Last night on Top Gear, one of the segments involved a review of some fancy European car or another, I forget what kind. It’s not really important; I just watch the review segments of Top Gear to hear Jeremy Clarkson be snarky and because they’re in between the really fun parts of the show. What’s important for our purposes today is that the car in question had umpteen zillion gadgets and geegaws and electronic whatchamacallits, including a central computer brain controlled with a big chrome knob on the center console, about where the toggle switches for the machine guns were in the Aston Martin in Goldfinger.

That got me to thinking about how much more fiddly and sophisticated cars have gotten in the last 20 years or so, and how little they really changed in the 20 or so years before that, comparatively speaking.
Read the rest of this entry »

The startling fact that a commenter recognized the name of my old employer Leading Edge in the last Technosophy reminded me of this little piece, which I originally wrote up for another web board some years ago. I should note in advance that we did have some competent servicing dealers and resellers - some were in fact quite good - so if you, by chance, worked for a Leading Edge dealer in the past, you shouldn’t take personally the part where I take cheap shots at them.

(It should also be noted that when I wrote this, Compaq was not merely a brand of Hewlett-Packard, but was in fact a vast manufacturing concern in its own right which had recently finished dismembering and devouring Digital Equipment Corporation.)
Read the rest of this entry »

I was shaving the other day when I noticed one of those small white plastic warning tags on the power adapter of my electric shaver. I didn’t pay it much mind at first, figuring that it was just the usual kind of thing - you know, “Do not immerse in water, do not feed after midnight,” etc.

As it happens, the shaver itself is cordless - the adapter is just plugged in to charge it, not used when actually shaving - so it spends most of its time not connected. Its usual spot is up on one of the shelves in the bathroom, where one tends to see it whenever one uses the facilities. So over the next few days, I kept noticing the warning tag, and eventually it penetrated my conscious mind that there was something odd about it.

Finally I took a closer look today and realized that it’s not one of the usual warnings. It’s a little pictogram showing the transformer on the plug end, a pair of scissors positioned just below it on the wire itself, and a red X over the junction of scissors and wire. The warning here seems to be at once very specific and, to my mind, more than a little bizarre: Do not take a pair of scissors and cut the transformer off this power cord.

I find this simultaneously amusing and appalling. Amusing because we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago, appalled because, well, we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago.

A long time ago, I worked for a PC manufacturer, Leading Edge Products, as did my friends Andrew and Derek (and a good many others besides, but that’s not important right now). One day we were looking over the documentation for one of Leading Edge’s laptop computers and came across the page explaining the relative severity levels of the several different types of interjectory bullets one was likely to find in the course of reading the manual. I’m paraphrasing from memory, because it’s been a long time and I don’t have any of those docs any more, but they ranged from something like Note!, which indicated something the user might find helpful but that wasn’t of particular importance, through Caution! and Warning! to STOP!, which, the book gravely explained, was a warning that, if unheeded, could lead to injury or death!

There being a relatively limited number of ways in which even a careless user could kill himself with a laptop computer, Andrew speculated jokingly that somewhere in the book was the warning, “STOP! Do not eat your laptop!”

Well, we’re there. Manufacturers now feel it necessary to include little iconic warnings advising us not to do things that:

A) Any idiot can plainly see are dangerous (cutting an electric wire with a pair of scissors); and

B) Would wreck the device if performed, even if no danger to the user was present (severing the transformer, even on a power cord not presently plugged into the wall).

So I thought for a while: Why would Philips Norelco have felt the very specific need to warn us not to do this particular thing? And the only conclusion I could come to was that someone has done it, then brought the fact that it tends to cause problems to the company’s attention, probably by way of a lawsuit.

I find this both depressing and more than a little baffling. I mean, what person rational enough to go out and buy an electric shaver, and old enough to have any use for same, would even think of cutting the transformer off the charging cord with a pair of scissors? Who looks at any electrically powered device and thinks, You know, if I had a pair of Fiskars, I could just lop that sucker right off of there? I suppose you could argue that a child might do it, but there again - any child capable of operating scissors should already know both A and B, and any child incapable of grasping those two points should certainly not be roaming around the bathroom with scissors.

I’m all for basic safety precautions with our household electric devices, but come on, people.

The other day, I used my laptop computer to order a copy of James Cameron’s classic 1984 sci-fi film The Terminator from Amazon.com. Within a couple of hours, the movie had been delivered to my TiVo, to be watched at any time in the next 31 days when I might feel like getting around to it. There is, of course, a certain irony in using this strange convergence of the Internet, the movie business, and my television set to grab a movie about a war waged by computers to destroy humanity, but something else occurred to me while I was reflecting on this technology.

For years now, we’ve been told – oddly, almost always by computer people, not TV people – that the personal computer and the television set will become one any day now. The supposedly imminent coalescence of TV and computers, we’re told, will mean new heights in convenience, instant access to… well, pretty much everything, all without ever getting up from our Barcaloungers. Mind you, they’ve been saying that and then not doing it for so long now that it’s become something of a joke, this era’s equivalent of the old Popular Science “by the year 2000, cars will fly” thing. (Remember how we were all going to have WebTVs within five years?) Still, I have to admit that, with things like the ability to push content to a TiVo by doing something on the Internet, downloading stuff to your Xbox 360, and whatnot working now, we are getting closer… and that concerns me on a couple of levels.

The first is simple, bordering on prosaic, and I don’t really have the time or the inclination to embark on a deep probing of the “is there such a thing as too much convenience?” question right now. The other is… more complex, and has its roots in a speech delivered by a journalist to a gathering of his peers 50 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

I truly gives me great pleasure to welcome Ben to the site, because he’s been by best friend for going on seventeen years now. I met Ben back in the fall of 1991 in college at WPI. Since then we’ve shared a couple of apartments and worked together at three different companies - Xylogics, Livingston, and GTE Internetworking. We also co-founded a little writing cabal called Eyrie Productions way back in 1991 that’s still going today. We haven’t figured out which one of us is Jay and which is Silent Bob just yet.

Like so many others, myself included, Ben was a victim of the tech bubble collapse back in 2001. And like many, he took the opportunity to strike out in a new direction - in his case, as a writer. In his own words:

In his career - well, not so much a career as a series of interesting but usually ill-advised vocational choices, if we’re being honest - Benjamin D. Hutchins has been a tech support grunt, an Internet operations tech, a small-town print reporter, a public relations writer, and a semiprofessional muser upon the random. Now he’s working on several books (none of which, just to buck tradition, is the Great American Novel), eyeing the relentless march of personal gadget technology with bemusement and often suspicion, and wondering what’s with these kids today, with their clothes and their hair and that stuff they think is music.

His first book, Off the Top of My Head: Personal Reflections of a Small-Town Newsman, can be had here or here.

I’ve always enjoyed his writing style, and for a while I’ve had the idea of having Ben contribute to the site, kind of how Lewis Black does in his Back in Black segment on The Daily Show. And it finally gelled in a conversation with him this weekend.

His ‘column’, Technosophy, will basically cover whatever he feels like writing about (with some tech/geek connection), whenever he feels like doing so. He also has a thing for somewhat geeky toys, and reviewing same. He’s already queued up two posts, and I think they present an interesting, and amusing, contrast in subject matter.

And if you like his writing style, check out his book, and I don’t say that just because I appear in a few of the anecdotes.

Welcome, Ben!