Picture this scenario: You’re driving home from work, and your car’s engine starts to run erratically. It sounds like it is only firing on 3 cylinders, and the plume of smoke and scent of unburnt fuel tend to confirm this. You’re almost home, so you limp the rest of the way there, where your neighbour notices your problem and wanders over.
Your neighbour says that if you pop the hood, he’ll have a look at it and see what is wrong. He’s mechanincally inclined, so you go ahead and pop it, where he finds that one of the wires has worked loose from a spark plug. He examines the plug, and the socket on the end of the wire, to make sure that they aren’t too badly scorched, then, deciding that they look okay, plugs the wire back in, wiggling it a bit to make sure there is a good connection. “Turn it over,” he says.
You start your engine. After a moment of rough running, it levels out and is back to its normal self. You thank your neighbour for his help and both of you get on with your day.
Now let’s try this another way.
Your neighbour says that if you pop the hood, he’ll have a look at it and see what is wrong, but this time, you can’t pop the hood because the hood is locked, and only the car dealer has the key. Now you have to make an appointment to get the car fixed, get the car there, maybe take time off from work, and you will be without the car until they are done, however long that is. We know from the last scenario that this is a simple problem, easily solved in minutes by any knowledgeable person, and yet we are now talking about hours of your time, possibly days of inconvenience, and probably a couple of hundred dollars, all preventable if you could have just opened your hood.
We would never put up with such a scenario, would we? We would, and we do; not from our cars, to be sure, but certainly from other bits of technology.
Let me give you an example.
I build my own computers, because I find it to be an immensely satisfying thing to do. In recent years, more frequently, the motherboards have all of the needed bits and pieces on them to do video, audio, networking etc. Recently, I bought parts for, and built, two computers.
The first computer was designed to be an energy efficient server, to be running 24×7, serving photos and home videos up to family and friends, and providing a common place for files to be stored in our house, rather than having them spread out amongst the 7 computers in the house. It uses an Intel chipset.
The second computer was designed to be my workstation. It’s where I surf, code, compile, transcode videos, edit audio, and so on. I got it a high-powered AMD processor, and made sure that it supported 7.1 channel surround sound. It uses an nVidia chipset.
Both computers had problems with the drivers for their respective chipsets. How many of you have had driver problems? The hands not up either don’t use computers or use Macs.
The problem for the Intel motherboard was in the driver for the network interface. The good news is that Intel uses open-source drivers. A quick Google search revealed that Intel offered the source code — essentially the plans — for the driver, and that someone else had already produced a fix. I downloaded the fix, opened it up and read it, because I can do that, to make sure that there was nothing malicious in there, and installed it. Problem solved.
The problem for the nVidia motherboard was in the driver for the video. Without nVidia’s driver, the computer runs at lower resolution, and can’t play video or render 3D graphics. Unfortunately, nVidia’s drivers are closed-source. I can’t examine them, and neither can anyone else. All I can do is play with different versions to see which one works best. That left me with a choice between three versions: the one that made the screen flicker, the one that randomly forgot to put letters on the screen, or the one that hung up the computer.
While it is granted that not everyone has the technical expertise to write, or even examine, the source code of a device driver, it is also true that not everyone knows what to do once they get the hood of the car open. Had it not been for that mechanically-inclined neighbour, your car would still be going to the shop. Had it not been for that mechanically-inclined e-neighbour, my Intel motherboard would be on its way back to Intel.
Ultimately, I was able to find a solution, by swapping the two computers. The workstation is now a server and the server a workstation. I have a very powerful server now, far more powerful than necessary, and it uses too much energy. Alongside that, I have a workstation that works well enough, thanks to a marvelously efficient operating system. I had to give up my 7.1 channel surround sound in favour of good old-fashioned stereo. It’s working, but it isn’t what I wanted.
Needless to say, nVidia have made my blacklist. I don’t really own that computer; nVidia does. If I want it to do everything it’s supposed to, I’m dependent on nVidia to make it happen. In this, they have failed. I can’t even attempt to fix it, either, because I can’t open the code.
Taking this to the greater picture, I want you to think about the things you can’t see into. Think about the things you think you own, but for which you are totally dependent on someone else, not because they require a service of some sort, but because they require a service from one particular vendor, and no option exists for you, even if you understand how it works, to wrest that control from that vendor for yourself. As the Maker’s Manifesto says: If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.
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Numbers
Just a couple of observations about numbers used to identify things.
My sister was musing to me recently that she can never remember my wireline phone number, largely because the city in which we both live has some phone numbers which begin with 347 and other, older numbers that start with 374. For that matter, most 4chenectady phone numbers begin with 37, so for mine to turn that pattern around causes confusion.
our local transit authority has recently begun re-numbering the bus routes, so that they are all getting three-digit numbers, and they do actually have this pretty well planned out. They started in Saratoga County, giving all of those routes numbers in the 400’s, then they renumbered the rural routes with numbers in the 800’s.
They have just started working on the shuttles (600’s) and expresses (500’s).
And then there is Rensselaer County (200’s) . . .
There are two buses that run from Albany to Rensselaer. One is route 24, which I use; the other used to be called 14 . . . Until they renumbered it to 214.
Oh, I almost forgot — these two routes overlap.
I ride the 24 to work and back every day. Ever since the day they changed 14 to 214, I’ve seen a lot of people I don’t normally see on the 24 getting on at one stop, and getting off two stops later, when the bus makes a different turn than they were expecting
They could have fixed this very easily, just by renumbering both routes at the same time.
In other places, I can see that people get it. The two U.S. Highway systems are deliberately numbered to keep like-numbered highways apart. U.S. Highways are numbered low in the east and north; high in the south and west; Interstate highways are low in the west and south and high in the north and east. Both have odd numbers for north-south and even for east-west.
These really are freshman mistakes that could be avoided to limit confusion.