Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

What is the real meaning of money?

I have read a book about alternative money schemes. It is called “Funny Money”, written by David Boyle (who has a Web site at http://david-boyle.co.uk/). ISBN 0 00 653067 2.

The book offers alternative points of view on money – as time, as information, as religion, etc. One of the alternative money schemes has people earn “time-dollars” for helping their elderly neighbors, running their errands, keeping them company, etc. They can pay with “time-dollars” for help to their own grandparents or parents, or even themselves if they themselves are old.

In another section of the book, the author explains that all of us are already exposed to various alternative monies, and he does not mean foreign currency. There are the air-miles handed out by airlines, “points” given by the credit card issuers for purchases (worth in Israel about 1 agora per “point”), etc.

I found two oversights in the book.
One oversight is the Free Software world. You pay for your use of Free Software by adding your pet features to it and allowing the entire world and his niece to use them.
Another oversight is understandable. It was due to the fact that the author wrote his book as an account of his trip in USA, which of course excluded Israel. The book does not cover the economic systems developed in Israeli kibbutzim at intermediate stages of privatization.

The important point I took home from the book is that the meaning of money is – that in exchange of my labor, I get a promise that someone else will work for me sometime in the future, when I need this. Bills or gold bars are concrete manifestations of this promise.

Of course, if someone collects more promises of labor than other people can deliver within reasonable working time, then they would eventually find a way to renege on their promise. This is inflation.

One complicating factor of money as a promise of labor is that an hour of one person’s labor is not equivalent to an hour of another person’s labor. Education, experience, availability of capital equipment (such as hammer and screwdriver or an oscilloscope with voltmeter or a stethoscope or a PC) apply a factor, which can be very large in today’s Hi-Tech based economy. The value also varies over the seasons of a year (or a business cycle). At some times, certain professions are in demand and an hour of their labor is worth more than that what it would be worth at other times.

Civil empowerment in Israel?

Where is the Israeli Ralph Nader?
http://www.nader.org/history/bollier_chapter_1.html

After Yom Kippur War in 1973, there were civil protest movements, which eventually caused Golda Meir to resign from her post as the Israeli Prime Minister. However, there were no organizations which lasted for long time and which addressed a spectrum of issues, like Nader’s creations.

The longest surviving organization of protesting citizens, “Peace Now”, dealt with Mideast political issues, rather than with consumer or civil issues.

C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/c_northcote_parkinson.html has two less-known quotes, which are nevertheless gems:

  • Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
  • Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.

European software patents

Software patents cleared another hurdle toward approval by the EU (see http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/other/0,39020682,39190515,00.htm).

Now the question is: what are the implications for the Israeli patent law and software industry?

  1. Will Israel be pressurized to allow software patents as in USA and Europe, or will we escape this fate due to the relatively small local market for software?
    If pressurized, how much ability will Israel have to resist the pressure?
  2. Will the Israeli patent office rigorously examine software patent applications?
  3. What will happen to Israeli Hi-Tech companies, which develop and/or use software, which violates software patents, but is critical to their product, process or service business?
  4. What will be the impact on joint ventures between Israeli and European Hi-Tech businesses?

Avigad Berman

Slowly and under the ground, a loosely-knit group of fans of Avigad Berman is forming.
Avigad Berman specializes in recommending cool and silly gadgets in http://computers.walla.co.il/.
He makes an effort to draw out the trolls among the talkbackers cultivated by Walla not only by recommending gadgets without a point, but also by his portrait and his mention of living with his mother and being pampered by her.
It is believed that Avigad Berman is a pen name used by a woman, who prefers to hide her fatness and love for gadgets and her sons.

Jack W. Reeves' opinion that Code Is Design – an exercise in outdated concepts

In http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html there are links to three essays by Jack W. Reeves, in which he claims that source code is software design, and that the software design process contains both high level design, coding, debugging and testing.
According to his point of view, software testing is the equivalent in software engineering of testing airplane models in wind tunnels in aeronautical engineering.

Now, the question is why haven’t people thought of this at the beginning of computer era?

One possibility is that the languages available for building the software for the first computers were very very very low level. Assemblers were nonexistent or very primitive. Compilers were not there yet, either.

Therefore, people had to do the equivalent of modern software building by hand. They had to manually translate their ideas into machine language (or low level assembly language), adjust addresses and offsets by hand, link code pieces by hand. In short, they had to manufacture software (in Reeves’ sense of the word) by hand. The process was relatively labor intensive. Therefore, at the early years of the computer era, design was really separate from coding, more or less.

However, the sixty years, which elapsed since those days, brought us better assemblers, good compilers and high-level programming languages. There were also changes in software development processes. However, our concepts about software design and manufacturing did not change to fit the new reality – until Reeves pointed out the discrepancy.

Any ideas for business model for distributed Free knowledgebase?

I am now reading the interesting article at http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksNoSilverBullet.html, referred to by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_computer_science, which is in turn referred to by http://www.livejournal.com/users/mulix/141984.html?nc=2&style=mine.

As I was reading the section about expert systems and knowledge bases needed by expert systems, the following question came to my mind:
Suppose we want to develop, build and deploy an Internet based database of rules for software test cases generation.
We would like to have software test engineers contribute their wisdom to the database, for the benefit of everyone.
We would also like to allow GPL-like freedom to the users of the information in the database.

Thus, access to the database and the expert system will be free for everyone. Everyone will also be able to contribute new knowledge to the system. Everyone will also be able to have a private repository of knowledge about testing those parts of his software, which he wants to keep secret for now.

The big question:
Is there any business model, which can make the above work?
Such a business model would have to:

  1. Encourage users of the system to contribute information to the public rather than keep it to themselves.
  2. Encourage payment to the company which developed and is maintaining the expert system and the database and the network of hosts, which make the data accessible to the public.
  3. Discourage people from defiling the database by filling it with junk information.

Contact information for hard-of-hearing and deafened people in Israel

Recently some people asked me for contact information for their hearing impaired relatives or friends, who used to be hearing but are now having hearing problems.

Well, to save everyone’s time, it is:

Bekol – is a self-help organization of hard-of-hearing and deafened people.
Voice phone (inside Israel): 03-5257001
FAX (inside Israel): 03-5257004
E-mail: info at bekol dot org

Information about other relevant organizations can be found at:
http://www.hearing.org.il/n-irgunim.htm

Will deaf people in Israel and other countries without relay services be able to use MS-Windows XP?

The Slashdot article http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/02/25/0350219.shtml?tid=201&tid=109&tid=164 mentions that as of February 28, Windows users who purchased their PC will no longer be able to reinstall without calling Microsoft and answering a series of questions. See also http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Closes_Activation_Loophole/1109293194
.
Deaf customers of Microsoft in USA will be able to reinstall MS-Windows XP, because USA has a well-developed infrastructure of relay services. Those services allow the deaf to use alternative communication technologies (such as TTY) and mediate between them and hearing people, who use regular voice phone.

However, several other countries have no well-developed relay services. And, if those services operate at all, they operate at limited hours.

This new development means that deaf persons may be unable to reactivate their MS-Windows XP installations at all, or have to wait until the next day to reactivate their installations, and if this is for their home computers – they may have to take few hours off their work. (Microsoft probably won’t pay for the time of the friendly hearing neighbor, whom the pressed-for-time deaf repeatedly summons to call Microsoft in his behalf.)