Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for November, 2007
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
While the Eee will be perfectly capable at handling older games, we found that anything newer tended to fall flat on its face for several reasons. First and foremost is the Intel GMA900 graphics chip -– second is the fact that the Eee’s processor is actually running at 630MHz instead of the alleged 900MHz that has been such a popular number until this point.
The Eee’s shipping BIOS –- and the recently updated version -– both lock the front-side bus to only 70MHz, bringing the processor and memory clocks down with it. There is a “leaked†BIOS floating around from ASUS’s international site, but it caused the Eee to become unstable to the point where tests would not reliably complete. ^
Ouch! That’s an ugly glitch to an otherwise enthralling machine. With the motherboard technology we have in proven state today, I see no reason not to have a faster bus and possibly even 1 GHz processor. It won’t consume that much more memory. The one area Asus does get to play around is with internal design within its specification, and a little more creative engineering here could make this machine far more usable.
Posted in Industrial Design | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
In terms of price, performance, and features the Asus Eee PC hits the trifecta and could be a game-changer in the mobile market. Thanks to its combination of Intel hardware and a non-bloated Linux install, reviewers found that Asus’s little laptop performs just as well as much larger and more expensive Windows notebooks.
The device does support Windows XP, but Linux seems to be the OS of choice of reviewers for performance and ease-of-use reasons. In this respect, Microsoft has well and truly blown it, because this device is poised to introduce a few million Best Buy shoppers to a pleasantly usable, non-embedded Linux distro.^
Linux is far from perfect (BSD is more fun and more stable, especially in a server environment). Windows is not only good, but getting better. However, there are also many advantages to Linux. Among other things, it encourages people to buy white boxes instead of Macs, Dells and HPs.
For some years people have wondered when Linux would make inroads to desktop computing. After all, it is free. However, it doesn’t work on all hardware, and often takes hours of tedious work to make simple changes to the operating system. Also, it does not have the broad software base that Windows has.
What has made Windows predominant is the convergence of several factors: it’s cheap, because most people burn a CD-R from a friend. It works very intuitively, more so than the Mac, although you won’t see this mentioned in the computer media. It is backward compatible with a giant library of software. Simple changes occur quickly, and the operating system gives a lot of power to its users, even if more than they should have sometimes.
The recent rash of viruses, trojans and other Windows problems gave Microsoft a chance to step up to the plate. Their response was to hurry Vista along, because they do not believe that the older versions of Windows can be safe and still support marketing objectives, like pushing ActiveX and BHOs and other Microsofty standards on the rest of us. In the meantime, Apple is selling more machines, but the pretentious, smug and combative users have made more than one ex-user flee in disgust.
Wal-Mart just began selling its $200 PC which uses a relatively non-bloated Linux installation called gOS and online apps from Google. The future of Linux, like that of Intel competitor AMD, is in being cheaper or free and starting out on the lower-end machines. It’s interesting that the machine to do this might be both lower-end and luxury, in that it gives its users the cheap, durable, uncomplicated laptop users have always said they have wanted.
The last time this happened, around 1988, was when Toshiba brought out the T-1000 laptop. It had no hard drive. It had an ugly, simple screen and a squishy, simple keyboard. But it sold for about $700 discount or used, could take a few hours of battery charge, and if you used shareware word processors and telecommunications software, could do everything a $2500 laptop could do and often could do it longer.
Toshiba promptly forgot these lessons, and maybe Asus will as well, but the users have yet again spoken: they want technology that’s durable, cheap, simple and doesn’t get in the way, and if Windows and HP don’t offer it, they’ll rush to whatever savvy marketer rises up with all the dunces in confederacy against him/her and offers it.
Posted in Industrial Design | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
In this post, I’m going to be entirely redundant and cite the topics of two past posts and show where there’s commonality, then get even more redundant and talk about stuff that was the tedium du jour in your first English Lit class. (The nice thing about blogs is that having one both allows you to assume that no one is reading it, and write it as if they and many other important people are.)
The first is something I want to remind you of, and then contrast to what’s coming.
The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. ^
I’ve mentioned Tom Wolfe on this blog before, as I’ve mentioned William Gibson and William S. Burroughs. What I like about these writers is that they view writing as a means to communicate something which cannot be found elsewhere, which is the experience of learning and how it shapes your soul. They write in the context of the quotation above because this is how humans define our own soul-shaping. We are social creatures who exist in a society, and finding a balance between ourselves and this society is essential.
My first English Lit teacher told me that literature took on three forms. These forms defined the types of struggle in our lives, because struggle is how we find balance between two possible options. Through struggle characters define themselves, because when there’s nothing pressing bearing down on their lives, they tend to do nothing important and take nothing seriously, which makes for very very boring literature. Here are the three forms:
- Humans against humans
- Human against himself/herself
- Human against other humans
- Humans against Nature
- Humans against Society
 The really tricky part there is the word “against.” Against doesn’t necessarily mean acts of terrorism. It does mean a jihad, or spirit-quest, to define oneself and where one’s limits are. A good example is the college student offered $5000 to act in a porno film. She’s got debts, she’s worried about the future, and doesn’t that sound easy — instead, she decides she’ll find another way of making money, and ends up owning a business that sells study guides to other struggling students. OK, that’s cheesy literature, but nonetheless, it’s literature.
Thomas Wolfe expands upon this idea with his concept of status. He has said that his books to date are about status, which corresponds to an internalized or externalized form of Nietzschean will to power. Status is social power, or cognitive dissonance internalized and a personal, moral power as we might see in Flannery O’Connor books. (If taken further, this becomes guilt power, and you find that in the execrable Barbara Kingsolver.)
Like most liberal arts students, I’d always looked down my nose at sociology as this kind of bogus science. When I finally had to deal with it in graduate school, I quickly came to the conclusion, which I maintain to this day, that it is, in fact, the queen of the sciences. I won’t get into this, but biology, in my mind, is a subset of sociology, not the other way around.
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Sociology is the big picture. As I say, I have a long involved theory, but I’ll only inflict that if you really want to know. My first great real flash was reading the work of Max Weber, who wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He wrote Class, Caste and Status, and many others, mostly essays. But he’s the one who originated the concept of status as a motivating force in life. It was one of those things that’s under everybody’s nose, but he gave it a name.
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My belief is that everyone, me included — I hate theories that don’t apply to the person who thought up the theory — All people live by what I call “the fiction absolute,” which is a set of values which, if absolute — in other words, God said, “Hey, here are the values,” and you heard the voice clearly — would make not you, yourself, but your group — your status group, whatever that may be comprised of — the best there is. For example, a group of good ol’ boys sitting around a general store in the South, and I’ve been around that a lot, they usually — things can get confused in this era — but they usually are very content to be good ol’ boys. And they’re not only content, but they value that life very, very highly. People who are obviously their superiors — or, in my case, my superiors — military people, politicians, President of the United States, movie stars, whatever — they become types who are really outside of your life. And whatever they’re doing doesn’t matter. Unless they move in the neighborhood, then it creates real problems. It really does. And so that just about everything we do is controlled by that constant need to feel that our status is being kept at a certain level. It doesn’t mean necessarily status climbing. It usually doesn’t mean that. More often it means believing that what you’re doing now, the people you’re with now, the values you have, are the most important.
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When I hit upon the whole concept of status and status absolute and all that, I was convinced that there is a part of the brain that controls this. For example, you can tell when you’re humiliated before you could put it into words. Something goes off. And you haven’t reasoned it all out. It’s just happened. And this has to be neurological in some way.
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Edward O. Wilson is probably the dominant theorist in neuroscience today. He once said in an interview — he probably would never write this as clearly — he said every human brain is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience, but as a negative — as in the film, negative in a camera — that is waiting to be dipped into developer fluid. And the idea is, it can be developed well, it can be developed badly, according to the environment. But no matter how it’s developed, you’re not going to get any more than is on that negative at birth. Which, of course, gets into the whole theory of genetics and things like hard-wiring of the brain and so on.
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I do not know who first said this, but one of the principles of neuroscience is that if you took a rock and you threw it, and in mid-flight of that rock you gave it consciousness and the power to reason, that rock would give you, until the day it hit the earth, the most cogent and absolutely ironclad logic as to why he’s going in this direction, and why he hasn’t chosen another direction, and why he’s happy with his choice. ^
This of course stumbles along quite brightly into what they call destiny in the Star Wars movies. Wolfe rejects the external causes, like class and sexuality, that are the main talking points of Marxism and Freudianism, but he stops short of talking about the next level. Arthur Schopenhauer has no such hangup.
“A stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after that impulse given by the external cause has ceased…Conceive of that stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing that it is endeavouring as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor…would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion, solely because of its own wish. That is human freedom…which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desired has been determined.” ^
Just to keep ourselves confused, let’s return to the statement we started with, which I consider a good mission statement for literature: The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. I’m going to distill that down further and say The goal of literature is to describe the relationship between the individual and the outside world, because this includes humanity versus nature from our list of three above. We might also have to add on to the end and the relationship between the individual and his/her knowledge of that outside world, so we can accomodate cases when the individual is at war with himself/herself over knowledge, including moral knowledge, that others do not see.
How do we understand this in the face of the kind of biological determinism than Nietzsche and Wolfe talk about? First we have to realize that they are speaking of biological potential and tendencies, which means “free will” is probably not a reality, but “choice” might be, and that even if our choice patterns are predetermined, we can pick the best options available in those patterns. For example if I am biologically predisposed to pick whatever food at lunch has the most cheese, I can opt to pick one with feta and not gouda, get less fat and not die of cancer and so become more biologically successful.
Next we should look at how Wolfeian status effects the three categories of literature. Wolfe’s fiction absolute could be defined as a sense of place, and when that does not exist (the challenge of newcomers of higher status coming to town), the struggle for status could be seen as either a desire for making things happen as his character Charlotte Simmons does, or an impulse to deny the lack of “free will” and invent some other type of status, like fake morality or some personal pretense of the ego as absolute.
- Human fighting to be content with own perceived status.
- Human in denial of lack of free will; cognitive dissonance.
- Human fighting for lack of status in society.
What makes Wolfe’s status so interesting is that it represents not the primal struggle of literature but the human solution to it, which is either fiction absolute or a contentment with life as it has happened (biological determinism) or an impulse to struggle for higher status, whether real (evolutionary) or imagined (social status). It is this re-interpretation of the classic definition of literature that makes me think Tom Wolfe has not only fully understood postmodernism, but transcended it, in the same way William S. Burroughs has done but Thomas Pynchon has not.
Posted in Literature, Psychology | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 5th, 2007
One of the reasons I find life inspiring is the endless variation of humanity, at least among those who think. They’re like little chaos engines out of control, but they’re making the kind of chaos that breeds new futures, not the kind of chaos that is simply disorder, like an old garage stuffed with junk too useless for anyone to sort through.
Some of these chaotic humans recently invented an Endless Coffee Pot as part of their senior thesis in electrical engineering. They designed, built, and programmed (in C++) a microcontroller-assisted coffee pot that loads itself with coffee, drains out stale coffee, throws out coffee grounds, and maintains a constant temperature. It has an LCD display and would very easily make a vending machine.
According to their paper on the topic, the endless coffee pot (ECP) requires little or no user interaction. “The user would enter the current time, start time, interval of operation and stop time. The other tasks that would require user maintenance would be the loading of coffee pouches into the dispenser and unloading used pouches from the waste receptacle.”
The paper goes on to give us technical specs and a project description. “The core component of the entire product is a ‘run-of-the-mill’ Proctor Silex coffee maker [1] which performs the basic brewing process. The brain of the product is Mini-Max/51C-2 8051 microcontroller board manufactured by BiPOM Electronics [2] and interfaces with all sensors, pumps, and motors through the Custom-Built Integration Board (CBIB). ”
Humanity keeps delighting me with its chaos, and the ECP surely qualifies. Some chaos is like lively thoughts on no particular topic, but other chaos is like the mental checklists I do at the end of the night before I fall asleep. These are laundry lists with no order, and so each item no matter how small seems the most important until thinking about it exhausts me, and I drop into the lively chaos of dreams.
Posted in Industrial Design | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 5th, 2007
Most consumers treat online privacy notices like the ‘UL’ labels on physical products, he said. “People think privacy notices mean certain default protections. Consumers don’t understand that privacy policies are just notices. They don’t guarantee any rights.”
One example of that disconnect is that more than half — about 55 percent — of those surveyed falsely assumed that a company’s privacy polices prohibited it from sharing their addresses and purchases with affiliated companies.
Compounding user ignorance is the fact that many companies say they respect a user’s choice not to be tracked, yet still find ways of circumventing that commitment, Hoofnagle said. For instance, some Web sites that promise not to allow third-party tracking cookies to be installed on a user’s system do so anyway in a roundabout fashion via so-called first-party sub-domain cookies, he said. Similarly, some companies install flash cookies to uniquely track users across sites, he said. ^
When I write about security, I write from the perspective of many years’ experience securing systems, which necessarily includes the human dimension. Anyone who does not accept the human dimension, or scorns users by saying “Only a total idiot would do that,” misses the point. It is reality that humans will screw up. It is reality that even good offices may hire idiots. It is true that many advanced degree types can be perfectly functional with complex technology, but blow off the simple stuff, creating disaster in their wake.
 Users are going to get the security game wrong. If you make them use hard passwords, they will write those passwords down on sticky notes, especially if the passwords change frequently. If you present them with a one-page document that looks like a contract, but is in actuality a “policy” that no one intends to follow, they will fall for it. If you, as CNN.com and other major press houses did, make a giant big deal about cookies, they will become trained to ask about cookies and forget everything else, including tracking images, flash bugs and passed string tokens.
The solution to user security is to simplify the process, inform the user, and make it a regular part of their experience. Just like washing hands before you leave a bathroom. For the web end-user, we need a contract suggesting general practices that web sites follow, and then we need specific policies that are binding so that users can read in one place, in four or five paragraphs, what will happen with their data — not empty promises as to what nonexistent threats won’t happen with it.
Posted in Information Technology, User Advocacy | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
 I discovered Tom Wolfe later in my reading career, mainly because the first book of his I picked up, The Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, annoyed me stylistically so much I resolved never to read any of his terrible prose again. I still feel he often overwrites, but that he gets the concepts and characters correct, and so is more profound than many who are better at stringing together sentences. In this he reminds me of William Gibson and Michael Crichton, both of whom often write bready text that discusses the underlying and invisible issues of the day that most people don’t know how to tackle.
If you’re going to read Wolfe, in my view, the book to read is A Man in Full, which is about heroism as an alternative to the ethic of convenience that makes people think they’re succeeding and escaping the errors of our time, but really lays the fertile seeds for future misery.
But reading was the sort of thing you did in idle hours if you didn’t want to go out and play. I just read constantly. I’m sure if I was that age today, I would be watching as much television as anybody else, but it’s a huge advantage if you ever start writing.
I began to notice, when I was working on magazines years later, I kept looking over my shoulder for the new talent that would be coming along which would be competition for those of us who had reached the ripe age of 37 or 38, and it wasn’t there. It just never got there. And part of it is that today, I think, so many talented writers want to go into television, or they want to go into movie writing. Those are the hot industries. But without that reading, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to turn out to be much of a writer.
Now my daughter Alexandra, who’s 24 now, she went to a very tough all-girls school here in New York. And that school is so hard, she watched exactly one hour of television a week. Not because my wife and I said, “You can’t go near that set.” We never said that. She would watch Beverly Hills 90210. That was the only thing she ever watched on television. She read and read. And now– you don’t mind a father bragging a little, do you? So today she’s 24 and she’s got a book contract. She’s worked on two newspapers. She worked on the New York Observer, a weekly here in New York, and she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and a publishing house approached her and gave her this book contract. And I think it’s partly because she read, she read, she read, she read, she read. It got to the point where she didn’t care about television.^
I refuse to own a television, but like his daughter, I don’t even face the issue. There’s too many other activities on which I would rather spend my irreplaceable time than watching television. Every time I do watch a movie or TV, I end up sitting there afterwards with a slight depression, because I gave hours of my life to someone else’s (badly expressed) dream and it made me no richer.
Posted in Literature | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. This is most notable in the novel; in fact, it is almost a definition of the novel. In poetry, the relationship is more complex. Poetry often seems to be the individual testing how far they can remove themselves from society.
The situation now, it seems to me, is one in which the particular individualism that literature has depicted (and, in large part, created) is in the process of breaking down. There are a number of reasons for this: changes in society and advances in science are the most important. ^
As the book publishing industry continues to hide how badly it is doing, many of us who want to write for a living find ourselves in the awkward position of wondering if the publishing industry will be around for us. While anyone who has ever stared at a residual check has mixed feelings about the death of the overhead-intensive record or book publishing industry, the truth remains that large, centralized corporations are the best way of concentrating power and getting books out to the rest of society.
 It’s kind of like your liver, in a way. Somewhere in the body there needs to be a central chemical processing unit, and if there’s not one, it has to go on in each of the cells but this means that you trade efficiency for localization. While I like the idea of localization, I know it doesn’t apply universally. We need some form of “book liver” to spread the best of our works to the world.
There’s no polite way to say what most people who are not employed by the book industry are thinking. Books lately have very little to offer us. They’re a lot like the mass media, which seems to “miss” big issues like climate change while it’s busy covering Britney Spears, as Carl Bernstein just noted.
He said more resources are being devoted to the lifestyles of celebrities such as Donald Trump and Paris Hilton.
“The problems we have in news and journalism are about us not doing our job well enough,” Bernstein said. “The ideal of providing the best available version of the truth is being affected by the dominance of a journalistic culture that has less and less to do with reality and context.”
Bernstein, 63, said he believes an “idiot culture” is partly to blame for the dysfunction of political life in the United States.
“You can’t separate the appetites and demands of the people themselves and what they are given,” he said. “The blame simply can’t all be put at the feet of those who present news.”^
Books now are written like blogs. They are generally about the author. We can justify this in terms of postmodern theory, but when every book is written in this style, it becomes less of progress and more of an excuse to do what is easy. Books now are not relevant to our lives, in that they do not explain the role of the individual in society, or even the individual in any context except a glorification of our neurotic little pleasures and pains. No big topics are covered. This makes books with a few exceptions totally irrelevant to their audience that isn’t looking for the literary equivalent of Paris Hilton.
If literature and sci-fi want to continue existing, they have to get more relevant to their readers’ lives. This means we have to get over all the social bullshit that we think is really important when it has caught us up in it, but years later we realize was just a distraction. We as writers must return to writing about the important issues in life, like our moral direction as individuals, the direction of our civilization, the future decisions we must take to make sure there’s beauty in our lives. This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing what Tom Wolfe calls “realism,” which is books that try to be gritty and realistic and end up being self-obsessive and neurotic. You can write about problems and complain about society all day long but unless you’re offering a different theory about how things should be done, your book is about life’s failings incoveniencing you, not changing your soul.
I have found that whenever a book comes out that rewards the experience of struggling for something that is not convenient in life, it sells in droves, and the publishers never expected it. They have become so accustomed to catering to the ethic of convenience that seems to propel our time, thinking it is what the audience demands, that they have forgotten what people have rewarded in stories for millennia. We want a sweet story. We want someone tackling life in an allegorical way, learning, growing as a result, and then returning to have success. We want the hero to get the girl and the lone artist to succeed, we want the mountain to get climbed, we want the single mother to rise above her circumstances and triumph. But you don’t get that kind of triumph without a metaphysical and moral learning that you find in the literary classics.
Publishing has failed because it has taken a detour into “realism,” forgetting that realism can be an aesthetic and not a topic. We don’t want to hear about every detail of life. We know. We want to see life’s details swept up in a tempest of metaphor that makes clarity of them, and gives us a reason to move on. Just like in sci-fi, we don’t want to see another post-apocalyptic world where everything is miserable. We want a reason to make our world better than that otherwise inevitable fate.
There are those clueless people who think that literature is stagnating because we have not developed the form of the novel enough. Form? Joyce went overboard with form, and few can read it, and among those that can read, few of them want to. The form of literature has changed little over the last three thousand years, because literature will always be first and foremost about the story. What happened, who changed, how’d they get the strength to do it, and finally did they triumph or fade away. That’s literature, no matter if it’s told by a talking postmodern unicorn made of unassociated string theory automata or an ancient Greek sailor with mud in his beard.
Almost all of the people I see published in book stores should not have been published, at least in literature and science fiction. They’re getting to enjoy rock star treatment for filling our minds with the neurotic self-indulgent ramblings of people who have never known moral struggle, or wanted something better for the world as a whole. It’s no surprise that people aren’t buying this stuff. If literature is to survive, it needs to reverse this direction and strike out again for the greatness in stories.
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
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