RELATED: Pogue’s unethical meltdown.

In resuscitating my laptop, I’m trying out an experiment. The only applications that I have installed on this machine are open source. While this means keeping Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Illustrator and Sound Forge sequestered to my desktop, their open source counterparts OpenOffice, GIIMPShop, Inkscape, and Audacity (which I was already using to a large degree anyway, along with Firefox, VLC, and Thunderbird) will operate on the laptop.

The prospect of being rid of corporate software appeals greatly to me (which is not to suggest that the above programs, in their Windows incarnations, don’t come with their own EULA strings attached). The problem with the open source movement, however, is that it is populated by quacks who prescribe half-built programs as definitive alternatives to their robust counterparts. Nevertheless, if Firefox and Thunderbird are now bona-fide alternatives, what’s not to suggest that similar remedies might come with the open source responses to Adobe and Company? The big question I have is whether I can get by on the laptop with these programs and, if necessary, find workarounds to some of the things I can do with applications that sell for hundreds of dollars.

I figured if a guy like Mark Pilgrim can make the bold switch from Mac to Ubuntu, then at least I can try this half-assed approach on Windows. And who knows? Maybe I might end up going Ubuntu on the laptop.

For folks who are interested, this is a helpful beginning for open source Windows apps.

I have attempted Twitter and I can’t say that I’m happy. It might help if there was more of a payoff. You see, I had thought this was some kind of social networking application, but aside from a kind friend invite from someone named “hephatitssundae,” who seems, based on her user profile, to be a pleasant pink-haired individual who I will likely never meet, my online ramblings, as far as I know, have been received by deaf ears. Perhaps I’m not meant to communicate in shorthand. Perhaps I’m simply too old.

140 characters? Hell, I can just barely get in a haiku within the box. What possible significance can I offer with such a diminutive limit? I may as well “type” a text message into my phone. At least I know that my text message will go to someone I know and that it will have some actual content value, such as conveying where the hell I am or telling someone I’m running five minutes late or describing a rather strange place I happen to be in. But if I’m typing every thought and I don’t have unlimited space to consider depth or nuances, then the Twitter people are almost ensuring a kind of Sturgeon’s law effect. I could be in the middle of a perfectly fantastic sentence, only to be warned that I have 20 characters left, and then where will I be? Spreading it out across a vast chasm of other text messages? That’s inconsiderate to the other users. That’s ineffectual communication. The problems may very well be mine, since I’m sort of a long-winded guy. But Twitter’s approach suggests that “long-winded guys” aren’t part of the constituency, which suggests, in turn, a kind of conformity masquerading as community.

And that’s just it. Aside from quibbles over meaningless messages, I don’t feel like conveying what I am constantly doing or thinking to random strangers, particularly since I don’t know if this content is being aggregated or data mined or sifted through by a server farm. I feel that the whole Twitter exercise is less of a social experiment and more of a way to rifle through anything I have to say so that people can sell me things somewhere down the line or so “friends” who are less concerned with who I am and more concerned with what I can purchase can form some kind of deranged impression of who I am. I have no proof, of course; only instinct. I do know that Twitter was set up by Obvious Corporation, a corporation led by one-time Blogger head man Evan Williams, who once worked at Google and who likely learned some inside information about how Google keeps track of user data (see, for example, the cookie set to expire on January 17, 2038).

I’m wondering if he is familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind set shortly before his death. After all, what do you do after you’ve given the world Blogger? Perhaps this is another case of the time-honored tech equation:

1. Twitter
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Twitter is gaining apparent steam right now. Obviously, this is going to cost bandwidth. And obviously, Obvious is going to need some way to recoup their investment. I can imagine the pitch to advertisers: “You think Google AdSense provides context? Well, not only do we have a user base revealing their immediate impulses online without fear of any of it coming back to bite them in the ass later. But we’re building a community to keep them addicted to this confessional impulse. We all know that nobody cares about privacy anymore and our user base demonstrates it!”

To be fair, Twitter has given you a Trash icon to get rid of your messages. But let’s say that you get on a roll and you have hundreds of messages to sift through. Who’s honestly going to take the time to go through them? A blog is one thing, where you can single out your thoughts by categories and the like. But Twitter offers no easy way to sort through your messages except chronology, which implies, in addition to the meager 140 character cap, that thought isn’t part of this new form of communication.

Of course, it’s very possible that some smart people, perhaps inspired by David Markson’s books, might find a form of free association and interesting expression with this tool.

But without thought and with an ostensible attitude and an interface that collides against the idea of thinking before writing, I’m afraid I have serious reservations against Twitter’s possibilities.

1. A history of Trade Wars.
2. Play Legend of the Red Dragon online.
3. Global War.

This will mean nothing to you if you did not come of age during the BBS days.

Inside Higher Ed: “Overreliance on Google is only one of many technology problems facing college students. A new report released Tuesday by the Educational Testing Service finds that students lack many basic skills in information literacy, which ETS defines as the ability to use technology to solve information problems.”

There’s even a Robocop-like promotional video. I’m guessing the robots will declare war against the humans before the harsh Russian winter.

New Scientist: “The US could be rife with ‘internet addicts’ who are as clinically ill as alcoholics, according to psychiatrists involved in a nationwide study….Most disturbing, according to the study’s lead author Elias Aboujaoude, is the discovery that some people hide their internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods – behaviour that mirrors the way alcoholics behave.”

Over at Critical Mass, Ellen Heltzel points (but doesn’t link) to this Terry Caesar essay. Caesar suggests that when a college student sits down to read a book, she might find difficulty looking for a space to read. Apparently, Caesar and Heltzel don’t seem to understand that the United States, which recently surpassed the 300 million population mark, has 3,537,441 square miles, or a little over a tenth of a square mile for each person. For those playing at home, that’s about 528 square feet per person. Do you mean to tell me that with this kind of mutable density, there isn’t anywhere to go to read? There isn’t anywhere to be alone with a book?

Further, Caesar and Heltzel suggest, rather foolishly, that text messaging, instant messaging, and television, in Heltzel’s words, “promote groupthink” and are thus “a dangerous place to be in a democracy.” Caesar (never was there a more ridiculous byline for a generalizer) cites an empirical example. The daughter of one of his friends flunks out of a state university because “she could never actually read anywhere.” But instead of suggesting that this student was not particularly effective at locating a reading environment that suited her (or, for that matter, suggesting that good grades aren’t necessarily reflective of good reading; or, for that matter, considering the other circumstantial factors which might have caused this student to drop out), Caesar makes an astonishing leap in logic, writing that “the girl fell victim to the energies of a text-messaged, i-Poded [sic] and above all cell-phoned American culture.”

First off, even if we assume the unlikely scenario that students are putting down their books to text message each other every paragraph or that these students cannot attune to their surroundings, what exactly about the freeflow exchange of information is “dangerous?”

If Caesar and Heltzel are going to point the finger at technology, why stop there? What about the forms of communication that came before? Why not rail against the letter or everyday conversation, where people (shocK! gasp! horror!) actually talk and thus engage (in Heltzel’s words) in “groupthink?” By what stretch of the imagination does a student sending an IM reading “hey! meet u at party; book great!!! byob lulz” become groupthink? I really wish Caesar and Heltzel would have had the courage to state what might really be on their minds: perhaps it is they who can neither understand nor adapt to the swift beat of technology. But instead of trying to determine how it exists in relation to culture and reading, they rail against it with hasty generalizations and without taking the time to understand it.

BBC: “So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication. Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.”

Salon: “But all of this misses the point. Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting — and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper — say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not. In effect, we have allowed a situation to develop that is like a civilization devouring its seed corn. If an enemy had set out to do this to us — quietly arranging so that almost no school child in America can tinker with line coding on his or her own — any reasonably patriotic person would have called it an act of war.”

The Register: “Through a combination of layoffs, attrition and the sale of business units, Intel plans to trim its 102,500 person workforce down to 92,000 people by the middle of 2007. To reach the 92,000 figure, Intel will let go of 7,500 people by the end of this year and then another 3,000 people in 2007.”

The Register: “An attempted burglary of a Liverpool sports store was foiled after a vulture-eyed viewer of a Beatles-related webcam alerted police.”

Work Friendly converts any URL into a Microsoft Word document. This reminds me of the boss key in many of those old Sierra games.

Filmmakers, Flashmakers and videomakers beware: PuppetVision uncovers disturbing new terms that YouTube has recently added to its site. You may want to think twice about uploading a video, because

by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

In other words, YouTube can take that video you labored over for thirty hours and sell it to somebody else. And you won’t get a cent.

Violet Blue has a post too noting more of YouTube’s shenanigans.

This is really disheartening news. YouTube was one of the best developments of the Web during the past few years. And now it looks like they’d rather defecate over its community rather than keep it shining.

[7/24 UPDATE: Valleywag has recently challenged this assertion, noting that the terms, as stated, have been up for about a year and that the license is revoked the minute that a User Submission is removed from the YouTube site. This still doesn’t take away from the possibility that YouTube could very well profit off of work before the user removes the Submission from the site, and I know I can’t be alone in hoping for a little bit of clarity here. But this addendum has been posted to reflect many sides to the story.]

New Scientist: “Imagine being able to record a smell and play it back later, just as you can with sounds or images. Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of doing just that. Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals.”

This GUI interface is intriguing, but I can’t see how it can possibly replace the tactile feel and natural sensory interface of touching, arranging and shuffling piles of paper. That so much energy has gone into developing a project which reproduces this sensation instead of encapsulating it is irksome and perhaps counterintuitive. It is mimesis, rather than transmutation. And while there are positive things which can be said about recreating human environments and experiences in a computer (e.g., it may permit us to understand instinctive impulses from a binary perspective, which could in turn shift paradigms), why don’t software developers and engineers understand that certain human nuances might be better studied or effected through basic human contact?

This reminds me of a game I often play with friends with Blackberries. When out in the real world, if the friend has a Blackberry and I have a cell phone, I then name a piece of information to extract. It could be a general piece of knowledge (Who popularized the Second Law of Thermodynamics?). It could be something as simple as finding out when the next showing of a movie starts. Each person must then ferret out a piece of information: the friend through Google, me through natural telephone conduits. Certain pieces of information are better extracted through the phone (such as when a restaurant is open). Other pieces of information, such as objective facts and data, are better extracted through the Google connection.

What the results here suggest is that, as dazzling as the Internet and technological conduits can be, there are still basic human impulses and communication patterns which can never be entirely reproduced or advanced through machines. (At least not yet.) Of course, where human contact ends and technological contact begins is a subjective question entirely up to the individual. But technology is a tool: an adjunct to the human experience, not a substitute.

(via The Old Hag)