More rants of a dead man

I’m not a big fan of apple (anymore) or jobs but I give jobs or whoever designed the iphone/ipod touch credit for one thing:
The do-anything-you-want design of desktop computers nowadays isn’t the right answer for most people.
Being able to set your desktop background, and change all your icons and create directories and install random software has done nothing for this world but advance the world of support problems.
I personally don’t care for it, but the iphone way of giving you a small menu of options and only letting you do the few useful things that they let you is really a better answer for the majority of consumer electronics users.
This is true for iphones and dvd players and tvs. Remember when they started putting zillions of options on TVs and nobody used any of them?
Remember when they put clocks on VCRs and they all blinked 12:00?
People don’t really want infinite configurability, and that is really the fundamental problem with the PC design.
Linux following in their wake wasn’t a terribly brilliant move either. And don’t be surprised if a lot of options go away on the MAC desktops as well, or maybe it will be called a mac-light. Or likely just a home version of the ipad with a keyboard.

This is one of my all time favorite articles. I quote it as often as I can. I just came across it again, thought I’d share.
http://www.newsweek.com/1997/09/14/a-week-of-sheer-fakery.html

Jumping the shark. Technology has jumped the shark when it is has finally succumbed to progress and requires an end-user-accessible reset button in order to ensure it will continue to function after repeated use.

All politicians are assholes. Nothing new there.

The only time they put aside their personal agendas and pretend to be working for the public good (which is their actual job) is when there is a crisis of some kind.

Everybody wanted to do the right thing after 9/11, everybody wanted to help after Katrina, all sorts of efforts were going to be made to help out in Haiti.

But when things go back to normal, the pretense of doing the right thing goes out the window to be replaced with doing what benefits them.

The answer seems pretty obvious. In order to get politicians to do their job, we must live in a state of crisis all the time.

We need hurricanes, and suicide bombers and plagues and economic turmoil and earthquakes. All The Time.

Of course the other simpler answer, and one that would raise everybody’s quality of life rather than lower it, would  be to simply get rid of the politicians.

Maybe we could outlaw it like witchcraft.

It used to be that you would only share the minutiae of your life with close friends, or people you saw or talked to frequently.
Facebook has made it possible to share the minutiae of your life with everybody at the same time with no extra effort on your part, thus severing any special bond you may have made with the few people you chose to share the details of your life with, because now the bar is set so low, people you don’t even know, know every little detail of your life.

More progress, I guess.

In the 80’s you had a program running on a PC, and you selected a menu item by typing it’s number and hitting enter.

Rudimentary, but possibly still more efficient than clicking on a button with a mouse.

But the important point was, when you hit enter, the response was instant. Nowadays, you hit a web server and the response sucks.

Google is trying to change this by making chrome an OS so once again the weight will shift and the client will be thick/heavy/fat/smart and response will be better, but it will still under-perform my apple II because it’s going to be html based, which means when the presentation really needs to be put this box HERE, the program has to generate html that the browser then has to interpret to get the desired results. All very backwards, extra layer-y and error prone, just like SQL.

Somebody needs to come up with an important niche and write a client program that just blows away google’s best efforts, because they’re starting with such a broken playing field.

our kids will always have facebook or something like it. they will never be separated from their childhood acquaintances such that 30 years later facebook will come along and reintroduce them

I figure that most people basically use their computers nowadays to surf the web, and read and send email.

Some do some programming, photography, and other less common things, but the vast majority generally  facebook, shop and read email.

Yet every few years you have to buy new hardware so you can keep doing these things.

Just the same rant really, that if people would write better software, everybody could save a lot of money.

Put speed limiters on strollers so even if it gets away from you and starts rolling down a hill, it won’t ever go so fast that you can’t easily catch up with it.