Steve Reads

Have you ever thought that someone or some product was doing something in exactly the wrong way, and that you’d do it differently if you had any control over it? Then you ought to be using open-source software.

I just had another run-in with the “let’s do it differently” principle. I was working with a client today whose machines got all messed up when its AirPort router rebooted. Ideally, when a machine reboots, the router would look at its MAC address (part of every Ethernet card), say, “Hey, I’ve seen that MAC before,” and assign that MAC the same IP address it got the last time it booted. There are some troubles with this, naturally: what if a machine gets an IP from the DHCP server once, then never returns to the network (as might happen if the DHCP server is assigning IPs for an open wireless network)? If enough machines did this, the MAC-to-IP table might fill up very quickly. The natural way around this would be to have a fixed-size (but large) table, and push MACs off the table if they’ve not shown up for a while.

But that’s all irrelevant. AirPort routers don’t do this (it’s called “DHCP reservation”) and apparently neither can Linksys routers.

But (all together now) that’s stupid, and it shouldn’t be that way. So Adam made the commonsense suggestion that I should get a cheap Linux box, install two network cards, and use that machine as the router. I’d bet there’s some Linux DHCP daemon that will handle DHCP reservation.

I repeat: if you’re fed up with the state of things and you wish you could fix it yourself, you need to be running Linux. It’s designed for people like us.

I’m going to kill my friends’ chicken on Friday. They bought a bunch of chickens a few months back, inspired by their 9-year-old’s sudden obsession with owning chickens, and are in the (long) process of building a coop to accommodate them. They wanted only hens, because a) they want to eat fresh eggs and b) their neighbors don’t want loud cock-a-doodle-doos at the break of dawn. Unfortunately, chicken salesmen (like used-car salesmen, only feathered and squawky) often slip roosters into the mix, because they’re (the roosters are) so hard to get rid of. So my friends ended up with a few roosters. They managed to pawn off a few on some people they met, but one — Victor — took longer to come out of his cloaca, so to speak. They couldn’t sell him off. So I’m gonna kill ‘im.

The big reason is that it seems disgusting to eat animals without being able to kill them. I’ve been ethically committed for a while to the view that eating animals is just as unethical as eating people: the more we learn about evolution and man’s place in the universe, the more it seems that there’s little separating us from them. So why are we allowed to eat them? Unfortunately, as with my ethical acceptance of Linux long before I actually started using it, my actions have not lined up with my beliefs. Someday soon, I hope they will.

In the meantime, it does seems cowardly in the extreme to let someone else do the dirty work of killing animals that end up on my plate. I mentioned tonight to my parents that I’ll be killing Victor next weekend, in all likelihood by snapping his neck. This horrified my mom, who hates to imagine her son as a murderer. (Her words.)

But isn’t that ignoring the truth that if what I’m doing is murder, then people who eat store-bought meat are just condoning someone else’s violence? The non-vegetarians among us are probably responsible for the deaths of a few cows and dozens of chickens in the average year, not to speak of an entire lifetime. If someone who kills a chicken with his bare hands is a murderer, aren’t most meat-eaters just contracting out death?

All I’m making here is an argument from consistency, not an argument about the immorality of meat-eating. I’m pretty much already there, but I think you can buy the consistency argument without subscribing to the moral one.

Is there anyone left who believes it was a bad idea to trade Nomar, given the guys we got and the team’s performance since he left?

Having done a decent job inviting people to use Gmail, I have five more invitations available. Again, if you’d like one of these invitations, please email me.

The XFree86 project recently changed the terms of their license, and a number of Linux distributors — including Debian and Mandrake — have taken steps to move away from the new license. My question is: might it be smarter for distributions to ship only GPLed software?

Finally someone in the mainstreamish press has brought up the Bushies’ (père et fils) habit of dirty tricks (my cache).

Writing or thinking about Swift Boat and all that it implies makes me literally ill, so I’ve been avoiding it. But since that author put it well, I’ll quote him; somehow that’s less frustrating than having to come up with a pithy sentence expressing the same anger:

The mantle passed to Bush the Younger in 1994 when he ran for governor of Texas against Ann Richards. She was a salty, strong, unmarried woman. And guess what? A whispering campaign got rolling in East Texas that she was gay and so were some of her staffers. Then one of the Bush campaign’s local chairmen told a reporter that Richards’ appointment of “avowed homosexuals” might become a campaign issue. In the twisted way the press legitimizes talking about questionable issues, that remark made the whole deal fair game.

Noam Chomsky, for all that people find wrong with him, really does have at least the broad contours of the media figured out. This Swift Boat business has brought out its most disgusting features. For one thing, it’s much easier for a journalist to consult a source from the White House or the DoD: those government organs have multimillion-dollar budgets every year to make life cozy for journalists; if a journalist wants to write a story about the DoD, he’s going to go there first and may not go anywhere else. Under tight deadlines, this is perfectly understandable. What it means, though, is that the incumbent power structure has a built-in advantage when dealing with the press. We see this every time Scott McClellan comes to bat for the administration. Given the number of times that he’s spewed obvious evasions, the press should have dug into two dozen exposés by now. But have they? No. The easiest explanation consistent with the data, it seems to me, is laziness — laziness exploited by the Administration.

The worst part is the lifecycle of the Swift Boat story, which is what really kills me. First someone proposes that Kerry’s a crook (for lack of a more-succinct way to put it). This gets some press coverage. Then the existence of the story becomes the story — “this Swift Boat [bullshit] story could be an issue for the Kerry campaign,” etc.

In comes the press’s ridiculous insistence on “balance,” which is again an implicit win for the side with the weaker argument; without any effort, they’ve just gained strength through repetition. So now even though the press has (3/4-heartedly) jumped on the story about Swift Boat’s implausibility, the damage has been done. No newspaper, as far as I know, has said outside of the op-ed pages that the Swift Boat story is baseless and absurd. Instead we get quotes like

O’BRIEN: All right, we are listening to Max Cleland, former senator from Georgia and former Lieutenant Jim Rassmann, a former Green Beret whose life was saved by John Kerry in the Mekong Delta in 1969. Although, that is a point of dispute, given what has all transpired here with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

It’s a “point of dispute” even though the story is a transparent falsehood. It’s a point of dispute because journalists haven’t done the debunking job that the Woodward-and-Bernstein image of journalists paints.

The story finally dies, but the lingering damage is there. A good recent example of this is the story about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the only real defender of which is Republican hack William Safire. But Bush and Cheney keep bringing up the story, and a sizable percentage of the American population believes it. See Gigerenzer and Todd (citation in right sidebar) on their version of the availability heuristic: it may be rational to choose the better-publicized option when faced with a choice, and Republicans know it.

I’m not sure about the best way to respond to these kinds of attacks, other than to kill them when they start. Even then, whisper campaigns that can’t be easily squashed often do the job that an organized smear cannot. Is advising Kerry to “just stick to the issues” even a good idea?

The Sox are now 5.5 games behind the Yankees. We’re 1/2 a game ahead of Anaheim in the wild-card race and 2 ahead of Texas. This while Pokey Reese is out with a thumb injury, Varitek is serving a four-game suspension, and Kevin Youkilis is in Florida getting rehabbed. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll win the wild card. If that happens  . . .  who knows how we’ll do?

You may think you have the cutest baby relatives in the world, but you are wrong.

A few economic issues popped into mind tonight: 1) outsourcing, 2) music and software “piracy,” and 3) price discrimination by places like Amazon. In all of these, I’m wondering whether people are just too focused on individual cases and not focused enough on the broader picture. About outsourcing, for instance: it seems reasonable to claim that outsourcing actually helps the American consumer, by forcing down product prices and forcing down the price of inputs to other products: we buy cheaper steel from abroad, which helps us sell more cars, which is where our real comparative advantage comes in. If American companies could make more money from producing steel domestically, or if car companies could earn more buying domestic steel, they would already be doing so.

There are arguments, of course, against outsourcing. One is that foreign companies have weaker environmental protections, less unionization and so forth. This isn’t really a level playing field, and the U.S. — with its relatively strong human-rights laws for workers — is at a disadvantage. Overcoming this objection requires some elaborate argumentation to explain how the market would somehow encourage democracy in developing nations. Thousands of “disappeared” Chileans are waiting anxiously on the phone for you to make this argument; I’ll be in the other room.

The point, though, is that it often seems as though people are ignoring the overall effect of a policy and focusing on individual cases; the story of the closed American factory is far more gripping than the story of lower product prices and a correspondingly lower cost of living.

Perhaps this shows up more clearly in the music-piracy debate. I’ve heard many people tell me that I support the downloading of free music in certain cases, or the use of open-source software, because I’m not making a living off either music or software. This is surely correct, but I’d like to think that I also have the broader picture in mind: requiring all software to be open-source creates benefits far down the line, including reduced costs of learning (imagine if every aspiring web designer could get a free copy of Photoshop), reduced costs of product development (imagine if the developers of Mozilla could borrow innovations from IE for free), reduced installation costs, etc. As for music piracy, imagine if every piano student could download every Thelonious Monk album for free. The economic effects of an economic policy percolate well beyond the people immediately harmed by the policy. Imagine if turn-of-the-century Americans focused only on lost horse-and-buggies when tallying up the economic effects of the automobile. For every flattened institution, there may be another on the rise. This is the discipline of the market.

Or take price discrimination, which seems outwardly indefensible. Under a price-discrimination plan, a service like Amazon would take a guess about the maximum amount of money you’d be willing to pay for a good or service, and would charge you that much for the product. In this way, different people would pay different amounts for the same book. It seems unjust, but a) it happens all the time (when you buy a car, it’s called dickering; when you buy an airline ticket, you pay different amounts for the same seat depending upon when you bought the ticket, and your inability to resell the ticket makes this price discrimination possible), and more importantly b) it’s probably economically efficient. The economically-efficient solution is the one that maximizes total economic wealth, and comes about when everyone is paying exactly the maximum that he or she would be willing to pay for a product. Without price discrimination, everyone pays the same amount — some people are paying less than they’d be willing to pay, while others might not buy the product at all because it’s too expensive. Those who don’t buy the product might then go and buy a substitute good that’s not as desirable as the one they really wanted, but which they can afford.

And yet I see a lot of resistance to price discrimination. It just seems ethically wrong to people. Part of this is, I think, a misunderstanding of how much price discrimination happens already. Part of it, though, is that the local effects (some people pay more for the same thing, which is bad) have a sign opposite to that of the global effects (total income is maximized, which is good). And it’s hard to step back from a policy and say, “While this might hurt me, it might also do some good for everyone around me.”

Maybe this is all part of the general problem of giving a policy’s local effects the same sign as its global effects — in other words, making the local incentives match the global rewards.

I’m at home in Vermont now to meet my niece (about which more soon, when I have photos to document her awe-inspiring cuteness), and I’m taking the time to read through blogs that I’ve not read in a while. While I’m at it, I’m discovering (via my favorite Windows newsreader) that physics post-doc, Sante Fe Institute dude, and generally fascinating writer Cosma Shalizi has written all kinds of interesting stuff recently.

I’d like to single out

• his piece on corporate governance (with a modest and intriguing proposal therein),
• a little blurb about “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?,” which Shalizi describes as “glorious and essential,”
• and an article about the condition of the working class in China that has made me want to read The Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine.

While on the topic of socialism, check out

• a thorough and satisfying evisceration of a paper on information theory written by an Intelligent Design creationist (not sure if the creationism shows up anywhere in the paper),
• some interesting points about fitting power-law distributions (and a link to an academic paper about the same topic),
• a fascinating read about Deborah Mayo’s philosophy-of-science book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge, and
• a couple links about topics in finance, including the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.

He’s a pretty remarkable writer, and I look forward to reading everything he writes; the appearance of an unread mark on his RSS feed fills me with low-grade glee. Welcome back to the web, Cosma.

Can anyone explain to me why Microsoft chose to use a deliberately crippled MS-DOS shell back in the day? UNIX was available at the time, along with various shells like DR-DOS (I’d provide a link to the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” link, but it’s horribly designed [it uses BLINK tags, ferchrissakes] and I don’t want to give it one more link). So why would DOS lack for-loops (I don’t think it got them until the NT shell extensions), while-loops (ditto), and all the powerful shell tools that UNIX people are used to, like “find” and “grep”? (Sidenote: you owe it to yourself to learn grep and find; they make it easy to find files when you know very little about them. Also, in the sense that you can search for arbitrary regular expressions with grep, whereas you can only search for text strings with the DOS and Windows tools, one can probably quantify just how much stronger grep is than the Windows tools. I would not be surprised if the power ratio were infinite.)

It’s not as though adding in more functionality would make the DOS shell any harder to use; if you don’t want those functions, don’t use them. Yet somehow Microsoft went without these features. Does anyone know why?

I hope this is just a random tossoff:

Bolstering Cashman’s self-assurance is the $12 million the Yankees are saving on Contreras’ contract through 2006 — cash they can use toward Matt Clement or Pedro Martinez or Carl Pavano or any of the other free agent pitchers this winter.

The Yankees getting Pedro? That would be too depressing for words. Especially after Manny (not sure in how much jest) offered to give up 1/4 of his salary to keep Pedro in Boston.

Brad DeLong has a great little reminder of how long ago the White House telegraphed its slime method:

Weren’t we told by the Financial Times last December that senior Republicans were “comment[ing] wryly: ‘By the time the White House finishes with Kerry, no one will know what side of the (Vietnam) war he fought on.’”

Googling didn’t turn up the date of that FT article; if anyone knows, please send it my way.

I had a long discussion about the bullshit Swift Boat non-controversy this weekend. There’s a certain meta-logic to the whole process, and I intend to go off about it when I’m not dead tired. Also, thinking about this campaign ties me in knots and turns up my Cynicism Volume Knob. I’d much prefer to go read about Thomas Jefferson’s paranoid delusions that Alexander Hamilton wanted to turn the U.S. into an aristocratic kingdom. Somehow that’s easier to stomach.

P.S.: My friend Mike passes along a pointer to a citation on the FT story:

From The Financial Times, left-wing rag, December 9th, 2003  . . . 

The Bush campaign machine, well oiled and already rolling, should not be underestimated. The current president’s father gained a formidable reputation as a nasty campaigner, though the presidential fingerprints were carefully wiped off negative blueprints administered by Lee Atwater, the first Mr Bush’s ruthless chief strategist.

Karl Rove, a disciple of Mr Atwater, is similarly meticulous about keeping the president publicly above the fray. Yet it is an open secret in Washington that White House-blessed campaign strategists have been working quietly for months to compile potentially damaging background on all the Democratic candidates. In the early going, when it appeared Mr Kerry would emerge as the frontrunner, one senior Republican commented wryly: “By the time the White House finishes with Kerry, no one will know what side of the (Vietnam) war he fought on.”

And from Bush campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, yesterday on Meet the Press  . . . 

The fact is this campaign is unprecedented in our praise of our opponent’s service during Vietnam.

WhyDoTheDemocratsFieldShittyPresidentialCandidates.com is still available, everyone.

I’m just sayin’.

I think it may be time.

(Introduction if you’re confused.)

Have people been paying attention to the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth slime? It’s amazing to me: this is a group that is obviously a front for the Bush administration, and Bush or his aides are obviously stage-managing the whole slimy affair. Josh Marshall gives a good synopsis of the whole thing. Bush’s henchmen slimed John McCain during the 2000 election (in South Carolina especially, if memory serves), forcing McCain to drop out. I don’t believe he fought back. Kerry looks like he’s starting to. Let’s hope that in the less than three months remaining, the sliming doesn’t do any real damage.

Josh Marshall links today to the text of a speech by Karl Popper, a man whose main idea — falsifiability — seems to me right in the general outline, even if people like Thomas Kuhn have poked holes in parts of it. Check out the speech; it’s a straightforward and short introduction to what makes falsifiability tick.

The ESPN baseball statistics are fetish porn to me, but I wish they’d make them even more flexible. For instance, I wish I could add in columns of my choosing, and have ESPN calculate the values of these new columns. One I want in particular is TBF/IP — Total Batters Faced per Inning Pitched. As it stands, the TBF statistic isn’t comparing apples to apples: closing pitchers will have a low TBF, but they’ll also have a low IP. Pitchers who play complete games will be correspondingly high in each measure.

Basically, I just want the ESPN stats in a big comma-delimited database file that I can go buck-wild on with R. So far I’ve not found the detailed statistics that I’m looking for, but maybe I’ve just not looked hard enough.

Rob Pegoraro wrote an article a little while ago in the Washington Post entitled “Linux, Still An Awkward Alternative” (my cache); the title pretty well suggests where the article’s going. The article makes a number of false claims, including

That brings up Linux’s biggest embarrassment: software installation. Outside of core system updates (ably handled by each distribution’s auto-update software), my attempts to add new programs were routinely stymied by the chancy availability of prepackaged downloads and “dependency” issues, in which the installation failed because the computer lacked needed library files.

The traditional fix has been to download a program’s source code and build it into the finished product on your computer, a lengthy and tricky process. The better solution is the smart package-installer Fedora employs; its “yum” utility fetches a program from an online archive, resolves dependency issues and sets it up with one command.

I have a few years of solid experience using Linux, and not once in that entire time have I compiled a program other than the kernel. (One can choose to compile the kernel, but one isn’t required to.) Every program I need is available through the Debian repository, and all the programs that those programs depend on are also in Debian. This is true of every major distribution, as far as I know. (I’ve heard something about how Gentoo requires — by design — that you compile every program for maximal efficiency tailored to your specific computer, but I’ve not used it.) It’s certainly true of Mandrake, Red Hat, and Debian.

There are a few other problems with the article, but it’s at least valuable to see what the rest of the world thinks about my favorite OS.

Since Pegoraro got Slashdotted, he was deluged with irate email. He presponded a little bit, then posted an actual response on Slashdot.

(Thanks to Adam Kessel for sending the guy a very smart email, and forwarding me his response. I wouldn’t have known about the Slashdot post had Adam not alerted me to it. Thanks also to Adam Gerard for pointing me to the article to begin with.)

It’s an old article, but it’s still interesting to read all the misstatements and evasions in Steve Ballmer’s discussion of Linux. Those of us using, promoting, and coding this “20-year-old system” will smile and keep doing our work. Whether Microsoft is as late to the open-source idea as it was to the idea of the Internet is its decision.