Conspiracy Theories

Had an epiphany while waking up this morning. Not new ideas, deep impressions. (Epiphanies tend to be such, not new information or synthesis, not factuality, deep impressions.)

Bill Gates is not really an evil genius. Nathan Myhrvold seems a bit more evil, but not as smart. Steve Ballmer is a gorilla. These guys are pains in the neck, but not really to be feared as much as to be avoided.

Steve Jobs? Johnathan Ive? Tim Cook?

Well, I would be more concerned about Apple as the defacto monopoly than Microsoft. I've been of that opinion since the days of the Apple II. I like their stuff to a certain extent, but I don't want to live in a world dominated by their tech.

But they are not the leaders of the conspiracy either.

The computer industry has seen more than one might think would be its share of plot and intrigue.There is a reason for this.

Conputers are much more about controlling the flow of information than about calculating. Programmable computers are, erm, programmable. Wonderful for enforcing protocol, if only there weren't that pesky halting problem. And that inscrutable NP complete nonsense. (It is nonsense, of course, right?)

Managerial types who get a taste of programming tend to be more than a little like the proverbial dog getting a taste of egg. And they unfortunately develop a blind streak relative to the limits of computers.

Control, control, CONTROL!!!!

No, this was not my epiphany.

You know, now that I'm back from work, I'm not sure what the epiphany was. (And that's not exactly atypical for epiphany, either.)

Years ago I had an epiphany about conspiracies. If you take the Bible seriously, conspiracies come as no surprise. We know they existed from Cain. And we know who the leader of the conspiracies is, too.

And there is something about the leader of the conspiracies that we know, he can't keep his stories straight. He was a liar from the beginning. If he could keep ever his stories straight for very long, he would quite possibly cease to be the devil.

Management that can't keep its stories straight tends to make for a volatile organization.

Thus, we can be sure that all conspiracies will sooner or later crumble under their own weight of lies.

Jesus said that we should fear God and not man. (He also tells us that God is watching us up close, not from a distance, that He knows when every sparrow falls or something like that.)

We need to recognize that there are conspiracies. We need to be cautious of them. Sometimes we need to take action relative to them. But we must never fear because of them.

[Note (15-17 July 2015)
One of my siggnatures used to read like this:

Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart,
and ask yourself if you are not your own worst enemy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well.

I think a lot of people misunderstood my intent. I do not mean to deny the existence or the dangers of conspiracies. I mean to point to what we, as individuals, can do about them.

So I changed that signature to point here, which is a bit of a half-way measure.

A little more to the point:

We can read in Moses 4: 4 about the spirit of deception and where it leads.

Conspiracies are one of the sub-themes of much of the Book of Mormon. They are often referred to there as "secret combinations". (I think this means the men and women combining to help each other to do bad things, and also the combinations of philosophies designed to confuse, mislead, and discourage people from thinking for themselves, among other things).

Third Nephi ch. 6 is rather poignant. Here, two cultural groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites, after having united to defeat a secret combination and restore peace to their land, prosper, get cocky, compete excessively, get their feelings hurt, and then start building the combinations up again. This leads to wars, and the complete destruction of their government.

And that is what that signature is supposed to be all about.
]

[For the record, I expanded a little further on this concept here. JMR20160106]

Passed the LPIC Level 1

Since I bragged about the JLPT, I suppose I should tell anyone who's listening: I passed the Linux Professional Institute Certification at level 1 at the end of the summer. (Last day of August, in fact.)

I suppose it was about time. I've been using Linux and other *nix OSses long enough. I really should have passed both level 1 and 2 over the summer, but I let a lot of unimportant things (and a few important ones) get in the way. So I'm working through a level 2 text (in Japanese, Linux 教科書 LPIC レベル2 第3版 on the train home, and trying to squeeze time in on the computer on the weekends to practice some of the stuff I really haven't done yet, like setting up DNS and mail servers. Not squeezing in enough time, though.

Back-Seat Driving Apple

Or, perhaps, trying to drive from outside the car.

I'm definitely not showing a sense of social protocol here, but I've been daydreaming about this for a long time, since well before I knew Steve Jobs was losing his battle with cancer. (This is more-or-less what I would have posted back in October, but didn't have time to.)

(If the reports of Steve's last diatribe against Android are accurate, I'm inclined to think respect for the dead means something a little different in this case.)

But here's what I'd do, were I in a position to do so, to try to avoid Apple following Bill and Microsoft down the hill:

Start two sister companies, called, maybe, AppleSeed and Crabapple.

The "Appleseed" company would take over from Apple most infrastructure intellectual assets, including the continued development of the OSses and fundamental hardware.

Apple itself would stay focused on customer/end-user issues and on designing and selling the current and next models.
 The Appleseed company would also be tasked with setting up and supporting a true open source community around both Darwin and iOS. Not the non-community archival site at opensource.apple.com, nor the para-community you find at www.macosforge.org. A true community, something like the Fedora community that Red Hat supports. Around both Darwin and iOS.

And the Appleseed company would be tasked with moving discontinued products, both software and hardware, into a community supportable state, mostly under the Apple Public License, GPL, and so forth. Include hardware and circuit diagrams for the old 68k and PPC stuff. Part of that would be clearing "intellectual property" issues and releasing the old Macintosh system and (Apple's) application code from the original Mac through Mac OS 9 under open source licenses. And clearing the "IP" issues for re-implementing a desktop manager based on the old Mac UI.

The "Crabapple" company would be a community based prototyping company, where one would be able to buy such things as PPC, ARM, and ColdFire motherboards running DarwinOS and iOS-sans-UI, and other DIY gadgets. You would also be able to buy current AMD x86 processor based systems pre-loaded with DarwinOS and open source desktops like KDE or XFCE. (No need for INTEL systems, Apple itself can maintain its relationship with INTEL for as long as it seems prudent to do so.)

The Crabapple company would also be tasked with maintaining security level updates for the Mac OS X versions that Apple has EOLed. This would not be a free service, but would not be overly expensive, either, perhaps $25 a year as a subscription. And they could provide other fee-based services, such as providing several versions of non-warranteed Aqua UI to load on top of the most recent DarwinOS.

Or, instead of actually maintaining the down-level systems, the Crabapple company could support the MoL/MoM community, officially allowing the old systems to be run under emulation on newer hardware under current OSses.

The Crabapple company would also publish open source hardware drivers for use in the Linux and BSD communities, under appropriate licenses

Why? end-user buzz is not enough, and Apple is too big already.  This would help keep Apple small and competitive.

The licensing would allow non-Apple companies to compete with the Crabapple company, which would also build the community.

And the future is in communities, made of small companies.

Linux on iBook redux (not yet)

My son has been using my old tangerine clamshell iBook with the original 5.6 G hard disk. (There's a lot of water under that bridge.) Mostly, he listens to mp3s, but he also sometimes plays around with ECMAScript and perl. Has some strange interest in the three kingdoms of China, and games based on the old tales.

(Must be a teen-age boy?)

Well, my white iBook G4 died the death. It served me pretty faithfully for about three years after I bought it used and installed a 160G HD in it. Mac OS X 10.3, OpenBSD, and Fedora 12; Mac OS 9 under classic emulation, but not booting from power on, as Apple designed it. (Wasn't interested interest in ex post facto or whatever that was, it did what I needed. I'm kind of looking at the reverse problem, now, more below.)

Then, about a year ago it just suddenly started powering down for no reason. I'd read somewhere on the web about cold solder joints. Found out enough to identify the video controller (maybe?) and test it with pressure, and then re-solder it. (3mm by 1mm flat tip was not fat thirty years ago! It's fat now.) Careful work cleared the slop between pins and it was running again.

About three months later, I dropped the poor thing on my way into the train station. My shoulder-bag strap broke. It took about a meter drop, but it was in the bag, with all my books that I read on the train. Checked when I got to the school and it booted up. Checked it more carefully at home, and the chassis was bent in around the battery. Straightened that out, but now it was powering down unannounced again.

After another three months or so of taking it apart and resoldering again every now and then, it just was getting too much, too often, so I semi-retired it. Recently had a little time and tried one last time. Not enough money (I thought) for a real iron, so I found a cheap hobby iron (ungrounded) with a fine point tip and bought that. Also found some cheap hobby grade braid.

Not a good idea.

I should have been willing to wait until I can afford real tools. Somewhere, I either burned a short in a chip from the lack of grounding in the iron, or I left a piece of braid or a whisker of solder somewhere. A different chip bubbled, I smelled the smoke, and it does not boot. Period.

I wonder if I can find parts, other than a new motherboard. (I have found those listed on the web, used, but with 6 month guarantees.)

Anyway, my son gets the 160 G hard drive, but there's that problem with the limits of Mac OS 9 on the iBook. 120G max per drive. Not partition. Drive.

So, much to my son's distress, I started trying again to get Linux running in it. Tried Debian this time. But the version of gparted currently in Debian is worse than the one in Fedora 12 for walking on the Apple Partition Map. Seems to think formatting the drive with less than it has is an error condition or something. I need to file a bug for this, and add the information to the bug I filed on Fedora.

Dug into the partition map information, found some old stuff around, a somewhat inaccurate mactech article on the change from APM to INTEL's GPT junk, walked the map, and tried patching the map.

Arggghhh. The pre-Firewire iBooks have no target disk mode to allow you to directly access the disk. Can't boot from USB on them, either. (Blast you, INTEL, for expanding USB beyond keyboards and low-speed printers!) I'm going to have to set up a live CD of something really small (openBSD, I suppose) in order to be able to patch the drivers.

Tried various things, botched it all up, re-installed Mac OS X and 9, spent some time bringing it all up to speed. Still missing a few things. Need to finish cutting the partitions and install OpenBSD. (After I get OpenBSD running, I may try loading drivers for the Linux ext3 file system and using OpenBSD's tools to get a beachhead install of either Debian or Fedora 16's highly experimental stuff running.) In the meantime, my son has his iBook back. With the ancient browsers.

I suppose I can call this all lab work for when I go after the LPIC level 2.

But this is a big part of a certain daydream. (With apologies to Steve's family and friends, for touching on his management style so soon after he crossed the stream.)

I sure wish Apple supported their old hardware and software better. They have the money now, and have no need at all to push so hard to get their customers to move to the latest, greatest. It would be a common courtesy to their customers to keep the paths open to all the old data.

• First, Mac-on-*nix. That really should be an official product of Apple, and it should run on Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X. If they didn't set the price too high, it would pay for itself monetarily and more than pay for itself in customer good will.
• Second, the old versions of Mac OS X. They should try to to at least keep them road-worthy -- security fixes and a reasonably functional web browser. Maybe active support for the authors of some of the better alternative web browsers that still support the old systems.
• Third, driver support for non-Apple Libre/Open OSses. Nothing to do with the crown jewels, it's just selfishness, pure and simple, to use closed drivers to try to force your customers to stay with you. Also reflects a lack of confidence in your product. Most important, it prevents your customers from helping you find and fix bugs. (Okay, that's the closed-vs.-open argument and it applies to all technical works. But these are real principles and they sit at the center of the current economic implosion, and they also drive a lot of the excess industrial activity that promotes the global climate changes.)
• Fourth, the old system software and hardware. Apple is not using Mac OS 7 any more. Why shouldn't they let students play with it? Publish it for reference, license it for non-profit study use, if they don't want to put it under their APL.

I'm sure that there are "intellectual property" (that old oxymoron) issues that would get in the way. But that could be solved by setting up a sister company, maybe call it Crabapple Computers, or something, to "launder" the IP rights issues and manage the open source projects.

Just make open source projects for all the major elements, and support them the way Red Hat (the real leader in open source, you guys!) does Fedora. It shouldn't be that hard to do.

Expansion, contraction, it's all the same.

Expansion, contraction, it's all the same.

The Japanese government is all in heat, scrambling for a fix for the aging society.

What's the point?

We can make enough food.

After that, value is what people make of it.

The people. Themselves.

And yes, they have to be free to make it.

Free.

I know freedom is scary, but after all, what else do we have?

Freedom is just another word for recognizing you've got nothing left to lose.

Never had, never will have.

Time to open society back up and let the people fix the economy from the ground up, even if it means scary things like letting non-natives really certify to teach in public schools. As real, certified 教職員 (kyoushokuin), leading classes, setting up curricula, discussing progress with parents, the whole thing.