Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Bob,Bob,Bob...Apple isn't a computer company any longer. They are a consumer electronics and financial services company. Their hardware is as closed as your tv remote for very good reasons. If you wanna fiddle around with your computer get a Linux machine and hire Harry to be your on call tech.

My mom and sister have iPads and they never have to call me for help. That's only one reason why Apple rules. I won't bore you with the other 100 reasons...

This is Good TV
 

Stay tuned for next episode, when Bob weighs in at length about the shortcomings of that toaster he recently purchased.

Re: This is Good TV
 

We should just give up the goose and embrace the trend. Bob, can I do a diavlog with Ta-Nehisi Coates about video games (and maybe the Civil War) after Starcraft 2 and Civilization 5 come out this fall?

Re: This is Good TV
 

Don't get me started! I'm for darkness/lightness dials all the way and a good left-right mouse button to toggle from bagels to whole wheat.

We could have a products program every week: Start with electric windows vs. roll-ups in cars, work our way toward cup holders and nail clippers. The sky's the limit, really: condoms, feminine hygiene, caskets or cremation, flossing ware, you-name-it.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times

I've recently started using Apple stuff. I'll always take the messy internet over the app store, though.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

As unopposed as I am to entertaining the thesis/wankery. The bolded portion is illustrative of the failure to cram the silly analogy into an altogether different and irrelevant idea. So all the urban (NY, LA, SF, etc...) sophisticates that have incorporated the format into their lives (app store included) are responsible for contributing to "a" demise of the internet? WTF. Without ever having left. To say nothing of the difference between current Detroit vs. New York. High brow asshattery if you ask me.

Re: This is Good TV
 

I wonder if we could arrange for a Frigidaire customer service representative at the call center in Bangalore to flip on his webcam so we could have a diavlog of Bob airing his grievances about the fine print of the refrigerator warranty as regards that crappy ice-maker component!

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Hear, hear.

Sadly, no
 

Sorry, but this is just flat-out wrong. You can control how Windows Updates works, through the Control Panel.* And further, I have mine set to the most automatic possible, but Windows will still ask me if I want to reboot, if the updating process requires it, after it finishes installing the update(s).

(Disclaimer: I'm still running Windows XP, so I can't be sure about later versions, but my experience helping a friend with a Vista machine showed the same behavior. Maybe this is a Windows 7 "feature," but somehow I doubt it.)

Further still, who in this day and age doesn't set his or her word processor or text editor to do autosaves? (Or what professional writer uses an app for writing that doesn't have this feature and/or has not long since gotten in the habit of doing C-x C-s or Control-S or whatever every few minutes?)

Somehow, this bothered me more than all of Bob's griping about his iPhone and webcams, hard as that may be to believe.

==========

* [Added] An afterthought: possibly Harry should change the time when updates are automatically installed to some time when he expects not to be rushing to meet deadline. I have my time set to 3 am, which means that the automatic update process usually works as follows for me. (1) The updates are automatically downloaded (at some less ungodly hour). (2) A little yellow shield icon appears in the System Tray. (3) I click that icon to start the installation of the updates. (4) At the conclusion of the installation, I get a notification window, telling me either that it's done, or that I have to reboot, and in the latter case, I am asked if I want to reboot.

So, possibly, if I was in the middle of something at, say, 3:30 in the morning, my computer would automatically reboot. But I have to say, I am often on my machine at that time, and I've never seen that happen, not once.

@Bob - Get the Pre
 

HPalm is probably going to release a vastly more powerful webOS phone down the road, but you can just hop to that later on and if you like webOS then patronize it, too many others did not and it led to a superior phone OS being sidelined in a sea of android/iphones.

Re: Sadly, no
 

WTF! Is this a Windows tutorial now! I've never had the problems McCracken and Wright kvetch about. But, I do have plenty of co-workers who get flummoxed by the shield or any kind of change. My wife also has an aversion to doing anything for herself. I'm grateful to Mozilla Firefox and Ubuntu for teaching me about my PC.

Clearly, ...
 

... this is all the fault of the commenters.

Re: @Bob - Get the Pre
 

Can anyone tell me what the 'Under the Hood' difference between WebOS and the other OS are? McCracken only went so far with the aesthetics v. functionality distinction. My first laptop was an HP, and I had a Palm PDA for the longest time, so I'd love to stay loyal to both and reward innovation by buying whatever comes next - all things being equal.

Re: Sadly, no
 

No, it's incredibly easy to believe, not to criticize you personally, BJ. Technical people are often astonished and actually enraged at how poorly non-techies understand the technology they depend on. Look at almost all of the comments so far -- very techie people are mad that a mere mortal like Bob would dare to interview someone about technology.

The amazing technology we have today is increasingly made possible because non-techies buy it and drive the prices down for everyone. It's still very hard to use, and if a non-techie asks for help, he's liable to get blasted by the techie for being so stupid.

I consulted for Sun Microsystems (a powerful server manufacturer) a lot during the 1990s and they absolutely hated dealing with unsophisticated users. They've recently been sold to Oracle and have essentially ceased to exist. Their stock price went from 65 dollars a share at the peak to around three dollars at the bottom.The only reason Sun survived into this century is because they had nine billion dollars in the bank when their business model tanked; they never recovered. Companies like that, who cannot or will not deal effectively with naive users, are doomed. Sad but true, I'm afraid.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Bloggingheads app for the iphone????? hello

Re: Sadly, no
 

All of your points about regular people who are not interested in geeking out with their gizmos and want them to Just Work are perfectly legitimate.

However, Harry is not such a person. He was in fact on Bh.tv precisely because he is a geek, who is in the business of distilling wisdom for everyone else. So, he has to meet higher standards, and that means getting basic facts right.

Re: This is Good TV
 

Would that it were so simple.

First off, you have the illegal alien issue to deal with if you transmit over a planet with Arizona in it.

Second, what is Mr. Bangalore's webcam attached to? I demand a s UN Summit on Clip Capability and Computer Display Screen Thickness. Bob got all millimetery on us when that came up.

I was not pleased that Harry used the nuclear option in his reply, suggesting that Bob could just buy a newfangled computer with a built-in camera. Humbug!

But yes, if we could get two Bheads to discuss crushed ice vs. cubes features I'd be delighted. Incidentally, why do some ice cubes stick to your fingers and others don't? Is it true that the Pentagon runs my fingerprints and gets a photograph of my genome every time I touch a sticky one?

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

Okay, I'll bite. I think a better analogy for the iPad/Phone is the auto industry--like how you used to be able to work on your own car at a much higher level than now, as cars become ever closer to high-tech lozenges that you plug into computers. The App Store does the same thing, making computers more indestructible and reliable, but also more like black boxes.

But also, Bob's critique of Jobs's somewhat capricious censorship: that does ring true. I agree that calling it white flight is a little dumb--not because it isn't a flight, but because white flight is a complicated, burdened example. The truth is though that the App Store is a sanitized version of the internet, free of ... what? Not minorities, and not poor people. What it's free of is crazies and pornography.

It might be a noble thing to weed out the crazies and porn. But I think it isn't. I like the internet with all that. What does the future hold?--will the App Store be 20% of the internet, at a steady state? Or will it be 100% of the internet? Will I still be able to buy a car with a carburetor? Er, I mean read 4Chan?

Re: Sadly, no
 

To Bokonon and xjudson, also too:

I will say, however, more generally and on a note unrelated to the particular gripe I had about Harry's mistake, that I am actually only 90 or so percent sympathetic to this point of view. To my mind, a user has some responsibility to learn about the gizmo, especially now that we're all connected to each other through them.

I also think that because there is this urge to make everything so simple that even your proverbial Aunt Martha could use it keeps threatening to go too far in the direction of everything being a sealed environment, and nothing under the hood being accessible for those of us who do want to play around, make it do things differently from the way some so-called "usability expert" thinks it should, and more importantly, learn. Mark Pilgrim had a nice post, "Tinkerer’s Sunset," about this a few months back. Ironically enough, one of the star characters is an Apple computer, though the principal villain is the iPad.

Re: This is Good TV
 

Proving, once again, that he hates America, because the metric system is socialist.

And has Latino prefixes.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

I think (by which I probably mean I hope) that the App Store world will come to be seen as the new incarnation of AOL, circa 1995.

On the other hand, the Internet was in some ways better when the geeks and the n00bs were somewhat walled off from each other. I'm sure any teenage boy on Facebook who has been friended by his mom will agree.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

I still think that flight misses the point. Customers are lead to or drawn to ease of use, not as an escape, but as a convenience. I'm certain that Job's is streamlining porn for reasons other than nobility. Which might include the same issues surrounding flash -- namely buggy and slow functionality. And Safari still allows you to surf for porn (or science sites in your case) unencumbered. The apps are a separate issue. Jailbreaking or tinkering are still possible and not altogether discouraged, if one is inclined.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

If it did automatic transcription of the diavlogs, then even I might buy an iPhone.

Re: This is Good TV
 

And Greek. And you know what that means -- men marrying horses.

Re: Sadly, no
 

Your added comment was posted after my comment was. I think Harry is right that you can't configure automatic updates to install the updates but not reboot automatically. If you're sitting at the computer, it asks if you want to reboot and allows you to delay it. If you're not there (because you went to lunch or are on the phone), it will reboot automatically.

But your response is what my comment was trying to grapple with. Very sophisticated tech people frequently seem to bang on people who "get the facts wrong," which is unhelpful I think. Every bug I've ever encountered, either as a developer or an end user, was created by someone who got the facts wrong. Human beings, both creators and users, always get the facts wrong, at some point.

Commoditizing computers has allowed very unsophisticated users to buy them, but they are still very difficult to administer. What Bob and Harry were talking about are administration problems. This is a Catch 22, and I don't think it has a good solution. But it's vital for developers to realize that users like Bob don't buy computers;they buy solutions to their problems that happen to be implemented on computers. They don't want to look under the hood; they just want to get in and go. That's not a bad thing per se; it just makes developers' already-difficult job that much harder.

Re: Sadly, no
 

Well, good luck holding them responsible. I don't think you can do it, so you're left (as a developer) with making computers increasingly easy to use, and especially to administer.

Yeah, I hate idiot lights, too. I think that's why people find old cars and hack away on them. You can't really do that with the modern marvels we've created. The same may be true of computers in years to come. You'll have to find some old iron to muck around with, because everything new is a sealed-up xPad.

Google is banning Windows?
 

via the Huffington Post:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6...44feab49a.html

Re: Google is banning Windows?
 

Smart, if too long in coming. It never fails to make me cringe when I see Windows used in critical areas.

Thanks for the link.

Re: Sadly, no
 

Mostly, I agree. But I still think we could do more to encourage people to educate themselves and to take some small amount of responsibility. I think we're making some good progress, and I expect it will always be easier with kids. I just want to keep agitating against too much of a tendency by companies who want to sell you gizmos to advertise themselves as "Don't worry. You won't ever have to think. We've got it all figured out."

[Added: and don't get me started on people who install GPS gizmos in their cars, refuse to look at a map before going to someplace new, and then gripe about being led into a bit of road construction.]

Cars I can sort of accept, because they really are so high-tech these days, in order to be safer, cleaner, and more efficient, that it's not reasonable to expect them to be made in such a way to enable the backyard mechanics. But as a principle, yes, I agree, and I've got lots of old iron kicking around, for that very reason.

Re: Sadly, no
 

I believe you, but Windows kept crashing while hunting for updates at 3AM in 2004, on a computer running a weeks-long fuel cell test, which would crash the test. Every day I would re-configure it, and then blam it would do it again. Took like 4-5 tries to get it to stop, and the results even made it into print (Figure with breaks in the data curve).

The point of this post: They may have (since then) made it easier to configure it to do what you really want, but regardless I still hold it against them, and if you drugged me up and gave me a word association test and said "Windows" I'd scream (while drugged up) "Those fuckers ruin everything, damn them, damn them straight to hell."

At the time, I looked up what all the daily updates were about, and they were for DRM. Which makes it even worse. Very likely, my hatred for Windows will not go away till a few days after my funeral is held. PR is important!

(Disclaimer: I like Windows better than both Mac and Linux. I wish I didn't have to use computers at all.)

Re: Sadly, no
 

Hmmm. I suppose that could be right, although as I say, I've never experienced it, and I do leave my machine on all the time, and due to the way I have it set up (multiple accounts, one of which has to be chosen after the first part of the boot completes), I would notice if a reboot had occurred, for sure. On the other hand, I usually click the icon to start the install as soon as I notice it, so I may have never given the machine a chance to get to this point. I'll try to remember, next Patch Tuesday.

However, irrespective of that, I would point out that going away to lunch or whatever should not mean loss of the document you're working on, should the computer reboot in your absence. Some minimal amount of effort to reduce PEBKAC is not unreasonable to expect, in my view. Save your work before you walk away. Is that really so much to ask? You wouldn't leave papers on a desk with the windows wide open on a rainy, windy day, would you?

Again, I mostly/generally agree. But I maintain that given who he is and what he does for a living, Harry is not in the group you're thinking about. You wouldn't expect a carpenter to express surprise at those pointy things on a saw blade, would you?

As an aside, I think the Windows Update system is pretty darned good. It's virtually automatic, and gives you about as painless a way as I can imagine to keep your system patched and up to date. I don't really agree that this is an "administration problem" -- right out of the box, it just works. And if you don't like the default behavior, visit the Control Panel. Or open Help, type in some obvious words, and you'll be taken right to the appropriate controls.

There gets to be a point where one can excuse too much on the part of people who don't want to be geeks, I think. I think it is a mistake, as I said elsewhere, for companies to keep promising that you can remain fully disengaged and just trust the gizmo, and for consumers to believe them.

Finally, if it's true that the rebooting happens automatically, after some span of idle time, okay. I could see tweaking that. But other than that, I really don't think Microsoft should be taken to task for this of all things.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

I take delight when I see diversity in the industry. I am delighted at the stylistic differences between Apple, Google and Microsoft. When a company makes a bone-headed decision, like eschewing the two-button mouse, it gives competitors an opening.

I'm fine with companies banning porn to get some market advantage. I'll go elsewhere for my porn.

Re: Sadly, no
 

It is now possible to disable Automatic Updates completely, so that you have to do them explicitly. I don't know how long that's been true, but given that it works that way on my XP machines, and worked that way on my Win2K machines, I think it's probably been around for a while.

I might have a vague memory of MS forcing updates on something related to DRM, though, so ...okay. Yes, no question, that's evil, in addition to being evil for breaking other things when it doesn't work. In that case, you probably already saw this.

==========

[Added]

(emph. added)

Philistine!

;^)

Re: Sadly, no
 

Well, I completely agree that it shouldn't be too much to expect, but clearly, from my long experience helping friends and family, it is. People don't realize that they can turn on autosave and specify the interval. Many users have no idea how to do that, and if you tell them it's possible, they couldn't find the settings to make it happen. To quote Boz Scaggs, that's the sad sad truth, it's the dirty lowdown. So once again, we can bang on users and try to hold them responsible for knowing enough, but they don't and many of them won't try.

Well again, Harry was surprised that Microsoft hadn't made this an option after all these years. I would be surprised if Sears didn't install safety guards on their Craftsman table saws.

I agree that automatic update works very well indeed. I never thought 20 years ago that it could ever get to this point. That said, many users are incapable of doing the simple steps you mention. I consider setting up system default behavior, especially for things such as updates, but even for word processor autosave, to be administrative. Having consulted in dozens of companies over the years, that's just the kind of thing that sys admins were constantly being driven crazy with. It's the high cost of low price; the systems are enormously powerful, but they're hideously complex. As they say, "that's why they pay those techies the big bucks."

Re: This is Good TV
 

DZ, I'd watch that one.

Re: Tech Nerd Edition (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)
 

iPad rules

Re: Sadly, no
 

LBut is it unreasonable to expect our technology to (someday) work as seamlessly as the basic, old school telephone? Apple products have always strived for such seamlessness. Just think how different the world would be had Apple been granted a monopoly as AT&T was way back when.

Re: @Bob - Get the Pre
 

WebOS is linux under the hood like android (well android uses java virtual machine on top of linux and iphone uses a subset of BSD Unix ) but it allows developers to use tools that web developers use, javascript,html,css etc. to develop apps that run on the phone, I believe the web browser handles most of the interface. Android devs use java and iphone uses xcode ( a version of apples Objective C programming language ) and webOS could or will be able to run flash.

So WebOS is easy to develop for but because it is relatively young developers didn't get to easy access all of the hardware bits such as graphic accelerator, touch interface blah blah.

Here we have another issue with apple since if you want to develop for iphone/ipad you MUST use their tools to do so. You can use whatever you want to develop WebOS or Android as long as it spits out the right code at the end to run on the platform. This puts me in mind of video showing Microsoft's steve balmer yelling at his minions at M$ to concentrate on the needs of software developers "DEVELOPERS,DEVELOPERS,DEVELOPERS " and slamming the table as a exclamation point. In response Steve Jobs must say something like "Developers ? Tell those scum to lick my boots" :-)

Re: @Bob - Get the Pre
 

Thanks!

It sounds as if WebOS is superior, at least for developers, to Apple and MS. Why has Palm never gotten traction in sales or among developers?