gagah.me

On Bad Biodiversity & Nature Conservation in Indonesia & Malaysia

Erik Meijaard, writing for The Jakarta Globe:

Globally, Malaysia is No. 2 and Indonesia No. 3 on the list of threatened species maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Indonesia and Malaysia outrank Brazil and Mexico, which are actually more species-rich.

One could argue that these two countries are simply not interested in conservation and that development at all costs comes first. But then why did they sign up to international conventions? Why do they have conservation and environmental laws that ought to protect species and their habitats? If these countries do not want conservation, just be honest and do away with these paper commitments.

As an Indonesian it’s almost a yearly event for the people and tv pundits to talk about nature being “angry” at us for neglecting them, and that is of course, because we’re inconvenienced every time there’s mass flooding or a huge landslide. I rarely hear people took the threatened animals point of view regarding nature, mainly because there’s supposedly more “important” issue at play, such as presidential election or political bullshit.

I wonder when and if sh*t really hit the fan, who’s going to get all the blame.

On The Illusion of Values in Diamond

Fascinating take on the history and expletive-ridden-ness of Diamonds on Priceonomics:

So here is a modest proposal: Let’s agree that diamonds are bullshit and reject their role in the marriage process. Let’s admit that as a society we got tricked for about century into coveting sparkling pieces of carbon, but it’s time to end the nonsense.

Yes.

Google & Dropbox Launches “Simply secure” Initiative

Brian Donohue on threatpost reports:

“We believe that people shouldn’t have to make a trade-off between security and ease of use. This is why we’re happy to support Simply Secure, a new organization dedicated to improving the usability and safety of open-source tools that help people secure their online lives,” Meredith Whittaker and Ben Laurie of Google said.

As great as these initiatives sounds, it somehow still feels like the two companies are only there so then they would be able to say, “we do care about user security! See? We have this initiative”. It feels like PR speaks to me.

What i would appreciate as a user of their service is more transparency regarding their usage of user data and their communication with government agency. Also, how about not having people associated with the issue as one of your board member? That would be helpful.

UK saw huge traffic uptake from iOS Update

Alex Hern on The Guardian wrote:

According to figures from LONAP, the internet exchange point that provides the physical infrastructure for much of England’s internet service providers, downloads peaked at more than 70 gigabits a second at 8pm Wednesday – a 60% increase on the same time the day before.

Amazing. And while i’m on this topic, I can’t imagine being the CEO of an ISP who sees these kinds of traffic uptakes without looking at the possibilites of selling some kinds of “value added” products¹. Let’s hope net neutrality win and we can still see these headlines without the word “profit” in them.

You know, the usual “HIGH SPEED DOWNLOAD: Pay 4.99 Now” kinds of value ↩

Problem at Jeff Bezos’ Fight Club

David Streitfeld at New York Times wrote:

Every fall, Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, hosts Campfire, a literary weekend in Santa Fe, N.M. Dozens of well-known novelists have attended, but they do not talk about the abundance of high-end clothing and other gifts, the lavish meals, the discussion under the desert stars by Neil Armstrong or the private planes that ferried some home.

The man who sells half the books in America seemed to want nothing more each year than for everyone to have a good time. All he asked in return was silence.

For four years, the bargain held. But the fifth Campfire, which writers say is taking place this weekend, is a little different. Amazon’s acrimonious battle with Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher, is fracturing the secrecy and sapping some of the good will.

There’s a huge problem with the book industry if the only effective way of revenge against monopolistic behavior by your retail partner is not coming to the store owner’s dinner party. But, i guess we already know that.

How Betaworks Revived Digg

A great article by Timothy B. Lee on Vox about the story behind Digg’s Revival

So Betaworks had about six weeks to create a new Digg.

The company decided to ditch the user voting system that had been the hallmark of the original Digg. The Digg user community had become too acrimonious — and the front page too spammy — to be salvaged. Instead, the new Digg would use a combination of software and human editors to decide what would go on the home page.

According to McLaughlin, Digg has grown from 1.5 million users per month to 8 million.

Interesting how one old media’s¹ trash is a another startup’s treasure. That startup is of course, Betaworks. The company that bought Digg’s brand name and domain in June 2012, and rebuild it to become what the current Digg is. A news aggregator that i use daily. I barely remember the old Digg, and the whole kerfuffle that became the narrative of its fall from glory. What i found even more interesting in this article though, is the working model of Betaworks, the startup incubator:

In a traditional incubator, each startup is run by independent founders who work primarily for equity in their own companies. If a startup fails, its founder-employees are out of a job. In contrast, the people running new Betaworks companies are salaried employees of Betaworks. They move from company to company as needed.

If a Betaworks company fails, the designers, developers, and other talent behind the company are re-assigned to other projects. If a Betaworks company grows large enough to leave the nest, some employees go with the new company but others will return to the mothership to work on another project.

Also these guys are the one who bought Instapaper² from Marco Arment last year. Great decision by Mr. Arment i should say.

Washington Post ↩
Digg Owner Betaworks Buys Instapaper To Go Big On Social Reading And Discovery ↩

Having a Stroke at 33

A remarkable article from Christine Hyung-Oak Lee on Buzzfeed, recounting her whole experience having a stroke at the age of 33.

It was Dec. 31, 2006. I was 33. I did not yet know this, but a clot had traveled from my aorta into my brain, and made its way to my left thalamus. As a result, my left brain, the expert at numbers and language and logic and reasoning, a part of it suffocated and died. My right brain, the specialist with regard to color, music, creativity, intuition, and emotions, therefore could not talk to my left brain. Numbers became squiggles, colors lost their names, food lost flavor, music had no melody.

What makes this story remarkable as well is that the symptom of her stroke is not normal. I’ve been hearing stories about people having a sudden stroke and the symptom is always physically there. Drooping face, unintelligible words, and such. But no.

People have asked if anyone around me could tell I was having a stroke. “Weren’t you acting weird?” they’d ask, and my husband’s mouth would turn into a thin line, and my friends who joined us for New Year’s would lower their eyes. I was acting weird, yes. But it was New Year’s Eve. My friends and husband were drunk and jolly. I was not talking. They thought that was odd, but not cause for huge concern. They thought that perhaps I too was drunk.

The whole article is a must read, especially since it seems she has recovered fully from the incident, and yet the incident, that little stroke, changed her life forever. I can never imagine how that feels, and trust me, being the overweight mess that i am, nothing scares me more than the thought of experiencing this kind of thing in my lifetime. Time to change, i guess?

3 Unique Values of Minecraft That Microsoft Needs to Understand

I’ve been playing Minecraft since a year ago. Before that, I used to think that the game is only about building stuff out of pixelated blocks. Like Lego. That’s how most people describe Minecraft, especially the one who just knew the game from screenshots or occasional minecraft-related news where people seem to constantly build ridiculous things in it.¹

But as it turns out, after just a week of gameplay i realised Minecraft is more than that. It’s a lot more than just building stuff out of pixelated blocks, it’s a lot more than just a game made for kids, it’s a lot more than lego.

In fact, Minecraft, specifically the survival gameplay mode, represents the best thing about gaming; it brings you to another dimension, an immersive and challenging world, where possibilities (and the dangers) are endless, yet it doesn’t need to utilise snazzy graphics or well-developed plot, or linear gameplay where you do one thing and you proceed to the next stage of the game. It’s all up to you to proceed the game, and it teaches you several good principles of life. Hard work, creativity, and personality.

It’s no surprise, then, that the game is so popular. Millions and millions of copies of Minecraft are sold every month, although the game itself is quite old, and updates by Mojang, although free, are usually slow and very careful in adding new things (or even fix bugs) to the game. It’s a very unique game, in that perspective.

And last week, it got acquired by Microsoft. Suddenly, for millions of vocal players of the game, Minecraft is dead (or soon to be). The fear of a big company acquiring things that they might not fully understand, that ends in the destruction of values that makes the thing valuable in the first place might be a cliche, but to some extend, probably holds some accuracy. Microsoft in the past has acquired several game studios that doesn’t end well, and while we all know there’s new regime at Redmond, the thought that they acquired a piece of software that is doing really well, brings the fear that Microsoft will change or instill new values in Mojang that doesn’t correspond well to the current values that Minecraft holds for millions of its gamers.

What are these values? Well, let’s just mention one by one here. Although i’m not exactly a heavy gamer, i recognise several key values of Minecraft that is different from other game, and these are some:

1. Developer as a Facilitator

Although 3rd party mods are not a new thing in game overall, but i think most of us who are familiar with minecraft will agree that the amount and variety of mods compatible with Minecraft is minid-blowingly large. Some of them even create new game inside the game, and this might conflict with Microsoft core interest as owner of Minecraft. For example, there are launchers like FTB Launcher & ATLauncher that pretty much allows you to play a pack of mods that make minecraft an entirely new game for free. Mojang until now apparently sees this as a healthy thing for the community and didn’t make a single dime off of it. Will Microsoft think the same?

2. As little update as possible

This one might be quite controversial, but i’d argue it’s actually one of the key values of Minecraft in its current form. The lack of manpower working for Mojang to develop new feature for the game might be what causing this instead of values that they actually realised and believed, but, hear me on this, this is what makes Minecraft trully amazing. It’s like old Apple in this regard. They didn’t put a bunch of new blocks, or introduce a bunch of new mobs in a single update. In fact, they only introduce, from my quick observation playing the game, a single new mob for every major new update. How can this be, when game developers are trying to make as much money as possible by making as many DLCs as they could to add more new things to the game? Will Microsoft understand this dynamic in play? I don’t know.

3. True cross-platform compatibility

This is one of the worries i’ve seen people have when reacting to the acquisition news. Will Minecraft still use Java, which facilitates its cross-platform compatibility across 3 different OS? From what i know as a mac user, a game might have some cross-platform compatibility, but not all parts of it. For example, GTA might be mac-compatible but some of the mods are not. Well, in Minecraft, since it runs on Java, all mods are compatible across platform. And about Java in general, i am quite torn about this. I’ve been reading a lot of people saying Java is actually the reason why Minecraft is so unoptimized. Moving to native programming language might mean the game runs faster, but again, read point 1. The mods are one of the key things that make this game great.

Those three are what i think is the core values that make Minecraft the game so unique in current gaming landscape. Whether or not Microsoft will be able to run Mojang without messing it up, i don’t know. But i’m hopeful. At the very least, having been alive to see one of the best game of this generation being born and maintained very well while the developer remained independent is truly great.

Do you think there are other values of Minecraft that Microsoft needs to note or you have an opinion regarding this acquisition? Fill up the comment with your thoughts

See: Minecraft players build working hard drives ↩

RIM is (still) stupid

The verge reports that RIM CEO, Thorsten heins will consider the possibility of closing down RIM’s hardware production division after the launch of BB10

“the CEO said that, although there was no need to make such a decision in haste, all options are being considered as he continues in his attempts to turn around the Canadian manufacturer’s fortunes.”

This is the problem when a company thinks “turning around” a company’s fortune means saving their investor from the possibility of losing their money instead of commiting to build the best products possible and trusting the market will react in accordance to how confident you are of your own judgement.

The rule of thumb is: when you have two plans to “turn around” a company with plan B being you’re gonna burn the friggin ship and sell it outright, keep your mouth shut. Because nothing convince me more to buy your product than knowing that the company will shut down in mere days if it fails to find enough people who wants to use the damn thing.

Android is a Piracy Platform

The article is about OUYA but i’m more interested at this quote which i think relevant; especially in the wake of the whole kerfuffle about piracy in Android forcing developers making their game free

“There are two platforms: [iOS] makes money [and] is still very programmable, like the Apple II, and then the other is Android, which is a piracy platform, and you’re not doing anything new with it — you’re making a bigger phone that connects to your TV.”

I don’t see any chance for OUYA to actually achieve any kind of meaningful success if developers still have this image sticks in their mind. Worse even that the whole concept of OUYA relies the fact that you can play games on it for free. Do something, Google.