Today, Greece and Portugal saw their credit ratings downgraded, once again. Greece’s socio-economic mess notwithstanding, reading the linked BBC article made the absurdity of the dependence on the ‘markets’ (and the ‘unrated’ rating agencies that drive them) clearer than ever: in 2010 Greece woke up to the realisation — or at least some in that country did; others had realised much earlier and a portion of the population was in denial — that it was in dire straits. It became clear that a massive existing debt, years of mismanagement, corruption, collective contempt for law, binging on a false sense of wealth, frivolous consumption and a norm promoting a degenerate unproductive lifestyle meant that the country could never meet even its most fundamental obligations alone, so it turned to the support of the European states in an attempt to secure funds with reasonable terms and — in the process — convince and calm the markets, so that it could lower the interest rate of its bonds that had skyrocketed in the period of a few months. At least that was the official explanation. This mechanism came, first in an ad-hoc form, and now in the form of the ESM. Let’s be clear about something: the ESM is meant to be a stabilisation mechanism that ensures that states in the eurozone will be able to secure funds with relatively reasonable terms; terms better than those offered by the markets, but not exactly a free ride. The ESM is not panacea; it is primarily meant to benefit those commercial entities that have invested in states that make use of it, even if there is a possibility of partial or full restructuring of the debt —a measure which would lead to losses for the lenders of those states. Since the ‘crisis’ erupted Greece’s credit rating was downgraded several times. The latest downgrade, it was argued, was reflecting the fact that the ESM might facilitate a restructuring of the debt, leading to a loss for the lenders, thus making any investment in Greece riskier. This makes little sense: the main reason the ESM was created was to help EU states requiring assistance to secure funds with reasonable terms and avoid default — thus satisfying the markets concerned that those states might not be a good investment for them and in the process lowering interest rates. Yet, the very existence of the ESM was now being used as a reason for a further downgrade, under the pretext that since under the ESM it is possible for a state to restructure its debt under certain circumstances, any investment in this state’s bonds is less attractive.

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Ten years ago, on March 24th, 2001, Mac OS X came out. A first, publicly available, one point oh unpolished version of Apple’s ‘next’ (pun intended) operating system. An operating system that Apple had been trying, in one way or another, to create for more than ten years. Remember Pink? Taligent? Copland? Gershwin? Mythical codenames to those that heard of them in the 1990s of either projects that promised amazing experiences compared to Mac OS Classic and that were never finished or released as planned, or spun-off products that died after a few short years. Mac OS X, what finally became a cornerstone of Apple’s platform well beyond the Mac and a catalyst of its success in the 2000s was a reincarnation of NeXTSTEP in Apple’s colours. Fusing NeXTSTEP’s core and frameworks with the Mac OS of old as one product that didn’t exactly know itself. A new skin, the same — amazingly advanced for their time — underpinnings.

In this short article I will describe, in summary, some experiences with Mac OS X from the point of view of a software engineer as opposed to a user, over the past ten years: The initial chaos of integration, Apple’s flirtation and dilemma with Java, the modernisation of Objective-C, the eventual coherence of the APIs and the extension of the system to support Touch in a way that was never achieved before.

NeXTSTEP frameworks used Objective-C. It was a language unknown to 99% of programmers out there in 2001. I had only heard of it while fiddling with GNUStep a few years earlier. In the early 2000s you could still find C++/Corba programmers in major service companies (as opposed to large software houses or systems development divisions) and Java was only starting, slowly but increasingly, to become the preferred platform for enterprise software. I remember meeting amazing and suitably eccentric software engineers — not merely the subpar ‘developers’ that are increasingly common nowadays in service/enterprise environments — that proudly proclaimed ‘Java is for girls!’ and other elitist, sexist jokes like that. Anything less than Alexandrescu and Sutter-class C++ was unacceptable to them. Knowledge of x86 assembly was standard among their friends. How could a person like that appreciate Objective-C? I felt comfortable hanging out with those people because I had gone through the rings of fire of learning, liking and using assembly, ‘high-level’ [insert CPU here] programming (irony!) and C/C++, but I also enjoyed the elegance and simplicity of Objective-C and Cocoa for rapid application development.
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Last year was arguably the year that made Projection Mapping known to the ‘masses’. Ok, not the masses, but quite a lot of people. This is a technique whereby projectors are positioned in front of existing physical objects whose 3d form has been mapped in software, allowing the projected ‘video’ (graphics) sequences to make use of it to create unbelievably cool effects. The end-result is a blurring of real and projected, an unbelievable sight, similar to that of seeing a hologram for the first time =)

The ‘effect’ has been part of artists and advertisers (luckily people of exceptional skill and æsthetics — something quite rare) and it has livened up what has traditionally be works of arguable value. I’d normally say here that I hope this will stay within the realm of competent, æsthetically coherent people, but I’m sure that hip ‘video artists’ that are content with repeatedly playing back short sequences of video or projecting triangle meshes on screens as well as moronic advertisers will find out sooner rather than later and make projection mapping the tool for unprecedented kitsch experiences. You still have time to watch some impressive examples of the technique below.

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The Inside Job is a documentary like few of its contemporaries: mainstream and accessible enough to win an Academy Award, yet sharp, piercing and well-researched enough to actually convince even the most sceptical among the viewers. This is a film narrated by an A-list hollywood star, Matt Damon, that dares to shred the current global economic system to pieces, along with the financial organisations that comprise it. A film that presents — in (perhaps over)simplified, digestible fashion — all those aspects of the financial crisis of 2008 that torment and dehumanise billions of people globally; that exposes the incomprehensible greed of those in the U.S. financial sector, the history behind financial deregulation from the 1980s onwards, the excesses, the abuse and the corruption that remains to this date unchallenged by the political powers, in the States and elsewhere, despite the damage the the system (not the crisis itself) has caused to both U.S. and European countries.

A matter of reputation

What really stuck in my mind after watching Inside Job, is how — throughout the film — the importance of credit rating organisations is highlighted and showcased in several occasions; organisations like Finch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s that provide ratings for anything ranging from corporations, bonds and sovereign states. Corporations that gave AAA ratings to CDOs based on subprime mortgages, allowing them to be bought by large institutional investors with strict requirements with regards to their portfolio contents. Corporations that had a determining role in the ‘creation’ of one of the greatest global financial crises of the past century and that continue to do so, through collusion with large financial organisations and as seen through their effects in the recent — partly unfounded — rating downgrades of various european states based on their national debt.

Surprisingly, those organisations were not affected by the crisis, despite their role and their position in the market. When asked, they all stated that their ratings only reflect their ‘opinion’, somehow deflecting the real issue — their de facto institutional part in a system of ‘free market’ that is largely guided by them. Despite their monumental failing, their antisocial, anti-investor, borderline illegal masking of the true value of subprime based CDOs in the mid 2000s and up until the 2008 crisis, those organisations continue to provide ratings as if they have a perfect reputation. I cannot imaging any other profession or industry when a person or corporation has consistently failed so bad at their core function and have remained in business, let alone maintained a dominant position that largely determines the actions of the largest institutional investors and with them the market.

For someone without intricate knowledge of economics and the way the financial sector in the U.S. works, Inside Job is worth watching even if it were only for the interviews and the simplified explanations of the crisis — which occasionally border on oversimplification. It serves as an eye opener that showcases how little has changed since the 2008 crisis, how consistent the actions of recent U.S. presidents (including Obama’s) have been with regards to turning a blind eye (or even supporting) Wall Street’s reckless course for profit, how the system is still as fragile, dangerous and completely inadequate, run by the same people and organisations that caused the 2008 crisis and (un)regulated in the same way. If anything Inside Job is approachable and basically sound, which is more than one can say for most other works out there that often border on sentimentalist, populist drivel similar to Moore’s works or high-brow academic works that alienate the intellectually-challenged.