Author: geoff

The blogosphere at its most enjoyable: “Aristotle’s Revenge”

Over the last few days I’ve been reading (and occasionally contributing to) a lengthy blog thread entitled A Central “Argument” in Feser’s Final Chapter, “Aristotle’s Revenge” « Choice in Dying. The starting point was a back-and-forth between Erin MacDonald, the thoughtful author of the Choice in Dying blog, and Edward Feser, an intemperate advocate of Aristotelianism and Roman Catholic “natural law”. The comments provide an excellent contrast between those who believe that teleology of some kind is inescapable, and those who feel that at best it’s a consequence of the way that our language reflects our intentional stance (cf. Dan Dennett), and at worst it’s just a crude attempt to smuggle in a purposive deity. Good clean philosophical fun. Recommended.

Imagine if every Android device maker lost their Linux distribution license

Every so often, I come across a blog posting that makes my head spin from thinking of the implications. This evening was one of those occasions. I defy you to ignore this after reading the opening paragraph…

Last week I read about an Android licensing issue that I wasn’t previously aware of. It’s a pretty serious one, and it’s not that hard to understand. The short version is that

  • rampant non-compliance with the source code disclosure requirement of the GPLv2 (the license under which Linux is published) — especially but not only in connection with Honeycomb — has technically resulted in a loss of most vendors’ right to distribute Linux;
  • this loss of the distribution license is irremediable except through a new license from each and every contributor to the Linux kernel, without which Android can’t run; and
  • as a result, there are thousands of people out there who could legally shake down Android device makers, threatening to obtain Apple-style injunctions unless their demands for a new license grant are met.

This is from the FOSS Patents blog. It is not a joke, there is no hyperbole. Even though IANAL, the analysis seems to be persuasively grounded in GPLv2 language and case law.
This could get very interesting indeed….
UPDATE: There’s been widespread reactions to the FOSSpatents piece, most of it critical. The Register picked it up (well, they would, wouldn’t they?), linking it to efforts by Edward Naughton, and the commenters rubbished the analysis. Over at Twitter, Carlo Daffara, Dj Walker-Morgan, and my old buddy Simon Phipps all piled in.
One of the toughest things in reading the legal tea-leaves is that when cases like the various BusyBox suits are settled before they go to trial, it’s impossible to determine whether the settlement was due to the strength of the case or the balance of expenses. Those who have an axe to grind will always insist that the settlement smoke means that the licensing fire was real. Skepticism seems prudent. Nevertheless, the stakes are high, and I’m glad that we’re discussing the topic.

Testing social integration (2)

The old plugins that I was using seem to have become abandonware, so I’ve been doing some housekeeping.
You know, blogs and computers are really great ways of procrastinating. There are always updates, patches, tweaking, and other essential but non-productive tasks to be done. And the complexity of smartphones and their apps now means that we can take this timewasting wherever we want. When I was a kid in England, male home-owners tended to use their garden shed or allotment for this kind of thing. The nearest kind of portable procrastination was smoking a pipe; a pipe always needed scraping or cleaning, or something.

T-shirts

In an uncharacteristic spasm of organization, I just piled up all of my t-shirts on the bed and sorted out the non-keepers. There were 33 of them. Quite a few passed the first test – “Do I like this shirt?” – but failed the second: “Am I really going to wear this in the future?”
I should probably go through the same exercise for the 411(!) iPhone/iPad apps on my computer. At the very least, I guess I should get rid of the iPhone versions of apps which I have in both formats (iPhone and iPad). But it’s hard for me to shake off the conviction that eventually I’m going to own an iPhone again. After the first few weeks of going Android, I feel that AT&T, Samsung and Google are going to have to work hard to keep me as a customer. (And maybe that’s the problem – all three of them have to get it right. Who is The Weakest Link?) Of course the current spate of lawsuits – Apple v. Samsung, Oracle v. Google, and LodSys v. everyone – may render the question moot. We’ll see. (I think that last sentence merits its own #FAIL tag.)

An unexpected experience connects with my childhood love of science

I’ve developed cataracts. Nothing very surprising there: there’s a family history of cataracts, and 42% of people here in the US between 52 and 64 are affected. So I’ve moved quickly through the various stages of understanding:

  • Shit, what’s happening to my eyesight? Did my optometrist screw up my last prescription?
  • Hmmm, I’m having difficulty reading highway signs. Perhaps I should get this checked.
  • Cataracts? Eye surgery? Ick…
  • Hmm, lens implants. How does that work? Let’s watch the video…. Wow, that’s cool!
  • Just a minute… you can choose any power lens you want? So I could get 20/20 distance vision and use reading glasses? So I could go out… walk… drive… without glasses for the first time since I was 4 years old? Awesome!

And so that’s what I’m going to be doing during September and October, spread out to accommodate travel and other stuff.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about.

I was sitting in the optometrist’s office, going through the usual left eye/right eye tests, reading the charts (“Can you read off line 2 to me?” “There’s a line 2???“), and suddenly she handed me a black paddle with a pin-hole. “Look through this,” she said, “and tell me what you can read.” And after a moment’s adjustment, I was able to read off the whole chart. Then I moved the pin-hole slightly, and everything went blurry. From somewhere inside me, an 8-year old voice asked if she could wait for a moment, and by moving the pin-hole around I was able to trace out the blotchy shapes of the cataracts on my lens. And as I did so, I was back in 1958, in our house in London NW2, lying in front of the fire in the sitting room, reading the dark green, leatherette-bound, 18-volume encyclopedia of science that my mother had bought for me at a jumble sale, and reviewing the diagrams of the optics of the eye, filled with awe at the power of science.
We all assume that a trained professional can measure things like cataracts to sub-millimetric precision using fancy technology. But it was surprising – delightful! – to find that I could visualize the same phenomena using a $5 piece of plastic. That was a very cool experience.

This is a test of the new Yahoo Video Player

My colleagues at Yahoo! just released an intriguing new video player module for websites. In its basic form, it detects links to many kinds of video resources and provides a popup player to display the video. For example, I was mesmerized by a YouTube video of a guy who creates sculptures out of rocks balanced on top of each other in a fast-flowing river.
But there are more features coming soon. For example, the player will detect movie titles and automatically link to the trailer. Let’s test it with a reference to a film that I’m hoping to see this weekend, “Cowboys & Aliens”. UPDATE: Well, name detection didn’t quite work. My theme converts straight double-quotes to smart quotes, and it looks like the detecter can’t handle these. But the basic version was easy (and took only a couple of minutes to add to my blog). UPDATE 2: It turned out that title detection was working OK, but (a) it’s asynchronous, so it may not show up immediately, (b) the page has to be public, so it won’t show up in “Preview” mode in the WordPress editor.

Why do I buy cool cars from dumb companies?

Over the last 30 years I’ve bought many cars of very different kinds, from my nimble (but tight) Miata to a great boat-like Ford Granada. But I find myself returning to one particular style: the two-door 2+2 sporty coupe. I tend to blame this on my exposure at an impressionable (adolescent) age to the first racing Mustangs to arrive in England. In any case, I’ve owned three of them: the Ford Probe, the Mercury Cougar, and now the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. What’s interesting is that I enjoyed each of these cars immensely, but each was (is) a commercial failure.
The Probe was a Ford derivative of the Mazda MX-6, which was a fairly successful model for the Japanese company. The car went through one major and one minor refresh before it disappeared. I bought the second version, drove it for years without any problems, and eventually passed it on to my daughter. Was it a failure? It didn’t sell very well, and while “Probe” was a new model name for Ford, they haven’t re-used it. I think part of the problem was that the top-of-the-line Probe was too close to the Mustang in capability, and they couldn’t figure out how to handle the positioning.
The Mercury Cougar was launched with great fanfare, as one of the first of a new “edgy” style from Ford. Mechanically it was fairly close to the Probe, which wasn’t a bad thing. I bought one within weeks of the release, and I really liked it. Unfortunately it was rear-ended by a hulking SUV as we were leaving a funeral in 2002, and in spite of extensive repairs it never felt quite right after that. Commercially it was a complete disaster. Mercury did one minor refresh (NACA scoops on the hood!) and then killed it. I’m convinced that the biggest problem was that although “Mercury Cougar” revived the name of a legendary muscle car, Ford had successfully repositioned the Mercury brand as a soft, luxury brand for older buyers. As WikiPedia puts it:

This new generation was aimed at younger buyers, but was sold alongside Sables and Grand Marquis which were marketed toward middle aged buyers. Also, Mercury salesmen did not know how to properly market the car, as they were used to interacting with older customers.

To confuse things further, they tried to sell it in Europe as the “Ford Cougar”.
So to my present car, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. I really love this car, and so did almost all of the reviewers. It simply blows away the present Mustang and Camaro. So why hasn’t it sold? I see very few of these cars around, and the poor sales are a frequent topic on automobile forums. Yes, it’s a bit too heavy at 3,300 lbs., but frankly most cars that are comfortable on the SFO-LAX haul are going to have that kind of weight. And 306 BHP with RWD means that I can mostly forget about the weight and size while I thrash around the Santa Cruz Mountains. The problem isn’t engineering, but marketing. Over at The Truth About Cars, Michael Karesh nailed it:

The coupe shares its name — but little else — with the Genesis sedan. The two cars don’t look alike. They don’t drive alike. They’re much different in size and price. So, “Genesis” is bound to be associated with the characteristics of one or the other, or neither, but certainly not both. In this case, the sedan arrived first and so got dibs. If people happen to hear that there is a Genesis coupe, they’re likely to assume it’s larger, more luxurious, and more expensive than it actually is.

So there you have it. Three fine cars, all of which have been commercial failures, mostly because of dumb marketing. I could try to spin it as “exclusive, discerning”, but it’s actually rather frustrating. Oh, well.