Nobody can stop two parties from killing each other but themselves.
Thoughts on War
8. August, 2010
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Posted by digulla
UltraViolet: Death of digital content
29. July, 2010UV radiation is invisible but extended exposure causes sunburn. It can also cause skin cancer which leads to certain death if not treated immediately. What an appropriate name for a new DRM system.
My guess is that it will help to kill sales of digital media like no technology before it. Why?
- It is supported by most of the important companies, so in a few years, you won’t be able to find consumer devices which don’t support it. Outside the OSS world that is.
- Did you know that you buy products because you like them? If that is so, then the products you buy tell about your psyche. In which mood are you today? Did you buy ABBA or Motörhead? Hmm… Imagine who might long for such information and how much.
- Finally you don’t have to spend hours selecting music for a friend, a coupon is enough. You can’t buy the music for them anymore because you can’t give it away anymore. Anything you buy will be yours. And yours only. Except if they are members of your family. Finally children can know what their parents read. And which movies the parents watch after the children were sent to bed. Did you know that most parents turn to their children for help with electronic devices?
- At long last DVDs and BlueRay disks will “just work“. No more sitting in front of a black screen because your DVD player can’t play the disk in the drive. And you won’t get an FBI warning either. They will know where you live the instant you try to play “content” you didn’t buy and sue you. Or kick your door in. Whatever they feel like. You’re just a petty criminal, like the molesters, thieves, murderers and other scum.
- UV will be anywhere (like in daylight). There will be no way to avoid it. Unless you stop buying. What an odd idea. Why would you stop giving money to greed…great companies who sue toddlers? Babies stink anyway. Stop making them. They only pollute the planet even more, they take room, breathe our air, eat our food and then refuse to pay for our pension. Buy more music instead! In UV2, we’ll figure out a way to sell condoms, too. Everything for our consumers!
- Of course this is a very complex technology, so the company behind it has meticulously created a roadmap which makes sure the most important features are available first. Which will be the ones that are paid for. By the companies using the technology to sell you stuff. But don’t worry. Eventually, when they run out of ideas how to spend the fortune they’ll make, they will eventually consider adding features for consumers. Eventually. Housing on the moon is so expensive. But well worth it: You can’t hear the complaints. And the view is priceless.
- Only very few, unimportant companies like Apple and Disney aren’t on the big, happy bandwagon. But don’t fear. In a short time, they will either be out of business (like they deserve) or see the light like everyone else.
Doesn’t that sound great? At last no more aggravation that you can’t play music on your Linux PC because the MP3 codec isn’t installed. No, finally you can be sure that no digital content, even if you bought it on a DVD and physically carried it home, will be owned by you. Or can be played on Linux. The Linux community, which has been spread like a virus for years, will be reduced again to the weirdos, sociopaths and communists. McCarthy would be so happy.
There is just one tiny problem. In Europe, there are some people called “data protection commissioners”. Unlike the name suggests, they are purely evil and as soon as they learn what the companies behind UV can do with the data they collect about the valued customers, they might try to outlaw the technology! Fret not, dear reader, the stupi…insight of the masses have always worked in our favor.
It won’t take long before new governments will be elected by careful persuasion of you with a little help of the, say, more “private” or, well, “odd” purchases you make. And if that doesn’t work, it should be possible to extrapolate your income this way and gently nudge the IRS who will be thankful of the service rendered by the law-abiding[*] companies behind the great new technology Ultraviolet!
[*] Read “we are the law”! And don’t you forget it! Now buy! The tires on my Ferrari are already dusty from the ride this morning! Yuck! I need a new one! Life is so … so … unjust!
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy, Software | Tagged: BlueRay, DRM, DVD, Linux, OSS, UltraViolet | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Sins of Commissions
18. July, 2010If you plan to measure the performance of your employees or to improve their performance with a bonus, then you should read this: How Hard Could It Be? Sins of Commissions.
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Posted by digulla
Gall’s Law
21. May, 2010I just stumbled over Gall’s Law:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
I you ever join a software project and someone mentions “complete rewrite”, you know two things for a fact:
- The current software sucks
- The rewrite will suck more.
Not convinced? See what Joel Spolsky has to say: Things You Should NEVER Do, Part I
If you still won’t believe, come back after the complete rewrite.
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Posted by digulla
Worse-is-better
18. May, 2010I just stumbled over “The Rise of “Worse is Better”“. The article deals with the “get it right the first time” and the “get it as right as possible” dilemma. In Software development, you often have a situation where you don’t know enough for “get it right 100%” and you don’t have the time to learn. Or “get it right 100%” just isn’t possible.
In the end, “do it as good as you can” is, all things considered, better than the alternative. Or as Bill Gates allegedly said: “Windows doesn’t contain any bugs which any big number of users wants to have fixed.”
Which explains nicely why programming languages which strive for perfectionism (like Lisp) never really caught on. There are just too few perfectionists – and it’s a recessive trait.
2 Comments | Philosophy, Software | Tagged: Design, Lisp, Software Development | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Aliens
3. May, 2010Recently, Stephen Hawking warned: Don’t talk to aliens. His argument: Aliens could be dangerous for us, either because they are like us (just think how the Native Americans were treated to get an idea) or because the very contact with an advanced culture will ruin us (think of the Australian Aborigines) or because they could simply wipe us out since we could become a threat or simply because they like our planet more than us. Let’s have a closer look at these arguments.
Which is more simple: To build artificial mini-planets (only a few kilometers across) which orbit around a star in the habitable zone or send an arch over thousands of light years to another system? A system which has a different star with a different light spectrum. Could we live under a class A star without adjusting our bodies? Anyone know that? Would we still be human, if we did? My conclusion: If aliens make the trip, it’s not for site development or the beaches. If they can build an ark, they can much more easily build their own fancy planets in a place that is much more like home.
Resources maybe? There is no indication that our star system is especially rich in terms of resources. The sad fact is that we can’t reach most of the resources; we can’t mine the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter (for gases) or the Oort cloud. We can’t even harvest more than an insignificant amount of the energy the Sun sends into space. If we could mine those resources and we really needed more, why fly thousands of light years when you have hundreds of uninhabitable star systems that are much closer? Why mine resources which are potentially defended when you can have billions times that in places where no one will bother you? Do you really think the rare unobtanium from Pandora exists only in that single place? And if they came here, why bother with Earth when you have so much more resources in places that are easier to reach?
Life tends to spread. I find it hard to believe that aliens would all evolve in a single place without spreading. If they spread, they will know about the devastating effect of the contact of two cultures at a different level. Maybe they would ignore it but what for? Even evil people act for a reason. A single madman won’t be able to build an ark. A society of madmen would do even worse and all the rest will be stopped by their bureaucracy.
America wasn’t conquered for fun, they did it for space (as in area to build a house on and the freedom to think and talk). If you don’t need more room and you can simply retreat to your own private mini-planet, why conquer space? Why invest a thousand years on something that you already have for free?
Slave labor? My guess is that evolved aliens will pay to work because all work will be done by machines. Today, robots aren’t cheap enough (in terms of money, time to train them or energy they consume) for widespread usage. But they will become smaller, cheaper and learn to train themselves. They will need maintenance but won’t go on strike because we will program them this way; there is just no reason to make a screw driver smarter than it being able to lock on the screw head and recognize the strength of the nut so it won’t break anything.
So in the end, I agree with the old joke:
Q: Why were we never visited by aliens?
A: Because they are intelligent.
If that were not the case, they wouldn’t get here (= too dump to build ark). And there simply is no reason to get here because there is nothing here for them. All the people hoping for alien visits expect that they will solve our problems. What smart person would want to visit a place like that? Maybe a parent. Or a friend.
My conclusion is that alien life out there is probably actively ignoring us. If they are technologically advanced, there is no reason to believe we can hide from them. And if they are advanced, I can’t find a reason to fear them either. Can you?
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy | Tagged: Aliens, Critique, Hawkin, Stephen | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Monsanto files patent on how to feed pigs
28. April, 2010Another abuse of the patent system has just surfaced: Monsanto is trying to patent how to feed pigs … er … improved corn: METHODS OF FEEDING PIGS AND PRODUCTS COMPRISING BENEFICIAL FATTY ACIDS
A great day for science and mankind, indeed. Obviously we did fed the poor animals so wrong for the past 15’000 years that a company as caring and social as Monsanto could no longer stand by idly and had to act to the benefit of all of us and the abused creatures.
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Posted by digulla
The future of data
23. April, 2010
RFid Data Table from a BBC exhibition (CC: by-nc-nd)
While people don’t talk about their private life in a public form, they do post it in social networks. They don’t want anyone to have a look at the data on their harddisks but they backup the very same data with online backup services. The line between private and the web is blurring.
Unfortunately, data can’t protect itself, so as soon as you put something online, anyone can see it, copy it, give it to someone else or keep a copy even after you deleted it yourself. The Internet doesn’t forget.
So the obvious solution is that data must become active. It must check who has permission to access it and only reveal its details to people who you have permission. How would that work?
Let’s have a look at ssh. At work, I’m accessing a server and work with an account but I have no idea what the password for that account is. How do I login? With my own credentials. I give a public key to the system administrator and he adds me to the list of people who can login. If he doesn’t want me anymore, he deletes the key from the list and I loose access. He doesn’t know my password and I doesn’t know his.
To achieve the same with data, the data must be encrypted. To decrypt it, users must ask a server for the decrypt key and identify themselves with their public key.
Of course, there are a couple of issues with this approach:
- First of all, it will bloat the data and make the processing (much) slower. Well, that might be an issue today but soon, progress will solve that.
- Users could decrypt the data once and then keep a decrypted copy. While this is true, is it an issue? First of all, these people had once access, so it will only become an issue if we want to revoke the access. Also, if they don’t backup the data regularly, a hardware failure will solve the problem sooner or later.
Lastly, we could attach a license to data which disallows to share the decrypted copy with anyone. If anyone did, they could be sued for the license infringement. And let us not forget that most people won’t understand how this all works, so they won’t be able to do it. Plus as long as it works and it comfortable enough to use, they won’t see a reason to do it.
For those who do understand the technology or want to abuse it, no amount of protection will be enough to stop them. This is why we have laws and courts.
- People could loose their data or their password. Happens all the time. But wouldn’t this approach solve both these issues? If all data was encrypted and there were servers to distribute credentials, people would have to remember just a single password for all services. The password could be strong and it could be changed with ease. Web sites could add users based on their public keys (just like ssh or OpenID). And there would be no need to worry about losing data since you could back it up with an online backup service since the encryption would happen before it is backed up.
Comments?
Leave a Comment » | Philosophy, Software | Tagged: Backup, Data, Encryption, OpenID, Privacy, ssh | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Art
5. April, 2010German judges had to come up with a definition of “artist”. They came up with this:
Ein Künstler ist jemand, der Gedanken oder Gefühle mittels eines Kunstwerks anderen Menschen zugänglich macht.
In English:
An artist is someone who makes thoughts and emotions accessible to other people using an artwork.
4 Comments | Philosophy | Tagged: art, artist | Permalink
Posted by digulla
How long to change?
9. March, 2010My last post about making software developers properly test their code lead me to thinking about change. We all changed since we were born and not only in size. We adopted new ideas, developed new skills and changed our habits. How long does this take?
Short answer: A day, a year or forever.
Long answer: There is change which just happens overnight. Take smoking. Many people successfully stop smoking all of a sudden. They start thinking what they do, why they do it and they stop. That’s what I call “one day change”. It’s not something which needs a lot of effort, it just needs resolve and a decision.
The year change is different. Imaging you want to give up a habit. Say you talk too loud. Or you’re not as reliable as you want. Or you don’t test your software enough. There are reasons why you should do it. And there are reasons why you don’t do it. Repeat: There are reasons not to change.
A lot of people try to change but they forget that there are “good” reasons why they behave the way they do. It’s more simple, maybe there is a genetic disposition, maybe their peer group supports the current behavior. If you want to change, you need two things:
- The goal must have some positive impact on you.
- A list of reasons why you don’t want to change
The first thing is necessary to make sure the goal is worth the effort. If it’s an uphill struggle with no gain, give up, spare yourself the frustration and try some other goal. Maybe someone else wants you to give up an annoying tick but you don’t see the point. Let me repeat: This is no excuse to have no goals, it just means not this goal.
The list will help you cut all the ties which hold you back. They will make you see patterns, they will make you realize when someone or something is trying to influence you to stay the way you are. So you want to lose weight. But your peers don’t want to waste money or effort on healthy food. Find a way to change that. Not overnight. You have one year. Start with small things. Eat a carrot every day. Try different carrots, see whether they taste different. Grow your own carrots.
Or maybe you eat because you feel bad. Buy some funny comic books that make you laugh. Buy them, read them and then place them next to the fridge. When the hunger comes, get some food and a comic and have some fun. It won’t solve the problem but it’s better than moping, right? You can’t really work on a personal issue while feeling bad, right? So have some fun and when you feel better, maybe you can do something about the real problem. Maybe not but you’ll still feel better.
When you often buy food that makes you gain weight, buy some small containers and spread the food into them. Turn one bag of chips into four small boxes. Store the boxes in a place that isn’t easy to reach. Make it harder to follow your old routine and more easy to follow the new one. Bury the chips behind a bowl of fruit and vegetables.
The year change is hard because it takes so long. If you don’t get positive feedback from the change along the way, you will lose focus and the change won’t happen. Also keep in mind that the change will happen slowly. After the year, you’ll suddenly notice that you changed.
Which leaves us with the forever change. There are two kinds: The Zen change and the impossible change.
The Zen change is something where you get better every day. You can meditate a hundred years and you will get better at it every single day.
The impossible change is change that won’t happen. If you try to quit smoking but you don’t have the resolve, even through they just took your last leg. If you select a fresh salad for lunch and pour half a liter of French sauce over it. If your boss says you must do something but you don’t see the point. When you just can’t see a reason to change. Try to notice it. When you noticed a forever change, learn to be honest with yourself and accept that it won’t happen. Or that you need someone else with an idea how to make it happen.
Good luck!
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Posted by digulla
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