The New Google News

Posted on July 19, 2010 by apreche

This guy Bruce Tognazzini (Tog), really doesn’t like the recent changes to Google news.

The team involved appears unwilling or unable to just come clean with the fact that they screwed up completely, and, instead, are just chipping away at one individual screw-up after the other. It’s as though they replaced their gazelle with a pig and are now carving away at the pig, desperate to make it at least look like a gazelle. So far the result, unfortunately, it does not look (or feel) like a gazelle at all, but only like a distressed and wounded pig.

- Top 10 Reasons the New Google News Sucks

I read Google News a lot. I visit it multiple times a day. It is by far the best news aggregator in existence. It doesn’t show you any stupid crap, because, as with all Google systems, it’s algorithmic as opposed to democratic. It is incredibly intelligent when it comes to grouping duplicate content. It’s highly customizable, and it manages to cover everything important.

Recently, they changed Google News. They changed the layout from two columns to one, and some other things. As someone who visits that site frequently, on my PC and on my iPhone, I’m indifferent. It’s neither better nor worse than it was before. All of the key reasons to visit Google News, which I have already described, have not changed. It still provides links to all the important news stories without duplicates or stupid crap.

Remember the hundred or so times Facebook changed its layout and/or privacy policies and people were in an uproar? Well, everyone is still using Facebook, still playing Farmville. No changes going on there. No surprises.

One of my favorite stories is about the Citgo sign in Boston. It’s a gigantic and famous outdoor advertisement. It’s quite garish. When they originally wanted to install it, the neighborhood fought against it tooth and nail. They lost. More recently when it was suggested that it be taken down, people fought to keep it up because it had become a landmark.

Remember when they changed the name of the Nintendo Revolution to the Nintendo Wii? Remember people made jokes about the name? Remember when Firefox changed it’s name two or three times? Now, everyone calls them Wii and Firefox without even thinking about it.

Every time anything changes, for better or for worse, people complain. Then after a time, the change almost always sticks and wins and the complainers forget. We’ll never eliminate all this moronic griping, but perhaps we can lessen it slightly. The next time something changes, wait a week or two before you decide whether the change is really so bad. Odds are you will get used to it and forget it was ever different. The next time you see or hear someone complaining about a recent change, simply because it is a change, ignore them, or at least give them the same advice of waiting a week or two.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Change is the only constant. You’ve heard it all before. That’s why we don’t want to hear it again. Save your breath for when there’s a really important change with real consequences. Losing your shit over the layout of a web site is kind of sad.

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Sell

Posted on July 7, 2010 by apreche

Douglas Rushkoff thinks that shit is about to go down, economically speaking.

Yes, this is really it. The beginning of a true end-of-cycle economically.

If you own “stocks,” use these bounces to get out completely. If you have to park your money somewhere, consider yourself lucky you have money to park.

- Sell

I’m not going to discuss whether he’s right or wrong. Time will tell, also I have no idea. I would however, like to add some counter advice. Well, maybe it’s not so much counter advice as it is additional advice.

Let’s pretend that he’s right and the market is about to go down, as in way down. If you own a lot of stock right now then yes, selling would be a good idea.

The rest of his advice, about creating actual value, is good advice in any economic scenario, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, selling now doesn’t mean avoiding stocks forever.

If the markets crash hard, I personally will likely buy like crazy. I’m young. I have a lot of time left. I have money. I have a 401k. If it goes way down, I’m going to increase my 401k contribution to the max I can afford. I might even just get an online trading account and just go for it.

See, I’m in it for the long haul. I’m not even 30 yet. Any investment I make will probably last 40 years plus. Buy low, sell high. That’s the most basic advice in all trading. There’s almost no chance that it will be lower when I retire than it will be if there’s a big dip soon.

It’s almost like a gift. Hey, maybe you didn’t start your 401k as early as you should have. Maybe you didn’t make your contribution large enough. If you have money afterwords, it’s your chance to play catchup.

If you believe Doug, then by all means sell now. But if he’s right, be prepared to buy after the smoke clears.

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Almost All Conventions Straight-Up Lie About Attendance

Posted on July 7, 2010 by apreche

My favorite convention in the entire world, PAX, has committed to Boston for three more years. I have attended the past three PAXes, and have spoken at all three. I plan to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. They have apparently just signed a deal to keep PAX East in Boston for three more years.

The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Reed Exhibitions, event organizer for the video gaming convention Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), signed an agreement recently that will bring the Seattle-based show back to the East Coast for at least the next three years.

In its first year at the Hynes Convention Center in March, PAX East drew nearly 60,000 gaming players and developers over the course of the sold-out three-day event.

- Video gaming conference PAX East commits to hub for three years

The only problem I have with this at all is the single lie. The lie is the sentence that says “PAX East drew nearly 60,000 gaming players and developers….” This is simply not the case. If someone goes to PAX East for the entire three day weekend, they are counted three times. I do not know their exact counting methodology, but they may also be counting staff, exhibitors, guests, and others in addition to the paying attendees.

I don’t mean to pick on PAX, my favorite convention of all. I go to a lot of conventions, and almost all of them tell the exact same lie. San Diego Comic Con, CES, New York Comic-Con, New York Anime Festival, E3, and more. All of these major conventions count attendance by turnstile. It throws the numbers off even more when you have a four day convention like SDCC, excuse me, Comic-Con International.

That being said, there are many conventions out there that do not lie at all. Otakon is a convention to note in this regard. All of the Otakon event stats are publicly available. I know for a fact that the attendance number they give is exact. It counts each human body exactly once. It does not count staff, exhibitors, etc. It only counts legitimate attendees once.

Perhaps, though, if the big conventions refuse to stop this farce, conventions like Otakon should begin to lie. If Otakon were to count turnstile, they could boast nearly 100,000 attendees, completely dwarfing even a big con like PAX. I have been to both Otakon and PAX several times. Without a doubt, Otakon is much larger in terms of physical space and population. There is no comparison when it comes to size. Comparing other factors is another matter entirely.

The thing is, I’m not even really picky here. If these articles about attendance would change their wording, I would have no cause to complain. For example, this article says “…60,000 players and developers.” That is a lie. They could have said something like “…an attendance figure of nearly 60,000.” That would be a true statement using the same number.

Imagine if you had a baseball stadium that seated 30,000 people. You sold it out every game. Assuming half of the 162 games are played at home, that’s 81 games. That’s 2,430,000 tickets sold. That’s well and good. However, if the stadium said that they “welcomed over 2,430,000 people this year”, that would be false. It is obvious that most of the tickets are held by season ticket holders. It’s the same butt in the seat every night. Assuming half the seats are season tickets, and the rest of the seats are never return visitors, that’s 1,230,000 unique people. These aren’t slight discrepancies we’re talking about here. These are numbers that are way off.

Now, you might ask what harm this lie does. Well, it is a harm to the conventions that do not lie. PAX gets lots of attention, far more than Otakon, and for many reasons. But perhaps if advertisers and the industry knew the true size of Otakon, they would pay it more attention. Perhaps some fans out there are deciding which convention to go to. Maybe they prefer big, or maybe they prefer small. Either way, they will make the wrong decision based on false information. Perhaps a business is deciding which convention to exhibit at. They will spend their money inefficiently at a smaller convention which lies, when they could perhaps get more bang for the buck at a truthful convention which is in fact larger.

We need to have some standard way of measuring event attendance. If we allow events to continue deciding their own attendance numbers based on whatever metric they decide upon, there will be no objectivity and no equal point of comparison. At the very least, the events should publish their attendance metric along with their figures to make it clear exactly how they are counting. Ideally, just cut the crap. Tell us the number of badges sold. As Otakon has shown, you know that exact number with an incredibly small margin of error, perhaps zero. If you want to brag about attendance, at least brag the truth. The true figures are still quite impressive, just let us compare apples to apples.

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American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation

Posted on July 7, 2010 by apreche

I don’t even know where to begin with this article from the New York Times. It tells the “sad” story of a college graduate who has to live with his parents because he can’t get a job. Except that he did get a job, and he turned it down.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

- American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation

There are so many things wrong here. Let me start with something simple. Why is he sending out four or five resumes a week? When I am on a job hunt, I can send out as many as five an hour. It’s clear from this fact alone that this kid is lazy and inefficient.

Well, there is one other explanation for how few applications he is sending. It could be that he’s just very picky. He claims that he’s willing to work anywhere, but apparently he’s not willing to do any job. He has some sense of entitlement that because he went to college he should immediately start in a high up position. Welcome to reality! He’s probably could apply to hundreds of jobs a week, he just doesn’t want those jobs because he thinks he’s too good for them. Guess what? Someone who will prefer to stay at home than to make $40k is an asshat. I wouldn’t hire him to flip burgers if I owned a McDonald’s.

The author of the article, Louis Uchitelle, places all the blame squarely on the economy. Oh, it’s so hard for these kids to find jobs. I don’t know what Louis is talking about, this kid found a job and turned it down. Blame the kid for being a douche, not the economy.

I graduated from high school in the year 2000, so I did not enter the job market until after the .com bust. I took the first job I could find. It paid $40k. I was working within a few weeks, and moved out soon after. Twice since then I have changed jobs. Each time I started my job hunt I have found new jobs in a matter of weeks for significant increases in pay. Even in this horrible economy, jobs are aplenty in my field.

Now, I don’t want to blame the kid entirely. I also want to blame his parents, and our whole society. My generation grew up with everyone telling us we should follow our passion and be whatever we wanted to be. They filled our heads with lies. This kid obviously still believes those lies. Not everyone can live their dream, most won’t. If we all lived our dream we would have too many astronauts and not enough farmers.

They also told my generation the lie that everyone should go to college, and that it’s a magical job ticket. Back in my parent’s generation going to college was special. Not everyone did it, and not everyone graduated. Thus, if you did have a degree, it was actually sort of a magical job ticket. Nowadays almost everyone has a degree, so the value of said degree in the job market is significantly reduced.

Because of these lies, my peers not only went to college, they majored in whatever they felt like. Many of them majored in things that provide absolutely no marketable job skills. I knew a person with a communications degree working at Gamestop, so awesome. Could have saved the money spent on college and gone to Gamestop right after high school and been a pretty big manager with four years of climbing the ladder. Four years of on the job experience is worth a lot more than four years of school.

Even worse than that, a lot of kids have gone to college with no direction. They went to college because it’s the thing to do, and their parent’s paid for it. They have no idea what they want to major in, or what they want to do with their lives. They toil in useless liberal arts classes doing nothing worthwhile, and perhaps never graduating. Even if they pick a major, they change their minds wasting thousands of dollars and years of their lives. The college doesn’t care, they’ll take your money.

Now, I did go to college. I went to RIT and majored in computer science. That happened to be both my passion and a marketable skill. It was easy to see from day one who was going to succeed and who would fail. There were kids who went home to their parents every weekend to have them do their laundry and feed them. There were kids in CS who had hopes of money, but no skill or interest. There were those who could work very hard and make the grade, but didn’t truly care about what they were doing.

The retention rates were horrible. A frighteningly large number of kids changed majors, transferred to other schools, or dropped out. They just couldn’t hack it. When actually forced to live independently and work hard, they quit. They boomeranged right back to mommy and daddy. It’s good, in a way, that we don’t have more job openings for these kids, as they would likely destroy whatever companies were fooled into hiring them.

I remember years ago I read a magazine that was left in a bathroom. There was an article in it about a couple who couldn’t get by because they were burdened with debt from college. At the time, their income was slightly less than mine, and their student loan debt was roughly equal. What was the problem? They had huge credit card debt. They had a gigantic house, kids, cars, luxuries. They lived as if they had a six figure income when they were in the lower five digit range. Yet the article blamed the economy rather than these people. They could have made a case using a better example, why did they choose these morons who were living so far above their means?

I think our friend in this article is quite a similar to that couple. He currently lives with his six figure parents. If he takes that $40k job, then his luxury level will decrease significantly. He won’t eat nearly as well. He won’t have as nice a television. He won’t have as nice a car. He won’t have an XBox. He refuses to step down before he takes a step up. Previous generations were forced to step down, by being drafted into war. The current one would rather leech off their parents.

And who can blame them? The parents must take a huge share of the blame. Why do they allow their kids to leech? They’ve spoiled these children their entire lives, why would they stop now? They’ve never forced, or even permitted, these children to live independently. They never will, unless they are tossed out in the street.

It’s well and good to have these kinds of stories out there. Tell the stories of the unemployed. Tell the story of any interesting person you can find. Just don’t go blaming the economy when the person is clearly at fault for their own problems. Find a better example. Find someone who has a marketable skill, is applying to jobs like crazy, and hasn’t even been called back. I think maybe the reason they don’t have such an example is because it doesn’t exist. Those people already have jobs, and the rest are not worth hiring. There isn’t a shortage of positions to be filled, there’s a shortage of quality labor.

I leave you with this relevant TED Talk by Mike Rowe. Make sure you watch the whole thing, or you won’t get it.

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Techies care about education, but not enough

Posted on June 30, 2010 by apreche

In a posting on LearnBoost Rafael claims that technologists care about education, but don’t care enough to actually do anything to solve the problems of education. He’s completely right, and he’s also completely wrong. He doesn’t even try to think of a single reason why this is the case. I will tell you those reasons.

This is why you see these passive signals of techies caring about education via the repeated upvotes on communities like Hacker News. Techies care a little bit, but still it’s not enough to drive change. Another way of putting it: there is a lot of demand for change in education but not enough people supplying that change. So we keep repeatedly celebrating the few education innovators.

- Techies care about education, but not enough

Let me tell you something Mr. Rafael. I care a great deal about education. If I could pick any job in the world, I would pick to be a technology teacher in a high school somewhere. Now, why aren’t I currently employed in that dream job of mine? It’s not because I didn’t try. The reasons I am not a high school computer teacher are the same reasons that technologists don’t care about education “enough”.

Reason number one is money. Technology skills are very rare, and very valuable. Almost all of my college professors worked in the private sector during the summer because that’s where they made their real money. Even with all the extra benefits from the teacher’s unions, a teacher’s salary isn’t even remotely enough compared to what I can make at even a normal tech job. If you want technologists to help with education, you have to pay. The reality of the world is that corporations have a lot more money than schools, so that’s where technologists go. I don’t know how well a school would handle a brand new computer teacher being paid more than the principal.

If it’s just a matter of money, I look like a greedy tool, so let’s look at the other two issues. The first of which is lack of freedom for the teacher. Most teachers do not have freedom to teach as they please. They have to follow curriculum. They have to teach a certain way. No decent technologist can tolerate that. They would demand to teach the subject matter they want in the manner of their own choosing. A technologist would chafe if they were told what to do or how to do it.

Even worse, many schools will not hire you to just teach technology. I looked into it, and most schools will hire you has a math or science teacher with the opportunity to teach one or two technology courses, if that. That just isn’t going to cut it. I have no interest whatsoever in being a math or science teacher, grading papers, or other bullshit. I want to have a classroom full of computers, and other stuff, and I want to be the complete dictator of that room. The school exists only to put students into and out of that room.

That ties into the last problem which is the bureaucracy of the school as a whole. You see plenty of stories all over tech sites about a kid being suspended for having his boy scout knife in school, or some other nonsense. Back in my high school I got reprimanded for installing the flash plugin on a school computer. Technologists are nothing if not infuriated at the moronic policies and limitations that are placed on students and on the school computers. I imagine I, and other similarly minded folk, would be fired almost immediately by some cowardly principal who always follows policy to the letter.

If you want technologists to help with education, you have to pave a path for us. Because our technological knowledge is rare, we have great power. We are holding all the cards. Therefore, you have to grease the wheels if you want our help. Even if we want to help you, we can’t as long as the walls of bullshit are still in our way. Even if you can’t offer us as much money, you have to eliminate the bureaucracy and idiocy. We won’t tolerate moronic school policies whether they are applied to us or to students. We’ll probably show up at the school, tell everyone they are stupid, wave the middle finger around, and be sent home, if not to prison.

We would love to come and help you, but I think it will have to wait some time. Call us when you’re really ready for technological egos to roam your halls.

Posted in Society, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

NoSQL or NoJoin?

Posted on June 28, 2010 by apreche

Daniel Lamire has written an interesting post discussing the terminology we should use to refer to the increasingly popular non-relational databases such as BigTable, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. He’s mostly discussing semantics, but it got my mind thinking on this issue just one more time.

However, in practice, SQL is based on joins and related low-level issues like foreign keys. SQL entices people to normalize their data. Normalization fragments databases into smaller tables which is great for data integrity and beneficial for some transactional systems. However, joins are expensive. Moreover, joins require strong consistency and fixed schemas.

In turn, avoiding join operations makes it possible to maintain flexible or informal schemas, and to scale horizontally. Thus, the NoSQL solutions should really be called NoJoin because they are mostly defined by avoidance of the join operation.

- NoSQL or NoJoin?

Because these databases have become very popular recently, I have tried to learn a great deal about them. I even went to a conference about MongoDB. What I have learned is that these databases are very fast, and more easily scalable than relational databases. I have also learned that not having a strict schema for each table is advantageous in many applications. However, there is still this circle of logic I can’t get out of my mind.

You’re using MySQL with MyISAM. That’s an unreliable and flawed database engine. It has no data integrity or compliance. Ok, so you switch to InnoDB or Postgres. Now you have the data integrity, but everything is slower and more difficult to scale or replicate. The solution, therefore is noSQL/noJoin databases which have none of the data integrity.

Wait, what? Why would you choose the non-relational database over MySQL with MyISAM? They have the same data integrity and transactional issues. They are both fast. They both scale and replicate easily. The only major difference I can see is that MySQL has a strict schema and the noSQL databases have no joins.

I don’t know about other people, but every database-powered application I have ever written includes many joins. There is a great deal you can do without joins, but eventually there is a feature that requires them. Let’s say you have authors and articles in two separate tables. The author gets married, and you want to change their last name. With SQL you just update the row in the author table. Without it, you have to search for every blog post with that author, and change the name. Talk about a pain.

Now, there is an alternative to this methodology. You could have an author record and put the unique ID of the author into each blog post. So now what are you doing? You’re writing a join by hand in your application. You get benefits of using the NoSQL database, but the consequence is that you have to write more code. If using a relational database, you could do a lot of work with a single line of SQL. Instead, you write an entire algorithm in your application to do that same work as an SQL statement. It’s reinventing the wheel. You’re duplicating the work of the MySQL developers.

Now what toll does this take on performance and scalability? Yes, the NoSQL databases scale so well, and are so fast. That’s because the application servers are doing all the hard work. It’s shifting the load, not removing the load. On top of that, how good a coder are you really? I personally do not think that I can write a join algorithm that is better than what the MySQL developers can write. If I have a database without joins, and I have to write a join for my application, then how can it possibly be better than if I had just used a relational database? If it is somehow faster and better, that can only mean there is a serious problem in the join algorithm in the relational database that must be fixed. I doubt it. If indeed it is better, then why don’t they just add join commands to the noSQL databases?

If anything in my logic is wrong, please point it out to me. I’m not trying to flame, I’m trying to learn. It’s just that no matter how hard I try, I can’t comprehend the supposed hueg benefit of the non-SQL database. At best it frees you of the limits of a schema while moving some load from the database server to the application server. If I had an application that would heavily benefit from being schema-free, and there were few joins, it might be worth it. For every real world application I have actually written, it makes little sense.

Then again, every application I have ever written has always had more strain on the application server than the database server. I’m sure if I worked at Facebook or some other incredibly large place, the scaling benefits would emerge. It would be worth the effort of writing that extra code and moving some of the heat over to application servers. The thing is, if that’s my problem, I’m in a good spot. It means I’ve got so much demand that I’ve probably got money to pay someone else to do that work. There’s still little reason to start out in the beginning with anything but SQL. You’re likely making more work for yourself in exchange for scaling benefits that you do not need because you are small.

I’m sure there are some applications out there that have few, or even zero, joins. I’m also well aware of many applications where being free of a schema is such a huge boon, it is worth the price of writing more code. These applications exist, but in my experience they are rare. Almost every application I can conceive of is naturally relational in some way.

If anyone out there can explain what I am missing, I will be very thankful. Until then, I’ll be using MySQL for almost everything. It’s easy. It works. It’s fast. I don’t need the super data integrity, or user unfriendliness, of Postgres. And while it may not scale as easily as others, it scales much larger than any application I have ever had to deal with. If I am ever so fortunate to have to scale large, then I’ll make a move. Until then, I’ll save myself the trouble.

Posted in Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

Not Implementing Features Is Hard

Posted on June 24, 2010 by apreche

Robert O’Callahan, a Mozilla developer, has made a blog post explaining why Firefox omits certain features. Based on the headline, I thought this was going to be discussing the evils of feature creep. That is not the case.

Sometimes we take heat for deliberately not implementing certain Web platform features. Three significant examples are SVG Fonts, WebSQLDatabase and H.264 in <video>.

…

But I honestly think we’re doing the Web a service by resisting these things.I think not implementing certain features is one of the hardest and most altruistic things we do.

Update I should also point out that we’re not just exerting “stop energy” here; for each of these features that we’re not adding, we are promoting superior alternatives — namely WOFF, IndexedDB, and WebM.

- Not Implementing Features Is Hard

I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. In those days, your only real browser choices were Internet Explorer or the full Mozilla. Mozilla was a better browser, and even had a crude tabbed browsing implementation. The problem was that it was big and slow because it wasn’t just a browser. It also included email, newsgroups, composer, and more. Imagine if all the different parts of Microsoft Office were a single program. That was Mozilla in those days.

Over time Phoenix, and then Firefox, gained popularity for three reasons. It removed all those features that most people didn’t want or use. This resulted in vastly increased performance and stability that other browsers had a hard time competing with. It removed even more features that some people actually did use, but made them available by extensions. Lastly, they added and polished new features that most users actually were using, such as tabbed browsing.

There was one more thing Firefox did that was very important. Most web sites actually worked in it. This was a time when many sites were built only for Internet Explorer. People would begrudgingly continue to use IE simply because some web site required it. Because most sites worked in Firefox people were able to switch. This is important because it shows that people are more loyal to web sites than web browsers. People will switch to a better browser, but only if all of “their” sites work in it. This is why businesses with Internet Explorer specific intranet apps stick with it, even when the IT staff knows that better browsers exist. The web apps take precedence.

Today we have some browser features like SVG Fonts, WebSQLDatabase, and H.264 video. If Firefox wanted to make an argument that they shouldn’t included these features at all, because of feature creep, that’s actually cool. That’s the philosophy of Firefox. Unless it’s for every user, put it in an extension or a plugin. Keep the browser small.

Too bad that’s not what they’re doing here. They are supporting what they feel are “superior” alternatives. Those alternatives may indeed be superior for legal reasons, or even technological reasons, but that doesn’t mean jack or shit. Web sites are already using these features that Firefox is not including, and the more sites that don’t work in Firefox, the less people will use Firefox.

As a web developer, Firefox is the go to browser. I’m using it right now. Why do I use it? It’s because it has Firebug. I can’t do my job without Firebug. The webkit developer tools are getting a lot better. Most developers I know only use Firefox because there is some extension they need. They really want to stop using Firefox, but can’t. Chrome has extensions now, and most of the important ones are being ported. There’s less and less tying people to Firefox, and if apps work better in webkit browsers, people are going to switch away. It might take some time, but it will happen.

What bothered me most about this article was that he says that they’re doing the web a service. I can safely say, they are doing the web a huge disservice. Let me use something people haven’t paid much attention to as an example. Behold the HTML5 audio tag. It’s just like the video tag, but for audio. Can you guess which browsers support which audio codecs?

Codec support in modern browsers
Browser Ogg Vorbis MP3 WAV
FireFox 3.5 ✓ ✓
Safari 4 ✓ ✓
Chrome 3 (beta) ✓ ✓
Opera 10 (beta) ✓

- Native Audio in the browser

This chart can easily be redone to show support for video codecs, fonts, etc. Just about any new HTML feature follows this same pattern. Yes, all browsers are equally to blame here. If Safari supported Ogg, we would be all set. If Chrome supported wav, that would also solve everything. It takes just one to break the dam.

That being said, I don’t know why none of them do it. The browser that supports the full set will be the browser that works with any web app. Thus, it will be the browser that dominates. Firefox could be that browser, they just have to give up on their philosophical bullshit. Web developers will have peace of mind. The web will become a much better place because there won’t be all sorts of hacks in web applications to switch between different codecs depending on user agent.

There is something to be said for leaving out features completely for the sake of performance and stability. The extension philosophy has got Firefox to the place it is today. Even so, making sure every web site works in your browser is priority number one. And sometimes adding a feature, like tabbed browsing, is beneficial to everybody. These things Firefox is holding out on should be included straight up. I’m starting to think maybe it would be a good idea for someone to create a Firefox fork that has all these features that Mozilla is refusing.

Well, it’s no skin off my back. If they continue to hold out, Chrome and others will just eat their lunch. They say they don’t care about market share, so that’s totally ok by them. It makes me wonder. If they don’t care about market share, why did they always so proudly advertise their download figures?

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Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry

Posted on June 23, 2010 by apreche

Over on the Chemistry Blog, Mitch has posted a professor’s letter to a doctoral student. After reading the letter, I can’t even fathom what kind of horrible person the professor is. I imagine that if I spoke to this professor, I would not be able to refrain from punching them in the head.

In addition to the usual work-day schedule, I expect all members of the group to work evenings and weekends.

- Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry

Sadly, this problem is not unique to chemistry. It’s not even unique to academia. It’s a problem all around the world in a wide variety of employment scenarios. I have encountered many of these scenarios in my lifetime, and they all have upset me a great deal. Allow me to share a few examples that I have seen.

The one that bothers me the most is that restaurant wait staff in the United States are not considered hourly workers. They are paid less than minimum wage, and it’s totally legal. This is why in the US we always tip the wait staff at least some amount, where in other countries you only tip for excellent service. Without tips the wait staff are underpaid. If you don’t tip, you get blamed for being a bad person. Well, the real bad person are the legislators who don’t correct the law. If wait staff were paid minimum wage, we could reserve tipping for excellent service. Prices would go up on menus, but customers will pay the same if they leave no tip.

Another similar scenario is the summer camp counselor. They are also not hourly workers. They get paid a flat fee for the entire summer. A really good camp counselor at a fancy sleep-away camp might make a few thousand for eight weeks of camp and one week of pre-camp. The US minimum wage is presently $7.25. 9 weeks times 7 days times 24 hours times $7.25 is closer to $10,000. Yes, camp counselors do not really work 24/7, and they get a few days off. Even so, most are horrendously underpaid.

One issue that really bugs me is child labor laws. Yes, of course we need these laws to prevent children from being exploited. However, these same laws also sometimes result in minors being unnecessarily restricted. I know many teenagers who would willingly do more work, and make more money, but the labor law prevents it because they are not eighteen. And no, the extra work wouldn’t interfere with homework. These extra hours are spent idling at home playing video games.

Lastly, let us look at countries as a whole. In Europe, many countries have a minimum of thirty days paid vacation for all employees, period. In the US, you are lucky to get ten. The number you get will inch up by one or two every year, assuming you stay at the same job. Switch jobs and you’re back to square one.

This is just criminal. There are people who live to work, but most people work to live. They only work to get money they need to survive in this world, and they would rather not be there. With so few vacation days, you can begin to question the point of living. People need vacation time to actually enjoy the life they have earned. The only reason I haven’t traveled the world already is not due to lack of funds, but due to lack of vacation time. It doesn’t even need to be paid vacation. Just let me leave for a few weeks and promise me that I will still have my job upon return.

Lastly, I must point out the horrible abuses laid upon some salaried employees. If you are paid hourly, or by commission, you might think that a salary is great. You get paid the same no matter what. Yes, that swings both ways. The employer can use threat of termination to get a salaried employee to work extra hours for no additional compensation. Someone with an hourly wage will typically receive time and a half, or some such. Not so for the salaried. They can make you stay late to finish the job for not a single dime extra.

Yes, the labor law is complicated because different jobs are different. Truck drivers, for example, have a completely different structure to their employment than stock brokers. The labor laws for one would be broken in many ways if the same exact rules were applied to both.

Even so, there needs to be some leveling of the board. Some basic principles can be applied equally to all employment. Nobody should face any consequence or demerit for leaving work, if they have put in eight hours that day. Anyone who freely chooses to put in more than eight hours per day should receive some form of extra compensation. Everyone should receive a minimum of thirty days per year vacation time. Even if you are not an hourly worker, your wages, not including tips, shall not be under what the minimum wage would be for the same number of working hours. Rules like these, and many others, should apply to every employment scenario, even the graduate students working in the lab. We already have a few good laws on the books, but we need quite a few more.

There are some people who love their work so much, they would stay there all day and night. Just because they would willingly sacrifice their health and well being, does not mean that everyone else should be forced to do the same. Give them the freedom to work their brains out, if they so desire, but do not force it on the rest of us. Many people look down on companies using off-shore labor, where practices are very bad. Well, there’s little room to talk if similar practices are widespread and legal right here at home.

And you know what, we have an unemployment rate in this country that is rising. If people no longer work extra hours, employers will have to hire more people to get the same work done in the same amount of time. I don’t think decreased profits from having some extra employees is going to hurt the economy all that much. We can just pay the workers with cuts from the CEOs salary.

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Meet the “Crying Girl” con artist of Davis, California

Posted on June 22, 2010 by apreche

BoingBoing has posted a story about the “epic” tale of some scam artist girl out in California.

Meet the “Crying Girl” con artist of Davis, California has earned a spot on the Davis Wiki, with photos tracked down by the Wiki’s users.

- Meet the “Crying Girl” con artist of Davis, California

I don’t know anything about Davis, California, but I don’t imagine it’s a big city. Well, maybe the Davis residents should visit Los Angeles more often. I can tell you that in New York City, we have no shortage of people pulling identical scams every single day.

There are the guys who offer to give you a CD of their music for free, but then they offer to sign it and ask for a “donation.” There are people who rent Sesame Street costumes and roam the streets taking pictures with kids and asking for “donations.” They are not associated with Sesame Street in any official capacity. Oh, and that’s just some of what you see on the corner directly outside my office without even walking one block or crossing the street. The old story of “I need bus/train fare” is as common as a vuvuzela at a South African football match.

Look how much effort has been put into making  wiki page investigating this one person. There really must be nothing better to do out in Davis, Hey, if you guys like investigating street scams, come on over. The NYPD is hiring.

I have a new headline for this article. Tell me if you like it. “Every day occurrence in New York City is headline news in suburb.” People wonder why us city folk have an attitude like the one I am presently putting on display. This is why. You country folk are extremely provincial. Get with the times.

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How Not to Fix Soccer

Posted on June 22, 2010 by apreche

Every four years when the fans of the USA actually watches soccer, they complain about the rules. I am guilty of this as well. I know that my knowledge of the game is very shallow compared to people who have watched it their entire lives, but I still believe that the game has problems that need fixing.

Ed Felten also sees this, and he provides an explanation of why the rules of soccer are the way they are.

So here’s the logic underlying soccer’s rules: the game is supposed to scale down, so that an ordinary youth or recreation-league game can be played under the exact same rules used by the pros. This means that the rules must be designed so that the game can be run by a single referee, without any special equipment such as a scoreboard.

- How Not To Fix Soccer

As I have already admitted, my knowledge of the game is very shallow, so while I may be able to recognize that there is something broken in the game, I know I am not highly qualified to make a specific suggestion to fix it. However, I am qualified to say that this excuse of keeping the game scalable is a very poor excuse for keeping broken rules.

Yes, let’s have the winner of the World Cup be decided based on a bad call by a ref because if we change the rules, then kids will not be able to play by the same rules as the pros. Seriously? That’s your reason to keep the rules broken?

First of all, kids are not playing soccer by the same rules as the pros. They have smaller fields and smaller nets. They don’t have offsides judges. They use different balls. Some don’t play for the same 90 minutes, or have the same limitations on substitutions. Already the argument falls apart.

Also, do you think it really matters to kids that they are playing the same exact game? I mean, I guess it’s kind of cool when you’re a kid to think that you are playing just like the grown ups. Still, it hasn’t been a problem for little league. Kids aren’t complaining that the game is six innings instead of nine. College football players aren’t complaining that they don’t have identical rules to the NFL. College basketball players don’t care that it’s not exactly the same as the NBA. So what makes this a good reason we should allow this most important sporting event to be ruined by bad rules or bad officiating?

When it comes to professional sports the stakes are very high. There is a lot of money at stake. There are the emotions of millions of people which will change according to the result. There are many thousands of ticket holders who paid money to see a game, and if there is a flaw in that game, they have effectively purchased a defective product. If FIFA were selling defective widgets instead of soccer games, they’d be dishing out a ton of refunds.

With amateurs playing, the stakes are low. If the rules are broken, or adjusted, it’s not really a big deal. The players don’t really care all that much. If they do, it’s not a big deal. If a team loses the World Cup because of a bad rule, then that’s a huge fucking deal.

From my perspective there are three obviously broken things in soccer. One is the off sides rule. The second is bad officiating. The third is timing. I can tell you why the off sides rule is broken, but I don’t have a fix for it. The other two rules I do have fixes for, and you don’t need to be a soccer scholar to see why.

The off sides rule exists in many sports. The one I am most familiar with is ice hockey. The purpose of this rule is to prevent camping. Without an off sides rule, an offensive player can just stay right next to the opponent’s goal. Then they can receive a long pass from all the way across the field of play, and score. That makes a game quite boring and easy. You want to force players to skillfully play the ball or puck down the field, instead of just making one big pass.

The off sides rule in soccer does prevent this from happening, but unlike hockey, it also has false positives. Say I am five yards from the goal. I pass to another player on my team who is three yards from the goal. It is possible in this circumstance we will be called off sides, and not be able to score. We marched the ball down the field legitimately all the way to the goal, but we’re still off sides. How can that possibly be a good rule? I have some ideas for fixes to this problem, but they are all flawed. Still, I am confident that a better rule can be made, even if a perfect one can not. Maybe a pass between players both in the penalty area can not be called offsides? I don’t know.

The second major problem in soccer is bad or inconsistent officiating. Everyone can plainly see that some referees in the World Cup throw out yellow, or even red, cards as if it were going out of style. Other referees hardly ever show the card, for similar offenses. The obvious solution is to have replay with one set of judges for all games. The NHL has people at NHL HQ watching replays of all games. A referee can call them if necessary to get the official, consistent, ruling from the highest authority.

This is something that applies to all professional sports. There is no reason no to replay absolutely everything that needs replaying. That’s not to say you should replay every single moment of every game. Then games will be slow and take forever. You should replay any play that has a significant consequence, or has anything that is questionable or debated in any way. The replay can be done very quickly if there is someone in a video booth with access to every camera angle. They watch the entire game, and can replay any part. They should be able to make a decision as quickly as fans watching replays at home make the decision, if not sooner. Every sport should have this, no excuses.

For soccer, replay would contribute to an already existing problem. That problem is timing. The game consists of two halves of 45 minutes each. Unlike other sports, the clock never stops. The result is that the actual time of play is very loose. The referee arbitrarily adds a few minutes to the end of each half to make up for it, but it is far from precise. In any sport, even one second can make all the difference in the world. It can make even more different in a low scoring game like soccer. There is no excuse not to have precise timing in a professional league.

Look at a sport like Formula 1. They have timing systems that are precise down to thousandths of a second. Yes, it is a sport in which time is far more important, but the point is that the technology exists. I’m not saying the clock should stop in soccer. I’m saying that we could easily develop a timing system which calculates how much time should be added to the end of each half that is precise to the second. It could even continue to add seconds to the end of the half if any stoppages occur during the additional time. Therefore every half of every game will consist of exactly 45 minutes of actual play.

When it comes to sports, too many people are purists. They have sentimental value attached to the rules. They don’t want change of any kind. They want every sport to be played the way it was a century ago. The fact is that over a century, we have made huge advances in athletic training and sport strategy. We’ve beaten all of our games. The only way for these games to remain fair and entertaining is to modify the games such that they are still competitive in an era when they are, effectively, played by supermen. We need to make all sports far more difficult, and have consistent rules enforcement.

People are always wondering why the citizens of the US never become big fans of soccer. Perhaps part of it is because sports fans here are used to the NFL. The same NFL which gladly changes its rules and makes extensive use of replay. We have a strong sense of justice and fairness in the US. The imprecision of soccer is definitely one reason, among many, why the sport can not gain traction here.

The most famous moments in sports in the US are almost always amazing plays, great feats of strength and dexterity. The miraculous escape and catch in Super Bowl 42 is a recent example. The most famous moment in soccer, that even a US citizen like me is aware of, is a bad call. The hand of god. How appropriate.

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