Dear CBS, Huh?

I don’t get it. You give me the distinct impression you couldn’t care less whether I watch your shows or not.

The season finale of Under The Dome was delayed by thirty minutes so the DVR didn’t record the entire episode. After watching what did record, I checked to see if the episode was available from AT&T U-verse on demand. I figured paying a cable bill might give me some perks I wouldn't get if I watched shows over the air for free. I figured wrong. NBC, ABC, and FOX all offer shows on demand. CBS, nada.

Next I tried downloading the CBS iPad app. Under The Dome wasn't available from there either, so I tried streaming it from the web browser on my iPad. I particularly like the way you detect I'm using an unapproved device and don’t make full episodes available.

Apparently, however, my desktop computer is worthy in your eyes—I just had to watch eight minutes of commercials to start where the show ended on the DVR. It was also much more comfortable sitting in front of my work desk rather than reclining in my La-Z-Boy.

And then I had the same problem a few days later. Another nice touch on your part: you change the name of Survivor every season by adding a subtitle, so every season the DVR has to be reprogrammed. Guess who forgot to reprogram the DVR?

So I missed the first episode which I won’t be seeing because, given your attitude, it’s more effort than I can muster.

You seem to think because you're doing better than the other networks in the Big Three, you can call the shots. The truth is you’re just the winner of the losers. The canaries in your coal mine are all dead. The early signs that you need to change the way you provide content have come and gone. It’s the miners who are keeling over now. People like me. The miners may not buy the coal from you, but without them you have nothing to sell.

So here’s some advice from the guy parents point at when warning their children of the dangers of watching too much TV: you’re mistaken if you think your shows are so addictive I’ll jump through hoops to watch them.

And when addicts won’t deal with you because it’s too inconvenient, you’ve got a big problem.

I feel jittery. Good thing I don’t have to wonder whether I can get a fix of Breaking Bad from Netflix.

Fingerprints and the iPhone 5s

Senator Al Franken has some privacy concerns with Apple’s new iPhone:

I am writing regarding Apple’s recent inclusion of a fingerprint reader on the new iPhone 5S. Apple has long been a leading innovator of mobile technology; I myself own an iPhone. At the same time, while Apple’s new fingerprint reader, Touch ID, may improve certain aspects of mobile security, it also raises substantial privacy questions for Apple and for anyone who may use your products. In writing you on this issue, I am seeking to establish a public record of how Apple has addressed these issues internally and in its rollout of this technology to millions of my constituents and other Americans.

This is an important discussion, but perhaps the government should be answering privacy questions as well as asking them. Identify theft via fake fingerprints becomes an issue only if fingerprints, like social security numbers, become a routine method of identification. If fingerprint readers in consumer devices don’t work reliably, aren’t convenient, and aren’t secure, consumers simply won’t use them.

On the other hand, imagine how much say you’ll have in the matter if the government decides your fingerprints are a good way to identify you before you board a flight. If that seems far-fetched, consider that you already have to choose between being irradiated or molested every time you fly as part of the TSA’s security theater. Fingerprinting is already required for many jobs and in some states to obtain a driver’s license or purchase a gun.

If you’re worried about Apple opening a Pandora’s box, remember that it’s usually the government that creates a self-aware supercomputer and puts it in charge of all the weapons.

Changes

When change happens gradually over a long period of time, it’s easy to lose sight of how far you’ve come from where you started. When I first started working with CLIPS in 1985, I used the monkey and banana (MAB) problem as a benchmark for improving performance of the rule engine. The original version had 20 rules, 5 initial facts, and executed 14 rules. To make the program a bit more complex, I added chests and keys so that objects could be locked away and the monkey required additional planning to gain access to them. This extended program had 32 rules, 13 initial facts, and executed 81 rules. It’s a toy problem and today it seems silly that I used it for benchmarking anything, but it was at the time invaluable in improving the performance of CLIPS as well as comparing the performance of various rule engines and hardware platforms. The usefulness of this benchmark is more apparent if you view it as measuring best case performance rather than performance under load as other benchmarks such as Manners and Waltz measure.

In 1986 even the state of the art Automated Reasoning Tool (ART) software running on expensive Lisp machines executed MAB at only 72 rules per second. CLIPS running on a VAX-11/780 clocked in at 16.8 rules per second and OPS5 on this same platform executed 62.3 rules per second. When I first got CLIPS running on an IBM AT, execution speed was less than 1 rule per minute. You read that right—it took over an hour for the monkey to get his hands on the banana. CLIPS dynamically allocates and deallocates memory as it executes and in those days—when memory on PCs was more often measured in KB rather than MB or GB—the memory allocation libraries were often painfully inefficient. It was only after I removed some of the unnecessary allocations/deallocations and had CLIPS cache deallocated memory that I was able to improve the performance to 4.3 rules per second.

Over 25 years later, CLIPS clocks in at well over 100,000 rules per second running MAB on my laptop. Think about that for a minute. That’s over 25,000 times faster. Twenty. Five. Thousand. And most of that, at least for MAB, is attributable to the hardware (and possibly the compiler/operating system), not improvements to CLIPS (which at most might have improved performance for MAB by a factor of 2 to 4 times). Consider that improvement in terms of the problems you can solve today that you couldn’t solve 25 years ago.

And it’s not just that hardware is faster—it’s also cheaper. I was downright ecstatic when I got a Macintosh IIfx in the early 90s at NASA. Programmers hate waiting for code to compile so we always want the fastest computer available. At the time the IIfx was “wicked fast” with a 40 MHz CPU and up to 128 MB of memory. It also had a hefty price of around $10,000 (roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars adjusting for inflation). After I left NASA and was working from home, I bought a Mac clone from Power Computing in 1997 for $4700 (roughly $6700 today). Since that time, my desire to have the fastest computer available has melted away as the lower end computers became fast enough for almost everything I do. The last desktop computer I bought was an iMac in 2009 for $1500 (roughly $1600 today). It came with a 2.66 GHz processor and 4 GB of memory. I upgraded to 8 GB of memory in 2011 for around $115 when I started running Windows in a virtual machine. Occasionally there’s some sluggishness when switching between the virtual machine and Mac OS X—which could probably be fixed by adding more RAM (if alas the computer weren’t already maxed out)—but for the most part this computer still feels new.

Usually after around four to five years, as the operating system and applications introduce new functionality that increasingly taxes the hardware, sluggishness becomes noticeable to the point that it’s easy for me to justify a new computer based on productivity alone. Yet I’m at the point where I usually start thinking about a replacement, but feel no serious need for one. If I feel that way and use a computer most of the day for programming, I wonder how the average consumer feels about replacing their computer when all they do is use it for activities like email and surfing the web. Obviously traditional computers (desktops and laptops) aren’t in danger of extinction, but if I were a company that just made these devices (and not smart phones and tablets), I’d be worried about my long term profitability.

Which gets me back to my original point. We had computers 25 years ago and we have them today, but boy have they changed. With smart phones, we literally walk around with computers having tricorder like functionality in our pockets. What will I be comparing these devices to in 25 years?

Grandeur is the Best Form of Delusion

Thanks, #Apple ;) pic.twitter.com/x4w3r8Ghcy

— Nokia UK (@nokia_uk) September 10, 2013

So Apple surveyed the entire mobile landscape and decided after careful consideration to imitate Nokia phone designs. That’s odd. Usually companies try to copy, you know, their successful competitors, not the ones on the brink of irrelevancy. Given that Apple provides color choices for their other devices (like the iPod shuffle, iPod nano, and iPod touch), isn’t it a bit less self-important to assume that they eventually would do this for the iPhone as well.

Kitty’s First Bath

App of the Day Promotion

Back in February I was approached about offering List! on a “free app of the day” promotion app. The idea is that you make your paid app free for a day during which you have mass exposure to the millions of users of the promotion app. The benefit pitched to developers is that once the app becomes paid again, there will be a significant increase in the number of downloads (4 to 50 times more). In my case, there was no cost for the app promotion other than the lost sales caused by reducing the cost of the app from $1.99 to free. The results of the promotion during the week ending February 10th, 2013 are shown in the following chart.



I’ve graphed the week of the promotion as having no paid downloads—there were over 446,000 app downloads during the week of the promotion, but only a minuscule portion of these would be paid rather than free on the days before and after the promotion. There was a slight bump of 2 to 3 times the usual number of downloads in the following week, but this wasn’t a sustained trend. So in my case, there was no upside to the promotion.

There was a downside to the promotion that I hadn’t fully considered beforehand. The promotion app was not available in the US App Store, so most of the additional exposure from the promotion was in Europe, Central and South America, Russia, and Japan. List! is not localized for languages other than English and the promotion app apparently did not contain any information about the languages supported by the promoted app. So rather than getting downloads from people who were fluent enough with English to consider using the app, there were a number of people who weren't comfortable with English, downloaded the app without knowing it didn't support their native language, and then left one star reviews because of the lack of localization. It wasn't a huge number, but a half dozen reviews is all it takes to get a one star average. Bottom line: I might consider another promotion like this even though the results were disappointing, but I wouldn't do it unless my app was localized.

Realistic Musicals

When I become Earth Overlord, I'm going to put the kibosh on these so-called realistic superhero movies and TV shows. They’re oxymoronic. If you think Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is awesomely believable, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re sadly mistaken. 

Here’s the deal: superheroes are like musicals. In real life no one starts spontaneously singing and dancing to snappy show tunes, but that’s pretty much what makes a musical a musical. So you can take the singing, dancing, and humor out of Fiddler on the Roof and call it dark and gritty, but you can't call it a musical. Similarly there are elements of the classic superhero genre that define it. You can’t remove these for realism without redefining the genre. And let’s be really honest; the superhero as depicted in classic comics such as Batman is far more than one or two tiny tweaks away from being realistic. Forget about aliens, radiation-induced superpowers, and magic. The logistics of maintaining a secret identity, changing into costume, and getting to and from your secret lair are realistically insurmountable. Having your superhero speak in a husky voice doesn’t solve any of these issues and in fact draws attention to the unrealistic aspects of the story. There’s a reason why the Batman voice schtick from the Dark Knight trilogy is so frequently parodied: it sounds stupid. Kevin Conroy from Batman: The Animated Series—which is arguably the best Batman to come out of Hollywood—has already solved the problem of using different voices for Bruce Wayne and Batman without sounding like an idiot. There was no need for another solution.

Here’s a thought: If you’re embarrassed by the conventions of the superhero genre, don’t make a superhero movie. If you can buy into Superman shooting fire out of his eyes, but can’t buy into his ‘pair of glasses’ disguise, then maybe you need to make another type of film. Or rather than fixing established characters that aren’t broken in the first place, how about creating new ones that you can make as realistic as you want. Films like Unbreakable and Chronicle come to mind. And if you still insist on making a “realistic” superhero movie, you might want to make the whole thing realistic. Start by getting rid of the part where Bruce Wayne’s broken back is fixed by shoving his spine back into his body and then suspending him from a rope until it mends.