cobolhacker.com

I wrote this around 1996. I uncovered this writing from a backup recently, and I present it here for your enjoyment. The reference to the International Space Station dates it. The ISS hadn’t launched yet — the first module didn’t go up until late 1998.

When I was a kid, my dad would wistfully, and maybe a bit jealously, tell me that I would see the first manned starshot sometime after his death. Like any ardent fan of science fiction literature, he always hoped that mankind would look beyond our native dirt-ball and head to the stars.

Our trivial probings into the nature of the Universe are nothing compared to what we could be really achieving. Unfortunately, it is unlikely we are going to even attempt it in my lifetime, if at all. Just as human nature calls to us to explore the unknown, it is human nature that prevents us from going there.

The only reason America went to the moon was to prove to the Russians that they could do it first. In the Sixties, with the cold war in full swing, the Americans figured that they could break the spirit of the Russians by beating them to the moon. After Russia beat them to orbit, the United States came back from behind to drop a pair of guys on the moon. It was genuine drama. Only recently did the Americans realize just how close they came to losing the space race.

Perhaps that’s the problem — now that there is no competitive spirit, no military objective, no survival impetus, the drive to go into space has waned. The Americans did more space research in the sixties than they have ever done, even to this day. Between 1955 and 1975 the American government spent twice as much money than they did between 1975 and 1995. And that’s without adjusting the dollars. The Russians never sent people to the moon after the U.S. did because they knew damn well how much it would cost. Now that the US has realized this too, the last nation with a GDP big enough to play the space game has basically quit the space race.

Our dreams of space have been brought down to Earth in recent years. Instead of the stars, we are shooting for Mars. Not a bad intermediate step, but it’s the only step NASA has planned. The International Space Station is more like a hobby these days, and we aren’t sending robot probes past Saturn any more. Our lofty dreams of colonising far away worlds, meeting aliens, and truly understanding our place in the Universe, have been grounded by a older and more venerable science — economics.

The costs of going to space are too high and the profits are too slim. Upon closer inspection, we find that there is virtually no money to be made building things in space. Everything we currently require is available on the planet Earth. Contrary to the predictions of many science fiction stories, mankind has no need to put mines on the moon, on the asteroids, or anywhere, because all of the elements can we find on these planetary bodies are also readily available on earth. The moon has nickel, aluminium and gold. So does the Earth. Asteroids have iron. So does the Earth. We gain nothing by mining these worlds, and the extraction costs are far too high. While we might go to orbit to set up precision zero-g materials plants, we won’t go any further until there is more money to be made.

Another theme from science fiction literature is the settlers fleeing from an overcrowded, poverty-stricken planet theme. Even if the planet becomes too crowded, we could terraform Venus sooner than we could move enough people to a new planet many light-years away. The last wave of colonialism, the settling of North and South America, did nothing to relieve overcrowding and starvation in Europe. Better urban infrastructure and superior farming methods saved the Europeans. There is no reason to assume that the same won’t eventually save places like Africa.

Besides, a mass colonisation of another world would beggar the Earth. Unless something changes, by the time we have the technology to go to other worlds our population will be feeling the crunch of tens-of-billions of occupants, most of which will be from countries which can’t afford to go to space. We would have to move billions of them to make a serious change on the Earth. The costs of doing so would be unattainable, not only from an economic point of view, but from a resource point of view too — the Earth has it’s own problems to deal with, and can’t afford devote even a tenth of its resources to building colony ships.

Humans are curious by nature, but we are also pragmatic. We don’t tend to do things unless we can be sure they will benefit us. These days, we measure that all too often in economic terms. In the case of the US-Russian space race, both sides figured that they could demoralize the other by getting to the moon first. After the Americans won, they stopped their mad dash to the heavens because they could no longer justify the cost to their citizens. It is this thinking that restrains us today, and it is because of this thinking that neither my father, nor I, will ever live to see a manned starshot. The human race has a lot of maturing to do before we can see our way clear to spending the kind of time, money and resources it is going to require to make a serious attempt to explore the stars.

The first time we hear the word “patch” in relation to a PS3 or XBox 360 game, we’re taking the console back to the store. Filled with our shit.

But surely the console industry, always more business savvy than their PC counterparts, will avoid making us gamers their unpaid beta testers.

Chances of that happening…

…again depends on how many turd-filled consoles they get stuck with. In other words, the consumer always gets exactly what they’ll put up with.

For some reason I found this irreverent article about bad video game design uproariously funny, and so true.

You learn something new every day. From this article (gleaned from Slash, of course), I learned a startling fact about computer security.

Author David Sheets tells us:

We rely on alarms and fences to minimise threats to our physical selves, yet most of us still don’t extend the same protection to our computers. It’s believed that today, even with thousands of computer viruses floating around — threats can enter a new computer within four minutes of first getting online — fully 70 percent of computer users still don’t employ antivirus measures or firewalls, or don’t maintain the ones they have.

I can’t verify the 70 percent number, but it is awfully high (I had it in my head for some reason that it was somewhere around 50 percent). If this number is true, it explains why viruses, worms, and the like, are so effective at infecting such a vast number of host computers. 70 percent of the hosts are doing nothing to stop them.

You put chain on your bicycle. You lock the door to your house when you leave for the day. You lock the doors on your car when you park it. We do all these things instinctively, but yet so many people don’t to the similar procedures with their computer.

Why don’t they? It’s because nobody told them. Everybody selling computers is too busy selling the productivity features and not worrying about the security features. Nobody is telling the end-users that security is a problem for them too.

Well, that’s going to have to change. It’s going to suck, but it has to happen.

Enjoy the nuke simulator. Check out how much of D.C. gets vaped by a 4 megaton warhead.

Notice that New York is not available as a target. I guess they figured it was in bad taste.

I recently encountered a truly evil adware system I’d never seen before. Installing an older machine with Windows 98, I was surprised, upon the initial boot, to see a screen politely offering to sign me up to a service called PhoenixNet. It said it would make my Internet experience better and find good deals on products I might be interested in.

Adware.

But how did it get on the machine? This was a new install of 98SE on a stripped down box — it didn’t even have a network card or modem. At first I thought our shop installer disk had been compromised by some adware virus (it was a new burn, so maybe something hacked us out and got into the shop installs source folder). When I rebooted the comp to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I noticed that the bootstrap screen for the BIOS also sported a PhoenixNet logo.

Good God. It’s a BIOS with adware built into it. Now that I think about it, I’d seen PhoenixNet BIOSes before, but I thought nothing of it. But this was because I’d never actually seen it working, as the PhoenixNet system only works on Windows 98 and Me. After we Googled it, I’m surprised that I hadn’t.

The PhoenixNet BIOS was an attempt somewhere around the year 2000 by the Phoenix Technologies company to deploy an adware network of sorts on personal computers equipped with a Phoenix BIOS. This could be as many as a two-thirds of the computers being produced (Phoenix owns Award, too). This would have been a very early adware attempt, back when there were only a few players in the industry and adware wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as it is today. I imagine that widespread outcry forced them to abandon the program, which is a good thing, because it would be virtually unstoppable.

Why the PhoenixNet BIOS would be so hard to stop is because the BIOS is a tiny operating system that every computer loads into memory when it first turned on. It provides configuration and diagnosis functions, but most importantly, it boots the main Operating System (eg. Windows). It is required for the machine to boot, and it is always loaded first before anything else. If it is aware of the operating system that it is booting, it can do anything it wants to it’s filesystem and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop it, short of flashing your computer with a different BIOS (and good luck with that). It is the ultimate adware system, one that is loaded before the computer even starts.

Luckily the PhoenixNet is now defunct, though I see an ominious future when I look at the current Phoenix product line: they are now big into the whole Trusted Computing thing, which is eerily similar to the idea of the PhoenixNet BIOS.

The Darth Side is a humorous, but brilliantly written take on Darth Vader. In fact, I think it’s better than anything that Lucas has ever written. I don’t read all that many humour blogs, but this one had me glued. Worth a read.

The Business Software Alliance, an American trade group that combats software piracy, says that software piracy has cost the global software industry 33 billion dollars in 2004. And what’s worse, they say, that number could climb to 200 billion dollars by the end of the decade. They way they spin it, thievery on this scale must be on par with mass-murder.

Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. The numbers are way too big.

Let’s put some perspective on it. For starters, 33 billion is a big damn number. It’s larger, in fact, than the GDP of over half of the nations in the World. And to say that by 2010 the software industry’s piracy losses will be on par with the revenues of all the Wal-Marts everywhere is just silliness (to say nothing about the implication that software production will somehow represent a third-of-a-percent of the entire World economy).

As near as I can tell, this is the same argument that the RIAA and the MPAA use when they talk about media downloads and frankly, it’s complete and utter horseshit. Here is why, and it’s really simple:

The numbers are made up. The formula they use to come up with them is based on an estimate of the number of bootlegged copies multiplied by the sales prices. Seems simple enough, but it’s not based on any kind of economic reality. Such a formula assumes that a product is so indispensable that everyone who wants to use it is willing to pay for it. Maybe the makers of toilet paper could boast such a claim, but the makers of software probably can’t. The makers of music and movies certainly can’t.

What they aren’t figuring in, of course, is what the bootlegger would have done if he were forced to actually pay the sales price. I suspect that nine times out of ten, the answer would be to not purchase the product. Maybe I’m over-thinking this, but I have a suspicion that people who obtain bootlegged stuff would never have paid money for it in the first place. So they would have never used the product unless they had found a bootlegged copy.

So, these multi-billion dollar claims about monetary damages as a result of media piracy strike me as pure fiction.

The slightly dumpy-looking Super Opera Guy does not inspire me to purchase enhanced services for my Opera browser. In fact, he really doesn’t inspire me to get Opera.

Opera is a pretty good web browser, yes, but to ask me to buy services. . . I dunno.

I know that the Opera guys expect to make a living and all, but their two nearest competitors, Internet Explorer and Firefox, give their product away for free, and their products don’t really need any support. They just work.

Super Opera Guy: maybe there is no longer any money to be made in the browser market. Seems unfair, but well, whadd’ya do?

Security people are already wittering on about how easily one cute video of British soldiers dancing about and having a good time broke the network of the Ministry of Defence in Britain. I guess everybody back home liked it so much that they emailed it everywhere in the MoD, causing a denial of service attack of sorts. “Nice to see that they are all over that national defence thing, ” said one poster. There are calls for great reviews of military computer security because, “what if the terrorists did it?”

Over exaggerated, I’d say. Slashdot member modworker comments:

As one of those who was affected, this is definitely a bit exaggerated. Here’s what really happened (at least, on the system that I use; I can’t speak for others).

The mail servers went down for a couple of hours last Friday morning – mail couldn’t be sent or received. About an hour into the outage, the sysadmins sent a Windows Messaging service message to all terminals saying that the problem was a 52Mb file called “Amarillo Video” (or something like that) which people were e-mailing internally and please don’t do it any more! That was it, essentially – a short-term nuisance, nothing more.

As for why this happened – well, our computer infrastructure is pretty old and cranky. The systems that fell over were mostly head office ones in London – there are literally hundreds of separate corporate networks currently in use, held together by duct tape (or so it sometimes seems), so only a fraction of the MOD was affected in the first place. They’re all due to be replaced by a shiny new Defence Information Infrastructure (http://www.mod.uk/dcsa/organisations/dii/ [www.mod.uk]) which will be all singing, all dancing, capable of dealing with huge files etc etc etc. (Also all Windows, but you can’t have everything.)

My two cents? Desktop computers are more of a convenience to the military than they are a requirement for the job. To many of the lads in any MoD throughout the Commonwealth, I suspect that email is really more of a curiosity than anything, and the web is just a convenient place to get pictures of areoplanes and girls. Sending jokes like this to each other is exactly kind of thing that people at the MoD do with their Internet.

In fact, I suspect it is what most people in offices do with their Internet, so losing it temporarily really does nothing to harm actual operations. The World would function just fine without Internet for a few days. Me, I’d go a little nuts, but I’d get over it.

The video is quite funny. If you want to see it, you might be able to get your .torrent going from this link at isohunt (where I found it).

And well, if you don’t have Bittorrent capabilites on your computer maybe you should get some. Very handy. I won’t have to email you a 52MB attachment then.

“Well, your quote is eighty-five bucks higher than [enter online retailer name here]. Can you match that?”

“No. Why would I want to?”

“I dunno. . . so you get the money instead of them.”

“No. I don’t think so. Why would I bother selling to you if I’m losing money?”

I not just talking out of my ass. As soon as he started to talk about 17 inch LCDs below $300 I knew that I could not help him. He’s not the kind of customer I can help.

The customers I like to keep are more perceptive. They know all about computer shit. They put up with my shit, market shit, and computer industry shit in general. The customers that I keep are the patient kind, and I thank them for it. In return I give them top notch service, and I get them the good stuff.

The good stuff is not always the absolute best, but it’s the stuff I know that will perform in a way that meets a customer’s needs and expectations, and is supportable and sustainable. It is not the cheapest. These days, it seems like the sale price is the thing. But to support and to sustain, there must also be margin. Clothing retailers, for example, enjoy two and three times their cost in profit margin. But in the computer industry, the gross profit margin is around ten percent. The net is closer to two. If you think that we have any leeway to bargain more than five bucks per item, you think wrong. We don’t.

While I work to keep prices competitive, I’ll never have the best price on a type of product, nor would I want to. It’s not realistic for a small retailer like me to attempt to maintain the market’s lowest price on something, because there is always a larger, wealthier retailer out there who can use any number of strategies against me, such as selling el-cheapo-just-barely-good-enough-stuff , or by getting a better cost price by seducing their suppliers into selling them underpriced units by the millions.

But all too often, there is no concern about sustainability. Sometimes product will be sold at cost. Other times it will be sold as a loss-leader, and that’s not a sustainable business model. Maybe it was for places like Amazon.com in the early days, when they had a billion dollars of venture capital to keep their operations afloat. Only during the dot-com era would investors have patience for that kind of burn rate. In the real world, I’d be out of business in a year selling product like that. It’s a practice that’s not sustainable. It’s not even honest, really. And if I go under because I wasn’t profitable, I’m not going to be able to continue to help all those customers who purchased product from me.

A big retailer does not care for such things. They don’t even have the staff to deal with it: do you suppose that some poor beggar in a gigantobox store, getting paid ten bucks an hour, is ever going to give you the same kind of support for a product that a small, independent vendor will? Think of it another way: why is it that automobiles are sold at dealerships and not off the shelves at retail outfits? Support. You can’t ring the neck of General Motors any easier than you can ring the neck of Asus. But like the local car dealer, the local Asus dealer is much more likely to take care of you.

At a big box joint you’ll get the best pre-consumer support a corporate training program could buy. But have you ever got excellent post-consumer service and support at such a place? How about an online retailer? Probably not. They’ll take good care of you right up until they have your money.

But that’s not me. I help the customers after the sale. I help them during the support phase. I help them to the end of the warranty. I help them over the life of their product and when it finally dies, I help them get a new one. Sustainability and support.

So in the end, my product has to be a certain brand and a certain type, and the price has to be the price. In a market increasingly dominated by mega-retailers this attitude may seem old-fashioned, but it is honest, and I think a better value in the end. So no, I’m not going to beat the lowest price on the market. I’m not even going to try. But I will attempt to give you the best value that I can, because I think this is the only way it can play out in the long run. It’s the only way I can continue to get my customers the good stuff.