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.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Having read several of Kiyosaki‘s books and even played his CashFlow game, I came to appreciate the fact that to get ahead financially, you need not only to have a positive difference between the amount of money you earn and the amount of money you spend (George S. Clason’s “The Richest Man in Babylon” illustrates this point), but also to make money work for you rather than force you to work for money.

However, I was bothered by his over-emphasis of real estate deals as a way to have positive cashflow. I also figured out that he sold out when he started advocating MLMs as means of learning how to do business. Now I came upon John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which clarified some things for me. Reed is author-publisher of books on real estate investment and some other subjects. So if one is going to follow him, one had better find a critic of Reed in order to have balance.

Another problem I had with Kiyosaki’s approach was as follows.

His goal is to have passive income larger than all of one’s life expenses. This way one would not have to work a day in the rest of his life. Kiyosaki however overlooks one very important point: the time needed to manage the passive income producing properties, businesses or paper investments.

If you have income from rental houses, but have to work, on the average, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to manage those properties, then your income is effectively as passive as the one you had from your software development job in that Hi-Tech company which you “retired” from.

What you really want is to have nice income while having to work on managing it only few hours a month. Then you have the rest of the month for yourself. If Kiyosaki’s goal was indeed achievable, then even dead people and “vegetables” would have been able to earn income. In practice, of course, this does not happen. Every form of income needs to be looked after, because market conditions change and eventually that property ceases to produce income.

However nowhere in his books, did I find anything, which addresses this issue of the time needed to manage various kinds of investments.

Should test cases of GPLed software be under GPL as well?

Pros:

  1. By definition, source code is the form of software, which is easiest to modify. The actual executable is created from it by an automatic build process, which may include compilation and linking. If you modify a complicated piece of software, you want to make sure that your modifications broke nothing. To do this efficiently, you need test cases.
  2. If your modifications are not generally useful, owners of secret test cases won’t test your modifications. The same applies if you were forced to fork the software package in question.

Cons:

  1. RMS didn’t require this so far. RMS’ printer driver problem can be solved without test cases. This has not been a requirement so far.
  2. Some test cases may embody proprietary software usage scenarios, and releasing them to the world, as required by GPL, would reveal too much of the company’s trade secrets.
  3. When you add your modifications to a GPLed software package, users with secret test scenarios will test your modifications, if they are useful for them. If your modifications break the software, they will fix them and you’ll get back their fixes thanks to the GPL.

At any case, there is a case for strong recommendation that test cases be constructed for GPLed software, and that they be released together with it and under the same license (GPL or LGPL).

What does Google have to say about mimsy borogoves?

The Borogoves Are Mimsy Again–Terry Gilliam’s JABBERWOCKY is a review of a movie, which was directed by the director of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

Mathematical Fiction: Mimsy Were the Borogoves has some comments and references concerning Lewis Padgett’s classical Sci-Fi story.

There is an application called Jabberwocky (Lewis Carroll’s original nonsense word, which titled the poem which introduced the mimsy borogoves). So this word already lost its lofty nonsense word status.

I can only wonder what widgets will be christened as borogoves, and in how many ways can they be mimsy.

Difference between blog and Usenet/E-mail/Web discussion group

When you blog, you set the agenda.

You discuss whatever you feel to be interesting,
    important,
        or valuable.

You build, or fail to build, a community.
A community of people who add insightful comments to your posts.
A community of people who share your sense of the worth of your blog stuff.

On the other hand,

Usenet discussion groups,
    E-mail based discussion groups,
        and Web forums

hold true group discussions.
The BDFT (Benevolent Dictator For a Term) moderator
Is Always Someone Else.

Your important messages
The ones which cost you love, sweat, tears and blood
Are the ones which are left without responses
Sometimes they are unmentioned.
Even if you were not trolling for attention.
The ones who get attention are the trolls,
who do get fed.

The group discussions go on
The group discussions drift here and there
The group discussions wander aimlessly
The group discussions ignore whatever is precious and dear to you
The group discussions may have originated from your brain
But then they have their own independent life.
The group discussions are not subordinate to your wishes or values.
People sometimes take the liberty of telling you to go and have a life.

On the other hand,
If people do not like your blogged stuff,
They simply ignore it
They simply do not read it
They simply do not comment on it.

When you are normally introvert
When you are not used to letting people
have a peek at your way of viewing the world
When the reason for opening a blog

When the reason was your desire to develop and discuss a special idea
When you feel like you speak to the black hole
The black hole which swallows your spoken and written stuff

Which demolishes it to its constituent leptons, baryons, and mesons.
When you feel like that
When your creative juices somehow start flowing.
It is then that you try to imitate post-modern art
And you write poems which do not gyre,
do not gimble
and most importantly – do not rhyme.

MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES?

Will car washes be as branded as fast food chains?

There is a car wash in Petah Tikva, where they wash my car once in a while, and sometimes dare to nag me about waxing it. I liked the place because they provided sitting places and newspapers for clients, who are waiting while the interiors of their cars are being cleaned.

Today the car was there again, escorted by me.

This time, they branded themselves as “King Wash”, advertising kingly treatment for her majesty the car. For example, you can have your car prepared and beautified for sale. Their prices are also a bit higher.

This time, the sitting service included also a free hot drink (such as coffee or hot chocolate).

As judged by someone, who cares about cleanliness of cars only due to social pressure, they did good but not perfect cleaning work.

  • What next? A shopping mall (“canion”) organized around car washes, like the Cinema City mall between north Tel Aviv and Herzliya, which is first a place for seeing movies and then a mall?
  • What would a Seinfeld skid about this have looked like?
  • How would the days before Passover look like in such a place? What special perks would be provided to people waiting in the long and slow-moving queue?

Do you have a time machine on your desk?

If we define time machine as an apparatus, which can transfer information from a possible future to the past – does a PC, which is sufficiently powerful to run simulations (i.e. has at least 4K memory), meet this definition?

Consider the following.

You want to know what will a potential future be, if you choose a certain course of action. This information will allow you to decide if to follow this course of action or a different course of action.

You develop (or pay someone else to develop) a program which simulates the future to the level of detail which you need. You run the program on your PC and analyze the simulation results. Finally you decide if you want this future or some other future.

However, simulating the future is philosophically equivalent to having a look at the future. Of course, you’ll not see everything in the future. But a time machine would not transfer from the future to the past every detail about the future world. Both PC and time machine will tell you as much as you need to know about the future. Sometimes less than you need, due to fog (time machine) or numerical difficulties due to chaotic regions in the simulation (PC).

The mystery of Queen Maud

One of my childhood’s mysteries was: who was the mysterious Queen Maud, whose name I saw on a large part of Antarctica in maps?

The grownups, whom I asked this question, were too busy in their affairs or about improving my deaf speech to take this question seriously.

No queen in the history books, which I read, had this name. I wondered whether there is a fairy tale, whose heroine has this name. I never saw or read about a real woman having this name.

In fact, the first time I saw Maud used as a woman’s name was in the movie “Harold and Maud”, which I saw several years after having seen Antarctica’s map.

The above happened in the pre-Internet era, when it was very difficult for me to find information which one’s parents and teachers don’t consider to be important or valuable.

For several years I forgot about this mystery. Once I remembered it again, few minutes’ worth of googling yielded the following facts.

The surprising conclusion was that even in pre-Internet stone age, it would have been sufficient to briefly glance through a book about modern history of Norway to find the answer to the Queen Maud mystery. The Queen Maud Land part of Antarctica is the area claimed by Norway. Queen Maud herself was a real person, and she was queen of Norway. The land in question was named by Roald Amundsen in honor of his queen.

Using welfare to restructure economy

Previously I wrote about the make-work problem of developed countries’ economics. In brief, the problem is that to produce the needs of a population, only small percentage (i.e. much less than 100%) needs to work. Thus, a system is needed to:

  1. Distribute the fruits of the producers’ labor among the entire population.
  2. Discourage people from being freeloaders incapable of doing productive work should this ever be necessary.
  3. Allow people to choose to work more (or make effort in another socially acceptable way) in exchange for more luxurious lifestyle.
  4. Develop and maintain excess capacity to work. This excess will allow the population to recover quickly from disasters.

There are some possible solutions:

  1. The conventional solution is to use advertising to develop artificial demand, and to get people to work to meet this artificial demand. I wrote elsewhere about some consequences of this solution.
  2. A better solution is to let people work in smaller and less efficient production units (factories, farms, or whatever) if they cannot pay for the products of bigger production units. On the other hand, people may find themselves working so much and get so tired that they cannot get ahead by studying.
  3. Even better system is to get people, who don’t have a job, to spend time learning something which will improve their productivity in the future.

The first two solutions are such that no special mechanisms are needed to cause cash to flow in a way which holds them together. This is why several economies implement them. The third solution needs special mechanisms to get goods to flow from the producers to the students, as there is no direct benefit to the producers from the fact that students spend time studying.

Now, I would like to propose a solution to this problem.

Welfare – both taxing of high incomes and handing out of money to people with low incomes – is now an established and accepted part of several economies. The welfare systems do a lot and get abused a lot.

My proposal is to replace existing income-based criteria for getting welfare by willingness to spend time studying something new.

Under this proposal, anyone, who did not (or was too lazy to) find a job, can get money for studying something. Welfare applicants would be evaluated to get a recommended course of study. However, they will then be free to study whatever they wish, at least some of their time.

Single mothers would be provided with services which look after their children while they study. People, who have learning disabilities, will be catered to by special methods of instruction, matched to their preferred studying style.

Just by studying, people would be able to get a minimum level if income. Certain subjects, which are deemed to be in demand, may carry higher pay tag. People, who study those subjects, will get more money while they study them.

The HELP 2004 Exhibition

Today I visited the HELP 2004 Exhibition in the Exhibition Grounds at northern part of Tel Aviv.
This is an exhibition of equipment, accessories, means and methods for the population of people with disabilities in Israel.

It was a small exhibition, occupying only one building in the Exhibition Grounds.
This exhibition started yesterday and will end tomorrow.

Overwhelmingly majority of the booths exhibited equipment which helps wheel chair bound people. Elevators, equipment which allows them to drive cars or to use cars at all, new kinds of wheelchairs, walkers, etc. The needs of the hard-of-hearing were represented mostly by booths of audiological clinics and hearing aid dispensers. I don’t recall seeing booths with equipment which serves the needs of blind or hard sighted people.

The hall was indeed full with people on wheelchairs. There was also respectable representation of people with hearing impairments, even though today was not Hearing Day (which was held yesterday, in parallel to the exhibition). Usually when I go to exhibitions or such places, I meet zero or one people whom I know from other place. This time, I met no less than two people whom I know from other places, not to mention people who manned (or rather, womanned) the booth of Bekol.

My personal goal was to find people, who develop new kinds of assistive equipment, and need help with the software part of their inventions. I located no such people, but I got hold of up-to-date contact information for M.I.L.B.A.T., the Israeli center for technology and accessibility. This center employs the services of volunteer professionals, who design custom adaptations for the needs of people with disabilities. I was in contact with the center several years ago, but somehow lost contact with them.