Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Global preferences regarding US presidential candidates

Given the degree to which the American president influences events all around the world, there is a certain degree of sense in polling the rest of the world to see which of the two current presidential candidates they prefer. This page on The Economist‘s website is doing just that. It is set up to mimic the American electoral college system, with each country getting three votes by default plus additional ones by population. In total, there are 9,875 votes.

At the time of writing, Canada’s 49 electoral college votes are going to Obama, who is preferred to McCain by 87% to 13%. The 432 American votes are also going to Obama, reflecting a 79% to 21% preference. The only countries that are toss ups or leaning towards McCain seem to be Macedonia (5 votes) and Andorra (3 votes). As such, Obama is leading by 8,360 to 8.

Of course, there are huge methodological problems with this type of survey. It is amalgamating the preferences of those who have volunteered to take it, and who therefore presumably have some knowledge of The Economist. It is neither a random nor a representative sample. Even so, the results are pretty striking.

An idea for reducing problems with dead links

As mentioned before, one of the most frustrating things about the internet is the likelihood that following a link will lead to a page that has moved, changed, or vanished since the link was posted. Given the massive increases in bandwidth and storage space that have taken place, I had an idea for combating this. Basically, it would be an automated system that saves a cached copy of any linked page, then allows anyone viewing the linking page to view the saved version of the linked page, in the event the latter became unavailable. That means a blog post linking to a news story or other blog entry would be able to provide access to either of the latter, even at a point in time when they are no longer available in their initial contexts.

It would work a lot like Google’s cache: saving text and formatting, with links to any images and video in their original locations. As such, the maximum amount of content would be retained without using too much disk space. To begin with, the system could be integrated into content management systems like WordPress. Eventually, it may be sensible for every link created to express this behaviour by default – at least on websites that choose to enable it.

Like so many useful things, the system would but up against copyright restrictions. That being said, Google has thus far been successful in defending the legality of their own caching practices. Perhaps the courts would be willing to consider the kind of enhanced links I described as a fair use of potentially copyrighted material.

A few Apple complaints

Last night, after the Bluetooth connection failed for the hundredth unexplained time, I switched back from my Apple wireless Mighty Mouse to my old Microsoft optical scrollmouse. I must say, the change is for the best. The old mouse is lighter, smaller, and more comfortable. It is possible to press both buttons at once, and press the middle button without accidentally scrolling. Most importantly, the scroll wheel itself is much less finicky – it may not be able to scroll horizontally, and it lacks the Might’s Mouse’s useless ‘squeeze’ buttons – but it seems the superior device overall, despite the need for it to be tethered to my computer.

In general, I think Apple does a magnificent job of making computer gear and software. If I had to make two complaints, the first would be about the way they sometimes privilege form over functionality. Alongside the Mighty Mouse (and the infamous prior hockey puck mouse), there is the interface of Time Machine, which is pretty but probably less useful than it could be. My other complaint is their willingness to change things after the fact in ways that cannot be reversed and that people might not like. For example, there was when they locked iTunes so that only three people per boot session could access your library over the network (a real pain in university residence), or when they limited the volume on my iPod Shuffle through a software update.

A Wikipedia paradox

The site is most useful when you know either absolutely nothing about something, or a great deal about it. It permits those utterly unaware of a topic to get some essential facts – probably true – very quickly and easily. It also allows real experts to track down something they once knew, can remember, but had forgotten very quickly.

Wikipedia is least useful for those in the middle zone. These are people who know more than the minimum, but not enough to really judge the credibility of complex arguments in the subject area.

Nonetheless, it is a wonderful resource. I use it at least twenty times a day.

Spore tip: species for terraforming

There is no quicker way to make money than to develop a bunch of T3 planets that are close to one another and which produce valuable forms of spice. Getting planets to T3 can be a pain, however. This is largely because you will need three species of small, medium, and large plants; six species of herbivores; and three carnivores or omnivores.

The easiest way to get them all – and avoid repeats – is to dump all the species you are carrying, visit an existing T3 planet (like your homeworld) and collect a dozen or so of each species present. You will then have a hold full of terraforming goodness.

Frustrated with Spore

There are aspects of Spore which are excellent, but far too much effort needs to be expended to keep the game from being absurdly frustrating.

When you visit other empires, you see things much as they ought to be. They have large numbers of attack and defense fleets, consisting of mother ships and fighters. These fleets will attack you if you enter their space. They will leave their space to attack nearby enemy colonies and thus capture or destroy them.

By contrast, regardless of the size of your empire, you will always be the only competent ship in it. Allied empires will provide one ship each, but these will behave like missile magnets, die almost immediately, and lead to the friendly empire blaming you for the loss of their ship. As such, it is up to you to personally defend your entire territory, as well as personally attack other systems (basically the only way to end wars once they start). Indeed, ending wars is a very tricky thing to do, especially considering that you can start one when your ship automatically returns fire on a ship that attacked you in an enemy system. Ending wars either requires conquering so many planets that the enemy sues for peace (only some races do this) or waging a genocidal campaign across their entire empire, which can easily take hours. Of course, whenever you are at war, you will be constantly attacked and obliged to manually defend whichever system(s) they have chosen to target.

There are also pirate attacks. These should ideally be ignored, since they are almost as much of a pain to fight off as attacks from rival empires and ignoring them has only a trifling consequence. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure if it is money-stealing pirates or civilization destroying enemies attacking is by flying across the galaxy to check manually.

Even more maddening are ‘ecological disasters.’ In these, a random planet somewhere within your empire or those of your allies gets five sick animals of a particular type somewhere on it. Even if your empire consists of hundreds of interconnected worlds, you are the only being that can kill these animals. Fail to do so, and the ecosystem on the planet gets destabilized, eventually destroying your colonies. Also, killing too many of the healthy animals moving in herds with the sick ones causes the extinction and makes you start over, hunting sick animals of a different kind.

Overall, the game was billed as a big universe that you could explore and experiment with however you like. Unfortunately, the frustrations built into the game make that very challenging. Implementing the following suggestions would significantly improve things:

  1. After five ‘ecological disasters,’ you win a badge. Having this badge means that your colonies have learned to deal with these things on their own. At the most, they should ask for some money with which to fund the five animal cull.
  2. If you accidentally start a war by firing upon a ship, you should have the chance to apologize diplomatically and pay compensation to avoid full-scale fighting.
  3. It should always be clear whether pirates or an enemy empire are attacking you.
  4. Enemy empires should be more willing to end wars.
  5. Your colonies should be more capable of defending themselves.
  6. Alternatively, much more powerful weapons should be available late in the game, so as to diminish the frustration of destroying fleet after identical fleet.
  7. Multiple AI modes should exist for escorts. In at least one, they should flee when near death.
  8. The game should make the status of ongoing battles clearer. At present, there is no easy way to tell when you have actually lost control of a star system.
  9. One option to consider is giving colonies two options for wealth production. In one mode, they behave as in the current game: they produce ‘spice’ which you need to personally fly around to collect and sell. In another mode, they produce spice which is sold automatically through intermediaries. You get about 30% of the profits.

Reducing the degree to which the player needs to micomanage the galaxy would probably do the most to improve this game. Hopefully, future patches will shift things somewhat in this direction.

Deletionpedia

On Wikipedia, there is an ongoing debate between ‘inclusionists’ who feel that any factual information – no matter how trivial – is suitable for inclusion and ‘deletionists’ who think only articles with a certain level of importance should be kept. Regardless of who wins on Wikipedia itself (or rather, which balance between the two views becomes stable), another site is automatically archiving everything that gets deleted from Wikipedia: Deletionpedia provides a fairly valuable service: both by being willing to archive information of limited importance to most people, but perhaps some use to some. Also, it lets people keep tabs on what kinds of articles are being removed from Wikipedia, which should provide editorial oversight.

Help design WordPress 2.7

For all those who complained about recent changes in the WordPress administration interface, there is a survey out collecting data on what people would like to see in version 2.7

Personally, I am perfectly happy with the design of the current system. I just hope the next version is a bit less touchy when it comes to autosaves and mysterious publication failures.

Hackers in the Large Hadron Collider

Apparently, hackers managed to take control of a website related to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment: one of the five detectors within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This isn’t terribly surprising, since high profile websites get vandalized reasonably frequently. What is rather more disturbing is that the hackers were apparently “one step away” from the control system of the detector itself. While I don’t know the details of the design, not connecting the computers that control the machine to the internet would seem like an elementary precaution. Not connecting them to publicly accessible web servers, even more so.

Apparently, the beams circulating in the LHC will eventually have as much kinetic energy as an aircraft carrier going 12 knots – all concentrated into bunches circling the accelerator 11,000 times per second. Preventing outside access to the control systems for the sensors that will make sense of all the data seems like common sense, even if the output from those sensors is getting sent around the world for analysis.