Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 63

The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%

The newest comScore figures, for February 2012, are out. Android has finally achieved majority market share in the U.S.. This is three months later than a linear fit to most of 2010 and 20111 predicted, but whatever happened in 4Q2011 to throw everybody off their previous long-term trend curves seems to be over. Android, in particular, is back to pulling about 2% of additional market share per month – actually, its growth rate seems to have increased a bit from before the glitch.

I was right not to overinterpret Apple's very slight loss of market share last month. The iPhone is back to very, very slowly gaining share. Apple fans should resist the temptation to overinterpret that, though, since the gain is within statistical noise level.

RIM and Microsoft continue to go down in flames, losing not just market share but total userbase as well.

What does it all mean?

The main thing I see in these numbers is that despite all the sound and fury about Apple's record quarter, the 4S has failed to improve the iPhone's competitive posture against Android. The fourth or fifth iteration of "this time for sure!" fizzled yet again. I'm sure we'll hear the same breathless hype when the iPhone 5 issues, though, it seems to be evergreen.

In fact, the pressure on Apple has increased. What we know about winner-take-all effects in markets with positive network externalities suggests that when you're facing supermajority competition, even slight erosions in market share tend to turn into self-reinforcing cascades as users defect to the safe majority choice.

Now, this could happen to Apple at any time. Apple no longer has margin for screwing up; it can't even afford a stumble. To be specific, just one botched product launch could easily cost it 15 points of share that it will never get back.

RIM has given up, withdrawing from the consumer market with high-ranking execs fleeing the sinking ship. Dead company walking, not that this will be any surprise to anyone following my analyses. Last June I predicted seven months plus or minus two to a crash or buyout; I was a little off, but not by much.

Microsoft is just bleeding cash and credibility at this point. There is zero possibility that they can recover against competition as strong as Apple and the Android army. And, as predicted here, they're taking Nokia down with them.

Trayvon Martin and the grievance factory

Even to a person as cynical and jaded as I have become about American politics, the brouhaha around the Trayvon Martin shooting is rather shocking. Usually, in past instances of even the most determined attempts to inflame racial hatred, there's been at least a fig leaf of plausible deniability over the manipulation. Not this time. Not with MSNBC getting caught editing its presentation of the 911 tape to make it sound like the shooter uttered a racial slur. Not with Trayvon Martin's photo obviously photoshopped to make him look younger, less threatening, and (ironically) more white.

I'm not going to utter or argue for a conclusion about whether or not Zimmerman shot in self-defense. We don't know that. Perhaps he was, in fact, motivated by race hatred. The facts of the shooting will have to come clearer before that can be judged. We have more than enough facts, though, to observe and indict the operation of the racial-grievance factory, and to point a finger squarely at those who are dishonestly battening on Trayvon Martin's death.

The progress of civil rights in the U.S. can be measured by the extent to which real racial outrages have been displaced by trumped-up fake ones. The year I was born, in 1957, segregation was still a cruel and oppressive fact in the American South; thirty years later, in 1987, Tawana Brawley's false rape accusations would certainly not have had to be pimped to the max by Al Sharpton if he'd had any true ones to work with.

With the Trayvon Martin shooting the fakery has reached dizzying heights. Beginning with the fact that a hispanic man shoots a black and we are immediately urged to see this as evidence of pervasive evil and prejudice in a racial group of "whites" which, according to their IDs, neither man thought he belonged to.

Personally, I think the distinction between "white" and "hispanic" is a rather silly one to be insisting on in 2012, especially for anybody named "George Zimmerman". But I'm not him – apparently George thought his hispanicity/non-whiteness was important enough to put on his documents. The racial-grievance industry, which thrives on assigning each of us to a place in an ever-more-ramified hierarchy of "victim" and "oppressor" groups, has no excuse in its own terms of reference for ignoring this.

And is anyone but me noticing the irony of whitening Trayvon Martin in his hoodie photograph? We'll pass over quickly the blatant flim-flam of publishing five-year-old photographs that make him look like a chubby-cheeked kid rather than the sullen, angry teenage gangbanger (Twitter handle "NO_LIMIT_NIGGA") in the more current ones. But the first time I saw the photoshopped version of the "hoodie" photograph, my instant thought was "My Goddess – they've Michael-Jacksonized him!"

That's right, in covering a story that was, for them, ostensibly all about race, the mainstream media more than half bleached out Trayvon Martin's blackness. To make him seem less threatening and more sympathetic. Thereby, implicitly, confirming and validating the exact stereotype of "black = danger" about which we are all being lectured!

But such thoughtless gaslighting should not surprise us. Because even supposing that Zimmerman pulled the trigger for racial reasons (which isn't established), the media-approved post-shooting spin is only pretending to be about racial justice. And the pretense is a thin one. What's actually going on is a load of grunting and posturing as stylized and disconnected from reality as a Kabuki drama, and directed to ends that had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin's life or death. Let's review some of the actual axes being ground here:

First on the scene to abuse Trayvon's corpse were the jackals from the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence", who have been fighting an increasingly desperate rear-guard action against civil-rights progress ever since the Heller ruling in 2008 reaffirmed the Second Amendment as an individual right. Their goal was to throw as much mud as possible at Florida's recently-passed "stand your ground" law in hopes that some of it would stick, and never mind that it would probably be irrelevant to Zimmerman's defense if he were charged.

But the gun-grabbers were quickly jostled aside by the usual gang of race hustlers, Al Sharpton being the most obvious but far from the only example. The last thing the race hustlers want is "racial justice"; their whole loathsome con depends on guilt-tripping Whitey, inflaming blacks, and profiting as both sides bleed. With actual racism as near dead as it is in the U.S., their game depends on being able to regularly construct white-on-black "injustice" out of nothing, and if that means editing George Zimmerman into a "white" racist, they'll do it.

The race hustlers are small-time, though, compared to the White House, the Democratic National Committee, and the mainstream press. When Barack Obama said he though that Trayvon Martin looked like the son he doesn't have, this had everything to do with his weak position going into the 2012 presidential elections. At all cost blacks must be mobilized to vote and everybody given a gaudy distraction from $5 gas prices, "green energy" cronyism, and the limping wreckage of the administration's economic policy.

If this means Trayvon Martin has to be whitewashed and George Zimmerman gets a public lynching, then the mainstream press is showing itself eager to comply, supplying all the photoshopping and fake-but-accurate 911 audio the DNC could actually want. The actual facts of the case, and the actual meaning of Trayvon Martin's death? Irrelevant. And, of course, the fact that George Zimmerman was a registered Democrat goes down the memory hole.

The Smartphone Wars: Exit Blackberry, pursued by a bear

Comes today the news that Blackberry is giving up on the consumer market. Of course this means the company will be as dead as Antigonus shortly.

Why do I say this? Because one of the most ironclad rules of the tech industry is this: retreat upward never works. If your company is failing, withdrawing from mass markets to focus on the high end may look like a smart move for a few quarters but it makes eventual doom more certain. The decline and fall of Sun Microsystems is probably the most recent major example but far from the only one.

Retreat upwards fails because it leaves space for your competitors to attack you from the low end – in effect, you're pinning a sign on your backside that says "DISRUPT ME!" Also, in any hardware-centered business, process improvements happen fastest where volume is highest (that is, at the low end); retreat upwards means your competitors will capture those gains faster than you do.

More grim details. Company is not profitable and will no longer be issuing financial projections. Balsillie is leaving. The COO and CTO are bailing out.

Everything about this smells of death. Not that it should come as a surprise to regular readers, because I've been saying RIM was doomed and explaining why since last June.

Penguicon 2012 Geeks With Guns

The party for Armed & Dangerous readers is still on for Friday night at Penguicon, and we have a new event – actually, the return of an old favorite: Geeks with Guns.

This year's GWG is scheduled for 2:00PM on Friday the 27th; it will take place at the Firing Line range. We will be teaching basic firearms safety, handling, and pistol marksmanship; first-time shooters are welcome. Experienced shooters are also welcome and may be drafted as range officers and assistant instructors. Yes, I've done this before, and no, we've never had an injury – pistol shooting is statistically safer than golf.

Important: please mail guns@penguicon.org with your intention to attend. We need to give the range advance notice of roughly how many people will be showing. Two dozen is pretty typical.

Thanks to regular John D. Bell for organizing. John will be passing around the hat for a few bucks each to cover the range fees. Bring your own weapon if you have one, otherwise you can rent at the range or possibly borrow a friend's. Newbs seeking instruction will be expected to buy their own ammunition.

Where your contributions go

This is a thank-you to my tip-jar contributors.

Today I spent $88.76 directly out of the tip jar on engineering samples of GPS dongles specially modified to carry the 1PPS signal out to USB. I will test them, and if the modification succeeds it is quite likely that the company I am cooperating with will begin shipping this mod in a volume product shortly. This will, for the first time, make time sources with 1ms accuracy available for less than $100 each. The application I have in mind is fixing the Internet; there are many others.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you donate money to support my open-source projects. Thank you; you are helping me make the world a better place.

Remembering the future

I own a rather large library of paperback SF which I have been collecting since the late 1960s; it includes a lot of stuff that is now quite rare and half forgotten. I owe a great deal to SF and consider these books cultural treasures, The last few years I've been wondering if there's any way to ensure that this treasure won't be lost as conventional printed books get left behind and the remaining copies of the more obscure stuff crumble.

Maybe there is the beginning of an answer. Singularity & Co. – Save the SciFi! is a Kickstarter project aimed specifically at rescuing out-of-print genre SF from oblivion. It is not yet clear whether their methods will scale; scanning is easy but untangling the IP around these old books can be difficult. But the response to the project has been encouraging; they're already 240% over their initial funding goal.

I have contributed $25, and offered them the use of my library. If it looks like they have developed a sustainable set of methods I will contribute a lot more. I think this is a worthy project and deserving of support from everyone who loves science fiction.

Michael Meets Mozart

I love classical music. It was my first musical vocabulary; I didn't start listening to popular music until I was 14. When I grew up enough to notice that I was listening to a collection of museum pieces and not a living genre, that realization made me very sad.

But go listen to this: Michael Meets Mozart.

Now, if you're a typical classical purist, you may be thinking something like this: "Big deal. It's just a couple of guys posing like rock stars, even if there's some Mozart in the DNA. Electric cello and a backbeat is just tacky. Feh."

I'm here to argue that this attitude is tragically wrong – not only is it bad for what's left of the classical-music tradition today, but that it's false to the way classical music was conceived by its composers and received by its audiences back when it was a living genre.

Mozart didn't think he was writing museum pieces…

…and neither should we. Once upon a time, classical music communicated with the popular music of its day. Composers mined the folk music they had grown up with for ideas. And 'classical' music was popular; adulation of its virtuosi and the electricity surrounding live performances was intense. By period accounts it is not hyperbole that Franz Liszt has been described as "the first rock star".

The avant-gardists strangled classical music in the early 20th century precisely by driving away its popular audience, reducing it to a arid landscape of theory, manifesto, and demonstration (I have written about this before). New composition found a fragile refuge in film scores, while dwindling concert-hall audiences of the increasingly old and elite settled for museum exhibits. Some time back I wrote this:

My favorite piece of recent classical music is a particular section of Hans Zimmer's Pirates of the Caribbean score. It combines kettledrums in 5/4 time, somewhat reminscent of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps with a wood flute being played microtonally.

I second Tom DeGisi's recommendation of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Their Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 is a setting of a well-known Christmas carol that combines high-Romantic orchestration and electric guitars played with savage elegance.

Another standout from a few years back was the soundtrack for an otherwise forgettable movie called Hidalgo made as a Viggo Mortensen vehicle. Lovely classical music mixed with North African hand drums and what I think might have been griot singing.

If you notice a pattern here of co-opting modern instruments to achieve a wider tonal range, good. I have a personal fondness for polyrhythmic hand drumming. But more generally, this is what "classical" sounds like as a living genre willing to experiment rather than a dead set of museum pieces!

And this is what the Piano Guys give us in in Michael meets Mozart – straight up, not a film score but standalone music that dares us to take it on its own terms as boldly as a pop album and co-opts the language of modern popular music for its own ends. This is the sound of classical music climbing out of its grave, spitting out the goddamned embalming fluid, and kicking ass.

A while back I wrote about how moving I found Ravel's Bolero played in a train station. The Piano Guys give me the same feeling of hope and pride. The nihilists and the downshouters and the politically-correct multi-culti zombies haven't done for Western civilization yet, not while we can regenerate ourselves like this. And that, as much as the music itself, is something to celebrate.

Eggs a la ESR

For no particular reason, my recipe for scrambled eggs.

Ingredients:

6 eggs

A heaping tablespoon of turmeric

A teaspoonful of chipotle powder

3 or 4 stalks of scallions

About 5 ounces (one large link) of andouille sausage

Tools:

One large non-stick frying pan

A glass measuring cup

A spatula and a sharp paring knife.

A fork or eggbeater for scrambling with.

Remove the sausage casing and mince the meat. Dice the scallions. Scramble the eggs in the measuring cup, mixing in the turmeric and chipotle powder.

Brown the sausage. Once it is evenly browned, pour the eggs over it and scramble everything with the spatula. Add the scallions as the eggs are beginning to solidify – not earlier or they will cook down too much.

A decent grade of chorizo works as well as andouille. Shallots will do instead of scallions and some people like that taste better, but if you do that cook the shallots down a bit in olive oil before browning the meat (and if you're going to do that, adding some sliced mushrooms is not at all a bad idea). Hotter varieties may be substituted for the chipotle to good effect; on one occasion I made this with powdered scorpion peppers.

Makes a generous breakfast for two. We usually accompany it with Italian sourdough toast.

The infrastructure gnomes of tomorrow

Regular TomA continues a hot streak by asking, in response to my post on Holding Up The Sky, "Is the hacker support system robust?"

That is: having noticed that open-source volunteers now have a large and increasing role in maintaining critical shared infrastructure like the Internet, is there a sustainability issue here? Once the old guard who were involved in the early days (people like Jim Gettys and Dave Taht and myself) dies off, are we going to be able to replace them?

I shall set forth my reasons for optimism.

My principal reason for optimism is that the hacker culture has gotten extremely good at recruiting new talent. By "hacker culture" I mean anybody for which this is either a look in the mirror or an aspiration. Another good test is, as I've written before, is RFC1149. If you find it funny you may be part of the hacker culture, and if you find a report of implementing it with actual pigeons hilarious you almost certainly are.

Consider: in the late 1970s when I first began to identify with this culture, you could almost certainly have fit every hacker in the United States in a medium-sized auditorium. If you were willing to have people standing in the aisles, every hacker in the world.

Today, many Linux user groups can easily fill a hall that size, even in a Third World country. I know because they do it when I give talks! Those people aren't swooning over my rugged masculine charm; they come to hear me because they want to be a part of what I represent to them (I know this directly from audience reactions). Even if only one in ten of the people in my audiences writes code, and only one in a hundred dedicates him- or herself to a piece of key software infrastructure, we'll be able to sustain the numbers to meet our responsibilties.

Now go watch #commits on freenode for a while. CIA only monitors a small fraction of the active projects out there, but watching will give you a feel for the huge volume and breadth of commits to public repositories going on all the time. This is shit getting real, people not just yakking on chat channels or listening to the likes of me rant at a LUG but writing code. Hacking. Creating. Perfecting their craft.

There's a helluva lot of momentum out there, and if anything the pace is increasing in tandem with Internet deployment, rather than slowing down. I think we're also seeing a positive network effect; as the hacker culture gets larger and more diverse, the attractive value of the options it presents to potential hackers rises. Today's flood of newbies will give us tomorrow's coders and the next decade's hard-core infrastructure gnomes.

Thus my optimism. The social machine that trains and motivates our sky-upholders is in rude, vibrant good health. if anything we can live with a lot more lossiness in the long pipeline from newb to infrastructure gnome today than we could have decades ago when our intake was orders of magnitude smaller.

I think it would take a disruption of historic proportions to stop that social machine from cranking out upholders of the sky. And it's actually pretty difficult for me to think of a disruption in the right intensity range – that is, large enough to stall out the hacker-culture social machine without being a civilization-wrecker so total that not being able to find skilled help for stuff like the Bufferbloat project would be the least of our problems.

The usual run of everybody's favorite looming threats don't worry me in the long term. We've survived software patents and the Microsoft monopoly in style. We just handed Big Media its ass over SOPA/PIPA and now we know how to do that again if we have to. Overtly political repression by any single government or plausible coalition of governments would just push activity to jurisdictions where it's less controllable. Pirate Bay isn't us, but it's a useful straw in the wind; even the weight of Big Media and several cooperating governments couldn't take them out, and our network is much better dispersed.

Actually the only kind of disrupter I can imagine actually screwing up the supply of future infrastructure gnomes would be some kind of superstimulus that would be so much more attractive than the hacker culture that it would outcompete us for geek attention. I could sort of distantly imagine the hackerspace crowd and their 3D printers doing that, maybe, except that (a) atoms are harder to push around than bits, creating friction costs we don't have, and (b) they're actually us anyway!

Maybe garage nanotech? But I have a strong hunch that when that gets here, the people who make it happen will be us, too. What the hacker culture has actually become is an attractor that both pulls into itself and seeds the maker communities around any new software-intensive technologies that arise near it. Early minicomputers, the Internet, Unix, microcomputers, smartphone modding, 3D fabrication, open-source software and hardware – the hacker posture of mind, and the cultural signifiers that have evolved to express and transmit it, spans all of these not as a matter of accident but of essence.

This, too, helps explain the population explosion. And gives me confidence about the answer to TomA's question. Crossover among the technologies we hack is constant, and everyone drawn into this attractor is implicitly in training to hold up a piece of the sky.

On becoming a machine

A regular, TomA, asks: "If you could replace your organic body (in its entirety) with a machine, would you do it?"

This is one of those questions where examining the implied premises is the most interesting thing about answering it…

My shortest answer is "No, unless I were dying and it was the only way to escape mortality." I have a strong hunch that being embodied as a human is required to understand the minds of other humans. Being posthuman might get pretty lonely. I'd also hate to give up eating and sex.

A slightly longer answer is that the question as posed neglects important issues about the capabilities of the machine. If I get to be an android with a fully human sensorium, that's a very different and more acceptable case from being a mobile computeroid with tank treads and grippers.

An interesting counter-question is: "How am I not a machine already?" I'm not a vitalist. I regard my body as a machine that happens to use organic molecules and assemblies thereof as parts. This observation takes me back to the question of how much transforming me into a different kind of machine would alienate me from human experience.

I'm not asserting this is true of TomA, but I think people who ask this question often have a sort of clanking Robbie-the-Robot stereotype about what becoming a machine would be like. Well, it would beat dying, but please hurry up the upgrade with the syntheflesh and genitalia, would you?