Friday Flash Fiction - The Road Ahead

The motorcycle purred to a stop outside the rickety-looking diner and motel, wheels crunching on the car park gravel. Something about the road beyond made Hank, the rider, stop, unwilling to go on, at least for a while. He couldn't put his finger on it, though. It even looked like a good road - smooth and well-maintained, varied scenery and enough dips, hills and turns to be interesting. But somehow it felt like a one-way trip.

He headed into the old diner instead, carrying his helmet with him. The waitress looked him over, then said with a smile, "You're taking the road, aren't you?"

"I don't think I've decided yet," replied Hank.

"You will," returned the waitress, and presented him with a plate of steak and a cup of coffee. Hank didn't even wonder about how he hadn't ordered. He just tucked in, hungry from his journey.

"How long you been travelling?" asked the waitress.

Hank opened his mouth to speak, then drew a complete blank. How long had it been? He couldn't remember when he started, couldn't remember how far he'd travelled. It's not just that it was a long way, a long time, but that there was literally no beginning to the journey in his mind.

"Take your time, hon, it'll come to you," she said, topping up his coffee.

Pushing back from the old dining counter, Hank considered a while. Was it days? Weeks? Months or years? Maybe he'd been on the road for a century or more. Who could say?

Then suddenly an image flashed in his mind. A whole life he had nearly forgotten. His wife, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, endless hours of riding familiar roads and days filled with watching sports on that old recliner.

And with that, he knew now where he was, and why the road ahead felt like a one-way trip. He'd crossed a border between lives, and that was the one he had lived, but now had to leave behind. They would remember him, and he them, but he couldn't go back. He was headed on, along that clear road, toward the white mountain on the horizon.

The waitress smiled and nodded at the door, and Hank knew it was time for him to go. He turned and left with a "thankyou", swung his leg over his bike and took off down the road. The waitress, still smiling, picked up the helmet he had left on the stool behind him, and placed it reverently on a shelf next to other remembrances of other travellers who had passed through. Hank wouldn't need it again. Not on that road to the mountain.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I lost my uncle this week.
PPS - This story is dedicated to him.

Ebook format war

With Google, Apple, Amazon and others all selling ebooks, you need different software for each one. This is because each seller has their own DRM to lock you in, and you either need a different device for each store or a general-purpose device with apps for each store. And you'll notice that each vendor does provide free apps for desktops and phone operating systems, too. That tells you the devices and software are not the major revenue stream; it's the books themselves. So each camp wants to get you hooked on their format and locked in so you only buy books from them, and book sales is where Amazon rules the roost.

Cross-compatibility would help any one camp win the format war. It is in Amazon's best interests to break or even support ePub DRM, making the Kindle compatible with Google Books and the Apple iBookstore, but the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means they're not even allowed to try. However, if someone were to publicly demonstrate that the ePub format is cracked, publishers might be less willing to support ebook sellers other than Amazon.

Now, for publishers, before any one format emerges as the winner, it is worth their while to support them all, and that's pretty easy, so they'll keep doing so. That means there's no differentiation between the ebook stores. Since there's no incentive for publishers to support one store over another, you can bet each store will be negotiating for exclusivity deals with publishers. That's when the wheels start to fall off for consumers. If some books are only available from certain locked-up ebook stores, but you want them all, you'll end up having to work with both, in much the same way as dedicated gamers own an XBox, a PlayStation and a Wii.

I really hope we can sort out this format war sooner rather than later, and I hope in the meantime I don't spend too much money on the losers. I don't want to get locked to a format that will die in a year or two, with a ton of ebooks I can no longer read. In the end, I support Amazon, because even if they fail, they can just switch to the winning open format, ePub. Any books I bought before their victory should be converted and still available afterwards on the same platform.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I really don't like that situation.
PPS - But what can you do besides not buying any ebooks?

Self-education

Self-paced education should never stop, throughout your entire life. What we need are skills for which people will pay, and that means education, but the baseline for the meaning of "skilled" is always rising. So in your spare time, you can teach yourself things through practice, or through websites like Khan Academy. For your personal gain and your personal skill set, it's pretty important to stay on the ball.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I feel like I don't get enough practice in a lot of things.
PPS - I could, though, and I should.

Thunderbird folder compacting bug

I've been having a bit of a bug with Thunderbird at work, and since nobody else seems to have even posted about it, I might as well mention it here. I keep my email archives in Dropbox, and this has saved my life twice now, but Dropbox is also part of the problem. Two times over the past weeks I have received errors from Thunderbird either claiming that my archive folders are "full" or else they have just disappeared entirely. Upon examination, those files have been deleted - an entire year's worth of email vanished silently. Fortunately for me, Dropbox has an undelete feature, so I was able to recover the files without much trouble, once I noticed they were missing.

My best guess at the cause involves a kind of conflict of timing between Dropbox and Thunderbird and the folder compacting process. At various times, Thunderbird decides that a folder needs to be compacted, which probably means resuming empty space left behind by deleted messages. It is possible that during these times when the folders are being automatically compacted, the file is deleted on disk. When this fact is noticed by Dropbox, it dutifully syncs the file deletion action to their servers and that becomes the official state of the folder. When Thunderbird goes to check again, the file is gone and there are problems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My solution was to make Thunderbird ask before compacting, and pause Dropbox while it does so.
PPS - It's not great, but it works.

Dropbox on my phone

I think the reason, or one of the reasons, I like Dropbox so much is that it makes my various computers and my phone feel more like one platform focused on me, rather than several different machines with different files and different software, disconnected across various sites and separated by firewalls. One thing I particularly like to do with Dropbox is manage my podcast playlist. I download podcasts on my desktop - any one - into Dropbox, then use the Dropbox app on my phone to copy them there. When I delete them from Dropbox on my phone, they're gone from my desktops as well. Very handy. I use it in a similar way to manage my free ebooks that I read on my phone too. Killing time is the killer app on my phone, but using Dropbox makes the process much easier, and even fun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know how I'd do without Dropbox now.
PPS - Possibly with some arrangement of a flash drive and sync software.

Kindle and Amazon wish lists

How come I can't access my Amazon wish list through the Kindle store on my phone or even my Kindle, for that matter? It only shows recommendations, but I already have some recommendations for myself. Apparently those aren't good enough. Also, if I don't mind whether I get a book from my list as a Kindle ebook or a print version, why can't I specify that on my wish list? As it is, I have to add the print and ebook editions to the list, then remove one version if I get the other one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The second feature is not affecting my life much.
PPS - But it might be handy.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Magic Book

On a little-used street away from the centre of town, in between a Chinese massage parlour and an all-night pancake restaurant, there is a solid wooden door with flaking green paint and a shiny brass letter slot. Behind the door, some people know, is a bookstore with shelves stacked from floor to ceiling haphazardly, sometimes two or three rows deep, in apparently random order. Customers range from school librarians to aging bibliophiles to young hipsters looking for something to show off at the cafe. They navigate around the piles of books on the floor and browse the shelves over two floors, passing each other up and down the rickety old staircase that is also jammed with books under the steps and, occasionally, a reader engrossed in a story she couldn't wait to get home.

Many of them, for whatever reason, do not know that there are further mysteries inside the shop, such as the one shelf off in the back, hidden behind piles of dusty encyclopedias - the magic bookshelf. It doesn't hold books about magic. That would be too obvious. What it holds is books that contain magic, like a gardening guide that will make your vegetables grow, or a photography book that will make you capture a golden moment on film by chance.

Even though the bookshelf was magic, it didn't look like it, so Emily didn't realise she'd picked up a book that would change her life. The shopkeeper behind the counter gave it a quizzical look, like he couldn't remember stocking that title, and Emily stood with a sheepish, slightly embarrassed grin. The shopkeeper found the hand-written price in the back cover, took Emily's money and put her book in a paper bag.

Outside, Emily pulled out the book and opened to the first page, walking as she read, and immediately bumped into a tall, dark, handsome stranger.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I had a magic book similar to that once.
PPS - Sort of.

Kinds of fun

There are some people who play games because they're fun. There are other people who play games because winning against real people is very satisfying. Then there are those people who define "winning" in this context as "inciting red-hot rage". I work with one of those people, and I do not play games anywhere near him.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's called "griefing".
PPS - I don't understand it, though.

Kindle and DRM

I have a kind of hard line about buying anything locked up with DRM. I don't buy it, because it only encourages them to tighten their hold, and I don't like paying that much for things I can't keep. I am breaking this rule for books on Kindle. If I am unlikely to read a book a second time, then I don't necessarily need to keep it, and the ebook versions are half the price of paper versions. That's a win.

Also, I would accept them as gifts, because it doesn't feel like directly supporting a DRM scheme, even though it really is. Somehow it just seems different if it's not my own money going to Amazon. And there are other advantages as well, such as instant delivery, no matter where you are in the world. They take up no space and are with me everywhere. The disadvantage of ebooks as gifts is that there's nothing to wrap up and physically hand over, which does make it feel less like a real gift.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So owning a Kindle hasn't made me change my mind about DRM.
PPS - I've just changed my rationalisation.

Bad customers

Why do the worst customers get the best service? It's just something I've observed, and I assume some of you would have too. I guess it's because you want your big problems to go away faster. It still doesn't seem right.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I try to be a good customer.
PPS - Even through bad service.

TV show subscriptions and discovery

If all our TV came via downloads (paid subscriptions, of course), you'd only ever see the shows to which you subscribed, and that leaves a gap: discovery. You'd need a service that allows you to browse for new show-feeds based on your interests or search for them by name, but you also need to be able to advertise them easily and recommend them to people based on the feeds to which they subscribe. Of course providers would want to insert ads to promote other shows, but viewers wouldn't want them interrupting their paid shows. We would, however, like suggestions such as at Amazon - "customers who bought this also bought...".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though of course in this case it would be "people who watch this also watch...".
PPS - And "suggestions for you" works best when it's genuine, not just ads.

Streaming music as standard ISP inclusion

Before too long, we may see Internet providers start to include services such as unlimited music streaming in their plans, as a little added incentive. They'd just need to do a deal with one of the growing number of services offering unlimited music. TV and movies might be a bigger draw card, even if a standard contract only includes two movies a month for free. That kind of price war can only end in one place: unlimited streaming for movies, TV and music included as standard in all internet service contracts.

That would put the pay TV operators almost completely out of business. They'd need to change drastically, perhaps becoming one of the preferred providers for ISPs for online offerings, while still selling sports-only packages for enthusiasts and certain businesses.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The full transition would take a while, though.
PPS - iiNet is the most likely Australian ISP to try this first.

Friday Flash Fiction - Guardian of Fire

I hitch a ride into the city on an apple cart, pulling my red and orange robes closer around me. They are warm for my body, but the cold air threatens to turn my ears to frostbite. Not for the first time, I wish I was allowed to wear a hat, or at least to grow my hair for the journey. The icy wind gusts over my bald head again and I shiver while I try to meditate, thinking warm thoughts.

Through the gates of the city, I thank the apple farmer and lean on my walking staff, waiting for the feeling to return to my numb feet. As the youngest avowed member of the monastery, this task is mine, mostly because some of the older monks would not survive a journey like this through the winter forest and back again. At least the city is a little less cold, thanks to the walls blocking the wind.

I breathe deep and feel for the spirit line through the streets, as the old monks have taught me. In my mind, a yellow thread unrolls, rounds a corner and wanders off between the buildings. Perhaps it is coming easily to me because of his nearness, or perhaps I am imagining things again. The only way to know is to follow the invisible thread.

The neat, even cobblestones near the gate gradually change to mismatched and recycled ones as my sandalled feet take me into the poorer sections of the city. Where the streets are dirt tracks between wooden hovels, I stop to look around. The spirit trail has grown faint, but nearby there is an obvious glow coming from a tavern. The new Guardian of Fire is clearly inside, and he will not want to come with me. They never do.

I enter the tavern as quietly as I can, but all eyes turn to me as soon as I step through the door to the relative warmth. The patrons are huddled around the only light in the room, and the warmth coming from it is obvious, even from this distance. I stand, waiting, and nobody seems certain what to do. Several avoid my gaze, but soon they part at some unseen signal in their midst.

There on the floor sits the Guardian of Fire, dressed in cheap, simple clothes. His eyes narrow as he sizes me up, and my feet reflexively take a defensive stance, echoing years of training. The Guardian stands in one fluid motion and flicks his dark black locks out of his eyes.

"You must come with me," I say. "To the temple, where you are needed."

In response, he aims a swift kick at my midriff, parried by my staff, and follows it up with an elbow that knocks me out into the street. My lungs struggle to take in air, and I see the snow begin to fall down into my eyes, which I blink away. Down past my feet I hear the snow hiss as the Guardian takes off on hot bare feet, down the street. When I can stand again, I will follow him. The balance of the world depends on it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's obviously a bigger world behind this one.
PPS - But I'm not sure what its shape is yet.

Novels to finish unfinished TV series

When a TV series is cancelled, but the stories unresolved, the studios could, conceivably, farm out the unfinished production notes to authors to novelise the closure of the story and sell it as an ebook. The costs are almost nil, especially if the author is only paid in royalties, and it gives fans at least something to finish. The upside is that the novel sales, if they are particularly good, could go on to fund a new season of the show, with the sales numbers as a prediction of audience size.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if you have the novel, there's your new season plot.
PPS - See how it can all come together?

Trust by proxy

You know what would be a really effective way to burn down a building? Get on the emergency PA system and say "This is only a test. Please disregard all alarms", then start your fire.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We tend to trust whoever gets on that system.
PPS - And in our building, it seems to happen once every few months.

Common sense is learned

I don't think I believe in "common sense" as it is usually invoked, and before I start, this is not a rant about how "people are stupid these days". This is more about what we mean when we say "common sense" and why we get so surprised when someone doesn't behave the way we expect.

As I understand it, "common sense" refers to a set of learned observations about how the world works, and our ability to apply that knowledge to new situations. This can go wrong in a few ways. First, someone's experiences may differ significantly from yours, making their observations of effects very different from yours, making them interpret events unusually. For instance, imagine that someone has only ever seen other drivers speed up at yellow lights, to beat the red, and has never had any other guidance on the meaning of that colour of traffic signal. What would their "common sense" interpretation be? Well, obviously, yellow means "speed up". It's just common sense: everyone does that. They are wrong in their conclusion, but they are being 100% consistent with the evidence they have observed, and therefore they are being sensible.

When we are surprised by an interpretation like that, what is actually happening? We bring a lot of observations to the table when we try to make sense of an event, and those are different for all of us. Our common sense when we are very young and still learning how a lot of the world works becomes very different as we grow up and form a more complete world view. But since that world view is formed through experience and education, it is different for everyone, making everyone's common sense a little bit unique.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is my excuse for why I'm a little weird.
PPS - Feel free to use it for yourself, too.

Thin operating systems

While I think the idea of a faster operating system for netbooks and tablets is a good thing, I don't know whether the Chromium approach by Google is the right one. It takes as much control away from the endpoint as possible and urges you to keep absolutely everything online. It turns your computer into nothing but a web browser, and while I appreciate that's all most people do with their machines, I worry about that idea. You are, at that point, completely at the mercy of online service providers. If you want to do something that is not provided online, or a service changes in a way that doesn't suit you, then too bad. This kind of device would also be 100% useless in offline situations, like flights, or anywhere network connections are spotty, like my daily train commute.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In short, the sentiment is good, but the execution is too much.
PPS - You would have to limit functionality, but not this much.

Post-industrial unemployment

Unemployment is an industrial word that doesn't make much sense in a post-industrial world. Post-industrial unemployment is more like being unskilled. These days, we do not need jobs, where we go and do the bidding of others. What we need is skills for which people will pay, and a way to find those people. It's messing with the industrialised efficiency of the mass market, but if the mass market has already disappeared in favour of custom solutions for every client, then that efficiency won't apply any more.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think the mass market has disappeared yet.
PPS - And maybe we need some artisan's guilds to help find people with the right skills.

Friday Flash Fiction - Wales

Micro-realities, fed up with our law of gravity, or the colour of the lightning, or the way rabbits go about without waistcoats, sometimes splinter off, declare independence, and live happily without us in their tiny subspaces. And whether they be called Oz, Wonderland, Narnia or what have you, they are all of them real, just "real" in different ways to here.

That's what happened to Wales that day. We should have seen it coming, I suppose. Their language had always been kind of an outsider, and then one day, somehow, all those awkward Welsh place names just decided to be elsewhere. Somewhere they were appreciated.

The rest of the land around there just sort of folded up or spread out to use the available space. Hereford and Shrewsbury became coastal towns. Liverpool got somehow closer to Dublin and further from Manchester. The Severn Road Bridge ended mysteriously at Beachley. The BBC found new actors for Doctor Who (normally filmed in Cardiff) and restarted production in White City, London.

And apart from that, the world continued much as it had before. Some modern-day druids claimed to be able to see Wales from the new coast, sort of thin, edge-on, and only when they held bundles of specially-selected herbs and twisted their heads in certain ways. They set up booths and charged people to teach them how to look, but what is there to see in a paper-thin sliver of Wales?

A year later, most people had forgotten about Wales, except the druids, and a rather vocal minority in New South Wales who argued they should just be called "Wales" now that the original was lost. Some biologist in Germany claimed to have it figured out as some kind of cellular fission.

The druids suddenly started claiming something was happening, but nobody paid much attention except for the tabloids. Then the weather turned strange around the fissure. Rolling clouds seemed to fold in on themselves, the wind blew in from all directions, but not out again. Plants and trees leaned in towards where Wales used to be, and there was an almighty thunderclap, heard around the world... then nothing. As far as anyone could tell, nothing at all had happened.

Only the druids, holding their bundles of herbs, standing on one foot and turning their heads this way and that, claimed that anything was different. Wales, so they claimed, had separated for good - broken its umbilicus and ventured off, completely independent now. A new world of its own making, born from ours like a soap bubble dividing in two. Some tourists still came to have the druids show them the thin sliver of Wales through the crack in reality, but all they found were charlatans and t-shirt salesmen. The real druids, clearly, had better things to do than go looking for Wales when it didn't want to be found anymore.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Inspired by the micronations of the world.
PPS - And also, probably, in counterpoint to A Heretic By Degrees, by Marie Brennan, about where worlds go to die.

Minecraft 0.3 review

I tried to get into Minecraft on my Christmas holiday, mostly because I had heard good things, I saw many impressive fortresses built and thought I might like to give it a go too. Because I wasn't ready to commit just yet, however, I opted to try the old 0.3 version in-browser. It's not quite like the current version, of course, lacking even the resource-gathering aspect, but it was adequate to show me whether I had enough spatial imagination to build things in the game.

I wandered around adding soil cubes to make land bridges for a bit, and I hollowed out a stone cliff into a boring square grey room. I dug down to get to bedrock, fell in some lava and got stuck. It seems that "death" was also not part of the 0.3 version, but neither was jumping out of lava again. So I had to restart, losing everything I'd done, which I admit is not what would have happened had I bought the full game.

Next I laid a foundation for a small castle and built up some short walls and ramparts, with an underground entrance. It looked like rubbish, and making it felt really awkward from a first-person perspective. The last thing I did was build an arbitrary tower as high as I could. I fell off many times, got bored and logged off for good.

This might not be your experience with Minecraft, and it certainly shouldn't be taken even as a review of the full game. All I mean to say here is that, as a demo, version 0.3 is entirely inadequate and did not inspire me to buy the full game, even though I have been thinking about it for over a month now. Maybe it will encourage you to buy the full game, but for me it did the exact opposite.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's still possible I would enjoy the full game.
PPS - But I still have other games to play before I try that.

Tea vs coffee

What makes tea so much more civilised than coffee? They both come from plants, they are both prepared with a mix of hot water, sugar and milk, and they both come from "faraway" lands (India and Ethiopia). They both contain about the same amount of caffeine. The only thing I can think of is the subtlety of the taste of tea vs coffee. Coffee is a strong taste, robust and powerful, while tea is more subtle. And obviously people who prefer subtle things are much more cultured, aren't they?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some people get awfully snobbish about their preference for tea over coffee.
PPS - Personally, I haven't got a taste for tea.

How I spent my holidays

Today is my last day of leave from work. I've had two weeks off, and during those weeks I've been tracking the time I spent on various activities. I did have a plan, to start with, where I had allocated up to 90 minutes a day for exercise, 1 hour for chores, 2 hours for general recreation and so on, but I didn't quite stick to it. In the end, I spent a lot more time on general recreation and a lot less on editing my novel than I had planned. Over two weeks, I spent approximately:

10 hours on household chores
4.5 hours running errands
5 hours on exercise
2.75 hours editing
37.5 hours on general recreation

Recreation consisted of:

13.75 hours reading
12.75 hours playing City of Heroes
9.75 hours watching Mythbusters
1 hour playing Minecraft (I just couldn't get into it)
and a 15-minute TED talk

I was only tracking time while I was on my own, too, so this is not a complete breakdown of my 24/7 holiday lifestyle, but clearly I have a much greater affinity for reading and playing games than keeping my house in order, and I find it very difficult to knuckle down and edit my novel.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wonder if there's a way I can trick myself into focusing on editing.
PPS - But if I need to be tricked, it's probably not going to be done well.

Quickflix WatchNow not yet worth it

Technically, I was part of the free trial of Quickflix's WatchNow streaming service, before it went fully live, but I didn't watch anything during that time. Why? Two reasons. First, during the trial, it was only open to Sony Bravia TVs and DVD players connected to the internet. Since I own neither one of those very specific devices, I was unable to participate. It is possible that access to ordinary computers was opened up later during that free trial, but I didn't notice whether that was the case. It is now, if you're wondering. The second reason is that not one of the movies in my queue was available for streaming. From a glance at the website, the emphasised launch titles were Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Batman (the 1989 Michael Keaton one). I've seen those already, and using them as a trial for a streaming service seemed a waste of bandwidth.

I'm sure the Quickflix team would be dismayed at my shallow engagement with their newest, shiniest service, but the library just wasn't comprehensive enough for me. I'm also sure that's not Quickflix's fault - I'm guessing movie publishers are holding back their catalogues for their own reasons. By my calculations, for the big launch, less than 1% of the Quickflix catalogue was available for streaming, which is pretty disappointing. That means, if you've got a queue with 100 movies waiting to be sent to you, you might find 1 to stream, if you're very lucky.

I'm not saying all this to bad-mouth Quickflix at all. I've been a customer for quite a while now, I enjoy the disc-by-mail service and plan to continue using it for a long time yet. I'm just saying that for me right now, the streaming service is not worth it, because of a limited catalogue and lack of device support.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do want a movie streaming service.
PPS - But if the catalogue is going to be artificially limited, I'm not sold on it yet.

Federated social network software

Social networks need to be interoperable. If it's not an open platform that anybody (meaning a new social network website) can join, then one site will gather all the users as other sites die off, and that site will become impossible to budge from its monopolistic position. To keep any one site from becoming too powerful, we need them all to operate on one free, open source protocol.

To an extent, however, you can fake that if you have good enough desktop software that presents one interface across all social network sites. It would need specialised plugins for each service, and they might be difficult to write if the sites are deliberately uncooperative, but it could be done. After that, the barrier to entry for new sites is much lower, since the desktop software can work with any of them, and you don't need to stay exclusively with one just because your friends are still there.

Yes, it would be complicated behind the scenes, but doing complicated things while presenting an easy user interface is what computers are for.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think this should be provided as a website.
PPS - But that's a different rant.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Floating City

Back when it was built, about 300 years ago, the Shimizu Green Float City was a marvel. Like a lily pad on the ocean, big enough to house and support ten thousand people. These days, the population has exploded, and the machinery is wearing down. We were abandoned by our parent nation and cut adrift when their economic troubles prompted the politicians to stop the trade ships. They could live without our dwindling fish production quite easily, but we had to adapt quickly to an autonomous life. That self-contained autonomy was an illusion, though. We could feed ourselves well enough, but we had nothing with which to repair our physical structures.

Well, today is the big day. We return home. We dismantled what we could of the central spire and built ourselves a vast engine underwater. With power from wind, the Sun, deep ocean water and a little fish oil, we have been powering the great propeller and aiming ourselves at the homeland. It was long, slow and ridiculous, but today the outer edge will make landfall around sunset and our hungriest, most viscious warriors will stream out and take the land for ourselves.

I wait in anticipation, hidden under seaweed scraps along with thousands of fellow soldiers, waiting for the grinding, crunching sounds of landfall. The stink is horrible, and I can't see anything, not even the other soldiers near me, but I can hear them breathing. They sound anxious and excited, like me. They can't wait to storm the beach. No doubt they will see us coming - a floating city is hard to miss - but they will assume we are weak, and that will be their downfall.

Maybe we'll put the politicians out to sea, along with the rich ones who lived at the top of the tower, and see how they fare without the poor and expendable workers to support them. Or maybe we'll just destroy this floating relic once and for all, and demand a place on dry land to settle. Deep underwater, the engine thrums with a subsonic heartbeat, inching us closer to the shore, and our destiny.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Inspired by this floating city concept.
PPS - It's one of a few mega-projects on that page.

Optimistic programmers

The irony of programming is that it takes optimism to do it, but makes cynics of us all. You need to imagine that your program is going to work, and you have to keep hoping that the last bug is just around the corner, but the endless bug fixing treadmill will get you so down that you end up looking for a new job out of sheer desperation. At least their bugs are new and different, whereas the same old bugs keep showing up where you are. It's as if our industry feeds on optimism, draining it out of us and leaving us dessicated old cynics, but, at the same time, we manage to rekindle that optimism by isolating the cynicism to our old jobs and seeking new ones.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Compartmentalisation saves my industry.
PPS - And, possibly, many others.

Apathy online

Since the internet the problem is not getting published but getting noticed. The enemy online is not hate, but apathy. When people are free to ignore you, and you them, you either do more because they love it or do less because they don't care, not because they don't enjoy it enough.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or, sometimes, you just keep doing something because it's a habit.
PPS - Like me and this blog.

Avatar

If you have never watched the TV series Avatar, you really should. Not James Cameron's blue people movie, a totally unrelated elemental kung fu story. Yes, it's animated. Yes, it was made for kids. But it is also a world-encompassing kung fu epic where the martial arts are semi-magical. There's moral dilemmas, pitched battles, prison escapes, humour and romance, plus the whole thing is tightly plotted and fits together really well. If I could write anything half as good as this story, I'd be immensely proud of it. When I started watching, I thought it was just going to be a bit of fun, like any other cartoon, but it has actually become kind of a favourite for me. If you like action and kung fu, go and watch it now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't been this excited about epic kung fu battles since the original Matrix movie.
PPS - Unfortunately, James Cameron and M. Night Shyamalan have made it harder to search for.

Missing numbers

How would you find a missing number? I saw a woman under hypnosis suppress her knowledge of the number four. She counted "1, 2, 3, 5..." and therefore saw a total of eleven fingers. She said there were three wheels on a car. She couldn't even recognise the word "four". So the question is: how would you discover that this has been done to you? Mismatched counts such as the eleven fingers should be a clue, and when simple sums don't make any sense, you should start to wonder. But it's such a bizarre effect that you might never reach the conclusion that something so basic as a number has been erased from your brain.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think I would assume some kind of optical illusion.
PPS - Or else some other trick.

Wifi at work

For a very long time, wifi at work was a big no-no, simply because the IT admins considered it too insecure. Now suddenly it's quite common. What changed? My theory is that businesses started buying iPhone plans for their employees, which come with data allowances and excess usage charges. So when the data allowance runs out, it costs the business a lot. The best way to get around that, at least while employees are at the office, is to set up a wifi access point and direct the iPhone internet traffic through there, piggybacking it on the existing internet connection. Money and convenience overrides security yet again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's usually how we get into trouble.
PPS - But in fact, it probably wasn't that secure before or after wifi.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Agents at the Door

The government agents at the door did not wear sunglasses or black suits. They did not threaten Mark with straight faces and veiled references to disappearing. They looked and acted more like plain-clothes detectives, but their badges said "DHS".

"That's CIA spook stuff", the woman had said with a slight smile and a dismissive wave of her hand. "We just need to ask you about the package you received on Tuesday."

The box had arrived on Mark's doorstep, and he had initially thought it was the eBay package he had been expecting. But when he opened it up and found four 1TB flash drives packed in foam cutouts in a rugged little case, he had been intrigued.

Contained on the drives was a virtual machine - a soft copy of an entire computer, operating system and all - and Mark had no idea where it had come from. He had just barely enough room to unpack the files and reassemble them, then his own computer had run the virtual one so slowly in simulation that he'd almost lost interest.
But he had left it running.

"You see," said the man, shifting in apparent discomfort, "what you have there is an AI. We don't know how the package got out, but now it's out and we can't get it back."

"That ... I guess ... what does that have to do with me?" asked Mark.

"Well, apparently," said the female agent, "it likes you."

"'Likes me'?"

"No accounting for taste" interjected the man, turning aside slightly. The woman shot him a dirty look, then turned back to Mark.

"Yes, it likes you. So we were sort of hoping you could ... ask it nicely to come back with us."

Mark sat silent, eyes moving between the two agents, trying to see if they were joking. Their faces kept displaying the same level of seriousness. His mother came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits, then wandered off elsewhere, but not quite out of earshot.

Eventually, Mark got up without a word and disappeared into his room for a while. He returned with his laptop open and running.

"She says she'll come along, but on one condition. I come too."

The man sputtered into his coffee, spilling a little down his blue shirt and tie. The woman raised an eyebrow. Mark added quickly, "She likes me."

The woman sighed, closed her eyes and shook her head, ever so slightly. "I guess you're coming with us, then."

Mark tried to hide his excitement, but he could tell from the agents' eyes that he wasn't fooling anyone, so he kept his mouth shut and followed them out the door to their van, waving goodbye to his mother on the way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Better late than never.
PPS - This could probably use a little work, but right now I'm going to bed.

DRM and honest customers

There's an argument in favour of DRM that says, basically, it won't beat the crooks, but it keeps honest people honest. I think it was Cory Doctorow who said that keeping an honest person honest is a goal akin to keeping a tall person tall. But more than that, DRM often fails those honest people too, and what do they do when that happens? If the DRM gets in their way, either they stop being your customer or they stop being honest, breaking the DRM or finding a copy that's already broken.

So, to summarise, this argument says that DRM is imperfect, but it keeps the sheep in line. That's only when it works. When it fails, it keeps honest people out of the purchases they honestly made, and it makes crooks out of customers or, at best, makes non-customers out of customers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Remember, kids, it's legal to rip your CDs, but not your DVDs.
PPS - And the DRM is just part of what stops you.

Grooming robots

If you had the right robots to do it, while you sleep they could keep your hair trimmed, your face (or legs) shaved, your fingernails and toenails clipped and all that other body maintenance stuff that currently takes up your waking time. The potential down side is that, if you wake up and see a robot hovering over you with a straight razor, you'll probably not get back to sleep.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And you'd want to be a heavy sleeper for this.
PPS - Or for the robots to be microscopic and unobtrusive.

Mediocre or amazing

Would you rather be amazing at something mediocre or mediocre at something amazing? An incredible typist or a moderate book author? The world's best Etch-a-Sketch artist or a so-so painter? Personally, I think we should aim to develop skills in the amazing category. Homing in on one everyday skill like sock-folding and becoming extraordinarily good at it might impress a few people for a few seconds, but the payoff is too small. Speaking economically about your days on Earth, you should spend them doing things that are worthwhile, and if you want to amaze people, the better payoff comes from developing skills in fields that people already think are amazing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Like secret ninja moves from the government.
PPS - Think about that in your new years' resolutions.

Book review: The Future of the Internet

The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain

I have always been a bit disturbed by the trend to rely on distant servers for specific purpose software that could be written for the desktop computer instead. This book did a good job of explaining exactly why my discomfort is justified. Zittrain makes the argument that the internet is valuable because of its "generativity", but also that that very openness, plasticity and freedom that leads to its success also leads to malicious uses. Those malicious uses lead people to ask for more "secure" solutions, by which they mean less generative ones: locked-down PCs where nobody can install anything without a central authority approving it, exactly like the iPhone. So the very thing that leads to the internet's success indirectly leads to its downfall, too.

It can get a bit dry and detailed, but that's to be expected in this type of book.

The potential solutions are where things start to fall down, as always, and some of the proposed answers have a faint tinge of unintended consequences. If you attempt some things to fix the internet, they won't work, and other things will just subtly break the system or cause a redirection in the arms race. That's not to say that it can't be done, but to my mind the solutions didn't quite ring totally true. Also, although tethered appliances under the control of their suppliers still have a security problem. It's just that there's a different group in charge of what can and cannot run on them.

Still, I think this is a very valuable book, and well worth reading, if only to understand what makes the internet work and what makes it fail. If you care about people or technology and where they might push each other, this is the book for you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have always preferred writing desktop software rather than websites.
PPS - Even when they're highly functional and clever websites in really nifty languages.

Standby excluders

Standby excluders, those remote-control devices you can plug in to turn off your electronic devices instead of leaving them waiting for their own remote control signal, don't work. The trouble is that most modern electronics are pretty darn good at not using a lot of power on standby, and the remote control standby excluders themselves are in a kind of standby mode all the time, waiting for a remote control signal. So you're really just swapping one standby device for another and hoping that the new one is more efficient. And according to my own digital power meter, they're exactly as efficient as my TV and microwave when they're off.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There might be some devices where they work, though.
PPS - But for me, they don't save any power.

Friday Flash Fiction - Patience

When people think of vampires, they think Hollywood. Who can blame them? They think Ann Rice. They think Buffy. Some of them even think of Twilight. The truth is, we're more literally cold-blooded than that. We live in the darkness, below ground; sewers, storm water drainage, caves and basements. We're like snakes, nesting in one place, using little energy, waiting for the next kill to come by and then BAM! The energy lasts months, sometimes years. Meanwhile we hibernate in the dark, warm places. You think it's life and youth everlasting, but it's more like prolonged stasis and timelessness. In that waiting state, time seems to fly past like nothing gets in its way. You have no idea what it's like to watch, unblinking, for days on end. Patience is a virtue for you. For us, it's necessity. And then that moment of the kill, the seconds can stretch out to feel like years.

I've seen would-be slayers before. Headstrong young men trying to prove themselves. Bold teenage girls with home-carved stakes and gloves with crosses sewn onto the knuckles, as if either of those things would help. When you can move faster than sound, what chance does an ordinary human have? That was why the old man gave me pause. He didn't walk like the drunks that usually find their way into my drainpipe, and he didn't smell drunk either. He stopped at the entrance, muscles loose and ready. I waited. It's what I do.

When he made his move, my metabolism kicked into hyperdrive, and the world stood still. His right hand brought up a pistol crossbow and fired, but I had hours to move out of the way. Around then I started noticing something odd about his movements. They were quicker than I expected, and maybe they were even speeding up. His left hand was swinging around holding a tranquiliser syringe, and it was obviously going faster than it should. Before it arrived at my neck, I started seeing stars, my fingertips started to tingle and I got dizzy. I fell to the floor of the tunnel, face up, and just had time to see the second man standing over me, wearing the gas mask.

That was maybe three years ago. An eyeblink in my time. I woke up in a cage, on display in some dark pit, where people come to see the real, live vampire. They tried feeding me every day - vermin, of course. As much as they want the spectacle, the people don't want to see me drain a rabbit, a cat, a puppy ... or a human. I don't need nearly as much as that, so the rats just piled up. I could leave at any time, but I am waiting. I wait to see those two faces again, close enough to strike. I am patient. I can wait.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The plot-free first paragraph was all I had of this for a long time.
PPS - Hope you like it.

Slightly better credit card fraud protection

It seems to happen often that online services will get hacked, and then a lot of credit card numbers will be stolen. For the banks, it is cheaper and easier to chase up the fraud after the fact, but for us, their customers, it is a major pain. We need to monitor our online charges carefully, listen for news about hacks, remember which services have our credit card numbers and occasionally change our passwords, cancel our cards, order new ones and distribute the number again. We should have some silos and firewalls in place so that each breach doesn't leave us scrambling to stop up the leaks.

Obviously we should be using different passwords for every online service, but we should also be able to have different disposable credit card numbers for each service, too. That way, if one number gets stolen, the others don't need to change. Also, we can easily trace which service got hacked by which credit card number got falsely charged, even if that company doesn't own up or recognise that a breach has taken place. More public identification of hacked services should make it more likely that they will beef up their security, and the ability to cancel one credit card number without affecting the master account will make things better for consumers. Not perfect, but better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There have been a couple of services offering disposable credit card numbers.
PPS - As far as I can tell, they all went out of business.

Technology in development

Something that is simultaneously cool and frustrating about upcoming tech reports is that they always seem to be just around the corner, but never here. For instance, I saw a great TED talk about transparent, cheap solar panels you can attach to your windows in order to generate the power you need, right here, using technology that would also allow low-power IR vision in the form of ordinary glasses. I hear about both of those things and think "Great! I want to do that to my house and my glasses right now! When can I have it?" and the answer is "Well, we don't know, we're kind of in the early stages of development, could be a few years, and even then it might not be blah blah blah". Disappointing. Even though this technology exists, I might never see it in actual use within my lifetime.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I prefer my technology news much further down the development road.
PPS - Otherwise I get excited about something I can never have.

The internet vs books

What is more exciting about the internet than books? Well, I'll bet the three things most people do online are watch videos, play games, and read. Videos and games are very old passtimes, and their appearance on the net is no surprise. It's just television and arcades in a new package. Then there's reading. People claim not to like reading, but then they spend a lot of time online reading emails, Facebook updates, Twitter and short-attention-span articles the size of sound bites. What is different about that form of reading as opposed to reading books? For some of it, there's the social factor - it came from my friends, so it has higher value to me. But most of it, I suspect, is the attention span issue. Too long, didn't read. What you're saying when you won't read long articles is that you are too distracted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I'm a fan of both.
PPS - And I'm moving towards ebooks as my primary reading material.

Open source security software is better

Sometimes law enforcement groups will request that security software such as encryption tools be built with back doors that enable them to bypass the security with some kind of master password. Most people assume that this means everything mostly remains secure, but when necessary the police can bypass the security and catch the bad guys. The actual objection is that it means building in secret and deliberate weaknesses to the software, and that this vulnerability will eventually be exploited by the wrong people - the very criminals the police intend to catch with it.

Truly secure software is secure against every attempt to bypass it, because you can't know whether the attempt is legitimate or not. That's why good encryption software like TrueCrypt is distributed as open source. Anyone can look, anyone can build it, the FBI couldn't crack it when they had to because there is no back door, and anyone with the right know-how can look and verify that it has no back door.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only encryption software I use directly is KeePass.
PPS - Though encryption is probably built into a few other programs I use, like my web browser.

Always-on screen sharing

One way to make a diverse set of computers feel more like a single environment would be always-on screen sharing. Say I have my home computer on while I'm at work, and they are both connected to a VPN service of some kind. Normally, while at work, I would be using the desktop there, but if I want to (in this scenario) I could activate a feature that zooms out and shows me both desktops at once. I can click on my home screen, which zooms in again to work on that remote machine, then zoom out and click back to my work machine. Add another machine to the mix, like my netbook, and the zoom-out adjusts to show that screen too. The borders between machines start to blur, and we would start to get a real-world idea of how people would use their computers if they had one environment spread across all their machines.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Security, of course, would be a big concern.
PPS - And this assumes "one user, many machines" rather than the common "one machine, many users".

Friday Flash Fiction - The Unreality Bomb

Gerry didn't know how the bomb worked. He'd heard some of the egghead technobabble, but all he needed to know was where to drop it from his plane. He checked his altimeter, speed and bearing again. Still on course. He cast a nervous look back towards the bomb in the hold. The thing gave him the creeps, to be honest. They'd called it a "Heisenbomb" or something. It was supposed to erase part of reality by collapsing a quantum something into a singular whatsit. Might as well have called it a voodoo bomb for all the sense it made to Gerry.

He saw the city lights spread out below him - Rocvale. The whole city was the target, but the bomb needed to be dropped in the centre. The radars hadn't spotted him, and probably wouldn't, and he'd be gone before they could do anything about it anyway. His plane was the latest and greatest in stealth and speed.

Flying over the centre of the city, Gerry's finger hovered for a second over the bomb release switch. He felt like, maybe, he couldn't do this. Then some other part of his brain stepped up and said "Don't worry, I got this", and his finger flipped the switch.

The bomb tumbled for a second or two before its fins stabilised its downwards course. It began to make a high-pitched whistling tone as its speed increased. People in the streets heard the bomb approaching, pointed and shouted, ran for cover. Some cursed their government for starting this awful war before running to their shelters and shutting the doors.

Gerry watched the bomb fall, but when it hit, there was no flash of light, no thunderclap, no mushroom cloud, no crater in the ground. Rocvale just stopped being there. There was a green field where there used to be ... something ...

Gerry shook his head to clear it. What was he doing again? He automatically checked his altimeter, speed and bearing, then his flight plan. He was ... on a test flight for the new stealth plane? Yes, that was it. He turned the prescribed circle and headed back to base. On the radio, the control tower seemed to have had a similar memory lapse about the same time as Gerry. Weird coincidence.

Gerry kept feeling somewhere in the back of his mind that there was something he'd forgotten. Not something he hadn't done, but something he had done, then forgotten about, but he could never quite put his finger on it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - How would you know if this had ever happened?
PPS - It might leave behind some weird conspiracy theories, at best.

Location location location

With GPS, the problem of location and mapping would appear to be solved, but the more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to be. Depending on how accurate you need to be, and how much geographical movement there is in a region, finding where X marks the spot could be very difficult indeed. A place that looks the same from the ground may have moved on the globe because of continental drift, landslides, earthquakes, floods and any number of things. So how can you be sure, when you stand on one spot on the Earth that this is the same spot you stood a year ago? The factor of time plus the habit of matter to decay means any given location measurement really needs to be accompanied by a timestamp and a confidence level.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And it seems so simple.
PPS - Must have a lot of smarts behind it.

Large email attachments

I think we need the ability to send very large files to be built into the email protocol. It doesn't have to be directly as an attachment, but it does need to be seamless and familiar. Our email programs can send the file another way and sort of pretend it's an attachment, and nobody will have to think about it again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - These days, the email definition of a "large" attachment is pretty limiting.
PPS - Hence the need for a new way of sending attachments.

Cross-site social network desktop software

I would like one desktop program that manages my social network profiles through one interface. I don't want another website for this. The precedent is Pidgin that manages three different chat protocols for me: MSN, Google Talk and Facebook chat, or Thunderbird that can access my work email (Exchange) or GMail. So what I want is a program that accesses Facebook and Google+, representing their common features in a standard way so that it doesn't matter whether a particular friend is on Facebook or Google+, and I don't have to check both to get all my updates. In a few years, more people will be fed up with Facebook and they may have moved onto something else, so this kind of standardisation is going to become more necessary as time goes on. I'm not holding my breath expecting standard cross-platform protocols for social networking sites, so this would be the next best thing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is a big advantage of general-purpose computers.
PPS - And open programming interfaces for websites.

Flying is supposed to be amazing

You know what? Flying should be amazing, but it's really unpleasant. The air is stale and dry because it's cheaper to recycle it than purge and refresh mid-flight, and it can make you sick. The seats are cramped and so bad for you that they need to advertise special exercises to prevent them from killing you. The first solution we have for that is not better seats but airline anti-death seated yoga. We absolutely should be amazed at the prospect of flight, but I don't think the entirety of the problem is our jaded natures. Our worst seats at home are better than airline seats. If we were able to bring our own, we probably would. Doesn't that mean something has gone wrong?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It certainly seems that way.
PPS - Most of it is probably because we're racing to the bottom to provide the cheapest flights.

Web installers are bad

There's a trend to distribute some software in a "web installer" that is basically a very small program that downloads the latest version of the real installer so that it's always up to date. It's an admirable goal, but it can be very inconvenient when you have no internet connection, or a very limited one. These unreliable network issues are becoming more prominent in my mind because of the problems we have with our office network (tends to drop large downloads every 2MB or so) and our connection to a remote office (an even worse setup). If we can't pre-download things and transfer them in a way that is tolerant of severe network difficulties, then it just doesn't get done, and web installers take that choice directly out of our hands.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only thing they're good for is quick initial transfers.
PPS - But you still have to wait for the rest of the download anyway.

Friday Flash Fiction - Pointless War Machines

The third war left the wasteland devoid of life, but it was by no means inactive. By now it was filled with fifth generation junk war bots, the offspring of repaired micro-tanks, mine-layers and automated gun turrets that once patrolled the area. The little war machines destroyed each other while the repair bots fixed broken ones, reprogrammed captured enemy bots or built new ones from scraps. They charged and retreated, burrowed and flew, hurled each other through the air and pinned each other to the ground to deliver dramatic killing blows. The region held no strategic value any more, and no country could spare the resources to clear it, so the robots continued fighting their solar-powered obsolete war.

Another repair-bot released a half-blind mobile turret that tottered off on three unsteady legs. It turned its head left and right, trying to get a clear picture through its camera lens, already smeared with mud and grease. It spots something cresting a nearby hill and leans forward as if to see better. In that moment of hesitation, the micro-tank siezes the advantage, flails its electro-whip and disables the newborn turret with a jolt of electricity. The repair-bot waits until the micro-tank trundles off elsewhere, then creeps out of hiding to drag the mobile turret back by the leg, through the churned and burned earth, and fix it once again, to fight its pointless part in an endless war.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Just a sad little image idea that came to me.
PPS - Do you think they would ever stop?

App stores

There are only two things keeping the app store model afloat: curation and lock-in. Curation in the broad sense that people know where to go for apps for their platform, and it is a consistent, unified user experience, whether the apps are free or paid. Apps themselves aren't going anywhere, because there are some things apps can do that the alternative, websites, can't do. You need apps, and you need a place to get them.

But the thing is, curation can come from anywhere, and if someone else does a better job, customers will use it that alternative. That's assuming you can set up an alternative app store, which is the lock-in part. But even if you can't set up an alternative, you can always set up better recommendations, categorisation, searching and reviews with links to the official app store. Even if using your version is harder than the real one, that price of inconvenience might be worth paying.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is part of why Apple makes it impossible to set up an alternative app store.
PPS - It keeps them in control by force.

NaNoWriMo wrap-up

So, my first NaNoWriMo is at an end. Technically, I did not win. At the close, my novel weighed in at just over 47000 words unfinished, which is nothing to scoff at, but not quite the completed standard required. I intend to finish it by Friday, just two days late. After that, it needs a lot of editing, and probably a lot of rewriting too, and will probably not be over 50000 words when it's ready for preview.

All told, I've had a really good time doing this. Writing on the train has been an interesting experience, but in future years I will need to do more than that if I want to finish within November. Next year I will use my lunch breaks, too. I've learned that, when I'm going strong, I can write as much as 1200 words in 30 minutes, and when it's a hard slog I'm more likely to end up with 800 words, as long as I remain focused.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know if I said yet, but I used my Friday Flash Fiction piece Planet Scavengers as a starting point.
PPS - I have ideas for next year and the year after, too.

Petrol price prediction and assistance

If petrol stations were made to publish their current prices along with their GPS coordinates, it would be easy to show on a map the locations of cheap petrol nearby. It would also be possible to calculate how far you would have to drive to get cheap petrol and whether it was worthwhile. Using that information, you could recommend a place to go for the best deal on your petrol. Couple that with your car's fuel gauge and you'd be able to automatically pop up a recommendation to buy fuel when it's cheap and nearby. If your car's computer can analyse both your driving habits and the petrol price cycle, it could help you optimise your purchases for the cheapest, most efficient and timely outcomes, and the only thing you'd need to see would be a slight deviation in your GPS guidance with a note to buy fuel now.

And that is why petrol stations do not publish their prices online unless forced to do so. They know that a large portion of their business comes from necessity: you need fuel now, and they're the only one nearby. Sometimes their prices will be high and you get screwed. They're okay with that. But if you're able to predict and take advantage consistently when prices are low, that's not okay by them. Anything, such as easier access to current prices, that helps you make better decisions as a consumer puts the brakes on their gravy train. They'll cry poor. They'll tell you it's not fair. They'll even try to tell you it's not possible. All lies.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, maybe it's not fair.
PPS - But only if they stick with their current price practices.

Casual toll auto pay phone app idea

Instead of having toll transponders in your car, you could turn on a phone app that tracks where you are, knows your credit card and vehicle details, and auto-submits them to toll collector websites when you go past toll points. The various toll operators would match your self-reported location with their video logs and charge you appropriately for the day. You could even arrange it so that multiple people per trip spread the toll out between them, by all using the app at once. That way you could automatically share the cost for, say, a car pool. Of course you'd need to get the toll operators on board with this, but at least then you wouldn't need a different transponder for every operator.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is my 2500th post!
PPS - There should be a cake or something.

Robot car rules

When auto-driving cars become the most common vehicles on the road, the rules will change. Speed limits may go up, since robot reaction times are much better than humans'. 11-year-old kids could borrow the car on their own. You could ride in your car to work, then send it home for the day, or call it to pick you up from wherever you are. You probably wouldn't need to find a parking spot ever again - just let the car drop you off and find a place to rest.

On the flip side, would you get in trouble for riding in a robot car drunk or asleep? How much responsibility would we expect "drivers" to accept in the case of a crash? Would we need robot cars to pass a driving exam? Would you, as the owner, even need to come along for that, or just let the examiner take care of things? Perhaps it would just mean a different class of license, only for robot cars, where they are expected to do most of the work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's probably what we'll get first.
PPS - But it will probably still be age-restricted.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Temple of the Clown

Ronaldo was one of the faithful. He attended mass, took communion at the Temple of the Clown every Sunday, along with thousands of others. He stood in line reverently, face upturned to consider the Holy Menu. At his turn, he placed his order in the ancient way, and his communion meal was delivered with the traditional catechism, "Have A Nice Day Enjoy Your Meal".

He took a moment with his tray to kneel before the fibreglass statues of the saints and make the holy sign of the double-arches before taking his place at the pews and tables. His meal was meticulously prepared by the acolytes in the Kitchen. The beef would be perfectly cooked, the lettuce and tomato cut with precision and care. The wrapper was folded in intricate origami patterns, and every long finger of fried potato was exactly the same length, exactly the same shade.

But today, something different happened. Today, he received a vision. Just as he took the first bite into his burger, the figure of Saint Ronald himself, after whom Ronaldo was named, appeared in the air before him.

"Ronaldo, my people have lost their way. Their worship is empty, their actions meaningless. I have chosen you to lead them back to true faith. You will be my prophet."

Ronaldo sat, stunned for a moment, at the vision of Saint Ronald. He had read of things like this in the scriptures, but they all happened so long ago. Could it really be happening, now, and to him?

"Look around you, Ronaldo. What do you see? Do these people worship, deep in their hearts, or are they merely going through the motions?"

So Ronaldo looked, his own communion meal forgotten. There were people sitting in the pews at their tables, irreverently wolfing down the carefully-prepared burgers. Children throwing fries at each other. Teenagers removing pickle slices from between the sesame-seed buns and flinging them to stick on the walls of the Temple, laughing with each other in this sacred place of worship. How had he not noticed this before?

Ronaldo knew what he had to do. He stood from his place and began methodically moving along the aisles, overturning the tables to the stunned looks of fellow "worshippers". He flung their meals to the ground and gave stern looks to all who watched him. He made his way to the front counter and stood on top, every eye in the Temple on him. He would turn the people back to true worship. He would reform the Church of the Clown and bring the faithful back. It was his holy mission, and he would make Saint Ronald proud of his people again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think you know which clown I mean.
PPS - I have been to that "temple" too many times myself.

Libraries and ebooks

How do ebook libraries work? When you think about them in the same way as a traditional library, with physical books, things get complicated quickly. If you send an ebook to a patron's device, how do you make sure they eventually delete it? How do you ensure the devices people use obey the library rules and don't allow copying? Instead, you need to think about access, not possession.

The library itself is a collection, akin to an Amazon user account. And when you're talking about accessing their collection, you either need to think of devices or linked accounts. The digital library can function perfectly well if they have a collection of Kindles they can physically lend out, as long as those Kindles can't buy anything on library credit. Alternatively, since the Kindle is supposed to be controlled via DRM, you can just allow any patron to link their account to a public library and gain access to any books contained there, on any device that supports the Kindle software. If they are unlinked from the library, they lose access to those books.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If your DRM is as good as you say it is, this should be easy.
PPS - I'm pretty sure they wouldn't allow this, "for security reasons".

The craftsmanship learning model

I quite like the idea of applying the craftsman training model to modern professional development. For instance, becoming an apprentice to a master programmer, engineer, accountant, lawyer or doctor. Even though you may have many bosses and many jobs, for the first seven years after university, you are an apprentice, and you have a master from whom you learn most closely. After those seven years, you spend three years with other masters, learning the personal nuances they apply to their profession. Finally, after those ten years, you may submit some of your work for approval to the guild and be granted master status.

Admittedly, it does sound like university in a way, especially the status of "master" vs "masters degree". I'd be pretty sure that's where it came from. But I think modern university doesn't offer the same kind of practical, personal tuition you would find in an apprenticeship system.

It would be tricky to work with a master across several jobs, particularly since that relationship should involve very close work, to learn from the master and for him/her to observe your work. That's harder to do if you're not working directly together every day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We don't do much mentoring in our society, do we?
PPS - I think we should.

No-payout poker machines

I think we should legally require poker machines to never pay out, ever, and I think we should advertise that fact very boldly on the front. Seal up the return tray and put in a big sign that says "This machine never, ever pays out. You will not win. This is not a bluff or a challenge. We are not kidding." Then when you step up to one, you are under no delusion that you are about to win big, or that this week's welfare payment is sure to turn into big bucks, because there is obviously no winning.

You're already not going to win, long term, but this change turns this form of gambling from a tax on innumeracy to a dead certain black hole. Hopefully it would snap some people out of their addiction, but the effect will probably be more like a two-pronged response. The addicts will go elsewhere, like the lottery, and some will demand the return of the meagre payouts that kept their delusion afloat.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For those who are playing "just for the fun", there's no change.
PPS - Except that it gets slightly more expensive.

Android app permissions

On Android, you're supposed to read and accept the permissions each app requests before you install it. There are several problems with this user requirement. The first and most obvious is permission fatigue. After installing several apps, you start ignoring that button. You don't read the requested permissions and you don't care. This is a human trait that does not go away, and will always be a problem.

The next problem is understanding those permissions. Even if you read them all, do you know what they mean? Are they specific enough to give you a real understanding of what they will do with your phone? Usually not. Also, even if you do read and understand them, they can be misleading. Ad-supported free apps will usually include a request for "Full internet access", in order to get new ads, and sometimes "Fine (GPS) location" too, to provide location-appropriate ads. That might be fine if it's just used for ads, but that combination of permissions can also mean "reports your exact location to anyone who's listening", and you definitely wouldn't agree to that.

Lastly, you can't accept or deny individual permissions on a per-app basis. If this app requests full internet access and you don't want that, too bad. Take it with the rest or leave it completely alone, there's no middle ground.

What's the solution? Well, we could have a set of acceptable default permissions that we are happy to grant and some that we will deny by default so that we don't get nearly as many notifications about it. We also need a separate ad service on the phone so that we can see if a particular app wants internet access to display ads or phone home with private data. That "full internet access" permission needs to be more granular for ad-supported apps. Lastly, we do need the ability to grant or deny individual permissions for individual apps, so that we can still install them without having to take it all as one whole package. That will not be a feature of any official version of Android, because app makers need ads to keep their apps free.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At best, you'd get an ad service you can't turn off.
PPS - And that still means you don't completely own your phone.

Keeping your details private online

There are two ways you could keep your privacy online when asked for personal details. The easiest way - the way most people choose - is to lie. Give out fake details when they don't matter, especially to sites you don't trust. The harder way is to channel all your communications through an intermediary or broker. If you insist on privacy, then you need to trust someone else who will act as an anonymiser and firewall between you and the people you don't trust. You need this because once you give out your real details once, they are never secure again. Think of credit cards. If your number gets into the hands of the wrong people, you just need to cancel it, get a new one and give out the new number to the people you do still trust.

What you need, then are personal identity broker systems with unique disposable details. When you need to give out an email address to someone you need to trust temporarily, create a new one that automatically forwards to your real address. If they can't be trusted with that address, cancel it. Your main email address, and other fake addresses, remain unaffected, but anyone who got that forwarding address can't contact you any more. You can, in theory, do the same with phone numbers, and banking details too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Snail mail might work, but the service would be more complicated.
PPS - It would probably involve rented post office boxes.

Friday Flash Fiction - Power thief

I was shuffling through an air duct on the 114th floor when the building stopped breathing. It reminds me, when this happens, just how close these things are to dead. Take the power away, move the people out and a building gets to be as spooky in its hallways as it already is in its guts. And without power, the whole thing gets bigger too. When there are no express lifts to take you up and down, the stairs echo enormous. Sometimes, in this situation, I like to abseil down the lift shafts, but today I have a job to do. Today I am stealing this building's beating heart.

The power cores are in high demand. Tiny nuclear batteries that can power a building this size for a century can just as easily power a small town. Since the plague, we've lost too many people and therefore forgotten how to make them. But in the cities, there are hundreds, and out in the country there are towns willing to pay. So I steal from the rich and give (or sell) to the poor. Hey, a guy's gotta eat, right?

Approaching the spine of the building, that service shaft going up through the middle, I started hearing noises through the ducts that didn't sound like the usual pests. No, this was another thief, come to take my prize before me. With the power out and these noises going outwards, not inwards, I was pretty sure he had the power core already. That makes this a chase, not a heist.

He's either heading for the roof or the front door. I'm betting on the roof, because they tend to be less guarded. He'd know that. I start climbing the ladder in my service shaft, listening carefully for the sounds of the other thief. If he doesn't know I'm here, he might not move as quickly as me.

As I pop out of the vent on the roof, I see another figure, clad in black, fussing with a clearly-heavy backpack. And it's a "she". I can tell, though her face is covered. She notices me, looks to the edge of the roof, and quickly shoulders her pack. As she leaps over the railing, she does this complicated, graceful pirouhette in the air, reaches down and clips something onto it. I hurry out of my vent and look down over the side in time to see a figure finish running down the side of the building, assisted by a descender. When she reaches the bottom, she unclips it from her belt, looks back up towards me and lets it go.

It zips up the outside wall, bumping and spinning, winding itself back up on its springs. When it reaches the top, I step back as it flings energetically over the railing. So my rival is gone, but I have her descender. And I know the only man around who still makes things like this. I'll find her again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be honest: I haven't been writing much else since I started NaNoWriMo.
PPS - But I think this came out pretty well.

Printing the perfect tiles

When we tiled our lounge, kitchen and dining rooms recently, there was a lot of cutting to do around the fiddly corners, and a lot of waste, too. That got me thinking: with the right precise measurements, you could "print" exactly the right tiles for a space, custom-made to fit perfectly. Or maybe you could use a robot that trundles around the room extruding and baking ceramics in specified shapes in-place. Either way, it should be possible to fit tiles perfectly to a floor with zero waste. The only question is whether it would be more economical that way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess it depends how much more expensive custom-shaped tiles are.
PPS - And whether you accidentally break any.

Social network federation

Social network federation, or compatibility, is a good goal for users, but the main barrier to its implementation is that the big players - Facebook, for example - have an active interest in not supporting open standards. Keeping people locked into Facebook because all their friends are there has been the main competitive strategy of social networking sites from the beginning. The business plan is basically set up a website, attract a self-sustaining critical mass, then lock it down so the competition has no hope.

Federation means that it doesn't matter what network someone is on. It makes step 2 (critical mass) moot and openly mocks step 3 (lockdown). That's just not going to fly with the big players unless, for instance, the open network of competition grows far beyond them. That's the point that the critical mass shifts from Facebook to the open network, then everyone starts maintaining two profiles, and eventually abandons Facebook because not everyone is on it any more. So if you, as a small social network, want to topple Facebook, your best bet is to throw in your lot with the rest of the federated network and be part of the new majority.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then Microsoft, in their Microsofty way, will "embrace and extend" the standard.
PPS - Their proprietary extensions are compatible in one direction only.

The Internet is natural

In a sense, the internet has always existed. It just used to take the form of libraries or word of mouth without formally-defined protocols. Human communication has always been carefree and decentralised, based on loose agreements of protocols and shared understandings. When it was only spoken, messages were passed between people by that means, and those things that people cared to repeat or listen to were propagated most widely. When we started writing books, the best books were copied, distributed and read. Now that we have the Internet, that same pattern is proceeding. It's just like the writing of books and repeating of stories and news, only now the medium has changed. The Internet is a natural outgrowth of human communication, one more step in that journey.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course it's faster now.
PPS - And further-reaching.

Cookie privacy

I watched a talk by Cory Doctorow about browser privacy and the need for cookie management similar to popup management. He made a compelling point. A lot of our cross-site privacy and tracking issues these days are caused by cookies, and there are so many of them that we can't deal with them ourselves. We need our software to help us, the same way Mozilla (later Firefox) started refusing to display popup windows on websites. That choice, even though it was only enacted by a small, geeky subset of internet users, eventually changed the face of the whole internet, in browsers and websites alike. We can do that again if we just figure out how to manage our browser cookies better. It's going to be harder, I expect, but it's going to be even more worthwhile. The trouble is that cookies are so invisible that most people don't realise it's even happening, let alone that it's a problem.

Making cookies more visible might be the first step, or part of the first action. Next might be applying a reasonable upper limit to cookie expiry dates, regardless of what they request. Right now, a website can request that your browser store a cookie indefinitely, and your browser will oblige. That doesn't seem right.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I use the Vanilla Cookie Manager plugin for Chrome.
PPS - It deletes cookies after 30 minutes unless I whitelist them.

The internet and tasks

The web needs better collaboration tools. As illustrated in xkcd, "send a file" (if it's too big for email) is still a task that gets us scratching our heads, fumbling for some known hacks, then just copying it to a flash drive and taking it in person. Video chat is getting better, though, like text chat, it's still locked up in walled gardens of individual services. To get expert help on something, you either take your chances reading Wikipedia or find any number of domain-specific help forums, or perhaps Twitter. The massive proliferation of services and websites is part of the web's appeal - anyone from anywhere can set up and start reaching people online, any time - but it also means certain tasks are made more difficult for users.

Basically, the web is not designed for users and tasks. It's designed for websites, and most of the design decisions are built around the idea of getting specific website information to you as reliably as possible (though not necessarily as quickly as possible - that's another rant). Your task, as a user, is not "Facebook", but "interact with friends", where "interact" is made up of chatting, reading, updating, sharing and playing. It doesn't matter if Facebook is involved. Facebook itself is not the point. It is just the tool you use to accomplish your goals. You can go anywhere and do anything if there's a website for it, but how do you find out what you can do, or how do you go from a vague description of a task to finding a specific website to fill that need?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can probably find websites for specific tasks with Google.
PPS - But you can't easily find out what is possible online.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Memory of the Soldier

When we take the time to remember our fallen soldiers, we do it properly. At the same time, across the globe, over every airwave and every broadcast medium comes one message: the Memory of the Soldier. At that time we all fall into a deep trance and dream the dream of that one soldier whose memory has been chosen for that year.

This year, as we dream, we see young hands holding a rifle, feel young feet and legs racing across a battlefield under enemy fire. Then there's a thok in the shoulder, and some momentum is lost as we stumble. Another bullet tears quickly through the left side and we hold the wound in the rising pain. Only one or two steps later comes the shot through the thigh, and we all dream the collapse, face down on the sodden earth.

It takes a few minutes of lying there until the soldier loses consciousness, then we are all left in the dark. As we snap out of the Remembrance, we all know how lucky we were not to be there, not to be that boy. We know how much we appreciate that hard and dangerous job he did.

Mostly, we appreciate the fact that we haven't had any war in a very long time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Today is Remembrance Day, obviously.
PPS - Lest we forget.

Flexible factories

Once 3D printers become standard home appliances, what will be the needs filled by old-style factories? Well, for one thing, we'll need someone to produce all our 3D printers, so there's that. There will also be other things home printers can't do, like milled metal parts or electronics. And with home 3D printers commonplace, consumer demands could shift quickly. The world of tomorrow needs factories that can take any complicated design, including electronic components, metals, plastics, rubber, foam, glass, ceramics and countless other material needs, and produce the finished product on demand, whether you need a thousand of them or only one. Those factories need to be flexible enough to produce cars today, rubber duckies tomorrow and telephones the next day without skipping a beat. It will probably have a different name than "3D printing" by that point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably something like "automated industrial manufacturing".
PPS - Or something cooler-sounding.

DRM is always broken

I have received a couple of spam comments on old posts of mine from a company with a vested interest in promoting DRM software. Their comment is that DRM needs "built in safeguards" to prevent "reverse engineering or bypassing". Leaving aside the fact that bypassing DRM is the same as defeating it entirely, if it were good encryption and you could reverse engineer the method, it would not mean anything for attacks, since good encryption depends on the security of the key, not the obscurity of the method. You should be able to publish your encryption software as open source, and this will actually increase its security, because more people will be able to find and alert you to bugs.

Now, when it is applied to DRM, encryption is a pointless endeavour, because the message recipient and the potential attacker are the same person. All DRM systems, if people care at all about what they are protecting, will be cracked and defeated eventually. That's not because they've all been written badly, but because they all depend on a misuse of encryption. You can't hand someone an encrypted message and the key to decrypt it and still control how they use them together. There is no good way to hand someone a decryption key that they can only use when you say so. When you write DRM, you must write bad encryption, because that's how it works.

In practice, systems do hold up for a while, but in theory (which precedes practice) all DRM systems are fundamentally flawed, because that is the essential nature of DRM. So when you come up with a new protection scheme, you will see it succeed for a while, then become totally worthless. That's what happened with CSS on DVDs, HD-DVD, and HDCP as well. It will happen with Blu-Ray, if that even matters any more, it will happen to the Kindle, and it will happen to LockLizard. The systems will get revised, and they will get hacked again. The only way they die is for people to stop caring about what is protected, at which point they also stop buying it, and the revenue goes away. That's really bad business.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - DRM is anti-customer technology anyway.
PPS - So why would you want it?

Entertainment superabundance

There is a superabundance of entertainment these days - music, movies, games and TV. What do we start to do when we move from scarcity value to superabundance? Well, one thing we do is stop trying to pay attention to everything. There's plenty of everything, so we only need to look at the best stuff, and we decide what's best by crowdsourcing our decisions. When there are tons of movies on, we don't even go looking for one to see. We wait for a recommendation to come to us. We don't scour the TV ads looking for new shows to fill our time, we get recommendations from friends and try out new shows a few episodes at a time. If they don't meet the mark, we don't need to bother with them.

The other things we do is value each individual item less and also don't bother trying to archive them all for ourselves. We only watch (or read or play or listen to) the best of what's recommended, and we only keep the best of what we experience. That's what physical media - printed books, DVDs, physical CDs - are for these days. They are the archive of the very best of what we experienced through some other means, not the means by which we get our entertainment in the first place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess people have always been ignoring bad entertainment.
PPS - But these days, we can also afford to ignore the merely good, in favour of the outstanding.

Beauty in technology

There is beauty in technology, but not in all of it, and not by default. You can bring it out if you have the right tools and the right skills, like a sculptor with a block of marble. Some days - the best days - that's what my job is like.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And some days, it's like pulling teeth.
PPS - From a crocodile. On fire.

Notifications in software

I think a modern operating system needs to include a standard notifications service that any program can link into. I think that's one of the subtle things Android (and other phone operating systems, in their own way) have done right. There is a separate area at the top of the screen (while in the main launcher) that is only ever used for notifications. They do not pop up over anything else, they never need to steal space from anywhere, and you always know where to look for them. Compare that with Windows where there's an expanding area at the bottom-right corner of the screen, and it can pop up balloons over what you're working on. That's the unobtrusive version. A lot of the time applications have their own focus-stealing popup windows that just don't

Maybe this is more a discussion to have about modern GUI frameworks rather than operating systems. They're often tied closely together, though. Also, a GUI framework can't reserve space on the screen except in its own window, right? So a notifications area needs to be a feature of the OS window manager.

I guess phones have a bit of an advantage with a different kind of app structure than Windows. Apps are expected to be one-at-a-time and full screen, which forces the notifications area to be what it is. Windows, being built on legacy expectations, having more power and freedom for applications than a mobile phone, allows actions that can be very disruptive to the user's workflow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are lots of ways to do notifications right.
PPS - Windows doesn't do any of them.

Friday Flash Fiction - Fire at the Magic School

The fire spread quickly through the bushlands, consuming dry trees and old tinder with ferocious force and intensity. The firefighter mystics did their best to arrest the spreading flames, using their most potent charms and spells. Some of the senior wizards managed to set up a floating bucket line, but they kept having to adjust the enchantments to direct it to more urgent areas of the blaze.

Eventually the wizards succeeded in bringing the fire under control, and the villagers were able to go and inspect the damage. Only the edge of the village had been touched - the one by the school. In fact, it looked as if the fire had started from nothing in the woods, in many places at once, and spread only as far inwards as the school's kitchen.

Investigating the kitchen itself was clearly going to be a difficult task. Pots and pans had melted from their holding hooks on the ceiling, the stone bench tops had cracked and shattered, and everything else was charred to ruin.

The embarrassed school cook shuffled awkwardly to the back of the gawking crowd, trying not to be noticed as she went. It had only been a small spell, meant to get the cooking done faster so she could get back to her reading. She wasn't much of a sorceress herself, but for goodness' sakes, the children did this kind of thing all the time!

She had figured out what went wrong about the time the school had been evacuated. The spell started a fire that moved backwards in time, approaching the kitchen and getting hotter as it went, eventually stopping there, or looking like it had. Should she confess? Well, the wizards would find out the truth eventually, and it might as well be via confession rather than investigation. After the cleanup had started in earnest, and the investigation began, she came forward to tell her tale and, if necessary, accept her punishment.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I suppose there's a bit of Harry Potter in this.
PPS - With a bit of the Australian outback, too.

NaNoWriMo

This year I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. I don't expect what I write to be publishable without some drastic editing and probably a lot of rewrites, but that's not the point. The main point is to get me writing every day and using my ideas instead of sitting on them and imagining maybe possibly one day writing them. So far, from that point of view, it's a success. Assuming I manage 50000 words in one month, then have to edit down to a third of that for quality, I will actually have something more akin to a novellette at the end, rather than a full novel. Still, writing 50000 words in one month would be a decent achievement, and if I also manage to pull out a 16000-word novellette to be proud of, that's just a bonus.

I'm not yet confident that I'll finish properly. My story could easily run out of steam long before the month is up, in which case I may have to switch tracks to a totally different story halfway through. I'd rather not do that, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - According to the Nebula awards, it's still a novel even if it's only 40000 words.
PPS - No, you can't see it yet.

Your desktop is powerful

We seem to be dividing the internet into two kinds of endpoints: clients and servers. Servers are "where the code runs" and clients are mere consumers. Though the network is a tool, the current practices of network software development are putting that tool only in the hands of those who control the servers. The computer on your desk should be considered just as important and just as powerful as the servers that run your favourite websites. It is not a mere consumer endpoint. It is capable of so much more, and furthermore, that is the point of having such a machine in the first place. If the only program your computer ever runs is a web browser, then it's not a real computer and you are nothing more than eyeballs to online advertisers. That's called television, and the web does not need to be more like that. Why would we want to turn back to that model of centralised control?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's interesting that Google's Chromebook project is pushing towards browser-only uses.
PPS - I suppose it makes sense for Google. Their revenues come from online ads.