Terry Jones

I was surprised after reading about Google lending YouTube $15M to get them through the month before they closed the deal that there wasn’t more of a fuss.

If YouTube were hurting that badly, they may not have been able to make payroll. They could perhaps have tried going to the bank for the money, on the strength of the presumed Google deal and a letter of intent. Getting a loan from your acquirer seems rather odd, at least in an arm’s length transaction.

Given that it sounds like YouTube were about to hit the wall, it’s incredible that the price was still so high. How come Google didn’t beat them down? It’s not like they didn’t know YouTube were desperate – they lent them the $15M after all.

So how did the deal still get done at the massive valuation? The obvious answer is that Sequoia was on both ends of the deal.

I bet Sequoia must have been tempted to provide YouTube with the $15M of capital themselves (= more stock), while simultaneously getting YouTube acquired by Google. I guess there are only so many ways you can have your cake and eat it though before things start to really stink. Plausible deniability is important; that would have been a step too far, with their thumb directly in the pie. Plus they’d have been putting the screws on the YouTube founders that way, perhaps thereby jeopardizing the bigger deal.

You’d think Google shareholders would be making a fuss about this.

I finished reading In Search of Lost Time early last (Northern hemisphere) summer. It took me six months, reading an average of 20 to 25 pages a day. Russell took much longer, after I sneakily distracted him by buying him a beautiful 7-volume copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – which he then read, putting Proust aside, unsuspectingly letting me sail past him and into the record books. There aren’t too many books on which you can blow a 1,500 page lead and still lose by 1,000 pages.

A few hours after Russell finally finished, he sent me mail. I speculated on the number of people that had finished it since he did. In other words, how often, anywhere on earth, does someone finish Proust?

Here’s an estimated answer, with plenty of assumptions:

Assume only one person in 10,000 actually _finishes_ the whole thing.

Assume it takes an average of a year to read it all.

So you’ve got 6,000,000,000 / 10,000 = 600K people currently on earth who will read it.

Assume that people’s ages are uniformly distributed, and that everyone dies at 75.

Assume that no-one finishes the book before turning 16.

So the people who are currently 0-15 have not started the book yet. So only (75 – 15) / 75, or 80%, of the 600K (= 480K) alive who will read it, might finish in the next year.

How many will finish in the next year?

Assume that half the people who will read it have already done so. That leaves 240K who will finish it at some point in their remaining lifetime.

Finally, if we assume these people finish at uniform ages, you’ve got 240K finishers finishing over 60 years, or 4K finishers per year.

There are 365 x 24 = 8760 hours in a year, so we have one person finishing every 8760 / 4K = 2.19 hours.

Over on the Python Dev mailing list, discussion has been raging about home directories, hidden dotfiles, user interface, etc. See this recent posting for the latest in a debate that was kicked off in November under the innocuous-sounding subject Python and the Linux Standard Base (LSB).

In the meantime, I have been forwarded a confidential Apple email from CEO Steve Jobs laying out his “roadmap for the Desktop”. In it, Jobs says he “saw the Desktop light” after former Disney CEO Michael Eisner called him a Shiite Muslim for his refusal to support efforts to root out subversive use of dotfiles and home directories in general.

Highlights from the memo:

• Campaign branding: “A man’s home is his Desktop”.
• Plan to completely phase out $HOME. Terminal will start in /Users/USER/Desktop. Use of cd .. to be monitored.
• Henceforth Apple developers are to refrain from directly mentioning user’s home directories in public, in blogs, etc. Internally, when mention of a home directory cannot be avoided, the approved phrasing is “Desktop/..“.
• There is a plan to put a small Supporter of Computational Liberty and Freedom flag icon on users’ Desktops. This flag cannot be removed, but automatically disappears if a user does ever access $HOME directly.
• There is a “four-part plan to undermine $HOME”:
  1. Jobs expresses admiration for the Microsoft warning dialog that appears when users try to access C:\WINDOWS and plans a similar feature for OS X.
  2. Once $HOME has been completely “annexed”, user related program activities will be moved into system-owned and managed 0700-mode /usr/sys/users/USER/home directories.
  3. User interaction will then be moved into /Users/USER/Desktop/MySpace where users can do anything they want. The parent /Users/USER/Desktop directory will then transition to being primarily managed by the system, and users will be discouraged from putting any actual files in there.
  4. Support for $HOME will be removed from bash, to be replaced with $HOMELAND (a synonym for $DESKTOP). $DESKTOP will be default destination for the cd command. ~ will also map to $DESKTOP.
• Perhaps most disturbing of all, there is an explicit plan to use PR and the media to fuel anti-$HOME sentiment. Use of $HOME is to be portrayed as un-American, subversive, terrorist, and effeminate. Only terrorists and insurgents use $HOME. Deliberate use of dotfiles to hide things is to be tied to terrorist use of stenography.

Folks, this is a clarion call to action. We cannot stand idly by as mute witnesses to the slow-drip erosion of personal liberties. Next we’ll be hearing that they’re taking away $HOME because we weren’t using it anyway.

Make no mistake, Big Government is behind this, egged on by the Disney lobby. I suspect they’re pushing for the infantilization of user interface, though I’m not entirely sure why (I have my suspicions). Jobs is clearly the go-to man they’re using to get it done and the route is ?? -> Disney -> Pixar -> Jobs -> Apple -> Consumer, with probable use of cut-outs. I wonder how they got to Steve.

These bastards know how to use the media better than anyone. Apple are clearly backed all the way by Hollywood and the MSM. All you ever read about these days in the media is the Desktop and how Web 2.0 is the new Desktop. Gone are the days when you could catch a glimpse in a movie of someone using a keyboard, or even ftp’ing into to someone else’s $HOME.

It’s all Desktop now, all the time.

This may all sound highly improbable. But that’s exactly what they want you to think! They want to spread doubt. They want to ridicule us, to divide us, weaken us, and to scoff at us. We must band together, with one voice, with the voice of freedom and of liberty, and collectively support our home directories. Don’t let them take it away. There’s no time like the present – we must act before it is too late.

As a UNIX command-line user, you have an inalienable right to a home directory. It’s part of our history, our tradition, our identity. Let us not forget who we are!

Just remember friends, it’s not a conspiracy theory when you’re right.

Here’s a nice paragraph from Illywhacker (Book 3, ch 59, p572 in my paperback faber & faber edition):

I sat in my chair and watched the hessianed goanna dropped into the boot. I knew, that day, that God is a glutton for grief, love, regret, sadness, joy too, everything, remorse, guilt – it is all steak and eggs to him and he will promise anything to get them. But what am I saying? There is no God. There is only me, Herbert Badgery, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance.

What a great name, Herbert Badgery.

Speaking of anal sex, I went to see if pooTube.com was taken. It is, and it leads to youTube. I thought it would be the perfect domain for an anal sex site. I like it (the name, I mean) a lot.

If I were in the business of making horror movies, I think I’d probably pay people to faint in early showings. This article describes a series of people being overcome at the opening shows of some horror flick or other. That sort of publicity must be worth a huge amount, though you wouldn’t want to be caught.

I remember reading about people being put on oxygen in Cannes at the showing of Irreversible and its anal sex rape scene. I immediately went out and saw the movie to see if it was as bad as all that. I sat there in the Angelika with a crowd of New Yorkers and no-one got up and left, or made noises like they couldn’t stand it any more, let alone needed oxygen. Perhaps that’s just because they were all living in New York and beyond normal human emotions, but I doubt it.

There’s yet more dirt on the Google / YouTube deal. I’ve thought several times already that I wouldn’t be surprised if the deal didn’t close. I don’t remember when it’s due to close, maybe as soon as December. It would be a major stumble for Google, but I’m not convinced that that would be worse than going ahead. It feels to me like the whole thing is built on sand, and that we’re seeing that now.

YouTube is changing so quickly, with tens of thousands of pieces of content being pulled very publically, lots of semi-negative write-ups, the threat of many lawsuits, the apparently desperate last-minute behind-the-scenes deal-making that went on the day they got it done, other video sites moving to share revenue with content providers, etc.

It all has a feeling of extreme volatility to me. It wouldn’t surprise me to see YouTube’s value plummet if this continues for long. Is it too late for Google to pull the plug?

I think there’s probably almost no brand faithfulness in the online video world. Sure, coolness is important, but coolness can change overnight. And then you’re left with what? What does someone who uploads a video actually want? Basically, they want storage space, a URL to point their friends to, and maybe somewhere for people to leave comments or a rating. A bit of revenue would be nice. Your average Joe probably doesn’t care about much more. It’s a bit like buying gas.

I don’t think it makes sense to run out and short Google over this, but I do think the potential for a major disruption is there. If it happened and people suddenly saw Google as just another company, capable of making big errors, there might be a disproportionally large adjustment in their stock price.

Pure speculation of course. I’m very interested to see how this plays out.

And you thought buying a shirt was just a matter of walking into a store and picking something out off the shelves? Not at English Cut.

How to tell when the public mood has changed on an issue? The subject of your spam mail might be a good indicator. Spammers are constantly testing the collective mood, twisting and turning, using any method they can dream up to get our attention and open their email. The main tool for this, having negotiated our spam filters, is the mail Subject line. When you see Viagra or penis enlargment, you know it must be working at a rate that keeps them going – if not on you then on others. Yes, it’s cheap to send spam, but they’re doing it for money. It’s in the interest of the spammers that their methods are successful because then they have happy customers who give them more business.

I write all this because I’ve noticed that i’ve started getting spam with subjects that quietly question the US presence in Iraq:

  Ellen Hammond         Oct 26 04:37 manage troop levels.
  Wiley King            Oct 26 04:49 how Iraq affects American security
  Veronica Ochoa        Oct 26 04:41 the United States
  Harris Bradshaw       Oct 26 04:39 troops home tomorrow
  Bob Jernigan          Oct 26 04:43 a reason to call for

I’m wondering if this might not be a sure sign that public mood has indeed swung.

You might claim that polls could tell you the same thing. But I’m not so sure. Large numbers of people have disagreed with the US Iraq fiasco for a long time. But it’s easy to say “oh yes, disgraceful” to a poll taker over the phone. It’s more of an acid test if the issue can induce you to open an unknown email, perhaps even to buy something.

Spammers are not dumb. A huge amount of effort and ingenuity goes into getting people to open spam mail. I think it would be fun to track spam titles as a measure of social issues. Of course I never will, I’ll just post this. On a small scale I think this example is interesting. Has public opninion really changed in a tangible way on Iraq, and is this made clear by the move to use the issue as the subject of spam a better indicator of it than other things?

This reminds me of Chomsky’s claim (paraphrased) that general opinion on political issues doesn’t affect things much. Things don’t change until the business community collectively realizes that the policy is bad for the bottom line, at which point things change rapidly.

This brief article discusses how thieves stole account details from two online brokerages using keystroke loggers. By some broad definition this falls into the category of “identity theft”, since the thieves could then pretend to be the user in question. I don’t really think that warrants being called identity theft, but whatever.

I think dreaming up crimes is pretty easy. The hard thing is to figure out a good way to take physical possession of the loot. At some point you have to go clean out that bank account, or have illegally bought goods delivered to a physical address, etc. It’s not easy to come up with ways that let you reap the benefits of crime while minimizing the risk associated with these physical problems. There are some classic approaches, like using cut outs, drops, etc. In the online world it seems just as hard, and perhaps more so. At the end of the day there’s a wire leading to your house, or similar.

That’s why I like the above scam. Instead of trying for a direct score, they set up a disconnect and used the accounts to create an effect in the stock market that they then took advantage of. That’s got to be much harder to nail down, especially if even moderate care is taken to disguise the trades. I think this disconnect is very clever. But perhaps it’s actually an old trick?

Cringley writes about Sun’s new black box portable server farms:

The beauty of a shipping container data center isn’t just that it operates stand-alone and can be plunked down in the parking lot of your existing data center or dropped by helicopter on the roof of your headquarters building. A great proportion of its beauty lies in the shipping container’s efficiency not as a server but as a network. It’s the largest sneakernet ever built. Moving a petabyte of data across the country using even the biggest optical fiber connection could take weeks, but the Blackbox can be installed in at most a few days.

which reminded me straight away of an Andrew Tanenbaum quote:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

which I’m pretty sure I ran across in one of Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls books in the mid-late 80s. I was surprised not to find it though. I thought either The Back of the Envelope (which poses the question) or the Bumper-Sticker Computer Science column was a sure bet.

Anyway, the station-wagon just got a whole lot bigger.

I guess this guy really didn’t want to get into management. He spends 2.5 years working on a product, launches it, and simultaneously offers it for sale. Or he just figured the time was right. That’s the ultimate in minimalist business plans.

Here’s a nice-looking box. Pricey though.

They just got acquired by Logitech.

Memo to self: Make something people want.

Here’s more on politicians thinking about imposing real-world tax on purely in-game profits.

I love the comment from the person who says they’ll be happy to pay real dollars for tax on in-game profits the day they can use virtual gold to pay real world tax.

Reuters sets up shop inside an online game.

From here:

So, while you think enviously about the $1.65 billion YouTube snagged from Google (or, as someone pointed out, approximately $3 million per day of their existence), you can feel some sympathy for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp — owners of the site utube.com. Turns out, plenty of people have been hearing the name YouTube and assuming it was UTube. So, those people have been checking out the wrong site… and knocking it completely offline (which is why we won’t bother even linking to it now). Of course, the head of Universal Tube knows an opportunity when his web server stats show it to him. He’s already turned down a million dollar offer on the domain, and is holding out for at least $2.5 million.

From this article:

I had the pleasure of moderating the presenters at the Stirr mixer last
night (see also ValleyWag coverage). I like these gatherings, mostly
because the pitches are very brief: Entrepreneurs get 60 seconds to make
their case. Also, Stirr events are at bars. Can’t beat that. (By the way,
the 60-second pitch is not briefest pitch format. At the upcoming SF Beta
event, the presenters will have to cram their pitches into haiku.)

I love it, and I’d love to try it. It levels the playing field beautifully – with grass cutting blades set to Super Low. There isn’t much room for marketing fluff in a haiku.

Teqlo

I’ve had Peter Carey’s Illywhacker high on my to-read list for a couple of years, following a glowing recommendation from Bambi. I started it two days ago and…… it’s great.

To the two faithful readers of this blog I say “thanks” and “what about you Russell?”

Apple-funded study reveals that $1999 Apple 30″ displays result in up to 50% productivity gains^*.

Hurry while stocks last.

* On certain tasks, such as mouse move and click.