The Actual Rock

Ran across this cartoon [Link]

shortly ago. Was engaged.

First, there is the aspect of Rat being the brunt for a change. I support proper disrespect but not when it is not deserved.

Second, I agree with the implied assessment. The internet is not trustworthy. If anything it is less trustworthy than most “holy” books, like the bible, if not by much. And unlike them, it is fairly open. But that openness means that one cannot tell poo from pony. Hence the need for the encyclopedia.

I have numerous – annual – copies of the electronic Britannica. Every year I buy one or more copies, depending on the needs of the few educationalists who will talk to me, and I go through the pain of getting my copy – the one I keep – to run on WINE.

information, computers, internet, encuclopedia

MegaSplat

Yesterday was another medicalist day, except this time for FD SCP. So I got to do a lot of sit and try to divert myself time. One of the topics was why we find external change so much more stressful than internal change.

That brings me to a pair of articles in the Register. The first [Link] was sent me by my colleague, Magnetic Inductance Force, and has the comforting title, “Every single Internet Explorer at risk of drive-by hacks until Patch Tuesday”. Comforting, at least, to those of us who don’t use Internet Exploder. Of course on a Linux box you can run, I am told, IE on WINE but why? I ask those who tell me this question and they all respond that it’s possible but not preferable. But in my discussion with my contributing colleague we did discuss why anyone still uses IE when there are other, gooder – as some say here in Alibam – browsers. I personally do not like Chromium, passing it by for the actual Chrome, mostly because of the ease of integrating with Gooey. But while I have Chrome installed on all my boxes I really only use it on the Xubuntu box that I use for surfing. FireFox is the browser of choice for serious internet usage.

I have heard colleague argue the merits of almost all browsers, except IE. Somehow there are no proponents of it, only folks who opt for the path of least resistance or are conditioned. I am often surprised by the former. Some of my colleagues, people of good knowledge and mind, who just can’t get engaged with the idea of a better browser. When I wax on the merits of things like ReminderFox and other add-ins, they blink stoically and radiate an attitude of enduring frivolity. When I ask how they get reminded of things like medication schedules they admit to not and missing regularly. They are also the people who use the MegaHard email client – not Outlook, the spayed one – instead of ThunderBird or some other client that does things – and they don’t have a gMail account and don’t understand why they need anything more than their ISP account. And they don’t do gCal or any other calendering, in the main.

There are a few who work in organizations of tight IT control. These are all MegaHard shops. And because they can’t use anything but IE at work, they don’t at home. Some of them are so low on the bog ladder that they don’t even know to complain.

I tend to think of these people as the third world of IT users. They are rather like primitive denizens of some third world country who suffer all sorts of medical maladies because they lack infrastructure and the knowledge to expect it. Just as people in more developed countries expect clean water and sanitary plumbing and …. and are keen to secure these benefits for all, those of us who use other browsers seem keen to secure those benefits for all, preferably by eradicating MegaHard.

Which brings us to article two [Link] about MegaHard’s abysmal sales of their tablets. I have to admit to a bit of surprise here. After all the MegaHard clone of Unity, whatever other name they stick on the GUI, is intended for a slab. It’s the reason they abandoned their established base in hopes of gathering in all the slab slime. And it appears they are failing.

But what took me by the surprise was that the article had as abysmal analysis as an Amerikan one. The article went on to discuss the depressed sales of PCs by folks like Higgledy Piggedly and Dull. But never did they consider in their analysis that part of the reason is that the consumerists are buying slabs. So if the market is dominated by replacement, sales of boxes are going to go down and sales of slabs are going to go up as the consumerists get rid of old box for new slab. Duhhhhhh!

What I haven’t grokked yet is the effect of UEFI. As the consumerists migrate to slabs and abandon their boxes, the box demographic will become more solidly creation users and the OS demographic will shift to Linux and (shudder) Apple OS. But if UEFI won’t work well with Linux – forget the Fruit Folk – then that will further depress sales of boxes.

I won’t even mention yet any views of MegaHard owning a big chunk of Dull and what that will do for the organic Linux box makers.

computers, information, internet, browser, malware, market, stupidity

Good for Whom?

Once more a sundae, and the nature of the tabs remaining seems congruent with a general atmosphere of superstition and mysticism on the christianist pseudo-shabat. Inasmuch as I am nowly returned from a pace about the path over in the Greater Metropolitan Arab schizophrenia (indecision?) park and the warmth of the thoughts is helpful in dispelling the creaks and groans of ache and pain in the phalanges and limbs.

First, a rather poorly composed article [Link] by journalists lambasting journalists for inconsistency. If I had not observed the cattiness of human cougars at shule reunions I should be inclined to think all the cannibalistic traits of humans are modernly concentrated in journalists. To say nothing about being the epitome of inconsistency and self-service.

The subject of the article is the coverage of two different studies on the value of “organic” foodstuffs. Apparently one study was trumpeted while the other was tacited. The occurrence is so common that surprise is itself surprising. Journalism has become just another form of advertising with at least one component that is the diametric opposite of accuracy, and ‘fair’ takes on its medieval meaning of attractive or pretty or clean. As with television meteorologists accuracy is sacrificed for appearance.

But what is attractive here is consideration of the science, not the journalistic stupidity. While I do shop at “organic: markets I also shop at conventional markets as well. And I find the “organic” appellation somewhere between confusing and amusing. My first learning of a meaning for “organic” was as a sophomore in college and as humans do, first knowledge sticks even when we know it to be inaccurate later, which is hardly the case here so ridiculous is the use of the term. Simply put to me organic means the chemistry of compounds containing the sixth element, carbon. The contemporary meaning, which I can only use with will power, means unsullied by additives not ripped from plants.

The hype among the “organic” bogs is that “organic” foodstuffs and products are better than un”organic” products because they lack these “artificial” additives. To a sense they are not inaccurate so far as I can determine. As foodstuffs, they are no more nutritious than the un”organic” foodstuffs although they are seem often to taste better, occasionally worse. The “organic” products are more of a mixed bag. But what is clearly beneficial, in specific instances, is the benefit of the absence of the “artificial” additives. So if you want to claim benefits for “organic” foodstuffs it needs to be confined to taste (maybe) and absence of additives (MAYBE.)

I cannot refrain from commenting that if you drink water without added fluorides be not surprised at increased incidence of cavities. Caveat Emptor.

I also have to register my amusement and disgust at the opposites in this terminology. Are foodstuffs that are not “organic” inorganic? To me the term inorganic means chemical compounds not containing carbon (or in some cases electronic analogs – but that is quantum mechanics which is much closer to real than this nonsense.) And what makes these other compounds artificial. They are made from atoms arising from the same sources as those “organic” molecules. I know of no data that distinguished an “organic” molecule from an “artificial” molecule. That leaves only the “art” aspect of “artificial” and I cannot find disgust with human art and creativity except when its purpose is enslavement and terror. And that is almost always from organizations rather than humans per se.

On which note we more on to article [Link] the second. It seems that the slave masters (humor?) at FaceScroll are implementing a “profile meter” similar to than in LinkedIn. On surface this does not look like enslavement and terror but I shall let it run. Clearly there are many who use Face Scroll who are enslaved. I know many of those aforementioned “cougars” who have to broadcast their location on FaceScroll every time they can. Heretofore I have considered this an admixture of insecurity over aging and general boggish stupidity but now I must consider if this be a form of slavery?

I have to admit to never having completed my profile on LinkedIn. There are some things I reserve from public view. Call them privates if you will. The bogs running LinkedIn used to send me harassing emails about not completing but wisely never bothered to add any “or else” stipulations, I suspect knowing full well that the gauntlet would be used to beat them into bankruptcy.

The question is, are the bog masters of FaceScroll as intelligent, or canny, at least? I am not at all sure. Their behavior lately seems destined to reduce their sociality to full egalitarianism, for spite if nothing else. Their transition from hunter-gatherers to oligarchic capitalists has been surprising only in its rapidity, not its depths of depravity.

So we have the possibility of the challenge of gaming the completion of the FaceScroll profile in such a way as to satisfy the automated whip handlers while abusing the advertising engines to the maximum extent. One can only hope the FaceScroll managers are indeed this stupid so we may actually derive some actual entertainment from their increasingly moldy web site.

humans, behavior, health, journalism, corporations, tyranny, internet

Advertising Response

In reply to why we go with the phone company;s DSL and not Charter?

Because it’s Charter.

With the phone company I can get in my car, drive five minutes, and have a meaningful conversation with a human.

Charter has no humans, just robots who read FAQ over the telephone.

Put in analytical terms, using the phone company is like taking a risk that it will rain when you didn’t carry an umbrella; using Charter is doing nothing as the fifty kilometer meteorite streaks towards Tellus.

When the first goes wrong you get a little wet; when the second goes wrong, you’re extinct.

humans, behavior, computers, internet

Post Shabat Culling

It’s ice cream day and I have to intensify from tabhogging to tabculling so I can go get a whole new collection of tabs from the accumulator. More properly, via the accumulator.

Starting, I noticed an article [Link] in Smithsonian entitled “What is the future of Education?” Overall, not a very newsy piece since there have been lots of prior copy with the same factoids. It is a bit more insightful however, but only a bit. The theme of this is the move to online presentation. I find this odious. Back when I was a teaching assistant at the campus of the Boneyard, the chemistry shule had finally acknowledged that its freshman conglomeration where all the students taking freshman chemistry were collected into one mega-class in the largest auditorium on campus was a resounding failure. Cuts were running around 0.9 of enrollment, and drop-out were manifold. So they switched to a format where groups of 20-25 students were locked in a classroom to watch a video of a lecture and have a TA present to answer questions.

After a while we just quit watching the videos and I presented the material myself, at the demand of the students. They got great grades and I eventually got moved over to lab TAing to close the loophole. Evidently everyone had to be equally miserable.

I do not think I like the future being depicted. I realize that we have evolved a long way economically from the Greek ideal of college as a log, but I treasure the lectures I attended. I don’t know how you can teach STEM stuff in big lecture halls – all I have seen of this is failure and mediocrity – and especially not on-line. Perhaps we are abandoning STEM? Or at least rushing to turn our society into one that is stupid.

This certainly seems to be supported by another Smithsonian article [Link] on the popularity of “Fake Science”. Evidently this is the ultimate in popularized science. In sympathy of the amount of verbal harassment occurring on this day of christianist pseudo-shabat, I will not discuss further. Caveat Emptor.

While we’re not emitting hate speech on hateful things, I note an article [Link] on how the Europeans have bested (?) Apple and Amazing and the eBook publishers. Still looks too costly to me.

On a more positive side, a study [Link] by the porch walkers at Stanford U indicates that work-at-home telecommuters (?) are more efficient, productive, and satisfied. So much for the benefits of management. If anything this upholds two things: that 0.9 of all managers are incompetent (Sturgeon’s rule) and that humans are naturally workers. Similarly, a Northwestern U study [Link] indicates that the fire hose flood of information today seems to not so much overload humans as to enthuse them. We do have to ask if this has anything to do with the thinness of much of that information. And no discussion of sorting poo from pony.

On the other hand, research out of U Bonn [Link] indicates that internet addiction is related to the same mutation that causes nicotine addiction. So does this indicate that all those frustrated smokers have sublimated in pictures of felines?

humans, education, academia, computers, internet, addiction, stupidity

Roll a D99

Lovely frawg-straggling rain out there, and the Greater Metropolitan Arab Electron Uncooperative is flickering and flaying the computers. Maybe they have a bribe coming from the manufacturers of UPS?

Speaking of pay offs, I noted an article [Link] reviewing how Winders Ate does on a slab. The reviewer gave it good marks on functionality without pinging them anywhere near strongly enough on app absence. I kept asking myself, given that Metro is a copy cat of Unity, why we haven’t seen Ubuntu slabs yet? Could it be because Linux users are mostly doing work? And know how to use a computer, two attributes not often found in Winders users.

I also noted an article slamming the idea of bringing more games to Linux. I didn’t think it worth the notice at the time and didn’t note the link. I have to admit that I am not really engaged by the matter. As I have stated previously, my type of gaming is passe and the current games are unattractive, even repulsive.

What does engage is MegaHard’s abandonment of its core market, turning its back on desk and lap boxes for the sake of slabs and cells. Especially when so many old timers in that marketplace are sinking fast – Rim has become badly pitted – and many competitors still remain. The assumption that the existing base, which is patently being abandoned, will migrate with MegaHard to the plank box marketplace seems questionable. Somehow it seems more likely that when those users take up a new desk/lap box OS, they’ll stay with that for planks.

computers, internet, OS, Windows, stupidity

Internet Incredibles

It’s sundae and the day of attending services for most of the christianist sects in Greater Metropolitan Arab. That sorta makes it Shabat for those denominations. Of course they still do work and even gossip so it’s not really?

Anyway, for me, it is time to prune tabs which is not as onerous as it should be since I am operating off a small lapbox rather than one of my deskboxes – still too much sensitivity to too much emitting area and too much white space in email and browser windows.

The first tab/article is a stern criticism of Megahard.[Link] Seems that Winders Ate has been annointed as an utter disaster by some gaming guru,

“a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space”

using a pronouncement that the tile gui will drive some OEMs out of business. I have to admit that between not being a gaming type – I’m too old and the games that are out there aren’t what I want to play being an old miniatures gamer, Modern Armor and WW1 naval, transitioned to EMPIRE and PERFECT GENERAL when I got volunteered for the Yankee Army War College – and the reportage, which is turgid at least, but the implication is that the MegaHard Mafia is leaving the gaming fanatics behind in their rush to replicate Canonical’s catastrophe and become just another player in the cellular telephone/tablet market.

The article is semi-couched in this is good for Linux but I am not sure I get that unless this is one of those folks who still think Android is really a distro and not a mutation. From my parochial and heartland viewpoint Android is the new gaming OS because the gaming industry continues to seek the bottom of what’s under the Marianas Trench.

Next, there are a couple of articles: one from Marketplace Tech [Link] about how FaceScroll is going to push out more advertisements; and another [Link] by our esteemed colleague Matt Asay in the Register about FaceScroll following MySpace into the infamous accumulating Markov state of gone. Matt’s azimuth is the grail quest for a safe archive for information (in the technical sense) of personal importance – i.e., where do I stash all my photos and poetry? Since I haven’t drunk the cloud bladder lemonade his concerns are peripheral to mine. I used to have a cloud, called my house, that an act of deity put poof to and disposed of most of FD SCP and my personal importance information. You learn from such experiences, mostly to view any effort to stash stuff as temporary and hope that the destruction comes after you discorporate. Between that and a grave distrust of the shoddy state of encryption in the cloud, spiced with a bit of paranoia over the expansion of warrantless Big Brother, and I am going to keep my personal value information on many pieces of matter, redundantly.

But that is not the azimuth I wanted to pursue about FaceScroll. I put pictures on FaceScroll for sharing, not archiving. And yes, I am aware that the young are departing FaceScroll as fast (or faster) than ORFs are arriving. But I think is FaceScroll collapses it will be from economic pipe clogging rather than fashion. First of all, I am not concerned about the ads thing. There are add-ins for browsers to squash the most execrable of them. It is amusing to remind the FaceScroll suits that it is not Gooey; that I am not looking for a source of stuff but to interact with other humans. Advertisements are orthogonal to that experience. There, plain and simple. Advertisements don’t work well on FaceScroll because they aren’t relevant to its functionality. In fact, I will go out on a limb and offer the hypothesis that advertisement effect is a constant and adding additional advertisements will only dilute things.

Nor am I worried about humans abandoning FaceScroll. No one is going to go develop a new social site (that works) for ORFs. It’s been tried and failed. More than once. Contrary to the picture of market pundits, ORFs do talk to their children and grandchildren and they do have younger friends. And FaceScroll may be a hemorrhoid with all the disruptive “improvements” but it’s still order of magnitude better than Gooey(minus). Selah.

And lastly, there is a rather odious little article [Link] in SmartPlanet about how colleges need to convert sine die to internet presentation. The only factoid that I saw of concrete nature was a claim that undergrads are not learning very much. The concrete of that statement was that in my experience undergrads have never learned very much, mostly because of distractions, hormones, and absence of discipline. Yes, I learned a great deal as an undergrad but I mostly attribute that to making my own way in deciding what courses to take and consistently evading/avoiding/ignoring some rules that I don’t think most undergrads can do, especially the bogs.

That, of course, is the crux of why this lemming rush to the internet is farcical. Yes, it may work for the bogs, taking their majors in business or literature or humanities or some other fluff discipline. They can not learn in a web lecture or structured learning site just as easily as they can not learn in a human presence lecture. Of course, the down side of the whole thing is that this web shift eliminates the option of cutting lecture and learning it on your own which is what the smart bogs used to do and I suspect still do.

But the crux of the matter is that internet presentation flat does not work for nerd courses and nerds. Nerds already have a good, arms length, medium for learning course material. It’s called a book. And the eBook readers of today do not support nerd books – absence of equations and graphs and such – and likely won’t in future. But the crux of nerd courses is problem solving and that needs to be done in small sized classes where students can watch a senior (professor or grad student) work an actual problem and ask questions like “What the heck was that you just did?”and “Why did you do that?” And no matter how good the senior is, he/she can’t anticipate all the critical questions.

This is one of the primary reasons we are turning into a third world nation. It’s because we are not teaching our nerds right. That is, we aren’t teaching how they learn. We aren’t writing and drawing ad hoc and responsively on a blackboard. We’re using canned stuff that isn’t really providing what is needed, because only the student can tell you what is needed and usually only after the fact. So responsiveness and freedom are the watchwords of nerd education and that is what all of this internet presentation is doing away with. So we aren’t teaching nerds and as a result our society is being drug down to the level of bogs. Third world level.

humans, behavior, internet, computers, social, games, academia, education

Convene a Congress

Last weekEarlier this week an attempt was made [Link] – again – to pronounce some code of internet freedoms and since yesterday was the anniversary of Independence Day for the Yankee republic I though some of my wanted commentary on lists would have to be offered.
The plan is based on five principles:
1. Expression – Don’t censor the Internet
This is intriguing. Censorship is rather a slippery pole that every society persists in trying to climb, always with disastrous results. All of us dislike something in print, on television, on the internet. I personally do not care for either LOLcats or profanity, the former because I find no humor in them and the latter because I consider it to detract from actual communication. The internet is not now censorless. All of the organizational sites practice some form of censorship. Wikipedia permits rewriting so in a sense it is nothing but censorship. Even Facebook has a form of censorship that is strengthening in some areas and weakening in others as it feels the need to flow cash.
2. Access – Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks
Another intriguing, especially since the hinterland of the republic has access to neither fast nor affordable networks. There are still locations in the republic where there is effectively no internet access. So if we are to fully apply this, internet service will have to be provided by the Yankee government, which implies all sorts of things about rules and regulations.
3. Openness – Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create, and innovate.
I am not sure how this is actually different from absence of censorship. I also have my doubts that it is feasible given the commercialization of the internet and the way internet service is provided.
4. Innovation – Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
This amounts to negation of copyright. Not a bad idea. The model that is evolving is that publication delay can be almost eliminated and revenue made on novelty. Sadly this attacks the old guard of capitalist copyright accumulators who want to be paid for the very mention of their product. I find myself on the side of the revolutionaries. It has long galled me that something can be in copyright but out of print and so I am unable to acquire a copy. Ranted for years that once something goes out of print it goes out of copyright – use it or lose it. But I am not sure the authors need this form of protection any more and the corporations certainly do not deserve it.
5. Privacy – Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and services are used.
If you think about it, privacy is a form of censorship, and gets us onto the slippery pole. How about criminals? Do we protect their anonymity? I clearly think anonymity has its merits – there are some things I could not say if attached to my name and the organizations criticized had to take responsibility for. So yes, let us have privacy. Even if it means the YG has to be the ISP and we lose it.

A good set of goals/rules/rights, IMHO. But also, maybe already lost? And irrecoverable?

Nonetheless, let us convene a congress and enact such for ourselves. Let us do a Cloud William.

humans, computers, internet, government, corporations, greed, tyranny

Thrashing off the Pier 1

Still trying. Not a fun activity. I have discovered that Xubuntu 12.04 is at least 10 dB faster than Ubuntu 12.04. If I correct for disk speeds, it’s 6 dB.

At this point the only good thing to report is that at least the eye candy is not the time eater that it was in Gnome 2. But is that really a good?

The interface is a mind destroyer. It takes so much effort trying to do what needs be done that what needs be done doesn’t get done. Which may not be a bad thing. Also, the appliance-ness has grown enormously. I can honestly say this is a neub neutral interface because that’s as far as most neubs will ever get in using it. Rather reminds me of my 1984 Honda Prelude. Up to that point I could check the oil and do a,couple of minor maintenance things. On that motorcar I found that I had to buy a pair of long handled pliers to remove the (hot) dip stick without doing plastic surgery level damage to the back of my hand. Since then I have owned a number of Hondas and have resigned myself to having the shop at the dealer do all my maintenance beyond battery and petrol.

I suspect my gorge will rise as I acclimate myself to the way that this OS has abandoned the spirit of Linux. Perhaps it is time to rename what Canonical has done? Perhaps Linux -> Lummox?

Orthogonal Add-ins

MakeUseOf this morning has an article [Link] entitled ¨Stop Installing Browser Add-ons – For a Faster, Leaner Browser Use Bookmarklets Instead¨. I have no quibble with the argument that they are making which is sorta a way to move your add-on overhead to the cloud, but I was intrigued by one of their lead-in sentences,

¨Browser extras let us do wonderful things, such as control how tabs behave, make webpages easier to read, and even have a better time shopping online.¨

I was perplexed by this list. It is rather at odds with my taste in add-ons. Yes, at one time I did a lot to control where the tabs were and how they were arranged but that has gone by the by. The only thing I think I do to make webpages easier to read is to block ads, which I am told is a bad thing to do, both by the liberal social engineers and the folks selling stuff in the ads. And I don think I do anything to make shopping nicer other than to use a screen keyboard for identity information.

So I yanked out my FireFox extension page and looked:

• tab control add-ins – 0;
• webpage reading add-ins – 4 – all for rejecting cookies and the like; and
• shopping add-ins – 0.

Thatś out of 23 non-theme add-ins.

So why should I keep reading? In fact, can I take this as an indication that I am abnormal? Or is it that the nature of other people is whacked? Is the world full of bogs? And do they use add-ins.

Apparently so.

I am disappointed. Here I thought MakeUseOf was a worthwhile site. Disappointing.