tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76751956816224160262024-03-13T20:12:41.671-07:00Technology DimensionsAn exploration of technology, history, science fiction, fantasy, meditation, martial arts, and global capitalism.
I apologize if I occasionally digress from these topics.Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-81574729030712268512013-11-12T04:42:00.000-08:002013-11-12T04:42:03.555-08:00How Do You Like Them Apples?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="Body">
Anybody unfortunate enough to be standing near me recently while
I'm using my iPad will be aware that I am not a fan of iOS7.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have not been shy about expressing my
vexation about the new look and feel, and my feelings towards its creators,
along with my speculations about their activities, inclinations, and
parentage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, it occurs to me that
I have not always been as eloquent as I might about its exact shortcomings.</div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
After all, iOS7 does in fact live up to most of its advertised
goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it not a sleek, modern looking
interface?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well yes, yes it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it not bold and distinctive?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Does it not have a spare elegance, and striking use of colors?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, but all this misses the point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ask the wrong questions, and you'll get
appropriately pointless answers.</div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
Perhaps an analogy will do a better job expressing my
opinion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another recent acquisition, an
early Christmas present from my wonderful wife, is a Martin guitar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's an absolutely gorgeous instrument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This present follows the theory that even
though I don't know how to play, having such a beautiful instrument will make
me want to learn to play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So far, this
is an incredibly successful strategy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don't want to put it down, even when the steel strings make my fingers hurt so
much I can no longer hold it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The top
and bottom are a rich, dark mahogany, with a lovely woodgrain and a gleaming
satin finish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The headplate is East
Indian Rosewood, bearing the words "C.F. Martin & Co Est 1833" in
ornate gold letters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tortoise pickguard and
the ebony endpins provide a lovely accent and blend of textures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Sitka Spruce struts help contribute to a
beautiful smell, which makes holding it an incredible tactile experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's a feast for the eyes, ears, nose and
fingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.martinguitar.com/media/k2/attachments/000-15M_x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="131" src="http://www.martinguitar.com/media/k2/attachments/000-15M_x.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="Body">
I know my flute is beautiful
too, but I'm having a hard time remembering it at the moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New toy syndrome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We'll see.</div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
Now let's imagine that one day, a friendly rep from Martin &
Co comes by my house and knocks on my door.</div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
"Hi there!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm from
Martin, and we're coming by to do some work for on your guitar."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Um, wow, that's great.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Is there a charge for this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
didn't schedule an appointment."</div>
<div class="Body">
"No, it's absolutely free!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It's just part of the superior service that we like to provide to our
loyal customers."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Wow, that's great!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Come on in!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So what are you going
to do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An adjustment, or
something?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Even better!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We've
been working very hard at Martin to come up with a completely new look for your
instrument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We love it, and we think
that you will too!"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Great!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What will it
look like now?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Well, for starters, we're ditching the whole natural wood
grain look.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That's feeling a bit old -
we've been doing it since 1833, after all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We'll start by painting the body solid white."</div>
<div class="Body">
"What?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"That's right. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very
sleek, very modern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, it's not
all white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We've accented it on the
fingerboard and headplate with bright, vibrant colors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very edgy, very eye catching."</div>
<div class="Body">
"You're joking."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Not at all!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
you'll see that we replaced the font on our logo as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those letters in that loopy font in the
golden paint was so last century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
logo is now in Helvetica.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very
cool!"</div>
<div class="Body">
"But I like the old look of my guitar!"</div>
<div class="Body">
"No, you don't.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We've
got top designers that say this look is much better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's all sleek and modern."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Can't I keep the same as it was?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I appreciate your coming all the way out
here, but I'd really like to keep things as they are."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Well, I won't do the work today, if you insist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I'll keep coming back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And pretty soon, none of our replacement
guitar strings, or straps, or anything else will work on your guitar unless we
make this modification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sooner or later,
you'll need to upgrade, and then you'll thank us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Really."</div>
<div class="Body">
"If Mr. Martin were still alive, he'd be appalled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a huge fan of the natural wood look on
guitars, and he had more taste than your whole design department put
together."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Well, that's the issue, isn't it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He's not around anymore, so we need to do
something different, or people won't think we're an innovative guitar maker
anymore."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Even if it's worse?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Yeah, even so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
the way, I see that you have some sheet music for movie music on your
bookshelf?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Yes..."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Well, we're changing that as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We're going to replace your sheet music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We think it's wasteful to have the <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5325116">title of the music</a> on the top of the page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
all, you can see what movie it's for on the front cover."</div>
<div class="Body">
"But wait a minute!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don't have covers for any of my music!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
won't be able to tell what anything is!"</div>
<div class="Body">
"No problem, we thought of that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don't have the cover, you just have to
label each bit of sheet music as 'my personal music'.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That way, we won't take away the title from
the front page!"</div>
<div class="Body">
"I don't know why you care so much, but if that's your
policy, why don't you simply leave the title on the front page whenever I don't
have a cover?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Our designers didn't like that option.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They really think it's much cooler if
everything is sleek and uniform."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Why can't I have a choice with all this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean, I'm sure that some people like this
new sleek, modern look, but it doesn't seem like it would be that much trouble
to offer the classic guitar, and then the new guitar look as a separate
option.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isn't that possible?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Possible?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure, it
would be easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it doesn't hold with
our philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We offer you loads of
choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That choice is 'our way or the
highway'.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lots of people like it, so we
must be right."</div>
<div class="Body">
"But I don't like it."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Yes, but you're not going to switch to another guitar, are
you?"</div>
<div class="Body">
"Probably not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have
too much invested in this one."</div>
<div class="Body">
"Wow!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'll have to
send a note to our business strategists and tell them what a great job we're
doing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our guitars are so enmeshed in
our customers lives, that they don't feel like they can switch, even when they
hate what we're doing to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good news
for our stockholders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have a nice
day!"</div>
Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-49587985696013706542013-05-19T07:45:00.000-07:002013-05-19T07:48:44.893-07:00Google Glass: Course Set for Failure<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS5zYa4cYIBKKJ3jM_gmgPpcxp3gL6GObrsiPZz0ZWBmZrvNNUH" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" id="irc_mi" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS5zYa4cYIBKKJ3jM_gmgPpcxp3gL6GObrsiPZz0ZWBmZrvNNUH" style="margin-top: 57px;" width="200" /></a>
</div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I wish I didn’t believe in this blog. Like many people, I’m intrigued by the potential of Google Glass, and would like to see it succeed. But so far, I haven’t seen evidence that anybody working with Glass really understands what it is or how to use it.<br /><br />In many ways, Google Glass is simply a continuation of a long trend in making computing power more accessible. We started with mainframes, then evolved to minis, desktops, laptops, and smart phones. Mainframes could not be moved without a small team equipped with a truck or two, and could only be accessed by a small number of highly trained individuals employed by an institution large enough to spend millions of dollars. Each successive phase of computing evolution reduced the barriers for accessing computing power, and in the process, opened up new possibilities of what you could use that computing power for. Using a mainframe for word processing made no sense, but it’s a great use for a desktop computer. It would be technically feasible to log your location in Foursquare using a laptop, but it only took off once we had smartphones.</span></div>
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<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Viewed
simplistically, Google Glass is simply the next phase in making computing power
smaller and more accessible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s only modestly smaller and more mobile than a smart phone,
so on the surface, it might seem to occupy a similar niche in terms of
applications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in terms of its
usage, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s much more akin to the
difference between a mainframe and a laptop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Every previous phase of technology had an interface which the user interacted with to the exclusion of doing anything else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could run programs on a mainframe, or you could go sightseeing in town, but you couldn't do both at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Smartphones come close to crossing this line,
as you can shift your gaze quickly from phone to your surroundings, but it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s still an either/or proposition, as many people learn to
their dismay after unsuccessfully attempting to drive while texting.</span></div>
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<div class="Body1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> </span><img class="rg_i" data-sz="f" name="cQPsL88-5IG3kM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTU4MrOM5bz1-xtVWCw5B3Cx0GeO8u2zv6FrW4-aN19b-ZBAh0k" style="height: 182px; margin-left: -5px; margin-top: 0px; width: 243px;" /></div>
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<div class="Body1">
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Google
glass, on the other hand, offers a unique opportunity to integrate computing
power with your everyday interactions with the world<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">. </span>This opens up an entirely new world of
computing applications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is why I
was so disappointed when the <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/new-apps-arrive-on-google-glass/">New York Times</a> recently reported on the latest
Google Glass developments from Google's I/O developers conference.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Apps
under construction include</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Twitter</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Facebook</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">CNN
news alerts</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Elle
fashion features</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In short,
these are simply repackaging existing applications and data feeds onto the new
device.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of them buttress the worst arguments that Google Glass's critics make, which is that people are going to be distracted (with potentially fatal results) from whatever they need to be really focused on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>None of these apps enhance the user's existing visual experience.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">What
should developers be working on instead?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here's a few initial ideas:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
personal database.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A lifesaver for those
of us who have difficulty remembering peoples names, but also useful for anybody without a perfect memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever the camera focuses
squarely on somebody</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s face, it uses facial
recognition to compare that person to the people in your database and reminds
you of that persons name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would also
quickly pop up any timely facts such as if that person's birthday or anniversary
was coming up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A quick input from the
user (perhaps a nod or a tap on the side of the glasses) would produce a quick
summary of facts you had previously stored, either displayed on screen or
recited to a bluetooth earphone.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
tour guide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Travel through any location,
and have great attractions, good restaurants, and other points of
interest presented to you in real time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Focus and tap again, and get
detailed reviews for that restaurant or historical information on the cathedral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ideally, this application would be an API, rather than being a single
vendor's perspective, so you could subscribe to whatever perspective you
liked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Imagine legions of bloggers, each
with their own unique voice, annotating the landscape with a variety of
viewpoints. Anything from the Hipster's Guide to San Francisco to the Italian Gourmet's Guide to Topeka Kansas.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
training assistant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Need to change the oil
on your car, or install a video card in your computer, but not quite sure how
to do it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Youtube has thousands of great
videos instructing people how to do all sorts of things, but they are limited
by the context of the film-makers environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Imagine getting step by step instructions, and when you got stuck, the
glasses would highlight the component you're looking for via pattern
recognition.</span></div>
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<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Google
Glass has the potential to be the indispensable tool for tomorrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's a pity that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the developers working on it seem to be
thoroughly fixated on yesterday.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>
<br />Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-59660961746159882262012-12-19T09:00:00.000-08:002012-12-19T09:00:33.271-08:00We need to re-examine gun control<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I'm not a
gun person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I've never owned one, and my
father never took me hunting when I was a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I once went to a firing range, took some training, and spent half an
hour punching holes in a paper target, but that's about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I've never been particularly anti-gun
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had you asked me in a survey if
I supported increased gun legislation, I would have said yes in an ambivalent
sort of way, but it was never my issue.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">That
changed on December 14, 2012, in the Newtown Elementary school massacre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My thoughts on the subject are captured below
in question and answer format.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you
are a gun proponent and believe I've missed some significant arguments, I would
sincerely like to hear them in the comments.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: Aren't
you politicizing a tragedy?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Politicizing the tragedy would be to
suggest it wouldn't have happened under a republican white house, or a
democratic congress, etc...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Advocating gun
control following a gun related tragedy is no more political than advocating a
review of fire safety standards after a fire.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: Guns
don't kill people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People kill people.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
True.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But guns make people much more
efficient at it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Newtown Elementary
involved guns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So did Columbine, and the
shooting at Aurora.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: What
about 9/11?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
True.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even with no guns, there will be
the potential for large scale catastrophic incidents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they'll be much more rare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>9/11 took years of sophisticated planning -
it's not something a lone lunatic is likely to be able to achieve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, you'll note that after 9/11, we took significant
action to prevent a recurrence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
you can argue for or against the effectiveness of any particular bit of airport
security, you must acknowledge that there has not been a recurrence of that
type of large scale airline hijacking since 9/11.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There have, however, been multiple
recurrences of large scale shootings in public places since Columbine.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: What
about Oklahoma City?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: Once
again, you'll note that after the bombing of Oklahoma city, we introduced new
safety restrictions around government and other buildings to make it more
difficult for somebody to drive up and detonate a bomb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And once again, you'll note we haven't had a
major recurrence since then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We try to
make things better after every plane crash, after every major fire, and after
every financial disaster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's only gun
violence that we allow to recur again and again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something is wrong with this picture.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: But if
you take away the guns, only criminals will have guns.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
Criminals and police, yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
criminals will still have guns, but far fewer than otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That means fewer crimes, fewer household
accidents, fewer rampages.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: Gun
ownership prevents crime via deterrence.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: While
there is anecdotal evidence of specific crimes being prevented, there is no
evidence that gun ownership lowers the overall crime rate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gun ownership did not prevent Newtown, or
Columbine, or Aurora, or Virginia Tech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Also, if gun ownership prevents crime, we should expect to see
significantly higher levels of crime in countries such as the United Kingdom
and Australia (which I picked for their cultural similarity to us, and
different approach to gun laws).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
not the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The United Kingdom has an
"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate">intentional homicide rate</a>" of 1.2 per 100,000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Australia's rate is 1.0.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rate for the United Stated is 4.2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That's a higher rate than France, Spain,
Portugal, Germany, or Italy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's even
higher than Libya, Algeria, Somalia, Iraq or Iran.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A citizen of Switzerland coming to the United
States faces roughly the same increase in danger that a citizen of the United
States would face traveling to Sudan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tanzania.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In case you're not familiar with these
countries, it would be safer to go to Rwanda.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: The
constitution protects gun ownership.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: Three
points on that:</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Congress
has already implemented some gun legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s relatively toothless, but the legal precedent has been established.</div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The constitution doesn't spell
out the right for individual gun ownership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall
not be infringed."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our current
policies on gun ownership do not require a prospective owner to be a member of
a well regulated militia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One could
easily restrict guns to members of the police, army and national guard without
straying from the wording of the constitution, as long as any able bodied
individual was permitted to join these institutions (especially the
guard).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I admit that I'm on the opposite
side of current judicial thinking on this one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In his decision on District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonia
Scalia wrote "Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed
to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more,
in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention 'the people,' the
term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an
unspecified subset."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, he
argued that because every other part of the constitution only deals with
individual liberties, this section should be interpreted as dealing with
individual liberty as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put another
way, he argues that this section of the constitution is unconstitutional, and
should be reinterpreted based on how the rest of it is written.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that logic requires a serious
re-examination in court.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: .25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I'm willing to back a change
in the constitution if need be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
constitution supported slavery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then one
day, we said "that's not who we are", and we changed the
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's a great
document.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's not infallible.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q:
Changing the constitution just isn't feasible.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
Neither was eradicating smallpox, or traveling to the moon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until we did both of these things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are some problems that are so vexing
that we just have no idea how to start.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is not one of those problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Difficult?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that's hardly a reason not to do it.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q:
Restricting guns is a restriction of individual liberty.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: True,
to a point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not restricting guns is also
a restriction of liberty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word
freedom is an often misused concept.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is rarely acknowledged that every "freedom to" is an infringement on
a "freedom from".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was
well summarized by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said: "The right to swing my
fist ends where the other man's nose begins."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever we discuss protecting or infringing
liberty, we need to look at both sides of this equation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case, I believe that your freedom to
own a gun is outweighed by a first grader's right not to be massacred in the
classroom.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: If the
shooter in Newtown didn't have guns, he just would have found another way to
commit this atrocity.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm sure he would have tried.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don't believe he would have gotten
nearly as far as he did before one of the adults at the school managed to take
him down.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: We
have a long tradition of gun ownership in this country.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: The
South had a long tradition of slavery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But it was wrong, so we ended it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not all traditions can or should be maintained.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: If we
abolish gun ownership today, what's to stop somebody from ending other
constitutional liberties like free speech tomorrow?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: Me,
you, and every other citizen who values free speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The day that we are massively outnumbered by
citizens who believe that the costs of free speech are too heavy to bear, then
free speech will end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether or not
that day ever comes has nothing to do with whether we address gun ownership
today.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: I'm a
responsible gun owner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why must I pay
the price for some lunatic's actions?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A:
Because, unfortunately, lunatics look like everybody else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there's a reliable way to prevent lunatics
from ever getting their hands on guns, I'm all ears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sadly, the NRA, which should have been
leading the effort to ensure that only responsible, committed people get their
hands on guns, had instead been opposing every effort to take steps in this
direction.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: If the
citizenry is unarmed, what's to stop the US government from taking over and
turning into a police state?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: The
same thing that prevents this from happening in the United Kingdom, Australia,
Japan, and most other first world countries that have much more restricted gun
ownership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact that politicians and
the army consist of your friends and neighbors.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Q: If you
made it illegal to buy guns tomorrow, there would still be millions of guns in
people's homes.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A: Most
gun owners are responsible, honest citizens who would turn in their guns if it
became illegal to own them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That right
there would have stopped the Newtown shooter, who apparently got his guns from
the collection of his mother, a gun enthusiast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There would still be people who would insist on keeping grandpa's
vintage rifle in the attic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the more
effort it takes for lunatics to find these guns, and the more people they have
to ask to find where these guns are, the more likely they'll be stopped before
the tragedy begins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would definitely
take time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once again, that's no reason
not to begin.</span></div>
Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-21497806228037306982012-10-01T17:14:00.001-07:002012-10-01T17:25:58.421-07:00The Most Influential Person in History<i>"There is no need to run outside<br />For better seeing</i><br />
<i>Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide</i><br />
<i>At the center of your being;</i><br />
<i>For the more you leave it, the less you learn.</i><br />
<i>Search your heart and see</i><br />
<i>If he is wise who takes each turn:</i><br />
<i>The way to do is to be."</i><br />
<i>-Lao Tzu</i><br />
<br />
I was recently catching up on back episodes of the truly excellent <a href="http://thebritishhistorypodcast.com/">British History Podcast</a> (which I strongly recommend if you haven't yet discovered it), and found myself listening to an argument between a number of history podcasters over which person was the most influential in all of history.<br />
<br />
An interesting question, and one virtually impossible to answer without a time machine, because you never know if somebody changed everything, or was simply marching in front of the parade. For example, you could argue that Constantine ushered in the age of Christianity, which had enormous influence over Europe and most of the rest of the world. On the other hand, Christianity was already spreading rapidly. If not Constantine, would some other Emperor a few decades later have done the exact same thing? Similar arguments can be made for many historical events and technological innovations.<br />
<br />
However, there is one figure who I think is a very strong candidate for the most influential person of all time, by virtue of the fact that if he hadn't been exactly where he was, there's at least a reasonable chance that the entire human species would have come to a very abrupt end.<br />
<br />
Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet officer monitoring a nuclear early warning system. On September 26, 1983, the alarm went off, indicating five missiles had been launched from the United States. Imagine yourself in his shoes. You have moments to decide, and only one chance to get it right. The fate of your entire nation, and the rest of the world, lies in the balance. Your worst enemy has done what everybody feared, and launched a pre-emptive strike. Under these circumstances, could you even think straight?<br />
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Commander Petrov clearly could. This attack made no sense to him. He knew that the United States knew that an attack would precipitate a counter-attack. The only hope for victory under this scenario was to wipe out your foe in one sudden onslaught. Five missiles wouldn't do that.<br />
<br />
So Commander Petrov made an instant decision. With no time to run a diagnostic on the system, no theory to offer as to what might have gone wrong, and knowing what was at stake, he informed his commanders that it was a false alarm. Based largely on this information, Soviet command chose not to launch a retaliatory strike. Petrov was correct. Later analysis showed that a quirk of the weather had played havoc with the system, indicating missiles where none existed.<br />
<br />
Another man in that position might have easily made a different decision. It's not a sure thing that humanity would have been wiped off the map had Petrov called in sick that day, but it's a very real possibility.<br />
<br />
So next time you weigh the influence of Aristotle versus Caesar versus Pasteur versus Napoleon, remember that had it not been for one man, you might not have the luxury of thinking about it at all. Remember Stanislav Petrov.<br />
<br />
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<br />Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-68105979963750621622012-09-30T12:01:00.001-07:002012-09-30T12:01:35.810-07:00Who's driving this car?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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In September 2012, the state of California passed a bill
(SB1298) allowing self-driving cars onto California's roads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a great step forward for a technology
that many have been researching, though perhaps none as enthusiastically as
Google, which has logged over 300,000 miles so far in its fleet of self-driving
automobiles.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://images2-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/cdgQpa1pUUE/hqdefault.jpg&container=focus&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*&refresh=31536000&resize_w=497" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://images2-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/cdgQpa1pUUE/hqdefault.jpg&container=focus&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*&refresh=31536000&resize_w=497" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
While still in its infancy, this technology shows every
sign of maturing <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2011/12/bruces-law-of-technology.html">very quickly</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nearly
everybody is eagerly anticipating the day when they can spend time doing
something other than grimly staring at the road while sitting in bumper to
bumper traffic.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Nearly.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
One group that is not so thrilled is Consumer
Watchdog (CW).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an <a href="http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/ltrgoogdrive053012.pdf">open letter</a> to California State Assembly Speaker John Perez, Consumer Watchdog urged the
banning of driver-less technology without strict controls preventing the
collection of information for marketing or other non-driving purposes.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Really guys?</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
I have to say, I'm a hate receiving advertisements,
mostly because advertisers are <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2012/02/promise-of-online-advertising.html">universally incompetent</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the seventeen years
I've been using the internet, I've seen exactly two advertisements that were of
interest to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a great track
record.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Monkeys on typewriters could probably do better.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/40000/0000/000/40020/40020.strip.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/40000/0000/000/40020/40020.strip.gif" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
But still, CW is really missing the bus on this one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they had their way, it would be illegal to
offer a reduced fare or free bus or taxi service that used driver-less
technologies that subsidized its service using advertisements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a service offered to people too poor to
own a car might be the difference between having a job and not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And preventing this is CW's best idea for how
to improve the world?</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Even ignoring this point, you have to take a look at the
bigger picture,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we now have face
recognition technology that can identify people from photographs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have have <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578004723603576296.html">license plate scanners</a> that
can read and identify up to 1800 plates per minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And CW thinks that the driver-less technology is the Pandora's box in
this equation?</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
So let's keep some perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much as I dislike it, the concept of privacy
is vanishing fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let's not stand in
the way of some of the most promising technology we've seen in many years in a
quixotic attempt to slow down this process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because I can think of all sorts of better uses of my time than staring
at the road in bumper to bumper traffic.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
After all, when else am I going to find time to keep up
with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoT66v4EHg">funny cat videos</a>?</div>
Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-59415932812927683242012-09-30T11:16:00.003-07:002012-09-30T11:39:25.991-07:00Dinosaurs on a spaceship!<br />
Doctor Who fans were recently treated to the second episode of Season 7, called "Dinosaurs in a Spaceship". Awesomely cool?
Absolutely. Really stupid? Perhaps. But who cares?<br />
<br />
This is probably the most awesome mash-up of genres since this classic incursion in the late Mesozoic: <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu77NPORKToxKHgktX2n0dbbowwVVMzcdnANdiGkdtlIGdNGaNuIy2ex7ufN_Oh_Gp73mi1nXme6vlkl6kE6Ndqx2snqLOxkchNO9WpdU5nG4k21F1D45OpYxE2SwS1mmgs3YktXsl2A/s1600/Tyrranosaurs+in+F14s.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu77NPORKToxKHgktX2n0dbbowwVVMzcdnANdiGkdtlIGdNGaNuIy2ex7ufN_Oh_Gp73mi1nXme6vlkl6kE6Ndqx2snqLOxkchNO9WpdU5nG4k21F1D45OpYxE2SwS1mmgs3YktXsl2A/s640/Tyrranosaurs+in+F14s.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Calvin's logic was simple. Carnivorous dinosaurs are cool.
F-14s are cool. Put them together, and you've got something 2x cool, or
perhaps even cool^2. Half the population reading the strip agreed with
Calvin on this.<br />
<br />
The other half agreed with Hobbes, that
mixing these elements was just stupid. (There's another half that never
read Calvin & Hobbes, but I choose to pretend these people simply don't exist.)<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, the culture was defined by people who liked their genres one at a time, thank you very much. Detective stories, sure. War movies, good. Mythology? Absolutely. But mix them all together? No way, that's just ridiculous.<br />
<br />
But now things are different. There's a new sheriff in town. And a whole new set of rules. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/grownups.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="209" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/grownups.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Call it the triumph of the geeks. Growing up, geeks hung out in the background while the popular kids played football. They were mocked for reading super-hero comic books, and scorned for spending huge amounts of time with these weird counting machines instead of socializing like real people. It was sometimes grudgingly admitted that there might be a place for them in society, but only on the fringes.<br />
<br />
Very people considered that some day, the geeks might take over.<br />
<br />
<br />
This happens over and over throughout history. Julius Caesar and his pals were the radical outcasts of the Roman Republic, shocking people with their new styles of dress, and redefining the entire social and political order. The thinkers of the renaissance threw out a thousand years of medieval philosophy and culture as they embraced new worlds of art and science. Each generation redefines the world as they see fit.<br />
<br />
And now the comic book geeks have come of age. We no longer have the Dirty Dozen, we've got the
Avengers. Science Fiction and Fantasy is no longer relegated to cheap
pulp fiction and considered second class literature, it regularly sells
in expensive leather-bound editions and tops the New York Times
bestseller lists. The old myths are not forgotten, they're just being recast to a new set of tastes. Have you seen the trailer for "<a href="http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount/hanselandgretelwitchhunters/">Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters</a>"?<br />
<br />
So deal with it. Gen X is in charge. Life
moves on, and the culture moves with it. While some things are lost,
and some of those losses are a tragedy, it's hard to get too worked up
about it when we've got...<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/944x531/p00y5dxb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/944x531/p00y5dxb.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-16809829083559841432012-04-23T17:15:00.001-07:002012-04-23T17:15:24.864-07:00Know Your Strengths<br />
<div class="Body1">
Last
week, I attended the Amazon Web Summit in New York City. My conclusion: Amazon is taking over the
world.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
OK, yes,
I get that this was an elaborate sales presentation, not a
technical conference. While I was being wowed by their talks,
I was cognizant that I had entered Amazon's reality distortion field, and
that not everything was to be taken at face value.
But even taking these factors into account, what Amazon is working on is impressive.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
In case
you don't follow these things, Amazon is one of the biggest players in Cloud
Computing. Suppose you need to run a
large, complicated computing problem, such as a one-time conversion of a large
number of video files. It's computation
intensive, so running it on your company's computers might take weeks or
months. You could bite the bullet and
wait weeks or months. You could purchase additional servers. This would be an expensive option, to say nothing of the logistics of
ordering and installing them, plus the question of what you do with these servers once the task is done. Alternately, you could lease some online servers from Amazon. Use as
many as you like. Pay by the hour. Once you're done, take back your processed
files and shut down your account. All
done, no mess, no hassle.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Sounds
like an interesting niche business. But
it's not a niche business, not anymore.
It's huge. Netflix <a href="http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-innovators-netflix-strategy-reflects-google-philosophy/">relies on Amazon Web Servers</a> to stream movies.
Instagram <a href="http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of">relies on Amazon</a> to host it's infrastructure, which may help
explain how a billion dollar company was able to get by with only twelve
employees. Schrodinger recently worked
with Cycle Computing to build an <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/4829-per-hour-supercomputer-built-on-amazon-cloud-to-fuel-cancer-research.ars?clicked=related_right">Amazon Cloud supercomputer</a>, leveraging 50,000
cores to do an exhaustive analysis of 21 million compounds to discover
good drug candidates. This virtual
supercomputer was estimated to be among the top 50 supercomputers in the world,
and cost just under $5000 an hour, with no setup or capital costs. One recent analysis of web traffic estimated
that 1% of all web traffic goes to a web server hosted by an Amazon cloud computer. This business is massive.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
How did
Amazon get here? To hear Amazon tell it,
they're not a retail company. They're a
technology company that happens to do retail, among other things. And they've certainly paid their dues in the
process. If you followed the tech
industry back in the late nineties, then you probably remember the anecdotes
that surfaced at the end of the every year like clockwork, as Amazon's systems
were overloaded by a Christmas rush bigger than anything they'd ever
experienced before - again. Everybody,
including the CEO, pitched in to help get packages out of the warehouses on
time. Computer systems were overloaded. Inevitably, many packages only shipped weeks after Christmas had come and gone. I'm sure it was a painful process to go
through.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
But
having gone through their trial by fire, Amazon seems to have learned their
lessons well. They've developed one of
the top logistical systems in the world, and more importantly, they've mastered
the art of running the tens or hundreds of thousands of servers required to
keep it all running. You can't manage
that type of complexity one server at a time.
You need to organize it, glue it together with seamless software that
allows you to transparently shift processing activities from one part of the
world to another to deal with the inevitable breakdowns and snafus. And once you've built this impressive
infrastructure, it's a very small step to
sell some of this processing power to the outside world.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
In short,
Amazon has done exactly what business gurus like <a href="http://www.fireupyouremployees.com/tag/tom-peters/">Tom Peters</a> and <a href="http://thedx.druckerinstitute.com/2011/09/behaving-like-a-human-being/">Peter Drucker</a>
have been talking about for decades - building on its strengths as much as
possible. A superficial analysis of
Amazon would have said that they were retail wizards, and should stick to that
world. If they want to expand, maybe they should try opening a
line of physical stores. That misses
their real strength, which is managing the complexity behind their
operation. Thus they've found a huge
opportunity in a business that seems highly unrelated to their origins as an
online bookstore.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Here's
the real question: why aren't more businesses doing this?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
The answer is, they try. For example, in 1994, <a href="http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pdf/2002-1-0041.pdf">Quaker Oats acquired Snapple</a>, thinking that their experience running Gatorade would make
this an easy win. They discovered,
to their great dismay, that the logistical and marketing issues made the skills needed to manage these different brands very different from each other.
Quaker finally sold the business in 1997, having lost a billion or more learning this lesson.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Quaker
made a common mistake. They assumed that
two processes that produce similar products or outcomes must be similar. What they needed to do instead was to ask
what their real core competency was, and figure out how they could leverage it,
even if it turned out to be in a radically different business.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Here<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>s a thought. Walmart
is one of the best companies in the world at getting their products where they
need to be. Stories abound of how they
can shift inventories from one region of the country to another in a blink of the eye,
whether its old video games being purchased in Florida by grandparents for
their visiting grandkids, or <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501598.html">emergency supplies in New Orleans</a> in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
So why
hasn<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>t Walmart started a shipping
business? You could simply drop off your
package in your local Walmart store, and the recipient could pick it up in
another Walmart store anywhere in the country the next day. Because Walmart is one of the pioneers in the
use of RFIDs, there would be excellent package tracking through the entire
process. And because they already have
all the fleets and computer systems developed, deployed and scaled to massive
volumes, they could ship packages for a fraction of what it costs Fed Ex to or
UPS to bring it to your door. It wouldn<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>t replace traditional shipping companies, but there would
probably be significant interest, for almost no risk or additional cost.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
What
applies to a business applies to a person.
What<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>s your unique strength? Don<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>t assume it has to be
something related to your current line of work.
An administrative assistant with a relentless eye to detail might make a
great event planner, or accountant. An
interior decorator with exquisite taste and an eye for color might do well
consulting on movie design, or taking photographs.<br />
<br />
The deeper your understanding of your unique
strengths, the more prosperous you<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span>ll be in any type of economy. </div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-69947950523860024402012-04-16T17:06:00.001-07:002012-04-16T17:06:56.316-07:00Who are you?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
On March 30<sup>th</sup>, 2012 (or sometime close to then,
nobody knows the exact date), a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/utah-health-department-data-breach-may-include-750000-records-many-victims-are-children/2012/04/09/gIQABPUV6S_story.html">server breach occurred within the Utah Department of Health</a>. It was reported that personal
information for 25,000 people was exposed, including names, addresses, birth
dates, and social security numbers.
This figure was later increased to over 250,000 people. If you follow this sort of news at all,
you’ll know that this is just one in a long string of similar breaches. It happens to all sorts of organizations,
public and private, government and corporate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These data breaches are a serious problem. This information is all that is needed to
open financial accounts, such as credit cards.
When this happens, a person’s credit record can be destroyed. Fixing the problem can take years or
decades. Some people never recover. There is very little recourse for a person
claiming that an account was opened without their knowledge or consent. The Utah Department of Health is offering a
year’s worth of free credit monitoring to all affected individuals to limit the
damage, which is better than nothing, but not much.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Organizations that treat this type of data carelessly need
to be held accountable. We need to
highlight these cases in the media, and discover who was negligent, and
why. Lessons need to be learned, and
civil and criminal charges need to be issued where appropriate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the end of the day, this type of breach is not the real
problem. It’s just a symptom. The real issue is that
we allow to people to be held accountable for accounts opened using nothing
more than their name, address, birth date and social security number. While all of this information may be tricky
to assemble, none of it is actually secret.
All of it is in the public domain, somewhere. Before all records were computerized, the
cost of pulling together a comprehensive data profile for somebody was
considerable, and often required the services of a private investigator, who
would physically visit town halls and other archives. It’s only a matter of time before all this
data is available freely on the Internet, with automated data agents able to pull it together with no human involvement.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What happens then?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are some areas of security, such as choosing better
passwords, that are relatively easy to address.
But before you can validate somebody’s access, you first need to
identify that person. How do you do so,
in a way that only one person in the entire world can successfully pass the
test?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It used to be that most transactions and account
applications were done face to face. In
a small town, the people involved had probably known each other all their
lives. Therefore, identity was a combination
of hair color, facial and body structure, accent and speech patterns, and
thousands of other minor factors. While
it was possible to engage in fraud by mimicking another person, it wasn’t common, and carried a high degree of risk for
the perpetrator. It's too easy to be caught when you have to show up in person.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As the economy grew and national (and then global) banks and
stores took over, the system of personal recognition broke down.
We evolved a new system, which is based on security
through obscurity. A bank would ask all sorts of questions that were difficult for another person to know. It would then spend time and effort to validate that this data was correct. It was certainly easier to commit fraud than it had been when everybody knew everybody else, but was still
enough of a challenge that losses were manageable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are now approaching the tipping point, when information
will flow so freely that we will need to develop a completely new approach
to identifying people. How
can we achieve this?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are generally three ways to identify somebody: </div>
<ul>
<li>Something you know</li>
<li>Something you have</li>
<li>Something you are</li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our current system is based on something you know. People know their
own Social Security numbers, addresses, mother’s maiden names, and so
forth. If we’re going to keep this
solution, then we need to ensure that people know something that is not, and never will be, public knowledge. In short, everybody will need a “secret” Social Security Number, or other identifying
text string, which would be issued when they are born.
Their parents would store it in a secret place, and have them
commit it to memory as soon as they were old enough.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I doubt this will work.
In order to effectively validate this secret, somebody else will need to
look it up. Even if you use a
fully encrypted process, sooner or later, the secret is going to get out, and
we’ll be right back to Social Security numbers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Something you have is generally some type of possession
which can be uniquely identified, such as an <a href="http://www.tokenguard.com/RSA-SecurID-SID700.asp?gclid=CN_7xcLDuq8CFQdN4Aod1Gmklw">RSA token</a>. Unfortunately, tokens are easily lost –
people will constantly be having to ask for new ones. And if the token is the principle way of
identifying somebody, how do you figure out that the right person is asking for
the replacement token?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Something you are represents physical characteristics, such as
finger prints, retina patterns, or bone structure. Since we’ve ruled out something you have and something you know,
we’re probably going to have to go with this one. And yet, this is a very tricky and
problematic option. The first solution
that everybody immediately thinks of are finger prints. They are unique to a person, and have
successfully solved countless crimes by criminals who fail to take the basic
precaution of wearing gloves. It’s easy
to find their fingerprints covering everything they touched.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s the problem with fingerprints.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We leave them everywhere.
Finding somebody’s fingerprints is a trivial exercise – just pick up any
object they’ve handled. And once you
have their prints, they’re pretty easy to replicate. All you need is a pair of extremely thin latex
gloves, encoded with another person’s prints, and voila! You are now that person.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Retina patterns are a little better, but still
problematic. With today’s technology,
you don’t leave your retina patterns lying around everywhere. But what about with tomorrow’s
technology? How long before a high
quality camera can take a picture of somebody from 5 or 10 feet away, and see
enough detail to capture all the necessary details in their eyes? Heck, all you need to do is to put your own
camera onto something that looks like an ATM, and ask them to have a retina
scan to make a deposit. (<a href="http://lifehacker.com/5221255/know-how-to-spot-an-atm-skimmer">This is already done for skimming a person's ATM card.</a>) What you do with
that information is a trickier challenge, but it doesn’t seem impossible for
somebody to invent a set of contact lenses in the near future that can match
another person’s retinal patterns. And
once that happens, here’s the real problem with retinal patterns and finger
prints – you can’t change them. You’re
stuck for life, so as soon as anybody figures out what yours are and invents
the technology to duplicate them, you’ve now lost your identity permanently.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
DNA scanning is possible, I suppose. But frankly, I simply don’t want to spend much
of my time time envisioning a world where you’re asked to spit into the handy receptacle
to prove your identity every time you wish to make a purchase. So we’ll leave it at that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That leaves facial and body recognition. This seems to have some promise. Unlike when humans recognize faces, computers
are not fooled by wigs or extra glasses.
Facial recognition software works by looking for structural features
such as the contours of the eye sockets, shape of the cheek bones, and length
of the jaw line. Weaknesses in the
facial recognition systems tend to result from poor lighting or bad angles,
which can be reduced or eliminated when the subject wishes to be identified to
complete a transaction. Add measurements
of bone structures to the mix just for safety, and you’ve probably got a fairly
robust system.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But remember, the purpose is to identify somebody, not just
validate them. Which means that every
time you want to really demonstrate your identity, you need to be measured – we
don’t want people simply showing a photograph to fool facial recognition
software. Which means that first of all,
your measurements have to be recorded in a secure, encrypted database somewhere
– probably initially when you are born, and then updated every year until you
reach maturity. Then, to demonstrate
you are the same person who belongs to these measurements, you need to subject
yourself to detailed scanning that can confirm that you are a real live person
who has facial and body features that match those on record. Only then can anybody safely assume that you
are who you say you are.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, this doesn’t prevent identity theft, it just
brings it down to a manageable level.
You still have the problem of an impostor taking your turn when you go
to be measured. Or a hacker breaking
into the database to update the records recording who you are. And of course, you’re always in danger from
your evil identical twin.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the meantime, call up the Utah Department of Health and
give them an earful about losing their data. We may never be able to go back to the days when are personal information was relatively obscure and private. But I miss them already.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-9679645435672146112012-04-09T16:33:00.001-07:002012-04-09T16:33:07.720-07:00Looking for Danger in All the Wrong Places<br />
<div class="Body1">
A doe had
the misfortune to lose one of her eyes, and could not see anybody approaching her on that side. So to avoid danger she always used to feed on
a high cliff near the sea, with her sound eye looking towards the land. By this
means she could see whenever the hunters approached her on land, and often
escaped by this means. But the hunters found out that she was blind in one eye,
and hiring a boat, rowed under the cliff where she used to graze and shot her
from the sea.</div>
<div class="Body1">
-Aesop's
Fables</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Anybody
paying attention to advances in artificial intelligence has noticed that
significant milestones are being crossed
more and more frequently. <a href="http://www.geekosystem.com/deep-blue-kasparov-anniversary/">Deep Blue defeated world chess champion</a> Gary Kasparov in 1997. Watson took the crown in the much more
flexible game of Jeopardy on 2011. And
while Dr. Fill disappointed many observers by only placing in the near the
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-23/artificial-intelligence-ill-say-dot-why-computers-cant-joke">bottom of the top quartile</a> at the America Crossword Puzzle Competition, few
expect it to take much longer before computers reign supreme in this area as
well. Jeopardy Champion Ken Jennings
summarized the ambivalence of many when he used his terminal to display the line <span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">“</span><a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-x-overlords">I for one welcome our new robot overlords.</a><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">”</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
We've all
seen movies like The Terminator and The
Matrix. We're all wondering which
massive collection of computers is going to go Skynet on us and achieve the
critical mass needed to wake up and start making its own decisions. Will it be Watson? Dr. Fill?
Or perhaps Google's seemingly infinite collection of server farms,
running in unmarked, undisclosed locations spread across the world? We pontificate endlessly about what
safeguards we need to keep these colossal systems in check. Can we build in kill switches? Keep them fire-walled off from the control
software running power plants and weapons systems?
Build in Asimov's three laws of Robotics in the hope that the newly
awakened system will serve our needs instead of their own?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
I have to
wonder if, like the one-eyed doe, we're all looking in the wrong direction.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
For all
the intricacy of a Watson or Dr. Fill, these are highly monolithic programs,
designed to do one thing and do it well.
I haven't heard any reports that Deep Blue or any other chess program has
been getting bored and asked to try its hand at tennis, or Parcheesi. Adapting Dr. Fill to to do some task other than complete crossword puzzles would be a monumental undertaking.
Probably easier to throw everything out and start from scratch.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Moreover, these programs have no survival instinct. They have
no ability or inclination to replicate, or to try to thwart the intentions of
anyone who would prevent these activities. They cannot rewrite their own code to
avoid detection and adapt to a new environment.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br />
Modern malware has all of these attributes.</div>
<div class="Body1">
</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
The
sobering fact is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to come up with a good
definition of life <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9225311/Computer_viruses_could_move_into_biological_realm_researchers_say?taxonomyName=Security&taxonomyId=17">that does not include malware</a>. Wikipedia lists the following criteria to consider something "alive":</div>
<ul>
<li>Undergoes
metabolism. While this traditionally
refers to chemical reactions that sustain an organism, there's no intrinsic
reason why it couldn't refer to the processes of a functioning program.</li>
<li>Maintains
homeostasis. Similar to metabolism.</li>
<li>Possesses a
capacity to grow. True, though currently limited. (But see below) </li>
<li>Respond
to stimuli. Absolutely. Many worms and
viruses will watch what is happening in the operating system and take actions
accordingly.</li>
<li>Reproduce. Yes, and then some.</li>
<li>Through
natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations. Limited again, but not for long.</li>
</ul>
<div class="Body1">
The two
points above that are weakest today are the ability of malware to grow and
adapt to its environment. In malware
terms, this most closely translates to polymorphism, where a virus will modify
its own code. In today's world, these are
generally very minor modifications, designed to make the virus more difficult
to detect by an anti-malware program looking for a specific code signature. A given unit of malware doesn't have the
ability to spontaneously change itself in order to discover and take advantage of a new
zero day exploit.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Not yet.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
There's
no reason why its not possible. The
technique involved is called a genetic algorithm. It involves replicating evolutionary
techniques by introducing random variations into code to see if it
improves. It has minimal usefulness in
many programming applications due to the high level
of computational power required, and the difficulty of measuring improvements
from one generation to the next. When
the computing power is provided by infected computers on the internet, and
effectiveness is measured by the ability to survive and propagate, both these
limitations go away for malware.</div>
<br />
<div class="Body1">
We are
then left with the question of how fast a self-replicating, self-modifying worm
in the wild could improve using genetic algorithms could improve. I see no reason why it could not improve <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2011/12/bruces-law-of-technology.html">very quickly indeed</a>. The field of medicine
has recently seen the introduction of "super-bugs", bacteria which
has acquired immunity to many or most antibiotics over time. A bacteria attempting to infect humans has
faced a very difficult environment since the introduction of antibiotics. What we're only beginning to appreciate is
how a difficult environment leads to much more rapid evolution. With an internet full of
anti-malware programs and researchers dedicated to stamping it out, malware
must be very good to survive for long.
Many or most strands will be identified and wiped out. Those that survive will be scary indeed.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
I don't
know when we're going to get the first malware in the wild that can truly
modify its own capabilities, rather than just its signature. Maybe its already out there. How complex is it getting? At what point is it going to exceed its
creators wildest expectations? At what
point will it begin exhibiting behaviors that will appear to demonstrate
creativity and innovative problem solving?
A what point does it become self aware?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Whenever
that happens, I don't know if we'll know what to do. We're going to need help.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Maybe we
can ask Watson.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-7900567011496025422012-04-02T17:35:00.000-07:002012-04-02T17:36:31.868-07:00Intentions versus Capabilities - Part II<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’d like to open this post with an apology, because I’m
deviating a little bit from my usual subject matter. This is a blog about
technology, and about how patterns of technology change and interact with daily
life. I don’t normally comment on general news stories that don’t have a
direct connection with technology. I’m making an exception this time because it
touches on some themes I’ve covered before, which I’d like to reiterate from a
different angle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The story in question is the tragic death of Trayvon Martin,
and the <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-family-seeks-justice-unarmed-teen-shot-neighborhood/story?id=15888961#.T3pDDNnh7To">failure of Florida police to prosecute</a> his assailant due to Florida’s
“Stand Your Ground” laws. This is still a story in progress, and anything
could happen, but the evidence is increasingly casting doubt on George
Zimmerman’s story. Independent analysis demonstrates it is <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57407964-504083/screams-on-911-call-not-george-zimmerman-forensic-voice-experts-say/">exceedingly unlikely</a> that the cries for help were Zimmerman’s. It is further
difficult to demonstrate that George Zimmerman had sustained the <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57408040-504083/ambulance-called-for-george-zimmerman-canceled-dispatch-recordings-say/">types of injuries</a>
that his story had claimed. Add to this the undisputed fact that George
Zimmerman left his car to confront Martin despite the instructions from 911 not
to do so, and it’s difficult to paint this as anything other than a one-sided
assault. This is a crime.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or is it?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Under normal circumstances, Zimmerman’s departure from his
car to confront Martin would paint him fairly clearly as the aggressor.
Under the stand your ground laws, he had no duty to retreat from what he
believed to be a dangerous situation, and, having deliberately entered into
this situation seeking a confrontation, was justified in the use of deadly
force to protect himself from what he reasonably believed was a threat.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Critics might question whether his fear of Martin, who was
unarmed and a hundred pounds lighter than Zimmerman, was “reasonable”.
Unfortunately, there is no precise definition of what constitutes
“reasonable”. Certainly his fears would be shared by many other residents
in his neighborhood. Does that make them reasonable?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Regardless of how the law will be interpreted, the fact that
the Florida police used it as an excuse to not initiate a criminal
investigation of Zimmerman indicates that something is seriously askew. At the root of the issue is an asymmetry of
information created by the situation. In
any dispute between two individuals, each is likely to have a different
narrative explaining the context, motivations, and possibly even the facts
leading to the event. In a murder, one
of those narratives disappears. The only
narrative remaining belongs to somebody who will likely have every reason and
every inclination to skew the facts in his own favor. This is why imposing a duty to retreat is
such a useful concept. While it does not
eliminate this type of situation – anybody can still claim they had no
opportunity to retreat – it does reduce the number of situations in which an
assailant can claim a legal justification for their own aggression.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t believe the Florida legislature had malicious intent
when they enacted this law. I don’t
expect they ever thought about the possibility of an individual committing an
act of murder and using their law to claim it was self-defense. And that’s the crux of the problem. They didn’t think.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I noted when I discussed <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2012/01/intentions-versus-capabilities.html">SOPA</a>, there is a world of
difference between the intentions of a law, and its real life effects. It behooves legislatures to think long and
hard about the possible secondary effects of the laws they pass. In this case, it seems they didn’t think hard
enough. The results have been lethal.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well done, Florida.
Well done.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-20612283014166926362012-03-25T16:44:00.001-07:002012-03-25T17:19:06.096-07:00Waiting for the End of the World<br />
On March 19, 2012, Amazon announced they were purchasing <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/amazon-com-buys-kiva-systems-for-775-million/">Kiva Systems</a> for $775 million. By all accounts, they're not planning on selling these robots on their website. Rather, this is another step forward in the development of the automated warehouse, in which robots will manage inventory and fulfill orders more cheaply than humans could. Many people have noted that the loss of jobs is one more step in a long cycle of economic decline for the United States. It's the end of the world.<br />
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
And yet, as I touched upon in a <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2012/01/contemplating-personal-data-warehouse.html">previous discussion</a>, the end of the world has come and gone many times, and somehow there are still people around to complain about it all. (OK, technically I talked about how civilization was going to the dogs, but same thing.) People will probably lose jobs when Amazon automates their warehouses. On the other hand, we've been losing jobs for centuries, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. If something wasn't filling the void, we'd have an unemployment rate in excess of 99%. Life goes on. When the citizens of the Roman Empire became more interested in enjoying
the luxuries of civilization than in defending it, the Roman Empire fell, and
the world came to an end. Of course, what that really meant was that people were more interested in investing their time and energy building the new kingdoms that became feudal Europe than they were in defending a political structure that had become obsolete centuries ago. Somehow, life went on. More recently, when rock & roll swept through the
nation, it was a corrupting influence on our youth that would destabilize
society. Today we consider many early
rock & roll tunes to be light and easy listening, and play them as background
music in elevators. Life goes on.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Of
course, sometimes the world really does come to an end. Our records are scarce, but I guess that there was probably somebody in the city of Carthage around 250BC saying that everybody should focus a bit less on making money and a bit more on beefing up their own military. They should have listened. For the Carthaginians, the world truly came to an end, as
the city was burned to the ground, and all the inhabitants were killed or
enslaved.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
The
problem is, it's really hard to tell in advance if the particular end of the
world we're talking about is going to be in the "life goes on"
category, or the "no, its really the end of the world" category. So without attempting to forecast exactly
what's going to happen, lets look at a number of other ways in which the world is
going to end, and think about what this really means.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Talkin' 'Bout My (Facebook) Generation</div>
<div class="Body1">
</div>
<div class="Body1">
George
Orwell got it all wrong. Big brother
didn't start spying on people in their living rooms.
Instead, people simply started broadcasting every aspect of their lives
on tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
It's easy
to see examples of highly questionable decisions being made about what people
post. Everything from pictures and
videos of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8958714/Britons-drunk-in-three-quarters-of-Facebook-photos.html">drunken behavior</a> at parties, to cursing of bosses and co-workers and
customers, to defamatory insults of whatever is nearby.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
The law
hasn't quite settled on how to treat these situations - do they represent free
speech to be protected, or does an employer have a right, or even an
obligation, to control its image by <a href="http://www.itworld.com/internet/127121/careful-what-you-say-facebook-boss-watching?page=0%2C0&source=peer2peerpromo">firing employees</a> who engage in unseemly
behavior?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
It seems
to run against human nature for people to stop acting out and sharing everything. Which raises an interesting question: if
everybody (or at least lots of them) engages in "unseemly" behavior,
is it still unseemly? What happens when
the generation that grew up with Facebook is in their fifties and sixties, and
run all the corporations (and not just the hot tech startups). Do we give up and adopt new societal
standards for behavior because "everybody does it"? Or does society bifurcate into a new set of
haves and have nots, in which a few people are lucky (or boring) enough
never to do anything really stupid in the public eye, and are thus our only candidates to run major corporations and hold public office?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
If a Tree Falls Before Wikipedia Covers It, Was It Ever Standing?</div>
<div class="Body1">
Encyclopedia
Britannica recently announced that it was finally discontinuing the print
version of it's encyclopedia. On the one
hand, this was a momentous event, as Britannica had been in continuous
publication since 1768. On the other
hand, its amazing they kept making the print version as long as they did. The company has been <a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/wikipedia-didnt-kill-brittanica-windows-did/">struggling for years</a>,
threatened first by CD Rom dictionaries like Encarta, and now by Wikipedia. While there are a certain number of adherents
to Britannica's use of experts rather than Wikipedia's crowd sourced model, it
is unclear how long the for-profit company can survive against a free
competitor.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<u><a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/wikipedia-didnt-kill-brittanica-windows-did/"><span style="color: black;"></span></a></u></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
This is
simply one example of print materials giving way to their electronic
counterparts. The Kindle and the iPad
have ushered in a new era of ebooks, with the result that Borders has declared
bankruptcy, and Barnes and Noble loses money hand over fist while it struggled to reinvent
itself. Perhaps the independent
bookstores will survive indefinitely as a niche market, but paper publishing in
general is likely to be a shadow of what it once was.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Which
raises the question: when the vast majority of all information is only
available in online formats, how will we footnote our references? If George Lucas decides that Greedo shot
first, could we ever lose every reference that the story wasn't always that
way? (Yes, I know that he made the
original versions available on DVD, but you'll note he didn't extend that to
Blu-Ray. Wanna bet as to whether they'll
migrate onto whatever format comes next?)</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Perhaps
references will become impossible, and all knowledge will devolve into
"<a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/24039/october-17-2005/the-word---truthiness">truthiness</a>". On the other hand, challenging data problems have a way of attracting programmers looking the next great start-up idea. Perhaps this very problem will inspire new types of technology that will lead to unprecedented levels of accuracy and transparency. Imagine a scientific journal that automatically tracked its footnotes, and warned the reader if key references were out of date and could no longer be trusted. It would dynamically call the entire premise of the article into question, and you would have real-time feedback as to whether the article you were reading was still relevant.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
</div>
<div class="Body1">
To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before (Back Home)</div>
<div class="Body1">
Whenever criticisms of Gen Y come up, high among this list is that they are the "<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0315/Three-in-10-young-adults-live-with-parents-highest-level-since-1950s">Boomerang Generation</a>". Whether due to an unprecedented combination of school debt and economic malaise, or simply a lack of gumption caused by overindulgent helicopter parents, this generation leaves home, marries, and starts their real careers later than any other generation in recent memory. Have we lost the critical pioneer spirit that makes up the American psyche?</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
On the other hand, maybe looking only at generations in recent memory is a short-sighted endeavor. The whole concept of personal independence is relatively recent. The standard family unit used to be extended, with three generations living under a roof, not just two. Kids didn't generally strike out on their own, they joined the family business. Perhaps the last couple generations have been a deviation from a historical norm, and Gen Y is simply taking us back to our roots. Only time will tell.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
On so many levels, the world is ending. Sometimes the end of the world really is the end of the world. But much more often, it just seems that way to the previous generation who doesn't like or understand the new environment, and can't imagine how it will hold together if it's not like it used to be.</div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
So do what you can. If you see a problem, try and fix it. But remember to keep an open mind and a sense of wonder, because whether your're going to love it or hate it, you'll hate to miss what's coming next.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-33510937739513561052012-03-18T09:24:00.001-07:002012-03-18T09:26:17.117-07:00Know Your Limits<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">On June 22, 1941, Germany launched <a href="http://www.lookandlearn.com/blog/16701/operation-barbarossa-was-the-tactical-error-of-a-fuhrer-paranoid-about-stalins-dpplicity/">Operation Barbarossa</a></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">, sending 3.9 million troops into the Soviet Union. This was the largest invasion in the history of warfare, and was likely the most significant reason why the Axis powers lost World War II.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Untangling all the reasons why Germany lost along its Eastern front could keep a horde of rampaging historians busy for a lifetime. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">However, very high among the top candidates would have to be that the Germans failed to pay proper attention to the most critical constraints. They had plenty of weapons, ammunition, motorized vehicles and horses, which Hitler believed to be all that was necessary to win. But, overconfident of his ability to achieve a decisive victory quickly, he made no provisions for the supplies that would be needed if the campaign stretched into November or later.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">There are some constraints in warfare which are flexible. Treaties can be bent or broken, and then rationalized later. Troops who are tired or dispirited can be bribed or threatened to march just a little farther. Recruitment standards can be lowered to expand the pool of available soldiers.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Winter in Moscow is not one of those constraints. It makes no allowances for your failure to plan. When temperatures hit -40 degrees Fahrenheit, guns jammed, fuel turned solid, and troops stuffed newspapers into their light summer uniforms in a futile attempt to avoid freezing to death.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Military planners have studied these battles carefully. They have attempted to extrapolate the underlying principles of cause and effect, and apply these principles to as many other situations as possible. But have the lessons really sunk in for everybody else?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">On February 14, 2012, the FCC <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/daily-report-big-trouble-for-a-broadband-plan/?scp=5&sq=lightsquared&st=cse">rescinded permission</a> it had previously granted to Lightsquared Corporation to create a new broadband wireless network. The effect of this decision was devastating. Shortly thereafter, the CEO of Lightsquared resigned, half the employees were laid off, and Sprint cancelled a 15 year spectrum-hosting agreement.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> It is unlikely the company will recover.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Should anybody care?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Let’s think about constraints from an engineering context. Some constraints are more important than others. When designing an airplane, the total weight is a critical constraint. Engineers will spend thousands of hours and billions of dollars to find a <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/26/carbon-fiber-dreamliner-set-to-make-first-commercial-flight-on-sept-27/">new type of material</a> that will make the airplane a tiny percentage lighter. When designing a washing machine, weight isn't nearly as important. It's not completely irrelevant, as you wouldn't want to build a two ton machine that couldn't easily be delivered, or which would fall through an average floor. But in general, washing machine designers don't spend much time worrying about it. A 10% difference, say between a 180 lb and a 200 lb machine, is largely irrelevant.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Some constraints tend to become less significant over time. Computing power is a great example. If you have an idea for a great video game that would be too complex to run on today's generation of computers, don't throw the idea away. Given the rate of improvement, driven by Moore's law, it might just might run on the next generation. In fact, given the lead time needed to develop most games these days, you might just want to start developing it right now, under the assumption that the hardware will catch up to you by the time you're done.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The size and cost of consumer electronics is similar (and closely related). They are small and constantly getting smaller. If you have a ten year plan to build a robot that needs a fully functioning Linux server the size of your thumbnail, don't worry that you can't find a server that size on the market today. The <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry pi</a> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">has already demonstrated a Linux machine the size of a credit card. Ten years should be more than sufficient time to shrink it down to thumbnail size.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Other constraints aren't so easily resolved. One of these is the amount of available electromagnetic spectrum. Spectrum is needed any time you want to communicate without a connected medium (such as a wire). It</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s uses include television, AM and FM radio, Wifi networks, cell phones, radar, microwave transmitters and garage door openers. There is only only have a fixed amount of it, and there will never be any more. Demand for spectrum is intense, and growing rapidly. Companies pay tens of billions of dollars to license relatively small portions of the available spectrum.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It is more precious than gold.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">With this in mind, a number of years ago, Lightsquared made a proposal to use advanced technology to deliver a new 4G LTE wireless network using a slice of unallocated spectrum bandwidth. They would provide this network capacity to existing providers wholesale. This would have increased capacity, exerted downward pressure on the currently rising prices, and been a boon for both consumers and corporations alike. Everybody wins, right?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Well, not everyone.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It seems that GPS manufacturers were a bit concerned by this idea. Lightsquared's plans would potentially interfere with some GPS devices. In February, their concern made enough of an impact on the FCC to cause the FCC to put a halt to the venture.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">If we left the story right there, then I'd probably side with the GPS manufacturers. I like my GPS. I don't want it to break. If somebody has other ideas, well tough, because my GPS was here first, right?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Well, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s not quite that simple. You see, you need to remember what I said about the <a href="http://xkcd.com/273/">electromagnetic spectrum</a>. Because it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s so precious, it's all carefully defined and licensed out. And as it turns out, Lightsquared was not infringing on the GPS wavelengths at all. Instead, GPS's are infringing on spectrum that was licensed to Lightsquared.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Although we talk about spectrum in very precise, digital terms, its actually very analog. If you broadcast on a specific frequency, unless you're very careful, it doesn't look like a sharp spike at that specific frequency. Instead, it looks like a broad bell curve, centering around that frequency. Try looking at a simple frequency analyzer (such as Soniqviewer for iOS) while you play a single note on a musical instrument. You'll be amazed at how many sound frequencies are playing all at once.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The problem in this case isn't the transmissions from the GPS satellites, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s the receivers. GPS signals tend to be weak. GPS devices are inexpensive. To make the devices as cheap as possible, and get the best possible reception, GPS devices use receivers that are very imprecisely tuned, in an attempt to pick up as much of the signal as possible. That means that GPS devices end up listening to a lot of spectrum they have no business listening to. And, no surprise, they have the tendency to get confused when they hear some other signal on this other spectrum.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This is a fixable problem. Lightsquared has demonstrated how a simple filter could be added to the GPS filter to clean up reception. This would increase the cost of a GPS. But cost isn't a significant constraint for consumer devices. GPS chips are already such a commodity that they are being added into every model of smartphone on the market. Garmin, the leader in standalone GPS devices, is desperately trying to find a <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/08/garmin-gps-dashboards/">new niche</a> because it's product is becoming such a commodity. </span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So let</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s think about this from a constraint perspective:</span></div>
<ul>
<li><div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">GPS</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> devices</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> are <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2012/02/democratization-of-technology.html">cheap</a>, and getting cheaper</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Spectrum is expensive, and getting more expensive</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The constraint the FCC wants to address is the current cost of GPS devices, rather than increasing utilization of spectrum</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Does this make sense to anybody?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So far, we</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">ve managed to handle spectrum concerns. Smart phones, which are among the biggest consumers of data, are still relatively new. We</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">ve been enjoying a pleasant summer of bandwidth availability.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But demand is growing fast. Available spectrum is fixed.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Winter is coming.</span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-31521459762463920302012-03-11T09:49:00.001-07:002012-03-13T03:55:50.113-07:00You Can Lead a Horticulture…<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another year, and once again Apple has managed to dominate
the attention of the global media by releasing a new version of the iPad. Curiously enough, even news outlets that
didn’t think it was big news carried it as their top story. For example, the New York Times article described
the improvements in their headline as “modest”.
And yet, it chose to carry that story on the front page of their
website.</div>
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Well, I’m sure it made sense to them.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Whenever Apple hits the news like this, the world seems to
split into two extremely vocal camps.
Camp number one loves Apple and follows every detail. Camp number two <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/06/why-do-people-hate-apple">loathes Apple</a> and disparages
Apple followers as “<a href="http://www.thehermesproject.com/2011/11/samsung-mocks-apple-sheep.html">sheep</a>” and “lemmings” for snapping up every Apple
product. Curiously enough, they also
tend to follow every detail. (There’s a
third camp who doesn’t pay any attention to any of this, but since they tend to
be a quiet bunch, we can safely ignore them for this exercise.) Without stepping too deeply into this debate,
I would like to focus on one particular criticism that is sometimes leveled at
Apple, which is that its products should not be purchased because they are much
more expensive than competitor’s products with the same specifications.</div>
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This criticism represents extremely sloppy thinking. I might even go so far as to call it stupid.</div>
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Before the deluge of hate mail begins, let me make clear
that I’m not criticizing people who dislike Apple products. I’m not even criticizing people who choose
not to buy Apple products because of their specifications. However, I am criticizing people who think
that the technical specifications are necessarily the only relevant criteria for
purchasing a product.</div>
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To illustrate what I mean by this, let’s take a look at a
branch of <a href="http://imairfan.wordpress.com/2012/01/">artificial intelligence</a> (AI) known as expert systems, and more
specifically at automated rule induction.
I find it useful to consider artificial intelligence for subjects like
this because AI was designed to replicate, at least superficially, how humans
think. By understanding the limitations
of AI, we can sometimes gain insight into the limitations of our own thought
processes.</div>
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In expert systems, knowledge is represented by a series of
rules. While the concept of an expert system
as a form of artificial intelligence is only about forty years old, the idea of
capturing knowledge in a simple rule is ancient. For example consider the following sayings:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<a href="http://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?502">Red at night, sailor’s delight. Red in morning, sailor takes warning.</a>”</div>
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“<a href="http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-coral-and-vs-king-snake/">Red on black, friend of Jack. Red on yellow, kill a fellow.</a>”</div>
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<br /></div>
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Both of these represent knowledge within a particular knowledge domain (meteorology
and herpetology respectively) captured in a simple, rhyming rule. With these types of rules, it becomes much
easier to communicate, store and pass this knowledge on. An expert system uses rules similarly to
develop a knowledge base about a knowledge domain.</div>
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The creators of the first expert systems collected knowledge
manually. They would interview experts (hence the name) in a particular knowledge
domain, and codify the knowledge gathered from these experts in the form
of rules. As the field developed, the
concept of automated rule induction was introduced. In automated rule induction, a computer uses
various algorithms to analyze a set of data, and derives various predictive
rules from that data set. For example,
perhaps you would prepare a set of data which includes a simplified description of
the weather (such as “clear” or “stormy”), the time, and the color of the sky
twelve hours previously. The computer
analyzes the data, and discovers a strong correlation between a red sky at night
and clear weather the following day. Similarly, a red sky in the morning is strongly correlated with an upcoming storm. This
example is trivial, but when you increase the number of potential variables to
hundreds, with thousands or millions of data points, computers can become very
useful at spotting patterns and relationships that a human would miss.</div>
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There are two challenges in running an effective automated
rule induction program. The first is to
avoid rules that are too narrow. For
example, the computer might produce the following rule: “Whenever the date is
August 29<sup>th</sup>, 2005, there will be a hurricane.” This rule would be 100% accurate based on the
available data. However, it’s also not
particularly useful, because that date will never come around again.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The second problem is a rule that is too wide. For example, the computer might produce a
rule that says “It will snow whenever it is Christmas”. The computer might choose this rule because
it finds that it was true more than 50% of the time in the data set it analyzed. But it’s so vague that it has extremely
limited predictive value. It is, to use
the colloquial term, a “stupid” rule. If
you want a good weather forecasting program, you need a computer with much more
intelligent rules, which look at a number of relevant variables and model how
they interact.</div>
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It’s this second problem that trips up so many people in
real life. Somewhere along the line,
they get an overly simplified rule in their head, and for whatever reason, they stick
with it. Maybe it’s too tiring to keep
running the automated rule induction program in their brain. Despite the constant influx of new data to the contrary,
they continue to operate with an over-simplified view of the world that ignores
most of the key variables.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In fact, this is exactly what racism is. Whatever else you can say about somebody who
is racist, you can also, quite objectively, call them stupid. This is because the rules in their head which
judge people look only at a single variable, and ignore the more complex factors
and relationships which are necessary to develop a more sophisticated judgment
of a person. Racists are not
intrinsically stupid – they might be quite sophisticated when it comes to other
knowledge domains. They’ve simply picked
up a bad set of rules for this domain, and kept them despite evidence to the
contrary.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Curiously, this same phenomenon proliferates in the “sophisticated”
world of technology as well. Dave Pogue
discussed this at length in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/technology/08pogue.html?pagewanted=all">2007 column</a>, in which he challenged the
assumption that more megapixels on digital cameras result in better image
quality. It’s easy to understand where
this assumption came from. In the very
early days of digital photography, megapixels were so limited that any time
they increased, you did see a noticeable improvement. But somewhere along the line, the megapixel
count stopped being the limiting factor, and other variables, such as the lens
and sensor, became much more significant.
But megapixels are simple. They're clearly labelled
on the box.
If you buy based on megapixels, you don’t have to think very hard about
your choice. You can get by using
simpler rules. You can, in short, be
stupid.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Which brings us back to Apple. The differences between an Apple laptop and,
for example, a Dell laptop are so numerous that it’s difficult to list them all
out. OS usability. Form factors (such as size, weight and
shape). Available applications. Available interface ports. Susceptibility to malware. Compatibility with other devices. Access to friends or colleagues who can
provide support if need be. Any one of these might be important to a particular person.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Computers are, in a word, complicated. Attempting to define them solely based on a
small list of metrics such as gigahertz and gigabytes is simple. It’s easy.
But it is also, unfortunately, just a bit stupid.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-67929752749988729732012-03-05T18:10:00.000-08:002012-03-05T18:10:37.435-08:00Do You See What I See?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Do you
want to heap praise upon somebody in the technology industry?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Use a single word to describe them as tops in
their field, somebody to be looked up to, respected, and admired?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Call them
a "visionary".</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Everybody
wants to be a visionary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be a
visionary means to be able to see what other people can't.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means being able to predict the
future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means being able to find winning
solutions, and understanding what your customers want before they know it
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What could possibly be more
valuable than to have a clear view of the future before anybody else?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Lots of
things, actually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just ask Cassandra.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">According
to Greek myth, Cassandra was blessed by the god Apollo with the ability to see
the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, nobody would
believe her, so she was unable to act on her visions, and the blessing became a
curse.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Steve
Jobs was often acclaimed as a visionary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps that</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif";"> </span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">was t</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">rue in spots, but it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s also true that much of his success was attributable to
being a guy with absolutely zero vision, but who could identify quality
whenever he saw it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was well demonstrated
in a <a href="http://jonathan.graehl.org/youve-got-to-tell-me-what-you-want">famous exchange</a> between him and James Vincent, who was developing the
commercials for the forthcoming iPad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jobs was adamant that the first round of proposals "sucked",
but was unable to provide any guidance for how to improve them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
pressed on this point, Jobs responded "You</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">ve
got to show me some stuff, and I</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">ll know it when I see it.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the
flip side, let's talk about somebody who is not often called a visionary: Bill
Gates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need to be a bit cautious
about denigrating Gate's achievements, because whatever you may think of
Microsoft's products, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s indisputable that he
achieved a level of professional success that most people will never approach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it's also true that despite
hundreds of different products, the vast bulk of Microsoft's wealth and success
came from just two product lines: Windows and Office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In neither of these categories was Microsoft
first to market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Anybody remember when
the leading Office applications were <a href="http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?storeKey=us&trkid=NASEMGglOP&pid=prod3670083">WordPerfect</a> and <a href="http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/123/">Lotus123</a>?)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, Microsoft came late to the game with
inferior, "me too" products, and achieved market dominance through aggressive
marketing, incremental improvement and sheer stubbornness.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Despite
this, Bill Gates has demonstrated a brilliant understanding of the future on
numerous occasions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider this
excerpt from his book "The Road Ahead", where he described a future
product, which he called the </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">wallet PC</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"You'll be
able to carry the wallet PC in your pocket or purse. It will display messages
and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor
weather and stock reports, play both simple and sophisticated games, browse
information if you're bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call up
photos of your kids."</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Sound
familiar?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Swap the words "Wallet
PC" with </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">iPhone</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> or the Android of your choice, and the description is spot
on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bear in mind that this book was
published back in 1994, when the state of the art in portable computing was a
device that weighed only 5 lbs and had no built in internet connectivity.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">With a
lead like this, how could Microsoft possibly fail to dominate the mobile
technology platform as thoroughly as it dominated the personal computer?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How
indeed.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This isn't
the only lead that Microsoft has squandered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Back in 2008, 2 years before Apple released
the iPad, Microsoft was working on a revolutionary new tablet device code-named
</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Courier</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had a built in
camera, and accepted input from both multi-touch and stylus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gizmodo, in a review of a late stage
prototype, called it "<a href="http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet">astonishing</a>".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It might have proved a fearsome competitor to the iPad, but we'll never
know, because Microsoft killed the product before it was ever released.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This decision was made in part on the advice
of then-retired Chairman Bill Gates, who didn't think that Courier followed the
core Microsoft Windows strategy closely enough.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In
hindsight, this was probably a bad choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Might it have been anticipated?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many years before Courier was killed, a technology visionary made an astute observation about how an
ailing IBM was stifling its own innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This came during the period of collaboration between IBM and Microsoft,
who were jointly developing the new OS/2 operating system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the time, IBM was extremely concerned
about interoperability between all of its product lines, and suggested in all
seriousness that fonts be dropped from OS/2, because they would not be
supported by IBMs existing line of mainframe printers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This visionary correctly noted that you can't
survive in the technology industry for long unless you are willing to cannibalize
and render obsolete your own product lines.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">That
person's name?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bill Gates.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Cassandra
must have been laughing her head off.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">For all
of Microsoft</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s considerable success, it
seems like it might have been greater still had it only managed to take better
advantage of the visionary skills of its founder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might not be struggling to stay relevant
in a world where PCs are rapidly giving way to mobile phones and tablets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might still succeed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if so, it will be celebrated as a
surprising turnaround story, not of a Goliath maintaining its dominance.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So if
ever Apollo offers you the chance to be a visionary, think about Bill
Gates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember Cassandra.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And most importantly, remember Noah, who
understood the key principle of being a visionary: Predicting rain doesn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t count, unless you're also building arks.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-40948515375418297612012-02-27T16:10:00.000-08:002012-02-27T16:10:54.359-08:00The Promise of Online Advertising<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On
February 1st, 2012, Facebook filed papers in preparation for an Initial Public
Offering, which is expected to take place sometime later this year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may be one of the largest IPOs ever, and
is expected to result in Facebook achieving a $100 billion market
capitalization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That would give Facebook
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg a paper wealth of $28 billion.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Facebook
is the latest incarnation of an intoxicating vision we've heard about for some
time now: customized, behavioral marketing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This will revolutionize the marketing experience for companies and
consumers alike, helping to connect people with the exact products and services
they need, for little cost and with no effort.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Who
wouldn't like that?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">To
understand this model, its helpful to remember where we've been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let's use television as an example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It used to be that TV networks would produce
a half hour or hour show, possibly about a group of four Vietnam vets who went
around blowing up everything in sight in order to solve various problems, all
without actually injuring anybody.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The TV networks would pay for the cost of producing and broadcasting the show by selling air time during the broadcast to companies who
wished to advertise their products to the viewers of the show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The nature of the show would help the companies
to determine the types of viewers most likely to be watching, and thus to
target their advertising effectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For the A-Team, one might reasonably expect a high population of males
between the ages of 7 and 30.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adult females?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not so much.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Sadly,
the advertisements we got were mostly for toothpaste and paper towels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe not the best fit for the target
audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm not entirely sure why that
was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe the lack of sophisticated
computers back then limited their ability to figure out that 18 year old guys
were not obsessed with decisions over which brand of paper towels to buy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe the ad execs were all out to lunch.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Today,
instead of television, we've got cool, targeted advertising venues like Google, Youtube and
Facebook.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of relying on Nielsen
to figure out roughly who is watching which show, we have direct access to
detailed characteristics about a person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Facebook not only knows I'm a male over 35, it knows about my taste in
books, movies and music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can probably
make some shrewd guesses about my politics, my interest (or lack thereof) in
sports, and my relative socio-economic status.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What a wealth of data!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can now
look forward to sophisticated, targeted advertisements that are aimed directly
at me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be like they're reading
my mind, figuring out exactly what I want moments before I decide I want
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Advertisements will be transformed
from an annoying distraction into something eagerly anticipated.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It will
be cool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be awesome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will transform everything.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Just as
soon as those ad execs get back from lunch.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Because,
for reasons surpassing my understanding, the ads I see are still as mundane and pointless as they've ever been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
just checked my Facebook page, and found advertisements for:</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Visa (I
haven't applied for a new card in over 15 years)</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Heineken
(I don't drink)</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">An
electronic cigarette (I don't smoke)</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Restaurants
located in Bucks County (I don't know where that is)</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">And many
more.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I don't
mean to single out Facebook here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
recently received a targeted advertisement from an Internet provider (who shall
remain nameless, but their initials are AT&T).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The email suggested that I might like to
upgrade to a faster internet service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don't fault AT&T for emailing me - I'm an existing customer, so it doesn't really
count as spam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe they checked my
account logs and noticed that I do max out the bandwidth from time to
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was actually a good
advertisement, because I would like to have faster internet speed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is advertising at it's best - a focused,
targeted advertisement, sent directly to somebody who is looking for that
service.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">There was
just one teensy, tiny problem.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">AT&T
doesn't offer faster internet service in my zip code.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Don't
tell me they don't know my zip code, because they use it to mail me a bill each
month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And don't expect me to believe
that it takes a human to check on the service availability, because I was able
to look it up using the link they provided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For whatever reason, AT&T simply finds it convenient to advertise
their services to people they know they can't deliver them to.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So call
me an advertising skeptic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don't ask me
to believe that sharing my personal data will benefit me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's not that I don't like the vision, I do.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It's just
that before it can become reality, those ad execs are going to have to come back
from a very, very long lunch.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-23104555789338717352012-02-20T09:55:00.000-08:002012-02-20T09:55:06.854-08:00China or Bust<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I'd like to continue with the subject raised in my last post regarding working conditions and wages in China.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There has been a lot of scrutiny in the media on this subject lately, most of it focused on Apple, largely because Apple is so insanely profitable that it's easy to make the case that they could improve wages and working conditions if they really wanted to.</span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So the question is: should they?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the one side, we have the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman">Milton Friedman</a>, pure economics school of thought, which believes that the economy should be driven by pure supply and demand, and any attempt to artificially tinker with it will be negative (or catastrophic) to all involved parties.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the other side, we have people who believe that everybody deserves a living wage, and good working conditions, no matter what.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This group often overlaps with people who are upset about the loss of US manufacturing jobs, and would like the US to become more competitive by bringing foreign workers up to US standards.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Who is right?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the subject of wages, I have to vote with the school of economics here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Judging wages in other countries against US standards makes no sense when you consider local costs of living, and economic alternatives.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Let me provide a personal example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few years ago, I worked with a group of programmers in India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found them to be dedicated, hard-working and competent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew their names, talked with them frequently, and enjoyed their company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were paid a small fraction of a US competitive wage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This money allowed them to live a comfortable life in India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The savings to my company helped (in small part) to lower the price of its products and increase its margins (which directly benefited US stockholders, which includes a large number of US retirees).</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I think about them any time I hear somebody complaining about US programmers losing work to foreign competition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While I can sympathize with anybody who</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s lost their job, I can</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t see a net advantage to the planet by putting three or four of Indian programmers out of work so a single US programmer could be hired in their place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking back on it several years later, I still believe that working with them left all of us better off.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So if wages were all there were to it, I'd be a pure free market advocate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As much as I would like to improve the economy and employment figures here in the US, I can</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t justify one country enjoying a high standard of living while people in another country, possessing the same work ethic and skills, starves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My hope is that we can quickly bring much of the rest of the world up to first world standards, without the US sinking down to third world standards.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">But in addition to wages, we also need to consider working conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In their profile on Foxconn (which largely triggered the recent round of media attention), the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=1">New York Times</a> highlighted workers being exposed to poisonous chemicals, explosions caused by non-ventilated aluminum dust, and other health hazards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this subject, I believe first world standards should prevail.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">While I was making this argument on a forum in the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-winston/apple-employee-labor_b_1258219.html">Huffington Post</a>, somebody named "S M V" responded as follows: "Exposure to toxic chemicals and other work place hazards ... needs to be compared to the other options available. In 3rd world countries a lot of people stay alive by scavenging through garbage dumps. If they can have a better life sorting through computer waste and the resulting exposure to chemicals would you ban it? If you required 1st world safety levels much of the recycling either would not happen or would be automated."</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I think S M V has a point, but it's not one I can subscribe to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has the same horrible logic of questioning whether its right for shipwreck survivors to resort to cannibalism and eat their best friends in order to avoid certain starvation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On paper, considering only raw survival metrics, it's probably inarguable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we don't live on paper, and we</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">re more than just metrics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People have names, and are more than the sum of their statistics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So while I can't come up with a coherent logical argument to defeat S M V's rationale, I can propose some scenarios to consider.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Here's scenario number one: I'm back with my group of Indian programmers, and one of them leaves the group because they're not making enough money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I imagine I would wish that person well, and hope that they got something positive out of working with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if they left angry, I'd be more inclined to think the fault lay with that person, rather than myself, because I know they took the job willingly, fully aware of the compensation, and have lost no future opportunities in the process.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I can live with that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Here's scenario number two: I'm back with my group of Indian programmers, and am told that one won't be working anymore, because he or she has gone blind due to working conditions in the facility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don't think I'd sleep well that night, or the night after that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew that person's name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'd worked with them for months, or years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'd think about the cost pressure I'd personally exerted on their employer, and wonder if I had direct responsibility for the conditions that resulted in this permanent injury.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if I knew they had equal or greater likelihood of getting injured even worse doing some other local job, I don't think that would help me sleep better at night.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I don't think I could live with that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Neither, I suspect, could S M V.</span></span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-78385450098317898572012-02-13T10:02:00.000-08:002012-02-13T10:04:13.780-08:00The Democratization of Technology<div class="Body1" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">A few weeks ago, Henry Blodget wrote an <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/apple-sweatshop-problem-16-hour-days-70-cents-172800495.html">article</a> on Yahoo</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s Daily Ticker, casting a critical eye on Apple's outsourcing agreements with companies such as Foxconn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's worth reading, and essentially makes the case that we're enjoying inexpensive consumer electronics at the cost of terrible working conditions for thousands of people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It was an interesting article, but what really caught my eye was one of the comments, posted by somebody calling themselves "T Bo R": "iphone a low price...??? where have u been????"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Ignoring the punctuation and spelling issues, this raises an interesting question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are devices like the iPhone "cheap", or are they "expensive"?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And given that these are subjective designations, how do we even decide?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">One place to start is to figure out who can afford an iPhone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The median income in the US is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/recession-officially-over-us-incomes-kept-falling.html">$49,909</a></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This works out to $959 a week, pre-tax.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A top end iPhone costs $399, plus data plan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spending half a week's salary on a phone is pretty steep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paying for food, shelter, clothing, taxes, and everything else doesn</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">t leave much left for discretionary purchases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s not completely out of reach for a median income person, but it is a large expenditure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So if you define "cheap" as "easily affordable by the vast majority of the population", then the answer is "no".</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">However, that's probably too simplistic a definition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I find a house for sale on a ten acre lot for $50,000 in Connecticut, I will certainly define that as "cheap", even though it</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s many times the cost of an iPhone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So to define cheap versus expensive, we need to establish a relative baseline.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">What's a useful baseline?</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Let's assume the iPhone is one of the top phones you can purchase in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe you're an Android fan, but since they fit into a similar price point, it's hard to argue convincingly that they</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">re not fairly competitive with each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the world of, say, automobiles, there's not another level of phone experience that can be procured for ten or a hundred times the price of your basic iPhone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can certainly buy phones for those price points, but they're pretty much just iPhones decked out with gold or diamonds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other than displaying the owner</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s wealth, they don't offer a different experience for the money.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This hasn't always been the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember car phones?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They used to be the exclusive domain of the extremely wealthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first car phone, called the ARP (or <a href="http://www.techgig.com/topics/Autoradiopuhelin">Autoradiopuhelin</a>, "car radio phone"), was released in Finland in 1971.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was considered a huge success, reaching an install base of 10,000 users within 6 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Compare that with the iPhone, which has sold 73 million in the first four years of its launch.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I have no idea how much the ARP cost per user, so it's difficult to compare the relative financial success of these two products.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it's abundantly clear that far more people have access to the top tier of telephone technology today than was the case 40 years ago.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">OK, so maybe phones are cheap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is this an isolated case?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How about supercomputers?</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It's true that an iPhone or a basic laptop packs more punch than a Cray supercomputer from a few decades ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But technology always improves, so that</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">s not a fair comparison.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The real question is, based on what we consider to be a </span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">supercomputer</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> in today</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s terms, how accessible are supercomputer technologies to the average consumer?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The answer: Much more than they used to be.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It used to be that supercomputers were a breed apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the Cray-2 became the world</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s fastest machine in 1985, it was unlike anything you might have at your home or in your office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It used a proprietary operating system not shared by any other computer in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It cooled itself using a brand new inert liquid (Fluorinert).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Operating and programming a Cray required a unique set of skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you didn't work for the Department of Defense or one of a very few huge corporations, you probably never got near one.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">By contrast, not too long ago, the Air Force Research Laboratory constructed a powerful supercomputer, not out of advanced components you've never heard of, but by connecting <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html">1760 Playstation 3</a> gaming consoles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may not be the absolute fastest in the world, but it's definitely in the top 50.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Imagine going back to 1972 and suggesting the government build a supercomputer by networking thousands of pong consoles.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Of course, the average person doesn't have access to 1760 Playstation consoles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That doesn't mean that supercomputing capability is out of reach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/">Seti at Home</a> project showed that in 1999, when it demonstrated the ability to distribute computing projects among millions of personal computers using fairly simple software.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of similar volunteer computing projects underway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Access to supercomputing power no longer requires vast amounts of cash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It simply takes some competent programming skills and a persuasive message.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">If your ethics are lacking, you might even dispense with the persuasive bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Botnets are the latest form of distributed computing infrastructure, collecting the computing resources (coercively) from thousands of PCs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker">Conficker worm</a> controlled an estimated seven millions machines at the height of its infection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s a single example of many.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The list goes on and on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Near-professional quality movie cameras are now available for amateur movie-makers at an affordable price.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vast databases of knowledge are accessible for free or for modest subscriptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>High speed networking is now installed in over 25% of US households.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So sorry, T Bo R, by any realistic measure, iPhones, and all sorts of other advanced technologies, are available dirt cheap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe this is good, maybe it's bad, but it's the way things are right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of complaining that you</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">d like them even cheaper, I suggest you take advantage of what we have, and figure out how to use it to change the world for the better.</span></span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-56677960526564624252012-02-06T17:52:00.000-08:002012-02-13T10:05:14.685-08:00What Limits Humanity?<br />
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">One of the oldest ideas in existence is of humans receiving super powers due to some type of artificial augmentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Achilles was said to have gained near-invulnerability after his mother submerged him in the river Styx.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Chinese folk hero Fong Sai-yuk was made similarly invulnerable when his mother treated him by breaking every bone in his body and then bathing him in Chinese Rubbing Alcohol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(No word on where child services was during either of these events.) More recent cultural heroes include astronaut Steve Austin being rebuilt stronger, faster and better following a debilitating accident in The Six Million Dollar Man, and Peter Parker's inheritance of super powers as a result of being bitten by a radioactive (or genetically modified) spider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the beginning, these stories have been harmless fantasies, an escape for people wishing to exceed their own limits.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How much longer will these stories remain fantasies?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what will happen when they become real?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The New York Times recently profiled <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/oscar-pistorius.html">Oscar Pistorius</a>, a runner from South Africa, who is the center of an unusual controversy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given that he has no legs, should he be allowed to race in the Olympics?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until recently, this would be a non-issue, as his handicap would have prevented him from qualifying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, however, the question is being raised as to whether his artificial limbs give him an unfair advantage.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Both sides raise excellent points, and the case could still go either way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The complexities of the biology and physics involved make it difficult or impossible to arrive at a truly objective and accurate answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact that other amputees, using the same type of artificial limbs, have not enjoyed similar athletic success certainly suggests that Mr. Pistorius is an accomplished athlete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On that basis, perhaps he should be allowed to compete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, that's a short term answer, and every year the decision will get more difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless of the state of technology today, it is inevitable that at some point, possibly soon, a runner using artificial limbs will have an overwhelming advantage over his or her "non-handicapped" competition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recent progress in </span><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomechatronics"><span style="color: black; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></a></u><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomechatronics">biomechatronics</a> has been impressive, and this progress shows every indication of continuing or accelerating in the foreseeable future.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Perhaps you think I'm being overly optimistic in this assessment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so, you probably haven't seen the videos of </span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0_mLumx-6Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player">Dean Kamen's "Luke" arm</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You probably haven't seen the demonstrations of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww&feature=youtube_gdata_player">walking robots</a>, capable of navigating terrain ranging from hills to snow to ice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For years, we couldn't even think about these types of technologies, because the computing power needed was too heavy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But artificial limbs have finally made the same types of breakthroughs that computers made when mainframes and minicomputers finally gave way to the first primitive personal computers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The current generation, represented in those video links, represents the TRS-80 and the Apple IIe of prosthetic technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think about what happened to personal computers after 10, 15, or 20 years.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Where is this going to go?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the one hand, this development is a triumph of progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For most of human history, a physical handicap has been a death sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the best of circumstances, it was an overwhelming burden for the handicapped, forcing them to live on charity at the outer fringes of society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only recently have people missing limbs had a reasonable chance to participate in society on almost equal terms, with that "almost" always representing a disadvantage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea that a handicap might turn into an advantage seems like long overdue compensation for millennia of suffering and marginalization.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Still though, are we ready for what comes next?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Let's suppose that to keep things "fair" (or at least simple), the Olympic Committee decides that athletes cannot compete with artificial enhancements, thus limiting the field to people with their full complement of limbs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is roughly where we've been up till now, albeit enforced by the limits of technology, not the rules.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then what happens?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Even if you're not a sports fan, it's likely that at some point, you've watched at least a small portion of the Olympics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And even if you are a sports fan, unless you have a physical disability, or are close friends with or related to somebody who is, odds are that you've never watched the </span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><a href="http://www.paralympic.org/index.html">Paralympics</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn't have the same excitement, the same cachet, nor the same advertising or endorsement dollars.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">When Paralympic athletes start outperforming their Olympic peers on a regular basis, expect that to change in a big hurry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The definitions of what is possible will go out the window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Paralympics will be faster, more exciting, and more unexpected than the Olympics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's audience will grow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The advertising and endorsement dollars will follow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fame, recognition, and glory will follow for the participants.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How long before the first able-bodied athlete voluntarily amputates his or her own limbs in order to be able to compete?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Perhaps you think the answer is "never".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if the Paralympics gain more prestige than the Olympics, surely that won't drive people to willingly mutilate themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isn't that much too high a price to pay to be a champion?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">For me, absolutely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably also for the majority of the human race.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there's a problem with this sample size.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The majority of the human race are not competitive athletes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a famous study done by Dr. Gabe Mirkin, 100 competitive runners were asked if they would be willing to take a magic pill that would guarantee them an Olympic gold medal, if the pill would also kill them within a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roughly half of them said yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Presumably they planned to take it during an Olympic year.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">To my knowledge, this survey has not been repeated, and I have no idea if it was conducted properly, with the necessary scientific sampling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even if improperly conducted, it seems a strong indicator that the number of people willing to trade their health for victory is far above zero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you doubt, check take another look at your sports pages for the latest steroid scandal in your favorite sport.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">For years, people were terrified by the loss of privacy that would come with advancing computer and networking technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now that the technology has arrived, we find that privacy has not been snatched away by big brother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's been voluntarily given up by people in the form of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the information we share seems like a good idea at the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Occasionally, somebody </span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37986320/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/facebook-divorce-lawyers-new-best-friend/">is rudely reminded</a> that perhaps there should be some self imposed limits.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">We've similarly been terrified of the possibility of being transformed into Cyborgs against our will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems much more likely that we'll do it to ourselves, because it seems like a good idea at the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let us hope that we figure out how to set appropriate limits before we learn the consequences unpleasantly.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-1364964655118586032012-01-23T16:22:00.000-08:002012-01-23T16:22:55.292-08:00Invert, always invert<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Charlie
Munger, the less famous Billionaire partner of Berkshire Hathaway, is famous
for his critiques of human psychology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He constantly warns of common mistakes that people make, and suggests
simple ways you can improve your thinking capability.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">One of
his basic maxims is: "<a href="http://robdkelly.com/blog/models-frameworks/munger-mental-models/">Invert, always invert</a>".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea is that by always looking at
something in the same way, you get stuck in basic assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By inverting your perspective, you can often
find radically new approaches to problem solving.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Let's
take a look at how this might be applied to the world of computer security.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Many
years ago, while reading the otherwise excellent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAK_Industries">DAK Catalog</a>, I found
a description of one of the most poorly designed security products I can
imagine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a password protection
system designed for a dial-up phone system (yes, at risk of dating myself, this
was pre-Internet).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Concerned about the
possibility that an intruder would attempt a brute force attack, the designers
of this product came up with what they thought was a very clever idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first incorrect character that was
entered would immediately disconnect the call.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No longer would it be possible for an
intruder to try<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hundreds or thousands of
passwords at a go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One strike and you're
out, dial back and try again.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Let's
think about what this means.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Suppose
this product used a ten character password.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Further assume it can use upper and lower case letters, and
numbers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That gives you a total of 62 options per character, and 62 to
the tenth power possible passwords, or roughly 839 quadrillion possible
passwords.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On average, a brute force
attack will guess it correctly after 419 quadrillion tries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Assuming you could try ten times a second
(which is a pretty aggressive assumption for a slow speed dial-up system), hacking this system using a brute force attack would probably require 1.3 billion years.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">However,
this system accidentally leaked critical information to the intruder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As soon as you guessed the first character
correctly, IT TOLD YOU THAT YOU WERE CORRECT.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is, it failed to disconnect you immediately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means that on average, you can guess each character in 31
attempts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guessing the entire ten character password
would likely take you 310 attempts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Assuming you could try one combination per minute (much slower than before, as it
forces you to redial each time), hacking this system would require a bit over 5
hours.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Ouch.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This is
why it's difficult to build secure systems just right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you're not really careful, it's very easy
to leak all sorts of unintentional information, sometimes using the very
mechanisms that you think are making your system more secure.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This is a
great example of a security flaw, because it provides an interesting clue about
how we might invert our entire approach to security.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Let's go
back to the original idea of a ten character password.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let's assume that we don't leak any
information to the would-be intruder to let them know how much progress they're
making on cracking that password.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
still suffer from the same basic weakness: we tell the intruder when they have
successfully guessed the password.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This sounds
ridiculously obvious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can a
legitimate user of the service function if they don't get access to their data
when they type the correct password?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
soon as the data comes up, you know the password is correct.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Unless..
you invert the assumption.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">What if
every user id and password combination provided access to the system?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note I didn't say "legitimate access", just access. An incorrect id and password combination would take the intruder straight into a bogus screen, a concept known as a honeypot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If this was a banking system, then it would provide access to an account
with an imaginary name, holding imaginary sums of cash, and an imaginary
history of transactions.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Could an
intruder tell that all this was fake?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Probably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could research that name, and see if it was
a legitimate person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Look up that name at the account's address</span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There's all sorts
of things they could do.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It would
take minutes at the best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might take
hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Or days. </span>What a waste of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How is an intruder ever going to do
a brute force attack if they have to spend minutes or hours or days on each guess,
using human intelligence rather than a machine algorithm to detect if they've found a legitimate combination? And all the while, alarm bells should be going off in the bank, warning administrators and police that somebody is attempting to snoop where they shouldn't be. Choosing one wrong id and password is understandable. Ten in a row is clearly a criminal. And finding a legitimate account will take trillions (or more) of tries.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
Clearly, this idea is more applicable in some contexts than in others. It <span>takes time and effort to create effective algorithms to generate realistic
looking data (and especially to make sure that real data doesn't leak through).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> For a bank system, which has highly structured, very valuable, and easily generated data, this makes sense. For an online newspaper, not so much. </span>So it's not a silver bullet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still though, it's an interesting concept
that can be combined with existing security technologies to drastically raise
the difficulty for intruders, simply by inverting a basic concept.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
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<span></span></div>
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<span></span></div>
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<span></span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Always remember to invert!</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-22066084957643608572012-01-16T16:38:00.000-08:002012-01-16T16:38:50.295-08:00Contemplating the Personal Data Warehouse<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A few
weeks ago, my friend Sivakumar suggested that we could improve human life by
creating a <a href="http://vsdimension.blogspot.com/2011/12/dwh-for-human-life-contd.html#links">Personal Data Warehouse</a>, that tracked the development and abilities
of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Imagine if you could compare
the age at which your children developed certain language or other cognitive
skills relative to their parents or grand-parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We might be able to detect and correct
developmental problems early.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">He then
makes an interesting observation about a trait in his own family, as the mental
math skills of each generation are slightly less well developed than the
previous one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He speculated that perhaps
this was the result of an increasing reliance upon technology.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Is this
true?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">If it's
true, is it a problem?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The idea
that people will degenerate due to increasing reliance on technology (or
something that functions like it, such as slavery) is an old one, and has been
put forth as one of the possible causes of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire">fall of the Roman Empire</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More recently, it was brilliantly illustrated
in Pixar's film <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall*e">Wall*E</a>, where the human race is depicted as having depended on
their robotic creations for so long that they have descended into a race of
barely animate blobs, largely unaware of their surroundings, and motivated by nothing
but an increasingly desperate search for entertainment.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It's also
a very old idea that civilization is on the verge of collapsing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the earliest examples of writing we
have, stemming from ancient Egypt thousands of years before the birth of
Christ, complain about how much better things were in the good old days, and
how everything since then has been going to the dogs.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How is it
that everything has been sliding out of control for so many thousands of years,
and yet there are still people around to complain about it?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I would
argue that the crux of the issue is the constancy of change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes things change rapidly, sometimes
things change slowly, but it never comes to a complete stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Political revolutions challenge the old power
structures, waged by youth who wear outlandish
clothing, and completely ignore the accepted methods of political
engagement and boldly protest and rebel in brand new ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And lest you think I'm talking about the
1960s, or perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement, I actually had in mind Julius
Caesar's rise to power in the late Roman Republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe some things never change.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Change
inevitably seems destructive to the previous generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The old values are thrown out the
window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems like the world is
coming to an end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is - their
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What they (understandably) fail
to appreciate is that when one world comes to an end, another one rises up to
take it's place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so the cycle
continues.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">As much
as we may be annoyed by the ghastly and garish fashions that the next generation
inevitably adopts, we can presumably agree that fashion is in the eye of the
beholder, and that one generation's tastes cannot be objectively
demonstrated to be inferior to another's.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(At least if we ignore the <a href="http://www.plaidstallions.com/fashion.html">1970s</a>.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But some things can be measured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn't a decline in mathematical ability
across the generations indicate a genuine loss?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This can be objectively measured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So can knowledge of critical facts about the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or the ability to react effectively to a
crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aren't there objective
yardsticks by which we can measure gain and loss?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The Fall
of the Roman Empire once again provides an interesting case study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The population of the city of Rome had,
fairly objectively, lost their physical and psychological ability to wage
effective war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were pushovers for
the rising powers of the Goths and the Huns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Surely this is an objective example of civilization going to the dogs?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Maybe
not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes lost in the discussion is
the fact that the Roman Empire never exactly fell, not in the sense of having
the entire continent of Europe sitting happily as a thriving metropolis on one
day, to be replaced by a smoldering crater the next. The city of Rome was
sacked, to be sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the large
scale economic trade routes and complex industries disappeared, true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for many of the inhabitants of the
Empire, the fall of the Empire was barely noticeable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day they were citizens of Rome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next day, somebody came along and told
them that for the last five years, they'd been<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>citizens of the Ostrogothic Kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Taxed continued to be paid, official corruption continued, and everybody
complained about how much better things used to be, when everybody wore togas and spoke proper Latin, instead of this degenerate Italian which seems to
be spreading everywhere.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">And why
was it that nobody seemed interested in learning to speak proper Latin
anymore?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's not that people had
become stupid, or otherwise incapable of learning the language of their
forebears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It simply wasn't useful
anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was the point of learning a
language that you couldn't do trade in, woo a girl with, or use to gripe with your
friends?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might be useful if you wanted to
read a bunch of really old books, but that didn't really describe most of the population.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So
returning to our previous question, is the loss of mathematical ability the
sign of decline?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or is it simply a
reflection that those skills no longer make any sense?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What's the point, when your computer, your
phone, your tablet, and maybe even your watch can calculate any mathematical
product you can type, faster than you can type it?</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Critics
of this perspective will point out that it represents a loss of
independence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If all our computers,
phones, tablets, and digital watches go simultaneously on the fritz, then we'll all be sorry
we never learned to do math properly.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Or
not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More likely, we'll wish we had
spent more time learning how to fight off mutant zombies using home made spears
and improvised explosives, because the zombie apocalypse (or something like it)
is the most likely scenario which will result in a complete breakdown of
technology.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This
brings us back to our original question: is there value in creating a Personal
Data Warehouse, which can be used to measure our skills and relative progress
across our lives and across the generations?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In theory, I'm a keen supporter of any way that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>technology can be used to improve our
individual lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I like the concept.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">But a
Data Warehouse is intrinsically a structured repository of data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It allows you to organize vast amounts of
data to spot complex patterns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's a
great way to see sales trends, or weather patterns, or traffic flow, among
reams of data that would otherwise be unintelligible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The challenging part of designing a Data
Warehouse is understanding what types of questions you may want to ask, which
influences the structure of your data.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So what
are your values?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What things are you
going to measure?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what makes you
think those values will continue to be valued by the next generation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My forebears might have created their own
version of a data warehouse to measure skill in archery and driving horse-drawn
chariots, skills at which I would fail miserably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I'm pretty good at navigating a Subaru
through snow covered roads, a skill I find highly valuable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My ability to re-materialize following an
inter-dimensional trans-warp is nonexistent, a fact that bothers me not at all,
but which might make me a laughingstock if I'm still around in two or three
generations when that's the only way to travel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I might snarl at these kids who don't know the first thing about a stick
shift, but I suspect they won't care.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So if
we're going to try to measure ourselves through time, it's going to be a trick to do so in a way that holds up over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mind you, I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'll have to be convinced that whatever measures we choose are truly useful over time, and not simply a reflection of our current tastes. The closest thing we have right now for this type of human record is the
memoir. It's a useful document, highly flexible in it's ability to track lots of variable data, but it lacks something
in terms of analytical and comparative analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least it lasts. </span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Now,
should I publish mine on paper or ebook...?</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-62898313781717598092012-01-09T17:37:00.000-08:002012-01-16T05:23:53.098-08:00When will the future finally get here?<br />
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It's interesting how insanely wrong predictions of the future tend to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even people who dream about the future all the time have terrible track records.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's not that they predict too aggressively, or not aggressively enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They just focus on the wrong things.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">One of my favorite examples of this is Robert Heinlein, widely considered to be one of the Godfathers of science fiction, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heinlein dreamed about the future all the time, but consistently got two things wrong:</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">He vastly overestimated progress in physical science and engineering, especially regarding space travel.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="margin-left: 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">He vastly underestimated progress in computers.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The implications of this can be comical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <u>Starman Jones</u>, he envisions a world in which we have technology that can beat the speed of light by manipulating the fabric of space, but computers which are incapable of performing simple mathematical calculations, so astrogators spend their time on flights looking up figures in printed tables and keying them into the navigation systems by hand.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Even when Heinlein speculates specifically about computers, he gets it all wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <u>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</u>, he envisions a supercomputer so powerful that it wakes up and becomes artificially intelligent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had so much computational ability that it can calculate the odds of the Lunar colonists launching a successful revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet this massive supercomputer, capable of self-programming and orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we have today, is just about maxed about by doing a simple video rendering of a human torso.</span></div>
<div class="Body1">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1">
<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Part of the challenge in predicting the future is that technology doesn't improve at regular intervals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a given area, it might barely move for years or centuries, then explode forward in the blink of an eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Five years ago, electronic books were a joke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Companies had been noodling with the concept for decades, but nothing they came up with was any good, and it seemed like it might be decades before anything might catch on.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Then the Kindle appeared, and the iPad, and the Nook, and numerous smaller competitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now the question isn't how fast ebooks will grow, it's how long and in what form paper books will survive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I think they will survive for the long term, but at a fraction of their previous prominence).</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So we've got ebooks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are we in the future yet?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Overall, I'd say no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We're almost at 2015, and the world still seems a far cry from the vision presented in the movie <u>Back to the Future 2</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It got a few parts right, like the prominence of large screen TVs and the tendency for kids (and adults!) to excessively multitask, but we seem as far away as ever from the flying cars, weather control, and hover boards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Curiously enough, the movie made no mention of areas where we have made enormous progress, such as computers that can beat chess and jeopardy champions, and consumer devices like iPhones and iPads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did Heinlein consult on this movie?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the other hand, we've definitely arrived at the future in some aspects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I realized we had crossed a line into the future when I saw my first web URL on a movie poster back in 1995 (it was for<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mortal Kombat).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you grew up with the Internet, you have no idea how startling it was when this obscure bit of networking technology finally broke into the mainstream as people had been speculating it might for years.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Once it did, all bets were off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of us back then who were on the cutting edge (using advanced services like Compuserve and Prodigy) could have predicted email and Wikipedia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody could have predicted twitter as a force that could organize revolutions, blogging that would take on mainstream media, or youtube that would turn funny cat videos into global sensations.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So for purposes of figuring out when the future has arrived, I'm going to arbitrarily divide it into three basic stages:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Computers and networks go mainstream</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Household robots take over household chores</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Flying cars </span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">As noted, we're already well ensconced in Phase 1, and have a generation of kids and young adults who can't imagine the world any other way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(And I must confess I still scratch my head when I try to remember how people used to find things out before Google, or even its predecessor Alta Vista.)</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">But if you think Phase 1 was a game changer, just wait until Phase 2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is going to revolutionize the very concept of what it means to be human, and will rock our society and economy to its core.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, if we have robots that can make the bed, do the dishes and take out the cat,</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Do we still need housekeepers?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Do we still need cashiers?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Do we still need auto mechanics?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">You might get a bit queasy thinking about that last one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, do you really want to trust your life to a machine that might suffer a blue screen of death at any moment?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And you'd be justified in your concerns, as long as you ignore <a href="http://technologydimensions.blogspot.com/2011/12/bruces-law-of-technology.html">Bruce's Law of Technology</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because shortly after we graduate from today's autopilot to something that can approximate a takeoff and landing in good conditions, the technology is going to improve so quickly that insurance premiums for using human pilots instead of automated ones will go through the roof.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Expect automated pilots to catch on as fast as ebooks.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">How far are we away from this transition to a robotic world?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could be a long way off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, from where we stand, it looks as far off as ebooks looked in 1986.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And 1996.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And 2006.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">At Google's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXBUp-4800">2011 I/O Conference</a>, Google announced an initiative to develop an open source operating system for robots (ROS).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As you might expect from a Google initiative, this OS will be easy to connect to the Cloud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means that robots can leverage Google's massive server farms for complex tasks such as object recognition, and not have to lug around the huge volume of CPUs that would be required to do this in real time, nor their associate batteries.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It also potentially means that researchers can share ideas, technology and databases much easier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why reinvent the complex algorithms to recognize a household object, when somebody else has already invested hundreds or thousands of hours on it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leverage their code, and spend your time thinking about what cool things your robot can do with that object, once it has recognized it.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Does this mean the robot revolution is just around the corner?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That's the problem with predictions - we just can't tell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Google's latest initiative certainly looks promising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I could find other initiatives back in the nineties and eighties that looked just as promising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The technology needed wasn't ready back then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe its not now, either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or maybe it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it finally is, expect robots to turn our entire world upside down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will revolutionize life, work, employment, and leisure, although for good or ill is impossible to say.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">All I can say is that humans better still be allowed to drive by the time I can finally buy my first flying car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm sticking firm on that one.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-18196635075676931062012-01-01T11:53:00.000-08:002012-01-16T05:24:41.963-08:00Intentions versus Capabilities<br />
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In the last few weeks, one of the most prominent technology stories has been about one of the most divisive legislative proposals in recent memory, called Sopa (Stop Online Piracy Act).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This proposed bill makes for strange bedfellows, bringing together organizations that have probably never agreed on anything in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce are supporting the legislation, while the Tea Party and The Huffington Post find themselves united in opposition.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Part of the reason for the opposition to the bill is the sweeping powers it provides.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is possible, for example, to interpret the legislation as allowing a judge to shut down Google if any of Google's search results end up aiding pirates (which is virtually inevitable, given the sweeping nature of Google</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s services).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Proponents of the bill dismiss this concern, saying that's not the intention of the legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This dismissal soothes the critics not at all.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It's worth noting that critics of the bill include a large number of programmers and other people with technical backgrounds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Programmers have deep experience with a problem that was perhaps best illustrated in the story </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The Sorcerer's Apprentice</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">”</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> (of which Disney's 1940 Fantasia cartoon is one of the most accessible and popular versions).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this story, we see the young apprentice, eager to use his new-found skills to lighten his load, enchanting a broom to carry the water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything goes fine until the apprentice realizes he doesn't know how to make it stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His attempts to do so makes things infinitely worse, and he nearly drowns before the Sorcerer returns to the scene to save the day.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The moral of the story is that having access to power (or technology) does not convey understanding of or control over it, which can lead to unexpected and very unpleasant results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any programmer who has done even basic debugging has come to realize that it doesn't matter in the slightest what they intended their code to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What matters is what it actually does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Discovering and correcting the difference between the two can be fiendishly difficult.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This is why programmers are not soothed by reassurances of what the legislation is intended to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn't matter that somebody says "give me these sweeping powers, and I promise not to abuse them".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world doesn't work that way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the genie has been let out of the bottle, it can't be stuffed back in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Power that can be abused, will be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if you trust the current person in charge, what about the next one?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I don't support piracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even less do I support sweeping reform that is poorly understood, with concerns swept under the rug because the architects say "That's not what we meant."</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Spend some time learning to debug C, then we can talk.</span><span lang="en-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: #0400;"></span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-3572136371343827722011-12-19T19:04:00.000-08:002012-01-16T05:26:00.205-08:00The End of PCs?<br />
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">You are most likely reading this blog article on a machine that would have been considered inconceivably powerful for most of the scope of human history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can easily communicate with people around the world in the blink of an eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can effortlessly solve mathematical problems that would have confounded Euclid and Archimedes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can access an information repository greater than the Library of Alexandria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you transported this machine back a thousand years or so (and let</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s pretend it would have had access to the necessary battery life and internet knowledge bases), wars would have been fought to possess it.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">You hold in your hands the power of the Gods.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">"With great power comes great responsibility." (Spider-man comics)</span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Spider-man learned this lesson to his cost when his inaction lead to the death of his beloved Uncle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Spider-man's powers were insignificant next to the powers of a modern personal computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This power is literally in your grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you ready to accept the mantle of responsibility?</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">You probably think I'm stretching a point here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you're like most people, you just want to use your computer to read the news, gossip with friends on Facebook, and maybe watch some videos on Youtube.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You're just minding your own business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have no intention whatsoever of, say, joining a ring of criminals in Eastern Europe and participating in a scheme to extort money from e-commerce sites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Except that, unless you</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">ve been extraordinarily careful with your super-powers, you probably already have.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)</span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The most common form of cyber-crime involves collecting a group of PCs to form a botnet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This involves infecting each of these PCs with malware, which quietly turns that PC into a slave of the botnet owner, rather than the PC owner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the malware is at all clever at its task (which most of them are), it leaves the PC owner oblivious to the fact that anything has changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You still think that you're just minding your own business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You don't realize that you've started engaging in criminal activity.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">If it's any consolation, you're not the only inadvertent criminal out there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You're in the company of millions of others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tens of millions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Possibly hundreds of millions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you're talking about this magnitude of numbers, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s hard to suggest a lack of personal ethics or failure of responsibility from any particular individual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we have is a systemic problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Systemic problems require systemic solutions.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">"We have met the enemy and he is us." (Pogo cartoon strip)</span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It is possible to keep a PC free of malware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You need to keep up to date with your patches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not just your operating system patches, however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also your browser patches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And your Adobe patches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Java.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And any of the tens or hundreds of other programs you have installed on your computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And you need to make sure that you have a detailed understanding of any peer to peer software you run, in order to ensure that it's configured correctly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And know how to configure your NAT router or firewall correctly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And understand how to create good passwords.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And understand how to spot false links in emails.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The list goes on and on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can be done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s a full time job just to keep up with it.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">There is an alternative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is to realize that not everybody has what it takes to be Spider-man, and not even to try.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means something that makes most people cringe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means the end of PCs.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">As revolutionary as this sounds, it's not actually a new idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We've already started using iPads, which are not PCs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not in the traditional sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are extraordinarily limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’</span><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s only one way to get additional software on them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don't have an exposed file system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can't connect them to all the cool USB devices that make your PC so flexible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are restricted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are, in a word, much safer than PCs.</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">"PCs are going to be like trucks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're still going to be around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're still going to have value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they're going to be used by one out of x people." (Steve Jobs)</span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Steve Jobs had an interesting vision: most people don't need PCs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most people don't need the level of power and flexibility that a full-blown computer provides.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You don't need a PC to browse the internet, check your email, and watch Youtube.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Apple isn't simply filling this need with iPads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're moving in that direction with Macs as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In March of 2012, Apple will be implementing sandboxing for all applications sold through the Mac store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means that every application must request the specific permissions it will require before it is sold by Apple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Apple will have to approve it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This will just be the online store. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if Apple has its way, I suspect that it won't be long before the online store becomes the only way to purchase applications for a Mac.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This is going to slow down innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People won't be able to write and release new and interesting applications nearly as fast as they could in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this had been the model back in the 80s, personal computers might never have gotten off the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we're no longer in the 80s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it's ok for us to finally slow down a tad.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Of course, this doesn't impact Microsoft in the least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it seems that even Microsoft is realizing that unlimited power and flexibility in the operating system is not always such a good thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2001, feeling a surge of Unix envy, Microsoft released a feature called "raw sockets" into Windows XP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raw Sockets are cool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're powerful. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can do all sorts of interesting things with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe a little too interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some hackers leveraged them to perform some sophisticated attacks, some against Microsoft itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raw sockets were quietly removed a few service packs later.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">We may not yet be at the end of the PC era.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But maybe we should be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because most people simply don't need them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most people are unable or unwilling to spend the time and energy to use them safely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that's OK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not everybody needs to be Spider-man.</span></div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-78780396335852682032011-12-12T16:05:00.000-08:002012-01-16T05:26:42.035-08:00Bruce's Law of Technology<br />
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Once upon a time, Information Technology consisted primarily of Mainframes, sold by IBM and one or two small time competitors. Oh sure, there were a few Unix and VAX minicomputers around if you looked hard enough, but these were being used mostly by scientists and engineers, and nobody paid them much mind. Mainframes were running the corporations. Mainframes were where the action was.</div>
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Then Apple (and quickly followed by several others, including IBM) released computers that would fit onto a single desktop. They were small. They didn't have much power. They lacked the basic functionality needed to do any kind of real computing, such as job scheduling. The IT professionals gave them a quick look, realized they were toys, and then promptly ignored them, to get back to the real business of doing IT.</div>
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Once upon a time, music was played on physical media. Changes in technology involved migrating from one media to the next. LPs gave way to tape cassettes (with a short detour through 8 track tapes), and then to Compact Disks. Record labels looked forward to these changes, because it meant they could resell all their old titles in the new media.</div>
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Then, somewhere in the nineties, people started talking about music files called MP3s, which could play directly on computers, or even on dedicated devices. These files took up a large percentage of the hard drive space that was available at the time. Their sound quality was lousy. The record labels took a look at MP3s, realized they couldn't compete with CD quality music, and then promptly ignored them, to get back to the real business of selling music.</div>
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Once upon a time, books consisted of sheets of paper bound together between two covers. People liked their paper books a lot. So did authors and publishers. They were cheap and portable. The format had survived relatively unchanged for roughly a thousand years. They seemed likely to be the dominant format for the next thousand years.</div>
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Then it became possible to store books on digital media. It was lousy. Nobody liked reading a CD Rom on their computer desktop. Portable book readers had poor screens, terrible battery life, and were all incompatible with each other. Publishers took a quick look at these eBooks, realized they'd never catch on, and then promptly ignored them, to get back to the real business of publishing paper books.</div>
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Clearly, we have a pattern here. A pattern that was consistently missed by the people who most desperately needed to spot it. They failed to understand what was happening, because they ignored Bruce's Law of Technology (which is perhaps understandable, as it is being published here for the first time). Bruce's Law of Technology is as follows:</div>
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"New technology sucks. Until, suddenly and unexpectedly, it doesn't."</div>
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It seems obvious. But based on the anecdotes above (and I could add many more), people consistently ignore it's implications. They know that technology improves. But they don<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif";">’</span>t want to think about the possibility that it might overturn the world they know and understand and love. They see its limitations, and refuse to see its possibilities, until it's far too late to do anything about it.</div>
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Somewhere out there, there<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif";">’</span>s technology that has the potential to turn your world upside down. When you discover that technology, don<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif";">’</span>t discount it because it sucks. Plan ahead for what the new world will look like once it stops sucking. Think about how you will need to reinvent yourself, no matter how unpleasant that prospect may be. Remember that not reinventing yourself will be much worse. Remember Bruce<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "sans-serif";">’</span>s Law of Technology.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7675195681622416026.post-67004997515076380412011-12-05T17:00:00.001-08:002012-01-16T05:28:20.736-08:00The Limits of Reason<br />
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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a device known as the Mechanical Turk toured Europe and the United States, astounding it’s audiences by playing chess with an impressive degree of skill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many leading thinkers and engineers of the day were utterly convinced that it was a true chess playing machine, although there were persistent suspicions that perhaps the device (which included a large cabinet, apparently filled with gears and cogs) hid a real human chess player, possibly a dwarf, in its interior.</div>
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One of the most convincing exposes on the subject was written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1836.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His article was printed in the Southern Literary Messenger, and elicited responses from numerous newspapers and magazines including the New Yorker and the Baltimore Gazette.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was well written, and completely correct in it’s conclusions – the Mechanical Turk was eventually revealed as a fraud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, it’s interesting to note that some of the most critical arguments employed by Poe were utterly incorrect.</div>
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His primary point was that as a mechanical device, it must necessarily be 100% fixed and determinate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From this foundation, he makes several observations about the nature of the machine: “The moves of the Turk are not made at regular intervals of time, but accommodate themselves to the moves of the antagonist – although this point (of regularity), so important in all kinds of mechanical contrivance, might have been readily brought about by limiting the time allowed for the moves of the antagonist.”</div>
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He goes on to make a very interesting argument about the nature of the machine's purported algorithm: “The Automation does not invariably win the game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were the machine a pure machine, this would not be the case – it would always win.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The principle being discovered by which a machine can be made to play a game of chess, an extension of the same principle would enable it to win a game; a further extension would enable it to win all games – that is, to beat any possible game of an antagonist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A little consideration will convince any one that the difficulty of making a machine beat all games is not in the least degree greater, as regards the principle of the operations necessary, than that of making it beat a single game.”</div>
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I’m not aware that any of Poe’s contemporaries had any disagreements with these points. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, from our modern perspective, it’s easy to see that he was utterly incorrect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have chess playing machines today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what we know about the principles of making them play chess did not inevitably lead to an understanding of how to make them play perfect chess – it took decades of improvement (mostly on the hardware side) to evolve from the first primitive chess program to Deep Blue, which finally defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even now that we've left human players far behind, nobody would claim that any computer in the foreseeable future could play a “perfect” game of chess (a feat which would require calculating every conceivable move on the chess board – a trivial exercise with a game like tic-tac-toe, but infeasible on a 64 square chess board).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor has our success at developing computer chess programs led to similar success teaching computers to master the much more fluid game of Go.</div>
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What would it have taken to convince Poe that he was wrong, especially when his ultimate conclusion was correct?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We could try to introduce him to the concept of heuristics, or allowing variable response times through the use of triggers, or even introducing the concept of indeterminacy to a system by seeding a complex algorithm with an external (and completely random) value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe this would have worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But none of this would be nearly as effective as simply having him grow up in a world where computers play chess all the time, and nobody thinks very much about it.</div>
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We like to think of ourselves as living in the age of reason and critical thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We like to point at our technological progress and say “Here is where logic and reason have taken us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They will solve any problem.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We forget how much of what we know is built not on reason, but on trial and error, iterative improvement, and pure luck.</div>Bruce Andrewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04765635900810468315noreply@blogger.com0