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A while ago I wrote an article about Agile and Scrum and wanted to write another one following my recent experience with Agile. However, somehow I couldn’t add anything of that great value to my original post that would be worth a new one.

And now I know I don’t have to. In this fantastic post, Gwaredd takes a deep look into all failures and successes of Agile, with the common misconceptions of believers and decision-makers. In the end, the so called “Post Agile”, is just plain common sense.

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70’s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70’s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

I have recently joined the IETF Smart Grid group to see what people were talking about it and to put away my fears on security and privacy. What I saw was a bunch of experts discussing the plethora of standards that could be applied (very important) but few people seemed too interested in the privacy issue.

If you see the IEEE page on Smart Grids, besides the smart generation / distribution / reception (very important) there is a paragraph on the interaction between the grid and the customers, being very careful not to mention invasive techniques to allow the grid to control customer’s appliances:

“Intelligent appliances capable of deciding when to consume power based on pre-set customer preferences.”

Here, they focus on letting the appliances decide what will be done to save power, not the grid or the provider. Later on, on the same paragraph:

“Early tests with smart grids have shown that consumers can save up to 25% on their energy usage by simply providing them with information on that usage and the tools to manage it.”

Again, enforcing that the providers will only “provide [the customer] with information”. In other words, the grid is smart up to the smart meter (that is controlled by the provider), where inside people’s houses, it’s the appliances that have to be smart. One pertinent comment from Hector Santos in the IETF group:

“Security (most privacy) issues, I believe, has been sedated over the years with the change in consumer mindset. Tomorrow (and to a large extent today) generation of consumers will not even give it a second thought. They will not even realize that it was once considered a social engineering taboo to conflict with user privacy issues.”

I hate to be pessimist, but there is a very important truth in this. Not only people are allowing systems to store their data for completely different reasons, but they don’t care if the owner of the system will distribute their information or not. I, myself, always paranoid, have signed contracts with providers knowing that they would use and sell my data to third parties. The British Telecom is one good example. He continues:

“Just look how social networking and the drive to share more, not less has changed the consumer mindset. Tomorrow engineers will be part of all this new mindset.”

There is no social engineering any more like it used to be. Who needs to steal your information when it’s already there, on your Facebook? People are sharing willingly, and a lot of them know what problems it may cause, but the benefit, for them, is greater. Moreover, millions bought music, games and films with DRM, allowing a company control what you do, see or listen. How many Kindles were bought? How many iPhones? People don’t care what’s going on if they have what they want.

That is the true meaning of sedated privacy concerns. It’s a very distorted way of selfishness, where you don’t care about yourself, as long as you are happy. If it makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it makes no sense to me too.

Recently, the Future of Privacy Forum published an excellent analysis (via Ars) on the smart grid privacy. Several concepts that are easy to understand how dangerous they can be, became commonplace to not think about it or even consider it a silly worry, given that no one cares anyway.

An evil use of a similar technology is the “Selectable Output Control“. Just like a Kindle, the media companies want to make sure you only watch what you pay for. It may seem fair, and even cheaper, as they allow “smart pricing”, like some smart-grid technologies.

But we all have seen what Amazon did to kindle users, of Apple did to its AppStore, taking down contents without warn, removing things you paid for from your device, allowing or disallowing you to run applications or contents on your device as if you hadn’t pay enough money to own the device and its contents.

In the end, “smart pricing” is like tax cut, they reduce tax A, but introduce taxes B, C and D, which double the amount of taxes you pay. Of course, you only knew about tax A and went happy about your life. All in all, nobody cares who or how much they pay, as long as they can get the newest fart app…

Why is it so hard for the game industry to get the online experience? I understand the media industry being utterly ignorant about how to make sense of the internet, but gaming is about pure fun, isn’t it? The new survey done in UK is more than proof of the obvious fact that people will use all resources of the internet to get what they want, whether it’s illegal or not.

After all, who defines what’s legal and what’s not? The UK government already said that it’s OK to invade one’s privacy for the matter of general security, even when everybody knows that any government has no clue on what’s security and what’s not. Not to mention the Orwellian attitudes of certain US companies seem not to raise any eyebrow from the local government or the general public…

That said, games are a different matter. Offline games still need have some kind of protection, but online games should rely on online commerce, and that can only be complete if the user has a full online experience. So, what do I mean by full online experience?

You don’t always have access to your own computer. Sometimes you have just a remote connection, sometimes only your mobile phone or a web browser. Sometimes you have an old laptop with no decent graphic card and those golden times when you have a brand new game machine with four graphic cards. 10 years ago, mobile phones were not as today, but even though my current mobile has a 3D graphic card in it, it’s closer to the lower end when compared to desktops or even laptops.

So, what’s the catch? Imagine a game that you can play exactly the same game irrespective of where you play it.

There are lots of new online games, so called ORPG (online RPG) or the bigger brothers (MMORPG, massively-multi-player ORPG), but all of them rely on a Windows machine with OpenGL2 and DirectX 10 to play it, even though not half of it really need that kind of realism to be fun.

Moreover, when you’re at the toilet and you want to keep playing your battles, you could easily get your mobile and use a stripped down version with little graphic elements but with the same basic principles. When you’re at your parent’s and the only thing you have is dial-up, you can connect via SSH and play the console version. At least to manage your stuff, talk to your friends or plan future battles.

The hard part in all this, I understand, is to manage different players playing with different levels of graphic detail. Scripts on online games are normally prohibited because it eases too much cheating, and that would be the way of battling via a SSH connection… Players with better graphic cards would have the advantage of seeing more of the battlefield than its friends with a mobile phone, or even using a much better mouse/joystick and a much bigger keyboard (short-cuts are *very* important in online gaming).

With the new mobiles and their motion sensor and GPS interfaces, that wouldn’t be a much bigger difference, as you could wave the mobile to have a quicker glance and even use voice-control for some features that is still lacking support in desktop but it’s surprisingly popular in mobile devices. All in all, having at least three platforms: high-end and low-end graphics plus a mobile version, would be a major breakthrough in online gaming. I just wonder why game makers are not even hinting in that direction…

The console version is pushing a bit, I know, I just love the console…

While EA seems to have understood how to play the game, the Swedish court (and the European legal system) not only fails to get it, but also came with a lame excuse to reject the pirate bay retrial.

On one side, one of the judges was a member of several copyright protection groups and forgot to mention that before the case. This fact itself should be enough for a reconsideration of the decision, as his interests were too tied up with the case to have a fair opinion. But what bugs me most is the reason (or rather, the excuse) of why they are still determined to make them pay for their “crimes”.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

So, they’re not keeping any copyrighted material themselves, and they have a clause that takes away their responsibility of whatever material is shared across their networks, but that’s not enough, they should have done something.

Let’s say they did have to do something, now we should apply the same rule to others as well right? What about the weapons industry? They know it’ll be used to kill other people, but they still make it and sell it (much worse than only provide the means). What about the tobacco industry? They know it’s not healthy, they know people will get lung cancer, but they still do it (and quite a lot of it).

What about the recording industry? Yes, the same one that is accusing pirate bay of “harming the artists”, forces artists to sign diabolical contracts where they get all the money and the artists get all the work. Who’s harming the artists in the end?

I completely agree with the court decision, as long as they apply the same rule to everyone. No more firearms (for civilians, at least), no more cigarettes, 50/50 for contracts. Fair is fair.

Spam is good for you, at least better than you may think. Spam accounts for three quarters of all emails sent worldwide and some even attached carbon footprint to it (and here one of the reasons why it’s nonsense). But it’s good for you in ways that does not meet the eye very easily and very few people would even consider it as good in the first place.

Not only emails, think on how much regular mail you receive is really worthy and how much is spam, it’ll probably account for three quarters as well. How much of that is really mean, how that really hurts you so bad that you’d put the sender in jail for it?

Sure spam is a nuisance, sure it gets in the way of the real work, but at what cost are we, the society, willing to pay to eradicate such problem? Well, lets take a look on how spam really started…

Local business

You’re a window cleaner and recently moved to Shlobershire in a very quite little village. How would you let people know about your business? You can go on, talking to each one of the local residents but that’s a nuisance, so you print some pamphlets and post through the door of everyone.

Some will read and call you, some will be pissed off but most will just ignore you. You’ll figure out pretty quickly about those that got pissed off (if you live in a small village you know that already), but then you buy them a pint and everything is settled.

What’s the final cost? A few pamphlets, a couple pints and you got two great things: one or two windows to clean and the whole village knowing who you are. This is, by far, the cheapest marketing ever. The rest of us that can’t afford a real marketing campaign have to find ways to promote our business.

With all the fuss about global warming, organic farming and fair competition in business (if there is such thing), we want to promote and use more of local business than big brands. We’re loosing creativity, diversity and quality if we don’t.

ROI

Just like the local business, some people can’t afford big marketing campaigns. Either because they’re poor or because their business is not so legal in every country.

So, why people still send those stupid ill edited loosely formatted emails, even when it’s obvious what they want? Who wants pills, fake degrees or enlarge their penises? Well, apparently some do and the do reply and may well get what they want!

The return of investment is much, much better than most marketing campaigns. Take Microsoft’s campaign with Jerry Seinfield or the “I’m a PC” thing? It was the most expensive piece of crap ever done. Seriously, I prefer spam than that!

The return rate is very low, one reply in millions of email, but if they send billions of emails, go figure.

But that’s clearly bad, isn’t it?

Well, illegal activities are bad, of course. Either on-line of off-line, drug dealing is bad, banking scams are bad, but not all spam is a scam or a drug selling point.

First, people receive so much spam from normal companies (even those that they have explicitly opted-out) including broadband providers, software, telephone and TV etc and etc.

The smaller companies are still sending physical spam and it’s probably working much better than the electronic spam, but that’s the deal: it works and it’s cheap.

Second, what’s really illegal? Downloading a music you haven’t paid for is illegal? What if you will pay later? What if the author allowed you to? Ripping your CDs to MP3 to listen in your car is illegal? You have paid for it already!

Google has become target of many accusations of illegal behaviour because they host a number of websites, videos, personal profiles on social networks. If people started to massively upload child pornography to YouTube, would the Google guys be in jail? I bet my little finger they wouldn’t.

RIAA kills a kitten every time you download (or rip) a CD while governments detain people for years on maximum security prisons without a single charge, what’s really legal?

Pirate Bay scam

I still don’t believe it happened, even though it was on all major journals for a week, but the Pirate Bay guy actually got a jail sentence for owning a website that allowed people to share files. They’re not criminals, they’re not killing people or (more importantly) getting in the way of the course of business (after all, money is more important than peoples lives nowadays). They just set up a list of things.

File sharing is one of the biggest revolutions of the recent internet and more and more people are asking the industry to finally adopt the technique rather than fight it. Whether they like it or not, it will prevail.

What is worse, a few old ladies downloading very old music (unavailable from any shop in the world) or the fear that the recording industry poses on most governments today that allowed such a scam to ever being turn into reality?

One mistake does not justify the other, but many (sane) people are already saying: Stop fighting reality, come back to it, be part of it.

You can’t fight them, help them!

I can’t imagine a world where we wait people to deliver a pamphlet to hand-cuff them, or where someone is jailed for listening music in his player’s speakers. Unfortunately, we’re not that far from it.

Why spam works? Because there isn’t any other way for those people. Yellow pages? Who reads them? Journal advertisement? Banners? People got used to them and can ad-block automatically. Our brains are trained to ignore them, it’s just not effective any more.

Some companies say they can provide a much better ad experience for the users by spying their lives closer than their lovers. I would object that approach…

There are many (free) systems for local business, but none of them seem to cut it. Maybe because people are always trying to get money in return (weird world, isn’t it?) and end up putting paid ads bigger, colourful and in the front page, and let the real local business somewhere between marriages and obituary.

I have no idea how a system would get rid of spam once and for all and it’s not my cup of tea to think about it, but I’m sure there are many people that could tackle this problem, they just need a bit of money (from the government) and time. It’s not a matter of filtering emails, it’s a matter of removing the need to send them in the first place!

If governments are really worried about spam, let them be creative and help freedom, privacy and good relationships rather than the totalitarianism we’re seeing around the world.

A new world is rising, new machines are taking life much faster than most governments would like and the digital hand-cuffs are showing that none of them understand a bit of what’s going on. All blinds, living in their caves watching the shadows on the wall. Whoever cry wolf is right for no one knows what wolf really is and where is it. Technology is like children, the more oppressed they are, the more you loose control over them.

Einstein didn’t go to the US because he liked the land of freedom, he moved because he hoped (in vain) that they would know how to use wisely the technology he knew how to build. He knew that others would be able to build it and it was just a matter of time before any bomb was actually available. Holding it back was not the answer and he knew it.

I just hope people figure it out sooner rather than later, or 1984 will seem like a pretty boring fairy tale for our children…

Almost 10 years ago, MySQL became a great open source database, part of the LAMP platform (Perl, not PHP) and had everything to compete with the big players in the next few years.

It was then that they have done major releases, with a huge set of new features each, almost once a year. The community was happy using, developing and integrating with other products. But it was around 2005 that the things started going bad…

Back in 2005, when I was still in the loop, I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with the progress that the database had. I wasn’t also impressed with the new view the board gave to big companies (such as Yahoo!) on what was a good bet and what wasn’t.

After release 5.0 (still the production release, irrespective of what Sun says) there wasn’t a major development until Sun acquired MySQL and only then they’ve released 5.1 which they better shouldn’t.

In the old days, MySQL became famous by not implementing foreign keys and transactions, something that every other database had, because of speed issues. That decision became the core of the company and allowed other storage engines (such as InnoDB and BerkeleyDB which had those features) to be integrated, making it very easy to plan your database, using only the features you needed where you needed.

Who’s to blame?

I’m not sure it has something to do with Oracle buying InnoDB and Sleepycat (and now buying Sun, which owns MySQL). Even with all the politics of Oracle slowly buying MySQL in pieces, I don’t believe it’s the whole story. I see much more of an internal conflict and a lack of vision (probably for the lack of guts to keep taking weird decisions and succeeding) than anything else.

Now, MySQL is going down the same drain InnoDB and Sleepycat went, but with a twist: the source code is still GPL. Sun screwed up MySQL in a way I thought it wasn’t possible, Oracle will do it much more efficiently, even if they still play as good guys, it is definitely the end.

Don’t take my word only, my good friend and MySQL guru Jeremy Cole is taking himself out of the loop to avoid the useless politics. Steven (Computerworld) also cannot see how any of the involved companies will get anything in return of this deal.

Is there a light at the end?

Could Monty’s fork become a new MySQL without all the fuss? Could he, the odd guy with odd ideas, put MySQL on the map again? I do hope so, but that will cost MySQL the hall of fame. They’ll need to start over again and eventually fail once they’re there again and restart…

It’ll be fun to watch, at least MySQL had a GPL license which always ease forks and future development. Long live the open source revolution!

UPDATE:

Two excellent articles about the same issue from The Register and Ars Technica.

Hydrogenated, unsaturated fat and cholesterol are long enemies of the public, but recently a new type of fat has been added: FAT.

Microsoft has filed a patent suit against TomTom about its FAT implementation on their Linux satnavs. This is a bit of a long story and Microsoft is not tired yet. Probably because of the recent losses with patents, they’re trying to get some profit for themselves.

Luckily, there is hope. The guys at End Software Patents can see some light at the end of the tunnel. Looks like the Bilski case can give precedence for rejecting the lawsuit of that (and many other stupid patents they’re claiming) based on the tangibility of mathematical algorithms (software) when they’re not particularly tied to any concrete implementation (hardware).

This was how it was done before in the US until the first case passed through that wasn’t attached to any particular hardware and then with the final revision in 1998 that they could patent even cake recipes.

Why not ditch it for good?

So, FAT is rubbish, 30 years old and close to zero evolution since then, why keep it? It’s true that there are many other filesystems around, much faster, safer, optimized and well designed, but FAT still has its market: on embedded devices. Because it’s simple and stupid, it’s quite easy to support it on very small machines with reduced RAM and CPU power. It’s also light-weight and fits well for small flash cards and USB storage. But the biggest reason to keep it is another: Microsoft supports it since its birth.

Would you buy an SD card that needs to install a driver to make it work? What’d be the point?

Yet again, because of the market domination (and not technical merits), Microsoft forced rubbish down everyone’s throats live for longer that it was expected. And now, they’re trying to get the profits by suing everyone that followed them for decades. What a nice way to say thank you!

Speaking of which, not only they’re happy by suing companies by using Linux (TomTom in this case and many others during the FAT fight), they’re also asking for the open-source community’s help to make Visual Studio 2010 a better product, isn’t that nice? How lovely is the American way of life, I guess the world will never be able to thank them enough.

Pension plans are always too optimistic, and in this case, being optimistic is not at all a good thing. It’s actually getting the situation worse and, if nothing is done about it, it’ll be impossible to make the work force pay the pension for the huge retired population.

During the 80’s and 90’s we learned in school that European countries’ population pyramid had clear signs of development, because it had low birth rate and high life expectancy. Opposed, of course, to those from Brazil at that time, which was pretty much triangular, especially in the poorest regions.

This is obviously a problem as much more children are being born and dying, due to lack of education of the parents (that have dozens of children rather than a couple) and complete lack of health care. They were adopting the R-selection (as insects and lower organisms), where the more children you have, the higher are the chances of having grandchildren (and so, propagate your genes). It may sound terrible, but if you actually go there and talk to those people, that’s what they say. If you say you only have two children they think it’s an absurd, asking: “what would you do if one or two die?”. It’s not lack of love for all of them, it’s the hard truth they have to live with.

Now, terrible as it is, let’s see the other way around. In a high educated society, with excellent public health care, you normally see couples with none, one or at most two children. Seeing three is ok, but four is an absurd. How can you cope with all of them? Imagine the cost of childcare! (Note that this is no problem for those that have 15 in the situation above). What happens is that, with time, less children become adults and the number of retired people get bigger than those that pay for their pensions.

You may think that you (retired folks) have paid already your public and private pension in the past, but truth is that both the government and the banks already spent your money on something else (probably paying the pension of your parents). They never think soo long term as they ask you to. They force you to think on your own pension when you’re around 30 years old but all that money is being re-invested, lost and getting money from the government to pay the bill. Government money (from your tax and pension payments) were actually to pay other bills they had in the past, and they hope they’ll have money in 30 years to pay yours.

The big problem is that, today, the number of employed and retired people are still similar, but in 50 years it’ll be very unequal. With better health care (as we all expect), with stem cell research, gene therapy, cloning and other wonders of modern medicine we’ll probably be immortals by the end of the century. How can a small group of people between 20 and 65 years can ever pay for the pension of 65 until 200 years old? We don’t have to go so sci-fi, nor so distant in the future, some predictions are telling that the size of the work-force is going to be much smaller. Either the pensions payments go up or it’ll be impossible to pay up.

Have more children?

Until now the answer is “Have more children!”. Lots of couples in “baby-age” nowadays are having more than three children. They do it because, in developed countries, it’s cheap. Health care is free, schools are free, medicines and most services are free too. Who is paying for that? All of us. What happens with having more children is that, not only the work force is paying for the pension of the old, but also for the joy of the young. If it’s already a disaster to rely on such a small work force to pay the pension, how fair is it to demand them to pay for the young too?

But there is another, even bigger, question: Isn’t the population already big enough? Can we ever give decent food to every single living being (including animals, of course) that already exists in the world? Do we really need more? Shall we let people kill babies in China with the one-child policy while we have joy with our 10 children? If we really need those babies, shouldn’t we be adopting the “unwanted” Chinese, Ethiopian, etc?

Well, I particularly don’t believe in cheap charity. As my mother always said (and stuck for life in my mind): “Give the fishing pole and teach them how to fish”. So, I still think we should promote education and health care for countries in need so they can also have a population pyramid like the developed countries, but the policy of children, pension and taxes has to change. Of course, education and health care do take some time to evolve, and the children on those countries today won’t benefit from that, so plain old charity IS also fundamental to help those regions.

Managing the retirement age

People’s health is better today that it was 30 years ago. More and more people today retire older and older (quick Google for “increase retirement age” and you’ll see), and some countries are even increasing the official retirement age. That helps a lot, of course, but it’s only temporary and can work against the people. What happens, for instance, if the average retirement age decreases from one year to another? Would the official age reduce too? Is it fair for everyone, between one year and the other? I don’t think so.

One possible solution is to provide incrementing retirement payments, proportional to age and external remuneration. Say I turn 55 and, because of health problem, I need to reduce my work load by one third. I should be able to get one third of my retirement and keep on working, until I need another break and get, say, half of it by the age of 65. I could have gotten the full amount, but because I’m still working (or getting funds from elsewhere), I only get the amount proportional to what I was earning before and am now.

In numbers: With 55, I’m earning 60K a year. I have to work only 2/3 and therefore get only 40K. My pension is total of 30K, and 1/3 is 10K, so my new salary is 50K. With 60 years I need another break, so my new salary is 1/2 (30K) plus 1/2 of my pension (15K) = 45K. If I stop completely, I’ll only receive the 30K or my pension. Of course, if you want more you can always make a private pension plan and trust your bank won’t go bankrupt in the next 30 years.

Why this is fair?

1. If you’re still working full steam you should not get money from the government.
2. If you still want to work but can’t full time, you should get a proportional help from the government, but only what the government can afford to pay
3. If you can’t work at all, you should receive the full amount, exactly what the government already pays you today

This is just an example of how things can be worked out, not intended to be extensive not exhaustive. There are plenty of room for good ideas, we just need to get people talking about the alternatives rather than only thinking about how to get MORE money.

Why is retirement SO important?

Simply because there is just too much people in the world. Malthus would say: “Kill’em all”. I’d rather say: “Don’t let them be born at such an enormous rate”. If the solution for the future recession is having more babies, we’ll get ourselves into yet another one, much worse, in the next generation, like a snowball.

We have to stop having babies right now, deal with the consequences right now and hopefully in the future, our grandchildren will be better off. According to the CIA, the world population has just passed 6.7 billion people. With birth rate at 20/1000 and death rate around 8/1000 (same source), it’s not going to lower so soon. Raising 2% per year and with mortality rate extremely lower than in nature (which varies a lot, but seldom reach 0.8%), it’s very likely that in a few decades we’ll be the only animal on the planet. In a few centuries maybe the only living being (if you can say so).

Will we discover how to do photosynthesis with melanin? Or will we become cannibals?

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on software patents in US, and how the process is slowly reversing to what it should be (and was) since the beginning.

They describe all the history, important cases, different points of view and how the whole thing was going nuts in this century. The system was due to fail since the big companies started paying billions for patent trolls, but it took a bit too long to actually start reversing…

Would that be Obama’s aura? Or does both events mean that the US people finally started to think on their own? Whatever that is, it’s in the right direction, I think.

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