This is a feature cast.

The hacker word of the week this week is crawling horror.

The feature this week is a rant on my concerns about the acceptance of technological illiteracy amongst our leaders. While the problem is not new, my thoughts were spurred by this Washington Post op-ed.

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This is a feature cast.

I now have a promo! Thanks SusanZ and Biscuit of the Kulture Kast. I have a script for another one in the works, too. You can grab either a raw audio (AIF) version or a high quality (256Kbps) MP3 version. Neither version has the bed music I use in the show to make them easier to remix. If you want a version with bed music, let me know and I’ll happily post one.

The hacker word of the week this week is content-free.

The feature this week is a rant on the “impending bandwidth crunch”.

• TechDirt discussion on bandwidth crunch
• Wikipedia on dark fiber
• David Weinberger on delaminating the telcos

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This is a feature cast.

The hacker word of the week this week is computron.

The feature this week is a rant where I consider the question of whether fair use is a right.

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This is a feature cast.

The DC area CopyNight was last night. Dennis McDonald has an excellent write up. He, of course, did not mention the iPhone inspired goatse. Trust me, do not ask.

I received some more listener feedback, again from Paul Fischer. This time he called in about the rant on social networks.

The hacker word of the week this week is coefficient of X

The feature this week is a new rant on the working of miracles. The circumstances that inspired this rant have also been encouraging my unusual uptick in beer consumption lately. Thankfully, this situation has settled out.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Jeff Atwood has another one of his infuriating pieces up. It is a comparison between installing an application bundle on a Macintosh and running the typical installer on Windows.

He quickly gets hung up on the number of manual steps involved in installing an application bundle and wonders why the convention on the Mac is not to use an installer. Sure, going be number of steps, the Mac is longer. I don’t think that makes it more complex or harder. And it completely misses a critical difference between an application bundle (which is not unique to the Mac by the way) and a typical Windows application.

The point of an application bundle is that it is self contained. No external pieces that must be set up just so in order for the application to run. Delete the bundle and the application is gone. No linger registry entries. Yeah, there may be some preference files but they are on the file system, in a standard location, where they can easily be found, identified and discarded if desired. And safely, too.

Application bundles are also usually agnostic of where they are installed. You can put them on your desktop, in your own folder or wherever you find them easiest to use. Granted, this seems to be something even seasoned Mac users miss. A very common issue I have seen with newer Mac users is they leave the applications in the disc image file, even if they keep it in their dock. Launching such an application bundle from the dock still just works, though, opening and mounting the disc image to get at the bundle. I’ll admit that I did this once or twice when I got my very first Mac.

Sure, Mac developers could use the very robust installer that is bundled with the OS X. Some kinds of software, like low level libraries and kernel extensions, do indeed use the installer to make sure all the pieces parts end up just so. The uninstaller could use some work, but the tools are there to build it out. From the command line, you can easily audit where all the parts of a .PKG file went. And as with application bundles, usually, it is safe to just go ahead and manually delete those files.

The installer, though, adds a speed bump to that assumption that the bundles and files are safely user modifiable. The choice to distribute Mac applications as bundles in disc images re-inforces the feeling that these are meant to be safely handle by the user at the expense of a few more steps.

Speaking of those steps for a moment what irks me is that the example Atwood references is not even typical. Most developers do not compress their disc images, so the silliness about digging out the image file is rarely an issue. More and more developers are also adding symbolic links in the disc image with a nice background to the folder that simplifies the process even further without preventing more advanced users for dragging the bundle off to a different, preferred location.

How many horror stories have you heard over the years of a Windows user trying to move or remove an application and disastrously harming their PC? There is no real reason this must be so other than convention and inertia. The Windows installer may be one click, but it is also a black box that band aids a process and end product that most Windows developers do not want the user touching.

Application bundles may seem “harder” to install to the uninitiated but re-inforces that the bundle is merely another kind of file that the user may safe move, remove or copy just like any other kind of file without worry.

And if you want to play a numbers game, how long does a typical setup.exe take to run compared to copying a bundle? All you have to do with the bundle is copy it. You get the same progress meter as any other kind of file copy. With an installer, other steps may be performed and you are limited to the feedback the developer chose to give. Is it copying files? Which ones and where? What does it mean when it says it is configuring?

Mac is only one example of different ways to get new software onto a system. Taking the installer forward to a more logical conclusion you arrive at the package management systems available as an integral part of Linux distributions. Wonder why Jeff didn’t take a swipe at say Ubuntu’s typical software installation? Nice golden hammer you have there.

I am starting to understand why Jon Gruber got so infuriated with Brian Krebs over at SecurityFix. Generally, I think Krebs’ reporting is no better or worse than anyone else trying to present readable yet accurate coverage of security issues that may affect the average user.

However, this post irked me within the very first paragraph.
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With each passing day, I draw closer to the extreme anti-DRM view, such as is represented by Defective by Design. Still, even in my more moderate days, serving an application patch as a security fix would be considered pretty low. Regardless of the relative (lack of) merits of DRM, they should call a duck, a duck. If they are going to change WMA, they should accurately describe the patch as applying specifically to WMA. Do they think anyone who catches them at this is going to honestly thank them?

Bruce, as always, explores the issue much more deeply. This is another case that reinforces the discussion around DRM being purely about protecting existing business models, versus serving consumer need. The comparison between the sub-optimal release schedule of legitimate security fixes, a definite consumer focused activity, and making sure Microsoft doesn’t offend any of its heavy DRM licensees really drives the point home quite clearly.

Last week, on Geek Fu Action Grip, Mur read an essay about her being incompetent as a geek. First, I think inadequate might have been a better word choice than incompetent, but in either case, it upset me to hear her put herself down in this way. Especially when the experiences she described seemed to me to be entirely coincidental and circumstantial.
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Stern’s rant is bombastic and monomaniacal, at best, but there is a kernel of a point with which I can agree. It seems that OSS should be able to genuinely improve faster than the rate at which most projects actually seem to do so. You do have wonder a little that the lack of a direct fiduciary consequence may take away some of the driving need to improve the user experience. Still, I generally prefer open source and free software to proprietary. I do have to admit to having a handful of must-have, smaller commercial applications for which I just haven’t found compelling free or open replacements.

The title really says it all. Ward’s probably not my favorite industry luminary, but any loss by Microsoft, if you will. And you can’t argue that the wiki is a powerful notion.

There are the guys I talked about a week or two ago. This update proves my contention that there was a better way to implement this idea. I haven’t seen Cory tear them apart any further, so take that as some support of my view.

I guess I was not the only person to ding Fox Music for their DRM’ed, Windows only online release of the Firefly TV series soundtrack. I got an email from them this morning announcing the availability of MP3 files for Mac users. Mac, Linux or people who hate DRM, whatever, they did the right thing here. It is a shame they didn’t do it this way, first, but I’ve got my fix, so I ain’t gonna complain too hard.

OK, an unnamed but reliable source and I were have a discussion over lunch the other day. I contended that the importance of inheritance to OO has traditionally been hugely overstated. I went so far as to even suggest that for almost any problem to which a solution could be crafted using inheritance, I could craft an equally simple and effective solution using just composition.
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In case you still wondered whether the US patent system had issues, here’s an interesting article about the retention issues at the USPTO. Along with issues in the US copyright system, trends like these tell me that legislators and administrators have forgotten that patents were meant to be a limited reward for genuine invention. It is bad enough that the limited part is so easily overlooked, in the form of Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, but that starting in the late nineties and apparently continuing through today, we are now having issues around the genuine part.

I saw this at the Download Squad. I have been scratching my head over Mono for some time, now. But combining an already strange technology effort with a new bridge with Apple’s V/RAD framework? That just seems to be stretching things a bit further, and for what?
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