High posting volume today. I just find it remarkable that in the last 2 weeks I've seen several incredible breakthrough level stories on health and life extension.

I wasn't going to make any special commemoration, but it seems a whole ton of other blogs are linking today to my articles on the history of Spam, so I should blog them as well.

Many years ago I got interested in the origins of the term "spam" to mean net abuse. I mean I had lived through most of its origin and seen most of the early spams myself, but it wasn't clear why people took the name of the meat product and applied it to junk mail. I knew it came from USENET, so I used the USENET search engines to trace the origins.

I've been writing a lot about self-driving cars which have automatic accident avoidance and how they will change our cities. I was recently talking again with Robin Chase, whose new company, goloco attempts to set people up for ad-hoc carpools and got into the issues again. She believes we should use more transit in cities and there's a lot of merit to that case.

However, in the wealthy USA, we don't, outside of New York City. We love our cars, and we can afford their much higher cost, so they still dominate, and even in New York many people of means rely strictly on taxis and car services.

Transit is, at first glance, more energy efficient. When it shares right of way with cars it reduces congestion. Private right of way transit also reduces congestion but only when you don't consider the cost of the private right-of-way, where the balance is harder to decide. (The land only has a many-person vehicle on it a small fraction of the time compared to 1-3 passenger vehicles almost all the time on ordinary roads.)

However, my new realization is that transit may not be as energy efficient as we hope. During rush hour, packed transit vehicles are very efficient, especially if they have regenerative braking. But outside those hours it can be quite wasteful to have a large bus or train with minimal ridership. However, in order to give transit users flexibility, good service outside of rush-hour is important.

As part of my series on the horrors of modern system administration and upgrading, let me propose the need for a universal API, over all operating systems, for accessing data from, and some control of the package management system.

There have been many efforts in the past to standardize programming APIs within all the unix-like operating systems, some of them extending into MS Windows, such as Posix. Posix is a bit small to write very complex programs fully portably but it's a start. Any such API can make your portability easier if it can't make it trivial the way it's supposed to.

But there has been little effort to standardize the next level, machine administration and configuration. Today a large part of that is done with the package manager. Indeed, the package manager is the soul (and curse) of most major OS distributions. One of the biggest answers to "what's the difference between debian and Fedora" is "dpkg and apt, vs. rpm and yum." (Yes you can, and I do, use apt with rpm.)

Now the truth is that from a user perspective, these package managers don't actually look very different. They all install and remove packages by name, perform upgrades, handle dependencies etc. Add-ons like apt and GUI package managers help users search and auto-install all dependencies. To the user, the most common requests are to find and install a package, and to upgrade it or the system.