Life in Central America

Software is not a commodity

I assume this is obvious, but let me say it again: software is not a thing, it is a process. We make a big, big mistake when we think of software products, or the software industry. This kind of thinking warps our minds.

“OK, wise-ass”, you may say, “What do you call Microsoft Windows, is that a product or not?”

I’m glad you picked that example, because it illustrates the problem nicely. I am perfectly aware that most people (people who know nothing about software) consider it a product—but there are plenty of other people, (people who do know something about software, including people at Microsoft itself) who understand very well that MS Windows is a service, and what they are selling is a bunch of coding instructions, or activities—not a product like shoe polish or sweet potatoes.

“So what?” you may say, “Why get excited about this? It makes no difference to me if a CD has music on it or a computer program. I pay my money and I get my thing. Calling it a service or product makes no difference.”

You are right and you are wrong. If you are a working grunt, software for you is just a thing.

But if you are involved in changing the world, not just using it, software for you is something else entirely. It is something that changes you just as you are changing it. And you cannot afford to let software become a commodity, because this would give control to people who think everything is made of machines, machines they can control.

Software That Lasts 200 Years

Some interesting thoughts from Dan Bricklin.

We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers.

Funding for initial development should come from the users. Bridges and water systems are usually funded by governments that will run them for generations, not by private entities. The long-term needs of the funders must be more inline with the project requirements than the investment return needs of most private sources of capital.

The structure and culture of a typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the needs of societal infrastructure software. The "ongoing business entity" and "new version" mentality downplay the value of the needs of societal infrastructure software and are sometimes at odds with it.

We are not good at making software

This is so obvious it hardly needs to be said. Our best software experts have been working on this problem for decades, and working hard, but they haven’t make much headway. It’s time we faced up to the problem.

And it’s time we faced up to the big problem: “Why haven’t improved methods of software development taken hold? ” Working on the small problem: “How can software development be improved?”, has not worked. The problem is social, not technical.

And I think we can take it further than that: the problem is cultural. Our culture is not good at making software. What culture? The global affluent culture which is the parent culture for the global software culture. This culture has been good at making hardware, but not good at making software.

Believe me, culture is important, it is all-important. Try living in an underdeveloped country for awhile (as I do) these cultures are not good at doing anything, except making tortillas and couscous. (I am a big fan of tribal cultures, on the other hand, they are good at doing everything.) But I digress, let me return to the 21 century.

We have been trying to move from a hardware culture (the market economy) to a software culture (the gift economy), and we have gotten nowhere. We need to make a quantum jump from one kind of place to another, but cultural changes of this magnitude take a long time—and it usually end up in strange places.

The most optimistic scenario would be for software to influence our cultural development, much like hardware did in the last three centuries. But this may be difficult, our concentration on hardware-based affluence has used up much of the earth’s resources—and produced a culture that wants still more hardware.

This culture can tolerate terrible software; it is only interested in hardware.

GeekMan

Happy Worker, a specialty toy developer, has introduced a new action figure

They rose to a height in the late 1990's, when their kind ruled the world like the carnivorous bird-reptiles of old. Tough and wily, they survived the subsequent digital ice age and dot com destruction that rained down, showering the planet with discarded stock options and unwanted AOL cds.

Now they lead the fight to tame and build our digital world. Each of these code warriors carries the codename… GeekMan.

SUPER POWERS: ungodly coding abilities; opposite sex repulsion; analytical reasoning; ability to create technical acronyms; less than ideal personal hygiene routine [this is a sly poke at Bill Gates]

71% of Spam Servers are Located in China

This doesn´t surprise me, and it probably doesn't you either.

The details are on slashdot.

Software workers of the world, arise!

Open source should be federally funded.

The logic is irrefutable: Open Source is vital for the American economy and for American politics (voting software, for example) - and it is not going to be funded anywhere else. If we had a Department of Open Source that had 1/100 of the funding of the Department of Defense, it would make America once again the leader of the world’s software. And if the US won’t do it, maybe the EU will. This would make the Gift Economy viable, and this would change the world.

Why hasn’t this been done already? You already know the answer: because the market economy won’t let it happen. It will fight open source to the death. They are afraid it will steal some of their precious money.

But they can be forced to change - if somebody holds a gun to their heads. This somebody will have to be bunch of bodies, a highly-motivated political force they cannot ignore. A new kind of labor union, with a new kind of a demands: maybe the Software Workers of the World.

This is not impossible, blue-collar workers have done it before, it’s time we did the same thing ourselves.

Silicon Valley BS

Several years ago, Silicon Valley fooled the whole world, now they are trying to fool themselves. Consider this article by Mike Langberg in the Mercury News.

He starts by saying:
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Silicon Valley is still the best place in the world to start a technology company.
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Doesn't make you feel good? But then he adds:
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Because it's so expensive to do business here, the start-ups only put the chief executive, researchers and top marketing executive in Silicon Valley. Everyone else is hired in Sacramento, Tel Aviv or Shenzen.

What this means to me, at the risk of sounding harsh: Outsourcing is a good thing. If software can be written more cost-effectively in Hyderabad, then software-writing jobs should move there.

The vacant cubicles in Silicon Valley will soon be filled by workers performing tasks that are more important -- and more economically valuable -- than what came before.
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Bullshit!

Silicon Valley was made by engineers (like Hewlett and Packard), not robber barons.

Progress is bad

Did I catch you attention? Good! Now let me explain myself.

I was raised, like most good Americans, to believe in Progress (with a capital P). It was the American Way. But now, in my old age, I have to ask myself: is the world better now than it was fifty years ago? The answer, of course, is: yes and no. But if I were God, and could put all the ways the world has improved on one side of a scale, and all the bad things on the other side, the results would be obvious. The scales would tip so far everything would fall of off them.

Progress doesn’t have to be bad. But like everything else is has to be under our control, not the other way around. As it is, we are on a treadmill, where we have to keep running faster and faster just to stay in one place. Just to try to stay in one place, which is impossible because we keep changing the world with all our huffing and puffing.

This is not a cheerful thought, but it has a flip side too: once we understand what is going on, maybe we can to something else. Maybe. Maybe we could be skeptical about all this wonderful progress, and proceed more cautiously, instead of rushing headlong into the future. We might be running of a cliff - or into the ocean, like the lemmings.

Let me give you a personal example. I loved computers, software, and the Internet. I knew they were good. But I was fooled into spending much of my life serving them - or more realistically, serving the people who took control of them. And now, when I try to warn people about the dangers of computers, software, and the Internet, they don’t listen to me. They think I am deluded, and obstructing progress – me, the same guy who served the software gods so faithfully!

Well let me tell you something. I have seen these gods in their underwear, and the sight is not pretty. If you want to serve someone, pick someone else, because these guys will kill you.

“Now, now”, you say, “Calm down, it’s not that bad, it couldn’t be.”

“Is that so,” I say, “Well just take off your blinders and look around - and look at computer voting, in particular. You like the idea of computer voting because you think it is progress, whatever that is. But lets anonymous persons control our voting. Now if that isn’t important, what is? This is the perfect example of bad progress.”

HushMail

This is a fine service. It allows you to send and receive encrypted email. I paid $30 to get a premium account, even though I could get an account for free. And I am extremely careful with my money, I pinch my nickels so hard, the buffalo screams, to use an old, worn out phrase. But some things I believe about strongly, and privacy is one of them.

I suppose all of you believe in privacy, just like you believe in motherhood and apple pie. But the Internet has changed everything, including our right to privacy. If you send a letter by snail mail, only your addressee is going to read it. Anything else would be unthinkable. If someone discovered the government was reading people’s mail in secret, there would be hell to pay. But the government does that all the time on the Internet. That’s right, they do that all the time. And different governments share the Internet information they all get automatically. Big brother wants to know everything that is going on, anywhere.

They say they are looking for criminals, and they probably are. They are always looking for criminals, and they should be. But they shouldn’t be reading everybody’s mail, just as they shouldn’t be listening to everybody’s phone conversations. This gives the government too much power, which is always a bad thing.

Now that I have stepped down from my soapbox, let me talk tech talk, and talk about encryption. This can provide privacy in the Internet. This is nothing new. Every time you use an ATM machine it encrypts your transaction before it sends it. Every time you buy something on the Internet (something I do all the time) your transaction is encrypted. No one else can look at it. But this is not completely true: they can look at it all right, but they can’t read it. It looks like garbage.

Now you can do the same thing for your email. Why would you want to do this? In my case, I bought this capability just to support Internet privacy, although I may find other uses for it. But I don’t see how companies can live without it. They always have information they want to protect, but if they send that information on the Internet (or a private net), without protecting it, they are foolish. They go to a lot of trouble to shred paper documents, but don’t worry about the electronic ones.

If you ever send email that you want to protect, (if you are an activist of some type, for example) you need it. If you don’t send such email, maybe you should be. You should be living more dangerously – with the proper protection, of course.

Private manned space flight

From the CourierPress

Burt Rutan, who 18 years ago designed and flew an airplane around the world nonstop without refueling is working on this. Now Rutan is aiming at the $10 million X Prize by sending a manned vehicle up 62.5 miles (100 kilometers), landing it safely and then repeating the feat within two weeks.

Rutan's plans call for a mother ship, the exotic twin-boom White Knight, to haul a rocket plane, SpaceShipOne, to high altitude and then launch it into space. Both craft have flown successfully.
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This makes sense. I was wondering recently why someone was not doing this, instead of the brute-force NASA approach.