Entries Tagged 'Rantery' ↓

Last.fm, a “social music” site, has started streaming full tracks, from thousands of artists, for free. I’m listening to Springsteen’s new album right now. So happy.

Incidentally … is it me, or is “social” the new “i”? For a while there, back in the mid-late 90s, every other mildly internet-related product had a little “e” tacked onto the beginning of its name. Then Apple ushered in the era of the “i”, setting off a mini-apocalypse of i-products and — even worse — endless i-puns. That seems to have petered out, thank god, but now the success of MySpace and FaceBook has given us a stultifying cavalcade of “social something” sites. Hey guys! Bandwagon much?

My work computer decided to freeze up and eat itself last night, and this morning it wouldn’t boot. I pawed ineffectually at it for a while, then broke down and called IT. I haven’t had to do that in a while, so it took me some time to track down their contact info. It turned out to be an 800 number. This was immediately troubling, but I dialed anyway, and sure enough … it was a call center.

We’d outsourced our own tech support.

I sighed, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Five hours and two calls later, my computer still isn’t working. But at least my ticket has moved down the chain to someone I actually share a goddam building with.

I was bitching about this to my brother, who wondered when corporations would start outsourcing their bathrooms facilities. It really isn’t all that far-fetched.

I just saw Christopher Hitchens — author of God Is Not Great — give a pretty amazing answer to a question about why the US is so much less receptive to atheism than Europe:

I think it’s hugely exaggerated. Everywhere I go, I find that everyone who comes to the meeting thinks that they’re the only other atheist, and they’re amazed to find that everyone else is one too.

Whereas if I’m in … my country of birth, in England, the queen is the head of the church as well as the head of the state. You have to pay for both. And when she dies, her slobbering weak-chinned dauphin of a son will be the head of the Church of England … and in Germany, you have to pay a tithe to a church, whether you want to or not.

We are very lucky in this country, we have a better tradition: we have Jefferson, we have Thomas Paine, we have the first amendment, we have the Virginia statute of religious freedom. We are the only country in the world that says that the state can’t back religion. We should appreciate it more.

I do a lot of bitching about Bush and his cronies, and with good reason. But the fact remains that all of their criminal insanity obscures a pretty amazing system of government. I’m not big into the cult of the Founding Fathers, but there’s no denying that they laid a foundation that institutionalized levels of freedom and tolerance that the world had rarely seen before. And that the constitution they wrote still reads very well, two hundred years later.

Yes, that original vision has been systematically subverted over the years — but it has always survived its batterings, more or less, and occasionally done better than survive. When the old dudes with the wigs said that all men are created equal, they may have been whispering “Except for black people, of course” under their breath — but what survives in our document is the original, unblemished proclamation, and the civil rights movement grew up and triumphed¹ under its aegis — despite the efforts of all the evil bastards who struggled to circumvent the constitution’s mandate, even as they claimed to be upholding it.

But even a framework this enlightened is only as viable as its executors allow it to be. The constitution has certainly survived some pretty terrible caretakers in the past. My fear is that it won’t survive Bush.

Update: In comments, Carlo tells me that Hitchens’ allegation about tithes in Germany is untrue — you only have to tithe if you’re officially Christian.

It’s got to be hard being a Senate Republican these days. You’ve basically spent the last six years keeping your country embroiled in a ruinous, pointless war, despoiling the environment, sanctioning torture, and installing the apparatus for a police state. You’ve been as evil as you can possibly be. You’ve reached the pinnacle of nasty. Where do you go from here?

Perhaps recognizing this, the Republican mean-machine went into overdrive yesterday, and blocked three bills that would have:

1. Granted congressional representation to the residents of Washington, DC — 600,000 taxpayers in the heart of the cradle of democracy who, as punishment for the sin of being mostly Democrats, will remain disenfranchised.
2. Restored basic habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants — where an “enemy combatant” is anyone our president decides is an enemy combatant.
3. Given our long-suffering troops more time off from their grueling tours in Iraq.

Not bad for a day’s work. On the agenda for next week:

1. Pass the McConnell-Brownback Baby-Eating Act of 2007.
2. Introduce a statute that mandates the issuance of tiny AK-47s to toddlers in all public schools.
3. Declare September 23rd National Puppy Clubbing Day.

You’ve got to hand it to these guys. They’re overachievers.

I was watching baseball highlights on ESPN the other night when I had an epiphany.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There are lots and lots of ways to waste the precious, fleeting, unrecoverable moments of your life, but watching a couple of snarky guys in suits spew tepid wisecracks over baseball replays is probably one of the worst. It’s about the equivalent of watching Golf Channel outtakes from The Great Cincinatti Putting Tournament of 1973, say, or a Fox News analysis of Barak Obama’s suspiciously terroristy-sounding last name. But if I’d done either of those things, I wouldn’t have had my epiphany.

Here’s my epiphany: highlights are killing baseball.

This is what a typical baseball highlight looks like:

• Begin highlight. An overweight dude in a frumpy uniform is standing on a mound of dirt.
• He grabs his crotch, looks intently at the catcher. He nods.
• He throws the ball.
• The batter hits the ball.
• The camera follows the ball as it sails up into the air — a slow, slow rise into the sky. Sometimes you can see outfielders at the bottom of the screen, just sort of standing there, watching.
• After a very long time, the ball disappears into the stands.
• End highlight.

Take that sequence, repeat it five or six times (with slight variations in the uniforms and the corpulence of the pitcher), and you’ve pretty much got your typical major league baseball highlight reel.

You can see why they do this: the home run is the sine qua non of the game: it’s the best thing that can possibly happen, pretty much, and baseball’s dwindling corpus of fans pray ardently for it. But here’s the thing: from a purely mechanical, replay perspective, it’s probably the least exciting event on the field.

That’s not true of other sports: a good 50-yard hail-mary pass into the end zone is always fun to watch, no matter who you’re rooting for; long, arcing three-pointers are delicate and lovely and breathtaking, and penalty kicks have a queasy, exciting vertiginous quality to them.

But homeruns are just boring.

The annoying and tragic thing here is that there’s a lot to get excited about in baseball: shortstops diving for a hard grounders, clinch double-plays, runners sliding under tags.

Show us more of that stuff, snarky announcer people. Because there’s a name for sports that give us nothing but replays of tiny white balls dwindling into the horizon.

Golf.

I caught an incoherent rant on the radio the other day, some blathering bit of puff about how Palestinian children are indoctrinated from birth with anti-semitic hatred, brought up to kill Israelis, taught to disassemble a klashinkof before they learn to read. The barely unstated implication was that Palestinians are vessels of pure hatred, with terrorism baked into their bones, and are therefore responsible for everything that’s going wrong in the West Bank and Gaza.

What rankles about this particular brand of sophistry is what it leaves out. The Palestinians have been under occupation for forty years now, crammed into tiny, squalorous enclaves, subject to bombings, embargoes, imprisonment at the whim of their Israeli occupiers. If a large portion of the Palestinian population has been completely radicalized, you have to ask why. Yes, their leaders have been ineffectual and corrupt; yes, many of them subscribe to a religion that — in its current form — makes a fetish of violence in the service of belief; yes, they’re “supported” by Arab countries that run the gamut from corrupt dictatorship to brutal theocracy. All true, all relevant, and all completely besides the point. The Palestinian uprising is a direct result of the occupation. Period. This is just so freaking obvious that it blows my mind every time I hear one of these mincing apologists parroting the same lines we’ve been hearing for two decades now. And they’ve got it down to a science, pretty much, a toxic cocktail of lies, half-truths, and omissions: focus exclusively on proximate causes, stubbornly refuse to do any sort of complex analysis, and ignore those pesky bits of history that don’t substantiate your current manufactured argument. It’s blame the victim, on a massive scale, and it’s been this way for a long, long time.

But it’s a very effective technique, and it would be a shame to waste it all in one place. And so the Bush/Cheney combine, never ones to pass up new and exciting ways to lie to their constituents, have co-opted it for Iraq. In fact, it’s the only consistent Iraqi strategy they’ve ever had. They talk about their vast landscape of failure only when they have to, preferring to spend most of their time focusing monomaniacally on the “good news” — which, given the extreme rarity of anything even resembling non-tragedy in Iraq, leads inevitably to an inordinate fixation on things like new schools and meaningless pronouncements by toothless government organs. This is sort of like standing outside a burning house and commenting on how beautiful and inspirational that bit of bannister that hasn’t caught on fire yet is.

But the Bush people have added a new wrinkle to the old technique, a dodge as fullproof as it is pathetic: the future. Whenever they run out of tiny pseudo-successes to celebrate, they fall back on what Atrios has dubbed the Friedman Unit — six months of time after which things must change in some way, named after Thomas Friedman’s tendency to place serial six-month deadlines on this or that aspect of the disaster. The administration has been spouting Friedmans for years, the latest example being the new troop escalation (ie, surge), six months of which, we are told, may or not affect things in some significant but undisclosed way. We’ll have to see. As usual.

It gets better than that, though. When even Friedman Units don’t do the trick, they take the extremely long view. Things may look like a total clusterfuck right now, says Condie, or Don, or Dick, or George, but in thirty, forty, fifty years, the seeds we’re planting in this ravaged ruined landscape will blossom into a beautiful garden of peace and democracy. So you people will have to wait.

The thing is, bullshit this ridiculous only works with the tacit consent of its audience. We the people are as much complicit in the lies as the liars themselves. Their stories aren’t convincing, but they do give us the tools we need to validate our own preconceptions: to believe the unbelievable, to justify the unjustifiable, to permit the impermissible. We want to believe, and these people make it possible. That’s their great sin. But it’s also ours.

Big news in the Web 2.0 world today. Google announced a new framework called Google Gears, which allows your web applications to save and retrieve stuff even when you’re not online. This online-only limitation has been a huge Achilles heel for the web app industry so far, and one of the major reasons that Google Apps — in its current form — has no chance of even denting Microsoft’s dominance in the office wars.

But it’s only a first step. It’ll probably be a year before the major vendors start pushing out viable disconnected web applications, and a couple of years more before they gain any traction in the market. There’s a better way. I call it WebAppetezier 1.0 (BETA).

WebAppetizer is a service that installs itself quietly on your machine, and then goes out and looks for all desktop applications that save and retrieve data locally. And then the magic happens — it modifies those apps so that they cannot save or load any data unless the machine is connected to the web. So your word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, music players, etc won’t do anything useful unless you’re online. The data’s still there, just inaccessible. It’ll be exactly like using a web app, except much more annoying.

I’m a little surprised no one’s thought of this before, actually. It seems like an obvious solution — just a different way of looking at the problem, really. Mostly, people try to fix deficiencies in their products by making them as good as, or better than, the competition. Why not, instead, just make everyone else as bad as you? It saves time and effort.

Of course, this technique will only work for Windows computers outfitted with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is an excellent delivery mechanisms for programs like this one — the kind that need to be installed automatically, without the user even knowing about it. Why bother all those busy people with details on how we’re making web applications a viable alternative in today’s industry. Just do it!

I see that Google just spent $3 billion to buy DoubleClick, another product that quietly does stuff to users that they don’t know about in order to make money for other people. I’d be willing to sell Google my product for a tenth of that price. Given the amount of money I’ll be saving them in R&D, development, and advertising, I think that’s a bargain.

This is what it’s like to be a conservative whackjob in America today:

Plans to vaccinate young girls against the sexually-transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer have been blocked in several US states by conservative groups, who say that doing so would encourage promiscuity.

So, to summarize:

1. Having sex is bad, and
2. Fear of cervical cancer might be a good way to discourage girls from doing so, but
3. There’s a drug out now that completely eliminates cervical cancers transmitted via sexual intercourse; therefore
4. This drug must be destroyed.

QED.

I’m not sure how long it takes to twist your brain into a state where teenagers having cancer seems preferable to teenagers having sex, but I can’t imagine it’s easy. You really have to struggle to be that stupid.

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting here in front of the Mavs / Spurs game. I haven’t watched basketball in a long time, I think because of the trauma of seeing the Stockton/Malone-era Jazz, a team I cared passionately about, lose championship after championship to Jordan and the damn Bulls (may the curse of the Flying Spaghetti Monster be everlastingly upon them). The memory burns still.

But I’ve started watching again, lately, and things have certainly changed. Not a lot, but noticeably. Here are my rip-van-winkle impressions:

1. Everyone’s huge now. Even the tiny point guards. Avery Johnson (who’s coaching the Mavs now — how cool) completely disappears when his players huddle around him.
2. Players are still doing this thing where they get someone up in the air, jump into them, and shoot. This invariably gets them a foul call. I have two problems with this: 1) Why the hell to the refs call that? It’s obvious what’s going on. 2) It’s kind of a shitty way to get points. I understand that it’s all about the final score, nobody remembers the details, etc, but that doesn’t explain the fist-pumping celebrations of the shooters who manage to pull this off, or the roar of the homecrowd when they do. The proper response to this kind of success is shame.
3. The announcers are still insanely hyperbolic when they’re talking about the big stars. Every made shot is a supreme act of grace and beauty by a titan of the sport. Every ball swatted down by some eight-footer with the winspan of a 747 is a dagger in the heart of the enemy and a triumphant proclamation that the swatter has arrived / perpetuated his supreme dominance / reasserted his defensive credentials for all time. Jesus. Settle down guys.
4. The sport has gotten prettier. It was kind of nasty and violent when I checked out, all kinds of pushing and grunting down in the paint, giant bruisers backing defenders down in the post then just turning around and dropping it in. Seems more wide open now.
5. More tattoos. A lot more tattoos.
6. I liked Charles Barkley as a player, but I love him as a commentator. The dude’s still hilarious, and still really smart.

Anyway. I didn’t know anything about basketball then, and I know less now. But it’s still kind of fun to watch.

Anyone who spends any time at all working in software will quickly find themselves bewildered by the ridiculous number of technologies/standards/frameworks that clot our industry. It’s often hard to tell for sure what these things actually do — but a lot of them seem to be solving the same problem, in slightly different ways.

This is no accident. Every year, the Committee for Technological Obfuscation takes a look at the industry and rates the current state of obfuscation on its patented Confuse-O-Meter. The Confuse-O-Meter (CoM) has five levels:

• Clear as a Bell (CaaB)
• Mildly Confusing (MC)
• Quite Confusing (QC)
• Not in Any Way Understandable (NiaWU)
• I Have No Fucking Idea What the Fuck Is Going On Here (IHNFIwtFiGOH)

Ideally, the industry is in a perpetual state of I Have No Fucking Idea What the Fuck Is Going On Here (IHNFIwtFiGOH). In this state, no mortal is able to truly apprehend anything more than a tiny, specialized sliver of his world. This perfect level of confusion is impossible to maintain all the time, however, so the Committee will accept a world that is merely Not in Any Way Understandable (NiaWU). Anything below NiaWU, though, is a crisis, and the committee will take immediate and severe obfuscatory measures when things spiral wildly into control.

The primary means of industry obfuscation, and by far the most effective, is the brute force approach: ie, the technology volume approach, otherwise known as When Technology Attacks!

Here’s how you go about it:

1. Find a problem that’s already been solved, and then introduce a technology that does essentially the same thing, but in a way that’s much, much more complicated than it needs to be.
2. Build a massive infrastructure around your useless and redundant technology. Start referring to it as an “ecosystem”.
3. Give your technology an odd and inscrutable name. If possible, the name should contain the words “service”, “transactional”, and/or “infrastructure”. Better yet, some sort of monstrous neologism that combines all three: Optimization Middleware Transservicestructure, say, or Orthogonal Infraservactionality Ecosystem.
4. Shorten your odd and inscrutable name to an odd and inscrutable acronym. The acronym should have no relationship to any sounds that human beings are able to produce, should be actively unpleasant to say, and should be identical to an acronym used for another (completely unrelated) technology.

Maybe the best example of this technique in the insane cloud of buzzing technologies surrounding the Web Services “space”:

• Web Services Definition Language (WSDL)
• Web Services Semantics (WSDL-S)
• Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSDL-R)
• Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM)
• Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF)

And this is just a tiny portion of the Web Services ecosystem. Web Services are the Obfuscation Committee’s crowning achievement. They mention it in all their literature.

So that’s step one of the Obfuscation Technique. Step two is to document your new technology. But not “document” in the sense of writing things that make it clear to other people what your stuff does. No. “Document” in the sense of barfing up thick blocks of text that read like legal briefs written by insane surrealist monkey-sadists. Under no circumstances should your audience glean any useful or even intelligible information from your documents. Great care should be taken to choose words that are guaranteed to shut down all but the most intrepid users’ cognitive facilities.

Take the W3C’s description of WSDL, for example:

WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). WSDL is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate, however, the only bindings described in this document describe how to use WSDL in conjunction with SOAP 1.1, HTTP GET/POST, and MIME.

If you’re not trying to claw your eyes out by the time you get to the third sentence of this passage, then you’re probably not human. You should get yourself checked.

Step 3 is Evangilizationism. This is where you go out into the community and pimp your new technology as if it’s (1) something new (2) better than whatever solution it’s replacing and (3) the defacto standard. These are contradictory statements, of course, but — if you’ve done a good job with Steps 1 and 2 — your audience will be so busy trying to figure out what he hell your thing does that they won’t notice.

So, in a well-obfuscated ecosystem, this is what usually happens: programmers get assigned some architectural task, google around to figure out the best way to do it, discover an Alexandrian Library’s worth of competing, inscrutable, and overlapping technologies that sort-of-but-not-quite do what they need, then crawl under their desks and weep like infants. After a couple of hours, the smart ones crawl out and submit their resignations and go back to school. The rest of them set up a virtual dartboard in their minds, close their virtual eyes, hurl a virtual dart, and choose whichever technology it lands on. This is a game called Pin the Arbitrary Decision on the Inscrutable Technology. It’s a very popular game in the computer industry, but no one will admit to playing it.

The Committee tries to mount at least five or six major obfuscation assaults every year, and hundreds of minor ones, force-feeding an industry already swollen to bursting, and working tirelessly to make our world as confusing as it can possibly be.