Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: BlogArchive for April, 2008What does undersea internet cable look like?Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008You probably didn’t, but I always did wonder about this. The answer is provided by our homies at Pipe International, who provide us with an informative illustration:
It’s a big thick plastic thing with a core of steel wires, and right at the very center, some tiny fluff of fiber optic cable that carries the signal. On Apple’s rising market shareMonday, April 21st, 2008In short notes, Apple is rising among the power users who are disgusted by a ream of security failures under Windows XP, and are buying into the (incorrect) hype about how broken Vista is. So more bandwagon-jumpers appear, the most notable being today’s post from developer Peter Bright:
People are jumping on the bash Windows bandwagon, and like most trends, this is only partially true. It’s a trend to bash Vista, too, but back in real life, many people are enjoying it and using it productively. And it’s an attempt to circumvent some of the problems described in his article.
Data portability is expensive, and exponentially so when custom formats are used, and they’re often necessary. The real problem is that most people are not paying attention to what they’re doing, most managers are clueless, and most customers, oblivious. People are making junk software because they can and get away with it, but there are some excellent applications, although they’re in the minority. A Honda is no Mercedes but people still buy them because they work for their needs. It’s the same way with most software, and with Windows, there’s the perception that for things like real-time audio drivers, you’ll install a third party one. I agree Microsoft could do better, and I think it’s great that people are putting pressure on them, but I refuse to buy into the trend, especially since Apple has claimed superiority since 1984 and has been wrong every time. I agree that Microsoft should emulate their older software, and if you look at the history of what they’ve done, they’ve slowly done this and have done it before with cmd.exe, which is not DOS but acts just like DOS, but better. They’re just more cautious because, unlike Apple, they pay attention to legacy needs and the needs of consumers who aren’t graphic artists who want to spend top dollar on new, pretty hardware. Bright does mention one area I have harped on for years:
But I started harping on it when I was a Macintosh developer, because their interface and APIs were inconsistent. Windows has through accretion over time and some poor corporate decision-making followed that same path, and that’s why it’s time for Vista to leapfrog us away from XP, and for Windows 7 to run a new API with win32 in isolation. That decision will have massive repercussions. For one, once you’ve got something coded to work with Windows, you can keep updating it with little effort, and it costs you very little. Recoding will cost everyone quite a bit of tasty cash. For another, customers are content with XP and its applications, even if to my mind they look and operate like something out of the 1980s, but faster. It’ll be a fun showdown. I find it sad that power users migrate to Macintosh instead of Linux or FreeBSD for two reasons. First, what makes the Mac stable at all (absent its flaky backward-compatibility APIs) is the FreeBSD core upon which it’s built. Second, moving to Apple is moving to a shop that’s even more closed and dictatorial than Microsoft. Open source software is often not so great, but a lot of it is quite impressive, and closed source software for UNIX has mostly moved to the point where you can install it on a Linux and/or BSD box. I remain agnostic about technology. Linux, for all of its greatness, has its flaws and flaws in its business model that make it laborous to use. FreeBSD has a community that sometimes sabotages itself so violently you have to wonder what they’re thinking. Microsoft has its own flaws, and Apple too many to count, starting with its complete lack of direction, its hardware lock-in, its snooty users, its careless attitude toward user rights, and most of all its pompous image. When I think of returning to the good old days of computing, where the fun of technology came before the marketing decisions designed to appeal to the numb and dumb masses, I think of a new frontier like what Linux and FreeBSD offer. Nothing will be as easy as with a Win XP box, but you get to play, and preserving that sense of joy in work is more important oftentime than finding a boring standard to which we need to conform. UMPCs get public recognitionFriday, April 18th, 2008
Nice to see a mainstream source I respect noting what I noted some time ago. I’d compare the UMPC to the T-1000, however, and I’d point out that what we’re seeing is the convergence of cell phones (which have become computers) and computers, with the new device favoring the form factor of the former. Light, cheap, massively portable. Laptop computers on the other hand are like slim desktops with smaller parts. The computer market has shown no signs of radical growth. People keep upgrading, but they’re less inspired. The future is an expandable desktop at home, network aware gadgets scattered through your life, and a dynabook style micro-laptop for basic tasks on the road. It’s a better future than having all of us enslaved to bulky technology. Now if Web 2.0 software would only follow the same path… Information overflowFriday, April 18th, 2008Looks like even the blogosphere is getting sick of its Ouroboric cliquishness:
As posted here before, we need editors to make sense of all this mess. There’s no sense having every user filter through every news item, when someone who is good at that sort of thing might do it well. Otherwise, why is there a “top” of the blogosphere? What Slashdot, Arrington, Battelle, and others do well is not posting news of a tangential or duplicate nature. They find the best thesis statements on the topic, compile them, and give us the skinny.
Web 3.0 isn’t going to be about the user until we determine what the user actually wants and needs to be doing. This goes back to the oldest fight in the web industry, one I’ve had with clients and executives many times: they want something flashy, but those of us who are both geeks and user-centric designers want a web application that has inherent function. What are the big successes of the web? Google (research), Amazon (retail), e-mail and Twitter (communication), blogs (identity). Other than that, the many small successes are the numerous business and government sites that let you take care of life’s many details with a few clicks.
As if proof of his statement, this blog post is filled with mostly redundant views caused by bloggers commenting on each other by taking a basic idea, adding observations, and making it their own.
Again, what the web needs is more competent aggregators with an eye toward real benefit to the user. Why do people read Slashdot? It’s the important news about technology, and its real benefit is not posting the stuff that’s duplicated or tangentially relevant.
Go for the jugular of the story like an old time newspaper reporter. Stop information overflow — by not posting what is, in the clarity of necessary efficiency common to the last half-hour of consciousness, not necessary. The forgotten generationFriday, April 18th, 2008
We have, as marketing history would tag them, the Jazz Generation, the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and now, the Forgotten Generation. These are, respectively, the great-grandparents of Generation X, the grandparents of Generation X, the parents of Generation X, and Generation Xers themselves. I think we have to look at the span of generations influencing one another. WWI was a horror for all involved. Europeans saw it as fratricide; Americans saw it as the ultimate example of the pointlessness of modern wars. People had to shift gears from “the war to end all wars” to “it was pointless” in ten minutes of conversation, and it turned their hair white. They never got over it. The generation after them hoped to avoid the same horrors, but was so busy with the hangover of WWI, called by some The Great Depression (and what was so great about it?) that it rejoiced in the chance to redeem itself through modern warfare. We hear about how great these people were without getting the message that they were basically on a turkey shoot against a ferocious but tiny enemy. Few historians were amazed that the bad guys didn’t win WWII. Of course, with all that Greatest Generation hoopla floating around, the generation after them had to prove itself somehow. Their war was so obviously pointless they became selfless, pacifistic altruists who were in private greedy hedonists. We hear about how great the hippies were, how pure, and now they’re all bankers who don’t regret all that free sex, free drugs, free ride from a Greatest Generation that couldn’t stop tooting its own horn. I have another term for Generation X: the shellshocked generation. This whole load of horrors I’ve described came down on our shoulders and we couldn’t find anyone to trust. Generation X became slackers because they didn’t trust American culture, or its counterculture, or even each other. We wanted to get the heck out of Dodge as quickly as possible, and if that meant camping out in a garage apartment eating Ramen for a decade or so, we were cool with that, at least until we turn 37 and “get responsible.” Current generations inherit from these last four generations. Good luck to them. Gordimer to my mind takes a funny but unkind look at these people. Just like some slackers turn out to be heroes, maybe some IM-ers will turn out OK too. The Sunshine Brothers featuring Owen PlantThursday, April 17th, 2008
Gaming the systemThursday, April 17th, 2008
Today’s pattern is that of people gaming the system. This means that when we create a well-intentioned method for handling a situation, someone looks at it and thinks, “I can’t change the underlying mechanics of the situation, but I can make the method think I did.” Kind of like putting a xeroxed dollar bill in a vending machine, or putting a stone in the middle of your aluminum foil ball so you get extra pennies at the recycling place.
The hype is always greater than the reality because for good news to be news, it has to be oversold and imply bad news, or a need. You don’t sell products by pitching inertia. You sell products by pitching change and/or implying a need for fear. Otherwise, why stir oneself from that La-Z-Boy and Battlestar Galactia full season DVD? Social media is a system that games itself.
Google makes its money by keeping systems open, and then selling ads within them to try to control the anarchy of open systems. It was a smart move. We can all learn from this type of gaming, because it could benefit us. Well, scratch that — could benefit us in some ways, I mean. Open systems are nicely flexible, but anarchic. Closed systems are ripoffs but orderly. The internet thrived because of the balance, not the excess. And finally, a more sobering reminder:
As Google showed us above, gaming the system is often good business. Why do companies want health records in permanent databases? They hope to leverage that data for something. Selling it. Using it to reduce risk. Finding targets for advertising. Permanent identification to keep customers honest. Whatever it is, we have to be careful that this system doesn’t get gamed against us. For the first time, Google strugglesWednesday, April 16th, 2008Trends are an odd thing. Something gains momentum, we watch it happen, and then we participate and assume it will have the same effect everywhere forever. But then it doesn’t, because life runs in cycles to ensure that data, energy and attention spans stay in motion. Google seems to be going through the same. Someone asked me the other day if the reason so many people were leaving Google was the increasingly corporate climate in the company. I said, no, I didn’t think so. I thought it was just the right time for many of them. They were vested, or had gotten that career boost, and it was time to move on, because the business model was waning and as a result, the company is trying to squeeze more blood out of stones through more bureaucracy. That’s how the cycle goes in tech start-ups. Some writing on the wall persists, though.
As blogged about before, internet advertising is changing from per-click to per-customer. Advertisers want to be selling to a person or “type” of person, not a random clicker. As a result, Yahoo and Microsoft — who have deeper fingers in different services than Google does, despite the success of GMail — are rising while Google is having to struggle to compete.
Every great business opportunity only exists for a certain amount of time before it is superseded by the technologies it helped seed. The steam plough begat the car, the adding machine the computer, and now, the search engine and ad business is giving way to the target sales business. Remember how in 1998 people were talking about intelligent agents, little bots that help us shop by knowing what we want and at what prices, and niche marketing? It took some time for the market to catch up, but we’re nearly there. What this means for Google: it’s time to get fleet-footed with that sea change. We can now surmise that Google’s great SaaS hype was a last-ditch attempt to have enough services to learn more about users and their demographic inclinations. We already know that Google knows a lot about us, but is weak on seeing what we buy at eCommerce sites; maybe they were hoping for an end-run around that. Google needs to not think Google has jumped the shark, but they need to know that Google business model 1.0 leapt over that beast late last year and is now heading for the sunset. Green writingTuesday, April 15th, 2008It’s hard to be anything but approving of the tendency toward “green products” that has recently become voguish. However, a lot of these products have dubious positive environmental effect, and seem more like a marketing prank. Too many of them seem to be designed for us to throw all our old stuff into the landfill, buy new stuff that’s carbon-neutral, and then replace it when it breaks in a few years. Today I’d like to introduce you to a green technology that has existed for centuries, is proven under adverse conditions, and can be a lot of fun. While the average person cycles through disposable ball-point pens, which at best allow you to replace the ink shaft and ball point itself, fountain pens are much less destructive, and can be less expensive, depending on how many ballpoints you buy in a year. Why fountain pens are green: I wanted to find an example that for $30 provided a year’s worth of trouble free writing. To figure this out, I had to consult with the online community “Pen Trace” where some helpful people pointed me in the right direction.
I picked this sturdy little pen because the Pelikan brand has produced pens that write smoothly and consistently. This is not their cheapest model, because in Europe, fountain pens are not an oddity. This entry-level pen uses a sturdy steel nib, which is the pointy part of the pen that conveys ink to paper, and is made of durable but soft plastic.
Normally, these little pens use disposable plastic cartridges, but those are about as green as SUVs, so instead, you can get it to take ink directly from a bottle by using this little gadget. It fits in place of the cartridge, and by using vacuum pressure when the knob is turned, can load up several days’ worth of ink. It also allows you to easily clean the pen.
This ink is what you put into the pen. The color is attractive and because it is water-based, it’s easier to clean up and biodegrade than the paintlike ink they put in ballpoint pens. You might not be able to turn your lifestyle green overnight, but a good way to start is to replace badly designed objects, like disposable pens, with more durable ones that require fewer resource refreshes as a result. Pens are one area we can all improve, since they are a ubiquitous technology and others will imitate what they see us doing. Linkpost 4-15-08Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Happy Tax Day! You’re probably more responsible than me, so you sent yours in weeks ago. If not, why not have a tax party? Pull out the power strip, plug in a wireless router, network a printer, and you’ve got a home office for as many friends as fit into your place to work on taxes until 11:35, when you can dash to the post office and use their electronic mailing system to get that all-important 4-15 timestamp. While you’re in line, read The history of the post office.
How did computers affect the power of writing. Well, computers increased the general literacy process, so now more people than ever before can read a newspaper, write a simple response, and navigate a computer and network. However, this means that those who are writing have simplified their content for that audience. In addition, the increase in common knowledge means that writing becomes more specialized, so niches are most common and few generalists exist. This all adds up to a lack of clear voices and more confusion, but more flexibility about what people can choose to believe, which means that most people read what they already agree with. There’s also another side effect of this opinion pluralism:
That’s probably not the most complete answer, but this at least addresses media writing. For fiction writing, the answer is similar. Everyone knows we have not produced a single author as great as those from our grandparents’ generation. At the same time, we all have our favorites that speak to our point of view. We’re still waiting for the voice that can unify a generation. And the post you responded to contained a thoughtful analysis of the computer’s effect on technical writing. Bolg – The Chris Blanc Weblog is proudly powered by WordPress
© 2010 Chris Blanc
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Maintaining backward compatibility is a beast but it’s essential for business. They predicted the mainframe would die by the early 1990s, but it’s going stronger than any time in the last fifteen years because of legacy applications.
I love the news. It’s a giant feast of stuff thrown out you to see what sticks. And while most of it is crap, and we all know that bad news sells because good news is no news, there are some gems that reveal patterns, Gibsonian “nodal points” forming in the fabric of our human universe.
