So it seems that Yahoo will not fall to the Dark Side, at least not for the moment. In these days it has been interesting to watch the reactions to Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. Especially among passionate users of some services owned by Yahoo, like Flickr [the partisans, the moderates, the attention seekers]. Suddenly everyone was talking about it, in most cases expressing their concern. Many people sounded very clear in their positions, even if I didn't hear nor read many clear reasons to be for, or against, the bid. Why is it so controversial? Is it a matter of size? MS is a huge company that would become even more huge after buying Yahoo. There is a natural opposition to massive, global companies; I guess in the same way that we are wired to reject massively powerful governments and stronger rival tribes. Specially when such conglomerates tend to pile data (our data) and control the raw materials that are building the digital age, whatever that be. But even so, what's the big deal? Yahoo is not small, neither, nor are Google and Apple (incidentally, both are companies that many people who criticise MS's bid seem to love). The revenue of the world's largest company is almost seven times bigger than Microsoft's — are we watching it even just as closely as we watch MS? Do we think that evil Microsoft is going to corrupt and pervert for the sake of destruction all beautiful creatures that sprout happy in the gardens of Yahoo? I don't think so. MS is not trying to buy Yahoo to kill it and then kick it out of its way. In other cases, MS would pay whatever is necessary to buy a small or medium company that is itching its neck, competing in a common area. But that is not the case with Yahoo. Yahoo and Google are competing against themselves in their market, while MS plays in a different arena. MS wants to buy Yahoo to use it, to learn from it, to inherit its base of users. MS is trying to enter the Internet through one of the tall doors by bribing the bouncer — its intention is not to brick the door up. My bet is that MS will not alter things too much and that it will try to avoid clashes with the established community of Yahoo users. Besides, we already saw cases of small companies being acquired by giants in which those deals didn't break the original spirit of the company but instead remained almost transparent to users (Google buying YouTube, Yahoo buying Flickr and del.icio.us, CBS buying Last.fm). Is it because we hate Microsoft software and their lack of moral principles, in particular for what regards to standards, open source and GNU/Linux? Oh, hell, yes. We don't like Microsoft's products and practices, and there are plenty of reasons for that. But hang on a minute, isn't MS just a company? And aren't they playing fair this time? So why are we that indignant about it? Shall we get indignant if MS buys Yahoo? Short answer: “No. The web is a free market too. Companies get sold, bought, liquidated and merged every day. Six Apart bought LiveJournal and then sold it to SUP Fabrik. As long as Yahoo and all its services keep honouring their ToS you should be fine. There is no base for angriness.” Long answer: “Well, sort of. Feel indignant if you please. After all, registering an account in Yahoo Mail or sharing your precious sites via del.icio.us is not like buying a bicycle. Internet services are radically different from tangible goods, and even from software. Internet services are kind of subscriptions. They evolve. They grow as your network of contacts expands and as you move more stuff in them (be it pictures, CV's, sound samples or routes on maps). Derived applications, mashups and bridges to other services and communities are already features that we take for granted. More importantly (and I think this is what, almost subconsciously, bothers most people) Internet services have styles*, and* souls*; probably much more than traditional services or products. It's not written anywhere, but you definitely expect Windows Live Spaces, MySpace and WordPress.com to progress in different directions and to do things in very different ways, even if they actually provide similar services. And that distinctive touch is usually clear from the moment the service is launched, because for web companies that provides their identity. Their style is the USP for the users who believe in that particular style. Take Flickr. Because we know how Flickr* behaves*, we assume that it is going to do things in a certain way. We assume that it will be friendly to mashups using their open API, make the most of Flash for their GUI, protect their sober design against distasteful CSS by users, keep their orientation to tags, geolocation, multiple taxonomies, etc. That is why Flickr users should feel betrayed if after an acquisition of Yahoo by MS all that good stuff turned into things like* ‘click here to export this set as a PowerPoint presentation’, ‘download ActiveX to display the notes on the photo’ and ‘it looks like you're trying to upload a landscape photo of a big zebra among green bushes. Would you like to tag the photo*“big zebra green bushes”?’”* Now, which is the right answer?

Se estremeció al pensar que aquella vez podía ser, por fin, diferente. Que lo que sentía por la chica era real e iba a permanecer. Que por fin estaba poniendo a alguien por delante de sí mismo. Y que al hacerlo se sentía completo y feliz. —De pronto me siento muy cansada — la oyó suspirar. Él se incorporó y se acercó al sillón en el que estaba sentada. Sin decir una palabra acarició su melena negra con devoción y la besó en la cara. —Pues duerme, no debes retrasarlo más. Salgo y te dejo sola. Ella le sonrió y dejó caer los párpados. Estaba recostada en el sillón que siempre usaba. Así que dejó el dormitorio cerrando la puerta tras de sí. La certeza que estaba creciendo en él le había dado un ánimo insospechado. Como quien acaba de llegar a lo alto de una colina y empieza con alegría el descenso, sintiéndose más liviano. Como alguien a quien dan una noticia enorme y buena. Las imágenes del día no abandonaban su cabeza. Habían hecho el amor durante mucho rato, con violenta ternura. Recordaba la sensación de tener el cuerpo de ella apretado contra el suyo con tanta nitidez que creía sentir aún su calor en el estómago. Había algo especial en la forma en que ella le besaba, no había encontrado eso antes en ninguna amante; no sabía ponerle un nombre pero sentía que era una señal. Confirmando la sospecha de los últimos meses. Había encontrado por fin lo que buscaba. Se sentía como un niño. Nada más iba a importar ya en el futuro si ella seguía perteneciéndole. Y la empresa había cumplido el contrato. Si alguna vez tuvo dudas, éstas se habían esfumado en la felicidad y en la certeza de tantos días como aquél. Entró en el despacho y autorizó el último pago; nunca se había deshecho de tanto dinero con tanta satisfacción. Al cruzar de nuevo el pasillo se detuvo frente a la puerta cerrada, se oía un suave zumbido tras ella. Calculó unas seis o siete horas más. Decidió que a la mañana siguiente, cuando se le hubiese terminado de cargar la batería, le diría que la amaba.   (See the original opening).

(References are at the bottom).

“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the ferocity of the copyright laws in America, which are in effect written by the large entertainment conglomerates. The most famous example of this is the Mickey Mouse effect, whereby every time the Mouse is about to come out of copyright, the term of copyright is extended. This has happened 11 times in the past 40 years.”

“There is a clause in US film contracts which awards the producers rights ‘in perpetuity and throughout the universe and for any and all forms of expression whether now existing or hereafter devised’. As far as I can tell, the only loophole in that is if you fell through a crack in the space-time fabric of the universe into a parallel one.”

“The idea of copyright began as an argument over books; and it is over books, both as intellectual property and as physical entities, that change and contention now looms.”

“A library is a machine for storing and retrieving information.”

“Google is digitising as much of the out-of-copyright sections of the collection as it can manage. That, in practice, means the 19th century.”

“Google never gives out figures about anything, but I was told that the Book Search programme already includes more than a million books; and the number is growing daily. Only the world's very biggest libraries are bigger than that.”

“80% of everything that has ever been published is still in copyright; 10% of that is still in print.”

“Nobody even knows how many books there are. The best guess seems to be about 32m.”

“Sceptics point to a contrast between Google's attitude to everyone else's information, which it wants to make available free, and its attitude to its own proprietary information — the company is famous for its close-mouthedness; it won't even say anything about how or where it scans the books.”

Last Saturday John Lanchester wrote in “The guardian” a great article entitled “It's a steal”. In a previous post we learnt what a “newspaper of record” is. Today I think Zugaldía may be delighted to read about “copyright libraries”.

English: throughout this week this blog will be highly unreliable due to planned engineering works. I'm migrating the domain tripu.info along with this web site and all *@tripu.info e-mail addresses to a new server. Expect funny things to happen. Apologies in advance if that puts bogus entries in your RSS or if I miss any message from you during the process.

Español: durante los próximos días voy a migrar esta bitácora y mis direcciones de correo tipo *@tripu.info a un nuevo servidor. Yo me voy a liar y tu agregador de RSS a lo peor también. Y puede que pierda algunos emilios durante el proceso. Pido disculpas de antemano.

Aquellos que leéis esta bitácora y conocéis a XiRicK, sabed que ya tiene bitácora propia. Conociendo la instancia de XiRicK en el Mundo Real™, puede esperarse material original y jugoso.

I think journalists are a funny species. At least Spanish journalists are. In Spain we are sadly used to mistranslated English numerals, for instance. There aren't “seis billones de seres humanos” in this planet, for god's sake. And if Spain's GDP amounted to as many “billones de euros” as some Spanish journalists believe, we would be by far the largest economy in the world. They lazily adopt foreign words and expressions in a horrible way. “Remover un obstáculo” will never help solving anything — actually it would be rather difficult to do unless such obstacle was made up of mud. In Spanish, the demonym “americano” covers all inhabitants of Patagonia as well as all Americans (we specifically have “estadounidense” for those), so there are no “Américas” for us. But many journalists even display an astonishing ignorance of the rules of their own language. If some prize has been awarded 42 times before now, the current award is not “la cuarenta y tres edición”, but “la cuadragésima tercera”. And what to say about their coverage of science and technology news? I think British media are more rigorous, but in Spain many journalists still call the WWW “el ciberespacio”. I know some folks who spend more time within the internet than out of it, and they almost never use that word. For some Spanish journalists, anything that remotely sounds computerish is always “virtual”, “multimedia” and “interactivo”. As if all that was not enough, sometimes it seems that they don't even ponder the meaning of what they write. This evening I read on the electronic edition of “El país” this headline:

“Ryanair ofrecerá en 2008 un viaje a la Luna de bajo coste”

My first thought was that Ryanair might be planning to start flying sub-orbital some day. It sounded odd, but still feasible. But when I went on reading the body, the news were that Ryanair was about to have such space flight as soon as next year! No need to read more; I assumed that April fools' day had soaked once more in the media of countries that don't recognize the significance of that day. One hour later I come back to find that “El país” has edited the article prepending some apologies, but not mentioning that they were victims of a prank! In fact they link to the item by Europa press and to Ryanair's news release itself, as if saying “they told us; it's not our fault”. But reality is you only need to read the latter to detect the joke flashing before your eyes: “[…] By 2020, Ryanair Orbital aims to make the moon as attractive a holiday destination as Alicante or Málaga. […] Reach for the stars from just 1c (one-way excludes taxes and charges)”. “El país” is no unreliable e-zine, but probably the most important newspaper of record in Spain. Although sometimes it lacks a good proofreader.

Lo que sigue es un ladrillo ombligocéntrico que no puede interesar a nadie más que a mí mismo. Seguro que tienes mejores cosas que hacer que leerlo :¬) El 21 de marzo del año pasado llegué a Londres Heathrow, solo, con mis maletas, para buscar piso y trabajo (no tenía nada excepto a mi amiga Araceli y su hospitalidad). Tres días después tenía una habitación en un piso compartido (que cambiaría luego por otro). Un mes y pico más tarde empecé a trabajar en una pequeña empresa, en la que sigo a día de hoy. El miércoles de la semana pasada hizo un año que vivo en Inglaterra. He batido pues mi récord personal de permanencia: unos diez meses en Milán, prácticamente un año en Sevilla… quién sabe cuánto tiempo en Londres. Suelo reflexionar sobre mi situación; ése es el tipo de cosas que uno puede hacer en mis circunstancias. Pero parece que cumplir el periodo redondo lo hace más trascendente. Así que en estos días estoy intentando hacer el diff de mi vida entre la revisión de hace un año y la actual. E intento ser objetivo. Me parece importante, porque en función de esos cambios habrá que decidir qué hacer a continuación. Si el desarrollo ha sido bueno, habrá que seguir en la misma dirección. Si las cosas no funcionan bien según el diseño inicial, quizás haya que crear una etiqueta e iniciar una nueva rama (y si hay que hacer una migración, ésta podría ser complicada). Podría ser necesario, incluso, revertir los cambios en ciertas partes y volver a revisiones anteriores. Ahí va un diff caprichoso, desordenado, incompleto y seguramente no tan objetivo: Me queda un año menos para hacer cosas antes de espicharla. Con 26'5 años, hace tiempo que el cristal en la palma de mi mano es amarillo. Pero también tengo un año más de experiencia, y es un poco menos probable que cometa los mismos errores que haya podido cometer en los 26'5 años anteriores. También puedo contar más batallitas; tantas como caben en un año. Como persona, soy un año más «interesante» y también un año más coñazo. (Lógicamente, y dado que no tengo ningún control sobre el factor «devenir inexorable del tiempo», todo esto importa poco en realidad). Mi DMSQ es más alta ahora. Tengo muy cerca a un puñado de personas a las que quiero, pero la inmensa mayoría de mis familiares y amigos están en «zona 7» (también llamada «zona Ryanair») y no puedo verlos sin coger un avión (aunque al menos ahora me es más fácil viajar a cualquier sitio que hace un año). Muchas de mis relaciones se han debilitado, o han cambiado significativamente en este año. De todos es sabido que el amistón y el cariñón, partículas subatómicas responsables de las relaciones humanas, tienden a desintegrarse en partículas de menor energía cuando se ven obligadas a viajar distancias superiores a unos pocos cientos de km. Mi día a día es bastante más variado de lo que era hace un año, por el simple hecho de estar aquí y ser un guiri. Incluso la rutina de los días de trabajo sin nada especial es un poco más interesante. Soy una especie de turista en estado semivegetativo durante 24 horas al día, aunque también sea un currito con todas las de la ley. En general, ahora me es más difícil relacionarme con la gente que tengo alrededor. Da igual que sea un mero dependiente, un colaborador del trabajo o un amigo potencial: el idioma y la cultura son una barrera a menos que uno sea oriundo o bilingüe (y yo ya nunca lo seré). Relacionándome con nativos soy menos elocuente, preciso, divertido, ocurrente y educado. ¡No es que sea todo eso hablando en español! Pero en cualquier caso, en inglés lo soy aún menos. Mi inglés es bastante mejor que hace un año. Supongo. De malo a regular. Me es muy difícil evaluar cuánto he aprendido en este tiempo. Pero sí creo que lo entiendo bastante mejor y lo leo con menos esfuerzo. También me siento un poco más cómodo hablándolo y mi vocabulario se ha ampliado. En cuanto a mi italiano, se ha mantenido estable con pronóstico reservado; está un año más oxidado, pero al menos lo uso de vez en cuando. He empezado a aprender japonés, que es algo que siempre había querido hacer, y que me ilusiona. Mi sueldo neto es mucho más alto que hace un año, incluso pagando un porcentaje mayor de impuestos. El alquiler de mi habitación, el transporte, la comida y en general cualquier cosa también me cuestan mucho más ahora, pero aún así la diferencia es positiva. Además, las cosas que cuestan más o menos lo mismo en cualquier parte del mundo (un iPod, un billete de avión, el alojamiento de esta bitácora) son para mí bastante más baratas ahora en términos relativos. Hay muchas más cosas ocurriendo a mi alrededor. Sea ocio, deporte, cultura o política, siempre hay mil cosas importantes a escasos kilómetros de mí. Y no importa que la compare con Granada, Sevilla o Madrid: esta ciudad siempre gana en cantidad y en variedad. Londres es, oficialmente, «la polla» (Golan dixit). Lo malo es que no estoy aprovechando todas esas posibilidades por falta de ánimo y de quórum. Como peor. Aquí tengo poca variedad de productos naturales sin alterar (¡pescado!) y abunda la comida facilona, artificial y no muy sana. Me da menos el sol, hay menos luz, el invierno es chungo. Aunque esto no lo llevo tan mal como me temía (ventajas de ser un friki misántropo intrapuertas). Lo bueno es que en primavera y en verano los días son aún más largos que en España, y no hace tanto calor. Etcétera. Ahora tengo que dejarlo reposar con tranquilidad.

…found out there.

“Say ‘What’ Again” by Jarratt Moody. A brilliant reinterpretation of one of “Pulp Fiction”'s most memorable scenes:

Y pasa el tiempo, y me duele igual. Igual que hace un año e igual que hace cinco. Y parece que nada cambia nunca.

“Always stays the same, nothing ever changes. English summer rain seems to last for ages.”

— Placebo

Y no sé qué voy a hacer (pero algo tendré que hacer).

The other day, as my train slowly entered the station and arrived to the platform, I noticed something falling to the floor when somebody got up to leave the train. The mature woman sitting behind me had dropped something accidentally. Or so I thought. It was a book. I stooped to pick it up for her — trying to read its title at the same time, of course. It was “On Beauty”, by Zadie Smith. I already knew that book because it received very good critics and won some important prize, and had been since heavily promoted here in England. I had been seeing it in the hands of commuters lately. I handed the book back to the lady expecting the preceptive “oh thank you very much” plus broad smile that I so much appreciate since I arrived to this country. Instead of that, the woman made me a gesture of subtle negation and stammered out something that I didn't understand. Suddenly it dawned on me: this lovely lady is a bookcrosser in disguise! I was happy with the possibility of rescuing a book from the wild for the second time in my life. But I saw no sticker of Bookcrossing on its cover. Why? Then the woman, noticing my confusion, looked at me again in guiltiness and confessed in a whisper: “I can't stand it. I don't like it. Do you want it?” Sure. Her guilty confession kept me laughing at intervals for the rest of that day. She was no bookcrosser. She was a bookdropper. Cool. Next time you realise that you actually loathe a book that you began to read just because all your friends were loving it, don't suffer. Instead, perform a sophisticated act of generous bookdropping in some crowded place. (Just make sure before that nobody is close enough as to offer it back to you). That might save yourself hundreds of boring pages and quite a few pathetic attempts to highbrow comments among your mates. And it's a smart, environmentally friendly move which Al Gore himself would be proud campaigning for. I wonder how many books are bought (and maybe read) just because of ads and trends. I myself have put it now in my queue, but after some other more important books. By the way, bookdropping.com is already registered, but bookdropping.info remains available…