Notes on Samsung Tab E

draft

I bought a Samsung Tab E 9.6 inches with 16 GBs of internal memory and 128 GBs of external storage.  These are random notes on setting up and learning how to use the device.

1. The battery charges amazingly fast and lasts a long time.

2. Setting up WiFi is easy.

3. The thing has a desire to set up every application with the most lenient privacy, guaranteeing that you will be exposing yourself to the world.

4. The desktop is filled with applications I do not want, do not use, and can not get rid of.

5. I try to increase the volume of the Amazon Music player and someone (the app? the OS?) tells me that it could damage my ears.  Jesus.

6. After a day of using I am impressed with the hardware but think that Samsung or whoever made the software for this thing needs to choke back their greed and let the user choose the software they want.

Google Mail Uses Esoteric Knowledge to Create Your Avatar

Things move ever swiftly on the Internet, that bold new paradigm, in order to maintain valuation and return maximum value to the shareholders. In the never ending efforts to achieve these worthwhile goals and with all the advanced and esoteric technology being used, it is reasonable to expect that mere users may be confused by what they see and foolishly and incorrectly believe that they are witnessing bugs and mistakes. It is incumbent on all of us to keep up and be aware of these misperceptions and help the future-challenged user to understand that the system is without flaw. 

For example, in the process of receiving and processing email with Google Mail, I was unaware that it helpfully creates a visual avatar of all the people who send me mail and does so flawlessly and automatically without needing to review its results with the mere sender of the email. It is not permitted for the user to be aware of the clever, neural network based, deeper learning informed, higher-level consciousness algorithms that Gmail uses to implement this miraculous new feature because we are uninitiated in the Mysteries.  Still some of us have speculated that Gmail might look out on social media, or perhaps remember attachments that the sender has used in the past.

I suspect it does nothing so simple. I think it is probable that Google is using the esoteric knowledge associated with the ancient Hermetian Mysteries themselves. Many have tried to use these Mysteries for practical purposes in the modern world, but I believe that only Google has had the resources and intellect to actually accomplish this difficult task.

Are Consecrated Masters using Esoteric Knowledge to create your Gmail avatar?

Alas, my sister in law did not realize the perfection of these esoteric algorithms and so when I made a comment about the nice picture of the dog that Google had used for her avatar, she tried to rip my head off.

I think it is important to remind the users that they are indeed "mere users" and that they should not attempt to understand the ways of the Illuminated Masters.  They should accept that their life is an open book, not just to the FBI but to the world at large and anything they use or say on the Internet may be repurposed for their own good.  Google Mail may choose all or none of these ephemera to represent you to your friends, to your family, to your clients, in fact, to anyone. You have no control over it, nor should you.

You should have faith that the Illuminated Masters working in secret shrines will use these Mysteries to create your new image and that the result will be as perfect as the spheres with which the celestial bodies orbit our planet.

Where did this come from?  No one knows but my sister-in-law was not amused.

Foolish mortal! Give up that illusion of control, abandon yourself to your fate and accept that the Adepts of the Mysteries have your best interests at heart.  

Choose Your Path to Hell: Windows 7 or 8?

A moment of pleasure, a lifetime of regret. That is how I see my decision to run Windows years ago. Back in the day, I had a Mac and an SGI and neither of them would run Java or PC - based games. Since I wasn't giving up the SGI and since two computers was my limit at the time, I switched to Windows in order to learn Java. Its been hell ever since. If at first you walk down the dark path, forever is your destiny affected.

The time has come to upgrade from Windows XP to another operating system. The Internet has become a cesspit of loonytoon right wingers and malicious code and one can no longer surf to your favorite porn sites at leisure without serious potential ramifications. Fixes to XP security problems will no longer be provided for the general public, so one must move on. But why run Windows at all at this point? The PC game business has died, and besides, any game I developed would not be for Windows. The only reason I continue to run Windows is that I have a handful of applications that I use in my work and I am loathe to give them up. One of them is Canopus ProCoder, a very good software only transcoder and there are a few others. Everything else, including all my writing and spreadsheets and so forth can be done very reliably on Linux.

So your "choices" for upgrade are Windows 7 or Windows 8. I already run 8 on a very inexpensive laptop and I can tell you flat out that I hate it. Maybe I will learn to love it, that happens quite frequently with me, but if so it hasn't happened yet.

In order to help others make this existential choice which will affect the rest of your so-called life, this are the reasons I chose to go with Windows 7.

1. There is a feature in Windows 8 that makes it impossible to delete a file unless you are logged in as Administrator. The only people who use this feature are people who write malicious viruses (virusi) for Windows 8.

2. But as distributed not only is there no Administrator account on Windows 8, the possibility of having such an account is deliberately disabled. So first you have to figure out how to go behind Microsofts back and disable the Administrator disabling code, and then create your administrator account and then, only then, can you delete a file on *your* fucking computer. Not their fucking computer, but your fucking computer. Life is too short for this kind of bullshit.

3.Windows 7 Professional has an XP compatibility mode that is actually a virtual machine with a licensed version of Windows XP already installed. By definition, this compatibility mode will work with your old XP application, albeit perhaps slower depending on things like graphics. Windows 8 hides this mode from you, and may have some other compatibility mode that may or may not work for you. Again, who needs it.

4. Windows 7 has been out for a while and is a mature OS. Windows 8 is a new OS. All new OSs are buggy, period. Its a law of nature. Just like all new rendering technologies are slow.

5. The only reason to use Windows is because one has learned to be productive on it. The Windows 8 UI is completely different and all productivity goes to hell.

6. One can get around the Windows 8 UI with third party software that tries to defeat the new UI and bring back the old one. These third party programs work pretty well, but the new UI creeps in occassionally in spite of this and then you waste minutes trying to figure out how to get out of it and back to work.

7. I hate the way the new UI looks.

8. I hate the way the new UI works.

9. In order to download updates or "apps" you need a Microsoft account so they can violate your privacy and track everything. I don't think I have any privacy on the Internet but I am still loathe to be forced to give Microsoft marketing information on me just to download updates that contain their bug fixes. Its not that big a deal, but I do it under duress. I believe that the concept of your Microsoft account, to let you use their "cloud", big whoopee, is integrated throughout Windows 8.

So down another path to hell and Windows 7 Professional it is.

Stupidity on the Internet: Is Quora the New Stupid?

This post is part of a series on the topic of Stupidity on the Internet.   There is so much material there to discuss!

One of the great things about the maturing of the Internet and the creation of vast wealth for a small number of criminals like the guy who runs Facebook, is that we no longer have to worry about any bullshit from right wingers about how "capitalism rewards merit".   Theft of ideas, sure, always rewarded.  Bad user interface design, absolutely.  Rewarded a billion times over.   Criminally stupid and obnoxious?  You bet!

But how stupid are people who are financed with hundreds of millions of dollars to steal money on the Internet?  Very stupid indeed.

Take for example, Quora.  No link provided, you want to talk to these morons, type in the link yourself.

I am surprised that Quora has not gone public and made 100 billion dollars like Facebook. They are eminently qualified.

Quora spammed me to tell me that a friend had provided an answer to a question about the future of Bitcoin. Ok, I said, I'll bite. Lets go see what my friend has to say. So I click on the link and ... Quora starts demanding answers to questions. Here are fifty topics we think you are interested in: Dick size in pygmies, dress lengths in Zimbabwe, How to Roast Pig, How to Castrate Pigs, How to Spam Your Friends and Make Money. All topics that have nothing to do with the link. And this goes on and on, without an option to "skip".

But best of all. Best, best, best of all:

It refuses, absolutely refuses, to let me see my friend's response.

So Quora, lets be clear: Fuck you. Never talk to me again.

This leads me to a practical suggestion for web browsers.   I need an easier way to block sites, and an easier way to suggest to friends that they also block web sites.   I understand that stupid companies are what the Internet is all about.  I understand that stupid companies is what Wall Street throws money at.  No problem there.  I just want to make it easier to make it clear I want them to go away and never, ever give a web hit to support their stupidity.

Bad User Interface Design: Celebrate the Nightmare from Hell that is Gimp

Many philosophers over the centuries have asked: "what makes bad user interface design?" Oh the arguments that have raged over that apparently simple question. Is it all inspiration, accident or genius that leads to bad user interface design? Are there principles we can deduce to help new and inexperienced designers write bad user interface code, maybe even dreadful user interface code?

I believe that the answer is yes, we can help people design and write bad user interface code, code that demeans the user, insults the user, makes their life worse, and makes their work impossible or nearly so. True inspiration may be beyond our capability to teach, true genius may break these principles we write down here, but for the great majority we can deduce principles that can act as guidelines for a truly bad user interface or "user experience" as we say.

We will take the case study approach as pioneered by Harvard Business School and from these case studies try to create principles to apply to new situations.

I recently sat down to learn GIMP, the Gnu Image Processing program, and was thrilled by its bad user interface ideas. From these I derived some principles and will then discuss how GIMP achieves these worthwhile goals.

Principle #1: Make a bad first impression.

If you can make a bad first impression, then you may even be able to make the user give up entirely. But how, specifically, can one make a bad first impression?

Principle #2:  Increase frustration by focusing on what the beginning user has to do and make that more difficult

In other words, concentrate your bad design into those areas that the beginner has to work through, it is less important to inconvenience the advanced user as they are far fewer in number and have more capability and skills to work through your stupidity.

Principle #3:  Use a GUI design or principle from a similar program that  the beginner almost certainly knows but give it a completely different meaning, and actually hide something important that the user needs to do under that category.

Our third principle here is a particularly nasty one. It solves several problems at once, it confuses the user, and makes them less confident that they bring skills to your program that will be useful.

Let us examine how GIMP achieves these three principles in a truly elegant manner. What is the first thing a beginner of a "paint" program might wish to do? Well I would argue that finding a paint brush and setting a color is pretty much right at the top of the list for a beginning user. What Gimp does for this is to make it ok to find a paint brush, although there is some good confusion there, but then it completely makes it inscrutable to choose a color. How does it do this?  It does this by hiding the pick-a-color function under a glyph that means something else entirely in Photoshop.

Then ask yourself how many new users of Gimp will have been exposed to Photoshop? I would argue that at least 80% of any user of Gimp will have learned at least something of Photoshop and the percentage may well be higher. Then what could be more devious and self-defeating than to hide "pick a color" under a graphic that has nothing to do with picking a color from Photoshop? And that is exactly what they do. In Gimp, pick a color is carefully hidden under the following icon:

which means of course to exchange a foreground color with a background color in Photoshop and has nothing to do, actually with choosing a color.

What genius ! What mad genius ! What a clever and nasty person whoever did this must be !!

No one would ever think to look under switch fg/bg color, and they have to look up how to pick color in Gimp on the internet (of course there is no online documentation for Gimp) and eventually they find it, but not after many minutes or even hours of frustration and hairpulling.

So our first case study suggests: find something a beginner certainly has to do, and hide it in a place he will explicitly not look for it based on previous experience.

In future posts we will examine other examples of genius bad user interface design.

Amazing Simulation of 1970s Graphics in WebGL

Its the mid 1970s all over again.

I actually have written my first WebGL application to display a .obj file.

First you have to convert the .obj to a ".json" file, and then type in its name to some code.  But this process which might seem awkward and stupid, is actually all the more authentic.  This makes the application feel even more 1970s with a retro user interface.

The image is of my test object, a viewpoint .obj of a playing card.   By being completely flat, believe it or not, I can test certain things in my code that was useful.  Yes I know, its not the most compelling 3D object you have ever seen, and you would not even guess that the object is lit, but it is.

So far I have only found one incompatibility between Firefox and Chrome, that being the ability to see the "." as in "period" in a javascript program.   Firefox can, Chrome can not.

The great advantage in having all this in HTML is that it provides all sorts of tools for layout, fonts, scrolling and so forth.  Thus the "program log" window on the far left scrolls which was trivial to implement.

Wow!  Thats exciting, isnt it !

Technical Notes

Ok, so the status display is wrong.  In fact this is the line segments of the very flat 3D object that you are seeing.   The display does not become correct until the user rotates the object and from that point forward it is correct.   Fixed in the next release.

Encouraging Free Expression by Users

I am having a phone meltdown and going through the hell of figuring out which provider, phone, etc, has minimal acceptable service for a price I can afford.

Here at Global Wahrman, we want to encourage the oppressed user to stand up for their rights, and along those lines, I pass on to you a first class review of Virgin Mobile that brings forth I think some important ideas.

From Ebony M on Yelp:

At first, I was IN LOVE with Virgin. I thought, "AT&T, you can kiss my big, black shiny hiney!" However, now that our relationship with each other has left the honeymoon phase, I see my chaste little Virgin for what it REALLY is: a greedy, no account whore.

WHY, am I constantly being billed for minutes I don't use? I just topped up. I have a boyfriend and a friend name Gerard whom I talked with last night only this billing cycle. My boyfriend and I talk for a few minutes, then we're off the phone. Where my minutes at, bitches????!!!!

Next, your "broadband-speed" internet is ass. It's slower than my mom's dial-up, and that fool's still using AOL. AOL, people. I didn't even know that company still existed. Can't watch Netflix. Got a faster computer but still can't watch hulu. And you KNOW I loves me some "Top Model."

So, now I'm back to f*cking around with whores: At&T, Verizon, Time Warner, come and get me, you skanks. Screw me and then rob me blind. I'll bend over and take it, just as long as the service is better than with Virgin.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/virgin-mobile-usa-walnut-creek#hrid:P8xHfZaT_Y9lBRXgjr5PLQ

The Failure of Moral Progress: The Tragedy of Javascript

From hope to despair, then to hope, then to despair again, is that the fate of all civilizations? To give in to sloth and decay, their monuments to reason covered with the slime of intellectual and moral weakness? To sink again and again into corruption, incompetence, venality and death ? Is hope for progress mere pablum for the weak minded to keep them enthusiastically at their tasks until it is too late and their fate is sealed?

Something has been revealed to me recently that would make me think so.

A computer language is many things but one of them is a (usually formal) specification of a grammar and a syntax that is useful to the bipeds in expressing their ways of doing things, what are sometimes called algorithms, named for the jazz trio of Johnny von Neumann, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church whose band, The Algorithms, dominated avant garde jazz in the 1930s up into the 1950s and whose influence is still heard today. Although writing computer algorithms is a very personal and idiosyncratic form of expression, the notation that the individual artists (and groups of artists) use to express themselves will subtly affect the elegance of the algorithm and can by its nature guide and channel what can be expressed. They may all be Turing equivalent at some theoretical level but they "feel" very different.

There is no one such formal language, there are many, and there will be many in the future. Like music and music notation, they will evolve and some will be appreciated by an elite, and some will be used by the masses. Some, like SNOBOL are esteemed but not in current usage. Others like C++ (pronounced "C Double Cross") are as common as flies on shit and just as attractive.

As in all things there is the matter of taste and the issues of elite style vs common style. The avant garde must by its very definition be avant, changing and moving forward.

Even so, we can look on in horror or at least puzzlement when something that is fundamentally flawed, something that we know is just not going to be good, becomes established and then through the vicissitudes of the uncaring fates explodes onto a hundred million computer screens to become encrusted into just as many computer programs and taught to our children and then to their children in perpetuity.

I have just looked more closely at HTML 5 which is already everywhere and soon will be truly everywhere. One day there will be an HTML 6 no doubt but until then it is HTML 5 that will be used to mark up what our civilization has to say about itself. HTML 5 is a synonym for Javascript, as Javascript is integrated into the very essence of HTML 5. There can not be one without the other. Where you find HTML 5 you will find Javascript.

The more I learn Javascript the more I realize that Satan and the Illuminati, another band from the 1930s, must be chortling with glee at the little joke they have played on our world. For Javascript is a pastiche which pulls a little from column A and column B and column C and Java and Scheme and C and blows smoke in our face. It is a tale told by a billionaire, Mark Andresson, who was in a hurry at the time and would we have done any better if we were in his shoes?     I would hope that we would, but it is very hard to know until we are tested, and we probably never will have that opportunity.   It is what it is, however.

Javascript is not the best we, the computer community, can do in a perfect world.  But it is not a perfect world, and at least Javascript is not the worst that there is out there.    At this point, it is just a fact of life.

___________________________________

HTML 5 Working Group
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/

HTML 5 on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

Computer Human Interface in Cinema: An Example from Patriot Games (1992)

In general if we ask the question "Is it too much to ask that Hollywood represent the use of computers with some authenticity or correctness?" the answer would clearly be "Yes, it is too much to ask".

Authenticity is a dirty word in Hollywood and computers fit the rule, not the exception. A computer in a movie serves some generally shallow plot points: the computer acts as an oracle, or a dictator, or whimsical child, or God knows what. These shallow ideas generally mirror the genuinely sincere shallow level of understanding of the filmmakers. Water seeks its own level, and in this area its a pretty low level.

But I came across a scene in a stupid movie called Patriot Games (1992) starring Harrison Ford and the sequence has an excellent representation of a classic late 60s, early 70s computer user interface, complete with user.

The sequence watches a preemptive strike on an IRA training camp in the desert somewhere (maybe Libya?) through a classic spy satellite, probably a KH-11 or 12. In the Intel vault we watch a perfect example, an authentic recreation, of a female computer programmer from the late 1960s or thereabouts controlling the imaging from the satellite in real time. She types commands one line at a time.

Serious of purpose, her fingers fly over the keyboard

Notice the innovative command structure.   One command per line.  A concise 2 or 3 letter command abbreviation.  Commands such as zoom (zm), rotate (rot), and name (nm).   Intuitive and facile, our user is a power user, confident and on post.

Its feels completely authentic to me.

A modern user of computing must only shake their head in confusion at the above display.  Where are the helpful advertisements for irrelevant products?  Where is the cheap violation of privacy, the contempt for the user's time?   All we see is a few lines of serious endeavor, clearly represented.   Its failure to demonstrate cheap consumerism and sellout marks this ancient computer interface for what it is: an artifact from a time which had more integrity than our own.

_________________________________________

You can see the sequence here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoVWedQOQl4

NB: The BG voices have good information in this sequence.

Patriot Games on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105112/

KH Satellites on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennan

Advertising and the Rights of Paranoid People on the Internet

[This essay is slowly being rewritten ... the topic is the relationship between targeted internet ads and big data machine learning of customer preferences and being slightly paranoid as you review the ads it selects for you ... which are so weird.   Several countermeasures are proposed ... ]

You know and I know that the ads we see on Google are targeted for and at us. Billions and billions of cookies and multiply/add instructions have been dedicated to determining, through expert systems and big data, what to sell to the biped, typing mammal at the other end of the line.

How many times have you waited for a web page to come up only to notice that the browser is waiting on a response from "www.double-click-and-steal-information-to-make-money.com" ? This all is part of an elaborate plot by left-wing health care supporters to gather data on our buying habits or is it?  How do we know what the data is really used for?   What if Proctor and Gamble is part of larger plot to enact gun control?   

Whenever you look at a web site today, it is trying to sell you something based on the conclusions its advanced machine-learning algorithms have selected from your interests on the internet.   But it seems there are still a few bugs in the algorithm because they are not always quite on target. 

Consider the following ads I recently recently experienced while trying to use Google Mail:

       PUBLIC ARREST RECORDS
       ARREST RECORDS NOW POSTED ONLINE

       BECAME A PERSONAL TRAINER

       U.S. MILITARY STORE

       AVOID BEING LIED TO

       SOFTBALL RECRUITING

I mean, pardon me, but what the fuck ? (1) Do they know something that I don't know? Am I about to be arrested, do I need a lawyer?  Am I about to join a softball team?   Are they lying to me about joining a softball team?  What do they really mean by asking me if I want to be a personal trainer?  Why am I always the last to know?

The biggest puzzle of all is why advertisers believe that by interfering with our ability to get work done on the Internet, that we are going to be predisposed to buying from them. Watching their stupid advertisement for the latest online dating service ("Liz!  Meet Brad !!!  6 feet of handsome !") while I am trying to download the latest horror movie trailer does not make me more likely to buy their product.

Here are two ideas to throw a wrench into their sales campaign:

The first suggestion uses good old American capitalism and micro economics.  The Googles of the world are making money selling ads, the ad agencies are making money designing the ads, the companies themselves must be making money selling product, right ? So why not just put a 10th of a penny in my Paypal account for every discreet little ad, up to maybe a nickle in my Paypal account for an obnoxious full flash multimedia ad? Then, as the mafia supposedly says, I get to dip my beak in the well and everyone is happy because although worried about what the ads really mean, our advertising victim is at least getting paid for his trouble and can buy himself an antidepressant or a stiff drink with the profits.

The second idea is a little more passive aggressive.  It would not be hard to generate internet marketing countermeasures that used their weapons against them.   A program could be written that accessed the Internet and left cookies around that implied a profile that you wanted them to see.  You could be an intellectual, or very interested in beach volleyball, or even an intellectual with a very serious interest in beach volleyball, or any of a number of other interests.  Or we could be even more devious and do big data analysis of the latest marketing trends and make you either fit in, or deliberately hide your real interests by overwhelming them with fake accesses designed to hide your real marketing preferences in a mountain of carefully selected spurious data.

I hope that all Americans will unite against this conspiracy to waste our time with stupid ads that are supposedly based on our interests.

Thank you.

_______________________________________________

1. Probably stolen from Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

What is the Meaning of Face Stealer?

When I look at an "app" (1) like Face Stealer from Yahoo Japan, I wonder what it is the author's were thinking?  If the author's were alienated teenagers writing a program to prototype looks for a horror film, then the app is a work of genius.

But if the authors thought they were merely doing something cool, or neat, then it is the app itself that is horrifying, as is their lack of awareness of impact of the results.

Faces are more than they appear.   We have a lot of perceptual machinery to perceive and interpret faces, and it is easy to go wrong.  This app supposedly maps another face from an image onto your face in real time.

The Internet is, among other things, a cabinet of perverse curiosities and Face Stealer certainly deserves to be collected.

Consider the following picture from Michelle Starr of Cnet/Australia.

We at Global Wahrman want to congratulate the authors of Face Stealer for creating a truly horrifying piece of software.

The app can be found here:

http://download.cnet.com/Face-Stealer/3000-2192_4-75886222.html

The article from Cnet can be found here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57574999-1/creepiest-app-ever-lets-you-wear-anothers-face/

___________________________________________

1. I wish to be the first to call for the death penalty for whoever came up with this stupid term, the "app". Oh "program" is not good enough for you, program?

Possible Alternate Career Directions

After many years of wandering in the wilderness trying to figure out how to make a living using the skills and technologies involved with computer animation, visualization and special effects and not being successful, I have started to entertain new directions for my career. I am advised in this by many immensely stupid news articles and boring TED like speeches that "one must think outside the box", which always makes me think about the famous Peace Corps dialectic about the glass half empty or half full. What glass exactly and which box, what are they talking about?

As I suspect that there are others out there with same existential dilemma, here is an essay listing a few alternate career directions that look like they might have promise.

To set the mood, please review this video by a famous scientist explaining to a potential hire the business plan for his new venture, SPECTRE.  The sequence is from Dr. No (1965).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdiq_YcIzg0

SPECTRE executive explains business plan to James Bond

As much as I respect Dr. No as a scientist and admire his efforts to take over the world by blowing up missiles and extorting money from governments, I do not agree that all power is based on counterintelligence, terrorism, revenge and extortion as he so colorfully claims. Revenge is rarely, if ever, profitable. It is more of an entertaining hobby that can only be afforded by the wealthy, like yachting, or polo, or controlling the US Senate.    Nor do I understand how counterintelligence can ever be profitable, it is at best a cost of doing certain kinds of business, not a profit center in itself. Terrorism and extortion have always been big money makers though.

Here is a short list of non-traditional areas that look to me like they have opportunity.

1. Design and Build Submarines for South American Drug Cartels

There is apparently a long standing, ever increasing, effort to build submersibles and semi-submersibles to transport contraband from S. America to N. America and Europe. All ranges and types of vehicles have been innovated and the S. Americans have received helpful technical and design advice from the unemployed nationals of many foreign countries. I believe that submarines are very important culturally and have been looking for a way to get involved in this industry. Perhaps in this new market, submarines for smuggling, an opportunity can be found.

2. Run for Elected Office of A Small City and Rob Them Blind

The elected representatives of Bell, California managed to steal about $5M in a few years, and Bell is not even a well-off community. Admittedly, most of the local governments in California are already corrupt, and there is no sense in entering an already crowded field, but it might be worth examining other states and see if this technique can not be adapted to a new environment.

3. Bad User Interface Design

America and the world in general seem to have an insatiable desire for really bad, incredibly stupid, user interface design. And now that the car industry has jumped in with both feet, the floodgates of shit are really going to open. One way to make money at this is to have a consulting design firm to help people misapply technology and ignore fundamental principles in order to torture their users. Another way is to review various consumer electronic / whatever devices and threaten to publish how stupid and incompetent they are unless the manufacturer hires you as a consultant for a six figure consulting fee. 

4. Start a Religion and Write A Book

Its been done many times in the past, sometimes very successfully. Its tax exempt which is a great advantage.

5. Go Into Finance, Fuck up, Get Bailed Out and Award Yourself a Bonus

The state-controlled news media in this country has not reported it, but Goldman Sachs in the UK is awarding its employees a modest 8.3 billion bonus this year. That's not a lot of money, but its pretty good.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, and there are many other directions that seem to also have merit, such as art fraud and arms smuggling, but I wanted to open the discussion and get these initial ideas out there for your consideration.

The New Sport of Reading Crazy Internet Comments

[Revised 12/31/2012 to add details about the comments]

There is a new sport in town, a new dance craze if you will, everybody can enjoy it. The sport is reading the comments of the biped mammals to a topical news article. For every rational response, there is at least one irrational one, or so it seems.  Topics that set them off include Radiation and Nuclear Power, 911, Obama, Climate Change and Global Warming, and the Economy.

The irrational comments fall into a number of categories, they represent a broad diversity of insanity. It would not be fair to characterize it all as right wing ranting because there is, depending on the topic, a certain amount of left wing insanity as well. It depends on the topic.

In this case, the topic is a lawsuit filed by crewmen of the USS Reagan who participated in the humanitarian efforts during the nuclear meltdown in Japan. They are claiming that the Tokyo Power company deliberately lied about the level of radiation exposure and caused the plaintiffs unnecessary harm.

See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/tokyo-electric-sued-by-u-s-sailors-exposed-to-radiation.html

Go to the bottom of the article, there will be a few comments, and click on "load more comments". Keep clicking until you have had enough.

Here is a summary of some of the comments:

Some Modest Suggestions for Human Resource Departments to Help Make the Internet Job Application Process Even More Pointless

We here at Global Wahrman believe that online Corporate Employment and Career web sites can do a better job at taking an unpleasant and difficult situation, looking for work in a down economy, and making it not just unpleasant but also hurtful to the worker as well.  We believe that Human Resources Departments must recognize that they have a responsibility to make the job search experience as negative, stupid and damaging as possible.

As we all know, the new way of getting a job is to apply through the Internet.  No other ways are permitted.  This is an excellent improvement for society as a whole over the old and discredited way that people got work: through colleagues who recommended them. This old way was very inefficient because it allowed employees and friends who knew the skills of individuals and the needs of corporations to find a match that was good for both parties.   With the new system we can depersonalize the process, fail to get the information necessary to find that match,  and destroy the self-esteem of the job seeker all at the same time.  Clearly, this is a great improvement.

J. Pierpont Finch reading about how to get a job on the Internet.

But some web sites for major corporations have failed to completely embrace this new paradigm, and still make modest efforts to do a good job of hiring people.   This is completely out of line with the Internet paradigm which works so hard to use technology as stupidly as possible in order to make life as unpleasant as possible.   This post serves notice to those archaic practitioners of the old, bad ways to get with the program.

To make their job of crafting an unpleasant experience for the job-seeker easier, we have compiled a series of suggestions based on our examination of the Career sections of major corporate web sites as well as some selected smaller companies.  We have also personally tested many of these web sites.  Many corporations are making excellent progress along the lines of making the online application process both self-defeating and destructive, but clearly there is more to do.

Here are some specific suggestions:

1. Do not permit the work candidate to upload a cover letter.  A cover letter can be used to defeat the process of depersonalizaton by providing information that is useful to the hiring process.  Therefore, cover letters must not be permitted.

2. Do not permit the work candidate to upload a resume for each job they apply for. The work candidate must acknowledge that their resume is generic and has no useful information that could contribute to the hiring process.  One resume should be sufficient no matter what job it is, or when that resume was created.

3. Do not permit the work candidate to efficiently upload information, instead demand that information as if they were a disabled child, and make them fill in endless categories about education, skills and so forth no matter how well that information is presented on a resume, it is important to waste their time and badly and stupidly elicit that information on a case by case basis.  We are not going to use that information, it is only there to waste the candidates' time and that is why it is important.

4. Do not allow the candidate to know whether or not they have successfully applied for the position. To do so would be to give the candidate some degree of reward for going through the immensely stupid process we have had them endure online.  Much better to not acknowledge whether the job was applied for and leave them in a state of uncertainty.  By frustrating the candidate in even this basic way, we can contribute to the psychology that nothing they do matters.

5. Do not allow the candidate to be able to contact anyone at the company in order to be able to ask questions or seek points of clarification.  That would be inefficient and far too expensive.  The work candidate is not interesting enough to be worth providing this kind of individual treatment.  In fact, the work candidate should realize that they are worthless, faceless garbage.   Allowing them to ask questions and seek clarification is counterproductive to achieving that realization.

6. Do not permit the worker any choice in the format with which documents are prepared.  Thus if they are permitted to upload a resume at all, make certain that you do not accomodate the standard formats of text, html, doc and pdf, but at most one of them, or better yet, none of them.

7. Make jobs come and go and make it very difficult to return to a job listing once found.  In this way, the job seeker can experience character-building frustration as he or she tries to find that previously listed job (which probably wasn't real anyway) and fail to find it.

8. Do not in any way serve notice to the applicant that the job is no longer available, or give him or her any useful information about how the job was filled, or even if the job was filled.

9. Do not in any way indicate that the job applicant's paperwork or application was in any way looked at by a human, but rather give the impression that they were dismissed without consideration.  Even better, is to not reply in any way at all, and thus they do not know whether they ever successfully applied and got rejected or have any other information.  Under no circumstances give constructive feedback.

But more important than any of the above is the following hard and fast rule: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LIST ANY GENUINE OPPORTUNITIES ON YOUR WEB SITE.  The only jobs that are permitted to be listed are (a) entry level jobs, or (b) jobs that are already filled and are being listed in pro forma compliance with law, (c) as a way of getting information about your competition and (d) as a way of misleading your competition.

The candidate must understand in a deep and meaningful way that any real opportunities will never be listed on your web site, now or in the future.

Remember, your employment web page is a way of communicating to the worker what the company thinks of their workers and that by treating them with contempt at this stage you accurately and efficiently communicate Corporate policy. More than just a human resources department and web site, you are an instrument of the Corporation's desire to demean and destroy the worker.

This is an important task you have been given by the Corporation, remember that, and work as hard as you can to achieve it.

My 15 Seconds of Fame: Interviewed on Intel Blog about UI Design

[This post has wildly screwed up the blogspot GUI and it will need to be completely reformatted, yikes!  Not to mention typographical and grammatical errors which I can not see because blogspot made the type the same color as the background.   Hmm, it must be karma.  I say nasty things about GUI design and look what happens!]

Every once in a while, someone does something nice for you and its very confusing. What is their real motivation? Why are they doing something nice?

Anyway, for some reason my friend Audri Phillips, a pioneer of computer animation, and a veteran of Robert Abel & Associates, who is among other things, an artist and a writer for corporate giant Intel, interviewed me on the subject of user interfaces. I am very opinionated on user interfaces, having been victimized by them most of my life.

User interface design and implementation is an easy target, because they are so badly done most of the time. Abomoniably and inexcusably done. Unfortunately, there are many plausible reasons why this can happen, most of them variations on a generic "constraints on the project that we know nothing about and aren't apparent from using the device but were very important during development", such as "you have to use this software package" or "this company is going to do this, we only get to do that", that sort of thing.

Once you have the device in hand, and without any knowledge of what happened behind the scenes, it is easy and even somewhat emotionally satisfying to strike back at being victimized by the bad result, we can only judge what we see. Nevertheless, it seems that only Apple can do a product with a good user interface (a slight exaggeration).

Here is Audri's article on the Intel blog, please click on it to give her page hits which no doubt her management tracks.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/26/interfaces-an-interview-with-michael-wahrman-1

Audri's blog on artistic matters is at:
http://cultureandscience.blogspot.com/

The Future of the Humanoid-Computer Interface as Seen in 1951

This post will showcase two designs for a future human-computer interface from two different movies, one from 1951 and 1960. I think that they both hold up remarkably well for being over 50 years old. The two films are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Time Machine (1960). The second film also illustrates the importance of a good voice actor, in this case one of my favorites, Paul Frees.

When you make a film about the future, or about an alien visit to earth, almost by definition you have to show sets, props, costumes and so forth in that future world.   Which means of course you have to design the future, or what the future will look like in the context of the film you are trying to make. Whenever a character has to interface with technology, then you have a man-machine interface or in this case a humanoid-computer interface (HCI).

In other words, you have trapped yourself into a situation in which you are forced to show the entire world how limited your imagination is, and how badly you failed to predict the future, there on the screen for everyone to see.  Your humiliation, inevitable and unstoppable, is assured unless you come up with a solution that convinces the audience that they are seeing the future (or an unknown technology) that lasts the test of time.  And this time around you may not be able to use giant robots to get out of this mess, either.

A notable recent example of a humanoid interface is the multi-touch display in Minority Report (2002), although not enough time has passed to be able to judge how it will hold up.  But for me, the best of the best is still "the button" at work in The Jetsons (1962) from Hanna Barbera.   George got tendinitis of his button pushing finger decades before people in the computer industry started complaining.    Its not perfect, notice the use of a CRT, but the design is so great that it doesn't bother me at all.  

Push the button faster, Jetson!

But most films do a lousy job of this.   They don't have the money, or they just don't care.   So they design something that looks silly, but not silly in a good way.   Its a hard problem and for many reasons including: things (e.g. technologies) move fast, they don't always move the way you think because of issues of style, economics and politics, its hard to estimate how fast things will move from the lab to the real world, and because you are telling a story and the audience has to understand what they see so it has to fit their preconceptions in some way.

It is also used as another excuse to substitute visual effects for design or story in many films.   

But rather than emphasize the negative, here are two examples from films that are quite old now, that I think stand up pretty well, at least to some extent.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is actually a fairly interesting film hiding inside a black and white science fiction movie. The plot turns on a visitor from another world who brings a message from the local galactic union about Earth's place in the universe, a message he has trouble delivering because he wants to deliver it to all the nations of the world simultaneously. Why doesn't he just broadcast it to the world from space, one wonders. My guess is that the alien humanoid grew up in a nice family of space humanoids in a more courteous civilization and believes that bad news needs to be delivered in person.

Anyway, getting back to our HCI, it turns out that our visitor must arrange for a dramatic demonstration that catches everyone's attention and forces them to listen.   To do this, he must go to his ship and arrange the events that give the film its title.

This is the only time in the movie that we see inside the ship, beyond a tiny glimpse through the open door and one giant robot whose design does not hold up at all well. I expected the worst. But what we see is not incredibly technological at all, it is simple, minimal, and darkly lit.  It suggests more than it shows.  We see that the circular design motif of the ship itself is repeated throughout: a circular access corridor, a circular control room, a circular workstation of some sort where our hero probably sits when navigating, and a control console with circular panels. All controls are activated by gesture and voice. He enters the ship, uses gestures to activate the systems, which respond with light, and issues commands by voice. The feedback is in devices that light as activated and in an abstract display. It is completely understated and minimal.

I met Michael Rennie when he reprised this role of an "understated alien with incredible power" in a two-part episode of Lost in Space (1966).   My father was able to arrange a visit to the set at 20th Century Fox because he knew the head of PR for the show, an old Marine Corps writing buddy (e.g. Combat Correspondent) from the Solomon Islands campaign.   Visiting a set of a TV show is a lot of fun for a little kid.

In The Time Machine (1960), the H.G. Wells and George Pal masterpiece, our hero is trying to figure out what has happened to earth and civilization in the future. The vague and blonde kids who live there can't tell him and couldn't care less, just like teenagers today. After a while, the classically blonde romantic interest tells our hero about "rings that talk". What do they talk about, he asks. Things that no one here understands, she says.

The rings turn out to be encoded audio, and the power for playback is generated from the energy used to spin the rings centrifugally on a table that illuminates when they are spun. As the ring loses energy and slowly decays to the table, the voice slows down with it. The technology appears to be robust, survivable, and works without any power but the power you use to spin it. I am pretty sure this design comes from the Wells book itself, and is realized well and simply here in the movie. The voice is the voice of Paul Frees, one of my favorite voice actors of all time, and noted previously on this blog.

In both of these cases, at least, the "advanced technology" did not look completely stupid a few years later, which is more than we can say for many films.

The moral of the story may be that in predicting the future, showing less and letting the imagination fill in the gaps is a plausible strategy.

Of them all, I still think that George Jetson's button at work is the best.

Day the Earth Stood Still on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/

The Time Machine on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054387/

Michael Rennie on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0719692/

Paul Frees on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frees

Minority Report on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

The Jetsons on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055683/

Selected Items of Interest from Computer Games of Recent Vintage Part 1

As previously mentioned, I did a survey of PC games a few years ago in order to form a more modern impression of the state of that industry, what games were being made, what I liked about them and what I didn't.   

As you would expect, it was a mixed bag.   But out of the 50 or so games I reviewed, there were about 30 or 40 things that did impress me.  Here is a list, more or less at random, of 10 of those things.

See this post for a discussion of what I was looking for:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/11/some-criteria-for-excellence-in.html

1. An idea so good you wish you had thought of it: Sissy Fight 2000

A turn-based game based on a playground in which young girls compete to become the most popular, or alternatively, do the best job of lowering the self esteem of the other girls by saying nasty things about them.

Although the server for Sissyfight 2000 is no longer operational, this high point in western culture will not be quickly forgotten.

www.sissyfight.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissyfight_2000

2. A great user-interface idea: Grand Theft Auto III

In GTA III, you are given tasks to accomplish for the local criminals. They want you to drive their car somewhere, say to pick up their girlfriend. But the user interface is rigged so that it overreacts making it nearly impossible to actually drive the car without bashing into other cars, or people, or streetlamps. The car is rigged with all sorts of great breakaway parts that get destroyed colorfully. So you pick up the girlfriend, and she pretends not to notice that the hood is bashed in and the door is hanging loosely off its hinges.

3. A great story point / gag: Grand Theft Auto III

You are given an assignment, pick up the boss's girlfriend, there is a map, but the city and the map are perverse. You pull into a parking lot to turn around, in what is probably a stolen car, and discover that the parking lot is actually the lot for the local police station. You try to turn around to get out of there but as with the point above, the car is impossible to drive so you end up playing demolition derby with a bunch of parked police cars. These guys are very funny.

4. Something happens that makes you think that it is actually thinking: SimCity IV

I set up a toll booth to try and collect revenue from an interstate (e.g. only collect money from people passing through, not locals). But I do not realize that I leave a back street open that people could use, if they were clever or persistent enough to find it, to avoid the toll booth.   Trust me, this route was not obvious, it required going around through a bunch of back streets and then back onto the main highway.

So I put in the toll booth and, after a while, a local neighborhood group complains about too much traffic from cars passing through. The game is obviously simulating some of the crazy things people do to save money, in this case, having them drive all over the place to find the cheapest path. It greatly added to the sense that the game was actually paying attention and that there was something actually going on in there.

5. A game that results in learning something about the world: SimCity IV

Maxis says that SimCity is not doing real urban simulation, it is just faking it.  That may be true, but even so, it is an excellent learning tool for people interested in such topics as urban design and management and it is the only such tool that I am aware of that is available to the general public.   

6. A game that is useful in thinking through a strategic issue: Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars

Tiberium Wars is an amusing real-time strategy game, one of the few I enjoy playing.  There is nothing about it that is intended to be realistic nor is that its purpose in any way.

But it has a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) feature and there are several amusing things about it, I noticed.  It is implemented in a way that you always know who did it, you are warned they are going to do it, they can only use it intermittently, and it is very destructive in a limited region but you will probably survive the first blow.

What was interesting was that without thinking about it, I found myself implementing these counter-strategies: (a) distribution of industries in different regions, (b) duplication of key technologies in different regions, (c) attempting surgical strikes to knock out their WMD before they can use it (or use it again), and (d) developing my own WMD in response.   I did not think about it at the time, but in retrospect the strategies that evolved to manage the threat of WMD are some of the same strategies used in the real world to deal with this threat.

7. A game that did a good job of creating a mood or feeling: Bioshock

One of the few games I have found that did a good job at creating some sort of feeling or sense of place, this time of a strange underwater world. The equivalent of a good, bad horror film.

8. A game with a weird funny idea: Portal

Portal is a pretty weird idea, and well implemented. Whether or not it is a good game or not, I could not tell you, its not the sort of game I enjoy. But it is fun to look at, and it is actully somewhat original in concept.

9. A game with some whimsical humor: Command and Conquer Red Alert

Very few games have anything I would see as charming, or whimsical. You may feel differently about it, but that is my impression. But in this version of the C&C franchise, there are some very funny bits. My favorite is the type of Russian soldier, the great Russian bear. The bear can be delivered to a place (a battle, an island, etc) by shooting it out of a cannon. When you do that, it is very cute in how it flies, how it parachutes down, and how it lands. Its really charming in the great wasteland of not-charming of most games.

This bear is fierce looking.  The bear(s) in the game itself are adorable.

Tim Curry as Premier Cherdenko.  He probably got this part because of his role in Hunt for Red October.

10. A game with a great use of some technology: the Total War series

The game separates out the strategy from the battle. During the battle you are given a user interface to attempt to control behaviorally generated troops of soldiers. A Roman Legion for example, made up of the different specialities that existed within the legion. A lot of work has gone into making it possible to give direction to these groups of simulated people as they try to kill each other. And the behavioral is very good and works in real time with dozens of groups interacting with each other and thousands of individual foot soldiers being animated.   A very good job, overall.

A view from the Rome: Total War series.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen !

I will probably post another list of equal length sometime soon of other things I thought were well done.

Then I will tell you what I really think about the games I reviewed.

The Game Industry As a Rational Career Move or Out of the Frying Pan

This post has been rewritten and can be found at:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-suitability-of-game-industry-as.html

Linux / Unix / Nvidia Update 9/13/2012

I am going to briefly digress from the topics of metaphor in space opera, and national security policy, to discuss the critical and related topic of which OS, specifically which Linux, to run.

The occasion comes about because we are going through a season where various collaborators (occasional collaborators, usually) are choosing their OS and seem blissfully unaware of the implications of their choice.   I believe that the choice of an OS is similar to choosing to use the Dark Side of the Force, forever is your destiny affected.

Or said another way, a moment of pleasure, a lifetime of regret.

But the answer to the question of which OS is a moving target because we live in a fast-paced world and also because the Linux community is working very, very hard to destroy any chance it has to become mainstream by splintering into as many small factions as they can as often as they can.

The Lisp community also splintered but were in general quite smart and had interesting reasons to splinter, even if in the long run it was very counterproductive.  But the Linux people aren't that smart, they just splinter because they are immature and can not compromise.

But I am holding back my real feelings, you may wish to read between the lines to see what it is I really think here.

Anyway, this is a brief update on Centos/Redhat, Ubuntu and FREEBSD (the descendent of the original Berkeley Software Distribution to which we are all beholden) and also a discussion of support for graphics hardware for Linux because there is so much misinformation out there.

Centos/Redhat is the professional version of Linux, as far as I can tell.  The people who are using Linux on their thousands of Apache servers, for example, seem to be using Centos / Redhat.   Centos is Redhat, but recompiled, and without formal support.  It is literally Redhat and those who need support (large corporations usually) buy directly from Redhat.  For the rest of us, Centos is free to download.   There is now a version 5.8 which I plan to upgrade to, and a version 6.3 that has many features I do not need, especially involving managing virtualization.

Centos should be your default Linux OS for professional work, unless you are bleeding edge, in which case you may prefer their developmental version, Fedora.

Ubuntu used to be the best choice for a primarily desktop user who needed an OS for their laptop, or for an office worker.  The latest version of Ubuntu however has moved to their own incompatible window system, and clearly indicates to me that they are out of their minds.  I wish all you Ubuntu users the best of luck.

For fun, and because I had never tried, I downloaded and installed FREEBSD on a system here.  It installed flawlessly.  And to my surprise, when I logged in, it had a classic beautiful Unix login shell.  No damn window system for these guys, they are manly men.   I love this, its so pure and unspoiled.  I would look seriously at FREEBSD if I were in a position to to change OS's and wanted a serious Unix as a base.

I want to publically thank NVIDIA for doing such a spectacularly good job of supporting Linux. ATI/AMD's support of Linux has always been minimal, and NVIDIA has always done a very serious and professional job of supporting Linux for all their many hardware products.  The confusion comes from people who have never seriously tried to do graphics with Linux, I suspect, because if they did they would quickly discover, as I have, that there is only one mainstream graphics vendor who seriously supports Linux.

Remember, whatever choice you make here will determine dozens if not hundreds of other choices you make in the future.   Changing OS's is very difficult, upgrading to a new release is very annoying.   Adding a new OS to a mix in a working studio always adds complication.  Choose wisely, as your destiny will be affected.

Android Notes: Cameras, FTP & Development Environments

A friend and I are goofing around trying to figure out how to write something for the Nexus 7 tablet. I am writing about it not because I have anything all that interesting to say, but because it may be useful to someone else trying to to the same thing.

1. In order to take pictures, you need to download an application, it doesn't come with the tablet. I downloaded the free Modoco applet, and it works fine. Yes, it is awkward to try and take a picture with the camera on the front, you have to angle it in a funny way to see what you are doing. The pictures are just ok, which is all they were ever intended to be.

2. In order to get files on and off the tablet, I downloaded the WellFTP server. It defaults to an ftp port of 2121, which is non-standard, but ok. I am using gftp on Linux and filezilla on the Windows XP, and they can both talk to it simultaneously. All user data on the device seems to be under the DCIM folder. You should set up your wireless router to assign a static IP number to it in order to make things easier to use. This is all under "LAN Setup" in your router's control panel.

3. There is good news and bad news about the Android development. On the one hand it is highly tied into Eclipse, which is one of these deeply disturbed development environments for children, or perhaps development environments for disturbed children. Its a real pain in the ass and frankly, as documented, it doesn't work. But you have to have one of these if you, Google, want to play in the mainstream and have the morons, I mean the developers, develop applications for you. You can spend days figuring out which version will play well together with which version of the android development environment, or you can, YIPPEE, use the command line interface. Just use the command line interface. It is much more productive.

4. In a later post, I will publish a "hello, world" applet. It is pretty ugly, imho.