Originally published here, with 7 comments
There are three ways for governments to get free money, without having to increase taxes. One is, of course, starting a national lottery (but there’s only so much money that can bring in). The second is by following the advice of MMT economists and creating money to fund themselves – a route open to all governments. The third way is this:
Germany Announces New Bond That Will Literally Pay You Nothing
As I occasionally do, I’m reading reviews about a film (The Dictator) after watching it (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT). It’s really striking how many basic facts reviewers have got wrong about this movie (although some of these errors could have been inserted by clueless editors I suppose). Here’s a sample:
And I could go on. I expect technology journalists in general-audience publications to be clueless (and am pleasantly surprised when they are not), but you’d think that movie reviewers would have a clue about the movie they’d just watched. Apparently not!
Originally posted here, with 1 comment
I think this writer is right. Many London voters may have inverted their first and second preferences in a mistaken attempt to “tactically vote”, when in fact it is impossible to tactically vote that way in the London mayoral elections. (In the extremely unlikely worst case, you swing the election away from your real first preference; in the most likely case, the inversion has no effect at all.) Others, who voted for two no-hopers, may not have realised that they had to choose between Ken and Boris for their “second preference” if they wanted to have any effect. However, it is of course only the latter type of mistake that could have realistically influenced the outcome.
The London mayoral voting system is meant to be simple, but as software developers know, even the simplest of systems can have the potential to confuse users, and what an expert thinks is simple is not always the same as what a user finds most simple.
(Sunny Hundal’s error in the opposite direction, mentioned in the article, is arguably not an error at all, although it could be an error in the sense that he might get kicked out of the Labour party.)
I can’t help but think that if computer science grants had more industry input into the writing process and more importantly the process of selecting grants to fund, we’d see a great wailing and gnashing of teeth and then some far more useful and relevant research being done.
For example, there has been research into “semantic wikis” and “semantic knowledge systems” for years. While fun, the sums invested seem to have been out of all proportion to what is basically quite a simple idea, with quite low uptake so far. (The main beneficiary of this particular line of research, other than the researchers themselves, may have been IBM, who I think received some EU funding to help it build its proprietary software. But I don’t know if that software was successful, so perhaps even IBM got hoodwinked.)
Also, the open source software created in those projects is frequently abandoned after production – in one case quite deliberately so, immediately after funding ceased, in order to focus on the next “latest, greatest” semantic knowledge system, which happened to involve a total rewrite. It’s great that there’s some open source code, but no-one seems to care about it or maintain it, which indicates something fundamentally wrong with the whole process.
It’s also possible that semantic wikis are actually brilliant, but not enough effort has been put into commercialising and disseminating the existing research. Again, industry advice could help here.
Another benefit of this idea might be that if grant assessors started to say, “No, this distributing computing calculus of yours has absolutely no relevance to bridging the digital divide in India”, funding bodies might realise that if they want to keep funding the amount of “basic research” that is being done, they ought to be honest about it and stop attaching spurious criteria to all funding tranches that grant writers then have to write nonsense to “fulfill”. By all means have practical criteria for more practical funding tranches, but don’t try and pretend that all research will have practical applications in the next 5 years, because some of it won’t.
Originally published here with 7 comments
Why is it OK for the UK government (a Conservative-led government no less) to propose competing with private landlords in order to subsidise UK tech startups (something that already goes on to a limited extent, it’s just outsourced to universities), and OK for Ken Livingstone to propose competing with estate agents to help poor people (something that already goes on, it’s called social housing), and it’s widely applauded when governments introduce enforced open access or open textbook policies to compete with Elsevier and other big publishers to help everyone… but somehow it’s unthinkable Marxist heresy to propose that the government fund open source software to compete with Microsoft to help startups (and indeed everyone else)?
I know politicians don’t know their Java from their Ruby, but still…
Perhaps that’s it, though. Maybe virtually the entire British political class (including the political staffers, pundits, wonks and columnists) haven’t got a clue about programming, since they all studied things like English or PPE at university, and the civil service is chronically short of expertise due to all this outsourcing and privatisation that’s been going on for the last couple of decades. Perhaps, though they recognise the centrality of tech to this new economy, they think that spending a bit of money on computer science research is the only legitimate role for government here, due to the universal received wisdom that “government should keep its nose out of everything” (except when it shouldn’t).
Of course Microsoft has been arguing against any positive mention of open source in government policies for years. Their argument has always been that competition or even just procurement preference towards open source from government is “unfair”.
But surely the policies I mentioned at the beginning would be unfair to landlords and/or estate agents. You might say that they’ve benefited unfairly from increases in the value of land in recent years… whereupon I’d just point out that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
Originally posted here with 2 comments
You have a point. The basic underlying technology is (still!) primitive, and things are being shoehorned into where they arguably shouldn’t go, partly because of totally inevitable corporate (and airport wifi) firewall policies. (Blocking everything except port 80 and port 443 is becoming increasingly meaningless – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still rational.)
Nevertheless, pretty much all the issues have been or are being worked around, or obsoleted. (No thanks to Microsoft, which has been dragging its feet every step of the way – ever wondered why so many web developers hate IE?)
Notably, there are now a plethora of client-side libraries (JQuery being one of the most famous) which claim to be cross-browser – the early 21st-century equivalent of cross-platform. Some of them even are. Some of them even support ancient browsers like Safari 2 (which you shouldn’t – it has an awful bug in its Javascript implementation).
And yes, some of them even support adapting to mobile browsers.
But so what? Isn’t this all a big hack?
And what? The x86 platform wasn’t? UNIX wasn’t? MS-DOS and Windows 3 weren’t?
UNIX/Linux took a long, long time to get rid of some of their laughable hacks (like /usr). As did DOS/Windows/Windows NT. This kind of thing has a long pedigree.
More to the point, some things are actually being done better this time around. Did CORBA have caching, or support Twitter-scale scalability? (Maybe it did, but I never heard of it.) You may think Java Swing or Qt is the bee’s knees for GUIs (really?) – but isn’t Swing actually pretty imperative and old hat these days, and isn’t Qt adopting Javascript and becoming in that sense more web-like?
Maybe worse is better.
Aren’t Swing and Qt huge monolithic libraries built by out-of-touch corporations and inadequately maintained and improved, and aren’t say JQuery and Firefox much better, healthier ecosystems, more responsive to developers’ concerns, more frequently released, more easily hackable (or at least perceived as such, in terms of the ease of writing extensions)?
And RIA development in the browser, and other web trends, are sneaking distributed computing – and knowledge of such – back into pedestrian, everyday application programming. This is wonderful! This is one of the best things that ever happened to computing!
Think of web development as like a massive franchise reboot. Being done extremely slowly and painstakingly, and still not finished.
The end result is going to be awesome.
Rattlecans: @greenrd One of the top dudes at PCS, asked about will the take action against sanctions said *Oh, but the public like it, it's popular* [22/05/2013 18:43:03]
Robin Green: RT @doingitwrong: Think! You don’t really care about cats or how to say “GIF”. Those opinions are orbital mind control lasers at work. Also… [22/05/2013 17:22:47]Robin Green: RT @corrinrenee: Dear all websites ever. My day phone is my evening phone is my home phone is my cell phone. Sincerely, 2013 [22/05/2013 17:22:09]Robin Green: RT @paulklipp: @yuvalyeret "resource" was intended to be a compliment. Before that, people were called "costs" [22/05/2013 17:12:18]Robin Green: @triketora ... but that once you rejected them they felt hurt. I'm just speculating here. [22/05/2013 14:49:21]Robin Green: @triketora wow, this problem had never even occurred to me. note that it's possible they didn't _initially_ think of you as gf material. [22/05/2013 14:47:22]
Tracy Chou: @greenrd it's actually surprisingly accurate. this happened to me repeatedly in uni, & it drove me crazy that none of my "friends" were real [22/05/2013 14:40:38]Robin Green: RT @edwardnh: Skidelsky: "prolonged unemployment destroys not just current but also potential output by eroding the “human capital” of the … [22/05/2013 13:00:55]Robin Green: @RichardJMurphy Gordon Brown promised to clamp down on it! And then did sod all. [22/05/2013 12:39:20]Robin Green: @rattlecans I thought politicians were supposed to set policy, not civil servants (real policy, not paperclips versus staples or something) [22/05/2013 12:37:04]
