I don’t want to predict the future. It turns out I’m pretty bad at predicting the future and chances are so are you. But I do want to delve into a possible future, one that could develop if certain things go a certain way and certain other things do not go a certain way.

Imagine a world where people stop demanding a faster, more awesome computer, simply because they don’t need one any more. Imagine a world where the pendulum swings back to where it came from and remote servers are the big deal and local terminals are essentially (but not totally) dumb.

This would be a surprising (and frightening) world to both the founders of IBM with their big iron and the founders of Microsoft with their big desktop iron. They would both be wrong at least a great deal of the time. Even in those places one might expect big iron there are simply commodity machines connected together. In those places where one might expect big desktop iron there are simply a bunch of web applications. This would be the miracle of the network. This would be the Cloud at work.

Maybe something will come along soon to make this possible future extremely unlikely. I have no doubt that is possible. The web, the big network connecting the small networks, is that sort of disruptive technology. Note though that the web first developed over existing infrastructure: Telephone lines were the first transport technology to support the internet. Now the internet is drawing that infrastructure into itself. It’s not that strange to imagine that the internet will be the infrastructure that draws all the separate infrastructures we know and dislike (telephone, cable television, etc) and unites them. This is happening right now. The internet is the One Ring, if you will.

But my point is not to state the obvious, but to point out that the infrastructure that replaces the internet as we know it will probably (barring any truly disruptive technologies; keep in mind that I don’t claim this is a necessary development but merely a likely one) use the internet as its infrastructure and gradually subsume it. Anyone who has coded a AJAX application is praying desperately for that day to come, and soon.

I can imagine a world where Netbooks (or whatever you like to call them: I choose Mark Shuttleworth’s term because I happen to admire him) are essentially access points to the Cloud. Certainly specialised hardware exists: No one wants to edit video on something just larger than their palm. But small laptop like devices become at least one of the dumb(ish) access points to the internet at large. This, also, is already happening.

It’s entirely possible that Moore’s Law will stop functioning. It’s not a physical law, after all, and it is a meme entirely subject to physical impossibilities that require a great deal of ingenuity and expense to circumvent. It’s also entirely possible that Moore’s Law will become irrelevant as computers become smaller, more ubiquitous, and less visible. It’s hard, for instance, to fit a heat sink in your shoe; it’s easier to simply make a smaller program and use a processor with less processing power.

Perhaps soon processors themselves will become obsolete. Who knows.

I know this post has been long and taken many un-needed detours but let me interject some personal thoughts on personal computers: Good riddance and could you please give me my fish back. I am so sick to death of overpowered computers that need to be constantly upgraded to do (essentially) the same thing. I could run a word processor on my 486 that did almost everything that the word processor on my P4 does (namely, process words). There are really very few applications that deserve the sort of processing power we’ve got idling in our living rooms. Video editing, sure. Audio processing, sure. Graphic-intensive games? Absolutely.

Instant messaging? Web browsing? VoIP? Creating text documents? No way.

I’d rather like a future where I could buy a box as I needed it. Not tailored to a one size fits all Swiss Army Knife approach (I’m looking at you, Windows) where every five years brings a new chance to upgrade to a shiny new (and despicably slow) operating system with shine new (and despicably slow) hardware. I want something I can purchase and use and throw away when I’m done. I want something disposable.

Imagine if the only options you had when buying a car were Porches, MacLaren F-1s, and Jaguars. Would that make sense?

So my challenge (ringing loud and clear to about five people) is this: Make my future fast, inexpensive, and disposable. Make my data live out in the Cloud so I don’t have to tie it to a piece of physical hardware. Please. For the children.

I wrote a whole long post two days ago, saved it, and am returning. I kept approximately 5% of it, and if you had read it you’d thank me for my slash-and-burn editorial skills. Still, I think the post bears writing. It’s an important topic and one that is lightly addressed in scripture. Or to put it another way, there’s lots of room for opinion, pretty much the inverse of me. With these introductory comments in mind, let’s blaze on, machetes and chainsaws in hand.

Every time I get near a book on church building I feel an irrational urge to break its spine and repurpose the pages as a certain toiletry item. It’s just who I am. Sometimes I have a hard time accepting that you can do this and do that and suddenly have a successful church. The idea that you can simply follow a formula and arrive at anything but a formulaic church seems irrational.

But there have to be guidelines, right? There are a lot of wacky things going on in North American churches, mostly due to this idea that everyone can have church they way they like. I’d like to sketch out a few thoughts and see what happens.

First, church needs to be organic. Don’t be relevant, don’t be topical, don’t be with the times, don’t be postmodern, don’t be a counter-cultural ghetto. Like that awkward kid everybody’s known, the one who’s always trying to be cool but ends up a huge loser, churches that chase culture look stupid. They look like they need attention or something. Let your church be a reflection of and a reflection on the community it comes from.

Second, some churches will play hymns on a piano, some will have elaborate bands, and some will have no instruments at all. I’ve been blessed by all three. It’s not really a big deal. It’s something we have to get over collectively. Music is an important part of the human experience, and an important part of the Christian experience. Some people will simply not be comfortable with an organ. I can’t stand pipe organs; with the amount of noise they make you may as well have a rock band playing, but that’s just me. If your community happens to include a lot of people who like pipe organs, why not?

Third, an effective church does a bunch of things. It provides people a place to gather in community, it provides a clear path to God, it provides for its own members, it provides help for those in need, and it provides a bunch of different opportunities in different areas. You could write entire books — and trust me, people have — on just those statements. This means that a church needs to be scriptural and Spirit-filled. Everything that a church does flows from scripture and from the workings of the Holy Ghost. Without either of those things, none of us would go to church. There wouldn’t be a church. That means that you need scriptural community, etc. You need the Spirit because, well, these things are pretty hard to do.

Fourth… that’s it. I think I lied, though; none of these things is easy. But they are pretty simple, right?

Getting the perfect PulseAudio setup in Ubuntu 7.10 isn’t hard. It’s basically installing a bunch of packages and editing a config file, then making sure ALSA is using PulseAudio instead of ESD.

The problems are these: there’s no metapackage that installs all the needed utilities, modules, and libs; the GUI tools pretty much suck; and there is no usable documentation that I could find for the base install or the GUI tools. The metapackage should be easy enough to implement, but the GUI tools need lot of work. The documentation needs to be created.

PulseAudio is a great idea. It’s well-implemented (afaict) at the system level. It enables the user to do a lot of pretty cool things, like sending audio to different computers. I would very much like to see it replace ESD, but before it can really do that, it needs a lot of usability tweaks.

For instance, “sinks” may be a nice technical name for where the daemon sends the sound, but the difference between sources, server, and sinks will probably be lost on the target audience of the Ubuntu distribution. These differences should either be elaborated with end-user oriented language, or the less-accesed hidden from view in a less visible part of the interface.

Ideally, I’d like to see a graphical representation of the possible output locations, much like the graphical representation of filesystems and available drives in the “Computer” dialogue. I could select “Send sound to” with a check box, and select multiple locations if I wanted to, something that’s difficult to do with the available user tools. Or alternately I could select, “Get sound from”, which would pick up the sound on an available server. Volume controls, server management, RTP multicast, default servers, all these things could be placed in an options dialogue. Much like, for instance, when a user is selecting a Metacity theme. Padevchooser is too technical, t0o complicated, and it lives in the tray: stop making things too technical, too complicated, and for the love of all that is holy, stop making things live in the tray! I already have a volume control there: that’s enough, thank you very much.

With these usability tweaks, I think PulseAudio would be ready for prime-time. Maybe even for Hardy Heron + 1.

You want to do something interesting? Start a netlabel. Start giving away music. Let those enterprising people who will give away music for free for whatever reason do so. And be picky.

I have a question. Consider serial cables and data cables for a moment. We have SATA, Ethernet, FireWire, USB 1.0, USB 2.0, PS2, Serial ports of all kinds of stripes, etc. Each of these has its own plug design, its own specification, and in many cases its own internal bus. In some cases, there are variations on the plug design: see USB. In some cases (I’m looking at you, hard drives), there’s a data cable and a power cable; in other cases they’re both in the same cord (USB, power over ethernet).

Why can’t we have just one cord with two or three plugs? Certainly the thing that would send information and power to a hard drive could do the same thing for your digital camera, your screen, your video camera, and your network. We could have on kind of plug for removable devices, another kind for semi-permanent devices, and a small version of both for compact devices.

Am I missing something here? Why can’t this be done?

Copyright is an important idea. It’s a big deal. It allows people to make money off what they create, in order to spur on even more creation. It’s a good idea, and it has worked for a long time, in the favour of a few.

Copyright is an important idea, but it’s flawed. Or at the very least, modern conceptions of copyright are flawed. Most people seem to think that when you create something, like an idea, or a book, or a song, or a collection of poems, that you own what you have created. It’s like property. This is, I think, flawed; it’s very evidently not property. Since the beginning of the printing press, as the costs to make and market a book have been declining toward zero, this notion has become increasingly irrelevant.

Yes, at one time a book was a very valuable thing, something time-consuming to make in every way. From the paper to the ink to the copying. Now, with the rise of electronics, books are not only declining in function as blogs and aggregators begin to supplant them, but the cost of making and distributing a book comes down to merely how much time you want to spend making and distributing it.

You can write and distribute an entire book, essentially for free. And the spare time you spend writing it, what is that worth? Who knows. The time that would otherwise be used sitting around or watching television or attending football games; can that time be reliably said to have monetary value? There’s a strong argument that it cannot.

The cost of making quite a few different things is now approaching zero, things that, when copyright was first implemented, cost an arm and a leg. Back then, we needed incentive to create culture, because creating culture was expensive. Some things still are. Major motion pictures, for instance. Broadway productions. Football games.

Secondly, copyright is not opt-in. It should be. The Berne Convention is–at least on this issue–a bit of an idiotic bit of Nanny State hand-holding that needs to be done away with. Automatic copyrights are a bad thing: a lot of the stuff that gets published is not worth copyrighting. A lot of the people that publish on the web don’t even care.

For the people who really do care about having their work copyrighted, let them bring it in to a copyright office and have their copy notarised. Let them pay an administrative fee. Think about it: copyright law protects even those who don’t care about copyright law. I pay for it through my tax money. But why? Why should I be paying to uphold the rights of those who may not even care whether their work is ripped off?

Let them pay for the costs of administering copyright, those people that care enough about what they have created to have copyright cover them. I don’t want to bear that cost.

Third, copyright lasts too long. Look, I don’t have a problem with Disney keeping copyrights to stuff that they try to foist on its customers every time there’s a format change. Let them keep the in perpetuity, if they can demonstrate that they actually use that copyright to generate revenue. But, also, let’s make them pay a fee to get copyright renewal every ten years, on an inclining scale. If they really want the copyright that badly, well, they should pay for it.

Everything else, all those records and books and articles and photos that no one cares about, let that stuff slip into the public domain. Let people use them for whatever they like. That, my friends, will be an explosion of creativity. Imagine being able to take some obscure artist that you think is an absolute gem but pretty much everyone else has forgotten and remix his records and re-release them. Or whatever else you can imagine.

Fourth, let’s make it very clear that the reason things enter the public domain is because they were always part of the public domain to begin with. That is to say, culture and its products cannot be owned by any particular person. Physical objects can, certainly, but not that thing that humans produce and call art simply because we’re human: no single person or entity can own that.

Copyright is like an exclusive license to use something for whatever purpose. Money, attention, goodwill, you name it. You get to use it for a set period of time, after which it goes back to people that–let’s face it–without whom you would never have been able to create that work to begin with.

Yes, copyright is a good idea. It still is, after all these years. Maybe the question we should be asking now, in the new millennium and beyond, is how do we make it better? How do we adjust copyright to optimally serve the needs and rights of copyright owners and at the same time serve the rights and needs of the public at large?

Music is too expensive. Electronic music especially.

See, most stuff on iTunes is 99c per song. That’s about $1.25 CDN. But I still can’t think of very many songs I’ve heard that are so good that I’d pay that much money for them. I’d pay $0.50, sure. In fact, at that price I’d be convinced to buy at least some music and maybe even a lot of music instead of no music whatsoever.

Well, I ordered Derek Webb’s new album. But that’s because Webb is amazing in ever sense of the word.

Here’s a list of demands, that, should you and your music store want to see me as a customer, you will need to meet:

• High quality copies of songs. I don’t want some lame (not as in the codec) 128kb file with the cymbals all compressed to crap. I want a VBR MP3 with a median bitrate of 192kb so I can safely say that it’s as good as what I’d rip from a CD or get over the internet.
• No restrictions. I want to make three redundant copies, move it to my iPod, move it to my Zen, move it to my (gag) Zune, use it on Linux, use it on Windows, use it on BSD, use it in my car, in my toaster, in my stove, in my car, in my house, as a soundtrack to my home videos, play it in iTunes, dbAmp, WinAmp, Amarok, iTunes, WiMP, or anything else I can reasonably do under fair use laws.
• Give me at least some excuse for liner art. Lyrics, pictures, a package of something or other for me to look at. Then I won’t have to go to some lyrics site that’s, you know, illegally copying the lyrics anyway.
• Distribute via something other than direct download. Use a modified version of BitTorrent if you have to. I’ll bear the cost of distribution if it’ll cut some dollars off my cost per song.
• At least give me the option of flat-rate pricing. Let me dump some money into my account, and download away like a good consumer.
• Don’t treat me like a consumer.

Come on, that’s not so hard, is it?

You know when someone asks you to join a group of become their friend or participate in something, and you know that you will not now nor will you ever want to click the Confirm/Join/Etc link?

Well, Facebook needs an option to “Terminate With Extreme Prejudice”. And a setting that goes along with it. If you hit that button, you could for instance bar the person that sent it from your wall, or just hide messages sent from that person, or un-friend that person, or a combo of some or none of the above.

That would be cool. Especially for those people who always seem to want to be my friend for a reason I can’t explain (and don’t want to).