Anonymity

Anonymity is a phase we go through, and I think we do it as part of building our own individual identity. When you grow up with parts of your identity defined for you - by your parents, by your school, by your peers - you need to separate from that to find out what is uniquely and personally yours. Anonymity is a good way to do that, because online nobody knows you, and so has no expectations to place on you yet. Anonymous, you can become truly yourself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you never felt the need to be anonymous, then I guess you're lucky.
PPS - You probably had a very strong sense of identity already.

Emotional game attachment

It's natural to become emotionally attached to certain games, especially those where you make friends and you do work that pays off, like World of Warcraft. But the best response when a game wrongs you (say, by gradually changing into a game that just frustrates you) is to stop playing rather than rant and rave at the publisher. Play while it's fun, stop when it's not. There are lots of other games out there. The emotional attachment makes that harder, but not impossible.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Game publishers don't owe you entertainment.
PPS - They only owe you the product you paid for.

Zune Pass vs Quickflix streaming

I was very excited to hear that the Zune Pass unlimited subscription option was coming to Australia, until I heard it would be for music only. The Zune Store already has movies and TV along with music, so Microsoft could have easily included that in the Zune Pass too, and it would have been available on my XBox, which would have been perfect for me. At $12 per month (or $120 per year) we could have cut out our Quickflix subscription and saved money into the bargain.

Which brings me to the other option. Quickflix is launching a new streaming service the day before the music-only Zune Pass goes live. It will be free until December for existing subscribers, but it seems to be heavily tied to Sony hardware - you need a Bravia TV or Blu-Ray player, or a Playstation, though that option won't be live until the end of the year. Or you could use any PC or internet-enabled phone. I assume I won't be able to download movies in advance to my phone to enjoy on the train, though. Also, since their announcement mentioned "hundreds" of movies, but they have tens of thousands in their library, I'm dubious about the available titles.

On the balance, for me, it's kind of a wait-and-see situation. I need to see whether Zune starts offering movies and TV, and for Quickflix I do need to be able to use my XBox. Both services will require a fair bit of bandwidth, so might require a step up in our internet plan to go with them. And the uncertainty of the available library is a concern too. I don't want to start paying for a service only to discover that most of what I would watch is not on there. I look forward to seeing how they both play out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Technically, they are probably both competing with BigPond Movies too.
PPS - But as far as I know, BigPond doesn't have an unlimited streaming option.

Friday Flash Fiction - Professor Sinister and the Radioactive Rats

Miss Phoenix propped herself up uncomfortably on the floor where she had been kicked. Her cape was torn, her mask askew. She spat blood and nursed some broken ribs as Professor Sinister stood gloating over her. His robot clanked to a halt behind him, its job of physical violence done, for the moment.

"You think you can win, Phoenix?" taunted the Professor, "My radioactive rats are already halfway across the city by now, and nothing can stop them! Even if you escaped, there's nothing you can do. You've already lost!"

"No, Sinister. You've lost. Mr Ambient tracked the rats through the sewers with his Geiger sense, and he has the Pied Piper's flute!"

Professor Sinister's face grew pale. Well, paler. "But ... no! I destroyed that cursed flute!"

"You only thought you did. We swapped it for a decoy in the museum months ago, when Doctor Vermin tried to steal it."

Sinister dropped his eyes, scanning his mental reserves for something, anything, that would mean his plan could still succeed. The robot's remote control sparked and released a wisp of smoke in his hand, and just then a jaunty flute tune started to drift in through the window from somewhere far away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This would be my second superhero vignette.
PPS - Probably won't be the last.

Asking why in technology

There are some people who embrace current technology. Above them are those who wish it could do something more. Dreamers. Above those, however, are visionaries that see past the stack of technology, past the people and the debate about whether it's good or bad, and get right to the heart of the issue, like what the problem is and why it should be solved this way or that, or what we need to do in the future to make best use of what we have. There's a progression of engagement with technology, then, from "what's new?" and "where is it going?" to "why are we doing this?". We need people - leaders - at that top level.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Fortunately, it's not that difficult to start asking "why".
PPS - If you can, you should start doing that.

Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

I found this book one of the most compelling I have ever read by Cory Doctorow. One that really excited me in the beginning, kind of horrified me in the middle and offered only bittersweet resolution at the end. The overwhelming feel is of transience. Nothing lasts very long, and certainly not as long as you feel it should.

The story follows Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, a pair of artists and generally creative types, through the rise and fall of micro-entrepeneurship funded on the collapse of big old corporations. With the help of 3D printers and networks of other small businesses, they make some cool stuff, set the world on fire with a new way of doing business and manufacturing, but like the soft plastic goop on which their printers run, it all starts wearing out too soon. Nobody really knows what they should be doing, long-term, and none of it really works out anyway. Businesses are created and abandoned before anyone knows what to do with them, and even interpersonal relationships are made of fragile stuff. At least the villain gets his just deserts, but the conclusion is just part of the wearing down.

It felt a little depressing, I suppose, but also relatable. I got excited about new things and new technological possibilities, but in the end I know it all winds down and wears out, even if you don't want it to. An individual's character remains firm at the core, and relationships built on that core can last, but everything else - the type of work we do, the way we do it and our friends and colleagues - are all built on the shifting sands of time. That said, I could hardly put the book down, and I definitely recommend it. Just don't go in expecting happiness, rainbows and unicorns all the way through.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Makers on Amazon.
PPS - Makers on Doctorow's site including free ebook version.

Deadlines and programming

Deadlines on programming tasks that are meant to create a little pressure inevitably slip because they don't mean anything real. Deadlines that *are* real might slip because programming takes as long as it takes, and knowing that it has to happen before a certain time doesn't really do anything to help that.

There are two ways you can deliver more quickly in programming: reduce quality expectations or cut features. Suggesting the former is a good way to get a swift kick, and the latter will result in long meetings about what features are the most or least essential. Basically between schedule, budget and features, you only get two. If you have an absolute deadline, then you need to choose whether you also have a fixed budget or a definite required set of features.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If it's features and budget you need, it's going to take some time.
PPS - And if it's a fixed budget and schedule, you might not get all your features.

Work and value

The goal of work is to use time and skill to produce value. Our society of trade is based on the idea that other people will produce the right value to exchange for ours. We use money as an enabler of trade, so that even if you have no goods I want and vice versa, we can still do business with each other. With the view of money as a means of enabling trade, two things immediately stop making sense: pure finance markets and people who hoard massive piles of cash. Finance markets make the medium of trade into a product of its own, and that causes inflation pretty directly, because people are paying more than face value for money. Sooner or later that house of cards must fall down. Hoarding cash, similarly, is like preparing for big trades that never happen. Having more money than you could ever use should be seen as a sign of wasted effort, a bad case or paranoia or pathological greed. Only in a few cases could it be seen as having produced something of worth that the whole world wanted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or performing some service the whole world needed.
PPS - But that's even rarer.

Conman's Conscience

Conman's Conscience is the name I have for those situations when a person or a business justifies itself by saying "it's your own fault". People who sell pictures of iPhones on eBay claim their victims didn't read carefully, so it's their own fault. An internet service provider that doesn't upgrade their customers to new, cheaper, better versions of their plans automatically says its their own fault for not checking regularly. If you're exploiting your customers in any way and justifying it by saying they should have known better, you've got Conman's Conscience.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Most privacy invasions online fit in this category.
PPS - And, of course, all cons, short or long.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Ends of the Monarchs

The king delegated his whole life to his servants. Others made his public appearances, prepared and delivered his speeches, signed documents on his behalf. In the end, he needed not move at all, but would have servants feed him, bathe him, dress him, drive him, carry him, read to him, speak for him. In this state, he became essentially useless, taking in resources and producing nothing of value. Realising this, the parliament and the servants came to an agreement. The servants would continue this life without their employer the king, going about the same actions as a collective unit but without a head, so to speak. They became new elected officials with quite specific tasks. This is how the king was replaced, and why our tradition still refers to the servants at the castle as "the king". The castle, and indeed the country, continues functioning as if there were a king, but we long ago outgrew the need to have an actual figurehead there.

In the Palace of a Thousand Steps, the emperor sits on his throne at the top of a miniature staircase, one thousand tiny steps above the audience chamber floor. That is how far you are beneath him. All who appear there to petition the emperor are ritually cut before leaving, for nobody can come face to face with the emperor and walk away unharmed. The emperor must be seen to be unconcerned with earthly matters, including food, shelter and clothing. Thus nobody may watch him eat, though food is delivered. He has no official home. He does not speak, does not walk, performs none of the mundane actions of ordinary life, at least not while anyone is looking. Such ritual, ceremony and tradition grew up around the emperor that, after several hundred years, the position was given to a wooden statue. It was far easier, then, to believe him to be immortal, to ensure he would never bleed and would not age. And, officially, the emperor still ruled, though his vice-chancellor had to do most of the work.

The Gnome Queen of the Opal Caverns holds court over a tiny nation. It is forever shrinking as border disputes, private land sales and plain old erosion nibble away at the edges. Centuries ago the Caverns domain stretched under the earth for hundreds of kilometres. Over time it diminished, by degrees, to only several caves. As recently as two years ago it covered just one cave and a dozen subjects. Today, technically, the Opal Caverns nation is one stalagmite, and has no populace but the queen herself. With a deep sigh of resignation, the Gnome Queen takes the quill from the grinning goblin and signs the treaty that gives away the very last vestiges of her once-great dominion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Everything comes to an end.
PPS - Well, most things.

Pedestrians as traffic control

There is a pedestrian crossing near the train station in my home suburb. It does nothing but allow people to cross the busy road in two stages, with a refuge island in the middle. You cross one half, push the next button, and cross the second half. Despite being exclusively for the good of pedestrians, I believe it has been designed mostly with the cars in mind. For instance, in the morning, when most people are heading towards the train station, the lights are timed so that they give the maximum possible delay to pedestrians crossing the road in that direction. When one pedestrian light goes green on the side furthest from the station, you can bet that its timer is just behind the one on the other side, so that you will have to wait in the middle. If you were coming out of the station at that time, you would find the timing quite agreeable. This timing is reversed in the afternoon.

Second, if you take a look down the road to another signalled intersection, you will notice that the pedestrian light goes red just as that other one goes green, so cars coming in that direction will have to stop at both lights. This does not provide any benefit to the pedestrians, of course, and it doesn't even happen at all if there are no pedestrians. I must conclude, therefore, that the timing is the result of a conscious decision to use pedestrians as a form of traffic control. Somehow that doesn't seem like a good idea.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think the maximum-delay timing is a mistake.
PPS - But I can't know for sure.

Live parking info

If we can get live traffic info from car transponders (sort of like Google Maps does), we could possibly get live parking info too. Because we don't have always-on, internet-enabled car transponders, though, you'd have to get the data some other way. If Google Maps can get live traffic data from users, perhaps you could compare the intended destinations of those users to see if there is likely to be a parking problem in a given area when they all arrive.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There would be a fair amount of guesswork involved.
PPS - But sometimes that's enough.

Inside-out computing

Every now and then there is a major shift in the way we think about computers and technology. It's like this: we make screens bigger, better and more immersive, but they're still screens we have to put in place. At some point there comes a shift - we flip inside out - and suddenly we're not looking at the world with screens put on top, but screens with the world underneath. It usually happens when someone invents a new way of doing things, but it doesn't happen every time. You can't reach that change point with the same technology and the same way of doing things. We can cram more and more technology into the gaps in our world, but eventually we're going to run out of room between existing technology and methods. At some point, we have to redesign and leave old technology behind.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Hopefully for something better.
PPS - Otherwise what's the point?

Smart phones and internet monitoring

Our next generation will probably have their own smart phones before they have their own computers. That means they have their own personal unmonitored internet connection, and for paranoid parents that's a huge red flag. Whereas normal desktops can be placed in common areas at home to discourage inappropriate use (whether deliberate or accidental), mobile phones don't have that option. When there's an internet connection in everyone's pocket, what do you do? You can try locking it down so that the user (the child) is not an administrator (the parent) who decides what is and is not acceptable on the phone. That kind of system has to be perfect to be successful, though, and nothing is ever perfect.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it would be good enough for most circumstances, though.
PPS - And it all depends how much you trust your kids.

Print on demand

If retail of the future is going to involve a lot more print on demand services, from where are the first 3D printing shops going to arise? Will they be additions to the old photo and camera shops, as a new print kiosk beside the photo printing booths? Will internet cafes install 3D printers for one-off object downloads beside their paper printers? Will they be vending machines standing alone? Will they be in their own service department at big department stores? Perhaps they'll be an important part of novelty shops, who can then print as many weird mugs or toy figurines as they require that day. Maybe they'll find their first niche at the local hardware store, where you can go and get that specific piece you need, the same way you can get a paint colour made to order. Or maybe they will just appear as their own standalone shop, much like current clothing personalisation shops.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I saw Coca Cola booths at Chermside shopping centre where you could have your name printed on a can.
PPS - But that counts more as experimental marketing.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Undercity

Thirteen years ago I entered the labyrinth of the Undercity through a manhole I found in an alley. I didn't know where I was going. If I'd known, I would have stayed out. In all my thirteen years down here, I have never found an exit, but I've been looking the whole time. That's why I am both intrigued by and skeptical of the little snivelling creature cowering at the tip of my drawn sword. I've learned the hard way to survive down here in this half-real place, and I've got the scars (and sword) to prove it. You don't live long on these streets by sweating and crying at the sight of every shiny blade, so this kid must be new. The trail back to his entry might still be fresh.

He tried to pick my pocket, a trick most urchins around here know not to try, and as I had wheeled on him, sword drawn, he jumped back, tripped and fell against the wall, with nowhere left to go. At the threat of a swift impalement, he squeaked quickly: "I know a way out!" Everyone is looking for a way out.

The rain pelts down, as always, and we walk. I follow the boy, clearly recovered from his ordeal, around the gravity well, past the blank-faced shops, over the Dozen Train Tracks and the boy keeps looking back to check on me. We turn left into a red-brick street that narrows the further it goes. There is a faint shimmer in the air at an uncertain distance, and on the edge of detection, a scent of ozone mixed with the usual rats-and-garbage smells. We do not seem to be getting closer, nor further away.

Then suddenly, like blundering into a thick curtain in the dark, I feel it. A velvet heaviness in the atmosphere, threatening to press me to the ground. It's as if the space here is more real than anywhere I've been in years. Maybe I've been here too long. Could true reality crush me? Every step grows more difficult, I feel like I'm breathing syrup and the raindrops assault me like almighty hailstones. I am strong. I can make it, I tell myself, but then I cannot. Though I summon every molecule of energy I possess, I fall back, my body too keen to breathe the half-real Undercity air, not this choking reality.

I can dimly see the boy racing ahead, as if this mystic doorway were a mere gap in a wall, then the space shifts, the bricks flow and interlock, and before me is a blank wall. No shimmer, no ozone, no heavy reality. I push myself to my feet, grit my teeth through the pins and needles as the blood resumes flowing, and sheath my sword. I belong here. I have belonged in the Undercity for longer than I realised. But now I know two things. There are exits, and it is possible to use them. The rest is details. Perhaps I can push further into an exit, train my body to be more real. Perhaps there are parts of the Undercity that are more real, where I can re-learn reality. Maybe the boy had a key, or some trick I can learn. Maybe, just maybe, there is a way for me to return home.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I picture the Undercity as a bizarre counterpart to a real city.
PPS - It might be one of those settings I revisit another time.

Compounding errors

There may be computer systems that do their individual tricks well enough, but when you compose them together, they don't do so well. For instance, we have moderately good textual language translation, and we have moderately good speech-to-text software, but if you try to use them together, those success percentages - say, 60% each - need to be multiplied together, and suddenly you only get a 36% total success rate. All the pieces for some really cool software are out there right now, but the overall effect of composing them together is less impressive than it could be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It can give you ideas, though.
PPS - And it can be useful for prototyping.

Moving lots of data

Services that move a lot of data - tens of gigabytes at a time, I mean - need three things: off-peak scheduling, bandwidth limiting and error recovery. You need to be able to schedule the file transfers for times when the network is not in high demand, or for separate quota times for domestic users. It's a kind of Quality of Service setting, I suppose. Bandwidth limiting means you can set caps on the rate at which data is to be transferred, staying under certain quotas or, again, to maintain the quality of other services. Error recovery is essential, too, since operations of that size are more likely to run into problems sooner or later, and retrying manually is a very large burden. If you can't recover automatically from errors, everything is going to take much longer and be much more frustrating.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A lot of our problems at work would be solved if we had software that did this.
PPS - Guess I'd better get writing.

A QR-code+smartphone point of sale system

Start with a bank-to-bank funds transfer system built on itemised invoices. You can create an itemised invoice with your bank, and they keep it on file, and generate a unique identifier for it. You pass that identifier and your bank's BSB code to your customer. They go to their bank and enter the number, which displays the invoice, fetched from your bank by the number. When they approve it, the appropriate total, as defined in the invoice, is transferred to your bank account. That's the backbone of this system.

Now for the cool part. Say you're at a market, where a lot of small businesses have booths to sell their wares. Using this invoice system and smartphones, these small market businesses can accept electronic payments rather than handling cash. The stall owner can pass the invoice numbers to customers via QR codes, so that there are no mistakes. The whole transaction from end to end would look a lot like tallying up an order on a calculator app, showing a generated code to the customer, then confirming receipt of the funds via the same app.

As long as the banks are all on board, and the apps are available for all major smartphone operating systems (or as mobile-friendly websites), there's no reason for any of this to be tied to a particular institution or device, and no personal information needs to be exchanged between customer and seller, so privacy is maintained (as long as invoice numbers are random) and security is aided by the disposable nature of the invoices.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Hopefully such a system would be provided for free.
PPS - Then again, banks do love their fees.

Critical thinking

Critical thinking requires the ability to analyse statements into facts, assumptions and interpretations. Facts can be checked, assumptions can be challenged and interpretations argued. That's intelligent debate. Most people will come at you with interpretations and facts, but to fully understand their position, you need to know the assumptions that have supported their interpretations. Anyone who says they aren't making assumptions either doesn't know what their assumptions are, or they aren't making logical arguments.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can't make logical arguments without assumptions.
PPS - You could try, I suppose, but they would fall over on their own.

Testing privacy claims

How do you know you can trust a website's privacy claims? You need ways of detecting abuse and one-way layers of revelation, undetectable to the service. That is, lies about your location, job, contact details and so on, thrown out like chaff to confuse and disorient data miners. That way you can test out the service's claims before you reveal any potentially compromising information. If any of those lies are used and abused in ways you did not specify, that site is not trustworthy. How would you detect such abuse?

With some details, like email, it's cheap and quick to set up a fake address and monitor it. Phone numbers are harder, but still potentially possible. Postal addresses can probably only be faked properly with PO boxes or a trusted remailing service that receives your mail at another address and forward it on. If all you're worried about is personal details, you can just lie and see if those lies show up in communication from other, unrelated companies. That means your lies need to be unique for each service. At this one you're an astronaut, that one a pastry chef and at another you're a doorman. If you use a lot of them, it would be tricky to keep track of them all, of course, and, as we all know, lies can come back to haunt you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - To see if humans even view the data, you could list your profession as "CEO of [company]".
PPS - Where "[company]" is the website you're using.

Friday Flash Fiction - Reality Distortion Field

The reality distortion field, or RDF, had kept Steve functional for a long time - about 115 years, to be precise - warding off infections and assassins equally, like they were mosquitoes. The side-effects of producing inspiration in others were just that: side-effects. Very beneficial, but not the focus of the device. While it sustained him, he could hardly help but become an inspiring visionary leader, or perhaps the head of a cult. He chuckled as he thought the two need not be mutually exclusive and admired the machine in its last moments.

As the tiny nuclear battery whirred to a halt and the indicator LEDs winked out, Steve sighed and resigned to his fate. He'd had some good times, but since that other genius had gone missing, nobody had been able to fix the RDF, and the more people knew about its existence, the less effective it would be. He couldn't afford to get too many people onto the repairs, or they would cancel the very effect they were trying to maintain.

He strolled to the window, looking out at the estate. Its manicured lawns, trimmed hedges and fountains, the circular drive. The stables and private polo field. He'd miss it. Steve figured he had done everything he could. The repairs failed, so he'd made some good succession plans and arranged everything as well as possible to continue after him. The company should survive. His family - great-great-grandchildren now - would be provided for; supported and comfortable but not extravagently so. And that was everything. Time to go out with a bang.

He raced, excited, up to the roof where the Zeppelin waited, donned his goggles, leather helmet and scarf, then took off, flying out over the ocean, higher and higher, until he disappeared from view entirely. He wouldn't be heard from again, and his "disappearence" would be one last mysterious gift to the world.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In memory of Steve Jobs, who I don't think actually had a Reality Distortion Field machine.
PPS - Or a Zeppelin, come to think of it.

Designing for users or not

I saw a talk online from Mix11, a Microsoft conference, where a designer said that the days of user-centric design were numbered. He also said that he was talking about a major shift in understanding our relationship with technology, and that this comes at the expense of seeing ourselves at the centre of the digital ecology. But if we are not designing for users, then by what principles do we guide our design? I think it would have to be via tasks and communication. We have something to do. Humans may or may not be involved, but if you're going to think of that, then you have also to think that computers might not be involved. This could easily be a discussion about human-to-human technology involving nothing but language.

The point is that there are tasks to do to accomplish some goal, and there are players involved who need to provide or receive certain information. The best way to do so might be on paper or it might be with a fully-automated internet-enabled system. To be a designer, you can't think in terms of "what can a computer do for a user in this context" but "what does everyone need to do to complete this task?" As soon as a computer is involved, however, and someone needs to use it to accomplish part of the task, you need to design the interface in a way that makes sense to humans, is easy to learn and easy to use. If you don't design that part for humans, it's pretty pointless.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some software makes me wonder whether anyone considered users at all.
PPS - But that's not new.

Patent licensing

I've seen a question about patent reform where the question was asked: should we be looking to overhaul the whole system, or would we do better to institute a flat licensing scheme to which patent owners can't say "no"? Rather than preventing the implementation of their ideas and suing everyone who tries to copy it, now inventors just get a license fee from everyone who wants to use their idea. Of course, it would still be up to them to find and point out that people are using the idea, and sometimes that argument might go to court to argue about whether or not the patented idea has been used at all, but anyone anywhere is free to build on any ideas anyone else has. Right now, if there are two technologies that are patented by different people or companies, nobody anywhere is allowed to put them together, even if it would work well and do amazing things. In this proposed system you can patent an idea and you don't even have to implement it to benefit. You just need to make sure people who use your idea are paying royalties.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which, to be fair, is as hard as enforcing a patent in the existing system.
PPS - But it should enable more innovation.

Maps and location online

Local services are difficult to do online, because the internet is not built around the idea of your location affecting what you do. That's kind of the point - no matter where you are, you can get to the same websites as everyone else. Sure, someone can create a website that tells you about local places and events, and individual business websites usually tell you where you can find their real-space offices, but that's just another outgrowth of the free-and-easy internet model. The same way Google can build a maps service, so can Microsoft or Apple or Facebook or Foursquare or anyone in their garage with the know-how and time. That's not a step towards clarity for local information.

What we need instead is a standard way to specify location information on any website so that Google Maps, Bing Maps, Whereis and all those other map search websites can crawl and index them, rank them and present them in any way they see fit. For instance, say BP publishes a list of the map coordinates of all their petrol stations worldwide as a KML file on their website. Google comes along and grabs that list, and then when you search for BP on a map, you can get your nearest petrol station, along with whatever metadata they associate with that map tag and a link to the website where it was harvested. We have a standard data format already that we could use for this: KML.

This kind of distributed map data publishing creates a greater incentive to spam, since now we're not just talking about page rank in Google keyword searches, but literal real estate on maps. If your result is more prominent than others, it's much more obvious and much more valuable. So there would need to be good ranking algorithms to make sure the right results show up for certain locations.

I wonder if map providers are already trying to do this, with their crawler bots recognising street addresses and associating them with keywords and icons. It would be surprising if nobody was trying, but I think a distributed map tag standard makes sense. It should also provide support for dates and times, so that we can list timed events too, and not just places.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know Google Maps already displays a lot of useful local information.
PPS - But does that come from automatic website scraping or from a team of people?

Room to fail

So many self-help books, management trends and motivational writers or speakers talk about being willing to fail and learn from it. But sometimes (quite often, in fact) we don't have room to fail. If you need to put your entire life savings into your dream of starting a restaurant, and it fails, then you have nothing. No life savings, no more restaurant and possibly a huge debt, too. You might die homeless and alone, but at least you learned a valuable lesson through your failure, right?

By all means, make the hard choices. Take the risks. Sometimes you will fail, and you will learn from it, but your mistakes will cost you, and you need something to absorb that cost. You might be able to start again from nothing, but "nothing" can look very different to an orphaned minimum-wage-slave in subsidised housing and a musician hipster with a rich, doting grandmother.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When all else fails, endeavour to be the one with the rich grandmother.
PPS - It's generally the better choice.

QR codes for augmented reality

The simplest way to get augmented reality is with a smartphone, QR codes and some software. The software stores data - 3D images, notes, music, whatever - in a database, the QR codes act as identifiers for the data that you can place anywhere visible and the phone reads the codes with its camera and displays whatever data is in the database. You could use it as a way to tag the world, organise virtual note cards, augment ordinary board games, all those things AR is good at. The best part is that there are just two hardware components (printed codes and mobile phones), and they have very high availability.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The system could be very generic and very useful.
PPS - It would make the physical world machine-readable.

Friday Flash Fiction - Train Station Nation

Someone must have flipped a track switch incorrectly by accident. A passenger train roared past at full speed, filled with commuters, half of them confused at the unfamiliar turn their morning route had taken, the other half gawking at the secret shanty town. Time to move on, and quickly. The denizens knew the drill, though many of them had not been part of a move-along before. They gathered grime-faced children, rolled up tents and sleeping mats, packed their camping stoves and other meagre belongings into duffel bags and backpacks. In twenty minutes they were mobile, ready to hike down the tunnels to find another station on a different abandoned train line.

Amil didn't want to let anyone know, but this had been the last abandoned station he'd known of. The last resort, and now it was suddenly exposed. It doesn't happen often, the exposure, but forgotten train stations happened even more rarely. Today the train schedule changes so that fewer services go to this or that station. A while later, services start bypassing the station entirely. The train drivers stop noticing the tracks going off to the left at that one point into a dark tunnel. The station is locked up, the lights turned off, and eventually the streetside entrances are paved over. Nobody even remembers there used to be a station there, except certain doddering archivists and intrepid urban spelunkers. Amil had grown up in the underground, and had scouted for abandoned stations in his youth. Now he had nowhere to lead his people.

They set off down a tunnel even Amil had not seen before. That was a good sign, at least. It angled down and around in a wide helix, and Amil lost track of how far they had come. The train tracks ended at a palatial underground station, older than any Amil had ever seen, art-deco styling, the roof twelve metres overhead, gilded columns and platform signs hand-written in looping calligraphy on carved wood. Chandelliers hanging down and ticket booths without glass or bars. No turnstyles anywhere. The whole floor caked with dust. The mayors of the displaced micronations began staking out territory. New Chinatown. New Little Italy. Nouvelle-France. New Home. The Train Station Nation, modern cave-dwellers with their own laws and their own borders, run out of their own city by racial violence in the war. We may be safe here for a month or a year, thought Amil to himself, but this life is not sustainable. Sooner or later, they'd run out of places to hide, and then could only hope that the world outside would be ready to accept them when they re-emerge into the daylight.

Amil stood back a bit and took a head count, then counted again to make sure. They were missing four. Asking around, Amil found that it was four Russian youths, and that nobody had seen them since the train passed. Amil wrapped his threadbare grey cloak around himself, explained his mission to the elders, and set off in search of the four boys, back up the dim tunnel, along some more familiar tracks, and cautiously to the surface streets.

What he saw there was shocking. From the tales of his father, he expected rubble, dust, violence and fire. Instead, the streets were clean, people were driving cars, eating in open-air restaurants, walking dogs down the street. There was no war, at least, not any more. There was no danger on the surface at all. Amil gaped at it all, unable to take it in. Passing people began to give strange looks to the soot-covered man in the grey coat, and Amil made himself scarce, retreating to the familiar darkness of the subway. When he caught his breath, Amil wondered what to do. What could he do? The youths would not be coming back, he was sure, but what could he tell the others? After a long while, Amil decided it was best the others not know. They had a life below the world, and a nice new station that would be safe for a long time. This was their place. Their home. This, Amil reassured himself, was where he and they belonged.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have a weird fondness for forgotten places.
PPS - And I like the idea that a whole city could forget about a whole train station.

Amazon and region restrictions

The maddest I have ever been at Amazon is when it told me I was not allowed to buy a particular ebook because it was available only to UK customers. It is only available in electronic format, and I am prevented from reading it because Amazon says so. Why? Shut up and get out, that's why. We don't want your filthy Australian dollars, thanks. But I discovered later that I can buy it from the US Amazon site. So what I really have here is a fractured user experience. Is Amazon one global company, from which I can buy what I want, or is it a a few companies obeying local laws? I was on the UK site because they have free shipping to Australia now for orders over $25, but I'm not allowed to buy everything there, because the UK site is only for UK customers. Or Australians who want free shipping, but not ebooks. No, for those exact same ebooks, you need to go to the American site.

I guess the problem is that it is very clear to me that I am not buying a book here. I am using a website that represents a publisher that has certain regional interests that need to be protected who happens to have a relationship with Amazon who has agreed to sell a book under certain conditions. There are so many layers and lawyers between me and the book that it doesn't feel like shopping any more. I need to navigate through the rat maze first, and then I get the food pellet. Hey, Amazon, I came here to buy a book. Do you want my money or not? Their answer, apparently, is "Yes, but only if you find out the right way to give it to us."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I sincerely hope someone is working on this.
PPS - Because if I can buy something digital from one Amazon site, shouldn't I be able to buy it anywhere?

iTunes Australian prices

American TV is dirt cheap through the American iTunes store. The theory is that it's showing on cable there anyway, so there's not much demand. In the Australian iTunes store, the same TV shows cost four times as much, to make more profit, but a lot of people just download instead. So if the iTunes prices were lower, would that mean more sales and more profit?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess the fear is that there still won't be enough sales.
PPS - It just depends where the natural balance lies.

Android, iOS and market share

If you can retail a capable Android phone for under $100, how is Apple going to maintain their market dominance? Actually, worldwide, Android already has the lion's share of the mobile market (43% according to 2011 research by Gartner, vs only 18% for iPhone), and it's likely to continue to grow. The sub-$100 phones just prove that Android is flexible enough for pretty much anything. The real question is whether that dominance will turn developers to think of Android first and iOS second.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Apparently the new iPhone might be due out later this year.
PPS - That could change things again.

Disagreeing with Seth Godin

I've been reading Seth Godin's blog, and while it might sound nice and inspirational, I'm having a few problems with it. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, or at least the motivations behind it.

For instance, he says some people take jobs with big firms to avoid responsibility, and they should be working to fix the problems they find there. But the job you get, especially in a recession, is not always entirely up to you. Also, in a big firm, the people at the bottom are not stupid. They see the problems, they report the problems, and the people at the top ignore those problems because they've got bigger problems. Then the people at the bottom leave in frustration and are replaced by other people who see the same problems. You might know there's an issue, and you might know how to solve it, but that is not always in your power, and that is not always your fault.

Or how about this one: you have chosen to live in a world where certain products are unavailable to you, for instance Mac-only computer programs, Amazon Kindle exclusive content and food that is only available in Norway. Ads for those products that you have "chosen" not to have make you mad, because they remind you of your choice of exclusion. But how can you choose to own and pay for three phones just to get access to all the apps? Can you even choose to live in two countries at once, for example, to have this country's health care but this country's tax rates? No. You can't choose to have everything, so acting like the exclusion is all your fault isn't helping anyone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It seems to me that his worldly wisdom is a little shallow.
PPS - Or just a little too worldly.

Anticipation

I've heard that anticipation of positive events (such as holidays) results in a bigger mental boost than the actual events themselves. Is it also true, then, that anticipation of negative events (getting fired) is worse than the actual negative event? Perhaps that's the reason behind the "get it over and done with" philosophy, the reason we procrastinate (things seem worse before you do them, so you don't bother) and ripping band aids off in one go (peeling slowly prolongs negative anticipation of the rest of the pain). Maybe it doesn't apply in all those cases, but I do think it might explain a lot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Call it the Anticipation Magnification Effect.
PPS - Sounds like a Big Bang Theory episode title.

Friday Flash Fiction - Unnatural disaster

The earthquake came out of nowhere, shaking the whole city. The side of the mountain liquefied and flowed down in a massive landslide, engulfing a third of the city's buildings and many of its inhabitants. People ran through the narrow streets, carrying what few possessions they were able to gather, urging children to hurry, trying to get out of the way of the advancing wall of mud. The roads and houses filled with the thick, flowing earth, or were crushed, toppled or even lifted from their foundations. Nothing survived in that affected area. The cleanup would take months, possibly years.

Watching from orbit, Gorignak marked off his checklist and shed a tear before turning off the agitator beam, stopping the earthquake he had caused. Being a park ranger for the Earth Natural Reserve was, for the most part, a very good job. The blue-and-white globe out the window of his monitoring station was the best view he could hope for, there was always something new and interesting to learn, and he only occasionally had to lead politicians from the central star systems on sightseeing tours. It was just days like this, when he had to do "population control" that he wished he'd applied to work at the galactic bank instead.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just wondered one day, what if all our natural disasters were a form of deliberate population control?
PPS - It's far from the simplest explanation, though.

Replacing movies

If big budget movies are failing these days, it's because they're too big. Too much money in each one means it needs a wider audience to make a profit, which means it needs broad appeal, which means it needs to be simple, so they're all basically the same. Or they're built on established properties like popular books (Harry Potter, Twilight). We need something smaller (to reduce risk), accessible (cheap and easy to get to) and with lots of variety (to appeal to as many people as possible). Until downloads completely kill off the old revenue models, that means television.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or vaudeville.
PPS - Video recording is to live performance as word of mouth is to television.

Save and restore pool games

If you were particularly skilled, determined and weird, you could build a robot arm and a computer vision system to save and restore games of pool on a real table. If you get to a point in a game that you want to save for later, you can just hit the "save" button, then a computer will take a picture and remember the position of all the balls on the table. Then, while you go away, someone else can play. Later you can come back, find that saved state again, and have the robot arm accurately replace the balls exactly where they were.

A system like that would enable other interesting options, too. For instance, you could save a trick shot setup to use over and over, or use it as an accurate "do-over" system when playing with less-skilled opponents. You could save a game and take it with you to play elsewhere, so, for instance, if you have to leave a party before you're done, the game doesn't have to stop there and then. You could even, if you were so inclined, play against someone over the internet, though it wouldn't look very exciting unless a robot cue attempts to reproduce their shot before the ball-placing arm corrects the table again. Also, the slight differences in your tables might make such a game a bit unbalanced.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some people have already built pool-playing robots.
PPS - Probably with mixed results.

Watermarked ideas

Apparently dictionary publishers play Balderdash just to see who copies their work, making up random words and meanings. If another dictionary turns up with that unword in it, you know they copied from this particular dictionary. It's like watermarking ideas to see who copied you. Cartographers do it to their maps, too, introducing little mistakes that let them see who has duplicated their hard work for their own profit. It's a clever and subtle kind of watermarking, for sure, but it can have drawbacks. For instance, because this type of watermark needs to look like real data in order to work, it can foul up actual use of the data. In the case of dictionaries, sometimes people start actually using the fake word as if it were real, and that nullifies the purpose because now the word belongs in other dictionaries.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think there have been any cases of people changing reality to match faulty maps.
PPS - Mostly because that's the hard way.

Technology advancement disappointment

When I see old technologies going away, I tend to assume that it's because newer, better things are coming, but that's not always the case. Sometimes old tech dies and there is nothing new to take its place. Instead of more ubiquity, more compatibility, better support and more reliability, the old things often break up and just become a bigger mess of proprietary, incompatible, unsupported, unfinished, inoperable new rubbish. There may be no golden age on the horizon.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Especially if companies don't work towards standardisation.
PPS - Or work towards whatever pleases them.

Paid opinions

If you're being paid for your opinion, it's not just an opinion. You can't shrug off the blame when someone follows your paid opinion by saying it was just your personal assessment of the situation. I know there are probably lawyers whose job is to write disclaimers for exactly this kind of situation, but the fact remains that a paid opinion carries more responsibility than an unpaid, unsolicited one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The credit rating agencies tried to call their published reports "just opinions" after the GFC.
PPS - But they knew nobody treated them as simple opinions.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Think Tank

I couldn't believe my eyes. The Think Tank had made a mistake. An actual mistake. And not a little one either. The defendant was going to go free for this. Of all the people on the entire police force, none were more trusted nor more trustworthy than the Think Tank, a group of twelve autistic savants with a keen eye for detail, eidetic memories and an obsession with crime. They read old case files, discuss them with each other and just basically remember the hell out of them. The defence lawyer was theatrically brandishing his evidence, enjoying his moment: a crime novel, found in the think tank rooms and containing all the major points from this so called case. Fiction was strictly forbidden in the Think Tank, since they didn't care whether they remembered real cases or pulp fiction novels. So that explained it.

The final blow came when the lawyer turned out the inside cover and read the book's owner's name, written on an old, yellowed sticky label. My name. My blood ran cold in my veins and I started sweating. It couldn't be mine. It's impossible. I don't even read crime novels. Why would I? Police work is hard enough without spending leisure hours reading about imaginary crimes.

When the trial concluded, I had no badge, no gun and no idea what was going on, but I did have two things. Two certainties in this world. One, the Think Tank had been manipulated, and I'd been made to take the fall. Two, I was going to find out who did it, badge or no badge. I hunched over to duck past the reporters on the courthouse steps and hurried home through the smoky streets, thinking over the points in a new case - a bigger case than I could have imagined even this morning.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This feels like part of a bigger story to me.
PPS - Maybe it will be, someday.

3D printing and design

We can easily keep improving on the technology behind 3D printing, with faster techniques, cheaper materials and so on, and websites like Thingiverse will be critical to spread printable designs so that anyone can make at home whatever they want. However, after 3D printers become affordable household appliances and the materials are cheap enough to use on a whim, the biggest barrier will be designing the thing you need to print. So if you really want everyone to get into creating 3D objects, you need great 3D modelling software, available for free and very easy to use.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or a vast library of snap-together generic printable parts.
PPS - Like LEGO.

If you could not fail

There's an inspirational/motivational quote attributed to Robert Schuller that goes like this: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" It's meant to focus you on the dreams you are too afraid to pursue, rather than attempting the literally impossible. But between the impossible and the scary is the very unlikely. If I knew I could not fail, I would make a career of acting. I know I have friends and relatives who would encourage me, but realistically I would put in maybe fifteen years of amateur performances paying my dues, by which time I would be nearly fifty. I might be lucky enough to score a couple of gigs as a background extra before I am too old to work, so over my total acting career, my income would be less than six months at my current salary. I have a family to support, and I can't do that as a struggling actor. But if I knew I could not fail, I would do it. My point is that there's a difference between fear of failure and realistic assessment of probability.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Acting is a very competitive field, and being talented is not enough.
PPS - You have to be well-connected too.

Ideas and advertising

The best idea in the world, if people can't hear about it, won't go anywhere, but on the flip side, if there is no idea, there's nothing to advertise. Both aspects need to be in play simultaneously.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, the best products will spread by word of mouth.
PPS - And some advertising only has a product to sell by default.

Diablo 3 dual auction houses

Diablo 3 will be using two auction houses, one for in-game gold and one for real cash. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. On the one hand, it's a way to cut Blizzard in on the action of (currently) illicit cash trading that goes on anyway, so I suppose that's a smart business move. On the other hand, it legitimises the gold farmer sweatshops. I predict a lot of ordinary players will attempt to buy things with in-game gold, but sell things for real cash, which might unbalance the system a bit, but eventually people will probably settle mostly on one or the other.

I suppose one of the good things about the cash market will be the way it levels the playing fields for gold farmers. At the moment, you have to know where to go to buy gold (or other goods), you have to pay that third party, then meet up in game to make the exchange. If you're a small gold farming business trying to break into that market, you have to spend a lot of time and effort to get noticed and gain trust. If it's part of the in-game market, all you have to do is compete on price, so you could be one guy in his basement on weekends or a warehouse full of orphans operating 24-7 and you both get the same chance to sell your wares legitimately for real cash. Who knows what kind of effect that will have on that business model?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might collapse that economy overnight.
PPS - Or it might stabilise it fairly permanently.

Google's new look and why it's bad

Google have been rolling out a new look to a lot of their online services, including Calendar and GMail in particular. To me, something looks a little off about them. I think it has something to do with faded lines and soft text. It's much harder to read, and the individual elements don't stand out as much as they should. This design just feels bad to me, but Google must have done some user testing on it, so I don't know. Must be me. For instance, look at the new Google Calendar layout. It's all faded, soft text. On the previous layout, calendar events used to be displayed with a normal text weight. Now it seems they're half-weight, and it's much harder to read. It almost looks like they're deliberately faded out in order to bring your attention to something else, but that's all there is. The eye just wants to slide off and ignore them in favour of whatever else is supposed to be much more important, but the faded text is all there is. Even the current day highlight is very subtle, so the eye isn't drawn there either. So the whole effect is a page that you subconsciously don't want to look at and don't think is important because there's nothing to draw focus. Mokalus of Borg PS - Maybe it's my monitors. All of them. PPS - Though that seems unlikely.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Minotaur's Library

The librarian gathered her wits about her, thumbed the stack of index cards in her pocket and nervously touched the ball of twine at her belt. She had seldom descended beyond the third circle of the Library before, but she was the only one on duty and this was urgent. The stacks changed down here. The books were wild and old, and the atmosphere heavy, but this was only the third circle. The book she needed was deep down in the fifth circle, so said the cards. Down there with the minotaur.

She played out more twine, navigating around a space-bending circular shelf of grimoires, under the stone arch and down stairs to the left, into the fourth circle. Down here, she knew, were elder-scrolls and magical books that only existed when you looked at them out of the corner of your eye, plus other dangerous wonders. There appeared to be a dark cloud overhead, flashing occasionally with purple lightning, but again only at the edge of her vision. The special wire-rimmed glasses helped keep everything in order right ahead of her. Without them, the books would be conjuring up nightmare images to frighten her away. These books do not like to be read. And still she had to go deeper, following vague clues in the cards and what few signs the Master Librarians of years gone past had managed to leave behind.

It was the third Master Librarian, Mugu, who had discovered the five-dimensional Dewey Decimal System underlying the library's structure. Few other librarians had risen to his level of mastery, possibly because his notes had to be kept here in the fourth circle, where the numbers on the stacks danced and played, never quite looking like numbers unless you knew how to look at them (and could do higher-dimensional library-calculus in your head).

She almost missed the door to the fifth circle in a tiny crack between the stones of the inner wall, halfway around, and had to use an index card incantation to fold herself between them and into the fifth circle. The gravity change was abrupt and unsettling. She was walking on the inner surface of the wall and had a stone floor (or ceiling?) to her right. On the left was a field of stars, offering the only light, and that very dim. The bellow of the blind minotaur roused her from her fascination. She checked her index cards again, performed some calculations, turned three times in a circle and deftly plucked her book from the half-invisible shelf mid-pirouette. She folded herself back through the impossibly narrow staircase just as the minotaur zeroed in on her scent and gave another mighty roar.

The trip back to the binding desk was relatively easy, though it did feel like squeezing her brain into a jar to return from those extra dimensions. She arrived famished, but first needed to clamp the book to the desk, lest it escape. It was vibrating slightly, clearly nervous to be out of its (super)natural domain, so she incanted some soothing mnemonics and it quieted down. Handling books and minotaurs, after all, was her trade. Readers, however, were something truly terrifying.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I quite like Terry Pratchett's writing about the Discworld's Unseen University library.
PPS - And most of his other stuff, too.

Expensive old replacement parts

I had a coworker with a broken washing machine where the repair man told him the necessary replacement part to fix the machine would cost $400. At that, he decided to buy a whole new machine, but wait a second. What is there in a washing machine that could possibly cost $400 to replace when a new machine costs only a little more than that?

I got the impression that the cost was due to the part being out of date, but so what? Either it's plastic, rubber, steel or electronics. The first three can be moulded, milled or printed from computer model files without much trouble, so we must be talking about electronics. Surely reproducing an old chip or two from plans wouldn't cost $400 for just one run, or if it does, it shouldn't. Someone with the right tools and the right info could produce those replacement parts cheaper.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess the hard part there is the right info.
PPS - Circuit diagrams are probably not very available.

Singularity and perception

The Singularity may be as much to do with our expectations and impressions of technological advancement as it is about actual advancement. After a few years of owning something new and exciting yourself, you can't imagine your world without it, so it's hard to imagine that anyone else is doing without it. Who among you with an iPhone honestly believes that pretty much every phone out there is an iPhone or at least a big-screen touch phone with many gigabytes of storage? It ain't true. The pace at which you think technology is advancing is closely related to your own contact with it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The Singularity is kind of when technology outpaces itself.
PPS - Personally I'm not so sure it's going to happen.

Integration vs modularity

I saw inside a taxi recently that the driver had about four different gadgets arrayed on the dashboard to do his job. There was navigation, the dispatch system, credit card reader and the fare meter. It seems like those could all be integrated into one big taxi management device, and there might be some advantages to doing that, but there would probably also be some disadvantages too. For instance, if the credit card reader hardware is found to be insecure and needs to be upgraded, an integrated system wouldn't allow that. You'd have to replace the whole thing.

So if your components are liable to be upgraded individually, modular design is best. But sometimes the benefits of integrated systems will outweigh that advantage, especially if it's small. The overall cost of an integrated system should be lower, it takes up less space and can be designed with one smooth interface.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think the navigation, dispatch and fare meter systems could be done in one app on a dashboard-mounted iPad.
PPS - Then I have another idea for payments I might talk about later.

Technology and people

Technology is inseparable from social forces and pressures. You can't talk about the internet apart from the people who use it. Bittorrent is not the threat, but the people who use it and the reasons they do so. Those people and their reasons are not going away IF the only thing that changes is more people being sued. The only thing that might go away is Bittorrent. If all file sharing services were forever shut down tomorrow (and they really can't be) then file sharing would only get more difficult, not impossible. If you want to stop file sharing, you need to figure out who those people are and why they do what they do, then give them a better option.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Like high-quality downloads at low prices.
PPS - And remember quick availability, too.

Ad-supported phones

Some time ago there were jokes about free phone plans where your calls would be interrupted by spoken ads. It turns out the ad-supported revenue model did come to phones after all, but in the form of free apps with banner ads. That's the one thing I don't like about Android, but I can understand it. Apps are free. That's pretty much what we do these days. But someone has to get paid, and that means either a limited app demo plus a paid full version or ads (plus possibly paid ad-free version). I think this model is here to stay, at least for a while.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's not exactly like the old jokes.
PPS - But the point is that ads are supporting our phones, to an extent.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Ocean's Call

The people walked down to the ocean shore and stared. They were mesmerised by the water, though none could fully say why. They had come from all over the world to the shores of their respective continents, drawn by some unheard calling. That was all they knew. Somehow the ocean was calling them forward, calling them to itself, and they were powerless to resist. They all stood there, feet wet in the lapping water, gazing with blank faces out to the horizon. Who knew what they saw there? Perhaps the movement of tides and currents, perhaps the very biosphere of all marine life, or maybe it was just the hypnotic rolling, rolling of the endless waves. Whatever the cause, they stood transfixed for a day and a night, then began to drop what they had carried there. Artifacts of humanity - toasters, lawn chairs, books, hair dryers, all the daily accessories of being human, and then suddenly they were free of the mesmerising gaze. Glancing at each other with slight embarrassment, they all turned and went home, allowing the waves to take their prizes out into the deep.

And somewhere out there, under the water, the Watcher gathered the pieces of discarded humanity to study them. In one day he accumulated a vast museum of humankind, to be preserved and to return with him to the stars, in case this world should ever be lost like so many others.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Obviously inspired by staying on the beach this week.
PPS - Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Multi-threaded programming and Mercury

Multi-threaded programming is hard. Really hard, like "shoot this camel out of a canon through the eye of that orbiting needle". Getting it right is nearly impossible and getting it wrong is often independent of your skill. Besides wrapping your head around the concepts, you will spend many hours wracking your brain trying to figure out what's going wrong, how and where there might be conflicts, mistimed events or other problems. That's why I was so interested to hear about Mercury, a declarative programming language with all-explicit state, one of whose side-effects is the ability for the compiler to figure out the best way to do multi-threading. That's exactly what multi-thread programming needs. The added complexity probably does mean that a whole new language and programming model is what we need to solve the problem. Yes, it's a big change. Yes, it means rewriting your programs if you want to take advantage of it, but aren't you spending that time doing so anyway? Mokalus of Borg PS - There are lots of interesting alternative languages out there. PPS - And this one's not even that new.

Reference ebooks

The Kindle was made for narrative books, to be read end-to-end, one page at a time. Reference books like textbooks were not designed to be used that way, so they don't really fit the Kindle model. For that, we need something different. We need a reference ebook format, or at least some software that more easily allows flipping quickly to a page, cross-referencing, highlighting and notes, and multiple open pages (so you can simultaneously open end-of-chapter questions and the pages to which they refer).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That quick page-flipping is a tricky one.
PPS - You don't always know the page number, and going one page at a time is a pain.

Automatic text summary

We could use software that can automatically summarise text accurately, given our short attention spans, and it seems quite a few researchers are working on the problem. Of course, the usual method has limits, because proper summaries need to understand the source material, and usually these programs remove some extraneous words. Push too far and too much text is removed, making the result incoherent. Since this is a natural language task, it must involve natural language processing, which is still very difficult, and will probably remain so for a very long time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Microsoft Word used to have a feature like this.
PPS - It seems to have lost it in recent versions.

Making your point

Making your point background-first is waffling. You need to make your point first, then build on it. If you can't lead with your point, then you need to find another way to express it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm at a conference this week.
PPS - I expect to identify good and bad speakers by this criterion.

Performance talents

Not everyone has performance talents. Some people's talents are in administration, conversation, catering or software user interface design. There are any number of other arenas in which people are skilled, but we often act as if everyone can get up and sing or dance or play an instrument in a talent show. It's just not true.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And, honestly, that's okay.
PPS - Because, really, what would all those performers be without an audience?

Friday Flash Fiction - The Nation of Luna

It cost the corporation billions to officially move their headquarters to the moon. At first they tried to do so figuratively, simply declaring their headquarters to be located on Earth's orbiting satellite, then the UN laws changed, so they physically moved a computer server there to maintain "active business assets" at their headquarters. Then the UN decided the only way to stop this nonsense was to require "regular human presence", by which time the corporation had already begun work on their 200-person spaceship. Before the UN could object, an active, permanent office had been established on the moon as corporate headquarters, and it was still costing less than the taxes it helped them to dodge. That's not to mention all the cash they saved by being able to ignore things like import laws and being paid to host other companies' web servers outside UN jurisdiction.

When Earthside governments heard about the nuclear missiles and petawatt lasers powered by hyperspatial fusion generators trained on capital cities worldwide, the Nation of Luna had already fortified to become impregnable. All operations were now moon-based and self-sustaining. There was nothing we could do but watch.

Nobody knows exactly where on Earth that first shot came from. The missile flew a crazy trajectory low under radar before turning skyward from the Pacific Ocean and headed right for the Nation of Luna's central dome fortress. Many suspected one of the the middling dictatorships, bent on similar domination. Luna destroyed it halfway between Earth and the moon with their deadly lasers, then retaliated by turning five megacities to nuclear glass. They could have used the lasers for that too, but the CEO's paranoid video rant made their reasons clear: the nuclear sites would serve as a warning not just to this generation, but for generations to come. Nobody can stand against the might of Luna.

So now we live under the oppressive dictatorship of a light in the night sky. Most of the time, it's not too bad. They use their near-infinite power generation to feed, clothe and shelter us, but for a price. Few people can afford a lifetime of the bills and become employees themselves, just for the discounts. Before too long, we'll all be employed by Luna, and probably at that point we will take to the stars, just to see if there are any more "customers" out there to conquer.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A lot of my stories seem to turn out bleak.
PPS - Hopefully that's not permanent.

Old tech doesn't really die

Only a few old technologies really die. The rest find a tiny niche where they can live forever. Niches like compatibility, nostalgia, quality or aesthetics, off the top of my head. That is, you might keep an old computer around because it's the only thing that runs a certain program correctly, or you might like to be reminded of the past time it represents. It may be of higher quality than new things, like built-to-last kitchen appliances, or it might appeal to you on a purely artistic level, made with a style and flair that's a bit different and quirky compared to what's available today.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can still buy typewriters online.
PPS - And a lot of other obsolete machines.

The point of ebooks

The beauty of ebooks is not their durability, their price or their flexibility, though those are all contributing factors. The main appeal of ebooks to me is their availability. Without any extra bulk, I can carry hundreds of books with me all the time, and all I need is my phone, which I already carry everywhere. And if I find myself with a few minutes to spare, such as waiting for a train, I can pull out my book and read. They're not better than paper books, and in certain ways they're definitely worse. But that just means they're fundamentally different - a revolution, not a mere evolution.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't actually have hundreds of ebooks to carry.
PPS - Yet.

Ideals

We need to know the ideals for which we are reaching, regardless of whether we ever actually get there. Ideals keep us focused in the right direction and provide a reference point to evaluate new things. Are we getting closer to our ideal or further from it? If you're getting further from your ideal, then you're on the wrong path.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Without ideals, it's too easy to go off track.
PPS - Plus a lot more things look ambiguous that way.

Time saved is more time for work

With labour saving devices we use the time saved to do more work, not for leisure. It makes work cheaper, not obsolete, and we still need knowledge workers. After all, they're the ones designing the labour-saving devices and their tasks, aren't they? In days gone by, they worried about what people would do with themselves once machines had made manual labour practically obsolete. They simply failed to understand how much work we can find for ourselves as a species.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They also failed to account for greed.
PPS - If you can get the job done twice as fast, you can make twice as much money.

The extra dimension

Adding one extra dimension to a situation often adds a lot more complexity than you would think. For instance, chess is a well-known game in two dimensions between two players, but try to add a third player or a third dimension to the board and everything gets way more complicated. There are so many ways to do this that no one option has ever emerged as standard. Or good old Spirograph. Try even imagining shape drawing like that in three dimensions and it quickly becomes clear that it's nothing like on paper, assuming you can even figure out how it should behave. The point is that simplified problems can help you get a feel for the more complex variants, but there is always an extra element that means the simplification is inadequate.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Things are often more than the sum of their parts.
PPS - Especially when you're modelling complex systems.

Friday Flash Fiction - Be Careful What You Wish For

I was cleaning out my grandpa's attic one time and found an old oil lamp. Naturally, I tried polishing it up, because are you going to not try to summon the genie on the off chance that you'll only end up with a shiny lamp? I was naturally shocked to be confronted by an actual genie in the end, though he was less helpful than I expected. Also, he looked kind of like Billy Idol for some reason.

At first I tried that trick from Aladdin. "What? You're not a genie. How could you be? I bet you can't even make a huge pile of gold right here."

I shouldn't have been surprised at the result. "Hey, who's giving out the wishes here, pal? You think you can trick me into giving you stuff for free? If I want to quit, I'm gone, and to hell with three wishes."

"Okay, okay, I wish I had a huge pile of gold."

Out of thin air appeared three gold bars. They hung there for a second - long enough for me to read "US Mint" and serial numbers on the side, then they crashed through the floor.

"Couldn't you have stacked them neatly?" I asked, with a little timidity.

"You get what I give you. There's not a thing you can do about it. Now out with it. Two more and let me get my sleep."

I thought for a second. Beyond money, I hadn't really thought about this. Then something came to me. "Oh, I know! I wish I could understand every language in the world!"

The genie raised his eyebrows, then whump! there appeared an enormous bookshelf stacked with black and yellow books. I picked one up.

"Italian for Dummies?"

"Better get started. One left, and make it good."

I heard some faint sirens in the distance, getting a little louder.

"What's that sound?"

"I expect it's the police. I had to leave an IOU for the gold bars, and moving them here might have set off the bank alarm."

"WHAT?!"

"Well, come on! You've got one left, and if you don't use it quick, I might get bored and leave."

"Uh ... okay ... I wish ... I wish ... I wish the police could never catch me!"

It was a mistake. I knew as soon as I said it. With a twinkle in his eyes the genie vanished and I was left exactly where I was, but the book fell through my hands. That mischevious djinn had made me immaterial so, sure enough, when the police arrived, they absolutely couldn't catch me. They couldn't cuff me either, or take me away in the squad car. I was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost, and they really had no choice but to either ask me nicely or leave me be. In the end, they took the gold and said they'd be back.

That was two days ago, and in the meantime, I've grown very, very hungry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wanted something besides sci-fi this week.
PPS - Hope you like it.

Culture

Culture is made of shared experiences. Television, movies and music make many of those experiences repeatable, so that people can be part of a culture without having to be at the same events at the same time. When you think about it, that's kind of weird. The basis on which I relate to you is, to a large extent, the movies, music and television we have both seen, whether or not that was together. And when we find something that one of us has seen but the other has not, you can go away and fix that, rather than being left out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is only as we get to know each other, though.
PPS - After that, presumably we do have some significant shared experiences of our own.

A different method for stage actor audio

Face tracking software plus directional microphones means you don't need actors to wear any extra gear. There are methods of using a microphone array so that individual voices can be picked out of a crowd, even in a stadium full of people. There's also face-recognition software that can find faces in images in real-time. Put them together and point them at a stage full of actors and what do you have? A system that allows actors to work on stage without lapel or head microphones, requires no batteries or transmitters, and gives crystal-clear sound reception regardless of house speakers, audience noise or other actors.

It also makes it possible for the sound desk to use an idiot-proof visual interface, showing actors' faces and their volume levels either on a grid or in real spatial orientation. Someone should make that. Every time I've worked on stage with microphones, there have been some kinds of problems, either with hiding the transmitters under costumes, batteries going flat or cords interfering with physical motions. This kind of system would eliminate all of that in one go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, other things could (and would) go wrong.
PPS - Starting with any time the actors turn away from the cameras.

Arguing about more than facts

We can't argue a lot about facts any more because of the internet being almost everywhere. That should mean we can start arguing about interpretations of facts. Also, since raw facts are so readily available these days (alongside blatant misinterpretations, false etymologies, outright lies and invisible sarcasm) there is little value in the skill of digging them up. Anyone can do that. What matters more is collating, summarising, interpreting and commenting on facts.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And, of course, telling fact from fiction.
PPS - We could always do with more of that.

Managing a family computer network

Professional IT support people have tools they can use to mass-manage whole networks of machines, set policies, install updates and so on. Some of us act in that role for our extended families, and would appreciate tools to help manage their computers too, ensuring they have the right firewall settings and things like that. Would such a thing be possible? Would it be popular, or is it too niche-focused to gain traction? I suppose the trouble is that family groups are different to businesses. They're not co-located, they don't have servers or internal domains from which to manage settings and there is every likelihood they aren't even online at the same time. The tools to manage such a mismatched wild stable of machines would be quite different under the hood than centralised business tools, but I think it can be done.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure there's something like this out there.
PPS - At least something to make certain tasks easier.

Housing grants and prices

Housing grants don't make houses more affordable. If you announce to the world that everyone buying (or building) a house is going to get an extra $10000, the prices will go up in proportion, meaning those people will out of pocket the same amount as before. The extra cash will go straight to the seller, on top of the original price. It makes more sense, then, to limit payouts by the type of buyer, because not everyone will be a first home owner, or below a certain income threshold. Limiting payouts to certain types of homes, such as new houses, on the other hand, will raise prices for that type of property across the board.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It may seem to help on the surface.
PPS - On the whole, though, the money never goes where it's meant to.

Friday Flash Fiction - Ahab

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago I joined a planet-hunter ship's crew, and this one was captained by a wild-eyed and hearty old man they called Ahab. The ship, under his command, like so many other planet hunters in the galaxy, would sail from star to star, spearing worlds and harvesting their magma. There aboard the ship it was processed for desirable heavy minerals, especially radioactive ones. Thus we made our living, but to Ahab it was more.

Today we have changed course, based on a star sighting, a faint radio signal, and Ahab's hunch. There were murmurs among the crew, that we were searching for some particular planet, home to a particular race. I hadn't heard of this before, so I asked in the mess hall that evening.

"Ahab was held as a slave in his youth," said Stubb, "by some white-haired alien creatures. That's when he lost his leg, and they replaced it with a rudely-fashioned rod of stone so that he could keep working in their mines. Nobody knows how he escaped-"

"Nonsense! There was a civil war."

"No, it was a slaves' revolt."

"Rubbish. He struck down a hundred of those white-haired alients himself, fled across their sun-scorched plains and stowed away on a cargo ship."
"Well," continued Stubb, with a little irritation, "whatever his means, he did escape, and now his passion is inflamed by nothing less than finding and destroying the homeworld of those white-haired slavers."

So this ship was his means to revenge.

It made the crew more than a little nervous, as we travelled the stars, to think that one day we might follow a particular radio signal back to a world Ahab recognised from his nightmares, and there we would be ordered to spear it with the great ship's harpoon. To suck dry an inhabited world is not done in this business, and for more reasons than one. A ship that did such a thing would be destroyed on sight if others learned of such a horrific deed. But Ahab was steadfast in his goal. He would find and destroy that world, and if it ever bothered him that he might die in the attempt, his stern face never showed a wrinkle of that fear.

It may be a long while before we arrive at that radio signal's origin, but I will pray fervently every day, to whatever gods will listen, that no white-haired aliens will be at its end.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I kind of wanted to link this with Planet Scavengers, but it didn't fit.
PPS - I've been reading Moby Dick, and I'm getting near the end now.

Leading and following

Someone has to do the boring work. If we are all following our own dreams, no project bigger than one person is going to get done. So someone needs to be a follower, an assistant, an apprentice. The world can't get by without followers the same way an army can't all be Generals.

Motivational speakers always seem to assume that everyone wants to lead, or that everyone wants to be a CEO. They at least assume that everyone wants to be running their own business. Some people want to let other people do that, and there is nothing wrong with working to further someone else's vision if it's compatible with yours.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm starting to think worldly motivation is the wrong direction.
PPS - Some posts on Seth Godin's blog just seem to rub me the wrong way.

Cheaper TV show prototypes

We need cheaper ways of prototyping TV shows to see what will work. By the time you get a pilot episode up and running, you've already got sets, props, costumes, actors, scripts and everything else. Producing the second episode would cost you almost nothing, so the process is very loaded against new, innovative shows coming out (except for reality TV, which costs nothing but dignity). What if we produced 30-second ads for notional shows and released those online to see what buzz they created? You don't need a whole episode script and you can probably get away with a reused set and props, depending on what kind of show you have.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, you need each show to have a unique feel.
PPS - That might mean lots of CGI backdrops.

City of Heroes Freedom

City of Heroes is going to become City of Heroes Freedom, with a hybrid price model based on free, "premium" and "VIP" accounts. Anyone who has been a player and created more than two characters would need to become a VIP subscriber to retain them, however, and that applies to both Debbie and me. On the plus side, all my friends who have wanted to play can soon do so indefinitely on a casual basis for nothing. In summary, it seems like a good idea if you're on the way in, but for existing players it doesn't feel like there's much "freedom" to be had.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, there's not much change if you keep paying, so I've got nothing to complain about.
PPS - I'll reserve my final judgment for the proper release.

Economics and the greater good

Slow and steady wins the race in economics. More people make more money on average when businesses run by trying to keep customers by treating them well and giving them a good deal. The problem is that one company can make more money in the short term by treating their customers somewhat badly, locking them in and crushing the opposition like bugs. The long-term effects of such lock-in are stifled innovation and loss of goodwill. That means the users won't trust a new competitor and the existing monopoly has no incentive to do anything different.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This should be taken with a grain of salt since I am not an economist.
PPS - Unless taking one subject ten years ago counts for anything.

Cross-compatible web services

I need services spanning websites; protocols that can break the bonds of individual domains. I need a universal wishlist that isn't dependent on Amazon at all, a friends list that doesn't care if it's used on Facebook or not. And I need those services, despite being website-independent, to operate with those websites seamlessly, so that I can (for instance) shop around for good book prices on my wishlist.

Think in terms of email. Before the standard emerged, only users on the same network could email each other. That's like needing several different mobile phones on different networks to allow you to call your friends on the different networks they've chosen. That's exactly the situation we currently have with social networking right now. It's a ridiculous situation that's crying out for a unification of standards. We need people on Facebook to be able to connect directly to their friends on Google+ and MySpace, without anyone needing to switch websites, maintain multiple accounts or sign up to yet another website that aggregates the others. We need Twitter to enable followers from Buzz and Tumblr. We need Live Messenger, Google Talk and Facebook chat to be seamlessly cross-compatible. We do want competing services, but we need them to compete purely on user experience, not critical mass or proprietary features. This will take a long time, especially when it's easier to keep your users by locking them up than by being the best.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The first of any new type of service is unlikely to be open.
PPS - But once it becomes common, it needs a standard.

Friday Flash Fiction - Planet Scavengers

I see a cave made of dust, or maybe ash. I see ancient machines, tall and hollow, now so rotted through that the slightest touch would crumble them. I see the remains of ancient soldiers who stayed in pointless vigil to protect the machines that once protected them, and through it all is dust caked thick on the floor, the walls and everywhere around. This cave is dry and dead, dessicated but not destroyed. A relic of a war-torn age.

I pick my way through the machines, little more than statues now, searching for pieces of value. Everything but the metal has rotted, and most of that has rusted. Here and there, however, I find a few pieces that have escaped decay. A badge, some tags, a long, thin tube with a complicated mechanism at the end. We may be able to melt them down, turn them into something useful. It's only recently that a blacksmith has managed to open up shop in the village, and he needs raw materials like these to work with. We don't have the means to mine it. We have to scavenge.

We are here only because this world is already dead. That's what we do - we are the slum-residents of the galaxy, forced from worn-out world to worn-out world, just able to scrape enough together to escape to another world and start again. Always racing against decay, outrunning the crumbling metaphorical cliff behind us. This world, they tell us, was once called "Erth", which sounds to us like a last, dying breath. Appropriate.

The elders tell us it was war that finished this world. It's usually war. I don't think they even research it any more. And our goal is always the same: survive, build a new ship and move on to the next planet. I keep some pieces for myself, though. I think it's important that somebody, somewhere, remembers the ones who came before us. Some piece of them should survive, the way we survive. They are not our relatives, but they are our ancestors, in a way, and I feel for them, even if they are no longer here.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not so much plot this week.
PPS - Hope you like it.

Microsoft, HTML5 and the end of .NET

Microsoft are kind of trying to kill .NET, starting with the UI frameworks, Silverlight and WPF, and probably moving down from there. In its place, they are trying to go where they imagine the developers are: HTML5 and JavaScript. In one sense, that's smart and gutsy, considering you will tick off and abandon all the developers who were loyal to you, and maybe (big maybe) get a whole new batch to take their place.

If their platform disintegrates to the lowest common denominator, they won't be attracting developers to theirs at all, just levelling the playing field and competing on ... what? Apple wins at hardware design, which everyone copies, their "metro" design style is much more difficult for users than the other two major smartphone operating systems, and that leaves exclusive content, which just makes everyone feel betrayed or locked in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - .NET has had a good run as a development platform, I guess.
PPS - But in some ways, it's just getting started.

Cash security online

Cash security online and in a new age should be a problem we can solve. Strong encryption is readily available, and our banks are online. We can have our banks communicate with each other over strongly-encrypted channels, passing one-time tokens to each other to represent transaction authorisations. At no point do we have to exchange any information that can be used again or that will enable any other party to access our funds. That basic idea has to be more secure than handing out reusable numbers (credit cards) and trusting everyone, everywhere, all at once not only to use that number responsibly but to keep it safe from everyone else. That's absurd, and it's been going wrong for a long time.

But how wrong, exactly, has it been going? How much is credit card fraud costing the banks and us as their consumers? I suspect it is still cheaper to chase down fraud after the fact. That is, it's more worthwhile for the banks to fight the fires as they come up rather than working to fix the whole system.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And systems like Visa Paywave (with no authorisation) confirm that suspicion.
PPS - The banks don't try to stop your credit card being stolen, but they'll fix it if necessary.

Mock-up trailers for potential movies

I think movie pitches should be made via mock-up trailers. Start releasing trailers for unmade movies online and just see what generates the most buzz. It's not a guarantee, of course, but it's a cheap way of testing the waters without having to get the whole production together, and it involves the movie-going public rather than just a few producers. It would also help to democratise movie making, even though you still need those producers and their money.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - By the time you get the real movie together, though, the world may have moved on.
PPS - But that's always a risk.

Paying for access rather than ownership

I find myself mentally blocked when asked to pay a one-off fee for digital goods like music, ebooks and movie downloads, especially when they come wrapped up in DRM. I fear that they might disappear at any moment and I might be forced to buy them again at some later date, which is something I definitely do not want to do. At the same time, I find I am attracted to the idea of a flat fee all-you-like subscription service for the exact same goods.

While I won't pay iTunes several dollars for every locked-up, tightly-guarded movie I want to watch, I might be convinced to pay $15 per month for unlimited access to all music, movies and TV in the store, even if I don't get to keep any of it afterwards. I wouldn't feel so much like I've been ripped off if I didn't pay specifically for any one item and then later had to cancel my subscription. I would feel the same way about books. Rather than paying Amazon $10 per ebook, I'd pay $10 per month for unlimited access to the library, even if it goes away when I stop paying. As long as those titles are still around, and I can still re-subscribe later (perhaps to another provider) I'd be happy.

My point is that an unlimited flat fee subscription model is a different - and sometimes more appealing - value proposition than pay-per-download for copy-controlled content. If you're going to wrap your content in DRM, it makes more sense to ask people to pay an entry fee, not "buy" things that, technically, they won't own.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My prices are probably much lower than those companies would like.
PPS - But that will always be the case.

Unintended side-effects of brain downloads

The hypothetical science fiction technology to download knowledge directly into the brain gives you knowledge without discipline. That could be a problem. If knowledge is power and discipline is responsibility, then it creates people with great power and no responsibility, otherwise known as supervillains. So even if you shortcut the fancy book learnin', you need minds trained in general mental discipline, ethics and critical thinking first. You might be able to put some of that into the download, but for other things there's no substitute but actual, real-time training.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In general, the time taken to learn something makes its own discipline.
PPS - Which becomes more of a problem when that time approaches zero.