Random Precision

According to CNET, HP is diving headfirst into the Netbook market. The interesting part of the article, though, is not so much about HP, as about netbooks in general, and how they are being marketed in Europe and Asia:

It’s a dramatic increase, and the difference is all coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where Asus and Acer have been incredibly aggressive about their Netbooks, the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. Of the 10.9 million units that are estimated to ship worldwide by the end of 2008, 8.1 million will go to EMEA, says IDC.

Acer and Asus have done well in the region, as evidenced by Acer’s quick rise to the top of the portable PC market there. But they’ve been aided by local telecom companies, who are subsidizing Netbooks in exchange for a signed wireless service contract. It’s a model that in the past few months has thrived in Europe.

Dell signed up Vodafone for this kind of deal on its Netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 in September, but HP’s mostly been on the sidelines in this regard, and representatives for the company haven’t indicated if a similar deal with wireless providers are in the works.

Wireless service contract to subsidize a Linux-based device optimized for mobile Internet access. Other than the physical size of the device, how is this different from Android (and, Linux notwithstanding, the iPhone)?

At some point in the near future, somebody is going to put Android on a netbook-class device, and the shape of the future of client computing will become clearly visible. And the day that happens is the day that Microsoft’s desktop monopoly will be truly broken.

What do you get when you cross Microsoft and Yahoo?

Microsoft.

Over at TechCrunch, Duncan Riley makes the case that people leery of the coming Microsoft/Yahoo merger are being unreasonable, and need to start thinking of Google, not Microsoft, as the Evil Empire.

The Microsoft is evil meme is alive and well this week as many digest Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer for Yahoo. There’s Flickr users protesting, talk of Yahoo teaming up with Google to block Microsoft’s bid, and general Microsoft is bad sentiment everywhere, even from Google itself. While Microsoft acquiring Yahoo may not provide the ultimate in happy endings to many, it’s really not as bad as some would have you believe.

My own objection is not so much because Microsoft is evil (and we’ll set aside for the moment whether Microsoft is evil). Rather, it’s over the fact that Microsoft is a desktop software company. Up to now, Yahoo has been a pure Internet company, like Google. They have not had any reason to care what platform its users run; they simply don’t have a horse in that race.

But a combined ‘MicroHoo’ has a vested interest in what software is running at the other end of the pipe. Even if the people running the ‘Yahoo Division’ say all the right things, there will always be a temptation for the Microsoft brass to use the Yahoo properties as instruments with which to promote Microsoft desktop software. That should be a concern for anyone who uses non-Microsoft alternatives to Microsoft products — not just Mac and Linux users, but users of Firefox and Opera, iTunes and Winamp.

Will you have to use IE to access del.icio.us or Yahoo Finanace? Will you have to use Windows Media Player to access Yahoo’s streaming media? Will you have to use Visual Studio to develop Yahoo plug-ins? Even if the answer to all of these questions is ‘No’ now, can anyone promise it will stay that way in the future? Even if Microsoft goes into debt with this deal, and has to justify its purchase to the stockholders, can we be sure that management won’t see this as a way to monetize their new properties?

And I don’t buy the parallel being drawn by some between Google’s domination of the net and Microsoft’s domination of the desktop. Microsoft gained its position by leveraging its relationship with IBM, and muscling PC vendors into exclusive deals, precluding them from offering pre-installed alternatives to Windows. Google, by contrast, is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, exactly the kind of company we should want to see more of: they built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door.

In practical terms, the only real stumbling block to this deal may be EU intervention, and even there, Microsoft can make a compelling case that the merger will increase rather than decrease competition, so I don’t see that as likely. So the deal is likely to go ahead. I just don’t see it as cause to celebrate.

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the past day about Robert Scoble’s banishment from Facebook (temporary, it turns out) and the reasons for it, and whether he deserved it. One point of view, espoused by no less than Jeff Jarvis, is that the contents of Scoble’s Facebook address book should be kept in Facebook, not exported to a system of Scoble’s choosing. It violates one’s privacy, apparently.

This is a ludicrously naive position.

Facebook and others may say they will protect your data as if it were their own. They are lying. To some of us, this lie was transparent from the start; but if you still believed the lie after the Beacon fiasco, and stories of information leaks from even the most secure government agencies, then you are a fool.

Once you put information in Facebook, or any other website, and allow others to access it, it is out there, no take-backs. If you want it kept private, then keep it private; and putting it on the web and letting other people see it is not “keeping it private”.

Consider this: Scoble did what he did in broad daylight, blogging about it once he had permission to do so. And he did it with apparently noble intentions, willing to sacrifice his Facebook account for the cause of data portability. (At least, that’s how he presents it after the fact, though I have no reason to doubt him.) And he did it badly; his activity was detected because the Plaxo script was too fast; the simple expedient of slowing it down and adding a little randomness might have allowed him to evade detection.

Now, do you really think the Plaxo developers were the first ones to come up with this idea? Do you think maybe someone else might be doing exactly the same thing, but more quietly, more competently, and with less noble intentions? In view of that, do you really think it’s even theoretically possible for your Facebook data to remain protected?

Do not count on Facebook to do your information security for you; they can’t do it, even if they sincerely mean to. (And are you really sure they do mean to? No matter how much revenue it would cost them?) If you want privacy, you have to manage it yourself. If you don’t want your data out there, then don’t put it out there. Be judicious in what information you supply to the social network; and consider salting it with disinformation.

That, or stop caring so much about privacy: embrace the Transparent Society, learn to stop worrying and love the social. Seriously, that’s a perfectly legitimate stance; privacy is optional. Or find your own personal balance between hiding everything and revealing everything.

But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can escape the fundamental tension between social networking and privacy.

Safari Books Online is a service by technical publisher O’Reilly and Associates, that allows subscribers to their service to access their books, and those of several other publishers, online. (Highly recommended, BTW.)

Anyway, their front page lists the most popular books on their service. For as long as I can remember, the top book was David Flanagan’s Java in a Nutshell; but today, it has been displaced by JavaScript, the Definitive Guide (also by Flanagan, as it happens).

It’s notable mainly in support of Steve Yegge’s proposition that JavaScript is the Next Big Language. It is certainly popping up everywhere, and it is, for now, the only Apple-approved method of developing for the iPhone.

UPDATE: Okay, now both of Flanagan’s books have been displaced by a C# book. Please forget I said anything.  :)

One Revolution Per Child

The OLPC project is laudable even on the basis of its stated goals; but I think there’s more going on here. As this article describes, the OLPC device is by its nature subversive. But why assume that that subversion will only take place in the underdeveloped countries that are the ostensible market?

After all, I want one. Don’t you? And if it really will just cost $100 — or even a smidge more — that makes it almost an impulse buy, at least as gadgets go. And what will happen when thousands of these are in the hands of gadget-fans here in the US, and elsewhere in the developed world?

Revolution begins at home.

Update: the Revolution marches forward. Applications as online services (e.g., Zoho, Google Apps) dovetail nicely with this trend. I remain convinced that Google Android is yet another manifestation of this, approaching the same destination by a different route.

Linux, on the other hand, is still to omni-directional for its own good. It could actually learn a lesson from Microsoft, in this sense. They need to standardize on a single desktop (KDE or GNOME) and a single core. It’ll never happen. My mom just doesn’t want to compile drivers and debug her kernel. Linux is perfect for verticals and corporate environments right now - not for the home desktop. –Chris Pirillo on the Opera Newsletter mailing list, Sunday, 05 Oct 2006 23:46:37, via the Quote of the Day on Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Cafe au Lait

I wonder if this issue isn’t beginning to sort itself out, though. Debian seems to be gaining more mindshare lately — not so much directly, as through distributions like Ubuntu and Linspire that derive from it. In fact, since Linspire has decided to use Ubuntu as a base, it looks like we see the start of an efficient production line that would make Adam Smith proud. Debian produces the core of a purely-free operating system; Ubuntu, next in the assembly line, tunes and polishes to the point that it is attractive to commercial users, and can be commercially supported; and Linspire polishes and adds-consumer-friendly touches like proprietary media codecs.

(I do think, though, that the GNOME-vs-KDE conflict is overblown, and doesn’t need to be ‘resolved’; applications for either desktop will work on either desktop, and which one you run as a base simply depends on user preference — and the design philosophies of the two are different enough that each has a well-defined constituency, just as Windows and Mac do.)

As everyone knows by now, Google has released its new SDK for mobile phones, Android.

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This early look at the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.

The SDK includes basically a one-stop shop for application development infrastructure: an OS kernel (Linux), a virtual machine (interestingly, not the Java VM, though Java is the main development language), a SQL engine, a communications stack, 2D and 3D graphics toolkits, a GUI stack, and so on. Everything a developer would want in a deployment platform.

As you, my legion of loyal readers, will know, I play Second Life. The SL client is based on OpenGL. When I saw that Android supported OpenGL, it naturally occurred to me that one could create an SL client for Android. It would suck to use SL on a mobile phone, of course; tiny screen, no keyboard, etc.

But then, there’s surely nothing in the spec about a maximum screen size for Android, and no reason you couldn’t have a physical keyboard. In fact, if you were to take an Android system, built to run efficiently on a phone-class device, and put it on a laptop-class processor, it would fly…

Whoa.

What can a desktop machine do, that an Android-based mobile phone can’t do? Mostly it’s a matter of form factor; a mobile phone isn’t big enough for a full-sized keyboard, multiple USB connectors, a DVD slot…

But is there anything that says Android can’t run on a laptop- or desktop-size device? If Android catches on, isn’t it inevitable that someone will put it on such a device? And given how many smart people work at Google, don’t you think they already considered that? that they may in fact have planned on that from the start?

Lots of people have been wondering when Google will come out with an operating system offering that will compete with, and maybe displace, Microsoft Windows.

I think it just happened. And no one noticed.

I missed this year’s OSCON (grumble, grumble). I had even more reason to want to go this year, because of the keynote address by Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) [video link] of Linden Lab.

One interesting thing that Philip mentions: apparently a Teen grid user from the UK has developed a limited-function browser-based client, so that she can log into SL, and can chat, IM, teleport, etc., from within Firefox, without downloading an official client (or any client, apparently). Cool stuff, I’ll see if I can track it down.

In this post I wondered why no one (that I knew of) had proposed using JavaScript as a server-side language, and developed tools to support it. Well, they say it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time. A lot of other people had the same idea; and unlike me, some of them did more than just blog about it.

Googler and blogger Steve Yegge (whose keynote at OSCON I am going to miss, dammit) made a splash by porting Rails to JavaScript — specifically, the Rhino JavaScript-on-Java interpreter that is bundled with Java SE 6. He calls it “Rhino on Rails”, the clever bastard.

In an effort to increase developer productivity at Google, Steve tried to convince the company to adopt Rails (and consequently Ruby) as a programming language. When that fell on deaf ears (Google really does not want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure), Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. Working 2000 hours. Steve is a coding stud.

And he is not alone: witness Project Phobos.

Phobos is a lightweight, scripting-friendly, web application environment running on the Java platform.

It comes with a set of plugins for the NetBeans IDE that cover the complete development process. These include a fully-featured debugger; wizards to help you get started faster; a palette of Ajax widgets that can be dropped on a page, thanks to jMaki; and the ability to generate a standard web application for deployment on any servlet container or Java EE application server.

Currently, the primary language supported by Phobos is JavaScript. By leveraging JavaScript on the server, Phobos allows developers to use the same language on the client and server tier of a web application, eliminating the impedance mismatch that characterizes other approaches to Ajax.

Digging farther back in Steve Yegge’s archive, one finds he has been thinking along these lines for some time:

JavaScript is probably the most important language in the world today. Funny, huh? You’d think it would be Java or C++ or something. But I think it just might be JavaScript.

For one thing, despite JavaScript’s inevitable quirks and flaws and warts and hairy boogers and severe body odor, it possesses that magical property that you can get stuff done really fast with it…

See, JavaScript has a captive audience. It’s one of those languages you just have to know, or you get to miss out on Web programming, and in case you hadn’t noticed, thick clients are like Big Hair these days. Most non-technical people I know pretty much live in their browsers, and they only emerge periodically to stare in puzzlement at iTunes or a game or something, and wonder why isn’t it in the browser, because everything else useful seems to be. It’s where the whole world is. To non-technical people, of course. Which is, like, practically everyone.

What other language is supported, in a reasonably cross-platform manner, on the Windows, MacOS X, and Linux native APIs, the Java virtual machine, the .Net virtual machine, the Parrot virtual machine, the Flash runtime, the Silverlight runtime, and 99% of the web browsers in the world? (And, oh yeah, what’s that new thingamajig from Apple? I vaguely remember reading something about it. Can’t seem to recall the name…) In other words, JavaScript not only runs on every platform of interest; it is the only language that runs on every platform. [1]

JavaScript isn’t winning the fight to be the Next Big Language; it’s already won.

[1] Actually, I don’t know if it runs natively on PlayStation3 and XBox 360. But given the little-bitty interpreter and the great big storage media, the games could ship with their own JS runtime and not miss the space.

Okay, I have nothing really to add on this, but this blog entry by Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, was simply so brilliant I had to point it out:

Forking is an extreme point in a continuum of options that exist with open source. The option to fork must exist as a feedback mechanism, but it need not be used in order for users to gain benefits not available with closed source and proprietary standards. Forking can be the right thing, or it can be a kind of mutually-assured-destruction option that keeps everyone acting in the interest of not forking.

Forking is not evil. The right to fork is a feature, not a bug. (And this makes Sun’s long-standing resistance to open-sourcing Java — recently overcome, happy happy joy joy — out of “fear of forking” seem especially short-sighted.)