Dave is, as he would say, full of sh*t today.

[Correction: After reading Dave's Why they hate me post, I have to say Dave is not full of sh*t today.  He is full of sh*t just in the post mentioned below.]

In It's not really piracy, Dave writes:

Calling it piracy views it only from the perspective of an obsolete distribution system. They see their revenue declining because the service they provide isn't worth anything. The Internet provides efficiency in distribution that cuts out the middle man. Since the industry pays little or no money to the artist, the users can have the music, if you cut out the distributors, for $0. To blame that on people who use music is to miss the historic trend. Users are just behaving economically, not unethically; and it's even arguable that they are behaving legally.

I sympathize with musicians who are being enslaved by the music industry labels and believe Internet technologies can and will free them eventually.  But using them to justify ethical failures or advocate new business models amounts to cowardly and selfish acts.  If people really wants to solve this problem, they should first learn to see straight instead of making up false and delusionary images.

Suppose you bought a country house with apple trees in the backyard which you never tended to.  What Dave is saying amounts to saying that if apples fall from the tree and roll downhill to a public road, anybody can take those apples because the owner never tended to the trees.  Nonesense.  If they didn't know where the apple came from, they are excusable and should be excused.  But if they are doing it knowingly, that is theft and it doesn't matter who the owner is nor whether he is a beastly fellow.

Just as atrocities are made easier by demonizing opponents, we are demonizing the music industry and planting seeds of wide-spread self-justified corruption into our young in the name of newage morality.  Piracy is piracy whether the pirate is a sleezy character or a 13 year-old girl.  Whether she should be punished or not is irrelevant to the definition of the word.

I am not faulting people for falling to temptations for I have fallen as well in the past.  When Napster became popular, I downloaded many MP3 files.  It was amazingly convenient and, as a geek, it opened new possibilities.  But I have never denied the fact that what I was doing was stealing because doing so will damage me more than I could ever gain from free music.

I am going to be shifting my consulting business to PowerVenture.com and reusing Docuverse.com as it was originally intended, a wiki-variation based document universe including my blog as well as other contents.

Beside PowerVenture.com and Docuverse.com, there is another website being planned.  I can't give any details though except that it will be a shocker of sort.

What all this means is that I will be needing more bandwidth and storage space.  I have chosen to use ServInt VPS instead of dragging a T1 line to my house and running my own Linux server farm which requires too much money way too early.  ServInt has pretty good reputation so I can trust them not to disappoint me and 100GB/month transfer with 2 GB storage for $49/month is very attractive.  As traffic and load grows, I can upgrade to ServInt dedicated servers.

If you decide to use ServInt as well, tell them Don sent ya.  But then I just signed up so you might want to wait until I have used their service for a while.  Life is full of surprises you know. ;-p

Even when online social networks becomes common place, nothing much has changed in the way people meet each other.  One could even say social network is degraded somewhat by people hunting people they want to meet by following the visual map of relationships made possible by social network services.

One can imagine Power Law working at multiple levels to route attention to people with the right look, positions, professions, money, and connections.  Play forward a bit and one could see how the popular nodes becoming ragged pretty fast.

If a girl looks great, she'll get a lot of wannabe friends who ponied up money for the chance to say hello.  Even with traffic control of sort, she will eventually feel like a dumb whore, dumb because she ain't getting paid for her troubles.  Profit sharing is not a solution because that just leads to world-wide whore, sorry, dating networks.

If it's some business person in a key position like CostCo Executive VP of Purchasing, same thing happens except there is a different kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge going on.  Social connections based on one-sided needs is not a social network IMHO and unstable by nature.  Over time, these networks will be sapped dry of valuable nodes, leaving behind only a network of predators.

As I mentioned before in my posts about the value of random encounters, new solutions are needed.  Game of Seven is one example.  The Game of Seven forms a random group of seven people that lasts a month as if seven random people got stranded on a deserted island.  One could run into great, mundane, or even terrible people.

You can sell individual Game of Seven too just like packs of Pokeymon or Yu-Ki-Oh cards.  You'll never know what you are going to get.  Maybe you'll meet the girl of your life.  Maybe you'll end up changing your definition of an a**hole.  The unknown is the product being sold.

To spice things up, each Game of Seven should be given a task to perform.  Result affects individual participant's stats that has some consequences.  If one acts like an asshole consistently, his stats should reduce his chance of meeting people with good stats.

Frankly, I have no idea whether solutions like the Game of Seven will work.  I am just using it as an example of possible solutions.

Many people are expressing surprise over the AtStake fiasco, firing of Dan Geer over a report (PDF) critical of Microsoft.  How can Microsoft or AtStake not behave that way when alternative is counter to survival instinct?

Of course, AtStake did not do Microsoft any favors by firing Dan.  All they did was confirm the concerns raised by the report: Microsoft can't help but be a bully even if it turned into a flower child overnight.  One doesn't have to be a bully for others to feel threatened.  It's like bringing a 800lb gorilla to a party and telling everyone to relax because it is so gentle.

I just wanted to say that six degrees of separation is real, but I don't give a damn about it.  One degree, friend of a friend, is where the action is and two degrees is the maximum under most social circumstances.

What this really means is that so called social network services are in the business of short-circuiting the six degrees of separation so the person you want to meet is one degree away.  In the case of dating service, the dating service is the short-circuiting friend/pimp.  That makes Jonathan Abrams the first pimp to be popular among VCs.

Hey, I got nothing against pimps.  I think they have a much better business model than most startups.

But then I do believe in Lassie so let's say there is some value in being able to meet friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friend.  Hold the music please.  They are not all friends, are they?  Dang.

A conversation from the near future overheard somewhere in Asheron's Call, Microsoft's MMORPG.

Fizban:  Hey, did you hear about the Cave of Longhorn?

Missalot:  Isn't Longhorn code name for Microsoft's new OS?

Fizban:  Yeah, its finally getting released so they are doing an adventure to promote the release of Longhorn.  Ad-venture, get it?

Missalot:  Haha.  So what's in the cave?

Fizban:  A user-friendly Minotaur named Longhorn.  He drops Longhorn discount coupons up to 50% off.  Longhorn is a tough mob though.  He'll stun you with Longhorn marketing mumbo-jumbo and power-hack with a double-headed axe named Scobleizer.  Best way to get him is to lure him into narrow corridors so his swollen head will get stuck.

Missalot:  Wow.  I could use 50% off.  Let's go get Longhorn!

There is an ongoing spat between two entries on my blogroll: Robert Scoble (aka Fu*kwit) and Russell Beatie (aka Nitwit).  This is how the blogwar went:

1. Fu*kwit flame-linked to Nitwit:

   Microsoft-hater Ru$$ell Beattie says "M$ SmartPhones Catching Up."
    

2. Upset by anti-anti-Microsoft-hater comments directed at him, Nitwit redirected all links referred from Fu*kwit's blog to US vs. Microsoft: Court's Findings of Fact document.
    
3. "Dave" noticed the referrer-based-redirection and commented:

   Can you believe it — there are weblogs that turn away traffic based on referrer. This is bad practice. These people seriously need to take a refresher course in what the Web is about and how important links are and stop screwing around with them. I won't read sites that do this, and I certainly won't point to them. You should let the authors of the sites know that you won't either. If they don't want to be linked to, just take the site off the Web.
    

4. Nitwit fired back with Weblog War #4553.
    
5. I suggested a more moderate solution in a comment to Nitwit's post.
    
6. Everybody ignores my suggestion and the war continues.

As Dave pointed out, refusing or redirecting access to free content based on referring site is an extremely distasteful act.  This is the sort of childish technical tricks that geeks often prefer doing instead of communicating like an adult.  All Nitwit really had to do was send Fu*kwit an e-mail.

Words are much more powerful than codes.

If anyone wants me to not link to your blog, just let me know.  Requests like that don't upset me.  I'll do likewise for distasteful links to my blog.  If I don't say anything, consider it acceptable practice until I say otherwise.  If I am too lazy to even express my disapproval, I deserve whatever I get.

PS: Fu*kwit and Nitwit are terms used within this spat to refer to Robert and Russell.  They are not my terms.  If I had to call them names, I would pick Childish and Irritable.

I don't know why I didn't think of replacing Notepad.exe until now.  I have much better editors like NoteTab and Metapad on my laptop, but I left Notepad in place and resorted to opening those files by drag-n-drop or open dialog because every software out there, including IE's view source, resorted to invoking notepad.exe to display files.

I finally had enough of crappy Notepad.

I chose Sc1, a special build of freeware open source text editor SciTE which is based on open source and platform-independent Scintilla text editing component, because Sc1 packs everything into a single EXE and has a small footprint (230K).  The downloaded file is the Sc1 executable file, not an installable package.  It's just ready to go and comes with syntax coloring support for most common text file types like HTML, Java, Perl, Python, XML, etc. 

HTML file in outliner mode

Perl source file

How to replace Notepad.exe on Windows XP

Windows XP has file protection so Notepad.exe will get restored if you just replace the file with renamed Sc1.exe.  Follow these steps:

1. Download Sc1.exe from SourceForge and rename it to Notepad.exe
2. Save a copy of the original Notepad.exe somewhere.
3. Replace Notepad.exe in following three locations (order is significant):
    
   • %WINDIR%\\System32\\DllCache
   • %WINDIR%\\System32
   • %WINDIR%

     *%WINDIR% is your Windows folder (i.e. C:\\Windows)
      

4. Press Cancel when a warning dialog appears.

That's it.  Enjoy.

Update #1:

If you are using Sc1.exe as Notepad.exe replacement and you are not happy with the default settings, drop this copy of SciTEGlobal.properties into System32 folder.  This config file changes default font to be monospaced and raises font size from 10 point to 12 point for my large screen and lowers tab size from 8 to 4.  The config file is amply documented so please do play with it.  For more documentation, visit the SciTE website.  You might also want to download the regular version of SciTE to get other property files to drop into System32 folder.

I know this is rather user-unfriendly, but I like the configurability of SciTE and the fact that I can ultimately make any change I want with the source code.

Update #2: 2003/10/06

David Schontzler wrote a batch file script to automate the installation process:

@echo off

@echo Backing up notepad.exe to %WINDIR%\notepad.exe.orig
copy %WINDIR%\notepad.exe %WINDIR%\notepad.exe.orig

@echo Replacing Notepad with SciTE
copy Sc1.exe %WINDIR%\System32\DllCache\notepad.exe
copy Sc1.exe %WINDIR%\System32\notepad.exe
copy Sc1.exe %WINDIR%\notepad.exe

@echo Copying SciTE preferences to %WINDIR%\System32
copy SciTE*.properties %WINDIR%\System32

Just pour the script into a batch file in the same folder as Sc1.exe and run.  Note that *.properties files are also copied.  Thanks David.

Update #3: 2003/10/09

SciTEGlobal.properties was updated to use 'findstr' instead of 'fgrep' for "Search in Files" command.  'findstr' is generally available while 'fgrep' is not.

Baltimore Technologies, Ireland-based security company, is finally being put to rest by dismemberment (via Lynn Wheeler).

At its height, it had 1500 employees but PKI overhype and market collapse finally caught up with them.  In a way, overhyping and overselling is like overfishing.  Today, it's much more difficult to pitch PKI as a solution.  Similar story for CRM.

The world is changing all the time.  Fortunately, the world is also round so we'll see PKI rise again.