For Whom the Bell Curve tolls

I've been procrastinating with debates of a rather dismal level. Some of my trolling efforts may be witnessed at the Occupy South Africa or Operation Ubuntu facebook page. It turns out there are a handful of dyed in the wool NOT reds who are spawning Occupy protest pages at a rate that would almost have gullible people believe that there's a massive uprising in the country.

What does equitable distribution mean?

From one of the commentators:

Direct Democracy is a socio-political element, Distribution is a socio-economic concept. Distribution is a seperate concept to that of Direct Democracy. Currently the distribution of resources cannot exceed the capacity. But current distribution is far from equitable, hence some have far more and others have none. The imbalance in distribution is caused by the system deployed to bridge individuals with resources. The current system is a one size fits all system with salaried employment, or profit motive at it's core. We are proposing a new resource distribution system in which the actual requirements of individuals is the determinant, from a base of acceptance that all humans have equal claim to all resources. Don't confuse the system of distribution with the system of decision making and planning.

The obvious apprehensions are:

1. How does one exceed distribution beyond capacity in any system?


2. What is an equitable distribution?


3. In what way is the current system profit-driven, when it appears that a lack of access to credit is the main concern for much of this occupy movement? Most people do not want to earn profit, they just want to share in what they perceive to be spoils.

It appears that income inequality is one of those things that causes people to yearn for a bed of Procrustes scenario whereby any loose ends are chopped off and piled on the big general resource pile to ensure a more equitable distribution. Most of the movement appears to put great stock in the labour theory of value, so why would anyone want more currency that is already decoupled from an underlying commodity like gold, beer or labour? These grievances aside, I poked some fun with a reply:

For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls

All humans do not have equal claim to all resources. For example, I do not have equal claim to the grapes growing on Rondebosch wine farm than the next bergie has.

• For one, while I am a dipsomaniac enthusiast of their products, I still have most of my own teeth.


• Secondly, I have not nurtured their vineyard and I haven't worked on my tan under the whip of their gentle but firm foreman.

I also have no need for kiddie seats in restaurants, wheelchair access ramps, ATMs where I have to duck or the warnings on coffee containers that the contents may be hot.

At first, this was perplexing, but I soon realised being hot is just one of those things that one could expect when one orders a drink that ordinary is served with a temperature on the tall and thin side of the thermometer. Clearly, there is a great deal of inequity in this world that goes beyond mere income distribution or access to resources.

Pray tell, which god may we thank for the greater glory of the auto-mobile seat belt and would you duct tape one to every rattling public transportation device? What if I've voted in a directly democratic system that I think seat belts are a terrible idea and we should neglect them to cull the herd so the aggregate of height increases to the point where we may lift the ATMs off the ground just far enough so it can look me in the eye while it throws money at me, because when I look down on it throwing money at me I feel like one of the ecdysiastic profession? Now, by show of hands or via the short message telegram it was determined and decreed that we shalt install seat belts everywhere, but I am not happy with this arrangement?

Furthermore, the villagers decided that I am to manufacture these seat belts, because when I was working on the vineyards a lot of wine went missing - and let's face it, everyone wants to work on the vineyards while nobody really wants to perform the grunt work like making seat belts. Now this musical chair labour union has gathered enough dirty hands to sentence me to seat belt and other safety paraphernalia construction.

Would you wear a seat belt manufactured by a disgruntled worker with an axe to grind because you've been rolling in the hay on the wine farm while I was left entirely in command of your safety precautions?


A Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Better whole than on the dole, I say.

I do realise that you've jumped the gun into the abstract while granting the specific details none more than a cursory glance. For this reason, I implore you to grant them some further attention. While your mechanisations and imaginations may seem grand (and they are grand), ultimately you want to deploy this castle in the sky in terms of bricks and mortar on the ground. This will start with the shiny things like gold, Rolls Royce cars and a few hidden teeth, but short before long you're going to reach the point where everyone has deconstructed the Rolls into nuts and bolts and are now wearing the bling, or one person has a Rolls while another has a Volkswagen Golf and since you've taken money out of the equation, Golf boy better have a few fetching family members or he would have naught to trade for the Rolls.

Oh, and this little minor detail of private property that you've abolished too, so nobody really has any claim to ownership of anything even after they voted who gets what. What do we do now? Do we play musical chairs with the Rolls too?

Welcome to Book Club

Welcome to Book Club. Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. Including books.


Fight Club film poster. Admit it: You saw the film before you read the book. You probably don't even know there is a book.

• The first rule of Book Club is: You DO NOT TALK ABOUT BOOK CLUB!


• The second rule of Book Club is: You DO NOT TALK ABOUT BOOK CLUB! You'll get teased.


• The third rule of Book Club is: No condensed versions.


• The fourth rule of Book Club is: Only 2 guys to a book. That's the maximum, and obviously it could be 2 persons of any gender matched in any combination of 1 or 2 persons to a book.


• The fifth rule of Book Club is: One book at a time, fellas.


• The sixth rule of Book Club is: No shirts, no shoes, no Kindle or e-book reader of any other variety. You're supposed to kick back with a Martini cocktail, or if you are a teetollar, a relaxing cup of tea or an invigorating brew of coffee.


• The seventh rule of Book Club is: Books go on for as long as they have to. In the meanwhile, Hollywood might produce a film version of the book. You may be tempted to watch it. Don't. Books go on for as long as they have to and you're not allowed to watch the film of the book unless you've finished the book.


• And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Book Club, you have to recommend a book. I'd recommend one on Game Theory.

Nerd rant: Gnome 3

Background

I've been a loyal Linux fanboy since discovering that it's free, fast, and runs on most older systems. I've been less of a fanboy since being able to afford more modern hardware and attempting to do something other than playing mp3 or video files on my desktop computer, especially with the great job Microsoft did with Windows 7.


Albert Einstein, who may have enjoyed Gnome 3. I do not.

My main reasons for preferring Linux over Windows are:

1. User control and freedom. I could plug anything I want into anything else and it usually worked after a bit of tweaking and a few blue sparks.


2. Consistency and standards. This is part of the Unix design philosophy. I knew, if I had a document or a file from one brand of Linux, that it would run on a different brand of Linux too. It would mostly run on Windows as well.


3. Aesthetic and minimalist design. This must be because Linux comes from a command-line interface culture. There was no clutter on the desktop with prior versions of Gnome and older versions of KDE. As a complete novice, I could find most information I needed in the man files or by going on a click quest through the window system. But, other than with Windows, I had User control and freedom to decide where my buttons were, what size they were, how many there were and even what they did.

What's wrong with Gnome 3

Their design approach is fundamentally flawed because it is inappropriate for a desktop computing environment. Gnome 3 looks like the worst in mobile operating system interface designed forcefully jammed onto a desktop.

Dude, where's my right click?

A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs *cough*).

Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits - and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar.[sic] from the Wikipedia entry on Gnome.

Emacs *cough* does a great job, because I can use it in virtually any context. I can use it as a plain text editor, a fully-fledged IDE, an email client, anything else I can think of but (most importantly) I do not need to use it at all. I don't even need to install it. This loose-coupling (as Object-Oriented slaves would know it, Unix developers would know it as orthogonality) is a solid design principle because it helps me on the user end to avoid the butterfly effect on my own computer.

It turns out that you do not have certain preferences with Gnome 3. Not only do you not have the preferences on the interface, but they simply are not there. Does this hurt anything? Yes, it does. It takes away the benefits of using Gnome 3 and since this is supposedly the best value for preferences dollar I can get from the free and open source world, I would rather spend real money and get a working operating system that gives me more preferences. Such as Windows 7. I'm not quite prepared to spend money on a Barbie computer from Apple yet, but even Windows is better!

Plus, there is no right click context menu!

It also turns out that some features (gnome keyring for one) get installed no matter what you chose to install on your computer. This gnome daemon is supposedly part of gnome, which I chose not to install, but it's still there. I presumed that I could unfuck my desktop by not installing Gnome at all, and opting for a traditional, configurable windowing system that allows me to join or separate all the features I'd like to see. The difference is that I am the one in control, and I may decide which preferences are available and which are unavailable. This is what preferences are about: catering the UI for my individual needs, which may be completely different from the next person who installs the same windowing system, but the option must be available.

How to unfuck your desktop if you were unfortunate enough to be hit by the plague that is Gnome 3

After installing and reinstalling about 4 different Linux distros, I realised that the main problem was not the Linux distro after all, but the horrendous retarded brain child that is Gnome 3. The first step to unfucking your desktop is DO NOT INSTALL GNOME 3. The second step is to use a windowing system that had the revolutionary idea of giving you more options instead of the beaurocratic idea of taking your options away.

A few of my favourites are:

• XFCE. What Gnome 3 could have been if they didn't take this minimalism idea too far. It looks like the real Gnome, with some interesting additions like a quick link bar at the bottom. Bonus: it doesn't look like a mobile phone.


• Openbox. My current favourite. What Gnome 3 should have been if hiding overwhelming task bar options from users was the main idea. It is based entirely on a right-click context menu idea and it is a thing of beauty. Bonus: it doesn't look like a mobile phone either.

My suggestions for future Gnome development

• User oriented development instead of "expert" driven design. With both Gnome and the new Unity for Ubuntu, I get the idea that some CEOs decided that the future of computing is in pads and hand-helds, so obviously it's a great idea to go after Android. Both projects have the mentality of 'this is how it's going to be, if you don't like it, tough'. Perhaps this works in the long run, but in the short run there's a large segment of Linux users who are used to having more options, not less. It appears that the only user testing (if any) in this development loop was done with fellow developers to see with what they can get away with, instead of seeing how they can solve usability problems in real user environments.


• Stick with established, tried and tested design hueristics instead of reinventing the wheel. There are a few that are readily available, my personal favourite being the Unix design philosophy heuristics but the shortest and sweetest is Nielsen's usability heuristics.

Less is not more. Less is less, and more is more. If you want to go for less, keep the following in mind:

Einstein's Razor

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. ~ Albert Einstein.