Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. – William Hazlitt
Is it any wonder broadcasters are afraid of the Internet? They don’t even understand it. Exhibit most recent: Hulu Plus, a $10 per month service which allows you to watch current and back-catalogs of television shows like X-Files, Modern Family, and others. Oh, wait, a $10 per month “ad-supported” service, something Hulu considers “revolutionary” and a price-point about which they’re “thrilled”.
Which would be great if they only had to eat their own dog food. But here in the real world, with services like Netflix already providing ad-free streaming (to more devices), the value proposition for Hulu Plus seems smaller. Add to this the ability to already see the same shows available on Hulu Plus through regular Hulu (with the same ads), things are looking oddly… off.
The big sell here is that you can watch all currently available episodes of a show, not just the three or five trailing episodes many shows currently allow. But, with movie studios clinging to old markets and trainingconsumers that they’re going to have to wait for releases, people using the convenience of the Internet to view media are more and more willing to wait.
Essentially, Hulu Plus is almost 3 years too late with this idea. The market has better offerings with more value. Unfortunately, if Hulu Plus fails, look for calls of piracy and consumer readiness as reasons. Never mind the complete lack of any value presented and the complete ignorance of what consumers actually want.
Yes, I caved (or, was tipped slightly further, causing me to plummet into the cavern into which I was desperately staring) and bought an iPad. Wifi-only, because I’m cheap, but bought one nonetheless. And here’s why.
Douglas Adams.
No, I’m serious. It’s slowly becoming a cliche, but the iPad is the first step in realizing the vision of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the nerd’s fantasy of an always connected, always updated book that tells you just what you need to know, now. It is a device that offers entertainment, wisdom, and places to get wasted. It is the Guide.
Any self-respecting (or moderately self-aware) nerd, geek, dweeb, A/V manager, or sys admin worth their salt has read the Sacred Tomes more than thrice. Annually if you want a really well-punched card. And the vision of that universe is a system of knowledge that crosses galaxies, instantaneously, if not accurately, to deliver the wisdom of people more worldly-wise-than-you to a device you can reasonably purchase. Adams himself saw the Internet to have the potential for this vision.
I did not, however, buy an iPad because I am some visionary sage of future tech. If that was my nature, I would be investing in toe nail collections (they have gold, you know). No, I bought it simply out of gadget lust. Nothing more, nothing less.
But then I saw what it did to people.
(Disclaimer, I’m well aware of the post-facto justification this post will sound like. Work with me through the rest; I’m writing with my biases prominently on display.)
I knew something was different on a Sunday a few weeks ago. My “in-laws” (not married) were over, with a visit from J–’s sister. I’d laid out the iPad casually, because I’m an attention whore like that. Everyone but J–’s mother was eager to try it; poked around the apps on it, flipped into the App Store to search for their favorite topic, things I’d seen a dozen people prior to them do at work.
J–’s mother, however, wanted nothing to with it. It didn’t interest her, it was odd and different. She didn’t need it. It got tossed back onto the coffee table. Then J–’s mother and I started talking about recipes for smoking meats while sitting on the couch (sidenote: I’d inherited a smoker from them and I LOVE it). I wanted to look up a recipe I’d seen, so I reached for the iPad. I didn’t do it to use the device, I reached for it because I didn’t want to leave the room and break up the conversation.
I fired up Safari and started searching, finding the first candidate. J–’s mum perked up, but that wasn’t the one. I search again. Closer, but she was sure she’d seen it somewhere else. I searched again but got further away.
J–’s mom got frustrated. She knew was it was, but couldn’t articulate it. So I handed her the iPad. I pointed out the search bar in Safari, made her tap to open the keyboard, and watched as she searched up the recipe. She emailed it to me, then proceeded to spend 20 minutes surfing various sites, zooming, opening multiple windows. She was a power user in less than half an hour. Her husband had to ask if they were leaving anytime soon to get her to stop.
And I knew. This was something different. I’d bought it out of lust, but fallen into the trap laid two decades ago by Douglas Adams. My Nerdself craved the interactive, ubiquitous ability to conjure up knowledge with my own fingers. Apple’s device isn’t magic, as so many marketing videos claim. But it is a visceral fulfillment of so many subconscious wishes. It can’t fail because we want it to succeed so much.
It is also the harbinger of how things will be. As with other things, it’s the first of many similar things. It may not be the most featured, but it is the more polished. There will certainly be Android touch tablets to follow, maybe even a Palm OS or Windows version. But Apple is defining the experience right now.
In 10 years, we’ll all have devices like this and wonder how we put up with things like mice, possibly even wondering what kind of idiot would have a 40-pound box stashed underneath their desk. Apple may not win the battle for market ($DEITY knows they’ve blown it many times before). But the model for how to interact is being changed and the future is being redefined. It’s an exciting time.
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“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
I love your products, Apple, but it’s hard to continue promoting your stuff when your strategy for a market is to patent-troll everyone else. If you can’t beat Androids on your own, maybe it’s time to innovate. And stop acting like that other huge monopoly; remember how that worked out for them?
I’m still getting used to my Mac, and one of the things I ran into recently drove me nuts. For a company that prides itself on the user experience, Apple sure does drop the ball in odd ways.
My annoyance was window sizing when switching from docked to not-docked on my MacBook. When docked, I’m running on a larger monitor so I have my windows sized to use more real estate. When I go mobile, the windows remain that size, which is far larger than the MacBook’s monitor size.
Here’s the thing though; you have to get to the bottom-right of the window to resize it, which I couldn’t do. iTunes in particular was giving me a headache because none of the tricks I found were working.
Finally, I stumbled onto this page that revealed the fix (someone else found through guessing it appears). It’s simple when you know it (hold Alt while toggling Window > Zoom), but so esoteric to be confounding. (Side note: for other apps, you can switch the dock location to another edge and then back and the windows seem to come back. Again, really? This was the intended UE?)
Anyway, windows now back to their working sizes, but what a stupid thing to have to deal with. At least Windows let’s you grab any side of the window to resize.
“Joy comes from using your potential.” – Will Schultz
I’m part of the generation that grew up both in awe of and, more and more, subservient to computers. Thirty-somethings have never known a world without computers, although not all of us had them in the home until our teens. But they’ve always been an impact on society, business, and education in our lives. They are not mysterious machines that beep for unknown reasons (well, ok, sometimes the reasons are unknown). They are not, as some family members label them, necessary evils. Computers have always, to us, been tools–hammers in an era of data and the need to manipulate that data.
We bathe in technology now on a daily basis, the likes of which would have blown our minds as children; the phone on my hip has more computing power than all the TRS-80s in the computer lab where I first entered “10 PRINT “55378008″ / 20 GOTO 10 / RUN” and then snickered on my way to lunch. The Web, for all its erudite uses, is still approached as a child’s toy by most people, cataloging our cats and dogs, making us giggle at life’s idiosyncrasies as if we were still that kid with a BASIC command line.
The influence on science and research is the most pronounced, with grid and distributed computing growing in importance. Worldwide computing power is nearly inconceivable; over 1 billion PCs are out there already, with projections of 2 billion by 2015. We have a global network that could potentially link a significant portion of these machines together (and already has in some cases) looking for cures for diseases, extraterrestrial life, or prime numbers.
And yet, in an age where consumer-level desktop computers contain the computing power of supercomputers from 15 years ago, what have we done with this potential? Aside from a sub-set of the general population donating computing cycles for distributed projects, what has the average person done with the machine sitting in their den or perched on their lap?
We play games, we surf the web, email our friends and update our statuses. We bid on auctions, vote on articles, and blog (hey, wait…). But, unlike many of our other tools, we don’t shape the computers to do what we want them to do. How many things have you used a screwdriver for other than to drive a screw? How many odds and ends sit in a drawer for that just-in-case moment? I know I have a dental pick sitting in a drawer and I’ve never used it to clean my teeth.
But we don’t view computers the same way. Sure, we install programs to collect and sift through our data, catalog our photos, and index our documents. By and large, though, we don’t know how to make the computer bend to our will, to make it do something we can’t find a command or app do for us. It’s not that we don’t know how to code, although relatively few people do know how to do so (when compared to the general population). It’s that we don’t even know how to use the cruft already on our machines to their full potential. The thought of using programs many of us own to build a list of addresses for sending out Christmas cards, merge it into a template, and print those addresses onto envelopes so eludes us that, even today, getting a card with a printed address from a non-business is shocking.
So, the obvious question here is: why? Why have we failed to utilize a greater part of the potential power in a computer?
I only have my own thoughts here (so, chime in if you feel like it), but here’s my punch list.
They’re still new
From a cultural standpoint, we’re still educating the second real generation to grow up digital, with computers as a part of their lives from Day 0. Computers are a relatively new concept culturally, despite the influence they wield. Because of this, we consider them powerful, mysterious machines; we don’t know how, but they do all these amazing things, things we then take for granted.
We don’t understand them
This goes along with the cultural newness. Arguments can rage for many pages of search results as to what constituted the first personal computer, but no matter where you draw the line (Apple ][ in 1977 or the Simon in 1949), the general acceptance of computers as de facto members of the household's electric-slurping ecosystem took some time. As recently as 1997, computers were only in 36.6% of homes [source: census (PDF)]. By 2003, it was just short of 62% [source: census (PDF)]. Think about that: 7 years ago, 1 out of 3 houses didn’t have a computer. I’m not going to get into the socio-economics of who did and didn’t have them within those groups, but as a collective, we haven’t had much change to actually learn about how the machines work.
Nevermind that, fundamentally, computers are somewhat difficult to grasp for someone uninitiated in their use. My mother, who can sort of describe to a mechanic what she believes is wrong with her car, couldn’t tell you the first thing about how a computer works. As why should she? She interacts with the interface without need to know why the program runs.
There’s no need for to know about pointers or buses or floating point errors to make a computer work. She doesn’t need to know about serpentine belts, brake pads, or alternators either in order to drive, but she’s picked it up throughout her life because she lived in an automotive world. People around her just knew about cars.
We have yet to have a generation that grew up not only in a world gone digital, but one where knowledge of computers is absorbed simply by living.
It is hard
Just as computers are dumb, so it is difficult to tell them what to do. Instructing a computer to do something used to be actual rocket science. Programming languages have simplified the process a bit, but brought along the necessary cruft as well: syntax, objects, variables. We need them for modern programming, but these are high concepts for a non-programmer.
In short, it takes a degree of knowledge to be able to bend a computer to your will. The average person isn’t just going to sit down with their shiny new laptop and start banging out code.
We’re Not Interested
We’ve accepted that computers will be “easy to use” and that we have no need to learn their inner workings. Like cars, we have moved computers into a category of Commodity and woven them into our daily lives. Which, really, is the point of many people’s careers: making computers easy to use and easy to integrate with our existences. We’re not interested because we don’t have to be.
So…
I feel ok with the current situation. Honestly, I do. There are many, many people around the world working on harnessing the power that sits on a vast majority of desks to solve problems.
I do hope, however, that others will come to appreciate that same power and supplement it with some knowledge. While every day brings the reality of the most computing power in history, we need to, as a species, ask the questions in the right way. And that’s something worth paying for.
After beating my head against a wall for the better part of an hour (I’m on vacation, I had the time to kill), I was completely unable to get iChat to connect to GTalk via the Jabber configuration that used to work prior to my Snow Leoapard install.
After searching around (on Google’s site), I resorted to trolling the Google Talk support forums and stumbled on the solution; you have to use a Captcha unlock to allow the signin to work. Why, I have no idea, but thank you to the person who posted this link on the Google forums.
If you are trying to sign into iChat and constantly get the “Login information is incorrect” message, go here: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha. I have no idea why you have to do this or what else becomes unlocked through this, but it allowed me to finally log in with iChat 5 on Snow Leopard.
After a couple of weeks with a new Dell Studio XPS 13, it was obvious that it was not the laptop for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fine machine, but with Vista 64-bit and my complete inability to succesfully “upgrade” it to Vista Ultimate 32-bit (yes, I tried to wipe and re-install).
So, with little hope but a “worth a shot” attitude, back to Best Buy I went. After a quick chat with the most helpful people at the Lohr Road (thanks Stefani and Ken!), I swapped the Dell for a MacBook (last of last year’s models); never had to pull out a card.
So far, I’m still getting used to the MacBook. The keyboard layout is just different enough that I keep hitting the Caps Lock key instead of “a”, and I do miss the backlit keyboard, but so far so good.
I’ve never actually owned a Mac before, so this is going to be an interesting trip.
Inspired by a conversation at work today about free (as in beer) software, here’s a quick list of some of my favorite apps. I use Windows, so many of these will be Windows-only.
FileZilla; open-source, easy to use, FTP client; even runs off a USB drive
KeePass – Password safe. Folder, search, password generation (with random inputs). Open-source, speedy, runs on USB drives.
Notepad++ – Enhanced text editor with support for syntax coloring for dozens of languages and plug-ins. Fast cross-file searching make this a must-have for troubleshooting via log file.
CDBurnerXP – Free CD/DVD burning software. Doesn’t automate, but is incredibly lightweight when compared to the bloatware that Roxio has become.
VirtualBox – Open-source virtualization software. Easy-to-use, let’s me safely build sandbox environments to trash.
Handbrake – DVD to MPEG-4 converter, which now accepts file (such as AVI) as inputs. Perfect for encoding video for my iPod/phone.
Synctoy – Synchronization tool from Microsoft. Echos, copies, moves, and synchronizes folders or entire drives. I use it for easily backing up my music collection to an external hard drive.
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