What country is this where all these businesses are so up-to-date and have all the latest versions and patches installed and all that? This is the same smoothly running oh-so-professional biz world that can't keep 15 year old script kiddies out of their boxes?
Yes, there really are people still using Works, in every flavor and version from 2.0 to 2000. Even in business. And of course everyone would be better off if they could figure out how to "save as...[some older relatively more compatible format]."
What about my original question: How is this any different from everyone just using whatever word processor they like? If you use Word, you have to save an extra copy in some lower-level format. If you don't use Word, same deal. So why are you obligated to use Word at all? It won't make your files any more portable.
No, just kidding. My preferred theory is just the simple observation that people have gone nuts over things like pagers, cell phones and the Internet because they help them communicate better. It is incredible how much bad technology people are willing to endure if it can in some small way bring them closer to other people and make them feel more wanted and more included. Smart toasters and most wearable computers don't really address this kind of need.
So then they must address some other need that people feel strongly about. VHS took off because what people really wanted was to record sports broadcasts and watch porn at home. Beta video was all about picture quality and other technical advantages that were besides the point. What does that tell you about the future of HDTV? Look next at the popularity of MP3's, which are popular in spite of their low sound quality (same with CD's vs vinyl, or even wax cylinders).
This disconnect between what geeks like (Beta, wearable HUD Internet eyepiece things) and what everyone else likes (VHS, PDA's full of phone numbers) follows a consistent pattern. It shouldn't be that hard to predict where things will go. What gets us off track is when we think that what we like is synonymous with what anybody would like. The cool thing is that now even if what you like isn't popular you can still be comfortable in a little niche outside the mainstream.
_Refactoring_ by Martin Fowler
anything by Laura Lemay
_The Design of Everyday Things_ (aka The Psychology of Everyday Things)
_One Hundred Years of Solitude_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At the university writing lab where I "work" (well, they pay me, and sometimes I do things that involve effort), students are
constantly bringing in Word documents that they can't open. There's a million reasons. They wrote it in Works. They took
the disk out while the Word had the file open. Or the #1 reason: they wrote it in Word 2000. So they tour the university
computer labs in search of something that will open their document. They try Word 97 on our machines, Word 2000 on the
ones upstairs, different Word 2000 on the NT boxes in the engineering building. It goes on and on. Sometimes it works,
sometimes not.
Often I try to convince the English department to teach their students to use something more compatible, like HTML or
RTF. There is little demand for images and tables, and when there is it is really part of a Powerpoint sedative or
spreadsheet. But they always say, we have to use Word because it is the standard. Meaning that it is the universally
compatible format that everyone can read. Now am I just crazy here? Don't answer that. If Word were in fact any kind of
standard, why do we have the Tower of Babel with all these incompatible Word documents? Word may be the standard word processor, but there is no standard Word format. There are a dozen different Word formats.
Everyone might as well use whatever weird word processor they like, and pass along a second copy in plain text every time they try to move the document to antother machine. The net effect would be the same.
The fallacy you are falling into is similar to the argument "They said Gallieo was wrong, but he was proven right, and therefore (since they say I'm wrong) I will be proven right too." You could reverse it and say that in the 1950's they predicted everyone would have flying cars in 2000, which shows that all predictions of future technology will be proven false.
In fact, we have the more difficult task of figuring out why some predicted technologies work out, and others languish, even if they seem really cool. Why did it take 100 years for the fax machine to catch on? Why do people in the year 2000 still die of polio? Why do so many people rush to get the most up to the minute cell phone but not update their voting machines or their web server security? This is not a random process. So what does this pattern tell you about the future of computerized clothing?
I think you are on the right track, thinking about how computers fit into a person's life, but you should take a more critical approach. The reason why people mock smart toasters and intelligent clothing is because they are the answers to questions that nobody asked. They are attempts to apply high-technology to every single thing you can think of without discrimination. People the world over are crying out for a browser that doesn't suck, or a way to safely shop on the web. Nobody is walking through the woods wishing they could go online right that instant. A piece of paper will let your record your thoughts, and realistically, you can look up the names of trees and animals later with little lost by the delay, or just carry a book if you can't wait.
Start by looking at the pattern of technologies that fail versus those that catch on. There are good reasons for the choices people make (except when they are being idiots of course).
As I follow the MIT link and wonder how the fonts will be mangled if the page ever finishes loading and the browser doesn't just up and crash, I also sort of wonder what flexible transisitors could be used for. Chips embedded in my clothing! At least it isn't a smart toaster. I'm getting tired of that one.
The computers at school fry my eyes after about an hour. They are mostly 15" curved screens, without glare filters and SVGA at 70 to 75khz. The lighting is all fluorescent.
At home I can go all day, with a 17" perfectly flat CRT, and a ARAG (?) glare filter, at 1280 x 1024 and 79khz. And regular light bulbs. Viwsonic also makes some claim about the quality of the color on my monitor (a PF775) that supposedly makes a difference.
So I must be benefiting from one of the above differences, probably the flat screen, the glare filter or the lights. Or it could be psychological, since I'd hate to believe I spent 300 whole dollars on a monitor for nothing, which is fine with me. If I feel better, that's good enough. Other people can't stand flat screens, so go figure. You could have yourself hypnotized.
Thank you for reading about me an my monitor. Until today, no one else cared.
I'm not naturally inclined to believe that such people exist, but I do know better.
So, granted, there are many people with nothing better to do than try to annoy others, but still, I find it hard to believe they have that kind of power. It seems much more likely that a community about to die on its own, or one that was no real commuity in the first place, would tend to collect a disproportionate number of Meows, mostly due to the exit of the finer citizens rather than an increase in the amount of riff-raff. Then the community would start smoking Crack or Crater or whatever it is they start smoking when they are near death. It just looks like it was the work of the Bad Emperor Meow, when in fact Rome was ready to fall from within.
I'm still intrigued, though. One possible experiment would be to sic Meow on a known healthy community (not the sickly ones that I think he picks out) and see if he can hurt it. But that raises the same ethical problems that medical science faces. So instead the methods of medicine ought to be used here as well. There are enough archives around to do the kind of post-mortems that would allow you to build a decent case. You might have to first define what a healthy community is. I think this is starting to sound like Book I of Plato's Republic...
I meant "might" in the sense that a guy with a Calvin-urinating-on-whatever sticker on his truck "might" be a redneck. But that is indeed not the point.
What I strongly suspect is going on, however, is that all these "communities being destroyed" are nothing more than the online equivalent of someone pushing 40 walking into their favorite bar and thinking "I don't like the looks of those teenagers over by the juke box. And listen to them cuss!" Times change, people age, and the crowd at a popular hangout changes too. The decidedly boomer prejudices of the writers of so many popular books on the Internet (Sherry Turkle, Clifford Stoll, Steven Levy, et. al.) make this seem like a much different phenomenon than it is. And it is simply because they refuse to admit that they are only speaking for themselves and others of their age group. It would be perfectly fine for them to say all the same things, provided they didn't generalize so much, and realized how homogonenously white, urban, professional and and middle-aged the people who agree with their opinons are. Look at all the posts to this article from people who have no idea what the big deal is about flamers. There is a whole other group of people who are not alarmed at all. They just ignore the flames, unless they show wit, in which case they get crowned with the laurels of that fine Western literary genre, invective.
As far at these moles, I have to say I am really skeptical. Are they the ones responsible for popular night spots that grow stale over time? Do such saboteurs also go around killing gardening clubs and bowling leagues? Or are they only on the Internet? How would we test to see if such people actually existed and were having a meaningful effect? Suppose there were no mole effect, but only the usual measure of rude behavior and mean language. Would the world look much different than it does now?
Now I'm getting all curious about this... Can you show me the evidence of the work of these moles?
The Well does not represent a reasonable cross section of the Internet, or of anything else, except the upper-income half of those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Don't you notice that when you go on about the "damage" caused by all these immature flamers (read Non-Boomers), most of the younger demographic has no idea what you are talking about? The baby boomers have been aging, and begun to realize that teenagers really get on their nerves. This is natural. You prefer the company of your own generation.
The problem is that a hugely disproportionate number of the baby boomer Well's membership has gone on to write way too many books about the story of The Internet, as if they had any clue about what online communities were for everyone else. They should have subtitled all of their books The Online Experience for the Middle-Aged Professional.
These are the basic facts that the Well and the boomers who live there do not get: You are only one small part of the population. You do not represent the whole. Most of your cherished values do not exist outside your select group. And we are getting along just fine without you.
...could you also see if you can find anthing on those cell phone blockers? I heard some restauraunts in France had a way of interfering with cell phone signals so people could dine in peace. Has anyone come up with a personal anti-cell phone device? Maybe some kind of visor unit, I don't know.
Or a directional signal that would cover the two or three blocks ahead of me as I ride my bike through the city. Drivers who I am about to encounter would have their phone calls cut off as I approached, and the sudden sensory deprivation would cause them to look around through the window of their jeep in search of some replacement stimulation. Moving objects, such as me approaching on my bike, might be just exciting enough to grab their attention, especially if there were bright colors. Conceivably, they would be willing to react to the world around them during this dead-phone period, but could return to talking as soon as I and my handy device had safely moved out of the area.
Ambulances and fire trucks could use this too.
Let me know what you find. Thanks.
Your daily news source for the last 3 years is not just a 'right wing advocacy site.' It is propaganda for the Republican religious right with heavy racist overtones, plus healthy dose of general loonyness. You have commentary by Christian millennial kooks like Hal Lindsey, two separtate attacks in one day on Jesse Jackson, and (I swear) a serious article from their editor-in-chief claiming that this PS/2 "threat" is reason to finally do, um, something, really, about Saddam. It sort of gets vague from there; I think more support for the oppostion in Iraq is what he wants. Probably they should have Playstation Parity with their oppressor.
This is a Libertarian site in your opinion? In the last three years have they sounded this nutty every day, or is this a special day? My guess is that if we dig some more we'll find these credulus paranoids being taken in by lots more hoaxes like the PS/2 gag.
You can keep it. When I want news, I'll take the bland AP kind, or even the NY Times, before I trust these freaks. When I want conspiracy cult fruitcakes, I want REAL conspiracy cult fruitcakes. Give me SLACK and be off with your weak imitations.
I wish I could claim credit for the idea, but in fact someone else though of it long ago and it has been implemented already for some products.
So where do they get the resources to move the stuff back from whence it came? Maybe from the same place they get the resources to transport it to a landfill and bury it. Maybe a well-designed product ought to continue to have inherent value even after it its "useful" life is over, so that someone will find it worth while to transport it. Think about the effort it takes to collect cans, or junk cars. It is obviously worth it to someone. The good thing about such a system is that it doesn't mandate specific procedures or technologies on the manufacturer, as does a law such as requiring all the plastic in a product be of the same type. You just tell them to make the product have a green life-cyle, but let them engineer any solution they want to the problem, including throwing the product in the trash--at their expense. And their customer's expense. But not the competition's customer's expense.
Is that explanation enough?
I think the best way to encourage recycling is to require manufactures (of PC's or cars or CDs or whatever) to accept back whatever they produce when the consumer is done with it. Then it's up to the maker to decide how much effort to put into making it recyclable, since it is going to be their problem. If they don't think it is worth it, they have to pay to dispose of it themselves. On the other hand, they could plan it so cleverly that recycling their products is actually profitable. In the mean time, I would go for a kitch angle with the old CD's, and try to come up with some kind of "ironic" collector interest. It worked for ABBA and Mr. T, why not for your bad burns?
You wonder why the ones you hear about after they get caught are always seem so dumb? It is because if they were not so dumb, then they would not get caught, and then you would never have heard of them. Often they got caught by bragging about how 31337 they are. You can continue this logic to make the mystical connection with the fact that people who brag about themselves all the time are really idiots, and that in prison you can find many idiots bragging about how smart they are. There are numerous corolaries and converses to this, but they are too obvious to mention.
History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris
History has plenty of examples of the regular kind of hubris, but the messing-with-the-secret-of-life-and-playing-god kind seems to be really only found in fiction in like, well, Franknestein. In actual history, where have we met our nemesis using biotech? Not that that is a reason to go ahead and do it; we just have to look to our imagination rather than history to see what might happen...
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What country is this where all these businesses are so up-to-date and have all the latest versions and patches installed and all that? This is the same smoothly running oh-so-professional biz world that can't keep 15 year old script kiddies out of their boxes?
Yes, there really are people still using Works, in every flavor and version from 2.0 to 2000. Even in business. And of course everyone would be better off if they could figure out how to "save as...[some older relatively more compatible format]."
What about my original question: How is this any different from everyone just using whatever word processor they like? If you use Word, you have to save an extra copy in some lower-level format. If you don't use Word, same deal. So why are you obligated to use Word at all? It won't make your files any more portable.
Your pleas for mercy mean NOTHING!!!
No, just kidding. My preferred theory is just the simple observation that people have gone nuts over things like pagers, cell phones and the Internet because they help them communicate better. It is incredible how much bad technology people are willing to endure if it can in some small way bring them closer to other people and make them feel more wanted and more included. Smart toasters and most wearable computers don't really address this kind of need.
So then they must address some other need that people feel strongly about. VHS took off because what people really wanted was to record sports broadcasts and watch porn at home. Beta video was all about picture quality and other technical advantages that were besides the point. What does that tell you about the future of HDTV? Look next at the popularity of MP3's, which are popular in spite of their low sound quality (same with CD's vs vinyl, or even wax cylinders).
This disconnect between what geeks like (Beta, wearable HUD Internet eyepiece things) and what everyone else likes (VHS, PDA's full of phone numbers) follows a consistent pattern. It shouldn't be that hard to predict where things will go. What gets us off track is when we think that what we like is synonymous with what anybody would like. The cool thing is that now even if what you like isn't popular you can still be comfortable in a little niche outside the mainstream.
Go ahead and flame me all you want. I'm into it.
_Refactoring_ by Martin Fowler
anything by Laura Lemay
_The Design of Everyday Things_ (aka The Psychology of Everyday Things)
_One Hundred Years of Solitude_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At the university writing lab where I "work" (well, they pay me, and sometimes I do things that involve effort), students are constantly bringing in Word documents that they can't open. There's a million reasons. They wrote it in Works. They took the disk out while the Word had the file open. Or the #1 reason: they wrote it in Word 2000. So they tour the university computer labs in search of something that will open their document. They try Word 97 on our machines, Word 2000 on the ones upstairs, different Word 2000 on the NT boxes in the engineering building. It goes on and on. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Often I try to convince the English department to teach their students to use something more compatible, like HTML or RTF. There is little demand for images and tables, and when there is it is really part of a Powerpoint sedative or spreadsheet. But they always say, we have to use Word because it is the standard. Meaning that it is the universally compatible format that everyone can read. Now am I just crazy here? Don't answer that. If Word were in fact any kind of standard, why do we have the Tower of Babel with all these incompatible Word documents? Word may be the standard word processor, but there is no standard Word format. There are a dozen different Word formats.
Everyone might as well use whatever weird word processor they like, and pass along a second copy in plain text every time they try to move the document to antother machine. The net effect would be the same.
The fallacy you are falling into is similar to the argument "They said Gallieo was wrong, but he was proven right, and therefore (since they say I'm wrong) I will be proven right too." You could reverse it and say that in the 1950's they predicted everyone would have flying cars in 2000, which shows that all predictions of future technology will be proven false.
In fact, we have the more difficult task of figuring out why some predicted technologies work out, and others languish, even if they seem really cool. Why did it take 100 years for the fax machine to catch on? Why do people in the year 2000 still die of polio? Why do so many people rush to get the most up to the minute cell phone but not update their voting machines or their web server security? This is not a random process. So what does this pattern tell you about the future of computerized clothing?
I think you are on the right track, thinking about how computers fit into a person's life, but you should take a more critical approach. The reason why people mock smart toasters and intelligent clothing is because they are the answers to questions that nobody asked. They are attempts to apply high-technology to every single thing you can think of without discrimination. People the world over are crying out for a browser that doesn't suck, or a way to safely shop on the web. Nobody is walking through the woods wishing they could go online right that instant. A piece of paper will let your record your thoughts, and realistically, you can look up the names of trees and animals later with little lost by the delay, or just carry a book if you can't wait.
Start by looking at the pattern of technologies that fail versus those that catch on. There are good reasons for the choices people make (except when they are being idiots of course).
As I follow the MIT link and wonder how the fonts will be mangled if the page ever finishes loading and the browser doesn't just up and crash, I also sort of wonder what flexible transisitors could be used for. Chips embedded in my clothing! At least it isn't a smart toaster. I'm getting tired of that one.
The computers at school fry my eyes after about an hour. They are mostly 15" curved screens, without glare filters and SVGA at 70 to 75khz. The lighting is all fluorescent.
At home I can go all day, with a 17" perfectly flat CRT, and a ARAG (?) glare filter, at 1280 x 1024 and 79khz. And regular light bulbs. Viwsonic also makes some claim about the quality of the color on my monitor (a PF775) that supposedly makes a difference.
So I must be benefiting from one of the above differences, probably the flat screen, the glare filter or the lights. Or it could be psychological, since I'd hate to believe I spent 300 whole dollars on a monitor for nothing, which is fine with me. If I feel better, that's good enough. Other people can't stand flat screens, so go figure. You could have yourself hypnotized.
Thank you for reading about me an my monitor. Until today, no one else cared.
I'm not naturally inclined to believe that such people exist, but I do know better.
So, granted, there are many people with nothing better to do than try to annoy others, but still, I find it hard to believe they have that kind of power. It seems much more likely that a community about to die on its own, or one that was no real commuity in the first place, would tend to collect a disproportionate number of Meows, mostly due to the exit of the finer citizens rather than an increase in the amount of riff-raff. Then the community would start smoking Crack or Crater or whatever it is they start smoking when they are near death. It just looks like it was the work of the Bad Emperor Meow, when in fact Rome was ready to fall from within.
I'm still intrigued, though. One possible experiment would be to sic Meow on a known healthy community (not the sickly ones that I think he picks out) and see if he can hurt it. But that raises the same ethical problems that medical science faces. So instead the methods of medicine ought to be used here as well. There are enough archives around to do the kind of post-mortems that would allow you to build a decent case. You might have to first define what a healthy community is. I think this is starting to sound like Book I of Plato's Republic...
I meant "might" in the sense that a guy with a Calvin-urinating-on-whatever sticker on his truck "might" be a redneck. But that is indeed not the point.
What I strongly suspect is going on, however, is that all these "communities being destroyed" are nothing more than the online equivalent of someone pushing 40 walking into their favorite bar and thinking "I don't like the looks of those teenagers over by the juke box. And listen to them cuss!" Times change, people age, and the crowd at a popular hangout changes too. The decidedly boomer prejudices of the writers of so many popular books on the Internet (Sherry Turkle, Clifford Stoll, Steven Levy, et. al.) make this seem like a much different phenomenon than it is. And it is simply because they refuse to admit that they are only speaking for themselves and others of their age group. It would be perfectly fine for them to say all the same things, provided they didn't generalize so much, and realized how homogonenously white, urban, professional and and middle-aged the people who agree with their opinons are. Look at all the posts to this article from people who have no idea what the big deal is about flamers. There is a whole other group of people who are not alarmed at all. They just ignore the flames, unless they show wit, in which case they get crowned with the laurels of that fine Western literary genre, invective.
As far at these moles, I have to say I am really skeptical. Are they the ones responsible for popular night spots that grow stale over time? Do such saboteurs also go around killing gardening clubs and bowling leagues? Or are they only on the Internet? How would we test to see if such people actually existed and were having a meaningful effect? Suppose there were no mole effect, but only the usual measure of rude behavior and mean language. Would the world look much different than it does now?
Now I'm getting all curious about this... Can you show me the evidence of the work of these moles?
The Well does not represent a reasonable cross section of the Internet, or of anything else, except the upper-income half of those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Don't you notice that when you go on about the "damage" caused by all these immature flamers (read Non-Boomers), most of the younger demographic has no idea what you are talking about? The baby boomers have been aging, and begun to realize that teenagers really get on their nerves. This is natural. You prefer the company of your own generation.
The problem is that a hugely disproportionate number of the baby boomer Well's membership has gone on to write way too many books about the story of The Internet, as if they had any clue about what online communities were for everyone else. They should have subtitled all of their books The Online Experience for the Middle-Aged Professional.
These are the basic facts that the Well and the boomers who live there do not get: You are only one small part of the population. You do not represent the whole. Most of your cherished values do not exist outside your select group. And we are getting along just fine without you.
...could you also see if you can find anthing on those cell phone blockers? I heard some restauraunts in France had a way of interfering with cell phone signals so people could dine in peace. Has anyone come up with a personal anti-cell phone device? Maybe some kind of visor unit, I don't know.
Or a directional signal that would cover the two or three blocks ahead of me as I ride my bike through the city. Drivers who I am about to encounter would have their phone calls cut off as I approached, and the sudden sensory deprivation would cause them to look around through the window of their jeep in search of some replacement stimulation. Moving objects, such as me approaching on my bike, might be just exciting enough to grab their attention, especially if there were bright colors. Conceivably, they would be willing to react to the world around them during this dead-phone period, but could return to talking as soon as I and my handy device had safely moved out of the area.
Ambulances and fire trucks could use this too. Let me know what you find. Thanks.
Your daily news source for the last 3 years is not just a 'right wing advocacy site.' It is propaganda for the Republican religious right with heavy racist overtones, plus healthy dose of general loonyness. You have commentary by Christian millennial kooks like Hal Lindsey, two separtate attacks in one day on Jesse Jackson, and (I swear) a serious article from their editor-in-chief claiming that this PS/2 "threat" is reason to finally do, um, something, really, about Saddam. It sort of gets vague from there; I think more support for the oppostion in Iraq is what he wants. Probably they should have Playstation Parity with their oppressor.
This is a Libertarian site in your opinion? In the last three years have they sounded this nutty every day, or is this a special day? My guess is that if we dig some more we'll find these credulus paranoids being taken in by lots more hoaxes like the PS/2 gag.
You can keep it. When I want news, I'll take the bland AP kind, or even the NY Times, before I trust these freaks. When I want conspiracy cult fruitcakes, I want REAL conspiracy cult fruitcakes. Give me SLACK and be off with your weak imitations.
I wish I could claim credit for the idea, but in fact someone else though of it long ago and it has been implemented already for some products.
So where do they get the resources to move the stuff back from whence it came? Maybe from the same place they get the resources to transport it to a landfill and bury it. Maybe a well-designed product ought to continue to have inherent value even after it its "useful" life is over, so that someone will find it worth while to transport it. Think about the effort it takes to collect cans, or junk cars. It is obviously worth it to someone. The good thing about such a system is that it doesn't mandate specific procedures or technologies on the manufacturer, as does a law such as requiring all the plastic in a product be of the same type. You just tell them to make the product have a green life-cyle, but let them engineer any solution they want to the problem, including throwing the product in the trash--at their expense. And their customer's expense. But not the competition's customer's expense.
Is that explanation enough?
I think the best way to encourage recycling is to require manufactures (of PC's or cars or CDs or whatever) to accept back whatever they produce when the consumer is done with it. Then it's up to the maker to decide how much effort to put into making it recyclable, since it is going to be their problem. If they don't think it is worth it, they have to pay to dispose of it themselves. On the other hand, they could plan it so cleverly that recycling their products is actually profitable. In the mean time, I would go for a kitch angle with the old CD's, and try to come up with some kind of "ironic" collector interest. It worked for ABBA and Mr. T, why not for your bad burns?
You wonder why the ones you hear about after they get caught are always seem so dumb? It is because if they were not so dumb, then they would not get caught, and then you would never have heard of them. Often they got caught by bragging about how 31337 they are. You can continue this logic to make the mystical connection with the fact that people who brag about themselves all the time are really idiots, and that in prison you can find many idiots bragging about how smart they are. There are numerous corolaries and converses to this, but they are too obvious to mention.