Tag: technology

The war on grammar

As the rape of science fiction was apparently not enough for the pinkshirts, some of them are now attempting to destroy programming in the name of sex equity as well:

One of the node.js core contributors, Ben Noordhuis, rejected a pull request that eliminated the use of a gendered pronoun in libuv. Now, this was quickly reversed by node.js project lead Isaac Schlueter (that is, Isaac accepted the patch eliminating the gendered pronoun), but because this is a Joyent-sponsored project, many made the reasonable inference that Ben is a Joyent employee—and have called Joyent to task for tolerating such poor behavior. (Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac’s commit.)

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn’t be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun — but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it’s not the use of the gendered pronoun that’s at issue (that’s just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that’s not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. This isn’t merely a legalistic concern (though that too, certainly), but also a technical one: we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well….

But just so you heard it from
us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we would—to
deliberately use a gender-neutral pronoun—fire them.

I would avoid using any of Joyent’s products, given that it is clear that as a company, they are far more concerned about ideological correctness than with working code or the abilities of their programmers. They are actually insisting upon the use of grammatically incorrect language and threatening to fire those who are unwilling to use the improper form. It would be fascinating to investigate their employment practices and determine if they have 50 percent female programmers, and if not, to learn why they are operating in such an overtly sexist manner.

As a game developer, I am a potential customer of “high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company”. And I certainly will not be using, or recommending, Joyent.

It’s also informative to learn it has now been established that the deliberate choice of pronouns is a fireable offense. This means those of us who speak proper English and understand, as Churchill used to say, that the masculine embraces the feminine in English grammar, are now free to fire anyone who deliberately uses a gender-neutral pronoun such as “he or she” or “them”.

This gender-policing of the language is such a stupid, left-wing, and above all, parochial attitude. It should be amusing to see them clumsily attempt to covert all gendered articles to “das” in German and to attempt to impose gender neutrality upon la lingua bella and le français.

A techno-historical landmark

Apple, the Computer History Museum, and the immortal Paul Laughton have made the source code for the original Apple II DOS available for public use:

Apple only had about 15 employees, and none of them had both the skills and the time to work on it. The magician who pulled that rabbit out of the hat was Paul Laughton, a contract programmer for Shepardson Microsystems, which was located in the same Cupertino office park as Apple.

On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000 one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. It specified that “Delivery will be May 15″, which was incredibly aggressive. But, amazingly, “Apple II DOS version 3.1″ was released in June 1978.

With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use.

In these days of 36-month development programs with teams in the triple digits, it is incredible to think of an operating system being delivered in months. It’s great to see that some of the early computing world’s history is being saved. I would encourage anyone who has an interest in technology to save these documents and thereby increase the chances they will survive for the perusal of future generations.

I spent hours at the Radio Shack playing Akalabeth. I spent more time than I can possibly estimate in the chilly, otherwise empty room down in the basement playing everything from Wizardry to Ultima to Seven Cities of Gold and Alpine Adventure on the Apple //e that my father later bought me. I never really learned to program anything serious, much to my later regret, but I did acquire a near-encyclopedic knowledge of games, and more importantly, the mechanics that underlie them.

So I ended up becoming a sophisticated user and designer rather than a programmer. There are worse fates. And despite my loathing for what Apple became, I still have great affection for the Apple II and all those early games. In fact, I have CandyApple installed on all of my various Android devices and was showing Swashbuckler to Ender just the other day when we were waiting for an appointment.

Running down John Scalzi II

Nearly a year ago, I observed that this blog appeared to be the verge of catching up to McRapey’s Magnum Opus, The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction with 50,000 DAILY READERS, in terms of its pageview traffic. This was very surprising to me, as for some time before then, various trolls and rabbits had been insistent that my views were irrelevant because no one was interested in them. They were forthright in declaring that only a few thousand extremist right-wing outliers read VP, which couldn’t possibly bear comparison with a massively popular blog like Whatever.

As recently as 26 December, 2012, I still believed the hype. I honestly thought McRapey must have meant “visits” rather than “views” when he reported 8 million views for Whatever in 2012. After all, I knew my own blogs had nearly 7.8 million views.

“Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to
the Whatever readership?  No, I don’t think so.  I think Scalzi is using
the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”.” 

Ah, how innocent we were! Despite being John Scalzi’s bête noire, I didn’t have a proper grasp of what a lying, self-promoting little snake he is. These days, thanks to Anonymous Conservative, we now understand exactly what McRapey and the other rabbits were doing. They’re like demons constantly whispering “you don’t matter, nobody loves you, why don’t you just give up” into the ears of bullied teenagers.

There were some readers who were skeptical of my observations concerning traffic, pointing, not unreasonably, to Alexa. I readily admitted that VP was still considerably behind Whatever in the Alexa rankings, although I was starting to understand that this was merely an artifact of the ranking system being less reliable than Google Analytics: “For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA.  Vox Popoli is 29,426.  Alpha Game is 73,183.”

So, in light of that, perhaps you can understand that I was a little amused when, after having exposed McRapey’s false claims of popularity earlier this fall, I observed this in the Alexa rankings today.

scalzi.com
109,589 Global rank
44,648 USA rank
4,857 sites linking in

voxday.blogspot.com
108,511 Global rank
22,967 USA rank
920 sites linking in

alphagameplan.blogspot.com
179,597 Global rank
53,907 USA rank
311 sites linking in

There are one or two interesting details one can observe there beyond the fact that Vox Popoli has now passed up a declining Whatever in Alexa terms, both globally and in the USA. McRapey’s self-promotion appears to be considerable, but inefficient, as he requires thousands more site links, and tens of thousands more Twitter followers to produce fewer, less-engaged blog readers. Despite the Chief Gamma Rabbit’s occasional attempts to denigrate Game, one can’t help but notice that Alpha Game is also rapidly catching up to the warren.

John Scalzi is a big fat fraud. He’s the Bernie Madoff of science fiction, having built his Hubbardesque SF career with smoke, mirrors, and sleight of hand. The fact is that leftists are seldom as popular, as influential, or as inevitable as they claim themselves to be. They readily resort to The Big Lie whenever it serves their interests, and their interest is usually focused on exaggerating their importance and their numbers. What I have learned from this is to never, EVER take a Leftist’s claims on faith. Always verify them, and quite often you will be surprised to discover in the process how brazenly they tried to slip one past you.

Now, I have no doubt that Scalzi’s remaining rabbits will hasten to move the goalposts yet again and point out that he sells more books than I do. And that, at least, is true. For now. Of course, in light of how the other metrics to which they previously appealed have tumbled one by one, how long can they be certain the final one will last? Winter is coming… and so is Quantum Mortis.

Download the VP toolbarOn a tangential note, I also discovered Alexa has a custom toolbar that is in beta, played around with it, and was a little shocked to find out that it is rather useful. In addition to giving an easy way to search this blog from anywhere and providing access to my updated game links and book recommendations, one can navigate more rapidly between the various comment threads by using the RSS feed pull-down menu. Anyhow, if you want to check it out and help me promote VP, click on the graphic to the left. 

And if you have any ideas for improving the toolbar within the framework of what Alexa permits, please let me know. I have no idea why the text doesn’t always display the most recent post instead of a randomly selected one, but it is in beta and I suspect it might be a Feedburner thing anyway since Feedburner doesn’t always pick up the new posts right away.

Top 10 Game blogs

The quarterly report on the Top 10 Game blogs for the third
quarter of 2013 is now up on Alpha Game. What is most interesting about it is the way it shows
considerable growth across the board, in line with the widespread
expectations that the Androsphere would begin garnering more mainstream
attention this year.

  1. Return of Kings: 19,257 (+23,568)
  2. A Voice for Men 31,452 (new to list)
  3. Roissy: 35,799 (+19,649)

See the rest of the list there. I found two things to be interesting. First was the fact that every single top Game blog significantly increased its Alexa ranking in the third quarter. Second was the observation that the Androsphere’s gamma male critics, who frequently try to claim that no one reads the Game bloggers, happen to have considerably less traffic than the leading Game bloggers do.

This means we can expect more hysteria and more nonsensical attacks on the Androsphere as it becomes increasingly evident that more and more men are breaking their cultural conditioning and coming to terms with at least some aspects of the Game perspective on intersexual relations.

And on a tangential note, I was reminded of a previous question from a reader concerning the apparent dichotomy between my claim of more Google pageviews than McRapey and Whatever’s higher Alexa ranking.

You may recall this McRapey tweet: “All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa” 

It is little ironic, but as it happens, Whatever’s global Alexa ranking is still slightly higher than VP’s despite the US rankings now falling in line with the actual pageview traffic. Despite the big day in August that McRapey cited in a futile attempt to support his wildly exaggerated readership claims, not only has VP surpassed Whatever, but Alpha Game is fast catching up as well.

Alexa Rank in USA
23,846  Vox Popoli
47,018  Whatever
58,514  Alpha Game

Hey, at least he still has the most popular blog in SFWA, right? To say nothing of his Participation Hugo. Anyhow, given the way in which the mainstream media has barely begun to become aware of Game, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alpha Game also passed up Whatever in the USA by this time next year.

Anti-Americanism in Europe

It’s completely understandable why average Europeans are beginning to turn anti-American:

US intelligence has been operating a global network of 80 eavesdropping centres, including 19 European listening posts in cities such as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid, the German magazine Spiegel has reported.

The new revelations, which Spiegel said were based on leaked American intelligence documents, are certain to fuel international outrage at the sweeping scale of US international surveillance operations.

Spiegel also reported that the telephone number of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been a target of US surveillance since 2002, when she was leader of the opposition.

Mrs Merkel, who telephoned President Barack Obama on Wednesday to express her anger at reports that her phone had been hacked, was still under surveillance until a few weeks before the US leader Berlin in June, Spiegel said.

Even before the latest reports, Germany said that it would send a high-level delegation to the US this week to demand answer s at the White House and National Security Agency (NSA) about the reports that Mrs Merkel’s phone was tapped. The team will include spy chiefs, German media reported.

I had an interesting experience this weekend that exposed how many Europeans feel about the NSA revelations. My team was playing an away game and I got a little lost trying to find a soccer field. Most villages have signs clearly marking where their main field is, but this one didn’t, so I stopped at a small restaurant where several people were hanging out on the deck, smoking and drinking.

They were obviously locals, so I parked the car, got out, and asked them where the field was. I was wearing my team’s jacket, and as we are known to have a few Portuguese players, one of the men asked me if I was Portuguese, most likely because of my accent. The two women both laughed at that and said: “but come on, look at him, he’s clearly not Portuguese.”

When I explained I was originally from America, the man made a face, held his hand up to his ear like a telephone, and said, “USA? Why are you listening to my mobile phone? Why are you listening to my phone calls?” He was joking, of course, as he promptly laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and provided directions to the field, but it really startled me to discover that in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, the immediate reaction to an American would be to bring up the NSA.

And the more elite Europeans aren’t blind to the opportunities presented by the scandal either. I spoke to several high-level investment executives over the last few weeks, and to a man, they see the scandal as being a reason for Europe to make a serious effort to break away from the technology chains of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and other American companies that have dominated the world. The larger the corporation, the more determined they are to keep the US out of their emails and servers.

As more and more revelations of tech-enabled spying come out, it wouldn’t surprise me to see nations deciding to subsidize national alternatives and perhaps even eventually banning the use of American software. And why shouldn’t they? How can they possibly accept the status quo? It’s not inconceivable that the long-term result of using the NSA to spy on everyone through international business and the consequential shattering of trust may be a factor in the material reduction of transnational trade.

This isn’t merely a diplomatic or political scandal, it is probably an economic one as well.

The end of the liberal arts major

The bottom is dropping out of their employment-of-last-resort:

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for “out-of-home coffee drinkers”—Nater’s phrase—sick of an “inconsistent experience.”

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgments. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.

In a common area at the University of Texas at Austin, the Briggo
coffee kiosk, covered in fake wood paneling and a touch screen and not
much else, takes up about as much space as a pair of phone booths. Its
external appearance was designed by award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar,
with the intention that it radiate authenticity and what Briggo says is
its commitment to making coffee that is the equal of what comes out of
any high-end coffee shop.

The kiosk at the university is the second version, the one that will
be rolling out across the country in locations that are still secret. It
needs just 50 square feet (4.6 sq m) of floor space, and it can be
dropped anywhere—an airport, a hospital, a company campus, a cafe with
tables and chairs and WiFi just like Starbucks. It’s manufactured in
Austin.

Inside, protected by stainless steel walls and a thicket of patents,
there is a secret, proprietary viscera of pipes, storage vessels,
heating instruments, robot arms and 250 or so sensors that together do
everything a human barista would do if only she had something like
perfect self-knowledge.

 Robo-baristas may be what finally pops the higher education bubble.

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

The history of the three-finger salute

Bill Gates appears to have not infrequently gotten things right by accident:

Speaking at a fundraising campaign at Harvard University, however, Gates
blamed IBM engineer David Bradley for the so-called “three-fingered
salute”, claiming that he had favoured a single button.

“We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard
design didn’t want to give us our single button,” he said.

Bradley originally designed Ctrl+Alt+Esc to trigger a reboot, but he found it
was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer
accidentally. He switched the key combination to Ctrl+Alt+Del – a
combination that was impossible to press with just one hand on the original
IBM PC keyboard.

One of the craziest things I ever saw was a programmer who designed a software program with a menu that you accessed by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F4+Del.  Intuitive and risk-free!

No, don’t go

Breaking up with Facebook is harder than breaking up with a real live individual:

According to journalist Sarah Kessler from FastCompany, leaving Facebook can be a long-winded and difficult process. After struggling to find the Delete Account option, which she eventually found by searching Google, she was met with photos of a selection of her Facebook friends with an automated message about how much they’d miss her if she left.

She was then asked to tell Facebook the reasons why she was leaving, which she said was due to privacy concerns, before Facebook tried to persuade her to stay by explaining more about how the site handles private data.

Facebook warned her that by deleting her account she’d lose all of her photos and posts, before trying to convince her to stay by telling her she could deactivate her account for as long as she liked, and then just login to reactivate.

By deactivating, everything on her profile would stay where it is but would become hidden in case she wanted to return to the site.

I wonder how long it will take before Facebook starts actively stalking people?  I never log into my account there and it was constantly pleading at me to pay it attention until I finally spammed its email.