Dana Blankenhorn

Who is George McGovern Now: The 1971 Game

Regular visitors here may recall that I've been writing about historical parallels between our time and the 1960s for some time. Since The 1966 Game, I have traced parallels between those times and this one, seeking a new set of assumptions to drive our politics, finding parallels to the hippies in right-wing causes, hopefully providing some thoughtful entertainment along the way.

In this alternate universe President Barack Obama takes the position Richard Nixon once had. His policy assumptions are popular, but untested, and the man himself is personally reviled by those whose ideas he overthrew.

So who's George McGovern now?

Those with just a casual knowledge of history know McGovern was the most hapless Presidential nominee in a century, losing 3-2 despite the smoke of Watergate, Had that scandal not happened, had Nixon not let his demons consume him, the 1974 Democratic landslide and Jimmy Carter's 1976 election would likely not have happened.

The real tragedy, for conservatives, was that Watergate was unnecessary. Nixon had the people with him. But the validation Nixon sought would be given to Ronald Reagan instead. It's Reagan conservatives have made their political god, as Democrats made FDR a god in Nixon's time.

But that time has ended.

OpenOffice and the Great Game

Larry Ellison has something in common with most reporters.

They're both fans of the Great Game.

The Great Game is a way of analyzing everything through the Great Men leading Great Movements and Great Peoples on to Greatness. It's a top-down analysis that sees peoples and movements as mere pieces on a chessboard, to be manipulated by the Great Man (it's almost never women) at the Top.

If you've ever watched nerds debate Austrian history, for instance, or play video games, you've seen this type of analysis in action. Princes and kings and heroes and villains. Everything is seen from 30,000 feet, and everything can be manipulated because the Great Man has control of the board.

Open source explicitly rejects this type of analysis. Because the code is open for inspection, available to all, it's the code that matters, not the Great Man (or woman) behind it.

Overcoming the Crazy

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A united minority will beat a disunited majority every time.

It's an old political truth, one that holds no matter the kind of government system you have. Sunni unity gave Saddam Hussein power in Iraq's autocracy. Conservative unity gave Silvio Berlusconi power in Italy's democracy.

Unity leads to power in American politics as well. It's how political machines have always worked. As George Washington Plunkitt put it, “reformers are only morning glories.”  Organization is the key to power, even in a democracy.

This is how the Crazy hangs on, in every era. A movement maintains unity even after it becomes a minority, and intensity compensates. It becomes institutionalized. It becomes received wisdom. Even after its assumptions become the cause of a new crisis – monopolies in the 1890s, producers in the 1930s, scaled manufacturing in the 1960s – organization allows power to be maintained.

Even after power is lost, the minority view remains powerful. It's partly because Washington doesn't adapt readily to new ideas. But it's also because old ideas hang on thanks to superior organization, and institutions created to attain power a generation before.

Plunkitt spoke his famous piece when he had lost power, and what's most important to remember is that he never regained power. The west side Democratic club that was Plunkitt's base took the name of the man who defeated him, Thomas McManus (left), and kept that name for a century.

 

The Big Opportunity in Home Servers

A lot of people are writing today that Apple has killed the home PC  with its iCloud and iOS announcements.

They haven't. The PC has been dieing for years. As a client.

But as a server? Not so much.

I know that the long-term talk about “media servers”  has proven to be a dead end. I'm talking about an opportunity that has existed for nearly a decade, which I first began labeling “the world of always-on.”

I'm talking of single-chip, specialty devices that can provide automation, security, inventory and medical services to our aging population.

• Devices placed in-line with lights, kitchen appliances, and any other system which uses energy, which can monitor the conditions of those devices, turning them on-and-off in response to a program.

• Single-chip cameras that can be turned on remotely, or via a program, to provide constant security.

• RFID chips placed on goods and even foodstuffs that can monitor the inventory and location of what you got.

• Medical devices that can monitor and report on health without outside intervention.

Elvis is Leaving the Building

In the last decade Steve Jobs has transformed technology the way Elvis transformed music.

Everyone now dances to Jobs' tune. Where products were once announced at trade shows like Comdex, and sometimes delivered months later, now they're announced and delivered at Worldwide Developer Conferences, set pieces where CEOs strut the stage and, thanks to webcasting, reporters in the room and everywhere else are on equal footing.

The nature of technology has changed too. The PC era is over. We are now well into the gadget era. Client devices survive for the length of a phone contract, maybe less. They come to you complete, with no hardware upgrades, Floppies are gone, CD drives are gone, keyboards are gone. It's all done online, wirelessly. Even the browser is dead, replaced by “apps” that define a single site's interaction.

It's been a heck of a ride. But just as those who saw Elvis' last concerts could see the paunch, taste the sweat and feel the angel of death hanging just off stage, so it is with recent Apple Worldwide Developer Conferences. Especially the one early this week, where Jobs appeared to the sound of James Brown's “I Feel Good.”

Well, here are some cold, hard facts. James Brown is dead. Elvis is dead. Steve Jobs is dieing.

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in 2004. It's a miracle he's alive today, a miracle made possible by a liver replacement two years ago that he hid from the public and hid from shareholders. 

Wise observers say he seems to be in even more of a hurry these days, and there's reason for that. The bell tolls. It tolls for all of us, but pancreatic cancer is still incurable, and only 4% live five years. 

Jobs has lived seven.

What Clouds Teach About Education

Cloud computing is a new way of organizing computing resources. It's a new structure and a new paradigm.

Cloud computing strips away things that had been roadblocks to scale. Operating systems. Database sizes. The assignment of specific functions to specific machines – a web server, a database server, an authentication server.

Instead, through virtualization, all system resources become available to programs as they are needed. If there is a “rush to the rail” of your web services or database, or a particular job needs all your resources now (calculating trends in Wikipedia entries going back years, for instance), that can be done.

Once you have the paradigm down, once your stuff is aligned with it,then computing becomes a utility, power and storage mere light and heat you can turn on (and most important, turn off) like you would a light switch. Amazon's EC2 has defined the space, but there are other ways to define it, and the greatest benefits come when things are derived in an open, transparent way, so everyone involved in a problem can work on it – so programming becomes a utility as well.

Needless to say, this threatens a lot of people, a lot of jobs. So there is a concerted effort underway to confuse the issue, to either make cloud computing proprietary or make it appear that it's just another mainframe.

Most big vendors, including Oracle and Apple, want to stand in the way of cloud computing, because it breaks down proprietary advantages, and the need for you to maintain all your own infrastructure. So Apple wants you to think it's just a giant file host. Oracle wants you to think, if this idea is so good, you need your own private cloud  – which means you need to spend just as much on computing as before.

All this is a way to protect current ways of doing business for as long as possible.

Don't be fooled.

What is LibreOffice Supposed to Do?

The big news on the open source beat last week was the move of OpenOffice to Apache.

It was a very big deal, although I guess in the Great Game not such a big deal. After all, Steve Jobs is strutting on a stage right now, merging his iOS and OS X Lion platforms (a rather obvious move), while Microsoft executives are fighting to respond by merging Windows with XBox, and Nokia with Windows.

But in open source it was a very big deal, and for me it was a poignant one.

I kept wondering what the folks at LibreOffice thought of this. They're like the wife of divorce whose spouse gets a trophy wife. She's gone on with her life, with a big update, and while her friends can talk all they want about Oracle being a prick, the fact is that OpenOffice -- not LibreOffice -- has the money and now OpenOffice -- not LibreOffice -- is going to have the talent, too.

I also know what it's like to lose a job. It hurts. Someone takes what you've built, gives it to someone else, and they get the benefit of all your hard work while you're left in the cold.

I get it.

Intellectual Property Imperialism, or The 1793 Game

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 24 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Ideas have no intrinsic value.

They are only valuable if they are exploited. You can only get value from them if you pursue an idea to a completed work or invention, or if you get so good at coming up with new ideas people who do scale works or invention will pay you to supply them.

Patent and copyright were first created as “monopolies” in our 1787 Constitution, but they did not become enforced until the late 19^th century, after the U.S. gained a positive balance-of-trade in the products of ideas – in books and inventions.

When countries like China and India choose to ignore our copyright and patent laws, they are walking in the foodsteps of people like Samuel Slater (right), the people whose inventiveness built this country. Slater copied his 1793 Rhode Island mill from one he'd worked at in England, in violation of English law. Eli Whitney never made money from his cotton gin – his money came from a gun made with interchangeable parts he was able to manufacture.

Even when copyright and patent rights are fully maintained, most of the money they generate does not go to the people who came up with the ideas. In fact, very little does. A singer or author may only earn a 15% royalty. Royalties on patents are even more modest.

So why has the United States become such a stickler on patent and copyright, to the point where the government is willing to call Google an outlaw in order to enforce these laws more rigorously? 

Is Amazon Good for Open Source

One of those silly open source pissing matches has broken out between Glyn Moody, an online friend and Matt Asay, a former online colleague, over Amazon's contributions to open source.

I call it a pissing match because Asay and Moody don't really disagree. Moody is saying it would be in Amazon's best interest to contribute more to the projects it benefits from. Asay responds that Amazon will decide when that happens.

Can Apache Put OpenOffice Back Together

It's the best news open source has gotten in some time.

Apache is adopting OpenOffice.org as an official project.

Rob Weir of Apache is jazzed about this, and I am too. Apache is a perfect home for OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is perfect for where Apache is right now.

By that I mean that Apache is traditionally a server organization, a collection of wizards (most of them with jobs at major vendors) tasked with working together on tools enterprises can get direct benefit from. That's the heritage of Apache Server, and many of the group's projects are outgrowths of that work.