Ideas & Analysis

Discussions of various issues including suggested solutions to problems and pure speculation

Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad Gets Real

I read about Michael Arrington’s concept for a low-cost Web tablet back last summer, and was intrigued. Web is useful, but the resolution on this gadget (1024 X 768) would make it ideal for reading PDF ebooks, particularly textbooks and scientific/technical nonfiction with lots of illustrations. Not every type of book can be read on a cellphone, and the sorts of ebooks that require larger displays are getting precious little respect in the gadget world.

But I learned today that the Crunchpad (as the TechCrunch crowd is now informally calling it) has reached the prototype stage. They sound like they’re aimed in the right direction, but remarkably, I see no discussion at all of the device’s usefulness as an ebook reader. (I added a comment to the entry to this effect.) It looks like it can work in portrait mode, and has an accelerometer to sense when it’s been “spun.” Ebook reader utilities are not cycle-hogs, and would add little to the burden on the CPU or SSD storage.

I’m a little queasy about on-screen touch keyboards; I would use the USB port for a “real” keyboard when one is needed. I would also add an externally-accessible SDHC card slot for loading content without waiting for the inevitably slow Wi-Fi link. But beyond that, if the thing can render PDF and CHM ebooks well, I’d buy one like a shot, and pay $300 for it without regret. This is one to keep an eye on.

The New Economics of Cool

Jan 16th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

There was a very funny article by Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal this morning, about a very stylish New Yorker who converted his entire family to Macs years ago because, well, they were cool. This is easy to do when you have a good job and you know your co-op will continue to appreciate at the rate of 30% a year forever. However, now that Big Media is reminding us every day that we are being crushed under the worst Depression in world history, even the cool people are buying Windows machines because the cost of cool may far outweigh its benefits.

(By the way, although Dan looks cool–click to his Web site–he is actually a highly insightful writer who could make his reputation by puncturing cool culture as his writer’s mission. Read his stuff. I think he should start by buying a suit and getting a professional publicity photo taken. At least he hasn’t shaved his head, which the majority of cool guys do, especially once they start to go bald.)

There’s nothing wrong with Macs apart from the fact that they cost too much. I have some technical quibbles about the UI–using a one-button mouse was a hideous mistake, founded in Jobs’ condescending view that All Users Are Idiots–but it’s a very solid, well-engineered box, basically a Unix system that has been beaten about the head until it learned some manners. But that’s not why people buy them, and once The New Austerity goes mainstream, either their prices will come down or they will become the next NeXT.

MAKE Magazine regularly runs articles about making furniture out of old cardboard boxes. Odd, though, that I rarely hear anybody say that used computers work just as well as new computers–better, actually, when the new runs Vista and the old runs XP.

And cheap. You want cheap? On eBay right now as I write this, there’s a used 2.8 GHz Dell SX270 with 1 GB of RAM, a keyboard, and a mouse. Starting bid is $89.95, the auction expires in an hour, and there are no bids. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a very good machine, because I have one almost exactly like it in our condo in Des Plaines, and I very happily lay out books on it and process graphics. Add an SX270 Windows install CD (which may cost you $30) and a monitor (which you may already have) and for under $200 you have a machine that is built like a tank and will do anything you need to do. The install CD is BIOS-locked to the model (not the individual machine) and you don’t have to activate it. The only thing it won’t do is be cool.

Interestingly, there are pockets of coolness in the free software world, as I’ve discovered as I’ve kicked into high gear revising my assembly language book to be all-Linux. The cool index of Karsten “Rasterman” Heitzler’s Enlightenment desktop manager is off the charts, and Raster’s been working on it for 12 years now. He himself is one of the coolest geeks I’ve ever met, and he does it without any condescension or venom. (I’ve spoken with him in person on several occasions, though it’s been awhile.) How well it works I won’t know until I try it, but that’s a separate issue. The cool is there. Few people know about it because cool is a proxy for status, and status is a proxy for money. If it doesn’t cost money, and if just anybody can get it, then in our culture it’s almost by definition not cool.

This may change. It may change in weird ways, too. It’s currently cool to live in Manhattan, but once companies move most New York jobs to Iowa, Iowa may have to become cooler. Pockets of uncool places are sometimes cool, like Boulder and Austin, but such cool places are so expensive that they may eventually share New York’s fate. You can buy a three-bedroom bungalow outside of Ogallala, Nebraska for 10% of what a similar house would cost in Santa Cruz, and you’d be closer to the beach than much of Santa Cruz. (It’s a way better beach, too.)

Jobs will eventually follow affordable housing. Are you too cool to live in Nebraska? Heh. We’ll see.

DDJ Ascending Into Heaven–Or At Least the Cloud

Jan 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Back in the spring of 1976, my friend Gus Flassig showed me an issue of a new magazine called Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, a thin but sprightly fanzine-ish item full of articles on programming the Altair, the Kim-1, and other primordial micros. The opcodes were thick as flies, but it was very cool in a slightly goofy bit-hippie way that none of us would appreciate yet for a number of years. I subscribed off and on for a long time, though I gave away a lot of the mags when I left Rochester NY in early 1985. In early 1989, I became a DDJ columnist myself, and wrote “Structured Programming” for over four years, focusing on Pascal but occasionally Modula 2 and related issues like database techniques. I had to give it up after I started my own publishing company and that quickly became several full-time jobs, but I will always be proud to have had that slot when I did, and will always cite Jon Erickson as one of the best technical media editors who has ever lived.

This is starting to sound like a euology, right? And that’s my point for this entry: DDJ is going all-Web with the January 2009 issue. The news was broken on the blog of Herb Sutter, a C++ force and long-time DDJ columnist. The entry is notable because Herb speaks of many other “ascent into the Cloud” events within the physical media world. It’s happening a lot. The big question remains: Is this a death sentence? It certainly was for Byte, and I can’t imagine that it won’t be for PC, though I could and would like to be wrong.

I’ve always liked magazines, as both a reader and a publisher, and if the magazine business model were still viable I would still be running one. Herb Sutter doesn’t say much about why magazines are fading away. Most people probably think it’s because of the cost of the paper, the cost of mailing, and so on. That’s certainly part of it, but we shouldn’t forget the following things:

Computer technology has gotten fearsomely complex in the last ten or fifteen years. It’s very difficult to treat a programming topic usefully at magazine length. I was confronting this issue as early as 1995.
As a corollary to the previous point, people are increasingly becoming specialists, of increasingly narrow specialties. This used to break down by languages (“I’m a C/C++ guy”) but ballooning complexity is cutting out niches much finer than that. (“I’m a client-side .NET IL guy.”) There simply isn’t enough time nor mental bandwidth to learn everything, and a magazine’s reader base can only be so small and remain economically viable.
The community elements of magazines (letter columns, Q/A columns, columnists treating reader requests, etc.) are now handled very capably by online forums, blogs, and other social networking mechanisms.

Money of course, remains an issue. Paper and postage cost money, which print ads traditionally provided. (Subscriber revenues are useful but not sufficient to float a decent mag, and this was true even in 1998.) It’s an issue for Web content as well. Authors and editors need to be paid, and server space is cheap (compared to paper channels of comparable bandwidth) but it is not free. I almost hate to say this, but the transition from commercial software to free software makes an ad-based model very difficult. My magazines lived on smallish ads from smallish tool companies, and the sorts of things they used to sell are now free downloads. This is in part a consequence of the fact that personal computing is now mature, and software tools that used to become obsolete in six months can now be used for years and perhaps indefinitely without regular, radical rewrites.

We forget sometimes what made magazines so compelling: The element of surprise. Magazines exposed us to ideas and technologies and products that we might not have discovered on our own. (This is precisely why broadcast radio is important to the music industry.) The Web world is a search-engine world, and we generally ascend into the Cloud looking for something very specific, and it is in the nature of clouds to make things difficult to see unless they’re right in your face. Search engines encourage us to become better and better at what we already know, further accelerating the natural trend toward specialization in the face of increasing complexity. Magazines tended to broaden our horizons, and they were useful bathroom reading too. Pervasive home Wi-Fi is eroding even this ancient bastion of print publishing, and once a decent convertible (tablet-like) netbook matures, well, the bathroom magazine rack may vanish, and be replaced by an EEEEEEE PC in a wall-mounted charging dock.

So I would like to see DDJ continue as a viable entity, and it may, but it has to be done very carefully. It also has to be done well. One way for them to proceed is to look around the Cloud and see what’s already there and works. Make, Lockergnome, and Slashdot may already be “magazines,” and Cloud portal platforms like Mambo and Joomla can work well when intelligently configured. We still need to figure out where the money will come from, and we must remind ourselves that reading outside our core preferences is a powerful intellectual advantage. There’s a pony up there somewhere. Let’s all of us, readers and editors alike, keep looking.

So What’s a “Contrarian”?

Jan 1st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Ever since I declared myself a Contrarian Optimist and renamed my VDM Diary to ContraPositive Diary in 2000, people have been asking me what a “contrarian” is. Everybody seems to connect it with buying stock right after a market crash (not always a bad thing) or buying gold because, after all, the end of the world is coming Real Soon. Nor does it mean stubborn, although it may mean “stubborn about refusing to agree with you.” It’s a fair question, and warrants some explanation.

First of all and most fundamentally, a contrarian is a sharp stick in the eye of conventional wisdom. There are certain things that “everybody knows” even though this “everybody” is often the intersection of the sets of the captious, the lazy, and a tribe of opinion-makers with an agenda. The troubling part is that conventional wisdom is sometimes true, and sometimes in opposition to other tenets of conventional wisdom. The world is never as simple as we think, and conventional wisdom is often an oversimplification of a difficult truth, offered up to the ignorant to keep them from having to work too hard, and sometimes serving to sugarcoat an agenda in the process. Contrarians understand that conventional wisdom is the cross-product of lazy thinking and hidden agendas, and go digging for the truth. Where to dig is important, and generally not obvious.Contrarians pay attention to those who doth protest too much, and look for clues in the sound and the fury. Much can be learned by listening to fools and discerning their agendas; fools are less adept at concealing agendas than the people who originated the agendas.

Agendas are key. Contrarians do not swear fealty to tribes or tribal ideologies. (Tribalism is a special danger to civilization, and I’ll expand on this issue here on Contra as time allows.) Tribes are groups who define their own specific conventional wisdom–a collection of ideologies that I call “received opinions”–and then enforce it within the tribe as mercilessly as they must. Deep psychologies are at work here. There seems to be a peculiar and powerful desire in some personality types to offer fealty to a tribe, in a very deep and preverbal way that precludes any meaningful opposition to the tribe’s ideologies. We are looking at things we inherited from our primate ancestors, things we’ve had since before we had language. Such people are pretty much owned by the tribe, and serve the needs of tribal leaders while feeling that the fate of the world depends on their loyalty to the tribe and their vilification of The Enemy–basically, competing tribes.

Contrarians may hold positions that they develop over time, but they do not swear fealty to anything, and reserve the right to change their minds, and recognize their occasional responsibility to do so.

Changing one’s mind is good exercise (way better than leg lifts) and Contrarians do it as often as necessary. Key here is that contrarians are not certain. Contrarians doubt everything, in the older and higher sense of “doubt,” meaning to recognize the incompleteness of a particular understanding of something. Doubts do not preclude faith. Doubts, in fact, are how faith happens. Certainty is how faith dies. Faith may well be defined as “conditional acceptance of something for which we have incomplete corroboration.” I have personal doubts about whether God exists, but I also have faith that He does. This is not schizophrenic; this is how it works. When you become certain of something, the game is over, the doors are locked, and the lights inside go out. Further insight is impossible, and further movement toward wisdom does not happen. (Worse, people prone to certainty are easy pickins’ for tribal leaders who need foot soldiers.) Certainty, after all, is the conviction that there is nothing more to be learned. After that, what’s left but watching hockey?

Issues of God and religion may be bad examples; I’m just odd that way. I believe in the laws of physics, but I also know that somebody with Major Doubts got the “law” of parity conservation repealed in the 1950s. That’s how science works, and in these days of belligerent certainty, a true scientific mindset is a contrarian attribute. I will not be surprised when String Theory gets shot in the head by some doubter somewhere (who may not even be born yet) and I won’t get annoyed when it happens. Less cosmic and closer to home, I am pretty sure that eating carbs makes you fat and eating fat makes you thin. I won’t say that I know for certain, but the more I look, the more evidence I’ve found to balance my doubts. My doubts remain. This doesn’t bother me. Nor would being proven wrong. I enjoy changing my mind when the evidence suggests that it’s necessary. The process is painful, but so is a twenty-mile hike. The pain will pass.

Doubts are a manifestation of humility. We always know less than we think we do, and the best way to learn more is to assume that you know less going in. No matter what you think you know, you are wrong. And so am I. A contrarian, however, is willing to admit it, and keep on diggin’.

It’s not all drudgework, this contrarian business. A contrarian enjoys the perversity inherent in being a contrarian. A touch of perversity keeps your crap detector sharp, and prevents you from falling into predictable ruts that all too often lead directly to tribal enslavement.

The more I read wine snobs dumping on sweet wine, the more I enjoy sweet wine. The more some people froth about Global Warming, the more intrigued I am by the possibility of Global Cooling–and the research that I’ve pursued there has been a lot of fun. I enjoy tweaking cultural snobs of all types, and my practice in being a contrarian has allowed me to work both sides of most of these streets: I’ll waltz but damn, I’ll polka! I read Chaucer in Middle English, but I like country music and I have a cowboy hat made by Ronald Reagan’s hatmaker. I like a good souffle, and I like Egg McMuffins. I write my reserved words in uppercase. (My language allows that. Sorry about yours.) My mix CDs jump between the Chicago Symphony and The Peppermint Trolley Company. Bach, sure. Barry Manilow, no problem.

Ruts, after all, are horizons pulled in too close. Shove ’em back whenever you can. I know dopers and scientists and crackpots and 4-star generals, and I have enjoyed the company of all of them. Life is full of irony and little weirdnesses, and as Art Linkletter hugely profited in learning, people are funny. Contrarians strive not to take anything too seriously. (We fail sometimes, but we try.) Even, or especially, ourselves.

Finally, a contrarian is free. This shouldn’t be necessary to say, but so much of modern life consists of surrendering your intellectual freedom to tribes of various kinds for dubious rewards. Tell the weasels to –ck off. (Tsk. Really, now. The hidden word is “back.”)

So I begin 2009 and a rebooted Contra, with a promise to revisit some of the points here in more detail as time permits. Happy New Year. Keep an open mind. And stay tuned.

The Real Problem With Big 3 Bankruptcy

Dec 28th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

I’ve been very puzzled by Big Media’s consensus that we simply can’t allow the Big Three to file for bankruptcy. I guess too many people think that “bankruptcy” means sending everybody home, closing the doors forever, and selling off the machines for ten cents on the dollar. There are, of course, forms of bankruptcy that work that way, but that’s not what anybody’s talking about. Chapter 11 bankruptcy is about reorganization with an eye toward continued operation. The reorganized company is forgiven some of its debts and is given more flexibility to remake itself as a profitable operation. That’s what all three of our automakers should be doing, and should have been working in that direction for some time. But GM’s board says that bankruptcy is not an option.

In cruising online articles, I find it peculiar that no one is raising an interesting possibility: Bankruptcy for the Big Three means an end to the UAW as we know it—and the Big Three can no longer operate their plants without the UAW’s help. Chapter 11 would basically allow a judge to tear up an automaker’s union contracts, allowing the firm to cut salaries, lay off as many people as it wants to without union consultation, and nullify work rules. It basically turns a union shop into a union-less shop (not a non-union shop, but a shop in which the union exists without any power) and the unique problem with that is that without UAW cooperation, it’s unclear whether GM, Ford, or Chrysler management know enough about their own SOPs to make the plants work. The UAW, seeing its own inevitable death (or at least irrelevancy) would have no strong motivation to work with reorganized automakers. Whether or not the rank and file would want to keep working, the UAW could shut the American portion of the industry down, in a strike not so much against management as against American society. It would be a weird twist on the goofy Ayn Randian idea of creative people withdrawing from society to punish society for not “appreciating” their self-defined importance. “Give us billions of dollars annually forever or you won’t be able to buy Chevies anymore!” Uhhh, no. It won’t work for the Objectivists, and it won’t work for the UAW.

On the other hand, such a shutdown, as hard as it would be on the workers, could be the only way to force the changes that have to happen: The Big Three would close for perhaps as much as a year, and maybe more, while plants are shuttered, marques retired (do we still need Buick? Or Pontiac?) and the entire process of making autos rebuilt from the ground up, more along the lines of non-union plants operated in the South by overseas companies. There’s a good description of what such a process might be like over at The Deal, and although it goes deeper into the finance than most of us could follow, it’s worth a look. This would not be the end of the world. It needn’t be the end of the UAW, either, but the UAW will have to retool itself every bit as much as management will have to retool the plants.

The other and perhaps more serious problem with the UAW is that GM (as an example) has three times as many retiree members as working members, and retirees have voting rights. In effect, the UAW is no longer a worker’s union but a pension management organization, and this should make us a little uneasy. Keeping the plants running is no longer the overriding concern of UAW membership. The Feds absorbed the pension plans of dying railroads, and this may be one reason we cannot make passenger rail service work over here. (The article is ten years old but worth reading.) There is some danger that a special autoworkers’ retirement system could make it impossible to produce autos profitably here, but I haven’t been able to find enough on this to have a strong opinion.

I guess the whole situation is a lot more complex than anyone has understood prior to now. Taylorism and the century-long one-time labor shortage created by industrialization made trade unionism inevitable, but both of those forces are now history. The Big Three need to be remade along the lines of the Little Five, the foreign-owned “transplant” automakers that seem to be doing quite well in the US. They are not sweatshops, and their people seem to be happy. The UAW may refuse to do this, and management probably doesn’t know how. Without cooperation by both, the task may be impossible, and American automaking may go the way of the railroads, or become impossible except for foreign corporations. It’s a weird, sad business.

Is Everybody Happy?

Dec 19th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

I just ordered two books: Gross National Happiness by Arthur Brooks, and The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop. The books are part of my long-term research into why we think and act the way we do. I’ll report further next year when I summarize my thoughts so far, but sniffing around online for reactions to Brooks’ book has raised an interesting question: Can we in fact measure happiness?

I don’t always agree with Arthur Brooks, but I admire his willingness to bring up issues that seem calculated to infuriate liberal opinion-makers—and back his opinions up with reasonable research. One of his controversial positions in Gross National Happiness is that happiness appears to correlate with intensity of religious feelings. Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson challenges that thesis in his blog, and whereas it’s a reasonable counterpoint, one of the comments below Wilkinson’s essay hit the whole problem between the eyes: People belonging to deeply conservative religious organizations are pressured, sometimes intensely, to say that they’re happy. (The commenter claims to be a lapsed Evangelical.) This maps with my own experience dealing with the conservative Catholic fringe, and yet the truth is that a lot of these people seem to me to be not only deeply unhappy, but on the thin edge of panic.

Why this should be is a subject I hate to broach at all and can’t even attempt right now, but set it aside for the moment. The real flaw in Brooks’ research may be that asking a person if he or she is happy is not a useful way to measure happiness. I see research summarized online indicating that the people in Nigeria are the happiest people in the world, though more recent research tags the Danes. The summaries understate the obvious: Happiness does not mean the same thing to all people. Worse, there are cultural pressures in a lot of places to fit in and not make a fuss (Japan comes to mind) and heavy pressure in religious and other tribal organizations to claim that the tribe provides everything they need to be happy—leading their adherents to make the statements that are simply expected of them. It’s like the ritual answer to the seminal rhetorical question, “How ya doin’?” People who answer something other than “Great!” don’t really understand the ritual.

It might be more useful to measure happiness by way of things like public civility, rate and tenure of marriage, incidence of alcohol and drug abuse, and so on. If research must be based on questionnaires, it may be possible to approach the matter from the other side, by asking more oblique questions about feelings like satisfaction, pain, sadness, or enthusiasm, or at least things that are not obviously a part of cultural or religious scripts. The truth may be that the whole question is meaningless; after all, what is the objective experience of the color red, or the taste of dry wine? We all experience the world differently, and we interpret that experience for ourselves through the lens of our culture and the social structures that are the most important to us. If we badly want to be part of a sophisticated social culture, we may choke down a crappy bitter Cabernet and praise it to the ceiling even if (to us) it’s (red) swill, because that’s what the cultural leaders and our “initiated” peers expect. This is a very deep well of inquiry, and I will be writing more about it in months to come.

We’ll see what Brooks has to say when the book arrives, but I’m suspicious of the premise, even though I would be happy (as it were) to be proven wrong.

The Algernon Conundrum

Dec 8th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

My previous entry on drug prohibition (December 5, 2008) triggered a great deal of discussion, and prompted someone to send me a link to a story on chemical cognitive enhancement. People are using a number of drugs and non-regulated chemicals to give themselves a performance edge at work or school, and the question of whether this is a good thing or not is complex. Caffeine tops the list of cognitive enhancers by popularity; I also have an intuition that certain “smart drinks” containing herbals like ginko biloba really work because they have more caffeine than Mountain Dew. Most cognitive enhancers are stimulants of some kind, and people who depend on them often lose sleep, which some research suggests is behind a great many health problems from obesity to hypertension. Other less obvious effects may exist. Caffeine is ancient but most other nootropic drugs are not, and we have no clue what they might do to the human system over an adult life of forty years or more.

However, someday we will know. The question then becomes: If we can improve brain function with chemicals that have no adverse effects, should we? And if those chemicals actually make human beings brighter, less angry, more social, or more effective in other ways, are there grounds for restricting their use? One could argue that life’s game is now all about brains and personality—brawn went out of fashion as a career choice a generation ago—and letting people “cheat” with pills or patches is fundamentally unfair to those who can’t afford the pills or patches or by some odd quirk of physiology do not respond to them. Beyond that, objections thin out pretty quickly. The benefits are immense, and if the costs were modest, we could make the enhancers available to anybody who wanted them.

The remaining objection is subtle: There are rarely any free lunches. Assuming that we can find cognitive enhancers without some sort of damaging side effects might be naive. Evolution made us as we are, and did so at the cost of billions of “bad throws” of the genetic dice. Making better humans may come at a cost, and the SF writer in me wants to ask questions like this: Suppose you could boost your intelligence radically using a chemical that cranked up brain chemistry at the cost of burning your brain out after forty years or so. I’m not talking about a little better detail recall or a little more personal energy to work through your do-it list. (That’s what people who use Ritalin or Provigil today are achieving.) I’m talking about being able to grasp and integrate massive amounts of information into your daily experience of life; of being able to hold dazzlingly interesting discussions with other people that range across all human knowledge; of being able to understand the ways that widely separated facts interlock and shed light on things that you would never have thought were related at all. Burning through a do-it list a little faster is just a temptation to add more drudgery to your life. But being able to kick back and your chair and Put It All Together, wow! That would tempt me. I’m not naturally prone to envy, but I confess to being a little envious of the dazzlingly bright people I’ve met in my life. Looks, eh. Wealth, eh. Power, yukkh. Brains, yeah.

Now, suppose that being such a person would reduce the length of my life from eighty-five to sixty years. Would I still be tempted? That’s a tough question, especially if the last twenty-five years of my life were assumed to be lived within a gradually deteriorating body. To have a dazzling mind while still having a body capable of making use of it—that’s the temptation. If the cost is early death, well…what would you do?

I call this the Algernon Conundrum, from Daniel Keyes’ seminal story and novel, Flowers for Algernon, which I read in high school and which affected me deeply. A mentally handicapped man becomes a genius through medical intervention, but the effect is short-lived, and discovered to greatly shorten the life of the lab mouse (Algernon of the title) that first underwent the procedure. Charlie soons reverts to his original self, with the implication that he will die far younger than his peers. The novel side-stepped the obvious question: Was it worth it? That was forty years ago, and I still haven’t decided. I doubt I’ll live long enough for it to be a choice I’ll have to make, but I often wonder how our grandchildren will deal with the difficult tradeoffs that medical technology will inevitably offer them. Drugs? Getting high, well, that’s going to be the least of it.

Malware from SourceForge?

Nov 8th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

I've been chasing something very odd here recently. For about a year nowI have used a FOSS utility called MozBackup to both archive and move my 1.7 GB mailbase around. It has always worked beautifully, but when I used it to restore my mailbase onto my new quad-core machine last week, the mailbase did not come back intact. I was getting weird error messages about the inbox not truncating when messages were moved into the junk folder, etc. which made me wonder what was going on.

Ok. This is a quad-core machine running XP SP3. I deliberately set it up so that AVG 8 runs during the day and not at 2 ayem, because I want to observe what effect multiple tasks in multiple cores has on overall system response. So every day at 1 PM, AVG 8 runs a full scan. It ran a full scan on all drives yesterday, and came up with nothing except warnings about a couple of revenant tracking cookies.

Late yesterday afternoon, I copied the current MozBackup installer file from my installers archive on D: to my “installed installers” folder (where I put installers for software installed on the machine) on C:. Instantly, AVG 8 set up a howl that it had found a trojan in MozBackup-1.4.8-EN.exe, the installer for the instance of MozBackup that I have had installed on the quad-core since June. The trojan was called Generic12.HTC.

That's odd in itself: On all the bazillion-squared pages that Google indexes, there was not a single mention of “Generic12.HTC” yesterday . Nor is there any entry by that name in AVG's virus encyclopedia. This morning, however, I suddenly see five or six mentions indexed during the night. It looks like a false positive, but I'm still a little nervous.

As a test, I went back to SourceForge and downloaded another copy of the file. As soon as it was complete in a temp folder, wham! AVG's “resident shield” utility called it out as Generic12.HTC. Now, I'm not used to thinking that SourceForge downloads can be malware sources, though there's no reason that it's impossible. However, the MozBackup-1.4.8-EN.exe file has been on my hard drive since June, and has passed muster every afternoon that the machine has been powered up. The file's time stamp has not changed. I can only assume that during yesterday's daily update, AVG brought down a signature that matched something inside the file—and that would be a mighty freaky coincidence if true.

The other freaky thing is that after I deleted MozBackup 1.4.8 and installed the previous version 1.4.7 (which is in use on three of my other machines, including my X41 tablet) the mailbase restore worked perfectly. So are there two problems here or one?

The handul of reports surfacing this morning seem to indicate that it's a false positive, which would make sense, given that it's been on this system since June without AVG making noise. So maybe I don't need to warn you against the 1.4.8 version. However, it does look like 1.4.8 doesn't necessarily import an archive created with 1.4.7. Yes, a coincidence, and a weird one.

…If You Can Keep It

Nov 4th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Ben Franklin's grim congratulation is ringing in my head tonight, and even though the whole election thing will (with some luck) soon be over, I'm sad. A good part of the sadness is a consequence of all the hateful tribal rhetoric I've had to listen to for over a year now, but a lot of it is for personal reasons that I'm not talking about at the moment. (A couple of people on my LJ friends list know what's going on, and I'll ask them not to mention it.) Carol's in Chicago and I'm here by myself. The universe's perversity has tended toward a maximum today: My dinner exploded in the microwave and (in a stunning reversal of the usual puppy scheme of things) I peed on my dog. I'll tell that story in the next Odd Lots; we have more important things to discuss tonight.

What's the key issue this election year? Lord knows it's not gay marriage; we've heard nary a peep about that. Nor is it abortion, nor any species of sexual shenanigans, nor the separation of Church and State. Health care is a live issue, but the War is winding down and people just don't seem especially exercised by it anymore. The economy, sure—but $2.35 gas relieves a lot of other pain, and we won't know much about the future until the next regime takes its seats in the new year.

What I'm seeing a lot about is a far darker and more dangerous issue: Vote fraud. The Wall Street Journal ran a huge article on it the other day, and explained what any reasonably aware person has already heard: The Democrats tend to commit vote fraud by giving the vote to people who are not qualified (the dead, noncitizens, imaginary individuals, family pets, people who have already voted) and Republicans by keeping the vote from people who are qualified, by imposing unreasonable conditions on the exercise of the franchise. No partisan squeals allowed here; nobody's hands are clean. It happens (I'm a Chicago boy; like, vote fraud doesn't happen? Puh-leez.) and it highlights a debate few people seem willing to take up: Should we work to minimize fraudulent voting? Or should we work to minimize voter disenfranchisement? It is not a simple question, and in an era when Presidental elections are swung by 400-vote margins, it is a gravely important one. The two positions are in tension: The harder you crack down on fraudulent voting, the more likely it is that marginal voters will be discouraged from voting at all, even if they're qualified. The harder you crack down on disenfranchisement, the more likely it is that unqualified voters will slip through the nets, via deliberate fraud or simple confusion.

The photo ID issue is an interesting one from a partisan perspective. We are essentially the last nation in the developed world that does not require presentation of a government-issued photo ID to vote. There is rich irony in Democrats screaming “disenfranchisement!” over a requirement long enforced by lefty paradises like France and Sweden. People say I lean right, but I have long supported a national ID card, especially since we already basically have one in our state drivers' licenses. The issue, as I have said before many times, is not the existence of the card itself but what we allow government to do with it. Enumerate the circumstances under which the card may be demanded, and make any noncompliant request a felony with a one-year minimum sentence. I'd support that in a heartbeat. I'm amazed, in fact, that vote fraud is so lacking in penalties. Did Acorn in fact register a goldfish to vote? If so, somebody needs to do time. Did Republicans purge registered voters from the roster in Ohio? Somebody needs to do time. Lots of somebodies. If we must spend more money—a lot more money—ensuring that Somebody Is Watching while the democratic process operates, I'm good with that. Even honest mistakes must be punished. When democracy itself is at stake, there are no honest mistakes.

Don't deny it: Democracy is at stake. Vote fraud is a frightening issue because it undermines faith in the democratic process. When too many people are convinced or have convinced themselves that [The Enemy] has stolen the election (plug in whichever Enemy you are tribally obliged to condemn here) they will be less likely to even attempt to vote, and much more willing to listen to clever tyrants who will “clean up the mess” and make those trains run on time.

I'm a purist on issues like this. Vote fraud aside, money is also a dangerous corruptor of the democratic process. Money is not speech. Money is force, and force has no place in the democratic process. Shouting down your opponents is not debate. (And my readings tell me that what the First Amendment was really intended by the Founders to guard against were government reprisals against political opponents.) It may sound perverse, but the contrarian in me feels that the (careful) regulation of political speech connected with the democratic process actually yields greater freedom to more people in deciding who should govern (and how) than simply allowing the richest contender to buy the podium. I think the hoary old stoplight metaphor applies here: Uniform and careful restriction of movement by stoplights allows greater overall freedom of movement on crowded roads than just letting everybody drive without any regulation whatsoever until we're all in a state of wreck-littered gridlock.

I'm running long tonight, but here's my whacko solution to the money issue, which I may have mentioned in this space before, though it's been awhile: Require that all campaign contributions go to a bank account created for the office (or the initiative proposition) rather than to a candidate. Then give contributed money in equal proportion to all candidates who qualified for a place on the ballot for that office. It's trickier for initiatives, but it could be done with some care. Supposedly campaign contributions are not to buy the office, but to educate the public. If that's the case, how better to inform the public without preference than to allow each candidate an equal budget with which to inform the public? Hands off the content of the message, obviously, but make sure that nobody's simply writing a check for the podium and walking away with the election in his pocket.

I know, I know, it's impossible. But trust me: It would work, and we would all be freer for it.

_ . . . _

And with that I bring this series on politics to a conclusion. It's been a long day. I'm tired, I'm sad, and the kitchen smells of incinerated salmon. I voted two weeks ago using the Colorado mail-in ballot, which is good, or I'd be even sadder. I never fail to vote, but voting always depresses me. I do the research. I sit in my comfy chair, and I think. I think of the consequences of supporting this candidate or that candidate, and each of the two sides of every initiative proposition I am faced with. I take notes. I read those notes. I look more things up. And I think some more. And I get sadder.

Consider what I'm facing: I'm deciding who goes bankrupt. I'm deciding who loses their businesses. I'm deciding who loses their homes. I'm deciding who gets their money taken away, and to whom that money is given. I'm deciding who goes to war to be maimed or killed. I'm deciding who gets thrown in jail and for what offenses. I try to see the consequences of each decision I make, but it's like trying to look ahead in a Go game: Very soon a combinatorial explosion of possibility singes the remains of my hair to remind me that no matter which way I decide, somebody wins, and sombody loses. Somebody gets rich, somebody goes broke. Lives are destroyed.

This is the naked face of politics: There is no moral high ground. There are no good solutions. In truth, there are no solutions at all, only endless compromises in which countless good people suffer. That is the human condition, and this is how it works in a democracy. All other mechanisms of governance are far, far worse. All of which is good to keep in mind tonight, and on all future nights when you have taken the vote (which is to say, the lives of others no less worthy than yourself) into your hands. Politics is not joyful. Politics is not fun. If politics does not break your heart, you have no idea at all what the hell you're doing.

What Is Government Actually For?

Nov 3rd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I'm finally climbing out of the worst headcold I've had in three years, and although I'm still not at my ever-best, it's time to continue the series here on politics without a) naming individual candidates, and b) anger. Point a) is a requirement I've placed on myself; you needn't feel thus constrained. Point b) is in force for both of us, and so far (reading the comments on LiveJournal) I think it's working extraordinarily well.

Today, I'd like to go back to fundamental principles and ask, What is government actually for? We don't teach anything about the ideas behind government in this country anymore, because any time one tries, his or her tribal opponents yell, indoctrination! This is largely due to the sad fact that there are two theories of wealth locked in eternal warfare: The position that wealth happens by luck or corruption and must be redistributed; and the position that wealth happens by work and must be retained by the worker as his or her property.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Minor wealth is usually obtained by work. Great wealth is almost always more luck than anything else, at least in developed nations where corruption does not completely dominate government. (I use “wealth” in the technical sense here, as owned assets of any kind, without any implication of scale. A man with a quarter has some wealth, even if he's starving to death.) It seems pretty clear from my reading of history that wealth tends to concentrate over time until wealth concentration makes societies unstable. This is one point (among many others) that Will and Ariel Durant make in their superb little book, The Lessons of History. The redistributionists have history on their side. But…you can't redistribute what you ain't got. (Marxism tried to do this, and killed 100,000,000 people in the process.) So the fundamental purpose of government is this: To establish and maintain the conditions necessary to keep the rate of wealth creation ahead of population growth. Put another way: Government needs to create a framework within which people can work to support themselves. By “framework” I do not mean government jobs, which exist only by siphoning wealth out of the private sector. I mean things like maintaining civil order and a stable currency, respect for private property, allowing trade with other nations, and defense from attack. I could put a number of other things on the list, but those are the biggies.

It's a complicated and subtle business. Total freedom does not maximize the rate of wealth creation; I've read that in many places. There's a sweet spot where a certain amount of regulation, read here as limits on economic freedom, yields the highest rate of wealth creation. Alas, there's no tag on the graph to mark the spot—and the location of the spot changes unpredictably. There is, however, a huge hint: Maximizing economic opportunity for individuals (as opposed to public or private corporate bodies) probably leads more directly toward the sweet spot than anything else we could do. This includes access to markets, choice of education, career, and workplace, and freedom to create new businesses (and thus jobs) with minimal interference.

What troubles me about modern politics is that the forces controlling both sides are opposed to expanding the economic freedom of individuals. Both sides look to government to expand their power, and power is really what politics is about. On the left, the tendency is for the aggregation of power of governmental and semigovernmental bodies at the expense of individuals. On the right, the tendency is toward aggregation of power of large corporations against individuals and especially against entrepreneurs. The right/left mapping to political parties breaks down here: The most rabid Republicans I know are small business owners, who are willing to work for little or nothing when starting out or when conditions get bad. The big corporate people I know are much more nuanced in their politics, and many admit to being Democrats. This seems obvious in retrospect, but it took a fair bit of time for me to figure out: Big corporations fear startups far more than they fear government. (Like recognizes and begets like: The bigger a corporation is, the more it actually begins to look like a government.) Governments and corporations both strive toward monopolies; governments of force, and corporations of markets. Without limits, those monopolies work against the well-being of individuals, and they grow unless explicitly checked.

The depressing thing about this election cycle is that neither party seems especially interested in economic opportunity for individuals, and especially in job creation. The Democrats are basically owned by Big Labor and the tort bar. The Republicans (what's left of the party, at least) are beholden to certain large corporations who want protected markets, and a relative handful of conservative social organizations that are mostly religious in underpinnings. There's not a whiff of populist sentiment on either side. Many people who would otherwise lean Republican are disgusted and will vote Democratic just to kill the cancer of the last eight years.

There's opportunity there; the Republicans could win (long-term) by losing. It's interesting to look back and see that when the Democrats have taken control of all three elected branches of government, they don't hold it very long. If the Republican party is ever reborn with a genuinely populist message, they could well put the Democrats back into the broom closet for another twenty years. Much collateral damage happens as the pendulum swings, but I don't think anybody knows how to keep political parties from abandoning the center, which these days means respect for the primacy of the individual against moneyed interests at either extreme of the left/right axis. The party that takes the center and keeps it will rule until they forget why they came to rule.

I see from my notes that I could go on for another several thousand words, but that's all I want to deal with tonight. And tomorrow, mon dieu. I wish I could just jump directly to Wednesday.