On the unremarked and curious decay of software

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

From a reader comment in Macintouch:

[MacInTouch Readers] Creating long documents with cross-references, many tables, and heaven forbid - figures - is not really possible on the Mac nowadays. MS Word, even splitting files and trying every trick, is unstable and crashes frequently. This seems to occur across our university and there is much gnashing of teeth.

In the past we tried Framemaker 6 (Win) with Virtual PC. It was too slow. However, in desperation have just tried the combination (VPC 7.02 running Win XP and Framemaker 6 for Win) on a17' 1.67 GHz Powerbook. It was fast enough and stable enough for me to create a 200-page document with 6 chapters, multiple cross references, proper numbering, etc. It is disappointing that this can't be done on the Mac but now there is a solution.

15 years ago one could create a complex 200 page document using WordPerfect 5 for DOS. It wouldn't be all that pretty on the screen, but it would print out well.

I don't think this is an isolated issue. Many software solutions that were created in the 1980s no longer have consumer equivalents. Quite curious really.

Fax and Voicemail to email: MaxEmail and more

In years past I've used eFax, jFax and Faxaway in an attempt to integrate fax and email. Results were mixed. Faxaway was once a good solution for sending email as a fax, but I don't like their billing procedures (they do get some good reviews nowadays and claim to have added fax receipt). eFax (e-Fax) died in an ugly spiral of spam; they were a .com without a business plan. jFax (j-Fax) required some odd sort of proprietary viewer -- I want PDF.

Recently I decided to try again -- especially for fax receipt.

In theory one could use an email/fax service to send faxes as well, but scanning documents then faxing them is too awkward a workflow -- particularly in the absence of a sheet feed scanner. It's technically feasible, but there are problems with both software and hardware.

The hardware problem is the tougher one. Traditionally home scanners were designed for image acquisition, not document management. They haven't had reliable sheet feeders or the software to assemble pages into a document. This may be changing, but it's a slow process that's moved forwards and backwards over the past decade. For most of the past ten years reliable document scanners have started at $1,000 a unit and moved quickly into the five figure range.

Even if the hardware worked, the software I've seen isn't good enough. This task requires software that automates assembling the scanned images into a document, translating that to CCITT encoded TIFF, and uploading the result to the send-scan service (ideally through an API). I don't think there's a market to support this kind of software. Someday, perhaps in the VOIP world of the future, some vendor (Google?) will decide to take over faxing and provide the software/API solution that manufacturers will create hardware for.

So for sending faxes we will buy a dedicated fax machine, or maybe an integrated hydra multi-funtion device (but those have a reputation for buggy device drivers, unreliable hardware, and lousy Mac support). Any online service support for fax sending is just gravy (it's about 10 cents/fax with MaxEmail).

So how about receiving faxes? In theory a standalone fax machine can monitor incoming phone calls line and automatically distinguish incoming faxes from voice calls. In practice none of the people I know have been happy with this; most either end up connecting the fax machine erratically or they pay for a dedicated line. Since I'll eventually buy a fax machine I'll get to test this out myself.

So it's for incoming faxes where a fax to email service ought to work well. Nowadays the best ones support both incoming fax and incoming voice messages. Fax is translated to PDF or TIFF, voicemail to WAV (or something else). Users receive an email with an attached WAV or PDF file, or an email with a link to such. Inbound WAVs or PDFs are retained on the host service for at least 30 days, outbound faxes are not stored.

It's tough to find reviews of such services, Tidbits had the best I found from April 2005 (link to futher discussion on the right side of this page.) They liked MaxEmail's low cost ($15/year, Chicago phone number) solution. Innoport also got good reviews, but they don't offer anything comparable to MaxEmail's low cost Lite solution.

I decided both MaxEmail and Innoport looked reasonable. The latter is more corporate looking, but MaxEmail offered a free limited trial solution and Innoport didn't have any Minnesota local fax numbers. I ended up signing up for MaxEmail's Plus solution with a local fax number -- the Lite solution is a much better deal but our incoming faxes are frequently from small local educational institutions who might balk at sending some information to a remote number.

I'll try MaxEmail for a while and experiment with their voicemail service. I'll compare that to the dedicated fax machine. More later ...

Update 10/5/09: Somehow MaxEmail crept up to a $9/month flat fee. I didn't pay much attention, but that starts to add up for a service we now rarely use. I canceled it.

The BBC destroys classical music CD sales

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

The BBC has become a rogue force on a world scale. Bully for them.

Beethoven's symponies are no longer under copyrighted, but the performances are. The BBC has a very fine internal orchestra, they had them perform the symphonies and they've released them as MP3 files.

This is not what you'd get were you to "rip" a classical music CD. The performance is preceded by some BBC dialog. There are no tracks, no named portions of the symphony. There's no "metadata" associated with the file. Each MP3 file is online for only one week after the companion radio show -- for reasons that are unclear to me (perhaps they want to give record companies time to shut down their operations?).

Even so, this is the beginning of the end for classical music CD sales. As others do this the economics of the business will shift. At current prices it may become uneconomical to continue to sell classical music CDs. The only way to preserve the business in 10 years will be to charge substantially more money for each CD sold.

Kawasaki Mobile DVD PVS1965: in the new world, electronics gear is mostly disposable

I bought a Kawasaki Mobile DVD System with Dual 6.5" LCD Monitors - PVS1965 from Target. It's a portable DVD player to sedate the children for a long drive to the grandparents. It has a central player and two 7" displays with speakers and headphone jacks. It's quite a marvel of technology, but it's not the technology that I find fascinating. It's the packaging, product placement, and marketing. This is the quintessential 21st century product.

Why is it a quintessential 21st century consumer product? Let me name the ways.

1. It's sold using the name of Kawasaki, who once sold motor bikes. I don't know what they do now, but they actually have nothing to do with this product. Alco Electronics (Ontario, Canada -- but really Hong Kong) is the designer, manufacturer and distributor, they used Kasawaki's name. If you haven't noticed, most brand names mean nothing in the 21st century. (Apple is the obvious exception, I do think Brands will make a comeback in a few years.)
2. It's made in China, but I think it's designed there too.
3. It's not marketed at all. You won't find any reviews very easily -- if at all. It seems to be sold only through Target with this particular name.
4. It's quite sophisticated. (See review)
5. It's disposable (feels feeble.)
   

And now, a quick review.

• It worked for our two week trip. Image quality is poor, but our kids didn't care.
• The kids used headphones to listen.
  
• It allows an audio or video input. I piped my iPod into it using a mini-jack to mini-jack cable. Worked great. The kids listened to music in between exercise outings, bathroom visits, movies, etc. I think I could pipe my iBook A/V output through there and show slideshows of the kids pictures, but I didn't try this (6/15/08: years later, I figure this out.) We monitored movies by using our cassette adapter to pipe audio through the car speakers.
• Volume controls and jack on each display
• Compact very generic switchable power supply
• jpeg, mp3, dvd, cd display or playing
  
• cheap but very convenient case
• Lots of connectors: A/V I/O, Digital out

A few caveats:

• It doesn't remember where a movie was interrupted. If you power off most DVDs, they "remember" where you left off. Not so this device. Turn off the car and you lose your spot in a movie. This was quite annoying.
• There's something odd about the way they handle different display formats, but we left everything at letterbox and it seemed to work.

Nonlocality and quantum theory

Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality? -- Seife 309 (5731): 98 -- Science

One of the 125 questions.

In 1935, Einstein came up with a scenario that still defies common sense. In his thought experiment, two particles fly away from each other and wind up at opposite ends of the galaxy. But the two particles happen to be 'entangled'--linked in a quantum-mechanical sense--so that one particle instantly 'feels' what happens to its twin. Measure one, and the other is instantly transformed by that measurement as well; it's as if the twins mystically communicate, instantly, over vast regions of space. This 'nonlocality' is a mathematical consequence of quantum theory and has been measured in the lab. The spooky action apparently ignores distance and the flow of time; in theory, particles can be entangled after their entanglement has already been measured.

Nonlocality, if it were demonstrated to actually exist and to imply a faster than light "connection", ought to make one wonder if we're "living in a simulation".

Update 6/12/07: Ahh, those were innocent days. I later engaged in a "catchup with physics" project, to discover that nonlocality died about ten to twenty years ago, though there may have been a prolonged period of denial.

Are we alone? One of the top 25 questions in the 125th issue of Science

Are We Alone in the Universe? -- Kerr 309 (5731): 88 -- Science

Wow. Science, the ultra-prestigious journal, has released a special public issue on the top 125 questions in science -- in honor of their 125th anniversary. They highlight 25 of those, including one of my favorite topics -- the question of human solitude. Alas, they don't explore the Fermi Paradox at all.

Be careful though -- I opened all 25 in tabs and my IP address was blocked as though I were some evil hacker. Go slow and read them one at a time.

Google Earth - Keyhole for free, and for more machines

Google Earth - Home

I've installed Google Earth. This is what giant CPUs, fast GPUs, big "pipes", and biggish drives were made for. Google bought Keyhole a while back and they've released a new version that's free and works on many more Wintel machines. It runs reasonably well on my 2-3 yo XP box; I think the primary source of delays are network traffic. I have a lot of free space on my cache drive, so I'll give it a 1GB cache to help with future performance.

A Mac version has been promised, Google is good at delivering on promises.

Very fascinating. Even my wife is truly impressed. I haven't yet tried the feature of setting out a route, then watching Google Earth traverse the path.

Unfortunately they've closed the beta to newcomers -- so check back in about two weeks.

Biden on Iraq: A speech to the Brookings Institute

A New Compact for Iraq

So you want to know what's happening in Iraq? Forget the TV. Forget the New York Times and The Economist and the Washington Post. Forget the bloggers and Newsweek and Time magazine. Of course don't even consider our current regime. Instead, read the speech of Senator Joe Biden.

First, the insurgency remains as bad as it was a year ago. But more jihadists are coming across the Iraqi border, and they are an increasingly lethal part of the problem. Insurgent attacks are back up between 60 and 70 per week. Car bombs now average 30 a week, up from just one a week in January of 2004. In the seven weeks since the Iraqi government has been seated, more than 1,000 people have been killed. The good news is—and there is some good news—the good news is that some disgruntled Sunnis are finally beginning to make the switch from violence to politics. The bad news is, a whole not of them are not. And Iraq's porous borders are being penetrated by well-trained fanatical jihadists who find a seemingly endless supply in what should not surprise us, somewhat of the excessive 600,000 tons of munitions that we acknowledged existed, that we pointed out we could not guard because we had insufficient forces to guard them as long as 18 to 20 months ago.

Our military is doing everything that is possible, and I would suggest more. But there's not enough of them and they are not enough fully trained or capable Iraqi forces to take territory and maintain it from the insurgents. Our forces go out and clean out towns. But then they move to next hornet's nest. They lack the resources to leave a strong residual force behind to prevent the insurgents from returning to and intimidating the fence-sitters, who are too afraid to take a chance on behalf of the government.

I heard with every general and every flag officer with whom I spoke about the inability to mount a serious counter insurgency effort.

Second, Iraqi security forces are very gradually improving. But they are still no match for the insurgents without significant coalition support. General Petreus, who I think is an absolutely first-rate, absolutely first-rate general, who has been in charge of our training of late. And I would argue, had we listened to him much earlier, we wouldn't have squandered the 18 months we've squandered in actually bringing on a more competent, more fully trained and larger number of Iraqi forces. But we have a long way to go. When the American people heard the Secretary of Defense back in February of '04 brag about the fact we had 210,000 Iraqi forces in the security force, and then when 16 months later the administration suggested that there were 168,581—pretty precise number—trained Iraqis, I don't know about where you all live, but I tell where I live, folks asked, "Well, Joe, what's the deal? You got 200,000 Iraqis or 150,00 Iraqis trained, why do you need to keep my kid there? Why do we need 136,000 American forces?"

And the next thing they'd say: "Is even if they're trained and you need all of those forces, then Joe, you're telling me we need well over 300,000 forces to get this thing done?" Remember, remember a guy named Shinseki. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the answer is that there are very few of those Iraqis who are trained to the only standard that counts—that is the ability to take over for an American troop. That's the ultimate exit strategy we've announced a long time ago, be able to replace essentially one for one—an Iraqi for an American force.

Right now, there are 107 battalions in uniform being trained by us. Three of those are fully capably. Translated—it means they can do the job without any American hanging around with them. They can do the job. Somewhere around 27 are somewhat capable, meaning they can do the job is backed up by a significant American presence—backed up by. The rest are in varying degrees of ability to be able to in any way enhance the security circumstance with American forces...

It's a long and very educational speech. But why are we getting our news from senatorial speeches?

Cringely on Web 2.0 -- and Greasemonkey

PBS | I, Cringely . June 30, 2005 - Accessories Make the Nerd

Web 2.0 will be staffed by two different kinds of entrepreneurs -- those who provide staunch web services exposed through APIs (Amazon, eBay, Google, and a bunch more), and those who glue those services together and make some sort of useful abstraction service.

As an example, look at Greasemonkey, a FireFox plug-in that allows dynamic client-side manipulation of web pages. In other words, you write a little JavaScript app that gets applied to every page you want it to on YOUR browser. With Greasemonkey you can add a delete button to Gmail (there isn't one now), add a link on every Amazon book page that looks up that book in your local library and tells you if it's on the shelf or not. In other words, with Greasemonkey you can manipulate anyone's web page to do anything you want (even collect info from other web pages and aggregate it). Now that's powerful.

And it brings us back to Grokster and the Supreme Court. Grokster wanted to be seen as a common carrier like the telephone company. Just because telephones can be used to plan and sometimes carry out crimes doesn't make the phone company a criminal accessory. But Grokster, the Court decided, was built more with the intention of illegally sharing music than the phone company was built to aid kidnappers. So Grokster IS a criminal accessory in the eyes of the court.

What will happen, of course, is that Web 2.0 will turn the next Grokster into several separate organizations offering different services that use a common API syntax to create a Grokster equivalent. Each of these parts will look more like the phone company and less like Grokster until the Supreme Court won't recognize them as the accessories they happen to be.

Crime never goes away, it just evolves.

He's in good form today. There are many subtexts in this essay.

Dianetics and Scientology: Lessons for the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia?

Salon.com Books | Stranger than fiction

I've not read many reviews of Dianetics. This one is interesting ...

In a way, it's impressive. Hubbard not only managed to get one of these books published, it actually became a bestseller and the founding text for Scientology. It's not your garden-variety crank who can take a crackpot rant, turn it into a creepy gazillion-dollar church with the scariest lawyers around, and set himself up as the 'Commodore' of a small fleet of ships, waited on hand and foot by teenage girls in white hot pants. But, I digress.

... Not only does "Dianetics" offer precious little sideshow appeal, it's impossible to read much of it without realizing that it's the work of a very disturbed man. (Here's where things get less entertaining.) Hubbard's grandiose preoccupation with "an answer to the goal of all thought," the reiteration of fantasies of perfect mastery foiled by invasive, alien forces (engrams are described as "parasites"), the determination to envision the mind as a machine that can be brought under absolute control if only these enemies can be ejected -- all these are classic forms of paranoid thinking. The alarm bells really start to ring when Hubbard describes colorblindness as caused by a "circuit" in a person's mind that "behaves as though it were someone or something separate from him and that either talks to him or goes into action of its own accord, and may even, if severe enough, take control of him while it operates...

The subsequent description of Hubbard as a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic is persuasive; it includes a description of what seems to have been one of his core delusional complexes having to do with abortion and domestic abuse. If Hubbard were paranoid schizophrenic this would also account for his suspicion of physicians and hatred of psychiatrists.

I've long wondered about the natural history of paranoid schizophrenia and its relationship to religion. Hubbard's story adds an interesting angle. We are far from understanding what paranoid schizophrenia is, how it can be avoided or mitigated, and what the natural history of the condition is from age 20 to 40 and beyond.

I wonder if some of the methods Hubbard teaches in Dianetics (later incorporated into Scientology's "Thetan" retraining programs) reflect techniques Hubbard developed to manage his own psychiatric disorder. If so, could we translate them into evidence-based testable therapeutic techniques?

It would be a great irony if L Ron Hubbard, a passionate hatred of psychiatry, were to teach us valuable lessons in the management of one of the most terrible of human disorders -- schizophrenia.

Blumenthal summarizes the Iraqi situation: 600 years of Sunni rule

Salon.com | Empty words

Bush's strategy rests on more than sheer avoidance of facts, however; it depends on willful ignorance of the history of Mesopotamia.

From the creation of the Iraqi state in 1921 to the army's coup of 1958, Iraq had 58 governments. In 1968, the Baathist Party led by Saddam staged another coup. Some periods of this prolonged instability were less unstable than others, but the instability was chronic and profound. The overthrow of Saddam appears to have returned Iraq to its 'natural' unstable state. But in fact the instability runs even deeper.

The Baathists, of course, were Sunnis. Saddam was a Sunni. Before him, the monarchs, beginning with Faisal I, were Sunnis. Before Faisal, the Ottomans, who ruled beginning in the 15th century, were Sunnis. Shiites have never ruled the country until now. Why should the Sunnis, after 600 years of control, accede to the dominance of Shiites? In Vietnam, the root motivation against the United States was nationalism, as it was against the French. It even trumped communism in the national liberation struggle. In Iraq, religion and ethnicity are often ascribed as the root motivations of conflict. But to the extent that nationalism may exist as a factor, its ownership does not and cannot reside in the current Iraqi state.

The present Iraqi government is a ramshackle affair of Shiites and Kurds. The Kurds have no interest in a central authority, and play the game only to solidify their autonomy. The Shiites are maintained as dominant only by the presence of the U.S. occupation army and their sectarian militias. They will never disband those militias in favor of a national army unless they can run the army like an expanded version of the Shiite militias. Prime Minister al-Jaafari and the other Shiite leaders, including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, have all been Iranian agents or allies, recipients of Iranian largess in one form or another. Shiite Iraqis are natural friends and allies of Shiite Iran. Iraq under the Shiites does not have to be remade in Iran's image to serve Iranian interests. Whether or not sharia (Islamic) law is imposed, Iraqi Sunnis will never see Shiites as Iraqi patriots or nationalists but, instead, as being in league with Iraq's traditional and worst enemy.

These suspicions are hardly abstract. The militia of the largest Shiite faction, the Badr Brigade of SCIRI (Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq), was trained and armed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and is heavily infiltrated and directed by Iranian agents today. Yet Bush has invested American blood and treasure in the proposition that a Shiite-dominated government, which now inevitably means an Iranian-influenced regime, can serve a second master in the United States and present itself to the Sunnis as national saviors.

At the time of the invasion I thought Rumsfeld's strategy made sense only if the goal was to partition Iraq.

Given the current state, is the least worst goal mitigation of the civil war?

Salon takes on Scientology

Salon.com News | The press vs. Scientology

This is the third of what will be four articles on Scientology. Great job by Salon. This article describes how the Church has cowed mainstream journalists; it says something very important about the state of journalism today. They also seem to have become less aggressive than they were in the Hubbard days.

Salon and Slate do some of the most interesting journalism anywhere.

Google to annihilate PayPal - thank heavens

Verizon | Reuters.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay Inc.'s (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) PayPal unit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Exact details of the search company's planned service are not known, the report said, but quoted people familiar with the matter as saying it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts.

It's been known for at least a decade that the fundamental security model of credit cards was a very poor match for online transactions. Fraud cases have waxed and waned over the years, but based on recent news reports I suspect the toll on small vendors is getting pretty heavy.

So what are the alternatives to standard credit cards? PayPal is the big one today, but I've never liked them. I've been monumentally unimpressed with their approach to security, or the feeble and unimaginative ways they've struggled with phishing scams and PayPalm spam.

Now, apparently, there will be Google.

Good.

(BTW, does anyone remember Microsoft Wallet -- a major component of the very first release of Internet Explorer? Don't think Microsoft has forgotten. Palladium has a role here too.)

Brin on hierarchical societies and the Bush agenda

Contrary Brin: A Little More Hormatsian Wisdom

A good summary. In a world where brilliance and excellence is commonplace, what becomes valuable? Remember, diamonds, if they were common, would be cheap -- despite their interesting properties.

That which is valuable is that which cannot be readily substituted. Connections. Family ties. Owned wealth. Power.

See also this and this and this and (most recently) this. From neo-feudalism to the new guilded age.

Teddy Roosevelt, where are you?

Does Scientology really want all this publicity?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Psychiatrists hit back at Cruise

I like this. The more Cruise talks, the more publicity scientology gets. The American Psychiatric Association's press release, however, was pretty pusilanimous. They called Cruise "irresponsible" for claiming psychiatry was evil and patients should all stop their meds. This is not Cruise being irresponsible, it is him expressing a key tenet of a very whacky, and often quite nasty, religion.

Keep talking Cruise.