brainwagon

I normally read the blog of W9OY for its ham radio content, but this morning he waxed poetical on the impending cessation of human space flights here in the United States. His vantage point in sight of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape make it especially poignant for him.

Software Defined Ham Radio: End of an Era.

First of all, I’m a child of the Apollo era. I remember watching launches on our old Zenith black and white. I remember dashing home from Church at age 5 to hear news of the Apollo 11 lander. My interest in science and technology was fueled by the fires of Apollo, and the idea that they could be harnessed to achieve great things for all mankind. After setting foot on the moon, who knew what the actual limit of mankind would be?

But for all that, I’m not especially broken up about the cessation of human space flights. The reasons are essentially three fold:

First, there is a cost/benefit ratio. Sending humans into space costs money, and a lot of it. Humans are capable of performing some tasks in space which are impossible for current machines (like the Hubble reservicing), but were servicing not a possibility, the money spent on it would have been channeled into other areas, perhaps equally as fruitful for scientists. Compare the budget for reservicing the HST to the total cost for the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea. It is much simpler to design satellites when freed from the need to keep the soft, squishy humans inside within the a gassy envelope of the proper temperature, within G limits, and shielded from damaging radiation.

Secondly, NASA funding has essentially become a source of pork barrel jobs. Congress hands out funding not because of any particular dedication to space travel, or the development of new technologies, but because for some of them the money they hand out buys jobs in their districts, and those jobs mean re-election. Every president since Kennedy has given flowery speeches about the importance of “sending men to the stars”, and frankly they’ve all been insincere. The reality is that NASA was a vast employer, and keeping those jobs going meant political stability for the Congressmen and Senators who were the beneficiaries of this federal generosity.

Lastly, I believe that if we are to have a lasting presence in space, it must be driven by economic factors. We have lauded the pioneers of the American West as bold innovators and frontiersmen, but for the most part they were people who saw an economic opportunity that didn’t exist where they were. They left their jobs to homestead a farm, or to search for gold, or just to sell goods to those that did. The federal government didn’t manufacture this opportunity. The next stage of space exploration will be fueled by the economic opportunities exploited by individuals and companies.

I’ve visited the VAB. I’ve seen the Saturn V, and thrilled to the multimedia presentations on the Apollo 11 in their visitor’s center, which reminded me of the thrill I had at age five. Heck, I’ve even had my salary paid as part of a NASA grant back when I was in graduate school over twenty years ago. But with 40+ year history of manned space flight, a grand total of about four hundred fifty people have been in space. 18 Americans and 4 Russians died there (about 5% of those launched).

It is likely that no reasonable economic case can be made for men in space until the costs are reduced by at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude and the safety of spaceflight increased by similar orders of magnitude. That sounds difficult, but those numbers are not significantly different than the increase in reliability in conventional air travel over the last three quarters of a century. The government played a role in this, but it didn’t have to own airlines to do so. I suspect it will be the same with human spaceflight. Companies like Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic and probably ones that have not even been formed yet will lead the way for humans to go back to space.

And, quite frankly I think we have bigger things to worry about down here on earth. Things like health care for the sick. Like education. Like feeding the hungry. Do we really want to spend billions putting a few more humans in orbit when there are so many pressing issues that Americans (and indeed, the people of the world) face every single day?

From JFK’s Inaugural Address:

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Indeed.

Phillip Torrone pointed out a dreadful article on CNN.com today:

Digital piracy hits the e-book industry – CNN.com

A few things that I’d like to directly comment on:

“With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away,” Alexie added. “It terrifies me.”

This is dreadfully annoying, because “open-source culture” has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy. Open-source culture is actually based upon the idea that artists should be allowed to choose (for themselves! gasp!) the conditions under which their works are used and shared. Nothing in the open source world does anything to deprive anyone of anything they own: indeed, to be enforceable, it absolutely relies on copyright law. But even more annoying is that someone can be quoted in a CNN story basically equating open source culture with piracy.

“Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories,” said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. “We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut.”

Textbooks are an interesting case: they are frequently pirated for a couple of reasons. First, they are enormously expensive. Ridiculously expensive. 25 years ago when I was in college, they were expensive, but now, they are ridiculously so. What’s more is that publishers have worked hard to destroy any potential resale value for books on the used market. They do this by deliberately obsoleting books by creating only short runs of a version of a textbook, immediately replacing it with a “new version”. In order to keep all students using the same version of the text (for uniformity), professors are then required to ask that all students use the most recent and available version of the text. This drives down resale prices for the old versions, and creates a single supplier situation for the publisher. Combine this with attempts to “license” medical and legal textbooks to students, and it’s no wonder that students seek a way to reduce the $500-$1000 or more that they’ll spend on books in a semester.

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King’s novel, “Under the Dome,” although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Guess what? That’s not going to work. Here’s why. Projects like DIYBookScanner already exist, and can be replicated for a few hundred bucks. Using a book scanner, any hardcover book can be converted into digital form in a matter of hours. And as (I think) Mike Godwin said, digital piracy isn’t like trying to keep cows in a corral. All it takes is one smart cow to break the copy protection or scan a book, and then thousands of other cows can follow suit. And quite frankly, there is no possible way to stop it.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

And yet, as any one with a minute to spend on bittorrent might be able to tell you, it’s not hard to find scans of any Harry Potter book. And yet, Rowling has sold gazillions of dead tree books.

Ultimately, the headline of this article is totally misleading. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over piracy, those who buy e-books buy more real books. Those who download music buy more music. For every negative consequence of new technology, there is a positive opportunity. Some people will realize this and benefit from this new technology, creating new markets and products. Others will try to cling to business practices which they are comfortable with, and will fight a losing battle against the new technology by annoying their customers with new annoyances to “protect” their works.

It’s been quite some time since I had a decent rant on this blog, and I didn’t sleep well last night, and I am feeling a tiny bit grumpy, so pretty much anything will set me off on a rant. I figure I may as well get it off my chest now, then I can get down to work.

Comment spammers, you guys really suck.

I enjoy having a blog. I don’t try to support it with ads. It’s a flat out expense: my $8 or $10 a month buys my hosting, and I can run Wordpress and I’m really quite happy. To date, I’ve made 3234 posts (this will be 3235) and have approved 1,588 comments in the six years or so its been going on. For everyone who has found anything of genuine interest here, I thank you for checking it out, and occasionallly leaving your genuine comments.

But here’s my reality: since October, 2006 (the earliest date I have good statistics for) my blog, the spam filter Akismet that Wordpress ships with has caught 202,756 spam comments. In some sense, these aren’t the worst problem, since they are automatically caught and routed directly to the bit bucket. Nobody ever sees these posts. They don’t generate even a single click through. But the ratio of legitimate comments to fake comments is about 200:1 or so. That means that the vast majority of the actual cost in terms of bandwidth that I see is likely to go to these comment spammers. If we could eliminate spammers, there would be lots more, lots cheaper bandwidth available for us all.

But another kind of comment spam is currently sneaking past my filters occasionally. If you have no links inside your post, but merely use the ability to specify a URL with your ID, it will often make it through my spam filter and get posted. Many of these “comments” contain empty platitudes like “Wow, this is a great post, I’m bookmarking your site for later.” Who are they kidding? It’s annoying to have to read this kind of banal crap, whose only purpose is to send you to some overseas pharmacy where you can get drugs for that “special part of the male anatomy”.

Bleh! Comment spammers are going to a huge amount of effort to annoy us all. Can’t we all just rally with pitchforks and make the world a better place?

I now return you to your regularly scheduled morning.

The federal government is currently considering the possibility of legislation banning the use of cell phones and texting. I’m mostly okay with that, because, quite frankly, it’s obvious that people aren’t very good at operating a cell phone or texting while driving, a fact which has been reinforced by study after study. But while many radio amateurs accept this conclusion with respect to cell phones, radio amateurs as a whole seem to think that it doesn’t apply to operation of an amateur radio transmitter while the vehicle is in motion. Witness the quotation from ARRL CEO David Sumner:

According to ARRL Chief Executive Officer David Sumner, K1ZZ, it boils down to the difference between simplex — when only one message can be sent in either direction at one time — and duplex — a communications mode, such as a telephone system, that provides simultaneous transmission and reception in both directions. Harrison, citing Sumner's 40-plus years of experience as an Amateur Radio operator, puts it this way: “Simplex, two-way radio operation is simply different than duplex, cell phone use. Two-way radio operation in moving vehicles has been going on for decades without highway safety being an issue. The fact that cell phones have come along does not change that.”

via ARRLWeb: ARRL NEWS: ARRL President Presents League’s Views on Distracted Driving Laws to Safety Advocacy Group.

But here’s the thing that bothers me. This is just a bold assertion: that operation of simplex radios is inherently safer than duplex radios. Here is what the NSC President Janet Froetscher had to say about the subject:

The NSC position is grounded in science. There is significant evidence that talking on cell phones while driving poses crash risk four times that of other drivers. We are especially concerned with cell phone use because more than 100 million people engage in this behavior, with many doing so for long periods of time each day. This exposes these 100 million people and everyone who shares the road with them to this increased crash risk every day. This combination of risk and exposure underlies our specific focus on cell phones.

We are not aware of evidence that using amateur radios while driving has significant crash risks. We also have no evidence that using two-way radios while driving poses significant crash risks. Until such time as compelling, peer-reviewed scientific research is presented that denotes significant risks associated with the use of amateur radios, two-way radios, or other communication devices, the NSC does not support legislative bans or prohibition on their use.

That is not to say that there is no risk associated with drivers using amateur or two-way radios. Best safety practice is to have one’s full attention on their driving, their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. Drivers who engage in any activity that impairs any of these constitutes an increased risk. While the specific risk of radio use while driving is unmeasured and likely does not approach that of cell phones, there indeed is some elevated risk to the drivers, their passengers and the public associated with 650,000 amateur radio operators who may not, at one time or another, not concentrate fully on their driving.

This is widely being circulated as vindication of the idea that operation of a ham radio while simultaneously operating a motor vehicle is safe. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is an accurate representation of Froetscher’s position. Froetscher merely said that she was unaware of any scientific, peer reviewed studies that demonstrated a significant safety risk. As we should all know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. David Sumner’s assertion that simplex is inherently safer than duplex is just that: an assertion, and is not evidence.

The fact is that humans are very bad at evaluating risks and their own performances at tasks. That’s why we have scientific studies like the ones that we have for operating cell phones. Because there are 100 million cell phones being used literally every day, there is plenty of data to sift through on their potential role in accidents. Even so, it’s taken about a decade for the true extent of the risks involved in cell phone operation to become documented.

There are only about 660,000 or so hams licensed in the U.S. The vast majority of these do not operate mobile. The vast majority of those do probably spend most of their time listening. In such a case, we’d expect that the number of accidents caused to be much lower than those caused by cell phones, even if mobile operation was every bit as dangerous as using a cell phone. The overall instance of accidents may be only 0.1% or less of the levels we see from cell phones. One study estimated that 6000 accidents might have been caused by cell phones in California in 2001. Even if ham radio were as dangerous, we might expect to see only six accidents in the entire year from ham radio operation.

I’m not saying that we should outlaw mobile ham radio operation. Without evidence that it is dangerous, I think it is premature to make it illegal. But I also think that it is inappropriate to confidently assert that we understand what the risks are, and that we actually present no significant risk to ourselves or to others on the road.

Addendum: Ben makes an additional point which I think is worthy of mention. The ARRL is in part justifying their opposition to bans on mobile radio by suggesting that amateur radio serves a vital purpose in supporting emergency communications. I think this is a somewhat odd claim to make, since it should be fairly obvious that the overwhelming majority of emergencies are reported by calling 911 on the cell phone. Many states have exemptions for mobile cell phone use in times of emergencies: you can report an accident while calling 911 while your car is in motion. The ARRL could choose to suggest to its members that only emergency communications be carried out while the car is in motion, but instead, they suggest that the possibility of using a mobile radio to report an emergency justifies their free use for routine communications while the vehicle is in motion. I agree with Ben, I don’t think this is a reasonable “best practice” suggestion.

One slightly convincing argument that I haven’t heard, but which I can imagine someone making is that without the incentive of being allowed mobile operation, radio amateurs won’t install mobiles in their vehicles, and therefore we lose a valuable resource for reporting accidents and dealing with emergencies. This is an argument which I might seriously consider, and could be made compelling with the right sort of quantifiable evidence to determine the tradeoffs of different regulatory strategies.

This link is making the rounds of a couple of different mailing lists I’m on.

Activision games to bypass consoles – News at GameSpot

When he wasn’t promoting the company’s games or technology, Kotick was celebrating its laserlike focus on the bottom line. He pointed to changes he implemented in the past as being particularly beneficial, such as designing the employee incentive program so it “really rewards profit and nothing else.”

“You have studio heads who five years ago didn’t know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO’s office pretty regularly,” Kotick said.

He later added, “We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

Oh, goody. And…

The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” of the global economic downturn, adding, “We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”

In a way, I do understand. We are all in business to pay for our housing, our food and our health insurance. If we are lucky, we get to put some away for retirement, and even get to enjoy some of life’s little pleasures (many of which, despite the claim that the best things are free, often seem to require money). We have to look at things like costs in our planning, and we have to be aware of global changes in the market for our products to ensure that we remain employed. That kind of planning isn’t always the funnest thing to do, nor does cheerful optimism keep companies afloat.

But seriously, it needn’t be a death march. Fear can be a strong motivator, but it’s not sustainable, and it’s no great muse when it comes to creativity and innovation. Kotick’s entire strategy is to acquire and market sequels to existing products, and to milk them on every platform in every way possible. I can understand why bean counters like this: it’s essentially a low risk way to maximize profits. And, in fact, he’s been pretty darned successful doing precisely that. And, he’s not alone: a great deal of the film industry works precisely this way.

I’ve recently gained a slightly more charitable view toward sequels. They are successful, and it’s not entirely because people are sheep. It is because they saw something in the original work which they liked, and they want more of it. Their desire to slap down money on sequels is a compliment to the original work, and to their trust in you to continue to deliver that kind of positive experience that they originally remembered. But here is the tricky thing: it doesn’t last. We see this time and time again in the film industry. A great movie becomes a good franchise, then an okay franchise, and ultimately peters out into a dreadful mess. Occasionally, these franchises can be resurrected, but it usually takes a completely new approach by a completely new director/producer who isn’t afraid to bring something new to the table and take risks. Witness Abrams’ revival of the moribund Star Trek franchise if you need a recent example.

Great movies (and great games) are the result of great direction and great technical staff doing the work they love. People who are that good at their job aren’t going to be content with just doing the same thing over again: they are going to be looking for ew challenges and new opportunities. Hence, you generally end up with paler and paler imitations of the original painting, until it’s just something to wrap your fish and chips.

Bleh.

Pardon me for this diversion from usual topics.

While commuting in with my wife this morning, I was listening to a talk show discussing a reality TV show (specifically, the truly horrendous Real Housewives of New York, a show which obviously stretches the meaning of the words “real” and “housewives”). In it, one of the radio hosts expressed the idea that so-called “reality television” didn’t really give you a fair view of the people on the show, because they could be edited in anyway they like, and made to look like either a sinner or a saint at the whim of the editor.

Here’s the thing that struck me: in the real “real world”, we don’t even need to have an editor do that. If someone sees you just in one meeting a year, they are seeing a very edited version of who you are. If they see you only at work, they see a very edited version of who you are. If people only know you through the Internet, they are seeing a very edited version of who you are. Even if they only see you in public with friends, you might be very different in your own home with your family.

Everyone is edited by circumstance. (That’s my new phrase, and I’m applying for trademark protection.)

What does this mean? It means that perhaps we shouldn’t be quick to judge other people. What we are seeing of them is probably only the slimmest version of what they are really like, and we should exercise a little restraint we either condemn or praise them.

It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the number of months late that Windows Vista will slip, and it is now feared that when they finally do ship Vista 119 months late, it will cause…

Okay, okay, it’s not quite that bad yet, but it’s just about that bad. Today Microsoft announced that they won’t begin retail shipments of Windows Vista until January 2007. Microsoft began talking about Longhorn, Vista’s predecessor back in 2001, even before Windows XP was out, and they were predicting a shipment for it late in 2003. In August 2004, Microsoft had to admit that they were basically screwed, and had to start over again, dropping many important features that they had touted like their new WinFS. And it keeps slipping, and slipping, and slipping…

According to the WSJ, Steve Sinofsky, senior VP of Office at Microsoft will be taking over for Jim Allchin, who currently is the copresident of the Platfrom Products and Services devision. Nothing like seeing a change in leadership right at a critical juncture in product development.

Microsoft has deep pockets, and will likely weather this storm fairly well. The guys who are going to take it on the chin are guys like Dell and HP who will have a lean Christmas as people delay their PC purchases until after the holidays.

Robert Scoble had this to say:

I’ve learned that dates in the software industry are likely to slip and I’m glad that our management is still paying more attention to product quality and customer and partner feedback than trying to meet some date. Yes, it’s painful. Yes, it’s embarrassing. But we have been through product slips before (before I was a Microsoft employee I was a beta tester on Windows 2000 which slipped years after the first test CDs arrived) and I’d rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.

It is true: delays in shipping software are rampant in the industry, but that’s really just an excuse. Good companies ship software on time. Good companies get software into the hands of customers who want to pay for it as often as they possibly can. Apple doesn’t talk up their new releases of their software: they just release them. Adobe doesn’t chat up their releases: they just release them. When Vista finally does ship, it will be years late, without many of the innovations that were originally planned.

And the closing sentence of Scoble’s post implies that either we’d get a cruddy product, or we’d get it late. I suspect we are going to get both. As I have mentioned before, Vista seems to be more about placating various current and potential Microsoft partners than delivering compelling, enabling technology to the consumer. My years in software have taught me one thing: if it isn’t stable as it goes along, it isn’t going to be stable when it ships. You simply can’t add quality at the end of the production cycle.
But there are some bright sides:

• You are probably smiling a bit if you are holding Apple stock.
• The resulting catastrophe will likely give us this generation’s version of The Mythical Man Month, documenting the failure of large software for the new millenia, and educating a new generation of software people about hhow everything always goes wrong in software.
• Microsoft will be given the chance to sell even more Xbox 360s this Christmas, losing money on every one.
• Since you won’t be upgrading your PC, you’ll have more money for a PS3 for Christmas, or a PSP, or a Nintendo Revolution.

[tags]Microsoft,Windows Vista,Software Engineering,Rants and Raves[/tags]

Addendum: Check out Daniel Lyon’s Forbes article. A couple of telling quotes:

Meanwhile, 500 tech buyers sat there in the dark, their eyes glazing over from the sheer mind-numbing pointlessness of most of this stuff. The audience laughed out loud when the Microsoft guy showed off a kludgey system that lets you fetch Outlook e-mail messages using voice commands from a cell phone.

For God’s sake, can you imagine how absolutely soul crushing it must be for the poor software engineer tasked to create such a useless, pointless demonstration?

If you are in charge of PR, should you continue to have a job after Lyons’ writes this summary of their event?

Worse yet was the grumbling afterward in the press room. Why the hell did they drag us here? we wondered. We’d been promised big news and some earth-shattering announcements by Microsoft flacks who insisted this was something we shouldn’t miss. Instead, we got a demo that was about as compelling as a root canal followed by a 15-minute press conference with Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive who seems incapable of speaking at any level softer than a bellow. Ballmer took a few potshots at IBM, claiming the computer giant doesn’t innovate anymore.

Read the rest. It’s quite good.

A couple of days ago I pointed out the hypocrisy of Isaac Hayes in accepting payment for episodes of Southpark that ridiculed religion but adopting a different standard when it applied to him. Christian Pundits agreed with me. The problem is, I don’t agree with much that Christian Pundits have to say about anything. For instance, they promote all sorts of discrimination against gay people, including opposing any kind of extension of legal rights to same sex couples, like being able extend powers of attorney, medical decision making, and the ability to draw up will and dispense of your property. Or opposes a movie simply because one of the actors is “a self-professed homosexual”. Just in case someone thought that I might agree with such attitudes, I do not, and find such ideas “worthy of ridicule”, as I do the notion that Christians are some kind of victimized minority in the United States, as implied by Christian Pundit’s charter.

Still, today they got upset with me because I called them hypocrites. Were they right? Did I make a mistake? Go ahead and check it out. The author claims that she referred me to this post, (I don’t know how she could have done that, since she didn’t actually link that article in the article to which I was responding, but…) (ah, in my comments, didn’t catch that) which points out that she indeed did think that it was disrespectful to publish such cartoons, but “as a staunch supporter of free speech I have to say that the newspaper had every right to publish the cartoons”. Well, that’s nice: I’m a supporter of free speech as well, and don’t think that Muslims have any right that protects them from offense anymore than anyone else does. Perhaps I do owe Christian Pundits an apology after all…

But let’s shift back over to the article which spawned this debate. Did Christian Pundits say “we support freedom of speech, and while whe disagree with the depiction of Christianity in this cartoon and find it offensive, we continue to support free speech”? No. Instead, Christian Pundits lauded the fire that the University newspaper came under, and the ultimate resignation of their editor, calling it “much too late”. Does anyone else think that this is a reaction which differs in quality from tacit acceptance of cartoons which depict Islam negatively?

Christian Pundits also complained that the story of this offensive cartoon “got NO attention from American main-stream media”. Perhaps that’s because it was published in a school newspaper in Saskatoon for pity’s sake. Do you really have to go that far out of your way to find something to offend you, something that some pimply faced editor did for a school newspaper that has a circulation of 10,000 in another country? If this is the greatest injustice you can find against Christianity, perhaps you really don’t have much to complain about.

Perhaps I have gotten the wrong impression about Christian Pundits on this issue, but I think it’s understandable, and in all fairness, they probably think its fair too, otherwise they wouldn’t have felt the need to clarify their position again. To make sure that I have been clear, here’s my position:

People will say whatever they want to, and people should be allowed to say what ever they want to. That’s freedom of speech, and it’s important. Nothing anyone says should be cause for violence against them. Sticks and stones may break bones (and call for physical conflict as a result), but names will never hurt you. If someone offends you, take responsibility and don’t talk to them anymore. Talk positively about what you believe.

Christian Pundits concludes their article with this:

I don’t expect an apology from brainwagon, nor am I asking for one. What will be interesting to see is if he admits his ‘mistake’ to his readers.

Well, I don’t feel I’ve made a mistake, nor will I feel I have to “repay” the link with an apology. I do feel there are two distinct levelsof outrage displayed in your postings, an inconsistency in how you reacted to these two situations. I’ll let my readers (I think there is still more than one) decide for themselves whether I have over reacted or not, and they can choose to read me or, as I mentioned above, take their valuable time elsewhere. I’m quite happy holding opinions that are truly in the minority, and nobody has to stay and listen to me out of politeness.

Lastly, I will apologize to all my readers who read this blog (as I suspect most do) simply to find out about geeky computer stuff, baseball and the like. I usually limit my comments on politics and religion: that isn’t what this blog is about, because quite frankly that’s not what I find fun to blog about. My rants are usually a bit more esoteric (and therefore less inflammatory), and I’m not going to make a habit out of this momentary weakness.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a break, check out this highly inoffensive website.

[tags]Religion,Politics,Hypocrisy[/tags]

Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.   We’ve all used these systems which try to evaluate our choices in music or books, and then make suggestions based upon what we say.   They are sometimes useful, but most often useless in trying to find new material that’s of interest.

The reason is actually pretty easy to understand.  Let’s take books as our example domain.  Amazon knows that recently I’ve bought books on baseball, on the chinese language, on filmmaking, and on computer graphics.   So what does it do?  It gives me more of the same.   It’s not a bad idea really: there are undoubtedly lots of books in these subjects I don’t have.   But they are unlikely to actually suggest books in other, even related subjects that might be of interest.  Does an interest in filmmaking suggest an interest photography?  If I’m interested in Chinese language, might I not be interested in Chinese food or Chinese history?

It seems most of these systems work to dramatically reduce the number of possibilities that they present to you rather than expand them.  In that sense, they just reinforce your narrow tastes, rather than help you expand and educate them.  That’s too bad.

What’s the answer?  What algorithm will help?  Frankly, I don’t know.   The way that I deal with it is to read a wide variety of sources, keep a wide variety of interests, and actively work to break out of the ruts in your thinking.  Don’t be afraid to explore deeply, but also work to explore broadly.   Make it your responsibility, not just the responsibility of software.  Invest time in making yourself more interesting.

[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]

I laughed out loud. Scoble didn’t think it was funny, and just said “Ouch”. Of course all that is truly funny is true.  This is what you reap when your product development is all about filling out long checklists of features and signing partnership deals with third parties.
[tags]Microsoft,Parody,You Tube[/tags]

The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future:

The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night’s evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last night we were not merely in a blue zone, but a Navy Blue zone. And it showed–the pizza was great.

Dear lord, is there a more perverse collection of pizza toppings than ham and pineapple?

His treatment of his debate seemed no better than his choice of pizza toppings.

Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld, wrote this article called Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista. Me? I’m completely unconvinced. Let’s walk through what he thinks are the strengths of Windows Vista:

1. Security. The funny thing is, I expected all the previous versions of Windows to provide security, and for the most part, I’ve been cruelly let down. There is no bigger indication that Microsoft has fumbled the security ball than to look at the entire industry (with players like Symantec, McAffee, Network Associates, and literally dozens of others) that have sprung up solely to shore up the inadequate defenses of Windows against the attack of hackers.
2. Internet Explorer. Yawn, you mean the browser that doesn’t even implement the box model properly, making it virtually impossible to design portable css layouts for webpages? I’ll stick with Firefox, thank you very much.
3. Eye candy. Honestly, who cares? Especially since Microsoft thinks its reasonable to force you to upgrade your video hardware to provide this extra ocular saccharine.
4. Desktop search. Sorry, tried it, but never really use it.
5. Better updates. I’d like it if they didn’t make me reboot everytime I change a network setting. Updates never really bothered me the way they are.
6. More media. Too bad they are adding more DRM to keep you from using more media. It kind of balances out.
7. Parental controls. More features that only serve to keep me from using the computer. Yawn.
8. Better backups. Might be nice. Worth $180 for the upgrade?
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration. With other Vista users. Yawn.
10. Quick setup. Here’s an idea: how about an operating system that doesn’t force you to reinstall often enough for the hour install to matter?

To be fair, Desmond lists five things that should give us pause:

1. Cost. $100. Again.
2. No antivirus software, likely to be made available as a paid subscription. If Vista is so secure, why continue to tax us for security updates?
3. The upgrade carousel. You might be able to run Vista on your old hardware, but you won’t want to.
4. The learning curve. That doesn’t particularly concern me.
5. Lots of stuff is just warmed over. Well, yeah.

But the real problem is that Windows just doesn’t deliver very much. With Fedora, I can turn my PC into a document preparation system, a VOIP pbx, a webserver, a database server, a rich program development environment running literally dozens of languages, and dozens of other things. It’s just a better buy for the buck, allowing me to make better use of my available computing hardware.

So, why should I pay for Vista?

[tags]Microsoft, Rants, Raves[/tags]

It’s been some time since I mocked Robert Scoble, mostly because I’ve mostly stopped reading him. I guess i just don’t find seesawing between promotion of the A-List bloggers and apologetics for the sins of Microsoft all that compelling. But today I must have had more free time than usual, so I found myself reading his Tips for joining the A list. Surf on over there and read it, and then come back for the question I think you should be asking…

Ready?

Why don’t his tips on how to become an A-List blogger include any hints on making compelling content?

His tips are basically:

1. Use lots of graphics and screenshots.
2. Use lots of tags.
3. Link to other bloggers, even other Z-listers.

It’s not that these are particularly bad ideas: I use these techniques as much as the next guy. I just think they just should not be the meat and potatoes of your strategy in trying to attract readers.

Here’s my idea: let the A-List do whatever the A-List is doing, which is apparently standing around, patting one another on the back. Write about what you want, and let the popularity contest do what it will.

[tags]Blog, A List,Scoble,Rants and Raves[/tags]

Addendum:  Jeremy Wright gets it.  Quoting:

Blogging is just like high school. And, just like high school, who is cool right now doesn’t really matter. What matters is who is still cool in 10 years, and you are much more likely to get there if you don’t listen to Scoble’s advice than if you do.

Amen, Z-list brother.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that it would no longer run. When I got home to check it out, I found that my laptop, which used the identical virus scanner (Computer Associates EZ Antivirus) had been similarly afflicted. I ended up uninstalling EZ Antivirus (why would you use antivirus software that got disabled by a virus) and installed Norton’s on my laptop and F-Secure on my son’s machine, scanned them, and all seems better.

My wife system which runs McAffee seemed to be unaffected. I have another machine which wasn’t powered on and was running Nortons, which similarly seems to be unaffected.

Thanks Microsoft. Thanks Computer Associates. Nice system you’ve got there.

Google Virus News

[tags]Microsoft,Computer Associates,Virus,Nyxem,Blackworm[/tags]

What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy:

“We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.”

Really, why would this hobbyist give even another $.10 to this company?

[tags]Microsoft,Digital Rights Management[/tags]