zero-day photo
Tue, 13 Jun 2006
Conference Whuffie
Evan wants to implement something like the Whuffie system for conferences. "Like a little LED that glows red if you're red-hot, blue if you're nobody, green if you're the cool-kid dark-horse outsider. I'm not sure how the algorithm would work -- I'm thinking some kind of RFID transponder with other people's head movements counting as a vote gesture."
Or how about using Bluetooth to log people's movements at the conference and train a Bayesian filter on the log of where people go? Purposeful striding from speaker lounge to podium area: good. Sitting around: bad. Proximity to 1337 people: good.
Tue, 09 May 2006Lightweighting vs. bullshit
Harry G. Frankfurt points out that we have no theory of bullshit, and that "very little work has been done on the subject." His On Bullshit makes progress toward coming up with a definition, and he concentrates on one meaning of the word: communication that is "unconnected to a concern with the truth."
By this definition, the most effective bullshit does not involve actual lying, and the fact that bullshit is not aiming at the truth doesn't mean that it's careless or unconsidered about getting to where it is aiming. Prof. Frankfurt writes, "The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in those fields there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who—with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth—dedicate themselves to getting every word and image they produce exactly right."
Bullshit in that sense is a huge problem, and so calling bullshit where needed is the best thing you can do for the rest of the audience. Prof. Frankfurt, though, is concentrating on one side of the bullshit problem, which is probably the side that is more visible to a professor who has to spend a lot of time reading papers but has the help of a department secretary when dealing with the university administration.
The other side of the bullshit problem is what we complain about when we do "bullshit paperwork" or fill out a "bullshit form". It's what Prof. Frankfurt calls "unnecessary routine tasks or ceremonial." A "bullshit meeting" isn't necessarily a meeting at which bullshit is spoken, but is a unproductive meeting, one that delays progress toward its supposed goal. Normally, though, a bullshit meeting involves both kinds of bullshit: the anti-truth kind and the anti-productivity kind.
Bullshit in the second sense imposes transaction costs, and people have strong economic motivations to cut it out. Just as a USB cable with four conductors is less expensive than a parallel cable with 22, low-bullshit interactions are less expensive than high-bullshit ones.
And just as the amount of copper per bit transferred is going down, the amount of bullshit of the second kind in human interactions is going down, too. Lightweighting, as applied to aluminum cans, is improving the design of a product to do the same thing with less material. It overlaps with Buckminster Fuller's idea of Ephemeralization, which is replacing one technology with one a smaller, lighter one.
The idea of lightweighting is now showing up in business APIs and Web 2.0. While putting together a Wiki for a Linux device driver unconference, it occured to me that all of these activities: Web 2.0, Wikis, unconferences, and the Linux driver process are part of a larger lightweighting trend that's applying everywhere that people communicate and cooperate.
David Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network points out a famous example, the Internet. Just move the bits, stupid, and businesses that depend on doing creative things with bits that get moved for them will grow up around you and buy your service, even if you completely lack telco-style quality of service and accounting. It's not those features themselves that constitute "phone company bullshit," but the transaction costs involved in selling them and billing for them.
Here's another one: agile software development. More work on the software, less work on putting the cover sheet on your TPS reports or writing huge word processor documents of stuff that will end up never being implemented.
Corporate IT processes are having to do more with less, so, as JP Rangaswami points out, in-house IT operations have turned to lightweighting. "Reporting mechanisms of the past" (which sounds like a polite expression for the B word) had to go. "Architecture and standards and roadmaps and strategy papers and implementation plans became harder to maintain to any worthwhile accuracy."
Free-software development in the open doesn't meet the common definition of "agile", but it's lightweight in other ways. In the Linux device driver development process, instead of locked-down ABIs and formal certification programs, you can join a simple, common core/driver interface consensus—both technical and normative—and have one person do the work that requires, in one case, 150 for a proprietary OS. As Greg K-H contributed to the FreedomHEC Wiki, "Realize that Linux kernel developers are easy to approach, and work directly with, no management levels are present to slow things down."
And of course, the unconference system itself is an example. How much of a conference program committee's work is planning the conference, and how much is planning the program committee meetings? Cut back the overhead.
What's going on is that we're somehow, against all odds, collectively giving ourselves permission to eliminate bullshit. And one example of lightweighting breeds another. Eben Moglen writes, "wrap the Internet around every brain on the planet; spin the planet. Software flows in the network." In that example, the lightweight Internet standards process creates an environment suitable for peer production of software. And now lightweight software processes are enabling lightweighting of business processes that depend on that software and are increasingly embodied in it.
Lightweighting advertising, replacing bullshit such as focus groups with real results, is the engine behind Google earnings. And Google's success is setting an example for lightweighting the rest of Marketing.
Not surprisingly, the peer-production-enabled, Google-gaga software industry is the place where Marketing is most in the bullshit-removal crosshairs. Larry Augustin writes, "The problem is that the traditional enterprise software business model is broken. A rabid search for new customers and revenue growth has caused sales and marketing costs to spiral out of control. In fact, Rick Sherlund at Goldman Sachs estimates that in 2005 software companies will spend 82 percent of new license revenue on marketing and sales efforts. That's up from 66 percent in 2000."
Larry has it right, but in a world where bullshit is laid on so thick that every company seems to call itself a "global leader", it's easy to forget that marketing is full not just of the truth-sapping kind of bullshit, but burdensome transaction costs, too, and the latter is now something we're giving ourselves permission to eliminate. Yes, lightweighting is already moving the ad budget from unaccountable forms of advertising to the ruthless efficiency of Google, but there's a huge architecture of marketing bullshit behind the scenes that's in for the ruthless efficiency treatment, too.
Larry and I talked about this at LinuxWorld—a lot of the cost of marketing in the software industry isn't just communicating with a view to getting people to do business with you, it's bullshit around deciding what to make. Top-down marketing organizations are much worse at the latter than true markets are, because markets get better information out of people than marketing does. Peer production by user-engaged developers is a working solution for the "what to make" problem now; prediction markets are a good possibility for a method that could join it, I think. (Anybody want to bet?) At any rate, the Big Dumb Requirements Document is history.
Catching the "Cluetrain" is a matter of lightweighting marketing, reducing it to a process of (1) make good product (2) open up high-bandwidth communications channels to and from the market (3) listen and repeat. You could replace marketing with doing nothing, and in a lot of cases that might be an improvement. But just as software developers inside the corporate firewall looked at "just for fun" peer production and borrowed some ideas, companies are increasingly looking at what people are doing to build technical, network, business and social relationships "in the wild", on their own time, and borrowing that. People contribute to Wikipedia, not Wordprocessoropedia.
One promising direction is at launchpad.net, where you can track and participate in specs being implemented in the next generation of Ubuntu Linux. Going Web 2.0, using an open process that gets help from people a little at a time using friendly web software, is becoming an effective way to suck information out of the heads of users or prospective users, and "Architecture of Participation" is doing for marketing what Internet Protocol does for "intelligent" networks, agile development does to heavyweight software specs, and what Google ads do for focus groups.
It's interesting to imagine what a lightweighted, debullshitified company will look like, but I still think the anti-truth variety of bullshit is more of a threat in the long run than the anti-productivity variety. It's certainly a good idea for Prof. Frankfurt to concentrate on that, and maybe the quest to eliminate bullshit definition 2 will let us pick off a little of definition 1 while we're at it.
Thu, 06 Apr 2006I need some time to think about this.
Here's one good reason for the bullshit problem: fast talking beats correct "gut feelings" in meetings.
But your gut feeling is likely to be right, and it's good to "soak" and think about stuff.
So, do projects that use "offline" interaction, and collaboration tools that facilitate time delays, do better than meeting-centric ones? Is that a reason why open source projects are managing better than corporate development projects?
Fri, 16 Dec 2005Predictions for 2006
Advertising goes direct. This year, the New York Stock Exchange wiped out the "seat holder" system. In 2006, we'll see the same thing happening to ad buying and selling—and we'll see more innovative media companies do no ad selling at all, just using Google. The coming ad network price/feature war between Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo won't hurt.
"Death of Java" greatly exaggerated. In the 2000 paper The Cost of Migrating COBOL Developers to Java, the Gartner Group points out, in the nicest possible way, that it's cheaper to treat programmers as disposable than to pay for retraining and wait out their productivity ramp-up. In the real world, tool turnover means staff turnover. And in the real world, problem space knowledge and organizational knowledge are much more important than tool knowledge. So you're going to keep your COBOL++, I mean Java, developers.
Platforms get granular for self-defense. Tired of worms that attack software you don't use, but that you need to patch anyway because it's part of the "platform"? In 2006, you'll get better dependency checking to deploy just what you need, and update services that are smart enough not to bug you about software you don't need to update because you don't have it. (Gentoo has done some interesting work in this area, so be prepared for some "I told you so".)
Software entrepreneurs in India disintermediate marketing to the US. Most US open source users, developers, and "power" proprietary software users will deploy or seriously test at least one product—possibly open source, possibly proprietary—with an India-based brand name.
No future in carrier discrimination threats. Giving preferential treatment to web sites that pay a special fee would be a dumb move inviting retaliation. In response, a non-pipeowner could deploy a Coral-like service, and make carriers pay to peer. This is a big Won't Happen. Would have been a great "Internet War" news story, though.
Other predictions:
Bruce Perens: "Feature phones and the content sent to them will prosper in markets where many people ride mass transit - and not elsewhere."
Nancy Weil: "Because of the dominance of BlackBerries among lawmakers, their aides and others who work the corridors of Washington, D.C., the need for patent law reform will be pushed to the fore..."
Tue, 16 Aug 2005New job for me
If you had asked me if I would be willing to leave Linux Journal and go back to working at an IT company, I would have said, "only if it's a smart company that's solving an important problem in a way that really benefits customers."
Anyway, I found such a company. I think this place is capable of doing for system administrators what garbage collection did for programmers. That sounds big, I know. But there's a big conflict between something you can do to really improve functionality and security and what you end up having to do, and smoothing out even a little of that conflict is going to make lots of people really happy and create huge amounts of value.
Anyway, it's a good idea for someone else to take over editing Linux Journal to give it a fresh point of view. I'm looking forward to reading the Kevin Bedell issues, which should be starting right after we get finished with this really cool issue featuring a Linux-powered (something cool).
I just took about 15% of the amount I want to spend on rebuilding my desktop Linux box and spent it filling up the gas tank of the VW. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be putting more miles on it. Sorry about the extra traffic, folks.
Sun, 17 Apr 2005Hey Seth!
"Turning up the collar of his currency-patterned jacket and softly whistling a watermark, he vanished into the digital night."
-- last line of the last story in Permission Denied, an anthology of DRM dystopia stories
(late) predictions for 2004
At least one government free software mandate passes somewhere in the world, along with several preference bills. In an effort not to provoke any more, the Business Software Alliance does no high-profile audits all year.
An election-year anti-spam frenzy results in the arrests of several "Joe Job" victims, along with at least one high-volume US-based spammer.
Linux desktop TCO is impressive because sysadmins use the change of OS as cover for rolling out stricter policies on unauthorized user-installed software. Users, bored by lack of games, covert music trading, and instant messenger chatter, start going home at a sensible time, reducing help desk calls.
The Linux community, posting as 9indaddy43 on finance.yahoo.com, forever destroys the prospects of Linux as an enterprise OS when it refers to flackalyst Rob Enderle and forbes.com staffer Daniel Lyons as "a couple of ass clowns."
GNOME further simplfies the user interface and outscores all alternatives in a highly scientific study. However, the "enterprise" distributions of Linux give up most of the productivity gains by renaming the "Click Here, Asshole" default in dialog boxes.
Michael Robertson triumphs in his legal battle over the LindowsOS name, and invalidates Microsoft's "Windows" trademark. As soon as the publicity dies down he promptly changes the name to "Micki Mäus OS".
sync57.c
If the point of crafting a tweaked-out version of sync(1) is so that you can run it 57 times really fast, why not just
int main () {
int i;
for (i=57;i;i--) sync();
return 0;
}
Overhead: 0.21 extra system calls per actual sync.
My 2004 predictions
Well, how'd I do?
Any mailing list that munges addresses
in its archives is a list that I unsubscribe from.
In a free society I am happy to walk down the street without being grabbed and detained by somebody trying to sell me something. That's because we enforce our community standards by social conventions and if necessary by punishing the people who interfere with our right to use the public street -- not because we hide in our BASEMENTS all the time because we're AFRAID to go out.
You want to hide from spammers, to say out loud on the web, "I am hiding from people who abuse the network, because I believe network abuse is the norm, and I can't do anything about it" go ahead and do it on your own site. But some of us want to maintain an open public forum.
Peace on Earth
I'm editing an article written by a kernel hacker for Big Enterprise IT Company A, and it's all about a technology developed at Big Enterprise IT Company B -- the first citation is to B's Linux development site. Join us now and share the software.
Random things you might overhear in 2005
"Thanks for the Linux CD but I put my old OS back on my machine so that I could get my music collection back."
"Joe, since we put in the Linux desktops we only need one desktop support person, so we're going to have to let you go."
"I figured I was entitled to those songs since I paid 99 cents each for them, so when that stupid media player told me I couldn't listen to them on my new computer I got the MP3s from eXeem."
"Joe, since we put in the Linux desktops we only need one desktop support person, and Eliza likes that printer status page you did, so you can transfer to the Intranet team."
"So let me get this straight: this DMCA thing that you've been complaining about for five years is the law that's letting that spyware company sue that spyware removal company? Why didn't you say so?"
"Yes, we could put in a Samba server instead but really, there's no reason -- there's a special incentive package that lets companies like yours get free Client Access Licenses. Let me make a couple calls and get you a new proposal."
"How many times do I have to tell you? It's Debian GNU/OpenSolaris! Stop calling it the Linux box!"
"Agile Business" my foot.
"Whether you are in retail, manufacturing, or financial services, Microsoft® .NET-connected software can help you act on opportunities and react to threats faster than your competition." -- Microsoft marketing
"If you prefer not to receive future promotional e-mails of this type, please click below to unsubscribe: (long URL) Please note that it can take up to eight weeks to update customer information in our database; therefore, you may receive e-mail from us within that time period." -- actual Microsoft email newsletter (emphasis added)
Anna's pictures
Here are Anna's first Tux Paint pictures.
Don't do it.
Answering FUD only trashes your carpal tunnels and gives the FUDder more attention, or even ad impressions. Free software is getting its Super Bowl commercials paid for by IBM, and the anti-free-software zealots are stuck writing rants on third-rate web sites or buying time on an obscure talk channel on United Airlines. Let them rant.
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
