A Voice in the Dark

I just saw a television commercial for a combination PC, DVR, and game console. It’s from EnvisionsInc.com. When you go there, there’s nothing on the site. If you look them up, you’ll find them on the list of members for the Fort Wayne, Indiana Chamber of Commerce:

Envisions, Inc.
Audio/Visual Equipment-Dealers
3201 Stellhorn Road, Suite C143 Fort Wayne, IN 46815
Phone: (260) 407-1762     
http://www.envisionsinc.com
Timothy Wheeler, President & CEO

There’s also the usual WHOIS check which turns up the same information, plus an email address and a different phone number for Mr. Wheeler. (I don’t believe it’s helpful to publish these. Even if they are available to the general public with next to no effort, the minor hurdle of having to run a WHOIS query prevents an awful lot of abusive behavior.) The domain name is on a list of domains that expired in August of 2004, was registered in February of 2005, and expires in 2008. Name services are provided through NS73 and NS74 at worldnic.com.

This is pretty much all the information I can find about the company or its products. Since it’s currently 7 PM their time, calling the phone numbers is unlikely to accomplish anything. I’ll give them a call in the next couple of days and see what I can find out.

My gut instinct is that this product does not exist, never will exist, and if it ever does exist it will suck mightily and be a massive failure. But I’d like to do some digging. Anyone who wants to help is more than welcome to post a comment or two.

Update: I’m retarded. The correct domain is envizionsinc.com with a Z. There’s plenty of information there. I have never been so tempted to delete a blog entry in my life.

Filed under: Business, Media
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Eric Raymond has an excellent paper written with Rob Landley about how Linux can take over. This is, as always, an excellent paper. ESR is a smart guy, and he’s got a solid handle on what the industry is going to do.

There’s only one problem: the Linux community doesn’t care.

See, there’s been a massive problem with Windows for years. The security was shit. We had a totally open and insecure system, and people abused it. Now Microsoft is being blamed for the abuse, and they have to do something about it. So they did: they released Vista. Vista is much less vulnerable. It is still vulnerable in certain ways; you can run malware just as easily as always, you just have to type a password first. Since this happens frequently, most people won’t think twice about it.

Meanwhile, Linux has a series of problems, too. But what the Linux community has done in response to these problems is… well, nothing. So when Eric predicts that 2008 is the hard limit for Linux becoming more than an also-ran on the desktop, I predict two things.

Eric is probably right. He has been right many times before; he will be right many times again. The strategy he is backing to achieve the goal is certainly better than any I would have devised, and if it was just about technical problems, he’d probably “git ‘r done”. But it’s not. Which is what leads me to the next prediction.

Linux is going to lose. Big time.

Linux is not even going to come CLOSE to achieving domination by 2008, or even by 2010. The community is simply not interested in winning, because they want to be the underground. They want to be the elite, the enlightened few wandering amidst the sheep. Desktop dominance will make Linux into Windows, and they don’t want that. It will give Microsoft “underdog” status, and that’s largely what powers the Linux phenomenon - people who want to back the dark horse because it’s the dark horse.

So it’s not going anywhere; Linux will be around for the long haul, but desktop domination is simply not a success strategy for Linux. The one thing ESR and the rest of the Linux crowd don’t seem to get is that Linux has a market which does not value dominance. The closer Linux gets to being the desktop dominator, the more of the community will leave it, weakening the base that keeps it there. It can never get there. Ever.

Linux is already losing major ground to Apple because Apple still has an anti-Mac crowd against it. There is no anti-Linux crowd anymore; there’s only a “Linux isn’t for me on my desktop” crowd. But the underdog market is gradually moving to Macs, because then they’re “faggot Mac users” and somebody still hates them. The Linux community simply cannot cope with the idea that nobody wants to argue violently about how much Linux sucks, because then they’d forget why they use this piece of shit.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Open Source, Philosophy
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My two year old is beginning to assert authority over things to see where he does and doesn’t have it. Earlier tonight, he decided to assert some authority over his diaper.

The usual process is that if he hasn’t pooped, he takes off his own diaper and brings it to mommy or daddy to wrap up into a little bundle. Then we give it back, and he takes it to the trash. As he returns, he gets a new diaper (we use Pull-Ups), and we hold it while prompting him to put his left and right foot into the new diaper.

Tonight, he wanted to wrap up the diaper. When we didn’t let him (he’s not quite coordinated enough to do it), he refused to take it to the trash. So we began negotiating. My first offer was that he should take the diaper to the trash. He countered that I should take the diaper to the trash. I told him it was his diaper and his pee and he needed to take it to the trash. He thought about this for a moment, then opined that it was my diaper and my pee that I should take to the trash. The logic behind this seems to be that when I took the diaper to wrap it up, it became my diaper.

So I decided to try a typical parenting trick: hide the diaper in something else that the toddler can be convinced to throw in the trash. This wasn’t just an effort to get the diaper thrown away, but a test to see how smart my child is. So I grabbed an empty Pringle’s can, stuffed the diaper into it, and told him to throw it away.

To my wife’s great amusement, my son became highly offended and scolded me. “Daddy, don’t put the diaper in the chips,” he said. “That’s naughty.”

Eventually, we got him to throw the diaper away by saying that if daddy had to throw away the diaper, Logan had to sit in the naughty chair for two minutes. This was okay with him until he realised he would have to sit in the naughty chair without a diaper, where he would undoubtedly have no choice but to let it touch his penis. He’s deathly afraid of that for some reason; apparently, your penis is only allowed to touch diapers, wipes, and washcloths. (You should see him getting in and out of the bathtub. It’s a source of endless amusement for us.) So he panicked and cried and ran the diaper over to the trash can.

There’s really no other point to this post. It’s just your basic “I need to tell you about my kid” parenting story. If you’re not a parent, you probably don’t get it. If you ever become one, you will.

 

Filed under: Parenting
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A month or so back, a co-worker mentioned to me that he got in an argument with the marketing department because he said in an email that something was:

a “marketing” decision

The marketing department was upset about the quotes. Well, that makes sense, I observed. When you put “marketing” in quotes, it means “bullshit”. So I got started thinking about how quotes work.

Quotes usually mean “these exact words”. But they also mean one of three other things. They may mean “these are someone else’s words”. However, they may also mean “these are not my words”, and by extension they sometimes mean “these are not the right words”.

That’s when it occurred to me that a quoted string is a placeholder variable for an understood quantity. It’s like x in algebra: when you see the polynomial x^2 + 2x - 6, you know that it’s not a literal x. You can’t square a letter. Consider the following statement on a web forum:

You must agree to our terms of service.

That means you have to agree to the terms of service. Now compare this statement:

You must agree to our “terms of service”.

This is subtly different. This means you must agree to something that is called the terms of service. The author is saying “someone else called it the terms of service, not me, and it isn’t really the terms of service”. Which leads to an interesting point.

We quote when we do not agree.

If I agreed with what you were saying, I would say it again in my own words, thereby showing how smart I am. But since I don’t agree, I have to distance myself from your words, so they aren’t falsely attributed to me.

So whenever you quote something, you tend to mean “this is wrong”. And this is quite a change from the original colloquial purpose of quotes: to repeat something of lasting value in such a way that its originator is credited.

Filed under: Business, Philosophy
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Russ Nelson asks this in a recent blog entry, and concludes that the customer has more influence over the company.

This is simply not true. I don’t often disagree with Russ Nelson, who is one of my favorite economists (along with Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, and Arnold Kling - in no particular order). This is a prime example of where you can make hideously shortsighted observations based on data that are correct but incomplete.

Neither the shareholder nor the customer has any real influence over the company. That influence is held by the employees. They are directed by the executives. And the executives are directed primarily by shareholders - not individual shareholders, but the spectre of the anonymous shareholder: market funds and the like, which buy and sell shares based exclusively on mathematical formulae. The company can manipulate their business to maintain those equations such that the company remains attractive to these funds.

The company cannot expect any degree of success when it manipulates its business to make its shares or its product attractive to an emotionally invested individual. The important question is not the impact of a decision, but the influence the company can exert over that decision. The company cannot reliably make more people buy its products. The company cannot reliably make more individual investors buy its stock. But it CAN reliably manipulate its financial operations to create a favorable result when the stock is evaluated mathematically.

So the actions of the company are made by the employees, who are directed by the management, who are guided by the goal of satisfying a mathematical objective, which fulfills the decisive criteria used by an anonymous collection of shareholders. The customer isn’t really important. By the time a company is publicly traded, the customer is sufficiently nebulous that the company cannot really make a targeted effort to please customers anyway.

Besides, any marketer or salesman worth his salt knows that it’s a fool’s game trying to get what people want; it’s much easier to make people want what you have.

 

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy
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We have been without power for fourteen hours today, because there was a massive windstorm that knocked out power to over a million people. And I can’t help but think that when the media constantly freak out over every little thing, disaster forecasts don’t look at all unusual. If we had been given some indication that this was really going to be a huge crisis, we would have planned ahead and made sure to have batteries, candles, bags of ice, etc.

Instead, we just saw the typical idiots on the typical newscast talking about how many people might lose power in the storm. That didn’t sound so bad. We have talks like this about every storm of any appreciable size, and at worst we lose power for two to three hours. 

Instead, we lose power at one in the morning and spend the whole morning without it. Meanwhile, the power company is swamped with calls about outages, and tells us wonderful little pieces of news like how there are outages in parts of six counties. Teams will begin assessing the damage on Friday or Saturday. Emergency teams have been called in from adjacent states. Restoration of power will begin as soon as the storm subsides, and should be completed in seven to ten days.

Now, I’m not incapable of surviving without power. I grew up in the seventies. I was a scout. I went to camp. I had survival training in the military. A power outage is just an inconvenience for me. The biggest loss would be the food in the freezer, which at the moment is roughly $30 worth of chicken breast and ground beef. Not a big deal.

But it’s still an inconvenience, and it would have been LESS of an inconvenience had the media given us proper warning about it. Because they’re constantly whining about stupid shit, the real warning blended in with everything else, and I had no clue this was going to be anything more than a few gusty winds.

Which is why I get really annoyed at all the alarmist bullshit on the news. It inoculates us against real warnings, until we can’t tell the difference. Which is a prime example of how the media damages the public with shit that doesn’t matter.

 

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics
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My son likes to watch Blue’s Clues. The show has been through several changes over the years, which you can see rather easily when you’re watching four episodes a day seven days a week. (That’s roughly 150 episodes a month, which is more than most shows ever produce. A check of Wikipedia shows that Blue’s Clues has produced 130.) This is a basic summary.

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I’m moving over to the Windows test team at Microsoft, with roughly a 15% increase in pay. This isn’t all that different from what I’ve been doing in the mobile devices division. For my first seven months at Microsoft, I’ve been responsible for validating and managing the test binaries and procedures that determine whether a Windows Mobile device ships to end users; for the next four, I’ll be responsible for the same thing on a functional area of the Windows operating system.

I don’t know which area I’ll be handling yet. The interview process focused largely on my ability to debug and diagnose network and security problems, which may be a clue, or it may be irrelevant. I’m leaning in the direction that it’s irrelevant, because IMO no matter what you’re doing on this team, you’d better have a solid handle on networking and security.

Since we’ve just shipped Vista, there’s a weird sort of low-high pressure thing going on with this position. Internally, we’re in zero danger of shipping anything more than a hotfix or a service pack to end users in the near future, so nobody really cares what I’m doing. Externally, my department is the focus of any noise the public makes about Vista; if something is really badly broken in it, all fingers point to us. So when you think about it, I’m sort of being set up to take the heat, but I don’t end up with any significant authority.

I’ll keep the blog updated as time and confidentiality permit.

 

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy, Security, Software
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Outside the Beltway has a story today about commercial skipping. Essentially, advertisers are complaining that 40 percent of viewers skip commercials, which has cost them $300 million this year and will cost them twice as much next year.

The issue here isn’t that commercials aren’t working, but that the advertisers want a discount. The television stations need to respond to this by pointing out that nothing has really changed except the quality of information provided to the advertiser, which is now better. So advertisers shouldn’t get a discount. They should pay a premium.

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Filed under: Business, Economics, Media
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I just saw one of those “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads. The gist of this one was that the PC had to market itself and try to convince people to buy PCs.

I shouldn’t need to explain, but I probably do, or Apple wouldn’t be running these ads.

The commercial is trying to convince you that you should not buy a PC because PC vendors are always trying to make you buy a PC. Which is this commercial’s way of saying that you should buy a Mac, because they’re trying to make you buy a Mac.

Run that through your head a few times until the big neon “WTF” sign comes on.

I saw another one of these ads recently, where the Mac gave the PC a little photo album he made with iPhoto. The PC, on the other hand, gave the Mac a book on C++ GUI programming. The implication here is that the Mac is easy to use and you just click some buttons, but the PC needs a big thick manual. But that’s a shitty gift. Do you want your coworker to bring you a homemade photo album with all his pictures of you and him together? Not only is that cheap, inconsiderate, and generally self-involved… it’s also creepy and weird in some kind of stalkery way. (And the Mac does look a little effeminate on those spots.)

I just find it strange, you know. I have never in my life seen a single PC vendor say “buy a PC, because Macs suck”. What the hell kind of company chooses that as their marketing platform?

 

Filed under: Business, Open Source
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