Tag: People

What Web 2.0 really needs is a global “turn off comments” switch

I love a lot of things about “Web 2.0.” Websites just look better, for one thing, and I firmly believe that “form” is a key part of “function.” The increased interactivity both between user and site and between user and other users has made the whole thing a lot more engaging.

But some people seriously need to shut the hell up.

I love the fact that many sites allow readers to comment on their articles. And I often wish more people would post comments on my own site. (I have to assume/hope more people are reading it than just those who very… very… rarely post comments.) But sometimes, especially when the topic inspires a passionate response (often involving Apple, love ’em or hate ’em), the worst thing I can possibly do is allow myself to get sucked down into the vortex of asshat ramblings in the comments section. And I have a perfect case in point here today from Technology Review.

I happen to be an Apple fanatic, I can admit that. But even if I didn’t love Apple, the iPhone would have won me over. In fact, going into the Macworld Expo keynote where Jobs first announced the iPhone, I met the rumors of an Apple phone with cringes and revulsion. Why would Apple make a phone? I wondered. What a stupid idea, I was convinced. But by the end of the keynote, I wanted one.

I still don’t have one, although I am presently contemplating it. Once I had actually used one, I was even more convinced that it was the greatest invention of the computer age. Opening it up to business apps and third-party developers is going to release the deluge. So I found the TR article interesting, but I seriously wanted to crush my skull in a vise after reading the first comment. And it just got worse from there, even with the commenters I agreed with. And yet, like with Katherine Kersten, I just can’t… stop… reading… them! HHFFRRRGGH!!! (Suddenly, I think I understand what that means.)

I have a “theory” that most people don’t understand what a theory really is…

Wired has published an excellent article on how creationists are exploiting general misunderstanding of the scientific term “theory”. There is copious evidence that the principles of evolution are sound: aside from the fact that dog breeding (not a “natural” process, but evolutionary nonetheless) is something most people, creationist or not, take for granted, we can observe evolution — as an incontrovertible fact — among species like bacteria that undergo rapid reproductive cycles.

The problem, as the article suggests, is not so much one of science as it is of language: the word “theory” means something much different (and much more specific) to a scientist than it does to the average person, and creationist activists are expertly employing this fact to their advantage.

For me the question still remains, for what advantage? There’s nothing about evolutionary theory that denies the existence of a creator. The only thing at risk is wholesale fundamentalist belief in the inerrant truth of the Bible, and if you can live with “inerrant truth” being rife with self-contradictions, you’re going to have a lot of trouble with science anyway. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. But, meh, who needs science anyway? What has science done for the average person, anyway? (Don’t ask that question with your eyes open, unless you happen to be somewhere in the middle of untouched wilderness… completely naked and devoid of tools of any kind… and, uh, without a computer on which to read these words.)

All the World’s a Stage… and We Are Merely an Audience That Will Sit Through Just About Anything

Network television has been struggling lately to hold onto viewers. It’s no wonder why. In my early childhood years (the ones I can remember), say, 1977-1982, we got 4 TV channels… 5 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, the planets were properly aligned, and God was in a good mood. And 2 of those 5 were PBS.

Now I have a DirecTV satellite system that offers me over 130 channel options. Of course, about 127 of those channels are utter crap, but at least I get VH1 Classic and Boomerang, so when all else fails, I can always fall back on a cheesy Ratt video or an episode of Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. All of the old stuff from the broadcast networks that was actually worth watching is now on TV Land or Nick at Nite, and the more recent stuff is on TNT, or as I like to call it, the Law and Order Network.

You might think that with all of the competition from cable networks, broadcast TV would’ve withered away. But much to the contrary, the number of broadcast networks has doubled since my youth. So now instead of 3 networks competing for 95% of all viewers (perhaps I am being generous to PBS), we have 6 networks competing for about 10-15% of the total audience. (I think PBS has managed to retain about 3 or 4 viewers nationwide, for the shows that haven’t been stolen by the army of Discovery networks. So someone actually does watch Masterpiece Theater!)

Oh yeah… I had a point to all of this. Faced with dwindling audiences, atrophy of advertising revenues, and a chronic inability to get the public’s attention, the networks have resorted to… reality TV.

I remember naively thinking, around the third series of Survivor (which is now, incredibly, casting for its seventh series), that the public’s fascination with “ordinary” people making asses of themselves had run its course. Oh, how wrong I was.

I admit, occasionally I get sucked into this stuff. I spent 3 hours in front of the TV last night, flipping between the finale of Joe Millionaire on Fox (which I, honestly, had never watched before) and ABC‘s encore presentation of the freakshow that is Living with Michael Jackson.

A variety of thoughts went through my head during the course of the evening:

Am I witnessing the fall of Rome?

I can’t believe I’m buying into the hype and watching this crap.

God, that Sarah‘s a bitch!

Yes, it’s true. As high-and-mighty as I like to be, as much as I deride this tripe and the people who watch it, I get drawn into it too.

But what really disturbed me were the promo spots for other shows that the networks were airing. Just about every new show they were promoting was another reality show. And now we’ve gotten into the scariest territory of all: reality shows about fallen celebrities (or perpetual wannabe celebrities) who are desperately trying to revive their faltering careers. Granted, even then, I must admit I find it somewhat amusing to see what happens when the likes of Vince Neil, MC Hammer, Emmanuel “Webster” Lewis, Gabrielle Carteris from Beverly Hills 90210, Corey Feldman, and the rest (as they used to say in the first-season theme music to Gilligan’s Island) are thrown together, as with the WB‘s The Surreal Life. Of course, I got as much amusement from watching the closing credits of a recent rerun of SNL on Comedy Central, wherein Rob Lowe, Eminem, and Ralph Nader were standing in a row at the front of the stage. Any truly odd assortment of famous people is bound to be mildly entertaining, even if they’re just waving at TV cameras.

At this point, I can only wonder, what’s next? And how can I avoid watching it?

Don’t Expect them NOT to Be Incompetent

It is always with mild amusement that I listen to people complain about the incompetence of the sales staff at CompUSA or Best Buy or Radio Shack, or of the technical support people they get on the phone late at night or on weekends.

Think about it for a minute. Even though the economy is down, there are still plenty of well-paying high-tech jobs for people with knowledge and skills. If a person actually knows enough to be competent with computers, they will be able to get a better job than a thankless, $6.50-an-hour sales floor job at CompUSA, or working the graveyard shift doing phone tech support!

Now I am not saying there’s anything wrong with these kinds of jobs. Nor am I saying people seeking these services don’t deserve to be met with intelligence and courtesy. But in a market-driven economy, some things have to give.

If you want to walk into a store and pay under $1000 for a brand-new PC that’s roughly 10,000 times more powerful than those used to guide Apollo 11 to the moon, you’re going to have to accept that the place you’re buying it from can’t afford the overhead to hire people who can tell their heads from their asses (much less their hard drives from their RAM).

And if you’re going to get 1.5 Mbps broadband Internet access in your home for a little more than the cost of dial-up, and a tiny fraction of what businesses used to pay for T1 lines (in the “olden days” — about 3 weeks ago), your ISP also won’t be able to hire people to answer your phone call at 2 AM on a Saturday who have any skills beyond basic literacy so they can step through the phone script they’ve been given.

Accept it. Do the research yourself so you know what you want before you get there, and be glad you live in a world where electronics hardware and demeaning, thankless labor come cheap.

Am I TOO Detail-Obsessed?

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

I was riding in the car with some coworkers, returning from lunch. We were stopped in gridlock traffic (which seems to be the case more often than not on Roswell Rd.), and as my eyes (as usual) flitted from side to side, taking in the colors, shapes, fonts, states of decay, and other assorted minutiae of the storefronts and signs in the supersaturated commercial district, I happened to notice a sign on a nearby Chinese restaurant. It said:

GIANT CHINESE B.BQ.

Now your average person, even your average detail-oriented person, may have glanced at that sign and not given it a second thought. But I was immediately consumed with perplexity over the liberties taken by the sign maker with respect to the use of periods. Why, I wondered, did the first “B” warrant a period while the second did not?

Or take another example: Tonight when I got home from work, I found a new MacMall catalog had arrived, and I perused it with passive interest while SLP was on the phone. I was mildly irritated to see yet another use of the annoying stock photos of perfect people in black mock turtlenecks with their arms folded atop some invisible barrier, which have become staples for use in stupid photo illustrations in these catalogs, where the perfect people are made to look as if they are leaning against a steroid-enhanced 5-foot-tall software package.

You’re probably thinking that my awareness of these stock photos of perfect people in stupid poses is the focus of my detail-obsessed attention in this story, but you’re wrong.

In fact, I noticed something even more stimulating to my detail obsession: On one page I saw a photo of a young woman with long blonde hair, and on the next, a distinctly different young woman with short, curly red hair. And that was when it hit me. I noticed that the hands of the two women were in exactly the same position. In fact, the arms in the picture belonged to the same person and were from one single photograph, but the heads were different. What’s more, the skin of the hands in the photo was color-corrected to match the facial complexion of the woman in each photo.

Clearly, if I notice something like this on passing glance, I have a problem.