Wordpress 2.8 and brief downtime

Tonight I upgraded the Word­press install on the site to ver­sion 2.8, res­ul­ted in about half-an-hour’s down­time while I untangled some merge con­flicts the svn update to 2.8 com­bined with a move to the new Word­press core svn server cre­ated. Inter­est­ingly the pro­cess went fine on my test server, but not on live; I’ll have to look into that. Anyway, apo­lo­gies for any incon­veni­ence the down­time may have caused you.

The 2.8 upgrade itself is almost entirely back-end, admin stuff, and shouldn’t have any impact on the vis­ible site at all.

Death by Hyperbole

OK, this is get­ting out of hand now. I mean, it was out of hand before, but it just got passed the point where even I can stay quiet about it. It’s like we’ve just passed the event-horizon of some new kind of pub­li­city black hole and are now tum­bling help­lessly towards a sin­gu­lar­ity of over­state­ment where, rather than the laws of phys­ics, it’s our sense of pro­por­tion that breaks down.

If you’re not sure what I’m talk­ing about, take a look at this You­Tube clip, and see if you can guess.

Seen it? Any ideas?

It’s a TV show about a fossil. Ser­i­ously. Gran­ted, it’s a pretty inter­est­ing, par­tic­u­larly com­plete fossil of a 47 mil­lion year-old trans­it­ive prim­ate called Ida (who was a member of a spe­cies we’ve called Dar­winius masil­lae), which is some­thing you don’t exactly see every day. But still: a fossil.

It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolu­tion­ise the way we think about ourselves and it most cer­tainly is not the miss­ing link (which is – as I under­stand it – a term no ser­i­ous palae­on­to­lo­gist would use anyway.) But some­how, the media have got hold of it as some kind of world-changing event and are run­ning with it, real­ity be damned. The hype machine has been in full swing for about a week now and, if this video is to be believed, is show­ing no signs of slow­ing down. If it wasn’t quite so depress­ing, it’d be quite amaz­ing how much they can make of so little.

Hat tip to Carl Zimmer over at The Loom for this and other sens­ible writ­ing about Darwinius.

WolframAlpha isn’t all that

Although, I guess we have to give it 20 bil­lion years or so before we really write it off.

The New Apple Adverts

Well, Apple have come out with a new set of their (in)famous Mac/PC adverts. Sur­pris­ingly, this time round I find that I’m not para­lysed with rage – just mildly dis­gus­ted and dis­ap­poin­ted – and can write about them. Obvi­ously, I should make it abso­lutely clear that, as adverts, I hate them. They’re pat­ron­ising, con­front­a­tional and almost exclus­ively focus on per­ceived short­com­ings of the oppos­i­tion. But, as usual, they also make some claims that are gen­er­at­ing some … debate around the net, and I thought – as user of both Macs and PCs without (I hope) any par­tic­u­lar par­tisan lean­ings – I’d be well placed to pick them apart and give an object­ive review of their claims.

So without any fur­ther ado, here are my thoughts on the ads:

Legal Copy

This one is weird. I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to claim. That Apple machines don’t auto-update? Not true. That they don’t make you agree to click-through licenses when they do so? Also not true. About the only jus­ti­fi­able claim I could see here is that PCs tend to have a higher volume of auto-updates. But then the vast major­ity of them are Win­dows Defender updates that don’t have a click-through anyway. If I had to make a call, I’d say I do more clicking-through of licenses loaded with Legal Copy on my Mac than I do on my PC.

As far as I can see, this one is out-and-out dishonest.

Biohazard

This is prob­ably the most con­ten­tious issue raised by the new (and old) PC/Mac ads. Apple have always insisted that Macs don’t have vir­uses, and that PCs are much more at risk of infec­tion or being hacked. But then they do things like quietly post advice to run anti-virus soft­ware on their sup­port forums, and PC users are under­stand­ably quick to jump on that as evid­ence that Macs aren’t so safe as Apple would have us believe. So what is the deal? Can a Mac really hang around in his cas­u­als while nearby PCs are forced into isol­a­tion suits?

I’m going to say yes, but with a honk­ing caveat. The fun­da­mental truth of the issue is that there are almost no mal­ware threats to the Mac; there have been about five actual cases of OSX mal­ware making any head­way at all in the wild. Com­pare that to the thou­sands of dif­fer­ent PC mal­ware threats released into the wild every month, to the tens of mil­lions of PCs act­ively enlis­ted in bot­nets and the dif­fer­ence is so stark as to almost make Apple’s com­pla­cency jus­ti­fied. Almost.

The point is that the reason OSX is largely safe from mal­ware attack is that there is no mal­ware to be attacked by. It’s not that OSX is some magical virus-proof wonder-OS; it’s that it has too small a market-share to be worth a cyber-criminal’s time. If Apple con­tinue to grow their market-share then sooner or later someone’s going to go for them, and I sus­pect that when that hap­pens Apple, and the wider Mac com­munity, will be woe­fully unpre­pared. There’ll be a few hectic months while every­one and his dog gets infec­ted, Apple rush to get a fix out, play catchup for half a year and finally get on top of the prob­lem. At least as much as any other plat­form has.

I’ve heard it sug­ges­ted that telling people they don’t need virus pro­tec­tion is irre­spons­ible because it means that when a threat does arise, people won’t be pro­tec­ted. I don’t really agree, for a couple of reas­ons. Firstly and most gen­er­ally, I’m not con­vinced of the util­ity of anti-virus soft­ware on any plat­form. Con­sumers spend mil­lions of dol­lars a year on Win­dows anti-virus soft­ware, and infec­tion rates are still through the roof. Not only that but anti-virus soft­ware itself feels a lot like mal­ware to me; it insinu­ates itself in every corner of your OS, gives you no con­trol over what it does or when, often kills a machine’s per­form­ance, and all for what seems to be very little gain.

So given that anti-virus soft­ware is expens­ive, inef­fect­ive and det­ri­mental to a machine’s day to day run­ning, I fail to see how advoc­at­ing it’s use on a plat­form that doesn’t cur­rently need for it would be a respons­ible act. Espe­cially given my second point, which is that no-one really know what Mac mal­ware will look like when it appears, and until they do, how can anyone write soft­ware that has a fight­ing chance of coun­ter­ing it? It’s true that there are cer­tain stand­ard pat­terns to mal­ware design, and by look­ing out for those exist­ing soft­ware might get lucky, but my guess is that it’ll take six months after the first real wave of infec­tions for the anti-virus com­pan­ies to get up to speed on the sorts of exploits real mal­ware takes advant­age of and how to close the secur­ity holes.

Those six months should be plenty of time for Apple to reverse its mes­sage on vir­uses and get star­ted on what will, in all like­li­hood, be a continent-sized pile of humble pie.

So, er, to get back to the point of the advert, is it true that Macs don’t have to worry about vir­uses? I’m going to say yes. But with caveats.

Stacks

Another odd one this. I get the feel­ing they were just trying to advert­ise that iPhoto has this neat new fea­ture, but had to dress it up in their usual con­front­a­tional format to make it fit the ad-campaign. I mean, everything they say and imply is sort-of fair enough; iPhoto does ship with every Mac, and does have facial recog­ni­tion, where an out-of-the-box PC is much more lim­ited; it’s just that that’s not a par­tic­u­larly con­vin­cing point to make. Yeah, I guess organ­ising photos by facial recog­ni­tion is sort-of neat (when it works,) and it’s nice that it ships with Macs by default, but it’s not like the tech­no­logy is unheard-of on the PC; there is free, easily avail­able soft­ware (Picasa), that does it just as well.

This also is my favour­ite of these four new ads, because it high­lights the over­arch­ing mis­take Apple has made with the whole cam­paign; the PC is just a much more like­able char­ac­ter. It’s always true, but I think doubly so in this one.

So are the advert’s claims true? Yes, I think so, just also pointless.

Time Traveller

Appalling.

This sort of mud-slinging just pisses every­one off. It effect­ively says “PCs hang and crash all the time,” which, without jus­ti­fic­a­tion or stats, is just the advert­ising equi­val­ent of “PCs smell of poo!”

Having said that, I have to add: sub­ject­ively, my exper­i­ence has been that my Macs have been more stable than my PCs. That’s not to say that I’m a typ­ical case, or that my exper­i­ence is neces­sar­ily rep­res­ent­at­ive; it’s just what I’ve noted over the past half-a-decade or so.

I’m not going to let my sub­ject­ive exper­i­ence colour my judge­ment on this one though; it’s just not jus­ti­fi­able to make these kinds of claims without sup­port. False.

The End

So there you have it. I reckon roughly a 50% hit rate on truth, only one advert that actu­ally has a con­vin­cing argu­ment for buying a Mac, and even that one is so heav­ily caveated as to make the state­ment in isol­a­tion bor­der­line dishonest.

It’s a real shame Apple insist on stick­ing to this advert­ising cam­paign; as far as I can see, all it does is ali­en­ate people. It’s doubly frus­trat­ing to me because Apple make great products that I really like. I love both my Macs, and while not every­body is going to like them, they are def­in­itely good enough to sell on their own merits without need­ing to con­stantly bad-mouth the oppos­i­tion. Now, if only Apple would actu­ally tell people what those merits are.

Jack Thompson in legal trouble again

GamePol­it­ics is report­ing that Jack Thompson is back in the legal firing line, this time for spam­ming one of his sup­port­ers – the Pres­id­ent of the Utah State Senate, Michael Wad­doups – with “offens­ive” images from GTA4. Need­less to say, Mr Wad­doups is no longer quite so sup­port­ive of Mr Thompson and not only has he vowed not to sup­port his anti-game legis­la­tion again, he’s attempt­ing to have him sued for misuse of email.

This sort of thing really makes Jacko no friends, and it’s tempt­ing to think that he’s just a mad old fool who doesn’t real­ise he’s fast run­ning out of them. My take on it is some­what dif­fer­ent though; if you actu­ally look at how the man acts it’s clear that he’s not actu­ally inter­ested in making friends, or advan­cing his cause, or even in making money. What he craves is atten­tion. It’s that simple; he wants people to notice him, and he’s real­ised the best way to manage that is to piss them off. He’s basic­ally a troll, except that instead of hanging around on anonym­ous mes­sage boards annoy­ing Star Trek fans, he’s quite suc­cess­fully trolled the entire com­puter game industry, the US legal system and is moving on to their gov­ern­ment. Ladies and gen­tle­men, I put it to you that Jack Thompson is not an idiot at all; he’s the most suc­cess­ful troll the world has ever seen.

You have to respect him for that.

Fractal Wrongness!

I was going to make some quip about Sarah Palin here, but really, I guess I just did. :)

Science quote of the week

From the Tele­graph, about the Large Hadron Col­lider (emphasis mine, for the good bit):

Such is the angst that the Amer­ican Nobel prize win­ning phys­i­cist Frank Wil­czek of the Mas­sachu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­no­logy has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester Uni­ver­sity, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will des­troy the world is a twat.”

‘nuff said.

Bigotry in Australia

Well, we knew it wasn’t just the Abra­hamic reli­gions, and here’s a case in point. Abori­ginal lead­ers in Aus­tralia have called for a book to be scrapped because it teaches girls to play a musical instrument.

Depress­ingly Harper Collins have apo­lo­gised, when what they should have said was “um… it’s the 21st cen­tury; you don’t get to be both respec­ted and a sexist any more.”

I know people tend to think “they’re an ancient cul­ture, we have no right to judge their values,” but I call bull­shit. In this case their values are sexist and they’re wrong, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say as much. Sexism isn’t sud­denly OK once a cul­ture has been doing it for a cer­tain length of time, and their own inab­il­ity to move on shouldn’t give them a free pass to try to impose their back­wards ideas on others.

Thank­fully it looks like Harper Collins have no inten­tion of pulling the book, and the bigots are going to have to learn to live with it.

Goblin Shark

The Goblin Shark is a fas­cin­at­ing – not to men­tion slightly freaky-looking – creature, and this is a great video of one doing it’s thing, includ­ing some good foot­age of it’s sig­na­ture pro­trus­ible jaw.

When it’s not being used – unsuc­cess­fully – to fend off annoy­ing divers, that jaw shoots out to grab small, fast moving prey that has been detec­ted by the bat­tery of bio-electrical sense organs in the elong­ated snout. It’s much more energy effi­cient than trying to move an entire 11’ shark at the same speed, and prob­ably also helps to bring the jaws, which would oth­er­wise be obstruc­ted by the snout, into a useful biting position.

Hat-tip to Ceph­alo­pod­cast for the video. (There’s also some inter­est­ing stuff about Mega­lodon (pos­sibly the largest pred­ator the Earth has ever seen) at that link, in case you missed it in the news recently.)

In which avatars are discussed

A few months back, I quietly added gravatar sup­port to the site for com­menters. I didn’t men­tion it, as I (appar­ently incor­rectly) assumed almost every­one had a gravatar.

Since that’s turned out not to be the case, I’ve installed the excel­lent WP-monsterID plugin to gen­er­ate avatars for those com­menters that don’t have one. It’s really quite clever: it takes a hash of the commenter’s email address and uses some of it as a seed for a pro­ced­ur­ally gen­er­ated mon­ster. There are mil­lions of pos­sible com­bin­a­tions, and as long as you keep using the same email address in your com­ments, you’ll always get the same mon­ster. An even cooler side effect is that, you’ll take that mon­ster with you to any other site that uses the same (sort-of-standard-ish) monster-generation code.

Of course, if you create your­self a gravatar, that will over­ride your mon­ster avatar, as well as appear­ing on all of the many sites around the net with gravatar support.

If you’ve com­men­ted here before, you can check back to the old posts, to see what your mon­ster looks like. If you haven’t; feel free to com­ment on this post, for an example.

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