Worst company names

Licketyship. A guy from there called my cell phone today for something, the connection wasn't so great, so I spent most of the call trying to figure out what sort of business model could involve coprophagy. Then there's the classic expertsexchange.com.

The grain of sand at the core of the wikipedia pearl

Holy shit, Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder and guru) is an objectivist. That is just weird on multiple levels. For one thing, it's another example of a right-libertarian being in the vanguard of what amounts to a left-libertarian vision. When I was at MIT the objectivists used to quite literally worship the $ sign, now we have one whose slogan is "free knowledge for free minds".

For another, the philosophy of wikipedia seems determinedly anti-objectivist, at least superficially. They disdain expertise and seem to expect that truth will bubble up from a crowd-based distributed process. This egalitarian attitude seems very un-Randian to me, although who knows, maybe it is objectivist on a deeper level.

Given that Wikipedia seems to have become the new default authoritative source of knowledge, it's guiding philosophy and structures of governance become exceedingly interesting and important. The fact that it's run by someone under the influence of a nuttily simplistic ideology is a wee bit disturbing. On the other hand, Wales does not seem to have the virulently rabid form of the objectivist meme, and it certainly hasn't interfered with the success of his efforts.

Word and concept of the day: agalmics

Another person tries to make a compact characterization of the economics of open-source and other freely copyable goods: (via Notional Slurry)

agalmics (uh-GAL-miks), n. [Gr. "agalma", "a pleasing gift"]

The study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods.

...

agalmia, n.

The sum of the agalmic activity in a particular region or sphere. Analogous to an "economy" in economic theory.

My own particular interest is in how open source economics interfaces with the "normal" economics of scarcity -- ie, while it's wonderful that software can be given away for free, until potatoes can reproduce themselves as easily it will be problematic for people working on open source to feed themselves. Back in the embryonic days of the FSF I made this argument, but nobody paid me much attention, and as it turns out my objections, while valid, did not stop open source from taking over the world. And many people seem to be able to support themselves while working on free software, one way or another.

I still suspect there is something screwy about the economics, and I'm not the only one. It seems like programmers are collectively undermining their own value in the for-pay economy, to the delight of big service corporations like IBM.

what we're seeing playing out among coders is what I'll term the Programmer's Dilemma. Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger. At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior.

That syncing feeling

[profundities and delicious ironies have been scarce lately, so I'm lowering my posting threshold for awhile and will be sending out random bits of not-very-interesting tech geekery. This is by nature of an experiment.]

For various reasons, my life is scattered across several different machines and physical locations right now, and I'm looking for ways to keep things together. I set up an svn repository for most of my work files and code, but there's too much damn state information in tools.

One thing that promised to help was Google Browser Sync, which copies various items from one Firefox instance into another. At first I didn't think much of it, because it didn't do the one thing I wanted most (copying over extensions and their state). However, it does sync browser history and cookies, which is actually pretty useful. And I just found today that if you work with the history sidebar open, you can actually see the syncing happen, as elements from one computer pop on the other. That's pretty nifty.

Now if all the random config files of other programs would migrate themselves automagically from one place to another. It seems like half of the work in programming today is configuration, and the other half is glue.

I'm naming my kid Trev.r

The other day I was joking with a pregnant colleague about the importance of picking a unique baby name that will permit easy Googling down the road. Turns out I was behind the curve by a few days since the WSJ ran an article on this very subject (via Rough Type).

There's something mildly disturbing about this new twist on technological systems reshaping human existence. It used to be enough for names to be reasonably unique within a family or village, but if we're all globally connected then we will need globally unique identifiers, or close to it.

This will go on your permanent record

Did you know that the Federal Government keeps databases on everybody's drug prescriptions? I didn't. The Virgina Tech shootings brought out this fact, according to Glenn Greenwald who quotes ABC news:

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

So, it turns out that despite the tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality, your entire drug history is recorded and available to any agent of government who is curious about you. And who knows who else can access this data?

You are entitled to see what data credit agencies have collected on you. There needs to be a similar law for government dossiers.

And apparently it's a good idea to avoid taking any prescription drug unless you want the world to know you're taking it.

So it goes

Farewell Kurt Vonnegut. Plainspokenness never sounded so good. Bob Harris observes:

I also think somebody should be comparing the amount of airtime Vonnegut’s passing is getting compared to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I believe the ratio might provide an exact, scientific, numerical measure on our misplaced priorities.

Hm, well, Google can serve as a standin here for "airtime". We'll limit it hits in the past day, which is reasonably fair, since Kurt's only been gone about that long, and yesterday was a big news day for Anna Nicole. If anything, this is probably giving Kurt an unfair advantage, as is the use of the internet over broadcast media.

Google news hits for Kurt Vonnegut in the last day: 995
for Anna Nicole Smith: 6,354

So our cultural misplacement index can be rated as 6.4.