Anniversary Post: Tetris

Posted on 06 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

Tetris On this day in 1984, Tetris was first released. I’ve long been a major critic of video games. This is because they mostly suck. I blame it on Doom. It wasn’t the first first-person shooter game by a long shot. But it was the one that caused the game development business to go haywire. It was no longer necessary to do anything new. It was all just minor changes. Bored running around abandoned buildings shooting people? Try running around an abandoned ship shooting people! Or Nazis! Or Nazi Zombies! I’ll admit that I don’t stay up with it, but every time I revisit the subject, I find that there really is nothing new going on.

Now that’s not to say there is nothing new going on in the game development community. People continue to be creative. It is just that first-person shooter games are the bedrock of the industry. That’s because humans — especially men — are really horrible. Apparently, we continue to have wars because men really love them — at least in the abstract. Regardless, Tetris has always stood out to me as showing how much one can do with almost nothing. Remember: it came out years after more complex games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Q*Bert. It also came out a decade after the prototype for first-person shooter games, Maze War.

The point is that what interests us is not complexity. Certain stories require complexity to tell. It depends upon the story. But making Tetris three-dimensional did not improve it. I’m sure that some people are out there using the tools of first-person shooter games to do interesting things. But these are not the games people are lining up at game stores to buy.

Happy anniversary Tetris!

Thoughts on So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

Posted on 05 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

I just read Jon Ronson’s newest book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. It is probably his best book yet. Then again, maybe it’s just that I am really interested in the subject of public shaming — and shame more generally. But it was my intention to just read a couple of chapters and move on. Instead, I ended up reading almost the whole thing in one sitting. It really draws the reader in — especially anyone who is active in public life, even if that just means sending out a lot of tweets.

It is my fear of public shaming that stops me from being more involved in Twitter. For example, after the Vanity Fair cover with Caitlyn Jenner, I wanted to tweet out, “Great, now Jenner is providing unrealistic body images for women.” Similarly, after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, I wanted to announce a new line of hoodies that sported the words, “Don’t shoot! I’m white!” This second one relates directly to Ronson’s primary object: Justine Sacco. She is the woman who tweeted right before boarding a very long flight to South Africa, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet went viral while she was in the air, with at least one blogger camping out at the airport to get a picture of this supposed devil woman.

At the time, I really did not understand it. Maybe that’s not surprising coming from the man who thinks that “Don’t shoot! I’m white” on a hoodie is the height of social satire. But Sacco’s tweet was not insensitive, much less racist. It was rather the other way around: it was mocking western stereotypes and highlighting the fact that by and large Americans do not have to worry about AIDS. What I saw happen to Sacco was very typical and one of the reasons I’m not too keen on humanity. People decided to read the tweet as insensitive and racist so that they then could enjoy the pleasure of feeling outraged about it.

We see this same thing throughout media. Certainly, Jerry Springer and Judge Judy would have had no careers if it weren’t for the manufacture of outrage. And far from ideology, Fox News is primary an outrage machine. But that’s true to a lesser extent with CNN and MSNBC. People not only enjoy feeling outraged, they become addicted to it. It is one of the few ways that modern Americans have of feeling good about themselves. It’s sad.

The other major shaming example in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is Lindsey Stone. This story is an even better example of this. Stone is a caregiver to disabled people. She and a friend were in the habit of creating what they thought were funny pictures. For example, there is a photo of Stone smoking in front of a “no smoking” sign. The photo that got her in trouble was of her shouting and flipping off next to a sign that reads “Silence and Respect” at Arlington National Cemetery. Despite explaining what was going on in the picture, people decided to take it as disrespecting the people buried there and (Of course!) the military in general.

I’ve had to deal with this on Frankly Curious. I used to talk about the military as bluntly as I do the police. But I’ve been beaten down. It isn’t that my opinions have changed, but it just isn’t worth the bother. So I’m more careful when I talk about this subject, because there is an army of people out there just looking for something they can pounce on. To me it goes right along with those yellow ribbons. We don’t provide real respect in terms of using the military as little as possible and paying soldiers well. So it isn’t surprising that they would be always on the lookout for disrespect. But their wrath is ill directed at me and Lindsey Stone.

Two years ago, I got in a bit of a tussle on Twitter. A woman had tweeted out, “Is it me, lots of Bay Area tweeters going on about their day, tweeting stupid stuff. A plane crashed, lots of people impacted.” This enraged me. She was shaming the wider world because it wasn’t focused on what she was focused on. Ultimately, three people died in that crash — one because she was run over by a rescue vehicle. But I wasn’t nice about my anger. I tweeted, “About 2000 people died of malaria today. Why are you so focused on these people at SFO?” It wasn’t taken well. The whole thing still strikes me as bizarre. Apparently, a lot of people think that we must all obsess about whatever the television news is currently reporting.

Ultimately, I don’t think that Jon Ronson gets to the bottom of why we all are so inclined to shame each other. He posits that all of our personal shames make us shame others. I think it is more about control. But it hardly matters. Most of the stuff that people are publicly shamed for is forced. The shaming is a given, and the reason is reverse engineered. The only solution is for us all to show more mercy. But that is the solution to most problems in the world. I’m not hopeful. It doesn’t seem like Jon Ronson is either.

Decision 2016: the 404 Error Page War

Posted on 04 Jun 2015 by Frank Moraes

404 Error Gentle reader, Daniel Bean has written the most important article yet about the 2016 presidential election, The Presidential Candidates’ 404 Pages, Ranked. For those of you who are not computer freaks, a 404 page is what a web server sends out when it can’t find the actual page requested. It used to be, one would usually see just an awkward and ugly page proclaiming, “Not Found.” This was generally followed by some lightly technical jargon about URLs and ports. But it has pretty much always been possible to have custom error page and now most websites use them. And as Bean points out, often to great effect.

The Uninspired and Just Plain Bad

But not always. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina both have standard 404 pages. They are very similar to the error page for Frankly Curious — boring but not embarrassing. Ted Cruz manages error pages by loading his home page. That may seem like a good idea, but it is actually very bad from the standpoint of usability. It confuses users, but then most Ted Cruz supporters are already pretty confused.

Lindsey Graham, however, has a 404 page that is embarrassing. It the default kind that says, “I couldn’t be bothered to provide a proper error.” So the visitor is told, “Not Found.” This is followed by the standard detailed but useless message, “The requested URL /franklycurious was not found on this server. Apache Server at landing.lindseygraham.com Port 80.” The question comes to mind: if he can’t hire a competent web designer, how is he going to fill his cabinet? (Note: if you go to his direct site — instead of the subdomain, which is the first thing I found — he does the same stupid thing that Ted Cruz does.)

But what is amazing — thrilling in its total horribleness — is Rand Paul’s 404 page. It is a standard page from CloudFlare with a search box and “results” from the site. It looks just like those awful pages that come up when a website’s name registration lapses. But the truly horrible part is that regardless of what you enter into the search box, the same results come up. I’m sure this will be fixed soon, so don’t miss your chance to have Rand Paul waste your time and bandwidth!

The Inspired and Often Good

Bean didn’t much talk about the bad 404 pages. He focused on the good ones. And there are a number of them. Shockingly, God’s elder brother Rick Santorum has a snarky but compelling bit about Hillary Clinton. I think this is a political mistake — it uses that image of Clinton in sunglasses texting where she looks cool and in charge. But at least the page looks good. I think it looks a lot better than Marco Rubio’s page. Of course, Marco Rubio’s whole website kind of sucks.

Martin O’Malley’s 404 page is okay. It’s him on a horse with the headline, “Hold Your Horses. You’re Going the Wrong Way.” But I’m with Bean in not really liking it. It seems vaguely embarrassing and I’m not sure why. He might have been better off with the Carson or Fiorina model.

Hillary Clinton’s 404 page is charming. It features a picture of the young Clintons with Donald Duck with the headline, “Oops, that link wasn’t what it was quacked up to be.” Bean considers it the best. I understand this; I just don’t agree.

I think there is something to be said for having a little dignity. In Clinton’s case, the “fun” angle might be good because people tend to think of her as kind of intense.

Mike Huckabee’s 404 page is nice, and more straight forward. [Update: it is now used to sell stuff, which is really all Huckabee is about. -FM] It isn’t quite as good as it could be because the image of Huckabee fishing isn’t great. And it too has a sad joke, “Oops! Looks like you caught the wrong page.” It’s a little bit charming and a little bit, “Ugh! My grandpa’s on Facebook.” But that’s fine.

It isn’t surprising that I like Bernie Sanders’ 404 page the most: I’m inclined to like him. But I really do think it is the best in an objective sense because it is so Bernie Sanders. It is a short YouTube video that starts automatically. Sanders explains that you have come to the right website but not the right page. And it is said with the same kind of direct and authoritative tone that he explains why the minimum wage needs to be raised.

Regardless, I think it is great that these candidates took the time to create customer 404 pages. The truth is that it is only freaks like Daniel Bean (and me) who are likely to ever see these pages. But I’m really glad that Bean brought the issue to my attention. I think he was wrong, however, when he wrote, “You probably should not base your vote in the upcoming election on this.” You definitely should! And by that, I mean that you should vote for Bernie Sanders.

The Advertising Failures of the Web

Posted on 30 May 2015 by Frank Moraes

Too Much Advertising I’ve been on the web since its very first days — back when it was just httpd and Mosaic — long before Netscape. So I’ve watched it evolve. There was a (brief) time when blinking text was a cool thing. And then it became a no-no because it was annoying. Overall, changes were for the better. But then people started to figure out how to monetize the web. Advertising started to appear. And the web regressed. Yes, you might have been shamed out of putting blinking text[1] in their pages. But if you have advertising, you can be certain that there will be something at least as annoying on your page.

It seems that there is no end to the madness, however. First we got static images. Then we got animated gifs. Then Flash came in and that continues to be the standard way that advertising is forced on us. But there are even worse ways that we are so assaulted. A common, but old, way is something that is still seen on websites: the double underline. These are horrible active links that cause a popup window to appear if the user is foolish enough to simply move the mouse over them. They are extremely annoying.

Apparently, website owners realized just how horrible these things were, because they are now only seen on smaller websites that are desperate for revenue. The larger website owners seem to have realized that such stupidity actually pushes readers away. But advertisers keep trying. The most recent that I’ve seen is one where the text below a certain point is moved down (sometimes, it is at the very top of the page). Then a video ad is inserted into the gap. It runs silently, unless you run the mouse over it. You can just scroll down below it. But when the commercial is over, it disappear, re-scrolling your screen and screwing up where you are in the text. You can also close the ad, but that requires mousing over it and at least hearing some of it.

I consider this kind of advertisement even worse than the mouse-over pop-ups, because at least they don’t disturb your reading experience if you are careful with them. So the question is how long will these new monstrosities be with us? Is it possible people will be okay with them and the ads will become common? I really don’t know. But allowing such ads shows a complete lack care for one’s website readers.

It seems to me that all of this advertising nonsense stems from the fact that the website community has not been smart about selling advertising. Advertisers get far more bang for the buck in web advertising. When I briefly had Google ads on Frankly Curious, I was outraged that I only got revenue if a user clicked. I could have a banner ad for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. Clearly, such an ad is unlikely to get many clicks. But it is actually quite effective in subconsciously causing my website visitors to grab a pint of Cherry Garcia when they are at the supermarket later that evening. The issue is not that I don’t get a couple of cents; it is that Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t have to pay for what is clearly a profitable service provided them.

As a result, website ads have gotten out of hand. If websites only had to provide the ad-to-content ratio that television does, there wouldn’t be a fifth as much advertising on the web. And there wouldn’t be all these horrible “innovations.” As it is, there are websites I avoid — like The Washington Monthly — because they are so clogged up with ads that they take forever to load. It’s sad. And it makes the internet a lot less usable. It’s like living in a William Gibson novel, but without all the cool stuff.

[1] I really wanted to make that text blink, but there is apparently no simple way to do it. Apparently, blinking text can cause epileptic seizures, so it isn’t a good idea even as a joke.

Farcical Presidential Debates And Drunk Blogging

Posted on 22 May 2015 by Frank Moraes

Drunk Blogging The first Republican presidential nomination debate will air on Fox News on 6 August 2015. That’s just two and a half months away. I have very found memories of live-blogging some of the 2012 presidential debates with all the guys over at The Reaction. But that put a lot of pressure on Michael to take email that the rest of us were sending and then post it. Plus, users then had to manually update their pages. That is the problem with using Blogger for your hosting. It was also the problem here when Frankly Curious was using the Nucleus CMS. But now that I’m using WordPress, I can get actual live-blogging software, so I’m thinking of doing that here. Given that I can usually only stand to watch these things while I drink, it could be interesting.

Earlier this year, the RNC had announced that they were going to take control of the nomination process. But apparently not. Jonathan Bernstein summarized the situation well, Fox to Candidates: Go Nuts. On Camera. Please. One would think that the party would want to tightly control those who are in the debates, you know, so that the party doesn’t look totally crazy. But that apparently would have ruffled feathers with the crazy base of the party. So the RNC has abdicated the responsibility and just thrown it on the cable news networks.

Obviously, the networks have a different incentive than the Republican Party does. It strikes me as indicative of the fact that even the “adults” in the party are incompetent. For the first debate, Fox News is going to allow the top ten candidates as indicated by the last five polls before the even. That might include ties, so there could be more than ten. But isn’t ten about three times as many as the Republican Party needs to deeply embarrass itself? The situation is even worse for the second debate at CNN. For that, the network is going to have two debates: one for the top ten and a second one for those not in the top ten but who receive at least 1% in “public polling” — whatever that might be.

Jonathan Bernstein noted that even more than the bad incentives it provides the networks, are the incentives it provides the candidates, “We’re going to see gimmicks, stunts and every attention-grabbing device the campaigns can think of, all timed to maximize poll standings near the end of July.” He added that the huge amount of money available to some candidates will allow them to buy ads on Fox News to make it into the top ten. A win-win for Fox News!

At the moment, the Real Clear Politics average of polls provides the following winners in the top ten: Jeb Bush (15.4%), Scott Walker (13.2%), Marco Rubio (13.2%), Rand Paul (9.2%), Mike Huckabee (8.6%), Ted Cruz (8.6%), Ben Carson (7.8%), Chris Christie (5.4%), Rick Perry (2.4%), and Rick Santorum (2.3%). That’s like 2012, but worse. The field rounds out with John Kasich (2.0%), Carly Fiorina (1.3%), Bobby Jindal (1.3), and Lindsey Graham (1.3%). It’s quite a collection.

At the very least, the first couple of debates will be events to behold. So I think I’m going to press forward with the live blogging. If you see some weird stuff going on here over the weekend, it probably means that I’m testing some new software. Otherwise, I’m sure I will announce any live-blogging I intend to do. It would be nice if at least a couple of people watched. Like I said: it could be interesting. Especially if you’re drunk!

Anniversary Post: Windows 3.0

Posted on 22 May 2015 by Frank Moraes

On this day, 25 years ago, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It was a very big deal. You see, for almost a decade before that, Microsoft had only managed to provide MS-DOS. It was an 8086 clone of the CP/M operating system, written by 25-year-old programmer Tim Paterson. Just to be clear, all Microsoft did was buy what Paterson had written. And this may explain why for the next nine years — 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0! — Microsoft hardly managed to improve it. Of course, Microsoft did manage to come out with Windows 1.0 in 1985 and Windows 2.0 at the end of 1987. They were pathetic attempts. The only thing more pathetic was that Apple (Of course!) sued Microsoft for copyright infringement — unleashing on the world the “look and feel” lawsuit. (Note: the lawsuit that started this kind of anti-freedom nonsense actually dates back to Broderbund Software Inc. v Unison World, Inc. Courts should not be allowed to rule on technology or science when they don’t understand it — which they rarely do.)

But with Windows 3.0, Microsoft had finally managed to create something that was usable. It certainly wasn’t great. And a lot of it was just that computers were more powerful by that time, so the program could work reasonably well. Even still, the earlier versions of Windows did not multitask well. But let us remember: Windows 3.0 was a program that ran on MS-DOS. It was not until Windows 95 (version 4.0), that Microsoft managed to combine MS-DOS and Windows. And it wasn’t until Windows 2000 (version 5.0) that it became a modern operating system. (For the record, Windows XP is Windows 5.1. I find it annoying that people think that Windows XP was this major release. But all they did was put a different UI on it. If you wanted to save some resources, you could make it look just like Windows 2000. Indeed, my current Windows 7 computer looks just like Windows 2000. I don’t like change.)

So there you go. You may think that I’m opinionated about politics, but clearly computer history trumps that. And that’s especially true when I’m talking about Microsoft and Apple. Bill Gates is (usually) the richest man in the world for one reason: he got the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM personal computers. He used that advantage to stifle innovation for years. But mostly because of computer heroes like Mitch Kapor (creator of 1-2-3), Gates was able to become an incredibly rich man despite the fact that he was only hurting the industry. But it after Apple lead the way with the graphical user interface (which they stole before they started suing everyone who did the same thing), that Gate got immorally rich based upon his control the operating system that so many people used because of the great programs created by people who were not Bill Gates nor worked for Bill Gates.

Happy birthday to the first decent product that Microsoft managed to produce!

From Frank’s Notebooks: April 2010

Posted on 14 May 2015 by Frank Moraes

Frank's Notebook I was talking to Andrea recently when I mentioned that no one reads my fiction when I post it here. She seemed surprised by that. I’m not sure why. But it may not be so true anymore. Frankly Curious is now a destination for a fair number of people. For whatever reason, they think I should be checked in on. I do hope the NSA is checking on me, because a revolution (of despair) could break out at any moment.

Just as a lark, I went looking through some old notebooks for one of my Nixon puppet plays. But I got sidetracked in reading my thoughts from April 2010. My notebooks have always been a mess of lists, diary, random projects, whatever. Some of the descriptions of my life at that point are heartbreaking. I don’t remember feeling that sad. But mixed in are lots of fragments to my second novel “Treading Asphalt” — which is still fragments. But crammed in the middle of it is the beginning of a short story I had completely forgotten about. I rather like it. I wrote later, “I have no idea what the plot is about.” But it seems pretty clear to me now.

Here it is:

No one had ever explained what dyslexia was to Rene. Even now at 26, watching her PhD graduating class marching into the auditorium, her gut told her that it had something to do with falling down. She was also very clumsy as a child. But that was wrong. At some time she had confused dyslexia with vertigo and had only the vaguest notion that it had something to do with dangerous birds. This, of course, was due to three things: Alfred Hitchcock, growing up in Bodega Bay, and being more than a genius when it came to developing theoretical systems — even silly ones. All of this was on her mind as she took notes for the article she was writing for the school newspaper about the graduation ceremony.

She would be paid fifty dollars for the article. This alone made the ceremony worth missing, but it wasn’t the main reason she wasn’t marching with her colleagues in those stupid dresses — which they made the students pay to rent. The title of her dissertation was, “Four Investigations into Strong Force-Weak Force Interactions in Strong Magnetic Fields at Relativistic Speeds.” It was just four papers she had published that were impressive enough to get her several post-doc opportunities without seeking them out. And she had accepted Dr Ahmed’s offer at UT Austin. But she still hadn’t decided if she would show up. She really didn’t like physics — so soiled as it was by “reality.” She should have gone straight with her strengths — pure math — or her weaknesses — literature. Now she had this ridiculous degree. And it seemed no one would ever again let her do anything fun.

And then, almost without missing a beat, the journal goes back to “Treading Asphalt” — into Brian’s first person description of what is for me, the most creepy part of the book. I think poor Rene would be shocked. But they are joined in being lost souls. But I think I have a happier ending for Rene. For Brian, it will be as it always seems to be for my male characters — the way it is for all of us: a muddle.

Anniversary Post: YouTube

Posted on 23 Apr 2015 by Frank Moraes

YouTube YouTube is ten years old today. Well, kind of. Today, ten years ago, the first video was uploaded. It was called, “Me at the Zoo.” At just 18 seconds long, it set the tone for the following decade. It consists of a young man — YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim — at the zoo, in front of the elephant enclosure. With only the slightest hint of facetiousness, he says, “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks. And that’s, that’s cool.” Yes it is!

But not all people would agree. I am reminded of my favorite #SlatePitch joke headline, “What’s the giraffe’s most distinctive feature? Hint: It’s not the neck!” One might even say that an elephant’s proboscis is not that long compared to certain insects — not to mention those of invertebrate. And while the trunk is cool, so are those ears! Dumbo anyone?

I do think that YouTube is cool. I still think the best thing about it is little idiosyncratic videos like, “Me at the Zoo.” But I certainly appreciate the fact that I can usually find television commercials from the 1970s. And if I want, I can watch episodes of Lou Grant. I remember a friend of mine back in 1996 saying, “The only thing that the internet is good for is porn.” That wasn’t even true then, but it was more true. YouTube really has been a welcome addition to the internet — even with it being a corporate toady with a ridiculously biased approach to copyright. And it raises huge questions about inequality. And the abuse of market share. Actually, YouTube is a political nightmare. But look: elephants!

Happy birthday YouTube!

Crowdfunding Sites Show True Colors

Posted on 11 Apr 2015 by Frank Moraes

Indiegogo Crowdfunding sites are showing themselves to be moral cowards. GoFundMe refused to allow a campaign for officer Michael Slager who shot Walter Scott in the back last weekend. It has a policy against campaigns “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.” That is their right, of course.

But I find this troublesome for a couple of reasons. First, people are innocent until proven guilty — in theory at least. I think it is wrong to assume someone’s guilt in this way. If GoFundMe had been around in 1997, I assume it would have allowed the parents of Ron Goldman to campaign to get money for their civil case against OJ Simpson. But it wouldn’t have allowed Simpson to campaign for money for his original defense. So I think there is an implicit hypocrisy in this policy.

The other problem I have is that I don’t see why it is wrong to allow people who perpetrated heinous crimes (much less those who have simply been accused of it) should be denied the right to raise money for their defenses. I realize that one can always do it on their own. Certainly George Zimmerman managed to do that. But I have a problem with private companies making these kinds of decisions. These companies are, after all, nominally disinterested. And I think that the claim (made too often by liberals who should know better) that the First Amendment only applies to government restrictions is rather too limited a reading of rights in the modern world.

But now, after initially allowing it, Indiegogo Removes Fundraisers That Supported SC Police Officer. The company now claims that a review of the campaigns found that they did not meet their standards. I suspect that their decision is actually just a matter of a huge social media campaign focused on Indiegogo to forbid the Salger campaigns. And that strikes me as a very bad thing.

I don’t know all the details about Michael Slager’s shooting of Walter Scott. But I think I made my position pretty clear on Thursday, Police Lie Even When Cameras Aren’t Around. It is hard to see it as anything but a methodical, cold blooded murder. But that makes it all the more important that we treat this case carefully and that we don’t rush to legal judgement. I want Slager tried and properly convicted. What’s more, I would like this case to change the system. The way things are, if Slager and Scott had been fighting over the taser, the law would have stated that it was legal for Slager to kill Scott. I think that’s a much bigger problem than that Slager seems to be a psychopath.

In the United States, prosecutors have almost unlimited resources in a criminal case. So the best that Slager would ever get is a fair trial. I have no problem with him getting a fair trial. And I have enough confidence in the criminal justice system to think that he will be convicted in a fair trial. The recent cases of police officers apparently getting away with murder has not been a matter of them having great representation. It has rather been that the prosecution has had no interest in convicting them. That will still be the case with Slager regardless of his representation.

As it is, there were a total of seven Indiegogo campaigns for Officer Slager. The most successful one had only raised $1,500, “and six others received little to no funding.” It wasn’t as though Slager was racking in the cash. So the push to shutdown his campaigns had basically no practical consequences on him. But it did have practical consequences on Indiegogo and how it deals with people who are trying to raise money for unpopular causes.

Shame on GoFundMe. Shame of Indiegogo. And most of all, shame on us.

Anniversary Post: Apple I

Posted on 11 Apr 2015 by Frank Moraes

Apple I Today, the Apple I is 39 years old. The company itself was started just ten days earlier. It’s interesting that in the public consciousness, Apple is Steve Jobs. Yet the first Apple computer was not built by Steve Jobs. In fact, I don’t think that Steve Jobs ever built a computer. He was the sales guy — the PR man. The Apple I was built by Steve Wozniak. So was the Apple II. Wozniak was the tech guy of the company for as long as the company couldn’t afford to hire tech people from outside.

Apparently, a year earlier, Wozniak had attended a computer club meeting. He was so inspired that he decided to build his own computer. And a year later, he had. Forgive me for not thinking much about the non-technical aspects of business, but I just don’t think that Jobs’ “idea” of selling the computer was all that brilliant. But he’s the man who everyone remembers. And he’s the man who every know-nothing uses (along with Bill Gates) as examples of entrepreneurship and why we need to keep Mitt Romney’s taxes low.

The Apple I was a pretty basic unit. It came with 4 KB of memory — which could be expanded to 8 KB on board or 48 KB with expansion cards. I know, this sounds like nothing. But the truth is that with 48 KB, there are some pretty decent user applications that can be created. In particular, I’ve run totally acceptable word processors and spreadsheets on computers of that quality. But the biggest thing that limited all computers of that age was the video. The Apple I had a 40×24 character display. It looked something like this:

On March 5, 1975 Steve Wozniak attended

the first meeting of the Homebrew

Computer Club in Gordon French’s garage.

He was so inspired that he immediately

set to work on what would become the

Apple I computer. Wozniak calculated

that laying out his design would cost

$1,000 and parts would cost another $20

per computer; he hoped to recoup his

costs if 50 people bought his design

for $40 each. His friend Steve Jobs

obtained an order from a local computer

store the Byte Shop the affordable

computer store in Mt View California

for 50 computers at $500 each. To

fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained

$20,000 in parts at 30 days net and

delivered the finished product in 10

days. Apple went on to be one of the

biggest computer companies in the world

by stealing innovations of other

companies and suing any competitors. Now

people buy Apple products because of its

brand, even though better products at

cheaper prices are widely available.

Happy anniversary Apple I!

Richard Stallman Day!

Posted on 16 Mar 2015 by Frank Moraes

I’m calling it. Today is Richard Stallman Day. The last two years, the birthday post was about him and I see no reason to ever do anyone else. Stallman is the kind of guy who would be a billionaire if capitalism actually worked. But it doesn’t, and so he isn’t. Not that he seems to care. He has something far greater than money: a worthwhile life.

For those who don’t know him, he’s the guy who started the GNU project. He’s the guy who wrote the original GNU c and c++ compilers. He wrote the GNU Emacs editor. (I’m a vi guy, but pretty much every programmer I knew in the 1990s was an Emacs fanatic.) Without him, there would have been no Linux. And even still, people are confused as to what Linux is. Without all the GNU tools, Linux would have been this kernel with which you could do nothing.

But more than any of his technical accomplishment, Stallman is a political leader. And it is in this regard that he is truly revolutionary. Compilers and operating systems were no new concepts. But “free software” was. In the early 1990s, I knew people who loved the GNU project and what he was doing, but they didn’t like his clearly leftist politics. But they didn’t understand how it all went together. We’ve tried going with the strong property rights system for a long time. And what it creates is an incredibly unequal and unjust society. It’s time to try something new and the Free Software Foundation shows the way forward. Not that the power elite are going to allow that without a huge fight.

Happy Richard Stallman Day!

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