Noise Pollution

Ice cream day and it is hoped to be less than yesterday. Last night was a horror, noise pollution from the nearby park, hours and hours of unwanted music of the most irritating form. Doubled my affection for folk.

On a more positive note I ran across this article [Link] yesterday. At last a W8 tablet that I would consider buying. And why would I buy a W8 tablet? Because I didn’t have to boot it. I am not a strong fan of Swiss Army knives. I own several, both branded and, perhaps, generic. The best is one issued by the German army and, I believe, made in China. Other than a hideously poorly designed spring in the scissors, it is vastly superior to any of my other multi-blade knives.

And that is what this tablet is, a three blader – Ubuntu, Android, and W8. And it comes with a keyboard. So I can probably change the Unity GUI to something utile like XFCE or LXDE – not sure I want the overhead of KDE on a small RAM, limited CPU slab – and use the Ubuntu for “work” and the Android for “play”. And the W8 is there if a bog colleague is in need of rescue, purely as a social insurance thing.

The Ubuntu (real (?) Linux) tablet has been promised often and never, that I can see, delivered. So I am not holding my breath on this one. And it is hideously expensive. I can go buy a laptop workstation (almost) for this price. Or a really good laptop from a Linux house.

On which note, I also ran across [Link] an avowedly partial list of Linux GUI. This is the Linux equivalent of the Grand Canyon, an awe (?) inspiring sight. You have the great, colorful depths, like KDE and XFCE, the shadows like LXDE, and the cess pools like Unity and Gnome 3. And unlike the tyranny that is W8, choices. That is what counts.

And lastly, from England, [Link] the un-news that PC sales are down and tablet sales are up. But the telling stat is

“In the same three-month period, 2.3 million PCs were sent into channels, possibly to moulder in unsold piles, representing a decline of 15 per cent. This included a 20 per cent fall in portables and a six per cent decline in desktops.”

Note, pray, an 0.2 decline in lap boxes and an 0.06 decline in desk boxes. The article claims this is because lap boxes are more amenable to replacement than desk boxes. I would say that what is done with lap boxes is fundamentally different from desk boxes. Simply put, desk boxes are used more for creation and work than lap boxes which are used more for consumption and entertainment.

humans, music, computers, tyranny

Phone Religion

Mundane day again and week in. Happily back to gym although the podcast, an episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas” in their series on secularism was too PC, trying to press the idea that religion should be more than an individual matter. All they managed to do was further the argument that religionist organizations are all about control and only pretend to be about religion.

On which azimuth, I see [Link] that MegaHard is going to recant their stupidity – which demonstrates theirs is less than Canonical’s? – and reinstate the START button with their first major update of W8. Or could it be that they have discovered that they have a product without a market? Stats I have seen indicate box users are avoiding W8 like Vista while sales of slabs and smarts are well below the cut-and-run level.

What this does tell us is intriguing, especially in light of the whole ‘it’s the apps, not the OS’ theory. Evidently the OS does matter if it keeps you from running the apps. Gee, who would have guessed?

I noted yesterday in an eNewsLetter that sales of FaceBookFone are even worse than those of W8. Isn’t it wonderful that MegaHard now has something to brag about?

On which azimuth, I see [Link] that the Ubuntu phone is eminent. Wonder how big a thunk this one will make? But the really big question is whether Canonical will come to their senses and get back to being an OS and not a disaster?

I hate to say it, much as I dislike Gooey, but at least they are a secular organization to Apple’s religionist one.

computers, cellular telephones, OS, nonsense

Too much, Too late

Thor’s day and am I happy to put the hammer down. My sally to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill began with a visit to have the bandaging from the oral surgery so now I am in the mode of flouridizing the newly exposed roots so I can once more eat/drink stuff slightly different from body temperature. Coffee was DEFINITELY an adventure yesterday!

The gym was happily thin this morning, which rather matched with my absence of energy from the joy of food and drink yesterday. I listened to an episode of the English Ubuntu podcast and aside from the skit had little to gain from it. But it is noise of distraction.

Before I forget, today is the anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman. I shall celebrate his memory. I may even draw a few diagrams or drag out the bongos.

And in typical Feynmanesque humor (maybe) I note an article [Link] entitled “10 reasons why Canonical and Ubuntu will connect the masses with Linux”. My colleague Magnetic Inductance Force shared with me and my discussion will largely follow his comments.

The thesis is that Canonical, via Ubuntu, will glue together userdom. The list is sadly stuttering but that goes with any list. It’s the sort of thing that defies good composition but is attractive to humans, even the majority who suffer dyscalcula.

I fear I have to put this prediction in the same pile as Laplace’s (?) that the seas would turn to lemonade. What Canonical now seems fated to do is flop. For several reasons:

1. First of all, there is Unity, Canonical’s tile GUI. This abomination has been billed as the common interface for box/slab/phone. It does that, but as with most Swiss Army Knives, not well.
2. Second, Unity works for people who either do not work or who work sequentially as opposed to cumulatively. For those of the latter, Unity is something to to avoided or, as in my case, blown away with some useful GUI like XFCE or KDE.
3. Third, Unity is a tile GUI, just like Gnome 3 and whatever MegaHard calls ‘Metro’ this week. So all the folks running screaming in terror from W8 are not going to run to Ubuntu. One of the derivatives with a workable GUI maybe, but not Ubuntu.
4. Four, the Ubuntu tablet is probably never going to be anything more that a niche market. Consider the abject dismality of MegaHard’s tablet sales. The average tablet user – mostly consumerist – doesn’t care about OS, only about app. Which means that they ain’t gonna learn a new OS that has few apps when they are already comfortable with Apple or Android.
5. Five, the Ubuntu phone is probably a non-starter. Look at W8 phone sales. Same as with tablets but squared. The marketplace is pretty well dominated by Apple and Android and Ubuntu isn’t a camel to sneak into the tent.

That isn’t ten but it’s enough. I would be pleasantly surprised if Ubuntu does any good in the tablet or phone markets. I hope it does. I would like an Ubuntu tablet that I could do something useful on. After I replaced Unity with KDE, which already has a tablet and a tablet interface. I’m not sure about the phone. Maybe. That way I could get decent (maybe) email and calendar apps. If Thunderbird will work on a phone.

humans, behavior, corporations, computers, OS, stupidity

Wet Start

Survived another week out although the rains continue. And I did manage to retrieve the dowager maternal element from hospital. Despite the rain. Which continues this morning thus giving the negative to the proposition that the rain intensifies when one is going somewhere, especially somewhere sad like hospital.

I am also happy to report that Scant City Memorial, despite being a back woods, Jeff Foxworthy hospital in nawth Alibam takes second chair to none in its glacial pace of dismissal and its disregard for courtesy and efficiency. I suppose they have cultivated this skill to compensate for their other inefficiencies and apparent incompetencies?

In which spirit, I note an English corporate study that indicates that if one wants a prompt response to one’s email, one should write in a tone of despair and pessimism. [Link] The criterion for the assessment was apparently key words absent any context. I have to admit that of the examples cited, half were ambiguous in that regard. But then I am sure that being an introvert I have an inadequate appreciation of how extrovert bogs feel.

No attempt was made to associate this with email dependence, the phenomena whereby people have to reply to ever email, the modern equivalent of you-hang-up-first. Also no mention was made of age dependent differences in perception of email courtesy.  So what does this company do other than apparently inept studies?

Next, I ran across an article [Link] in Economist on how the English government organization for funding science has decreed that all research they pay for has to be journaled in open-access journals. The Yankee government is expected to follow suit soon.

Booyah! About time.

But what is entertaining is the tear jerk, handkerchief wringing from the for-profit journals. They threaten to discorporate if not paid for publication, and not the current exorbitant fees, but what they claim is actual cost.

Go quietly into the night, dinosaur.

I fear I cannot summon much sympathy for Nature or even Science. They have servers already and all they have to do is open then to the public. And their costs reflect a bloated archaic instrumentality whose lie is demonstrated by the new, not-for-profit journals like PLOS.

But I can summon glee for the demise of the for-profit journals, like Springer Verlag. I look forward to dancing on your graves.

And lastly, I note [Link] another instance of the lie that England is not a tyranny. Seems that one of the royal parasites was elected to honorary membership in Royal Society. What demonstrates the tyranny is that the ballot sent to the members for the election only has a Yea check box!

Gee, sounds like something Stalin would do, doesn’t it?

Makes me happy that we evicted the blackguard tyrants at point of bayonet when we did.

computers, humans, email, health, tyranny

Jargon Stream

Hectic weekend, what with the dowager maternal parental element in hospital and the precipitation. And still recovering from oral surgery myself. Gad! I am coming to hate mashed potatoes.

So as a diversion I shall clear a few tabs. First, a rather deepening article [Link] from the Tsar of Tsmart Ass, Alan Alda. The article is an admonition from Alda, who is doing some sort of popular science program on PBS, that in dealing with the public scientists not use “jargon”. Since I wanted to make sure the ramifications of the word, I looked it up

Jargon 1. Confused, unintelligible language; gibberish. “A barbarous jargon.” –Macaulay. “All jargon of the schools.” –Prior.  [1913 Webster]

I have to admit that after reading this and trying to place it in Alda’s context, I was quite confused. Then I realized that I had to put this in the frame of a communication model. The confusion is not on the part of the scientist but the other side of the conversation.

The point is that the folks on the other side, when one is talking to the “public” are mostly bogs, hence lacking any knowledge of the discipline. But my colleague went on to say that the hard part is not learning this, it’s obvious to anyone who observes, but rather the hard part is knowing what words to use. He claims, and I agree, that a certain minimum commonality of terms is necessary for any effective communication and if one side lacks those words, communication is impossible.

I am not sure why this is so unapparent to Alda.

On a rather less frustrating azimuth I see [Link] that the Google Glasses are being implemented to take photographs with a wink. I have to admit that I consider this whole Google Glasses think jargon. Why would anyone other than a voyeur want them? And if they take photographs with a wink how do they tell it from a blink? And does this mean that society will evolve into something where everyone appears to have palsy?

I shall admit to being ORF. And I am slowly warming to my barked shin (smart) cellular telephone, especially in dealing with situations when I am distanced from a real computer. I am also increasingly alienated by the shitty nature of the software and the opacity of the OS. I find it rather crippling to have to go find a REAL computer to find out how to make my phone do what I want it to.

And it is hideously time consuming. With my desk boxes I only lose time when the power is out or I need to do a system reboot. With the barked shin phone I seem to spend a quarter of my time fiddling with unruly software and another quarter charging it. Is battery technology really THAT bad?

And followingly, an article [Link] on the most reliable box to run Winders on. Seems the result of the study, small data set, is an Apple lapbox. In fact, only lapboxes were considered. Strange. That restriction, that is, lapboxes are much less reliable than desk boxes. But then consider that the primary issue of recovery is not so much the OS but the user. Hence, given the elitism of Apple and the uberboggish nature of their user demographic, that an Apple box is reliable is no surprise. And that the average Winders user cannot recover is the same. That’s one of the reasons we call using Winders serfdom – ignorance is exalted.

And lastly, I see [Link] that Winders Ate is being rescued – by Linux. Seems that the KDE folks, who have rescued Linux from Canonical’s Unity and Gnome’s Gnome Tile GUIs, are developing a version of KDE for Winders. BOOYAH! This is a true mitzvah. Not that MegaHard or most of its serfs will recognize it as such, of course. But at least it offers a means for Winders users who can do so or have access to a wizard get some relief from the insanity that is whatever MegaHqard calls its tile GUI today.

humans, stupidity, communication, computers,

Apres Moi

Now is the spring of discontent. This may be Saturn’s day on the official YG calendar but for me is it is two day – second day after gum surgery and the epitome of ache and distraction. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” And while Tellus may not end, my ability to apply attention span-time is impacted.

This is not helped by the weather beavers’ foretelling of rain all day.

On the good side at least I have no uncertainty of being alive.

On which azimuth, I noted an article [Link] in the Register that over half (barely) of the organizations they sampled lacked a plan to replace Winders XP. That’s with a looming end-of-life next calendar year.

Somehow I am NOT surprised. The problem comes down to Vista and Winders Ate. Both are banana peels. That is, once you have them installed all that is left is useless crap that is slippery on one side, tacky on the other, and generating accidents and spills without rhyme or reason. Add to this the relatively minor bit that you can’t upgrade from WXP to W7 and that almost all of the boxes running WXP aren’t brute enough to run W7 as other than a demonstration in slow motion and with fire alarms.

So some of the absence of plan is denial but a lot of it is just flat end-of-road. Anything you do and any direction you set out in will be painful and costly. In business, nothing is worse than being the best you can ever be.

I have to wonder how many of those are seriously considering Linux as an alternative? The bad part about end-of-life is cessation of security fixes. But if you run WXP in a virtual box in Linux then you get your security from Linux, especially if the WXP clients only talk to the internal network.

Of course you aren’t going to run Ubuntu 13.04. It seems the beast is perpetuating its woes without any improvements. [Link] The self-elevated Saint Mark of Canonical trumpets that his Unity GUI is natural and easy but that seems to be true only for geeks who work consecutively rather than cumulatively. And it is definitely alien landscape for WXP users of long standing, especially those who have been mind wiped by organizational IT Gestapo. They might be bale to switch to one of the derivatives with usable GUIs, but then we get into the question of whether Ubuntu hasn’t abandoned the Linux paean of running on old hardware or not?

I put U 12.10 on my dated Inspiron lapbox and it was like watching some miscegenation offspring of Plutonian molasses and liquid Helium. Yes, it booted faster than Winders but otherwise it was as snappy as ashes. I hate to say it but Ubuntu may have about run its course as number one. Canonical seems to be hell bent on reducing itself to a company of measure zero.

And on that note I must needs spread seed for the tree mammals and dinosaur descendants.

computers, humans, health, OS, corporations

Lack of Science

Ice cream day again and time to finish off the old tabs. Another pleasant morning that belies the misery that summer will too soon bring.

First, an article [Link] in the New Yawk Times entitled “Data Science: The Numbers of Our Lives”. The article is about the analysis of all that data that is collected in modern life by corporate parasites. Yes, parasites – animals that live by stealing the vitality of others.

My first thought was that anything that has to tell me it is a science isn’t. This one supports that hypothesis. The intent is not so much understanding as it is manipulation – how does one use the data to profit? But as horrible as that thought is, of a capitalist leech version of 1984, what may be more worrisome are those who decouple themselves from some or all of the sampling.

Privacy is an considerable and growing concern, at least based on the increase in numbers of add-ins for browsers and various stealth modes for them. But while this “data science” isn’t, there are still some STEM aspects to it – more bastard engineering than anything else – that raise red flags and alarming gongs when the sample is skewed. Admittedly, the corporate oligarchs are probably not too concerned about this so long as the fraction of the population not gathered into their blood sucking maws is small, but what does the absence of anything say about the existence of those people? Are we developing a society of shadow people who are not just the unemployed who live beneath overpasses and in storm drains and browse only at the diminishing number of public libraries but also those who have the knowledge to bypass part or all of this harvesting?

Since most of these latter are nerds, and perhaps a few geeks, and bogs who are canny associates, this may not be new. After all, these are the people who have been outside the domain of consumerist serfdom for years, and outside organizational fetters even longer. Yes, they are subjected to periodic pogroms, but dark ages then ensue and the woes dealt in disease and violence of unsupervised bogs allow the nerd population to regenerate and reassert.

Of course, the uncertainty is GEN Y which seems intent on not just cooperating but embracing this thralldom.

Next, an article [Link] in Scientific American comparing traditional book (paper) reading to using an eReader. The comparison is very one sided. eReaders are not good along many azimuths including stress on the reader, comprehension, and learning. One more  way to stupid the young seems to be the bottom line.

And unlike data science there may actually be some science to this.

humans, computers, stupidity, greed, tyranny

Unfixable Rot

It’s that time again. Ice cream day and the weather beavers are foretelling that I can maybe actually eat some today. And I also have to hawg out a lot of unremarked tabs. So be prepared for the chaos that yawns. And yes, I did have to drag myself out this morning.

The starting article [Link] has the rather spanning title “Is PubMed Hurting Scientific Journals?” I gather that PubMed, an obvious pun on ClubMed, is a repository of medicalist articles. Its use has been directed by the Yankee government for YG funded research. Anyway, a recent study by a “consultant” indicates that articles on PubMed are more widely read than journal articles, and if the article is on both a journal site and PubMed, the readers are passing up the journal site.

At first this looks like a colossal duhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Given the choice of a free or paid site which do you opt for? But it goes beyond that to folks showing this preference even when the journal site is free. The article, or at least  the journalism, now fails in its kritik and misses the idea that if one source has more good stuff than another the usage of the first will be disproportionate. That’s the duhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Anyway, the moaning is about the readers missing all sorts of stuff on the journal site that aren’t articles. Announcements and organizational stuff. And the readers, poor sods, are missing this. Well, I hate to tell you but they would have even in the days when the journal arrived via the YG postal service. Even medicalists, who are arguably only maybe scientists, are busy and do not do much browsing. Scientists read the journals that cover their area of interest and only those parts. The only time they read the social and organizational stuff is when they are either going to a conference or deciding whether to renew the subscription because the journal is tanking. So the message is be happy they aren’t reading those things because if they were the journals would be in worse shape than they are now.

Next, an article [Link] by the biologist E. O. Wilson declaring that one can do science even if one cannot do maths. He claims that many bright, promising students go over to the business shule because they can’t do maths and hence believe that they can’t do science. As I have noted here, the worst maths users I know of are biologists (flat can’t,) economists (do it WRONG!,) and historians (strange and often mystic.) We both went to the same undergraduate shule, the campus of the Black Warrior and my perception of the sorting he talks about is a bit different. If you can do maths and physics you can be a physicist. If that’s too hard you can be a chemist or an engineer. If you can’t do maths and physics, then you can do biology or geology. If you can’t do that then you go to business or education. About all the maths that biologists were required was rote memorization statistics and not very much of that. I don’t think biologists were expected to know the difference between a mode and a mean, or what normal meant. But my impression was that the folks who ran away from biology did so because they couldn’t do biology, not because they couldn’t do maths.

And if you run away, you can’t do science. As is, I see too many who didn’t run away, and are not only not good at science but they aren’t good at whatever they are doing, like administration. Which is not to say that Wilson is wrong, just that there is another side to his argument. But I do dismiss his claim that one can do almost everything without maths. That’s like saying a color blind person can design fabric patterns. What they can do is the things that don’t require maths. And while they are numerous, they are not all, or even, in my perception, the majority.

Next, on a happier note, I see [Link] that Winders Ate has now gobbled up 0.03 of the marketplace.

“Windows 8 was released to the general public on October 26, 2012, over five months ago, and only just recently captured 3% of the total desktop operating system market share.”

I suspect MegaHard is scurrying hard on W9 to return to something the PC minority can use on their boxes. And maybe lick its wounds over its dismal showing in the cellular telephone marketplace as well? This all gets summed up in a comment I heard the other day on a Linux podcast about the Ubuntu (Unity) phone: “Who cares?” The tile GUI is rapidly outshining the Edsel as an act of stupidity.
 
On which note, I ran across a Linux article [Link] with this lovely quote:

” I believe those of us who do introduce Linux to the general computing populace need to pick our targets carefully.  If the person you are helping utters, “Be patient with me, I’m computer illiterate…

Pass them by.”

I find this reassuring, coming from someone whose calling, as an extrovert, is to do a lot of interpersonal things. As an introvert I try and all it takes is one negative to send me into hiding for six months. Stupidity is a cancer.

More to the point, if you;re under eighty and say you are computer illiterate, you are likely going to stay that way because you have had opportunity and failed. If you’re over eighty then you will probably stay that way because of ossification of the change node. I know that sounds ageist but it’s a fact of human aging so get past it.

Even if you aren’t, I am not going to take any great effort any more unless you show some enthusiasm and honesty. Drug addicts backslide. Windows addicts are worse. And I am glad that others in the community are coming to the same conclusion. Linux is a good thing; Winders is a bad thing and if you won’t help yourself, my time is being wasted on you.

Some slaves cannot be freed.

humans, behavior, science, computers, stupidity

Humings? Off to the cliff!

Ok, time to get serious or no ice cream for me today.

First, an article [Link] about some calculation of when homo sapiens is going to go extinct. The argument, which I can’t follow very well from the reportage, is that there is some probabilistic total number of humans that can live before we go away. Yeah, that’s why I have problems with this one. But I think its the presentation rather than the idea. I have similar concerns but mine are founded in two things: available resources; and extinction events. There are only so much oxygen, water, ….. on Tellus, in the solar system, in the galaxy,….. and when it is used up we, and life as we know it, ends. And it doesn’t have to be exhaustion, just scarcity enough to tip us into the void. The extinction event thing is more direct but harder to confront since the probabilities are small at any time. So we happily go along being bogs, in the main, and assuming that will be solved by a nerd in someone else’s lifetime. And not inconvenience us.

That may the the scariest source of extinction of all.

On a different azimuth, I found an article in WIRED [Link] that argues we need to change our computer usage from GUI to “conversational interface”. Ala Star Trek. The article is amazingly, to me, at least, frank about the difficulties, turning them into values in several cases. But I can’t suspend my disbelief. I spent several years trying to use dictation word processing software. It never had an accuracy better than 0.1. On a VERY good day. I quit repeatedly because I couldn’t afford the time waste.

My concerns about this all turn on vocalization. Language is complex, full of things with fuzzy meanings. I don;t think we are going to be happy limiting ourselves to baby talk to deal with computers. Besides, there are lots of things, some of those 18 click chains the article mentions, that I can do better and faster with clicks than words. And there is accent. No one thinks they have one. And while we may all be able to learn to machine talk, can we keep it up when we are sick or distressed or emotional?

Nice idea. Maybe it will work with the next dominant species.

Speaking of which, i see [Link] that 0.2 of the population of the Yankee republic, as estimated from assumedly representative sample populations, afirm they have “no religion”. That doesn’t mean they are atheists. It just means they don’t associate themselves with a religion organization or brand. Yes, I know religions don’t talk about branding outside the inner circle. But they;re a business and that means branding.

What’s missing from the stats is the demographic of nerds versus bogs. I know the folks here in the old Confederacy are less likely to have this state, but I would like to know what fraction of that 0.2 are nerds and geeks.

humans, extinction, computers, religion, nonsense

National Insecurity

It is not “officially” week out and I have to begin cleaning out tabs in the overloaded browser. I start by noting that a Linux group in Spain has filed suit against MegaHard over its monopolistic UEFI. [Link] I have to admit to ambiguousness on this. Not that I do not applaud the righteousness of the effort. After all, MegaHard implemented this BIOS change as a sort of “Hadrian’s Wall” to keep the Linux barbarians out of its domains while it could still command the obedience of hardware manufacturers. Very definitely not a fair play however much MegaHard tries to dress up the gaping security weaknesses of Winders with its bleats of security.

The only security involved here is to assure MegaHard dominance of the computer environment.

I am told by colleagues who have to contend with the needs for both Winders access and a real OS every day in an organizational environment that the Linux UEFI solutions have limited space of solution. In bog talk that means they don’t work all the time on all boxes. In this regard the most intriguing (thought I was gonna use the “I” word, didn’t you?) bit is that here in the Yankee republic the approach has been to try to find non-confrontational ways to deal with the UEFI speed bump. This recognizes that as MegaHard diminishes in importance and influence, UEFI isn’t going to go away and so we are better off learning to teach it to sing than vainly try to make it go away.

Evidently the Europeans are taking a different approach, the beat MegaHard with a truncheon until they make nice approach. Based on history we know that this will be more an annoyance than a transformation. MegaHard has been beaten by the Europeans numerous times before, minorly altered its behavior for a pitifully short duration, and paid a trifling fine. There is no reason to expect anything different this time about.

We do have to ask the question of when in MegaHard’s deterioration it decides to abandon Europe? Right now the answer is probably never given that China has made Linux, or, at least, Ubuntu, its national OS. I expect them to approach the UEFI nonsense by writing their own, especially since they own most of the computer/tablet/cellular telephone factories. Then they can enjoy the double dividend of offering two models: one with their booter, at reduced price, or UEFI, with a surcharge for capitalist stupidity and greed.

Meanwhile, I read in the Register [Link] that the box market is expected to shrink while the tablet/”smart”phone market swells. This is news, already. If I have read this once in the last two years I have read it a hundred times. How many hack journalists are making a living rehashing this tattered doily? This one does have value added, seemingly the difference between Amerikan and English journalism. I quote,

“IDC forecasts a five per cent drop in sales of desk-based computers between 2012 and 2017, portable PC growth of at least 19 per cent, tabs soaring 174.5 per cent and smartphones rising 109.9 per cent.”

This seems to confirm that the question we got asked in the bairn days of the PC, “what is the value added of these hideously expensive toys?” has died a palsied death. Not because it has been answered but because it seems that while one isn’t being entertained on the devices, one may actually do a bit of work. Productivity, it appears, has become irrelevant.

Of course, I have to agree, that if all you are ever going to do is fuzzy feeling, blue serge suit stuff, then tablets and smutphones are adequate for the bogs. Actually, this is heartening. Deskboxes are supposed to go down only 0.05? That’s of order annual sales fluctuation. Perhaps HP and Dell need to rethink their MegaHardesque abandonment? And HP can clean up its act with lapboxes if there are still growth to be had. Maybe. Only if HP gets real management that cares about something other than profit taking.

This also portends that home computers may only get used for things they should be used for rather than being a social status statement. But what seems more likely is that the baby will get discarded with the gray water and our capacity to actually do and think will be reduced, both in homes and in the workplace. It seems these days that the thing we can have the greatest confidence in is that Amerika will do it wrong.

computers, stupidity, greed, corporations