Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

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Few things annoy me more than when I get punished for the indiscretions of others. You might think this doesn’t happen often—and that’s true, if you’re talking about innocent people being charged and convicted for crimes—but there are plenty of non-criminal examples where you and I unjustly pay the price for the bad things that others do.

Minor examples occur every day. When I was a senior at Liberty High School in Bedford, Virginia, I and several of my friends liked to eat lunch outside when the weather was nice. The cafeteria had a set of tables and benches outside and eating outside was permitted. One day, a different group of students sitting at the other side of the patio had a food fight. Ultimately, maybe four or five kids threw food at one another and the commotion lasted less than five minutes. How did the administration handle this? Asst. Principal John Eggleston suspended outdoor eating privileges for all students during all lunch periods for at least two weeks. In addition to punishing the four or five students involved, Eggy punished me and a number of others too without cause.

You see this flawed disciplinary method constantly in schools. Some students smoke in the bathroom, so instead of enforcing the no-smoking rules for those kids everybody has to be granted teacher’s permission to pee. Some students go to inappropriate web sites, so instead of paying attention to the students’ Internet use they install flawed, automatic net-nanny software that interferes with all students’ Internet access. More examples abound.

Unfortunately, this goofiness is not limited to our lazily-mismanaged public schools.

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Taking a Sledge Hammer to MSIE

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There are several ways technology moves forward.

  • The first way is for the incumbent (the current leaders in a market) to innovate their products forward on their own. Every company and organization that produces software should strive to do this, even if they happen to be a monopoly in their market, though many monopolistic or near-monopolistic companies have decided not to.
  • The second way is for a new product or many products to arrive on the scene that improves significantly upon the incumbent products. In a fully open market, these better products take over from the previous incumbents quickly. Quark XPress, formerly the industry standard for print layout, had grown stagnant and was quickly supplanted by the much-better Adobe InDesign—which has since become the industry standard. This is often the ideal course when the incumbents have ceased to move forward, but it is extremely difficult in a monopoly environment—witness Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, which have dented Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share in web browsing but have not yet supplanted it.
  • Finally, when the market leader/monopolist is stagnated and the competitive products have not completely taken hold, you can bring out the sledge hammer: hack and adjust the incumbent product to behave more like the better alternatives, rather than just letting the incumbent hold back market development.

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Quit Buggin’ Me

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So, I was sitting in front of the television last night watching Cops or Forensic Files or something when the cat, ever busy amusing herself, began jumping up and down by our sliding glass door. After she did this a few times, I figured there must be something there getting her attention. Sure enough, this little green bug was livin’ it up on our back door.

We get interesting bugs hanging out on our back porch fairly regularly, though they’re usually cicadas or bees and other random things. This one struck me as interesting.

I am always amazed at the unique features that animals develop, especially insects. Some look like nuts, some like leaves, some like sticks, and this one—apparently—is modeled after baby corn. Awesome.

The Most Annoying (and Successful) Pitch-Man

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Everybody who watches TV for more than 15 minutes in a week, particularly if some of that time is on Cable/Satillite networks, knows Billy Mays. He’s the guy who sells gimmicky ‘As Seen On TV’ junk like Oxi-Clean, Orange Glo, the Awesome Auger, and more by screaming at you. Personally I find his pitching style abrasive and annoying, and will avoid buying products he has pitched even more than I generally avoid ‘As Seen On TV’ junk. According to The Washington Post though, he is actually extremely successful at what he does. Mays is one of the most sought-after pitch-men in the television universe.

I really don’t get why these ‘As Seen On TV’ companies insist on annoying people—Billy Mays’s yelling to sell hundreds of products and Vince Offer’s condescending pitch for the ShamWow towels—rather than the traditional style of simply showing the product and why it’s better than the alternatives. I don’t buy from companies that don’t treat me like a rational, practical, intelligent person.

The strangest part is not that these companies resort to these pitches, since they have done it throughout the history of television. The strangest part is that it works, and people buy these products based solely on the annoying sales pitch of a paid advertiser. Invariably, independent research reveals that these products don’t work. On the rare occasion that they do work and do represent a novel solution to a problem, they quickly begin appearing in real retailers or established, trustworthy companies begin producing similar products. That’s when I start buying.

Replacing the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

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The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is probably something you’ve never heard of, but if you spend a lot of time on Linux or Mac systems (especially in a command line) you’ve probably run across it now and then. The FHS establishes a general directory structure for operating systems, largely based on ancient UNIX ideas. Read about it at the Wikipedia link above and see if you, as a normal human being, can make any sense of it.

Ultimately, the FHS is far more confusing than it is useful. I can navigate around it pretty well simply because I understand it after years of using it, but most user-facing operating systems avoid exposing their users to it lest they get lost (details below).

The folks over as OSNews have an interesting piece about the FHS and its problems, and GoboLinux which is the only somewhat-major Linux distribution to deviate drastically from the FHS. Personally I have very limited experience with GoboLinux, since I’m very comfortable with Ubuntu as my distro of choice, but I absolutely applaud the effort to move to a better Linux filesystem structure.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.