The Hard Edge
She slapped the button that linked the video intercom system between the guyrage Bill had built above the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola and the BofD&P itself. "How about some gingko biloba?" She'd seen that on some billboard while tooling the byways of her beloved California.
"Nah, it's not that. My mind's still as sharp as, er, um, uh, well, that's not it. It's my name. You wouldn't understand because you have an ASCII-friendly name. Did you know nearly half the Web sites that want me to log in can't handle the apostrophe in my name? To almost 50 percent of the Internet I've become 'Bill OBrien' or, worse still, 'Bill Obrien.' That apostrophe in 'O'Brien,' and those two capital letters, are part of a rich Irish tradition."
"They won't accept the apostrophe or the double caps?" Sometimes it is best to let Bill run to conclusion.
"I don't want to be a preprocessed vanilla citizen of Netania, y'know? The stupid part of it all is that it's maybe three lines more of code to be able to accept the most common name variants that include symbols or multiple capital letters. People were dealing with the problem back in the days of Fortran and Cobol. Even I could code around it. You have to wonder just what low level of expertise these modern-day Net programmers pretend to have to get away with that."
"So what are you going to do?" The end was near. She could sense it.
"I think I'll give it a brief mention in the column. Maybe I can rabble-rouse some of the multitudes out of their apathy long enough to fire off an e-mail to Web sites that deny their identity."
"Then again, Bill, anonymity is a functional cornerstone of the Internet."
"Yeah, there's that."
When Virgin Atlantic Airways announced it would offer the big daddy of all call forwarding—from the ground to your cell phone miles above the earth—the world was instantly divided in two. The heavy cell-phone users clapped and sang like small children, while the anti-cell-phone crowd imagined nightmarish scenarios of being trapped in coach beside a pea-brained meandering chatterer. Our stand on the issue aside, let's take a "Hard Edge" moment and check out the spectacular technology involved.
According to Virgin Atlantic, the Earth Calling program is easy to use. You get a special card from your cell-phone provider and carry it in your wallet. On an Earth Calling flight, you swipe the card through a reader in your seat's armrest and dial a registration number on your cell phone. Once you've been validated, your cell phone's call is redirected to your seat's headset. If you're not wearing the headset, the LCD monitor in front of you will alert you to the incoming call.
To deactivate the call forwarding, simply swipe the card through the armrest again. People calling from land are charged for the normal land part of the call, and the passenger is charged for the service.
What fascinated Alice was not the joy of overhearing a thousand inane conversations as she sits trapped in coach (Bill is wise enough to never, ever set foot on an airplane), but the thought that this may be the first time the phone number is separated from the phone. Yes, call forwarding existed on regular, old-fashioned telephones, but this concept of having a number and turning on and off the device of your choosing is really only beginning. Taking her patented "Hard Edge"-to-the-farthest-point view, Alice can see a day when you may choose to receive calls on your friend's television or your Palm V.
It's funny in an ironic way, that the more wireless technology evolves, the more connected it makes other things. You and a number suddenly join in a far more meaningful way than the lifetime of phone numbers you've gone through up till now. The same is true of the connection possibilities. True, cell-phone calling can be annoying, but why not be able to place a call from your laptop on the beach or use your watch as the true "Dick Tracy" device? As the old AT&T commercial promised so many years ago: "You will." ("Six, two, and even—over and out." —Comic Bill.)
The big drawback, in Alice's mind, is the shouting. Americans in particular have come under fire (as usual) for having overly loud speaking voices when using their cell phones. Sociologists claim Americans aren't used to filtering out loud background noises the way Europeans are, so they overcompensate by shouting. Alice recalls loud American tourists all over the globe happily shouting without cell phones, but it's an irony that has come home to roost. Until Americans can truly tone it down and stop using their cell phones as megaphones, these important advances will get only negative press instead of the fine applause they deserve.
Alice and Bill hereby suggest a logical technical pairing. Let the folks at Miracle-Ear create a boosted-volume earpiece that lets you hear the other caller clearly without straining. Talk about taking technology out of a niche and blasting it into the mainstream. (Hello, Miracle-Ear!) Once we've cleared that hurdle, Alice swears cell-phone hatred will die down. Meanwhile, if someone can figure out what to do about the loud tourists, Alice and Bill are all ears.
Word has it CDNow isn't doing too well. (Note: CDNow was purchased by Bertelsmann at press time.) And lately (in "Hard Edge" time) even Amazon.com is suffering a downturn in its fortunes. As the official chroniclers of All Things Computer, Great and Small, we'd like to offer some suggestions to these two noble pioneers of the e-mall: "Knock it off!"
Without fail, CDNow sends Bill periodic reminders of its existence replete with suggestions that it knows exactly what songs he wants to buy. First and foremost, stop with the reminders. They're annoying. Bill has gone out of his way (to his neighborhood Sam Goody's) to buy tunes locally rather than go to the CDNow site just because of those reminders. And because Bill hasn't liked much music of the past 10 years (except whatever older groups have released), it's the height of CDNow arrogance to think it would know what Bill's eclectic selection of music might be on any given day. (Some days he listens to Dr. Laura just for the transition music between segments.)
So perhaps if CDNow would stop aggravating people (and as special as Bill may be, it's impossible that he's the only one who feels this way), maybe things would get better.
Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about Amazon.com. Here's a little tidbit from an order Bill recently placed and then canceled because of unavailability:
1 of: Red Devil Inc. 4251 5-In-1 Painters Tool [Tools & Hardware]
By: Red Devil Inc. Ordered from publisher
(This item has 4-6 week availability.)
Cancel 1 copy
What's the deal here? Someone publishes a 5-in-1 painter's tool? Would that be in hardcover or paperback? (Perhaps one of the new Tools on Tape editions?) And Bill canceled a "copy"?
We all know Amazon started as a bookseller. Cool beans. But it's branched out into other things (now tools, apparently). So why hasn't anyone at Amazon (Jeff, are you listening?) spent some quality time revising the template it's using for sales?
Sure, a book and a hacksaw are both commodities. And they're sold in roughly the same way. But nobody publishes a hacksaw. It's a manufactured "item," not a "copy." We're not asking Amazon to come up with smooth pickup lines that no inflatable woman could resist. It's just a matter of changing the two literals in the reporting script to variables that are keyed to the section you're shopping in.
Amazon, you can't keep applying the same template to every new category of product you start to sell. Ask Apple. Doing that almost killed the company. We're not doofuses on this side of the modem anymore. You have to make it at least look like you know what you're carrying.
This year's PC Expo was hardly about PCs. It was about gadgets—especially wireless gadgets that get you online in some way. It was actually a return to the roots of PC Expo, which didn't start as a personal-computer exposition. More important, is it a hint that PCs are starting to get boring?
Thunderbird and Duron. No, they're not a futuristic sci-fi marionette show and an oil additive. They're AMD's newest CPUs. It took AMD more than a year to integrate its L2 cache on-die, and one of the first results is the Thunderbird. Now maybe the Athlons and the Pentium IIIs will show equivalent performance. Then there's the Duron, which some claim is AMD's Celeron killer. Yawn. Don't be surprised if Intel again one-ups AMD (if it hasn't already). We told you years ago AMD's number-one job was to play catch-up with Intel. So now AMD's invented the Coppermine Pentium III and the Celeron. How about some innovation for a change?
Intel. Well, until Intel is ready to admit it made a huge mistake with RDRAM for the personal-computer marketplace, we have a problem believing any of Intel's intel. In the words of Bill's one-time associate, Sal Hepatica, "Fuhgeddabowdit."
Despite incorporating 3,500 solar cells on a chip that's a tenth of an inch in diameter and barely one-thousandth of an inch thick, they're still crude and subject to further refinement. But keep your eye on electronic retinas. At some point you may need one—hopefully not—and it would be nice if it were all it could be, if you did.
Reader Gary Chamberlain has come up with a suggestion for countering Microsoft's less-than-sterling behavior. We must admit it sounds pretty good—and we didn't think of it. According to Gary, Microsoft's original whine about Internet Explorer's freebie status was that everyone was on the Web. It made sense to include a browser as part of the operating environment. Gary reminds us, however, that everyone is also doing word processing and spreadsheets. By Microsoft's logic, therefore, the company should also be including Microsoft Office as part of the operating environment—for free.
It's a simple yet totally diabolical suggestion that encapsulates all the elements of ironic justice. What do you think? Send us your opinion. And while you're at it, drop Bill an e-birthday card. It's not often a human being gets to be 34 for 16 years.
Alice got so despondent after not hearing from "Hard Edge" readers (Bill hogs all the snail mail and refuses to forward any to California), she set up her own Internet domain—alicehill.com. Stop by and sign the guest book, or drop Alice and Bill an old-fashioned letter. "Alice, I'm losing my identity." That one caught her by surprise. Alice had brought the IAS shocks and Hotchkiss springs and bars as suitable gifts for this year's celebration of Bill's birth. It should have been a calm and quiet day. (Well, except for the clank of parts and rivulet of swear words flowing out from under Bill's S-10 pickup.)
She slapped the button that linked the video intercom system between the guyrage Bill had built above the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola and the BofD&P itself. "How about some gingko biloba?" She'd seen that on some billboard while tooling the byways of her beloved California.
"Nah, it's not that. My mind's still as sharp as, er, um, uh, well, that's not it. It's my name. You wouldn't understand because you have an ASCII-friendly name. Did you know nearly half the Web sites that want me to log in can't handle the apostrophe in my name? To almost 50 percent of the Internet I've become 'Bill OBrien' or, worse still, 'Bill Obrien.' That apostrophe in 'O'Brien,' and those two capital letters, are part of a rich Irish tradition."
"They won't accept the apostrophe or the double caps?" Sometimes it is best to let Bill run to conclusion.
"I don't want to be a preprocessed vanilla citizen of Netania, y'know? The stupid part of it all is that it's maybe three lines more of code to be able to accept the most common name variants that include symbols or multiple capital letters. People were dealing with the problem back in the days of Fortran and Cobol. Even I could code around it. You have to wonder just what low level of expertise these modern-day Net programmers pretend to have to get away with that."
"So what are you going to do?" The end was near. She could sense it.
"I think I'll give it a brief mention in the column. Maybe I can rabble-rouse some of the multitudes out of their apathy long enough to fire off an e-mail to Web sites that deny their identity."
"Then again, Bill, anonymity is a functional cornerstone of the Internet."
"Yeah, there's that."
When Virgin Atlantic Airways announced it would offer the big daddy of all call forwarding—from the ground to your cell phone miles above the earth—the world was instantly divided in two. The heavy cell-phone users clapped and sang like small children, while the anti-cell-phone crowd imagined nightmarish scenarios of being trapped in coach beside a pea-brained meandering chatterer. Our stand on the issue aside, let's take a "Hard Edge" moment and check out the spectacular technology involved.
According to Virgin Atlantic, the Earth Calling program is easy to use. You get a special card from your cell-phone provider and carry it in your wallet. On an Earth Calling flight, you swipe the card through a reader in your seat's armrest and dial a registration number on your cell phone. Once you've been validated, your cell phone's call is redirected to your seat's headset. If you're not wearing the headset, the LCD monitor in front of you will alert you to the incoming call.
To deactivate the call forwarding, simply swipe the card through the armrest again. People calling from land are charged for the normal land part of the call, and the passenger is charged for the service.
What fascinated Alice was not the joy of overhearing a thousand inane conversations as she sits trapped in coach (Bill is wise enough to never, ever set foot on an airplane), but the thought that this may be the first time the phone number is separated from the phone. Yes, call forwarding existed on regular, old-fashioned telephones, but this concept of having a number and turning on and off the device of your choosing is really only beginning. Taking her patented "Hard Edge"-to-the-farthest-point view, Alice can see a day when you may choose to receive calls on your friend's television or your Palm V.
It's funny in an ironic way, that the more wireless technology evolves, the more connected it makes other things. You and a number suddenly join in a far more meaningful way than the lifetime of phone numbers you've gone through up till now. The same is true of the connection possibilities. True, cell-phone calling can be annoying, but why not be able to place a call from your laptop on the beach or use your watch as the true "Dick Tracy" device? As the old AT&T commercial promised so many years ago: "You will." ("Six, two, and even—over and out." —Comic Bill.)
The big drawback, in Alice's mind, is the shouting. Americans in particular have come under fire (as usual) for having overly loud speaking voices when using their cell phones. Sociologists claim Americans aren't used to filtering out loud background noises the way Europeans are, so they overcompensate by shouting. Alice recalls loud American tourists all over the globe happily shouting without cell phones, but it's an irony that has come home to roost. Until Americans can truly tone it down and stop using their cell phones as megaphones, these important advances will get only negative press instead of the fine applause they deserve.
Alice and Bill hereby suggest a logical technical pairing. Let the folks at Miracle-Ear create a boosted-volume earpiece that lets you hear the other caller clearly without straining. Talk about taking technology out of a niche and blasting it into the mainstream. (Hello, Miracle-Ear!) Once we've cleared that hurdle, Alice swears cell-phone hatred will die down. Meanwhile, if someone can figure out what to do about the loud tourists, Alice and Bill are all ears.
Word has it CDNow isn't doing too well. (Note: CDNow was purchased by Bertelsmann at press time.) And lately (in "Hard Edge" time) even Amazon.com is suffering a downturn in its fortunes. As the official chroniclers of All Things Computer, Great and Small, we'd like to offer some suggestions to these two noble pioneers of the e-mall: "Knock it off!"
Without fail, CDNow sends Bill periodic reminders of its existence replete with suggestions that it knows exactly what songs he wants to buy. First and foremost, stop with the reminders. They're annoying. Bill has gone out of his way (to his neighborhood Sam Goody's) to buy tunes locally rather than go to the CDNow site just because of those reminders. And because Bill hasn't liked much music of the past 10 years (except whatever older groups have released), it's the height of CDNow arrogance to think it would know what Bill's eclectic selection of music might be on any given day. (Some days he listens to Dr. Laura just for the transition music between segments.)
So perhaps if CDNow would stop aggravating people (and as special as Bill may be, it's impossible that he's the only one who feels this way), maybe things would get better.
Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about Amazon.com. Here's a little tidbit from an order Bill recently placed and then canceled because of unavailability:
1 of: Red Devil Inc. 4251 5-In-1 Painters Tool [Tools & Hardware]
By: Red Devil Inc. Ordered from publisher
(This item has 4-6 week availability.)
Cancel 1 copy
What's the deal here? Someone publishes a 5-in-1 painter's tool? Would that be in hardcover or paperback? (Perhaps one of the new Tools on Tape editions?) And Bill canceled a "copy"?
We all know Amazon started as a bookseller. Cool beans. But it's branched out into other things (now tools, apparently). So why hasn't anyone at Amazon (Jeff, are you listening?) spent some quality time revising the template it's using for sales?
Sure, a book and a hacksaw are both commodities. And they're sold in roughly the same way. But nobody publishes a hacksaw. It's a manufactured "item," not a "copy." We're not asking Amazon to come up with smooth pickup lines that no inflatable woman could resist. It's just a matter of changing the two literals in the reporting script to variables that are keyed to the section you're shopping in.
Amazon, you can't keep applying the same template to every new category of product you start to sell. Ask Apple. Doing that almost killed the company. We're not doofuses on this side of the modem anymore. You have to make it at least look like you know what you're carrying.
This year's PC Expo was hardly about PCs. It was about gadgets—especially wireless gadgets that get you online in some way. It was actually a return to the roots of PC Expo, which didn't start as a personal-computer exposition. More important, is it a hint that PCs are starting to get boring?
Thunderbird and Duron. No, they're not a futuristic sci-fi marionette show and an oil additive. They're AMD's newest CPUs. It took AMD more than a year to integrate its L2 cache on-die, and one of the first results is the Thunderbird. Now maybe the Athlons and the Pentium IIIs will show equivalent performance. Then there's the Duron, which some claim is AMD's Celeron killer. Yawn. Don't be surprised if Intel again one-ups AMD (if it hasn't already). We told you years ago AMD's number-one job was to play catch-up with Intel. So now AMD's invented the Coppermine Pentium III and the Celeron. How about some innovation for a change?
Intel. Well, until Intel is ready to admit it made a huge mistake with RDRAM for the personal-computer marketplace, we have a problem believing any of Intel's intel. In the words of Bill's one-time associate, Sal Hepatica, "Fuhgeddabowdit."
Despite incorporating 3,500 solar cells on a chip that's a tenth of an inch in diameter and barely one-thousandth of an inch thick, they're still crude and subject to further refinement. But keep your eye on electronic retinas. At some point you may need one—hopefully not—and it would be nice if it were all it could be, if you did.
Reader Gary Chamberlain has come up with a suggestion for countering Microsoft's less-than-sterling behavior. We must admit it sounds pretty good—and we didn't think of it. According to Gary, Microsoft's original whine about Internet Explorer's freebie status was that everyone was on the Web. It made sense to include a browser as part of the operating environment. Gary reminds us, however, that everyone is also doing word processing and spreadsheets. By Microsoft's logic, therefore, the company should also be including Microsoft Office as part of the operating environment—for free.
It's a simple yet totally diabolical suggestion that encapsulates all the elements of ironic justice. What do you think? Send us your opinion. And while you're at it, drop Bill an e-birthday card. It's not often a human being gets to be 34 for 16 years.
Alice got so despondent after not hearing from "Hard Edge" readers (Bill hogs all the snail mail and refuses to forward any to California), she set up her own Internet domain—alicehill.com. Stop by and sign the guest book, or drop Alice and Bill an old-fashioned letter.