Optimizing all the value out of your bottom line

Money.

I have a bunch of projects I could push forward if I had money. Last time I looked at Kickstarter, I would need a US credit card to try to get them funded there. I've looked at some of the other crowdfunding sites, and I don't really care for the models they use.

It's not just money I need. Publicity on Kickstarter or somewhere similar could help me reach people who might be interesting in working with me on those projects.

It's the connections I develop while getting the money the dull way that is the real value. The portfolio I develop is also useful, but it's the human relationships and the value that people have for each other, the value we generate when we work together that is the real value. Not money.

Money is cheap.

Money.

If money is what you want, I hear it's not hard to get. (And I think I have reason to believe it.) But when you go that way, you get money without meaning.

Money saves no one. I could suppose I could win a big lottery, but then I would have to spend a lot of time every day for several months just getting the money put away where the combination of US and Japanese taxes wouldn't have me owing more than I won.

Sure, that would eventually settle down, and I would be able to focus on my projects. And, for all that I could get to work, I still wouldn't have that network of like-minded people to help. Maybe I could get such a network if I had money. But there is the other possibility of just getting people who want the money clogging up my networks.

People who just want money also clog up companies, make them (appear to be) inefficient.

Companies big and small have focused on optimizing their processes, to build their bottom line. But what do they measure that bottom line in?

Money.

How often it is that a company gets a big hit on a product and then refocuses itself around the money the hit product brings in.

Focuses on the product, in theory, but more on the money. Gotta build that bottom line.

Then they optimize the company around the bottom line -- around the product, first, but around the money most of all.

And then the product begins to lose popularity. And the company finds it has money and no meaning. And no way to survive.

And then the company goes running to the government and cries,

SAVE US FROM OURSELVES!!!

Make a law that requires people to use our product!!!!

'Cause we were stupid and now we don't know anything but the product that people don't buy any more!!!

Copyright! Patent! Something has to work!!!!

We don't know how to make meaning any more!!!

If only companies could really see that this is what they are saying when the run crying to the government. Then they might not optimize all the meaning out of their operations so that they have to be saved from themselves.

Well, let's back up and look at the optimization process. How does that optimization work? How does it rob the company of meaning?

Well, there are two broad facets to the optimization. Two kinds of deadwood that companies like to optimize out of their organizations. Two kinds of employees that don't appear to contribute to the bottom line.

You know the one kind, no one remembers how he got hired. He never does anything. Every time you see him, he's surfing the web. Or talking at the water cooler. Or sleeping on company time.

He comes in late, leaves early. Ask him to do something, and it's a crap-shoot whether what he does, if anything, will be useful. In fact, sometimes when you involve him in your project, he does something that so much gets in the way that you'd have preferred that he had done nothing.

Clearly deadwood. Should be fired.

Well, you have to realize that, when you put that guy on the street, unless he finds something to motivate him, he goes on welfare. Then what the company is no longer paying out in wages, it is now paying in taxes.

(One problem with using inflation -- public debt -- as a way to hide future taxes, we don't see an immediate tax burden in putting such employees on the street.)

Then there's the other type. Faded stars. Still useful. Maybe they were involved in the hit product that is the company's (current) bread-and-butter. But they seem to have lost their way. Anyway, they are going a different direction from the rest of the company. They come in when they want, do what they want, what they contribute to projects is usually hard enough to work with that you wish they had done nothing.

Clearly deadwood. Should be given the opportunity to work elsewhere.

The problem is, intellectual property is a mirage. What the mirage hides is intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is in the brains of the faded stars. Maybe it's kinder to let them go elsewhere, but when you do so, a big chunk of the company's intellectual capital goes with them. And it's that intellectual capital that the company is going to need when the hit product begins to fail.

Let me tell you a secret: These two guys are one-and-the-same. You just didn't know enough about him when I described him to you the first time.

The problem is in your vision. In fact, you should go look in the mirror when you criticize the deadwood at your company, because one of these days, the deadwood is going to be you.

It's necessary to fire people or let them move on sometimes, but we should be careful about our reasons. It's even necessary to let go of entire companies.

But if our bottom line is money, the filter is going to be set to discard all meaning and all value. And it's no surprise when the company fails with its hit product. And no surprise when the surrounding society seems to have trouble maintaining enough value to survive as companies burn brightly and then burn out.

culpability for promoting bad tech

I've been wasting time on groklaw again.

This is about weev's problem, which I blogged about several months ago.

It's not a little problem, and it's not just weev's problem.

AT&T put an open interface to their database of iPhone customers' e-mail addresses. The primary key was essentially the serial number of the phone's radio modem circuit. This was negligent, and, with the current privacy laws, it was criminally negligent. Comparing database interfaces to doors, this is like failing to put a door in the doorway. It must be expected that people will come and go at will.

They could have put a hash on the key in their interface. A simple one-to-one hash would be like a gate with a latch. In this case, the key in the database query (visible in the browser's URL bar) would not look like the modem's serial number, so they interested visitor would be required to think a bit to conclude that there might be a relationship between the key and the serial number.

A simple hash would still be subject to the problem with bumping the number and seeing someone else's e-mail address, but at least it would not be advertising the path in. Using the serial number directly was effectively advertising the path in. That's why it's like an entranceway without gate or door. (And no lock.)

A sparse hatch, where numbers before and after valid keys would be invalid keys, would be a latch with a cheap and easy combination lock. Simply incrementing the key would result in an invalid query instead of a customer's e-mail address. But a curious visitor might "check the doorknob" and even try a few combinations. In other words, might try a long enough sequence to determine that the key was sufficient to produce more valid addresses.

To avoid revealing addresses, AT&T would have to limit such tries from the same IP address.

A cryptologically strong hash, sufficiently sparse, would be like a stronger lock. It would take a lot more deliberate and sustained effort to find valid keys, and such a sustained effort would be a red flag in AT&T's logs. (If they bothered to look.)

AT&T failed to make any real technical measure to limit access.

weev's actions were discourteous. But the only criminal element to them is projected through a twisted interpretation of bad laws that were written without any reference to the technology involved.

AT&T is the criminal, and the prosecuting attorney are also culpable.

Now, in truth, what AT&T did with the database should not need to be considered a crime. Negligent, discourteous, inconsiderate, grounds for reconsidering whether we want to be their customer, yes. It should not be a crime.

Why is it a crime?

The "technology" behind e-mail is extremely simple. Simple, as in, without safety features. Simple, as in minimalistic controls. They were "best practices" in a context where most users were technically inclined and motivated to be courteous to fellow users. They are not even good practices in the current context, where users don't want to be bothered with technical details, where many want to depend on the computer like it's a substitute for God, and where some are all too willing to misuse the tech if they can make a profit thereby.

In some ways, it's simple like physical mail. It's easy to write any address you want on the envelope.

But it is not as good as physical mail because the envelope is basically see-through. Any admin on any server that the e-mail passes through can easily look inside.

And if you open the envelope and change the contents, there is no evidence of the change.

And, while there are words on the envelope and inside it, those words are not like handwritten words, or even like typewritten words. There is no evidence of who put those words there when.

If it says it's from your Aunt Sharon, it's hard to tell whether it really is unless you call her up and ask her.

You can recognize her voice on the phone. If you got a physical letter from her, you probably know what her handwriting looks like. You can sort of tell a little by the words and expressions used, but there are far fewer clues about identity in e-mail.

There is some external evidence in the form of records on servers, but that is pretty weak evidence, and not visible to the ordinary user.

If your mail service provider encrypts their storage, the envelope and the contents become opaque, but only as long as the message is stored. Once the message is transmitted, it is visible to anyone and everyone who bothers to look during transit.

There is also the problem of volume. e-mail is much easier and cheaper to generate in excessive volume than ordinary junk mail.

End user encryption can mitigate some of these disadvantages to a certain degree, but there are no current common ways to use encryption.

When Microsoft incorporated e-mail into MSWindows95's internet application suite, they were making technology for the technically inclined to people who are not interested in technical details. They put an easy user interface on it and allowed ordinary users to do themselves damage with the tech.

They have several times offered to half-fix the technology, but their offerings are woefully inadequate and invariably make critical use of technical measures that Microsoft can control through patents and other means. Their solutions are always going to cement their effective monopoly position, if we allow them to have their way.

AT&T is culpable for putting a bad database interface on the web for all their iPhone customers. Microsoft is culpable for selling us technology that is not really appropriate for ordinary users in ordinary use.

We are culpable for continuing to use it.

I have some ideas about ways to mitigate the problems with e-mail, but it's a lot easier for me to just dream about re-booting the computer industry with good basic technology. So I waste my time dreaming instead of contributing to the solution. Mea culpa.

Someday.

Someday.

solved grub_divmod64_full not found on upgrading squeeze to wheezy

I have been moving my desktower from Debian 6 stable (Squeeze) to Debian 7 stable (Wheezy) using the apt-get method.

I keep two OSses installed, one of which is primarily to hold the boot manager and as a rescue system when I botch the other. These are on two different disks and, in fact, two different disk controllers.

Grub thinks I must have RAID since I have an external controller that is known for being used as a cheap RAID controller. So it continually messes up its guesses about which drive is which. So, affter I upgraded the rescue/boot system, it tried to set itself up to boot that system from (hd2), but it should have been trying to set itself up to boot from (hd0).

Now, you'd think I could edit the boot command in grub and go, but, no. The arrangement of three hard disks spread across two controllers causes grub to wander off into never-neverland.

The upshot of all this is that it gave me this message:

symbol not found: grub_divmod64_full

and dumped me into the grub rescue shell. (And induced this rant when I went looking for answers and found more questions.)

After more mucking around in the internet, I just burned a copy of the XFCE install disks for debian 7.1, booted the resulting CD, and used the included rescue functions to re-install grub.

• (got a shell,
• mounted the botched boot partition to /mnt or /target, 
• edited /mnt/etc/default/grub, but did I actually change anything important?
• returned to the install functions,
• selected the re-write grub option in the CD,
• re-booted.)

 And that fixed that.

grub rescue surprise for MSWindows users

Okay, so you got a laptop or PC from somewhere, cheap, or even free.

It has the entry-level MSWindows OS on it.

It has a moderately large hard disk, say 320 MB. But when you look at the hard disk's properties, it says that there is a nice chunk of it that seems not to be in use. 16 MB or even 100 MB.

And you think, "Huh? I want more space for my movies and songs!" And you format that space. And suddenly part of your laptop is no longer working. Maybe you can't even boot it at all.

You are not alone.

To understand the solution, you need to understand what happened.

There was probably another operating system in there, and it was hiding in the partition you thought would be great to use for your movies. Not just the other operating  system, but the program that lets you choose which one to boot.

So, no way to choose. No way to boot. Now what?

If you have a BIOS that is not locked down, you can boot a live CD from one of the Linux distributions. Knoppix is pretty good for this kind of thing.

You'll probably need a real-world friend to help you get the live CD and then to help you walk through the steps.

Oh, you'll need a CD or DVD drive, too.

Boot the live CD.

Launch a disk utility program. This is scary, because the one you want is also able to wipe your whole hard disk clean.

Select the hard disk.

Set the boot flag to the partition that contains the MSWindows boot programs. It will likely be the very first partition, unless the first partition was the one that was supposed to have Linux in it.

Quit the utility program.

You say, that's scary.

Okay, then here is the better solution:

Just install the OS from the live CD. Tell it to use the partition that you erased. The installer will most likely find your MSWindows partitions and set the new boot manager up for you.

And you'll be back in business with a reboot.

I mean, seriously, the only other alternative was to buy an official, high-priced MSWIndows package and try to install that. Just as dangerous and more expensive.

Just don't erase that Linux partition again. In fact, when you have time, boot the Linux OS and see if you can see anything that makes sense. A little bit at a time, and you can be amazed at what Microsoft won't let you do.

*GRUB* ISSUE in microsoft's help forums?

Got bit by grub2 again. This time it was being dumped to the grub "rescue shell" with a

symbol not found: grub_divmod64_full

message.

Looked it up on Google. One of the hits was on Microsoft's help forums, "GRUB ISSUES". I had to go take a look.

Irony abounds.

A user has MSWindows 7 and "Linux Boss" installed on his/her laptop. (At first, I thought, some new or custom boot manager, but maybe Boss Linux?)

And the user seems unaware that a Linux OS needs its own partition, among other things. And so, when MSWIndows disk utilities tell him he has 100MB unused, he takes the message at face value and reformats the partition for MSWindows.

Thus deleting most of grub. Thus deleting his boot manager. Thus the complaint from the part of grub that remained, telling him that grub can't find itself.

The first post is a partial answer, explanation that the Linux OS got wiped, and giving a pointer to the grub project's on-line documentation.

In the next post, the original poster clears things up. He got the laptop free from "the government". (Free? from the government? hmm .... Boss Linux seems to be an India-centric distribution.) Without install disks. Apparently without much instruction as to dual-booting and such.

(Kind of like with my Lenovo, partial steps that almost seem calculated to make users feel betrayed by Linux.)

Well, I started to get a hotmail account so I could go post over there some time back, but started reading the legalese and thought better of that idea. So I can't add my 50 cents to the discussion there. So I'll rant about it here. (Which delayed, by an hour, maybe, the fix.)

First. The bug is in Microsoft's tools. There should be stronger warning about the possibility of deleting something you actually needed when you decide to format a partition that does not contain a file system recognized by MSWindows.

Actually, if Microsoft wants to save its sinking ship and start learning how to cooperate with the rest of the world, MSWindows, even the free-as-in-free-beer "Home" version, should go to the minor effort of reporting the one-or-two-byte partition type flag that is part of their own partitioning scheme. A simple,

This partition appears to have data written by another operating system in it. You might want to check before you format it.

would be much more helpful than the current

 This partition appears to be empty. Do you want to format it?

Second. I'll offer some solutions, since it looks like other users are ending up in the same fix. But I will offer them in a separate post, to make them easier to find.

Third. The real fix for Microsoft's problems is something I've ranted about before, here, for instance.

The English Class Blog for the Otemae group, summer 2013

The English Class blog is set up. Not a lot of content yet.

授業ブログを設置しました。まだほとんど何もないままです。

See the blog here.

リンク

How many friends should you have?

This is a question in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language textbook that I will be teaching from for several months.

And the correct answer is ---

THREE.

One to listen to me when I'm happy.

One to listen to me when I'm sad.

And one to talk to me when I'm too busy.

How's that?

;-)

To my new friends, I've changed my mind. I will set up a blog just for the class.

やっぱり。考えが変わった。このブロッグを授業用に利用するのは難しい。専用のブロッグを作ります。

For the homework, something like the above is okay. Something not like the above is okay, too.

宿題については、上記の例のようなものでもいいし、全く違う作文でもいい。

More on Monday.

月曜日にまたお知らせします。

Hang in there.

一緒に頑張りましょう。