“The only known way to make software idiot-proof is to take away their computers.”
[Found on the web.]
Kurt Vonnegut
There’s a nice appreciation of Vonnegut by Christopher Bigsby on openDemocracy.net
Kurt Vonnegut, who died on 11 April 2007 at the age of 84, once said that he learned “bone-deep sadness” from his parents. He was 21 when his mother committed suicide and in Breakfast of Champions a character remarks “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did.” He later confessed to himself being a monopolar depressive, even attempting suicide, insisting nonetheless that he was unashamed of the incident, which he would not repeat because he did not want to be “a two-time loser”. His father, he recalled, had said some of the funniest things he had ever heard but that he was “the saddest man I ever knew”. Perhaps Vonnegut’s humour, always with a dark underlay, was his response to a sense of spiritual vertigo. Certainly, the laughter in his work often comes through clenched teeth.
In person, he could come across as lugubrious, mixing melancholy with wit. In performance, he was a vaudevillian with a carefully honed act. He was an habitual smoker, believing it a treatment for his depression, but acknowledged the side-effects, one of which being that he set himself alight, causing serious burns. In the end, though, it was writing that proved the real therapy and as he remarked, “I don’t think you have to write that close to the truth about yourself in order to feel better. I think that writing detective stories, spy stories or whatever, is probably as therapeutic.” In his case the “whatever” would be science fiction…
Strangely, the Vonnegutweb hasn’t caught up with news of his death.
Annual miracle performed again
Our house is screened by a wonderful beech hedge. Every winter it withers and I’m convinced it’s died. Every spring I watch it like a hawk to see if it’s still alive. Then, one day, I forget to check and the next time I get home I discover that green leaves have appeared when I wasn’t looking. So it was today. The photograph looks odd because it’s got a detailed inset.
Zero plus zero equals… how much?
The latest statement from the only department store where I have a charge card. Why do they bother, I wonder? I’d prefer to know only when I owe them money. Wonderful things, computers.
Economist supports Sarkozy
No surprise there, then. The magazine has been of the opinion for as long as I can remember that France is a basket case, economically speaking. What the French need — according to the Economist — is a short sharp shock to jolt them out of their state-subsidised complacency. The editors clearly think Sarkozy is the man for the job.
Hmmm… This is the magazine that also supported George W. Bush for the presidency.
The conversation
Douglas and Quentin deep in conversation at Ndiyo yesterday.
Kurt Vonnegut R.I.P.
He’s gone, and we will miss him. The NYT obit captured his essence nicely.
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography in a vernacular voice, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.
He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.
With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.
Like many baby boomers, I loved his work. During a sojourn in the UK, he once said something very generous on TV about a newspaper column I had written, and one never forgets compliments from people like him.
The real threat to national security
One of the most infuriating things aspects of the Blair hooey about the ’45 minute’ threat to Britain posed by Saddam Hussein was the way it diverted attention from real and substantive threats to the country’s national security. Like the stranglehold that Putin’s Russia now exerts on our energy supplies.
This week’s Economist has a sobering piece about it.
RUSSIA’S president, Vladimir Putin, must be feeling smug. His strategy of using the country’s vast natural resources to restore the greatness lost after the break-up of the Soviet Union seems to be paying off. If power is measured by the fear instilled in others—as many Russians believe—he is certainly winning.
The Soviet Union relied on its military machine for geopolitical power: its oil and gas were just a way to pay for it. In today’s Russia, energy is itself the tool of influence. To use it the Kremlin needs three things: control over Russian energy reserves and production, control over the pipelines snaking across its territory and that of its neighbours, and long-term contracts with European customers that are hard to break. All three are in place. For all the talk of a common strategy towards Russia, the EU is divided and stuck for an answer.
Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant, cherished by Mr Putin as a “powerful lever of economic and political influence in the world”, has long-term supply contracts with most European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Austria. It also has direct access to these countries’ domestic markets. The EU reckons that half its gas imports now come from Russia. Newer EU members, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, are almost entirely dependent on Russian gas. Moreover, a pipeline network that it inherited from the Soviet Union gives Russia control over gas imported from Central Asia.
The EU has few ideas for how to deal with its chief energy supplier. “We know we should do something about Russia, but we don’t know what,” one Brussels official says. “In the EU we negotiate on the rules, whereas Russia wants to do deals.” The deals are coming thick and fast. Last month, Russia secured one to build an oil pipeline from Bulgaria to Greece that will bypass the Bosporus. Symbolically, it will be the first Russian-controlled pipeline on EU territory. The pipeline will carry Russian and Central Asian oil straight to the EU, avoiding Turkey.
Oil can at least be bought from elsewhere. The bigger worry is about the EU’s dependence on Russian gas. The flow of natural gas depends on the routes and control of pipelines, as European consumers were reminded when Russia switched off the gas supply to Ukraine just over a year ago and Ukraine started to steal Russian gas that was destined for the EU. Russia’s pipeline routes encircle the EU from the north and south…
Why I don’t use Windows, no. 15235
Wonderful account by the NYT’s David Pogue of his struggle to install a Netgear 802.11n USB adapter onto a brand-new, spotless Lenovo ThinkPad laptop. Sample:
Screen #1: “Netgear WN121T Smart Wizard.” The startup window offers a photo of the product–but in the place of honor, in the lower-right, right where the Next button should be, it says only Quit. That’s the only choice there.
There are also SIX buttons to the left of the picture. One of them is Setup. Well, that sounds right, but it belongs in the lower-right. At the very least, it needs a border or something to differentiate it from the other five buttons (Registration, Web Support, etc.).
Screen #2: Tells me that my software might need updating already. My options are “Check for Updates” or “Install from CD.”
This is a totally unnecessary screen. Do what Apple and Microsoft do: quietly check for updates. If there is a newer version, THEN tell me about it (and give me a one-click way to download it). If there isn’t one, don’t even bring up the subject.
Screen #3: Now a second installer launches ON TOP of the first one–yes, we’ve got superimposed dialog boxes. What the heck?
Anyway, this one says “Welcome.”
Here it is: the very definition of a time-waster. If I’ve come this far, don’t you think I already know that I’m in the Netgear Installer?
Screen #4: “License Agreement.” The entire agreement is typed in capital letters, just to make sure it’s as difficult as possible to read.
Nobody reads these license agreements–nobody. What is Netgear worried about, anyway–that you’re going to distribute its USB software driver on Kazaa?
At least Netgear lets you just hit Enter to blow past this screen. Most companies don’t. It’s as though the software company lawyers are saying, “Nyah, nyahhh, you can’t ignore us!”
Guess what? We’ll still ignore you, even if you make us use the mouse.
Screen #5: “Select Destination.” Here’s where we specify where we want the software put. This, too, is a waste of time. Who on earth doesn’t want programs put in Programs?
Screen #6: “Software Installation Complete.” Yay!
But if it’s complete, then why is there a Next button?
Screen #7: Uh-oh. “The Software you are installing has not passed Windows Logo testing. Continuing your installation of this software may impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system… Microsoft strongly recommends that you stop this installation now.”
Here it is, on one screen: everything that’s wrong with Microsoft and the Windows software industry. I’m sorry, but you would NEVER see this kind of idiocy on the Macintosh.
Who’s being dumber here? Netgear, for not getting Microsoft’s blessing for its software? Or Microsoft, for trying to scare people away from perfectly legitimate software (and, presumably, for charging software companies for Logo testing)?
There’s more, much more. Why do people put themselves through this crap?
No-Fly lists and false positives
What I love about the blogosphere is its collective intelligence — notwithstanding all the fuss about incivility etc. I’ve been fuming quietly ever since I read about the experience of Professor Walter Murphy, a decorated former marine who found himself on Homeland Security’s No-Fly list.
But now Ed Felten casts a calmer (and more informed) eye on the matter, and comes to a different conclusion:
There are two aspects to the no-fly list, one that puts names on the list and another that checks airline reservations against the list. The two parts are almost entirely separate.
Names are put on the list through a secret process; about all we know is that names are added by intelligence and/or law enforcement agencies. We know the official standard for adding a name requires that the person be a sufficiently serious threat to aviation security, but we don’t know what processes, if any, are used to ensure that this standard is followed. In short, nobody outside the intelligence community knows much about how names get on the list.
The airlines check their customers’ reservations against the list, and they deal with customers who are “hits”. Most hits are false positives (innocent people who trigger mistaken hits), who are allowed to fly after talking to an airline customer service agent. The airlines aren’t told why any particular name is on the list, nor do they have special knowledge about how names are added. An airline employee, such as the one who told Prof. Murphy that he might be on the list for political reasons, would have no special knowledge about how names get on the list. In short, the employee must have been speculating about why Prof. Murphy’s name triggered a hit.
It’s well known by now that the no-fly list has many false positives. Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman John Lewis, among others, seem to trigger false positives. I know a man living in Princeton who triggers false positives every time he flies. Having many false positives is inevitable given that (1) the list is large, and (2) the matching algorithm requires only an approximate match (because flight reservations often have misspelled names). An ordinary false positive is by far the most likely explanation for Prof. Murphy’s experience.
Note, too, that Walter Murphy is a relatively common name, making it more likely that Prof. Murphy was being confused with somebody else. Lycos PeopleSearch finds 181 matches for Walter Murphy and 307 matches for W. Murphy in the U.S. And of course the name on the list could be somebody’s alias. Many false positive stories involve people with relatively common names.
Given all of this, the most likely story by far is that Prof. Murphy triggered an ordinary false positive in the no-fly system. These are very annoying to the affected person, and they happen much too often, but they aren’t targeted at particular people. We can’t entirely rule out the possibility that the name “Walter Murphy” was added to the no-fly list for political reasons, but it seems unlikely.