From: Ed Kummel (tech_ed_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2003 - 10:23:28 PDT
As a manager once said to me, "growth is painful. If
you're comfortable, then you're not growing and
instead, you're stagnating"
The human animal has one aspect of existance that no
other creature on the planet has, the need to improve
one's self. This is what truely seperates us from
other species on this world. I love technology and as
far as I'm concerned, things aren't going fast enough
for me. I'm all for simple, but not easy. I look back
at some websites I wrote in 1991, and while cutting
edge at the time, is laughable by today's standards.
It's like that TV comercial from IBM, where this suit
is talking to a geek and they are in front of a
computer monitor talking about the company's website
and the geek is saying, "Well, I was thinking of
making the logo appear in flames and spin and rotate
on the screen" and the suit said, "well, I was hoping
we could use the website to connect to our inventory
database backend and give real-time information on
order status" and the geek comes back and says in a
really hesitant manner, "well...I don't know how to do
that stuff..."
Technology for technology sake is stupid (the saying
goes, "Technology has brought meaning to the life of
many technicians") but technology to enhance the user
experience is crucial! One of my pet peeves is that I
call up a utilty and enter all the prompts and one of
the prompts asks for an account number which I type
into the phone dial pad. This is a good use of
technology. Then it drops me off to an operator who
invariable asks me for my account number. Why the heck
did I type it in if they're just going to ask me for
it again? That's stupid technology disguised as
usefull technology. And the reason being is these
things are being designed by individuals who are
technically competant, but have no social interaction
skills and as such have no idea how the human actually
interacts with the world around them. A case in point,
where I work, everyone has to use a web fronted
customer database...which is cool...but it contains
highly sensitive data so it times you out after 5
minutes of inactivity...which is a pain because the
password is a huge 15 character monstrosity (special,
number and ucase/lcase) which no one can memorize. So,
under everybody's keyboard is a slip of paper listing
passwords. It's just human nature! And why such a
complicated login? The website is inaccessible outside
the firewall! Technology for technology's sake.
Ed
web/gadget guru
--- Matt Janeczek <MJJ14_at_aol.com> wrote:
> Don't all you guys miss the 1994-1996 or 7 era of
> the internet, before
> all the ridiculous commercialization we have today?
> Sites back then
> were simple, yet elegant and useful. You didn't
> have to wait for Java
> to load or install a million plugins that end up
> crashing your web
> browser. You were able to cruise ftp sites for just
> about any kind of
> file you wanted. Having a 14.4 modem was not a big
> deal, and when the
> 33.6 and later 56 modems came out, you might as well
> have had DSL! :-)
> I don't know, I always post nostalgic items to
> this email list,
> probably more than I do technical ones. But I guess
> that is just me,
> missing the days when I first had my Performa and
> life was good...
>
> Robert Benschop wrote:
=====
"When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know', the end result is tyranny and oppression , no matter how holy the motives"
-Robert Heinlein, Revolt in 2100
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