Two Slashes

Listen to emo?  Perhaps you’re an emotionally-sensitive wrist-slitter.  How about rap?  Well, the bets are on that you’ve been having boatloads of sex and been drunk enough to make Lindsay Lohan look like a model citizen.  And jazz?  Oh, you’re probably hiding in the closet, too much of a loner to do anything social (like comment?).

I don’t mean to offend anyone there, as it’s not actually me saying any of that.  Nope, those would be (more or less) the words of Felicity Baker, who has all but attached every genre of music with some insane mental or social health diagnosis.  No offense to her, but I find it extremely ridiculous that any person who so much as turns on a radio could be diagnosed as suicidal or a drug addict.

I also say that none of this is revolutionary due to the fact that all of the “diagnoses” seem to be common themes in that genre.  For example, in a genre that (at this point in time) prides itself on “banging dem hoes” and getting “crunk,” it’s a miracle at all that someone could suggest that people who listen to rap are following along without someone having already noticed the obvious similarity. And while I can’t call H.I.M. “heavy metal”, there are enough mentions of drug use throughout metal and rock to give me credit when I point out one of the (pardon me) “documented types” of groupie.  I am, however, having a hard time picturing the corellation between techno and suicide.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this “research” isn’t really research so much as a “medically-relevant” way to stereotype people based upon the genres of music they listen to.  Think about it:  I know quite a few people who listen to those types of music, and I think the worst habit any of them have is a cigarette habit, hardly self-destructive nature at the level Baker (and the according article there) seem to imply.

Not every genre has been accounted for (at least judging by the article I linked to), but enough are mentioned to account for almost every person I’ve ever met.  And with the multifaceted nature of music, most music may actually end up classified at least partially under a genre that this article ties with “bad connotations,” or (to what probably would be a mixture of horror and ridicule) multiple “bad” genres.

I guess I’ll go back to listening to my vast library, and quit putting fuel on the fire.  Call me a depressed, drug-addicted loner with suicidal tendencies and questionable sexuality if you want, but I’m in perfectly good health and I’m not going to let something as harebrained as an amateur diagnosis of my social and mental capacities ruin my listening pleasure.  So go on then.  Ensure your path to drug addiction, wrist-cutting, and wallflower behavior today.

Side note:  I’d love to know the researcher’s medical opinion to songs like this one.  Aside from the flagrant disregard for authority, of course.

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.’

For every useful piece of technology, we’re left with some crock of crap that somehow manages to become a reigning champion and hang around for a while with no improvement. No, as much as I’d love to, I’m not actually talking about Microsoft Office today. This little blurb is about something much more common than that.

It’s on the very hard drive you’re probably using now, and chances are it’s probably alerted you to some problem at one point or another. Now, if that problem ever really existed, nobody knows, but you probably took the warning’s advice and replaced the drive pretty quick. Still not catching on? I’m talking about S.M.A.R.T. – the “drive health monitoring system” that’s been standard in every drive manufactured in the past several years.

Standardization is good. It’s why we can swap things around and still expect them to work without a lot of jerry-rigging or modification. It’s also the cause of plenty of things ranging from why Windows is the dominant operating system of this point in time to why the power connector on most internal devices is interchangable.

Still – why S.M.A.R.T.? Well, that’s a simple answer. The very “technology” designed to monitor the health of your hard drive and alert you when it might be dying has a very poor track record with me, and it’s about to get worse. Every S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drive I’ve used that has died has done so without so much as a single S.M.A.R.T. alert. That’s right, nothing but the dreaded “click of death” to tell you your data’s on its way to the curb with your useless hunk of metal. And in my case, that’s not exactly something to be celebrating or claiming that the drives in question failed suddenly or were abused – not at numbers like mine. These are drives that have essentially been babied from the get-go. And interestingly enough…the ones I get warnings on? False alarms. Yup, they keep churning away, while the drives that don’t give so much as a warning die off every once in a while.

Now, it’s been a while since I’ve had a drive fail…maybe a few months. (Though the fact that I’m now away from 90% of my equipment and unable to mess with it helps that longetivity score just a bit.) But I brought a desktop and my laptop with me to school.

My usage habits might raise some doubt in why I’m posting this, but it’s interesting all the same. My laptop, for instance, usually rides around with me in an unprotected backpack alongside my schoolbooks, sometimes being squeezed, pressed, crushed, dropped, smacked, banged, hit…in short, it takes quite a beating just being carried with me. I know I could protect it more, but it’s a cheap machine, it’s long outlived the lifespan I had expected for it, and in general it just goes to show that treatment isn’t always the primary reason for failure. Not to mention that I’ve pulled the thing apart several times, flung it around onto beds, tables, desks, chairs, and any other matter of instant-computing surface…and it works. For three years now it’s gone through treatment like that, and here it is, still churning away and letting me write up my post. In fact, the only new hardware the thing has seen is a stick of RAM. That’s it.

My “school” desktop, on the other hand, is a different story. For the most part, the machine’s been coddled like one would coddle a newborn. At least, since I got some of the parts. (I got them from a friend; long story, but they still work and they saved me a bit of cash.) The hard drive in there’s been mine since day one though. And even after suffering a nasty PSU incident about a year into its life (it’s now about 4-5 years old), it’s served me well. After that aforementioned incident, the drive developed a small clicking problem. And despite the clicking, I continued to use it. I mean, what’s the point of status monitoring if it tells you the drive is in better condition post-trauma than it is beforehand? Anyway, it managed to make it into my school machine (at which point the clicking had subsided). It’s been between a month and a month and a half since that…and the clicking’s back, but it’s no *click* this time. It’s almost more of a screech. In the signs of hard drive health, it’s not a good sign when the thing is screeching.

Anyway, even I can tell by now that the thing is about to kick the bucket…yet where’s the “monitoring” that was supposed to have alerted me to the problem even before it occured? I wouldn’t expect it to warn me about my PSU blowing up, but it certainly should be able to predict the drive’s death based on the fact that it spends more time attempting to perform disk activity than actually doing it.

Now, the concept of drives monitoring their health is novel, and bloody useful, especially in a corporate world, and if it weren’t for the problem of flash-based internal media coming to the consumer world in the next few years, I’d be wondering more why there haven’t been any recent announcements concerning a technology that may very well be on its way to redundancy. But based upon its standardization and wide acceptance, and (lack of) monitoring prowess, I’m left to wonder why nobody ever bothered to try and improve it considering it fails in every way, shape, and form imaginable.

So, this brings me back to my original point. Why include something that doesn’t work, and charge the consumer to implement it? Certainly there can be a middleground where the technology either is not implemented or actually functions well enough that the data on the drive can be backed up well before any audible clicking can be heard? It’s not smart, and it’s not fair to extort consumers for random “features” on that bulleted list that don’t work remotely near as advertised.  I realize that drive death prediction is really hard to do…but seriously…can it actually predict something?