Two Slashes

A few days ago, I was sifting through my referrer logs in a bored attempt to see which sites were bringing in readers, and which were nothing more than blogspam. In the course of this work, I naturally happened upon a cache of hits from sites like Plurk and Twitter, places where I’ve previously plugged my site. One of the referrers stood out to me, inherently different from the others; this one had not been posted by me, but in fact by someone I had never met (and probably never will), and had started a short but legitimate discussion about my writing here at Two Slashes.

The source: A post on Plurk linking to my thoughts on the service.

When I saw the thread, I practically fell out of my seat laughing, partly in celebration and partly at myself. No, there’s nothing particularly comedic about being linked to; it’s cool, but not humorous in any respect I can think of. No, my humor came mostly from realizing the primary shortcomings in my post.

I’ve always berided MySpace as being the collective “emo” scourge of the Internet, and apparently I’m not alone as the very first response notes my failure to mention MySpace in the usual (or the blogosphere equivalent of “politically-correct”) manner. Perhaps part of the reason I failed in this respect is because I’ve all but let MySpace fall from my thoughts anymore; it takes direct mention to even let me know that the site exists anymore as I’ve tuned it out almost completely from my thoughts. (I have my account still, but I can’t even tell you the last time I logged into it, and they don’t bother me with notifications because I registered with an e-mail address at a domain I no longer have.)

While Twitter’s had some ups and downs as far as availability, overall it’s been more than accessible enough for my taste (especially when I seem to miss their outages by not being around to experience them), and I don’t find the interface as wasteful as I do Plurk’s. To me (and I’ll throw in the obvious-but-mandatory opinion warning for safety), I find Plurk’s timeline idea to be novel, but not as efficient at using screen space as Twitter’s uniform list layout. Plurk’s timeline requires a lot of scrolling to be useful, and while the timeline gives you a more visual idea of the time spacing between peoples’ updates, it can also be a nuisance if that person (a la myself) has a lot of free space between two updates. Plurk’s idea to include threading was definitely a smart move, though.

Perhaps a directed post at the people from that Plurk link might be suitable here, so I’ll try this:

• Ecin: Thanks for noticing my faults in reviewing Plurk, and helping to point out that I might have been a little biased in my review, but remember that it’s more of my personal opinion than a professional review. All the same, I don’t find the timeline conducive to the way I would use the site as it leaves too much empty space for my liking.  I also don’t think you’re defending Plurk outright so much as simply offering the idea that you seem to be more of a Plurk than a Twitter fan. There’s nothing wrong with Plurk or Twitter, really; it’s more of a matter of preference, and I’ve chosen Twitter for reasons that may be completely different from the reasons for which you chose Plurk.
• Daicoden: I appreciate that you like the design of my site, even if my content isn’t up to your desired level. If you have any suggestions as far as design, pass them along.

To the both of you, if you’re reading, you’re welcome to leave comments (as is anyone else).

I’m not normally one for movie reviews, but I’m bored enough that just about anything is fair game for the moment.  And I need to stop with the multi-meaning post titles, I think.

During the course of this weekend, it came to be that I was stuck in a movie theater, once again (involuntarily) subjecting myself to overpriced/underperforming excuses for Hollywood creativity.  This weekend, the excuse was called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and for starters, this is probably one franchise they could have gone in a completely different direction with.

The writing is probably the biggest issue this movie has going for it.  Not only is it a rehash of everything already seen (with a backdrop in China this time), but they’ve taken anything that might have made the characters interesting and spun it into their most annoying attributes, with some off-brand sci-fi added in for kicks.  This combination means that not only is there absolutely nothing that holds your attention for long, you can see the clear transitions where action X happened in one or both of the previous movies.  The movie additionally suffers from some emotional compass issues that for all the world look like someone put a magnet next to the compass about halfway through the writing process, making the end result look inhuman enough to ruin the experience.

The special effects weren’t the worst, and took a bit of work (that much is apparent), but the storyline is too much of a black hole for them to save anything (in my opinion).  Anyone who has seen the movie should get what I mean when I say ‘avalanche,’ for example.

I’m not stopping you from seeing this (Warning: clichéd adjective) monstrosity, but I’m extremely curious how something with such poor reviews (more about my interpretations of them in a moment) managed to barely succomb to The Dark Knight, especially considering the showing I went to had no more than twenty-five people in a theater for several hundred.  At the least, you should be prepared for disappointment and a lack of new content, though.

Now, I’m sure someone’s going to call me out for mentioning reviews, since of course the reviewers are not me and probably don’t have the same biases or any of that other related baggage.  However, I’ve generally trusted Rotten Tomatoes (to an extent), with the rule of thumb that anything with an exceedingly low score (to compensate for their experiences) tends to suck as much for me as it did for them, anything with a middling score or above is probably something that will be at least watchable.

While The Mummy is not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, it certainly does nothing to make me want to watch it repeatedly.  Personally, I’ll go back to watching whatever movies the rest of my family has watched to death over Tomb again.

Note to Hollywood:  Care to stop ruining any more watchable movie franchises while you’re ahead?  My movie money may very well end up spent on my college textbooks if you keep this up.  And I promise to quit writing reviews if you follow through.

(That’s ‘cuil’ pronounced cool…bah, you’ll read why in a second, so screw the explanation.)

It’s no mistake that I’ve been a longtime fan of Google…well, everything.  Just about all of my e-mail is handled through them (including through Apps for Domains), I pay $20 a year for extra space on Picasa because I find it so much more usable than Flickr, and I’ve at least tried just about every other service they’ve offered.  I’m also the person who needs to try “the next big thing” much in the same way I have with Twitter and a whole dictionary of other sites that I’ve tried, put to use, retired, or whatever.

With all the buzz surrounding Cuil, I decided to divert my first few searches of the day (and a few vanity/test queries for comparison) to them to see how much more benefiting the results they deliver were to me.  And sadly, Cuil is about as “cuil” (it’s pronounced cool, if you missed that aside) as a sackful of cucumbers in this warmish Chicago summer.  In other words, their current setup renders it useless for me.  (Screenshots have been used throughout this post because at the time of writing, Cuil was bouncing in and out of service.)

Taking a look at their homepage, it’s no doubt that there’s a touch of Google in the air.  It’s simple, with only a few links to their policy and about pages, and the text box.  (Wait a minute…that sounds oddly like a page I see every hour.)  In fact, I think the only differences I can point out between the two are the off-center alignment, the color scheme, and the logos.  Hardly anything unexpected.  But looks don’t change how it works, so I might as well explain what I think of it after using it for a few minutes.

Being one of the founding members of TechCentric, it’s obviously no surprise that I would compare our rank on Cuil with how we’re doing everywhere else (which isn’t too hot given our hiatus, but that’s another story).  On Google and Yahoo, for example, TechCentric ranks right on top as the first result, while we place third on MSN (behind our own Wikipedia entry, for crying out loud).  With Cuil, there’s no “ranking” so much as there is a menagerie of results thrown at you in a somewhat-cool, somewhat-overloading multicolumn layout, with what I assume are supposed to be related images thrown in.  Picture a random page from the classifieds, replace all the advertisements with the typical excerpt from that result, and dot in a few random graphics for spice.  That’s the idea I get from Cuil’s results page.

Now, when I say they add random pictures, I pretty much mean it.  Aside from similar occurances noted by my friends, one of the images suggested by Cuil for my TechCentric search was that thumbnail of the three girls right there next to the link to the Crew listings.  I’ve included myself, Steve, and Will next to the image for comparison, but I don’t think any of those (four if you count the half-head to the right) girls look a thing like us, and they don’t appear anywhere on the TechCentric site.  I do believe they’re trying to suggest I’m something I’m not (namely, female).  They also seem to believe we’re related to The Who, as they have a poster thumbnail next to the suggested result on Wikipedia.

While the lack of relevance towards TechCentric could have been because of our lack of production, I found it quite awkward that searching for ‘justincox’ (you should know him by now) turned up only his Twitter account and some stuff which he claims isn’t him.  And not a sign of his site in sight on the first page of the results, either.  At least Rachelskirts can’t complain about her placement.  Searching for myself by name was a complete bust, as it turned up more results from other users’ Twitter pages than it did anything remotely relevant to me.  (Though there are a few underlaying things I noticed that I’m not willing to discuss just yet.)  Searching for ‘two slashes’ was also an exercise in patience, though removing the space found this site instantly (along with another random image alongside the TechCentric crew page).

One idea I liked, though it wasn’t exactly useful to me in its current state, was the category box on the right side, which suggests people and things relevant to what you might be searching for.  TechCentric comes up with some IPTV-related stuff, as it should, and some of my other searches were categorized correctly, but the suggested additions to your query might not be as helpful.  For example, searching for Darren Kitchen (from Hak.5) offered the expected categories for podcasting and vidcasts, but some of the suggested keywords (like Leo Laporte) just turned what could have been a helpful search into a useless waste of Intertubes, combined by the fact that they’re mashed with your original query.  (I think I finally stopped myself after ‘Darren Kitchen Leo Laporte Patrick Norton FLOSS Weekly‘ turned up as much whitespace as it did content.)

Cuil also seems to be having a problem with staying usable at the moment, partially thanks to repeated waves of news flooding Twitter, and its placement on Digg’s front page at the moment.  Considering Google’s tried-and-true methods and the fact that they handle plenty more traffic in any given hour than Cuil will probably see in the next day or two, perhaps the Google-alum masterminds behind the site could have brought a little more to the table in terms of reliability.  (Though I guess a similar suggestion could be made to Twitter about now.  Failwhale anyone?)

The concept of a competitor to Google with the brains to suggest relevant content is hard to believe, considering Google does a decent job of filtering out the garbage already (in my experience), and it’s even easier to limit the junk when you search for something with at least a respectable idea of what you’re aiming for.  But as long as the results turn up to be this jumbled and unrelated, I see no reason to deviate from my zealous (over)use of Google.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of geekdom’s most famous titles.  If you don’t already know where I’m going with this either by the date (and time) or the title quote, I’m referring to the original Wargames.  (Notice I say ‘original,’ as Hollywood saw fit to retrofit a sequel this year as well.  Perhaps in celebration, perhaps simply because they’re running out of material and saw a chance to recycle.  Any guess at the reason is as good as mine.)

Regardless, Wargames still stands as one of the required movies on any techno-buff’s watchlist, and for good reason.  While we may not be headed into nuclear war anytime soon (Requisite “In Soviet Russia…” joke here), the movie packs several remnants of geek culture of the time up in a family-friendly (it’s not often I can genuinely use that) but reasonably accurate(-for-Hollywood) bundle.

I really don’t have too much to say at the moment, so I’ll make it brief.  Here’s to simulated nuclear holocaust.  And hoping that any of Joshua’s siblings don’t have that level of control over the United States.  Joshua - would you like to play a nice game of chess?

If you’ve ever been to or live in or near Chicago, you probably know all about “The Bean,” that shiny alien-looking thing in Millenium Park, known for being huge, metal, and, perhaps most importantly given those two qualities, seamless (at least to casual inspection).

A talk with a friend about developing technologies and upcoming expectations of what these technologies will bring led to our noticing how problematic today’s technology is, and why it won’t be getting better anytime soon.

What does this have to do with a notorious Chicago tourist trap?  General consensus today is that consumers want everything they own to work together, or at least appear that way.  They want a combination DVD-playing toaster oven/blender that can do laundry and sort recycling in tandem with a drink-cooling microwave, and they want it all to be done perfectly, with no hiccups.  Unfortunately, I have yet to see a DVD-playing toaster oven/blender that folds my laundry and sorts recyclables or a drink-cooling microwave, but that’s besides the point - the point is that they want things to work perfectly, much like the dozens of individual panels that make up “The Bean.”

As I told my friend, it’s unlikely that we’re going to be experiencing such a demonstration of perfection in any aspect of life (but most specifically technology-based endeavors) anytime soon.  There are two polar scenarios I foresee, and each comes with its own problems when it comes to development.

The first scenario is the “monopolistic scenario” in which one or two companies handle a whole industry of work.  While (seeing that this is the same company all around) the products work seamlessly, they also become rather stagnant and produce little to no improvement from version to version.  While this means that things work well, after a while people get tired of seeing the same old thing all the time and wish there was something else to go to (which in turn creates a market…blah, I’ll spare the economics class talk).

The other scenario is the “competitive scenario” - as you might have guessed, this scenario involves a large number of companies all producing similar products.  You get near-constant development and revolutionary ideas and designs, but at the same time these ideas pave the way for a plethora of different, unconnected tangents (which is, unfortunately to say, also expected when each one is determined to make a profit from their product).  This would be akin to why you can’t typically use parts from one car on another - sometimes they have a slight chance of working, but other times you’re likely to break even more.  The point here is that there’s so many things to choose from, so many choices/paths/whatever-you-call-them, that ultimately what develops is not one “right” path but a series of dead ends.

These dead ends actually crop up more than you think.  Look at the current generation of video hookups, for example:  DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.  They all get video from point A to point B (and sometimes other things too), but each one has its own guise and is not directly compatible with one another.  DisplayPort, for example, supports daisy-chaining monitors through one cable; HDMI supports audio transmitted through the same cable.  While these are novel ideas…notice how they aren’t all that easily interoperable (well, HDMI and DVI are to an extent, but that’s not my point).  So, as consumers, we are left to either try and find what works best for our situation, and hope that everything we buy comes with support for that connection method, or sit and pray that one day someone will come along and magic everything into one “universal” connector, making themselves money, and consumers happy.

If you need a mixed example of standardization, just look on the back of your TV, computer, or home telephone.  Assuming the company that produced whatever you’re looking at isn’t an ***hat, you’re probably staring at the same menagerie of cables, ports, jacks, and plugs someone else is.  Thank standardization for that.  But at the same time, you can also note that while whatever’s plugged in there works with the setup you have now, you have the seed planted in the back of your mind worried about what happens when you need to bring in something new.  Is my mouse going to work?  Will my TV set play back the content from this Blu-ray player?  In these instances, your use isn’t seamless.  Instead, you find yourself driven by an inadvertant commitment to a specific set of technologies that may become outdated at any moment.

Another good example would be a digital camera (or more specifically the storage mediums for them).  Notice how Sony has their own “private” storage system with Memory Stick, something that Canon, Nikon, nor Kodak can or will use, and that this lock-in also means that without adapters, cables, or other fun things, the only way you can quickly show off those snapshots is by ramming them into a Sony television.  As far as seamlessly working, not bad for two things manufactured by a multimedia electronics corporation…but once you bring Toshiba or Panasonic into the mix, all bets are off.

Blame it on capitalism, blame it on everyone’s desire to keep secrets - whatever you blame, it’s probably at least a small part of why we’re in such a hole.  Unfortunately, the hole’s getting deeper by the day, and there’s no easy way to get back out.

So, I suppose you could say that “The Bean” represents not only Chicago’s continual placement of public art, but our desire for technologies and lives to work together in harmony - with no unsightly seams to tear at or detract from the beauty.  Unfortunately, “The Bean” is also the perfect metaphor for something we can’t have.  File it away with everlasting love, superpowers, and eternal life - because this is one thing that won’t be coming…at least, within our lifetimes, and I’d be pretty confident in placing bets on ‘never.’

A day or so ago, Gizmodo ran an article explaining some of their beliefs of why Windows Vista isn’t bad.  It’s their site, and their beliefs, but I’m not crazy over the arguments they picked, and decided it was worth at least a mild post about.

1. It’s more secure than Windows XP.

Excuse me a moment while I laugh, then point out that Windows XP has more security bulletins (at least, as far as I’m aware) than any other platform, be it OS X, Linux, Solaris, or anything else.  Then let me point out that XP also has the largest market share.  Make sense yet?  Notice the correlation?  I thought so.

I’ll give Gizmodo credit for actually acknowledging that little tidbit in their article, but there’s no reasonable way to compare the security across all of these platforms.  So what if there are fewer bulletins?  For example, if I code a CMS for a site, and that site is the only one with that CMS, is it necessarily any more secure than a common platform like Drupal or Joomla?  It could have all the holes in the world, intentional holes even…but the fact that it’s one site in the shadows means that there’s probably only a handful of people in all the world who would even attempt such a pointless endeavor.  Those holes would remain, my CMS would have no security reports - so by all means, I’m coding the most secure platform, right?

There are some things that can be compared…but the “amount of security” is not one of them.

2. It’s the best-looking Windows yet.

This is a matter of opinion.  While I’m not a fan of the Fisher-Price stock blue Windows XP theme, I’m not a fan of Aero either.  The transparency is a little much for my taste, and I prefer a full Start button to something that makes me feel like I’m trying to predict the future with it.  And most of the other stuff, like the 3D task switching, is just overkill.

Instead, I prefer Windows XP (*cough*) with this theme (though I use the alternate version with the actual start button instead).  It’s a lot cleaner looking, and it looks professional and sleek enough to me to at least not look like I’m messing with some virtual preschool toy.

3. Games work just about as well as under XP.

This one’s a tough one, because it really depends on the game and the system configuration.  Some games experience drags on one or the other, others need to be hacked to work on one or the other platform; all in all, it’s a real mess.  But in my case, I’m fine with Hover! and a 486.  (Nobody ever said “gaming rig” meant top-of-the-line specs.  And if they did…well, they should be forced to play Hover! for a while.)

4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR.

Not everybody’s even hopped on the DVR bandwagon yet.  First, you need to teach people how to make their clocks quit blinking 12:00am.  Then, you need to explain to these same people why using their computer over a subscription box or the cable converter gives them an advantage.  Good luck with that.

My dismay with the lack of intelligence among people today aside, there’s also the issue of lock-in here.  There are plenty of great and reliable alternatives that AREN’T Media Center, and have a lot more expandability (namely MythTV for the experienced, and MediaPortal for the faint-of-heart).  One also has the benefit of working under…Vista.

If I had to recommend a DVR, I’d actually probably end up recommending a Tivo over a PC solution for the people who can’t read manuals.  I did just suggest MediaPortal, but Tivo at least has the benefit of being dumbed down and friendly enough that anyone with a moderate English vocabulary or the ability to recognize a thumbs-up or -down could pick up the remote and start using it.  And people can understand and recognize a Tivo box much faster than they will a PC sitting in the entertainment center.

5. The sleep mode works.

Funny…I’ve only ever had one problem with a computer sleeping while using Windows XP.  And you know what the funny part is?  It’s a hardware problem, an issue on my motherboard designer’s part that causes the Ethernet jack to disable itself (and an issue easily circumvented with a separate LAN card, I just haven’t bothered to put one in).  My laptop’s actually sitting here, also in a state of slumber, awaiting me getting back to updates.

If you need further proof still, I’ve been kicking the power button to my Gateway Mini-PC for the past hour now.  And I can still see it lighting up in my management console.

6. Built-in search is better and more useful.

Perhaps if Microsoft had thought to default indexing to ‘on’ in XP, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  Not that it matters; a properly-organized work environment means you’ll still be able to find things faster than that search box.

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

Wait…what did they say?  Let’s look again:

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

That’s what I thought.  And the problem is that they’ve just shoved their foot in their mouth.  Yes, UAC may be useful to some people…but most often people get too annoyed.

Microsoft tarnished their “plug-and-chug” image as far as usability was concerned when they implemented UAC.  What I mean is that rather than people have their all-authoritative power that they’re used to, with nobody and nothing asking them what to do, suddenly the computer is the boss.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”  “Are you sure you want to delete that?”  “This wallpaper looks nice, so you’ll need administrative privledges to change it to something else.”

Understandably, there’s going to be the phase where everyone hates it, then slowly warms up to it and the idea that it “helps”.  Right now, this is the hate phase, and everyone’s turning it off.  OS X does something similar, requiring the user to enter their password as additional confirmation…but the users are over it because there’s no setting to turn it off.  (If there is, please correct me.  But my voyages through the cat-flavored fruit haven’t turned up any.)  Microsoft, perhaps the checkbox should have waited?  Or been included only for enterprises?)

If you want all that in a nutshell, I’m actually commending Microsoft for this move.  But the implementation…it’s missing something.

8. Drivers support isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.

Wow.  Finally an argument I don’t have enough experience with to debate completely over.  Why couldn’t Gizmodo have brought this up sooner?

I actually think the driver support is backwards at this point.  I’ve purchased “Vista-only” devices before, and had to hack them into submission for use with XP (namely, a Pinnacle remote control).  I understand that Vista’s the newer, shinier consumer sibling in the Windows family, but too many people are complaining and stalling their move to Vista to warrant products with no compatibility on older platforms.

9. It’s not any buggier than XP.

Once again, this is a matter of opinion in relation to the level of mishap you’re willing to accept before something becomes buggy and unusable.  And it’s already known that the biggest issues come from driver bugs - the more people using those “bugs” the merrier.

10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM.

Alright, complaining about this one is probably a little overkill, especially given that Microsoft has finally realized that free RAM is wasted RAM, and decided to stuff it with the morsels you might need to use the most.  Some of the slowness can be alleviated by turning off things like Aero…wait, did I just suggest turning off bloat?  Alright, that’s it.  Vista needs to get on the StairMaster now and lose some weight.

I tend to agree more with the complaints they brought up, including the painfully slow file transfers from h*** and the requirement to categorize every wireless network you see as something like “Home” or “Work”, .  But those are common and heard just about everywhere anyway, so it really wouldn’t be missed if Gizmodo hadn’t bothered at all.

For a computer science major, software developer, and someone who generally is known to stick with everything needed to get stuff done…it’s nearly 1.5 years since Vista was released, and I’m still running on the previous generation.  And for once, I would rather wallow in the history than leap into the future.

It’s a funny thing, how I tend to perpetually suck myself into discussions of P2P problems and flaws in reasoning. But it’s just too tempting to poke fun of the very people responsible for the evolution of file-sharing in the first place.

Wired has a blog article discussing the definition of distribution - what constitutes giving files to other people - and frankly, it’s not so much a definition as an utterly faulty assumption that every available share will be scoured, ripped off, and offered up again.

“You don’t have to prove actual distribution. You need to prove there’s works in the share folder, and that is distribution,” said Joseph Geisman, MPAA’s chief intellectual property attorney, as he described the so-called “making available” concept.

Why shouldn’t you have to prove distribution? After all, I find it very ridiculous to assume that just because something is made remotely accessible, it is accessible publicly; to even pretend this is a legitimate argument requires looking at each situation on a case-by-case basis and examining how each is configured. For example, I (and yes, I will admit it) keep a remotely-accessible share of my music and software backups via Samba. However, here’s the rub: It’s only available to anyone on MY Hamachi network, and considering I highly doubt anyone will be joining that anytime soon, I think it’s safe to say that I’m sharing only with myself.  (It’s not the KaZaA share folder, but I doubt they’re going to be making that distinction anytime soon.)

According to the MPAA’s definition above, that’s still enough to be prosecuted - even though there isn’t a soul in the world with a copy of anything I have. It’s cases like this that demonstrate indirect proofs aren’t enough to determine the intent to share.  My collection is shared - with the protections necessary to keep it to myself - and by that vague monster of a definition, I would still be looking at the same fines as anybody else, even though nobody else has access to them.  (Obviously a security breach would be different - but I wonder if proving that would help much in this case.)

During the Thomas trial, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis instructed jurors they could find unauthorized distribution — copyright infringement — if Thomas was “making available” the copyrighted works over a peer-to-peer network. The jury decided her liability in five minutes.

Here’s another problem: We’ve got so many technically-challenged people involved with these cases (judges, juries, lawyers - everyone; yes, I realize we need people who will be impartial but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a brain or any knowledge of how what they’re talking about works) that all it takes is a scare marathon compliments of the **AA lawyers for them to decide guilt in less time than it takes to boil pasta.

“It is a distribution by putting works in a shared folder. You can deem that copies are being made. That goes for the indirect proof,” Geisman said. “Having it in a shared folder is indirect proof of actual copying of another user.”

The only thing this indirectly proves is that our legal system needs an infusion of intelligence and competence to match the times if we’re going to see these parades of pointless lawsuits end. Perhaps the money they pay to the lawyers should instead be invested in other things - like the artists, studios, and various audiovisual studios that provide the content for them to rip off. I mean, there’s obviously a problem if even the artists would rather download (or promote an alternative means to paying for music).

Perhaps Trent Reznor and his OiNK comments (previous link above) are the best way for the double-A’s to get a clue to revamp their business model:

“If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

Fine, I’ll discuss something else next time.  But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Wow…did I actually just post my fourth thing in five days?  I…why, I think I’m in shock!  Hopefully either I can fall into the habit of posting more often (preferred) or anyone out there doesn’t get into the obsessive habit of checking for new stuff more often…well, at least let the RSS feed do that for you.

I paid $350 or so for my first useful* laptop (I say that with quotes for a reason, see below) during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, with my first MP3 player just a short while before that.  I’ve only had possession of a personal cellular telephone for a year.  I’ve had an account with AOL since the second grade (which, although I personally refuse to use the AOL client anymore, I still have).  And I’ve been really only establishing my online presence (with forums, websites, and the like) since the end of middle school.

Why do I tell you this, seemingly randomly?  I was perusing through the New York Times website today, and came across an article discussing the recommended ages children should be introduced to the very same technologies I just mentioned.  And obviously there’s some disagreement between what the article suggests and what I believe to be more appropriate, or I wouldn’t be bothered enough to write about it.

For ages 0-2, I can generally agree with the author.  I don’t see a reason your kid should be messing with anything electronic with more complication than making noise or blinking lights.  They’re way too young to understand cause-effect scenarios, and I certainly don’t foresee anybody’s newborn being able to “Press Enter to Continue…”

Sure, maybe all the fake toddler-toys are probably 1/4 as mind-stimulating as they’re advertised to be, but are they really ready to play online games?  No offense, but it seems to me like they want to train the next generation of WoW addicts from an early age; they’ll be more tolerant to the obsessive clicking and typing and random key-pressing it takes, and their vision will already be so screwed over from staring at the screen that they’ll have a 6000-strength glasses prescription by the time they’re eight.  Pardon me, but how about giving them their Playskool MP3 boombox thingy and sending them out to the sandbox?  And suggesting a Wii as a console for kids still trying to figure out why the cat doesn’t go in the washing machine, and that Hot Wheels are more collectible when the wheels aren’t on the other side of the room?  I really don’t need any more bologna-in-the-CD-tray service calls, thank you very much, so I’ll just say “That’s stupid” and continue on my merry way.

Moving towards the second half of the article, I really disagree more with their thinking.  For starters, explain to me why six-year-olds are eligible to be playing games that require interaction with people you don’t know but are connected to instantly?  I fail to see one instance where they won’t be talking to strangers at some point.  (And even if the parents are paying attention, can you really be certain that crazyboy2834 isn’t this guy (potentially NSFW)?  Your son/daughter claiming that it’s the friend from down the street doesn’t count.)  I have a brother that fits this age bracket, and I’ve watched him play similar games.  If someone sends him a friend request, his instant reaction is to accept it…no questions asked.  “But wait, that’s not Kyle?”  Stranger danger, indeed.  What happened to responsible parenting?

I can see maybe a shimmer of reasoning behind giving a twelve-year-old a cell phone…but only a shimmer.  Why, even my high-school-age siblings failed to understand why text messaging wasn’t included in their plan (it is now) and managed to rack up a rather exorbitant bill.  The point is, if you give them something that has the ability to do more than you pay for, it’s going to come back to bite you.  If you really need to give them the phone, get the blasted unlimited messaging plan…$30 per month is a lot more reasonable than $600 (trust me).  Perhaps towards high school would make better sense here.

High school would also be a prime time for these kids to get laptops and other “considered-essential” devices, not as they’re herded off like cattle to college.  Not only does this free the family computer from constant use by the IM- and MySpace-crazed teen, but it gives parents (as if they needed it) yet another thing to take away for groundings.  And has the benefit of teaching them about how to take care of more expensive equipment earlier on.

And I scoff at this comment:

In fact, cellphones are now more or less mandatory for children at this age. Besides providing a social advantage, phones can reduce parental stress in a crowded mall, get children in touch for homework help, serve as a call to dinner — and be withheld as punishment that really works.

Parenting skills for this age include reading phone bills. Lori McCoughey of Mahwah, N.J., a mother of two, saved $200 a month by switching to Verizon’s friends and family plan. There are also pay-as-you-go plans like those from Tracfone (www.tracfone.com). For $50, you get a working LG 225 camera phone, preloaded with 100 minutes. A meter counts down the remaining time.

If parenting skills require reading bills, why must you suggest a pay-as-you go plan on a cell phone, which defeats the entire purpose of reading bills?  It might reinforce and encourage the idea of having your child budget their usage (especially if you add a specific amount per month, and refuse to add any more until the next) in preparation for giving them access to your “big-person”, post-pay plan, but really I can’t see a prepaid phone as being anything more than a cash-cow and waste of time otherwise.  But “serving as a call to dinner?”  Although I’m pretty sure I can see through the poor language there, how is ringing your offspring anywhere near a reinforcement of the “personal nature” of dinner?  (Yes, I realize this is America, where ‘dinner’ is another word for vegging out in front of a television with McDonald’s, but cut me some slack.)

Of course, even my recommendations are just that, recommendations.  In reality, the parents should be capable enough to judge whether their kid actually has a need for the technologies of tomorrow, a need that outstretches the desire to “fit in” - because there’s always going to be someone else without it, and a lesson in not getting everything you want is perfect fare.  Nevertheless, any parents who take tips from that article and apply them probably could use a little help as a parent themselves.

Parenting is about guidance and helping a child to prepare themselves for an adult/parental role, not stepping in and going “Here’s a shiny new electronic toy that I bought; go have fun.”

*Useful in this sense refers to the sense that it could be used for more than running Windows 95 or browsers with the rendering support of an 1800s cash register.  My real first laptop was a 486 obtained long ago from one of my father’s co-workers, with a failed battery and a garbage-picker’s heaven of data left on it.  As most people know, I particularly enjoy older/restored computing equipment and so I keep this machine around for occasional use.

In accordance with my parents’ work, they often get recommendations for this service or that to make the redundant tasks a lot easier, or the company as a whole decides that everyone should be using this or that, and guides everyone into transitioning.  Such is any business, really, but for the sake of my post, I digress.

It was with one of these recommendations that I was stopped this morning by my mother asking me if their business PC had IE 5 or greater and “something called JavaScrip” (yes, she missed the ‘T’) installed.  This being a crappy XP rig running (and forever to my shame) AOL 9.1, naturally, it did.  She proceeded to go through a few more steps before the site decided she needed to install several random ActiveX controls to continue - something that never happened.

Running any of these sites through Firefox, or any other alternative browser, you’ll quickly find that they’re not particularly keen on you even visiting them with the “filth that isn’t IE.”  At times, they’ll even make up excuses (like the one displayed here about how JavaScript is a requirement, even though the error message is being displayed using a short user-agent-checking script) just to make sure you turn around, fire up Internet Exploder, and come back riding a piece of Swiss cheese.

You see, at least from my experiences playing with and setting up all of these services for my parents, I’ve found that there’s one thing they all have in common:  They all require Internet Explorer for “compatibility reasons” and each site comes with more effluent to install than AOL itself.  To be honest, it’s quite irritating having to diagnose issues with these, because they have a tendency to go AWOL (not to be confused with the ISP?) all the time.

Let’s take that “compatibility” notion for a moment, mix in the required ActiveX, and analyze it further.  Do you really want to know what a bunch of these controls are for?  Image uploading (and resizing), mere basic text editing…I could go on forever listing this stuff, but essentially it’s all things that could be taken care of in any other manner of more portable, usable manner…and without all of the bloat.  Heck, some of these are even uglier than Windows ME!

It’s pitiful that everyone needs to resort to some client-side browser helper to provide functionality that has long since been capable by more portable methods, such as the use of a Flash or Java applet.  With either of those, there’s plenty of room and cross-platform compatibility to spare, and it wouldn’t tax anything more than it already is.  Flickr, for example, has an excellent upload and management system; while I’m not expecting every little feature of Flickr to show up on in a business tool, it’s at least worth pointing out that there are working, real-life examples with the kind of portability and scalability that these costly services should be striving for.

One would think that, with the growing market share of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and increasing presence of nearly-fully-capable devices like the iPhone and other smartphones, businesses aimed at enterprises and the employees of those corporations would be falling head over heels to make sure that their platforms worked on as many devices and from as many points of accessibility as possible.  But apparently I’m thinking wrong.  Web 2.0?  Maybe for the personal side of life…but as far as I’m concerned, work is still a version behind.

At this point, the phrase ‘net neutrality’ is like an outdated fashion statement:  everyone knows about it and nobody really cares anymore.  And while it certainly plays an important role in the evolution of the twenty-first century, it’s been sent to the back of the bus to sit with the dot-com blowouts.

Why?  As far as anyone can speculate, the new idea for making sure ISPs can overstuff their networks is to limit how much the customer can use them, rather than get funding to expand them from the corporations who are most likely to be transmitting across it.

The concept of enforcing bandwidth quotas can be rather laughable, especially when there are (seemingly absurd) $5+/GB overage charges.  Considering that ISPs will swear up and down that their heaviest customers are heavy downloaders, they repeatedly argue that these fees will only apply to this clique.  From a pirate’s perspective, think about it:

• The average MP3 folder (via torrent, newsgroups, whatever) for a single album ranges between 60 and 130 MB.  Assuming an average 100 MB per album downloaded, that’s 10 albums for $5 (or whatever the overage charge is).  I dare anyone to beat that with music acquired from the store as far as quantity goes.  (Though this does raise a question in cases such the newer NIN albums.)
• Usually, rips of feature films run between 700-1300 MB depending on a few factors.  That’s between $5 and $10 for a movie; if the downloader is willing to suffer the (potentially) lower quality, $5 is perhaps not unreasonable.  For hour-long TV shows, it tends to be 350-700 MB per episode, so the cost incurred in getting that full season on DVD can instead be split between your download overages and the new hard drive you get to store all of your ‘acquisitions.’
• Some of the most popular/expensive software suites also happen to be some of the smallest downloads.  The more software crammed in per GB, the better that $5 looks.

Sure, it angers the people who think unlimited means unlimited (I would like to believe this, but it’s never going to happen.) to know that suddenly they’re being reigned into reality, but the reality is that the gray areas are still the more-approachable, cost-friendly bretheren of walking the thin white line.

During school, when I’m only doing my schoolwork and light browsing, I tend to use approximately 150 MB per day (out of the 2 GB per 24 hours allotted per residence hall resident).  So, taking my 150 MB and multiplying it by 7 for a full week, I’ve already covered 1050 MB.  So, for my example, take that as the usage of the heaviest user in the house.  Let’s add in a little more for the rest of the typical family, and the Time Warner-suggested 5GB-per-month quota is going to be gone within two or three weeks.  And they’re the light end of the spectrum.  (I’m a little stupid for taking my usage and using it in a fictional example, but let’s not go there for now; the point is that these people claim that such limited requirements will satisfy most people, but any connection with more than one or two people using it is going to have major quota collisions.)

Even more pathetic is the practice of combining the higher-cost, higher-level quotas with higher speeds; I see this not so much as extending the timespan over which that quota is used as shortening it - people with more bandwidth tend to either use it in the course of their work, or feel it is going to waste and put it to use doing something - and in the process rendering the extra quota cushioning useless.

Of course, this all comes in the middle of the transition from print and televised media to Internet-based streaming media, and at a time where (at least, I see no reason why this isn’t true) telecommuting is starting to become a real substitute for the people looking to save their $4+/gallon gas.  (I can already see the argument boiling in peoples’ heads over whether it’s more cost- and time-effective to drive to the office or telecommute and get their work done from home.)  Isn’t it great that everything’s closing in all at once?

Side note:  If you really want a kick in the pants, I suggest you try searching for “at one point, google was“.  You’ll get a kick out of some of the results you get (and yes, it’s safe for work).