Just thought I would add: there's mention of Bill Gates' donations to charity. But remember that it wasn't until three or four years ago that he started being charitable. And where do most of his charity bux go? The Bill and Melinda Gates Library Foundation. They donate computers and Microsoft software to libraries. Sounds great? It's not.
The maintenance of library computers is not cheap. Nor is training library staff to use the systems. And there's no guarantee that MS is going to help upgrade the hardware or software when it becomes obsolete or no longer supported.
And the computers apparently have the tendency to show up in the richer neighborhoods' rather than in the inner-city type places where they're really needed.
So! Your public library becomes a MS cash cow, and your library system gets lousier. Yay Bill! I can't help but wonder, then, if Ford has some kind of partnership-software/upgrade selling deal through which the Ford employees get fleeced over the long term.
(Most of this I picked up from my class with Donald Gutstein. he's got an excellent book on these types of issues called e.con)
I go to a Canadian university (SFU to be exact) and there is a severe shortage of on-campus housing, and no high-speed dorm connections either. Most Canadian colleges/universities are public, and I believe fewer have ethernet connections to residences (Gotta save that government money for adequate computer labs I guess:/ ). They have it in the labs, but they have strict rules about what you can do in the labs (No games, and the lack of audio capabilities or zip drives strongly indicates they discourage large multimedia downloads). Just as well 'cause the labs can scarcely accommodate the demands for word processing as it is. You Statesiders don't know how lucky you are!
Meanwhile I had a summer job on campus, and I was literally getting up at 5 am so that I could get there by bus and have a free hour to play with that precious ethernet connection before my shift started. Mmm, speed.
I'm not surprised that digital TV hasn't appeared yet. First of all, current low-definition TV takes a lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos and TV networks would rather have more channels than a few really high quality ones. Unless they are trying to cater only to the very wealthiest consumers, perhaps... who likely don't watch so much television.
There's also some paranoia about changing the standards - I recall hearing two women in the mall talking about how the gov't was going to change the standards to digital TV, forcing everyone to get a brand new expensive TV set etc.. This was last summer sometime. TV is currently a friendly, non-demanding technology and the idea of making it "high-tech" is going to lead to similar FUD amongst the less technologically minded.
Anyways the speech seems to be referring specifically to interactive TV rather than merely digital TV. But haven't most interactive TV experiments failed? The biggest project I know of was Videotron's Videoway service in Quebec, and judging from the last annual report of theirs I saw subscriptions are dropping and the company appears to be phasing it out. No wonder the industry isn't too keen on it.
I think the humor is more in the fact that, as common as computers are, so many people have such a fundamental lack of understanding about them, by no real fault of their own. Can you imagine any other piece of commonplace hardware that people misunderstand as much as the computer? Imagine if it was the car...
"You mean I need both gasoline *and* a battery to start my car? Well, that's not what the guy at the dealership told me!"
Yeah, we all know that the decision to shut down is probably more emotional than rational. But what have e-com sites got to lose by shutting down for New Years'?
The major sites have finished their holiday TV ad runs. Everyone's done their Holiday shopping. It's bill season now: January has got to be the lowest sales month of the year. And on top of this, it's New Years. People are going to be partying all night and recovering all day, not flipping through online mail order catalogues for cute sweater sets and cheap CD-R drives. Not to mention that even accessing the site would require the end users to not experience any Y2K glitches on their end.
Besides, I think the online retailers have scared off a good chunk of the market with their sloppy work over the holidays. They're probably just avoiding a lot of spur-of-the-moment drunken "Hey! Where's my Christmas presents?" complaint mail. Can't say I'd blame 'em for that.
But I wonder if they're going to cover it time zone by time zone, still.
"New York seems to be OK... but the big question is, what will be the effect when the clock strikes twelve on the West Coast... hitting both Microsoft and Silicon Valley at the same time!!!" I'm eagerly awaiting the whole news-channel response, mainly for humor value.
There seems to be this perception among the general public that the Y2K bug, if/when it hits, will smack everyone at the same exact moment. You now: 3!...2!...1!...Zonk! Lights out.
This ignores the obvious point that not everyone sets their clocks accurately.
Besides, there's the fact that a lot of systems are already dealing with 2000 dates: e.g. insurance co's. And then there's companies that aren't going to be open for business until Monday and thus won't discover their problems until then. So I figure it'll take a couple weeks before the full Y2K picture really pans out.
The GMT point is probably what CNN and their ilk are going to be yammering about to keep people in suspense, and ratings up, on New Years' Day. If nothing notable occurs all day: "But we may not know the REAL effects of the Y2K bug for days... weeks... years!"
One slightly OT thing that I've gotta mention: Millenium Bug themed 2000 wall calendars. WTF? The only calendars I've ever seen that will be embarrassingly obsolete before the first month is up. Available now at a mall near you!
Computer cables can be used for a variety of purposes: durable shoelaces, snares for rabbits or would-be encroachers, simple tentmaking, and various other rope applications.
Obsolete docs make excellent firestarters, as does leftover dot-matrix paper (lots of people seem to still have that stuff kicking around, for some reason). The really thick manuals should make for long-lasting firelogs.
Inkjet cartridges should contain enough ink for several threatening anti-trespasser signs.
Power supplies could make for excellent booby traps, if set up to drop on intruders from sufficient height. They might also be used as "bolo" style weapons for hunting wild game.
I've got to mention how my brother Enki is spending the Y2K clickover: he and his friends have planned for a year to have a camp-out in the woods. They should currently be setting up their campsite at an undisclosed location in the Canadian wilderness, complete with propane heating, hot tub, shower and full kitchen facilities. They're even planning on taping a radio show, What The Hell, to netcast from the site. (Sorry, couldn't resist giving them a plug. Besides, their Y2K provisions list, which is certinly competitive with the best I've seen here, is linked under "events" or the Y2K banner there.)
I, meanwhile, am likely going to be partying with Dick Clark with my sweetie, possibly heading out for hometown celebrations which include a mass wedding (yeesh) and fireworks if the weather is OK. I was going to head out for provisions tomorrow morning, but only for party snackage and a box of "Millennium" crackers. It only recently occurred to me that, Y2K bug or no, I'm likely in the more hazardous situation: a basement in my bf's over-dense subdivision full of disgruntled gangsta-wannabe teenage boys. Likely sitting directly beneath a plate glass window of kickable height, defending a hoard of pizza, drinks and Playstation games.
Then again, I live in a rural enough area that we have our own well for water (no municipal service) and have a generator. Frankly, we're set. Now I just have to wait for Tuesday to see if the guys' Getaway from Y2K turns into something resembing the Blair Witch Project. I guess I can attempt to tune in to the station this Sunday to hear them muttering: "Fsck, it's cold." "Yeah, but we got an excellent view of the riot fires."
It sounds like they haven't updated Epcot at all since I first went there around '88ish. But the vision of Epcot depended on the gosh-wow factor, removing the negatives of technology, and pretending that it would cure all the ills of society. You can't sell a gleaming vision of the future if the technology is just around the bend. Even as a kid, the vision lost its magic when it got too close to home, too understandable (we had a monorail in Vancouver already, but we still had traffic jams). The technology that's overtaken Epcot is in communications, and that's the exact technology which is changing so fast that any "vision" will become reality within a few short years. Communication is also much more difficult to build an exhibit about than, say, energy sources or transportation or even agriculture. So how can they build a gleaming model of some future utopia if the technology it rides on is so close, but all the problems it purports to solve are still very much with us and a long way from resolution?
If you're going to DW, don't forget to visit the Disney/MGM Studios area. I found an excellent live example of how Disney plays fast and loose with the truth to eke out a little more cash, and they didn't even hide it terribly well to the critical eye. Last time my family went to DW (95ish), I went to the D/MGM "animation studio", where (supposedly) real live animators actually worked and you got to see all the equipment they used. Well, none of them were in that day. While the desks certainly looked lived-in, something about the artfully arranged Pocahontas sketches made me suspicious - after all, the movie was about to come out, shouldn't it be done by now? Then they took us around to the tracing and painting tables, and the camera. And that's when my BS detector really went off. I knew from newsgroup postings by Disney employees that from Little Mermaid onwards, all the tracing and coloring had been done by computer. The tables and figurines has visible dust on them. The camera was poorly shielded from extraneous light. I couldn't figure out why they would rather show the masses the classical animation methods, when they could easily wow the crowds with newfangled whiz-bang digital technology, and be honest about the process to boot. And then I saw the $1000 sericels ("print" cels, not used in production) in the gift shop. The tour was still worth it, even if not all the laughs came from the pre-recorded Robin Williams guidethrough.
Well, even if they're using widely validated psychological testing procedures, there's the issue of what they're testing for.
Probably who they're looking to uncover are the kids that are likely to commit openly violent acts in school, like knifing a teacher or shooting up other students en masse. Unfortunately, these acts are statistically rare enough that I doubt there are many proven criteria for predicting them - beyond the obvious, like making threats. And if they were only looking for such obvious signs, they wouldn't need a $10k chunk of software.
Meanwhile, there are less mediagenic forms of violence in the schools - a.k.a common bullying - which likely derive from a completely different psychological profile than that of the nascent psychopaths that everyone's so worried about these days. It probably causes more problems in the long run (what set the kids off at Columbine, after all?), but it's also more subtle, harder to catch, and is usually shrugged off as inevitable. If they could successfully screen all the kids for that kind of behaviour, I'd stand up and cheer.
And then there's the issue of how subtle the questions are. I was once part of a psych experiment and took a questionnaire about my moods ("do you ever wish you could hurt people that make you mad?") and then another questionnaire in which all the questions were about what I thought of gay men, after reading some oddly stilted "interviews" with gay men. They seemed surprised that I could tell they were testing me for homophobia! And it didn't take a genius to figure out the mood questions were a simple honesty test - to see if I was "fudging the answers". And this was a university study, done by graduate students. Just because they used common techniques to avoid tampered results doesn't mean the test is well implemented - I suspect they didn't fool anyone. The Mosaic program could easily be just as sloppy in implementation. If so, the results won't tell anyone anything they don't already know.
Schools invariably waste their money on the wrong things when anything technological is concerned. Usually because they only appraise it by appearances. I find it amusing that the Mosaic article notes that the kind of security measures that parents and school boards are screaming for post-Columbine, like video cameras, did nothing to prevent violence in the Columbine incident itself. And as for computers... oh, boy. In my last years of high school, they built a spiffy new wing to my high school for a new library. They also installed a special computer room to replace the one that was currently in an old dingy classroom. It had special computer tables along the sides, adjustable chairs, the works. All in a lovely, fashionable cream-and-burgundy decor. And carpeting. Nice, inexpensive but durable burgundy carpeting, because it looks so much lovelier than linoleum. We'd frequently get visible static shocks when we reached to turn on the computers thanks to that carpeting. They ended up buying the computers over and over again that year, so to speak. The computer tables were also hideously non-ergonomic. But hey, they looked fabulous when the school trustees did their after-hours walking tour of the place. Six months after the software gets bought, it won't matter if $10000 program is only dragged out once every six months to "appraise" kids they already know have problems. The most important thing here is "hey, we spent $10k on making the schools safer, vote for us!"
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Just thought I would add: there's mention of Bill Gates' donations to charity. But remember that it wasn't until three or four years ago that he started being charitable. And where do most of his charity bux go? The Bill and Melinda Gates Library Foundation. They donate computers and Microsoft software to libraries. Sounds great? It's not.
The maintenance of library computers is not cheap. Nor is training library staff to use the systems. And there's no guarantee that MS is going to help upgrade the hardware or software when it becomes obsolete or no longer supported.
And the computers apparently have the tendency to show up in the richer neighborhoods' rather than in the inner-city type places where they're really needed.
So! Your public library becomes a MS cash cow, and your library system gets lousier. Yay Bill! I can't help but wonder, then, if Ford has some kind of partnership-software/upgrade selling deal through which the Ford employees get fleeced over the long term.
(Most of this I picked up from my class with Donald Gutstein. he's got an excellent book on these types of issues called e.con)
I go to a Canadian university (SFU to be exact) and there is a severe shortage of on-campus housing, and no high-speed dorm connections either. Most Canadian colleges/universities are public, and I believe fewer have ethernet connections to residences (Gotta save that government money for adequate computer labs I guess :/ ). They have it in the labs, but they have strict rules about what you can do in the labs (No games, and the lack of audio capabilities or zip drives strongly indicates they discourage large multimedia downloads). Just as well 'cause the labs can scarcely accommodate the demands for word processing as it is. You Statesiders don't know how lucky you are!
Meanwhile I had a summer job on campus, and I was literally getting up at 5 am so that I could get there by bus and have a free hour to play with that precious ethernet connection before my shift started. Mmm, speed.
I'm not surprised that digital TV hasn't appeared yet. First of all, current low-definition TV takes a lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos and TV networks would rather have more channels than a few really high quality ones. Unless they are trying to cater only to the very wealthiest consumers, perhaps... who likely don't watch so much television.
There's also some paranoia about changing the standards - I recall hearing two women in the mall talking about how the gov't was going to change the standards to digital TV, forcing everyone to get a brand new expensive TV set etc.. This was last summer sometime. TV is currently a friendly, non-demanding technology and the idea of making it "high-tech" is going to lead to similar FUD amongst the less technologically minded.
Anyways the speech seems to be referring specifically to interactive TV rather than merely digital TV. But haven't most interactive TV experiments failed? The biggest project I know of was Videotron's Videoway service in Quebec, and judging from the last annual report of theirs I saw subscriptions are dropping and the company appears to be phasing it out. No wonder the industry isn't too keen on it.
"You mean I need both gasoline *and* a battery to start my car? Well, that's not what the guy at the dealership told me!"
The major sites have finished their holiday TV ad runs. Everyone's done their Holiday shopping. It's bill season now: January has got to be the lowest sales month of the year. And on top of this, it's New Years. People are going to be partying all night and recovering all day, not flipping through online mail order catalogues for cute sweater sets and cheap CD-R drives. Not to mention that even accessing the site would require the end users to not experience any Y2K glitches on their end.
Besides, I think the online retailers have scared off a good chunk of the market with their sloppy work over the holidays. They're probably just avoiding a lot of spur-of-the-moment drunken "Hey! Where's my Christmas presents?" complaint mail. Can't say I'd blame 'em for that.
But I wonder if they're going to cover it time zone by time zone, still.
"New York seems to be OK... but the big question is, what will be the effect when the clock strikes twelve on the West Coast... hitting both Microsoft and Silicon Valley at the same time!!!" I'm eagerly awaiting the whole news-channel response, mainly for humor value.
This ignores the obvious point that not everyone sets their clocks accurately.
Besides, there's the fact that a lot of systems are already dealing with 2000 dates: e.g. insurance co's. And then there's companies that aren't going to be open for business until Monday and thus won't discover their problems until then. So I figure it'll take a couple weeks before the full Y2K picture really pans out.
The GMT point is probably what CNN and their ilk are going to be yammering about to keep people in suspense, and ratings up, on New Years' Day. If nothing notable occurs all day: "But we may not know the REAL effects of the Y2K bug for days... weeks... years!"
One slightly OT thing that I've gotta mention: Millenium Bug themed 2000 wall calendars. WTF? The only calendars I've ever seen that will be embarrassingly obsolete before the first month is up. Available now at a mall near you!
I've got to mention how my brother Enki is spending the Y2K clickover: he and his friends have planned for a year to have a camp-out in the woods. They should currently be setting up their campsite at an undisclosed location in the Canadian wilderness, complete with propane heating, hot tub, shower and full kitchen facilities. They're even planning on taping a radio show, What The Hell, to netcast from the site. (Sorry, couldn't resist giving them a plug. Besides, their Y2K provisions list, which is certinly competitive with the best I've seen here, is linked under "events" or the Y2K banner there.)
I, meanwhile, am likely going to be partying with Dick Clark with my sweetie, possibly heading out for hometown celebrations which include a mass wedding (yeesh) and fireworks if the weather is OK. I was going to head out for provisions tomorrow morning, but only for party snackage and a box of "Millennium" crackers. It only recently occurred to me that, Y2K bug or no, I'm likely in the more hazardous situation: a basement in my bf's over-dense subdivision full of disgruntled gangsta-wannabe teenage boys. Likely sitting directly beneath a plate glass window of kickable height, defending a hoard of pizza, drinks and Playstation games.
Then again, I live in a rural enough area that we have our own well for water (no municipal service) and have a generator. Frankly, we're set. Now I just have to wait for Tuesday to see if the guys' Getaway from Y2K turns into something resembing the Blair Witch Project. I guess I can attempt to tune in to the station this Sunday to hear them muttering: "Fsck, it's cold." "Yeah, but we got an excellent view of the riot fires."
It sounds like they haven't updated Epcot at all since I first went there around '88ish. But the vision of Epcot depended on the gosh-wow factor, removing the negatives of technology, and pretending that it would cure all the ills of society. You can't sell a gleaming vision of the future if the technology is just around the bend. Even as a kid, the vision lost its magic when it got too close to home, too understandable (we had a monorail in Vancouver already, but we still had traffic jams). The technology that's overtaken Epcot is in communications, and that's the exact technology which is changing so fast that any "vision" will become reality within a few short years. Communication is also much more difficult to build an exhibit about than, say, energy sources or transportation or even agriculture. So how can they build a gleaming model of some future utopia if the technology it rides on is so close, but all the problems it purports to solve are still very much with us and a long way from resolution?
If you're going to DW, don't forget to visit the Disney/MGM Studios area. I found an excellent live example of how Disney plays fast and loose with the truth to eke out a little more cash, and they didn't even hide it terribly well to the critical eye.
Last time my family went to DW (95ish), I went to the D/MGM "animation studio", where (supposedly) real live animators actually worked and you got to see all the equipment they used. Well, none of them were in that day. While the desks certainly looked lived-in, something about the artfully arranged Pocahontas sketches made me suspicious - after all, the movie was about to come out, shouldn't it be done by now?
Then they took us around to the tracing and painting tables, and the camera. And that's when my BS detector really went off. I knew from newsgroup postings by Disney employees that from Little Mermaid onwards, all the tracing and coloring had been done by computer. The tables and figurines has visible dust on them. The camera was poorly shielded from extraneous light.
I couldn't figure out why they would rather show the masses the classical animation methods, when they could easily wow the crowds with newfangled whiz-bang digital technology, and be honest about the process to boot. And then I saw the $1000 sericels ("print" cels, not used in production) in the gift shop.
The tour was still worth it, even if not all the laughs came from the pre-recorded Robin Williams guidethrough.
Well, even if they're using widely validated psychological testing procedures, there's the issue of what they're testing for.
Probably who they're looking to uncover are the kids that are likely to commit openly violent acts in school, like knifing a teacher or shooting up other students en masse. Unfortunately, these acts are statistically rare enough that I doubt there are many proven criteria for predicting them - beyond the obvious, like making threats. And if they were only looking for such obvious signs, they wouldn't need a $10k chunk of software.
Meanwhile, there are less mediagenic forms of violence in the schools - a.k.a common bullying - which likely derive from a completely different psychological profile than that of the nascent psychopaths that everyone's so worried about these days. It probably causes more problems in the long run (what set the kids off at Columbine, after all?), but it's also more subtle, harder to catch, and is usually shrugged off as inevitable. If they could successfully screen all the kids for that kind of behaviour, I'd stand up and cheer.
And then there's the issue of how subtle the questions are. I was once part of a psych experiment and took a questionnaire about my moods ("do you ever wish you could hurt people that make you mad?") and then another questionnaire in which all the questions were about what I thought of gay men, after reading some oddly stilted "interviews" with gay men. They seemed surprised that I could tell they were testing me for homophobia! And it didn't take a genius to figure out the mood questions were a simple honesty test - to see if I was "fudging the answers". And this was a university study, done by graduate students. Just because they used common techniques to avoid tampered results doesn't mean the test is well implemented - I suspect they didn't fool anyone. The Mosaic program could easily be just as sloppy in implementation. If so, the results won't tell anyone anything they don't already know.
Schools invariably waste their money on the wrong things when anything technological is concerned. Usually because they only appraise it by appearances.
I find it amusing that the Mosaic article notes that the kind of security measures that parents and school boards are screaming for post-Columbine, like video cameras, did nothing to prevent violence in the Columbine incident itself.
And as for computers... oh, boy. In my last years of high school, they built a spiffy new wing to my high school for a new library. They also installed a special computer room to replace the one that was currently in an old dingy classroom. It had special computer tables along the sides, adjustable chairs, the works. All in a lovely, fashionable cream-and-burgundy decor.
And carpeting. Nice, inexpensive but durable burgundy carpeting, because it looks so much lovelier than linoleum.
We'd frequently get visible static shocks when we reached to turn on the computers thanks to that carpeting. They ended up buying the computers over and over again that year, so to speak. The computer tables were also hideously non-ergonomic. But hey, they looked fabulous when the school trustees did their after-hours walking tour of the place.
Six months after the software gets bought, it won't matter if $10000 program is only dragged out once every six months to "appraise" kids they already know have problems. The most important thing here is "hey, we spent $10k on making the schools safer, vote for us!"