Category: Technology

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Enslaving the Internet

There was a time when television was the grand horizon, the magical future, the focus of mystical wishes about community, education, enlightenment, and the global village.

That was before NBC, CBS, and ABC got a hold of it, of course. That was when television was just an exciting technology.

One of the greatest deceptions of modern times is the myth that television is a conduit for “free expression”. Yes, no matter how different your opinions may be, they are represented somewhere on television.

Right.

Actually, one of the most remarkable things about television, especially in the past twenty years, has been the amazing uniformity of the programming on all the networks. Check out the news. Which television station presented the viewpoint that the Lewinsky scandal was no big deal and everyone should get over it? Right– nobody. Tell me, which television station or network can be identified with a pro-union/labour point of view? There must be one, somewhere. And which television station espouses the view that life is more meaningful when we have turned our backs on acquisitiveness and materialism and learned to appreciate the finer things in life, like friendship, nature, and charitable works? Which television station gives extensive coverage to environmental causes? Which tv commentator consistently advocates for the poor and dispossessed?

Well, we’re lucky up here in Canada: we have the CBC. But in the U.S., the so-called cradle of democracy, the uniformity of public opinion as expressed in the mainstream media is positively nauseating. And, sad to say, the religious channels are no better. In fact, in many ways they are worse. Their glib solutions to social problems and patriotic conservatism are merely the mainstream opinions of 50 years ago.

Well, why is that? The government doesn’t control television. How come television never questions authority?

There are three reasons.

Firstly, television is owned by large corporations. In the U.S., that is the real government: Congress is bought and sold by vast donations to re-election campaigns.

Secondly, television is governed by commercial interests: these corporations don’t want to offend the majority of viewers by presenting any minority opinions.

Third: the “self-regulating” nature of the television industry serves the government’s interest by treating consent in the same way obscenity is treated– television licensees are empowered to preserve good order and decency by preventing us from seeing a naked breast, or opinions that it deems to be “radical”.

Adbusters recently tried to buy time on commercial television to show “anti-ads”, little one-minute fables about consumerism and waste. The networks were able to refuse these ads because they would offend their regular advertisers.

Think about that. I am deeply offended by ads which try to use sex to sell cars, but no television station is going to pull Ford ads off the air for any reason whatsoever. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Which brings me to the Internet. What is happening on the Internet right now is remarkable: dissent is being heard. Alternative view-points are being presented. The unusual, the exotic, the idiosyncratic, is available for your perusal. Because nobody, no networks, no CBS, no Microsoft, no FCC, controls it. Do a search for the word “Clinton” and you will be presented will all manner of opinion.

So what does the government, and the big corporations think about this? Well, they’re not as dumb as they act sometimes. The music industry, for one, has suddenly realized that if the Internet really takes hold, and people begin to have access at speeds of 64K or better, nobody is going to need their slime-ball managerial skills anymore. Artists will have their own web sites through which you can download samples of their work and order the complete CD. The music industry, which presently controls artists by controlling the distribution of music, goes: “Hey! Where’s our cut?” They took one look at MP3, which allows people to freely and easily distribute musical recordings through the Internet, and they screamed bloody murder.

What galls me is the way they go around whining about the poor artists who are going to lose all their royalties. Well, artists don’t get royalties from the music industry because the record companies manipulate the expenses of recording and promotion to make it look like they’re hardly making any money at all.

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Frank the Hacker

I used to buy computers from salesmen. I shopped at MicroAge, way back in the 1980’s. A salesman convinced me that the IBM PS/2 Model 80, at $13,000, was better than state of the art. It was cutting edge. And, best of all, it used the new MicroChannel Architecture, so our I/O devices would be fast and easily configured. He rhapsodized about how IBM’s reliability and stability were in a class unto themselves. That’s why, when he offered a service contract at about $3,000 a year, I told him no. I said, “if it’s so reliable, we won’t need one.”

Well, as we all know now, MicroChannel died a quick, obscure death. When did I first realize I had been duped? When I tried to get a tape back-up drive for it and found out it cost $700 for the interface card alone.

Even better, I wanted an IBM keyboard for one of our other computers: $675.

It slowly dawned on me that this salesman, Wally, didn’t know a thing about computers, didn’t love computers, didn’t even know how to work a computer. I began to realize this when he wrote out my invoice, by hand, on one of those old metal boxes with the triplicate forms in them.

The next time I went shopping for computers, I went to a little shop in a decrepit little storefront on Queen Street. “Frank” sold me IBM clones for about $3,000 a piece. They were faster, better, more reliable, and more compatible (obviously) than anything MicroAge was offering at the time. I bought a Northgate keyboard from a company in Minnesota for about $150 after hearing Jerry Pournelle in Byte Magazine rave about it. It was better than the IBM keyboard– had the same nice click that I like, but it was lighter and more responsive. I had it for seven years before dropping a big heavy computer manual on it. I am not kidding. It was the manual for Word Perfect 5.0. It cracked the circuit board inside. I tried to re-solder it, but it was beyond me. I ordered a new one from Northgate. (Northgate’s keyboard division has since been bought out by their employees.)

Frank was a hacker. He dressed like a hacker. He looked like a hacker. I think he smelled like a hacker too, though I never got close enough to find out. His shop was a mess. He had a troll in the back room assembling motherboards and CPU’s and installing cards. But I loved Frank. He sold me computers and computer parts at a fair price. He loved computers. When a new device came out that was cheaper and better, he always recommended it, even if his profit margin was smaller. He couldn’t stand to sell you a piece of outdated, stupid technology, like parallel port tape drives or thermal printers.

Wally always wore a suit and tie. He looked frazzled for a while– I heard he went through an unpleasant divorce. He probably sold his wife one of those pathetic P/S 2 Model 50’s which were still based on the 286 processor and came out at the time the 386 was already getting old. It had a slick case, but the pathetic little power supply was capable of about 2 watts and it was impossible to upgrade.

The MicroAge store was slick and expensively decorated and went through a redesign every few months. I’ll bet their staff went on “retreats” and developed “strategic plans” and “mission statements”. They’re mission statement back then was something like: “We will fleece the customer for as much money as we can by deceiving him into believing he will be more productive with an empty hypocritical slogan than he will be with a functional computer”.

Frank’s mission statement was, “Where the hell did I leave that IDE cable? It was here a minute ago.” His strategic plan was to find his desk. His code of customer service was to try to remember to send out an invoice, and he gave you credit only if he remembered your name.

The world could do with a lot more Franks. We already know where all the Wallys are.

Keyboards

Even Northgate, by the way, puts the “\” in an idiotic place. Anyone who still uses the dos prompt has to reach his pinky way over to the right, to below the <enter> key to get to it. Meanwhile, the “}” is right up there in easy reach. Yeah, and how often do you use the “}”?

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Tape Accompaniement

As a former teacher, I remember meeting the word in all it’s awful dimensions: a student hands in an essay of exceptional, uncharacteristic clarity and eloquence, with a newly discovered gift for metaphor, and becomes defensive when questioned about sources.

It takes a while, but eventually I do locate the source: whole paragraphs copied verbatim from a youth magazine in the library. Confronted with irrefutable evidence, the student, far from being apologetic, looks me in the eye and says, “So? Who cares about a stupid essay anyway.”

Even the guilty find it easy to define cheating: passing someone else’s work as your own, “borrowing” from others, taking shortcuts when everyone else has to take the long route. We probably shouldn’t be so shocked to discover it: in most quarters of this society, taking the shortcut when everyone else is taking the long way is considered smart, shrewd, macho. It’s a sure way to prosperity and success. Donald Trump and Ivan Boesky may be vilified on the editorial page, but on the society pages, they’re kings. Oliver North may have lied to Congress and the public, and conspired to break the law, but he is growing rich peddling his Machiavellian politics to banquet halls filled with envious arm-chair rogues. Cheating is first and foremost lying.

Do we, as a Christian community, have a clear idea of what cheating is? We probably think so. We never tire of warning our children about cheating at games, or our young people about cheating at school or work, or our married couples about cheating on each other. As a Christian school teacher, I certainly thought I knew what it was. But recent experience has caused me to think twice about whether or not there is a consensus in our community about what cheating is. My question is, is taped accompaniment cheating?

Most of us have probably experienced this new approach to music by now. We attend a concert put on by school or church or club, and wonder where the sound of violins and trumpets is coming from. Soon we realize there is no orchestra: there is a tape. It sounds wonderful: musicians far more gifted and well-trained than anybody we know, playing along with familiar faces and voices from the congregation and community. The sound is clearer, better balanced, completely free of feedback and static. No flubs, except for the singers, occasionally. Nobody out of tune, except for the singers occasionally. Nobody misses their cues, except for the singers occasionally. I confess a secret wish that a fuse would blow, or that the tape would get snarled in the drive mechanism.

My first question is, why even bother with the singers? And in fact, at a recent Christian elementary school production, taped background voices were indeed added to the performance– just to make it sound a little better than it really was. “They needed a little help for that part,” so I heard. So why not go one step further, and have the students mime the lyrics, and use professional voices instead. It would certainly sound even better.

“Ah,” you say, “but then what’s the point? You could stay at home and listen to music like that anytime you want to. The important thing about a performance is… ” Well, what is it? That it’s real? That it’s live? That it’s people we know displaying their true talents?

Our society already suffers from an oversized respect for “celebrities” and “professionals”. It is in the interest of big corporations– music publishers and broadcasters– that we care as little as possible for local talent and as much as possible for famous people who live in mansions in New York or Los Angeles and never perform except when surrounded by 50 body-guards and an equal number of scantily clad dancers. Now even the Christian community sometimes prefers a tape made in Los Angeles or Nashville to the musicians in our own community. If we follow this path, we will someday have no local musicians left, for who want to compete with a multi-million dollar recording studio?

It may sound strange but I thank God everyday that the Canadian Government passed it’s Canadian content rules, requiring radio stations to play at least 33% Canadian music. If it were not for this law, we would never have heard of Spirit of the West, Bryan Adams, Crash Test Dummies, Blue Rodeo, Colin James, or dozens of other Canadian artists.

It surprises me that schools and churches– along with Karaoke bars!–are the worst culprits for this artistic shortcut. Whenever I can, I ask the people involved why they used it. Most often the reason given is expediency: it’s just too difficult to get live musicians to come out for practice and performances. People promised, but didn’t show up. It’s more convenient to use a tape. The microphones and PA equipment are a big head-ache.

Most musicians I talk to say, “If I had known that they were going to use a tape instead, I would gladly have played.”

One director was pleased to report a new minister’s opinion that the music was far superior to a live performance he had recently heard, with a real band. But what did he expect? And why should the director feel flattered by this opinion? The fact is that background tapes, because they are produced in a studio and because they are edited and mixed and enhanced in innumerable electronic ways, will always sound better than even the same musicians playing live. There is no question that for pure technical quality, nobody will ever beat a good studio recording, including the studio artists themselves.

It is an entirely different question as to whether or not technical quality is what really matters. There has always been a sizeable number of music lovers who prefer to hear live music, warts and all, because of its immediacy, it’s honesty and emotion, and the dynamic rapport between audience and performer.

But it is more convenient to use a tape, and I have some sympathy for the harassed choir director who feels she or he just can’t put up with even one more aggravation and decides to take a shortcut. I have the same sympathy for that student of mine who just couldn’t put up with the mental agony of writing and re-writing and revising and evaluating another essay, and decided to take the easy way out. She took the trouble to rewrite everything in her own hand, and even to reconstruct an outline and a rough draft, since they were required. For all that effort, she received a zero.

When the audience at one of these performances applauds at the end of the evening, I wonder if the organizers have the honesty to ask themselves if they have earned it honestly? I am reluctant to applaud even the singers, though I know most of them probably didn’t choose to be accompanied by a machine. It feels silly.

And it’s wrong, most of all, because just as most of our students are honest– even if they know they’re not perfect– most of our musicians are honest– even if they know that they are not perfect. And I will always rejoice to hear an honest musician up there in front of the crowd giving it his or her best shot, because while most of us are honest about what we actually say to people, very few of us are honest enough to show so much of ourselves to so many at once.

I wish our music directors and choir leaders would take a stand, speak up, and educate the Christian community about artistic ethics. Our community needs to know that, yeah, sure, it could sound better, and bigger, and slicker, but it wouldn’t be honest. It’s somebody else’ work.

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The World is Watching You

A new CMOS digital camera image sensor now costs only about five bucks to produce. This is the component of electronic products that translates an image into digital I/O for a computer.

There a lot of websites devoted to people who put these little cams into their apartments or bedrooms and invite you to watch them live their lives. But with these camera’s getting so cheap, we are going to see them everywhere.

You are going to see shoe-cams, so you can record where you walked. Your kids will wear hat-cams while playing baseball. You will have a car cam, so your wife can see if you’re sticking to the speed limit. There is going to be a camera in every phone-booth, so people can try to figure out what you were doing in a phone booth when you have a cell phone. There will be cameras in your lunch box, to see if you really eat your tuna salad sandwich, and in your office, so your boss can see if you’re in.

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Fakes

I have before me a Comstock photographic catalogue. This is a lovely little colour magazine that lists hundreds of pictures which you can buy to use in your advertising or internal communications.

The pictures are technically gorgeous. Outstanding colour and composition. Every defect, human or not, has been air-brushed into oblivion. This is about image. If you want a picture of a rugby team to help convince your sales staff to work together, here it is: woman, man, woman, man, perfect teeth, blue eyes, fake sweat on their brows.

Here’s a little Huck Finn guy with a sling shot and chocolate or dirt smeared on his cheeks. I have three children and I’ve never seen a smear like that. It looks like it was stroked on with a paint brush.

Here’s a picture of wrecked computers stacked in a pile. They look like real computers, but the stack doesn’t look real. It looks like it’s been arranged for a photograph.

Here’s a picture of a woman making a presentation. She is perfect, but not too perfect. Yes, there is a tiny bow at the hips to credibility: she is chewing on a pen, and her hair is carefully arranged to look slightly unarranged. The lighting gives it away though. No real office has that kind of dispersed, ambient sunshine. No people in real life look like they’re having so much fun working.

Here are two young, healthy, beautiful couples frolicking on a beach. I have never in my life seen two couples who look like that. Oh sure, I’ve seen lots of beautiful people. And I’ve occasionally seen two beautiful people standing together, in the same frame. But here are four of them: they are absolutely physically perfect. They are little Club Mediterranean Androids. They have perfect smiles, perfect hair, perfect tans, perfect brawny or buxom chests.

Here’s a couple with their two children at a camp-out, in front of a quaint little wood fire. The mom is wearing make-up. The dad has a perfect tan. The little girl is blonde. Even the fire is perfect. The “father” has his arm around the boy, who is toasting a marshmallow on a perfectly twisted little stick. The lighting is magical: their faces are bright, but so is the grass behind them. I picture them all sleeping in a tidy little row of perfectly new perfectly clean sleeping bags: mom, girl, dad, boy, collie. A bear comes along and looks fierce, and everyone cowers behind dad, but he only wants a cookie. A skunk comes by. He isn’t about to spray anything but everyone holds their noses. That’s what you do if you see a skunk: hold your nose. They don’t look like they actually smell anything bad. They look like it’s fun to hold your nose when you look at a skunk and make funny faces.

Here’s an old couple in a canoe. They are looking at each other. Yes, in a canoe. He is leaning to his left, and she is half-turned, looking behind. The canoe is perfectly balanced. His hair looks blow-dried and waxed. She is wearing a floppy hat that looks like someone wrinkled it to make it look rustic They both have perfectly casual yet attractive jackets. They are smiling and happy. Fun, fun, fun.

Here is a picture of the sphinx, a large pyramid, and a full moon, all in one frame, at night, perfectly exposed. Amazing.

CIBC has an ad in which an architect talks about how banking has really improved his architecture. Someone found out he wasn’t really an architect. He was an actor. CIBC says, “What’s the big deal? This is advertising, after all.” But the ad said that “real people” were switching to CIBC. That’s okay. Maybe an actor somewhere opened a new account.

I don’t like Walmart, but in some of their catalogues they use real store employees to model their clothing. I thought that was really cool. This is what you might actually look like if you buy this shirt. And there is a picture of Julie Schiestal in sales, Oklahoma City, wearing the shirt. I only hope that the next time they downsize, they include a few of the laid-off employees in their catalogues. Here’s a new pair of running shoes. Here’s Ed, downsized in Buffalo.  He only makes minimum wage so he’ll need good running shoes  to get away from all his creditors now!

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Millennial Madness

As a computer professional, I get asked a lot about the Y2K problem.

Well, no, actually, I don’t. I get a lot of statements, not questions. Like, “that’s really something about the Y2K problem, isn’t it?” I always reply, “Well, I won’t be flying anywhere on January 1, 2000.” And that’s true. I have no plans to be flying anywhere at any time in the next few years. I won’t be climbing a mountain on January 1, 2000 either. What’s the big deal?

Is the Y2K problem real? No it isn’t. Ignore it and go back to sleep.

Of course, as everyone knows, the year 2000 is not the first year of the next millennium, therefore, January 1, 2000 is the first day of the last year of the 19th century. Big deal. What people are celebrating is not the first year of the new millennium, but the day on which THREE digits turn over on their watch calendar instead of two. We are so excited by the idea of watching three digits turn over, that we are going to throw a world-wide bash to celebrate it. Well, it is a lot bigger than watching your car odometer turn over to 200,000.

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Y2K

As a computer professional, I get asked a lot about the Y2K problem.

Well, no, actually, I don’t. I get a lot of statements, not questions. Like, “that’s really something about the Y2K problem, isn’t it?” I always reply, “Well, I won’t be flying anywhere on January 1, 2000.” And that’s true. I have no plans to be flying anywhere at any time in the next few years. I won’t be mountain climbing on January 1, 2000 either. Big deal.

Is the Y2K problem real?

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Mona and Copyright

The Mona Lisa is not copyrighted. It is in the public domain. You can copy it all you want.

Except that… well, a picture of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted. So you can’t take a picture out of an art book and put it up on your web page. How would they know? They would analyze your copy and look for faults. If your faults are the same as the photographer’s faults, he can sue you. But first he’d have to admit, I think, that he was a lousy photographer.

If you took a picture of someone painting a copy of the Mona Lisa, you could be in trouble: his painting of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted, even if it’s an exact copy. You’d have to black out his picture. But then, you still have a picture of him. Can he sue your for violating his personal copyright of his own face? I don’t think so.

What if you took a picture of someone’s picture of a painting of someone else’s pictures? Sure, maybe he’s got a copyright on his picture of the painting, but what right does he have to take that picture of the painting of other paintings? Does he have permission from the artists who did the paintings in the painting? I’ll bet he doesn’t. So if he sues you, maybe you can find the descendents of the artists and sue him.

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Lament for Geoworks

Does it surprise you to know that Windows is only about 9 years old? That it was released in 1990?

That version of Windows, of course, was called 3.0. There was a Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0, but they were so pathetically, mind-numbingly bad that nobody even tried to use it. Windows 3.0 was different. It was merely incomprehensibly bad. But it was made by Microsoft, the company that gave us Dos 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, and 3.3, and 4.0, of course, and 5.0 (the best dos ever), and 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2. And Bill Gates, at the press conference announcing the conception of Windows, warned that other graphical user interfaces wouldn’t be compatible with future versions of dos.

In 1990, nobody could have believed that Windows would be so late, so bad, and so slow. Everybody thought that in a year or so, we’d all be happily clicking and dragging around on our IBM compatibles in Microsoft Windows.

Geoworks was released in 1990, and it ran great. It was a true graphical user interface with a remarkably functional core, and real multi-tasking. It ran happily on 2 MB of RAM and required very little disk space.

Just as it was set to take the world by storm, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was almost ready to roll out it’s own version, Windows, in just a few months.

Geoworks was destroyed, crushed by the announcement. Software developers switched to Windows, so third party applications dried up. Even worse, the investors pounded Geoworks’ stock until it was pretty well wiped out.

It took five years for a truly functional Windows to emerge (Windows 95) and, even then, it still wasn’t as reliable as Geoworks was in 1990. I run both Windows 98 and Windows NT on my desktop. They are both pieces of garbage, to put it bluntly. They are bloated, slow, bug-ridden, and annoying. Why do I use them? Because I make my living with computers. Everybody wants Office 97 and Quake and all the other Windows applications. I get paid to try to solve all the problems that shouldn’t exist.

There are other operating systems: Linux, BeOs, OS/2, but few applications that run on them. These other OS’s are strong, reliable, and fast, but Microsoft beat them off with sticks and stones. That is the legacy of Microsoft’s strong-arm tactics over the last 9 years. The result has been disastrous, though few people seem aware of it. The loss of productivity due to problems with Windows must be phenomenal.

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Telephobia

Can’t resist revisiting this for my usual annoying ideas– what’s so great about the blasted telephone? It hangs on your wall. It sits there. It makes an annoying noise. You run to answer it. You don’t know who it is. You can’t see the person you’re talking to. It’s probably a salesman or a wrong number or an annoying neighbor– but, it’s too late! You picked it up. You said “hello”.

I think we should change the rules. When you pick up the phone, you should just listen. The other person should say, “Hi, it’s Bill– is anybody there?” Then you can decide. You can say, “You again? Go away” or you could say, “Bill? I’m moving this weekend and I have 45 boxes of books and need help– you have to come over.”