Apple's Vision Pro headset has been a let-down, ( partly due to a series of unfortunate events that derailed me off the killer app I had planned to launch in March 2024 ).
Apple misread the pulse of the public and committed a major faux pas with its iPad Pro ad.
Apple is now past its zenith, and it would behoove Apple leadership to gracefully acknowledge that and strive to preserve the legacy of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozcniak, whom Apple fans adore.
“Computers are bicycles for the mind.”
~ Steve Jobs.
The Good:
Apple controls the M-series chips and Apple hardware.
Apple has the fanatical following of the cult of Mac.
Apple has a lot of cash on hand.
The Beautiful:
“I have something to say.
It's better to burn out than to fade away.”
~ Kurgan, “Highlander”
You already got Trillions, Apple. Use financial and social capital well instead of squandering it with hesitation and short-term greed. You can already afford 16942 healthy, tasty meals every day, unlike most people on this planet.
Please be a Super Nova, not a Black Hole, Apple.
To prepare for a year, plant rice.
To prepare for a lifetime, plant a tree.
To prepare for many lifetimes, educate the young ones.
~ Chinese proverb.
Apple should go all out and release the full source code to all their software ( not just Darwin ) under the GPL.
Apple has already been involved in education with its eMacs. Now Apple needs to use its remaining design acumen to become a leading producer of Free Educational Software for students of all ages.
When you use an Apple computer, it will explain its workings. It will encourage you to play with the software, improve it, share the improvements, feel the joy of sharing, and score bragging rights too.
Apple is the gateway to the Hacker Hippie Gift Culture of the two Steves' roots.
You can tweak the OS, and all applications, and Apple will provide Free Software to facilitate that interactive learning process.
Apple computers have 3 modes:
1. User mode: Users will have to make as few decisions as possible. The interface will be very simple and streamlined.
2. Expert mode: Expert users will be able to tweak configuration parameters using an advanced UI, create themes et cetera.
3. Dev mode: Developers will be able to edit the source code of applications and of the OS itself. If OS modifications cause the system to break or malfunction, a fallback to the last known good OS image will be provided.
Around the transition from the second millennium to the third, humanity underwent a sea change. At first, the hacker ethos of “information wants to be free” thrived in a culture of software freely shared among people who were really into it, without a thought of money changing hands. People wrote code for the sheer love of it, shared their software creations, and played with other geeks who shared their enthusiasm for this newly emerging frontier, that most adults, and most of their peers simply did not understand.
Early versions of UNIX were shared around freely. All was well in tech nirvana, till greed got in. Suddenly, code was not the shared infrastructure of society for people to freely study, share and improve. Code was now “intellectual property” ( oxymoron ). A few robber barons with Ozymandias conceits built empires out of silicon, like castles made of sand, that seemed like they would stand forever.
In a massive feat of mind manipulation through media, legal and unethical means, the robber barons had convinced the people that we lived in a world without breathable air, and that we needed to pay them for air, even though Free Software was available — Free as in Free Speech ( free to study, modify, and share ), and Free as in Free Pizza ( free to download and use ).
Governments, Corporations, Schools, and Home Users, all paid for canisters of “premium air” to breathe from. Microsoft's questionable value proposition, and its price, went unquestioned because of Microsoft's trickery.
If the world had cars like Microsoft's, you could not open the hood of your car and fix things yourself, nor take your car to your cousin who knows about engines. The hood would come locked shut, only Microsoft would have the keys, and you would have to pay them for upgrades and repairs.
The robber baron hoarded all the food,
while the people lived hand-to-mouth.
They had finally had enough,
gathered in a mob
and stormed the robber baron’s mansion.
Surrounding him with torches and pitchforks,
they demanded that everyone in the village be fed.
The robber baron was a cunning man.
He had not gained his position by being straightforward.
He addressed the crowd —
“Oh, this wealth? It’s all for you!
You see, I was planning to leave 90% of it to you.
After I die.”
This drew gasps from the crowd.
They backed away.
“He’s such a generous man!”
They exclaimed in delight.
The robber baron continued,
“And...and these mosquitoes…
…they can kill people!
That’s why I will work to eradicate malaria.”
The crowd wowed —
“He’s a dedicated philanthropist!
Spending his own money to save our lives.”
The crowd apologized to the robber baron,
thanked him for his generosity,
and was about to turn back.
Suddenly a boy spoke up.
He was not from this village.
“Malaria doesn’t kill.
I have had malaria several times!
It’s a harmless disease that is easily treated.
With proper food, medicine, and rest,
malaria takes its course and then goes away.
Malaria doesn’t kill.
Poverty does.
The rich don’t die of malaria, only the poor.
So think again about who the real parasites are.”
Research efforts to “eliminate malaria” are misguided. Mosquitoes are a part of the ecosystem and we should take care of the Earth, while tampering with Nature as little as possible. Eco-friendly, low cost, low tech, old school solutions are easily available.
It is much more cost-effective to:
Provide people in the affected areas with mosquito nets. ( say, 1 net / person / year ).
Provide herbal insect repellents made by local cottage industries to protect against not only mosquitoes, but a wide range of insect bites.
Systematically, periodically, sweep and clear stagnant pools of water near human dwellings, where mosquitoes breed.
Windows 95 was the first operating system with the Y2K bug right in its name.
3 years later, with the benefit of experience and hindsight, Microsoft released Windows 98, the second operating system with the Y2K bug right in its name.
“Grand Theft Auto” was once a crime fantasy to indulge in.
By the time you got the game called “Call of Duty”, you had already bought the idea, in the back of your mind, that your duty might call upon you to kill complete strangers and that you should enjoy doing it. It was all part of the game. The game normalized violence in people's minds and de-sensitized them to horrible things. The act of picking up a gun, and shooting at a stranger was a viscerally fun experience, realistically rendered blood with detailed environmental reflections, and the works.
Eventually, you ended up rooting for a person out there killing people on command, for real. This soldier also grew up playing the same Military Industrial Complex recruitment program sold as a game. “Call of Duty” was malware of the mind, wetware hiding as software in plain sight, targeting certain regions of the human brain, specifically the amygdala, and the dopamine regulation system.
It was “A Clockwork Orange” in reverse — weaponized, normalized, advertised, and monetized by selling to would-be recruits, man apes caught in the concrete jungle, looking for ways to act out the aggression they felt from having been circumcised, and known pain and helplessness at a very early age. Deeply internalized paranoiac aggression, seeded through this patriarchal ritual, ensured that enough people would want to join the military, as a cheap excuse to indulge in their worst impulses. Whether as a video game, or as a more sinister piece of software, “Call of Duty” was money.
In this era, by the time an average teenager grew up, they had shot so many virtual people, that they usually condoned and often enjoyed seeing violence and gun use.
A computer that is not reasonably secure against intrusion and malware is not useful.
Microsoft makes an Operating System that is not very secure.
Other companies have to make anti-malware software to fill in the security gap left by Microsoft in its offering.
Meanwhile, a default installation of the latest Debian Linux or OpenBSD is deemed secure enough for most purposes, and these are free and open source operating systems.
Microsoft itself gets to compete in the Windows anti-malware vertical market that exists only because of flaws in Windows, that Microsoft is best positioned to know about, because Windows is Closed source.
This is a breach of antitrust law.
Microsoft is like an auto maker that doesn't include safety belts as a standard feature, but sells them as extras, in a vertical market.
Rather than wait for the Department of Justice to fight Microsoft in court, here's a simple grassroots tactic that all freedom loving software developers can use today.
Here's a call to action!
Please modify the following email and send it to Microsoft.
Subject: Security Software Developer seeking Windows Source Code
Greetings,
My company, [YoyoDyne Co.] intends to develop anti-malware software for the Windows operating system.
We would like to request a comprehensive copy of the Windows source code.
Failure to provide the Windows source code, free of cost, would give Microsoft security products an unfair advantage over other developers and be prosecutable under antitrust laws.
Please respond within 30 business days of this message, providing the code complete with all documentation.
It's not the case that nutrition is easily available in Africa, and yet people are still mysteriously dying of malnutrition from some stomach disease that Microsoft can find the cure for, by throwing Billions at, to much public acclaim.
The simple fact is that Bill-ionaires have too many wealth-tokens ( money ) and hoard actual wealth ( food ), starving the masses to maintain their privileged status.
If you pretend to study the gut, you're full of shit!
Let’s say you have two job offers, which are equal in terms of money, benefits, and other material aspects, but differ only in the nature of the work.
Job #1: Be a Developer using Closed Source technologies and tools, such as Windows, Java etc.
Job #2: Be a Janitor, responsible for cleaning toilets and other restroom facilities.
Which job should you choose?
Personally, I would prefer to be a Janitor rather than a Closed Source Developer. Here is why:
As a Closed Source Developer, one works on an obsolescent, dead end technology that is sure to become irrelevant and extinct soon. Furthermore, working on Closed Source technologies only concentrates wealth in the hands of a few people who are more focused on their own material gains, than on benefiting humanity as a whole. The robber barons are unwilling to share the fruits of their labor and will even seek to stifle true innovation in order to perpetuate their agenda and maintain their closed castles made of sand. Work long enough on closed source code, and you will inevitably find yourself valuing money more than your intellectual potential. You will become cynical and start justifying this intellectual rot by saying that everyone else does it too, and that selfishness is a sad and inevitable fact of life. You will have made the world a little worse. Most of your precious hours will be wasted in the pursuit of money and in engaging with something lifeless and of limited use to humankind.
If I took the job as a Janitor, by contrast, my time would be spent doing something useful and of service. Most importantly, while I am cleaning toilets, my mind would be free to daydream a little, to visualize software as it ought to be, to imagine innovative solutions to problems that we all face.
At the end of the work day as a Janitor, I would be able to approach my leisure time charged and excited by these fresh ideas and concepts. Then I would contribute meaningfully to Open Source projects and work on building a better future for everyone. This is very much preferable to spending the day with the mind engaged with the trivialities of closed source software.
Closed Source software is on its way out. The future belongs to the intellectually free, the ones who program for love, not money. Empires will crumble. Freedom will prevail.
This article is an opinionated comparison between the Perl and Java programming languages.
Full disclosure: I am biased towards Perl as I have been programming in Perl since January 1995 and am a Perl veteran. While working as a Perl Programmer at Accenture Federal Services, writing applications to process veteran's benefits for the VA, I raised the question — Why Java? Why not Perl?
In this article, I try to be as objective as possible, using practical considerations and engineering trade-offs.
Though I have contrasted Java specifically with Perl here, Ruby and Python could also stand in for Perl, as the same reasoning applies to those open source scripting languages.
Please remember to think for yourself, and do tell me what you think, so I may round out and balance the comparison. Let's make this article a useful technical resource for all.
Benefit
Perl helps the world at large, and is maintained in public by the community founded by Larry Wall.
Java pays Larry Ellison.
Winner: Perl
Merit
Perl became popular on its own merit, and gained wide commercial support later.
Java was hyped by corporate interests, namely Sun Microsystems, and Oracle Corp.
Winner: Perl
Cost
Perl is free of cost and requires no closed tools.
Java requires fancy IDEs and heavy tooling which cost money.
Winner: Perl
Adaptability
Perl is multi-paradigm, OOP optional, and fluid.
Java is hung up on OOP, and therefore rigid.
Winner: Perl
Intuitiveness
Perl is DWIM ( do what I mean ).
Java is tell-me-exactly-what-to-do-or-else.
Winner: Perl
Concision
Perl is concise and informal.
Java is verbose and formal.
Winner: Perl
Directness
In Perl, you get out of the car.
say "Hello from Perl";
In Java, you have to disembark the 4-wheeled automotive vehicle that your physical body is currently occupying.
public class MyHello {
public static void main( String args[] ) {
System.out.writeln("Hello from Java");
}
}
Winner: Perl
Quality v/s Quantity
Perl requires finesse, which comes from a love of learning, experimenting, and creating.
Java was a commodity vocational skill for the masses.
Easy Names
In Perl, the variable name can be skipped.
Perl knows you are referring to the default variable ( $_ ), so you need not spell it out by name.
$_ = "By Jove!";
say;
In Java, variable names are so monstrously long, that you need multiple wide monitors side-by-side, to be able to read them.
German programmers are used to long words, and are usually emotionally reserved, but Java variable names cause them to fall to their knees and weep incontrollably, before rising up with steely rage and resolve, swearing to take California and improve it with German engineering.
Winner: Perl
Features
Perl and Java are largely equivalent, especially for a domain like server-side web application development.
Winner: -
Speed
Java VMs are faster than Perl.
Winner: Java
Lower error rate
Errors are directly proportional to the number of lines.
Winner: Perl
Higher Comprehension
Comprehension is inversely proportional to the number of lines.
Winner: Perl
Community
Perl is for hackers ( think Jedi ).
Java is for Business Application Developers ( think Stormtroopers ).
Project cost
Perl projects have low headcounts and therefore low management overheads.
Java projects have huge headcounts and require a lot of management, further adding to the project complexity and cost.
Winner: Perl
Speed of Delivery
Perl lets you whip up a working application fast.
Java projects take an order of magnitude more time to deliver.
Winner: Perl
Overall Software Engineering Soundness
Correct > Clear > Concise > Fast
Given two equivalent, correct programs, one in Perl and the other in Java,
Perl is clearer, and more concise than Java.
Java is faster than Perl, usually.
Winner: Perl
Longevity
Perl projects can be maintained long term, because the source code is public.
Java projects are tied to one company – Oracle.
When ( not if ) Oracle goes out of business, as closed source vendors do, Java projects will be jeopardized.
Winner: Perl
Total Cost of Ownership
Given that the same project can be delivered much faster in Perl than in Java, the time-to-delivery factor far outweighs the runtime speed.
The cost of hardware keeps dropping, so the speed factor can easily be adjusted for, cost effectively.
Winner: Perl
Comparison:
Overall, Perl comes out a clear winner.
With Perl, it is possible to deliver projects with a very small, skilled team, very rapidly, compared with Java.
Projects developed in Perl can be maintained indefinitely as they are free of vendor lock-in, unlike Java.
Prologue:
This is just why Accenture Federal Services uses Java instead of Perl. They want a project that has a huge head count, lots of middle management, and a 10 year development deadline. It means a lot more money from the government.
Furthermore, when Oracle shuts down, Accenture could go to the VA and ask for more money to rewrite the application in the latest closed source language.
A handful of skilled Perl hackers could deliver the same project much faster, and do a better job of it. And the project need never be rewritten.
Why Java? Why not Perl?
Why Windows? Why not Debian Linux?
That would leave a lot more money to benefit Veterans directly, instead of lining Accenture executives pockets.
In fact, it makes sense to me to just crowdsource all the source repositories. Teach veterans about software, so they can help the VA spot bugs, while waiting for their benefits. Keeping all code out in the open, with the affected veterans watching, is a good way to stay honest. Publicly funded software should be...public.
Imagine teams of veterans battling bugs like Starship Troopers, learning new skills, getting paid, hanging out with a group of fellow veterans, doing work that matters to them, and whose requirements they understand well.
