inputs/outputs

The other day I wrote a post that ended with some possible areas where second systems may be possible. One of the areas I mentioned was highways, or the traffic system. A week later, I heard about a town in Germany that is doing away with all traffic lights to create a more efficient system for pedestrians and drivers. They believe that there will be less traffic, and it will be much easier and quicker to get around.

If this works out, I can see a lot of other places catching on and trying the same tactic. The basic idea here is that now, the efficiency of the system lies with the users, rather than the technology, which doesn’t account for erratic traffic patterns. After all, the reason that traffic lights exist in the first place is because whoever built roads determined that the users of the system wouldn’t be able to self organize and work out the most efficient system for everyone. I don’t blame them - the roads are filled with people who don’t care about anything but their own agenda, so why would they self organize?

I’m guessing it’s the idea of Karma. When they realize that the most efficient system is one in which everyone collaborates, they’ll want to participate.

Based on the way the current market looks, ringtones are a terrible idea. I’ve only heard one good ringtone in my entire life, and it was my friend’s mother’s. A light marimba sound, loud enough to hear, but non-intrusive. My sister’s phone blasts ACDC whenever someone calls. I’m amazed that she hasn’t tired of it yet. As for me, I wrote my own ringtone.

The RIAA is trying to create a system where you can buy a CD single in a store for $6, and then have the ability to download the ringtone for that single onto your phone. The system is called Ringle. Let’s first take a look at the physical product: a CD single. I remember when these actually sold, before the iTunes store completely eradicated any need for them.

The two things that are wrong with this situation is that if physical CDs aren’t selling as well as digital music, there’s no way that a CD single is going to sell, especially for that price. Additionally, a ringtone generally lasts for about 10 seconds at most and is cut off when you pick up the phone. You only hear the first few bars of a song, if that. If a music lover really wanted to hear the song, they’d probably play it on their iPod, with the single that they bought on iTunes for a dollar. And if iTunes offer them a DRM-free version, they can pay an extra 20 cents and use the mp3 as a ringtone anyway.

When are those RIAA folks going to embrace the fact that digital music isn’t going to go away? Make the product useful in a way that can’t be digitally copied, and we’ll start to buy more of it. I don’t mean digital protection either. That’s a challenging goal since it will really involve some creative thinking, but the effort would be worth it for everyone.

I’m going to write about a system which has a bunch of bugs, inconsistencies, and overall problems: the education system.

There’s almost something humorous about the phrase “virtual learning.” Just like “virtual reality” refers to a situation which is not, in fact, real, virtual learning seems to refer to a situation where it only appears as if knowledge is being attained.

I guess the main thing to determine is whether or not the social-interactive component of education can be eliminated and still have the same effect on the user. Or at least, an equally beneficial effect. One of the arguments is that online learning is teaching students to interact with computers, something that they will have to do in their future. To me, this is silly. Non-virtual learning (we’ll refer to it as actual learning) allows students to learn how to use a computer at an early age, and still provides all of the same social benefits.

Virtual learning is cheaper, faster, and overall much easier. Thinking about a parallel universe where I took online courses and didn’t interact with any classmates, I probably wouldn’t have landed the job I’m in now, which requires a great deal of thinking, but is completely based around the way I communicate with people.

If all you can do is read, write, and crunch numbers, and you don’t have a clue how to act socially, you’re a commodity and can be interchanged with someone who’s a million miles away, in a different country.

The state government has placed vans with cameras on the potentially speed-friendly roads in my area. The idea is that with this system, the government can save on the cost of paying a policeman to set up a speed trap, and can also catch more speeders. The more tickets (punishments) a speeder gets, the less likely he is to repeat the action (speeding).

There are some interesting components to the system, though. The first is that there are designated areas for the speed traps to be set up. If you see a van in a certain location on your road, chances are that’s where it will be the next time. The locations and times that the cameras will be operational are posted on the county’s website every day, so if a speeder wanted to be meticulous, they could quickly consult the website on their way out in the morning. A speeder could be cautious when he/she passes an area where they’ve seen a camera-van before, and probably will begin to pick up their speed once they pass the van.

The second component is based on a rumor, but I wouldn’t disregard it: your picture is only taken if you’re going 10 miles above the speed limit. So a speeder isn’t punished if they’re breaking the law, but they are punished if they’re really breaking the law.

My guess is that the government’s goal in implementing this system is to prevent people from speeding in the suburbs. All this system does is encourage speeders to try and beat the system by memorizing the locations of the cameras and simply slowing down at those specific points if they notice a van. The speeders are actually being conditioned to stop speeding for just a brief second to avoid a ticket. Might as well install a stop sign.

I’m not going to pretend that I have a creative and workable solution for this problem, but it seems like threatening speeders with a punishment isn’t working here, simply because the punishment is so easily avoided. What if it worked the other way around? What if the non-speeders were rewarded for their (consistent) good driving habits? What if the non-speeders were awarded with HOV lane privileges for a one-man car during rush hour?

The system would have to be able to differentiate between the law-abiders and the fakers (and I have no idea how it would do that).  And sure, a reward shouldn’t be necessary for simply following the law, but the drivers in my neighborhood aren’t driving any slower.

Last night, I went to see a free a cappella show at the college that I graduated from. Afterwards, a few of us, in order to get to the parking garage, needed to pass through what was known as The Tavern, a communal space with couches, a chic fil a, and a greasy grill area called American Pi. I hate American Pi. It’s the type of place where they take your order, but don’t communicate it to the cooks. At dinnertime, the wait can be nearly 30 minutes, and you have to claim your food. There’s no real way to prove that the cheeseburger you ordered was truly your cheeseburger. No one checked your receipt. They just took your word for it. People took advantage of that system constantly. If I wanted to, I could walk up to the end of the tavern line and claim a cheeseburger without paying for it.

We walked into what seemed to be a second system - blue lights were now tacked up against the previously lifeless walls, the black trash cans had been replaced with open top silver bins, and there was a row of computers surrounding the perimeter. The place looked beautiful. There was less clutter, and more tables, and the tables were warm and inviting.

The problem is that it wasn’t a second system at all. It was a new user interface that didn’t do anything to solve the problems from the previous set-up. There may be more space, but after the novelty wears off, the line at the tavern will still be as long, and it will still be run just as poorly. If a system is broken to begin with, sprucing up the UI is only going to be a temporary delight. Spend money on coming up with a new process first, and then change the UI accordingly.

In the past few weeks, a flurry of internet articles have become a giant snowball flying right at Comcast’s head. As it turns out, Comcast isn’t equipped to handle all of the traffic that its users generate, so they try and control BitTorrent use and cut off their customers’ service when they’ve used too much bandwidth.

The undeniable economics: the demand for internet content is more than Comcast can supply, so someone has to bend. Either the user has to cut down on the amount of content they’re consuming, or the system has to increase their capacity. It should be apparent which option makes Comcast a more useable system, but on the contrary, Comcast is forcing their users to do the bending.

How can this happen? Quite simply, because Comcast can. Comcast is the only choice for many when it comes to internet providers. I’m sure that Comast will say that it is trying to maintain a usable system by not overloading itself with so much data flow, but in this case, “usable” does not mean that a system is simply up and running at an acceptable speed. It means that a system is not only running, but is meeting the needs of its content-hungry consumers.

How easy would it be for Comcast to upgrade their systems to meet the consumer demand? Probably not easy. But find a way, as soon as humanly possible, or someone else will.

It’s almost the fall, which for most of my friends means school again. Everyone has loaded up on new laptops, moved into their new pad, accessed their neighbor’s wireless, and has discovered that they haven’t bought the new version of Office, and can’t find their old discs to install a previous version.

I’ve been a “professional” consultant for a little more than a month now, but I’ve always played the role of tech consultant for my friends and relatives. My sister, who bought a MacBook, and my good friend Billy, both were in need of Office, and asked me if I knew where to grab a copy.

Now, legal issues aside, I didn’t know of a way for them to get a free copy of Office. But it wasn’t Word, Excel, and Powerpoint that they really needed. It was a word processor, a spreadsheet creator, and a slideshow app that they were really in search of. They just didn’t know it. It’s just like a scenario where someone in search of band-aids for a bleeding child, and is told by the store manager that, no, the store does not sell band-aids, but they do have adhesive bandages with a gauze strip.

And with the magic of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), all of those things are not only free, but they don’t require any downloading. And not only are they web accessible, but there aren’t many compatibility issues (so you can open your boss’ word documents in Google Docs, for instance). Additionally, you can save those documents to your google account (or wherever) and access them on any computer that has an internet connection.

Is it a good substitute for someone who doesn’t want to dish out a few hundred for the office suite? Yes. Because you can save your documents to your hard drive for backup, and there are free office application suites (like NeoOffice) that will open/edit your documents when you aren’t wired to the web.

That being said, my friends will end up dishing out the cash to feel comfortable with the software they’ve been using forever, even if these new-wave web 2.0 apps don’t have too many compatibility issues. And yet, many of them were so willing to switch over and learn OS X, simply because having the user experience was worth more than sticking with the norm.

The norm’s changes everyday, anyway, depending on what users are trying to accomplish. Adaptability is a skill that will save you time and money.

I went to Giant last night to buy some ingredients for my famous Orzo-Asparagus-Mushroom-Shrimp concoction, and I noticed something interesting. Most of the aisles in my local Giant food store were self-checkout. Only a few years ago, it was the special aisle for the tech savvy people who wanted to speed through checkout, while most people cowered in fear, running to their Giant employee to charge and bag their goods.

Now, most of us are weighing our vegetables, scanning items, and having the attendants bag our stuff and put them in a cart for us. Less interaction, more efficient. It makes the world seem like a colder place, now that technology is becoming smarter and taking the place of warm human blood. But the typical user, in this case, probably doesn’t care too much.

Grocery shopping can be an intimate experience. Any on-lookers are given a look into your homelife: what you are feeding your kids, what medicines you take, your habits, the magazines you read, and how much you spend on these items. Computers don’t judge.

The other side of the coin is that as simple as the system is, it still ends up being a problem for the users. Almost every time I’m in a self-checkout store, I see a “call for help” bulb light up on my station, or on someone else’s station. Or I have to remove something to re-weigh, or the belt sends it back.

Either way, incompetent users aren’t going to stop grocery stores from saving money with self-checkout registers. Once you get used to it, the whole process is really quite fast. Especially since you’re the one doing it, and it’s a chore that needs to be over as quickly as possible. There are some things that are much more intuitive than they appear to be - technology is can be one of those things. I mean, we all know how to use an ATM, right?

The Second System Effect is a theory from Frederick Brooks’ book The Mythical Man Month, a collection of essays about software design. He basically explains that a first system will inevitably fail, and that designers must keep that in mind. It almost seems pointless, then, to even build a first system. The catch is that you can’t have a second without a first.

The Regal Center, a shopping center in my hometown, has grown slowly over the past few years, with gigantic parking lot and a few auxilary stores next to the theater, so that people could grab a bite before a movie. Over the next few years, the center installed a Potbelly, and that restaurant soon became more than the pre-show bite. Pretty soon, it was a high school hangout, a concert venue, and a place to grab a really nifty/innovative sandwich. Other shops opened nearby, like Ben & Jerry’s, another store which is more than your run-of-the-mill ice cream vendor.

The parking lot overflowed, and all of the other parking lots nearby were off-limits for whatever reason. They installed a booth and a $1 fee to park, but the lot was still constantly full during peak hours. The booth was also awkwardly placed, and the cars have to snake around it, dodging the make-shift lane they had created with orange cones. It was pretty clear that adding anymore stores to this area would cause major problems with the traffic, especially since there’s a major route adjacent to the center.

Recently, a new center has opened directly behind the Regal center, and it is beautiful. Instead of one sidewalk, they’ve created a pavilion. There are multiple parking garages, and there are lights over every space that change color to indicate if the spot is occupied or not. The parking is free. There are restaurants that are a tad bit expensive. Well they’re more expensive than Potbelly, anyway.

There may not be a movie theater in this lot, or a nifty shop like Potbelly, but the user interface is a lot more elegant than the one of the center directly in front of it. That’s enough for me to ditch the Regal Center on a Friday night, even if I do love Potbelly’s award winning sandwich, “The Wreck.” A good user interface is enough, a lot of the time, to make consumers feel comfortable with paying a premium. It’s why we pay more for iPods/iPhones, Tablet PCs, etc.

Imagine the potential of a bunch of second systems that haven’t been invented yet: highways, tollbooths, plumbing, vending machines, medicine…

Update:  This blog posts talks about the ignorance of more than half of the blogging world towards RSS.  I do think that it’s a matter of time before it becomes like email.  And another point that I hadn’t really thought about is the exposure it can give bloggers.  I do use an RSS reader, by the way, but I do miss being able to see the blog for what it is.

Nowadays, most sites can be separated into style and content. That means you can design an entire site and syndicate the content (feed) in whatever format you please, allowing tools like Google Reader to make things easy for readers who want to aggregate their favorite blogs and websites.

(And, as a side note, aren’t most websites, that aren’t service oriented, blogs? I remember when tech-saavy friends would make websites in the 90’s, and suddenly realize that there was nothing to write. To much of a hassle to update the html everytime you wanted to write something new about your life, and besides, the 5 mb of free space that your provider gave you was filled with huge gifs anyway. Back then, you would only buy more than 50mb of space if you were running a business. Not the case anymore.)

So, what’s the point of spending time designing your blog when so many users are switching over to RSS readers like Google Reader? Instead of seeing your intense graphics and smoothed out fonts, they’ll see whatever font their reader is set on. Your blog is supposed to be an extension of you, isn’t it? Aesthetics and all?

Having a good design is useful when you have a really popular post that’s making its rounds on the internet, on the front page of Digg or Reddit. Maybe it’s a video that you found on an old VHS tape that has “youtube phenomenon” written all over it, or it’s a really amazing post that has a long running conversation going on. It’s like working in a call center and wearing pajamas: no one knows about your attire until you do something remarkable and your customer surprises you at work with an award and a promotion.

I almost wish RSS didn’t exist sometimes. If a blog is a representation of the person writing it, I want to see that person in the way they wanted to display themself - not on a boring RSS reader.