Author: geoff

Review: Ready Player One

Here’s my Amazon review of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”:

Simple Wonderful (five stars)
The 80s were an interesting decade: the first personal computers, the first video games (in arcades and in the home), the first music videos, and a string of wonderful movies that brought together teenage angst, over-the-top technology, exuberant fantasy, and epic quests. So what would seem more natural than to wrap up all of these themes into the ultimate epic video game quest of all time? What better distraction could we have from the dystopia of The Decline And Fall Of Just About Everything?
Read it. Just read it. I wish Douglas Adams was around to endorse it. And I hope you feel the same guilty pleasure that I experienced each time I worked out a puzzle before the protagonist had got there. (Isn’t being competitive what this is all about?)
And now I have to go and dust off my PS3 and kick some zombie butt….

Actually I have just acquired a PS3, but my game of choice is Soul Calibur IV. So rather than hacking zombies, I’ll be chasing sword-fighting maidens in skimpy clothing and High German knights in blood-stained armour…

What leads to the Argument From Personal Incredulity?

I just finished reading the slim account of a debate between Dan Dennett and Alvin Plantinga, entitled “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?”.

Dennett’s conclusion is straightforward:

Plantinga wanted to show… that science and religion are not just compatible: Science depends on theism to underwrite its epistemic self-confidence. […] [But] Our capacity to discover the facts, and to have good reasons for believing that we have done so, is explicable without appeal to inexplicable or irreducible genius, immaterial minds, or a divine helping hand. […] Let Plantinga, like Behe, try to show us the irreducible complexity in our minds that could not possibly have evolved (by genetic and cultural evolution). He will find, as Behe has, that his inability to imagine how this is possible is not the same as a proof that it is impossible. Richard Dawkins calls this the Argument from Personal Incredulity, and it is an obvious fallacy.

This fallacy — the Argument from Personal Incredulity – is one that has always fascinated me. Of course many (?most) people who say that they “can’t imagine how X could have happened” have probably never actually tried to imagine it: they have a prior commitment to a position that holds that it could not have done so, and that’s good enough for them. And in some cases they may lack the background to actually reason about the subject. But how about the others? What factors might underlie an honest, good-faith Argument from Personal Incredulity concerning the reality of evolution, from the origins of life to human consciousness?
It seems to me that there are a number of failures of imagination which, while individually innocuous, could have a cumulative effect. Let me list a few of them; I’m sure that you can think of others. Each of these items warrants a lengthy exposition, but for now let me simply summarize:

  • Lack of appreciation of very big (and very small) numbers. The enormous age of the planet (143 Petaseconds). The vast number of cells in an organism – or on the planet. The short time needed for a chemical reaction to play out, or for a mutated gene to thrive or be extinguished.
  • A tendency to think backwards, deterministically, all-or-nothing rather than forwards, incrementally, in parallel, with contingency. This builds on the large numbers involved: the entire planet (and indeed the universe) is full of experiments in selection, all proceeding in parallel, all interacting, and all subject to myriad contingencies.
  • Lack of appreciation of how much can be accomplished by so little. To understand the power of complex systems, start with simple ones. Look at the range of capabilities of single-celled organisms, or artificial life systems. Now apply scale and parallelism to these simple components.
  • Hubristic over-confidence in the capacity and ineffability of the human mind. Our brains are good at handling fragments of analysis, recognition, inference, and recollection; they’re also quite good at weaving together a story to fill in the gaps and fix up the mistakes. We “remember” things we haven’t seen, and “decide” to do things that have already started. (Philosophical arguments about mental capability – things like Searle’s “Chinese Room” and Jackson’s “Mary” – assume a total competence which is demonstrably at odds with the way the brain actually works.)

When an online store collapses under the load….

Like many people, I decided to buy an HP TouchPad last weekend. In my case it was mostly nostalgia: my first mobile wireless data device was an HP-200LX with a RAM Data Modem. But I digress. So last Sunday I went to Best Buy, and struck out. Fry’s ditto. So I came home and decided to try the HP online store. To my amazement, I was able to buy a 32GB TouchPad for $149.
Or so I thought.
That was August 21. On August 22, I returned to the HP site, and the entire online store had vanished. There was no record of my order, my login at a different storefront wasn’t accepted….
On August 24, after receiving a cryptic transactional email from HP I went back to the HP site. Now there was a link to a special page for customers who had bought over the weekend. I logged in, and saw a line item for my order, which was shown as having been placed on August 22. Clicking on the line item brought up detailed order page, which showed that the item had been ordered on August 24, was due to ship on August 24, with an estimated delivery date of… August 24:

Of course the shipping information was blank. But it gets better. At the bottom of the page there was a link to Line item detail. This brought up the following gem, showing the estimated delivery date as August 26!

It is now August 28. None of the information concerning my order has changed since August 24. And (obviously) I haven’t received my TouchPad.
Anyone care to guess when it might arrive? I’m not holding my breath….
UPDATE: This just gets better and better. I tried to ask HP about the status of the order using their email tool, and got the following error:

UPDATE #2: Sunday on Labor Day weekend seems like the perfect time to update the order status – and someone at HP did exactly that! Apparently it’s being delivered today! (I’m not holding my breath.) Here’s the status:

Getting the instant-on performance I expected out of Lion on my MBA

When Apple started working on 10.7 (Lion), I signed up for a developer account and installed every new developer build on my MacBook Air. (And then used it for production work, in flagrant disregard of Apple’s warnings.) When 10.7 was launched on the world, I was already running the release bits. And since then bunch of stuff I’m not supposed to talk about.
But there was a problem. Over the last few months, wake-from-sleep time was getting slower and slower. Reviewers were waxing lyrical about how an SSD MBA with Lion was “instant-on” when you opened the lid; for me it was 30-90 seconds. I wondered whether it was related to the fact that I run in 32-bit mode (I still have to use some brain-dead Cisco VPN drivers – and yes, I know about the workarounds, and no, they don’t apply to my situation.) But colleagues weren’t seeing those problems.
So yesterday I did a clean install. I backed up my stuff onto a USB drive; erased the SSD and reinstalled 10.6 (Snow Leopard) from the cute USB key that came with my MBA; brought 10.6 up to date with Software Update; installed the release version of 10.7 from the App Store; reinstalled Office 2011, iWork, OmniGraffle and all my other apps, and restored my home directory. Then I synced bookmarks, etc. via MobileMe, and applied the latest stuff I’m not allowed to talk about. Finally I flipped the system to boot in 32-bit mode and added in the accursed VPN crap.
And it all just worked. My MBA really is “instant-on” from sleep; when I open the lid, I see the password prompt before the lid is 45 degrees open. And the system feels much, much snappier. (And it was pretty snappy to start with.)
Recommended.

Since everyone seems to be blogging about Steve Jobs…

Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote in January, 2009 on how Steve affected my career:

Why am I a Mac user? During 1996 there were rumours that Sun was trying to buy Apple. While any talk of acquisition soon fizzled, contact continued. For most of that year, I was part of a secret team working to integrate the Sun and Apple technology portfolios. Sun was to give up making desktop computers, Apple would abandon its minuscule server business, Solaris would be used as the basis for OS X, and sales and channel strategies would be coordinated. I spent much of my time that year at Apple, working on the networking aspects of the deal. It all unravelled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the beginning of 1997; with the NeXT OS technology he had no need for Solaris. Shortly afterwards, Eric Schmidt left Sun to join Novell, before moving to Google a few years later. All I got was a T-shirt, and a PowerBook – but that was enough.

The Apple side of the proposed deal was initiated by Ellen Hancock (CTO) and Gil Amelio (CEO), both of whom were dumped by the Apple board as part of Steve’s return. Neither seemed the kind of person who understood the importance of design, and could have led Apple down the path towards the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. So in retrospect the Apple board got it exactly right. But the joint venture was fun while it lasted, and I got to work with some amazing Apple engineers: figuring out how to add AFP and Apple printing support into Solaris, and working on eliminating the last non-TCP based networking dependencies in Mac OS.

The blogosphere at its most enjoyable: “Aristotle’s Revenge”

Over the last few days I’ve been reading (and occasionally contributing to) a lengthy blog thread entitled A Central “Argument” in Feser’s Final Chapter, “Aristotle’s Revenge” « Choice in Dying. The starting point was a back-and-forth between Erin MacDonald, the thoughtful author of the Choice in Dying blog, and Edward Feser, an intemperate advocate of Aristotelianism and Roman Catholic “natural law”. The comments provide an excellent contrast between those who believe that teleology of some kind is inescapable, and those who feel that at best it’s a consequence of the way that our language reflects our intentional stance (cf. Dan Dennett), and at worst it’s just a crude attempt to smuggle in a purposive deity. Good clean philosophical fun. Recommended.

Imagine if every Android device maker lost their Linux distribution license

Every so often, I come across a blog posting that makes my head spin from thinking of the implications. This evening was one of those occasions. I defy you to ignore this after reading the opening paragraph…

Last week I read about an Android licensing issue that I wasn’t previously aware of. It’s a pretty serious one, and it’s not that hard to understand. The short version is that

  • rampant non-compliance with the source code disclosure requirement of the GPLv2 (the license under which Linux is published) — especially but not only in connection with Honeycomb — has technically resulted in a loss of most vendors’ right to distribute Linux;
  • this loss of the distribution license is irremediable except through a new license from each and every contributor to the Linux kernel, without which Android can’t run; and
  • as a result, there are thousands of people out there who could legally shake down Android device makers, threatening to obtain Apple-style injunctions unless their demands for a new license grant are met.

This is from the FOSS Patents blog. It is not a joke, there is no hyperbole. Even though IANAL, the analysis seems to be persuasively grounded in GPLv2 language and case law.
This could get very interesting indeed….
UPDATE: There’s been widespread reactions to the FOSSpatents piece, most of it critical. The Register picked it up (well, they would, wouldn’t they?), linking it to efforts by Edward Naughton, and the commenters rubbished the analysis. Over at Twitter, Carlo Daffara, Dj Walker-Morgan, and my old buddy Simon Phipps all piled in.
One of the toughest things in reading the legal tea-leaves is that when cases like the various BusyBox suits are settled before they go to trial, it’s impossible to determine whether the settlement was due to the strength of the case or the balance of expenses. Those who have an axe to grind will always insist that the settlement smoke means that the licensing fire was real. Skepticism seems prudent. Nevertheless, the stakes are high, and I’m glad that we’re discussing the topic.

Testing social integration (2)

The old plugins that I was using seem to have become abandonware, so I’ve been doing some housekeeping.
You know, blogs and computers are really great ways of procrastinating. There are always updates, patches, tweaking, and other essential but non-productive tasks to be done. And the complexity of smartphones and their apps now means that we can take this timewasting wherever we want. When I was a kid in England, male home-owners tended to use their garden shed or allotment for this kind of thing. The nearest kind of portable procrastination was smoking a pipe; a pipe always needed scraping or cleaning, or something.