1984, in word: nineteen eightyfour

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial announced that the future would be nothing like Orwell's vision, but in one aspect Apple was wrong. Orwell predicted a world where today's enemy becomes tommorrow's ally, and as that happened, all memory of the previous alliance or warfare was erased.

In Orwell's novel, that was Winston Smith's job: to put all records of previous alliancees down the "memory hole." In 2001 IBM, the implied enemy in the Super Bowl commercial, became an ally; Microsoft became the enemy. The trade press dutifully does Winston Smith's job of erasing everyone's memory of the relative roles of those two enteties twenty years ago.

Paul E. Ceruzzi: A History of Modern Computing, p 341f.

Nice insight, goes for a lot more than IT alliances.

About tinytalk 1.01 and TinyTalk plc

Publisher Mary J. West, legal advice Dogbert D. Adams & chief editor Alexander A. Leach, the TTCT

Full disclosure

The sole owner of this periodic media work is:

TinyTalk plc
3, Main Street
Highgate, Saint Mary Parish
Jamaica

History, Ownership, Independance

The sole owners of TinyTalk plc are Mary J. West, Alexander A. Leach and The Tinytalk Charitable Trust (TTCT) which in turn is held by the employees of the company and Dogbert D. Adams in a nondisclosed split. All of the above are postally reachable via the TTCT's main office at 3b, Mainstreet in Highgate, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica.

tinytalk was created in 1977 as a strictly jellygraphed print product with the aim of permeating educated and potentially influential people with "-ist" ideas of media and material production ecology. Its founders were Margaux S. and Emile B. with a small and completely irrelevant "young" group of would be satirists. They had done so having become disillusiond by their first thinking and writing experiments with local pupils', students' and adults' papers, all governed by tyrannic founders, owners or chief editors. Needless to say that subsequently this first version of tt failed in the market place as well as in its political endeavours.

From the late 70ies to the mid 80ies tinytalk went through a number of ownership changes and the corresponding ideological turmoil. In 1981 it received its first black and white copy machine. Primitive word processing was introduced in 1984. First dial-in to an online BBS system was achieved in 1985. In 1988 tinytalk started to build a multimedia and software development department.

In 1993 tinytalk had to seek Chapter 11 protection and then underwent a successful leveraged management buyout by the current owners. The head offices were moved to Jamaica, the business plan went through revision and the current sheet line received approval.

1995 saw the change from print to electronic distribution and presentation. In 1999 in-house software development was frozen and suspended. When Antville opened its gates the distribution arm of tinytalk was divested for good and the playout permanently moved to here.

All of this combined with the constitution and propriety protection laws of Jamaica as well as huge savings from the years of poverty will guarantee an unusually high grade of independence from outside control. If there be any problematic alignment of interests we will say so ahead. If trust and management deem that any such better be not admitted you will not know and so still be able to keep your peace of mind.

Major Focus

tinytalk is a magazine with absolutely no focus, whatsoever. The explicit tiny topics and even more so the topics selection in the navigation column might look like an indication of some kind of focus, but let us assure you, tinytalk is a magazine about all kinds of everything.

Now we are not wholly naive and somehow know that noticing even 1 per million of everything, let alone all kinds of it were impossible even if tinytalk had editors and reporters a thousandfold of what it really can afford. We also know, that in the short run and these times having no focus and being about everything seems to be a recipe for guaranteed failure.

But then again, as our doing and writing here in Highgate is oriented towards sustainable long term survival we are persuaded that being as open and unfocused as possible constitutes the best prerequisite for the declared goal set of our ownership.

Basic Direction and Methodology

As Niggas 'n' Bitches have taught us, inner strength in not a few cases can be stronger than outer. Sometimes it is possible to combine both into a kind of grand unified game. Later Dogbert A. turned up at our door and taught us the correct abstraction of that lesson:

You don't need competence if you've got attitude. Just stop fooling around!

That lesson was good enough for us to conclude a long time agreement with Dogbert as our legal advice and even partner. Observation and abstraction can bring you a long way. But at the end of that you will probably be alone.

So what is needed? Illustrative examples are the necessary tools. Before the war, our publisher Ms. West already was a champion of illustration and she keeps insisting on proliferately using that instrument even more in these dark new days. To illustrate the innovative ways of illustration she has brought to TTCT however we now use an example from between the 2 Bush wars. Its authors, adorable but sadly dissolved by nature musical band TLC, beside their music left us wonderful dialogues. So first here is one of their recorded dialogues - a poetic form which Ms. West also encourages - and then after that an examplarious illustrative poem:

L: "A good man is so hard to find." T: "Well, actually, a hard man is so good to find."

Nigga you must be crazy What you gonna do with a bitch like me I'm so good at being bad I'm the bitch you never had! No, you can't handle me.

Now ain't that a perfectly good example? Still, just to give you an original instance of what publisher West meant by illustration, here is one of from her own collection:

"It is not about the men in my life, it is about the life in my men."

And ha! What did we say?

Political Assessment and Opinion Bias Statement

Our political assessments and prejudices are firmly rooted in the errors of 17th century Dutch philosophy. Let us explain:

The basis of our ideological system consists of three seminal works of Dutch-Sephardic-Portuguese merchant, lens grinder and author Barukh (or, if you prefer the Ladino original, Bento) de Espinosa (spelled in the Verenigde Nederlanden as Benedictus Spinoza):

• Korte Verhandeling van God, de mensch en deszelvs welstand;
• Tractatus Theologico-Politicus;
• Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata;

We have to insist though that we strongly disapprove of 85 per 100 of the corpus of interpretations those treatises got in later years, namely 2 from 3 20th century scholars and members of academic elites in the united states of America and the not quite so united states of Europe. These two heuristics belong, if maybe only by the temporal and spatial setting of the sad lives of their respective authors, to the very worst we know of in abstract writing:

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus;
• Empire;

The first of them is a rather ridiculous paraphrase (of the Ethica paradoxically, not the TTP) by the turned-protestant-jewish-rich-kid slightly suicidal Austrian stutterer, failed aeronautical engineer, failed artillerist and rural primary schoolteacher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second metawork is worse still and a real thick as a brick try on analysis of the so called postwar wave of globalization, authored by a disappointed Italian catholic youth politician with an all too quick and early career to full University of Padua professor of 'dottrina dello stato' and an all too long insider practice of 'dottrina applicata delle funzionarii dello stato', a man called Antonio Negri in collaboration with a notorious US-American italophile, failed solar engineer and full Duke University professor of literature and Italian, a man apparently known by the name of Michael Hardt.

On a more modern note, the TTCT follows Niels Bohr and Freeman Dyson in the view that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity (GRT) as a classical theory of the universe and the theory of quantum mechanics or in today's terms quantum electrodynamics (QED) and quantum chromo dynamics (QCD) as non-classical theories of what we call matter and energy need and probably can not be unified in a satisfactory way. We do not know this as a truth but as a belief that it will turn out as a waste of money and human endeavour to go on and on to try. These sets of theories are two different views on two different aspects of the world, one looking into the past and bringing facts to light and the other looking into the future and computing propabilities for future events and statistics we can use for the construction of new materials and functionalities like doted silicon and powerful computing machines.

Dyson illustrates this view, when he says that the graviton, which would be to gravitation what the photon is to electromagnetism, is a fiction in the sense that we can study it mathematically but never in the real world. Gravitation waves on the other hand, which would be the analogous effect aspect of a hard to imagine number of gravitons have been searched for and have been detected in a huge set of ultra-sensitive and ultra-precise apparatuses in the real world in the last 15 years. The lowest threshold of that set of apparatus needs about 10³⁷ of the theoretical gravitons to measure anything, so its inventors would have to raise its sensitivity by that factor to be able to detect single gravitons. There is also a real difference in gravity as there seems to be no negative gravity. So you can in principle build no compensation mechanism to counter the effects of the apparatus that must work with the forces it attempts to measure, on the measurement.

Of course we can also not "see" single photons, we can only observe their effects and check if these observations fit together with our aforehand computed propabilities for sets of events and states that should occur. We could observe even larger numbers of gravitons acting together because in these huge numbers they "become" a classical field. On the other hand it is possible that the gravitational field just has no particle aspects (gravitons) in order to function the way we do experience and observe its effects.

This rather unambitious view of course has many consequences like being quite compatible with the world view of Espinosa. We cannot do today's natural sciences without either but the rather unambitious belief that the quantization of gravity is a pointless endeavour is held true by only a small number of scientists and other educated people. We nevertheless still think that the wave-particle dualism can be left where it is. Any electrodynamic field needs particles like the photon and the electron but we simply do not know if a gravity field does need such things. Its quantization has failed so far and this fact does not evoke any uneasy feeling in any of us.

A Little Help from Our Friends at the Office

Now, to be fair, we should also mention that de Espinosa, being not a native speaker in both languages, did not write in Latin or Dutch of the highest possible classical quality but did neither write Latin so bad or misunderstandable to justify these errors. Nor were all his readers as handicapped by the circumstances of geography, time and life as the above three to discourage study of his work. Nor did he leave us completely without usable aids when studying The 3 Treatises.

The first hint we give to study-aids is free as in free beer and is a complete collection of the preserved letters from and to de Espinosa which can by inference enlighten you if you are not deeply in the know of the contemporal 17th century western european meaning of latin expressions. They are - judging subjectively from our own experiences - best to be aquired in one of the better bilingual editions (estimate better from their price) with your native language as the second. (Amazon does not pay us so by principle we are not able to place a direct link here.)

In the mean time most of de Espinosas writings, the letters included, are available on the web and easy to google or bing. There are German, French and English translations of the letters, but it seems someone has yet to scan and ocr the originals. As we're in it strictly for the money that won't be us and you will still have to order, collect and pay for them. Recommended nevertheless.

If you want to get into QED and QCD without having to first learn all the necessary mathematical tools in 4 very hard semesters we recommend 3 thin books by Richard P. Feynman, "QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not So Easy Pieces". That would be a good start. Hard enough for the interested layman, even without the math. If you're up to the math of course you should do quantum field theory. We do not recommend that to but a few.

Special Services of the TTCT

For the politically and artistically interested people that do explicitely not try to avoid but do seriously aspire to sustained success in life we offer a comprehensive package of high quality textual and illustrated study and tool materials at the unsurpassed competitive price of $499.50 €499.99. If your interest is credible and plausible you are welcome to mail to tinytalk-services(at)jambiz.co.jm for information on our end user licensing requirements and our shipping conditions.

Quality Control at Tinytalk

The editorial management of tinytalk and the owners of TinyTalk plc are dogmatic about the political and ethical lines of its media. Every editor working for us must sign a 57 page contract as to those lines and is semiannually examined about her faithful adherence to them. Peer interrogation is encouraged and guaranteed to be held every quarter.

Adding up

Have been reading Doc Searl's older stuff. Some of what this guru wrote is near pure nonsense.

Most of what i read is in text books. How should i link those? Free ads, as in free beer, for Amazon and smart Jeff?

Good Idea

Pamela Samuelson We consider it a good idea to follow the work of this woman here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/

She is one of the foremost experts on IP (intellectual property that is, not internet protocol). On her website you will find lots of concise and well prepared material to this important topic.

We had her some time ago in these very pages here on tinytalk. We are fans.

A Remark On Competing With MS

An old Monghol saying goes: "Don't take to the weapons of your enemy unless you can improve them substantially."

To analyze the weapons by which MS fought and fights their competition we must first know what they are up to.

What MS has been doing for a long time is not what their enemies always said the did. What they did is the same thing that we do and that all the others do: Making money by raiding the large body of federally subsidized academic and corporate work, that has been worked out in the US and elsewhere and that has been put into the public domain by virtue of federal democratic law: information procession theory, logic, algorithms, OS-theory, language design and so on and on.

They have been very good at implementing this and selling the resulting products (e.g. Xenix). Only in recent years have they shown serious weaknesses.

"To ignore MS" as Mr. Cringely says is important for companies when they design a product strategy but should not be done dogmatically. There is still a lot to learn from MS History.

While Jobs drives Apple back into its normal rational greed mode and IBM might look like a big future winner, MS is being confronted with the situation of being the empire themselves. This is a role that they are not very well prepared for: A lot of their energy and spirit came from being the rebels against the evil empire of IBM with an oppressive 70% marketshare worldwide in HW and SW. In this, MS is like their environment, the US. The US too, still has not really accepted the fact that they are not the Rebel Alliance but the Empire and accordingly and responsibly should act as such.

MS now have little to go up against and lots of turf to defend. IBM on the other hands bet some of their cards on associating with the rebel spirit of Linux and Java. They have still a far way to go. Let' see.

Still nobody but Google - who have no old turf to defend and newer research - knows by which weapons to beat MS if not by ignoring them or going into a niche for 5 years or so. If anyone wants to work with their weapons they have to do better and I mean really implement better and they must sell better and I mean really sell better.

MS used to treat developers better than their competitors which was a great strength because it helps in both fields. Being the empire means they cannot do this anymore as well. Oracle and Sun have not learned this lesson yet. Only some open source projects treat developers better than MS. IBM at least tries to. A bit. This is a beginning but no guarantee.

Let us ignore MS in what we do but not in what we can learn.