocre talents to get by? Have cheap word-processors allowed us to produce better authors than the days of the type-writer or the simple pen and paper? Is GarageBand, CakeWalk, or other music tools producing better musicians and song-writers or was the acoustic guitar or piano superior for bringing out the creativity?

I hope I've sparked your interest in this question, because I think it is pretty important. If you have young children you should think about whether a modern education is better than the education that you received. Maybe you can think about whether a visit to Google is as good as a visit to your local library.

Don't think that I am computer-phobic, for this is far from the case. I am a card-carrying nerd, and proud of it. But sometimes I worry that the machine is possibly stifling my true potential. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician if it wasn't for that damn cool calculator watch.

Why Linux don’t support mp3 and selected wifi cards out of the box?

Posted by nixcraft in FAQ, Howto, Linux desktop

This question is asked again and again. Why Linux don’t support mp3, allow watching DVDs and selected wifi cards out of the box?

Short answer - copyright/IP laws prevent shipping all these software(s) and technologies/plugins with each Linux distribution. However some distribution comes with all these goodies but they are not free (try Linspire, which is not free but support is included for many common software). You need to purchase a subscription.

In the United States and many other countries, companies or developers or manufacturers must pay patent royalties to use an MP3 player or MP3 Encoder or Windows movie decoders. There is also conflicts between patent licenses and the licenses of application source code, so mp3 support is not provided out of box. This has been done for legal reasons. No one wants to get sued for breaking patent laws.

Most of these drivers are “restricted” because they are not available under a completely Free licence.

In short GNU/Linux and other distro try to follow rule:

1. If something is proprietary, it cannot be included in Linux
2. If it violates United States federal law (most popular distros are manufactured in USA), it cannot be included in Linux
3. Patent-encumbered software etc

Following packages/drivers/encoder are not includes in most distros:
=> Nvidia /ATI graphics card
=> Vmware player kernel modules
=> Wifi chipsets
=> MP3 Support
=> Real Media and Player
=> CSS encrypted DVDs (DVD Playback)
=> Cryptography
=> SUN JAVA
=> Adobe Flash Player etc

The patent holder is not ready to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL license. To get mp3 support for your distribution you must use third party repositories (or vendor site) to download application.

So how do I get working mp3 and other stuff?

You need to download RPM files or add selected repositories to your distributions. Following list summaries the work around for popular distribution:

Debian Linux

Use apt-get to install required software. However you may find Debian-multimedia repo good to install few codecs.

Add debian-multimedia.org repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
# vi /etc/apt/sources.list Append following line:
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sarge mainORdeb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable mainJust update all packages list:
# apt-get update
Use apt-get command to install multimedia packages such as mp3 players, DVD players etc.

=> Download and more information available at debian-multimedia

Ubuntu Linux

Use Automatix which is a graphical interface for automating the installation of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based linux operating systems.

=> Download and more information available at automatix

For Intel Centrino wifi card and other graphics card you need to use Ubuntu binary only package called linux-restricted-modules. Common modules are:
=> nvidia-glx/ATI graphics card
=> vmware-player-kernel-modules
=> Wifi chipsets etc

Most of above are restricted formats and as an end user you need to download and install them on Linux desktop system.

Under Ubuntu Linux linux-restricted* package is installed by default. You can always update this package to get bug fix and stability via update manager or type following commands:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install package-name
$ sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-x.x.xx

Always use latest kernel. Replace x.x.xx with your kernel version number. Use uname -r to find out kernel version. If kernel version number is 2.6.17 use package name linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17

Fedora Core (Red hat and friends)

Dag’s RPM/ RPMforge.net repositories provides support for following Linux distributions:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Fedora Core
• Old Red Hat Linux
• Yellow Dog Linux
• Aurora Linux
• CentOS
• Scientific Linux
• TaoLinux
• WhiteBox Linux
• Lineox
• BLAG

See how to play mp3 under Fedora Core Linux.

Download and more information available at following urls:
Dag’s rpms
Freshrpms
Rpmforge

Don’t forget to check out your distributions help documentation and official forum/mailing list

Please note that I am not a lawyer but just trying to answer a question which is asked by new Linux desktop users again and again. Hope this small how to provide answer and work around. If you have a better solution or thoughts on how we can help to solve this problem please comment back

Other possible solutions

If possible, use patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Vorbis or FLAC.

Further readings

• Mp3 licensing FAQ
• The Unofficial Fedora FAQ provides workaround for mp3 and other restricted format under Fedora Core
• Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide provides workaround for mp3 and other restricted format under Ubuntu Linux
• OpenSuse restricted formats wiki page and suggestion for restricted formats

Updated for accuracy.

Just downloaded the DMG of Leopard this week and try'd to install it on my G3 800Mhz iBook.
I've done some searching in the installer to see what's supported and found that there's a check for G3 proc's.

I've burned the image to DVD-R DL to make sure, and the installer give's an error message saying that my hardware isn't supported.

After editing the installer it did install succesfully, and i will show how to edit the file.

First convert the DMG to a read/write enabled DMG with the Disk Utility.
Mount the converted DMG and edit /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg/Contents/OSInstall.dist with tekstedit.

In the top of the file there are a few lines who look like this:

function checkSupportedMachine(machineType){
// Fail on G3
if (1 != system.sysctl('hw.vectorunit') ) {
return false;
}

var badMachines = ['iMac','PowerBook1,1','PowerBook2,1', 'AAPL,Gossamer', 'AAPL,PowerMac G3', 'AAPL,PowerBook1998', 'AAPL,PowerBook1999'];

if(machineType){
var length = badMachines.length;

// Fail if any of the compatible values match the list of badMachines
for( var j = 0; j < length; j++ ){
if(machineType == badMachines[j]){
return false;
}

}

}

// if we can't find it, assume it's supported
return true;
}

Change these lines to just this:

function checkSupportedMachine(machineType){
// if we can't find it, assume it's supported
return true;
}

Then burn the DMG to a dual layer DVD and have fun!


There are a few thing that don't work with a G3.
Safari doesn't wan't to start and the prefspanel for Pages doesn't work.
Safari can be enabled by copying it from a Tiger installation :-)

I've just installed Leopard on a G4, and it does work very well on a G4.


Please keep me updated with any error's and bugs you may find on a G3.
Meanwhile, i'm enjoying the first iBook G3 with Leopard in the Netherlands