InformIT has just published an interview with me where they asked me a bunch of questions related to C# 4.0 How-To. We got into the multicore future, Internet versus books, why C# programmers need to know about UAC, and a lot more. Check it out!

Star Trek, along with other science fiction futures, has given us many things, apart from a vision of humanity that is hopefully a little better than we prove to be, but also a taste of what technology can be like when it is integrated so fully into people’s lives that it’s nearly taken for granted.

The computer on the Enterprise is an interesting entity to think about. A crew member can ask it just about any question and it can give the desired answer. It doesn’t matter if the question is slightly vague, or depends on prior knowledge of the conversation. What phenomenal power! How does it work?

I can think of only two possibilities:

1. It can read their minds
2. It has been paying attention to their conversation, and thus understands the context.

Not discounting the possibility of the first scenario, I want to think about the second.

Context

How much understanding of our immediate environment is due to context? When analyzing a situation we have at our disposal our

1. Experience
2. Book knowledge
3. Logical analysis/intuition (I include them in the same since intuition could theoretically be a subconscious logical process, colored with experience—I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s not important)

Now take away experience. How would you fare when confronted with new situations (Which, by definition, are all situations)?

Most of us, I think, would understandably quail under the rigor of thought required to get through such an ordeal. If you believe otherwise, make the situation extreme—flying a plane, or leading a squad into war. No amount of knowledge or rational thought will help here—you need the benefit of hard-core training: experience–context.

Do this exercise: describe to someone what salt tastes like.

On the other hand, saying “It’s too salty.” immediately conveys exactly what you mean, based on shared context, mutual experience.

There is an enormous gap between where our computer systems are now, versus what is perhaps the holy grail of foreseeable technology, the computer on the Enterprise—an all-seeing, all-knowing, conversant entity. It’s like Wikipedia, but to a depth of knowledge unheard of on any web site today, all cross-referenced and Searchable.

Wikipedia is a decent (I won’t say great) source of much knowledge, but it’s hardly definitive, or all-encompassing. Also, it’s just facts. It’s not calculation or interpretation. It does not advise or synthesize.

In Star Trek, when  a crewmember asks questions, they can be these fact-based, context-free questions that require simple look-ups to respond with. But often, there is a series of questions, with dialogue in-between, all related to a certain topic. Each query does not contain the total information required to retrieve a response. Rather, the computer has tracked the context and maintained an accurate representation of the conversation thus far. In essence, the computer is participating in the conversation fully.

An idea of what context means is demonstrated by this simple list of questions. Just imagine giving these to a computer or search engine today. The first one is ok, but following that, not so much.

• What are the latest Hubble Telescope pictures?
• When were these taken?
• How much longer will it stay up?
• How will the next space telescope be different?
• Compare the efforts of all G7 nations to build orbiting observation platforms.

Each of those questions presupposed the previous one. The computer must keep track of this. That last one is a real doozy—it’s asking the computer to synthesize information from multiple sources into a coherent, original response. We can’t even dream of something this advanced right now, but I believe it’s coming.

On the other hand, let’s take a different direction, more personal:

• Which of my friends are having a birthday in the next month?
• What book should I read next?
• What do I need to get at the store?
• Where are my children?

Is this possible to do today? Yes, technologically speaking.

It’s not technology that will hold us back. It’s us.

Security, Privacy

Think of what it means to have a computer able to access full context to answer any query you throw at it. It has to know everything about you. To give you good food recommendations, it has to know where you’ve eaten and how you liked it. To be able to answer arbitrary questions in context, it needs to record your every conversation, parse it,  cross-reference it, and store it for later access.

In our current culture, what this means is tying together all systems. There are intimations of this happening. Every time you hear of a company providing an API to access its data, that’s a little piece of this context being hooked up. It means that the Computer now has access to your Facebook and LinkedIn data, so that when you search for “tortoise” it can see you’re a developer and a high-proportion of software developers want to actually download “TortoiseSVN”, not see pictures of reptiles. In fact, it probably means there is no such thing as Facebook (or any other social network) anymore. There is just one network filled with data.

It becomes even more intertwined. If I really want the computer to have full context of me, it should monitor what I watch on TV, what my tastes in music are, where I go, where I work, my habits, who I call, what I talk about, etc., etc., etc. It never ends.

Now, here’s the million-dollar question: who would agree to such invasive procedures, even if the benefit was enormous?

In many ways, we are agreeing to it all the time. We allow places like Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes to track all our purchases in order to give us decent recommendations (in the hope we’ll purchase more). We give up our privacy a bit when we get the grocery loyalty cards, or even credit cards. This is all tracked and correlated. In the case of recommendation systems, there is a tangible benefit for us,but the loyalty cards are less certainly valuable to us, other than lower prices (which is not an inherent benefit of those cards, just a marketing tactic). Indeed, studies have shown for just how little we humans give up our privacy.

There are a few levels of security we need to worry about. At a low level, how much do you trust Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon with your information? Right now, a lot of us trust them with a fair amount, but nowhere near our entire life’s story. We have it neatly segmented. Part in Amazon, part in Facebook, part in Google, part in all the other companies we deal with. If mistakes are made, consequences not thought through, we have problems like all our friends seeing what we’re purchasing.

At a high level, we need to consider all of this context ending up in the wrong hands. Not just scammers and other low-lifes, but government, foreign and domestic. The potential for abuse is massive—so much so that most of us wouldn’t voluntarily agree to any of the unifying ideas in this essay in our lifetimes. We just don’t trust anybody that much.

In essence, a Star Trek-like computer would require massive amounts of “spyware” on every system in the world, all tied together in a massive database. This is possible (maybe even desired?) in a closed system like a ship, where everything is easily monitored and hierarchies of security are well-understood. In the world at large, it’s just scary.

Economy and Altruism

I believe another obstacle to this is money. The way our society works, with limited resources, we are required (?) to have some system of trade, an economy. These days, the trade is often over information, the very thing this mythical Star Trek computer depends on. Think credit reports, buying history, demographics.

What is the specific danger of businesses finding out personal information about you? Can they force you to buy something? Not likely. But they can manipulate the environment in such a way to make it more likely. They present a lie designed to sell you something you don’t need. More maliciously, they can also sell your information to more vital entities, like insurance companies, or governments. If the government is too powerful, there is no way to prevent this. Think about what happens in China.

Is the only way to have such efficient and helpful systems to do away with our current capitalistic economy? Yes and no. Such far-reaching, life-changing technologies will undoubtedly continue to be developed and become more a part of our lives than they already are. Unfortunately, the potential for abuse is enormous and will grow as we become more and more dependent on them. We have no inherent trust in the system, nor should we. Just look at the ridiculous politicking taking place over voting machines. That’s just one system, and our society can’t get it right. We have a thousand such systems, many hanging onto usefulness and security by a thread. I bet that it’s not even the exception, but the rule to have such systems. Why should we trust such things to run our lives? We shouldn’t. There are so many reasons for this: corruption, economy, politics, and motivation.

Perhaps motivation is they key. We are often motivated now by money, comfort, or some other selfish reason—reasonable or not. In the Star Trek vision of the future, we see a population depicted as motivated by a quest for knowledge and understanding. That’s why they can have all-knowing computers. They trust who created it and what it does. They know there is no political or other ulterior motive. Yes, there’s adequate security and protections against attack, but the whole starting mindset is different.

Don’t think that I’m in favor of destroying capitalism in favor of more socialistic or idealistic systems. Imposing a system of “fairness” or “equality” does nothing to further those goals and I’m not advocating any political or economic system—I’m merely stating what I think the reality must be in the future for us to make these advancements. People themselves must reform their motivations. Pushing any political system has no effect because the fundamentals of our world haven’t changed. Resources are still scarce, thus economy must still exist. If people’s intrinsic motivations are to be changed, I believe resources must be (practically) infinite.

When this happens the nature of the Internet will change as well. If the economics change and we are no longer concerned with that, and we also have an altruistic frame of mind, information that is posted on the Internet will similarly change. No longer do we have to actually care about our walled gardens—the information is just put “up there”, in the “cloud”, to use the popular term. A computer would be free to just quote the contents to the user, or recombine it with other content. It’s all just content, with a single interface to access it all.

Understanding

There’s an important issue I glossed over in the above paragraphs. That is understanding. I talked a little about this in my previous blog entry about Software Creativity and Strange Loops.

I’m excited for this future. I doubt I’ll live to see advances fully along these lines. The problems are phenomenally difficult and they’re not all technical, but it’s still exciting to think about. Those of us who can just need to do our small part to contribute towards it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every question everything needed to answer. The computer has been monitoring the conversation and has thus built up a context that it can use to understand and intelligently respond.

A computer that records and correlates conversations real-time must have a phenomenal ability (compared to our current technology) to not just syntactically parse the content, but also construct semantic models of it. If a computer is going to respond intelligently to you, it has to understand you. This is far beyond our current technology, but we’re moving there. In 20 years who knows where this will be. In 100, we can’t even imagine it. 400 years is nearly beyond contemplation.

The philosophy of computer understanding, and human-computer interaction specifically is incredibly interesting. I was led to think a lot about this while reading Robert Glass’s Software Creativity 2.0. This book is about the design and construction of software, but it has a deep philosophical undercurrent running throughout that kept me richly engaged. Much of the book is presented as conflicts between opposing forces:

• Discipline versus Flexibility
• Formal Methods versus Heuristics
• Optimizing versus satisficing
• Quantitative versus qualitative reasoning
• Process versus product
• Intellectual versus clerical
• Theory versus practice
• Industry versus academe
• Fun versus getting serious

Too often, neither one of these sides is “right”—they are just part of the problem (or the solution). While the book was written from the perspective of software construction, I think you can twist the intention just a little and consider them as attributes of software itself, not just how to write it, but how software must function. Most of those titles can be broken up into a dichotomy of Thinking versus Doing.

Thinking: Flexibility, Heuristics, Satisficing, Qualitative, Process, Intellectual, Theory, Academe

Doing: Discipline, Formal Methods, Optimizing, Quantitative, Product, Clerical, Practice, Industry

Computers are wonderful at the doing, not so much at the thinking. Much of thinking is synthesizing information, recognizing patterns, and highlighting the important points so that we can understand it. As humans, we have to do this or we are overwhelmed and have no comprehension. A computer has no such requirement—all information is available to it, yet it has no capability to synthesize, apply experience and perhaps (seemingly) unrelated principles to the situation. In this respect, the computer’s advantage in quantity is far outweighed by its lack of understanding. It has all the context in the world, but no way to apply it.

A good benchmark for a reasonable AI on the level I’m dreaming about is a program that can synthesize a complex set of documents (be they text, audio, or video) and produce a comprehensible summary that is not just selected excerpts from each. This functionality implies an ability to understand and comprehend on many levels. To do this will mean a much deeper understanding of the problems facing us in computer science, as represented in the list above.

You can start to think of these attributes/actions as mutually beneficial and dependent, influencing one another, recursively, being distinct (at  first), and then morphing into a spiral, both being inputs to the other. Quantitative reasoning leads to qualitative analysis which leads back to qualitative measures, etc.

It made me think of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s opus Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This is a fascinating book that, if you can get through it (I admit I struggled through parts), wants you to think of consciousness as the attempted resolution of a very high-order strange loop.

The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

In the book, he discusses how this pattern appears in many areas, most notably music, the works of Escher, and in philosophy, as well as consciousness.

My belief is that the explanations of “emergent” phenomena in our brains—for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will—are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing “resonance” between different levels… The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself.

I can’t help but think that this idea of a strange loop, combined with Glass’s attributes of software creativity are what will lead to more intelligent computers.

Charles Fishman has a wonderful article on a aircraft engine manufacture plant in Durham, NC. There are a lot of interesting lessons in here about teamwork, motivation, and work that make it a highly recommended read.

I’m supposed to be packing up the house and instead just read that.

Update:Jon supplied a link to a Joel Spolsky article counterpointing the above article. Now I’m going to be reading that instead of doing some chores.

In the future, when you have your first humanoid robot servant and you decide to have some fun with it, and you tell it to do something stupid and arbitrary like go stand in the corner for no reason, put itself in embarrassing poses, or anything generally “abusive”, will you feel bad afterwards? Should you? Why?

I think I would, perhaps depending on the severity and arbitrariness. I asked my wife. She said definitely yes, and that regardless of whether the machine can “feel” embarrassment or frustration, it reveals a character deficiency in yourself. She compared it to abuse against animals.

I think it may also depend on how humanized the robot is. You would feel bad doing it to Data (ignoring his free will), but maybe not to a mute, grotesque car welder.

Thankfully, South Korea has come up with a robot code of ethics.

I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this morning. It took about 45 minutes, two reboots, and afterward I had no problems. It never showed up in Windows Update for me so I used the standalone installer (linked to above), fully prepared to reinstall some drivers. But afterwards, no drivers seemed to have any problems–Device Manager didn’t show any issues. So all is well and good.

Technorati Tags: Vista SP1

Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too!

Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will ever be allowed. You’re just annoying me. And you get nothing out of it. I hate you.

Sincerely,

Ben

Technorati Tags: spam,comments

My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, “Have you heard of this? what do you think?” I think she wants one.

I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other than a quick read now and then, it’s too painful–the screen was too small.

But the Kindle…this might work out. I’m seriously considering getting one.

With the news that Amazon is buying Audible, the story gets more interesting. Personally, I haven’t gotten much into audio books, but I know people who do and love them.

I have no idea if or how Amazon will integrate Audible into the Kindle’s experience, but I have a feature request. For a killer feature:

Sell the audio version of a book at a discount (or free, or + $1)when someone buys the e-book format (or vice-versa). Then, synchronize the bookmarks between the two formats. That way, I can plug the Kindle into my car’s stereo on the way home to listen to my current selection, and at night I can pull it out and continue reading from where the audio left off.

That’s my prediction for a killer app. My wife and I do a LOT of reading (we JUST ordered our first TV, and it’s only for NetFlix, and we will not be hooking it up for any broadcast or cable). I think someday soon we’ll both have our own Kindle–it would save a lot of bookshelf space.

Technorati Tags: amazon,kindle,audible,books

Power. Electricity. The Holy Grail of modern technology.

I say this because the information revolution completely depends on electricity, whether it’s batteries, hybrid motors, or the grid. Everything we do depends on converting some naturally occurring resource into power to drive our lives.

I was thinking about power recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Everything they do depends on an infinite (or nearly so) source of energy. Their warp core powers the ship for a 20-year mission. Each device they have is self-powered. From what? Do they need recharging? I imagine not, but it’s been a while since I’ve read the technical manual.

In any case, much of that world (and other Sci-Fi worlds) depends on powerful, long-lasting, disconnected energy sources. For one example, think of the energy required to power a laser-based weapon. And it has to fire more than once.

The truth is that having such a power source is more than world-changing. It has the potential to completely rebuild society from the ground up. If you think about it, much of the world’s conflict is over sources of energy. Authority and power is derived from who controls the resources. If energy was infinitely available, it would be infinitely cheap (at least in some sense). I almost think it would change society from being so focused on worldly gain, to more on pursuit of knowledge, enlightenment, and improvement. We wouldn’t have to worry about how to get from one place to another, or who has more oil, or what industries to invest energy resources in. So much would come free.

When I speak of “infinite” power, don’t take it literally. What I mean is “So much to be practically unlimited.”

Of course there are different types of infinities:

1. Infinite magnitude – Can produce any amount of power you desire. Not very likely. Something like this would be dangerous. “Ok, now I want Death Star phasers. ok. Go.” Boom.
2. Infinite supply – There’s a maximum magnitude in the amount of power it can generate, but it can continue “forever” (or at least a reasonable approximation of forever). This is the useful one.

And there are a few other requirements we should consider:

1. Non-destructive. Environment. Mankind, etc.
2. Highly-efficient.
3. Contained and controlled. Obvious.
4. Portable. Sometimes microscopically so.

It’s nice to dream about such things…

• Cell phones and Laptops that never need recharged
• Tiny devices everywhere that never need an external power source (GPS, sensors, communications devices, robots, etc.)
• Cars that do not fuel. Ever. We’d probably keep them a lot longer. They could do more, be larger, more efficient, faster, safer.
• Vehicles that can expand the boundaries of their current form. How big can you make an airplane if you don’t have to worry about using up all its fuel? (not to mention the weight)
• Easier to get things into orbit–space program suddenly becomes much more interesting. Maybe we can develop engines that produce enough power to escape gravity, without using propellant (a truly ancient technology).
• Devices that can act more intelligently, and just do more than current devices. Think if your iPod that turns itself off after a few minutes of not using it. That scenario would be a thing of the past.

With such a power source the energy economy of devices that we have to pay such close attention to now goes out the window. Who cares how much energy it uses if there’s an endless amount to go around (and since we’ve already established that the energy source is non-destructive and highly-efficient, environmental factors don’t enter in). There would be no need for efficiency until you started bumping up the boundaries of how much power you needed.

del.icio.us Tags: future,energy,star trek

Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html]

Ok. it’s ugly, but notice a few things:

1. The pink denotes the data points from the source data or what I put in (I added 1000 GB in 2007).
2. The scale is logarithmic, not linear. Each y-axis gridline represents a ten-fold increase in capacity.
3. At the current rate of growth, by 2020, we’ll have 1,000,000 GB hard drives. That’s 1 petabyte (1PB). (by the way, petabyte is not in Live Writer’s spelling dictionary–get with the times Microsoft!)
4. The formula, as calculated by Excel, says that the drive capacity should double roughly every 2 years.

Also, this doesn’t really take into account multiple-hard drive storage schemes like NAS, RAID, etc. Right now, it’s quite easy to lash individual storage units together into packages such as those for more space, redundancy, etc. I’ll ignore that ability for now.

So 2020: that’s 12 years from now. We can expect to have a petabyte in our computers. That’s a LOT of space. Imagine the amount of data that can be stored. How about every book ever written? How about all your music, high-def DVDs, ripped with no lossy compression?

Tools such as Live Desktop and Google Desktop take on a whole new level of importance when faced with the task of cataloging petabytes of information on your home PC. Because, let’s face it, you’ll never delete anything. You’ll take thousands of pictures with your digital camera and never delete any of them. You’ll take hours of high-def footage and never watch or edit them, but you’ll want to find something in them (with automated voice recognition and image analysis, of course). Every e-mail you get  over your entire lifetime can be permanently archived.

What if you could get a catalog of every song ever recorded? That would probably require more than a few petabytes, even compressed, but we’re heading that way. I don’t think the amount of music in the world is increasing exponentially, is it? Applications like iTunes and Window Media Player, not to mention things like iPods, would have to have a critically-designed interface to handle the organization and searching for desired music. I think Windows Media Player 11 is incredible, but I don’t think it could handle more than about 100,000 songs without choking–has anyone approached any practical limits with it?

What about the total information in the world–that probably is increasing exponentially.  Will we eventually have enough storage so that everyone can have their own local, easily searchable copy of the vast sum of human knowledge and experience? (Ignoring the question of why we would want to)

Let’s extrapolate this growth out 100 years to the year 2100. I won’t show the graph, but it approaches 1E+20 GB by the year 2100.

How do the economics of digital goods change when you can have an infinite number of them? It’s the opposite of real estate, an ever-diminishing good.

On my home PC, for  the first time, I do have a lot of storage that isn’t being used. I have about 1 TB of storage, and about 300 GB free. I suppose I could rip all my DVDs, rip all my music at lossless compression (it’s currently all WMA / 192Kbps).

The rules of the game can change quickly when that much storage is available. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming decades. Of course, all this discussion is completely ignoring the increasingly connected, networked world we live in.

del.icio.us Tags: hard drive,storage,infinity,searching

Do an experiment: keep Task Manager or any other CPU activity monitoring program up on your screen for a few hour or days, glancing at it every so often. Do you see it EVER above zero (other than momentary spikes)?

Here’s mine, from a Google sidebar gadget:

I’ve got a Dual Core and 2GB RAM. Currently I have open two copies of Visual Studio 2005, Word 2003, Outlook 2007, Paint.Net, RSS Bandit, Adobe Reader, IE, MSDN help, Windows Live Messenger, and Google Deskbar.

So that’s using just over 1 GB of RAM. And ZERO CPU. I’m watching this. The CPU meter goes up a little when I type, open a new program, compile my source code, etc., but most of the time it’s zero, even when I think I’m actually working.

I used to eschew running apps like Google Deskbar, wallpaper helpers like Display Fusion, or other system utilities that continually run. But I had a realization–it doesn’t matter! I could run many more utilities concurrently and still not come anywhere close to creating a slowdown on my computer.

Of course, I’m only talking about non-interfering/non-processor-intensive programs. This immediately excludes anti-virus programs, which interrupt every process to examine system behavior continually, or running video compression (duh) in the background.

But things like desktop searching, system monitoring (if it’s not too intrusive), utilities, and any other independent process–yeah, just throw them on. They won’t make a dent.

They key word in that last paragraph is independent. Independent means they don’t depend on or interfere with other processes.

Technorati Tags: processing power,system resources,CPU,Memory,Utilities

This strike is a big deal, but it’s much bigger deal for Hollywood, the producers and writers than for the rest of us. I think they are facing some specific dangers that they had better think about before they drag on too long. The actual points the union and producers are arguing about are probably valid, some on both sides, but whatever–that’s irrelevant for my point. For the viewing public–I don’t think we’ll notice or care as much.

I’m thinking about hockey–they used to be the #4 sport, then they had a strike. Now, more people watch POKER on ESPN than hockey.

And airlines–when their workers go on strike, I think it definitely hurts the airline as a whole, because in the end we the people don’t get our service. We choose something else. And we might not come back.

I think Hollywood needs to examine some facts: TV viewership is going down, way down. There are only a handful of shows that really do well. The 90% of the others will be what’s hurt by this strike. People will come back to Leno, the Daily Show, The Office, and the Simpsons, etc. The other ones are in danger. TV has very stiff competition from the Internet, DVDs, video games (video game industry is MUCH larger than Hollywood), satellite radio, YouTube, ipods, and tons of other little distractions. Sure, lots of online content is derived from traditional content, which comes from Hollywood, but much of it is user-generated or at least independent. If TV goes out, it’s so easy for people to find other avenues for entertainment. I wonder if the same writers that are striking will lose their jobs a week after they get back to work when their shows are canceled because nobody’s watching them anymore. (Of course, they’ll just move on to the next project, but it’s still disruptive.)

I’m also curious (with any union)–how many of the members are really happy with how the union does things. I really don’t have any idea–but at some point a union might not be the best way to do business, especially in today’s global economy.

The strike by itself isn’t anywhere close to enough to doom the TV/movie industry, but put together with all of these other forces, they could be in real trouble. Meanwhile, we’ll just look for the next big star on YouTube rather than Hollywood… (more people watch Ask a Ninja than some TV shows, after all)

Technorati Tags: Writers Guild of America , WGA , Strike , Hollywood , Scripts , TV , Competition , Entertainment

I’m embarrassed to say that the link took me a long time to figure out. If you’re wireless mouse or keyboard is having connection problems, signal weaknesses, or similar signs of problems, make sure your cell phone isn’t anywhere around them!

I did this at work for a long time–it screwed up the signal strength, and caused weird problems like dropped keys, stuck CAPS, and more.

I have also noticed signals getting screwed up when I had a Nalgene bottle full of ice water sort-of between the keyboard and wireless receiver.

Technorati Tags: wireless , keyboard , mouse , cell phone , interference

Bruce Schneier has a wonderful essay on his site today about how our culture of fear of harmless people and objects is being propagated. I think this is my favorite essay of his.

I really like this paragraph about how this happens:

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.

Please go read the full article and digg it, spread it around, especially to influential people you may know. It’s ridiculous, the things people are harassed for these days.

Technorati Tags: security , overreaction , terrorism

We don’t want to be free. Neo is our enemy, not our savior.

Most of us have seen The Matrix, or are at least familiar with the story. Neo is our hero in the movie, a virtual god in training, selflessly seeking to destroy the Matrix and free the enslaved humans therein.

Yet, curiously, one of the freed humans desires to get back into the Matrix. “Ignorance is bliss,” proclaims Cypher. Tired of the grit of the real world, he wants to enjoy his virtual steak in a comfortable booth in a nice restaurant in oblivion. Obviously the bad guy, he makes a deal with the Agents and betrays Neo and the crew.

Pointless to ask which character do you identify with more?

The ironic truth is that we humans are willingly inserting ourselves into the Matrix. We don’t need to wait for the Machines to come get us. We’re building them and strapping them on, plugging them in, and embedding ourselves within them.

Think of these trends:

1. iPods – It seems like there are nearly as many pairs of white ear buds as humans. It is easier than ever to block out the deafening silence with music, podcasts, and tiny videos for the attention-challenged masses. Do I have an iPod that I listen to while cooking, cleaning, building Legos, driving, falling asleep? You betcha.
2. World of Warcraft, Second Life, other MMORPGS – I think the resemblance of these to the Matrix is actually more superficial than anything else. They are obvious fantasy playgrounds. And yet…we read about WoW weddings, offline guilds, and more. Companies have virtual presences in Second Life. Real estate is bought and sold. Compare the experience of Mildred in Fahrenheit 451 and her 3-walled interactive-TV enclosure. Is that some way between virtual realities and alternate, livable realities? Does your Second Life avatar look just like you? Why not?
3. 24-hour news – It’s cliché to rail against the 24-hour media, and I don’t want to do that specifically. But it is another aspect of being “plugged in” to the world. We always have to know what’s going on everywhere (ignoring for the moment that most TV news is now tabloid and worthless).
4. Facebook, mySpace, etc. – These online communities have replaced many of the traditional face-to-face interactions we partake in. We count our friends, visit their pages, listen to their music, understand and comment on their thoughts, sometimes without ever actually meeting.
5. Twitter – is there anything more Borg-like than being continually updated with the status of hundreds of other individuals? Once we harness this power we, in effect, become individual cogs in a great machine.
6. Rise of Video over Literature – Books are still incredibly popular and probably will be forever, but the potential exists for books to be superceded by video-on-demand. We’ve always had a “Matrix” in our minds–a place to escape to, interpreting the words on the page however we like. With video, however, the vision is placed upon us and we become part of it, rather than it becoming part of us.
7. Simplifying life by placing organization burdens on computers – PDAs, Getting Things Done, Outlook. Unburdening our crowded minds, allowing the computer to track our lives for us, freeing us for more important pursuits. Rather than mindless tasks that we all must do, we can focus our energy on our creativity.

What happens to the human race as our reality is supplemented so heavily by virtual realities, by computers, by constant flows of information, and yet coincidentally we have so many automated processes to filter and store that information for when we need it. Do we become hyper-productive and fantastically creative? Do we enjoy the fruits of nearly infinite resources like learning and exploration for its own sake? Or do we become lazy and unproductive, mere taskmasters over the computers which run our lives, stuck in fantasy worlds more exciting than our own?

It’s not that any of these things are bad. What is evident now is that the Matrix itself isn’t bad. Neo is the Luddite trying to hold us back, pull us out of the hyper-connected, multiplexed virtual realities of the 21st century into the grim shadows of “real” life. Real life–that which deals pain equally with joy, sadness with happiness, tough breaks with outstanding successes, where you’re paid to work, not play, not be a hero.

Of course, the Matrix portrays a world equivalent to our own, with the real world being brutally harsh for human existence. But the difference is only in degree. Either way, we’re happier being in a virtual world that is somehow more attractive than the one we physically exist in.

Neo must die. Leave us alone to enjoy our fantasies, our electronically-fueled dalliances in worlds unknown.

Technorati Tags: Matrix , Virtual Worlds , Alternate Realities , iPods , plugged in , Neo

I really enjoyed and appreciated this essay from Raganwald about the user experience at work versus that of their home PC environments (among other topics).

I particularly liked the point:

And meanwhile, the very same users could walk across the street and buy themselves a much better PC for less money than we pay and take it home the same day.

Ain’t that the truth. I put together my Core 2 Duo system for the same price as my crappy Pentium 4 hyperthreaded number at work. The time frames were not that far apart. The Core 2 runs circles around this sick puppy.

A company’s philosophy should be to get users (especially developers like me!) whatever hardware/software they need immediately. Within minutes or hours, not days or weeks. Of course, then you have to trust your employees to make good requests. But if you don’t trust them to know what they need, why trust them to do their job at all?

The essay goes on to talk about writing applications that take advantage of modern PC horsepower. I think I’m doing an ok job of this at work now. For example, we have a database of assets that is continually growing. It used to be we could view all of the assets on a single page that took about 30 seconds to load off-site.

Now that list will take several minutes to bring up. Yeah, we’re growing. So we need tools to help manage all of that information. One thing I’m building right now (as soon as I’m done writing this, as a matter of fact) is a quick filtering functionality on a desktop app that talks to the database. The list of assets is filtered as you type, taking advantage of the fast PCs we have these days.

That’s just one example. I can think of others that are immediately useful in business apps:

• better visualization – it takes time and thought to develop good data visualization, but the results are usually worth it
• drag & drop support – make sense to drag assets from a customer to another? I don’t know, maybe.
• dynamic views – use all that processing power to show something more interesting than fields on a scrolling form. Graphics views that change in response to context
• track history, undo/redo – might make sense in some contexts
• attach more meaningful information – pictures, videos, documents, whatever. – with stuff like WPF, it’s easier than ever to display varied content

Technorati Tags: users, features, computing horsepower, programmers

On my drive into work this morning, I heard an interesting story on on WAMU (sorry, can’t find the specific story link) about a Korean-American adopted by white American parents. While initially struggling against her Korean heritage, she eventually came to appreciate and be proud of it. The commentator, himself an adopted Korean in the same situation, was very grateful for the chance to grow up in such a mixed household.

Along with these thoughts, I there’s a set of novels I recently finished: Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series. In it, he describes an Earth that starts out a lot like the one we know today (maybe a few hundred years in the future), and is eventually unified under a single ruler. The novels are very good, despite the fact that they leave quite a bit of details about how this would happen, given the nature of humanity. On the other hand, maybe it’s merely evoking the philosophy that humans are inherently good, and given the right set of circumstances, they will choose to do good for all of us. I think I could believe that, despite what we see in the world today.

But these two stories together got me thinking: what if the entire world were open to us–no borders, easy  transportation, peaceful coexistence, interdependency, leading to high intermixing, intermarriage, etc…. What would we end up looking like as a human race? I initially thought of this question in terms of physical features, but it’s interesting to think about language, culture, economics, technology–anything at all. It certainly requires a great deal of imagination and taking things for granted to see this world, but I think it’s interesting in a futuristic, sci-fi sort of way.

This is an issue that has been discussed many times previously–so many that I won’t even bother to link to those discussions. By now it’s well-understood that blogs carry a power stronger than most in the media initially assumed possible.

Not just blogs, but the entire “Web 2.0″ phenomenon–MySpace, YouTube–the whole rotten bunch. Would Patricia Dunn have stepped down as chair of HP were it not for the constant pounding brought on by the likes of Scoble? Maybe, maybe not. In some sectors, blogs are becoming as well-regarded, if not more, than traditional publishing. Maybe this is limited to the computer industry. Maybe I just read too many blogs.

Still, it seems that the nature of debate and information dissemination has changed. No longer are we fed what mainstream publishers tell us–even if it’s of better quality. We are now free to choose what and how we read–for good or bad.

We’ve already seen the effects on the corporations. Companies simply can’t get away with anything anymore. Somebody, somewhere, will jump on it.

Areas where I think it will get more interesting:

1. entertainment – RIAA, MPAA, I’m talking about you. You have ZERO friends among bloggers. All of the bad things you’ve done in courts to innocent people, all of your extortion is shouted from the rooftops by people like those at TechDirt.  You can’t win this war. For now, the audience isn’t very general, but news spreads, and it’s spreading faster and further. Sooner or later, you will lose the PR battle completely–in the meantime, unless your companies drastically change how they do business, your business will be swept out from under you, relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance.
2. corporations – Microsoft already can’t do anything without the blogosphere lighting up. In some ways, they’ve chosen to embrace this–witness the very high-quality set of developer blogs they host. On the other hand, they’re like any other large company–they have secrets and tactics they would rather not be public debate-fodder. Corporations will be forced to open the windows and let the light shine in on what they’re doing. 
3. government – imagine if honest, whistle-blowing (or even dishonest whistle-blowing!) staffers ratted on all the corruption in Washington. Imagine if every backroom deal was publicized in embarrassing detail. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that yet, but there are signs that things are beginning to emerge. Look at the hilarity on YouTube about Senator Ted Stevens’ gaffe about the Internet’s tubes. How long as CSPAN been broadcasting, again? Our elected officials say dumb things about topics they don’t understand all the time–but now we can hear about it over and over again.

Overall, I think blogging will lead to more accountability of traditional structures of society. However, even with these possibilities, there are potential pitfalls:

1. Overcrowded Medium — occurs when there are WAYYYYYYY too many people broadcasting that not enough people are listening. If everybody in the world blogged, who would read them?
2. Loss of accountability – if there is accountability for things that are written online, than anything goes. The Internet is already the source of much bad information–it can become much worse if most of it is partisan, subjective, opinionated blather. Still, I’m not convinced it will really be worse than the status quo. The media now is far from infallible. Maybe part of me just wants to keep faith in people’s ability to reason.
3. Undercrowded Debates – Broadcast media is a finite resource therefore it maintains its quality mostly by the fact that it has  to judge some things more worthy of discussion than others. Those topics are what people hear about. The Internet, on the other hand, is an unlimited resource. Anybody can have a blog on anything and most do. This means that people themselves must choose what they follow, leading to some topics having far fewer meaningful discussions than others. For example, blogs about software and computers comprise a fairly large and active community. Politics has a large community. But what about small-interest, high-importance communities and topics? Where are the scientist blogs about global warming? I’m sure there are some, but is that kind of community ever going to gain a large enough population to affect societal opinion?
4. Lack of participation – related to Undercrowded Debates, this means people don’t participate in all the areas that are pertinent to their lives. For example, how many of the US Internet users follow blogs discussing network neutrality? This is certainly an issue that could affect all of us, but from what I can tell it’s mostly debated on tech blogs, while the rest of the country misrepresents the entire issue. It works the other way around–I don’t read any political blogs at the moment. What issues am I missing out on? It’s too easy to become part of a niche community on the Internet and ignore the community as a whole.

Some of these problems stem from the anonymity of the Internet, others from the exponential increases in information available to us. Perhaps there are technologies in the pipeline that will solve these issues for us someday. They certainly aren’t going away.

tags: blogging, technology, society, government, accountability

A colleague at work recently got a second video card–a bottom of the barrel (or close to it) nVidia MX 4000 (PCI). He had an existing AGP nVidia Vanta. Well…the installation did not go well. It did something to Windows so that it consistently blue-screened during the driver load process (the progress bar moving in the startup splash screen).

Windows would start in safe mode, but removing the non-working drivers for the new card did not work. Removing both drivers did not work. Choosing last-known good configuration got us up and running in Windows (finally), but with only the bare VGA driver. Installing a driver from either CD or nVidia’s site ended in the strange error “Access Denied.”

Then I remembered what I had read in Windows Internals about the location of driver configuration information in the registry.  Driver info is stored with service configuration in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services.

First we removed all hints of nVidia apps and videos drivers using Add/Remove Programs. Then we went into regedit, into the above key and deleted the keys “nv”, “nv4″, and “nvsvc” (I think they were those, but looking on my own machine at home, they’re a bit different, so I’m half-guessing). I’m sure there are similar keys for ATI chips.

In the meantime, we had found an unused AGP version of the MX 4000 just lying around (no joke), and replaced the Vanta with this. We reinstalled the drivers and everything worked great.

Does anybody else think that the real purpose behind the big movements in privacy, hiding web browsing habits, building anonymizers, and more… is really just a movement to allow everyone to view pornography without their SO’s finding out?

Come on, perhaps there really are people in a public library who need to look up an embarrassing medical question and don’t want the next user to spy on them and confront them about it, but let’s be honest–is that REALLY the motivation?

On a personal computer, what excuse is there really? To hide your browsing habits from your children? your spouse? What web sites are you visiting that your family shouldn’t know about? Maybe you should work on your honesty with them…

At work? I’ll cut a little slack here, but not much. You REALLY shouldn’t be browsing bad sites at work–that creates liability problems. On the other hand, maybe you have some dishonest coworkers who would stoop to spying on your habits…