The Tyranny Of Groups

2011/09/17 — isecore

Imagine for a while that you’re a gourmet food critic. You enjoy the best of foods, and you require access to it in order to conduct your profession and hone your tastebuds. You have a carefully selected menu delivered to your home each day, and you’re very happy with how well it tastes.

Imagine now that the board of directors in the co-op you live in all of a sudden decide that everyone living there will have to eat the same thing, every day, for as long as you live there. What that meal will be is to be decided by a majority vote, and everyone will be allowed one vote. For each type of meal, statistics about that meal will be provided. Statistics such as how much the meal will cost you, what it tastes like and how it will be delivered.

Now, of course the majority of people will vote for the cheap (or very cheapest) meal. Most people don’t have a trained palate, most people don’t require expensive dinners and most will simply be happy if the meal dimishes their hunger and doesn’t obviously taste of dogshit. This of course leaves people like you in a bit of a bind. You don’t want the cheapest of meals, you want something that tastes good – yet you have no choice in the matter. Whatever the result of the vote, you’ll simply have to adapt or move out. Eat the crappy hamburger and like it, or move out.

This is an analogy for what is happening in my co-op. It’s not the residents dinner which is up for debate, it’s their choice of broadband supplier.

In fact, there isn’t even any vote. It’s already been decided, and I simply have to like it. Whatever “it” turns out to be, since nobody seems to have any information about it other than that it’s going to happen.

You see, when it comes to broadband I’m a gourmand. I want the best and I’m willing to pay for it. Yet this fundamental power of choice has been removed from me. Come the end of the year, I will be forced to change broadband-supplier to one who is admittedly a lot cheaper than my current, but which so far has supplied me with zero specifications. It’s essentially as if someone is forcing you to buy their car, yet refuses to disclose even the most basic information about it.

In my case, the co-op is going to get what’s called a “gruppanslutning”. Roughly translated, a group-connection. These type of things are fairly popular in Sweden, and essentially it’s where a somewhat large group of people get together and solicit a service from a company. The company agrees to a lower price, and in return they get a large influx of customers. The kicker is that these types of deals are always one-size-fits-all. There is no wiggle-room for individual needs.

And this is where the tyranny of groups come in play. The vast majority doesn’t care much about what type of “broadband” they get, as long as it’s dirt-cheap, allows them to check their email and is always on. They don’t have a clue about bandwidth restrictions, throughput or any other type of variable. Yet because the majority don’t care or are too (for lack of a better word) clueless, they will force more knowledgeable people to simply squeeze into the mold. One voice arguing for a slightly more expensive solution will have no footing in a flood of voice saying they want the cheapest and simplest thing available – even when they more knowledgeable voice knows better, and knows that in the long run the cheap bullshit solution will harm the group as a whole.

Group-mentality works great for ants. It does not work quite as great for people, because people will always have different needs and wishes. Disallowing choice simply to save some money is stupid. But that’s how the tyranny of groups work. The dumb majority will always outweigh the intelligent minority.

My co-op is no exception here, unfortunately.

Posted in Politics, Technology, Thoughts And Such. 3 Comments »

A Possible Event

2011/06/12 — isecore

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That’s a quote by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most well-respected scifi-authors in the history of the human existence. And you know what, he’s right. Humans today rarely understand much about the magical items we use every day. Computers, cellphones, LCD-televisions and so forth.

Occasionally I end up in discussions with other people about alien technology. You know, the scifi-type of technology. Flying saucers, mindrays, etc. That’s when I whip out the quote above and remind them that if we would travel back in time just a hundred years, and start explaining cellphones, the internet, satellites, the GPS-system to someone back in 1911 they would probably be convinced we were talking about magical items. The same thing goes for alien technology. If aliens showed up here one day, their technology would be amazing, but it would simply be more advanced than ours.

With this in mind, there’s a hypothetical future event that now and again catches my imagination. It’s been labeled as a “technological singularity” and most people believe it will take place sometime in the early to mid twenty-first century. Which is essentially right around the corner.

The singularity will actually be a number of different things taking place at roughly the same time. The primary event will be the development of machine intelligence that match or exceed our own intelligence. Personally I don’t like the term “artificial intelligence” and prefer to label it as machine intelligence instead, but it’s the same thing. One day we will develop machines that can think for real – not just the crude simulations of thought that we can produce today. Machines that can reason, that can wonder, machines that like us will have the capacity for genuine thought. Other parts of the singularity will be advanced technologies such as nanotechnology, workable quantum physics and biotech so advanced that the line between human and machine start to blur.

The mind has trouble even thinking about these things, and the singularity will so profoundly change our society and ourselves that it will be impossible for us to predict the future beyond that point. We simply don’t have the comprehension for it.

For me personally, the big question is whether we will benefit from the singularity, or if humans will self-destruct through it. Often I worry about our society claiming to be so evolved and civilized, yet we still fight meaningless wars over imagined resources rather than share them equally, and we still insist on being hindered by obsolete institutions such as religion and bureaucracy. I mean, we still insist on using money, and our countries and societies still use the same models of politics and economy that were created hundreds of years ago, only much more refined and detailed – but still as primitive.

For the singularity to work to our benefit, we need to lay aside much of the childish squabbles that humans still cling to. We need to stop worrying about money, remove the concept of money and profit, and instead share resources equally and for the benefit of all. The concept of money limits us, because large corporations who have invested resources in certain things (car-companies depending on oil, for example) will resist any change to that, and for the singularity to benefit we would have to leave all that behind.

Otherwise, it might be our undoing.

I hope that the singularity instead becomes our salvation. A way out from all this noise, all this violence and hate. I hope that we can lay off the yoke of religion, politics and borders to become something better. To use technology to free us and take us into a better future, to make ourselves better. I hope I live to see that day, when machine intelligence rises up as our equal, that day when we can cure any disease and any damage instantly and when we can travel anywhere faster than the speed of thought.

Posted in Technology, Thoughts And Such. 1 Comment »

Useless And Redundant Information

2011/06/06 — isecore

About fifteen years ago –when actual connections to the Internet started appearing in peoples homes– some theories were put forth as to the “dangers” of this. One of these theories were the concept of information overload. Back then we used dial-up modems running at quite low speeds compared to broadband now, and the web/internet was a bit more primitive and less hard-edged. Things like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia were at best some distant vague fantasies.

Today all this is a reality, and information overload is becoming a reality. I’m fascinated at the amount of useless and redundant information that is created, both by automatic systems and humans themselves.

For example, all of these goddamn notifications that gets emailed to me whenever something happens somewhere. Someone likes something I put on Facebook, bam – notification through email. More fluff to fill my inbox. Why is this necessary, and why does it have to happen instantly? I always liked email because you DIDN’T have to reply immediately, but this has been perverted now – since email takes virtually no time at all to arrive, people expect you to answer it instantaneously as well. Emails fly back and forth, and everything is bogged down in these useless and redundant emails informing me of how someone did this, something happened, someone did that, someone said this and so on.

GODDAMMIT. I will find this out the next time I visit Facebook or Youtube or whatever. Okay? Until then, could we please stop cluttering up the “information superhighway” (oh god what a hilarious phrase that is now) with this useless information? It does nothing except stress me up.

Posted in Technology, Thoughts And Such. 4 Comments »

What Kind Of Formal Education?

2011/01/14 — isecore

Yesterday at work we briefly discussed the matter of formal education in our line of business. At times, my place of employment receive teenagers who do a few weeks of internship with us. Often there are questions about what kind of training we carry in our luggage.

Well, most of us don’t have any. None that apply to our line of work anyways. Sure, we all have one or more certifications for various things, but that’s not the same kind of education as you would receive at, say, a university. It’s not formal training in that sense, but rather a way to ensure we’re qualified.

But education? Nope, none. Our boss has a degree in applied electronics, but that was 25 years ago or something and doesn’t really apply to the current computer technology. Apart from that, we’re essentially untrained monkeys. Rather than relying on any kind of education we rely on our wits, our experience, our creativity and our ability to solve problems.

We’re happy amateurs who have a deep interest in computers. We’ve been tinkering around with them, we’ve mastered them under our own conditions and now we fix them, repair them and make sure customers are happy.

In fact, when we talked about it we couldn’t really think of one type of formal education that suited our line of work. Not a single type of education that suited the computer-repairing monkeys. To do this work you need skills in many different fields, and if anyone asks me I feel those skills are acquired through experience and passion, not by sitting in a classroom or doing midterms.

Posted in Computers, Technology, Thoughts And Such. 1 Comment »

This Is So Backwards

2010/10/20 — isecore

Since back in February I’ve been a user (and customer) of Steam. My general dislike for DRM-infested bullshit aside, I do think it’s quite nice. It’s easy, it’s quick and it’s very painless. Almost dangerously painless. However, today I’m being annoyed by the stupidities and backwards idiocy of the companies who rule the gaming industry.

I pre-ordered Fallout: New Vegas on Steam a long time ago. Today I realized that had I bought it the old-fashioned way (with actual discs and other deprecated forms of distribution) would’ve been playing it today, since it was released on antique media yesterday. On Steam it doesn’t unlock until Friday.

This is so amazingly backwards. Why are we still insisting on shipping around plastic discs when we have the Internet and digital distribution? And why should the people who prefer a more progressive way of buying games be punished and have to wait three days longer – for no apparent reason other than to make us annoyed?

This is the same type of bullshit that makes people pirate music, movies and television shows. This is the same reason why I think Hulu is a big pile of crap, because of it’s regional lockouts. Look, get on the frelling bandwagon already – the Internet is global. It doesn’t care about borders or countries or release dates.

When you release the game, the movie, the album – release it everywhere at the same goddamn time. Don’t do staggered releases unless you have a seriously good excuse to do so. And I know you don’t have that.

Posted in Computers, Internet, Technology, Thoughts And Such. 1 Comment »

Att Indoktrinera Elever Till En Plattform

2010/09/12 — isecore

Jag läste igår om hur såväl borgare som de rödgröna vill att varje elev ska ha en dator. Principiellt håller jag med och tycker det är en bra sak att skolan ligger långt fram i att förse elever med tillgång till både datorer och uppkoppling.

Men även om vi lägger åt sidan att det här känns lite som ett lite väl populistiskt utspel från de båda allianserna så ser jag personligen en del problem med det.

Jag har jobbat med datorer inom skola, både på högstadie och gymnasienivå, och en sak som alltid störde mig med hur datorkunskapen var utformad var att man inte lärde sig en metod, man lärde sig en applikation och ett operativsystem. Snarare än att ge elever en möjlighet att lära sig lösningar till problem lärde man dem specifika program. Om vi använder bilar som jämförelse så var det lite som att inte lära en elev att köra en bil oavsett märke, utan att enbart lära dem hur Volvos olika bilmodeller fungerar.

På den tiden var det Microsoft överallt i skolan, och även om det har börjat luckras upp så är det fortfarande Office-sviten som regerar. Eleverna lär sig inte att hantera en ordbehandlare, de lär sig att använda Word. I många fall blir det därför svårt för dem att applicera sina kunskaper om de inte har Word på sin dator. Givetvis är det här något som Microsoft tycker bra om, att få en statligt finansierad indoktrinering till deras applikationer.

Så, när jag då läser om det här med datorer till elever börjar jag fundera på samma saker.


– Skolorna väljer själva om de vill ha PC eller Mac. Hur man använder datorerna är det viktiga, inget annat. Det hänger ihop med pedagogiken och hur skolan jobbar, säger Hans Olsson på utbildningsförvaltningen till Sydsvenskan.

Jag anser själv att termerna “PC” och “Mac” är lite förlegade, men det är ändå en stor skillnad mellan dem. Jag känner också att det blir lite problematiskt att standardisera på en plattform, för blir det inte samma problem som ovan då? Att man lär dem ett specifikt system, snarare än att lära dem metoder som kan appliceras på olika miljöer?

Eller är jag bara paranoid och tänker för mycket?

Posted in Computers, Politics, Technology, Thoughts And Such. 5 Comments »

The Ownership of Sounds

2010/06/25 — isecore

So, about half an hour ago or so I was in my kitchen making a sallad. It’s midsummers-eve here in Sweden, and while I’m not partaking in any festivities I felt that something a little more festive was called for as far as dinner was concerned. Thus, I made chicken-salad. Quite lovely.

While pretending to know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen, I had some music on for companionship. One of my favorite songs is “God is a DJ” by Faithless. It’s a great dance-type song, and I never tire of listening to it.

This time however I noticed an interesting sound in the song. Faithless often uses odd bleeps, sweeps and loops in their songs, and this one sounded familiar. I’d probably noticed it before, but this time I paid attention to it. While my hands chopped various vegetables my mind stirred around and tried to remember where I’d heard that particular sound before.

After some mental wandering through my archives I remembered. It was from one of my all-time favorite movies, the masterpiece known as “Apocalypse Now“.

Apocalypse Now has a very interesting soundscape. The music is this odd synthesizer-and-percussion thing, and most of the soundscape is somewhat surreal and unreal – which goes well with the films somewhat bisarre themes. One of the more noticeable aspects of this is that a lot of the helicopter sounds have been replaced with similar-sounding (yet at the same time kind of alien) synthesizer-created sounds.

The very first minutes of the film demonstrates this, with the Huey swooping across the film with a distinctly non-Huey type sound.

It was this very sound I heard in “God is a DJ”. An odd, swooping type sound filling out the background.

I briefly wondered if Faithless had sampled it from the movie, and if so whether it was a legitimate (i.e. they asked for permission from the copyright holders) or whether it was a black-market sample. The latter option seemed much more logical, and while it’s a fairly uniquie soundbite it’s also quite generic to the untrained ear.

But then my mind continued thinking about this. What if they’d recreated the sound using the same type of equipment? What if Faithless discovered they could replicate the sound using completely different equipment?

So who owns the sound if an almost identical sound can be recreated using completely different equipment some twenty years after the “original” sound was created?

Could the copyright holders of Apocalypse decide that they owned the IP of that particular sound, and that any other sound created independently of that sound, sounds that weren’t completely identical but at the same time sounded similar enough, was in fact infringing on their intellectual property? That they owned the rights to every similar sound?

Of course it’s quite bizarre to think about, but it’s also essentially how the copyright-mafia works today so it wouldn’t really surprise me either if some crazed hollywood rights-holder unleashed a shitload of lawyers over this trivial matter.

Which in the long run reminds me that this IP-hostility only serves to stifle creativity. If Faithless had to leave out that sound due to threats of being sued into oblivion, then the rights-holder of that sound would’ve stifled innovation and creativity.

Kind of sad to think about.

(The sound in question can be heard here, in this Youtube-video of the very introduction from Apocalypse Now. It’s the very first sound heard, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh.)

Posted in Music, Technology, Thoughts And Such. No Comments »

Things That Would Make The WDTV Live Perfect

2010/05/16 — isecore

As previously mentioned, I own a WDTV Live and I’m overall very happy with it. There’s some minor issues that tarnish an otherwise beautiful little product, but when pushed I will contend that it’s an excellent gadget that any geek would probably enjoy.

However, lately I’ve been kicking around some ideas regarding what could make it into a truly perfect device.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

YouTube in High-Definition

When I bought this thing it could play Youtube-movies in HD. In later firmware-revisions this was removed, probably since YouTube was moving into the territory of renting films, and various companies didn’t want the WDTV to compete with their products. In short – it wasn’t a technological thing, but rather the stupidity of business and bureaucracy that removed this function.

If it was brought back, it would be great.

Quicktime-support and built-in viewing of trailers from Apple

While I on general principle loathe proprietary and closed formats, I still do enjoy watching trailers on Apples website. They look great, it’s easy to browse and overall it’s a nice experience. Much nicer than trying to find them on Youtube or whatever.

This is another fine example of how bureaucracy and business-decisions get in the way of technological progress. Apple owns Quicktime, and Apple of course doesn’t want anyone else to stick their fingers in the jar. They most assuredly do not want any type of competition with their own AppleTV-device, and thus lock this down really hard. WDC can’t add unofficial support either because Apple would come down on them with an army of lawyers.

Thus no gorgeous high-def Apple trailer on the WDTV Live. Which is a shame, because it would be awesome.

Better built-in file management functions

The WDTV Live has some rudimentary functions for basic file management. These can probably do in a pinch, but overall they’re pretty useless. Personally I always get annoyed at how you have to go into a certain submenu to do the file-management rather than being able to do it “on the fly” while you’re browsing through files.

The interface for this could be cleaned up, and ideally I feel that maybe buttons could be added to the remote for some of this.

This also brings me to…

Cleaned-up interface

The WDTV Live is very easy to navigate, and it’s obvious that the UI has it’s roots in the UI of it’s smaller, non-networked sibling. When networking and file-management was added these functions were simply bolted on, and in some cases this has made the otherwise quite sleek UI a bit unwieldy to navigate. Especially if you’re like me and have multiple network shares.

The user tends to spend quite a while navigating the primary menu, then navigating into the network share, then navigating a system of subfolders for organizing and then finally finding the file you wish to play back. I’m not sure how, but I do believe this could be cleaned up a bit.

Expanded functionality and customization for the Photo-function

When I first bought this device I felt that the functions for Photo-viewing weren’t going to get much use in my house. I was right about this, but recently I discovered that it’s actually a rather neat thing when you want to do a slideshow for friends. It’s much nicer relaxing in the couch than cramping together in front of the computer. You can sit there and click through the pictures and tell anecdotes about them.

However, the function is quite crude. First off it’s annoyingly slow when dealing with either large pictures. Changing from one 3 mpx picture to another 3 mpx picture takes up to ten seconds, and it’s frustrating not knowing if the thing is working or if you didn’t press down enough on the remote control. Maybe a “working” indicator would be nice? Or preferably somehow speeding up the process.

It would also be cool if you could customize things such as transitions a bit more. Maybe implement a system where the user could download a tool from WDC, create transitions and then upload them to his WDTV Live? And maybe share them online via some community? Who knows, lots of potential here.

Proper DVD-Playback

I (almost literally, as a I sold it for a paltry sum of money to a friend) abandoned my DVD-player shortly after buying the WDTV Live. DVDs fill very little function in my life these days, but occasionally I find a movie that isn’t available in any other format, or I go on a wild romp in my DVD-collection and find some golden oldie I want to view again. Most of the time I copy the DVD to an ISO-image and play it over a network share – or (and this works just fine too) I simply pop the disc in my DVD-drive and share it through SAMBA then play the movie straight from it over the network.

But the WDTV has some fairly psychotic playback of DVDs, which is annoying. It completely ignores nice DVD-functions such as menus and chapters, and instead utilizes the somewhat crude functions it already has to fast-forward/reverse.

So, it would be really nice if the WDTV when playing back DVD-material would emulate the DVD-experience, complete with menus, chapters and whatnot.

Ability to customize the UI a bit further

Often when using the WDTV Live I find myself wishing there was some function to change the background image of the main menu. Sure, it’s functional – but it would be nice to be able to put something else there without firing up the hex-editor and mucking about in the firmware-image. This could also be a part of that UI overhaul I mentioned earlier.

Not to mention the fact that I wish there were more customization of various settings. For example, you can jump ten minutes in a movie if you press the “next” button while fast-forwarding. This is nice, but often I wish there was a way to jump shorter distances. Often you overshoot where you want to be in the film, and then you tediously have to rewind back to that moment. It would be nice if the user could change the settings for things such as the jump-function.

And finally, at least for now, until I think of more things that might fit the bill…

Stable firmware

The latest firmware (as of writing this) is not particularly stable IMHO. It feels like a beta-release. The player will lock up in various artful ways – the play/pause buttons when viewing a film will stop working, or the “loading” indicator will show up while watching a movie, or the movies soundtrack will keep playing even after you’ve pressed “Stop” and have dropped into the navigation-menu.

This needs to be a higher priority. Unstable firmware does nothing to make customers happy, and we don’t like being treated as a big bunch of unpaid beta-testers. So, pretty please with sugar on top, spend time making the firmware more stable?

Posted in Gadgets, Technology. 3 Comments »

Lickable: Tesla Model S

2010/04/16 — isecore

One of my lovely aunts recently bought a hybrid. She’s quite pleased with it, and it’s a pretty car. I don’t know the make or model, and I can’t identify it from the photo she has posted.

I’m all for environmentally-friendly cars. Sure, I do love a big V8 in some american iron from the late ’60s, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that cars need to evolve and change. Fossil-fuel is looking more and more like a dead-end since oil doesn’t last forever and it also creates heavy pollution. Plus, internal combustion engines are amazingly wasteful.

The only problem is that most environmentally friendly cars are incredibly lame. The Toyota Prius for example, or Chevys Volt concept. Lame. Sure, they’re green and will do nicely for transporting grandma to bingo and back, but they have all the style and flavor of a glass of water.

Thus, I’m saying this: if I was in the market for a brand-new car I would without a doubt buy a Tesla Model S. It’s 100% electric, it looks great and it’s also quite practical. Four-door sedan for the whole family, and plenty of torque for when you feel the need to lay rubber.

It’s a win for the gearhead and a win for the environment.

The only problem is that Tesla is a small manufacturer, and even though the Model S is (in my opinion) extremely competitively priced compared to similar-looking and similar-equipped cars from more established automaker it’s still a problem buying one. Demand for them far outstrips availability, and the closest Tesla-dealer in europe is in the UK.

I hope this will change soon and we’ll see more Teslas on the road.

And I mean, just look at the damn thing! Gets me all worked up just looking at it!

Posted in Cars, Technology. No Comments »

I Knew It!

2010/04/08 — isecore

Today, while doing my usual daily routing (reading sites, checking email, reading comics, reading the newspapers) I find out that Victor Muller, the president of SAAB wants to build a retro-styled version of the classic SAAB 92. He explicitly names the new Fiat 500 and the retrostyled VW Beetle as inspirations for this opinion.

All I can say is, you heard it here first, folks. I was the one who suggested they do this.

Posted in Cars. No Comments »
« Older posts «
»