REASON Express
January 10, 2000
Vol. 3 No. 2
1) Something Old, Something New
2) Bugged-Out Views on Software
3) The OSHA Backtrack: Round 1
4) Quick Hits
- - We've All Got Mail - -
The first business bombshell of the millennium will fuse Time Warner to America Online. The $350 billion company could help quell all the bickering between old media and new media. With luck, AOL-Warner will even throw its new heft against archaic regulations--like encryption controls--which continue to hang over the Net economy.
But if CNN telecasts sprout endless pop-up windows when you switch on, we'll know things have gone horribly wrong.
In recent weeks, given all the money dot.com companies burned through to buy Christmas season TV ads, it became fashionable to speculate that old media would take the cash and turn around and buy up the new Net players. That still could happen, but the AOL-Warner deal shows why it is hard to pull off.
For a long time AOL has conducted itself as an entertainment network first and an Internet provider second. That has made it especially eager to nail down recognizable content. The technological side of the operation was allowed to tread water until the acquisition of Netscape, which gave AOL just enough tech heads to continue to update its offerings. Still, its core technical ability was pretty high for an entertainment network.
On the other side of the ledger, media giants like Time Warner still don't have anything like the nuts-and-bolts technical know-how or vision to run around making good use of Net resources. Witness the clumsy attempt at "enhanced TV," which offers little to viewers besides a headache caused by trying to do two things at once.
The good, content, rich Web sites that big media has put up are as much the product of innovations in third-party Web publishing software as anything specific to the parent company. Besides, such sites do not bring in revenue.
But television does, and that medium as a whole has yet to find ways to integrate itself with the Net experience. In many ways TV remains at war with the new medium. Just last week the Fox network went on a copyright rampage against Web sites put up by fans of its shows. Will AOL-Warner see how shortsighted such things are?
This media marriage also should drive a stake through the heart of the pointless "open access" cable debate. AOL has bought itself a big chunk of coaxial cable with the deal. Now that he is a cable guy, watch how fast Steve Case abandons GTE and his other open access telco allies, who have a vested interest in slowing cable down while they build out DSL.
Case himself is Time Warner's biggest prize. Never wedded to one static view of technology, Case has leapt from one development to the next, always in the name of pushing his AOL brand. The question is what does Case do with the ubiquitous AOL brand now that it sits atop a very disparate empire.
http://cnnfn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/
Ryan H. Sager looked at how the fight over open access delays new Net services at http://www.reason.com/0001/fe.rs.broadband.html
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- - Buggy Whipped - -
It should be obvious that the AOL-Time Warner deal makes fears of Microsoft hegemony even more irrational. But hatred of Microsoft has evolved beyond that point where rationality has anything to do with.
The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner recently offered a fine distillation of anti-Redmond hysteria. Kuttner was spectacularly ill-informed during a rant against Microsoft as the source of all Y2K evil, but he likely only voiced the things he had ventured without dissent in private. Still, that The Washington Post would print such things tells us what an easy sell Microsoft-bashing is to the media elites.
After telling us that everything would've been all right if programmers had listened to the government experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Kuttner gets right to the point.
"If there is a private sector villain of the piece, it is of course Microsoft. The early universal operating system, Microsoft's DOS, came into widespread use in the early 1980s. It used a two-digit date format," Kuttner offers.
And? Is Kuttner suggesting that at the close of 1999 somebody, somewhere was using DOS circa-1983 for a mission critical task? If so, Y2K would seem to be the least of their problems. Besides, given what little DOS is asked to do on those systems, a Y2K bug might do no more than sort a user's files in a funky order.
Kuttner goes on to knock Windows for retaining vestiges of the two-digit date system, but never acknowledges that many potential Y2K problems had nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft.
Those bugs resided in the billions of lines of code sold by IBM, Digital, Wang, and other mid-range and mainframe vendors over the last 25 years. The glitches ranged across a rainbow of operating systems and applications, some proprietary, none with their genesis at Microsoft.
Then there is the entire category of programmable chips that harbor a date code of some kind that could go haywire. Tough to blame chip makers' errors on Microsoft, so no wonder Kuttner doesn't mention them.
But Kuttner's biggest mistake is holding up Apple as some sort of shining example of Y2K readiness. In fact, the rollover brought real misery to some Mac users who happened to be using a particular version of Microsoft's or Netscape's browser.
Security certificates embedded in the browsers expired on Dec. 31, making it impossible to access some sites, such as banks or brokerages, which look for the certificates. The browser-makers' fix for the problem was for users to get a newer version of the browser. Trouble is, not all Macs affected by the problem will run the new browsers.
That leaves exactly one option: buy a new Mac. Strictly speaking this is not a Y2K problem, as it could've happened on any date the certificates expired. But that is little solace to anyone stuck with a Mac that won't browse.
Now--to play Kuttner's favorite game--who is the villain here? The simple thing would be to say that Apple is trying to force people to buy new Macs. But the anti-browsing Mac outcome is surely not the product of conscious design or policy. Why would Apple want to anger and offend loyal users who, at some point, will almost surely spend more money on Apple products?
For this reason it should be clear that the glitch is just one of those things that happens when very complex systems bump up against each other. It is lamentable, regrettable, but not uncommon.
Unfortunately, Kuttner is not alone among commentators who have trouble sorting through the tech they think they understand. And nothing is more misunderstood than where bugs come from and what can be done about them.
Business Week's Marcia Stepanek opined on Nightline that Y2K was just one of many bugs, which shows "that software quality isn't very good."
"There are hundreds, if not thousands, of bugs. And as society becomes more increasingly reliant on software to run its every day operations, I think it would be wise for all of us to look a little more closely at perhaps a call for industrywide standards. Not necessarily regulation, but perhaps some industrywide licensing of software," Stepanek explained.
Perhaps it would shock Stepanek, the magazine's technology strategies editor, which evidently means she is the one in the office who knows how to change screen savers, to know that every piece of commercial software shipped has had bugs in it. Pursuit of bug-free code is a pointless waste of resources. Testers cannot, in software meant for wide distribution with a wide array of systems, replicate every single way the end user will use the software.
What Stepanek really wants is risk-free software and there is no such thing. And what Kuttner wants when something goes wrong, is a pound of flesh--even if it is the wrong flesh. What the general public deserves is more sophisticated analysis of the increasingly technological world they live in.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/04/012l-010400-idx.html http://abcnews.go.com/onair/nightline/transcripts/nl000103_trans.html
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- - OSHA Can You See - -
Something very important is going on at the federal regulatory hothouse, and it goes far beyond the Department of Labor fretting about home work spaces. For now, OSHA has retreated in applying workplace safety rules to telecommuters, but it is a battle that will be fought again--soon.
OSHA, like all the various regulatory agencies, functions best in black-and-white. This is forbidden, that is allowed; this is good, that is bad. In the case of OSHA and the entire Labor Department, the crucial distinction is between employer and employee. Further, the agency sees itself as an advocate for the latter against the former.
So naturally it would approach developments like telecommuting by asking, How does this hurt employees? Are employers evading regulations by shipping their workers off to their bedrooms and basements?
It is hard enough for OSHA to see that employees might actually benefit from the changes. Next to impossible is grasping the idea that the line between employee and employer is blurring. With collaborative efforts, consulting, and discrete projects, the cigar-chomping bad guy is harder and harder to find.
A work world of free agents is what the Labor Department's puppet masters in organized labor fear most. Union dues, shop stewards, collective bargaining agreements, all fall by the wayside when each worker is his or her own CEO.
So OSHA cares about quite a bit more than how slick your stair treads are or how many plugs are in that surge protector.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/06/184l-010600-idx.html
************************************************************* QUICK HITS
- - Quote of the Week - -
"I heard that banks kept the commas on checks so people can't add another zero after the number. But that's not an issue in education. We're not teaching kids to write checks," Mary Lou Kestell, of the Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office, on Canadian teachers' jihad against the use of a comma in numbers. The official, correct way to write 1,000 is 1 000. Students who use commas are graded down.
http://www.thestar.com/back_issues/ED20000104/news/999000104NEW01c_UPFRONT.htm l
- - Welcome Back - -
Washington state's tax-revolt against high car fees will hit neighboring states too. Washington residents who previously tagged their cars with, say, Oregon plates, are signing up for their home-state plates again. Oregon officials put the loss to their state at $1.5 million.
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=010700&ID=s729260&cat=
- - Feedback Loop - -
The feds decide that wireless transmitters are the latest threat to the republic and come down hard on one small seller of the devices.
http://slashdot.org/features/00/01/04/2316228.shtml
############################################################## REASON NEWS
Adrian Moore, Reason Public Policy Institute Director of Privatization and Government Reform will be speaking at the U.S. Water and Wastewater Summit, January 24th, at the Loews L'Enfant Plaza hotel, Washington DC. His topic will be "Water as a commodity vs. natural resource right." For more info, see http://www.cbinet.com/wconnect/wc.dll?CBEvent~GetMoreInfo~EB007
ARE YOU fascinated by innovation? Do you love new ideas? Would you like to stimulate your creative thinking? Do you want to explore the connection between freedom, enterprise, and progress?
Don't miss the 2nd Annual Reason Dynamic Visions Conference http://www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html
"On the Verge: Creative Mixing on the Frontiers of Business, Society, Art, and Technology," takes place February 19 - 21, 2000 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Silicon Valley.
Founded by Reason Editor Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies, the conference offers an opportunity for creative people from a variety of backgrounds to cross-fertilize, discover new ideas, and gain fresh insights into their work, home, and civic lives--and their futures. At ordinary conferences, people are exposed to a narrow pool of industry-specific expertise and concepts. At the Dynamic Visions Conference, attendees and speakers from biology, technology, management, ecology, media, public policy, education, design, and other fields converge, sparking brand new ideas--ideas that propel them beyond the traditional boundaries of their own disciplines.
The conference program and registration information are available at http://www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html or by calling Erica Mannard at 310-391-2245.
Confirmed speakers and their topics include:
Jhane Barnes, designer - "Mathematics, Computers, and the Art of Textile Design"
Gregory Benford, UC-Irvine astrophysicist and author of Timescape, Deep Time, and Cosm - "Thinking Long in the Millennium"
Daniel Botkin, UC-Santa Barbara ecologist, president, Center for the Study of the Environment, author of Discordant Harmonies - "The Future of Nature: How to Have Both Civilization and Nature in the 21st Century"
Charles Paul Freund, senior editor, Reason, "Dark Verge? The Case of Vienna 1900"
Neil Gershenfeld, leader, physics and media group, MIT Media Lab, author, When Things Start to Think - "Things that Think"
Nick Gillespie, executive editor, Reason - "Popular Culture on the Verge"
Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction - "Innovations in Education"
Grant McCracken, Harvard Business School, author, Plenitude and Culture and Consumption - "Verge of Verges: Sir Francis Bacon at the Gates of Gibraltar"
Christena Nippert-Eng, sociologist, Illinois Institute of Technology, author, Home and Work - "Home and Work: Drawing the Boundaries"
Dan Pink, Fast Company contributor - "Free Agent Nation"
Steven Postrel, UC-Irvine Graduate School of Management -"The Geek and the Dilettante: Sharing Knowledge Across Specialities"
Virginia Postrel, editor, Reason, author, The Future and Its Enemies, - "On the Verge: Exploring the Frontiers of Creative Encounter"
Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president, technology and programs, The Freedom Forum - "Culture and Collision"
Richard Rodriguez, author, Days of Obligation and Hunger of Memory - "Some Thoughts on the Burrito and the Browning of America"
Lynn Scarlett, executive director, Reason Public Policy Institute - "Can Industry Save the Planet? The Rise of Industrial Ecology"
Michael Schrage, columnist, Fortune, senior associate, MIT Media Lab, author, No More Teams! and Serious Play - "Serious Play"
Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars - "Mars Direct: Humans to the Red Planet within a Decade"
For full descriptions and speaker information, see http://www.reason.com/dynamic/speakers.html
To register, see http://www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html
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