Quotulatiousness

July 8, 2010

Monty sneers at your so-called “service industry” economy

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

In today’s daily Financial Briefing, Monty takes a bit of time to pine for the good old days when a job meant lots of physical work:

I’ve always felt that the “service-based” economy idea was kind of a mirage. Yes, IT has turned into a huge industry in the United States; and yes, IT has transformed the world job market. I’m just not sure the transformation is an entirely positive one. If you’re smart and willing to sit in a cubicle all day staring at a computer screen, you can do quite well. If your skills are more mechanical or manual in nature, or you like to work outdoors or on a shop-floor . . . not so much. It’s not just a question of being smart enough or not. Are we going to say that people below some arbitrary level of IQ are not essential any more, or are not able to be productive or successful? It’s almost like a mirror-image of Harrison Bergeron. Efficiency isn’t everything, in markets or anything else. An economy must produce stuff, not just electrons in different patterns that fly back and forth. Less-bright people may have skills that the smarties lack. Many is the theoretical physicist or mathematician or computer whiz who must call a plumber when the toilet backs up.

Speaking as someone who started with a few manual labour jobs, I’m absolutely delighted that I didn’t have to stay in that segment of the economy: I was terrible at ’em. He does make a good point that no matter how digitized our economy becomes, there will always be need for people who are more skilled at moving atomic-based matter as well as those who play with electrons.

It’s not exactly news that Obama is as anti-business as they come, even for a Democrat, but it’s nice to see that more people are realizing it. It’s useful to recognize the beast that’s killing you.

This is a good overview of why Obama (or any politician, really) can’t “create jobs” by hiring in the public sector. Public-sector workers do not add to GDP; they are net consumers of GDP because their paychecks are funded ultimately through taxes and fees. (They are also overpaid by about 12% compared to the private sector, mainly because their jobs are not subject to market pressures.) Public workers are paid via transfer-payments from the private sector. Government workers of any level are overhead. They are part of the cost-center, not the profit-center. You don’t hear private sector businessmen crying, “Let’s increase our overhead by 100%, boys! It’s the only way to save the firm!” There’s a reason why they don’t say that: it’s self-evidently stupid. There is also the fact that economies do not exist to give people jobs — economies exist to mediate the flow of goods between producers and consumers. Jobs are a side-effect, not the purpose, of an economy.

Several embedded links in the original post that are worth following.

July 6, 2010

The anti-ergonomic design of scanners

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Having recently inherited Elizabeth’s printer/scanner because it stopped being willing to play nice with her computer, I found that if anything, James Lileks is being over-charitable to scanner ergonomic design teams:

I just fear dealing with the Canon scanner interface, although it can’t be worse than HP. Yes, yes, I know, buy VueScan. But I had just gotten used to the HP interface on the new scanner. It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”

“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”

“Excellent! Make it so.”

June 23, 2010

Bunch of “radical extremists”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

Protest groups at the G20? No, the Heritage Minister’s sweeping characterization of the people and organizations opposed to the new copyright bill:

So when Moore warns about radical extremists opposing C-32, who is he speaking of? Who has criticized parts of the bill or called for reforms? A short list of those critical of the digital lock provisions in C-32 would include:

* Liberal MPs
* NDP MPs
* Bloc MPs
* Green Party
* Canadian Consumer Initiative
* Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada
* Canadian Association of University Teachers
* Canadian Federation of Students
* Canadian Library Association
* Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright
* Retail Council of Canada
* Canadian Bookseller Association
* Documentary Organization of Canada

While there are bound to be a few individual “radical extremists” in any organization, these particular groups aren’t known for their bomb-throwing agitator ways.

June 18, 2010

Royal charter granted

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:01

The most recent recipients of a royal charter are the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists:

The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists received its Royal Charter yesterday — its mark of approval from the Queen.

The Livery Companies were originally proto-trade unions or professional standards bodies, depending which you look at it, based in the City of London. The first, the Worshipful Company of Mercers, got its Royal Charter in 1394 but was in existence for an unknown time before that. Although some retain a regulatory role — assay marks to show the purity of gold and silver are still overseen by the Company of Goldsmiths — most are now social and charitable bodies.

Yesterday’s ceremony was part of Evensong at London’s most beautiful building, St Paul’s Cathedral. The actual Royal Charter — a large vellum certificate — was blessed before freemen and livery men walked to Mansion House escorted by a ceremonial guard of Pikemen and Musketeers for a banquet with the Lord Mayor.

I was hoping that the recipients were the chaps with the morion helmets and the back-and-breastplates:

June 16, 2010

The irritating part of “mobile computing”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow just got back from a book tour, but unlike all the other ones, he found this tour was both pleasant and productive, thanks to mobile computing:

I “rooted” my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily “tether” it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn’t have to root my wife’s matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there’s actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort’s car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop — this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author’s most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours’ worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights.

So all is sweetness and light with modern mobile computing, yes? Not quite:

. . . the fundamental paradox of mobile — so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don’t go anywhere.

One of the more frustrating parts of travelling with my iPhone has been that I have to basically lobotomize it before crossing the border, reducing it from really powerful smart phone to a PDA with a phone line: the data and “roaming” charges are so high that it’s not economical to use them for anything other than an emergency. Just when being able to get driving directions or hotel or restaurant recommendations would be most useful — on the road or in an unfamiliar city — the cost is usually too high to justify turning on the damned feature.

Yes, you can hunt down wifi connections (and I did, on my last few trips to the US), but it hardly counts as convenient. The phone companies still assume anyone travelling with a smart phone is going to be spending their employers’ money and therefore won’t notice or care about the up-front costs.

May 18, 2010

QotD: Time to kill the “information wants to be free” meme

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

“Information wants to be free” (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

This is a chunky, chewy little koan, and as these go, it’s an elegant statement of the main contradiction of life in the “information age”. It means, fundamentally, that the increase in information’s role as an accelerant and source of value is accompanied by a paradoxical increase in the cost of preventing the spread of information. That is, the more IT you have, the more IT generates value, and the more information becomes the centre of your world. But the more IT (and IT expertise) you have, the easier it is for information to spread and escape any proprietary barrier. As an oracular utterance predicting the next 40 years’ worth of policy, business and political fights, you can hardly do better.

But it’s time for it to die.

Cory Doctorow, “Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good”, The Guardian, 2010-05-18

May 13, 2010

A “secret weapon” from WW2 updated for the 21st century

Filed under: History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Strategy Page looks at Operations Research in its modern guise:

It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century. OR is basically applying mathematical analysis to problems. OR turned out to be a major “weapon” for the Allies during World War II. OR, like radar, was developed in the 1930s, just in time for a major war, when whatever was available was put to work to win the conflict. OR is also, half jokingly, called a merger of math and common sense. It is widely used today in science, industry and, especially, in business (it’s the primary tool of MBAs, where it’s called “management science”.) With predictive analysis, the most important OR tool was the ability to “backtest” (see if the simulation of a situation could accurately predict the outcome of something that had already happened, if the same historical decisions are made). For predictive analysis of contemporary situations, the backtest is, instead, a predictive tool that reveals likely outcomes.

Predictive analysis, like OR in general, creates a framework that points you towards the right questions, and often provides the best answers as well. Like many OR problems, especially in the business world, the simulation framework is often quite rough. But in war, as in commerce, anything that will give you an edge can lead to success over your opponents. A predictive analysis is similar to what engineers call “a 60 percent solution” that can be calculated on the back of an envelope.

The one form of predictive analysis that the general public is aware of is wargames, and these have been increasingly useful in predicting the outbreak, and outcomes, of wars. There have even been commercial manual (like chess) wargames that have successfully applied predictive analysis. The commercial manual wargames produced some impressive results when it came to actual wars.

In late 1972 a game (“Year of the Rat”) was published covering the recent (earlier in the year) North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. This game didn’t predict the outcome of the war, but it got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames, for it was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, wargames did just that, accurately portraying the outcome of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The game (“Sinai”) was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation had watched the game in development (he was a wargamer), and was assigned to camp out at the publishers offices, while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting.

May 4, 2010

The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:04

A colour survey gone very wrong:

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

And a selection of miscellaneous answers:

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

April 27, 2010

Tech-clueless in Toronto

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

I received the following rant from a reader who is experiencing some, um, technical challenges in his job. Not technical challenges for himself: boss and co-worker foundering under the foaming, rushing waters of technology:

They are going to drive me absolutely insane.

Did you know … that you can select the program with which to open a file by right-clicking on the file and selecting Open With…?

DID YOU KNOW THAT?!

That is the MOST AMAZING THING EVER, according to the oldsters. These guys could not figure out how to open a text file that has an extension other than .TXT. I showed them the Open With… twiddlebit, and now Head Oldster is busy adding the procedure to our internal style guide.

Gobsmacked with heartbroken outrage, I said “Dude. Anyone who has used Windows for any amount of time will know that. You don’t have to put it into our style guide.”

To which he responded: “I have been doing this for 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. So it should be documented.”

I don’t know how much longer I can work here.

And to top if off, BOTH OF THEM are constantly getting calls from headhunters and former employers who want them back as contractors. How is that possible? Head Oldster can generally get through the day, but The New Guy — Judas on a Vespa with Cheese and Peppers. Watching him navigate through FrameMaker is like watching Stephen Hawking type out A Brief History of Time character-by-character with his eyeballs, minus the genius part of it.

The guy struggles to find the SAME FUNCTIONS THAT HE USES EVERY DAY in the menus. How can he possibly beswamped with job offers? IS THE ECONOMY DOING THAT WELL?

Crickey.

I have to admit, reading this rant made me feel better about my own work . . .

April 26, 2010

McAfee’s tech problem resolved: image problem will take much longer

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

After the technical disaster of an anti-virus company releasing an update that shut down many of their customers’ computers, McAfee now has to cope with the public relations disaster:

After dealing with McAfee’s most recent fix that sabotaged Windows XP PC clients worldwide, users of the antivirus software headed over to Twitter to vent their rage, creating a public-relations and legal nightmare that will likely continue long after the last machine is patched.

“I hate McAfee,” more than one Tweeter wrote, summing up the frustration felt when a McAfee update identified a “normal Windows process” as malware and killed it, kicking off a death spiral for the affected machines.

Another Tweet: “McAfee DAT 5958, you’ve made…no wait, what’s the opposite of “made my day”?… you’ve DESTROYED MY DAY. hate you McAfee. HAAATEEEEE.”

“VirusScan,” another person Tweeted. “The cure is worse than the disease.”

I was fortunate, as fellow blogger William P. alerted me to the issue and I got home and turned off McAfee automatic updating before my desktop machine loaded the poison update.

April 21, 2010

When copyright goes bad

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

H/T to Cory Doctorow.

April 20, 2010

Apple officially asks for their missing iPhone back

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

I guess Gizmodo did get their hands on something genuine, as Apple has sent a letter formally asking for the device to be returned to them:

Gizmodo says it has now received a letter from Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel Bruce Sewell:

“It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is currently in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let us know where to pick up the unit.”

Gizmodo says the iPhone 4G/iPhone HD — take your pick — was left in a German beer garden (we like those details) called Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood. Speculate what you will about this: how convenient this kind of intense interest is for Apple, whether this is a fake, the various ways in which infamously secretive Apple might retaliate against the hapless prototype phone-loser Gray Powell — or, as the well-connected John Gruber says, why Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the phone which was stolen from Apple.

Given that almost any device Apple introduces is greeted with hosannas and hallelujahs from the fanboy crowd, it does seem unlikely that this is a deliberate attempt by Apple to create or increase public interest in their next iPhone release.

25 years on, the “Hackers” bestride the globe

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:34

Steven Levy revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution:

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.

I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.

I must have read Hackers during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.

Americans’ eroded right to be free from invasive searches

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

John Perry Barlow shared a link to this Washington Times editorial, which clearly illustrates how the US federal government has managed to undermine Americans’ right to privacy:

Federal security workers are now free to snoop through more than just your undergarments and luggage at the airport. Thanks to a recent series of federal court decisions, the digital belongings of international fliers are now open for inspection. This includes reading the saved e-mails on your laptop, scanning the address book on your iPhone or BlackBerry and closely scrutinizing your digital vacation snapshots.

Unlike the more common confiscations of dangerous Evian bottles and fingernail clippers, these searches are not being done in the name of safety. The digital seizures instead are part of a disturbing trend of federal agencies using legal gimmicks to sidestep Fourth Amendment constitutional protections. This became clear in an April 8 court ruling that found admissible the evidence obtained by officials who had peeped at a passenger’s laptop files at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Didn’t you guys fight a war a couple of hundred years back over the 18th century equivalent of this kind of thing?

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