Mike's List
The Apathy Index

QUESTION: HOW DO YOU KNOW when a technology has "arrived" -- when it's good enough, cheap enough and standard enough to become an important part of our computing lives?

Answer: When nobody cares about it anymore.

All the technologies that people are excited about -- that technology pundits praise or criticize with heated emotions, that prognosticators predict will solve all problems -- are always technologies that are not ready for prime time, that don't work well or are too expensive or exotic for real users to actually use.

By the time a given technology works well and is affordable, ubiquitous and standard, we just don't care anymore.

Opinions among pundits and enthusiasts always pass through four distinct phases, which correlate with the maturity of the technology:

1. Ignorance phase (research and development)

2. Guarded education phase (prototypes and 1.0 versions)

3. Religious zealotry phase (widely available, but buggy, problematic and expensive)

4. Apathy phase (perfection, ubiquity and compatibility)

One could imagine an "Apathy Index," whereby you could rate how passionate people are about various technologies on a scale of one to ten. When the interest level drops to near zero, the technology will have reached a state of near perfection and true usefulness.

Let me give you two examples. Ten years ago, the Next Big Thing was "multimedia," the blanket term used to categorize better sound, colors and video for PCs. Back then, PCs had puny, tinny sounding speakers that emitted cheap, digital sounds. Few PCs had the power to play real video -- all that would come about in a glorious future of high fidelity games, movies and more. By the mid to late 1990s, multimedia really happened. Nowadays, when you buy a PC, it simply comes with great sound, more color variation than your eyes can distinguish and the ability to play better video than your TV. It's wonderful, but nobody cares. When is the last time you heard anyone talking excitedly about "multimedia"?

Remember the browser wars? In the mid to late 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape fought a heated battle over who was allowed to give away their browsers, how and to whom. People almost came to fisticuffs in the halls of corporate America over which was the superior browser. Back then, browsers sucked. Now, they're all nearly perfect, doing far more far better than any of us really has time to appreciate. Nobody cares about browsers -- browsers have "arrived."

The same process has happened to PCs, laptops, the Internet, Ethernet, flat-panel displays, tiny laptops, PDAs, multi-function cell phones, color printers and others. We don't get excited about these things anymore because they're all ubiquitous, affordable and truly usable.

We're going through a similar process with "wireless." For the past five years, people have cared a great deal about Wi-Fi in all its permutations. But now that hotspots are popping up everywhere, millions of homes have wireless networks and the price of the hardware is coming down as fast as the speeds are going up, interest is flagging. Wireless is arriving.

We're also in the process of learning not to care about blogs, web cams, PDA/cell phone combinations and digital cameras.

Meanwhile, we're all very excited 4G networks, cell phones with high-resolution digital cameras and HDTV-quality video, home robots that do all the housework, "Minority Report" style virtual input devices, computerized cars that drive themselves, nanotechnology and natural-language, voice-response user interfaces. Why? Because they don't work yet, aren't affordable and haven't lived up to their promise. When all that happens, we just won't care anymore.

What have YOU grown apathetic about lately?

Want Privacy? Don't Stay at the Hilton!

An article in the Wall Street Journal Thursday (May 8, 2003, page D4) reported on Hilton's new customer system called OnQ, which is designed to improve customer service by retaining details of hotel-customer interactions and making that information available to the front desk of every hotel in the chain. The article said that hotel employees are told by the computer how much you drank from the mini-bar last time you stayed at the Hilton, what kind of movies you watched and about complaints you made to hotel staff. Presumably, that allows the front desk to greet you with personalized comments, such as "will you be getting sh*tfaced again this evening?" or "You'll be happy to know we just received a fresh batch of dirty movies," or "We'll try not to wake you up at noon again like we did last month." The Wall Street Journal reporter wrote, "In a demonstration of the technology, we pulled up one customer's record and found he had watched [adult movies] the evening before." So if you stay at the Hilton, you should know that not only will employees in 21,000 hotels know what kind of movies you like to watch, but they might even share that information with the media!

Only In Japan

A Japanese electronics shop called Tsukumo Co is showing off one of the most ambitious PC case mods ever: A life size blond female action figure. The ERN001-PC Eren was designed by Katsuya Matsumura. This guy needs to get out more!

Bad Robots

Geniuses at the University of California, Davis, have created a GPS-guided robot that kills weeds. Designed for commercial farmers, the machine uses video, pattern recognition technology and tiny spray needles to wipe out unwanted plants. It's designed for use on crops like tomatoes, lettuce and cotton, which usually require expensive, labor-intensive hand-weeding. The robot moves at 1.5 miles per hour, using its web cam and built-in PC to look at and analyze crop rows, looking for plant size, color and shape. Now the scary part. When the robot identifies weeds, 40 syringes shoot high-pressure jets of poison at 50 miles per hour at the offending plants. Once the research and development on this is complete and it's sold on the open market, farmers would allow it to run unattended, day-and-night. The robot reportedly got "confused" in trials. I just hope a software bug doesn't cause this frightening monster to escape from the farms and roll into cities spraying poison in every direction.

Found Video

MIT researchers are hard at work pushing the boundaries of computer game technology. Here's the video.

Don't Try This At Home

A guy named Neil Jansen got his hands on an old Commodore SX-64, a state-of-the-art mobile computer circa 1983, and built a fully functional Windows XP screamer inside, complete with Commodore 64 emulation for his old games. He even successfully wired the tiny, built-in 5" screen to the system and added video-out for an external display hookup. His goal was to keep the box looking pristine and original. Don't be fooled by the apparent 5.25" floppy slot. It's really a DVD drive. The original SX-64 packed a screaming 1 megahertz processor and 64 kilobytes of RAM. Neil's upgrade is 1,600 times faster than the original -- and still runs Donkey Kong.

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Mike's List on the Radio

Craig Crossman's Computer America features Mike Elgan every Thursday night. The show runs from 7pm to 9pm SVT (Silicon Valley Time). Listen to Computer America on your local Business TalkRadio station or over the Internet every weeknight. Don't miss Computer America!

Reader Web Site o' the Week

Check out the TranspoMan web site by Mike's List reader Jim Hamilton. It's an eclectic personal site with a little bit of everything.  

Get YOUR web site on the high-traffic Mike's List Reader Links page. HERE'S HOW! 

Wacky Web Sites

If you enjoy pictures of sleazy criminals, tragic victims, perp walks and other images from the seamy underside of mid-century Los Angeles -- and, really, who doesn't? -- then you'll love the Local News web site, which features "Tabloid photographs from the Los Angeles Herald Express" between 1936 and 1961.

If you like to wear sandals with socks, do I have a web site for you: SandalAndSoxer.co.uk.

The future isn't what it used to be. That's why the Yesterday's Tomorrows web site is so much fun.

Twisted Games

Let's Have Some Pie

Bungee Ball

Air Balls

Clay Kitten Shooting

Bubble Trouble

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Reader Comment

Mike,
Great newsletter as always. Thank you very much. I purchased the "L'espion" digital camera here and, as you can see, it is a tad smaller than the Che-ez you mentioned in Mike's List 61. You can see some pictures I have taken with this little "spy" camera here.
Bob

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Big Number o' the Week

9,000,000,000 (The number of dollars in the new Department of Homeland Security's IT budget.)

Geek Trivia o' the Week

Spammers send more junk mail on one day of the week than the others. Which day is the biggest day for spam?

Know the answer? Send it to [email protected] (be sure to say where you live). If you're first with the right answer, I'll print your name in the next issue of Mike's List!

LAST WEEK'S GEEK TRIVIA ANSWER: Last week, I wrote: "One of Microsoft's most important executives during the past decade left the company in 1999 and recently created and launched a new board game. Who is the executive and what is the board game?" Answer: The executive was Brad Chase, who was the senior executive in charge of both Windows 95 and subsequent versions of Internet Explorer. Since leaving the company, he created a board game called "Derivation," which is about English words and phrases and their origins and meaning. Congratulations to Bob Potemski of Overland Park, Kansas, for being first with the right answer.

Mystery Pic o' the Week

What is it? Send YOUR guess to [email protected] (be sure to say where you live). If you're first with the right answer, I'll print your name in the next issue of Mike's List!

LAST WEEK'S MYSTERY PIC: No, it's not a "wireless hack into the Center for Disease Control system," "a Palm Pilot found in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces," or even Mr. Spock's "tricorder," as suggested by some readers. In fact, it's a Palm Vx displaying a "DocAlert," or bioterror alert. These emergency broadcasts will go out in the event of such an attack to doctors from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over the e-Pocrates system, which is a nationwide network for doctors with handheld devices. Congratulations to Jim Whitt of Temple, Texas, for being first with the right answer.

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