Blog: Pete Loshin

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September 28, 2007

Guerilla Knowledge Processing

No matter what our job descriptions, most of what we do every day revolves around manipulating data and turning it into knowledge/intelligence. Enterprises routinely budget hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of thing, so we all know how difficult it can be.

But here's an example of how one guy turned his credit card statements into a vehicle for generating and tracking information--and the surprising discovery he made when the results didn't match his expectations. In A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel, this fellow, Ian Hixie, starts by noting that when he eats at a restaurant in the US, "you never pay what the bill says" because he always adds a tip. Thus, he concludes:

The net effect of this is that you basically get to decide how much you pay. Indeed, credit card bills at restaurants have a space where you fill in how much you want to pay.

The aha moment for Hixie came when he noticed that, to make things simple, he usually rounded this amount to a full dollar:

... there are data bits there, lying unused! It struck me that with every single restaurant transaction I could set the cents field to some number under my control, thus allowing me to communicate with myself at a later date!

Ian goes on to describe a protocol for encoding several different pieces of information about the restaurant into the decimal values available ($.00 through $.99), and--if you want to know how it worked, you'll have to go read Ian's article.

But what's really relevant here is that Ian did some applied business information processing by:

1. First noticing that there were some bits available and under his control
2. Deciding that he could encode some information into those bits in a way that he could use...
3. ...to recover and use that information later on.

Ian discovered a bug in the system, but he's also conjectured a reason for the bug as well as a fix for it; hopefully we'll hear more about the second version of this system--and possible other uses for these data bits.

Where else are there opportunities in your work (or personal) life for adding value through knowledge processing?

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September 10, 2007

Windows: Defective by Design

I've got to say, I truly wonder why so many corporations willingly cede complete and utter control over their software infrastructure to proprietary software vendors.

Let's face it, when you are a proprietary software vendor, your entire business rests on how good you are at preventing people from using your software unless they've paid for it. The only practical way to do that is to build extra software that makes sure only authorized users use the product software.

In other words, part of what you are paying for with proprietary software is an extra piece of software that decides whether or not you can use the software you've paid for. If that software doesn't work right, you can't use your own software. Even if you've done absolutely nothing wrong, until the vendor fixes the problem.

Got it?

That's how Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage works. If the server goes down (as happened recently, read the comments for some great user opinions on the MSDN blog entry about it here), or if something else breaks, you can't use your software.

If I had to run Windows, I would seriously consider buying a pirated version (in addition to the "legal" version) just so I wouldn't have to worry about just this kind of thing.

This isn't news: twenty years ago, PC support staff at small/medium sized companies routinely used commercial copy-protection cracking software so they could re-install Lotus 1-2-3 (et al) when the users lost key diskettes or misplaced their activation codes. If you were big enough, you could get more special-purpose software to manage your licenses; if you weren't, you had to go out and spend a few hundred bucks every time your users trashed their systems and needed to replace their applications.

Just in case you had any illusions about what your software is doing and who is in charge, consider this: Windows Update updating without permission! Basically, the story here is that the blogger didn't want Windows Update to update without permission, but the fact is that the EULA for Windows says that Microsoft is in charge of how that software works, not you. But it is galling nonetheless.

This little titbit, I Warned Ye... may be flip, but it sure is true: don't go rushing into the latest and greatest for no other reason than your vendor wants you to. Vista may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but according to this report from W3Counter.com, Vista has only about 3.46% market share, versus 83.48% for Windows XP (Linux is climbing, having just beat out Windows 98 at 1.34%).

So what are you paying your software vendors for?

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September 6, 2007

++Change == Same

The more some things change, the more they stay the same. It's interesting to see how some stories keep popping up, over and over--and then it's even more interesting to see what happens when things turn out different.

So, RIP to my favorite resource for Microsoft FUD and unintentional support for open source software, Microsoft's "Get the Facts" website: purportedly a repository of good, un-biased information from third-party researchers about how much better Windows Server is than Linux.

The story of the demise (as well as some of the good stuff that made it so juicy) is here at Linux Watch: Microsoft kills off anti-Linux 'Get the Facts' site. I wrote about "Get the Facts" earlier this summer on my Linux Cookbook website ("Microsoft's "Get the Facts" (tm) Campaign, Deconstructed"), and was hoping to make a mini-career of deconstructing all that propaganda. Now, I'll just have to look for the FUD in new places, but the good news is that Microsoft's replacement, windowsserver/compare, looks like it'll be chock full of FUD-goodness.

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