systemcall dot org

About 15 years ago, when I was working on a dodgy Brazilian firm, I had a conversation with an older programmer that I never forgot. He said something along the lines of:

Medicine is way easier than computer science. Doctors are still using the same books, written decades ago, while we have to buy only the latest ones. Our reality gets rewritten every five years or so, and by the time you leave university, you’re already outdated.

There is a lot of merit in this argument. Even though the common cold’s strain changes every week, its symptoms are exactly the same. Cancer, HIV, malaria, Lupus and other big diseases are treated more or less the same way as they were when first treated, and GPs still give you aspirin/paracetamol/ibuprofen for any kind of pain.

Human anatomy, physiology and psychology doesn’t change at all. Broken legs, runny noses and swollen tonsils are the same on every person and they require the same treatment for everyone.

While doctors kill one patient when they do make a mistake, developers can kill hundreds if they happen to introduce a bug on the Airbus fault-tolerant fail-over system.

But recently, I had to re-think this through, and I have to say I’m not 100% in agreement any more.

When programmers change jobs, they get a few weeks to get used to the new system. They might get months to actually be productive as their peers and will mature within a few years working with the same piece of software. Programmers can run tests, regression tests and usability tests, unit tests, etc, which is something a bit complicated with human beings.

When a doctor gets a new patient, it’s like getting a new programming job. It’s the same language, but the system is completely different. It might take you weeks to start getting the prognosis right, and in a few months you’ll be able to get it right before your patient even tells you the symptoms.

The similarities are remarkable

Consultant programmers get new systems to work on every week. Like ER doctors. They do what they can, with the time they have and the solution is most of the time acceptable. A more stable doctor or programmer might look at the job and cry, but the job was done, the fire was put off and the “patient” is out of the door.

Family doctors, that were there when you were born, know you better than yourself. They know when your symptoms are only psychological and what cause that and when it’s going to go away. They rarely touch the “system”, but normally fix an unrelated bug and you’re good as new.

But not everybody is lucky enough to have such doctors. They are expensive, and there aren’t enough good doctors in the health system of any country to account for every family. Even if the doctor share a hundred families, it’s still very far from enough.

This is the reason that systems fail, and get half-fixed, and why most GPs will send you home with a paracetamol unless you’re dying in front of them.

If doctors and programmers had such a different world, the emergent behaviour wouldn’t be that similar, I believe.

No, not the one everyone is talking about. The one that actually made it all work.

Not the one that was worried about uniforms and style, the one that actually designed and develop the foundations of modern society.

Not the one that enclosed people into a dungeon of usability, but the one that created the tools to enable everyone’s freedom.

The one whose work made possible the computer revolution in the 70s, the micro-computer revolution in the 80s, the open-source revolution in the 90s and the mobile revolution this last decade. Without Unix and C, and their simplistic but elegant design, the stronghold of modern society, none of this would be possible. We’d still be fighting over who invented the bloody pipe.

Rest in peace, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie and may your wisdom embedded in the world today, linger as much as possible in our minds.

UPDATE: (Wired) Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

Geeks like to hack stuff, especially if they’re not meant to be hacked. But hacking computers or mobile phones is piece of cake, so some, more adventurous geeks hack cars. The Toyota Prius is a particularly interesting car to hack, since a lot of its functionality is based on control systems and they have interface ports that you can plug in debug systems and change (or add) behaviour to your car.

For instance, you can enable the SatNav screen to play video CDs or MP3s, since the system supports it, but there aren’t enough buttons on the panel and, well, you shouldn’t be watching videos while you drive, anyway.

Another less common hack, but doable is to change the voice commands. They’re normally hard-coded to respond when you press a button on the steering wheel and say something. For instance, on my Prius, if you say “fire photon torpedoes” it puts the air condition temperature down a bit. If you say “Khaaaaaaaan!” it turns off the radio, and so on.

Some controls are a bit less harmless, like activating the breaks or turning off the car, but normally you can’t access them from the control panel, anyway. That is, unless you by-pass the CAN network and connect the central control with the control panel.

Legend tells that a geek bypassed the system and, just for fun, added a voice command to turn off the car when he’d say “off“. That was his pride and joy, and (geek) friends would go jealous of his control over his car. Until the day the car was too old and he decided to buy a new one, with even more technology. Only he forgot to disable the “off” button.

A few months later, they say, the new owner was having a fight with his girlfriend on M11 at full speed and, well, as many would do in those circumstances, he was swearing a lot. Loudly. His unfortunate last minute of life began when he accidentally pressed the “talk” button and said something along the lines of “f*** off …”.

The car dutifully acknowledged the command and, since the previous owner forgot to add any security checks, turned itself off at once. Havoc and carnage followed, but that’s another story.

Now you know why Toyota voids your warranty when you open the panel…

This is a little pet project I did a while ago. It’s a FreeCell puzzle‘s solver API.

The idea is to provide a basic validation engine and board management (pretty much like my old chess validation), so people can write FreeCell solvers on top of it. It has basic board setup (of multiple sizes), movement legalisation, and a basic Solver class, which you must derive to create your own solvers.

There’s even a BruteFroceSolver that can solve a few small boards, and that gives you an idea on how to create your own solvers. However, the API is not clear enough yet that children could start playing with it, and that’s the real goal of this project: to get kids interested in solving complex optimisation problems in an easy way.

Freecell is a perfect game for it. Most boards can be solved (only a handful of them were proven – by exhaustion – not solvable), some movements can be rolled back and you can freely re-use cards that have already been placed into the foundations (their final destination) back in the game again.

It’s out of the scope of this project to produce a full-featured graphic interface for kids, but making the API easy enough so they understand the concepts without dragging themselves into idiosyncrasies of C++ is important.

Compiler optimisations

The reason why I did this was to make some of the optimisations compiler engineers have to do more appealing to non-compiler engineers or children with a taste for complex problems. But what does this have to do with compilers? The analogy is a bit far-fetching and somewhat reverse, but it’s interesting nevertheless and it was worth the shot.

Programming languages are transformed into graphs inside the compiler, which should represent the intentions of the original programmer. This graphs are often optimised multiple times until you end up with a stream of instructions representing the source code in the machine language.

Ignore for now the optimisations on those graphs, and focus on the final part: selecting machine instructions that can represent that final graph in the machine language (assembly). This selection can pick any assembly instruction at will, but it has to put them into a very specific order to represent the same semantics (not just syntactic) of the original program. Since many instructions have side effects, pipeline interactions, special flags set or cleaned up, it’s not trivial to produce correct code if you don’t check and re-check all conditions every time. This is a known complex optimisation problem and can be responsible for changes in speed or code size in orders of magnitude.

What does it have to do with the Freecell puzzle? Well, in Freecell, you have a number of cards and you have to put them in a specific order, just like assembly instructions. But in this case, the analogy is reverse: the “sequence” is trivial, but the “instructions” are hard to get.

There are other similarities. For example, you have four free cells, and they can only hold one value at a time. They are similar to registers, and manipulating them, gives you a good taste of how hard it is to do register scheduling when building the assembly result. But in this case, it’s much harder to spill (move the data back to memory, or in this case, card back to cascades), since there are strict rules on how to move cards around.

Reusing cards from the foundations is similar to expanding single instructions into a sequence of them in order to circumvent pipeline stalls. In real compilers you could expand a multiply+add (very useful for digital signal processing) into two instructions: multiply and add, if that gives you some advantage on special cases on special chips. In Freecell, you can use a 9 on top of a 10, to move an 8 from another cascade and free up a card that you need to clean up your freecells (registers).

I’m sure you can find many more similarities, even if you have to skew the rules a bit (or completely reverse them), but that’s not the point. The point is to interest people into complex optimisation techniques without the hassle of learning a whole new section of computer science, especially if that section puts fear in most people in the first place.

Since the end of the dark ages, and the emergence of modern capitalism, science has been connected to business, in one way or another.

During my academic life and later (when I moved to business), I saw the battle of those that would only do pure science (with government funding) and those that would mainly do business science (with private money). There were only few in between the two groups and most of them argued that it was possible to use private money to promote and develop science.

For years I believed that it was possible, and in my book, the title of this post wouldn’t make sense. But as I dove into the business side, every step closer to business research than before, I realised that there is no such thing as business science. It is such a fundamental aspect of capitalism, profit, that make it so.

Copy cats

Good mathematicians copy, best mathematicians steal. The three biggest revolutions in computing during the last three decades were the PC, the Open Source and Apple.

The PC revolution was started by IBM (with open platforms and standard components) but it was really driven by Bill Gates and Microsoft, and that’s what generated most of his fortune. However, it was a great business idea, not a great scientific one, as Bill Gates copied from a company (the size of a government), such as IBM. His business model’s return on investment was instantaneous and gigantic.

Apple, on the other hand, never made much money (not as much as IBM or Microsoft) until recently with the iPhone and iPad. That is, I believe, because Steve Jobs copied from a visionary, Douglas Engelbart, rather than a business model. His return on investment took decades and he took one step at a time.

However, even copying from a true scientist, he had to have a business model. It was impossible for him to open the platform (as MS did), because that was where all the value was located. Apple’s graphical interface (with the first Macs), the mouse etc (all blatantly copied from Engelbart). They couldn’t control the quality of the software for their platform (they still can’t today on AppStore) and they opted for doing everything themselves. That was the business model getting in the way of a true revolution.

Until today, Apple tries to do the coolest system on the planet, only to fall short because of the business model. The draconian methods Microsoft took on competitors, Apple takes on the customers. Honestly, I don’t know what’s worse.

On the other hand, Open Source was born as the real business-free deal. But its success has nothing to do with science, nor with the business-freeness. Most companies that profit with open source, do so by exploiting the benefits and putting little back. There isn’t any other way to turn open source into profit, since profit is basically to gain more than what you spend.

This is not all bad. Most successful Open source systems (such as Apache, MySQL, Hadoop, GCC, LLVM, etc) are so because big companies (like Intel, Apple, Yahoo) put a lot of effort into it. Managing the private changes is a big pain, especially if more than one company is a major contributor, but it’s more profitable than putting everything into the open. Getting the balance right is what boosts, or breaks, those companies.

Physics

The same rules also apply to other sciences, like physics. The United States are governed by big companies (oil, weapons, pharma, media) and not by its own government (which is only a puppet for the big companies). There, science is mostly applied to those fields.

Nuclear physics was only developed at such a fast pace because of the bomb. Laser, nuclear fusion, carbon nanotubes are mostly done with military funding, or via the government, for military purposes. Computer science (both hardware and software) are mainly done on the big companies and with a business background, so again not real science.

Only the EU, a less business oriented government (but still, not that much less), could spend a gigantic amount of money on the LHC at CERN to search for a mere boson. I still don’t understand what’s the commercial applicability of finding the Higgs boson and why the EU has agreed to spend such money on it. I’m not yet ready to accept that it was all in the name of science…

But while physics has clear military and power-related objectives, computing, or rather, social computing, has little to no impact. Radar technologies, heavy-load simulations, and prediction networks receive a strong budget from governments (especially US, Russia), while other topics such as how to make the world a better place with technology, has little or no space is either business or government sponsored research.

That is why, in my humble opinion, technology has yet to flourish. Computers today create more problems than they solve. Operating systems make our life harder than they should, office tools are not intuitive enough for every one to use, compilers always fall short of doing a great job, the human interface is still dominated by the mouse, invented by Engelbart himself in the 60′s.

Not to mention the rampant race to keep Moore’s law (in both cycles and profit) at the cost of everything else, most notably the environment. Chip companies want to sell more and more, obsolete last year’s chip and send it to the land fills, as there is no efficient recycling technology yet for chips and circuits.

Unsolved questions of the last century

Like Fermat’s theorems, computer scientists had loads of ideas last century, at the dawn of computing era, that are still unsolved. Problems that everybody tries to solve the wrong way, as if they were going to make that person famous, or rich. The most important problems, as I see, are:

• Computer-human interaction: How to develop an efficient interface between humans and computers as to remove all barriers on communication and ease the development of effective systems
• Artificial Intelligence: As in real intelligence, not mimicking animal behaviour, not solving subset of problems. Solutions that are based on emergent behaviour, probabilistic networks and automatons.
• Parallel Computation: Natural brains are parallel in nature, yet, computers are serial. Even parallel computers nowadays (multi-core) are only parallel to a point, where they go back on being serial. Serial barriers must be broken, we need to scratch the theory so far and think again. We need to ask ourselves: “what happens when I’m at the speed of light and I look into the mirror?“.
• Environmentally friendly computing: Most components on chips and boards are not recyclable, and yet, they’re replaced every year. Does the hardware really need to be more advanced, or the software is being dumber and dumber, driving the hardware complexity up? Can we use the same hardware with smarter software? Is the hardware smart enough to last a decade? Was it really meant to last that long?

All those questions are, in a nutshell, in a scientific nature. If you take the business approach, you’ll end up with a simple answer to all of them: it’s not worth the trouble. It is impossible, at short and medium term, to profit from any of those routes. Some of them won’t generate profit even in the long term.

That’s why there is no advance in that area. Scientists that study such topics are alone and most of the time trying to make money out of it (thus, going the wrong way and not hitting the bull’s eye). One of the gurus in AI at the University of Cambridge is a physicist, and his company does anything new in AI, but exploits the little effort on old school data-mining to generate profit.

They do generate profit, of course, but does it help to develop the field of computer science? Does it help tailor technology to better ourselves? To make the world a better place? I think not.

Almost a decade ago I joined Yahoo to work on the search team. At that time, Google was giving Yahoo a hard time with their amazing search, while Yahoo was mostly based on directory search and some ad-hoc buyouts (AltaVista et al). Yahoo came with its own search, then bought Inktomy, then re-wrote the search engine, and they’re now using Bing. They were late on the search business. Too late. Not that Inktomy was bad, but it wasn’t better than Google and certainly wasn’t a novelty.

When Google came with Gmail it was a shock to all of us, Yahoo workers. How can they offer 1GB free mail and we only offer 10MB? How can a (then) small company provide such massive storage while the behemoth of the Internet could only afford peanuts? It’s all in the administration. Yahoo, for some reason I still don’t understand, had to have all user’s emails on filers (very expensive storage), and had to reserve the whole storage, even if less than 10% of the users actually used more than 50%. There was a lot of very expensive idle disks at Yahoo Mail…

Another case was social networks. Yahoo was never able to write a single decent social network that wouldn’t close an year later. Several internal attempts were made (during years of development) before the first Yahoo-360 came out, only to die a few months later of starvation.

Yahoo-style

When the internet was young, and Yahoo was at the top, they could do anything, people would just love. Yahoo mail was free and came with a calendar and some bits. It was horrid, but it was free, and we all used one day (especially after Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft). Somehow, the directors of Yahoo decided it was better to have it all, even if the quality was unbelievably low. They were so famous and so ubiquitous that anyone wanted to advertise on their websites. The more they had, the more people wanted.

That cycle made Yahoo create a huge number of useless pages and verticals (content website like weather, mobile, etc), just because people would pay loads of money to advertise there. I’ve seen many pages going live without proper review or a decent market analysis, and some were still with bogus content (non non non) and broken links after years. Yahoo had spread their butter so thin that it was impossible for them to compete with any other company.

Google came, Google destroyed Yahoo, Microsoft came and bought it. It may not be in paper, but Yahoo is the new Microsoft garden, where they put their feet up when they’re tired of working.

Facebook

With Facebook, the story is not completely similar. Google is still not where Yahoo was 8 years ago and the Internet is not as naive as it used to be. It’s true that Facebook killed every other social network website, but it’s not true that they’ll be able to do with GMail, what Google did with Yahoo Mail. Part because GMail is really good, and part because Facebook guys are not that good.

But there’s one trend that is happening to Google that is similar to Yahoo of the past: legacy. Google has a decade of code, normally more bad than good, and the new systems have to integrate with it. But that’s not the worse, by far. As Yahoo, Google started from ground-up, so they always had the start-up mentality. When the company wasn’t a start up any more, they still tried to do things the same way.

Two things happened during the last few years that put Google in a bad situation: first, because in the golden days they had truly done remarkable systems (simple, yet efficient), they thought (and carried on thinking) not only that they were the best of the best, but that they could do anything and anything they did was automatically better than any one else. Second, the lack of process and reality check only made things worse, by kludging infrastructure on top of infrastructure, by solving every problem as if it was map-reduce and by doing everything in-house, it was difficult to use off-the-shelf applications for things that weren’t really that relevant, and move on when it was, indeed, relevant.

Facebook is still a young company, but I hardly believe their fate will not be the same. It was also clear from the beginning (8 years ago), that Google would have the same fate. However, I don’t think that Facebook will overrun Google as the latter did with Yahoo, but that’s neither fault. The market is not the same, the Internet is not the same.

Google+

In the same style as Yahoo-360, Google is trying to use their own user-base to compete with Facebook, and for that, it’s very likely that they’ll fail. Not as bad as 360, but they won’t kill Facebook.

Hangouts, Circles, Huddle are just different names for the same functionality in Facebook, Twitter, etc. Even the layout of Google+ is identical to Facebook. 360 was exactly the same thing and that’s where I draw the line. That’s where Google is getting ludicrously similar to Yahoo 8 years ago and that’s why they’ll start failing more and more often from now on.

They stopped being creative. Their creative innovations (wave, buzz) is average at best, their copied products (chrome, android) and similar to the competition with no clear game changer and the old stuff (search, gmail) is still the same. Not bad, but not creative any more.

From now on, is only downhill. In a decade or so, Apple will offer to buy them, and fail to, but enough to dismiss the general trust people have on them and that will be the end. Zombies of the Internet…

Ever since Moore’s idea became a law (by providence), and empires were built upon this law, little has been thought about the need for such advancements. Raw power is considered to many the only real benchmark to what a machine can be compared to others. Cars, computers and toasters are all alike in those matters, and are only as good as their raw throughput (real or not).

With the carbon footprint disaster, some people began to realise (not for the correct reasons) that maybe we don’t actually need all that power to be happy. Electric cars, low-powered computers and smart-appliances are now appealing to the final consumer and, for good or bad, things are changing. The rocketing growth of the mobile market (smartphones, netbooks and tablets) in recent years is a good indicator that the easily seduced consumer mass has now being driven towards leaner, more efficient machines.

But, how lean are we ready to go? How much raw power are we willing to give away. In other words, how far goes the appeal that the media push on us to relinquish those rights bestowed by Moore? It seems not so much, with all chip companies fighting for a piece of the fat market (as well as the lean, but).

What is the question, anyway?

Ever since that became a trend, the question has always been: “how lean can we make our machine without impacting on usability?”. The focus so far has only been on creating smarter hardware, to a lesser extent (and only recently) reducing the unneeded fat of operating systems and applications, but no one ever touches the fundamental question: “Do we really need all that?“.

The questions is clearly cyclic. For example, you wouldn’t need a car if the public transport was decent. You wouldn’t need health insurance if the public health system was perfect, and so on. With computing is the same. If you rely on a text editor or a spreadsheet, it has to be fast and powerful, so you can finish your work on time (and not get fired). If you are a developer and have to re-compile your code every so often, you need a damn good (in CPU and memory) computer to make it as painless as possible. Having a slow computer can harm the creative process that involves all tasks around it, and degrade the quality of your work to an unknown quantity.

Or does it?

If you didn’t have to finish your work quicker, would you still work the same way? If you didn’t have to save your work, or install additional software, just because the system you’re working on only works on a particular type of computer (say, only available on your workplace). If you could perform tasks as tasks and not a whole sequence of meaningless steps and bureaucracy, would you still take that amount of time to finish your task?

Real world

Even though the real world is not that simple, one cannot take into account the whole reality on each investigation. Science just doesn’t work that way. To be effective, you take out all but one variable and test it. One by one, until you have a simplified picture, a model of reality. If on every step you include the whole world, the real world, in your simulations, you won’t get far.

There is one paper that touched some of these topics back in 2000, and little has changed since then. I dare to say that it actually got worse. With all these app stores competing for publicity and forcing incompatibility with invisible boundaries, has only made matters worse. It seems clear enough for me that the computing world, as far I can remember (early 80′s) was always like that and it’s not showing signs of change so far.

The excuse to keep doing the wrong thing (ie. not thinking clearly about what a decent system is) was always because “the real world is not that simple”, but in fact, the only limitation factor has been the greed of investors who cannot begin to understand that a decent system can bring more value (not necessarily money) than any quickly designed and delivered piece of software available today.

Back in the lab…

Because I don’t give a fig to what they think, I can go back to the lab and think clearly. Remove greed, profit and market from the table. Leave users, systems and what’s really necessary.

Computers were (much before Turing)  meant to solve specific problems. Today, general purpose computers create more problems than they solve, so let’s go back to what the problem is and lets try to solve it without any external context: Tasks.

A general purpose computer can perform a task in pretty much the same way as any other, after all, that’s why they’re called “general purpose”. So the system that runs on it is irrelevant, if it does not perform the task, it’s no good. A good example of that are web browsers. Virtually every browser can render a screen, and show surprisingly similar results. A bad example is a text editor, which most of them won’t even open another’s documents, and if they do, the former will do all in its power to make the result horrid in the latter.

Supposing tasks can be done seamlessly on any computer (lets assume web pages for the moment), than does the computer only computes that task, or is it doing other things as well?

All computers I know of will be running, even if broken, until they’re turned off. Some can increase and decrease their power consumption, but they’ll still be executing instructions to the world’s end. According to out least-work principle (to execute tasks), this is not particularly relevant, so we must take that out of our system.

Thus, such a computer can only execute when a task is requested, it must complete that task (and nothing else more), and stop (really, zero watts consumption) right after that.

But this is madness!

A particular task can take longer to execute, yes. It’ll be more difficult to execute simultaneous tasks, yes. You’ll spend more cycles per particular task than usual, yes! So, if you still thinking like Moore, than this is utter madness and you can stop reading right now.

Task Driven Computing

For those who are still with me, let me try to convince you. Around 80% of my smartphone’s battery is consumed by the screen. The rest is generally spend on background tasks (system daemons) and only about 5% on real tasks. So, if you could remove 95% of your system’s consumption, you could still take 20x more power consumption for your tasks and be even.

Note that I didn’t say “20x the time”, for that’s not necessarily true. The easiest way to run multiple tasks at the same time is to have multiple CPUs in a given system. Today that doesn’t scale too well because the operating systems have to control them all, and they all just keep running (even when idle) and wasting a huge amount of power for nothing.

But if your system is not designed to control anything, but to execute tasks, even though you’ll spend more time per task, you’ll have more CPUs working on tasks and less on background maintenance. Also, once the task is done, the CPU can literally shut down (I mean, zero watts) and wait for the next task. There is no idle cost, there is no operational code being run to multi-task or to protect memory or avoid race-conditions.

Problems

Of course, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Turning on and off CPUs is not that trivial, running tasks with no OS underneath (and expecting them to communicate) is not an easy task, and fitting multiple processors into a small chip is very expensive. But, as I said earlier, I’m not concerned with investors, market or money, I’m concerned with technology and it’s real purpose.

Also, the scaling is a real problem. Connection Machines were built and thrown away, clusters have peak performance way above their average performance levels, and multi-core systems are hard to work with. Part of that is real, the interconnection and communication parts, but the rest was artificially created by operating systems to solve new problems in an old way, just because it was cheaper, or quicker, or easier.

Back in the days…

I envy the time of the savants, when they had all the time and money in the world to solve the problems of nature. Today, the world is corrupted by money and even the most prominent minds in science are corrupt by it, trying to be the first to do such and such, protecting research from other peers just to claim a silly Nobel prize or to be world famous.

The laws of physics had led us into it, we live in the local minima of the least energetic configuration possible, and that’s here, now. To get our of any local minima we need a good kick, something that will take us out in a configuration of a more energetic configuration, but with enough luck, we’ll fall into another local minima that is less energetic than this one. Or, we we’re really the masters of the universe, maybe we can even live harmoniously in a place of local maxima, who knows!?

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) are not new. The first I remember playing is the Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD), but before that, of course, I’ve played other (real-life) multiplayer RPG games as well, and they were never quite the same thing.

Of course, at that time the graphic cards couldn’t quite compete with our imagination (not to mention connection speeds), but a lot has improved in both fronts, and lots of very good looking games have arrived, but still, there’s something missing. For years I couldn’t put my finger on it, but recently I think I nailed the issue: user driven content.

The interface

Most of the MMORGP are war games. World of Warcraft, LOTR online, Vendetta, Star Trek Online, Regnum and so many others rely on war to be fun. Of course, all of them have the side issues, some trade or silly missions, but the real fun is going to the battlefield.

If you look from the technical side of things, this is not surprising at all. Aside from good graphics, one of the hardest things to do in a game is a good interface. Very few games are perfect like Tetris. I gave Tetris to both my sons when they were about 2 years old and after about a minute they were already playing. There is no need to instructions, tutorials or any training and still today I find it quite fun. This is why it’s probably the most successful game in history.

But it’s all about the interface. It’s easy to create a seamless interface for Tetris. Try to create an interface for a strategy game that doesn’t require some hours of training, or an interface for first-person games that actually allows you to know where you are, or an interface for adventure games that doesn’t make you click in half-dozen places to get anything. Many have tried, all have failed.

At the dawn of internet games, strategy and quake were dominant. That’s because the internet wasn’t so fast and both were quite good in saving bandwidth. Quake had a special fix to avoid sending one packet for every bullet and only one packet when you press the trigger and another when you release it, the rest was up to the client.

But in war games, the interface is pretty much established. World of Warcraft didn’t invent anything, they just mixed Warcraft with Lara Croft (rubbish interface, by the way). Space ship games got the interface from Wing Commander (Vendetta got it from W.C. Privateer), Lord of the Rings and Regnum mixed Second Life with old-style RPG (even with the same deficiencies) and Star Trek Online copied from everyone above.

Now, the interface for a good strategy or adventure game is somewhat complicated. For a first-person 3D RPG, even worse. It doesn’t have to be mind controlled to be easy, nor you have to use 3D glasses or any immersion technology to be fun. Simplifying the game is one way, but then it’s even harder to make it more interesting.

It’s the user, stupid!

I can see only one way to add value to a game that is simple but still fun: user driven content.

You can enrich the world in which you’re immersed into. For instance, Zynga is quickly gathering an impressive amount of users by adding a lot of content. I don’t play those games, but people around me do and I can see why it’s so addictive. There are so many things to do and the frequency of updates is so impressive that it’s almost impossible not to be driven to it.

You might think that the games are too simple, and the graphics are average, but the interface is extremely simple, the challenges are simple, yet still challenging, and the number of paths you can choose for your character are enormous. In this case, the user experience is driven by his own choices. The content is so rich that each and every place is completely different from every other, solely driven by user choices.

Not many game companies (certainly not the indie ones) have time or money to do that. So, why are indie games generally more interesting than commercial ones? They go back to square one, simplify the game and optimise the interface. EA would never release something like Angry Birds or World of Goo, and yet those are the two best games I played in a long time. But, world of Goo is over and Angry Birds require constant attention (seasonal versions) to keep selling or making money (from ads).

They are missing the user content. It might not be their style, nor objective, but that’s a difference between Deep Purple and a one-hit-band.

Back to MMORGP

So, from all MMORPGs, there are many good looking, some with good challenges and a lot of slaughtering fun, but I tire quite quickly from playing them. The last I played was Vendetta. Quite good graphically, it has some reasonably accurate physics simulation (what drove me to it) but not accurate enough to keep me playing. The content tires too quickly to be fun after a few hours and even though I had 8 hours of free play, I spent less than two and dropped it.

This was always a pain, since Final Fantasy and the like, building up the character, hitting slugs for XP, fight-heal-run until you level up. Though Final Fantasy was better, as it normally would throw you on level 10 or so, so you didn’t need too much of levelling up. But why? Who likes beating 253 slugs to get 1000 experience points, going to level 2 and being able to equip a copper sword that doesn’t even cut a snail’s shell?

One of the best MMORGP experiences I had recently was Regnum. This is a free game made in Argentina and has a lot of content, good interface and a healthy community. They do the normal quest levelling up technique and it works quite well until level 15 or so. After that, it’s hitting bears, golems and phantoms for half a year until you can go outside and beat other users.

I got outside prematurely (couldn’t bother to wait) and the experience was also not great. Huge lag on big crowds, people disappearing in mid-air and appearing a few meters away, etc. But the most annoying of all was the content. It was always the same fort that we had to protect, always the same keep we had to attack, always the same talk on how our race is superior to your race, etc.

I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings (which sucks on Linux) or Star Trek Online (which doesn’t even run), but I bet they can get a bit further. They’re there to compete with World of Warcraft, not Regnum, but the fate will be the same: boring.

So, after quite a big rant, how would I do it?

User content

First, a memory refresh: all free first-person shooter I know of are a re-make of Quake. They use the same engine, the same world builders, the same techniques. On Debian repositories you’ll find at least a dozen, all of them running on some version of Quake. Nexuiz, Tremulous, Open Arena, Urban Terror, etc.

Not only the Quake engine is open source, but it was built to be extensible and that, even before the source was opened by ID. I made some levels for Doom, there were good editors at the time (1994?), probably there are full development suites today.

The user has the power to extend, create, evolve and transform your game in ways that you never thought possible. To think that only the few people you hire are good enough to create game content is to be, to say the least, naive.

Now, all those games are segmented. Nexuiz levels don’t connect to Tremulous levels. That’s because the mods (as they’re called) are independent. To be able to play all those different games you need to download a whole lot of data (objects, music, game logic, physics settings, etc) and each game has it radically different. Sarge with a rocket launcher would be invincible in most of other quake variants.

But that is, in my opinion, the missing link between short spurs of fun and long lasting enjoyment. I want to be able t build my world (like Zynga), but in a world with free movement (like Quake) with quests (like MMORPGs) made by the users themselves (like no FP-game I know) in a connected world. It cannot penalise those that connect seldom, or those that connect through text terminals, Android phones or browser users in any way.

As some games have started to understand, people like different things in games. I like building stuff and optimizing structures, some like carnage, others like to level up or wait 45 minutes for a virtual beef pie to be ready. You cannot have all that in one game if you’re the only content generator.

Also, if the engine is not open, people won’t be able to enhance it for their particular worlds. It doesn’t have to be open source, but it has to have a good API and an efficient plugin system. Tools to create mods and content is also essential, but the real deal is to give the users freedom to create their versions of the game and be able to connect them all.

If every game is also a server, people can create their small worlds inside the bigger world, that is in the central server. A business strategy would be, then, to host those worlds for people that really cared about them. Either host for free in exchange of ads and content generation, or paid hosting for the more serious users. You can also easily sell content, but more importantly, you can create a whole marketplace of content driven by the users! Read Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash and you know what I mean.

I think Apple and Google have proven over and over that a market with apps generated by the users is very effective indeed! Intel is just following the same path with their new App store, so yes, this is a good business strategy. But, it’s still fun for a wider range of people, from game addicts to casual gamers, from heavy modders to passive Facebook users.

There are many ways of doing that, maybe not all of them will be successful, but at least from my point of view, until that day arrives, no game will be fun.

As a postal worker, Mark had plenty of time to wonder in his head about things. Being in the post was not the most boring job ever, but wasn’t also complex that would put his brain cells to work that much. A bit of letter sorting and route planning was more than he needed to perform his job well and, even though he had a few neurons to spare, that actually didn’t help with his boss’ appraisal.

Not that Mark’s boss didn’t welcome a bit of thinking, it’s just that sometimes, too much thinking can do more harm than good. Nevertheless, Mark had that job for a few years now, and no plans to actually make a change. He had no family to care for, nor any massive debt to pay out and wasn’t particularly good looking to actually have a girlfriend.

But all that averageness wouldn’t help Mark to stop thinking about those things. Things that would make him loose his job. Things that always made him awkward when talking to women. Things that nobody else could understand, and nobody cared for that matter. Probably the very reason why he was thinking about it again this morning…

Spam

Between delivering some spam to a semi-detached family house and dropping a small box to a bungalow with lots of rubbish on the pavement, he thought how hard it is to do what people expect you to. Why do we have to deliver spam to half the country? Why can’t he just skip the spam, since nobody wants it anyway, and just deliver the good stuff? Would they really know if he’d delivered the spam in the first place?

For a few minutes that day, people walking down the pavement were somewhat annoyed with the presence of a motionless postman holding a few flyers. He was thinking… If they were actually paying attention, people on that street, that day, would see a perfectly regular postman sorting through his delivery quota in his bag with anger, until all the flyers were in his hand. He opened the green bin of that bungalow, and dropped them all in there.

To be honest, one mother coming down the high street, immediately after dropping her daughter at school (and the usual chat with other parents), actually saw all that happening. But her head was so full of problems, her daughter’s performance in school wasn’t that good and her husband, if you can call that husband, wasn’t being particularly nice that day. She dismissed the whole scene as another common madness of the world.

Mark was anxious, waiting for someone to say something, to reprehend him or to cheers for his bravery, but nothing really happened. It was exactly the same village as he was just a few minutes ago. A very radical move from his part had no damage whatsoever on the course of man kind. It was in that moment that he decided to do that every day.

For 3 years he put all the flyers in random bins (there weren’t that many, but he managed to hid some other on random places, too). To no surprise, absolutely nothing happened to any one. Local business were still working, Tesco was still full of people buying the same chicken wings on sale and the brand new chip shop had a very good clientèle, despite all their spam going to the bin every day.

With great power…

His success was a bit disappointing. Not only he managed to keep doing for so long, but nobody ever cared. Now, people were actually used to seeing him dropping flyers, no matter how extravagant were his moves around green bins. People would even greet him good morning while he was doing it. But he wasn’t a normal fellow, and his sense of righteousness put him on track to reform society. Small changes for a small man, but nevertheless, changes.

He decided to do every right thing where a wrong thing was expected. He delivered letters to doctors on the same day, even when a second class stamp was used. He’d slack off during most of the afternoon to deliver the big packages during the evening, when everybody was at home. He even delivered letters to people he knew while shopping and one day he replied to a letter himself.

It was a letter to a marriage lawyer firm on the postbox next to school. The letter was a bit crumpled and had a very shaky hand writing. He knew exactly from who that was and why. He replied:

Dear Mrs. Wife,

Your husband is a crook. He gambles the unemployment benefit, he hits your daughter and has an affair with more people that I’d dare to say.

You don’t need a lawyer, you need to slap him in the face and throw him out of your house.

Regards,
The postman

If that ever helped, nobody knows, but how that made him feel better, is inexplicable. The good feeling was taking over his life. He was less tense, had a few dates with the bakery attendant and even sent a letter to his mother. But all that feeling was stopped dead by a call from his boss. Apparently there were some complaints that the postal service was a bit erratic and some letters were not reaching their destinations.

Mark’s boss reassured him that he trusted Mark, but wanted him to know that there would be some investigations and questions to all members of staff. As it turned out, another postman was unhappy about his work and stopped delivering anything and went to the pub for the few last days. After a weekend delivering more letters than usual, everything went back to normal.

Happiness is ethereal

During the next few months, Mark managed to have a sound relationship with Emma (the bakery attendant) and they were actually happy. After the year’s end, Mark got a raise and could now afford a cable TV subscription. He didn’t get the sports pack, since Emma wanted the entertainment one, but all was fine as long as she was there, with him.

However, as it couldn’t be different, Mark started to wonder… He was really happier now than some years ago. The whole city seemed to have accepted his behaviour, no matter how odd. Even Emma ignored the issue after Mark told her during one of their first dates. It really wasn’t that important. How is that possible?

Can he, then, do whatever he wants? To what extent will bending the laws imposed by the people actually go before people start noticing, and doing something about it? How can some people do so little and go to jail, while him, with such a radical take on life, gets completely ignored. What would he have to do to be noticed?

In whatever group you are, Mark realised, as long as you don’t interfere with its natural course, you will be ignored. He learnt from the one of the documentary channels that this is true with every animal. Man is not more than any other animal. Society is not more than any other group. Not only you can do whatever you want, as long as that doesn’t interfere with the group, but everything you do will be completely ignored and, when you die, forgotten.

Obviously, Mark’s new take on life put some dents in his relationship, but he managed to suppress his thoughts while Emma was around. He wouldn’t want to loose her, not after so much trouble to get her. He also agreed not to talk weird while her friends would come over, and that took their relationship to a marriage, and life went on as you know it.

…

To be honest, I never heard of a postman named Mark, but according to his own theories, he could very much have existed and you’ll never know it…

More than three years ago I wrote about the desktop I really wanted… Now it’s time to review that and make some new speculations…

Back Then

The key issues I raised back then were wireless technology, box size, noise, temperature and the interface.

Wireless power hasn’t progressed as much as I’d like, but all the rest (including wireless graphic cards) are already at full steam. So, apart from power, you don’t need any cables. Also, batteries are getting a bit better (not as fast as I’d like, too), so there is another stop-gap for wireless power.

Box size has reduced dramatically since 2007. All the tablets are almost full computers and with Intel and ARM battling for the mid-size form-factor, we’ll see radical improvements with lower power consumption, smaller sizes, much cooler CPUs and consequently, no noisy fans. Another thing that is bound to reduce temperature and noise is the speed in which solid-state drives are catching up with magnetic ones.

But with regard to the interface, I have to admit I was a bit too retro. Who needs 3D glasses, or pointer hats to drive the cursor on the screen? Why does anyone needs a cursor in the first place? Well, that comes to my second dream machine.

Form Factor

I love keyboards. Writing for (int i=0; i<10; i++) { a[i] = i*M_PI; } is way easier than try to dictate that and hope it gets the brackets, increments and semi-colons correctly. Even if the dictation software was super-smart, I still would feel silly dictating that. Unless I can think and the computer creates the code for me the way I want, there no better interface than the keyboard.

Having a full-size keyboard also allows you to spare some space for the rest of the machine. Transparent CPUs, GPUs and storage are still not available (nor I think will be in the next three years), so putting it into the monitor is a no-go. Flat keyboards (like the Mac ones) are a bit odd and bad for ergonomics, so a simple ergonomic keyboard with the basic hardware inside would do. No mouse, of course, nor any other device except the keyboard.

A flat transparent screen, of some organic LED or electronic paper, with the camera built-in in the centre of the screen, just behind it. So, on VoIP conversations, you look straight into the eyes of the interlocutor. Also, transparent speakers are part of the screen, half-right and half-left are screen + speakers, with transparent wiring as well. All of that, wireless of course. It should be extra-light, so just a single arm to hold the monitor, not attached to the keyboard. You should be able to control the transparency of the screen, to change between VoIP and video modes.

Hardware

CPUs and GPUs are so 10's. The best way to go forward is to have multi-purpose chips, that can turn themselves (or their parts) on and off at will, that can execute serial or vector code (or both) when required. So, a 16/32 core machine, with heavily pipelined CPU/GPUs, on multiple buses (not necessarily all active at the same time, or for the same communication purpose), could deal with on-demand gaming, video streaming, real-time ray-tracing and multi-threaded compilation without wasting too much power.

On a direct comparison, any of those CPU/GPU dies would have a fraction of the performance of a traditional mono-block chip, but their inherent parallelism and if the OS/drivers are written based on that assumption, a lot of power can be extracted from them. Also, with so many chips, you can selectively use only as much as you need for each task for specific applications. So, a game would use more GPUs than CPUs, probably with one or two CPUs to handle interface and sound. When programming, one or two CPUs can handle the IDE, while the other can compile your code in background. As all of this is on-demand, even during the game you could have a variable number of chips working as GPUs, depending on the depth of the world it's rendering.

Memory and disk are getting cheaper by the second. I wouldn't be surprised if in three years 128GB of memory and 10TB of solid-state disk are the new minima. All that, fitting nicely alongside the CPU/GPU bus, avoiding too many hops (NB+PCI+SATA+etc) to get the data in and out would also speed up the storage/retrieval of information. You can probably do a 1s boot up from scratch without the necessity of sleeping any more, just pure hibernate.

Network, again, wireless of course. It's already a reality for a while, but I don't expect it to increase considerably in the next 3 years. I assume broadband would increase a few percent, 4G will fail to deliver what it promises when the number of active clients reach a few hundred and the TV spectrum requires more bureaucracy than the world can handle. The cloud will have to wait a bit more to get where hard drives are today.

Interface

A few designs have revolutionized interfaces in the last three years. I consider the pointer-less interface (decent touch screen, camera-ware) and the brain interface as the two most important ones. Touch-screens are interesting, but they are cumbersome as your limbs get in the way of the screen you're trying to interact with. The Wii-mote was a pioneer, but the MS Kinect broke the barrier of usability. It's still in its early stages, but as such, it's a great revolution and because of the unnatural openness of Microsoft about it, I expect it to baffle even the most open minded ones.

On the other hand, brain interfaces only began this year to be usable (and not that much so), the combination of a Kinect, with a camera that reads your eyes and the brain interface to control interactions with the items on the screen should be enough to work efficiently and effectively.

People already follow the mouse with their eyes, it's easy to teach people to make the pointer follow their eyes. But to remove uncertainties and get rid once and for all of the annoying cursor, you need a 3D camera to take into account your position relative to the screen, the position of other people (that could also interact with the screen on a multi-look interface) and think together to achieve goals. That has applications from games to XP programming.

Voice control could also be used for more natural commands such as "shut-up" or "play some jazz, will ya?". Nothing too complex, as that's another field that is crawling for decades and hasn't have a decent sprint since it started...

Cost

The cost of such a machine wouldn't be too high, as the components are cheaper than today's complex motherboard designs, with multiple interconnection standards, different manufacturing processes and tests (very expensive!). The parts themselves would maybe be a bit expensive, but in such volumes (and standardised production) the cost would be greatly reduced.

To the environment, not so much. If mankind continues with the ridiculous necessity of changing their computers every year, a computer like that would fill up the landfills. The integration of the parts is so dense (eg monitor+cameras+speakers in one package) that would be impossible to recycle that cheaper than sending it to the sun to burn (a not so bad alternative).

But in life, we have to choose what's really important. A nice computer that puts you in a chair for the majority of your life is more important that some pandas and bumble bees, right?

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