waffle

The idea of “intellectual property” is intellectually bankrupt.

You don’t need me to tell you everything that’s wrong with the patent system. I am reliably assured that there’s been written long, best-selling books about it, of which I have read none, and weblog posts, of which I have read several. We all know that the idea stems from ownership, possession and a manic fear of pilfering which validity has been continuously declining, and which stopped overweighing the downsides a long time ago. The idea of patents is to benefit the commons and protect the small inventor; none are the case anymore. So I think I’ll write about something else.

When Apple’s not off suing companies for daring to adopt ideas that have been discovered, they’d like to control much of the environment that their hardware creates in which their software runs. The PC has been an enormous success, but not many have emulated that particular part of the equation. Apple don’t just retain control because they like being in control; they do it because it affords them the ability to be responsible for how everything is integrated. I think it’s fair to attribute some of their success and reputation for a good experience to this.

But it’s not all about that. When the original Macintosh launched, you could write programs that did everything. You may complain that the only reason programs could traipse through low memory was because the Mac was streamlined to the point of being underly insulated, and the spell of a fundamental memory protection problem that would follow it for 17 years would be a good argument. The case remains that when Andy Hertzfeld, legendary software engineer then no longer with Apple sat down to write Switcher, the first application to bring multi-tasking to the Mac, he was using the same SDK as everyone else (Toolbox).

Of course, Switcher was also implemented through very careful consideration, swapping a painstakingly detailed set of bytes in and out of their special memory segment. Steve Jobs went so far as to say that Andy would not have been able to build Switcher without having been with the team as they designed Toolbox and System (the original Mac OS). Apple bought Switcher and turned it into MultiFinder, which would eventually bring multitasking using the same principle but now regarded more officially.

This would never happen today. The iPhone is a far more closed platform. It provides a far better user experience in the areas where anything at all is offered, but the holes that would need to be opened for it to become an open platform are small. They can be opened without affecting the usability of the device, without infecting the device with viruses, without infecting the “user” with dangerous analogies to concurrent, crooked computer usability flaws and concepts, and without forcing Apple to peddle porn, seemingly explicit toddler-era humor and applications with network television programming-strength political commentary.

The interesting thing is that love finds a way. There are millions of jailbroken iPhones that already multi-task, sniff for Wi-Fi hotspots or tether without the consent of a grumpy carrier (let’s not go there). Apple has nothing to gain from pissing off its own customers. It seems to fit that they’re doing it out of spite. We know that Steve’s assertion from before isn’t true: Andy would simply have had to work more studiously to figure out the mechanism. There are jailbreak applications doing amazing things with no official backing API whatsoever on the iPhone.

This post isn’t about Apple. It’s about ideas and control. You can’t. You can’t control ideas. Rather importantly, the spread of ideas, and the ability to facilitate it, is probably the best tool in humanity’s chest right next to opposable thumbs, abstract thinking and awareness of the future. For every insipid patent that Apple have, have ever attempted or could ever file, there are ten ingenious ideas that have been thought before and made every single one of their previous creations possible and dramatically more powerful.

For any company to continue this farce of “intellectual property” is ridiculous. For Apple that’s been so creative with it is abhorrent. I know they’re not stupid. I know they’re not greedy. I’m hoping they’ll eventually turn around, to the benefit of their customers and themselves. Rather, I know there will eventually be devices that are as good as any Apple device but respects the emergent laws of the universe and human behavior. When that choice exists, I’ll know which one to pick.

Today, 633 members of the European Parliament voted against the ACTA talks taking place outside of the customary, legal and courteous scrutiny of the body. (13 voted against, and 16 abstained.)

Yesterday, Christian Engström, the first publicly elected Pirate, spoke on the floor. In case it wasn’t already apparent, the reason the talks are secret is because of bullshitting. Waiving the civil freedoms of millions because you don’t want to figure out the proper definition of a counterfeit item tends to anger up the blood.

Download Squad fails in the most hilarious way possible.

Can Apple really see themselves competing, with a minuscule desktop market share and 25% of the smartphone sector?

Desktop gaming? We’ll see. Obviously, Valve thinks that the Mac market is worth going after and they seem to know a thing or two about moving games. I’m glad that games have been returning to the Mac again for a few years.

Mobile gaming? The iPhone grosses the most games on any phone ever, including some that are by far the best mobile phone games ever. Nokia’s N-”Sidetalking”-Gage is the closest historical competitor and the only credible gaming phone predecessor and even it didn’t ever attract this level of attention, talent or quality. Windows Mobile has had forever to gain a stronghold, and while I have actually enjoyed playing Jawbreaker on a Windows Mobile device on occasion, I don’t see how this argument that you’re trying to make plays out. Regardless of their percentage of the smartphone or overall sector, I don’t see any other phone that competes with the iPhone with regards to gaming.

Steve Jobs has announced Apple’s intent to move into mobile gaming, but can you really see developers siding with the iPhone when Windows Phone 7 is just around the corner? The iPhone has an installed base of about 9 million users in the USA — would you like to guess at the combined figures of Windows and Xbox?

Wow. Do you even know yourself what you’re measuring? Did you switch the comparison halfway through when you realized that even Windows Mobile Classic is now behind iPhone OS in market share; slightly if you consider iPhone only, but by a mile if you also count iPod touch?

I won’t discount the possibility of Xbox and Windows making a difference. But the original Xbox hit the market eight years ago. If Microsoft wanted to parlay this onto the mobile games market, they’ve had five and a half years from the US launch of the Xbox to do so undisturbed, and yet another 18 months before the iPhone third-party apps market opened up. “Microsoft will crush Apple because Microsoft is huge” isn’t a convincing argument in the face of Microsoft having had that opportunity for the past decade, and in the face of Apple actually being huge in the market you’re flailing your arms around about.

Let’s wind down with a bit more level-headed analysis from Mr. Thurrott, in the light of today’s Steam announcement:

[quoting a Steam press release] “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Pfft. See my previous comments about Microsoft trying this as well.

Here, Paul links to some earlier sane analysis. There’s only one problem: Paul correctly took Microsoft to task for attempting this across their own platforms — Windows, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360. Valve’s approach involves two gaming computers; Microsoft’s approach involves several different tier devices. I may agree that a good gaming PC and an Xbox 360 could perform on par, but if you’re going to play on a Windows Phone 7 phone, that game is going to have to be svelte enough to run well on a 1 GHz ARM processor, which means that the game will be restricted to the smarts of a smartphone-level device on Windows and on Xbox 360 if it really is going to be the same exact game. You will also have bought that lowest-common-denominator for multiple platforms. Right.

If this is directly comparable to just switching between two different gaming computers and getting a free download of the game for the other computer, I’d like to see how.

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter, penned by Warren Buffet, is a better read than most anything; brutally honest, interesting enough even if you don’t follow them or finance at all, and actually funny. This year’s entry is no exception. One more piece:

And now a painful confession: Last year your chairman closed the book on a very expensive business fiasco entirely of his own making.

For many years I had struggled to think of side products that we could offer our millions of loyal GEICO customers. Unfortunately, I finally succeeded, coming up with a brilliant insight that we should market our own credit card. I reasoned that GEICO policyholders were likely to be good credit risks and, assuming we offered an attractive card, would likely favor us with their business. We got business all right – but of the wrong type.

Our pre-tax losses from credit-card operations came to about $6.3 million before I finally woke up. We then sold our $98 million portfolio of troubled receivables for 55¢ on the dollar, losing an additional $44 million.

GEICO’s managers, it should be emphasized, were never enthusiastic about my idea. They warned me that instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream. I subtly indicated that I was older and wiser.

I was just older.