Rants & Raves
Gary Reback considers old laissez-faire models to be inadequate to cope with an information-based economy (" The Robin Hood of the Rich," Wired 5.08, page 108). In fact, the history of the computer industry clearly and consistently illustrates how well the laissez-faire model works. Does anyone seriously believe that the information explosion of the past 15 years would have occurred as quickly or as thoroughly in a federally regulated environment? Reback seems to prefer the concept of increasing returns, though the history of his client, Netscape, calls that unsubstantiated theory into serious question. It was a swift and decisive competitive response to a changing marketplace - not entrenched technological standards - that allowed Microsoft to survive Netscape' s threat. If Microsoft had reacted as lethargically to the Netscape threat as IBM reacted to Microsoft' s threat 15 years ago, the marketplace might be quite different today despite the established standards that Reback considers so formidable.
George W. Colombo
influence1@aol.com
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Having been born and raised on a North Carolina farm in the first half of this century and having learned how to program by reading the holes in cardboard cards probably makes this old dog too old and too bucolic to learn any really new tricks, but I am always impressed by new words and the images a good writer can create. After reading James Daly' s " The Robin Hood of the Rich," I opened the dictionary window and started searching but never did find "frowsy." A friend of mine from California explained "latte-addled" in detail, even though I had a suspicion from the beginning that it was a Left Coast thingy. I managed to decipher " world-weary effusion of hyperlinked questions" after diagramming it on the blackboard, and although I have never used the word "horsepuckey," I did live on the farm long enough to grasp that image right away. Speaking of images, the one of a lawyer as a " hood ornament" was particularly entertaining, although I think I saw it in a different light than it was intended to portray. Who said technocrats can' t write well? Good work, Mr. Daly.
Christopher E. Meadows
chrism001@aol.com
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Good article on Linux (" The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was," Wired 5.08, page 122). You got all the facts straight. Most writers botch it. There' s one thing you missed, though. Microsoft has a monopoly on support for NT. If Microsoft abandons it (as they did OS/2, so don't believe them when they say they won't), your boots are nailed to the floor. It also means that you're stuck with Microsoft's definition of "mission critical." If, at 2 a.m. when your server crashes, their definition doesn't match yours, you're in big trouble. Linux has neither of these flaws, because its source is available. This gives you a competitive market for support.
Russell Nelson
nelson@crynwr.com
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Glyn Moody's article on Linux was well-balanced and accurate in both its description and its assessment. I' m among those who believe that it is possible for Linux plus XFree86 (or any similar OS package with freely available source code) to end up beating Microsoft. Whether this will actually happen is a whole other question. For Microsoft to be overtaken, a paradigm shift (or an "inversion," to use Eric Schmidt' s term from "The Network Is the Network," Wired 5.08, page 120) will need to occur. Linux has a weakness in that a lot of the developers are doing this not for profit or for market share. They're doing this for themselves. To make Linux a greater commercial success, more people will be needed for whom it will always be their first priority.
Edward Stasic
stasic@dorsai.org
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Glyn Moody forgot to mention Linux's most salient feature: its utter incomprehensibility to the non-Unix priesthood. I currently install and configure software systems for a living - DOS, OS/2, and Windows. Yet I found myself completely stumped by Linux and its shabby manuals. At first I was embarrassed by my confusion. Then I heard that a normally coolheaded software developer friend had destroyed a lawn tool or two in a snit fit over a Linux server install. If Linux is our only alternative to Microsoft, God help us all.
Bill Powell
bill@sexart.com
Outlawing "the practice of registering new domains to avoid filter detection" is simply impossible to enforce (" Stomping Out Spam," Wired 5.08, page 82). The proliferation of Internet domains - especially .com domains - makes it difficult to pinpoint whether a new registration is for a legitimate purpose or is simply to avoid filter detection. Even if one could obtain a list of domains used by, for example, Cyber Promotions, could the company not argue that it uses that domain for other purposes also, and that its primary purpose in registering the domain was not simply to avoid detection? Legislation is necessary. However, I resist the urge to overlegislate and to infringe on the possible rights of victims of such overzealousness. There is an extremely fine line between restricting free speech (even of spammers) and protecting the privacy and rights of individuals who do not engage in such inappropriate behavior.
Rob Sherman
rsherman@usa.net
Satellite image resolutions below 3 meters are justifiable for just one application - targeting and battle-damage assessment (" Private Spy," Wired 5.08, page 114). Despite current attempts to regulate such excellent imagery, it will inevitably proliferate. As this imagery becomes more widely available, the central axiom of the information age ought to apply to the general consumption of space imagery just as it does to consumption of Usenet traffic: caveat emptor. Deliberate deception and concealment will be a fact of life in the age of excellent space imaging - it was so effectively refined by the Soviets during the Cold War that they even built a doctrine around it. Called maskirovka, this point of hiding important assets from prying eyes and deceiving analysts was not lost on Soviet clients. Iraqis, for example, were able to effectively deceive the best satellite imagery analysts in the world as to the nature and scope of their robust nuclear, chemical, and biological programs prior to the Persian Gulf War.
Mark S. Hewitt
mshewitt@sprintmail.com
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During the Gulf War, I watched Japanese television news reports that used what were purported to be Spot Images to contradict claims made by the United States military. The reports made repeated and detailed claims contrary to those dealt out to the media by the US military, including, for example, that the Americans deliberately caused the marine oil spills to discredit Iraq.
As far as I know, not one US network or newspaper reported on the Japanese claims. Having better eyes in the sky is one thing, but the will to look at what they may show us is an important requisite for making use of them.
John Elemans
jelemans@planeteer.com
Your philosopher-grocer should get out of his Platonic cave and visit a real store once in a while (" The Progressive Grocer," Wired 5.09, page 146). Maybe shopping is " monastic" and " passive" for him, but at my local supermarket I see friends and neighbors and clerks who recognize me. So what if I could save time by ordering bananas online? I happily go to the supermarket every day because it' s a break from staring at a computer screen. Wake up and smell the chicken wings!
Gregor Hartmann
gregor8@netcom.com
Your article on The New York Times was great, but there is one small point that I have to take issue with (" What Have They Been Smoking?" Wired 5.09, page 53). Your statement that nobody " stumbles onto" anything in cyberspace because you must request it first may be true in a theoretical sense, but it just doesn' t click in reality. Try bringing up a search engine and plugging in a term such as " government." Click on Search, and what do you get? A list of thousands of sites, and if you take some time to look through them, you might " stumble onto" almost anything. When you request something, generally you get a lot more than you asked for, including unexpected sites with links that can take you to never-never land if you probe the possibilities.
Allan Arnold
alnjoy@ids.net
Regarding "It Takes a Village to Make a Mall" (Wired 5.08, page 84): Finally, someone as baffled as I at the amount of money invested in the " technology itself, versus that spent understanding social dynamics." Perhaps there is hope that Silicon Valley will one day appreciate the value of consumer market research. I look forward to a day when managers are willing to sacrifice a few precious weeks to find out how (if at all) a product will actually be used by the people whose lives they ostensibly want to improve. What a concept! If John Hagel' s interview is any indication, consumers may begin to get the attention they deserve � and we' d all be the better for it.
Cate Riegner
cate@mindshare.to
I found Alex Frankel' s article (" Name-o-rama�," Wired 5.06, page 94) on how naming companies create trademarks useful and enjoyable, but his statement that "the US Patent and Trademark Office places trademarks in 42 classes" was misleading. The PTO divides goods and services in 42 classes - the trademarks themselves are not classified, and there is no limit to the number of marks that may fall into any one class. Frankel seemed to be making the point that some classes of goods are getting crowded, but his statement that " most high tech names fall into Class 9" is meaningless, since it' s the high tech goods, not the marks, that are in Class 9. The real problem is that too many marks are too much alike - the result is that some marks and parts of marks become weak because they lose their distinctiveness when applied to similar products. That's where the naming companies can be most useful in finding a mark that stands out.
Richard Maulsby
Director of Public Affairs
US Patent & Trademark Office
Crystal City, Virginia
There is always some confusion between filtering and finding, and Simson Garfinkel' s piece reflects this (" Tim Berners-Lee' s Metadata," Wired 5.08, page 41). Filtering protocols like PICS work on an already retrieved set of data. No matter how refined your filtering of this set, the quality of your end result ultimately depends on the quality of that initial set. In other words, PICS won' t help you find Web sites that AltaVista missed. Retrieval metadata has the purpose of improving the finding function. Information seeking is a very complex human activity, not easily expressed in algorithms or calculations. It is both cumulative and iterative, and needs to take into account such things as the seeker' s level of education, language preferences, and immediate goals. So far, the best interface between a person and information has turned out to be another person - someone who has already studied the topic at hand.
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@ix.netcom.com
Searching for material via bot has many drawbacks (" Leave Your Marc," Wired 5.09, page 48). A bot observing bot etiquette can easily be deterred from accessing a given site. Furthermore, a bot is bandwidth-intensive and will only add to the current throughput problems we are experiencing. The first thing most folks with an imaging program will do is subtly, but thoroughly, alter the image so that tracking via digital watermark will be impossible (an example would be to darken or lighten the image a few shades). I guarantee that most of those online who broker illicit images have been doing this for years. The underlying problem with mass market visual media is that the lock-it-in-the-darkroom-and-charge-admission method simply does not work.
Eli Ofenstein
ejo@vsurf.net
Namibia has been on the Internet, with varying degrees of connectivity, for two years or more. The same goes for Zimbabwe (" Freedom to Connect," Wired 5.08, page 106). Internet connectivity is generally very limited in African nations, predominantly due to the poor state of terrestrial telecom infrastructures and their state-owned/monopoly nature. Outside of South Africa - an interesting anomaly in connectivity terms - the Internet has vertical availability even in environments where it is not explicitly limited by any governmental or other barriers. I have encountered significant fear amongst African telcos of the " threat" the Internet presents to their monopoly position. Several operators have made moves to attempt to operate Internet services themselves, but with very limited success. The irony is that the Internet is providing a point of leverage to liberalize telecom markets just as multinational and large corporate clients - usually the dominant revenue producers - generate increasing demand. The big swinger of telecom power and policy in Africa is the revenue telcos derive from international call traffic. The Internet is perceived as a threat to this traffic, and hence revenue. But international call traffic is sitting on a knife edge of collapse.
Niall Murphy
niall@dtn.net
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There are more than 70 ISPs in Turkey, and access is permitted to everyone. Content is neither censored nor regulated. With the recent introduction of home banking, people can now access the Internet through the same setup they use to complete online transactions at home.
Ebru Keni
ebru@comnet.com.tr
I am new to Wired, and after reading the two latest issues I am impressed by the subject matter, writing style, and appearance. The mix of computer technology, politics, and sociology with an eye on the future is inspirational compared with the continuous barrage of doom and gloom from other media. The articles on offshore electronic commerce (" Plotting Away in Margaritaville," Wired 5.07, page 140), The 500-Year Delta (" Speak the Future," Wired 5.06, page 100), and the development of Linux (" The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was," Wired 5.08, page 122) were favorites.
Matthew Robbins
mrobbins@psionworld.net
The return path of the typical cable plant needs to be cleaned up, but the entire cable network does not need to be completely replaced (Hype List, Wired 5.09, page 80). Time Warner, TCI, Cox Communications, Cablevision, and others will be rolling out cable modems in the not-too-distant future. Probably before your phone company offers you DSL, too. I' ve already gotten my butt kicked playing Quake against cable-modem users and their low-ping advantage (faster than ISDN, not as fast as a T1). While direct-broadcast satellite has lured some of cable' s most profitable customers away, there are now more households subscribing to cable than ever.
Tom Adams
dishhed@sprintmail.com
Nicholas Negroponte' s column on reintermediating service professions is right on the mark (" Reintermediated," Wired 5.09, page 208). Their role will no longer be as a source point of information, but rather the placing of that information into the context needed by individuals to make their purchasing decisions. However, Negroponte misses half of the issue: the need for a reconfiguration of intermediary roles is most important to retain the humanity of social interaction. Since modern interaction tends to be leveled to the lowest common denominator (bits of data, in Negroponte' s context), the individual as a whole is ignored. Intermediaries who can place data bits into relevant contexts are necessary to retain a vital touch of humanity in tomorrow' s information society.
David Gammel
davgam@erols.com
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While superficially compelling, Nicholas Negroponte' s editorial on the elimination of middlemen and the evolution of commerce has some glaring holes. He suggests that car dealerships will vanish because of online shopping. While one might narrow down choices online, ultimately most consumers will want to test-drive the vehicle. Enter the middleman. The situation is similar for real estate transactions; perhaps this is why online real estate services are going broke. Except in rare instances where the item in question is available only from an online source and it is so unique that there is no comparable product, I suspect most people will continue to buy locally. Jim Schreiber
af074@traverse.lib.mi.us
I read with disgust " Return on Investment" (Wired 5.08, page 89). Micah Sifry of Public Campaign asserts that the only way to protect the public interest is full public financing. To which I respond, " Bullshit!" While Sifry correctly notes that in the world of campaign reform " plugging one hole just opens up another," somehow he manages to conclude that the problem can be fixed by more - much more - of the same old nonsense. Right. Let' s give some " independent" agency complete control of which candidates receive financing, and how much. That would never work. Taxpayers should not be billed for the privilege of supporting this abomination.
Dev Null
dev@rigley.org
Relocation: Canada has not annexed Michigan, as the map in " Freedom to Connect" (Wired 5.08, page 106) seemed to imply. Title Change: Daniel Goldman is founder and former CEO of Total Entertainment (Read Me, Wired 5.08, page 137). Photo Op: Lloyd Kaufman, The Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD were the three creatures of superhuman size and strength featured in the photograph accompanying " Great Expectorations" (Wired 5.08, page 40). Booster Blooper: British biochemist Terence Kealey is not a booster of state-subsidized science (" Unplugging State Science," Wired 5.08, page 129). Kealey is one of its few diehard opponents. Not Zed: In " New Rules for the New Economy," Zeno' s tortoise is erroneously referred to as " Zero' s tortoise" (Wired 5.09, page 140). Credit Due: Daniel Furon snapped the photo of Burning Man for the Wired Books announcement in the October issue (Wired 5.10, page 66).
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