There is a series of documentaries by Adam Curtis on BBC this month about Nash’s “Game Theory” that was used during the Cold War and how now UK’s and USA’s governments are using the same technique to spark civil servant’s interest to perform better.

The theory is based on the assumption that humans are selfish by nature and so each part of their life must be all about screwing the person next to them for personal gain. According to Nash, just like in a poker game, because everyone would think in the selfish same way, the world would not dissolve into chaos, but instead an equilibrium would be reached. USA and UK started using this theory on their own civil servants by creating a “points” system where the employees must achieve specific goals by any means necessary. The idea is to create a free marketplace at any level in life. Basically, this is 100% capitalism, not just from the business & economical point of view, but it’s about a society that’s driven by the “values” of capitalism from head to toe: screw your fellow man to make a buck.

Curtis debunks this approach, and even Nash himself recently said that it might not work as well as he thought as it would be when he invented the theory in the ’50s (simply because employees try to “game” the new system anyway, and also the theory falls apart from the moment a person shows compassion & altruism towards his fellow man). When Curtis was asked what politicians should do instead of using such “inhumane” methods to manipulate their citizens to work more, he has no answer.

In my opinion, no matter what political system we get above our heads, things won’t get better. You can get the same kind of screwing from either communism, capitalism or royalty. And there is a reason why people are not happy with any of these economical or political systems: because the people involved (both citizens and politicians) are not mature and determined enough to handle their place in the society as they should.

There is no perfect political system. And the reason for this is because people are not perfect. People are not good by nature, neither they are bad by nature. They are complex creatures. You only start to get a pretty good society when all the citizens of the country are well-educated and moral people. Societies mature with time, just like humans do. I believe we are some 500 years away from a “pretty good” political system where people would feel “happy” with — that is, if totalitarianism doesn’t take over sooner.

Humans must become model citizens to perfect their system (be it communism or capitalism or something else). Education and responsibility is what would drive a society to prosperity. And when some few of these citizens rise to power, you get these much-desired model politicians rather than face today’s corruption. It’s all about the quality of the citizens and mature societies. Not that political systems can’t further mature (corporations should lose some of their power for example), but without the people themselves get responsible and wise, no system can work.

No, you can’t lean on the “goodness” of people to do their paid job. As I said, people are neither good or bad (the vast majority of them at least). Communism failed because people didn’t care to do their everyday jobs (bakeries anyone?). To _care_ to do something means that you _understand_ WHY you are doing it. You see the big picture. And you can only see the big picture, when you have an open mind and a solid education on your back. Sure they are going to be some jerks to spill the milk, but hey, overall it would balance out.

Maybe another way to make humans understand their role into the society would be to bring the population down (below a billion people), and then have them live and work in small cities rather in megacities where they lose their purpose. A person is more prone to go help in his free time to paint a school in the small town where he knows everyone and understands his role, rather than when living let’s say, in New York. I believe the fact that as many as 40% of Americans suffer from depression has to do with the fact that they don’t live in the country side anymore. They’ve lost their purpose because they don’t get gratification of their current role. They don’t feel part of the community anymore, but part of the faceless mass. I never met anyone in Greece, outside Athens or Thessalonica, having this medical condition, while it is almost an epidemic in USA.

This whole thing kinda reminds me of the utopian world of Star Trek. If you really try to pinpoint the political system that drives Earth in the Star Trek universe you won’t find any (other than some vague notion of democracy in the Federation and the fact that there is no currency anymore). What you get in your face each time you watch a Star Trek episode though is how perfect the citizens are in their relationships, morality, points of views and daily responsibilities.

It’s all about mature people. Look no further.

I am heads over heels about my husband.

That is all.

I will be honest with you. While the encoding times of h.264 were always pissing me off, I recognized the format as the best option to do video online regarding bandwidth consumption. I was always bummed by the fact that Flash used a niche format for its video support rather than h.264. I felt like grabbing Tinic (Adobe engineer working in Flash video, but also an ex-Be, Inc. engineer and my ex-housemate) from his hair and shout at his ear (I am adorable, yes).

So, I did some research today.

I found that Flash uses a video format called VP6, from a company called On2. Never heard of them. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and I checked their latest format version, called VP7. I downloaded one of their movie trailer samples, and then I downloaded the same trailer in high-resolution and re-encoded it in h.264 at the same bitrate. Results below.

WOW! That’s all I can say. VP7 kicks h.264’s ass any time of the day at the same bitrate. Not only h.264 had 2 fps less in its advantage, 6 horizontal fewer pixels to deal with, somewhat bigger resulted filesize overall (it wouldn’t let me encode video below 32kbps you see) and terrible quality at that bitrate, but also it required more CPU power to decode than VP7. I encoded the h.264 video with multi-pass for better(!) quality and low-enough AAC encoding so it fits together with the video at that 1200 KBs as the VP7 does. So, at the same resulted filesize, VP7 is miles better.

Now, I only pray that Adobe uses VP7 in Flash 10 and that Joost also switches to VP7 instead of using h.264. And I also hope that VP7 becomes a standard and services use it enough to provide good video quality via cellphones or 56k modem lines. I am impressed. I never thought that it was engineeringly possible to have anything that much better than h.264 and definitely didn’t expect usable video on a 56k modem line. Never say never I guess.

Update: Reader AC re-encoded the video using the x264 encoder variant of h.264 and he came up with this very good quality at 58kbps. There is no audio in his video so we are not sure what the filesize would really be with some AAC in there, but for the resulted 870 KBs, I’ll bite. Problem with the x264 encoder is that it is a bitch to use. The GUIs for it only make it more difficult to use, not the other way around (MediaCoder fails to use x264 properly, MEgui is made for people with IQ 200 by people with IQ 50 and StarTrix just fails to read the .mov or .mpg source file here).

On some forums people are making fun of Ryan Seacrest’s “petite” nature. The guy is 1.73m. Is that really “petite”, even for a man though? I mean, at least for Mediterranean people, his height is just normal. What really pisses me off though is that Ryan himself tries to downplay his height by making jokes about it on the show. You see, the best way to not get completely hammered is to make fun about it. I think he is overreacting.

If there’s someone who’s petite, that’s me: 1.52m. Never grew a centimeter from the moment my period came when I was 11. I was the tallest person in class at the time. And then, that was it for me although there is a good reason why. I was born during the 8th month of the pregnancy, I was very small (1700 grams) and with few hopes to live. The doctor requested that for at least a year my parents should feed me a very special and expensive milk that was full in hormones. This drove my family almost broke back in 1973 because each of these cans was just too expensive. They had to switch to a cheaper one, although the doctor did warn them that the quality of that other product was seriously questionable. These “milks” made me grow very fast later in life too, even if I was only fed with them for a year. I had breasts like a cow when I was 10 already. And my period came long before than any of my cousins. And today, 33 years later, my hormones are still out of whack all too often.

But hey, I don’t mind my small build, I don’t mind my ugly tooth or my far and between hairline. I feel good and comfortable about myself so I won’t hide neither fact. And I am really happy that my JBQ loves me the way I am too.

When Apple introduced “sleep” especially on its laptops, it raised the bar in the industry because people loved the feature. The feature existed before but Apple really made it one of the reasons why someone would want a Mac laptop.

For the last few years Linux users are ranting about the sub-standard support of “sleep”. Compatibility is better these days, but still not great. Thing is, it will never be.

Apple only deals with a very specific set of hardware parts that has total control of most of the time, and Microsoft certifies most third party drivers. These two reasons are good enough to deliver a good suspend-to-RAM support. But Linux has no such certification program (if a driver is deemed “stable” it gets in the kernel without questions), it has to deal with vast amounts of hardware models and it doesn’t have good “workarounds” for buggy BIOSes either.

This will never change. There is never going to be good-enough “sleep” when using Linux — except if Intel creates a new BIOS/hardware standard that pushes developers to write drivers the right way.

On my new laptop, 1 out of 10 wake ups is screwed up: gfx can’t wake up, network card can’t be re-initialized, or if I leave it sleep for more than 3-4 hours it never wakes up again. Honestly, even if these weird cases get fixed in 3 years time, by then the same problems will be for newer laptops. So, I don’t keep my hopes high that sleep will work out of the box for any given hardware.

Update: Here’s a new one tonight: laptop comes back from sleep, regains network connection and everything, only to go back to sleep all by itself 10 seconds later.

My JBQ is coming back from France tonight. I can’t wait! I am so glad he had a great time there and he saw his extended family after almost 2 years!

One bad thing is that he might have temporarily lost his suitcase though, as he got his connection in Washington DC at the last moment and he is not sure that his baggage will arrive with him on the same plane in SFO. It might take up to 3 weeks to get it back if that’s the case. He was late for his connection just because immigration took 1.5 hours in DC. You gotta hate these dreadful immigration lines when you arrive in USA.

I want a world with no borders. A central government. Today’s “countries” should simply be “provinces”.

Update: Yup, suitcase didn’t arrive…

I wrote a UI article yesterday for Beryl on OSNews and it’s quite interesting to read the comments. Basically, the opinions were polarized although feedback was mostly positive. They either liked it because it was very “gnome-ish”, or the few who hated it was because they “prefer the KDE way of having choice”. I found this interesting because the disliking of the mockups was not a matter of their favorite feature not listed, but just because the mockups were “too simple” to even consider it as an alternative.

It really makes me wonder. Do people want to have a garabazilion of settings and asphyxiated sub-settings of a setting, or it is just that they are too young and they like to play with cool things all day long? I wonder if the KDE way is the young people’s way and Gnome’s the older, bored, just-works kind of people’s. What I am trying to say is that I am wondering if this polarization has to do with age and energy rather than real valid UI preference.

But then again, Havoc put it best once: “If cool was everything, we would all be hacking Enlightenment instead“.

There was that show on tonight, “CSI: Miami”. There you have that guy murdered. Then, the suspicion goes to his wife. But wait! Apparently the wife has a twin sister. Could she be the murderer? Oh, wait! The dead husband actually is not the husband, but a look-alike who went surgical procedure to look like him. But wait, while they were interviewing the real husband, just out of the blue the detective spots a body in the dirt. The murderer of that body is the husband’s aid, but this murder has nothing to do with the main assassination — it’s just a filler. And finally wait! There is a third sister! They’re triplets and the husband never knew about it. Neither the triplets knew of the look alike of the husband.

Are the writers even serious? This show is so stupid, so laughable. What bugs me really is the fact that CSI:Miami is always #1 in its timeslot every Monday with about 16 to 22 million viewers each week. How is it possible for people to watch that crap? I mean, look, such a scenario is more plausible than the scenario of Lost or Heroes. But man, this supposed to be a somewhat realistic detective show, not sci-fi.

Is Hollywood out of ideas? Better do some remakes then.

Stormrider blogged about his favorite movies, and so here is my list too:

- Star Wars: A New Hope
- The Matrix
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- Equilibrium
- Donnie Darko

For other, less known movies, but equal gems I have blogged about here.

I must note here that Stormirder’s post was mostly about movies that have played a big role in shaping his personality while growing up. I can claim the same thing about art work, but in my case it’s ‘Star Trek: TOS’ and ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ that has.

BTW, don’t you think that L.A. Confidential is the most overrated movie ever? It is on the top250 of IMDb and I don’t understand why. It is just a normal movie, not bad, and not great either. I don’t get any ‘greatness’ about this movie.

Suddenly my new laptop stopped waking up from sleep. At first I thought that it was ubuntu’s new kernel version, but later I figured it must be a new driver. And indeed, after removing Linuxant’s Connexant non-free modem driver, the laptop was able to wake up again. Amazing that they charge $20 for it.

On other laptop news, I am selling this LinuxCertified laptop. I deleted its Arch Linux partition and installed Ubuntu in it. Amazing how I had everything the way I wanted it within 2 hours (drivers, codecs, third party apps and all). So, check the link above and tell me how much I should be selling it for. Except the fact that the battery is dead, it is a healthy portable computer & desktop replacement (it is not really a traditional laptop as it weighs over 7 lbs).