Category: From the Old Server

The August 18-25 double issue of Newsweek, whose theme is “The Future of Technology”, contains a brief interview with Paul Saffo, identified only as being from the Institute For the Future. Asked “are there any obstacles to innovation?” Saffo responds “We’ve got a couple of gorillas holding back innovation. Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in and they don’t come out.”

Of course Saffo doesn’t address the question of what alternatives the big minds have. If they want to work at a software products company and have a reasonable chance of getting their creation into the hands of customers, the choices pretty much boil down to Microsoft or some company that is likely to be put out of business soon by Microsoft.

[Of course there are quite a few programmers, as distinct from engineers, who are happy with a warm cubicle and a fat salary even if they have no impact on users or their employer’s profits. Sadly, however, in an age where spectacular managerial incompetence continues to be the norm it seems that many managers have gotten smart enough to eliminate tech jobs that aren’t directly profitable.]

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Left the Bay Area on the morning of the Great Blackout of 2003. Oakland Airport turned out to be one of the most peaceful and least crowded spots in the Bay Area: vast open space, never more than three or four vehicles moving at the same time, each in its very multi-mile corridor. Parking was $8 per day, more than 99 percent of the airports in this country, where parking is generally free, but less than it costs to park a car at the O-town airport. Flew over Yosemite Valley and crossed the Sierra at Tioga Pass (10,000′) where N505WT began to be buffeted by turbulence that continued for three more hours (the price of having slept late). Somewhere over south-central Nevada a JetBlue pilot called Air Traffic Control: “This might sound crazy, but have you heard anything about a blackout in the New York area?” After a few minutes, the response was “You’re not going to like this but LaGuardia, Newark, and JFK are all shut down.”

After four hours in the air it seemed the better part of valor not to fight the line of thunderstorms looming over Bryce Canyon so I landed one ridge short at Cedar City, Utah. It turned out that a big Shakespeare Festival was in town. Back in 1971 the good folks here built a replica of an Elizabethan theater and have filled it for six weeks every summer ever since. I got the last ticket for Much Ado and was shocked at how poor a grammarian Shakespeare was. This play alone contains a character asking “with who”, someone modifying “perfect” (“perfectest”), and a character saying “you learned me” for “you taught me”.

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Joel was looking a little out of shape so I suggested that he ride his bike up to the 1500′ ridge behind Berkeley and Oakland… with 200 lbs. of dead weight on the back of the bike (me).  Two guys on a tandem bicycle in the Bay Area it is just about the same as painting “We are gay” on the back of your T-shirt.

What’s it like being gay?  Attractive young women on bikes going the opposite direction smiled and waved at us.

What does one talk about when riding a tandem?  There are the fabulous views out over all the bridges of San Francisco Bay, of course, but also gay marriage.  In this day and age of private contracts it seems that the one truly concrete benefit gay marriage confers is the ability to transfer property, tax-free, upon one’s death to one’s partner.  George W., however, has basically eliminated the “death tax”.  Thus gay couples, even without the benefit of a civil marriage of some sort, are able to enjoy substantially all of the benefits of being married.

Ergo, George W. Bush is the greatest gay rights activist of the 21st Century (so far).

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At dim sum on Sunday Arthur was wearing a Lisp Conference T-shirt.  Kleanthes asked “What do they do at the Lisp Conference?”  I chimed in “it is a bunch of old guys talking about how a 20-year-old version of Lisp is so much better than all the language tools being hyped right now.”  My position was that this isn’t a credible stance.  Though it is probably true that you can be more productive in Common Lisp (1982) than in C# (2002), nobody will believe that the industrial software world has stagnated for 20+ years.  I said that nobody will take Lisp seriously until it at least adds the truly state-of-the-art language features such as type-inferencing (from ML) and preconditions, postconditions, and invariants (from Eiffel).  Bill came up with a novel objection to this idea:  “My style of programming is exploratory and anything that gets in the way of that slows me down.”

Could he be right?  Is old-style Common Lisp or Scheme actually the best that we can do?

——————– a quote from a problem set that I wrote a few years ago

“Another issue is a perennial side-show in the world-wide computer programming circus: the spectacle of nerds arguing over programming tools. The data model can’t represent the information that the users need, the application doesn’t do what what the users need it to do, and instead of writing code, the “engineers” are arguing about Java versus Lisp versus Perl versus Tcl. If you want to know why computer programmers get paid less than medical doctors, consider the situation of two trauma surgeons arriving at an accident scene. The patient is bleeding profusely. If surgeons were like programmers, they’d leave the patient to bleed out in order to have a really satisfying argument over the merits of two different kinds of tourniquet.

“If you’re programming one Web page at a time, you can switch to the Language du Jour in search of higher productivity. But you won’t achieve significant gains unless you switch from writing code for one page. You need to think about ways to write down a machine-readable description of the application and user experience, then let the computer generate the application automatically. “

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Powerboats are noisy.  Electric boats have limited speed and range.  Why not a hybrid boat?  The Toyota Prius can pull itself along at low speeds with only its electric motor.  Why not find a wrecked Prius and remove its vital organs to form the basis of a fantastic power boat:  silent when poking along the shore but capable of cruising at 20-30 knots at the cost of a big increase in noise.

Thoughts?

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A visit to a used bookstore in Omaha has caused a detour in the planned summer reading list:  The Prize.  This is a landmark history of the oil industry.  It seems that we’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of political and religious violence sending shock waves through the oil markets:

“[Russian] government officials, fearful of revolution, provided arms to the Moslem Tatars, who rose up to massacre and mutilate Christian Armenians, including the leaders of the oil industry [in Baku].  … Strikes and open rebellion spread again throughout the empire in September and October 1905.  In the Caucasus, it was race and ethnic conflict, and not socialism, that drove events.  Tatars rose up once more in an attack on the oil industry throughout Baku and its environs, intent on killing every Armenian they could find, setting fire to buildings where Armenians had taken refuge, pillaging every piece of property on which they could lay their lands. …

“The news from Baku had a profound effect on the outside world.  Here, for the first time, a violent upheavel had interrupted the flow of oil, threatening to make a vast investment worthless. … As for the Russian industry itself, the tally was dismaying: Two-thirds of all oil wells had been destroyed and exports had collapsed.”

That’s page 131 out of 900.  We’ll see what happens next…

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Forty years ago it cost $500 to buy a factory-made TV and $10,000 to have a nice house built from scratch on a plot of land, a ratio of 20:1.  Today the TV costs $200 and assembling the local tradespeople and lumber will probably set you back $200,000, a ratio of 1000:1.  Part of this difference may be ascribed to the TV being built with $1/day Chinese labor.

How about this for a brilliant business idea:  clearcut a Canadian forest (they love to cut down trees in British Columbia) and ship the lumber to China, build modular houses there and ship the completed houses back to the U.S. in container ships.  Sell them at Walmart (they’ll sell anything Chinese-made at Walmart).  The quality won’t be quite as good as the best custom homes in the U.S. but it will be good enough and when things start to get creaky in 20 years you can throw the house out and buy a new one at Walmart or Home Depot.

This is not a totally new idea, of course.  Nearly all houses in Scandinavia are factory-built.  We have it here in the South with http://www.topsider.com/ and in Quebec with http://www.profab.ca/ but I don’t think anyone has tried it with Chinese labor.  It costs less than $2000 to ship a container from China to the U.S. and a prefab house ought to fit in one or two containers.  So shipping shouldn’t be a killer.

Chinese-built houses wouldn’t have a huge impact where I’m sitting right now, on top of a $1 million plot of land in Berkeley, but in Maine or the Midwest, why not?  Think about all the poor people currently being housed in cities, occupying housing that could be sold to rich yuppies who would pay huge property tax.  The City of Cambridge just spent about $1.5 million buying and renovating the house behind my condo so that they could park a poor family there.  Why not give the poor family the $1.5 mil in cash and they could buy some land in an uncrowded part of the country ($20,000) and a house at Walmart ($40,000) and live comfortably for the rest of their lives off the interest?

Or consider the vacation house dilemma.  Do you really want to spend a year or two dealing with contractors and paying big bucks when you could buy a second house at Walmart for $40,000 and put your money into travel, jet aircraft, etc.?

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Sartre never tried to drive around the Bay Area so it is tough to know where he got his inspiration for the line “Hell is other people.”  Certainly he would have been inspired by my trip from Berkeley to San Francisco today.  Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada).  No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon.

From the wheel of my 1992 Honda Civic, the subject of an experiment by my hosts in how long a car can run without ever being washed or maintained, I had ample opportunity to observe sailboats in the bay and boat-sized SUVs on the bridge.  It seems that sports cars have vanished from highways around San Francisco.  If you’re seldom going to exceed 20 mph or travel more than 5 seconds before stopping, it doesn’t make sense to have a manual transmission.  You need to allow 2 hours for each trip and therefore you’ll want an upright driving position and very comfortable seats.  On-board espresso and Diet Coke machines would be nice (along with a bathroom to match) as would an autopilot for traffic jams.  Cruise control isn’t much use in the Bay Area because mostly it is designed to work at speeds of 30 mph and greater.  What you really want is a system that will go at speeds of 3 mph and less, inching your car along in a traffic jam.

Speaking of inching… my hosts also have a new Honda Civic hybrid.  It isn’t quite as glorious as imagined.  It can’t inch its way forward in a traffic jam by dint of electric power.  If the car is moving, the combustion engine is running.  The electric stuff is there to provide extra acceleration for leadfooted drivers.  So basically you could have a car that was just as fuel efficient if you were willing to tolerate sluggish acceleration (which in the Bay Area wouldn’t be an issue since there is seldom more than 20 feet between you and the car in front of you).  Also the entire ventilation system shuts down if the engine shuts down at a traffic light.  Finally the system isn’t very smart.  If you accelerate to 30 mph and then stop at a light, the engine is shut off.  If you need to creep forward a bit and then stop for 2 minutes, the engine continues to run because you never got over a threshold speed.  My hosts say that what they really want is a button on the steering wheel that will tell the car “okay to go to sleep now”.

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A slightly built female engineer is walking through the San Jose airport, lugging two enormous suitcases that appear to be extremely heavy.  A businessman in a suit comes over and asks the lady if he can assist her with her bags.  While reaching for one of the suitcases he notices the watch on her wrist.

“Say, that’s an unusual looking watch,” he observes as they walk out to the engineer’s car.  “Thanks,” she replies, “I made it myself.”  What does it do? the businessman wonders.   “Oh, it runs a stripped down version of Linux, connects via Bluetooth and 802.11g, sends and receives FAXes, lets me work through email on an eyeglass LCD display, holds current digitized VFR and IFR charts for my Cirrus airplane, plus a lot more.”

“Wow!” says the businessman, “Can I buy it off you?  I’ll give you $3000.”  The engineer thinks for a minute and then says “Sure, I can always build myself another one.”  She hands over the watch and the businessman starts to walk away.  She holds up the two suitcases and calls out after him “Hey, don’t you want the batteries?”

…

After two weeks with a Compaq iPAQ 3765 PocketPC, very kindly loaned by Andrew Grumet, here’s what I’ve learned…

• the batteries go dead after looking up 10 addresses over a period of 3 days (by contrast on one charge my old Handspring Treo would last for a couple of days as a phone and then at least 2 weeks as a Palm)
  
• there is no battery level display (takes about 8 stylus strokes to find the current battery level)
  
• handwriting recognition doesn’t work for me
  
• it was a lot easier to enter text on the Treo’s thumb keyboard than using the stylus/screen keyboard on the PocketPC
  
• carrying a separate phone and PDA is painful
  
• I couldn’t get the iPAQ to sync with a laptop via IR, only with a desktop via USB

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“You’re going to stop in Reno?” Faith asked incredulously.  “It’s a hole, a lame version of Las Vegas.”

Reno has virtues beyond a big airport, cheap downtown casino hotels, cheap retirement homes for Californians who’ve come to enjoy Nevada’s income tax-free environment, and lack of traffic jams.

Up on a hill to the north of town is the Wilbur D. May Center.  Wilbur’s dad was a poor hardworking Jewish boy from Leadville, Colorado who started the May Department Stores chain in 1887.  The son, however, found that work wasn’t to his taste.  He got his pilot’s license and a series of airplanes, learned to paint and compose music, bought a ranch in Nevada, and traveled around the world shooting animals and collecting trinkets.  The trinkets and animal heads are on display in Reno.  Wilbur May went around the world 40 times before his death in 1982 at the age of 84.

Smack downtown is the National Automobile Museum, mostly the collection of Bill Harrah, the founder of the Harrah’s casino chain.  These are the most beautiful cars that you’ll ever see, with a lot of fantastic examples of custom coachwork from 1910-1935.  A car back then was sort of like an airplane today:  handmade in small quantities and priced between 1X and 3X the cost of a nice house.

As it happened the arrival of Diamond Star N505WT coincided with “Hot August Nights” and 5000 classic cars cruising around town, mostly street rods and 1960s muscle cars.  After going to the gym and watching the cars roll past, I had dinner in the Eldorado’s Italian restaurant.  An accordian player filled the room with the theme from The Godfather movie.

The 8:00 am trip over the Sierra at Donner Pass was smooth and uneventful at 10,500′.  “Welcome to the West Coast,” said the friendly woman at Travis (Air Force Base) Approach before handing me off to the Napa airport tower.

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