A case of duty

I often get asked by people I know why I often vote *for* taxes, or vote against reducing them.

I think this election season thats a particularly salient question.

My answer: I feel it is my duty.

To often, we have let the right wing coopt that word and use it when its convenient to their goals and interests only.

Its time to take it back. Here are duties I feel strongly I have to my country and my countrymen:

(1) To support my fellow Americans in their hours of need

Right now we are in tough economic times. Some of us are lucky enough to still have gainful employment and I am among them. I consider it my duty to help those not so fortunate and cutting the taxes that support the social services (as meager as they may be) that form what little safety net they have would be beneath my conscience.

Similarly, to let my fellow Americans die from exposure because they cannot afford shelter, or of disease because they cannot afford proper medical care, is something I again cannot conscience. If we truly are one people, then we owe it to our less fortunate to share some modicum of our good fortune with them, even if its just their basic needs.

(2) To support my country's economic future
We will never again be a manufacturing power. That is a reality of economics. All we have left to bargain with in the world economy is our skilled labor and skilled labor requires learning skills, which means education. I support education and education spending as vital to our country's future and as another duty of being a beneficiary of this country's economy.

(3) To support the American Dream

This country is built on a promise, that someone who wants to work, can work and someone who wants to work hard can be rewarded for that effort with a reasonable standard of living. This can only be true in an economy with an ample place for a middle class. For the past thirty years, the distribution of wealth in this country has been shifting more and more to the wealthy and that wealth has come out of what is available to the middle class.

The right likes to accuse the left of "class warfare" but the fact of the matter is that its a war that both sides have been engaged in for a long time, and the shift of wealth shows who is is winning it and it isn't the working man or woman.

(4) To support a government By the people and For the people.

The sad fact today is that our government is bought and paid for with money spent on advertising (and "news-vertising") that tells lies to the voting public. One look at who is paying for those ads tells you which side is which. The right is funded by large for-profit corporations and very wealthy people. The left is funded by organized groups of working men and women (that's called a "union" by the way), not-for-profit social justice groups, and more and more by middle-class individuals of conscience.

I believe that as is, it is fundamentally unstable and that there is no mistake that the rise of the over-bearing power of the rich coincides directly with the rise of the importance of advertising driven mass media in our society. I believe the system today is fundamentally flawed, distorted past recognition by a media-power our founders could never have anticipated. In the short run, it is my duty to be part of that mobilized shrinking middle class.

In the long run, I believe the system is terribly unstable today and major change is needed to ensure that this government by and for the people does not perish from this earth.

We are headed straight back into aristocracy and I believe it is my duty to fight that.

(5) A duty to create Liberty and Justice for All

The American Dream of the middle class is something we had and have just about lost. This dream, I am afraid, we have never had. The good news is that it is one of the few parts of that grand promise that actually is getting better. We have our first President of Color. We edge closer and closer to equal rights for the LGBT community. Racial distinctions are blurring as our country "browns" through mixed race relations. All this is good.

But it is still true that there are two standards of justice in this country, one for those who can afford the costs of courts and another for those who cannot. It is still true that people of color live in poverty in statistically far greater numbers then those not. And we still have a court system that cares more about convicting somebody, anybody, for a crime then about seeing justice done.

These are fundamental duties of citizenship and success.

These are why I am a progressive and proud of it.

It's a case of duty.

Apple: An iMac is NOT an iPad with a keyboard!

In a number of moves in the past few weeks Apple has tipped their hands on a new strategy-- they want to turn iMacs into over-sized iPhones.

They are shutting down Java

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

And Flash

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/30691/Apple-axes-Flash-from-new-Macs

And launching an online Mac "app" store:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/the-mac-app-store-will-create-competition/

This is a whole lot like Ford selling a lot of pickups and deciding every car has to have a flatbed. What is appropriate for one market (iPhone and iPad mobile computing ) is not necessarily appropriate for another (desktop computing).

But there is no denying that Apple has made a lot of money in their closed iApp market. A LOT of money. Google-like money.

http://mashable.com/2010/10/18/apple-earnings-q4-2010/

So a decision to try to take back total control of their desktop apps is not surprising.

Greedy, stupid, and destined to push them back into single digit market shares.

But not surprising.

Good news for Apple, bad news for Apple users

Apple has topped 10% of the US market

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/pc-demand-slows-amid-consumer-fatigue-but-apple-share-surges/40416?tag=nl.e539

If you are an Apple user and you aren't running virus protection software, you are officially a fool.

At not just 10% of the market, but a very complacent 10% who are used to believing they are "virus proof" you have become a very viable target.

My Advice: Don't be one of those who learns that the hard way.

Why I don't care about "The Social Network."

So, the big buzz right now is the Mark Zuckerberg biopic "The Social Network."

Its been called "Citizen Kane for the ADD, I wan't it NOW generation", but I think even thats been overly generous.

The thing is, Citizen Kane, the thinly disguised biopic of Willam Randolf Herst, was about a character who was sympathetic in many ways and who had actually lived a life. While not in all senses a nice man, Kane is a hard working, driven man who we see work and sacrifice to make his way to the top. He puts in a life of determined work in order to reach the pinnacle he does. And the ultimate lesson of the movie, that you can't expect to understand a man or his drives from one or two isolated facts about him, is a deep and meaningful thing to think about.

And then we have Zuckerberg, by all accounts (including this movie) an obnoxious self-obsessed late adolescent. Mr. Zuckerberg, you HAVE no life to write about. You are 26. When Kane is 26 he's still a struggling junior reporter. At 26 he is still far lower on the economic scale than you were at birth. And what this movie says is that your motivations are so thin, juvenile, and simplistic that they can be adequately explained by a handful of life events.

And thats why I don't care about you or your "story".

A spoiled rich kid goes to Harvard, feels like an outsider, and gets rich himself. No big surprise. Money is power and, like Bill Gates, you started out with a lot of it. Power brings power, money brings money. If you had had to work flipping burgers to pay your way through a state school, like many people I know, would you have had the time to create your "brilliant" invention? I bet there are plenty more brilliant inventions out there that could be created by college students without the need to actually pay their way through life.

Your story, such as it is, is pedantic, predictable and maybe just a bit pathetic. The rich get richer. Thats a story I see every day in the news for free.

Get them to make another movie when you have actually lived some life, say maybe when your 70, and maybe I'll go see that.

Preparing to be a third world country

Lots to rant about this week. Today its going to be about US economic development policy.

As in, we have none.

I have had the opportunity to talk to people from many different countries and governments about startup funding for a new business in the past year or so. Its a software infrastructure project that has the potential to have a major developmental impact on the countries electronic entertainment industry.

Canada, Singapore and Scottland all have programs where they will pay 50% of the salaries of engineers hired in their countries to pursue this project.

Germany and the EU have programs where they will pay for the costs of commercializing university research.

What about the US? The US has the attitude that anything that is useful for industry should be funded solely by industry. In other words, we have no policy of support for the development of our high tech industry in this country. At all.

This is frightening. We have effectively lost all manufacturing in this country. When I was at Sun a common idea floating around was that this was okay because we would always be *the* center of intellectual property and new ideas.

I thought that was hubris then, I think its provably false now. With other countries actively investing in their high tech industries the way we once invested in a space program I am afraid our time at the top of the heap is coming to an abrupt close. Of the three top game consoles today, the only one that was created in the US i the one that doesn't make money. I am referring of course to the XBox360 and the huge sums of money Microsoft has poured into buying the number two console spot.

We have Apple still making innovative product, but that innovation is almost immediately copied and then riffed on by companies in Asia. I wouldn't peg our hopes to that particular horse. Apple's lead is primarily in industrial design, and thats a talent that can be developed anywhere with a little bit of effort. And at still less then 10% of the PC market and a seriously threatened position in mobile computing, they are hardly a drop in the world market bucket. The other 90% of the PC market? Thats already majoratively owned by Korean and Chinese computer makers.

Other signs of our retreat into third world status are the growing gulf between the rich and the poor and the evaporation of the middle class. With every step in that direction we are look less and less like a modern industrialized nation.

They say a laurel wilts the fastest when its sat upon. And we have planted our posteriors smugly upon ours for far too long. Either we snap out of it and remember that a rising tide rises all boats, and a falling one drops them, or we cede our place in the world to countries that need no reminding.




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The Dysfunctional Family of Open Source

So, I have had the honor this week of working with a set of some of the smartest, most cutting edge game researchers in academia this week putting together a research agenda for the National Science Foundation.

This has given me a chance to immerse myself in a world I normal only touch on the edges, and in the process something has struck me. It is one of many many places I have been where there is an institutional double standard on open source software.

One of my frustrations in life has been how badly we do information transfer in this country. There are all sorts of interesting research projects in our universities that could lead to either interesting one off games or potentially whole new tools or genres. That transfer however seldom happens and the reasons come down to economics. The researchers need funding to do their research. The universities need funding as well. But the game industry isn't like the telephone industry where a few big companies dominate the market and are brimming with money to throw at Universities. Even the biggest game houses are really just large collections of individually accounted for projects, each of which has to make an immediate decision about where dollars for the currently in development game goes. If it doesn't make THIS game cheaper or better NOW, there is no room in the budget for it.

But where is this double standard? The answers is that university researchers *love* free and open source game engines. They find them incredibly useful in doing their jobs. But raise the idea that they should in turn open source their software artifacts and you better duck.

This is not specific to academia. I've seen this double standard over and over. Lots of people use open source software today without any interest in returning the results of that use to community ownership. Big software companies will use open source components freely in their products, but have no interest in giving away the products of their own labors.

But it seems to me a fundamentally dysfunctional relationship. As a socialist revolution, it seems pretty one-sided, opportunistic, and ultimately unsupportable.




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The power of connotations

Its funny how even intelligent engineers can be easily swayed by the connotations associated with a name.

Periodically, we get asked "why does Darkstar (now RedDwarf) use pessimistic concurrency, wouldn't optimsitic concurrency be better? Optimism is better then pessimism right?"

Well, not necessarily. Unbridled optimism can be a very bad thing. Optimism about the housing market created the economic situation we are all in now. But more to the point, the connotations of the words "optimistic" and "pessimistic" don't really say anything about how the software functions. As it turns out neither is "better" then the other. It depends on what you are trying to optimize, where and when.

To quote wikipedia:

"In the field of relational database management systems, optimistic concurrency control (OCC) is a concurrency control method that assumes that multiple transactions can complete without affecting each other, and that therefore transactions can proceed without locking the data resources that they affect. Before committing, each transaction verifies that no other transaction has modified its data. If the check reveals conflicting modifications, the committing transaction rolls back.^[1]

However, if conflicts happen often, the cost of repeatedly restarting transactions hurts performance significantly; other concurrency control methods have better performance under these conditions."

So called pessimistic concurrency checks for conflicts when an object is first accessed for read or write. If there others out there using the object in a conflicting manner, it can cause the thread to pause while it waits for the other thread to finish its use of that object. In the event that there is such a contention, this is a good thing. It means you don't waste CPU doing calculations based on a 'stale' object and throwing all that work away at the end and having to start all over again. This reduces CPU load. While the blocked thread is waiting, other threads get to use the CPU. The end result is that more users can be processed in parallel with less total CPU usage.

However that check does come with some small cost. In an environment where you are accessing hundreds or thousands of objects in a thread this way, it can add up. Thats where so-called optimistic concurrency comes in. It doesn't take those costs but just acts like the object is always free. It keeps its own copy and, at the end, checks for consistency. If it finds a conflict, it dumps all its investment and starts over. (No government bailout applies.)

SO, which is better? It depends on your expected usage. If you expect a high volume of data accesses to data processing with very little contention, optimistic concurrency makes sense.

In Darkstar/RedDwarf however where we expect maybe a few dozen data access per thread, and where we expect our data processing (game logic) to be of significant cost, its better to be safe (and pessimistic) then sorry.