ARTS & FARCES internet

When I bought my first computer (an Apple II+), the salesman asked me if I wanted some floppy disks for digital storage. I asked how much one held; 140Kb was the response. One hundred and forty thousand characters (give or take) boggled my mind. I said I’d take one (back then they sold single floppy disks, believe it or not). I never thought I’d fill that single floppy disk up and I wasn’t smart enough to realize that I needed another for backup.

I was back within a week for several boxes of those disks, and I soon learned how to “notch” the disks to double their storage capacity.

Then came 3.5-inch drives that could store 800KB. Once upon a time I had four of them connected to an Apple IIe with a big honking RAM disk card installed.

My first hard drive was a Mirror Technologies 40/40. It was a 40MB hard drive with a 40MB tape drive backup in a box. It was connected to a Mac Plus and was so spacious I never thought I’d fill it up.

It took me a while to figure out that my digital storage needs are never-ending, but now I always buy the largest capacity hard drives I can afford. And I seem to be replacing drives every two or three years as our storage needs are growing on the order of about 1TB per year or so.

Centralized storage on our servers has also become a problem, so now I’m shopping for some sort of removable-drive RAID system within which I can slide larger capacity drives as they become available.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got my choice narrowed down to two devices: The G-Technology G-SAFE and the Drobo S. As unfortunate as it is predictable, both have advantages and disadvantages over the other.

Oh, and then there’s the Promise Pegasus lurking over there in the corner. But it’s a Thunderbolt device and not one of our computers or servers has a Thunderbolt port. Chances are we’ll need a lot more storage space before we have servers with Thunderbolt ports. But you never know.

One of the core skills Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers identified as necessary for meaningful participation in new media is multitasking. Jenkins, in an introduction to an interview with Linda Stone, recognizes “that many regard multitasking as a form of distraction which fragments the attention” but is necessary for coping with the immense information flow we all face. A key component, according to Jenkins and his findings, is managing attention: “... [S]hifting it as needed between modes which involve scanning their environment for meaningful inputs (like a hunter) and focusing closely on a specific domain (like a farmer).”

Managing attention is one of the focus points of Stone’s research, resulting in the notion of “continuous partial attention” and, more recently, “conscious computing.” Jenkins quotes Stone on the impact of new media on attention: “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.” Stone goes on to eloquently describe continual partial attention as chasing fireflies when she says, “Every stray input was a firefly. And every firefly was examined to determine if it burned more brightly than the one in hand.”

Stone observes that the digital immigrants—the olds, those that used technology solely for productivity and creativity gains—were outgunned by the digital natives, the youngs, who took the technology tools further—into the realm of personal empowerment through communications and networking. Where digital immigrants multitasked by diverting attention between tasks, digital natives were hyper alert and truly attending to several tasks simultaneously.

Macintosh sales represent a full third—US$22 billion—of Apple’s revenue for fiscal year 2010. And all we get is an updated operating system (not now; next summer) an updated MacBook Air, updated iLife, and a Mac App Store. Really? For a third of the business?

The touchpad- and mouse-based multitouch gesture support in Mac OS X Lion is a welcome improvement, but the good news apparently stops there.

The show-stopper is the Mac App Store. In 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with the jaw-dropping 1984 commercial. In the ad, an unnamed heroine representing the advent of Macintosh promised to save humanity from conformity. In the commercial, the Big Brother-like character is celebrating the anniversary of the “Information Purification Directives,” a once-and-for-all-forever end to “contradictory thinking.” Here’s the entire bit:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

Wait. What?

Under the guise of “dropping by for [Apple’s] first US$20 billion quarter,” Steve Jobs used the Apple earnings call to rant about the company’s competition (Google, Research in Motion, tablet developers) and—strangely enough—stakeholders (customers and developers). But mostly Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices.

Jobs did address the open v. closed business models head-on—if seemingly scripted—citing Microsoft’s abandoned PlaysForSure digital rights management (DRM): “Even if Google were right and the issue is ‘closed’ versus ‘open,’ open doesn’t always win. We think the ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ argument is a smokescreen for what’s really best for the customers. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becomes more so every day. We think this is a huge strength of our approach when compared to Google’s. We think integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

He also addressed human factors issues related to tablet computers with less than 10 inches of screen real estate, saying, “One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. This is far from the truth: Seven-inch screens are 45 percent as large as an iPad…. Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff: There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touch screen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum screen size to create great tablet apps.”

Google’s Andy Rubin responded to Jobs’s rant with a tweet making it clear that Google needs to hire a few lot more user experience professionals: “the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’” For the uninitiated, that’s a command-line sequence to make a directory, download Android source code, and build the operating system. What’s missing—from a developer’s perspective—is the fact that only major releases of the Android source are available and only those inside Google can add to the code base. What’s missing—from a user’s perspective—is that the vast majority’s eyes glaze over when they see this; they don’t want to deal with all that crap on a mobile device.

TweetDeck chief executive Iain Dodsworth responded to Jobs with a bit more finesse, again with a tweet: “Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.” TweetDeck also released a chart visualizing the Android ecosystem. TweetDeck has two developers working on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform, which is basically Flash with support for HTML, Ajax, and JavaScript.

Here’s a laundry list of what I’d like to see from Apple at its “Back to the Mac” event on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 (in addition to the next major revision of Mac OS X, of course; all apply to the 15-inch MacBook Pro, my tool of choice):

1. Top-of-the-line Intel Core i7 processors with updated, automatically switchable, slide-scale variable third-party graphics (I’m looking at you NVIDIA Optimus), and a user-replaceable battery
2. High-resolution (1680x1050) antiglare display standard
3. 8GB RAM and larger hard drives standard
4. Lower prices for optional solid-state drives (SSD).
5. HDMI and USB 3 ports
6. Integrated WiMAX radio
7. Updated, fully 64-bit iLife and iWork
8. Updated MobileMe, with an iDisk as useful as Dropbox
9. An explanation of the North Carolina data center (see 8, above)
10. That one thing in OS X that will make us all wet ourselves (no, not FaceTime; that’s a given in an updated iChat)

I know it’s too much to hope for, but I’d really like to see an OS X roadmap with regard to iOS. If they’re going to merge—and I’m not at all sure that’s as likely as everyone else on the planet seems to believe—I want to know about it definitively sooner rather than later. And if the Touch interface comes to OS X, I sure hope its in the trackpad and not in the screen.