Google v. Oracle, by analogy
Suppose Joe opens a restaurant. He hires a waiter who is really great at following directions, but speaks no English. Over time, Joe comes up with a way of working with this waiter that’s very precise and detailed. You can ask the waiter for things like “order burger plus cheese plus ketchup no tomato no onion” or “bring check” or “bring water”. However, you have to say things exactly the right way each time. You can’t just say “order cheeseburger” instead of “order burger plus cheese”, or “bring me some water” instead of “bring water”. If you do, the waiter will only say “I don’t understand” and wait for you to say it the right way.
All of this is explained on the menu, and the waiter is otherwise good enough at his job that people are willing to learn the Joe’s Cafe way of ordering their food and asking for the check afterward.
A while later, Gina decides to open a different restaurant across town from Joe’s place. Her food is nothing like Joe’s, she uses different suppliers, her kitchen has a brand new setup she invented herself, and she uses little robot dogs instead of waiters. However, she does a little market research and finds out that a lot of people in her city are use to ordering food the Joe way. To make it easier for her customers, she programs her robot dogs to respond to requests the same way that Joe’s waiter would. Then they’ll be able to order food and enjoy her restaurant without having to learn a whole new system!
Now, at Joe’s, if you say “order burger plus cheese”, the waiter writes this down, carries the order to the kitchen, and hands it to the cook. The cook follows the instructions, hands the food to the waiter, and the waiter takes it back to the table. Gina’s restaurant doesn’t have burgers, but if you tell her robot dog to “order steak plus potato”, it transmits the order via radio to the kitchen where a 3D printer makes it and then sends it to your table via a flying drone.
In other words, you place your order at Gina’s restaurant the same way you would at Joe’s, but almost everything else about the process is completely different because Gina came up with her system from scratch. As it turns out, a few orders do happen to work the same because there are only so many ways to react to “bring water”. That’s natural, though. Gina didn’t copy Joe’s “leave the table, fill a pitcher with water, bring it back to the table, and fill the empty glasses” process; that’s just the way you do it.
This is same as the relationship between Oracle and Google. Oracle bought a company who made a programming language called Java that became popular. When Google was making their Android phones, they wanted to make it easy for developers to write apps and games for it. Since so many people were already familiar with Java, they decided to let developers use it. However, they made their own Java from scratch that looks like Oracle’s Java from a programmer’s point of view but is completely different behind the scenes. As with Joe and Gina, the way you place your order is the same, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Oracle is suing Google because they say it’s unfair that Google allowed their developers to write programs in something that looks like Java, except without it actually being Java, and that Google should pay them for the privilege.
If it’s not reasonable that Gina should have to pay Joe just because her robot dog knows how to respond to “order steak plus potato”, then it’s not reasonable that Google should have to pay Oracle since they didn’t use any of Oracle’s underlying work.
Google is asking the US Supreme Court to declare that they didn’t copy Oracle’s programming code when they created their own work-alike system. For the sake of the US software industry, I hope Google wins.
As a personal note, I don’t like eating at either Joe’s or Gina’s restaurant. The food’s awful in both places. I still don’t think that Gina (or Google) owe Joe (or Oracle) anything.
November 2020 Voting Guide
These are the notes I collected to determine how I’m going to vote on November 3, 2020. I’m posting this not to tell you how you should vote, but to share my reasons for why I’m voting this way.
United States
President
Biden is the only serious candidate.
Congress
U.S. House California District 13
Barbara Lee (D, Incumbent)
California
State Assembly District 18
Rob Bonta (D, Incumbent)
State Senate District 9
Nancy Skinner (D, Incumbent)
Ballot measures
Prop 14: Stem Cell Research Institute Bond Initiative
Slightly oppose: It’s a good thing to research and support in general, but this isn’t a good time to incur more public debt.
For
- Gavin Newsom
- Cal Dems
- Diabetes research
- University of California regents
Against
- No one organized group
- Main argument: it’s a $5B bond issue we can’t afford right now, even if it’s probably a good thing.
Prop 15: Tax on Commercial and Industrial Properties for Education and Local Government Funding Initiative
Support. Raises taxes on large companies while specifically exempting houses, farms, and small businesses.
For
- Everyone
Against
- CA Republicans
- Coalition of industrial property owners
Prop 16: Repeal Proposition 209 Affirmative Action Amendment
Support. Prop 209 ended affirmative action. This doesn’t bring it back, but allows it to be considered when it makes sense.
For
- Cal Dems
- Everyone else
Against
- Cal GOP
Prop 17: Voting Rights Restoration for Persons on Parole Amendment
Support. If someone’s done their time, then they should be able to participate in society again.
For
- Everyone
Against
- CA Republicans
Prop 18: Primary Voting for 17-Year-Olds Amendment
Mildly support. It seems goofy to allow a 17 year old to vote in the primary for someone they can’t vote for in the actual election, but it’s probably not the end of the world
First time we have a record turnout because a YouTuber urges everyone to support Deez Nuts for the CA Democrat nomination, I’ll protest this with a pitchfork.
For
- Gavin Newson
- CA Dems
- ACLU
Against
- Not really anyone
Prop 19: Property Tax Transfers, Exemptions, and Revenue for Wildfire Agencies and Counties Amendment
Oppose. This is charity for the rich. You can sell your house and transfer the low tax basis to a new, more expensive house three times? No way. It has some good ideas but we should weigh them in a standalone proposition, or better, a state bill.
For
- Everyone
Against
- ACLU
Prop 20: Criminal Sentencing, Parole, and DNA Collection Initiative
Oppose. This is a charity to the prison systems. Collecting DNA on shoplifters and drug possessors? WTF.
For
- CA Republicans
- Police associations
- Albertsons Safeway?
Against
- CA Dems
- ACLU
Prop 21: Local Rent Control Initiative
Support. It makes sense to let cities experiment. If it doesn’t work locally, change it. What’s good in Oakland may suck in San Diego and vice versa.
For
- Bernie
- Employee unions
- Underlying theme of endorsements: “let cities decide which policies make sense for them at the local level.”
Against
- Gavin Newsom
- Builders unions
- Underlying theme of opposition: “Will reduce incentive to build affordable housing.”
Prop 22: App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative
Oppose: This is some bullshit charity for Uber, Lyft, and Door Dash.
Everything about this seems to be a lie. For example, it provides a good minimum wage, but only while the drive is actively on a run, not when they’re between runs.
For
- GOP
- Police unions
- Chambers of commerce
Against
- Everyone else
Prop 23: Dialysis Clinic Requirements Initiative
Oppose: No, and stop asking. No one wants this. As a prop, it’s super hard to get rid of if it turns out to be a horrible idea.
For
- Healthcare workers union. This would require clinics to hire more workers. It’s a job handout.
- Cal Dems
Against
- Cal Republicans, oddly enough
- Cal Medical Association. Doctors are saying this isn’t necessary.
- Cal Nurses union
Prop 24: Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative
Oppose. I generally support privacy laws, but this has issues. The EFF described Proposition 24 as “a mixed bag of partial steps backwards and forwards.” I’m very skeptical of a privacy bill that the EFF doesn’t actively endorse.
Come back next election with a better version and I’ll totally back it.
For
- Some CA Democrats
- CA firefighters union?
Against
- Republicans
- Greens
- CA nurses association
- ACLU
Prop 25: Replace Cash Bail with Risk Assessments Referendum
Support. End the cash bail system. Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. This is a good idea.
For
- Everyone
Against
- ACLU doesn’t like the new assessment system, which is a legit concern.
Alameda County
AC Transit District
Director At-large
Peeples (Endorsed by papers. Opponents aren’t bad, but Peeples is more experienced and seems to be pretty good at this.)
Peralta Community College District Trustee
Heyman (Incumbent; opponent doesn’t have much reason to vote for him.)
Superior Court
Condes (Supported by majority of progressive groups. Opponent isn’t awful, though.)
Measure V: Sales Tax
Support. Extends the existing sales tax.
Measure W: Sales Tax
Lightly oppose. Good to fund housing and services, but we’re already slammed with super high sales taxes and that feels regressive.
City of Alameda
Auditor
Kearney (unopposed)
AUSD board
(Best profiles, and endorsed by groups that seemed relevant.)
- Aney
- Little
- Williams
City Council
(By ruling out other candidates, not as an endorsement of these)
- Codiga
- White
Measure AA
Mildly support. It’s goofy that voters are being asked to rule on this petty internal bickering, but here we are.
Measure Z
Mildly oppose. Allows altering existing 3-bedroom homes into 2 1-bedroom. Parking and traffic are already bad. We couldn’t live in Alameda if we couldn’t find 3-bedroom housing.
Treasurer
Kennedy (unopposed)
Sources
Staying away from WD NAS drives for now
Western Digital just admitted to Tom’s Hardware that they use a notoriously slow technology, shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in the WD Red drives they market for use in high performance storage devices. This is a very bad look for them.
I just replaced my last 6TB Red with a Seagate IronWolf over the weekend (coincidentally; it had nothing to do with this). In my experience, Reds have a nasty habit in their old age of taking performance nosedives without reporting any SMART errors. Suddenly my storage volume would be slow and pegged at 100% utilization without anything out of the ordinary running, but everything would look OK otherwise. My NAS’s resource monitor would show that all drives are at like 30% utilization, except for a single Red hovering at the top of the graph. The drive would show no errors or really any problems at all, but would be slow as molasses for no apparent reason.
This has happened to me three times now, and each time the fix is to replace the lame duck Red. My storage volume over the weekend was actually faster during the RAID rebuild than it was with the dying drive.
I don’t trust Western Digital’s drives right now, which is a pity because they use to have a great reputation and I loved them.
The Kansas City Wormhole
I’ve had one inexplicable thing happen in my life. I remembered it today and texted an old buddy about it, and his memory of it was identical to mine.
One day after high school, 3 friends and I piled into my car and drove to Kansas City to meet up with some other friends who had moved there. They weren’t home when we arrived, and at some point we had the idea to go to the zoo to kill time because we thought it was free (and we were broke). Turns out the KC zoo was very much not free, so we decided to go back to our friends’ home.
We tried to take a shortcut through the parking lot of the Blenheim Square Research Hospital next to the zoo but got turned around in a series of one-way lanes and toll gates before we were dropped back onto the surface streets. Thing is, when we got back on the road and were trying to get our bearings, none of us could see the hospital we’d just left. We pulled into a gas station a block away and asked the attendant which direction we were from the hospital.
“Which hospital? I don’t know where that is.” When we asked him to show us where we were on a map, he pointed to the corner of Lamar Ave & Shawnee Mission Parkway - which was a good half an hour drive from the hospital whose parking lot we’d been in less than 5 minutes ago.
We were utterly flummoxed. I can’t emphasize this enough: our 1 block drive dropped us 30 minutes from where we’d started. We drove through a parking lot, turned around, and were… transported?… across town. Everyone was cold sober and very freaked out. When we compared notes, we all remembered it exactly the same way. We kind of jokingly (and more than a little seriously) talked about the “wormhole” through Kansas City.
To this day, my recollection of this is crystal clear and I simply cannot explain what happened that day.
More apps lost to subscriptions
Two more apps I really like(d) have recently announced that they’re moving to subscription models: Fantastical and Paste. The Internet almost universally decided to stomp on the former’s announcement, but I’m not sure that the latter is widely popular enough to get a lot of people riled up. With rare exception, these moves are death knells for my usage of such apps. As I’ve written before, the bottom line is that apps have to offer good value to their users. To me, $40 per year for a pretty calendar does not offer good value. A clipboard manager which jumps from $15 once to $10 per year does not offer good value.
What these changes really do for me is nudge me out of complacency and into reevaluating my app choices. As it turns out, the built-in Calendar.app isn’t as pretty as Fantastical, but for $40 per year it’s gotten to be good enough. There are any number of clipboard managers - some inside apps I was already using, like Keyboard Maestro - that aren’t as nice as Paste, but for $10 per year they’re good enough. And so those moves to subscription models, which are always accompanied by long blog posts explaining how it’s really in my best interest, move me away from the apps I had liked and push me to check out the alternatives. What they almost never do is get me to switch to the desired Patreon-like financial model.
Merlin Mann described the category of little things that sit in the background and suck money or resources from you as eels attached to your neck. One is bad. Dozens are terrible. Well, I’m getting rid of my neck eels. There are very few apps I use that can’t be replaced. And when an app’s price suddenly skyrockets and stops offering good value, that’s exactly why I do.
Commodore declared bankruptcy 25 years ago today
Commodore International declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, and pretty much sealed the fate of the Amiga. I couldn’t care less about Commodore, but I think we lost something special when Amiga died.
My parents bought an Amiga 1000 shortly after it launched (and then, begrudgingly, a 256KB RAM expansion a month later because otherwise you couldn’t do much with it). It was a magical machine with true preemptive multitasking at a time when DOS was normal, and years before Macs could decently run multiple programs at once. I exclusively used it and its successors into the late 90s, until it became obvious to me — probably years after it was obvious to everyone else — that I was past the end of the road and well off into the weeds. The most frustrating thing about owning one of those clearly superior machines was the bragging of PC and Mac owners when their clearly inferior systems added features I’d enjoyed for years. High-res color graphics! Speech synthesis! Sampled sound! A usable GUI! Shared libraries! An object-oriented plugin system! Cross-application scripting! And most importantly, that gorgeous multitasking! Yes, yes, that’s great; I’d had those for a decade before they became popular on other personal computers.
Other people have written better than I possibly could, and at great length, about the many ways that Commodore managed to screw up their golden child. I was only peripherally aware of all that at the time. But I know that they had something amazingly special that earned a fiercely loyal cult following, and I truly believe we lost something good when they died.
RIP, Amiga. You were loved.
A standard for describing a site's password rules
There’s not a universal standard for what a valid password on a website must look like. Some sites allow you to use any four letters. Others require at least twenty characters, including at least one numeric digit and one “special character” (aka punctuation). Even when using a password manager, the process of creating a good one looks a lot like:
- Turn the password manager’s strength settings all the way up and generate a password.
- The website replies “passwords can’t be more than 20 characters long”.
- Adjust the length down to twenty. Generate a new one and send it to the website.
- The website replies “passwords may only contain the special characters ‘$_!#’.
- Adjust the number of symbols down to zero. Generate. Try again.
- The website replies “passwords must contain at least two special characters”.
- Turn the number of symbols back up to two. Click “generate” until you a password that contains punctuation from “$”, “_”, “!”, and “#”, but nothing else. Generate. Try again.
- …and repeat until you’ve appeased the website’s rules.
I propose instead that websites should document their password rules in a standardized, machine-readable manner. For instance, suppose that each site hosted a file in a pre-defined location, like /.well-known/password-rules.yaml, in a format such as:
max_length: 64
min_length: 8
allowed_symbols: "$#@!"
min_symbols: 1
min_upper: 1
min_lower: 1
min_digits: 1
matches: "^[a-z]+(.*)+$"
Then tools like 1Password could look for that file and tune their settings to suit. The new process for creating a password would look like:
- Tell 1Password to generate a password for the site you’re currently looking at.
- It fetches the rules file, interprets it, creates a password that satisfies all the requirements, and pastes it in the password field on the site.
Further suppose that the standard defined the calling conventions of a REST endpoint for changing passwords, and the rules file included that URL like:
change_url: /ajax/change_my_password
Wouldn’t it be just lovely if 1Password could automatically update every such website on a monthly basis, or whenever a site announces a security breach?
Ringing the bird
I was on an early morning walk and came across a guy staring at the telephone wires. As I approached, I caught the distinct aroma of marijuana. I turned to see what he might be looking at, and he held a finger to his lips to quiet me. He whispered, “there’s a mockingbird up there. If you listen, he’ll ring like a bell.” Sure, buddy.
So we stood there in silence, and then the little bird opened his mouth and sang chimes to us. He rang like a bell.
The stranger and I looked at each other, then smiled and laughed as we went our separate ways. That was a nice way to start a day.
Heavy traffic is not a DDoS
Ajit Pai claimed that when the FCC asked citizens to comment on Net Neutrality, their website was attacked with a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. I’ve heard many of his defenders claim that an overwhelming number of people trying to use the website to comment was in fact a DDoS. This is a lie.
It was not a kind of DDoS. Words mean things, and “DDoS” specifically means a coordinated attack. What the FCC experienced is what we call “heavy traffic”. A car analogy:
- “Heavy traffic” is rush hour on the freeway.
- “DDoS” is a mass protest with people physically blocking lanes on the road.
Even though the end result might be everything moving slower than desired, if you’re stuck in traffic but you tell your boss that you’re late to work because a protest blocked the street, you’re exactly as much a liar as Ajit Pai was when he perjured himself to Congress.
"At a Crucial Juncture, Trump's Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation"
At a Crucial Juncture, Trump’s Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation — The New York Times
Highlights:
Joseph diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has pushed theories on Fox News that the F.B.I. made up evidence against Mr. Trump, left the team on Sunday. He had been hired last Monday, three days before the head of the president’s personal legal team, John Dowd, quit after determining that the president was not listening to his advice.”
Also:
“Mr. Dowd had concluded that there was no upside and that the president, who often does not tell the truth, could increase his legal exposure if his answers were not accurate.”
Jokes about “the best people” aside, it sounds like genuinely competent people want nothing to do with the fiasco in DC.
How many minutes of Internet are you paying for each month?
If you pay for a 100Mbps cable connection to the Internet and your plan sets a 300GB data cap, you can use your connection at full speed for 8.3 hours per month before hitting overuse charges.
If your cell phone plan supports 50Mbps LTE speeds and has a 10GB data cap, you’re only allowed to use it at full speed for 33 minutes per month.
I think it’s deceptive for an ISP to advertise an Internet connection’s speeds without disclosing how much you can actually use it without being disconnected or racking up extra fees. I’ve written to my senators asking them to introduce legislation to protect customers from this misleading and predatory practice:
I believe that all Internet service providers should be required to disclose, as part of their advertising, how many minutes you may use their service at full speed without hitting data caps.
For instance, a cable company advertising “100 megabits!” but imposing a 300GB data cap only allows their users to download information for about 8 hours per month. A cell phone company that advertises fast 50 megabit LTE speed but has a 10GB data limit only gives their customers about 33 minutes per month of full speed usage.
I believe that simultaneously advertising fast Internet connections while only allowing customers to use it for a short amount of time each month is highly deceptive and should be illegal. Please introduce truth in advertising legislation requiring ISPs to disclose what portion of time customers on a typical plan would be allowed to use an Internet service being advertised.
I don’t reasonably expect anything to come of this, but I’m going to try anyway.
Airlines Restrict 'Smart Luggage' Over Fire Hazards Posed By Batteries
Airlines Restrict ‘Smart Luggage’ Over Fire Hazards Posed By Batteries : The Two-Way : NPR:
“Beginning Jan. 15, customers who travel with a smart bag must be able to remove the battery in case the bag has to be checked at any point in the customer’s journey. If the battery cannot be removed, the bag will not be allowed,” American said in a statement on Friday. The same day, Delta and Alaska announced similar policies on their flights.
American’s policy dictates that if the bag is carry-on size, passengers can take the luggage onboard, so long as the battery can be removed if needed. If passengers need to check the bag, the battery must be removed and carried onboard. But if the bag has a nonremovable battery, it can’t be checked or carried on.
An FAA spokesman told The Washington Post that the airlines’ policies are “consistent with our guidance that lithium-ion batteries should not be carried in the cargo hold.”
Last month I wrote: “Listening to an ad for luggage with a built in USB charger, which may be the worst idea ever. Now your suitcase can grow obsolete. What if it breaks? Or a bigger battery comes along? And you always have the weight penalty even when you don’t need it.” I think we can all agree now that this is a terrible idea for many reasons.
App subscriptions must offer value
Software authors are increasingly switching to subscription models to make their work “sustainable”. Too often they’re forgetting to make a value proposition that helps their customers. Here’s a hint: if you have to write a Medium post explaining why I should support your new business model, you’re doing it wrong.
I understand why authors can’t afford to write an app and then offer free upgrades for the following decade. That’s a great way to cut off the income supply that keeps new development happening. Neither authors nor their customers want that! Creators want to be compensated for their time and users want up-to-date software with competitive features. Buying an application one time shouldn’t come with the expectation that I should get all the newest work for free, forever.
The alternative is not that purchasers are an endless font of cash and goodwill, though. A recent trend is for annual app subscriptions to cost roughly the same as buying a copy of the app each year. In the real world, no one does this and it’s not sustainable. If you want to move to a subscription model, your price has to make sense as a value proposition by itself. Customers don’t care about pretty words and guilt trips in long blog posts. They want a good deal from their own perspective.
From a customer’s point of view, the math is simple: your target annual fee is the previous price divided by the number of years I would have expected to keep a paid copy before upgrading. For instance, if your upgrades used to cost $40, and you released new paid major versions every two years, I can be convinced to subscribe at a rate of $20 per year. Anything beyond that is a price increase, and that increase must be justified exactly as if you were selling me a new copy instead of a monthly rental. That is, you can’t tack on “…and now with cloud sync!”, or “…for teams!”, or pack it with other features I won’t care about and expect that I’ll happily pay twice the old price.
1Password did this right: although their new “1Password Families” service costs more than their old software licenses, it offers lots of features that genuinely make it more useful. Smile Software did this wrong: their new annual TextExpander subscription service costs about the same as their previous one-time software licenses, but all of the new features were geared to a workflow that could not have been less attractive to me if they’d tried. They were asking me to pay a lot more and get nothing of value to me in return.
In summary, you want to make money. I want you to run a profitable business so that you’ll continue to make the software I enjoy. But you have to remember that while your app is your labor of love, for me it’s just a tool I use for work or play and it’s not my life’s ambition. It’s the one among several competitors that had the best value proposition. If that ever changes, I’ll re-evaluate and move on to one of the others. I’m frustrated that this is 101-level business class stuff, and we shouldn’t need to keep learning this lesson anew.
Introducing metric quantity units for computing
In computing, metric-sounding prefixes almost universally refer to sizes expressed as powers of two:
- kilo = 2^10 = 1024
- mega = 2^20 = 1,048,576
- giga = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824
- …and so on.
In 1998, the IEC incorrectly voted to change that, and it’s time to fix this mistake.
Using “k” to mean 2^10 dates back to at least 1959, with Gordon Bell of IBM ("Architecture of the IBM System/360"), Gene Amdahl of DEC ("Instrumentation Techniques in Nuclear Pulse Analysis"), and others standardizing them as units in 1964. Since that time, binary units have been used pervasively to describe quantities. Well, almost. Hard drive manufacturers started using the smaller, metric homonyms to describe their products with larger numbers than their competitors. That is, a company could market their 50MB hard drive as 52 (metric) MB so that it sounded larger than anyone else’s 50MB drive. This caught on like wildfire because marketing loved it, even though binary sizes were correctly used for everything else.
The International Electrotechnical Commission decided to weigh in, and in 1998 (the same year that gave us SOAP) decided that the electronics industry should change their standard units to use a new system. Henceforth metric-sounding prefixes would start referring to decimal sizes, like:
- kilo = 10^3 = 1,000
- mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000
- giga = 10^9 = 1,000,000
- etc.
This was bad enough, because those numbers don’t naturally correspond to anything computer-related except hard drive sizes. For instance, the IEC would have us incorrectly believe that a 32-bit address could refer to 4.29GB of RAM. No. Worse, though, were the fictional binary units they invented to replace the actual industry standard. From then on, we were to say that:
- 1,024 bytes = 1 KiB = 1 kibibyte
- 1,048,576 bytes = 1 MiB = 1 mebibyte
- 1,073,741,824 = 1 GiB = 1 gibibyte
- and I lack the stomach to continue.
Donald Knuth said:
The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival — who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! […] I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says “we’re going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)” the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there.
Knuth, as always, was right. The awful-sounding standard was appropriately mocked and ignored. Western Digital settled a lawsuit in 2006 for marketing an 80 billion byte hard drive as 80 gigabytes, with the plaintiff citing the fact that even then — 8 years after the “standard” was passed — essentially no one used metric sizes to refer to quantities.
A few well-meaning but misled companies have started using the metric units. For instance, Apple’s macOS describes hard drive sizes in metric units (but inconsistently lists RAM quantities in correct binary sizes such as 16GB). Before this snowballs out of control, we need to reach a real industry-wide standard that engineers will actually use. I assert that:
- Computing, as do all other industries, has its own jargon. Our mouse is not a mammal, and our prefixes don’t need to mirror the metric system.
- The current IEC standard looks terrible, sounds terrible, and is nearly universally avoided.
- The great thing about standards is that we can make our own and start using it.
The binary kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte are our heritage and our vocabulary. In the realm of computing, we own those terms. Therefore, I propose a new standard for describing storage quantities in computing. Effective immediately, metric-sounding prefixes in computing officially refer to their binary sizes as they have since IBM and DEC claimed them in the 1960s. Furthermore, metric sizes will use the new “tri” infix notation — abbreviated “t” — like so:
- 1,000 bytes = 1 KtB = 1 kitribyte
- 1,000,000 bytes = 1MtB = 1 metribyte
- 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1GtB = 1 gitribyte
- and so on for tetribyte, petribyte, extribyte, and so on.
Let people who want to use different units be the ones to adopt them. And frankly, “metribyte” sounds a lot better than “mebibyte” ever will.
Traveling with OmniFocus and OmniOutliner
I don’t travel a lot, so when I do I invariably find that I’ve forgotten something important (9 PM the night before: “say, dear, where are we boarding the dogs?” “I thought you were doing that!”). I wrote an AppleScript to copy items from an OmniOutliner document to an OmniFocus project so that I never have to forget again.
I love OmniFocus. It runs my life. But it lacks any kind of a template systems to let you quickly churn out copies of a project. That’s exactly what I needed here, though. Fortunately OmniOutliner fills that gap and gives me a nice way to describe that project. Here’s how mine starts:
When I run the AppleScript and say “I want to travel on June 24”, it creates actions like “Call the vet to make pet boarding arrangements, with the Phone context, due on June 3 at 5PM”. I add everything to this list:
- USB gadgets to charge
- Toiletries to pack
- Things to remove from my messenger bag (so I don’t find myself in line at security and realize I’ve still got my pocket knife)
- People to notify, such as telling my credit union that I’ll be using my debit card in some exotic place like Topeka and please not to block it as fraud
A magic moment for me was hearing Merlin Mann’s suggestion to add an “update this list” action:
A couple of days into my trip, I get a reminder to add anything new I’d forgotten or wish I’d done differently. This turns my template into a living document of exactly my own personalized requirements.
Provider
The shield was half-heartedly poking at her keyboard when the car started to move. Oh. “I guess I’m rolling. Coverage is sketch here so I might cut out.”
“Oh my God. You’re still shielding her? I thought we paid you better than that.” His voice lifted when he disapproved. She rolled her eyes. “Her husband gives me a hundred bucks plus six a mile. She probably just wants ice cream or fries or something.”
She didn’t mention the time when it wasn’t just ice cream or fries, but shopping down in the Long Beach Autonomous Zone. That trip had covered her rent for two months. She didn’t know how to get any good drugs in Little Utah, though, and she had been bored out of her mind, barely leaving the car. He was still pissy that she’d left without telling him first. She didn’t care. They chose her more often because she was willing to roll on a moment’s notice.
“I worry, you know.” His tone softened. He probably did worry. “I know. You shouldn’t. Nothing ever happens. As long as a rock doesn’t fall on the highway or something, it’s free money.” If it did, well, that would be different. As negotiated and coordinated with the AIs steering the cars around them, her own little car would race to wedge its way between the road hazard and the cargo she was protecting, absorbing the damage so that her employer’s car didn’t have to. Lots of shields walked away from events. Sometimes they didn’t. For six bucks a mile, she was ready to take that chance. US West law didn’t allow unoccupied vehicles on the road, so she hung out and napped her way through riding shotgun.
“Look, I’ve gotta go. I need more insulin and they pay up hourly. I wanna top off my playlist while I still have data. I’ll hit you up when I get back.”
“If. If you get back.”
“When,” her voice shaking. She didn’t have time for this.
America's military versus the world
I am pro-military. I think having a strong military means we’re unlikely to have to use it to protect ourselves. But how strong does it actually need to be?
For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that spending corresponds to strength. That is, America spending $1 million gives us roughly as much military power as China or Russia spending $1 million. If this is not true, then we’re spending money poorly and should re-evaluate our budget before increasing it. But that whole line of argument frankly disrespects our world’s finest soldiers and sailors, so let’s agree to set that aside for now.
According to SIPRI, these are the budgets of the world’s biggest militaries in 2015, in billions of dollars:
World Military Spending, 2015
| # | Country | Spending ($B) | Cumulative ($B) | Ally |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 596.0 | ||
| 2 | China | 215.0 | 215.0 | |
| 3 | Saudi Arabia | 87.2 | 302.2 | |
| 4 | Russia | 66.4 | 368.6 | |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 55.5 | 424.1 | ✔️ |
| 6 | India | 51.3 | 475.4 | ✔️ |
| 7 | France | 50.9 | 526.3 | ✔️ |
| 8 | Japan | 40.9 | 567.2 | ✔️ |
| 9 | Germany | 39.4 | 606.6 | ✔️ |
| 10 | South Korea | 36.4 | 643.0 | ✔️ |
The extra column, “Cumulative”, is a running total of the budgets of countries other than the United States. Look at Germany, #9 on the list: that’s where the rest of the world added together is finally bigger than America. We literally spend more than the next 8 countries after us. Of those, UK, India, France, Japan, and Germany are staunch US allies. Removing those, we outspend the remaining top three countries by 60%. Even in an outlandishly unrealistic scenario where we’d be fighting all three of them simultaneously1, with no help at all from our allies, we’d probably still win by a wide margin.
If something like that happened, we would get help from our allies on this list, whose militaries add up to $274.4B, or just $94.4B shy of those top three “unfriendly” countries (and $59.4B greater than China alone). In a likely situation where the rest of the world shows up, our combined allied strength is vastly stronger than any potential enemies.
We’re currently hearing lots of propaganda about our pathetic, run-down little military. Those are unpatriotic lies. We already have the world’s largest military and it’s nearly three times stronger than runner up China. We could probably be making wiser decisions about how we’re spending our money, but if anyone tells you we should be spending more, make sure their hands aren’t reaching for your wallet.
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China and Russia aren’t strongly allied with each other; they’re not going to double-team us. We are China’s biggest trading partner and they don’t want to cripple their economy by destroying that relationship. We have our disagreements with Saudi Arabia, but not so many that they’re going to throw away decades of friendship and attack us. That we’d have to fight all three at once is ridiculous, but I’m using that as an absurd worst-case scenario. ↩︎
Search-proof your devices when traveling
Over-eager airport security has recently taken to making travelers unlock their phones and tablets for examination. This is both unforgivably invasive and trivially easy to defeat. Here’s how to protect your data1 on your iPhone or iPad2 when traveling.
Simplest: disable Touch ID
- Enable a six-digit passcode on your device.
- Set your device to erase itself after 10 failed passcode attempts. You should do these two steps anyway!
- Before you get to airport security, turn your device off. iOS devices require a passcode to unlock themselves the first time after they’re turned on. For dumb legal reasons, passcodes are generally thought to be protected by the 5th amendment, but fingerprints are not.
Now you have at least the physical ability to refuse to unlock your device. Be prepared for mental or legal pressure to supply your password, though. File this under “better than nothing”.
If you want to keep your current device
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device to its factory settings.
- When you get where you’re going, restore your device from backup.
You’re traveling with a device, but one as bare as the day you originally bought it. Be prepared to explain why you’re carrying an empty device.
Keep your device, but less suspicious
- Turn on iCloud backup.
- When it’s finished backing up, reset your device.
- Start using it. Add a few contacts. Set up a (disposable) email account. Add some songs.
Now you have a plausibly used device. When you get to your destination, reset your device again. Restore it from backup. This is more work than the previous instructions, but also less suspicious.
If you’d rather travel bare-handed
- Turn on iCloud backup. Let it finish.
- Leave this device at home.
- When you get where you’re going, buy a replacement device. Restore it from the backup you made earlier. Now you have an exact clone of the original.
This is the most expensive option, but you can’t unlock what you don’t have.
Conclusion
Searching travelers’ devices at airports is security theater. It’s a massive and inconvenient violation of privacy, and only the world’s least prepared criminals would ever get caught this way. I guarantee I’m not the first person to think of backing up a phone and restoring it at my destination. Since it’s ineffective and almost certainly unconstitutional, cooler heads would recommend ending these pointless searches. Don’t wait for that to happen. Protect your data.
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This isn’t meant as advice for criminals. Lots of people travel with information they’re legally obligated to safeguard, like company plans, legal documents, and other confidential information. ↩︎
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Similar ideas apply for Android and other devices, but I don’t have one of those to experiment with. ↩︎