Tag: technology

The epic flop of Windows 8

Karl Denninger suspects it is even worse than is being reported:

There is another interesting batch of numbers here as well in the desktop figures:
SunOS         0.01%
FreeBSD         0.04%
Windows 98    0.12%
ChromeOS/Linux    0.14%
BB Playbook    0.15%
WinXP/64         0.69%
Linux         4.09%
Windows 8    4.52%
Apple iPad    8.10%
Vista/Win2008    8.28%
MacOS         14.75%
WinXP         17.88%
Windows 7    41.25%

Note carefully those Windows 8 figures.  4.5%, or less than Vista?!  In addition note all the people still running XP — there are a hell of a lot of them!  In fact those desktop machines identifying themselves as Linux machines compares favorably with those running Windows 8!

I would say Microsoft has flopped the Win8 release in a big way — far worse than is being reported.

Worse than Vista?  Yowzers, that’s pathetic! Blogger doesn’t report in this kind of detail, but I do find it interesting to note that the Android percentage, at 12%, presently exceeds that of iPhone and iPad combined at 11%.

Wish list

I don’t bother with tip jars or Amazon wish lists, but if you’re looking for ideas about what to buy me for Christmas, this will do nicely:

The PGF isn’t just a fancy scope on top of a rifle. All together, the PGF is made up of a firearm, a modified trigger mechanism with variable weighting, the computerized digital tracking scope, and hand-loaded match grade rounds (which you need to purchase from TrackingPoint). This is a little like selling both the razor and the razor blades, but the rounds must be manufactured to tight tolerances since precise guidance of a round to a target by the rifle’s computer requires that the round perform within known boundaries.

The image displayed on the scope isn’t a direct visual, but rather a video image taken through the scope’s objective lens. The Linux-powered scope produces a display that looks something like the heads-up display you’d see sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet, showing the weapon’s compass orientation, cant, and incline. To shoot at something, you first “mark” it using a button near the trigger. Marking a target illuminates it with the tracking scope’s built-in laser, and the target gains a pip in the scope’s display. When a target is marked, the tracking scope takes into account the range of the target, the ambient temperature and humidity, the age of the barrel, and a whole boatload of other parameters. It quickly reorients the display so the crosshairs in the center accurately show where the round will go.

Image recognition routines keep the pip stuck to the marked target in the scope’s field of view, and at that point, you squeeze the trigger. This doesn’t fire the weapon; rather, the reticle goes from blue to red, and while keeping the trigger held down, you position the reticle over the marked target’s pip. As soon as they coincide, the rifle fires.

People occasionally accuse me of being envious of this or that.  But if I’m envious of something, I’ll admit it.  And yes, to be honest, I am totally envious of the guy who thought of software-corrected personal firearms.  Because it essentially defines awesome.  I mean, an 18-button mouse with a joystick, that’s cool.  But a Linux-powered rifle?  How do you top that, with a freaking Death Star?

Of course, being Linux-based, there will probably be annoying package update requests popping up right when you’re busy trying to shoot something.  Or someone.  On the plus side, you can probably play Battle for Wesnoth on it while you’re waiting for the target to present itself.

State Department attacks First and Second Amendments

Defense Distributed was instructed to take down the CAD files for the Liberator, a single-shot 3D printed plastic gun, by the US State Department:

Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that wants to empower people to 3D print their own guns, has hit a bit of a legal snag. According to founder Cody Wilson, DEFCAD, the open source weapon-printing project powered by Defense Distributed, received a letter (embedded below) from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance, telling him to remove the blueprints of the Liberator, his 3D printed gun, from the web so that they may be reviewed by the department.

The group’s website currently has a red banner appended to the top that reads, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls.  Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.”

“We got an official letter from the Secretary of State, telling me who they were, what their authority was under U.S. law and telling me they want to review these files to see if they’re class one munitions,” Mr. Wilson told Betabeat by phone. “That includes blueprints.”

In the letter, embedded below, the State Department says that Defense Distributed may have released data that is controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation without getting prior authorization. This would put the company’s actions in conflict with–oh boy–the Arms Export Control Act.

“Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export,” reads the letter. It also says that until Defense Distributed has received the legal all-clear, the company “should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled. This means that all such data should be removed from public access immediately.”

Keep in mind, this is the very same State Department that sends tanks, jet fighters, and missiles to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.  But the freely distributed plans for a single-shot plastic pistol is somehow considered sufficient cause to justify violating the First and Second Amendments.

Forget Pirate Bay and the thousands of torrents that are already distributing the files, given that the zipfile is only 2 megs, it seems to me that a few patriotic virus programmers should be able to see that they are rapidly distributed to millions of computers around the world regardless of what the State Department has to say about it.

And if they think they’ve got problems now, just wait until home genetics become as accessible as 3D-printed firearms.  It will bring back the old fears of witchcraft; I can imagine that the unauthorized possession of another individual’s hair and nail clippings, or at least a government employee’s, will becomes a crime.

Fred Reed bites the Apple

His thought processes concerning his next computer are entertaining, if not, in my opinion, even remotely convincing:

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew
that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to
them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a
carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described
the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming
nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually
well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in
computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not
Mac-heards, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the
chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a
buddy who does networking and data-base manage for medium-sized
companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one,
but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the
network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their
data-base and spread-sheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data
bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that….

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It
didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is
better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the
consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:  Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It
just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it
easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the
mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the
PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know
much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the
Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can
make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have
manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap
power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert,
and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or
until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you
have solidly built PCs such as Delll’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed
at businessmen.

Give him six months and he’ll either be parroting the very cultists he mocked, or, like Spacebunny and a few others of my acquaintance, he’ll regard his brief period of Macintosh ownership as being the techno-analog of surviving cancer or a stint in a concentration camp.  But Fred is right in discerning that there is no one correct and objective answer, because it completely depends upon what one’s individual requirements and preferences are.

None of this should be in any way taken for a defense, much less endorsement, of Windows 8, you understand.

Mailvox: ideas for a new comment system

After fixing the template here – you can now link properly to individual comments by using the link on the comment’s datestamp – Matt contemplates going where so many have gone before, and failed:

The CoCo circus and slow disaster, combined with your rejection of the alternatives, followed by all the infelicities of Blogger’s commenting system has long tempted me to try to create a better way.  I’m now professionally situated in a place where trying to design [if not necessarily implement] a better commenting system is on topic.  I understand most of the challenges in designing and maintaining such a system on the back end, but I do not have a good grasp on the needs and failure modes for the front end.

For me, the single most important thing is to avoid any registration requirement on the part of the commenters.  This is where most of the comment systems fall down. They place all their emphasis on allowing logins through Facebook, Twitter, and 10 other systems, clutter up their interfaces with micrologos, and make no effort to let people comment as they obviously prefer to comment. Back when I had the system distinguish between logged-in commenter and not logged-in commenter via color, it was obvious that between 10 and 15 percent of the commenters were logged into something.  So, most comment systems are designed to cater to the vast minority of commenters.  This is a fundamental design mistake, as it is there to serve the needs of the comment system, not those who are intended to use it.

Anyhow, here is my list of the features of an optimal comment system:

  1. No registration necessary.  Custom registration only, no use of all the other systems.
  2. Option to block or auto-spam blank, Anonymous, and blacklisted names. Note that hese are two different things, as in some circumstances it may be better to accept and auto-spam than simply block.
  3. Ability to search comments by name, URL, or IP address.
  4. Good spam-trapping.  Blogger is actually pretty good in this regard, although vastly better on VP than on AG for some reason.
  5. Checkboxes, mass select and mass delete options for managing comments.  What Blogger really misses is the ability to view by Name, which would make managing them much easier.
  6. Editable comments. They should always be editable by the blog host, with editing capabilities made available to registered commenters at the blog host’s option.
  7. Good, easy quoting system.
  8. Recognize HTML tags and buttons to provide the basics: B, I, U, strike, Link, and blockquote.  No need for spellchecks and so forth; no one ever uses them.
  9. Session recognition of commenter’s Name/URL.  Even if you don’t want to register, it is tedious to repeatedly type those in.

There are other things, to be sure, but that would be a desirable base.  I actually like the Blogger comment system as a base, but it’s lacking in a few important particulars, such as the inability to separate the permission of unregistered comments from permitting Anonymous comments.  If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share them here.

And while we’re discussing your thoughts on the matter, I’m curious to know what sort of subjects people are finding to be of the most interest today.  I’ve been writing more about the business of fiction than I normally do, mostly because the world of publishing is changing so rapidly and I’ve been cranking out a considerable quantity of it lately, but there has also been an awful lot of excitement on the economic and current events front as well, so I don’t have a good feel for what is of particular interest these days.  And then there is the Great Rabbit Hunt and the occasional soccer game. On the other hand, I’ve been writing less about some popular subjects to which I tended to pay inordinate attention in the past, such as history, evolution, and games.

I’m not promising that I’ll pay any attention to what anyone thinks, of course, but I am curious nevertheless.  If you’re so inclined, just list your favorite three subjects for blog discussion, in your personal order of preference.

WRE: technology conference edition

It is customary for women to lament the way men are openly hostile to their presence when they insert themselves into hacker fests and technology conferences.  And yet, it is hardly difficult to understand why men tend to be less than enthusiastic about opening themselves up to be patrolled by volunteer speech police and self-appointed equality cops.

A Playhaven developer was fired after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner, and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

    Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…
    — Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The developer on the left, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was apparently fired by PlayHaven for the incident.

Adria Richards, having successfully gained the attention she was there to seek, tries to justify her actions in the usual self-lionizing language: “Adria Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl,
saying that she took the comments for as long as she could, but when
she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a
stand for her, and all the women who have not considered technology as a
career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible
for her to do so.”

What Richards clearly doesn’t realize is that she is the parasitical ass clown making it more difficult for women to pursue technology as a career path.  What sort of idiot employer would want to hire disruptive, self-seeking, controlling employees actively looking for causes to fight instead good engineers who will simply do their jobs and may happen to tell a mildly offensive joke now and then in the process?  At this point, I have no doubt that the conference organizers are regretting their decision to permit Adria Richards to attend.

After all, who wants to attend the sort of conference where merely being overheard by a fellow attendee comes with a proven risk of losing your job?  I’m not a Python developer, but if I was, I’d certainly wouldn’t bother to clear a spot on my calendar for it.  And as a game developer, I’m certainly going to be looking at PlayHaven with a deeply skeptical eye going forward.

As one female developer – in other words a woman who actually works in the industry, as opposed to patrols it on behalf of her equalitarian ideology – correctly observed: “Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech.”  It does.  It absolutely does. People like Richards are parasites who have no place in technology because they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they construct nothing, they only destroy.  They only seek to destroy.

Even the lowly white knights who desperately desire to be considered good and proper equalitarians understand the problem:  “She damages the reputation of everyone trying to make this industry more
female-friendly. She’s done the opposite of making men and women feel
more comfortable working together; now men will be looking over their
shoulder every time a woman is present in the workplace or a conference
because hey, she might do what Adria did. This is not an environment
anyone wants to work in.”

It is reported that 20 percent of  the 2013 attendees at PyCon were female.  If the men who attended this year have any sense at all, that percentage will be considerably higher next year.  Meanwhile, those of us who don’t give a quantum of a damn about making “industry more female-friendly”, but are focused on creating compelling, entertaining, and useful technologies, see our skepticism vindicated.  Again.

UPDATE:  Apparently SendGrid was unimpressed with their employees decision to evangelize feminist speech control rather than SMTP relay services.  It is a wise move on their part, and should serve as an object lesson to other would-be though police.

“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.“

First Sale doctrine lives

Capitalism and private property aren’t entirely dead in the West, not yet, anyway:

The Supreme Court has sided with a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher’s permission, a decision with important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores.

The justices, in a 6-3 vote Tuesday, threw out a copyright infringement award to publisher John Wiley & Sons. Thai graduate student Supap Kirtsaeng used eBay to resell copies of the publisher’s copyrighted books that his relatives first bought abroad at cut-rate prices.

Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion for the court that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad.

This will be interesting because the battle over used electronic items, such as ebooks, is only just beginning.  But at least those who are trying to expand copyright to subsume private property rights will have to change the law first.  Of course, the current life+70 Disneyright tends to indicate that there is a reasonable chance they’ll be able to do it.

Intergenerational war

As if the younger generations don’t already have a strong casus belli given the debt with which their great-grandparents and grandparents have saddled them, Karl Denninger points out yet another reason today’s children will have just cause to hate their parents:

We all have the right to consent to our data being used and even sold in exchange for something.  Today you consent to a lot of that, even though you may not be paying attention to your granting of that consent.

But children are not of age.  They thus cannot consent.  And it is a long-standing principle that a bargain must include something of at least putative value to both parties as consideration, or it’s no contract at all.

There is no benefit to the kids in this paradigm — only costs that are intentionally hidden from them but which, mark my words, will screw them in the future.

Mark this post and wait 10 years. 

Those kids who are being “tracked” now will find that they’ve been violated repeatedly by this data collection and sharing.

If your state is involved in this, and there are a lot that are, you need to get every last one of your state legislators out of office and all of the local school board members must be instantly ejected and shunned to the point of literal starvation.

If you’re in a state that is not participating, make damn sure they don’t now or in the future.

If you’re a parent and don’t do those two things then prepare for your kids to throw you into the wood chipper feet-first when they figure out how badly you allowed them to be screwed.

I utterly guarantee that you will deserve it.

On a related note, don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

In defense of “extremism”

Frank Bruni complains about the loss of the media monoculture in the New York Times:

America these days is an immoderate land of fixed opinions and outsize fixations. More and more we wallow: in our established political philosophy; in our preferred interest group; in our pastime of choice; in whichever health routine we’ve turned into a health religion.

I BLAME the Internet. Well, that and social media and cable television, with its infinity of channels. In theory our hyperconnectivity and surfeit of possibilities have broadened our universes, speeding us to distant galaxies, fresh discoveries and new information. But in reality they’ve just as often had a narrowing effect, enabling us to dwell longer on, and burrow deeper into, one way of being, one mode of thinking.

Whether you’re predisposed to a conservative or liberal view, you can set your bookmarks to Web sites that reinforce what you already believe, take a similar tack with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and turn for news to Fox News or MSNBC, each an echo chamber for like minds.

And many Americans do just that. The prime-time audiences for Fox News and MSNBC increased significantly between 2011 and 2012, while CNN’s prime-time audience dropped. The percentage of swing voters seemed to shrink, and over the last two decades, the percentage of voters who label themselves “moderate” has similarly declined. 

Bruni is whining about essentially the same “problem” that McRapey lamented in his recent interview.  The Left is deeply and bitterly upset about their inability to control the narrative in the way they were once able to.  Bruni is complaining that although ABCNNBCBS, NPR, the AP, and the New York Times are all still around and putting out news and opinion, Americans don’t have to pay attention to them anymore, and increasingly, they don’t.  Bruni resents the fact that, as McRapey said in the CBC-Q interview, “the internet is a great big world and you
can’t mallet everybody.”

But the Left would like to.  Oh, how they would dearly love to be able to shut out every critical voice, to see and hear no evil, to prevent the innocent ignorant from being able to learn that the Officially Sanctioned Story is not necessarily true and its case is riddled with holes.  This is why the Left so religiously shuns debate, erases its opponents from the history books, and often tries to pretend that the other side doesn’t even exist.  They have to rewrite history, and in some cases jettison it entirely, because the facts and lessons of history simply do not work in their favor.

It’s not the Right that is burrowing deeper into its own way of thinking.  We of the Right have been steeped in leftist propaganda and ideology for our entire lives.  We understand the Left’s thinking, and we reject it due to that very understanding, whereas leftists, when caught off-guard, will readily admit that they are both frightened and confused by what those on the Right are thinking.  This is usually because they are totally unfamiliar with it; in some cases they literally haven’t ever heard anything like it before.  And because their thinking is wholly based on rhetoric and rote-learning, they are almost uniformly incapable of operating on a genuinely dialectical level; what looks like leftist dialectic is almost always, when you examine it, nothing more than rhetoric.

Consider the poor leftist who believes avidly that a) racism is evil and b) evolution is true.  What is he to do when confronted by someone who points out, on the basis of genetic science, that humans are not even all equally homo sapiens sapiens?  If he is to cling to his beliefs, he must either accept a continual state of cognitive dissonance or bury his head in the intellectual sand.  This is why “burrowing” is an apt term for the Left’s response to the changes brought about by the Internet, though not necessarily the Right’s.

Expect more public lamentations from the likes of Bruni as the power of the media gatekeepers continues to fade and more and more independent alternatives whose only credibility is based on their substance, not their credentials or their historical position.  As was once said of liberty, extremism in the pursuit of truth is no vice.  It is, rather, the cardinal virtue.

Helen’s Page

Dr. Helen has introduced a new page that is intended to be a right-wing online Craig’s List.  It’s called Helen’s Page.  If you’ve got something to sell, a service to offer, or even just a worthy blog post to pitch, you can sign in and post it there.  People can add comments; for example, here is a post about A THRONE OF BONES I put up there last week.

It’s still in live beta, but it’s an interesting concept.  Check it out.