Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A lot of folks up here have asked about the two-seat Cessna that flew over downtown Washington, DC last week, spreading panic among the bureaucrats.  How could this have happened, they wonder, imagining that the average small plane has at least the computing and display power of a Honda Accord with the navi system option.  In reality an old plane like the Cessna 150 is worth less than $20,000.  Thanks to the miracle of FAA bureaucracy, a moving-map GPS unit that can be legally installed in the dashboard costs around $10,000 plus another $500/year to keep the database of airports and navigation aids current (this is government info so it would be possible for the FAA to make this available on the Web in a machine-readable form and encourage owner’s of cheap planes to keep it current).  Consequently the Cessna 150 that these guys were flying didn’t have one.  It is possible to get handheld GPS units for $500-1000 but they rely on AA batteries and never seem to have juice left when you need them.  Without a GPS or some earlier form of electronic navigation it is reasonably easy to get lost.  Look to the left:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Look to the right:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Look straight ahead:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Making matters worse the DC area is fairly flat with no distinctive terrain and the weather tends to be hazy so if you’re flying low you usually can’t see more than five strip malls ahead.

My favorite part of these flight restriction violation incidents is the actual bust.  When the two-seat 40-year-old airplane is finally forced to land it is surrounded by 20-30 law enforcement officials, each carrying a semi- or fully automatic pistol or rifle.  By this time the airplane and its pilot are 30 or 40 miles from the restricted area and they’re at a big airport with miles of grass and fence all around.  There would be no way for the pilot to escape.    Yet despite the fact that in no case has one of these pilots ever been carrying any kind of weapon the 20-30 cops have their guns drawn and pointed at the poor schlub standing next to his 1000-lb. airplane.  The pilot is pushed down onto the pavement and handcuffed (see the photos from the recent incident at Frederick; another good one was a pipeline patrol pilot in Pennsylvania during the last presidential election who didn’t find out about a last-minute visit by George W.).  To me it always made the government look weak and paranoid.  If they are this afraid of a confused unarmed guy in a 1962 Cessna 150 (who in all of the cases so far had kept his transponder turned on for the entire flight to facilitate FAA tracking) how can they possibly handle our actual enemies?

[The Cessna 150 seems to be the preferred choice for presidential intimidation.  The 1994 suicide crash of a light plane into the White House was, as one would hope conspiracy theorists would soon note, a Cessna 150 (see http://www-tech.mit.edu/V114/N40/crash.40w.html for more on this incident).]

Full post, including comments

A friend recently attended a demo of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Longhorn.  This is the long-delayed replacement for Windows NT, which was introduced in the early 1990s and has been improved into Win2000 and WinXP.  The main risk for a project like Longhorn is Second System Syndrome.  A group of programmers is given an existing product and a list of 100 things that people have said they don’t like about the product.  They boldly plan to build a Second (new) System from scratch that will solve all of the problems the First System solved plus have the 100 new nice-to-have features.  Traditionally Second Systems are late and often, on balance, don’t solve any more problems than the First System.  Longhorn was particularly at risk due to the fact that a larger challenge was attacked with very similar tools to those used to build Windows NT circa 1990.  Programmers haven’t gotten any smarter since 1990; how can we expect better results than were obtained back then unless there is a shift to radically new tools?

Longhorn has in fact been running quite late (two years?) and Microsoft has been reducing the scope of its ambition.  My friend was underwhelmed by the result.  One of the big features of Longhorn is a more searchable file system, something that WinXP users can get right now by downloading Google Desktop Search.  Longhorn will let you create a virtual folder that represents the results of a persistent search, e.g., you can have a folder with all files containing the word “Samoyed” and it will be updated quickly when a new matching document appears anywhere in the file system.

Does Longhorn have a versioned file system?  No.  I.e., you can’t ask the system to show you what a spreadsheet or document looked like two months ago.  Probably the vast majority of user-created documents in a file system are there because of this lack of versioning in WinXP’s NTFS file system.  You have “Whizco Contract”, “Whizco Contract pre-lawyers”, “Whizco Contract post-legal-review”, “Whizco Contract with comments from Whizco”, “Whizco Contract 20050510”, “Whizco Contract Final”, “Whizco Contract Final Signature Copy”, etc.  If Longhorn had a versioned file system, as became available for commercial Unices in the early 1990s, there would only be perhaps 1/10th as many user-created documents on the typical system.

The hierarchical file system with its folders and subfolders was created for mainframe programmers in the early 1960s.  Let’s call it a Multics-style file system to pay homage to this pioneering system built in the 1960s by MIT and Honeywell.  Alan Cooper, one of the creators of Visual Basic, and a perennial consultant to Microsoft, has persuasively attacked the idea of exposing this hierarchy to end-users.  It was built by programmers for programmers but somehow leaked out into consumer consciousness with the Apple Macintosh and the original DOS on the IBM PC.  Do we need this?  How many documents can one person create?  Even a professional writer such as Stephen King hasn’t generated an overwhelming number of stories and novels.

Why not start with a versioned file system?  Then we can get rid of the “save” and “save as” commands in word processors and spreadsheet programs and replace them with a “name this version” command.  When you’re done working on a document you close it.  If you want to go back a couple of months you ask for the version circa 20050301 or a version with a specific name.  Given a versioned file system we provide access to documents via a chronology.  If you’re looking for something related to your 1999 taxes, scroll back to April 1999 and it will probably be there.  If that doesn’t work resort to a full-text search.  If we need to organize a bit more let us aggregate documents in named folders, as in a mail-reading program, most of which don’t allow or don’t encourage subfolders.

There is nothing wrong with the hierarchical file system as a tool. Assuming you know a file’s name, it provides O[log N] access to a corpus of N documents.  This makes a hierarchical file system great for computer programs and computer programmers but why should users have to see the innards?

Apple and the Linux folks aren’t doing any better in this area than Microsoft.  For years I have been hoping that Google or Yahoo! will show the way with a replacement for Microsoft Office and the underlying desktop file system.  The average household user of a personal computer doesn’t need anything with many more features that the Palm OS or Microsoft Outlook and probably has far fewer megabytes of documents than he or she has of archived email.

Full post, including comments

Doug Kaye, whom most people know as the creative force behind IT Conversations, turns out to be an accomplished Bonanza pilot.  He graciously invited me out for a day of goofing off in the sky on Monday.  Under rainy skies we departed Marin County’s Gnoss Field in the Bonanza, a “machine invented to make sure that the world didn’t become overpopulated with doctors and lawyers”, and retracted the landing gear before climbing 1000 feet-per-minute up through a hole in the clouds.  Thanks to a turbonormalizer the engine maintained good power right up to 15,500′ where we had to stay to remain clear of the ice-filled cumulus clouds.  We landed on the 12,000′ runway at the former Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, California.  The base closed 10 years ago, devastating the town’s economy, but an airplane museum remains with a collection of WWII and Cold War planes.  The largest is a B-52 and the weirdest is an enormous B-36 with 6 huge pusher propellers on the mid-wing-mounted piston engines and four turbojet engines slung under the wingtips for takeoff assistance.

George W. Bush’s F-104 is represented among the fighters as well as one of the F-111s that Ronald Reagan sent to Libya in 1986 to demonstrate our irritation with its owner’s attacks on American interests.  (Young folks: this incident was notable because Ronbo went to sleep after ordering the bombing of Libya; he terrified Qaddafi by not caring enough about the operation to let it disturb his sleep).

We decided to return to the Bay Area underneath the 5000′ overcast. Before departing the Castle area I practiced some chandelles and lazy-eights from the right seat.  These precision maneuvers are required of applicants for a flight instructor rating and I’d only done them in my old Diamond Star and the clunky Piper Arrow trainers. A chandelle is a maximum performance climb while turning 180 degrees. The Bonanza has so much power and so little drag with its gear retracted that this turns out to require a much more extreme pitch-up attitude than in the Arrow.

As we steered our way around the heavier downpours I noticed that we were coming up on a large town and asked Doug what it was.  “Modesto, home of Scott Peterson,” he replied.  For any man who has been dumped or divorced by a woman reflecting on Scott Peterson ought to be a humbling experience.  Consider that Scott was beloved by both his wife, a beautiful and kind person, and his massage therapist girlfriend.  This despite the fact that Scott was an adulterer and murderer, both black marks against a person’s character.  So the only reasonable conclusion that a rejected man can draw is that he is less attractive, as a package, than Scott Peterson.

Full post, including comments

The May 9, 2005 New Yorker magazine contains the final installment of Elizabeth Kolbert’s series of articles on climate change.  The series started off with interesting accounts of scientists at work and people living in the Far North.  It ends with boring government officials negotiating and a prediction that the human race will go extinct due to climate change.  Kolbert’s lack of faith in human adaptability stems perhaps from her not seen Peter Ginter’s show at SlideWest 2005 in which he documented the life of folks living in one of Manila’s flooded ghetto.  The Filipinos in the photos don’t seem to enjoy wading through knee-high water to get from house to house but the cycle of birth, education, marriage, and reproduction seems to continue unabated.  Even if one isn’t despairing for the survival of the species, however, it might not be wise to buy a beach house 10′ above sea level with the expectation that one’s grandchildren will enjoy it…

The good news from the rest of the issue is that a computer programmer makes it into a story as the main character for the first time in memory.  “Along the Highways” by Nick Arvin starts with Graham, a “thin and bald” thirtysomething guy who “studied computer science in college” and is in love with his brother’s widow Lindsey.  Graham is disturbed to find Lindsey riding down the highway in a convertible with a big pudgy guy named Doug.  He pursues them for many hours, punctuated by mobile phone conversations among the parties, and finally the story ends at the side of the road with Lindsey encouraging Doug to beat up our programmer protagonist.  Graham ends up in a heap by the side of the road while Doug and Lindsey drive off.

Full post, including comments

The New Yorker magazine’s Web site has the full text of a recent series by Elizabeth Kolbert on climate change.  Highly recommended.

Full post, including comments

The main reason for this trip to California was to attend Slide West, a periodic gathering of some of the world’s best photographers at Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio’s house in Napa, California.  Menzel and D’Aluisio are the brains behind the books Material World, Robo Sapiens, and some very interesting new books on food and death.  The event started with an outing to COPIA, the Napa art and culture center, currently showing some large prints of families in 24 different countries, each photographed with a week’s worth of the typical food that they eat.  These were made with the last generation 12 MP Canon EOS-1Ds body and the results are technically beautiful.  They will all be available in September as part of the new book Hungry Planet.

The stars of the unlimited budget annual report world were represented by Peter Ginter from Germany and Louie Psihoyos from Boulder, Colorado (nice photos of Netscape founder Jim Clark’s various yachts and helicopter adventures).  The world of fine art photography showed up in the person of Elizabeth Opalenik (mostly nudes).  Three photojournalists from the San Francisco Chronicle showed slides.  Deanne Fitzmaurice showed the pictures of a 9-year-old injured Iraqi boy who had been treated at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital.  These won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism.  Kurt Rogers showed an amazing set of photos from day-to-day work, also for the Chronicle, around the Bay Area.  My favorite was a clown being frisked by security at SFO.  United Airlines runs a “fantasy flight” program where they load sick kids and parents onto a big jet and fly them on a scenic route down to Monterey with various musicians and clowns on board.  Since September 11, 2001, however, the airline can’t afford the jet fuel so they just load them onto the plane, taxi around SFO, and go back to the terminal.  And since September 11th the dressed-up clowns end up getting special scrutiny by the metal detectors.  The paper never ran the photo, sadly, and it made me think about how much great photography goes to waste because the newspapers don’t use more photos on their Web sites and, when they do, make them available at such puny sizes (maybe filling 1/20th of the latest big LCD monitors).  Biologist Pete Oxford, based in Quito, Ecuador, used photos to tell an interesting story about a Harpy Eagle being tagged with a GPS-equipped radio monitor.

The strangest presentation was by Timonthy Archibald.  He has been going around the country photographing inventors in their suburban homes showing off their “sex machines”, most of which are high-powered rotating motors that convert the rotation into a back-and-forth oscillation.  At the end of the oscillating rod a plastic dildo is attached.  These can sell for $5000 and, supposedly, chicks dig them.  He had some interesting stories to relate…

Full post, including comments

The engineering staff at Google threw a big party for Silicon Valley nerds last Thursday night, complete with band and Cinco de Mayo-themed food and drink.  The last time I visited was so long ago that Segways were still cool (Google still has a few but today they gather dust in a corner).  Google has grown up to employ over 3000 people and occupies a campus built for Silicon Graphics (SGI; kids: this was a Unix workstation company that bloomed in the late 1980s and faded as Sun grew).  The center is built around a volleyball court and an endless pool, complete with lifeguard until 9 pm.  The company provides all of the fun things that profitable companies can provide, e.g., haircuts, massages, day care for kids, free meals, etc.

Larry Page, one of the founders, gave an inspiring talk about what a great time this is to be an engineer.  He recalled how at one point Google had five employees and two million customers.  Outside of Internet applications it is tough to imagine where that would be possible.  Page also talked about the enjoyment of launching something, getting feedback from users, and refining the service on the fly.  The Google speakers made a persuasive case that there is no better place to be a programmer.  No startup company is going to have a 5000-machine cluster available to launch a new service or a guaranteed first day audience of 100 million people.  Financially it might also make much more sense to work at Google as opposed to a startup.  For teams of engineers who create a lot of value for Google the company is able to hand out $millions or tens of $millions in bonuses, to be shared among a group of 5-10 programmers.  That is admittedly a small percentage of the new advertising reveue that Google earns from a new service but it is in absolute terms more than someone is likely to make creating the same service at a startup, where hardly anyone is likely to find out about it and use it.

One of the anecdotes that Page related was about an experienced Silicon Valley executive who told him, several years ago, “in the long run, every company is led by either marketing or sales; you just have to choose which it is going to be in Google’s case.”  This prophecy does indeed seem to be true for the big tech companies.  Microsoft never does anything because an engineer thinks it is fun or cool; they wait for the marketing department to notice a new product from a competitor and then go to work.  Oracle seems to be led by their sales organization.  They add features if customers are telling the sales people “this is what I need to make it worth buying the next release.”  Google remains an engineering-led company.  They launch Google Maps with satellite imagery because they can.

As I wandered through the party and through the offices I kept noticing more and more familiar faces and the names of former students whom I remembered as among the smartest and nicest.  They will, of course, need all of those smart people if they are to deliver on their long-term goals.  Doing search right will eventually require machine understanding of natural language, i.e., full artificial intelligence.

Full post, including comments

Sitting around with a couple of friends at breakfast in Santa Clara, the question of how to spend $100 million on charity came up.  As these folks had been working at Google for a few years this was not mere idle speculation.  Giving money to U.S. universities was ruled out in advance; they are too rich and too inefficient.  Going to the other side of the wealth spectrum helping Africa had also been previously nixed; hundreds of $billions are already being pumped into that continent with negligible results.  The rest of the world of possibilities was open for discussion.

My personal suggestion #1 is to support online education.  People almost everywhere in the world have computers with Internet access but there is precious little online content that will enable them to improve themselves.

My personal suggestion #2 is to use the money as a seed for a bank-financed real estate development, modeled after towns in Mexico, Peru, and the rest of Latin America.  Americans are rich but lonely and not nearly as happy statistically as Mexicans.  I think one big reason is that most Americans live in sprawl-land where it is difficult to meet friends and interact with neighbors.  There are plenty of 1000-house real estate developments being built right now in the Southwest.  Why not build one around a central plaza like a Mexican or Chilean town?  Offer very low rent to vital shops such as a supermarket, a hardware store, etc., so that it doesn’t turn into a travesty like Disney’s Celebration near Orlando, Florida.  Include one of the “small high schools” that Bill Gates likes to talk about (private, presumably).  And then hire sociologists to come in and figure out if people are in fact happier in such a community.

My personal suggestion #3 is to fund open-source software.  A tremendous amount of benefit has been delivered to people around the world by free and open-source software.  Aside from Web applications it is in fact tough to think of things that can be built by just a handful of people that touch the lives of millions.  Yet traditional foundations don’t think software is interesting and the U.S. Government spends its time and effort suing Microsoft instead of paying programmers to improve the GNU tools and Linux.

Who has some better ideas than these?

Full post, including comments

http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/01/news/fortune500/buffett_talks/index.htm?cnn=yes summarizes Warren Buffett and Charles Munger’s address to shareholders.  My favorite line:

Some people seem to think there’s no trouble [with Ford and GM] just because it hasn’t happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you’re still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a serious problem.

Full post, including comments

The latest New Yorker magazine has a story about the Mongols, under Hulagu, sacking Baghdad back in 1257 A.D.  There are some fun facts in the article such as that Genghis Khan was said to have had 500 wives and concubines.  Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at Oxford University, has done Y-chromosome studies and estimates that roughly 32 million people today are descended from Genghis Khan and his harem.  Charity was not a big part of the Mongol system:

When anyone begged from [the Mongols], they replied, “Go, with God’s curse, for if he loved you as he loves me, he would have provided for you.”

No theodicy problem for Genghis and pals…

Full post, including comments