So left without google I felt like I was marooned in a sea of information without rhyme or reason. I went to yahoo and then bing but to my total horror, neither of them allow you to limit your search to content that’s been updated in the last 24 hours, in the last day etc, a feature that’s been part of google for yonks.  It was a harsh reminder of why all the other engines still suck next to google. Even yandex, the Russian ‘yet another index’ that some people prefer for searches in the Russian internet as it supposedly does a better job of finding all possible inflected forms of Russian word, doesn’t seem to have this extremely useful feature and it sucks.

It’s kind of weird but I still have vague memories of the Internet without google. Back in the day everybody was using altavista.com and when I saw google for the first time I was unimpressed. It looked kind of spartan, just a search box. It’s definitely gone a long way from those humble beginnings. Just how much of an integral part of the Internet it has become over the years was made very clear to me today as all of a sudden I couldn’t access it. It felt as if the Internet just stopped making sense, I was lost, totally without direction.  That’s what the power of habit can reduce us to.

At the same time it makes me wonder what the Internet will be like in the future, post-google. After all it’s only a matter of time before google gets overtaken and left in the dust by some other technology.

The situation in modern day Russia is unique in that all the drawbacks of representatives democracy have been laid bare here. It would appear at first sight that all the necessary institutions are in place, we’ve got a parliament and a president that is elected in a general election and yet we’ve had the exact same group of people in power for more than ten years already and they’ve managed quite successfully to remain in the Kremlin despite the economic crisis of 2008 and the devastating wild fires of 2010.

Do elections get routinely rigged in Russia? I personally don’t know, probably some of them do, however, I don’t think that they necessarily have to in a representative democracy. Theoretically, for instance, just about anyone can run for president in Russia but in reality most people can’t for the simple reason that they don’t have enough resources to mount a successful presidential campaign. The same applies to parliamentary elections. To get to parliament you need a party but to organize a party you need resources and lots of them. Thus at the end of the day whoever has got the most cash ends up calling all the shots in a representative democracy.

And this doesn’t apply to Russia alone, it’s just that in Russia today the powers that be cannot even bothered to make the effort to put on an air of legitimacy; their methods are crude and they hardly even try to conceal their machinations. Plus in general the ordinary people in Russia tend to be a bit less gullible than in some other places about these things.

So if what we’ve been taught about representative democracy is a hopelessly idealized model that doesn’t really work in reality, sort of like perfect competition with every decision maker having access to all the information about the market, why do the ruling elites in the world’s most successful countries even bother with this charade. After even in the US when push came to shove in the 2000 election, it was the supreme court and not the voters that decided who was going to be the president.

My theory is that enlightened ruling elites use the institutions of representative democracy as a means to gauge the public mood and aspirations. History teaches us that if the ruling elites complete lose touch with the masses things will often get completely out of hand with the masses storming the posh houses and palaces of their rulers and stringing them up on lam posts or doing some other nasty things to them. The last such major showdown was in Romania where the Ceuacescus were essentially summarily executed after a failed attempt to escape Romania. Before that a similar fate befell the Romanov family in Russia. Imho, the failure of both regimes stemmed from completely losing touch their their people and that’s where representative democracy comes into play.

Its goal is not to empower people to rule themselves but rather to provide the ruling elites with a safety valve and a way to monitor what’s going on in the general population.  However, in Russia, it would appear that our representative democracy is failing miserably in this mission. The prudent course of action at this stage, imho, would be to ditch the Putin-Medvedev tandem as well as the United Russia party and bring to power someone new. If Putin actually remains in power in Russia things might eventually spin out of control, possibly even by 2017.

Think about it, running a marathon is dull, you just run on and on, after a while you’re so exhausted you stop noticing what’s happening around you and once you cross the finish line you just drop to the ground half dead. With mountains it’s much more interesting, a mountain is always a challenge, even if it’s a small mountain and yet nobody’s rushing you and you can pace yourself, take your time, camp half way up, take in the scenery, take pictures. Then if it’s a really high mountain you can even get to look down at the clouds or get to see snow in the middle of the summer. In short climbing a mountain, imho, is a far more diverse and rewarding experience than simply running like a stupid machine with an Energizer battery up your butt.

Running is too much like the sort of lives we tend to live today, we’re all already running marathons as it is, getting up in the morning, going to work, working, then coming back home, going through the motions, a huge percentage of what we do every day gets done on autopilot we’re not living anymore we’re just going through the motions and running a marathon is very much about going through the motions of moving your legs and arms and running on along. By contrast to successfully climb a mountain you have to think and plan first and then you’ve got to be switched-on all the way to the summit so you can adjust if things change.

In short, we ought all to stop running marathons and try and climb more mountains instead, both literally and metaphorically

The reason she knows so much about me is because I lived with my parents for far too long and it’s inevitable that your parents are going to know too much about you after watching you grow up and go through all your trials and tribulations. And in a way it sort of sucks. I guess I’m a secretive kind of person so I don’t particularly like it when people know too much about me. My idea of effective communication is where I only reveal to others as much as I want and not more and I’m always in control.

If somebody knows you too well that also implies they know your vulnerabilities, it kind of puts you at their mercy. I guess it’s ok if it’s your parents because parents normally tend to love their kids but what if somebody else? they can always use that knowledge to manipulate you into doing something you’re later going to regret.

I still remember how when I was in high school we were sent to this special trade school where we were supposed to learn an occupation. Probably it was just in case we chose not to go on to university after graduation. Anyway, the occupation I eventually chose to learn was that of a ‘computer operator’. It probably sounds weird today but back then if you knew your way around computers that already qualified as a job.

They had these old computers with monochrome displays at the trade schools. I still remember the specs, 512 kb of RAM, 20 MB hard drives, and yet still somehow those old computers could do stuff that seemed totally amazing at the time. You could run games on them. They were pretty simplistic games with monochrome graphics but we enjoyed them very much nonetheless. They ran DOS, so you could only run one program at a time. They taught us to write programs in BASIC. Each line started with a number, for some reason the first line started with a 10, the next one started with a 20 etc.

It’s strange how the memories of those times have become vague and elusive. I can still remember facts but I don’t really remember how I felt. Well, probably I sort of do. I do remember that after spending my first couple of hours on those old computers I was hooked, addicted, I wanted to come back for more, which I did.

Those old computers were crap next to the sort of machines we’ve got today. Hell, you couldn’t even really play music on them. Those old arcade style games had sound, sure, but the sound was crap. Still, something drew us to them. I wasn’t the only one in that computer class. It was something inexplicable. This feeling as if they offered us a window into Plato’s world of ideas. Plus they were for programming. BASIC wasn’t much of a programming language, at least the version that we used on those old computers, but still suddenly you had this machine that you could program, that you could get to do thing for you. It was an amazing feeling.

These days, imho, one of the things that I think kids really miss out on when it comes to computers is that few of them are really given the chance to realize that you can not only use them as a consumer to check emails or social networking sites but you can create things on computers. Sure there’s still people who eventually realize that and go on to become programmers etc but to the majority modern computers, and especially laptops and tablets, have turned into dumbed down consumer appliances, which is a shame, imho.

Part of the problem is that all the mechanism behind modern applications have really grown in complexity since those early days of GW BASIC. Now when I look at all the stuff behind web applications I can’t help asking myself did things really have to get so involved in the end? Couldn’t they have chosen some simpler way of doing web programming. In the past spaghetti code  was regarded as a bad thing, today in web programming it’s the only kind of code you get, there’s simply no way of programming for the web differently once you get down to the very basic level of style sheets and HTML with chunks of embedded php code for good measure. I often can’t help pondering whether they (whoever they are) could have come up with something cleaner.

There is another website that I’ve come to enjoy that’s been down the past few days and it’s been quite disheartening. When a website or an online service is there, after a while you come to take it for granted and then when it suddenly goes away one day it feels personal, it feels like they’ve pulled the plug on you rather than on their services because you’ve come to depend on it so much that it felt like it was part of you and now it’s gone. Well bummer.

If there is just one good thing about locally installed applications that store all their data on your hard drive that’s probably the fact that they never go offline unless you wreck your OS or your computer is destroyed.

It’s an interesting philosophical question, actually, why is it that we always feel better after we’ve passed on the responsibility for taking care of our own shit (computer data in this case) to someone else, someone in the cloud. It’s as if we’ve got this innate belief that other people are bound to be better than us at doing this job, but why on earth do we assume that?

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt2p2o

In short the guy writes about how he spent months painstakingly  migrating all his other email accounts to his one gmail account and uploading all his documents to his google docs account only to have his google account deleted (or suspended) by google.

It’s sort of like when you have all your info on this one laptop that you lug around with you everywhere you go and then you drop it and it breaks into tiny little pieces from which no information can be recovered only it’s probably more like having somebody grab your laptop from you and smash it to pieces as you stand there and watch helplessly.

Well, maybe  it’s not all that bade and who knows, google may eventually reactive the poor fella’s account and he’ll once again have access to all his stuff. However, what this story really calls attention to is the risks people are invited to take when they are encouraged to switch to cloud computing.  On the surface cloud computing looks like a very cool idea – software as a service, a new digital utility that allows you to rent digital space and applications, however at the end of the day what cloud computing boils down to is that you let someone else handle your (sensitive) data. Cloud is a very cool metaphor, but in actuality what it sort of conceals is that fact that your data that is in the ‘cloud’ is in actuality sitting on someone’s hard drive.

It may not really be that much of a problem from a purely technological viewpoint as in all probability those data will be backed-up and there will be some redundancy built into the system so that even if the actual server your data is stored on should go down, some other server will pick up the slack; in the worst case scenario loss of data will be minimal and 9 times out of 10 you probably won’t even notice anything. However, what do you do if your cloud computing provider decides you’ve violated some obscure terms of use (which most people hardly ever read anyway) and pulls the plug on your account. And what if it’s a major provider of cloud services like google with millions of users that can afford to ignore complaints from the likes of you for weeks on end or even to never get back to you at all? Yes, probably in most cases they will reactivate your account eventually but still what if it’s at a critical point that they shut down your account; suppose you’re finishing an important project and all of a sudden poof, you can’t access your data anymore and you write them an email and they tell you that you’ve violated their terms of use and that they’ll get back to you next week but your project is due tomorrow.

So what’s the lesson we can learn from this cautionary tale? – for the time being it would appear that the best policy is to store all your most important files locally and to only use the cloud for backups.

Well, the thing is, though that in the first three seasons they kind of managed to get away with this approach, but towards the end of Season 3 they began losing steam and the characters started doing stupid things like killing TV presenters before live cameras or trying to bury each other in concrete and failing. And now as the fourth season started we first met Sookie’s grandfather who was killed instantly, then the witches were shown like a bunch of idiots that don’t really know what they’re doing and so on and so fourth so far the whole thing just isn’t making much sense.

Well, maybe they’ll pick up speed in future episodes but so far it’s not looking good at all.

In technology today things are changing very fast. I’m not really all that old yet but I can still remember the time when the Internet was global in the sense that it didn’t matter where you were accessing a resource from, you’d still be getting the exact same information. Back in the ‘olden days’ I was so enamored of that ‘global village’ idea I didn’t even notice when things started changing.

I believe that the first time it was brought home for me loud and clear that the global village might be going down the drain was back in 03 (or was it 04) when I was visiting my relatives in West Ukraine and wanted to look up the roaming rates of my mobile operator on their website. I went to a local Internet cafe, since back then my Ukrainian relatives did not eve have a computer, but to my total dismay each time I tried to load my mobile operator’s website, it loaded the website of their Ukrainian branch instead. I remember that I eventually figure out a way around this region-based redirect and got through to my mobile operator’s website but still the whole experience seemed totally wrong to me. What’s the use of the Internet if I can’t access a website I want from anywhere in the world?

Unfortunately since then things have been going from bad to worse. This abandonment of global values has been especially awful in the corporate world. The websites of various commercial news outlets, TV companies and the like offer lots of content that can only be accessed from within the US or the UK or whatever regional market they happen to be targeting. It’s the f..cking DVD region codes all over again. As one sitcom character from the 1990′s would have said, ‘This sucks, this is total BS’

It would appear that the corporate types have totally missed the entire point of the Internet. The whole idea behind the technology was to make information globally accessible to facilitate cooperation and creativity and I believe that at its core this idea doesn’t really run counter to market economy. If anything the globalization capability offered by the Interent on the one hand makes the market place more competitive, which in theory should lead to better products, but on the other hand allows companies with niche market offerings to make a killing by targeting niche markets all over the world.

I was also wondering if there are any legal repercussions to refusing to sell stuff to people because of where they happen to be accessing your website from. It’s one thing if you simply can’t send things there but what if all the infrastructure is in place (and for most places it is in place, services like DHL can deliver things wherever) but you still say, sorry, you’re in eastern Europe so you can’t buy anything from us.

Well, whatever the case might be regarding all those legal issues, the fact remains that the global village as people envisaged it in the early naughties seems to have been divided up and segmented into tiny little localized sub-villages with all sorts of restrictions on what kind of information can be passed from one to another, and I personally think it’s a rather sad development – yet another dream of humanity has been crushed or is in the process of being crushed.