Politics, history and ignorance
Just yesterday I had an interesting – though brief – conversation with a friend of mine regarding some aspects of Romanian politics. One thing I found surprising was that my friend – an intelligent individual whose opinions I respect for being well argued and referenced – was supporting a certain figure of Romanian politics whom I believed should long have been thrown in jail. We had little time to develop on the subject and I hope we will in the future, but this reminded me of how easy it is to be wrong, but unaware that you are wrong. Long have I complained about the Romanian youth’s ignorance of history, politics and such, and now someone was proving me to be wrong in my own knowledge and interpretation of historical facts, interpretation which is not the result of trivial observation.
I appreciate his comments. I appreciate his interest. If I am wrong, even more than if I were right, I appreciate him proving me wrong. If only more people were interested in these topics, than there would be more debates and we would, some day, understand the truth.
When it comes to opinions of this type, I urge people to be, in this aspect at least, humble. No matter how firmly you believe in something never forget that you could be wrong. I tell the students I train for ACM to always assume that the implementation of their solution for any given problem has bugs no matter how many tests they ran that said otherwise. I think if we all lived by this concept, it would be a much better world for all of us. Remember what Bertrand Russell said: “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
So what really happened back in December 1989? What happened in June 1990 in Bucharest? What has happened since, in the past 19 years? Where will we be next year, after 20 years of democracy? These are questions many of us want answered now, but we will have to wait for another 20 years at least before we will get our true answers. As my high school history professor put it: 20 years is to soon to discuss history. If we talk about it now, it’s just politics. In maybe another 20 years it will just be history and we will really find out what happened there.
1 Decembrie 2008. 90 de ani de la Marea Unire. 19 ani de la Revolutie.
Desteapta-te romane, acum ori niciodata.
La Multi Ani
iTunes or how to mess up something really good
When I first ran into iTunes I thought it was amazing. I mean really, so you can download all these songs, for a relatively small price and it’s all legal? Whoa, awesome! Last year, about this time, I downloaded an album from iTunes. It was all good, cheaper than buying the disk on Amazon so I was happy. Then slowly things started turning sour.
First of all, the quality is good, but it’s not what I’m used to. Maybe it’s just for this specific album, but anyway it’s not that “you can’t tell the difference between this and an audio CD” thing, like most of my music library. Second, some of the songs weren’t cut off correctly. So, the beginning of track 3 will be actually on the end of track 2 and so on. Not a big issue unless you’re a fan of shuffling.. but I am. (Note: emailing them about the issue didn’t merit a response)
But it really really started sucking when I realized the only way I can listen to this stuff is WITH iTunes (and more on that in a minute). I can’t play it in my normal music player where all my other thousands of tracks are, I can’t burn a CD with it (so no listening to this in the car) and at that time I was playing music from my phone so no iPod meaning I couldn’t take my music with me. Well thank you iTunes, for saving me $3 and taking all the fun out of digital music! I actually have to buy the album AGAIN from somewhere else if I want to be able to ever really listen to it. So, instead of saving me $3 you cost me $10. Great!
While we’re at it, let’s talk about the software iTunes. First off, I admire Apple for their good software. No really. The only thing that makes Macs good is Mac OS X. Not the hardware, definitely not the price. Just the OS. Also, Safari is a good browser (at least on Mac OS, I had no experience with it on Windows) and I had no complains about it. Also some of the photo/video software I ran into from Apple was quite good. So yeah, I like Apple software. Generally good quality stuff.
But then there’s iTunes. iTunes takes more resources than anything else I’ve ever seen. It takes about the same time to launch on my laptop as Adobe Photoshop and that’s known to be a beast. If they implemented any multithreading in it, they did it badly, nearly any operation freezes the whole thing until it completes (and it takes its time to complete ANYTHING). I hate having to open it and I try and keep the time it’s open to a minimum, because it simply destroys my multitasking. When iTunes is doing something, everything else needs to stand down. Including my brain, because I’m just stuck waiting for it to do something.
Apple, face it, iTunes is your MOST used software. If this is the way you advertise your software division, don’t be surprised that many people won’t pay the extra bucks for your Mac OS. Maybe it’s time you fix this fail boat of a program. And your DRM policies, before everyone switches to something better and you lose all the market share in the music industry you worked so hard to get.
Smells like winter
I went outside to get some food earlier in the evening and I was struck by the whiff of a very chilly weather. Yes, the whiff, smell, the odor, the aroma of the air. It was as if somebody had slapped me in the face with it. I love that fragrance. It’s the way air smells once it goes below a certain temperature (don’t ask me why, I don’t care, some things need to stay mysterious and not be revealed by science). I adore it. Every winter I get at least several days when this scent just jumps out at me (usually towards the beginning or towards the end of the season). There’s something about it that always made me feel happy… in a childish way that I care not to explain. Mark my words, if there is a heaven, that’s what the air there should smell like (even if they have to keep it frozen to maintain that smell).
Electronic voting
A friend of mine Stefan Popoveniuc, a Romanian Ph.D. student at GWU is part of a team that has been working on a new electronic voting system called Scantegrity for several years now. The system can be used in a similar way to current paper ballot systems (i.e. making a mark of your vote on a printed ballot), while at the same time allowing the voter to check that their vote was properly counted after the election, simply by going to a website and putting in a code. Because of the way the system is designed to use encryption, the vote remains anonymous. Only the person that voted can check their own vote because they are the only ones that know that code stands for on their ballot.
The system is getting more and more recognition in the past months and I am happy to see that news has also reached TVs at home ( TVR video here ). My sincere thanks to Mihai Melinescu for his efforts to come down and record this material during the extremely busy election day!
If you want to find out more about the system, please visit Scantegrity.
