Peter Merholz has posted an article with generous scans from the manual for the first 128K Macintosh (yes, kids, I said 128K). How quickly we forget all of the conventions and metaphor that have become second nature: scrolling, the desktop, using the mouse in various ways.
I use a couple of tools to keep myself somewhat organized. Besides a general methodology (David Allen’s Getting Things Done), the most important tools are:
These three tolls help keep ideas and tasks organized and make it easier to find information in files. But file management is always an issue, primarily because of changing locations… I reference a file in a note and then the location changes because I move the document to an archive or external drive or new folder and the reference is useless. Searching helps, but ideally I could create shortcuts that actually work (Windows shortcuts are not recognized by many tools).
Until recently, I had no idea that Windows had the ability to create and use “hard links” similar to those available in Unix. To simplify, in the world of Windows, hard links to files are called hardlinks while those to drives or directories (folders) are called junctions. Both are explained– simply and then in depth– in this shell-shocked article as well as in Wikipedia.
Simply put, junctions (which I find most useful) are like Windows Shortcuts but they actually work.
Despite all of the flaws in software, nasty bugs, worms, and virii of all kinds, the number one vulnerability in most systems are users with weak and repeated passwords. Sure, it’s easy to remember that same password (or small set) you’ve been using for the last five years, but they are likely vulnerable to attack– not to mention the fact that compromising one password compromises multiple resources.
This Lifehacker article shows some very simple ways to create secure passwords that are easy to remember based on keyboard patterns, resource names, and other techniques. Check it out and protect yourself (and all the other users on your shared systems).
Doc links to a post that says 99.9% of the country have never heard of him, Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis and says that number is too low. Which is true. But also meaningless. How many people know who Charles Jenkins is or Philo Farnsworth? How about Albert Sigren? And yet almost all of us watch television and store our food in refrigerators.
The names don’t matter– the effects of their work do.
In many areas, I’ve become less and less an absolutist as I’ve gotten older (someone once told me it would be the other way around). Large scale societies and the many good things that come from them exist because of compromise. So I’m willing to accept that the job of protecting public safety will always operate in a contentious manner with the idea of civil liberties. During wartime, the compromises will be greatest. However, I don’t consider protecting ourselves from terrorist attacks a “war” (with all that loaded term implies) as much as a condition of being a nation. The potential to be attacked by another is as much as a characteristic of peace as it is conflict. So the question becomes: how much compromise and intrusion is permissible?
Our government has seriously bungled this question in multiple ways. The current furor over the NSA tracking of phone numbers and connections would be much less intense had they not already admitted to illegal wiretapping despite the highly liberal provisos of FISA that would have allowed them to operate legally just as easily as not. Keeping track of phone numbers and doing social network analysis to try to identify connections is almost precisely what the NSA should be doing. It’s almost the very definition of acceptable domestic surveillance.
Ironically, the actually acceptable method for this kind of analysis was already put in place once by the NSA, but killed due to political infighting. It’s not as if the methods are opaque– this kind of de-referenced study is common to a plethora of studies that involve human subjects. Leave it to the government to kill a sensible, logical program for fear of being embarrassed by the results– only to embark upon much more embarrassing methods a decade later…
Anyone who has been thinking about Net Neutrality should check out this current report on Senate net neutrality activity by Art Brodsky– it’s going to start heating up…
Mike McCurry doesn’t like the hostility of the rhetoric surrounding net neutrality. McCurry asks:
Do you really believe this is good v. evil or just an honest disagreement about what will make the ‘net flourish and prosper?
The answer, of course, is that it is both– it is an honest disagreement about a technology that is permeating our society, making it a deeply moral issue as well as a commercial one.
It’s certainly no secret that the fundamental question here is one of profit. ISPs would love to monetize the services they provide twice. They would surely love to create premium rates not for more bandwidth (which is fine on a neutral net) but for access to particular services… many of which they can charge for a third time through the media vendors. According to those opposing net neutrality, this is all OK because it’s the American way.
But as if this weren’t obscene enough, you have cancerous growths like Hands Off the Internet, funded by bandwidth/media conglomerates and conservative non-thinking tanks treating the term “regulation” as if it always has the same effect and moral meaning no matter how it is applied. Sadly, there might just be enough ignorance out there that these shrill cries of “regulation! regulation! Run!” might find a sympathetic audience, despite the simple eloquence of people like Tim Berners-Lee.
It’s interesting that people don’t mind regulation when it is performing services such as forcing cable providers to provide local and broadcast channels as part of their basic packages, or cell phone providers to allow complete interconnects with all wired carriers (not to mention free and ever-present access to 911). Regulation is, in and of itself, meaningless.
“Regulating” the Internet by legislating that it remain in operation as it has since the beginning of its phenomenal growth isn’t regulation in the sense that the scare-mongers would have you think. If everything has been so wonderful in terms of the Internet’s current growth (as most on both sides agree), then what’s wrong with protecting that status? It’s like complaining that keeping people who would like to shoot and rob me at an ATM machine are being unfairly regulated by having laws that prevent them from pursuing these actions. After all, so far I haven’t been shot and left to die…
I guess this commercial featuring a real-life Rube Goldberg device is a year old, but I’d never seen it! No digital effects, and 606 takes before they were able to get the single non-stop take seen here…
If my life were rendered as a device, this is what it would look like.
Among other speakers at our Internet2 Day was Doug Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2, etc. Just about every discussion of Internet2 seems to come back around to video delivery. I was hoping Doug, speaking on the topic “Beyond Tomorrow’s Internet” would help open peoples’ minds to some real innovative ideas. Unfortunately, while his notes about partnerships, neutral nets, and the nuts and bolts of Internet2 becoming everyone’s bandwidth were well taken and on-point, when he had a chance to talk about innovation he fell right back into the same old song and dance I’ve seen a dozen times before.
Doug’s house of the future was essentially my household with some Jetson’s style video layered on top. So you have kids surfing the net and using IM and eyeball cams, and you have work and downloads happening with impressive speed. But beyond that it was just more video: high def videoconferencing, video phones, high def delivery of movies, high def entertainment delivery and storage. I’m not denying that most of these are good things that will happen. They are happening now, they’ll just be happening faster and with more clarity.
But that’s exactly the problem. When it comes to communication, there’s a reason George and Jane Jetson’s video phones haven’t become ubiquitous, and it’s not about bandwidth. It’s because people don’t want them. Videophones are a dead idea. Videoconferencing, no matter how high-def, is a highly constrained technology. The fourth wall remains, the high transactional distance remains in full force. Video conference works in certain settings and with a certain definition of “works” that is usually based on there being no other technology available. But adding increased clarity and more frames-per-second will have almost no effect on that rate of success. Videconference is simply a very poor educational tool that is highly desired by those who don’t have it, valued by those who have nothing else, and easy to understand by those who don’t use it.
No matter how speedy and how many pixels there are, the heart of videoconferencing is hollow. You can make it bigger, you can make it faster, you can make it sharper, but it doesn’t make it better. It has an undeniable hold on the imagination of administrators (and when it comes to entertainment it makes great sense), but ultimately it’s just what I’ve started calling “polishing the poo.” No matter how lacquered and attractive, it’s still a turd. It’s not innovation.
Our Internet2 Day demo went quite well (a few photos here– I actually did present despite the picture of me in apparent stasis). Our basic question was: if you had Internet2 connectivity right now (we do in fact have access to Internet2 bandwidth, but since it doesn’t go anywhere except to other Internet2 participating institutions it isn’t particularly useful) what would you do with it?
Doing a demo on this question is a bit tricky– we don’t spend time developing for extremely high-bandwidth, so anything we did would have to be theoretical, but it was important to me that we tie it to real practices. So we basically came up with a demo that talked about creating a unified interface that would pull together the three main segments of a future classroom interaction:
All three of these are achievable now, but bringing them together cohesively is the big-bandwidth dream. Not incidentally, the three pieces align perfectly with the “arc of technologies”: broadcast, transaction, and transformation.
My idea to do real-time scanning electron microscopy and analysis was scuttled because the remotely controlled scanning electron microscope was being used for a different session right after ours. So we decided on a hypothetical class bringing together remote biology and geography students to study the Avian Flu. The basic layout was:
There were only two minor technical flubs on the part of the sound and light stage crew, but they were basically invisible to the audience anyway. The important things were we were on-time, the transitions all worked seamlessely, and we were able to hammer home the most important messages: creating a learning environment that allowed for creation of new meaning, place-based relevance in the learning environment, reaching a distributed cohort across disciplines, real-life examples of the educational arc, that much of this was available now and that Internet2 could be about more than just video (more on that in my next post). I may have ranted a little bit towards the end in reaction to earlier speakers that kept talking about making the location of users irrelevant (equal access) where I want to see the location take on a new, important relevance in learning!