09:00am Call Dell for price for replacement RW331 card (NVidia 8700m GT SLI, ebay prices range from 300-500$)

09:10am transferred, disconnected with "Too busy to answer your call please call back later" from IVR system

09:20am Call back.

09:30am Repeat

09:30am Call back.

09:40am Repeat

09:40am Call back.

09:50am Repeat

09:50am Call back.

10:00am Repeat

10:00am Call back.

10:10am Repeat

10:10am Call back, ask for direct number to parts department, request denied, transferred, disconnected again, this happens another four times until I finally get a line that keeps me on hold for 22 minutes.

10:42am Explain that I'm looking for a part to replace failed component on XPS m1730 notebook technician fails comprehension and instantly transfers me to technical support.

10:53 Line failure.

10:53 Call back. explain massive amount of prior disconnects, explain problem in exacting detail, explain product is out of warranty, explain need for simple price on simple component which I am well aware of the part number for.

11:24 transferred to parts department again, repeat previous explanation, says someone will get back to me within (line disconnects)

11:24 calls back, resummarise situation, transferred again.

11:54 repeat explanation to parts department again, someone will get back to me within 24 hours about a price for the component. No it is not possible for him to simply look up the price in inventory, no it is not possible to have the answer any faster than this, no there is nothing that can be done.

16:10 contact from Dell, resummarise situation, line drops out three times during conversation, call backs are almost instant, consultant barely intelligible.

16:14 Price for RW331 from Dell not including GST = $926 AUD, Question posed as to why this is available at approximately half the price or less from various sources throughout the 'net. Answer; We don't know, but that is our price, if you want to use it from somewhere else you're welcome to do so. Enquiry as to price of XM888 module, also compatible with the notebook in question (Dell XPS m1730) answer $2135 AUD not including GST. Note total price of current generation XPS m1730 from the dell store is $3499 AUD which includes a better video card than either of the requested priced replacement modules.

16:20 Decide to never purchase, support or recommend products from Dell.

The notebook in question is an XPS M1730, although quite a powerful system it has provided me with no end of troubles through my period owning it, but the final break point was when I made the tragic mistake of attempting to connect an S-video cable from the S-Video out port on the notebook to the S-video in port of a television, I realise in hindsight that this is in fact just crazy behaviour on my part and I should have known beforehand it would inevitably result in the frying of the video card module but hey, I like to live dangerously.

Another ridiculous episode with this system has been the battery. Discharged fifteen times before being unable to hold a charge. Because of the very high size and weight of the system it was almost never taken anywhere and thus left on mains power, but Dell assures me that this is simply the way that batteries work and nothing can be done about it, numerous other stories were found without much digging of similiar behaviour of even shelved backup batteries failing immediately after opening. Never charged or discharged, but out of warranty now because they were in reserve for a year.

After this final conclusion to this ridiculous episode I just absolutely dread to think what the hell anyone who had no idea beyond "hey there's all of a sudden fuzzy red lines on my $4000 laptop, can't you guys get this fixed for something approaching a reasonable price and approaching a reasonable time" would have had to go through to get to this conclusion.

I'm going to disassemble the system and oven bake the video card for a minute or so as soon as I can find the appropriate tools to do so, it can't get any worse than it already is, and even if the card is baked as a result I'll be needing a replacement module anyway, but I certainly won't be buying it from Dell.

In other news, now back to using my old Acer Aspire 5630 which has lasted over three years without so much as a hiccup. I think I'll stick to custom built desktops for my performance computing from here on in.

GoGaRuCo Fist Shaking

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past few days this is a pretty good summation of the situation so far.

I must admit that I was initially confused as to what the fuss was even about, and none of the avalance of commentary I've read from the start till now had changed that position. I thought Martin's post on the issue raised a fair few interesting points though that at least warranted formal consideration.

The take away point here really needs to be that people are responsible for their own reactions to things like this.

The power dynamic does not change this relationship, how often is the paradigm of the put upon geek bandied about in similar contexts? Ask your high school football team what they think of the social power of geeks as a group. Once you get done explaining the big words in your question, the result should make my point well enough.

The funny thing is if you had asked me about this issue a year or two ago I would've just shrugged in a completely nonplussed fashion. I never cared if women were interested in becoming involved in technology, it isn't that I wanted them to avoid it, I've worked under female managers at various tech companies before and to be honest one of them was about the second best manager I've ever had, she was the first manager I'd ever had that actually had the technical skills necessary to elicit due respect for her position, and I was not satisfied with any other management thereafter for about three years.

At the same time, we got saddled in that department with a woman who really did not seem to know anything about the job she found herself in. I don't know what possessed that woman to pursue this career path but I heard enough under the breath cursing from the aforementioned female manager that I didn't think it was just my sexism shining through with regards to my evaluations of her performance.

Now, though, I hack from home, meaning a large amount of the time I sit directly next to my significant other, and in a lot of cases the input of a feminine psyche is greatly desirable. Many times I've had to choose between two equally meaningless things to me and she took one look at them and made a strong choice in one direction and then explained the reasoning in a way that I'd not at all considered. Estrogen can be totally useful when you're attempting to write software that deals with humans because it gives you a nice perspective on 50% of them that over 90% of hackers don't have.

So yes, I care that female coders as a group might be offended by the content of the presentation, but I feel that that conclusion alone isn't sufficient enough to automatically condemn the presentation itself. It really is possible for otherwise decent and rational people to overreact to a perceived slight when in all fact that was absolutely never the original intention of the communication.

I understand that there is an inclination to then single out the communication as ineffective, but actually if it were not for this entire debacle of the various presentations I've viewed this week that would definitely be the one that would stick the most firmly in my mind. This is the very essence of what an effective communication is all about. This is exactly why the scourge of corporate blandness must be wiped from the face of the earth, because the nth time you've heard about synergising values for b2b return on investments, the first *syllable* of the line makes your eyes glaze over and your tongue hang slack from your jaw.

In light of this fact, and with the observance that noone seems to be actually of the opinion that any offense was *intended*, merely that it was perceived, is it not reasonable to give a little latitude to speakers in order to encourage experimentation designed to keep us awake during their talks? Even if it isn't perfectly executed?

Here's a thought experiment for you; What if the group taking unintended offense were entirely different, if there was a martyrdom slant in the talk with a picture of Jesus Christ with his crown of thorns focused on the face looking morose (This guy used to program in ColdFusion) and then the next slide he was running along the top of a couple of sand dunes with two legionaires in hot pursuit jumping for joy and clicking his heels with the thorny crown long since discarded (But then Rails set him free).

Was offense intended toward Christians? In the event that they were offended, would they be told to harden up a bit and take it in the obviously humorous fashion it was meant? Would we be asking if it mattered that they were offended or mattered that the intent was not to offend, but entertain and communicate effectively? Would their contributions simply be dismissed out of hand? Matz is a mormon, Larry Wall is an evangelical, these are things that would actually have some kind of bearing upon the community.

Why Apple actually does *not* suck.

This puzzled me for the longest time before I finally figured it out. My position basically ignores windows and puts it in the "you use it because the company who bought you a computer and subsidises your environment bought it for you" but maybe I could imagine some permutation of the same kind of argument for windows users, also.

I call it the Segway argument. ;)

Marathon runners, the type that train obsessively for days at a time, fly to exotic high altitude locales to starve their bodies of oxygen, etc, and are at the absolute peak of human conditioning, are quite capable of running very long distances without much effort, in fact a case could reasonably made to say that they actually enjoy doing so.

Try sell one of those people a Segway.

It will have no tangible benefit aside from getting in the way of that person, and in fact just the idea of trying to sell one to that market shows the entire thing for the charade it is. It is not designed to service people like that.

The thing is that you can fairly make an argument that Marathon Runners like that are probably wasting their lives / time developing that degree of ability simply to do something like get from A to B with a reasonable level of rapidity. Thus something like a Segway can actually make sense because it isn't targeted at marathon runners, but a completely different type of person.

Now I don't want to be overly bragging, but I am only comfortable speaking for myself in this debate so that is what I am going to do. Once you've been using Linux since 1994, keeping well abreast of all the changes and benefits that have been added to the platform between then and now. Once you've mastered that environment so thoroughly that the regex flows from your fingertips as easily as a normal user's expectation of a tooltip hover on a pretty OS X widget. Once you've become accustomed to the almost limitless flexibility and control of the platform, and all the niggling problems and voodoo that one must occasionally confront when dealing with such a fluid platform slips so silently into the unconscious competence basket that you cannot personally even define the fact that it actually requires any competence at all without thinking about it really really hard.

Once you've got all that, the idea of someone making a cut down variant based on the BSD code base and making everything "just work" instantly, providing a contiguous user experience, doing a ton of things that basically all group up under the heading of "eliminating the need to acquire any indepth computer literacy at all", the idea of switching to a mac is as puzzling to you as the idea of the marathon runner picking up a Segway.

The critical thing to take away though, is that this is all value neutral, the marathon runner is not a hero, he probably wasted a ton of his life and time that could be spent better elsewhere acquiring the conditioning and abilities allowing him to accomplish the feats that he can. The same could be said of people in my situation with regards to computers, I am prepared to accept that if something like OS X had existed back when I wanted a "real computer" in 1994, it would indeed have been a waste of my time to develop all these skills. Further fair arguments could be made that I've wasted a ton of time developing all those skills now when you can get it "almost" as good just by paying a little premium on top of your average computer's cost. I get all that, I want to be as absolutely non-elitist about this as I can be. Taking all the above information into account I can totally see how it makes sense for normal people, and even up to a threshold some pretty extraordinary people even in this particular sphere to choose OS X as a platform.

That is definitely something that was in my blind spot not long ago, just as surely as Segways were an utterly bewildering concept to a marathon runner, but I'm aware of it now. The fact is of course that your average person is generally a lot more interested in stuff like walking around and fitness than advanced computer science, thus the relative success rates of Segway and Apple Computer.

But just because that market exists, is real, and has genuine value propositions for a large swathe of humankind, should not be taken as a reflection of it's value for everyone regardless of experience or situation. People like me will probably always prefer what we've developed this intensely powerful unconscious competence in, and everyone else will look at us and say it was a waste to do that, and although I don't agree with that position, I can at least see how the conclusion would be reached and accept it.

"Big Content" desperately in need of a wake up call.

Just sent to office@last.fm due to recent shenanigans.

Hey guys,

I assume you're probably doing the discrimination against non us uk de users due to the idiocy of the record industry's international licensing.

I'm not going to close my account, mostly because it has great statistical information on it that I wouldn't like to lose, but there's no way I'll be actually using it anymore unless one of two things happen.

1. The charges for international only listeners get dropped
2. The same charges apply to everyone.

The discrimination, even though I realise why you're probably doing it, is so utterly ridiculous considering the realities of the landscape of internet music that it's simply intolerable.

Good luck with trying to get those coked out record executives to pull their heads from their nether regions. If I were trying to push that angle I'd be trying to present statistics of people that are dropping the service due to this issue, please add one to that list, despite the fact that I haven't actually dropped my account.

Regards
Eric

Hulu, Pandora, and now Last.fm, man it must suck to be these guys and have to deal with the idiots convinced that the CD is still advanced technology, the separation from online reality is mind boggling. Don't try to bend customers over a barrel when they have effective means of utterly destroying your revenue streams, it's pure idiocy.

Why Apple Sucks pt 2

An interesting pattern in the responses I received in my last post was a consistent accusation of iconoclasm. The anti hipster sentiment really was not the point, though it's interesting to see that it's being taken that way by people. This would indicate I need to be clearer in my explanations, in pursuit of that goal I'd like to go into a little more detail about why I think it's important to actually explore *why* Apple does what it does, rather than just looking at it's actions in a vacuum without recourse to motivation or philosophy.

Apple tends to behave in ways that are driven by their positioning their products as fashion centerpieces. It's not the sentiment that makes me dismissive of them, it's the actual follow up actions that they take because of that underlying philosophy, such as forcing a pricing tier specifically to squeeze the maximum margins out of the marketplace (more money for a black MacBook? Really?) whilst still being able to claim price parity in the narrow band of sections which they do compete. And of course all the issues I raised in the previous post on this subject.

Graphical session based remote access to Macs is a nightmare compared to Linux, I know it has a VNC clone / work-alike, but that compared NoMachine NX or Windows RDP is a pale imitation of proper remote access at best. In all the research I'd done into Macs before when I was considering actually buying one, this didn't even come up. Why not? Because most people that use Macs don't even care about it and for those that do simple VNC is "good enough", even when they're charged extra for it like they were when it was first released. At this point NX and RDP on Linux and Windows respectively were ancient news in the industry, but this was somehow acceptable "because it's Apple".

This attitude permeates the entire environment, instead of the reverse in a Linux environment;

Linux Environment;

A pixel or two is out of place? Who cares, it crunches numbers, pretty pictures are for designers. If you really care fix it yourself

Apple Environment;

It's not technically better than the competition, lacks feature parity, is dramatically overpriced? Who cares, it's so pretty. If you really care you're out of luck until we take the 2-3 years it typically takes us to catch up with the competition in the areas where we don't focus the vast majority of our energy.

This is why the philosophy is important, you can see where the underlying philosophies come out in the real world. When I attack the underlying philosophy, I do so not for the sake of iconoclasm but because I think the results are unacceptably bad. Just like the people complaining about font / colour / UI inconsistency / insert related issues here within Linux think those results are unacceptably bad.

Apple constructs it's game plan based on the underlying philosophy that it is a luxury products company that is designed to inspire a cult-like following amongst people who share this underlying philosophy. This is it's primary driving force in just about all of it's decisions, and this is the reason that I went over that philosophy when laying out my problems with Apple.

Why Apple sucks

I recently finished setting up my workspace just the way I want it, a task I've been putting off for far too long. I posted a photo of my workspace to facebook / twitter and eventually it came up that I had no Apple machines in my workspace, and it got me to doing a full concrete analysis of why I have chosen not to use any Apple stuff.

In a nutshell, why Apple annoys me is the way that they treat their users, they tend to pander to the "in-crowd" and try to make the business of getting stuff done with computers into something not massively removed from a big fashionista love-in. Yes, I'm sure if you're a designer / graphical creative type it's a lovely platform to use, but for a coder / sysadmin like myself it's almost a hundred percent superfluous stuff that has been done before and better elsewhere, and to boot they charge you out the nose for the privellege of playing in their walled garden.

I know the standard rebuttal; "It's really not all that much more expensive, here's a configuration apple offers of product X, here's a configuration matching that configuration from vendor Y, see? it's pretty much the same". That's not the way I buy computers, I figure out what I want to do with the computer, and then I figure out what I will need from that computer in terms of hardware.

Example; about two years ago I wanted to get a new laptop that was good for coding / gaming, a MacBook was definitely in the running at the time, but you could not get the specs I wanted without upgrading to a drastically more expensive buildout. I wanted a non-integrated graphics card with a DVD writer, that was about the only thing that stopped me from just getting a flat MacBook, the price of those was indeed quite reasonable at around 1300$ if memory serves vs the 1200$ I ended up spending on an Acer Aspire 5630 with a fast graphics card and a built in dvd burner with more memory / storage than I could've got on the comparable macbook model that I would've had to settle for no burner and an integrated graphics card for. If I wanted to get a Pro model I'd be looking at something in the realm of 2k more.

This is not an acceptable margin between the two systems by any stretch of the imagination, yet it has nothing to do with Apple not being directly competitive with identical configurations in the marketplace, it has more to do with the fact that you may well end up (and I have always ended up) in a situation where Apple doesn't have anything that will meet your criteria without being drastically overinflated with a bunch of stuff you don't need, thus pushing out the basic price mismatch to the level where it's just a ridiculous choice.

Putting aside the price and mindless drone trying to be fashionable with his glossy plastic computer BS, Apple's architectural choices are questionable and seem to follow a fairly well established pattern, who remembers these?

Apple (Pimping OS9): Our architecture is totally awesome, everyone wants to use our excellent operating system without proper protected memory, it forces our coders to be better.

Apple (Years Later): You know what, strike that, we'll just rip out the BSD core and charge people a ridiculously high margin for a pimped out enlightenment clone.

Apple (Pimping PowerPC): Our processors are world beaters, we can spin a benchmark anyway you like in order to prove our CPU's are better than intel.

Apple (Years Later): You know what? strike that, we'll just start using intel because everyone knows it's been faster for ages and we're tired of pushing this lie.

Apple (Pimping the JesusPhone): Our phone is a groundbreaking world beating device that is many years ahead of the competition, if you want something that it can't do, then you're just an idiot.

Years Later: You know what? strike that, you bought our bullshit a couple of years and now we've had time to mostly catch up to the rest of the market, we'll pimp this as a massive leap forward rather than just getting our shit together a few years late and charge people 120$ for early access to the upgrade, if they work for us.

Apple has it's place, there's no doubt about that, those old advertisements I remember reading about it being the computer of choice for the mentally handicapped due to it's ease of use, and because of the semi-sweetheart relationship with Adobe resulting in all of their products being available for the platform, some people that rely on that platform have a good reason for using what they use. And a lot of those people are at the moment capable of switching to Linux, as you have the liberty to do as a more technical type.

But for the small fraction of us who have been using Linux happily since 1.2.13 over ten years ago the growing surprise from people around us when they hear we have no intention of making the switch to Apple's high priced gated community is becoming kind of annoying. I do not and never will care about your platform as a fashion statement and I'm not going to drink the reality distortion field Flavor-Aid, thanks but no thanks.

Expertise, rote memorisation, abstraction, and mental acuity.

This topic has been bubbling to the fore in a huge amount of spaces recently, I'm not sure if it's just because I've been looking for it and seeing it all over the place or it really is the precipice of a fundamental shift in thinking, but here's my 2c for what they're worth.

Just so people know what I'm actually ranting about, here are a bunch of posts addressing these issues, on both sides of the fence;

Are You An Expert?

Dynamic Languages Strike Back

My Job Interview at Google

Brain Rot

What You Need To Know

This is really interesting to me because I find it to be one of the problems I often see floating around in my head that there are no simple answers to. I mean, I know, there are very few simple answers to anything, but this specifically has two simple paths and both of them have plenty of cases justifying their positions, and neither are inherently wrong just at first glance.

Supporters of expertise will notice the extremely obvious fact that the world is populated by a very large excess of people who are stupid, it is thus important that we are capable of gauging the capacity of a given speaker to speak about the subject matter in question that they're currently addressing. Case in point, when the new guy decries the inefficiencies of subversion by saying something along the lines of "This is really dumb", most listeners lent less credence to his arguments than the video lecture by Linus Torvalds about why subversion was, in fact, quite stupid.

The fact that at this point the innate reaction is to say something along the lines of "Yeah but despite what he said, you know, subversion does actually get the job done a large amount of the time, and if you're in an environment working with a bunch of windows based coders who are intimidated by the command line, setting up a version control system based on git is actually just as stupid as Linus' points about git being better than subversion make subversion appear to be, tortoise svn is the clincher, and telling something like that to a person like Linus would just make him laugh at you." And you'd be pretty much right on the money with that summation of the situation, and although a genuine expert would indeed laugh at you, git would still be a bad fit for the exact reasons you raise.

Within our domain, it is important to be able to research and critically analyse complex situations independently and come to something of a balanced and well thought out conclusion with regards to issues of such complexity that if you were to try and explain them to someone from before the dawn of civilisation, you may as well be talking to an alien. We all exist and operate within this space as subject matter experts to lesser or greater degrees based on our abilities to bootstrap our grasp of a problem from the entire expanse of human knowledge.

I was reading a blog post by Steve Yegge not long ago, which I thought was a really interesting summation of the entire situation, he was talking about the acceptable level at which you could safely rely upon an innately leaky abstraction as "just magic". Amusingly enough he placed this level of abstraction at just below the point where he understood and admitted that he didn't really get how stuff worked at a transistor level, but if anyone wanted to argue with him about the importance of knowing raw java rather than just using J2EE they'd be in for a fight to the death, or recollecting more models from Design Patterns than the singleton, etc. Despite Steve's dismissal of comprehension of this level of abstraction, it is, indeed, actually critical stuff to know under certain circumstances.

I often hear nowadays of the fact that the entire length and breadth of human knowledge is simply too vast to store within memory, and you cannot become a subject matter expert on every single thing that there is that humans have discovered and abstracted in the history of civilisation. This is self evidently true, and yet having that depth of knowledge is in one sphere or another entirely critical to the sphere in question. The solution, in my opinion is to abandon our vaunted reliance on field expertise as rote memorisation, rapid calculation, or precise simulation, even at the generalised theory level. All three of these things computers do far better than any of us, and they should be used when these things need to be done.

I had a job interview with google, and have read of many job interviews conducted by google, where they've almost disqualified candidates on the spot for writing a prototype c program in the interview and not spotting a memory leak immediately, or because they could not instantly recall the precise amount of blocks in an inode created by mke2fs in distribution X. Stuff like this is the symptom of the disease that this entire situation is so emblematic of. They have a word for people that dedicate a disproportionate amount of mental resources to the rote memorisation or ignoring the forest for the trees based reasoning that is a hallmark of the aforementioned situations, idiot savant, autistic, etc.

It's particularly amusing behaviour coming from the very company that makes such skills largely irrelevant. Mark Cuban summed it up pretty well when he said an excellent memory used to be worth something, but now we just google it. If you're relying on your encyclopaedic knowledge of domain x without reference checking your critical decisions each and every time and making sure that your underlying assumptions are entirely valid, sooner or later you're going to make a mistake that someone who *does* that would not have made. And no, it doesn't make you immensely faster or more effective to do so, because the cognitive abilities that you sacrifice to this rote memorisation exercise tends to contribute to an impairment of your ability to quickly and effectively conduct a complete analysis of the entire problem on the spot building all the information from nothing and making sure it is entirely valid and applicable at the exact time you're doing it. Idiot savants, absent minded professors and general autistic tendencies are illustrative of exactly what I'm talking about.

We, especially as coders, but arguably as an entire species, are ideally, no longer purely biological entities when it comes to addressing problems. We have a wealth of experience to draw from, both personal and external with regards to what has worked in similar domains in the past. We do not need to remember every keyword and function call within an entire language by rote to be effective coders, we do not need to remember every object oriented design paradigm to be effective coders, and we absolutely, positively, do not need 100% reliable working c compilers embedded in our wetware in order to be effective coders, nor need to memorise the precise amount of blocks in an inode created by mke2fs on distribution x version y. But it can very much help toward the goal of being effective coders if we can quickly and accurately gain access to all of the prior information *and* an indefinite amount more as quickly and easily as possible.

And this, I believe, is the true role of expertise, understanding what the important variables are, and being able to quickly and reliably fill them in with all due respect to the specific domain of the problem in question. I will take someone that can do that over a person who has memorised less than a percent of what could reasonably be stored in a terabyte of space, on any modern software project. Compete in the sphere in which we excel, none of us will ever outmatch a hard disk in a memory contest, nor execute more instructions per second than a modern CPU.

Disclaimer; This is only my opinion, and I do fully admit that I could be wrong, maybe these things are in fact critical and I am in fact simply stupid and the world will keep turning without my ludicrous opinions, thank you very much. And with regards to the specific examples I gave, I have a ton of respect for both Steve Yegge and Google, despite my disagreeing with them on this particular issue, it is not my intent to point and laugh at all, merely to illustrate that some overall very clever people and organisations are behaving in some small way which under closer examination, are maybe not all that clever. The fact that Steve has started pushing the virtues of dynamic languages and google doesn't insist everything be done in assembler gives me hope for the future.