When Acer announced that they were acquiring Gateway, I remember quipping to my officemates that “If they really wanted to scrape the bottom of the barrel, they should really buy out Packard Bell.”
There is a silver lining to this: gathering them all into a single cesspool makes ’em easier to avoid.
Possible dream jobs.
The poll posed these two questions to adults:
The results:
Both my parents were doctors, so at the age of 5, I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. This was in the early seventies, and the way I hear my parents tell it, those were some of the best years to be in medicine, from a money-making point of view.
However, at around age 7, I discovered space and astronomy books. I was glued to the TV set when the Apollo-Soyuz mission took place and followed any news about the not-ready-for-flight space shuttle, which was stilled named the Constitution. (A letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans would later make them rechristen it as the Enterprise.) I thought I might make a good astronomer, space scientist or rocket engineer.
In my teen years, I met my friend Pavel Rozalski, whose dad did some computer/electronics work at a glass company, and he got me into computers. We developed a sort of early Apple Computer working relationship while working on our science fair projects: Pavel played the “Woz” role doing much of the building of our simulator of AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates, while I was the “Jobs” guy, doing a lot of the writing of reports and talking to the judges. Our heroes were the guys who did stuff out of their garages — Woz and Jobs, as well as Hewlett and Packard. From then on, I was hooked on computers. I wanted to do something computer-related when I grew up.
I was also a dabbler in music and graphic arts (especially cartooning — most people at Crazy Go Nuts University know me for being a DJ and a cartoonist rather than an engineering and computer science major), so I always hoped that there’d be a way to combine those two loves with computers, perhaps with some chatting with people thrown in.
I remember reading an article in Creative Computing, one of the premier computer hobbyist magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In that article, a programmer predicted that in the next coupel of decades, computer programmers might get the same sort of recognition as rock stars. I remember thinking, “Yeah, I’d like that.”
I showed the article to a friend of mine who laughed at me. “That’s stupid. That’s why I’m going to be a rock drummer. It’ll be way better — you’ll be coming home, all tired from work, ready to die, and I’ll be onstage and on TV in front of screaming chicks, getting high off the audience’s smoke.”
(Dude: been there, done that. With an effin’ accordion. How ’bout you?)
Finally, at the end of my teens — or maybe just after — I became aware of Guy Kawasaki, who held an interesting position at Apple: Technical Evangelist. I remember thinking “That’s a cool job…maybe I’d like to do that someday.” Since then, Guy’s been a role model of mine.
All this is an explanation for my generally good mood: I’m working at my dream job.
Me and Chad Fowler playing the opening number for an evening keynote at the RailsConf 2007 conference.
In his blog Rough Type, Nicholas Carr points out the hypocrisy in Yahoo’s move to dismiss a lawsuit against them filed by jailed Chinese dissidents. The suit is being filed on the behalf of Yu Ling, wife of Wang Xiazoning, who was arrested on some rather suspciously-totalitarian-sounding charges such as “incitement to subvert state power”.
Nick’s argument is simple and goes like this:
Believe it or not, this image is from a BBC story on the Yahoo! Nazi memorabilia auction case.
Click the picture to see the BBC story.
Remember back in 2000, when Nazi memorabilia was available for sale on a Yahoo! auction page? A French court ordered them to remove the item since the sale of such items is illegal in France. Yahoo’s top French executive, Philippe Guillanton, argued that:
“Yahoo.com is not doing anything unlawful. It is completely complying with the law of the country in which it operates and where its target audience is,” he said. “Yahoo auctions in the U.S. are ruled by the legal, moral and cultural principles of that country.”
Simply put, it was “screw you and your French laws, we’re operating in America!”
But now that a Chinese dissident has put the legal ball in their court, Yahoo!’s taking a more “enlightened” citizen-of-the-world view of things:
“This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts.”
It’s as if they’ve suddenly discovered the Prime Directive.
Carr sums up the hypocrisy so nicely with this line: This time, Yahoo executives are making no mention of “the legal, moral and cultural principles” of the U.S.
Nicely done, Nick! I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword.
The first thing you’ll notice about Boing Boing if you visit it today is the new cleaner, two-column look:
You might have also heard of its new gadget blog, located at gadgets.boingboing.net, run by Joel Johnson, former editor of Gizmodo and current editor of Dethroner.
The change that interests me most is something that Boing Boing used to have and has now brought back: comments! Along with the comments comes the best person I could think of as an online community manager: Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose Making Light is something I always cite as the best example of managing comments. For more on her comment-fu, see this article: How to Keep Hostile Jerks from Taking Over Your Online Community.
Back when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, I loved the Usborne series of books about life in the future. Now that I’m living in the future, I’m trying to find these old books and see how many of their predictions of life today came true. The Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games, which I pointed to in an earlier entry, was rather accurate in its predictions of what was in store for video and computer games. The future home tech featured in Usborne’s Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century (whose cover appears below) isn’t too far off the mark either; most of it would be easily found at your local Best Buy.
One section in Future Cities is titled Computers in the Home. It describes a home of future, as seen through the eyes of a British author dabbling in sci-fi in the late 1970s. Here’s its introduction:
Computers in the Home
The picture on the right takes you into the living room of a house in the future. The basics will probably be similar — windo9ws, furniture, carpet and TV. There will be one big change though — the number of electronic gadgets in use.
The same computer revolution which has resulted in calculators and digital watches could, through the 1980s and ’90s, revolutionise people’s living habits.
Television is changing from a box to stare at into a useful two-way tool. Electronic newspapers are already available — pushing the button on a handset lets you read ‘pages’ of news, weather, puzzles and quizzes.
TV-telephones should be a practical reality by the mid 1980s. Xerox copying over the telephone already exists. Combining the two could result in millions of office workers being able to work at home if they wish. There is little need to work in a central office if a computer can store records, copiers can send information from place to place and people can talk on TV-telephones.
Many people may prefer to carry on working in an office with others, but for those who are happy at home, the savings in travelling time would be useful. Even better would be the money saved on transport costs to and from work.
Pictured below is a scan of the two-page spread in which the Computers in the Home section appears. It points out some features in a future home, most of which you might find in your own living room today.
Click to see the full picture at full size.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Here’s the accompanying text, with my commentary in italics:
The Electronic Household
This living room has many electronic gadgets which are either in use already or are being developed for people to buy in the 1980s.
1. Giant-size TV
Based on the designs already available, this one has a super-bright screen for daylight viewing and stereo sound system.
(Came true and even was surpassed in some ways. 42-inch plasma screens sell at Costco for about $1000 and TV isn’t just broadcast in stereo, but 5:1 surround.)
2. Electronic video movie camera
Requires no film, just a spool of tape. Within ten years video cameras like this could be replaced by 3-D holographic recorders.
(The bit about tape came true in the 80s and is surpassed today by recorders that write to magnetic and optical disk as well as solid-state memory. Holograms, a “science news” favourite that seemed to crop up in the news once a month, don’t have the future-appeal they did back then.)
3. Flat screen TV
No longer a bulky box, TV has shrunk to a thickness of less than five centimetres. This one is used to order shopping via a computerised shopping centre a few kilometres away. The system takes orders and indicates if any items are in stock.
(Strange how they separated “giant TV” from “flat screen” TV, as if it were an either-or-but-not-both choice. It’s come true, all right: the LCD monitor with which I’m making this entry is a mere 3 centimetres thick, and the head office of Amazon — this entry links to Future Cities in its catalog — is about 3000 kilometres away.)
4. Video disc player
Used for recording off the TV and for replaying favourite films.
(Came true and surpassed with DVDs, Tivo, movies-on-demand and the merging of disc players and videogames.)
5. Domestic robot rolls in with drinks.
One robot, the Quasar, is already on sale in the USA. Reports indicate that it may be little more than a toy, however, so it will be a few years before “Star Wars” robots tramp through our homes.
(Things didn’t turn out as predicted. The Quasar, pictured below, was much less than a toy. In fact, it turned out to be a hoax:
We do have the Roomba, though, and we do live in a world where a robot gladiator contest is a viable TV show.)
6. Mail slot
By 1990, most mail will be sent in electronic form. Posting a letter will consist of placing it in front of a copier at your home or post office. The electronic read-out will be flashed up to a satellite, to be beamed to its destination. Like many other electronic ideas, the savings in time and energy could be enormous.
(Two areas in which retro-future predictions break down are how we’ll communicate with our machines and how we’ll communicate with each other. Most models of electronic mail as perceived around 1980 was always some form of tele-copying, where you’d write or type your original letter, which would then be scanned into electronic form and then printed at the post office closest to the receiving party. Even the U.S. Postal Service envisioned this model, since they saw mail, whether physical or electronic as their rightful domain. Remind me to post and article about this sometime.)
Overheard on the #rubyonrails IRC channel:
[ Following a discussion in which someone talks about how his company is switching from a web-based app to a thick client. ]
<Vardogr> Bad ideas never die, they just get new project names.
I was most amused by this comment made in response to the Engadget article about Acer’s announcement that they plan to acquire Gateway:
Wow, when 2 turds collide! This should be an exciting merger.
Having been an owner of two Acer laptops (one back in 1997, the other being the Vista PC sent to me in Microsoft’s PR disaster earlier this year) and the user of a number of Gateway desktops, I have to agree with the general sentiment expressed both in the Engadget comments as well as among my peers: they may be cheap, but their quality is on the low end of the scale, especially when it comes to laptops. They’re the makes I recommend against whenever people ask me what Wintel/Lintel machines they should buy.
