Because the internet needed another blog
You’re paying for it, and by golly, you want it! You want that internet speed. But mostly, you probably want to know why it’s so slow right now that you’re about ready to go mental. Well, as you no doubt know, you could be using speediest.net to find out just how fast your connection to … Read more
You know one of the best advancements in modern computing? I shall tell you: autofill. Long ago, in ages past, a world existed where every time you had to input information into a field, you had to type in the entire thing manually. The fact that you might have to type in the same thing … Read more
One of the most important questions of our time is this: how are we, as a species, going to cope with the technology we create?
There is an article on the Wall Street Journal website that wrestles with some of the ramifications of that question. It’s titled ‘Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?’ and it’s dumb.
Yesterday, I opted into taking our business site down for yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA strike, a decidedly political move. It’s not like outofajam.net being down is going to affect anyone or anything. I mean, the Google bot might be miffed as it crawls the web, but that’s about it. For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), … Read more
What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?
“My computer is just so sloooooow.”
Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.
The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.
Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else.
It’s ironic that computers, whose very purpose for existence is to increase your efficiency, are so very incredibly efficient at making you waste time. Like any good tool, if you decide to make it do something, they will do it quickly and well – get my work done? Sure! Find ways for me to get loads of dopamine by obsessively checking social websites, email, and various other time sinks? Absolutely! With great power comes great responsibility and all that, and if you aren’t too careful, you’ll find yourself where I have been, far too many times – wondering how you got derailed from the middle of your project about 20 minutes ago.
Rather than gnashing your teeth and spending another 20 minutes reading up on the benefits of Neo-Luddism, turn all that great power towards defeating the time-sink beast.