microsoft must die

I still remember the early days of computers when Bill Gates
looked so smart, dropping out of Uni and getting handed
a freebee by IBM, the software rights.

What has followed is 30 years of a virtual monopoly.
And as with every monopoly, they make sh*t products.

Microsoft 8 is a new low. There was a time when
Microsoft would tweak things a bit and muddle on.
No. they could not do that this time.
Tablets were on the way. So M8 had to be for them
and concurrently for PCs.

I've got this product/virus on this computer. The
touchpad thinks it's a tablet, so I get whisked to
screens I do not want to see. This can start up the video
player without my wanting it. It's impossible to shut
off the video player. It just hangs around. The pdf
reader makes it impossible to copy text.
They still have not cured the tendency for the computer
to choose where to place the icons on the desktop.
There's no start button. I can just imagine the
standing ovation that the author of that f%&*k-up got
at the annual general meeting.

checkit: Rick Ackerman

Microsoft’s Slow Death

by Rick Ackerman on May 14, 2013 12:01 am GMT · 33 comments

I spent three hours online Friday with the Geek Squad’s best and brightest, attempting without success to fix two seemingly minor problems in Microsoft Outlook. The first is that Outlook has been forgetting the password every time it checks my e-mail server. This problem has been intermittent over the more than ten years I’ve used Outlook, a nettlesome glitch that has survived all versions, updates and security patches. Although there are thousands of web pages that purport to deal with the issue, and presumably tens of millions of PC users who have sought to resolve it, I’ve yet to find a fix. Although Outlook on a bad day duns users with endless “Remember this password?” prompts, it would be easier to teach an Irish Setter to remember the date of your wedding anniversary. Particularly maddening is that the prompts continue to pop up every three seconds, even when one keeps instructing Outlook to “Remember this password”. My other Outlook  problem is that a feature designed to test the e-mail account settings has stopped working. Activate a test and it simply locks up Outlook so that the program becomes unusable. The only way to get past this bug – until the next time — is to reboot the computer.
At the end of Friday’s tech-support marathon, Chris, a Geek Squad expert with a five-star rating, offered the same, useless suggestion that tech support personnel have been offering PC users for decades: reinstall Windows.  They do this, of course, knowing full well that it takes someone who knows his way around computers the better part of a weekend to do a complete reinstall, and the user another two or three weeks to re-install all of the third-party applications that get wiped out in the process.

A Thousand Layers of Buggy Code

I mention all of this because it buttresses a prediction I’ve repeated here many times before – that Microsoft as a company is destined for failure.  The Redmond behemoth seems well along this path not merely because of management’s breathtaking ineptitude, lack of vision and obliviousness to the needs of customers, but also because Windows has accumulated layer upon layer of buggy code atop an architecture that was never meant to handle a thousand patches, updates and iterations. How bad has Windows become?  So bad, in fact, that the latest version, Windows 8, has almost single-handedly killed off the PC business. With tablets on their way to becoming ubiquitous, PC and laptop sales were already falling sharply. The last thing in the world that Dell, Hewlett-Packard, ASUS, Lenovo et al. needed was a new version of Windows that almost no one wanted or needed.
There are so many gratutious changes in Windows 8’s interface, most of them geared toward touch-screen users, that system administrators and PC users have effectively boycotted the product rather than subject themselves to yet another time-wasting slog up the learning curve.  Microsoft, reacting with understandably little fanfare, has promised to ameliorate the global flop of this latest release with a new version of the O/S called Windows Blue. In the meantime, Windows 8 can only continue to garner negative press and the hostility of users everywhere. It were as though General Motors had introduced a jazzy new Chevy that lacked a “traditional” steering wheel, had a radio that played only hip-hop music, and brake and accelerator pedals whose positions were reversed.

‘A Lot of Ruin in an Empire’

To be sure, it is taking GM a very long time to go out of business, and the company has been in far worse shape than Microsoft for nearly two generations. There is a lot of ruin in an empire, as the saying goes.  In the case of Microsoft, with more spare cash than it knows how to deploy and an all but impregnable monopoly on PC operating systems, there is little hope that the company’s demise will come nearly as swiftly as deserved. But it seems inevitable nonetheless, since no company that does as many things – does everything – as badly as Microsoft can survive indefinitely. 

 

bark at the moon. humans & dogs

Thanks to Ozzy's big tune, we can see the effect of
dogs on humans. They teach some how to sing.

Other dog-culture achievements:
Dogging- (UK) public sex- cuz dogs ain't got motels,
doggy style- boinking like a dog,
fuckin' the dog- (North Am) being lazy


But more importantly, the relationship between dogs
and humans is complex but telling as regards how
dogs and humans developed.

I read a book called Rogue Primate which, if I remember
said that dogs showed humans how to survive in social
groups.
You know that animals tend to like a territory to themselves.
and we've always thought that humans have developed the
sense of being able to cancel the perceived threat of your
neighbours, so that you can survive in sanity.
You know that , from time to time, you're sick of all the
noise and people around, right? Well, that's the basic
need for a lack of threats. People need to be sized up
as to their threat to you, or ignored, so that you don't
go nuts, and pull knives on people.

We thought that dogs showed us how to live in packs
and cooperate. BUTT, new research from China, on
the genetic level, has shown how wolves hung around,
near human societies, benefiting from their garbage,
and changing slowly into dogs. It has to do with
serotonin which says so much for drug use in modern
society (leave that for another story).

anyway, checkit: Stowe boyd

Did We Domesticate Ourselves, Like We Did With Dogs?

Carl Zimmer reported recently on some interesting genetic research on dogs that tells us a great deal about their divergence from wolves, but also reflects back on the social mind of people.

Carl Zimmer, From Fearsome Predator to Man’s Best Friend

As they [Ya-Ping Zhang and others] reported on Tuesday [14 May 2013] in the journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000 years ago. Those early dogs would have encountered small bands of hunter-gatherers. People didn’t settle in villages to farm in East Asia until about 10,000 years ago.

After dogs split from wolves, their genes began to evolve in a new direction. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues were able to identify some of these evolving genes. A number of them, it turned out, are active in dog brains. (Dr. Zhang and some of his colleagues published some of these results last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.)

 Some of the genes that evolved early in dog evolution are involved in smell or hearing. Others are active in a region called the prefrontal cortex, where mammals make decisions about how to behave. Some genes are involved in growing connections between neurons. One gene, called SLC6A4, transports a neurotransmitter called serotonin into neurons.

 The results offer some tantalizing hints about how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would have descended from a very small population.

 That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have found, though. Instead, it appears that a large population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging the carcasses that hunters left behind.

 In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out to be true, it means that we didn’t domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

 To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4 affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.

 “Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr. Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate the presence of others.”

 Turns out that the Clan of the Cave Bear theory is wrong. We didn’t nab a mating pair of wolves and domesticate them. Instead, lots of dogs — large packs — hung around with hunter gathers, who gradually culled the more aggressive members of the packs, leaving those that were more docile and pretty soon, those that fared best were those more willing to cooperate with humans. After a short time, the proto-dogs are learning to behave, and perhaps being rewarded by squirts of serotonin in the brain when interacting with humans. This chemical leads to binding and trust when present in human brains.

 The second part of the story also comes from Zimmer. Following the release of Ya-Ping Zhang’s paper, other researcher noticed that some of the genes being tracked in the study are related to serotonin production, but also on the list is MET, which is linked to cancers, but that’s not all.

… So, then, we have found that the same genes are linked to the foundation of human and canine sociability, although human sociability evolved earlier. But, perhaps there is a tantalizing glimpse of the evolution of how the social mind evolved in people, based on looking at what apparently happened with dogs. One group — nearly modern human hunter-gatherers — was decidedly social, and encounters a relatively non-social species — wolves — who began to wander with them, eating their leavings. The interaction leads to the wolves becoming dogs, because the humans kill the meanest canines, and exert an evolutionary pressure that selects for human-style sociality.

 Imagine two hundred thousand years earlier, when one small band of early humans shared a collection of gene mutations, leading to enhanced sociality, like MET, SLC6A4, and others. (Note that this also led to a higher incidence of autism and cancer, as side effects.) Imagine that other, less social hominins might have trailed those early humans around, and the social humans might have exerted the same evolutionary pressures that we later directed on canines. We may have domesticated ourselves into being human, into being social. And maybe we aren’t finished yet.

how tech can make a disagreement into a homicide

I don't know about you , but if
somebody pointed an electronic
gun at me and it cut off my voice,
I'd basically go for the guy's jugular.

How anyone could actually accept
having their voice silenced is beyond
me, but the inventor is Japanese. That
probably explains it. Obedience is their
mantra.

Try that crap with an Italian and I'll
show you what asphyxiation does to
your voice.

cracks are starting to show in globalised food

This coming text will discuss how globalised food
is a disaster in many ways but especially for the
environment and for local communities. It's also
related to the supermarket story on my 'canuck'
blog.

coming soon

Human magnetism

Many people are aware of the degree to which
humans are removed from nature. We had many
more abilities that have lain fallow for
millenia, and some others we've just ignored.

We don't need these animal instincts because
they are not necessary when you're stuck
in a traffic jam, listening to the radio,
checking your emails on your phone,
smoking a ciggie and drinking a
store-bought coffee.

So, one research study tried to show the
benefits of animal instincts by strapping
one of those instincts onto some
unfortunate bipedal guinea pigs.
The Earth's magnetic field was
made accessible to wearers of a fancy
belt. This allowed the participants to
navigate a course blindfolded. I guess
that is the instinct that allows turtles
to return to their birthplace to spawn,
after having circumnavigated the planet
for who-knows-what-reason.

I think there was a documentary that
tagged a turtle. I seemed to have caught
a snippet of that.

Check this: Guardian
Review of Horizon on BBC2
...team of scientists from Osnabruck in
Germany who had persuaded volunteers to
wear a belt that allowed them to feel the
Earth's magnetic field for 12 weeks and enabled
them to navigate a course blindfolded at the ennd
of it. just why this particular skill was so useful
was again unclear , but the overall point was
that we may have rather more senses than we
imagine and in time might harness them
productively.

Engineer, heal thineself

The reason this blog exists is to both celebrate,
and warn against, technology. That's because
I saw that tech was taking over our lives,
slowly, and yet it was wasteful and unnecessary,
very often.

This article, below, has helped to express the
ideas I've had about over-teching. Pretty soon,
people will be second class citizens, with the
robots being first.
I just saw an ad for a tv show called "what if"
where one guest was saying how robotics will
take over much of our lives, soon and he seemed
happy about it.

I think we're already too far removed from
nature. It also precludes us ever changing
the horrible political system, because
we'll be too busy working our apps to
get our robot to do backflips, or some such
stupidity.

So, if anybody is truly reading this, the
really advanced engineers will truly improve
life and not the P/E ratios of Apple. Society
will  have to deal with the detritus of every
failed or surpassed technology.


checkit:  new statesman

What happens when engineers run the world?

The global tech over.

By Aditya Chakrabortty Published 09 April 2013 8:34

the 2 books:

Who Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier

Allen Lane, 384pp, £20

To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist

Evgeny Morozov

Allen Lane, 432pp, £20

On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines plane wearing customised underpants stuffed with explosives. As Flight 253 approached Detroit, he tried to blow himself up – along with nearly 300 other passengers and crew. It was the biggest flop in the recent history of Islamic terrorism. The baby-faced bomber succeeded only in setting his trousers on fire and burning his legs, before getting doused by fire extinguishers and being sat on by some intrepid souls in economy class. Not even Ryanair dishes out that kind of treatment.

Landed with a huge story, the papers dutifully cranked out their journey-to-jihad profiles and searched for a motivation. Abdulmutallab had been a pious introvert. “Sex torment drove him nuts,” suggested the New York Post (“The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants”). The most intriguing explanation, though, came from a couple of academics. Whatever else could be said about the failed terrorist, he’d recently graduated from University College London with a degree in mechanical engineering. That, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog wrote, slotted him into a gruesome tradition summarised in the title of their paper: “Why Are There So Many Engineers Among Islamic Radicals?”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, 9/11’s mastermind and one of its ringleaders, were both engineers. Imam Samudra, the plotter of the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002, was an engineer. Kafeel Ahmed, who in 2007 charged a Jeep into Glasgow airport, had an MPhil in aeronautical engineering.

Analysing the backgrounds of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an engineering degree – while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per cent of the male workforce in their home countries. Most of the standard explanations for this vast over-representation are no doubt familiar to diligent New Statesman readers: graduate employment across the Middle East is hard to find and, as Jean-Paul Marat could tell you, frustrated ambition is often a catalyst for radicalisation.

While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.

Had the sociologists panned their lens across from the Middle East to the west coast of the US, they would have found that same mindset not confined to the political margins but flourishing in the commercial mainstream. If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways but in its new sense of makers of technology and software. Look at the Forbes billionaire list, published in March: of the ten richest people in the world, three – Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – made their riches through engineering. Run through the companies that have become household names in the past 20 years and they are, at root, engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter.

Three things have converged to make this batch of engineers more prominent than those of previous generations who worked at such venerable giants as BAE or General Electric. First, rather than making bits of public infrastructure – power plants and bridges, for example – this new lot are in your personal space. They produce the iPhone in your pocket or the social media sites you check over lunch.

Second, the IT revolution has triggered a wave of inventions and innovations. Look out for Google Glass spectacles that enable you to browse the web and film what you’re watching. Wearers have already been given a nickname: “Glassholes”.

Finally, the politicians and the commentariat, as well as business executives, increasingly defer to the needs of those in engineering. Think of how David Cameron cosies up to Google or consider how the coalition government has cut public funding for all university teaching except in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

Precedents exist for each of these factors. Didn’t Harold Wilson get excited about the “white heat of technology”? But add the three together and lob in the propulsive force of venture capital and you have a world in which books emerge with titles such as What Would Google Do?and in which the untimely death of the chief executive of a consumer electronics company, Apple’s Steve Jobs, prompts the kind of mass grief that greeted the assassination of John Lennon. A world in which engineers – and the culture described by Gambetta and Hertog – reign supreme.

It’s the implications of this new world that Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier discuss in their new books. Where public debate still struggles to get over the giddiness brought on by all this novelty (look, youngsters in Tahrir Square on Twitter!), both writers want to draw out some of its shortcomings. Yet neither is hard-wired to technophobia. The 28-year-old Morozov confesses that he used to be a digital evangelist: “I remember perfectly the thrill that comes from thinking that the lessons of Wikipedia . . . could and should be applied absolutely everywhere.”

As for Lanier, he was one of the pioneers of virtual reality and now works for Microsoft. He is that odd combination, a member of Silicon Valley’s “1 per cent” and a philosopher who has written widely about the limits of technology. He is also the owner of the world’s biggest flute.

In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov describes how responsibility for solving social problems has been arrogated by engineers at Google and other private-sector businesses. Need to recycle more? Get BinCam, which photographs your bin’s contents and sends the image to freelancers hired through Amazon. They analyse just how wasteful you’ve been and then stick the results on – you’ve guessed it – your Facebook page for all your friends to see. It doesn’t stop there. Because your pals also have BinCams, soon an entire social network is competing to see who’s the greenest. Result: Gaia is saved. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and BinCam!

This is a prime example of “solutionism”, as Morozov calls it: the notion that a messy problem sprawling across morality and politics can be resolved with just a little engineering ingenuity and the latest technology. Solutionism is the natural extension of Gambetta’s and Hertog’s observation about the engineer’s desire to turn society into a well functioning machine – and it’s everywhere.

After a gunman killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a residents’ group named the Sandy Hook Promise sprang up, looking for new technologies to increase gun safety. Breakthrough ideas would be put in front of “venture capitalists and angel investors”. The intentions are surely sincere but I can’t help feeling that the most straightforward way to reduce gun crime would be to reduce gun ownership. For the Sandy Hook Promise, however, that smells too much like politics.

Then there’s “big data”, the concept, fashionable across Washington and now Whitehall, that any problem – from underperforming pupils to failing hospitals – can be solved by collecting some tightly focused data, crunching it and making tweaks such as shifting pupils or rejigging nurses’ shifts, rather than dealing with bigger issues, such as the poverty of the catchment area or the spending cuts being made by your local trust.

This is an approach that focuses narrowly on “what works” without ever troubling to ask: “Works for whom?” Its watchword is “smart”, which can easily be appreciated, not “right”, which can’t. Putting trust in highly educated technocrats, it is naturally less interested in public debate. Amplify this by the imperative to deliver financial returns and the result is often easy to admire – and yet to dislike.

In 2010, Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, explained how his company “is really an engineering company, with all these computer scientists that see the world as a completely broken place”. Friedrich Hayek would have recognised this sentiment. Over 60 years ago, he observed that the best engineers eventually “develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar”.

In his first book, The Net Delusion, Morozov rubbished the idea that totalitarian regimes could be toppled by “slacktivists”: Iranian hipsters retweeting badinage about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say. It was a subtle argument in which both the Belarusian and his opponents splashed around a little too much black and white but Morozov captured how protesters in the internet age often place trust in tools such as blogs and twitter simply because they’re the closest to hand.

The new book develops that picture, suggesting that a cadre of technologists and policymakers is now so depoliticised that it naturally reaches for engineering solutions. The Prime Minister gets a dishonourable mention here, on account of his enthusiasm for nudge policies to prompt voters into eating better and being greener.

All this polemicising is delivered with a delightful bitchiness and Morozov spends much of his book in hand-to-hand combat with some of his “internet-centric” opponents (Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky). The result, though, is that he pays too little attention to why we live in an age dominated by zealous engineers. One answer may be generational – that technological positivism has become the reflex instinct for a post-coldwar generation assured that all the big questions in politics have now been settled.

Or you could look at two of the societies driving the IT age. The US and India are both marked by small states, in which the aspirant middle classes cannot rely on government support in good schooling, higher education, health care and pensions. Inside your private bubble, why wouldn’t you steer clear of the hurly-burly of democratic politics and go for pragmatic individualism instead?

By not widening his focus to the political context, Morozov is as guilty of internetcentrism as his targets. Indeed, until reading these books, I hadn’t realised how much serious, non-fiction writing now resembles those quarter-hour Ted talks in which smart people rely on nifty neologisms and tidy framing to make an argument. In his book, Lanier’s only index is of new terms he has coined and where they first appear. And To Save Everything, Click Here concludes with a joke about how Morozov should have produced a book with “one big idea” but can only offer “two middle-sized ideas”.

He’s better than that. For someone who was born in 1984, Morozov has done an obscene amount of reading. Early in the book, he imagines a dinner party attended by Michael Oakeshott, Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich and Friedrich Hayek; and every time he takes on some wrong-headed internet evangelist, he lets you know just how much of their dreck he’s yawned over.

As a result, To Save Everything, Click Here comes with endnotes that stretch on for 50 pages. By contrast, Who Owns the Future? has a bunch of links to blogs and Facebook pages. And Lanier writes as if pretty much all Engine room: one of Google’s eight data centres he’s read is a bunch of blogs and Facebook pages. It is a shame, because his earlier book You Are Not a Gadget was a bracing polemic on how our reliance on IT is hollowing out culture.

......

According to Lanier, our only hope is to charge these companies for the data they gather on us. It is a cheerless future, in which 99 per cent of the population are, in effect, digital welfare claimants: doing nothing productive or independent and surrendering their most intimate details in return for spare change.

Whatever Lanier may think, Google, Apple and Amazon are not forces of nature but businesses with workers and stockholders and supply chains. There is nothing inevitable about Apple outsourcing work to China, especially when research shows that it could make its iPhones in the US and still take a gross margin of 46 per cent – one of the highest in the world. Lanier does not bother with such frippery as regulating our internet companies or nationalising these siren servers. Those would be political solutions and he is an engineer who wants to do what works.

Towards the end of his book, Morozov quotes the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “I wish it would dawn upon engineers that, in order to be an engineer, it is not enough to be an engineer.” For all his dissident qualities, Lanier is still stuck in the engineering mindset.