SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #66 New Moon of June 2, 2000 Contents copyright 2000 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. If you don't want to read about the mechanics of this, skip down to the row of asterisks (****). 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I do that one manually. ********************* The big news at work is that we are moving. It's only a few blocks, but still far enough to have to pack stuff up and load it into trucks. Friday was the last day at the old location, and the place was crawling with movers. During one break period I noticed several of the movers sitting around talking about that TV show where they put a bunch of people on an island and vote them off one by one. I think it's called "Survivor". What was so unusual about that? It was the first time I'd ever noticed anyone there talking about any mainstream prime-time TV show. Whenever I read about some new TV show, the article often says that it will be one of the main topics of conversation at offices all over the country the following morning. But that never seems to really happen. I've heard occasional mention of specials and such, but not all that often. People tend to mostly talk shop. When they aren't talking shop they're going on about what life was like at other companies they'd worked for in the past, or what the stock market is doing, or various hobbies some of them have in common such as square-dancing or flying, or what idiots most other drivers are during commute times. But almost never do they talk about things they've seen on TV. Is this company atypical in that regard? Or are the media overestimating people's interest in prime-time TV? ********************* At work we have free food in the lunchroom. This includes assorted donuts every morning. It also includes bagels. And where there are bagels and people concerned about employee safety, there are also bagel slicers. Now someone has discovered that some types of frosted donuts can be sliced in the bagel slicers. That nameless person has been slicing frosted donuts, eating the half with the frosting, and leaving the plain half. Others have been heard grumbling about how that isn't fair. The company also has a weekly "all hands" lunch meeting which includes a question-and-answer session. There's an anonymous email setup that people can use to submit their questions. So someone asked if it was cheating to slice frosted donuts in the bagel slicer and eat just the frosted half. Amid a fair amount of laughter the CEO took a show-of-hands vote. It looked to me like it was fairly close, but the CEO (who was standing up front and thus presumably had a better view) declared that it looked like only a minority considered it cheating. Therefore officially it's not cheating to slice frosted donuts in the bagel slicer and eat just the frosted half, at least at that company. Other corporate cultures may differ. ********************* In other news, there's an IEEE Proceedings article on how human hearing perception was taken into account in designing audio compression algorithms like MP3. The article goes on at great length about banks of (virtual) filters, the fact that some sounds can mask others, and so on. Very complicated and very technical. All that discussion of how human senses work led me to wonder about non- human listeners. For example, with an analog recording of a live night-club concert Superman, with his super-hearing, might be able to follow a conversation at one of the front tables even though for the rest of us it's drowned out by the music and we wouldn't even notice it was there. But with a modern high-compression digital recording most of the conversation would have been blanked out to save bits, since its presence or absence would not matter to ordinary humans. Would that kind of thing bother Superman? Would Clark Kent dare to be heard saying that this newfangled digital stuff doesn't sound right? And what of beings from other planets? If their hearing mechanism is fundamentally different from ours, and their engineers did a good job of optimizing for them and didn't know or care about humans, their audio compression systems might not work well for us. We'd hear various sorts of distortions they wouldn't notice, and they would have the same problem with our audio technology. Interestingly enough, the problems might be less with older technology. If our hearing range pretty much overlapped theirs, then their analog recordings might sound OK to us, perhaps a little muffled or tinny if hearing ranges didn't overlap exactly, but no worse than what our parents and grandparents grew up with. On the other hand, extreme speech compression optimized for either species might be pretty much unusable by the other. And this is just audio. What might their video look like to us (and vice versa) if they don't see the same primary colors we do? Would a whole new field (or sub-field) of engineering spring up to handle such human-alien interfaces? ********************* You may be pleased to learn that the Microsoft court shenanigans won't affect Putri-DOS. Putri-DOS, Inc., Putrisoft, PutriSoft, Putri-Soft, Putri_Soft, and so on are already several competing companies. The reason most people think of them as one entity is that they're incorporated under the laws of some uncharted desert island which is very lax about company names being similar to other company names. The fact that the quality of some PutriDOS distributions is such that the developers don't want to be associated with them (as long as the money comes to the right place) tends to add to the confusion. ********************* In related news, the people who brought you PutriDOS have recently announced PutridOffice70. PutridOffice70 carries the idea of hiding abstract concepts (computer files) behind familiar physical objects (paper-based offices) to new heights. For example, there's a fixed directory hierarchy of \\Campus\Building\Room\Cabinet\Drawer\Folder\File for storing files. To work with a file you move it to some workspace of the form \\Campus\Building\Room\Desk and move it back when you're done. In general the only file-manipulation operation is to move a file from one Folder (anywhere in the hierarchy) to another (nearby or far away) or to or from a Desk or to the Trash. That greatly simplifies learning. There are a number of exceptions to the above, but they still follow the paper-office paradigm: Copying (as opposed to moving) is allowed from a special Copier in the Copy Room, to any Folder or Desk in the same Building. Copying is also allowed from a special FaxMachine in the Copy Room, but only to a Folder or Desk in some other Building. Files are deleted by moving them to a special Trash area. And so on. Some users may need to now and then create a new Building or Folder or some such, but in general such tasks are delegated to the MIS department. All in all, if you enjoyed working in a physical office thirty years ago, and are uncomfortable with all this newfangled computer stuff, you might like PutridOffice70 (also known as Putrid Office MCMLXX, depending on the vendor). It will be available (or at least officially become vaporware) sometime in the early years of the 21st Century. At least one vendor is planning to take the concept back another thirty years with Putrid Office MCMXL. This eliminates the concepts of the Copier and the Fax, so there is even less to learn. The downside is that more documents will need to be retyped, so you will probably need to hire people for a typing pool. PDA users who prefer handwriting over typing can go back three more steps to Putrid Office MDCCCL. Most analysts, however, believe the market for such a product will be quite limited. ********************* I finally managed to open the plastic wrap on an extension cable I got for a computer peripheral. Took several minutes with a knife and scissors. Apparently that kind of packaging isn't designed to be opened without major tools. Or maybe it wasn't designed to be opened at all. Maybe it was some kind of Art Object, and I defiled it by cutting open the package and taking out the cable. Is the art world going to descend on me en masse for vandalizing "USB Cable Safe from a Cruel World" after I bought it off the exhibit rack at the computer store, cut the transparent outer housing asunder, and actually plugged the cable into a computer? Or maybe it's a toy for toddlers who dream of one day being system administrators. In its original state it could be looked at and fantasized over, but couldn't actually be touched. And the housing was tough enough that it seemed likely to pass just about any child-safety test in which the child doing the test was too young to be trusted with knives and other such tools. So if they wanted to throw it around like a ball, or run over it with their trikes, it would probably take the punishment and keep coming back for more. But why was it in a computer store rather than an art gallery or toy store or sporting goods place, and why was it labeled for use with computers? ********************* I recently saw a beer ad that had a large picture of the can, and on the label was mention that the cans were marked with a date. What got my attention was that they called it a "born-on date". That led me to think of horoscopes. If you know when a can of beer was "born", you can in theory take its horoscope to determine how compatible you and it are before you drink it. You might also be able to tell if a particular can of beer is destined to get into trouble with the law or some such, and avoid drinking it lest the trouble also involve you. The next logical step would seem to me to be for the brewery to calculate the beer's horoscope and print that on the can. They have economies of scale in their favor so they can afford bigger computers and better software and more astrological expertise than the average beer drinker. They know the exact latitude and longitude of the brewery, and have the resources to seek out and hire an astrologer who's also an expert on beer. Thus they're in a position to print interpretations on the can as well. This is especially important since it's beer, which means the person who's been drinking it may not be in a position to do complex astrological calculations at the time the info is most needed. So why is the beer industry not rushing to fill this marketing gap? ********************* ... or Mineral Pet rocks are OK But some people prefer more variety. The guy upstairs from he Has a 1947 Chevrolet engine block: I think his apartment is too small for it But there it is. And the family down the street With the goldfish pond in the yard Has an old ship's anchor To keep the fish company. But of all the inorganic pets in the neighborhood, The happiest is an old beer can Belonging to a small boy. It would never win a prize at a show: Too many dents And spots of rust And paint flaking off. And besides, it a brand of beer Most people don't like. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is FUN Like afternoons when they go for a walk: The can leaps joyously ahead CLATTERDY RATTLDEY CLANG BANG!! Then lies quietly waiting for its master to catch up Before leaping ahead again. I may get a beer can myself some day. But I still don't think it's right To keep a 1947 Chevrolet engine block Cooped up in such a small apartment. Thomas G. Digby written 1730 hr 2/07/76 entered 2045 hr 3/29/92 -- END --