Thinking Outside the Box.

March 20, 2001 3:17 PM

Thinking Outside the Box. A washington post article on technology and its incompatibility with humans.
"Instead of hunting down people who smoke pot, they'd be hunting down people who sell business software that crashes. They'd owe people a buck or go to jail. That's what Washington should be doing." Via Slashdot
posted by bytecode (10 comments total)

In other words, the software developers will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Cool.

Seriously, though, I don't think people will just put up with this situation forever. Sooner or later, people will think they've reached the point of marginal returns.
posted by anapestic at 3:33 PM on March 20, 2001

Yeah, apparently it's all about those pesky engineers. After all, they enjoy creating dysfunctional programs, then browbeating members of the public into shelling out cash for the Latest Greatest Thing. The rapscallions!

I can't see this continuing forever, either. People stopped buying the newest processor on the block en masse when they figured that their current rigs were "good enough". The same thing's bound to happen to other technological offerings sooner or later.
posted by youhas at 3:47 PM on March 20, 2001

Nice to see another article by the Post glamorizing that which it pretends to bemoan. microchips will never be in soup cans. ever.
posted by jasonsmall at 4:03 PM on March 20, 2001

Even if they still only hunted down people who smoked pot, it'd probably be all the software engineers who'd go first.
posted by annathea at 4:23 PM on March 20, 2001

In other words, the software developers will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

...while the technical writers sneak quietly out the back door and blend in with the mob...
posted by jennyb at 4:44 PM on March 20, 2001

The same thing's bound to happen to other technological offerings sooner or later.

God help us all.

I'm still holding out hope that we'll be able to somehow magically hijack the endless upgrade cycle to substitute something that isn't complete worthless crap for the mangy excuses for software most people are currently suffering under. If people decide they've got enough... well... we all end up permanently screwed.

This is how we got stuck with the crufty-beyond-all-belief x86 processor architecture.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 5:13 PM on March 20, 2001

With gizmos mutating at wild rates, engineers love the endless stomach-churning ride of creating the firstest with the newest. They've dragged us along with them.

No! Lazy marketing people want 'firstest' (yuk!) and 'newest'. All the engineers I know and work with generally want 'better'. Marketing people don't understand engineers and don't want to, they want an easy way to sell. New is easier to sell than explaining why a different version of something that already exists is better. And they're right. New does sell. The market has demonstrated this over and over again. Consumers are not passive in the engineering process. Nobody's been dragged anywhere.
posted by normy at 9:40 PM on March 20, 2001

I want a software company that lays out in a contract exactly what the product (say, a word processor) is supposed to do -- including 'not crash' -- and gives you your money back if it fails to live up to that contract. And I would want a guarantee that the product would never be 'enhanced'; that if I were to buy Word Processor version 1.0, that they would never try to add, change, or remove a 'feature,' but that they would continue for at least the five years following product release to work on bullet-proofing the existing product and making free patches available to all users.

You could 'upgrade' to a new version (say, Word Processor version 2.0) but it would come with a different contract, one that covers only version 2.0 and its set of features and the company's guarantee never to do anything with that version but fix the bugs for five years.

And you could use plug-ins to upgrade old versions, but the contract would apply only to pure versions. Providers of plug-ins would be expected to offer their own contracts covering the functionality and compatibility of their plug-ins.
posted by pracowity at 11:18 PM on March 20, 2001

Nice to see another article by the Post glamorizing that which it pretends to bemoan. microchips will never be in soup cans. ever.

Why not? Just now I thought that a self-heating can, with a chip to control the temperature would be a pretty handy job. Perhaps not a tin can, but a self-contained, disposable thermos like container that heats up with the press of a button and keeps the soup a constant temperature until the soups gone or the container's turned off.

Seems like a handy device to me. Also take note of prior art described should any decide to try and patent the idea. :-)
posted by cCranium at 7:13 AM on March 21, 2001

Why not just have a can-shaped receptacle above your existing CPU? Use the can as a heat exchanger and cook your beans'n'franks at the same time!
posted by rodii at 7:40 AM on March 21, 2001