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5月30日 Surveillance SocietyIn last week's WXPnews editorial (www.wxpnews.com), I talked about how technology is tracking us everywhere we go these days. With Google's maps, now you can also zoom into photos of people on the streets, cars (with readable license plates) and other details. Privacy? We don't need no steenking privacy.
5月25日 E-mail cop-out?According to an article reprinted in today's Dallas Morning News from the Washington Post (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/052607dnnatemail.b7805f7.html), people all over the place are "just saying no" to email. I suspect it was written by a technophobe. :) No doubt there are folks who don't understand how to manage their mail and get overwhelmed. But the solution is not to abandon this form of communication (which, if it weren't for spam, would be the perfect form of communication), but to learn how to use it more effectively. I, too, get hundreds or sometimes thousands of messages per day sent to my primary email address. Good spam filters prevent most of the junk mail from ever reaching my mailbox. A system of rules set up in Outlook then routes messages from common sources to different folders, sorted by sender and/or subject. That means my inbox isn't cluttered up with mail from discussion lists, and mail from the people with whom I work is separated from mail from family, friends and fans. I can prioritize easy and answer the mail that needs to be answered, and ignore that which doesn't. One hard decision that will free you from e-mail hell is to acknowledge that just because someone sends you a message, that doesn't make you obligated to respond. I have a reputation for always answering mail from work colleagues, relatives and friends within 24 hours, but that's because I don't waste time on messages from people I don't know asking me for free email-based networking consultations that would take an hour or more to answer. I have one day per week set aside to read and answer mail from my newsletter readers. I get to all that I can on that day; what I don't get to gets deleted. First come, first serve. That's just the way it has to be, based on the huge volume of mail, and most readers understand that. The article mentions people going back to the phone as their primary means of communication. I can't think of anything more unpleasant. I'd much prefer to get an email message that I can answer at a time convenient to me, to having my phone ringing and disrupting me while I'm trying to work. Email today usually arrives at its destination almost instantaneously. I often carry on email "conversations" that are practically in real time. Yet email doesn't insist on being answered immediately, so if I'm in the middle of something, I can wait until I get to a stopping place to answer. I often work odd hours, and I can send an email any time of the day or night without worrying that I'm waking someone up or interrupting a meal. And email has the advantage of providing me with a written record of what was said, like snail mail - but without the wait. I love email. You want see me giving it up anytime soon. Keep those cards and letters and electronic messages coming - but don't call me (and I won't call you).
5月24日 Are Cell Phones killing productivity?We're in the middle of some landscaping and remodeling projects at our house. The good thing about working at home is that you can be there for things like this. The bad thing about working at home is that you have to be there for things like this. Something I noticed recently is that some workers seem to talk on their cell phones constantly. These are jobs where people work with their hands; generally you need both hands to lay tiles, plant flowers and so forth. You can't get much work done when you're on the phone. Yet whenever the project boss isn't around, I hear these guys on their phones. And it's not just during occasional breaks - come of these calls go on for 45 minutes or an hour. I can't help but wonder how much faster the job would get done if there were no cell phones (and since most jobs are based on labor hours, how much less I'd be paying). Technology is wonderful and the availability of portable phones to everyone is a good thing in many ways; people are able to quickly get a call out in an emergency, for instance. But it also has many negative impacts on our society. Based on my observations, it's slowing down productivity in at least some industries. That's not good for business or for the consumer.
5月14日 Landlines going the way of the dinosaur?A recent Associated Press story printed in the Dallas Morning News (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/ptech/stories/051507dnnatphones.6b002bb8.html) states that over 1/4 of young adults in the U.S. now have only cell phones, and claims that "The trend away from landline phones affects the telephone industry, 911 emergency service providers, and government and private polling organizations, which rely heavily on random calls to households with wired telephones." Here's something interesting: the study showed that 22 percent of the "poorest adults" have only cell phones, twice the percentage for those who aren't considered poor. Now that seems a tad curious, considering the high cost of cell phone service. Not so long ago, cell phones were a luxury item enjoyed mostly by the upper middle class and above. Now the poorest people apparently have them instead of landlines. And I guess it makes sense. Sort of. Although the typical cell phone plan costs more than the typical basic landline ($39/month plus another $15 or so in taxes, versus $25/month plus another $10-12 in taxes in my area), if those poor people are making a lot of long distance calls, the cell phone that doesn't charge extra for long distance could quickly become a better deal than the landline. Of course, it wasn't so long ago that long distance calling was something of a luxury item itself. Maybe the most interesting thing about this study was that it didn't mention the lowest cost alternative to landlines and cellular service of all: Voice over IP. VoIP might not work out to be a good deal for those poorest people who don't already have an Internet connection, but for the millions who do have broadband, you can add unlimited calling not just in the U.S. but also to Canada and Western Europe for under $20/month plus less than $5 in taxes. Dropping your landline service for VoIP makes a lot of sense. Whichever way you look at it, it seems the telcos are looking at declining prospects for selling regular PSTN service. If it weren't for fax and the security alarm system, we would probably have dropped our landline a long time ago. Once we get those problems ironed out, it'll be bye, bye, AT&T. Our VoIP service with Lingo has been rock solid for the last year (there were a few rough spots in the very beginning). We will, however, keep the cell phones for backup.
5月4日 Operating Systems and AutomobilesI keep hearing people compare software to cars. In complaining about some programs that are incompatible with Vista, several folks have said that's like buying a new car and finding that it won't work on the same streets you drove down in the old car. No, it's not. It's like buying a new car and finding that the same model of tires you bought for the old one don't fit it. Not really such an uncommon occurrence, after all. My Vista computers go down the same roads (the Internet, my local area network) as my XP computers. It's funny, hearing all these complaints about how awful Vista is and how everyone wants to keep or go back to XP. Funny because I remember all the same weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth when XP came out. It was awful, it was a resource hog, it didn't run on old hardware, it didn't work with old applications. Some folks are just resistant to change, and that's okay. But it's funny that so many of those same people who hated XP in the beginning love it so much now. With any new product, there's a learning curve. Vista includes some significant enhancements to the interface, search capabilities and especially, security. This is in response to demands by customers and the industry. Unfortunately, to make software more secure, you are inevitably going to "break" some applications that were not written for the higher security model. What's that old saying? "You have to break a few eggs to get an omelet." And you have to break a few old, poorly-written applications to get a better, more secure OS. That's just the way it is. But getting back to the computer/car comparison: I remember spending over $4000 (in more valuable 1980s dollars) for an IBM PC running DOS that wouldn't do one 1/100th of what a basic $699 computer running Vista will do today. On the other hand, the typical new car today costs around $20,000 - almost twice what it cost back in the mid-80s.
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