Saturday, January 28, 2012

Blogamania

Good news everyone! I've imported my blog to tumblr. I'm also making use of ifttt so that every subsequent post I make here, Blogger, should show up there too. It should also post links on twitter and Wordpress. Ain't that just grand!

I've actually planning to do a massive toy project that incorporates ifttt and some other neat little things. Problem is, I just have to come up with what the project will be in what little spare time I have.

Anyway, welcome to all the new viewers and I hope you get some enjoyment, and possibly information, out of my posts.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Open Source Software: Doom and Gloom

A few years ago there was a rumor that the Linux Hater's Blog was being abandoned. I took the opportunity to read through his old post. Most of his posts were filled with immature rants and filled with swears, but he had a genuine point at times.

Open source software may not cost you any money, but poorly designed software will cost you time and effort. I have seen more than my share of dropped projects; projects that start out with a small team that slowly erodes away until that last person leaves up a “Thanks for all the fish” post.

The greatest evil of OSS is probably fragmentation. The mantra of OSS source software has always been freedom of choice. And it’s good if you’re a consumer trying to pick a media player or web browser, but it is hell for software developers. Each distro has a different set of libraries and a different kernel and a different set of binaries. Your software might work on distro and not on another at any given time. That’s one of the reasons companies are so afraid to make software on linux, they have no clue what libraries they can support.

I recently found out about the Linux Standard Base, who are attempting to standardize binaries across distos. However, the LSB has failed, to a certain extent. The LSB doesn’t have the influence over the distros that they need. How many distos are going to listen to the LSB and use older binaries for compatibility when they can update to the latest and greatest?

Check out what distros the LSB has certified:


Ubuntu: the latest release certified is 9.04, which is no longer supported. 8.04 (LTS) is also certified, but support ends next month. And having used an LTS this late in this life cycle, I can tell you, they are unusable.


Mandriva: the last desktop version certified is from 2006 (2007.0)!

SUSE: version 11.0 is no longer supported.

Debian: not certified at all.

Fedora: not certified at all.

Mint: not certified at all.

Congratulations Linux Standard Base, you’ve managed to standardize a bunch of Linux distros no one is running!

But that’s not to say OSS is the only software affected by these issues. Let me illustrate it with an example. Before Microsoft released Vista it was codenamed Longhorn and it was a much grander undertaking than the released product. There were, what Microsoft called, the “3 pillars of longhorn”; 3 key technologies that would form the backbone of the finished Longhorn. One of these pillars was WinFS which called for all the files on a computer to be stored in a database. For those less technically minded, this was a big deal and allowed for some neat things to be done.

At the beginning, everything seemed to be going fine; Microsoft released multiple preview releases of Longhorn and, with the exception of the normal bugs, everything was moving along. Then nothing was released to the public for several months; no preview builds, no progress reports, nothing. One day, Microsoft announced that they would be releasing WinFS after Longhorn’s release and would be porting the other 2 pillars back to XP. The reason was, they simply bit off more they could chew, they kept on adding more and more features, they had to eventually crunch bugs and make a release. In the end it WinFS was further delayed and then outright canceled.

At the same time, linux had a similar open source program: Gnome Storage. Like WinFS, it planned to put every file on a computer into a database for organization purposes. What happened to it? Well, it was abandoned. It was done almost entirely by a college student, maybe he graduated, maybe he got a job, maybe he just was no longer interested in it anymore. The end result is Gnome Storage is in a perpetually unfinished state.

Two separate project failed for entirely different reasons.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Banking: Money for Nothing

Happy new year everyone. I've been quite busy recently. So, excuses the large gap between posts. I meant to have this in my last post, but it was already such a meaty post I’ll just create a new post for it. It's not as timely as my last post. It certainly seems like the Occupy protests have wound down, which is a shame. There's rumors of something happening in March, but we'll have to wait and see.

I’ve always had a bane for banks, specifically insurance banks. You pay every month in case something unfortunate happens, making the insurance company nice and rich without providing a single product or service. And when something actually does happen, you have to fight them tooth and nail get them to give you what they agreed.

To understand banks, you must first understand money. A long time ago, paper money was simply a substitute for a real product: gold. You could take your $1 to the bank and receive $1 in gold. This was called the gold standard. But, our economy grew beyond the amount of available rare metal, so we switched to a fiat money. Money now has value because or government says it does, and we have faith in our government and the value of our currency.

The financial crisis of that started in 2007 seems like a complex issues, but it’s actually quite simple. Read a few articles, here and here, and you begin to get the idea. Large investment banks invested sold loans to people who probably wouldn’t pay them back (sub-prime loans). And then sold “insurance” on these “investments”. When people stopped paying their loans, the investment banks were in trouble. Had these had been smaller banks it would have been no big problem. But these were huge international banks, they had insured and invested in many other companies. They were “to big to fail”.

Bear Sterns was lucky, they found a buyer. But Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. Some blame it on the government wanting the free market to take over, others blame Lehman Brothers for being uncooperative. And it sent ripples across the market. When later financial institutions when to the government and essentially held the market hostage for government money, they got what they wanted.

Years ago, this would not be possible. There were laws to prevent banks from becoming too large and taking stupid risks. They were implemented around the great depression to prevent what happened then from happening again. But, our representatives repealed those laws. I don’t know if it was greed or stupidity that led to that decision.

Let me explain, to the best of my abilities, how banks create money out of thin air. Most people believed that money is created at a mint and makes it’s way into everyday life by some form of government magic. But this is not how it happens for most money. Most people know, when you deposit currency at a bank, that bank can loan out the majority of the money to generate income from interest in loans. As anyone can who’s watched It’s a Wonderful Life can tell you, this can get banks in a heap of trouble if everyone wants to withdraw their deposits. What most people don’t know is that banks can loan out more than you deposit (called a monetary base). Lets say you deposit $1 in a bank and the government has set a reserve rate of 1:9, the bank can now conjure $8 into existence and loan out $9!

Now remember how I said our money is fiat currency? How I said our money has value only because people believe in it? That is why preventing counterfeiters is so important, if we did not protect our money, it would become worthless. What would happen if the average person found out that the “money” on their credit card was conjured into exist out of thin air?