The New Yorker: Fact
Money Quote:
A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment the were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
Genie Grants Scalia Strict Constructionist Interpretation Of Wish
Genie Grants Scalia Strict Constructionist Interpretation Of Wish
The Onion makes my day yet again.
Convergence my foot
Every so often, I'll read an article on the web, and someone will mention one of those memes that seems to go around: What's going to replace my computer? The PDA? Set-top Boxes? Smart phones? Internet Appliances? Everyone has their idea. And I have mine: Nothing.
The problem with all the replacement objects du jour is their specificity, and their crappy interfaces. PDA's for instance, which seem to be on the slow march out. I've owned six of the buggers, and the experience is always the same: It starts out really neat. It's handy to snap out your PDA, scribble in a to-do or event, and sock it away again. But then what do you do? You sync it to your computer. And eventually, the convenience of easy access is outweighed by the undeniable annoyance of using a pen to write text. Just give me a keyboard, please. And a mouse.
What about set-top boxes? I guess I just don't get this one. People want computers on their TV? Really? WebTV really took off, didn't it? Perhaps I want to watch movies that are stored digitally. But why not just beam it over from my computer? Because using remote controls to handle serious interface navigation is a pain in the ass, and managing a library of movies involves serious navigation. Just give me a fucking mouse and a keyboard. See the pattern?
Most pundits espousing these sort of views tend to point to some specialized gadget, but computers can do so many things in so many ways. To fully replicate a computer's feature set, you'd need a wrack of gadgets, or a few "combined" gadgets. And combined gadgets suck a lot. So where's the win in that?
I'm sure we'll find more and more ways to connect the things in our lives to computers. I'm sure sooner or later, our fridges really will be online, and we really will turn on the oven from work, or re-cycle the drier so our socks are warm when we get home. And I'm sure at the center of all this will still be the good old, oft maligned, but as yet un-replaced, personal computer. Maybe it'll be a thin client, running off the network. Who knows. But it'll be there, with it's do-anything, keyboard and mouse-driven glory.
Which is all to say, Steve Jobs is right. Again.
Fish in a barrel
Pat Robertson thinks we should assassinate a foreign leader. (Chavez, of Venezuela)
Very pro-life.
When everything lives on the internet (Again)
About once a month, maybe more, an article seems to appear talking about AJAX. For those not in the know, AJAX is a technique whereby, instead of entering information on a web form and submitting and going to another page, you can do all the submitting in a little bubble, and stay right where you are. Simple in concept, AJAX represents a giant leap in usability for regular folk. For a taste, head on over to Google Maps or Netflix, among others. At google maps, enter and address like New York, NY, and marvel as that map is brought up. Then drag the map around. Not bad, eh?
No one disputes that all of this is cool beans. The matter of debate centers around web apps vs. regular apps, the titanic struggle. Will web apps supplant desktops apps? Some say yes, others say no, never. Slashdot grouches in particular seem to view web apps as silly toys that'll never conquer the world, because you can't write photoshop on the web. As a web developer, my biases are pointless to deny. Clearly, web apps aren't taking over just yet, although I'd rather use Gmail than regular mail at this point. My line usually falls on the side of "web apps aren't there... yet."
Although it's dangerous to invoke fate, especially in technology, it seems inevitable to me that network based applications will win, if not today, then tomorrow. Whether those applications will be web apps or not is a small question, as by the time the victory is complete, there will likely be no real difference between the "web" and "applications".
These days, the thought of booting entirely from a network is a silly thought. But it's really a matter of infrastructure. When the internet is always on and fast, and all but unbreakable, storing applications on a local machine will seem a silly waste. The beauty of web apps is that they need not be installed. Web apps just are.
Eventually, the whole machine will run in this manner. The network will be the computer. In our own time, we've begun moving in this direction with data. Wouldn't life be easier if every document you owned existed in one place on a network, invisibly backed up by a service provider, there for the using, as you see fit? Email already works this way. Web apps already work this way. Apple's .Mac service syncronizes my calendar, my contacts, my book marks, my mail and mail settings, and any documents I ask it to sync, all seemlessly, invisibly. There is no way to do without such convenience once you've experienced it. You develop this craving to take leave of that annoying hard drive. Some day, you will.
Of course, the curmudgeon geeks in the audience are grumbling at this point. "That's a mainframe." Nevermind what a mainframe is, the curmudgeons are right: We're going round in circles. Once upon a time, everything lived centrally, accessed through a dummy terminal, and our current dominant model of the personal machine with all our apps and data local was queer, even weird. Now the circle has come round, this time with an enormous, global infrastructure and expanding wireless ends. This time, the we have a mainframe in the air. But the idea is the same.
At long last, we're coming home.