This Space Intentionally Left Blank

It Probably Won a Prize

drnick — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:35:21 +0000

Design is hard. A structural engineer must balance structural integrity and utilitarian function with the look and style of the building. Bridge engineers want to build strong and flexible bridges, capable of standing up to both fierce weather and the test of time; however, large bridges are points of interest for a city (or even a country) and must therefore be aesthetically pleasing and as unique as possible. Software engineers enjoy building specialized and interesting projects that allow people to achieve some meaningful goal, but often struggle to provide a user interface that is discoverable, easily understandable, and lives in the balance between not-enough-information and too-much-noise. In each case the problem can be resolved by bringing together a team of people who can marry pragmatic engineering with the needs of the users.

The success or failure of any software product can often be correlated, at least partially, to the degree of usability of the product. Usability is a sticky word in software development — it can refer many seemingly unrelated aspects of the product — but at the core it is a combination of three primary things: how easy the product is to learn, the visual appearance of the interface, and feature discoverability. Each of these is a very important part of the user experience, and each is exposed via the product documentation and the user interface of the product. However, since users don’t read documentation and even the best software is useless if nobody can figure out how to use it, the user interface becomes, quite possibly, the most important part of the software.

With this in mind it makes sense for a company to expend considerable resources to hire and train interface designers and to include them as a part of any development project. These individuals must somehow capture and visually represent the combination of what the software is actually capable of with what the user expects it to do, how they expect it to do it, and the way they expect it to look before, during, and after the procedure. Understanding and representing this conceptual model and then rendering it to the computer screen is the fundamental basis of interface design.

For us as software engineers, creating a good user interface design is usually an intractable problem. At the same time we tend to pooh-pooh interface designers; after all, how hard is it to throw some buttons and sliders up on the screen? However, the results speak for themselves: Many believe a primary reason that Linux distributions haven’t made significant inroads on the consumer desktop is because of their inattention to user interface design. Conversely, one of the biggest draws to Apple’s handheld offerings is the enormous (and largely successful) effort in that same area.

The truth is that user interface experts are an essential glue between engineers and users, and we should respect them as valued members of the team. Our product’s users will thank us.

Explicitly Ethical

drnick — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:54:45 +0000

Ethics. A subject which, outside of a seminar class in college or a mandatory semi-decadal company meeting, few people give any serious thought. After all, right is right and wrong is wrong, right? Ignoring contrived examples — save the lives of 5 strangers at the cost of a loved one? — it seems that most people live their lives, day by day, according to an implicit set of ethics. An implicitly ethical individual is usually a good person. They will probably make the right decisions, most of the time; and, when facing a difficult situation, they can mostly be relied on to do a good thing. If all this equivocation and hand waving doesn’t bother you, feel free to skip the rest of this post. The truth is that unless person sits down and intentionally focuses on what their own personal ethics are, nobody — including the individual in question — really knows what kind of person they are. To truly discover yourself you must be explicitly ethical. You must, at some specific point, decide what it is you believe in, what rules govern your behavior, what your own personal Articles of Ethics are. Others are quick to notice and understand an explicitly ethical person. They know that you are a good person. That you will make the right decision, each and every time. And, when faced with a difficult situation, they know that you can always be relied upon to do the right thing. Life is too short to equivocate. Now, go do the Right Thing™

Information Wants to be Fr#++ATH&#{1^$ NO CARRIER

drnick — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:53:24 +0000

The Internet should not be censored and, unfortunately for those who might disagree, any attempt to do so is doomed from the outset to fail miserably. A fundamental tenet upon which the Internet has been built and to which it owes much of its continued success is the free exchange of all forms of information. This ideal holds regardless of your location on the planet, but in the United States it is safeguarded by the First Amendment as a form of protected speech. As with other forms of speech, disagreement is not grounds for censorship. However, this does not absolve Internet users of all responsibility — content illegal in traditional media is also illegal when presented online. Additionally, users are still free to choose what content they do and do not want to consume, but they should not expect some magical device to protected them from such undesirables. Just as there is no magical pair of glasses you can wear to obscure things you don’t want to see, there is no Internet filter capable of removing all unwanted content while leaving the rest untouched. The only safe and sure way to filter the Internet is by using the best content identification and pattern recognition tool mankind has in its toolbox: the human brain.

The Transmogrifier

drnick — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:40:04 +0000

A defining characteristic of humanity is our skill and penchant for creating and using tools. From a sharpened shard of obsidian to a central processing unit composed of hundreds of millions of transistors, we are continually trying to improve ourselves and our society through technological advancement. In many ways we have arguably been successful, but the process is not without danger. The age of nuclear power brought the hydrogen bomb and space exploration yielded ICBMs — the combined power of which certainly brought humanity closer to the brink of annihilation than ever before. Fortunately not all such marriages produce similarly undesirable offspring. Perhaps the crowning achievement of modern human engineering — a culmination of hundreds or perhaps thousands of preceding innovations — is the child of the personal computer and digital communications: the Internet (that is the Internet, not an internet). It is, according to almost any technological or sociological measure, the most complex, dynamic, interconnected, and immense construct devised and implemented by mankind.

It is therefore expected, perhaps, that a significant portion of the interconnected growth of both the hardware and the wetware (a convenient, if slightly uncouth term for people using the technology) has been organic in nature. Aside from the most fundamental protocols and interconnects of the Internet, the direction and growth of the technology has been driven in an evolutionary fashion: through spurts of success and cullings of failure. Ideas and implementations which are epitomes of pragmatism and logic are rejected while frivolous nonsensicals thrive. It is this aspect of the Internet which makes attempting to divine the future both impossible and immensely profitable.

However, as important and fascinating as such development and technology is, over the last several years the primary focus of attention has shifted away from this aspect of the Internet and been directed instead onto the way the network is actually being used. Humanity has created for itself an immensely powerful tool of unprecedented capability and scope, and even today, some 10 or 15 years after its inception, we are still trying to figure out exactly what it is we have created. At the same time the tool appears to have taken on a life of its own — growing and expanding faster than we can understand such changes. One thing is certain: this tool has already fundamentally influenced human society more than any other and as the number of people using the Internet increases and the number of connections between users skyrockets this influence will only get larger. Once again society has been thrown in the transmogrifier; with some luck what emerges will be an improvement and not a monster.

The Day the Music Died

drnick — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:52:17 +0000

Copyright law is simple and yet complex, fundamentally necessary and yet fundamentally broken, for the public good and yet a detriment to the public’s intellectual well-being. The basis for the law is simple enough; the Constitution grants Congress the power:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

From this single sentence springs the laws of copyrights and patents, and all the intertwined legal baggage we are now forced to associate with them. The Founding Fathers were incredibly skilled literary craftsmen — they did not waste, nor did they use unnecessary words. The inclusion of limited in the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution is very important. Over time “limited” has come to mean less and less, with the current US copyright term being the life of the author plus 70 years. Considering copyright law was designed to “promote progress”, one truly struggles to determine how a term of up to 150 years promotes anything besides individual profit. This is the first way that copyright law is broken: When a limited term is forever extended, is it really limited in the first place? However, this isn’t the only way copyright law has eroded the rights of the public (that pesky group of people which usually fund the works protected by copyright). Fair use law is also under attack, though such attacks are subversive, designed to avoid being labeled as such. Unfortunately, and very intentionally, copyright reform has never been a “hot item” on a political platform. As such, the only way to restore copyright law to its original intent is through education, and depending on an educated public has rarely, if ever in modern society, been a reliable mechanism to enact change.

Equality Giveth and Equality Taketh Away

drnick — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 04:19:51 +0000

I believe in equality, without qualification. Equality is; however, a malleable thing, and difficult to define. When applied correctly human equality raises society as a whole. It is a key for the chains around those individuals and groups which are artificially held back. The malleability of equality allows it to be applied easily and liberally, perhaps its most powerful attribute. Unfortunately it is this same malleability which allows “equality” to be dangerously misapplied, misused, and — in a terrible demonstration of irony — act as a lock instead of a key. Title IX of 1972 too often falls into this category. While written and originally executed in good faith, it has since become a magnet for those wishing to impose their own twisted version of equality onto the American education system. Equality does not require that there are an equal number of male and female students enrolled in a school. Equality does not require the abolishment of a male soccer team because there is no interest in forming a female soccer team. Equality does not require an equal number of male and female electrical engineering professors. And, finally, equality does not require an equal number of male and female computer science students. Put simply, honoring equality requires offering equal opportunity within the bounds of equal expectation. For equality — when applied without bound nor mind — is its own antithesis, and results not in freedom, but in tyranny and oppression.

Fallacy of the Amish

drnick — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 03:25:50 +0000

It is a natural human tendency to feel that as the size of a community increases, the quantity, quality, and significance of the relationships between members of that community become diluted — essentially, traditionalists fear that a community can outgrow itself. When in such a mindset it is easy to take a step further and conclude that this “communal divergence” is exacerbated by the advancement of technology. Just as the physical growth of a community increases the local population, new technologies such as telephones, satellites, and the Internet transmute “local” into “global”. The key behind disarming this fallacious train of thought is so simple as to be easily missed — while the addition of a globally-reachable community may appear to dilute local communal bonds, the inverse is in fact true. As technology enables people to reach out, it also allows others to reach in. Whether the intentions are that of education, friendship, religion, or just relaxation, this additional human interaction only strengthens the individual, and that which strengthens the individual strengthens the community.

Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

drnick — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:10:05 +0000

The software development “bazaar” should not be compared to the classical “cathedral” system of development. With seemingly unlimited manpower and no concept of a budget, the bazaar seems an impossible entity — one which produces marvelous works of software, but does so without itself consuming anything. It is true that many things of quality have come from the software development bazaar; however, because of the unique and bizarre way it operates, the bazaar cannot and should not be compared to cathedral development. The two systems function according to completely different sets of laws. The cathedral pays an electric bill — the bazaar has a zero-point energy module. The cathedral has a limited talent pool from which to draw — the bazaar simply expects talent to materialize. Employees of a cathedral are compensated for their work — the bazaar has no concept of employees, only “contributors”. A comparison between the bazaar and the cathedral comes with an implicit and invalid assumption: that the two systems can operate independently. The hidden truth and the subtle lie is that the bazaar isn’t mystical at all: It is cathedral which fuels and supports the operation of the bazaar, and without the cathedral, the bazaar could not and would not exist. There is, in fact, a man behind the curtain, and that man works at Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

The Möbius Strip of Technological Ignorance

drnick — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 04:22:29 +0000

The one constant in life, they say, is Change. We’re not talking about just any kind of mundane everyday change — someone moving cheese around, increased prices at the local BurgerMart, or your sister getting married — no, we’re talking about Change. Fundamental deviations in the state of the human condition: Changes which intimately influence the day-to-day life of nearly every human on the planet, and which will result in a newborn growing up, living, and dying in an innately different world than that of previous generations. For many thousands of years early humans only rarely experienced these kinds of deep structural changes, perhaps first with the taming of fire and the slow domestication in agriculture and animal husbandry. However, as humanity advanced such innovation started to arise more frequently and each one was now ushered in with an impressive new name. The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age — Change was coming slowly but steadily.

At some point the word “age” became inappropriate given the shorter and shorter durations between each Change. History was no longer divided up into distinct ages but was instead morphing into a series of high-speed evolutions; such “revolutions” as the Industrial Revolution the Computer Revolution marked our quickening ascent out of ages past. A key differences between an age and a revolution are the continuing nature of the second, and the speed at which the changes being ushered in take hold upon both human beings and human societies. These two attributes make a revolution much more difficult for society to absorb — many small adjustments are needed over a very short period of time. The most recent (and current) fundamental change of this nature, the Computer Revolution, has approached with such stealth and struck with such fervor that, for a long time, society at large was unaware that a revolution was even underway.

Phillip Armour’s Five Orders of Ignorance^* play a uniquely dynamic role in technological revolutions such as these. Instead of a relatively easy stationary target, the technological revolution provides a quickly moving and multifaceted window of ignorance which must be constantly analyzed and adjusted to. It is no longer enough to apply the Orders to a problem and transition to the 0^th level — you must make the transition, but then continuously re-evaluate your ignorance of both that one aspect of the underlying changes taking place and all the new ones being created. The normal ladder used to ascend out of ignorance has been replaced with a runged Möbius strip, and the slow self-paced approach to understanding new problems has transformed into a rapid-fire machine gun. A moving window of ignorance has been created, and one must either keep pace or fall by the technological wayside.

Such ignorance is both a blessing and curse. The first pioneers to overcome the technological ignorance of the Computer Revolution were hackers and engineers, each of whom relatively easily obtained and maintains a tentative balance between the 0^th and 1^st Orders. This understanding gave them great freedom and power over the new domain being created and expanded each day. More slowly, large bureaucracies such as governments and corporations begin to divert manpower into gaining a foothold of understanding, slowly expanding it as resources allowed, bringing them into a slowly revolving chain of the 0^th, 1^st, and 2^nd Orders. Finally, everyday consumers and users of new innovations generated by the revolution live day-to-day in the 3^rd, or if they’re lucky, the 2^nd Order of ignorance.

The key to surviving a technological revolution is, as one might expect, maintaining a balance. In this case, between the ignorance of hackers, consumers, and bureaucracies. Tilting the scale too far in favor of hackers can lead to a system of anarchy at worst and vigilantism at best, accompanied by an overbearing transparency — no security and no privacy. However, if the balance shifts overwhelmingly towards the bureaucracies — governments and corporations — we see rigid controls with little personal freedom (and true innovation requires freedom), an opaque and impenetrable system, and exploitation of consumers. Only by understanding the influences of technological ignorance can we maintain the delicate balance between such opposing forces, but by doing so we obtain the best of worlds: freedom, security, and consumer safety.

* Non-ACM version

Apple: Blight of the Personal Computing Industry

drnick — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:59:51 +0000

Apple is a dangerous blight on the entire personal computing industry. From their core corporate identity and their attitude towards software developers, to the dictatorial hammer wielded against third-party distributors and the utter contempt they hold their customers in, Apple goes against everything which made early personal computers flourish and which made it possible for the industry as we know it today to come to fruition. Even many who should know better — software and hardware engineers — have sold themselves, their history, and their peers out for shiny mediocre trinkets. However, the bright side is that it is these same traits which have prevented Apple from becoming more than a niche platform. Even newer markets in which Apple surged early (such as multimedia and mobile computing) have seen a steadily decreasing market share as consumers realize alternatives exist, alternatives which offer real freedom of choice. Eventually only those “dedicated” shallow-minded consumers which fear the freedom of choice will remain in Apple’s Garden of Pure Ideology. True invention and innovation require freedom of expression, and these things will tolerate no dictator, regardless of how benevolent he may seem.