Apple Secrecy and the Tech Press

Posted on 2019-09-07 by jcs

It’s no secret among those who have been reading this blog for a while that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard. Those that aren’t explicitly corrupt are mostly lazy and ignorant (yes, yes, of course there are exceptions). I wish I could say that the tech press is better but, sadly, if anything they’re worse.

A glaring example of this is Apple coverage. For reasons unknown to me—and probably any other sane observer—Apple drives many reporters into paroxysms of mindless fury and an inability to see facts or reason about them. Every single thing that Apple does is taken by these reporters as proof that Apple is doomed and is only barely holding on. No one, no one, with any sense believes any of their nonsense because Apple continues to be, arguably, the most successful company ever and is showing no signs of slowing down. Sure, eventually they’ll start the inevitable decline common to all earthly things but that time is not yet upon us.

Apple hasn’t been blind to this and being Apple have brilliantly used it to advance their ends. Over at Apple Insider, Daniel Eran Dilger writes about Apple’s infamous secrecy and how they use it to leverage the press in helping them gain competitive advantages against their rivals. The article is, in a way, screamingly funny and you don’t have to be an Apple fan to enjoy the spectacle of a hapless press being pressed into serving Apple’s ends while believing they are fighting the evil empire.

The funniest part of the story is that Apple doesn’t have to lie to the press or do any overt misdirection. They simply keep their plans private and let the press make up their own stories. As I said, nobody with a modicum of sense believes anything they write and it’s unlikely that they’ve changed anyone’s perception of Apple or its products. But they keep at it.

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Emacs or Vi

Posted on 2019-09-06 by jcs

It’s Friday so it’s time for a little red meat.

Ward Willats tackles the critical issue of “Emacs or Vi.” He appears to have strongly held views on the matter.

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The Google GDPR Workaround

Posted on 2019-09-05 by jcs

A little over a week ago in my post on Google Tracking, I remarked that nothing short of strictly enforced GDPR-syle legislation would get Google and the other adtech miscreants to behave. I ended on the cynical note that maybe even then they wouldn’t behave. It turns out that I was right to be cynical.

The Irish Times is reporting that Google has been accused of secretly sending users’ personal data to advertisers. They’re doing this with a new mechanism being called “push pages.” The details are technical and a bit hard to understand but the TL;DR is it allows participants in Google’s real time bidding program to match the user with their own profiles and to share that information with other participants. Google has assured us that neither of those activities would be possible with their new GDPR-compliant protocols.

Johnny Ryan from Brave decided to investigate how Google handled his personal data and ran some tests. What he found was alarming. Google is, in fact, doing both those things. Ryan’s account, which the Irish Times report is based on, has a few more details including a link to his formal complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), an example of a push page, and a sequence diagram showing how the new scheme works.

If the charges are verified by the DPC, Google will undoubted be fined several million Euros. The problem is that they won’t care; the fine will simply be written off as a cost of doing business. If we want to end the scourge of adtech, the only thing that will get it done is putting a few executives in jail. I’m really against the automatic urge (especially in the U.S.) to put people in jail for the slightest infraction but I don’t think anything else will get the adtech industry’s attention. Fines certainly haven’t helped.

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Org Mode 9.2.6

Posted on 2019-09-04 by jcs

Bastien tweets that he’s just released Org-mode 9.2.6:

It’s a bug release so there’s no big changes, just a bit of bolt tightening.

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Tips For Working Remotely

Posted on 2019-09-03 by jcs

The other day I blogged about The Remote Work Report and how most people, given the opportunity, love working remotely. Some work from home, while others prefer coffee shops for even remote working spaces. For those of you who spend some or all of your time working from home, Christopher Hiller has some tips on how to do so effectively.

The most important of these are to have a home office and good equipment. The home office is important not only for psychological reasons but also because it provides a place where you can shut the door and focus on the task at hand. Hiller recommends against working on, say, the couch both for focus and health reasons.

The mandate to have good equipment is pretty obvious but as Hiller says, a craftsman doesn’t try to work with inferior tools and you shouldn’t either if you want to produce good work. Some equipment that you might not think about are a good, boom-mounted microphone and earphones. You’ll need those for teleconferencing, which you’ll probably be doing a lot.

The rest of Hiller’s post focuses on good habits, things like working regular hours and being able to stop at the end of your day. Take a look at his post. Most of it’s common sense but if you’re just starting out it can be a big help.

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Remembering Unix at 50

Posted on 2019-09-02 by jcs

As hard as it seems to believe, Unix is going to be 50 this year. Once Unix escaped from the Labs and became generally known and available, there was a lot of skepticism that it would have amount to anything. You can still find and read lots of papers detailing all the problems with Unix. That continued even after it became clear that Unix was changing everything.

As a nice nice retrospective at Ars Technica points out, Unix’s influence is everywhere today. Both Android and Apple phones run on Unix derivatives and, of course, the Internet essentially runs on Unix. The article tells the story of how Unix grew out of the failed Multics effort and was, for the first part of its life, a skunkworks project that most definitely did not have the support of Bell Labs management. They didn’t even have a computer to do the work on until Ken Thompson found an unused PDP-7 in a neighboring department that he able to appropriate.

That got them going but it was very rudimentary and didn’t have any disks or even tape drives. It wasn’t until they concocted a fiction about a text processing system for the patent department that they got a decent machine to work on.

Perhaps the most fortuitous aspect of Unix was that it was developed while AT&T was still a regulated monopoly and not allowed to sell or make a profit from—among other things—computer software. That resulted in Unix being given to universities and then its escape into the wild. When AT&T was broken up, they tried to put that genie back in the bottle but it was, of course, too late and Unix came to dominate the computer operating systems space.

Take a look at the Ars Technica article. It’s tells the story of an important part of our heritage and tells it pretty much the way I have always understood it.

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Weather Alert

Posted on 2019-09-01 by jcs

Those of you in the U.S., especially the South Eastern U.S., are certainly aware of Hurricane Dorian, a very powerful Cat 5 hurricane bearing down on the Bahamas and the southern east coast. Happily, the forecast track moved to the East since the earlier advisories, which means it’s less likely to make landfall in Florida.

The latest advisories have Tampa (home of the Irreal International Headquarters) out of the probability cone so Irreal and its minions probably won’t be affected. Nonetheless, the current advisory has a 17 per cent probability of Irreal experiencing tropical storm force winds. That’s not likely to cause any Internet or power disruptions but it is, I suppose, possible. Thus, if Irreal misses a post or two during the next few days, don’t worry. I’ll post them as soon as I can.

In the mean time, if you want to follow along at home, here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center. Scroll down to the Hurricane Dorian section and click on the Warnings/Cone Static Images graphic to see the latest track and probability cone.

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Open Office Sanity Strategies

Posted on 2019-08-31 by jcs

I keep resolving to stop writing about open office spaces. Even though I’ve never suffered having to work in one, I find their use almost as infuriating as I do the government’s illegal surveillance. Sadly, the madness goes on, I keep getting incensed, and I keep writing.

There are a couple of fairly recent articles on open offices worth mentioning. The first, Everyone hates open offices. Here’s why they still exist, by Katharine Schwab takes a look at why, despite the myriad studies showing that they don’t deliver on their promised benefits and have significantly adverse effects on employee productivity, morale, and health, open offices not only aren’t going away but are becoming more common.

The reasons are well known. One is that they’re cheaper and can save large companies hundreds of millions of dollars. As much as managers love to recite their fairy tales about increased communication and productivity, it’s just cant; the main reason is saving on rent and buildout.

The other reason, although not as venal, is more depressing: the hipsters are doing it and the people in charge want to be hip too. These people think that because Google has open offices they should get them too so they’ll be cool and successful. Like Google. The idea is self-ridiculing so there’s no point on saying more about it.

The second article, How my colleagues and I stay sane in our open office, by Jonas Downey discusses some strategies for dealing with the open office environment if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in one. The first and most important rule is to strictly enforce “library rules” for the office. That means no talking, no phones, no music, and generally being quiet and respecting your colleagues’ focus.

Downey works at Basecamp, which is predominately a remote work company so mostly people are in the office only if they need to meet with someone face-to-face. That makes the open office setup less onerous, I suppose, but notice that even so the company has taken pains to reduce the stress on their employees. Obviously not cool like the hipsters.

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The Remote Work Report

Posted on 2019-08-30 by jcs

Over at FYI they have an interesting report on working remotely. The number one takeaway, I suppose, is that almost everyone loves working remotely. If you’re one of those people who do, it’s hard to see why someone wouldn’t love it. Still, some folks don’t. One of my friends and ex-colleagues had to work remotely for a few months and hated it. He felt isolated and alone and missed talking to people.

We here at Irreal are misanthropes, of course, and have no such problems. It turns out that in that respect we’re like almost everyone else. Almost every remote worker who responded to FYI’s survey (486 people) said they loved it (91%) and would recommend it to a friend (96%).

The rest of the article deals with why people love working remotely, the problems that they encounter doing so, their workspaces, and tips they’ve found helpful in dealing with the problems. The number one problem, of course, is maintaining a presence with the rest of the team. That’s pretty easy if everyone is working remotely but can be especially tricky when most or part of your team is colocated.

The benefits most mentioned were not having a commute and being able to spend more time with your family. If you live someplace like California, your commute can easily be 3 hours a day so not having to endure it is a huge benefit. And, of course, being there to see your kids off to school and welcome them home is something that shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.

The article is fairly long but is mostly sidebars and charts rather than running text so it’s easy to read. If you’re interested at all in remote work, you should definitely give it a read.

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Emacs 26.3 Released

Posted on 2019-08-29 by jcs

Nicolas Petton has announced that Emacs 26.3 has been released and is available for download. I always compile mine by hand so I have no idea if the prebuilt binaries have appeared yet but compilation—even on the Mac—is simple and fast.

I’m writing this with 26.3 and haven’t encountered any problems. Of course, the release is a bug fix mainly, I think, to squash the problem with loading GNU ELPA packages that I wrote about previously, so I’d expect it to be rock solid or at least as solid as Emacs 26.2.

As usual, thanks to Nico, John, Eli, and all the others for their hard work in bringing us another release of our favorite editor.

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