In Defense of Custom Computing

The Top 500 List of supercomputers has quite a number of Intel CPU machines running Linux on the list. These are considered commodity supercomputers, even though they use custom backplanes and highly modified Linux kernels.

But several of the Top 10 do not meet that criteria, including the 3 IBM BlueGene systems that have custom chips. But the most interesting to me is the NEC Earth Simulator. This machine is well off the Top 10, in mere 31st place, but the thing that jumps out when you look at the chart is that it only has 1280 processors. In the Top 100, there are no other machines with fewer than 2048 processors, and most of the machines with under 5000 processors are based on the IBM PowerComputing architecture.

Simply dividing Rmax (which is in tflops) by the # of processors, we get 0.95 for the Earth Simulator, or about 95gflops per CPU. The #1 machine, Cray's "Jaguar" XT system, is 0.0078 or about 780mflops per CPU. Though there are other conflating factors in supercomputer design that make a CPU-to-CPU comparison difficult, a rough estimate of 100 times faster per CPU ought to pique interest in the NEC architecture. But it hasn't.

The Earth Simulator is the only machine in the Top 100 running the NEC Vector architecture and Super-UX operating system. The Intel-Linux pairing is quite cost competitive, and therefore often wins out on bids. But this is still the main advantage of Intel's commodity CISC architecture. The per-CPU compute rate is still a lot better when R&D dollars are applied to other computing architectures. By always going with the cheap solution, as an industry we're holding ourselves back. We've been stuck with the same Intel x86-ish architecture now for a while. RISC machines officially left the desktop mainstream in 2006 when Apple dumped the PowerPC architecture, but x86 dominance of the chip market has been a reality for a while. As of 2009, Intel has about 80% of the CPU market (including the mobile market, according to TGdaily), and its biggest rival is x86 clone maker AMD.

Most people don't need more computing power, more efficient CPUs, and less bloated / more compute efficient operating systems. But for those of us who do, it's a shame that so few resources are going into RISC CPU, whole-system architecture, and OS R&D in favor of trying to solve the problem with hacks on top of commodity systems. It's not like the industry is at a standstill, far from it. And sometimes those hacks work, which has all sorts of interesting results. But just imagine a 224162 CPU Earth Simulator instead of a 224162 Intel-based Cray XT, and what kinds of complex physics and earth science computations that could do.

I Adore My 64, And So Must Everyone Else

Though the Apple ][ scored the #1 slot, the Commodore 64 did not even make it onto the PC World 25 Greatest Computers of All Time list at all (it, along with the PET, made it onto the "near greatest" list in favor of barely innovative, and (except the iMac) marginally culturally significant computers like the Alienware, Shuttle, Sony, and Apple iMac boxes on the list).


This is preposterous. The C64 sold 17 million units, making it the best selling model of personal computer of all time. In its heyday, it had between 30% and 40% of PC market share.

The C64 essentially defined a generation of computing, becoming a major force in popularizing hobbyist programming and PC gaming (many programmers I meet who are my age or older either owned a 64 at some point, or hacked on them in school -- even some who were primarily Apple ][ or Atari 800 hackers).

It defined a generation in part because it was the first computer that was truly affordable yet as good or better than its more expensive contemporaries. Families like mine couldn't afford $1200-3000 Apple ][s or even $1000 Atari 800s, but the initially $600 Commodore 64 dropped to $400 a year after its release, making it truly a people's computer. That alone is a major accomplishment in the history of computing, worthy of note (unless you think only rich people contributed to the history of computing).

And even though the Apple ][ and Atari 800 had sound and color graphics, it was really the C64 that was accepted as the the first prominent consumer/small business proto-multimedia-workstation. It was used extensively on TV especially for low budget chargen apps, helped define and popularize the demo scene, and the SID chip is still coveted today by electronic musicians.

Furthermore, only the Amiga, Apple ][, and Atari 800 machines can even compare to it in terms of long-term user loyalty. Many people still use C64s today, either the real hardware, or emulators to run beloved old games (and rediscover one's own early programming projects).

Personally, I think the C64 should have been #1 on that list. Objectively, it should have at least been in the top 10 -- not an also-ran.

Google vs. Microsoft, Again

Google recently announced their Chrome OS. In addition to upsetting my various friends who once worked at the company called Desktop.com that was trying to do the same thing (and which may or may not still be kicking around in some post crash form, I'm not sure), it is intended to scare the pants off Microsoft. I'm not terribly worried about Microsoft's pants, but some folks have pointed out some interesting questions about the Google project.

Comcast Sucks

We recently replaced AT&T and DirecTV with Comcast, mainly because AT&T would not allow existing customers to take advantage of the AT&T/DirecTV reduced priced bundle to renew their service, and Comcast offered a decently priced package deal. With Anu recently being laid off, reducing our overall Internet/Phone/TV costs seemed like a very good proposition.

Holy crap does Comcast suck!

Since we had Comcast previously in El Cerrito, which is less than five miles from our current place, we figured we'd be happy with them. This is not the case.

I have a class that is conducted via Skype. Today my connection was dropped more than 20 times during the 3 hour class. Not since the days of dial-up have I had so many connection failures in such a short amount of time. Sometimes the connection failure lasted over five minutes. And it was total failure -- I couldn't connect to any Internet service at all. And since Comcast is now also our telephone carrier, I had no phone service either. Not even 911 service.

This has been going on since the day of the Comcast installation. A classmate in the online class said he had a similar problem during his last Skype class, and Comcast was so unresponsive that he could only solve the problem by switching to AT&T. We're far away from any central office, and I know we probably won't get perfect service. We also had some connectivity problems with AT&T, but not even close to as bad as with Comcast -- I did four other Skype classes with the AT&T link with no big problems. This is so frustrating that I'm already considering switching back -- after less than a week with Comcast.

New URLs and Hosting Changeover

After many years sharing a colocated server hosted by Silicon Valley Colocation (formerly part of Meer.net), I have unfortunately had to switch over to a shared managed server hosted by Webfaction. This was not my choice, but the server was once shared by four paying contributors, and the last one decided to opt-out a month ago, leaving me responsible for a $200/month bill which, since my web sites earn no money, I couldn't really afford, despite that being a great price for great service.

I will miss SVcolo and the server itself, but so far the transition to Webfaction has been very smooth, and their prices are very reasonable for the services provided. My only complaint so-far, besides only being able to afford a shared server (my problem, not theirs), is that SFTP transfers are very flaky and unreliable, and that DNS override changes take a while to propagate even into WF's own DNS servers. I've also not yet heard back to my support request about SFTP (and one about e-mail services), but have heard back in less than 24 hours for the other four or five support requests I've made, which is a very good response rate for a shared server account at any company.

Because DNS changes are trivial using Webfaction's server control panel, I've done some things I'd been too lazy to until now, including pointing www.lhooqtius.com at this blog, and www.feralgovernment.com to The Feral Government. While I'm not thrilled about losing the freedom associated with a colocated server, the upside is that what little system administration (which I was sick of doing years ago) I have to do for my own sites is trivial, and everything else is Webfaction's responsibility. Downtime due to someone else's code run amok on the server is a real concern, but it's a risk I have to take at this point due to the economics of the situation. Hopefully things at Webfaction will be as trouble-free in the long-term as they have been over the last few days.

Not In Love Anymore

I once had a girlfriend ask me if I loved my computer more than her.

Though the answer was "no," at the time the question didn't seem quite as ridiculous as it now does. Once upon a time, when video games weren't outgrossing movie tickets, major news media weren't quoting Internet memes, and computers weren't ubiquitous, I loved computers. I loved video games. I loved programming. I loved modding hardware and building systems. Even word processing seemed new and amazing.

Today, a friend posted something to a discussion on the Simon's Rock alumni mail alias in which he casually mentioned "loving" his laptop. I realized that I found the statement surprisingly absurd. More than lamenting about the diluted meaning of the word "love," I lament that I no longer love computers.

When the hobby was more obscure, and being a computer nerd was uncommon, I enjoyed both the underground social aspect of computing and the fact that it was a lot more DIY. In the 1980s, pretty much every computer owner I knew wrote programs and could maintain their system. Creating your own software and comparing notes was just part of the hobby. As that creative aspect was replaced by just more consumerism, computing became decreasingly interesting to me. Becoming mainstream didn't help. Now that computers are everywhere, the novelty is gone. Standardization and market forces (including some "aggressive" business practices on the part of some companies) has eliminated all the interesting, creative and unusual hardware developments that used to occur. Computers are no longer a new frontier, and have become boring.

Though I still enjoy writing programs, I do agree with Donald Knuth's recent argument in Communications of the ACM that programming as it is currently taught and practices has become soulless and uncreative. That most programming jobs involve maintaining other people's code, stitching together mystery code through opaque "business logic" interfaces, and copying the functionality of popular, successful software is a shame. Once upon a time, there was a lot more room for experimentation and innovation even in professional, commercial software development. Now it's mostly maintenance, refinement, updating, and replication.

Sure, there are still interesting research and career opportunities in computing, but financial support for them is dwindling as "safe" bets are now the norm in the industry. Once, the whole computing community was innovative. Now, the innovators stand out. Naturally, this happens to every industry as it matures, and it was to be expected. Personally, I didn't think it would happen so quickly, and to such an extent. In one sense, it means that we've done our jobs well and covered a lot of ground, but there could be a lot more interesting R&D and hobbyist computing going on if the industry hadn't so fully embraced the commodity model of business.

I still like computers. We've had many good times together, and I still want to be friends. I hope computers sill want to be friends, too. But I just feel like we've both changed, grown apart, and I'm just not in love with computers anymore. Computers, you're still young and have a lot going for you. I'm sure you'll find someone else.

Indieauteur.com on hiatus for a while

Yahoo! is much too buggy, and their customer service is nonexistent. I've decided to cancel my hosting account with them, and find an alternate provider or build WP on my colocated server and run it myself (I'd rather not, I'm way past bored with system administration).

I will re-launch indieauteur.com after I've found a better hosting site, and come up with a decent design template for the site (the current one, which I just found and downloaded, is pretty awful). There wasn't any real activity on that blog, anyway -- I spent most of my time fighting bugs in the Yahoo! system, including having to delete and re-create the site four times because Wordpress irrecoverably hung (at least, the Web management console became detached, so without console access I couldn't do anything). Yahoo! offers no support for restarting it on their end (or, really, much support at all). Their servers are also very slow. I highly recommend avoiding them for Web hosting, even for something "simple" like a blog.

Someone has recommended "WebFaction" to me. I'm going to give them a try. They are three times as expensive as Yahoo! (about $35/month vs. $35 / 3 months on Yahoo!), but their pre-sales support folks answered two sets of questions already -- infinity times the number of answers I've ever gotten to a support e-mail as a paying Yahoo! customer.

SIGGRAPH 08

My report on SIGGRAPH 08 will be relatively short because even though I enjoyed going, there wasn't a lot to talk about. I gave a talk, with Max Planck (no, not the famous dead physicist), about our system for shading the background robots on WALL-E. Though I've been co-author on a presentation previously, when I was at Bell Labs, I have never spoken at SIGGRAPH before so that was interesting. It was a much different experience than the free-for-all arguments that break out at the Transhumanist and Real AI events I've primarily spoken at. At SIGGRAPH, everyone listens politely, and follow-up questions are either nonexistant (in our case) or very nonconfrontational (a colleague's talk) -- at least, that's the case if you happen to be there representing Pixar. Perhaps more relaxing, but also a bit less amusing.

The Computer Animation Festival this year was shown in a very unsuccessful format. Instead having a few showings of the exact same juried Electronic Theater, and the other clips running in 4-6 category-based sessions that repeat multiple times, they merged the film show and animation screening room concepts into a series of different "competition screenings," so everyone saw a slightly different program -- but not different enough to warrant seeing all of them.

The seven "competition screenings" were subject to an audience prize vote. I saw two, one of which inexplicably ran after voting was closed. There was plenty of overlap between the two sessions, even though I chose the two that appeared to intersect the least. Under this arrangement it was entirely possible that you could miss seeing the winning entry unless you sat through other clips at least twice, if not more. Even worse, the Demo Scene, Japan Media Arts Festival, and similar screenings were only shown once -- and each was 15-30 minutes. If you were late, or a session you had to be in (say, if you were a speaker) was on at that time, you had no other chance to see this material. This hasn't been the case in the past, and I have previously always managed to see all of the clips. It was frustrating to miss some work I heard was very good. The theater, however, was amazingly excellent. Fortunately, I still managed to see a lot of good stuff anyway, such as Oktapodi, Mauvais Rôle, Rua das Tulipas, Appleseed: Ex Machina, and a few others.

Two interesting panels were presented by people from start-up studios Lightstream and MeniThings. Both are doing independently funded feature animation, and had a lot of interesting perspectives about starting a studio from scratch. Lightstream is doing a feature called "The 4th Magi," and MeniThings one called "Terra." The latter is much more technically primitive, but I think will be accomplished for a very low budget. It has the possibility, from what I saw, to be decent at the level of an average Don Bluth film. If that is the case, and my estimates of how cheap it is are correct, "Terra" could show that feature CG animation is within reach of independents, rather than being solely the domain of very wealthy studios (and individuals, like Laika's Phil Knight).

The technical and production talks I went to were all good, but nothing mindblowing. I did enjoye the four "Kung-Fu Panda" presentations I saw. They did good work on that film, and their presentations made me want to go see it (I haven't yet, but will soon). The "Horton" crew did some very nice hair work with hairs growing from hairs and tons of LOD management to make a very hairy show managable, and I hear some folks at work are doing something similar in our hair system, which I'm excited about. Their work was very nice, but it didn't make me want to see yet another Dr. Seuss story savaged by insipid hipsterism and faddish, crass humor.

I also saw the Clone Wars film. It was better than I expected -- but I expected my eyeballs to burst into flames within a few minutes, and for me to run screaming from the theater just in time to narrowly avoid my head exploding. We were softened-up by an enjoyable Q&A in which John Knoll asked Director Dave Filoni a bunch of snarky insider questions which essentially only John Knoll could get away with asking. It was done on a TV show budget, with a TV show crew. Go into the film expecting to vomit copiously, and keep in the back of your mind that the film was dirt cheap (by Lucas standards), and that nobody involved ever wanted it to be seen anywhere other than on TV (except Lucas), and you might make it through only throwing-up a little bit (such as whenever the phrase "sky guy" is uttered, for example). Taking the spirit of Filoni and Knoll's Q&A to heart as we watched it, we were able to even somewhat enjoy the moment. However, since you probably won't get to see it under such ideal conditions -- don't.

I actually like being down in LA, and we also got to see lots of friends, so all in all it was a good trip, even if SIGGRAPH itself was merely "pretty good" rather than awesome.

To Upgrade Or Not To Upgrade

A G5-based Mac is the center of my home studio. I've got some quite expensive software (Waves, NI Bundle, etc.) which costs a lot to upgrade each time Apple releases a new, incompatible technology (this happened when going from OS9 to OSX, and again when Core Audio reared its pointless head). Intel Macs have been around for a while now, so I have to decide whether or not I should spend the money to upgrade everything, or just keep it running on the old Mac as long as possible.

The other alternative is to switch to Windows, running Steinberg Nuendo, and cross-grade Waves, etc. onto that platform. This would also move me to Avid or Premiere and away from Final Cut Pro (not that big of a deal), and while initially expensive it would mean the end of spurious incompatible hardware and OS revisions cropping up. Microsoft, to their credit, understands that their users run other software on their OSes and that incompatible OS upgrades mean cash outlays to upgrade/replace these apps. I've been delaying this decision for quite a while. I'd like to just get my studio stabilized and focus on using it rather than maintaining it, so I'm inclined towards just running the G5 until flames shoot out the side and it melts into a pool -- but that means that eventually I can no longer get new upgrades and plug-ins for Logic and other packages.

This flurry of incompatible upgrades that Apple released over the last few years was a big part of my turning from being platform agnostic and running all 3 major OSes, to really regretting ever having bought a Mac at all. Apple has always been antagonistic towards many of their developers and corporate users, but in the last several years their attitude towards customers has also become "either you're with us, or you're against us." Buy into the Apple hype wholesale (and be rich enough to do it), or forget it. My current plan is to get a trial version of Nuendo and see what I think.

Sweet Dreams Are Not Made Of This

In the last few years, I've noticed hard drives failing at a spectacular rate. This phenomenon has cut across vendors. I've had Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM and Seagate drives all fail on me, regardless of whether internally or externally mounted. Just this week, one of the drives in my Buffalo DriveStation Quattro failed, and so did one of the drives mounted in one of my machines at work. External housings also fail at an alarming rate (I've had controllers or power supplies fail on about 40% of the ones I own).

Electronic devices in general are either failing more often, or their ubiquity is making apparent failure rates that have always been there. My new computer shipped with one or two chips of bad RAM. Our GPS navigational device failed recently. All manner of components fail regularly, often bringing down an entire system.

As someone who engages himself in discussions and debates about Transhumanism, I have come to believe that while it is fascinating to contemplate the high-level concerns about the feasibility of uploading -- ranging from whether or not the human mind is sufficiently represented in determinate hardware for it to be at all feasible, to trying to determine if scanning brain states or understanding the underlying logic is a more tenable approach -- that a much more mundane concern must first be addressed before any of those discussions move beyond the realm of fantastical speculation. That concern is reliability, both of hardware and software.

Simply put, nothing lasts forever. But, if we want to explore the idea of allowing our minds to outlast our body hardware, we must deal with the decidedly unsexy problem of reliability. Hardware and software will always fail, though hopefully not always as frequently as is the case now. A major component of reliability is trust, which is placed in the hands of other people. In the case of Transhumanism, that trust is placed in the hands of future generations who may have no real attachment to their wards, depending on what differences would emerge between uploads and humans should this become feasible.

What we are trusting others to do, even in contemporary society, is to maintain systems that keep us alive. Aircraft mechanics, hospital equipment technicians, traffic systems engineers, and a whole host of other people are entrusted to maintain and repair systems we've come to utterly depend upon. Uploaded minds would not only need more reliable hardware, but also a trustworthy system of stewardship in which redundancy is provided, timely and complete backups are maintained, and hardware and software failures are addressed before minds are literally lost.

One limiting factor here is cost. Doing all these things requires resources, and as more and more minds got uploaded, more and more resources would be needed. Incentives would be needed to give the stewards reason to perform their duties, both the promise of future uploading for themselves and material supplies and comforts in their biological lives.

Perhaps this all becomes a moot point once computers can reliably maintain, repair, upgrade and replace themselves without loss of data. But we're so far from this point that there is a legitimate bootstrapping concern here. Waving it away with hopes for a magical "hard singularity" by which a rapid transition causes the universe to go from chaotic and flawed to perfectly managed in a matter of minutes may palliate some people's concerns in this area. Personally, I don't see how we could get anywhere near a Transhumanist ideal of preserving our thoughts, memories, and personalities in such a way as to afford "eternal" life with continuity of consciousness, without first addressing immediate concerns about reliability.

Moore's law hoodwinks Transhumanists into believing that eventually all mundane problems of computing capacity will "solve themselves" with time, but I contend that these pragmatic issues of computer hardware and software development pose a far greater challenge to Transhumanism via uploading than the dyed-in-the-wool idealists are willing to accept.

Even without taking into account Transhumanist fantasy, the problem of system reliability is a very real and pressing issue as our society becomes increasingly computerized. Transport, medicine, finance, the military, and law enforcement all rely heavily on computerized systems. These are systems upon which lives, sometimes millions of lives at once, utterly depend. Reliable systems engineering is an incredibly boring area of research, which also happens to be utterly essential if we're to continue to expand the degree to which we rely upon technology to maintain our way of life, and indeed life itself.

Social Futilities

There are too many social networking sites. Enough that there are emerging, competing standards for a universal login / universal online ID like Open ID and Friend Connect, so that you are have one ID for all the myriad sites that want you to have an ID. I have even tried Gravitar (I don't like it -- the restrictions on nicknames are arbitrary and stupid).

But what is the point of all this divergence and reconvergence and redivergence -- and so on? How many social network utilities does one need? I am already a member of MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Tribes, Notch Up, Naymz, Twitter, Flixster, Good Reads, vfxConnection, Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.ici.ous, Flickr, YouTube, Live Journal, and of course Blogger (and probably a dozen others I'm just forgetting about). I was gung-ho about social utilities for a brief period, convinced by friends and the media that they provided good value in terms of fun, meeting people, and career opportunities. However, I quickly realized this was just another "history repeats itself" moment for the Internet -- social utilities are just Web user interfaces slapped on old ideas that have been around since my BBS days. Even Digg and Twitter are just interface updates of the original core concept of the BBS -- a bulletin board. People invite me to join new social utilities at least once a week. I literally can't keep track of them all, and considering how little value they provide, why bother?

I rarely log-in to most of them. I just don't have time to compete with, for example, the seemingly full-time Diggers, in terms of becoming a popular contributor of articles. (And, like being a DJ, I'm unclear as to why merely presenting the creative work of other people earns respect in the first place.) I certainly don't have time to take random stabs at befriending people who happen to like one of the bands I like. Indeed I don't have time to do much of anything online these days except write. My life outside the Internet, the actual physical life of food and wine and travel and art and literature and myriad other interesting things, which we're supposed to be living, takes precedence these days over jostling for virtual position with people who have too much time on their hands. And the irritable idiots who patrol the Internet looking to assert themselves in their self-appointed roles of cybercop (for all manner of "infractions" usually related to their disagreeing with something you think) just aren't worth the bother. When I was a teenager it seemed like grand fun, all this online arguing and jostling for the role of minor digital celebrity or king of some obscure corner of the networks (when I was a teenager, there wasn't a single monolithic Internet -- things like FidoNet and Compuserve were still separate worlds). Nowadays, it's dull as dirt.

I could look at the explosion of these sites as information overload, but the problem is that many of them don't really have much in the way of information. At least, not any that's useful to me. For all the effort some people put into social networking, what rewards do they reap? It's difficult to say. The occasional Internet phenom gets their Warholian 15 minutes and perhaps some cash, but people also still can get their moment in the sun doing decidedly old-school things like writing books -- on paper. What sites to engender success of some kind are the ones which are most focused on having something to say (mostly blogs, art/photo portfolios, and plain old hand-built websites).

The majority of social networking sites, like Facebook, do not facilitate anything but time-wasting. Facebook's stock in trade are games which are actually less fun than the old mail-order, turn-based games of the 80s on which their gameplay style is based. Old promises of the Internet being interactive, and therefore engaging people in new ways, seem to be broken most hypocritically by social utilities, as these sites all promised that their raison d'etre was to revitalize that aspect of the Internet. Most of them serve primarily as engines for passive fandom, combined with the same kind bickering that has been around since BBSes and Usenet. Media stories explaining the necessity of having such a "presence" uniformly fail to explain why, other than that this is the latest fad in herdlike conformity to sweep through the human race. It is very primal, the urges that play out in social networking. Each page is like digital urine on a virtual tree, marking territory and announcing to all sniffers-by that you are the alpha dog of a whole realm of Web pages.

But there are no trees, and the territory is free. It's a safe, non-zero-sum game of territorial conquest. Sure, occasionally the ego-bashing Vandals swarm through your digital space, stabbing at everything they see with all the elegance of a ruptured sewer pipe -- but there's no real territory for them to seize, and anyone with any sense merely ignores these intrusions (or, if you're sufficiently bored, they are generally easy to make sport of as their own egos and IQs are nothing to write home about). The toothless predators are safely ensconced in their mothers' basements, and only those chronically predisposed to being victims are ever victimized by them. But other than the chance at an occasional dull fight with a halfwit, or to waste time deleting spam, what exactly does digital social networking provide its users?

Once upon a time, it was a decent way to expand one's network of actual friends. I've made friends -- the kind I'd at least e-mail off-system, if not get to see in-person -- both on MU*s (Qwest, then Delusions, in particular) and Orkut. But, since then, all this social networking just seems to serve to either amuse or annoy people I already know. Nearly all of my connections on Facebook, for example, are people I know. By force of pure number of users, I have managed to reconnect with old friends through Linked In, Facebook, and MySpace -- so that was a genuine benefit -- but I still immediately try to shunt those conversations to real-space or e-mail rather than use the slow, buggy, clunky and advertising-laden interfaces of any of these sites. And how I'd get to know people I don't already know on Facebook or MySpace is uncertain, because their message boards are either nonexistant, not nearly as active as they once were on Orkut (before exhaustion at dealing with spammers drove most people away), or active but vapid (no creative role-playing, or joke telling, or word games, or exquisite corpses, or even debating science or politics -- just the same boring trolling and arguments about sex and fandom that have been rehashed over and over since at least the early days of Usenet). Sure, MySpace is ok for finding out about bands I'd never heard of before -- but frankly, even though I can hear tracks for free on MySpace, I still think magazines like Maximum Rock N' Roll or review sites like Heathen Harvest do a better job of organizing and presenting information about what bands and albums might be worth hearing.

Blogging (words or photos or videos) has its benefits, in at least it requires thought and activity on the part of the individual to create the material. Much of what is presented is not worth a first look, never mind a second, but I can't criticize people for at least trying. What complaints I do have about blogging will come with more details in a follow-up post some time soon, but let me state that it revolves around the problem of totally devaluing content, and leaving only advertising as a means of compensation for content creators. Eventually there will be nothing left to advertise, because people will come to expect to get everything for free (even physical goods) in return for watching ads.

Even with social utility sites, the cost of all this "benefit" is non-stop advertising (or, in the case of Facebook, invasive datamining and targeted spamming). I'm not opposed to the idea of social networking on-line, indeed I did some pioneering work in this area as a software developer in the 1990s, but before I sign-up for one more social networking site, whoever invites me better be able to explain what conceivable benefit will come to me, and at what cost before I even bother to spend the time necessary to fill-out the sign-up form.

Cool (I hope) New Blog, Stupid Old Hosting Company

I've just launched my new filmmaking blog.

I had always intended to have how-to and craft sort of stuff separate from this blog, and now that site is launched.

However, Yahoo! is just about the worst hosting situation I've encountered. I've submitted three help requests and received zero answers (including one request using their suggested candy-colored, headache-inducing community help system).

If you go to www.indieauteur.com you get a different version of the page than if you go to www.indieauteur.com/blog (they're supposed to be the same). At first I thought it was always older than the /blog one, but actually they alternate between which is older and which is current. There is no apparent way to fix this (I tried deleting and recreating the site -- entirely from scratch -- three times, and it persists).

Despite my utter lack of enthusiasm for system administration tasks these days, my current plan is to try to install Word Press myself on the colocated host that bugaj.com lives on. But, if you know of a better pre-installed Word Press host, feel free to mention it in the comments.