And the Dawn of a New Age Begins! Gamma-Testers Beware..

With much anticipation, the iPad is on sale to the public today. I've never quite understood this almost pathological need to be the first on the block to own technology. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that it's always the best decision.

I can recall that it was years before I bought a CD player. While I didn't benefit from the technology as others did, by the same token, I didn't pay the sky-high prices of new tech - often with a healthy chunk of R&D built into the cost. Let alone the fact that the technology needs to mature and for the most part, when we jump on this technology bandwagon.

It's pretty well considered that alpha and beta testers are those that test a product of technology before it gets released - shake the bugs out sort of thing. I refer to these people that live off of instant gratification as Gamma testers - those who pay a healthy dollar to for all intents of purposes test the technology in the "real world".

Thanks, but no thanks - not for me.

Maybe I'm technologically astute - or maybe I'm just a cheap Scotsman that wants to hold onto my dollars for a little bit longer.

We'll All Turn Into Mush!

As good as technology gets - for everything that it does for us, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the downside is that it can and will turn us into mush, in all aspects of the word.

Today, I was filling out a contest entry form and the skill testing question was 50/2*4+11-7. Instead of figuring out what should be a pretty simple formula, I whip out the handy-dandy calculator. In some respects, isn't technology making it too easy not to exercise basic skills?

Along the same lines, the other day, I was at the store, buying bus tickets for my son. The tickets cost $11.50 and I handed the cashier a $20 bill. I was astounded when she pulled out her calculator to figure out the change due.

Unreal - totally and truly. So many of us are just too guilty of being lazy.

In 500 years, we will have mutated to the extend where we don't have legs and we will just have big thumbs for texting - that's it.

Is It a Concern? You Bet!

Story down in the US where a lady was in the casino playing the penny slots. The slot machine clearly stated that the maximum payout was something like $100k. This woman "won" $43m and now is considering legal action. Casino claims that it was obviously a mistake with the VLT and that they are legally covered for things like this. Said woman is insistent at getting the whole kit-n-kaboodle (not bloody likely!).

Granted, I have no idea how many slot machines there are throughout the US, nor do I have any idea as to how many plays there would be in a given day. If I had to guess (I'll see if I can find out), I'd say that there are perhaps 1,000,000 machines. Let's say on average, there are 1,000 plays on a machine, so we'd be looking at possibly there being 1,000,000,000 plays each day.
(Author's note: based on one website, in 2004, there were about 790,000 slot machines in the US, so it would look like my original estimate was at least ballpark accurate!)

Sure - it's reasonable to expect that if there a billion plays per day, there's gonna be a few bugs, but it seems to me that there are way too many stories of this machines issuing inaccurate payouts. I'm curious why - one wouldn't think that calculating the payout would be all that complicated - it would seem like simple equations to me, so I'm curious as to how and why there are so many mistakes.

Thursday, April 1

Yes - that time of year - one that I often dread because it seems like each and every year, someone, somehow manages to sucker me in - even just once.

In the news today, there are a myriad of stories about some of the more inventive hoaxes and as I read these articles, I see how even things like April Fool's Day is permeated by technology.

I'm not talking about the lame hoaxes - such as "RickRolling" (by the way, it's interesting that this particular hoax can only be done in the electronic world. For the uninitiated, rickrolling is the phenomenan where person A (or a website for that matter) sends out a link to some page of interest. When the user clicks on the link, instead of the suggested content, the user is directed to Youtube where a video of Rick Astley performing "Never Going to Give You Up" is played. This bait-and-switch is old and it's lame and probably a bit tired.

One of the best technology related hoaxes that I read today was that The Guardian newspaper (British tabloid) announced that they were going to rewrite ALL news archives in the form of tweets. Some of the examples that they would rewrite history are as follows:
- "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"
- "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"
- "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Honestly - I think that this is just totally bloody creative and I love it. If anyone has any tech related hoaxes, please feel free to share :)

The Internet & Google & The Issue of Free Speech

The issue of unregulated and uncensored web content seems to be becoming more and more of an issue.

Firstly, China attempts to regulat Google's search results - to the extent that Google has decided to pull their Chinese presence out. Now, the Vietnamese (government(?)) is accused of initiating cyberattacks to take down opinions contrary to the "party line".

This whole issue of censorship and freedem of speech - it is just too much to fathom the right answer.

The scary thing is that I think that this will even get more convoluted.

To what extent is the Web an open forum? Is it a place for idealism when one states that freedom of speech is the be all and the end all, or are there limits - must there be limits?

Defamation would clearly not be acceptable - or would it? If someone "attacked" (for instance) John Travolta's involvement in Scientology and made inaccurate claims - is this right? Is it justified? Can it be regulated in some manner? If not, where does this lead us? Do we end up with a Wild Wild West mentality where anything goes? Or are there "reasonable restrictions" (and how would this be quantified?) as to what is out there in the binary landscape.

I"m not sure that we'll ever have an true answer on this one.

See You Later - Alligator!

I read with not a small amount of bemusement about an alleged Amazon shipment that didn't arrive to the purchaser. Said purchaser called customer service asking what happened to the shipment and was informed by the CSR that the reason why the package didn't arrive is because it was...wait for it....eaten by an alligator.

Now - I don't know the authenticity of this story. If it's part urban legend, totally true, or perhaps the "eaten by an alligator" was just the CSR parlance or euphemism for "dude - we have no idea where the package is".

Still - I find it amusing to visualize what could have happened, in this universe or an alternate one. I can just imagine the delivery dude somehow notifying his superior that said delivery was no more and was nothing more than an appetizer for the 'gator in question.

Around the World in 80 Nanoseconds

With all due respect and apologies to Jules Verne, I ponder today how technology has affected the speed at which we can communicate.

It was often said that the invention of the airplane made the world “smaller”. Certainly, no-one ever took this literally, but the concept is that the world feels smaller. Instead of taking days to cross the Atlantic by steamship, this was
reduced to hours.

Whereas a sail across the Atlantic was a major undertaking due to the time involved, the advent of air travel made it much more feasible to just “pick up and go”.

In addition to air travel, the invention of the telephone revolutionized communications. What would have taken days, weeks, or even months, could now be talked about instantly. Being able to pick up the phone to call a family member or colleague and to ask a question and to be able to get a response back in real-time is a very powerful ability. Where telephone communications did not exist, perhaps two people located across the world were not able to communicate back and forth much more than a half dozen times.

The Internet has taken this further and not only are we able to chat in real time, but we can share information. The proliferation of social networking – the Facebooks, the Twitters and all of the other social environments has opened up new doors at being able to share information with loved ones.

Case in point, the distance between Toronto, Canada and Sofia, Bulgaria is approximately 4,800 miles. If one says, for the sake of argument, that it takes 2 seconds (an eternity in a digital age!) for data to transmit back and forth, that would work out to a “speed” of (if my math is right) of 8,400,00 MPH! Heady stuff being able to talk to someone across the Atlantic at such breakneck speed! What a wonderful way to be able to speak to a loved one who was born in the “middle of the last century”!

Along the same lines, business are starting to realize the benefit of this type of networking – of the ability to instantly communicate and share data with colleagues across the world.

Where instant messaging in the corporate world was once taboo, it is slowly becoming embraced by the big-wigs in the ivory tower as a way to increase productivity.
One tool that is becoming more common is Microsoft Sharepoint. Think of Sharepoint as being a “blank canvas” where companies can post content. Not only can files be posted in an easily accessible and secured area, but it lends itself quite well to collaboration. Instead of storing files locally on a LAN where others can update and maintain, Sharepoint allows collaboration of these documents regardless of their geographic location.

Think back to my analogy of how before the advent of the telephone, that communications were restricted to how ever many letters could be ferried back and forth.

One of the beauties of Sharepoint is that as a blank canvas, it easily adapts itself to how the organization works.

As an example of this, I recently left a large financial services organization. Their implementation of Sharepoint reflected their corporate culture. It was highly staged, regulated and was very methodical in nature. Not making any judgments on this – this is just the way that they did business. Contrast this to my new employer – a mid-size accounting firm that also has Sharepoint. The corporate culture here is much different and it lends itself to empowering the various teams to design a Sharepoint site that meets their individual needs.

The software development team here has some great sites on Sharepoint for managing defects, requested enhancements and also for sharing information among the developer team.

This is not an article about what is a good and what is a bad Sharepoint
implementation. In both cases, Sharepoint clearly reflects the corporate culture, and in my mind, that is one of the strengths of Sharepoint and it is precisely this characteristic that I think that any tool should have.

The truly scary thing is that I think that the world will just continue to get smaller and smaller. Will our children and grand-children scoff at our “primitive” 100mbps access? Will they wonder how archaic our methods of communication were – and will they marvel at how we were actually able to get anything done.

The mind boggles.