Microsoft’s “Mojave” and Folger’s Crystals
Posted on July 30, 2008 - Filed Under Marketing, Microsoft, Mojave, Vista, Windows
So, MS-haters and MS-lovers are back in the trenches yet again over Microsoft’s latest pro-Vista stunt. They conducted focus group testing on what the participants were told was “the next Microsoft OS”, codenamed Mojave. The results of the testing were very positive for MS. However, it turns out that the testers were in fact not using “Mojave”, but rather Microsoft Vista. The Mojave cover story was intended to get the testers to look at Vista without any preconceived notions.
The anti-Microsoft crowd quickly took the position that this is just indicative of the kind of lying, underhanded marketing that continually comes out of Redmond. Others defending MS, saying this was a smart way to show that even though Vista got off to a shaky start, the OS is a lot better than it was.
I have to agree with the latter point of view. When I first saw Vista, I did not like it whatsoever. As a result, I didn’t switch from XP. Even after I read news that Vista has gotten a lot better, I know that my opinion was colored by my initial experiences. Though I’m not in the market for a new Windows box, if I were I think this kind of information might make me take a second look.
As for the “stunt” part of this, do I think it’s underhanded lying on the part of MS? Not really. If they packaged the same software in a box and sold it as a different product, that would be unethical. What they did was on par with the old Folger’s Crystals ads, where they would go into a four-star restaurant and replace their regular coffee with Folger’s Crystals. It’s to get an honest reaction from people outside of their prejudices.
Will I be buying Vista anytime soon as a result? Probably not unless my gaming machine unexpectedly catches fire and melts into a pile of plastic goo.
For almost everything else, my MacBook Pro is my main computer.
Thoughts on the paperless office
Posted on July 26, 2008 - Filed Under Apple, Enterprise, Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft, Surface, Windows, iPhone
I had a great conversation last night with my friend Mark. Among many other things we talked about, we came around to the topic of the paperless office. For about a decade now, we’ve heard that we are at the dawn of the paperless office. Documents can be virtualized, then organized and re-organized on a whim. Data in XML format can be ported and shared between people and applications with very little loss due to “friction” in process. We are no longer beholden to the costs of filing and storing physical paper pages.
So, why do we still use paper?
I think there are two main reasons:
- Paper is cheap.
- Paper is simple to use, and as a technology, provides additional functionality over what current computer displays can provide.
Since I know very little about the economics of paper production, I can’t really address the first point, other than to say if paper suddenly jumped in price the way gasoline has, I doubt you’d see nearly as many people in the office sending those 200 page reports over to the LaserJet.
The second point however is firmly in techno-weenie land (my happy home). What kind of digital technology can compete with paper for functionality and ease-of-use?
Readability
Face it, computer screens are hard to read. If you look at them too long you go cross-eyed. Innovations like the Amazon Kindle make me hopeful that in the near future, all monitors will be similarly optimized for document readability.
Organizing, highlighting and notetaking
The one thing you definitely learn after you’ve shuffled papers around your desk for any length of time is that paper is easy to shuffle around. If you want to combine a spreadsheet and a document into one report, all you need is a stapler. Marking up printed documents is simple and quick.
Touch screen interfaces seem to be the best prospect for easy manipulation of digital documents. Personally, I think the best current implementation is Apple’s iPhone. Microsoft also has an exciting offering in this space, called Surface. Rather than being a touchscreen you can fit in your pocket like the iPhone, with Surface, the interface is a multi-touch tabletop. The demo shows applications in the home, restaurants, bars, etc.
Imagine a different application where your physical desktop is replaced with a Surface interface instead. You can do your regular computing with your standard keyboard/mouse/monitor. Then, we you need to, you just drag your document over to your Surface desktop, where you can use the touch interface to flip through documents, shuffle pages, blend documents together, insert photos, markup documents with a pen or stylus … whatever you want to do, all with the same relative ease of manipulating paper documents. The best of both worlds.
The biggest downside to this is that currently Surface is not available to consumers. Also, it’s very expensive, the main current target market being hotels, resorts, casinos, trendy high-end bars, etc. Also, let’s face it, as this hysterical Surface parody from SarcasticGamer points out, Surface is a big-ass table. There is a long way to go before this could be integrated into the workplace.
Power Consumption
You don’t have to plug paper in. Not sure what we can do about that one.
I believe the paperless office can actually become a reality, but we’re not really there yet. Why do I care so much about it? Because even though I’ve never hugged one, trees are nice. They provide shade, they make the air smell nice, they use up carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and it sounds cool when wind blows through their leaves. We should cut fewer of them down.
Moving toward humanlike computer interactions
Posted on July 25, 2008 - Filed Under Speculation
When you want to get one computer to talk to another one, both computers must know the same rigid set of rules. These rules are agreed upon standards that are shepherded by an organization called The Internet Engineering Task Force, which publishes these standards through a very detailed and well-documented process.
The specifications for the standards are published through documents with a very friendly sounding name — “Requests for Comment” (more commonly known as RFCs). However, a quick perusal through even the first RFC (RFC 0001 from April 7, 1969) will show you that right from the start, these rules have always been quite complex, intricate, arcane and inflexible.
Note: if you work with computers and find RFCs to be insanely boring, don’t worry you’re not alone. However, if you don’t work with computers and you find them to be a fascinating read, you truly missed your calling.
All of this complicated, structured interaction between computers is designed with good reason. Computers, despite how quickly they can perform calculations, are pretty stupid. They need clearly defined rules of engagement. As as result, however, we get an either/or kind of performance. Either both systems know exactly how to talk to each other precisely along these rules, or they don’t. It will either work or it won’t. There isn’t a lot of in-between.
Take network protocols, for example. Protocols, in short, are agreed upon patterns of conversation between computers. For example, when e-mail is sent from one server to another, the servers communicate using the SMTP protocol. The protocol is very rigid in the structure. Both sender and receiver must communicate in a pre-orchestrated conversation that, in English would look something like:
Server 1: Hi, I’m an e-mail server.
Server 2: Hi, I’m the e-mail server for davekawalec.com.
Server 1: OK, what do you got for me?
Server 2: I have an e-mail from blog@davekawalec.com.
Server 1: OK.
Server 2: This e-mail should be delivered to whoever@phonydomain.com.
Server 1: OK.
Server 2: I’d like to start telling you the contents of this e-mail.
Server 1: I’m ready. Go ahead.
And it goes on and on like this. If either of the two servers doesn’t communicate the correct information in the correct sequence, the whole transaction is a failure. Even if Server 1 doesn’t say, “OK” in all the right spots, Server 2 will just stand there tapping its foot until the either it gets the “OK” it wants, or it just gives up and times out the session.
What if people operated this way? What if there was no variance allowed in the protocols we use to speak with one another? Imagine two co-workers at the office, we’ll call them Sally and Phil, walking toward each other down a hallway. Let’s say the RFC says the initiator of conversation should say, “Hello” but instead, Sally says, “Hey, Phil”. Without a flexible protocol (a combination of language and social norms), Phil would have no idea what Sally was getting at. The two would pass right by one another, maybe with each wondering why the other was being so rude.
Actually, given the strict rigidity of computer protocols, a successful standards-driven conversation between Phil and Sally might go something like this:
Sally: Hello, I am Sally what’s your name?
Phil: Hello Sally, my name is Phil.
Sally: Hello, Phil. I would like to begin having a conversation with you.
Phil: I agree to begin having a conversation with you.
Sally: Thank you for acknowledging me.
Phil: I acknowledge that you thanked me. I am waiting for you to ask a question.
Sally: How are you?
Phil: I am fine.
Sally: I have acknowledged that you are fine.
Phil: I am waiting for you to ask a question.
Sally: I don’t have another question. We can stop talking now.
Phil: Goodbye.
This kind of thinking pervades computer design from top to bottom. When I create a database, the first thing I have to do is to create a structure to put my data in. I have to not only know what kind of data I’m going to use, but I have to already know how that data is going to interrelate. You can’t start a database as a neutral “knowledge bucket” and let the database organize and relate the data on its own as those linkages become evident over time. You create a field, and you have to tell the database whether that’s going to hold a little text, a lot of text, smaller numbers, big numbers, dates/times, true/false … whatever. And that field is what it is always and forever. If you want to interact with the database, you must organize your data that way and package it in a way that the database can agree is correct.
This approach has been enormously successful up until now. However, is there a better way that computers can be designed to function to put some slack in the rigid rules? Can computers be designed to operate without such strictness, more along the lines of how people casually communicate?
Certainly, I’m talking about some level of artificial intelligence, because in order to accomplish something like this, computers would have to be capable of discerning meaning and intention outside of a set framework of expectation. There is great work currently being done in the field of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and such. For me, it’s exciting stuff to read about. However, I’ve noticed that the approach is typically to write the intelligence into a software abstraction. So, even if successful, we would be left not with intelligence, but with a simulation of intelligence.
What if instead of working on just 0s and 1s, computers could be made to understand, at a very low level, the infinitude of decimals in between?
WANTED: A vision for the future of Linux
Posted on July 24, 2008 - Filed Under Linux
On ZDNet today, Jason Perlow wrote a fun blog post 2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.â€. Instead of the usual opinion piece, he instead tells us a day-in-the-life story of an average Joe (Josef Konsumer), who works in New Jersey for a global bank conglomerate HQ’ed in Bangalore. It’s an interesting snapshot of Jason’s vision of a world of Linux-based cloud computing, ubiquitous broadband connectivity, and smart household devices.
Without getting too deep into the specifics of his ideas (essentially subscription based access to Linux via semi-dumb terminals) or the literary merit of the piece (a little thin on plot, but this is what Orson Scott Card would call a “milieu story” — lol), Mr. Perlow supplies us with something I find lacking in general discussions about Linux - a clear singular vision of what Linux can be.
My main problem with the Linux community is the feeling that the FOSS nature of Linux means it can be literally all things to all people. The OS can be anything, so therefore it can be everything. Whether the future of Linux is going where Jason wants it to go remains to be seen. However, for it to go anywhere, someone is going to have to step up with a clear vision of a niche where Linux can be the best solution. Despite major leaps forward in that past decade in terms of simplicity, ease of installation, look and feel, and number of available applications, Linux still can’t shake the “me too” stigma.
Linux has a nice GUI, too. Linux has an Office suite, too.
What I want to know is, what is Linux the leader in. What can Linux be that no other OS can be?
The answer, I suspect, will not be a technological one, but rather an entrepreneurial one. Some bright, tech-savvy, business-minded person (or group of people) will see a need and will leverage Linux to bring this solution to market. Rather than build something from scratch, they will instead leverage what Linux already can do. The future, I believe, will not be in innovations to Linux itself, but rather to applications of Linux. Perhaps it will include major proprietary components, along the lines of Apple leveraging BSD for use in OS X. Perhaps it will be fully open source.
Regardless, it is going to require a visionary leader to stand out in front of the community and lead the charge. And thanks, Jason, for showing us a glimpse of where that leader might take us.
Looks like a long wait for my iPhone 3G
Posted on July 21, 2008 - Filed Under Apple, iPhone
When the first wave of iPhones came out, there were three missing components that to me were deal-breakers:
- No GPS chip
- No third-party applications
- Slow broadband network
And while the iPhone 3G is not perfect (there are a whole bunch of “like to haves”, just no more “must haves”), I love the interface and I think coupled with my Mac at home, will be a very convenient way to take my personal computing mobile. I’m ready to jump in and buy an iPhone 3G. Trouble is, so is everyone else.
OK, definitely not “everyone”. There are iPhone haters for sure, and certainly a large number of fence-sitters who are waiting for still more features, or just to see how the 2.0 rollout shakes out. However, as reported on ZDnet, iPhone 3Gs are sold out nationwide and there won’t be any more for four weeks. I could understand the two-hour lines on launch day, even the three-hour lines the day after launch (it was a Saturday and more people have free time to stand in line). But a four week wait?!? That just sucks.
Taking the long view, I’ve lived without an iPhone this long. I can wait another four weeks. Hopefully by then, even more of the kinks will be worked out of the system, any my iPhone experience will be smooth sailing.
Isn’t a trailer already an advertisement?
Posted on July 9, 2007 - Filed Under Advertising, New Media
I tried to watch the trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum on IMDB. The Flash player started up and informed me that before I could watch the trailer, I’d have to watch an advertisement first:
Sorry, isn’t the trailer already an advertisement for the movie? So, in order to watch an ad I want to see, I have to first watch one I don’t want to see. In this case, VH1 is paying IMDB for me to be able to see an ad for The Bourne Ultimatum. WTF?!?
To top off the screwiness, after the Flash-based pre-advertisement advertisement which played flawlessly and without delay, the player tried to load a Windows Media version of the advertisement that I actually wanted to see. However, all I was able to see was a black screen and the phrase, “Connecting to media…” Alas, it never did connect to media, and so I all I got for my trouble was a blog topic.
My heart is all a-Twitter
Posted on May 21, 2007 - Filed Under Blogging, Microblogging, New Media, Twitter
The other day, a friend of mine (someone who should know better) asked me, “What’s the name of that really dumb site where everyone just posts what they’re doing?” My friend was referring to Twitter, which as I am coming to learn, is a simple yet very powerful communications tool.
When you log in to Twitter, you’re presented with a single prompt asking What are you doing? You get 140 characters worth of space to tell the world what you’re up to. Hit “Update” and your message gets posted to your profile and added to the positively massive public timeline, which includes all posts from all users.
For example, just before I typed this sentence, I posted this entry to Twitter:
Writing a blog entry about Twitter.
which you can see here at http://twitter.com/dkawalec
Pretty dumb, huh? At first glance, Twitter might seem somewhat self-indulgent or maybe even completely pointless. So, I can post what I’m doing to some website? So what?
Adding Friends
Twitter begins to show its value when you begin to follow other people’s streams. Not only can you view the posts of anyone else on Twitter, you can also add them to your Friends list and have their post feed intermingled with yours on your Twitter home page. As you add friends, acquaintances, or just people you think have interesting things to say, your home page turns into a vibrant real time stream of multiple consciousnesses.
Attracting Followers
Just as you can add friends and read all of their posts in your stream, others can add your posts to their streams. The people that add you to their friends list show up on your profile as followers. Followers are your audience. They are the ones who will be reading when you post something new.
Public IM
You can see that if someone is both a friend (you read their posts) and a follower (they read your posts), the two of you can communicate in what amounts to a kind of public IM session. Why not just use IM then? Because other people are reading the conversations too, and getting involved in them. These other people may have answers you need, points of view you never considered, or facts you’re not aware of.
For example, I first learned of the death of Jerry Falwell, not from the 11 o’clock news, not from CNN or even from CNN.com, not from blogs. I read about it on Twitter, when financialaidpodcast posted
Is it bad luck to say that I’m glad Jerry Falwell is dead?
With Friends
This is hands-down my favorite feature of Twitter. You can visit anyone’s profile (www.twitter.com/profile name) and click the With Friends link to see Twitter as they see it.
This experience is not quite voyeuristic — all Twitter posts are public, after all. However, you still get a sense of tapping into a view of the Twitter timeline that is specifically meant for someone else. This feature offers interesting insight into how other people are using Twitter, lets you see who might be worth adding to your friends list, or simply gives you the chance to virtually walk in another person’s shoes if only for a few minutes.
Microblogging
The ability to quickly publish tiny messages, and the fact that these posts are availble through RSS feeds, has led many to begin thinking about posting on Twitter (and on similar services such as Jaiku) as microblogging. I’m still getting comfortable with this term. First, because the working definition of microblogging seems to be, “what you do on Twitter.” Second, because I’m not sure that it captures what makes Twitter unique.
Microblogging implies something less than blogging. However, with its endless stream of posts, the stream-of-consciousness thought, and the near-frictionless interaction among users (made even more frictionless by the ability to add and receive new posts via phone text messaging and IM), Twitter seems to be, in some respects, a great deal more. It strips away the (yes, I’m actually about to type this) formality of blogs (with their “post/comment” and/or “post/counter-post” conversational dynamics), and leaves behind something more fluid and immediate.
On the other hand, I never feel like I have to catch up on what I’ve missed on Twitter. Posts on Twitter have an implied urgency (i.e., “This is what I think is interesting RIGHT NOW.”) to keep looking forward to the next post, the next discussion, the next idea. And the idea need not be earth-shattering. On May 18, it was a miserable and rainy in New York and I posted:
Today is a good day for soup.
I’d like to think that somewhere someone read that and thought, “yeah, soup sounds pretty good.”
Is Second Life a First-Order Medium?
Posted on May 15, 2007 - Filed Under Books to Read, New Media, Second Life, Speculation
This past weekend, I finished up reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The main premise of the book is that there is no one best way that you can organize any group of information. He then goes on to explain how Web 2.0 technologies allow us to dynamically organize the massive collection of disorganized, miscellaneous information on the internet in ways that suit our needs at the moment.
I want to delve a bit more deeply into the concept of orders of organization that Weinberger talks about. The First Order is the physical. Knowledge is condensed into a readable form in books. Books are physical objects comprised of atoms and are thus bound to the laws of physics. They have to exist at some point in space and at some point in time. They can’t occupy the same space as any other object. A group of books can only be arranged on a shelf in one way at any one time. So, you may line the books on your shelf up by alphabetical order by author, or you may organize them by subject, title, height, thickness, whatever you want — you can pick any method of organization you want, but you can only pick one. This is the First Order of organization. The Dewey Decimal System (which Weinberger spends a great many pages discussing) describes one way to physically organize books in a library.
The Second Order introduces metadata (data about data) — we’re talking about the card catalog. Certainly, the card catalog doesn’t tell us as much as the books themselves do. However, multiple cards referencing the same book can be put in multiple places. As a result, the book can appear in the system in two (or more) places at once. We can organize the same information in multiple ways. But this Second Order still has its physical limits. For example, you can only have so many cards before the system becomes unusable.
In the Third Order, hyperlinks, tagging, playlists and folksonomies allow us to organize whatever information we want however we want. We can find connections we never knew existed, completely on the fly by bringing our information in the digital realm, making it miscellaneous, and then applying technologies that allow us to easily turn knowledge upside down and inside out.
When looked at in this way, the First Order becomes almost irrelevant. Weinberger asks us to consider Wikipedia, where pages don’t even “exist” until a collection of servers assemble them on the fly. Which sector of which hard drive are those bytes stored on? Does it matter? Contrast that with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You’d better know where Volume 1 is or you’ll never be able to read about the fascinating lives of aardvarks.
As I read this, I thought of Second Life.
Is Second Life more like the Britannica than Wikipedia? Is Second Life less miscellaneous than the web? Sure, it often is seemingly random, but does it allow us to organize information in the Third Order?
One take on Second Life that I’ve read a few times is something along the lines of, “What if you were looking for a book, and you could browse through a virtual book store in Second Life, and with a single mouse click, buy the book and have it delivered to you in the real world?”
Would this make for a better store-browsing experience than shopping in real life, or a better online experience than Amazon.com? I don’t think I’d want to browse through infinitely long virtual rows of every book ever written. It would be like sifting through the entire Library of Congress every time I went to buy a book. Since Second Life simulates a kind of world with physical rules, we’re bound by its physical limits, and stuck with its First Order organization.
Sure you can fly and teleport in Second Life, but you’re still limited to a four-dimensional spacetime experience. You can only be in one place at a time. Events happen only once, at a certain time. You can craft an amazing island, with buildings featuring architecture unrivaled by any construction in real life. However, if you throw a party in Second Life, and someone shows up a half-hour after it’s over, rather than experiencing the communal bliss of interacting with people from the farthest reaches of the globe, they’ll instead be standing alone in a big empty building. In fact, the number one complaint I hear about Second Life is that when people log on, it always seems empty. It’s clear that you need to know not only WHERE to go, but WHEN to go. This is a limitation the web mitigated, that Second Life is reintroducing.
What might a Third-Order Second Life look like? Imagine being able to form space around you at any time. Why should Second Life necessarily mimic a physical reality everyone can agree on? What if “here” is not where I am on a grid, but rather some subjective “space” where I can pull together people and objects in order to create my unique experience? Maybe on my screen, we’re standing on a mountain, and on yours we’re on a beach. Or maybe we could both be in two places at once. What if any “thing” could be two things or three, or could be one thing for me and one thing for you, but it was exactly what we both wanted? What if we could trade, not just playlists, but whole realities?