Day: September 25, 2000

Ator at ArsTechnica points out how bizarre it is that the whole Y2K story went from pretty much being the only story this time last year to completely disappearing from the radar screen today (when was the last time you heard the phrase Y2K?). He links to a News.Com story that points out the controversial law designed to forestall waves of Y2K lawsuits has been invoked a grand total of 18 times (the most bizarre case has to be someone suing Circuit City and Best Buy for selling non-Y2K compliant software. Why go after the middle men instead of the manufacturer? CC and BB should be sued for their salespeople’s complete lack of understanding about computers, but not for this nonsense).

Now if we could only get the national media to stop reporting every single non-development in the Jon Benet Ramsey case, I’d be happy.

Discovery.Com had a story on Friday about new evidence that our galaxy spins around a massive black hole. By analyzing the movement of stars near the center of the Milky Way, astronomers estimate that a black hole with a mass equivalent to 2.6 million(!) suns lies at the center of galaxy. The gravitational pull is so strong near the center of the galaxy, that the stars being studied take only a few decades to orbit the center of the Milky Way compared to the 220 million years it takes the Sun to make one revolution around the galaxy.

There has been a lot of speculation among some libertarians that digital financial transactions combined with strong encryption will eventually make it very difficult for the state to track money, and thus potentially reduce one of its major source of revenues — taxes. Others have been a bit more skeptical, noting that the U.S. government is especially tenacious about going after money launderers and is unlikely to let up any time soon.

Regardless of which side is right, one thing is for certain — the government itself is very worried about electronic transactions. Wired recently obtained a draft copy of a Treasury Department report that complains while technology will help it keep betters tabs on Americans spending habits to ferret out those hiding cash, at the same time strongly encrypted digital cash transactions could thwart such surveillance efforts.

Wired quotes the draft report as saying,

The development of new technologies — such as electronic cash, electronic purses, Internet or smart card based electronic payment systems, and Internet banking — is increasing the ability of individuals to rapidly transfer large sums of money, and could pose a challenge for FinCEN and other law enforcement agencies combating money laundering.

Both the Treasury Department and those who favor secure, anonymous financial transactions typically frame the issue in terms of the drug war, with the Clinton administration arguing financial privacy only makes the drug war more difficult to fight, while civil libertarians argue this is another example of the war on drugs taking away the civil liberties of average Americans. The more important impact, however, will be felt with the IRS which needs to be able to track income in order to tax it. Already large numbers of Americans admit they hide financial transactions from the IRS, and this number would only increase if cash transactions suddenly had the easy of non-cash transactions thanks to secure, anonymous digital systems.

One of things that would help in this area is an educational effort to let people know just how retrograde the laws currently are. For example, I doubt very few people know that if they want to use cash to make say a $10,000 down payment on a large purchase and withdraw $5,000 from a bank account on Monday and the other $5,000 on Tuesday that they have just committed a felony (in fact people unaware of the existence of this law have been prosecuted for doing precisely this).

On the other hand, it is also very ironic that for at least a couple decades the government has at time studies various ways of discouraging people from holding cash — one proposal looked at the technical feasibility of putting a strip in money so that if you get a $20 bill today, it would begin declining in value with a few days unless it was spent or deposited into an account where it could be more easily tracked. How fitting that the high technology that the government thought would make it easier to track people’s money also turns out to be a potential boon to allow them to evade such invasions of their privacy.

When it comes to software, hardware, toys, or whatever, my mantra is simple — I want options, options, and more options. I think the day software designers can write a program and expect people to conform their behavior to the needs of the program are long gone. Instead consumers want software that they can customize to the way they work rather than vice versa.

An example of a computer game that does this well is Space Empires IV by Malfador Machinations. Space Empires is legendary among fanatics of the so-called 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy games. It takes the space gameplay from the excellent Masters of Orion and then throws in so much customizability that at times it comes close to having too many options, if that is possible (on the other hand, if you just want to play the game as is you can ignore all of those options, which is also important).

Just about everything can be changed in the game. Want to set a Babylon-5 vs. Star Trek game? Definitely doable (and believe me, the game’s fanbase will take only a few weeks after the game is released to post complete ships, technology trees, etc. for scifi properties like Babylon-5 and Star Trek on the Internet).

I got very burned out on strategy games after too many 4 a.m. sessions of Civilization II, but I bought Space Empires III based solely on the customizability, and eagerly await version IV. To my mind this is the way to sell a toy, electronic or not. Don’t sell me a gadget that just does one or two things, sell me that box of Legos where I can build the toy depicted on the front cover of the box if I want or if I feel more energetic create something completely different. I hate software that boxes the user in to only a few, often relatively meaningless, choices.

Since I was expounding on what I thought made good and bad software, I got to thinking about the best and worst software I’ve ever used.

On the best side, the best computer game I ever played was Pinball Construction Set. To my mind that game is still as close to perfection as I’ve seen. The beauty was that pinball is a pretty limited game but within that basic board and balls domain you could do anything. I remember creating a game once where the gravity was set to zero, there was one hole in the middle of the board for the ball to go into, and then bumpers, flippers and other stuff on the outside — called the game The Black Hole. You could do that sort of thing very easily and it was fun to play around with.

The worst software is a shoe-in — pretty much any Windows word processor. WordPerfect stinks, and MS Word somehow manages to be even worse. I spend much of my time at work editing documents in those two programs and they drive me bonkers. Most of my co-workers like WordPerfect because of the “Reveal Codes” feature, but I routinely run into documents where what I see on screen has nothing to do with the codes. Word is pretty much unuseable; I really have no idea how people get work done with it.