etbe - Russell Coker

Links October 2010

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful post about why designing products for wiretapping is a bad idea [1]. It seems that large parts of the Internet will be easy to tap (for both governments and criminals) in the near future unless something is done. The bad results of criminal use will outweigh any benefits of government use.

Sam Watkins wrote an informative post about Android security [2]. Among other things any application can read all stored data including all photos, that’s got to be a problem for anyone who photographs themself naked…

Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgements [3]. Somehow she managed to speak about the Theory of Mind without mentioning Autism once.

The Guardian has an amusing article by Cory Doctorow about security policies in banks [4]. He advocates promoting statistical literacy (or at least not promoting a lack of it) as a sound government policy. He also suggests allowing regulators to fine banks that get it wrong.

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about Where Good Ideas Come From [5]. It’s a bit slow at the start but gets good at the end.

Adam Grosser gave an interesting TED talk about a fridge that was designed for use in Africa [6]. The core of the Absorption Refrigerator is designed to be heated in a pot of water in a cooking fire and it can then keep food cool for 12 hours. It’s a pity that they couldn’t design it to work on solar power to avoid the fuel use for the cooking fire.

Josh Silver gave an interesting TED talk about liquid filled spectacles [7]. The glasses are shipped with a syringe filled with liquid at each side that is used to inflate the lenses to the desired refractive index. The wearer can just adjust the syringes until they get to the right magnification, as there are separate syringes the glasses work well with people who’s eyes aren’t identical (which is most people). Once the syringes are at the right spots the user can tighten some screws to prevent further transfer of liquid and cut the syringes off – to give glasses that aren’t overly heavy but which can’t be adjusted any more, I guess that a natural extension to this would be to allow the syringes to be re-attached so that the user could adjust them every year to match declining vision. One thing that this wouldn’t do is counter for Astigmatism (where the lens of the eye doesn’t focus light to a point), but I guess they could make lenses to deal with a few common varieties of Astigmatism so that most people who have that problem can get a reasonable approximation. The current best effort is to make the glasses cost $19, which is 19 days salary for some of the poorest people in the world. Glasses in Australia cost up to $650 for a pair (or a more common cost of $200 or about $100 after Medicare) which would be about one day’s salary.

Eben Bayer gave an inspiring TED talk about one of the ways that mushrooms can save the planet [8]. He has designed molds that can be filled with Pasteurised organic waste (seed husks etc) and then seeded with fungal spores. The fungus then grows mycelium (thin fungal root fibers) through the organic waste making it into a solid structure which fits the shape of the mold. This is currently being used to replace poly-styrene foam for packaging and can apparently be used for making tiles that are fire retardant and sound proof for constructing buildings. The main benefits of the material are that it can be cheaply made without petrochemicals and that it is bio-degradable, I’m not sure how the bio-degradable part would work with constructing buildings – maybe they would just replace the panels every few years.

Annie Lennox gave a TED talk about her Sing foundation to care for women and children who are affected by AIDS [9]. She describes the effect of AIDS in Africa as Genocide.

Robert Ballard gave a very informative TED talk about exploring the oceans [10]. This was one of the most informative TED talks I’ve seen and Robert is also one of the most enthusiastic speakers I’ve seen, it’s really worth watching! We really need more money spent on exploring the oceans.

Jessa Gamble gave an interesting TED talk which suggests that the best thing to do is to go to bed at about sunset and then have a couple of hours of relaxing time during the middle of the night [11]. Apparently the subjects of body-block experiments who live for a month in a bunker without natural light or access to a clock get better sleep in this manner than they ever had in their life and feel fully awake for the first time.

World Changing is a blog that has a lot of interesting articles about climate change and related issues [12]. It’s worth a read.

Cynthia Schneider gave an interesting TED talk about how reality competition TV is affecting reality [13]. Shows that are derived from the American Idol concept are driving a resurgence in some traditional forms of performance art while also promoting equality – among other things it’s apparent that winning is more important than misogyny.

The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer is an interesting concept [14]. I think it would be good to have something similar for Computer Science.

Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting and insightful essay about Piracy and Free Software [15].

Web Video, Global Innovation, and Free Software

Web Video and Global Innovation

Chris Anderson (the curator of TED) gave an insightful TED talk about Web Video and Global Innovation [1]. Probably most people who have used the Internet seriously have an intuitive knowledge of the basic points of this talk, Chris had the insight to package it together in a clear manner.

He describes how the printing press decreased the importance of verbal communication skills and services such as Youtube have caused a resurgence in the popularity and importance of speeches. He has some interesting theories on how this can be leveraged to improve education and society.

Lectures for Developers vs Users

Now how can we use these principles to advance the development of Free Software?

It seems to me that a good lecture about Free Software achieve will achieve some of the following goals:

Promoting projects to new developers.
Teaching developers some new aspects of software development related to the system.
Promoting projects to new users.
Teaching users (and prospective users) how to use the software.

The talks aimed at developers need to be given by technical experts, but talks aimed at users don’t need to be given by experts on the technology – and someone who has less knowledge of the software but better public speaking skills could probably do a better job when speaking to users. Would it do some good to encourage people to join Free Software projects for the purpose of teaching users? It seems that there are already some people doing such work, but there seems little evidence of people being actively recruited for such work – which is a stark contrast to the effort that is sometimes put in to recruiting developers.

One problem in regard to separating the user-training and developer-training parts of Free Software advocacy and education is that most conferences seem to appeal to developers and the more Geeky users. Talks for such conferences tend to be given by developers but the audience is a mix of developers and users. Would it be better to have streams in conferences for developers and users with different requirements for getting a talk accepted for each stream?

Publishing Videos

It has become a standard feature of Free Software related conferences to release videos of all the talks so anyone anywhere in the world can watch them, but it seems that this isn’t used as much as we would like. The incidence of Free Software developers citing TED talks in blog posts appears to exceed the incidence of them citing lectures by their peers, while TED talks are world leading in terms of presentation quality the talks by peers are more relevant to the typical Free Software developer who blogs. This seems to be an indication that there is a problem in getting the videos of talks to the audience.

Would it help this to make it a standard feature to allow comments (and comments that are rated by other readers) on every video? Would having a central repository (or multiple repositories) of links to Free Software related talks help?

Would it help to have a service such as Youtube or Blip.tv used as a separate repository for such talks? Instead of having each conference just use it’s own servers if multiple conferences uploaded talks to Youtube (or one of it’s competitors) then users could search for relevant talks (including conference content and videos made by individuals not associated with conferences). What about “video replies”?

What if after each conference there was an RSS feed of links to videos that had one video featured per day in a similar manner to the way TED dribbles the talks out. If you publish 40 videos of 45 minute lectures in one week you can be sure that almost no-one will watch them all and very few people will watch even half of them. But if you had an RSS feed that gave a summary of one talk per day for 6 weeks then maybe many people would watch half of them.

Defining Success

Chris cites as an example of the success of online video the competition by amateur dancers to create videos of their work and the way that this was used in selecting dancers for The LXD (Legion of eXtraordinary Dancers) [2]. I think that we need a similar culture in our community. Apart from people who give lectures at conferences and some of the larger user group meetings there are very few people giving public video talks related to Free Software. There is also a great lack of instructional videos.

This is something that anyone could start doing at home, the basic video mixing that you need can be done with ffmpeg (it’s not very good for that purpose, but for short videos it’s probably adequate) and Istanbul is good for making videos of X sessions. If we had hundreds of Free Software users making videos of what they were doing then I’m sure that the quality would increase rapidly. I expect that some people who made such videos would find themselves invited to speak at major conferences – even if they hadn’t previously considered themself capable of doing so (the major conferences can be a bit intimidating).

How do we Start?

Publishing videos requires some significant bandwidth, a cheap VPS has a bandwidth quota of 200GB per month, if short videos are used with an average size of 30MB (which seems about typical for Youtube videos) then that allows more than 6000 video views per month – which is OK but as my blog averages about 2000 visits per day (according to Webalizer) it seems that 6000 views per month isn’t enough for any serious vlogging. Not to mention the fact that videos in higher resolution or a sudden spike in popularity can drive the usage a lot higher.

It seems that a site like Youtube or blip.tv is necessary, which one is best?

There are lots of things that can be changed along the way, but a hosting service is difficult to change when people link to it.

Conclusion

I don’t claim to have many answers to these questions. I’m planning to start vlogging soon so I will probably learn along the way.

I would appreciate any suggestions. Also if anyone has a long suggestion then a blog post will be best (I’ll link to any posts that reference this one). If anyone has a long suggestion that is worthy of a blog post but they don’t have a blog then I would be happy to post it on my blog.

Choosing an Android Phone

My phone contract ends in a few months, so I’m looking at getting a new Android phone. I want a big Android phone (in both physical size and resolution) that has a physical keyboard, a digital compass, A-GPS and at least a 5MP camera with geo-tagging.

I want to be able to read PDF files and run ssh sessions, so a big screen is required and a physical keyboard avoids wasting screen space for a soft-keyboard. My pockets will fit something about 10.5cm wide by 17cm high but I don’t expect anyone to manufacture such a large phone. High resolution is a good thing too, it seems that the best available at the moment is 854*480 (with 800*480 being reasonably common).

I want Wifi and all the 3G and GSM data transfer standards. It would be ideal to have a phone with the dual networking stack needed to do both voice and data at the same time.

I’m not interested in anything that runs a version of Android older than 2.2 as native tethering is important. An option to upgrade to post 2.2 would be a really good thing.

Here are the nearest options I could find:

Phone	Resolution	Screen Size (inches)	Camera Resolution	Notes
Motorola Milestone	854*480	3.7	5MP
Motorola Droid	854*480	3.7	5MP
LG VS 740	800*480	3.2	3.2MP	no GPS or compass
Lenovo LePhone	800*480	3.7	3MP	no GPS or compass

It seems that Motorola makes the phones that best suit my needs, does anyone know of any better options?

Open Source Learning

Richard Baraniuk gave an interesting TED talk about Open Source Learning [1]. His project named Connexions which is dedicated to the purpose of creating Creative Commons free textbooks is a leader in this space [2].

He spoke about Catherine Schmidt-Jones who wrote 197 modules and 12 courses on music [3], that’s a very significant amount of work!

He also mentioned the translation of the work into other languages. I wonder how well the changes get merged back across the language divide. We have ongoing disputes in the free software community about whether various organisations do enough work to send patches back upstream, this seems likely to be more of a problem in situations where most of the upstream authors can’t even understand the language in which the changes are written and when the changes involve something a lot more subtle than an change to an algorithm. This would be particularly difficult for Chinese and Japanese as those languages seem to lack quality automatic translation.

He mentioned Teachers Without Borders [4] in passing. Obviously an organisation that wants to bring education to some of the poorer parts of the world can’t have a curriculum that involves $250 of text books per year for a high school student (which was about what my parents paid when I was in year 12) or $500 of text books per year for a university student (which might be a low estimate for some courses as a single text can cost more than $120). Free content and on-demand printing (or viewing PDF files on a OLPC system) can dramatically lower the cost of education.

It’s widely believed that free content without the ability to remix is cultural imperialism. This is apparently one of the reasons that the connexions project is based on the Creative Commons Attribution license [5]. So anyone anywhere can translate it, make a derivative work, or collate parts of it with other work. I expect that another factor is the great lack of success of all the various schemes that involve people contributing content for a share of the profits, the profits just don’t match the amount of work involved. Philanthropy and reputation seem to be the only suitable motivating factors for contributing to such projects.

One of the stated benefits of the project is to have computer based content with live examples of equations. Sometimes it is possible to just look at an equation and know what it means, but often more explanation is required. The ability to click on an equation, plug in different values and have them automatically calculated and possibly graphed if appropriate can make things a lot easier. Even if the result is merely what would be provided by reading a text book and spending a few minutes with a scientific calculator the result should be a lot better in terms of learning as the time required to operate a calculator can break the student’s concentration. Even better it’s possible to have dynamic explanations tailored to the user’s demand. To try this out I searched on Ohm’s Law (something that seems to be unknown by many people on the Internet who claim to understand electricity). I was directed to an off-site page which used Flash to display a tutorial on Ohm’s Law, the tutorial was quite good but it does seem to depart from the free content mission of the project to direct people off-site to proprietary content which uses a proprietary delivery system. I think that the Connexions project could do without links to sites such as college-cram.com.

One of the most important features of the project is peer review “lenses“. The High Performance Computing Lens [6] has some good content and will be of interest to many people in the free software community – but again it requires Flash.

One final nit is the search engine which is slow and not very useful. A search for “engine” returned lots of hits about “engineering” which isn’t useful if you want to learn about how engines work. But generally this is a great project, it seems to be doing a lot of good and it’s got enough content to encourage other people and organisations to get involved. It would be good to get some text books about free software on there!

Links September 2010

Kevin Stone gave an interesting TED talk about the biological future of joint replacement [1]. Using stem cells and animal tissue which has been prepared to destroy the chemicals that trigger immune responses the tissues can regrow. Replacing joints with titanium and ceramic lets people walk again, regrowing them with Kevin’s methods allows them to compete at the highest levels of sporting contests!

Derek Sivers gave a brief and interesting TED talk advising people to keep their goals secret if they want to achieve them [2].

The Parrot AR.Drone is an interesting device [3], it’s a four-propeller helicopter that is controlled by WiFi. Apparently there is little security (it binds to the first WiFi client it sees) which is a significant down-side. It returns a video feed to the controlling iPhone as it flys and can hover when it loses it’s connection. It will be interesting to see when people write software for other devices (Android etc). Also I wonder whether there will be open source weapons kits for it. If you could have those devices use either a nerf gun or a lance to attack each other’s turbines then you could have drone jousting.

Don Marti had an interesting new idea for a crime game [4]. The main concept is to use the element of mistrust that is present in real criminal gangs. The new guy you invite to join a job might inform the police and you won’t know for sure. Sometimes a heist will be discovered by the police through bad luck (or good police work) and you will wonder whether there was an informant. The aim is for a simple game design and with the complexity in email discussions between the players.

The C64 isn’t dead, it’s even on the Internet [5], an original C64 is running a web site!

Tan Li gave an interesting TED talk about a new headset to read brain-waves [6]. The device in question can be applied in minutes, requires no gel or abrasion of the scalp, connects to the computer wirelessly and is relatively cheap at $300US. The developer’s kit (which I think includes a headset) is $500US. I wonder if the community can develop a cheaper version of this which is more open.

Lisa Margonelli gave an interesting TED talk about the politics of oil [7]. One of her insightful points is that the subsidies for oil should be shifted from the oil industry to middle-class consumers. But she goes off track a bit by suggesting gradual oil tax increases until 2020, according to the best estimates of groups such as the CSIRO they won’t need to have taxes to give a high oil price in 2020! She is aiming for a 20% reduction in petrol use by 2020, but I’m not aware of any serious group of scientists who have evidence to suggest that the production capacity in 2020 will be close to 80% what it is now.

Slate has a good article about The Innocence Project which uses DNA tests to overturn false convictions [8], it’s scarey how badly the justice system works.

Rachel Sussman gave an interesting talk about the World’s Oldest Living Things [9], nothing less than 2000 years old is included.

Nicholas Negroponte gave an interesting EG 2007 talk about the OLPC project [10]. While some of the content about OLPC production is a little dated the OLPC history is relevant and his personal opinions regarding the benefits that children receive from computers are insightful.

Jayne Poynter gave an interesting TED talk about life in Biosphere 2 [11]. Her work on mini-biospheres is also interesting. Let’s hope we get a permanent Biosphere running outside the Earth sometime soon.

Sheryl WuDunn gave an informative TED talk titled “Our Century’s Greatest Injustice” about the plight of women in most of the world [12].

Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote a good article about the use of ssh-agent [13]. You really should use it to secure your ssh keys.

Mark Shuttleworth has described the development process for the Ubuntu font [14]. This is a very interesting project and IMHO one of the most significant things that Ubuntu has done. Prior to this an entirely closed development process has been used for font development. Now we are getting a major new font family developed with a free and open process and with some new legal developments for a font license! One thing to note that this project appears to have involved a lot of work from professional font designers, it sounds like Canonical spent a significant amount of money on this project.

Is Pre-Forking any Good?

Many Unix daemons use a technique known as “pre-forking”. This means that to save the amount of time taken to fork a child process they will keep a pool of processes waiting for work to come in. When a job arrives then one of the existing processes is used and the overhead of the fork() system call is saved. I decided to write a little benchmark to see how much overhead a fork() really has. I wrote the below program (which is released under the GPL 3.0 license) to test this. It gives the performance of a fork() operation followed by a waitpid() operation in fork()s per second and also the performance of running a trivial program via system which uses /bin/sh to execute the given command.

On my Thinkpad T61 with a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz I could get 2429.85 forks per second when running Linux 2.6.32 in 64bit mode. On a Thinkpad T20 with a 500MHz P3 CPU I could get 341.74 forks per second. In both cases is seems that the number of forks per second is significantly greater than the number of real-world requests. If each request on average took one disk seek then neither system would have the fork performance as any sort of bottleneck. Also if each request took more than a couple of milliseconds of CPU time on the T7500 or 10ms of CPU time on the 500MHz P3 then the benefits of pre-forking would be very small. Finally it’s worth noting that the overhead of fork() + waitpid() in a loop will not be the same as the overhead of just fork()ing off processes and calling waitpid() when there’s nothing else to do.

I had a brief look at some of my servers to see how many operations they perform. One busy front-end mail server has about 3,000,000 log entries in mail.log per day, that is about 35 per second. These log entries include calling SpamAssassin and Clamav, which are fairly heavy operations. The system in question averages one Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5420 @ 2.50GHz core being used 24*7, I can’t do a good benchmark run on that system as it’s always busy but I think it’s reasonable to assume for the sake of discussion that it’s about the same speed as the T7500 (it may be 5* faster, but that won’t change things much). At 2429 forks per second (or 0.4ms per fork/wait) if that time is entirely reduced to zero that won’t make any noticeable difference to a system that has an average operation taking 1000/35= 28ms!

Now if a daemon was to use fork() + system() to launch a child process (which is a really slow way of doing it) then the T7500 gets 248.51 fork()+system() operations per second with bash and 305.63 per second with dash. The P3-500 gets 24.48 with bash and 33.06 with dash.

So it seems that if every log entry on my busy mail server involved using a fork()+system() operation and it was replaced to use pre-forked daemons then it might be possible to save almost 10% of the CPU time on that system in question.

Now it is theoretically possible that the setup of a daemon process can take more CPU time than fork()+system(). EG a daemon could have some really complex data structures to initialise. If the structures in question were initialised in the same way for each request then a viable design would be to have the master process initialise all the data which would then be inherited by the children. The only way I can imagine for a daemon child process to take any significant amount of time on modern hardware is for it to generate a session encryption key, and there’s really nothing stopping a single master process from generating several such keys in advance and then passing them to child processes as needed.

In conclusion I think that the meme about pre-forking is based on hardware that was used at a time when a 500MHz 32bit system (like my ancient Thinkpad T20) was unimaginably fast and when operating systems were less efficient than a modern Linux kernel. The only corner case might be daemons which do relatively simple CPU bound operations – such as serving static files from a web server where the data all fits into the system cache, but even then I expect that the benefit is a lot smaller than most people think and the number of pre-forked processes is probably best kept very low.

One final thing to note is that if you compare fork()+exec() with an operation to instruct a running daemon (via Unix domain sockets perhaps) to provide access to a new child (which may be pre-forked or may be forked on demand) then you have the potential to save a moderate amount of CPU time. The initialisation of a new process has some overhead that is greater than calling fork(), and when you fork() a new process there are usually lots of data structures which are not written after that time which means that on Linux they remain as shared memory and thus reduce the system memory use (and improve cache efficiency when they are read).

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define NUM_FORKS 10000
#define NUM_SHELLS 1000

int main()
{
struct timeval start, end;
if(gettimeofday(&start, NULL) == -1)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
}

int i = 0;
while(i < NUM_FORKS)
{
pid_t pid = fork();
if(pid == 0)
return 0;
if(pid > 0)
{
int status;
pid_t rc = waitpid(-1, &status, 0);
if(rc != pid)
{
fprintf(stderr, "waidpid() failed\n");
return 1;
}
}
else
{
fprintf(stderr, "fork() failed\n");
return 1;
}
i++;
}

if(gettimeofday(&end, NULL) == -1)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
}

printf("%.2f fork()s per second\n", double(NUM_FORKS)/(double(end.tv_sec – start.tv_sec) + double(end.tv_usec – start.tv_usec) / 1000000.0) );

if(gettimeofday(&start, NULL) == -1)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
}

i = 0;
while(i < NUM_SHELLS)
{
pid_t pid = fork();
if(pid == 0)
{
if(system("id > /dev/null") == -1)
fprintf(stderr, "system() failed\n");
return 0;
}
if(pid > 0)
{
int status;
pid_t rc = waitpid(-1, &status, 0);
if(rc != pid)
{
fprintf(stderr, "waidpid() failed\n");
return 1;
}
}
else
{
fprintf(stderr, "fork() failed\n");
return 1;
}
i++;
}

if(gettimeofday(&end, NULL) == -1)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Can't get time of day\n");
return 1;
}

printf("%.2f fork() and system() calls per second\n", double(NUM_SHELLS)/(double(end.tv_sec – start.tv_sec) + double(end.tv_usec – start.tv_usec) / 1000000.0) );
return 0;
}

My Squeeze SE Linux Repository

deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux

I have an Apt repository for Squeeze SE Linux packages at the above URL. Currently it contains a modified version of ffmpeg that doesn’t need execmod access on i386 and fixes the labeling of /dev/xen on systems that use devtmpfs as reported in bug #597403. I will keep updating this repository for any SE Linux related bugs that won’t get fixed in Squeeze.

Is there any interest in architectures other than i386 and AMD64?

Preferring Low Quality and Microsoft Software

Is Low Quality in Italian Academia related to the choice of Low Quality Software?

Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi wrote an interesting paper titled “L-worlds: The curious preference for low quality and its norms” [1]. The paper describes how in Italian universities (and large portions of Italian life) there are covert agreements that both parties in a transaction (the employee and the employer or the buyer and the seller) will deliver less than agreed while pretending that they are offering the agreed exchange. People who offer high quality in exchanges are discriminated against because they make people who offer low quality in exchange feel guilty.

Nathan suggests that this is the explanation for people choosing to pay for inferior software from Microsoft instead of getting superior software for free [2]. Now it does seem quite plausible that someone who is offering low quality goods in the manner of Italian academia would refuse to consider software from any company other than Microsoft, after all the easiest way of selecting software is to phone a MS representative and be told exactly what to buy. But I don’t think that this explains even a significant fraction of the people who refuse free software.

There is no direct analogy between bilateral agreements to produce low quality and the choice of MS Software because MS Software is quite expensive (they demand what would be considered a “high quality” trade in the jargon of the paper). If someone was to buy one of the cheaper laptops in Australia (around $650 new) and upgrade to the full version of Windows 7 along with purchasing the home version of MS Office then the cost of software would be almost as much as the cost of hardware. If they wanted one other MS product then the cost of MS software would probably be greater than the cost of hardware. Hardware costs are steadily falling and MS prices are only increasing, for people who use MS software we should expect that soon the MS tax will be the majority of the costs of running a typical PC.

Good Reasons for Choosing MS

One thing we have to consider is that there are people who have good reasons for using MS software. One example is the companies that depend on proprietary applications which are central to their business. When the entire company’s data is stored in an undocumented proprietary database it’s really not easy to change to a different application – even when everyone in the company knows the software to be of amazingly low quality. If the vendor of the proprietary application in question decides to only support MS Windows then it’s customers (victims?) have no choice about which OS to use.

One interesting thing to note about such companies that are locked in to proprietary software is that the amount that they spend per year on license and support fees is usually greater than the cost of hiring one good programmer. If a few such companies formed a consortium to develop free software to manage their business where each company paid the salary of one programmer then after a couple of years of development they could move to the free software and reduce their operating expenses.

Another category of users who have a good reason to choose MS is the people who play games seriously. If you want to play games then MS Windows does offer some real advantages. The price of games will usually be a fraction of the hardware cost (the serious gamers spend a lot more on hardware than most people) and MS Windows is apparently the best PC OS for commercial games. Personally I’ve found that there are more than enough free games on Linux to waste my time, Warzone 2100 [3] is one that I currently play, and I’ve tried Battle for Wesnoth [4] in the past and found it too time consuming and addictive.

How a Preference for Low Quality could lead to Microsoft

I think that everyone who has any significant experience in the computer industry has encountered companies that have large areas of low quality. This generally tends to be in large corporations as small companies can’t afford the waste.

In some large corporations Linux on the desktop is never considered, even when people are hired as Linux sysadmins and there are obvious productivity benefits to having the same OS on the desktop as on the servers (even if two desktop PCs are required so that proprietary software can be run on MS-Windows). Major wrote a good satire of the corporate IT non-working culture with a comparison to medical work [5], it illustrates the principle of a coalition to ensure low quality. He later documented how he was sacked by the low quality coalition at a company that uses a lot of Microsoft software [6].

So it does seem that when customers don’t care at all about the quality of the result it does help drive some sales for Microsoft. But that doesn’t explain the market share that they have.

It takes a lot of work to get Market Share without Quality

Microsoft has spared no effort in gaining market share. Every possible effort including buying out small competitors, aggressively FUDing competition, using all manner of legal attacks (including the threat of patent suits), and deliberately breaking standards has been used. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the MS senior management are not entirely stupid, they do so many things that are unethical and possibly illegal because they know that they need to do so to maintain their market share. The result is that the market capitalisation of MS is almost as high as that of Apple – and Apple makes vastly superior products.

Given the amount of effort that MS uses to keep market share it seems apparent that they aren’t just relying on customers not caring about quality.

Should users have to Understand Computers?

My observation is that most users don’t want to know much about how their computers work. The desire to understand computers seems to be about as common as the desire to understand cars, people just want to buy one that looks good and have it work. The difference is that cars are very compatible while computers aren’t. Cars have the same controls in the same places and large parts of the design are specified by law so that they can’t differ between models. Proprietary software is usually intentionally incompatible with other software (both open and proprietary) to try and gain a competitive advantage. Hardware is often incompatible due to the rapid developments in technology and the requirements for new interfaces to take advantage of new features.

In concept it seems reasonable for someone who is about to spend $30,000 on a car and $1000 on a computer (for hardware and software) to spend 30 times longer considering which brand of car to buy. One could argue that more than 30 times as much consideration should be given to the car as most people can’t afford to discard a car that they don’t like. As people spend a few minutes considering which brand of car to buy they can be excused for spending a few seconds considering which type of computer to buy. But once a choice has been made about which software to use it’s very difficult to change to something else, while in comparison it’s easy to drive a car that was manufactured by a different company. So a poorly informed choice made at an early stage can have costly long-term affects when buying software.

If we had mandated open standards for file formats and data interchange then users would be able to make choices that don’t result in their data being locked in to some proprietary format. Such standards could be set through government tender processes, if every government agency was to only buy software that complies with open standards then the proprietary software vendors would scramble to make their products less incompatible. The result would be that bad choices in purchasing software could become learning experiences that result in better purchases in future instead of being a lock on users that forces them to keep using the same software that doesn’t satisfy their needs.

Conclusion

I think that the best thing about the paper by Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi is that it highlights the issue of low quality. No-one wants to be considered a loser, so maybe this can encourage people to strive for high quality (or at least try to make their work suck a little less). Regardless of the conclusion they eventually reach, it’s probably good for people to occasionally wonder “do I suck?“.

Changes

Oct 2017, new URL for the paper because Oxford doesn’t like maintaining URLs or having redirects.

How to Start Learning Linux

I was asked for advice on how to start learning Linux. Rather than replying via email I’m writing a blog post for future people who ask such questions and also to get comments from other people which may provide information I missed.

Join a LUG

The best thing to do is to start by joining your local Linux Users Group (LUG). Linux International maintains a list of LUGs that is reasonably comprehensive [1]. Even if there isn’t a LUG near enough for you to attend meetings you can learn a lot from a mailing list of a LUG that’s close to your region. There is usually no great reason not to join the mailing list of a LUG in a different region or country, but a local LUG is that the advice will often be tailored to issues such as the local prices of hardware and the practices of your government.

Also note that Linux International doesn’t list all LUGs, the MLUG group in Melbourne [2] and the BLUG group in Ballarat [3] aren’t listed. Anyone who joins LUG (the group based in Melbourne, Victoria that I’m a member of) will be advised of the smaller groups in the region if they ask on the list.

As an aside it would probably make sense for the main LUV web page [4] to have links to local LUGs and to the LI page of users’ groups and for other LUGs to do the same. It’s pretty common for a Google search to turn up the web site of a LUG that’s near the ideal location but not quite right. Also it would be good if LUV could have a link to the Victorian Linux Users Group in Canada – this should reduce the confusion a bit and they have a link to us [5].

Play with Linux

Get a spare PC (with no important data) and try installing different distributions of Linux on it. Make sure that it never has anything particularly important so you can freely try things out without worrying about the risk of losing data. Part of the learning process usually involves breaking a system so badly that it needs to be reinstalled. Linux can run on really old hardware, an old system with 64M of RAM will do for learning (but 128M will really be preferred and 256M will be even better).

Learn with other Beginners

LUV has a very active beginners group, with a beginners mailing list and special beginners meetings. A group that has such things will be more helpful as you can easily learn from other people who are at a similar level to you. Also you can spend time learning Linux with friends, just spend a weekend with some friends who want to learn Linux and play with things – you can often learn more by trying things than by reading books etc.

Do some Programming

One of the advantages of Linux (and other Free Software OSs) is that it comes with a full range of programming languages for free. You can get a much greater understanding of an OS by writing programs for it and a typical Linux distribution gives you all the tools you need.

Any other Ideas?

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Please leave a comment.

Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet

Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

etbe – Russell Coker

Archives

Categories

Links October 2010

Web Video, Global Innovation, and Free Software

Web Video and Global Innovation

Lectures for Developers vs Users

Publishing Videos

Defining Success

How do we Start?

Conclusion

Choosing an Android Phone

Open Source Learning

Links September 2010

Is Pre-Forking any Good?

My Squeeze SE Linux Repository

Preferring Low Quality and Microsoft Software

Is Low Quality in Italian Academia related to the choice of Low Quality Software?

Good Reasons for Choosing MS

How a Preference for Low Quality could lead to Microsoft

It takes a lot of work to get Market Share without Quality

Should users have to Understand Computers?

Conclusion

Changes

How to Start Learning Linux

Join a LUG

Play with Linux

Learn with other Beginners

Do some Programming

Any other Ideas?

Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet

Archives

Email and RSS

Archives

Categories

Tags

Web Video and Global Innovation

Lectures for Developers vs Users

Publishing Videos

Defining Success

How do we Start?

Conclusion

Is Low Quality in Italian Academia related to the choice of Low Quality Software?

Good Reasons for Choosing MS

How a Preference for Low Quality could lead to Microsoft

It takes a lot of work to get Market Share without Quality

Should users have to Understand Computers?

Conclusion

Changes

Join a LUG

Play with Linux

Learn with other Beginners

Do some Programming

Any other Ideas?

Archives

Email and RSS