The Goldfish Chronicles

Article on multi-tasking research is stunned to find out that focus-task type individuals are better at all the core constituent parts of multi-tasking:

Multitaskers bad at multitasking

Being good little scientists, they took the parts of multi-tasking (allegedly), then they split them up into separate tests because that’s how you test them. Then, when given one test at a time they were stunned that multi-taskers were no longer good at them. Erm. Way to not understand your subject.

Where was the test that asked them to do all three at the same time?

Interesting BBC article -
UK games market being ’strangled’. One of the main complaints being that the 2nd hand game market is stifling industry growth. When you buy a game, a lump of that money goes to the publisher (and various others involved). When you sell that game again, you don’t give any of it to the publisher (and cronies).

Not content with steadily rising prices in the gaming arms race (much like the TV and music arms races of throwing more and more money at each release and using that black hole to justify whining… in fact much like top tier football transfers), creators of games are being nice and honest that they’re looking forward to digital distribution when selling on a game won’t be possible. Of course they’ll also then complain when the consumer base reacts to increasingly being milked of their incomes and turns increasingly to piracy.

This pattern of moving from ownership to licensing seems to be everywhere… there must be a whole economic theory around it if only I knew the write name.

The theory of spending more and more money and taking on more and more risk to increase your share of a relatively constant pool of wealth; and then justifying attempts to give less and less value for that wealth and making the transfer of value a temporary thing with the need to spend more and more money. “Movies are so expensive to make nowadays, we can’t let you ‘own’ them”. “Surviving in the Premier League costs more and more each year”. “Games aren’t cheap you know”. “We have to charge full price for that 1960s classic because… erm…remastered….erm…cost of…you’ll pay it like the dumb eyeballs you are”.

Wonder what the games industry thinks of my kids spending more of their time playing DOS games than the latest PS3 or XBox2 ‘megahits’. Hopefully they’ll honestly look forward to the death of the PC and it being harder to put together a game, or upload it to WiiWare.

Irritated at Open Source software that doesn’t use standard licensing but instead picks and chooses from other licenses. A huge amount of the value in Open Source licensing is not in the text of the licenses themselves. Great - it’s a free use agreement. It’s in the fact that we’ve got a standards body and a set of standard accepted licenses. Suddenly you can start to have standard use definitions rather than having to look at every license as if it is unique.

If you go and play expert by editing license texts, you’re not longer using a standard and half of the value of Open Source is lost.

[Publishing a draft from a few months back. Internet time is lovely - in the meantime SourceForge bought Ohloh and not Google as I predicted. Given that I was predicting it would be bought by Google Code as such, I’m feeling nicely prescient here]

How the Open Space became

Nathan Yandell - Year 12 - OSS101

In the last decade, the 10s, Open Source development has undergone yet another revolution.  The bazaar has truly come of age and the last Open Source cathedrals are torn down - there are no more ‘committers’.  Looking back, it’s easy to see how we got here - the only oddity is why it took so long.

The first step was the surprising popularity of Linus Torvalds’ Git project.  Written for the now gone Linux operating system, it took off, added recognition to existing tools and was emulated by others.  It’s unlikely to cause argument to say that without Git we would not have had dSVN.

The second step came when Google having bought Ohloh, decided to donate the company to the Open Source Initiative and signed Google Code up as the first user of its shared identity pool. Sourceforge and Codeplex soon followed - eventually even the hold outs at the FSF, Mozilla, Eclipse and Apache joined the pool.

Sourceforge’s ‘branch a non-sourceforge project’ feature made a high noise but low impact entrance - but over time it built in popularity and with the other open cathedrals following suit the Open Space was born allowing projects to be copied from one repository to another.

To an outsider - our new world looked like chaos. URLs to codebases were as fleeting as your parent’s tweets. Reputations were built up and torn down, code patches danced into view only to vanish into history. More worryingly, legal arguments between projects increased. We saw amendments to the popular Open Source licenses that defined the list of licenses which may be used on a patch branch, and trademark enforcement was used to keep terrible old software from being destroyed by this week’s new up and coming patch branch.

This all changed with the release of the Creative Commons Trademark License (Swaziland). Connected to changes in trademark law in Swaziland, it allowed for trademarked brands while enforcing that product names must be openly useable. A dusty project such as Firefox saw a name change to Mozilla Iceweazel - at long last able to build on the success of its descendants. GNU Java finally gained competitors in IBM Java and Codehaus Java, which led to much confusion in the aging Java development community.

Now I can take a project, fork it and apply my official IETF Brand name by signing the product’s Ohloh certificate with my personal Ohloh brand certificate. As a member of the OpenLoonies I can also apply the certificate for the OpenLoonie brand (”The most trusted brand in Open Source”) - once I’ve had 3 +1s from other loonies. Within an hour I can release my bugfix as OpenLoonie Lucene and it can start building up its trust rating.

How people used software before the community evolved the trusted open software system - my generation will never understand.  It must have been like flying your car blind.

Reading the BBC’s article on Getting inside a downloader’s head and one of the bits that sticks out is the popular advert which points out that you wouldn’t steal a car etc, so why are you downloading a film?

The biggest miss imo is that the alternative is not answered. If I own a car, I can sell it, rent it, lend it, show it off in public, customize it, rip it apart and build a motorbike from its parts. Or at least I could - I bet that nowadays there are patents in some black box in the engine and I’m not allowed to reuse it for a different use. Anyway… when I buy a DVD (or CD or audio book) I am buying something that I don’t own, instead I am paying for a license to it. I can’t do any of the above. That’s the mind of the downloader - why do I have to buy a DVD, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v1, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v2, then buy the same but for the iPhone, then…. Basically if the vendor starts to milk their customer, the customer starts to find their own milk.

What’s the effect?

With music I started to listen to the CDs I had. One of these days I need to buy a tape -> mp3 converter, but they’re not cheap. Generally I feel morally right to download any song I have on tape, the claim that it was a lower tech is weak as I paid the same amount then for the tape than I would pay today for the CD (inflation included). I wouldn’t be stunned to find out that I paid more. I’ve done it for a few, but a) it’s painful to find such things (or I don’t know how) and b) I don’t have that many tapes that I care about. My new music is either a couple of new CDs at christmas (and that is the limit of the CDs I get) or the occasional download from mp3.amazon.com. Usually for the case where I like a song but not the band. The Pogues for example. Apologies to fans of that band, but after getting their best of album, I immediately disliked everything but their poppy New York song. Same for the Undertones iirc. Lots of songs that underwhelmed me, and I’d have much preferred to have spent less on the one song I liked.

Movies. I don’t buy a lot of these. Mostly it’s DVDs for the kids. The Region thing has me very pissed off. We go to the UK, they see something they like, we come back to the US and you can’t get it in Region 0 or Region 1. Goto the store and the sellers have no clue Regions even exist. Sure I can research DVDs more to find one that can be unlocked, but given that I use an XBox and am not willing to risk its clunky old hardware with my soldering attempts, I have to find some other way to get the Flumps off of the DVD. I have some DVDs that are simply bricks right now. So mind of the consumer… stop ripping me off with your Region evilness.

And let’s not mention Disney and their “It’s our copyright, but we’re not going to sell it right now because you’ll pay more in 2 years for the ultra-double-super-amazing 80th anniversary edition”. Copyright hostage taking. If something is out of print, then it should be out of copyright. Which is a nice statement and it would be interesting to see how modifications apply. If Disney release Cinderalla 2, is that enough to keep Cinderalla in copyright? Or would it be more like Star Wars: Digital Edition with ‘Han shooting second because heroes have to be whiter than white’ keeping the original Star Wars edition in copyright? When does a modification stop being a modification. Presumably that’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” judge decision.

“Clip-on ties also allow schools to create a more standardised appearance, says the association, stopping pupils from being more creative in how they wear their ties.”

Glad to know we’ve got our priorities straight. I’m all for uniforms, but trying to create a monoculture will just adapt students to find new ways to express themselves. Ringtones, haircuts, shoes, bags. What’s the point?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8051982.stm

[And if we’re talking child safety - at least include the numbers of deaths per year due to wearing a tie in schools]

I’m looking forward to the scifi novel which bases its premise on spam filters and spam bots increasingly reaching artificial intelligence by passing the Turing test. It seems to me that both can be viewed as the two halves of this test and are playing out a socio-genetic algorithm to get there.

There are a few interesting areas to deal with in this vision:

1. Spam filtering isn’t only concerned with whether something sounds like a human, but rather whether it’s talking about something that the human it’s defending is interested in. To that end it’s a higher bar than a Turing test and humans will start to fail that test (to the point where the human checking their spam folder does not recognize that email as not spam). We’re probably here already.

2. People don’t generally respond to spam. So it’s a one-off Turing test rather than the ability to hold a conversation. Spam is generating believable messages, but is not parsing human text (one assumes). So you’d have to make the ‘one item of non-reality’ that you put into the system the notion that spam companies start writing IM spam to have entire converstions and going down the Eliza route.

3.  The people who do reply to spam are not the smartest. The AI that this socio-genetic loop will create will be equally not smart.

Yes it’s true… the singularity is coming, and when it arrives it will mean nothing more than our stopping caring about machine intelligence and caring more about whether the intelligence talking to us passes our bar (and our automated agent’s bar).

[PS: I’m sure all of this is in multiple novels and short stories already… there is nothing new under the sun ]

Fun times in Sweden:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8003799.stm

It’s interesting how the digital world has changed our notions of ownership. We used to have two concepts:

* An owned asset
* A rented asset

Digital came along and now my owned asset was easily copyable. It was both an asset and a template. Producers see huge reductions in costs as they no longer have to go to print as early (authors no longer writing in pen & ink up to e-books and ipods). Users are able to overcome the resourcing issue of the singleton’d asset. As a side effect that puts those who rent assets out of business as they are all about managing a resourcing issue [cf libraries], and it leads to the effect whereby every consumer is a potential producer, which devalues products for producers and the quality of production collapses. Instead of watching the multimillion Lord of the Rings movies, we get to watch the school production that we paid for via our children’s school fees [not that we’ll allow that to happen given that that production could end up in the hands of evil people]. Our society crumbles, cats and dogs etc etc and we’re all forced to make our own entertainment in whitenoise enhanced homes to stop people stealing our likeness.

The solutions that exist currently are:

*1* Block duplication. Effectively to rollback on the ‘cat out of the bag’ moment of digitizing. This is failing because a) duplication blocking mechanisms can be broken at the end user point, and b) you have to do it all the way up the chain (for example, the Wolverine movie’s leaked pre-final copy), and that’s more expensive than the old way of doing things.

*2* Eradicate ownership. I don’t own the book beside me, I merely license it from the producer. If I choose to give it up, I end that contract. If I die, nothing goes to my next of kin. Blocking duplication is a way to keep ownership eradicated, but this is the real underlying movement. I no longer own things, instead I license and am licensed to. Because of the structure of our old society, I am licensed to most of the time as things are not well defined for individuals to license out [cf: Open Source movement as a mechanism for overcoming this].

*3* Criminalize/unsocialize marketplaces. Worse than someone duplicating, is a vibrant marketplace in which duplications are shared/sold/distributed. Marketplaces are about asset movement and so they need to go. Instead licensed channels are created for licensed works to propagate.

*4* Reinvent assets. DVDs come with a poster. Or with a physical book. Or a t-shirt. This ony has value if the additional asset is more valuable than the DVD, which makes it not worthwhile selling and the film company get into the t-shirt company. This also loses out as things become more digital. Books are now digital, posters are heading digital and t-shirts are going to be digital pretty soon. Fab printers are on there way and soon much will be digital. Patterns in knitting are in this area of pain.

It’s a problem.

There are two areas of solution that interest me.

The first is in individual licensing. Megacorp own a block of value and want lots of money for it. I also a smaller version of that block of value and want to distribute it out. The net has helped us start competing on the same scale [cf ravalry etc]. Given that the ownership world is a thing of the past, the important aspect for me is that licensing needs to be a level playing field and that co-ops need to evolve themselves better to catch up with corps. We see it in some places [cf: open source, bind vs $dns, apache vs iis], but generally that’s in the free area rather than the commons producing product with a cost that is then shared back to the commons.

The second is in marketplace-with-license development. As the marketplaces grow and increase in size, having forum and agora’s in which corps, co-ops and individuals can all compete is increasingly needed.

<End Friday random diatribe/>

The AIG ’scandal’ is much fun.

I get the shock and horror on the part of the ‘taxpayer’ at money being spent on performance bonuses at a company who presumably ‘have not performed’ as a whole otherwise they wouldn’t be asking for a bail-out. It’s a problem though as companies do need to retain valuable staff and even companies in these situations should be giving bonuses to those who have performed. Presumably the lions share of the bonuses went to the top level, so hopefully the 90% congress tax issue has a reasonable non-taxed floor to allow performing employees to not get hit for board room greed.

The joke of it all though is that the government is bailing out a company whose board and highest level of leadership have failed financially in some way - why should they be shocked that the money is not well used. Hindsight would imply that the money should only have been given with indicate of an overhaul of the leadership leading to that lack of money.

I’m beginning to become a believer that we need to sort things out in Open Source land regarding trademarks. Namely that projects should be put together in the following way:

<BRAND> <PRODUCT>

Such as Mozilla Firefox. If Microsoft were to fork Firefox they would call it Microsoft Firefox (or optionally they could call it Internet Explorer, IceWeasel or Nancy for all I care).  Product names should be open, brand should be closed.

This allows the success of Linux. So something generic along the lines of: http://www.linuxmark.org/linux_sublicense.php and http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/trademarkpolicy.

Otherwise the shift to decentralized style development is full of fun. One git fork becomes more successful than another and - bang - an argument starts about the need to change the name because it’s no longer the core product.