Category Archives: View

View 723 Tuesday, May 08, 2012

A MALWARE WARNING from a long time subscriber:

Malware warning – NCH software "Doxillion"

Jerry,

A warning for your users, the default windows application search when trying to open up a .wps file leads to malware from "NCH software". It purports to install doxillion software converter which on the face of it appears legit and since microsoft’s own application search listed it, you might think that it is in fact legit. In reality, it doesn’t really do anything worthwhile but now opening almost any data file will lead to a pop-up saying that you need a converter update from NCH doxillion so please click here.

I’m 60 minutes into rooting it out of my registry since microsoft program remover doesn’t come close to removing the damage done, and I’m probably going to have to do a system restore or restore from backup since it has altered document opening/conversion settings for nearly every application on my computer (including itunes features for converting between sound file formats).

This is badly destructive and poorly behaved, and microsoft is part of the problem since the automatic application search feature links to this (instead of the correct microsoft word document converter which works fine) and windows doesn’t offer up a way to undo the damage caused without rolling the system back to a restore point created before the installation.

So, my fault for trusting a microsoft "approved" solution, but your readers might be saved a lot of hassle by a warning to treat this as the worst kind of malware.

Oh btw neither Norton nor Microsoft security essentials nor msie’s site screening feature offered any help. And CCleaner wasn’t able to completely root it out of the registry either, the damage was so widespread.

Sean

I have not experienced this and with luck never will, but be careful.  BEWARE.

As usual, Fred cuts through the euphemisms and gets to the point in his latest essay on education.

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Yet public schools remain very popular, and people are willing to tax themselves (and raise inordinately on others) to “support education” and “support the schools.” Of course this all became inevitable when the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom declared education – something never mentioned in the Constitution or its amendments – as a federal entitlement, rather than as something provided by citizens for whatever reasons appeal to them. When schools are funded by local property owners who also elect the local school board, you get one kind of school; when “education” becomes an entitlement and is paid for by the state (on the basis of attendance, not results) you get quite another.

For my first eight years in grade school, we had about 20 students to a grade and two grades to the classroom. Capleville school was in the middle of nowhere and my classmates were farm children brought in by school bus. In my case the school was about a mile and a half from my house, but the school bus route wandered all through the country east of Highway 78 picking up farm kids. What they learned in Capleville consolidated was pretty standard for Tennessee. The math instruction was arithmetic and pretty well stopped at 6^th grade. English literature included what was standard fare in those days, Ruskin, Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Longfellow, that sort of thing. There was world history, Tennessee history, US history, and in 5^th grade as I recall mostly European history; I remember that because there was a textbook with a picture of something medieval or renaissance (I doubt that we were taught the difference) and the village idiot, a girl about 14 still in 5^th grade, had copied the caption to a picture in the history textbook and read it aloud as her writing assignment.

Fred continues

Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

And that is where I disagree with him. I don’t recall anyone at Capleville who was in misery over schoolwork. Everyone in my classes – gathered from farms all around, there being no more than a couple of hundred families in Capleville itself – could read, and all of them except me learned something. I suppose I learned something too – I would never have read most of the items in our readers if they hadn’t been assigned – but mostly I was on my own. I had the Britannica at home and a pretty good memory, so I often knew more about anything brought up for class discussion than the teachers did, and mostly I learned that this wasn’t always a good thing – adults don’t really appreciate being corrected by ten year olds in sixth grade – and that I hated penmanship classes. And that what you learn from Captain Marvel comic books isn’t very good science, but the notion of an intelligent worm setting out to conquer the earth can be interesting.

Moreover, in my eight years in grade school I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t read. Plenty who didn’t really understand what they were reading, but even the village idiot could read in the sense that she saw words and pronounced them, even though she didn’t see why reading the caption to a picture (The man and the lady are playing chess, a popular game in those times) would be thought amusing to students who had seen that in their history lesson book a week before. Incidentally, the girl in question got pregnant at age 16 and married an Italian prisoner of war who worked on the farm her parents owned, and when I last heard of her she had two children and had inherited the farm.

The point being that the farm owners in the Capleville consolidated district were presumably satisfied with the school. I don’t really know, but I don’t recall any contested school board elections. I think the local general store owner was one of the school board members.

But Fred’s depiction of many schools as sheer hell for bright and stupid pupils alike, and not much use for all those in between is I gather fairly accurate for most of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I happen to live near one of the LAUSD flagship schools and in a neighborhood of mostly behind the scenes movie people – I expect there are more employed writers in Studio City than in any other square mile on earth. Our local school serves us well and people all over the city try to find ways to get their kids into it. There are other decent schools in LA. Alas, Fred’s horror stories apply to a lot of it.

And his conclusion:

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

As I have said, repeatedly, the best way to be certain that no child is left behind is to be certain that no child gets ahead. If you reward schools for attendance and nothing else, then try to modify that by demanding that all the students get over a very low bar, you can predict the result: all the effort will be spent on those who would fail without it. Resources won’t go do bright kids, nor will they go to the average students who could greatly benefit from it. It will go to those below normal and they’ll get just enough to get them over the bar. And of course the unions will insist that there are no incompetent teachers. There never are.

For all its floundering around with the notion that every kid is entitled to a world class university prep education, the Gates Foundation has made one key discovery: you can get about 100% improvement in any school simply by firing the worst 10% of the teachers in it. Don’t replace them, simply get them out and distribute the others into the remaining classes, even if you have to go to two grades to the room. Get the dullards out of the school teaching business and things will get better. Of course twice as good as what we have is pretty awful, but it’s something.

But the only systematic solution to the ‘education problem’ is to go back to transparency and subsidiarity. Let local school boards run the schools, and let them be elected by the people who pay for them. That way there might be some justification for thinking of the schools as ‘investments.’ So long as they remain subject to a central bureaucracy, the Iron Law will see to it that many bright kids, supposedly entitled to a world class university prep education, find themselves sentenced to Hell.

More later, but we have a virus warning.

View 722 Friday, May 04, 2012

New Chinese Motto: “Have One Child. Please.”

Steve Barnes is in town, and Niven, Barnes, and I went up the hill, 4 miles round trip and 750 foot elevation. Sable has hunted gophers on that hill for all of her eight years, and today she caught on. A good day, but I’m exhausted. And the Lakers blew game three in Denver.

Good night…

To remind you of what Scientific American once was and sometimes can be again http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/04/30/dogs-but-not-wolves-use-humans-as-tools/  (This was actually mail but now I can’t find it. I’m good at losing things.) Psychologists have been trying to determine who is smarter, dogs or wolves, but that’s the wrong question. Dogs do what they are good at, and rely on humans to do the rest.  Wolves don’t think they have that option.

View 722 Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Breaking News from MSNBC

Headline:

Bin Laden Killed One Year Ago!

I have no data on why MSNBC considers that breaking news, but that was just up. I doubt it will last scrutiny from the program managers on duty in the news control center. It might be interesting to find the reasoning of those who thought it worth having a banner calling that breaking news.

The President is spiking the ball while taking victory laps accompanied by the team band. I guess that’s called running on your record. I understand that Vice President Biden voted not to go after Bin Ladin. I actually understand that: it was the open and undeniable invasion of a sovereign ally without their permission; a rather grave thing to do, reminiscent of sending in the Marines to a banana republic. I don’t know what alternatives the President was given. And it did go better than Carter’s attempt to rescue our embassy hostages, when President Carter sent too little and kept Colonel Beckwith on the telephone during the entire operation. Why we did not take Bin Laden alive for interrogation has not been explained, and probably never will be.

The President is taking his victory lap. This is breaking news.

We have been under heavy attack from fake subscriptions (multiple thousands), and some real ones got buried. I have means for sorting the real from the fake, but it has caused a bunch of problems. In particular I haven’t answered a number of comments and questions that came with the subscription. These are all subscriptions entered through the website. Anyway, my apologies to all I actually missed in the past few months. I’m dancing as fast as I can. It has wasted a bunch of time, but I think we have means to deal with these now.

There are several articles about how Obama is increasing the efficiency of government regulators. One wonders if they have made bunny inspection more efficient? And how that would work? We clearly need the bunny inspectors since Obama promised in his inauguration to make a laser like focus on the budget to eliminated needless jobs and waste in the name of Hope and Change. That was years ago, so one presumes that the lasers have been applied. Since we still have bunny inspectors – grown men and women whose job is to be certain that stage magicians who use bunny rabbits in their stage acts have a federal license to keep rabbits – one presumes that this is needed activity. The President must after all take care to see that the laws are enforced. He can’t get all of them, but this one must be important. One magician I know got out of the charge of keeping an unlicensed rabbit by feeding it to a friend’s pet snake and claiming that it wasn’t a rabbit bought for a stage act but only as snake food. The Federal Government doesn’t require a license for you to keep rabbits as snake food (or to eat or skin for bunnyskin; only for keeping as pets or for stage acts). I am glad to hear that bunny inspections will be made even more efficient. (For those new to this site, no I am not making any of this up.)

A few years ago California by initiative voted for about $9 billion in bonds to build a high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with some expectation that this would be enough money to do the job, or maybe it would take longer and cost more as all such things do, but this would be enough for a good start and surely it wouldn’t be more than – gulp – twice as much? Well, nothing so far as been done except to pay millions to lobbyists and engineers and architects and bureaucrats and grant application experts and cubicle workers, nothing has been built, and the expected cost is well above $100 billion and climbing. At one point the High Speed Railway was to be about 10 miles between a prison and a village that lost its post office years ago. There are various other proposals. None get to either San Francisco or Los Angeles. None really cope with the San Andreas Fault and other known difficulties. The State hasn’t issued the bonds yet, but they probably will be issued: the purpose of the project now is to pay workers, particularly engineers and architects and cubicle workers who will apply for grants from the Federal government. The estimates are that there will be tens of thousands of people a day who will take this high speed train from nowhere to nowhere else, and the operating costs are officially estimated at about half the operating costs of the best railway systems in the world. The whole scheme is merely a way to extract money to pay our masters.

Part of the efficiency improvements that President Obama is proud of include changing regulations so that Federal grant money for transportation can consider social factors like low cost housing rather than engineering and ridership and economic factors. This allows more money to be transferred from those who have to those have nots who need it so much. Salve Sclave.

At LAX today there are demonstrators trying to keep airport workers from going to their jobs. There are few to no airport workers in the demonstrations. Those are public employee union members bussed in from downtown. No one has yet explained why public employees deserve both civil service and union protections, and why the unions can require membership then spend money on lobbying for higher wages while the civil service protection means – well, a very long time ago at Boeing we called the BOMARC “the civil service missile. You can’t fire it and it won’t work.” And the unionized professors of the California State Colleges are taking a strike vote because they haven’t had a raise in five years. Tuition will go up. Taxes will go up. Salve Sclave.

Microsoft is investing in Nook. There will now be a Nook App for Windows. This may be interesting. Meanwhile we have

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

The shift will not be instant, and there’s still a good couple of years of life left in the e-book market before the alternatives work out the kinks of presentation, distribution and retailing.  But e-readers will be obsolete in a few years, and once they’re gone, the sole weak advantage an e-book has over its future replacements will be gone.  Any publisher banking on e-books being around 5 years from now is in for a rude surprise.

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

Which may be interesting. The eBook revolution has been wonderful for authors with a backlist. I would myself guess that the iBook and other tablets are here to stay, and iPhones and iBooks and the Windows Phone and the new Nokia stuff and tablets will just get better and better; and the eBook revolution will continue. Dedicated book readers probably will go obsolete and die away, but so what? The eBook revolution in publishing is here to stay and will get larger, not smaller. And it’s good news that Microsoft is investing in it. Amazon is wonderful , but monopolies aren’t so good.

View 722 Monday, April 30, 2012

This is from a Huffington Post article:

A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a "death spiral," the school’s president, Brian Murphy, wrote to the faculty in January. Apple, of course, is not responsible for the state’s financial shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
"I just don’t understand it," he said in an interview. "I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.
"But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-bernstein/apples-and-health-spendin_b_1464262.html

It took me a while to remember where I had heard of De Anza College before. I was sure I had been there. Then I recalled: sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when I wrote The User’s Column for BYTE – then owned by McGraw Hill and the leading computing magazine in the world – I was invited to come up to De Anza College and take part in a weekend Faculty Symposium. I don’t recall much of the visit. I was invited by the college administration, probably by its President, and the subject was what the college ought to do given the coming computer age. The faculty were given a day of class suspension so that they could attend; I don’t think most of them wanted to come. I had been invited in part because of my computer articles, and partly because of my former professorial status. I think John McCarthy had something to do with the invitation.

They didn’t offer much besides expenses, and I told them I wouldn’t have time for much preparation, but they were more interested in my taking part in a symposium on what community colleges ought to do to prepare for this coming computer revolution. This was in the days of the S-100 buss and the Apple ][ which was invading the business world because of VisiCalc, the first spread sheet. I had personally witnessed thoroughly naïve business people going into a computer store and asking for “A VisiCalc”, only to be told that was a computer program and they would have to have an Apple ][ computer to run it on. “Yeah, yeah, whatever it takes, I got to have one of those.” Computers were not well known in the general public but they were beginning to penetrate business offices. In those days the big computer show was the West Coast Computer Faire, and Apple and Microsoft were in competition for leadership. An entrepreneur named Sheldon Adelson was starting an annual convention called COMDEX in Las Vegas.

I don’t remember the details of my weekend in Cupertino. It involved several presentations, most of which I found dull because in those days BYTE had more expertise on matters computerish than any academic institutions other than Stanford and MIT and ETH in Zurich, and the De Anza budget couldn’t afford the fees charged by major figures in those institutions. I believe one speaker was one of John McCarthy’s graduate students. I don’t recall what I told the faculty of De Anza, but I vividly recall an interchange with one of the professors. After I outlined where I thought the computer revolution was going – using, I expect, ny usual theme of the early 1980’s that “Before the end of this century, everyone in the Free World will be able to get the answer to any question that has an answer, certainly within days and probably within hours.” I thought that a fairly profound observation, and coupling that with Arthur Koestler’s observation that a sufficient condition for the destruction of any totalitarian ideology would be the free exchange of ideas within that ideological society made for some interesting predictions about the future of the Soviet Union.

After my presentation there was a general discussion. One of the professors, I think of social science, asked “but what should we do, then? Prepare our students to serve the Lords of Silicon Valley?”

As I understand it, this symposium was a required event for the faculty, and they were all present. Many to most of them indicated high approval of the question and its implications. My reply to that was to ask what else a community college in Cupertino ought to be doing. It seemed to me they were in a golden place at a golden time, and my only real question was why the Lords of Silicon Valley weren’t at the symposium. I fear that didn’t get much enthusiastic approval from the majority of the faculty, although in the reception afterwards I found that this was an ongoing question at the college. As it ought to have been.

I gave my talk and participated in the symposium and went home, and I don’t think I have thought about community colleges in Silicon Valley since; but I did find that attitude fairly common when I visited other University of California and California State University campuses over the years, and I suspect that may have something to do with the current crisis in higher education. It may even be more important than a lack of funding. It may also have a bit to do with Apple’s tax strategy.

If the local community college can’t prepare its students to serve the lords of silicon valley, you may be sure that someone else will.

Roland had this comment

The Lords of Silicon Valley.

It seems to me that the faculty of De Anza College should’ve been preparing their students to *become* the Lords of Silicon Valley.

Which is exactly correct. Instead, apparently they are unhappy because the Lords aren’t paying enough taxes and aren’t appreciative enough.