Ones and Zeros

In the late 1980s Hewlett-Packard would support products for five to seven years and expect to come out with new products in that line every 2-3 years. Today, consumer product lifecycles are nine months to a year for more mature products. And they’re continuing to shorten; six month announcements are common now.

A few years ago at work I was helping the US DoD purchase some then-new handheld computers for a research project. (The computers were lousy. You can’t fit a desktop version of Windows on a screen the size of a small index card!) The product cycle was nine months for the computers. To purchase them the government needed the exact model number to purchase, and about a year for the acquisition cycle they were using.

By the time they’d determined that they could buy the devices, those computers were already obsolete and unavailable. Pace of change had caught up with reaction time.

We see this in people we know too. I email with several people that check their email once a week or so. I’ve learned to expect very slow replies from them. For someone living in a well-controlled environment, perhaps retired, this is workable. For the rest of us, we need to keep up.

How do you keep up with change? I’ve got my strategies and I’ll write about them later. But I’d like to hear yours.

In the vein if my last post about older ways of thinking, there are three ways of giving directions.

First, to not give specific directions but only general ones.  Assume that anyone finding your house or place of business is familiar enough with the area to know the building or major roads that you don’t have to be precise.

When we lived in New Hampshire this was common.  I once got the directions, “Go south on highway 1, pass the first Dunkin’ Doughnuts, then turn left a half mile before the old Channel Hardware store.”  For some reason most of the directions I got in New Hampshire and Massachusetts included Dunkin’ Doughnuts.  Those stores were common enough to be landmarks.  But my favorite part was to “turn a half mile before” that old store.  That store went out of business before we moved to the area and the sign was long gone. Basically you had to already know where you were going to get there!

Second, to give specific directions including turns, streets you’ll see before your turns, and streets you’ll see if you miss your turns.  In short, good directions.   Good directions that are great if you don’t have a map or a GPS with a moving map.  And are a waste of time with those devices.

I have Google Earth (version 5.1, the latest) installed on my computers.  I have a GPS with a moving map in one car, and we have iPhones with GPS and moving maps with us in any case.  Ten minutes of discussion on directions is wasting everyone’s time.  And if it’s from your memory, it may not be right either.

What I want is a third way to give directions: Note the destination address, any issues not clear on maps (funny turn lanes, oddball corners, etc) and note parking information at the destination.  I want the stuff that’s not clear on the GPS moving map.  The whole turn-by-turn directions are not that useful.

If you have a snake that’s bitten you once, chances are it’ll bite you again.  Snakes are consistent that way.  So are most adults.  Lieberman time and time again voted against the best interests of the country and his party.  The Senator from Aetna Insurance is planning to vote against the people of his state and the country again.  His “more in sorry than in pleasure” routine is wearing thin.

Tell me why does the democratic caucus still have him as a member?  Are the Caucus members that dumb?  Or just don’t care?  Yes, the 60 vote issue was important.  But not important enough to keep a dangerous man like him.

William Gibson has said, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”. But the future gets distributed more evenly over time. Bruce Sterling reports that the UN is going to be texting food coupons to 1000 Iraqi refugees in Syria in a pilot program. All the 130,000 refugees receiving food aid already have cell phones.

But there’s a corollary to Gibson’s statement. Call it Tangozulu’s corollary to Gibson’s Law: “The past is still with us, it’s just found a niche.” Older technologies, obsolete ways of thought, and older patterns of living are still around. Some school districts in WV for example, have given their teachers no funding for paper. Perhaps they’re planning to rely on slate tablets?