Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

This is an open letter to Chris Fisher from Jupiter Broadcasting (and friends) regarding the recent tirade against Google “winning” the court battle against Oracle for the use of the Java APIs.

A short summary for the uninitiated:

After Oracle bought Sun including their Java implementation, they sued Google who implemented (some of) the Java APIs for use in the Android operating system, for copyright infringement in some source code, copyright infringement on the API definitions themselves and a couple of software patents they held about how to implement some Java behavior. Round one: Some source code was ruled infringing, APIs were found non-copyrightable  and patents were found not-infringing. Round two: A federal court (that normally rules on patent issues) held the ruling of copying (for Oracle) and patents (for Google) but ruled APIs copyrightable and Google infringing on that. Third round: a jury found that Google’s use of the Java APIs was fair-use and no damages should be awarded.

After the last jury decision, there was a lot of back and forth on the internet, notably one Ars Technica article (“op-ed”), by an Oracle lawyer claimed that the result boils down to nullifying any and all open source licenses:

if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.

Then we come to Chris Fisher – as the host of his Linux Action Show podcast, he has spoke out against Google many times in the past, but this tirade in the discussion of the Oracle vs. Google action in the most recent Linux Action Show #419, really demonstrates well the extents of his Googlephobia (LAS #419, 0:46:42):

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As can be evident across the web (for example in this article), the current discussion fueled by Google’s self driving car news and a the possible development plans of other small and large companies is often concerning itself with the morals of a software driven car¹. Which is, frankly, unfortunate.

I think that the only people that should be really bothered by all this talk of “who should the autonomous car kill (in case of an accident)” discussion are the programmers hard at Google and other companies, who are suddenly held to a much higher moral standard than expected of programmers who are responsible, today, to hundreds of lives in each instances – such as programmers for railway systems and passenger jets flight control software.

When you look at the problem from the perspective of autonomous transport control software, that is right now being used to safely transport millions of humans daily, its obvious that the main concern of the designers is to have quantitatively better response (more consistent and faster, in that order) than a human, for adverse situations, but qualitatively better – that is, the systems will not pretend to make decisions morally better than a human would do at any given situation, just perform better on the exact same actions that the human it replaces will have taken anyway.

So when a Google self-driving car programmer comes answer to the “trolley problem” or the “fat man problem” discussed in the linked article, they should not be held to a higher moral standard than the average driver, because that is who they are replacing.

Related articles

• Google’s self-driving car tests in California ruined by human error(digitalspy.co.uk)

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• Google Software: Safer Than Human Drivers?(insights.dice.com)

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• These crazy new cars will save lives(news.com.au)

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• Consumer Group Worries Over Safety of Google’s Self-Driving Cars(technewsworld.com)

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1. that is, immediately after the “ooh, technology is so awesome” debate [↩]

One of the weird things that sane (or some would say “old skool”) system administrators complain about lately is that with the rising popularity of UN*X systems (mostly Mac OS X and Linux) in the world, and in particular in the software development world, people using UN*X system want less and less to understand how to manage their systems and the culmination is the

to install this complicated system level software, just copy and paste simple wget command to your terminal

with Docker being the most horrible example of that behavior. No sane person (who understand UN*X) will ever think that installing Docker by feeding the content of a URL to bash is a good idea, but for some reason this is the documented and recommended way by the Docker people. Other examples are abound, but lets concentrate on fixing the Docker scenario.

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Frankly, I don’t think that there is any point of discussion, it is hands down KDE’s Konsole, but as recently I’ve been using GNOME 3.16 as my main desktop environment, I thought it will be useful to have a list of features missing from GNOME Terminal to be a contender:

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Well, at least until the entire world uses high DPI screens. Lets see an example:

Pulsing button (video)

This is a “call to action” effect on a button – it pulses slightly to get attention. This has proven to be really effective at improving “conversion” (web term to “getting you to do that thing I want you to do”). But even if you are not a designer at heart its easy to see that the text in the button is pulsing at different speeds and this creates a really jarring effect.

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Every now and then, when discussing EVs (electric vehicles) or other alternative fuel cars¹, that offer basically zero pollution (in the form of green house gases and other poisonous gases) someone always raises the argument that these cars just “move the pollution upstream” to the electric power plants and you are still polluting just the same.

But this argument only works if the power production “upstream” really is polluting as much as an onboard gas engine – which really sounds weird to me, because as you increase the success of the engine – from something that had to be small enough to fit in a car to something that basically only had the limit of required to be cost effective – surely you can have large efficiency gains, even if burning the same fuel?

So here are some numbers:

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1. like the new “hydrogen powered” cars [↩]

ניגשתי היום לנקודת שרות של סלקום בשביל לשחזר את כרטיס ה-SIM של הטלפון שאיבדתי (את הכרטיס, לא את הטלפון), וכשאיש השרות שאל אותי איזה סוג כרטיס אני צריך, עניתי לא בפשטות “הרגיל – מיני SIM”. מה שהוביל לויכוח האם קיים דבר כזה שנקרא “Mini-SIM” (רמז: קיים, זה מה שיש ברוב הטלפונים).

שזה כנראה היה טעות מצידי, כי איש השרות א) לא מבין במוצר שהוא מוכר (שזה לא מקרה מיוחד), אבל ב) משוכנע ש(חוסר) הידע שלו הוא הדבר הנכון ו-ג) מאוד לא סלחני לאנשים שמנסים להסביר לו שהוא טועה – מה שגרם לכך שקיבלתי שרות ממש גרוע ויחס מזלזל.

באופן מעצבן יותר ויותר (ככל שהפילוט של המאגר הביומטרי נמשך ומאיים להביא עלינו אסון), כל מיני אתרי אינטרנט טריוויאלים לחלוטין דורשים מאיתנו האזרחים לספק להם את הזיהוי היחודי שלנו במאגר (הביומטרי וגם זה שלא) של הממשלה (הווה אומר “מספר תעודת הזהות”).

אני לא בטוח בכלל מה הזכות של חברות מסחריות אקראיות לדרוש מאיתנו את הפרט הזה, אבל אני די בטוח שאני לא חייב לספק אותו, וזה ממש מעצבן שהם דורשים את הזהות שלי כתנאי למכירה של כרטיס קולנוע, או שאר דברים טריוויאלים.

בגלל שאני בטוח שגם אותכן זה מעצבן, ובגלל שאני חושב שכל הפרקטיקה מטופשת (אפילו אם היא חוקית, ויש חשד קל שהיא לא), הנה לשרותכם – מחשב מספרי תעודות זהות ישראלית:

לשם הנוחות העמוד הנ”ל ידידותי לטלפונים חכמים והכתובת הישירה אליו היא: https://geek.co.il/articles/israeli-id.html

עוד נקודה: הוצע לי ששימוש במספר ת”ז לא שלכן באתר של ספק שרות זה עבירה על החוק – סוג של גניבת זהות. אני לא חושב שזה המצב – ואני אשמח לדעתכן בנושא, אבל לשם הזהירות:

1. אין בבנית התוכנה הנ”ל משום המלצה להציג מספרי זהות שאינם שלכם לספקי שרות ואחרים. אם אתם בוחרים לעשות זאת זה על אחריותכם בלבד.
2. אם אתם בכל זאת בוחרים להציג מספרי זהות כך, אני ממליץ לבחור מספרים שלא סביר שנמצאים בשימוש, כמו מספרים שמתחילים בשלוש פעמים אפס או שלוש פעמים תשע

A public response to “FaiF oggcast 0x43“, or at least to the second section (after the FOSDEM talk recording starting at 0:54:31):

Sometimes you guys just drink your own cool-aid, while being completely out of contact with reality. This is a prime example – in FaiF 0x43, at 1:12:40 Bradley says “Proprietary Javascript … is the new form of [vendor] lock-in, and People are locked in to GitHub”, which is just the worst of a large tirade where Bradley just compares people who create useful services and want to finance them – while contributing to open source and free software – to the worst proprietary software vendors, for the crime of creating their website with unlicensed Javascript code. All the while Karen just says “yes”.

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Powershell is a great command line shell, if you all you know is cmd and batch. There are so many things it is missing when trying to compete with current Unix shells such as Bash, and while some of them have semi-working workarounds, many are sorely missing.

My pet peeves are:

• A decent pager. “more” is basically at the same stage it was when I started working in MS-DOS 3.30, and it is nowhere near the functionality of “less”¹.
• Persistent history. I’ve seen some workarounds but couldn’t get any of them to work properly.

Both of these features have been available to me since I started working with Linux in 1995, and it is really difficult living without them in MS-world. A decent terminal emulator will be nice too – the Powershell box has advantage over the cmd.exe box in that it is blue – other then that they are both in the same sorry state that the “dos box” of Windows 3 fame was at. I’m using “Console 2” to get some useful work done, but it too leaves much to be desired.

Also, startup is so.. fscking.. slow.. Starting Powershell on a brand new machine (with no per-session user scripts) can take as much as 3 seconds. Those are minutes of my life everyday that I would never get back.

1. and I’m not talking about the built-in editor, just being able to “page up” would have been nice [↩]