Quick Hit: Cut. It. Out

As we mentioned when we started publishing The Times, we fully admit when we are wrong. That does not mean we're not going to go out on the occasional limb and make a blatant statement that can come back and bite us in the tuchus.

We feel pretty confident about the following statement, so we're going to place it here so you can cut it out and put it in your wallet, billfold, or between the pages of your yearbook. If what it describes ever comes to pass, you can take it out, look at it, and either congratulate us on getting it right, or use it as another example to yell out a binary statement implying that since you disagree, obviously the entire process and existence of our opinion has been an unmitigated disaster (more on that later...)

Here it is:

If copy and paste is ever added to the iPhone, it will cause so many memory leaks, application and OS crashes that people will find their devices unusable. Rather than blaming themselves, they shall blame Apple, first for not having it, and then for having it. Once it is implemented correctly, if it ever is, people will use it a few times and then rarely use it again.

They shall then complain that it does not hook up to a printer, probably via a serial cable.

Thank you.

Wither Early Adopters? RIM and Buggy software releases.

We saw via this article that Jim Balsillie of RIM said that buggy software rollouts were going to become more and more common, to the point where they might become the default. While we at The Times believe that early adopters should caveat all their emptors, this information does disturb us as for the future of new software and firmware.

We do acknowledge that there is no way that all bugs can be caught before public version 1.0 goes out the door. With code getting more and more complex, and the devices getting more and more powerful, it becomes the very definition of hitting a moving target. There was always more truth than poetry in the joke that one should never buy anything from Microsoft until it hit at least version 3 (or these days, Service Pack 1). No matter how good the testing, there will be issues or use cases that get overlooked and slip out into the public. This is why we both admire and are confounded by early adopters: thank you for finding the bugs, but are you crazy for putting yourself up for so much heartache?

So, is Jim Balsillie just stating what we all know? No. However, he's breaking a sacred covenant, the Paul Masson rule: We shall sell no wine before its time.

We know that there are street dates and commitments to be made, and that even delaying a release a couple of days can wreak havoc on the stock market. However, we always believe that comprehensive testing is built into that time. There is also the tacit understanding that a company will vet everything as rigorously as possible before releasing it

When a trailer for a movie is released for example we know that the movie might not be completely edited and mixed, but we don't expect to go on opening day and find a "Missing Reel" frame on the screen (except for the obvious exception), with a promise that if we hold on to our tickets and come back next week, we can get all the movie.

What Balsillie has said is a hint that companies might not be building that into their timelines anymore, and going to rely on hotfixes to pick up the burden. It seems to indicate that there is going to be a greater acceptance of obvious flaws in a roll out, since it's easier and more profitable to release it and then a hotfix a few weeks later than to delay the roll out entirely. He points to the fact that while some regard the recent release of the Storm to be a failure, only a handful of units were actually returned.

What does not seem to be thought about there, we believe, is the issue of consumer confidence: Even those that did not return their units were disappointed, and the ink and electrons spilled over the issue gave the APPEARANCE of it being a flop and a disaster. Apple had the same problem with the release of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe: Both were buggy, and while many of these bugs were fixed in software updates (well...almost fixed) it angered and upset many people. In the case of MobileMe, even if it were restored to 100% functionality tomorrow, there would be the feeling that it was a failure and not worth moving to.

Who suffers the most are the early adopters, who are normally a heartier bunch. But when you lose the early adopters, here's what else you use:

1. People who pay to test your product. They know what they're getting into, and a good number of them are willing to help the community, and by extension the product, work around the problems and eventually get them fixed. But if they KNOW they're getting a sub par product out of the gate, then we imagine that over time they will be less and less willing to pay for the privilege.
2. Perception. Here's a great example from the film world: Popeye. Before it was released it was fraught with stories about the delays, the on-set drama, and budget overruns. But as Robert Evans pointed out, it made money and received good reviews. People, however, remember the drama, the overruns, and today at best it is a cult hit, and at worst it is considered a bomb. The same can happen with a product that is released and not properly tested.

RIM is not alone in this. There is the iPhone 3G launch. Many feel that Vista was rushed out the door, more according to a timetable than its actual preparedness. Its reputation has suffered to the point where it is being retired. This is why we are also worried about Leo Laporte's campaign to get Windows 7 released immediately (assuming he is being sincere). The idea that it works fine right now on a couple of installations should never trump full design and full testing.

Apple used to brag in ads that their products "worked". While most people recognize that as ad copy, there was a deal struck there: we're going to take our time and design it properly so that for the majority of day to day cases our products will work perfectly and efficiently. What RIM seems to be saying is that its more important to get it out on the start date, and then worry about its ability to meet its advertised promises. The fact that an article like this is even being written should give companies pause to consider their reputations before considering such a model

The Lazy - The Elevator Grid

We here at The Times like to look at way technology and innovation interacts with our lives. Part of it is asking if certain ideas are really necessary for day to day life. Normally these are ideas that weren't thought through, or were only thought out for a very small segment of the population: a niche interest.

In the feature we call The Lazy we take a look at how an idea or invention has taken what should be a simple thing and made it more complex, or made it seem easier while actually adding a lot of steps behind the scenes.

We're also not so proud: we examine silly things we've done or thought of and put them here for your amusement. Some we've even come perilously close to actually implementing.

Witness: The Elevator Grid

We used to work in the tallest building in Canada, and as such every day we dealt with a series of double decker elevators that each serviced a selection of floors. The mornings were always hectic as everyone arrived for work and crammed into the cars.

Without fail, as soon as the doors opened on the first office floor a voice would come from the back of the elevator saying "Excuse me" (or at least as far as we could determine, as it was muffled by the sound of all the bodies). The people closest to the door would get out of the elevator, the remaining would part and often cram people up against the walls of the car, and the one person would trudge out to do their daily graft.

By the time they got out, the doors would start closing. The occupants of the elevator would lunge to hold the doors open so that the people who got out to let the one person off would be able to get back in. This would happen floor after floor. Since we worked on the top floor we had ample opportunity to watch it, analyze it, and come up with ideas of how it could work better (when looking at the ceiling and exhaling a plaintive "Come on!" failed to generate a result).

One morning we got to our desk and boiled it down to a central question: Is there a way to enforce the sensible behavior of last in first out that did not require everyone to queue up before entering the elevator? We fired up Photoshop and (obviously) quickly threw this together:

How does this work?:

1. You enter the elevator and head to the right, selecting your floor as you pass by the elevator panel.
2. After selecting your floor, you move along the right side wall towards the back of the car
   
3. On the floor of the elevator are two coloured bars: In this case orange for floors 1 to 12, and yellowish orange for floors 13 to 24.
   
4. When you get the bar representing your floor, you move as far to the left as possible. This way no matter what order people get on, the people getting off earlier will be closer to the front, while those who are making a longer trip are at the back of the elevator.
   
5. As the elevator stops on each floor, the people in the front will empty out with a minimum of disruption to the other passengers.
   
6. By moving to the right and then the left as they board the car, they will also avoid the awkwardness that happens when people get on and stay close to the door, or even worse, stand smack dab in the middle of the car.
   

We worked on this idea for a while and this is the closest we've gotten to something that was workable (somewhere we have the "Roundabout" design which involved rotating along a checkerboard pattern). We fully admit that it's still not perfect: It doesn't really work at the end of the day unless everyone is getting off on the main floor, or if people are moving between floors (getting on at 6 and off at 18). There could be times that people all gather in the 1-12 zone with no one in the 13-24 zone, causing an awkward cramping until the car actually starts moving and people realize they can step out. There is also the issue of explaining this setup to people who are visiting the building for the first time. And let's not even talk about the people who visit with their new children in a stroller larger than our old Chevy Sprint. These are outliers, but still have to be accounted for.

We've always believed there is merit in this idea, even if it is the very definition of The Lazy. So we're giving it to the world: Do you have any ideas on how to make getting off a busy elevator less an invasion of personal space? Leave a comment, or email us at theludditetimes at gmail dot com, and we'll post a list of suggestions.

Pattern Matching in the Oscar Race

We at The Times are big movie fans. We're 100% in support of them. We also take the Oscars very seriously, trying to read everything from trends in movies to cultural zeitgeists in how the awards are dished out. Is this a productive use of our time? Hell no! But it does make us interesting at parties. Sometimes.

When the nominations were announced this week, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the inclusion of the The Reader and the exclusion of The Dark Night. We felt that The Dark Night was deserving of a nod for either best picture or best director, but we also knew going in that it would get either one, or the other, or neither, but never both. After thinking about it for a few more minutes, we knew that the end result would either be best director or neither, simply because all the slots were filled.

We don't mean that all five nomination slots were filled. What we mean is that as we looked at the list of movies that were likely candidates, we knew inclusion of The Dark Night did not allow for the normal pattern of nomination distribution in Oscar picks to be satisfied.

Confused? There are two main points to consider about the Academy and how it hands out nominations

1. The Academy does not vote as a block, so one should never think of the nominations in terms of "The Academy honoured this film, so it could feel this way". As tempting as it is, never think that a majority vote or a plurality vote can be treated as a unified voice.
2. When individuals make their vote, they are choosing between many movies in conflicting genres, so they have to use another quick binary metric to determine their choice. We have called those choices they make Categories. These categories shift over the years, but by understanding how they are ranked and how they accumulate can help you pick, more often than not, what films will and will not be nominated.

For the Academy Awards, all films compete together, regardless of genre (except for documentary and animated films). So what you get is five films that represent underlying larger themes, as opposed to "the best comedy" etc.

Let's take a look at this year's nominees

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - This is a prestige film, a large, broad canvas themed movie that represents some Greater Idea. The Prestige film is a standard category every year: even in the more "independent" years, there is a prestige film (The English Patient). It gives an actor and director a chance to stretch and be serious, because they are talking about Important Things. It gives a chance for a director to break out of his/her established genre and be so very very earnest.

Frost/Nixon - This is the history category. This deals with an event (as opposed to a person's life) and dramatizes it, often providing a revisionist slant to it. Often it will produce one, and only one, acting nomination. These are often great Academy bait movies because they focus in on one event, and not consider other people's motivations, or development over their lives (Apollo 13, JFK, The Insider are all best picture nominees who have been historical.

Milk - This is the biopic, often told in either a non-linear or shorthand format. It will try to tell a complete life story, often reducing turning points in a person's life to one or two incidents. Often these will produce a screenwriting and acting nomination as well, though it will often produce two nominations for acting, as it did this year. Shine is a great example.

The Reader - This is the important movie. It takes a heme central to almost all movies, such as love, and casts it against some larger background. They are often, like this year, where the left field picks come from, and are often the best ones to stump people with at trivia contests because people will have forgotten them. Often the important movie will carry another category with it, so you get the important war movie, or the important crime movie, or the important biopic. The Dresser, Michael Clayton, Good Night and Good Luck are all important movies.

Slumdog Millionaire - This is a category gaining prevalence in this decade - the little movie. This is a sliding scale, meaning that it often might have one or two names associated with it, and then either a bunch of people either unheard of, or playing against type. Juno, of course, Little Miss Sunshine.

So we have identified five categories that a movie can fill. But, we hear you say, what about Lord of the Rings, or Jaws, or Star Wars, which were all huge money makers and nominated for the best picture. What about those?

There are five nomination slots, but more than five categories. Some of those categories go in and out of vogue. For example. in the 50s and 60s that was often a slot for musicals, and in the 1970s there were foreign films that routinely got nominated, as well as blockbusters (Star Wars, The Exorcist). In the 1980s it was the sweeping biographical film, like Amadeus or The Last Emperor.

So...how does all of this mean that it was easy to tell that The Dark Knight was not going to get nominated? It's what happens when you combine the categories. The more times a film can fit into a category, the better it will do. So let's take a list at those categories again, and expand on the list.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Prestige film, History, Important Film, Actor playing against type, Director becoming serious

Frost/Nixon - History, Biopic, Actor Tour De Force (an actor who falls so completely into the role as to define all other interpretations of it), Legacy (former Oscar winner)

Milk - History, Biopic, Actor Tour de Force, Legacy, Current Event

The Reader - Important movie, History, Dues (Actor or directory who has been nominated multiple times and not won, both Winslet and Daldry), Holocaust (this, as Ricky Gervais pointed out long before this movie, become a category).

Slumdog Millionaire - Little Movie, Genre picture (represents a commercially viable vision of an entire film industry), Comedy (movie is pleasing or funny, often there is only ONE of these picked), Dues.

So what categories did The Dark Knight have: Actor tour de Force, Blockbuster, and the very minor Drama in getting made which is nomally only effective when combined with Dues (see Gangs of New York). It did not have enough powerful categories to jump into the top five for best picture.  There was no way it could compete with the other (Dues will always trump Drama in Getting Made, and Blockbuster often needs to be combined with at least two other categories: Lord of the Rings had Blockbuster, Drama Getting Made, Audatious Achievement, Epic, and Genre film.)

This left best director, where often only one or two categories need to be met to be a contender (this is why often the list of best picture and best director do not match up). All it really had going for it here was Dues, and Drama in getting made, which Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader also had. There was no way it could pull down best picture and not best director (pulling a Baz Lurhman), nor could it do the same for best director and not best picture (pulling a David Lynch). No matter how it was sliced, it didn't fill in enough categories to match with the others, so when filling out their ballots it was easier for it to fall down the list.

In this post we have listed most of the categories that films fall in when it comes to Oscar time. There is a hierarchy to them that we won't go into here, but which you can probably figure out on your own. And the more categories a film falls into come award time, the better its chances are. 

Coming soon: we'll take the same categories and use that to predict who will win in the major categories.

Tell me how you REALLY feel...

The Boy Genius Report (BGR) posted the Top Ten Things We Hate about the iPhone. We at The Times read it with interest, as we have posted a modest proposal about the iPhone in the past.

We thought it would be interesting to go through the list of Things They Hate, and see if we hate them also (Like BGR, we are assuming that the iPhone is in a default state):

1. You can’t use custom sounds for email notifications, SMS, etc.

When we analyze something, we create a number of categories. One of them is called "Nice to have".  This is the definition of nice to have. It does not impact the usefulness of the device, nor our usability of it. Would we love to have the guitar riff that starts "Take Me Out" play whenever we get a text message? Yes. Will we blend the iPhone because it doesn't? No.

2. Copy and paste. Sorry, but it’s ridiculous at this point.

It's ridiculous that people even bring this up. How long have we had our iPhone? Six months. How often have we wanted to copy and paste? Twice. What was it regarding? Twitter. What did we do? Waited until we got home and wrote the post then. We remain convinced that this is just a meme that people keep in their back pocket to complain about the iPhone and never really consider it's actual usefulness in a day to day situation. (Another great example of this: The iPod doesn't have a radio. You know what doesn't have a radio? Things that AREN'T radios, of which the iPod is one of many).

3. When forwarding an email with an attachment, the iPhone sends it out locally. That means if you have a 1MB attachment, you have to send 1MB worth of data when forwarding. This doesn’t happen on Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry — it’s sent from the server. Not cool.

This might be a bigger issue for some people. We admit that we've never sent an attachment, or dealt with something like this. We'll agree and say this sounds bad, considering limited data plans.

4. No unified inbox. At this point, there’s no reason you should have to go through the rigmarole of switching through tabs and endless menus to get to another email inbox. Cut this down, give us color-coded emails that correspond with that particular account — something!

This is a frustrating issue, and does impact on the iPhone from a business perspective. One of the big wins that Apple claimed early in the 3G life cycle was that HSBC was considering replacing their BlackBerrys with iPhones. A unified inbox is a common business use case where the iPhone falls flat.

5. Video recording. Again, it’s technically possible, but we don’t have it.

We would take a step back and say the bigger problem is the camera. This is a HUGE tick in the loss column for the iPhone especially when we consider that Apple has always been a favorite of the digital photography crowd. This is like Sony deciding to release their Walkman but only for 8-tracks: it would have its use, but that use would be very limited. The iPhone's camera use and quality is a meme that is correct: it IS very poor, and could actually lead people away from using it. My wife's 2 year old w810 phone takes better pictures than the iPhone. 

6. The touch screen capture button in the Camera application is horrid. Let’s use one of the volume keys or something to take a picture. It’s not a good setup.

Agreed. At times the screen can be non-responsive, especially when we are in cases where we want to gently touch the screen so as not to disturb a cat on a catnip high. We're not sure that the volume keys are much better, as they require a little bit of force and would move the phone when they  are pressed. Maybe a swipe top-down would do the job. The perfect solution would be another button, but Apple's aversion to buttons is well known. This might be a case where an imperfect solution is the only solution.

7. You can’t forward text messages. Something that is a no-brainer just isn’t here.

We've never really found this lacking in any other phone, smart or dumb. Maybe for some people it would be a deal breaker, but it's a feature we've never missed at any point in our life. If that many people need to have access to a message, we'll start calling them.

8. There isn’t a way to delete individual calls from the recent call list. Not that we need to hide anything from our girlfriends or anything…

Not even hiding anything, but just cleaning the list. What we have now is an all-or-nothing approach -  either clear ALL incoming calls, or keep them all. As well, most other lists on the iPhone have the "swipe to delete/edit" gesture associated with them. There's nothing like that here, which is a slight interface incompatibility.

9. No file structure that is user-accessible. That means you can’t save any attachment that isn’t a photo, you can’t download files from websites, etc. Additionally, each application can only access its own file structure so you can forget about doing anything sexy.

We have to admit that we knew this bothered us, but we could never put our finger on why. There are times we'd love a native mode, offline way of accessing files, rather than having to look for a an app and/or do cloud syncing. It might be going a little bit beyond the paradigm of the iPhone, but it can be annoying, especially in a business environment.

10. The push-background notification service is still nowhere to be found.

At first we didn't care about this, but the more we use our iPhone, the more we would label this as broken. We get alerts from the Toronto Transit Commission, and it would be nicer to get those pushed to iPhone rather than having to think to check. We know we can use Yahoo mail, but we (1) are lazy and don't want to go through the whole drama of forwarding and configuring another email account and (2) this SHOULD be a feature.

So we've identified some of the things that BGR reports hates as not really being big deals, and some as being very legitimate gripes. But what some of the things we would consider big deals in their stead?

1) Shortcuts. The inability to create shortcuts, which we discussed earlier, does impact our experience with the phone.

2) Vibrate. The vibrate feature is really only noticeable if the phone is in your hand and next to your ear at the time that the call comes in. We wonder sometimes if the "dropped calls" that some people report aren't dropped, but the notification is just so weak that no-one notices.

3) Earbuds. We're not talking about the audio quality but the physical quality of them. We've owned a few iPods in our day, the earbuds supplied with them have never lasted beyond two months. The audio  quality of them is good enough for most casual listening, and when we want better quality for our tunes, we put on our Sennheisers. But the fact that one of their earbuds will die no matter how gently we treat them is disappointing. Considering the amount of support that Apple has in the music community, this ranks alongside the poor camera as the most disappointing oversight.

4) Podcast syncing. If we delete a podcast on our iPhone, it immediately copies back over when we resync.This is wrong. When we delete it from our phone, we want it gone, baby, gone. (We admit that we like to keep podcasts we've already listened to on our phone for entertainment at a later time, like You Look Nice Today or Ricky Gervais). 

Now, do we HATE these? No, and we don't think BGR really HATES them either. But we all agree on one thing: there are many things about the iPhone that we can improve on. What's important is making sure that the improvements are actually affect the experience of the majority of users, and not just niches.

The Network Cabinet - Obama's online administration

Today was historic for a lot of reasons: the first African-American President, the end (hopefully) to a chapter of world politics (not just American) that has been incredibly divisive, and some fundamental changes to how international and financial issues are dealt with. Was this a realigning moment? Perhaps, but we won't know for a long time.

It was a milestone either way, and one would be hard-pressed to find an inauguration that had such symbolic value. Perhaps Lincoln, but for the opposite reasons, or Kennedy and Clinton for the generational shift those elections signified. In a manner of speaking the inagauration was the first socially networked event of real, living, breathing history. 

President Obama ran a platform promising change.One significant change that we can be assured of is the continued expansion of the political debate and presence to the electronic forum. This is more than just debate on blogs and internet forums, but the movement of the functioning, established political base online.

This community was forming before the oath was administered. In fact, since 2006 there has been a marked shift towards online commentary, politicking and fundraising in American politics, and a corresponding increase in its effectiveness. In the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Senate primary, where Ned Lamont leveraged an online community opposed to the military actions in Iraq, and defeated Joe Lieberman for his party's nomination.

But, Joe Lieberman is still senator. He ran as an independent and won re-election. It turned out that the reach of the online community then was not quite up to its grasp.  Barack Obama's campaign picked up from there, and we all saw the results today.

It might be easy to overstate this, but this could be the first online presidency (we are hoping a better term comes up than i-President or e-Administration. We would like to propose The Network Cabinet like The Kitchen Cabinet of olden days). As hard as it is to believe, Obama will be the first president to actually have a computer in the Oval Office. Additionally, he plans to carry a BlackBerry,(ed note: Ha ha) and we all know about his Presidential channel on YouTube. While people pointed to change.gov and his administration websites, these were more communication and PR tools. The biggest change is going to be how, for lack of a better word, wired the President is going to be inside his own administration.

Will this be a good thing or bad thing? Hopefully it will diminish the tendency of the office to place its occupant in a bubble (Clinton called the position "the crown jewel of the Federal Penal System" and Truman called it a "Great White Jail"). It will also give him access to more information, quickly, without having to rely as much on assistants to find and relay it to him.  There are a few questions we have about the implementation:

1. Will this be a distraction? We don't mean that he will be distracted by Facebook or Wikipedia, but will the sheer amount of information coming in result in a sort of overload and paralysis? We know that President Obama is an intense reader and a very deep thinker, so we believe that he will be able to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio when he makes decisions. We also know that while on the campaign trail, towards the end the volume of email he read was greater than the volume he sent. This could either mean he had made up his mind and was just closing the loops in his head, or that the debate had exhausted him. Had someone like President Clinton had access to the Internet in his day-to-day operations, his already slow decision-making process would have ground to a halt.
2. Will other people in his administration be similarly equipped? While a BlackBerry is useful, it is only as good as the information coming into it. Will his cabinet have their own? Or will they be primarily using desktop computers? Ideally, the cabinet and inner circle would all have BlackBerrys to facilitate instant communication between all parties involved. 
3. Can the network handle this? In the final weeks of the Bush presidency, the internal network at the Department of State was hobbled. The cause was not an attack, or virus. It was a case of everyone hitting "Reply All", and then when the volume of mail became too much, hitting "Reply All" to ask people not to hit "Reply All." If the president and his cabinet are bringing new hardware onto the network, will it have the strength to support it all? As well, will the people using it be trained on how to use it properly, so that it does not just become a very large black hole of administration communication?
4. Can the security handle this? President Obama will be a tempting target, and not just from direct threats to national security, but from hackers and phreakers looking to make a point. Networks, physical and wireless can be hacked, emails exposed, GPS tracked. This might actually have to be stronger than military level protection.

We're sure that minds greater than ours have already addressed these issues and many more, and that proper steps are being taken to ensure that a significant online presence does not hinder or comprise this or any future administration. We wouldn't be doing our job, however, if we didn't at least worry that such a historic moment could be undone by the equivalent of a Linksys router.

Now, the party's over. Get to work.

Why a Luddite?

The Luddite Times is a week old. In that time we've discussed the iPhone, the future of Apple, how people use Facebook, and a few other random ideas.

A few days after we launched the site, we received a call from our domain name registrar to follow up and see if we had any questions, as well as just to learn a little more about their clients. One question he asked was "What's a Luddite?"

This is an excellent question, and it might explain a lot about how we see the intersections between technology, culture, and human behavior here at The Times.

The Luddites got their name from Ned Ludd, a fictitious character in England who allegedly broke a series of machines in a fit of rage, believing that they were taking away work from humans. In the 19th century the movement grew and became very organized, even clashing with the British army on a few occasions until it was quashed by a series of trials and executions.

But why name a website after them? Isn't that pretty much anathema to everything they stood for?

Yes, yes it is. And that's partly the idea.

The Luddite Times looks at trends and innovations and examines them by asking the the following questions:

1) How does technology shape our lives? Not all innovations are good ones, nor are they all bad ones. Most importantly, not all innovations are necessary ones. Sometimes they can actually complicate our lives, taking what might be a simple but mundane task and turning it into something that requires far too many moving parts to co-operate.

2) What is the User Experience? In business analysis one question that has to keep being asked is "How does this fit the user exeprience?" One has to consider if this works in a way that the user anticipates, if it logically flows from the other operations alongside of it, and if it integrates seamlessly into how they use the application. The rest, as stated before, is noise. As well, the user shouldn't have to break something to make the application work the way they want to: workarounds are permissible, but only in so far as a stopgap until the "proper" way is analyzed.

This explains our policy on jailbreaking the iPhone: If you want to do it, fine, but we don't believe that undermining the foundations of a system is a suitable recourse: It means that you are trying to change to tool to do the job, when you should be selecting the right tool for the job. We know this can be an unpopular opinion in some circles and that we miss out on some really great features and things that people are doing, but we also believe it to be part of the contract we enter into when using an app or a peice of hardware: We respect the efforts to meet our needs, and will either provide feedback to make it better or choose another application or device. If they decide they don't see our need as vital, or want to do it according to their own priorities, we respect that decision.

3) When something fails, whose fault is it and why? Sometimes, even with the best of intentions and the hardest work, something will not catch on, or just not meet anyone's needs in a satisfactory way. Sometimes the fault lies in the analysis, but there are times that it can lie in how the user treats the application: We knew one person who used to use PowerPoint as a word processor. In these cases we examine why the application didn't work, and if the problem was fundamental or in communication, or those rare cases when an application is just light years ahead of its time. (Microsoft Vista might be an example of this, believe it or not).

What we've done is shift the definition of Luddite to meet our own needs. We believe you can no more be pro- or anti-technology than you can be pro- or anti-wheel. They are facts of life. But just because something can be done doesn't mean it should, or just because something should be done doesn't mean that it must be done. We believe in the sober second thought, thinking about the ramifications, and not being in a rush to be first, or the earliest adopters.

Over the coming weeks we'll be exploring those ideas as well as some of the following:

1. More definitions. You've seen the tag "The Max Power Way", and we'll explain what that means, as well as the terms "McClaren" and "Wilson"
2. "Simply the Greatest, most Innovative and World Changing invention of all time" A selection of simple little inventions that we may, or may not, be taking for granted.
3. More of The Lazy, ways we've used technology to do simple things in complicated ways.
4. Loves/Likes/Dislikes/Hates. Examining four facets of some tool, or event, and breaking it down into how we feel about it.

As always, we live for your comments and suggestions. You can leave a comment at the end of any post, or email us at theludditetimes at gmail dot com. (Please note that comments are unmoderated at the present time, but we reserve the right to turn on moderation in case of spamming or flaming).

Wishlist: iPhone shortcuts

Not to put to fine a point on it but the iPhone is quite simply the greatest, most innovative and world changing invention of all time.

We say so in jest (there will be postings of candidates for "Simply the Greatest, most Innovative and World Changing invention of all time" in the coming weeks, though), but we at The Times fully admit that since we got our iPhone 3G it is harder to imagine our lives without it.

There are a few, of course, annoyances that crop up from time to time.

One of them is NOT copy and paste. We can say that the only time (singluar) we have fretted about the lack of copy and paste is when using Twitter, and even that's not a huge deal. We at The Times believe that the issue of copy and pate exists mostly as a meme, and that more people complain about than would actually use it.

Since it is trendy to come up with gaps that address our particular needs and treat them like design flaws, we would like to propose the following be enshrined right next to copy and paste:

Shortcuts.

We are battery misers when it comes to our iPhone. As the battery icon goes down we feel ourselves get a little emptier inside as well. We feel like we do at the end of the long weekend, as we get closer to 5 PM and realize that all that time that was allocated for joy is going...going....

Where were we?

Oh yes...so since we are battery misers we like to turn features on and off. We are quite content to stay in EDGE mode, as for most of our browsing it's fast enough. But when we want to use GPS, or do a quick seach with the Google App, or something more intensive we like to switch to 3G. This means we have to

1. Press the home button to go to the first screen
2. Tap "Settings"
3. Tap "General"
4. Tap "Network"
5. Slide "Enable 3G"
6. Press the home button to go back to our home screen

These are a lot of little repettive tasks, and since we already have some repettitive strain injury (damn your eyes, Civilization IV) and it feels like a long way to travel for something so trivial.

What we at The Times would love to see is the ability to take a control panel and have a little pin icon up in the corner. This would then pin that particular panel to the last available slot on your pages. In this case, the user could select the Network panel and pin it so that when they want to switch from EDGE to 3G, all they have to do is go to the icon, tap, and they're right there.

1. Press home key to go first screen
2. Tap "Network panel"
   
3. Slide 3G
4. Press home key to go back to page

That has stripped two steps from the series listed above. If they do this a lot, they could place the icon on the dock at the bottom of the screen, or on the first screen so that there would only be three actions required. If the user places the shortcut on their dock, it cuts the number of actions in half.

We're sure there is a very good reason why this hasn't been done, and that it may have only limited uses, but we think it's an idea worth considering.

The blackout and how crowds move - off topic

(Off topic posts are posted in a personal voice, while actual articles in The Luddite Times are written in the editorial voice)

As a consequence of the West End Blackout of 2009 , Friday (January 16th) rush hour began with trains unable to run along a substantial section of the Bloor-Danforth line. The TTC began running a shuttle service of 40 buses between Jane Station and St George Station.

I was one of the people who had to take the shuttle bus that morning. I have lived in Ontario since 1996, and in Toronto proper since 2001. In all that time I have managed to avoid any emergency that has required me to take a shuttle bus, so I'm sure I was due for such an event.

I had prepared for the worst, and so I was not at all surprised at Jane Station, as we made our way up the concourse, to hear someone complain that there was only one stairway. This was said as we stood in the foyer, flanked on either side by a set of stairs. There was another set at the other end of the foyer, but this was closed so that generator cables could be run down. I bit my tongue, but wanted to ask the person if they (1) noticed the other staircase next to them that people were climbing or (2) expected the TTC to carry an extra staircase around in the back of a truck.

When we got the surface. People had to spill out on to the bus lanes while they waited for shuttle buses. At the same time, the regular bus service for Jane Station had to run. It was a large crowd, and it was very tight as there is not much room at Jane Station.

The TTC Constables did an admirable job of crowd control. They kept people back so that the busses could get through, informed them of what was happening, and looking out for people who needed help right away. They attempted as much as possible to communicate with the drivers what was happening with the crowd and trying to implement a plan so that as many people were loaded and ready to go as quickly as possible.

The drivers, themselves, did a good job. There were a few issues, but considering the number of people that needed to be helped they did an admirable job as well. And the TTC planning was great as well: busses appeared at regular intervals and left at them as well.

The problem was with the passengers.

Combinations of crowds, a barely understood situation, and the cold can create a very stressful situation. I myself briefly became curt with a fellow passenger when they had their elbow in my lung, but kept as calm as possible because I knew that getting angry wasn't going to get anyone on the busses any quicker.

Others did not deal with the stress as well. Many resorted to simple griping, which provided some quick entertainment, like the person who complained about their being only one stairway, or the person who was behind me and had been so since I arrived 40 minutes earlier, but somehow had managed to be waiting an hour and half. This meant she would have gotten there before the subway started running.

It got ugly very quickly. Pushing and shoving became rampant every time a bus appeared, and if the bus went past to the front of the queue, people began hurling insults and epithets at the drivers, and then at the TTC Constables. As this was Jane Station, the occasional Jane Street bus would pull up. People would swarm those buses and begin to bang on the doors and the bus itself, insisting it be opened despite the fact that it was going to Steeles. I pondered, but dismissed, the idea leaving more for my own safety than because of any inconvenience. My job is not so important that lives would be lost if I worked from home.

Others, it appeared, did not feel the same way. A woman began sobbing, and then yelling, and then screaming, and then crying. Her plea to the TTC Constable was the same: "You promised I would get on this bus! Why did the bus not pick me up? I pay your salary! I need to go to work!" No amount of reassurance or consolation from the constable would do, and she became more and more hysterical as the time went on, at points following the constable into the bus lane as we were trying to move back to let busses through.

This seemed to unleash an energy in the crowd. I could hear scuffling and people yelling behind me, and more and more people insisting, borderline yelling that something must be done.

There were then two moments that chilled my soul.

A bus was slowing down so it could navigate the turn, but there was still a little bit of room at the end of the queue so there was a very good chance it was going to go past us. "SOMEONE! QUICK! JUMP IN FRONT OF THE BUS!" I looked around to find the voice, which was to the right of me. I looked at her, trying to measure intent. This woman was not joking. This was not trying to alleviate a little stress. This woman was in such a rush to get to work that she was willing to sacrifice the body of a fellow passenger.

A few minutes later, in the middle of a complaint about having to wait so long, and from a different person: "What is going to have to happen before they do something for us? DOES SOMEONE HAVE TO DIE?"

These are tough economic times. We all have jobs to do that are important to us and to our families. In the end though, very few are required for the world to keep spinning. Unless you are a surgeon, doctor, or fireman (and possibly a couple of other highly specialized professions) there is no reason to for you to risk life and limb and sanity to get to your job. And at the point where you completely lose your composure and your grip on your situation, it's time for you to turn around and go home. Use a sick day if you don't think your boss will understand, but don't make a situation worse because of your inability to cope with some hardship. Yes, it was cold, we were all shivering. If it's that much of a bother, go back into the station and wait, or borrow a cell phone and call your work and tell them you will not be in, or will be very late. The simplest solution is often the right one.

Since I have moved to this area I have been through 4 major catastrophes: The Snowstorm of 1999, 9/11, the Blackout, and SARS. For all except the first, I have seen the City actually acquit itself very well. People were informed about what was going on, plans were executed, and the City survived. What has not coped well have been the PEOPLE of Toronto. Crowds move in an irrational manner, but the reaction to every situation has been so out of scale with the actual impact of the event that it has been alarming, and not just in retrospect but even as the event was occurring. As I stood in the crowd, wondering how much longer it would be before I would have to ACTUALLY worry about my safety, I could not help but wonder what would happen if an actual catastrophe did happen, heaven forbid. I have no doubt that there would be great plans and infrastructure available, but that the people would not avail themselves of these in their panic and make the situation worse.

I have a Jimmy Breslin-like relationship with Toronto. I both love and fear this city. There is much more about it that I love than fear, but I find there is more and more that worries me about it.

The Lazy - Moving a song to an iPhone

From time to time at The Times we're going to look at the ways technology is used to take a simple task and make it SEEM simpler but in the end generate more work for equal or less benefit.

We have an iPod (60 GB) and iPhone 3G (16 GB). The iPod is bursting at the seams with "the essentials", while the iPhone carries some random playlists (primarily double albums) and podcasts, and is mostly used as a convenience.

The other day while walking home we had a hankering to listen to "My Year in Lists" by Los Campensinos! only to discover that it was not on our iPhone. Rather than rummage through our messenger bag to get out our iPod we decided to listen to some Elbow instead, and resolve the problem when we got home.

We, of course, forgot to resolve the problem until the next morning when we were clearing out our old podcasts. Time was tight to get to work, and we were already listening to the song. As a rule all our playlists are synced onto our iPhone.

The simple solution: drop the album onto the playlists tab, or drop the song into an already existing playlist, sync and then be on our merry way.

BUT we were in a rush, and just took a look at our options and did this.

1. Since the song was selected, created a Genius playlist based around it
2. Save the Genius playlist
3. Sync the iPhone

This also moved about 10 other songs over during the sync, but during that time we could gel our hair and be ready to be out the door as soon as it was done. Which we were.

We looked at the list as we walked down to the subway station, marveling that actually a pretty good playlist was created, and cited the Law of Unintended Consequences as justification for our lazyness.

We then put "My Year in Lists" on repeat and listened to it until we got to the subway, a 15 minute walk. We never touched the other songs.

(Do you have a story where technology provided you with what seemed like a simpler solution, but in the end generated more work for you? Send it theludditetimes at gmail dot com)

Apple is going to be fine...and if not, that's fine also

With the news of Steve Jobs taking a temporary leave of absence, there has been much sturmg and drang in the press and the market, worrying about the future of Apple. People point to the decline that hit Apple when Mr Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, and the renaissance that occurred when he came back as interim CEO (or iCEO. True story...that's where the "i" comes from).

Since his bout of pancreatic cancer in 2004 to his recent gaunt appearance, there has been much speculation over his health. And since his fortunes and that of his company are linked, this also extends to the health of Apple. 

We at The Times take a very simplistic view of this: One day Mr Jobs, like all of us, will die. It may be today, tomorrow, or 40 years from now, but we are willing to make a prediction and say Steve Jobs will one day die.

Or he will retire and want to enjoy the benefits his largess has given him. 

Either way, there will be a day when there will be Apple without Mr. Jobs. Scuttlebutt around the water cooler has it that Tim Cook would take over the reins no matter how Mr Jobs chooses to go (with a gold iPod or otherwise). No matter who it is, it's an inevitability that there will be an Apple without Mr Jobs.

Something which has been overstated, however, is Mr Jobs' day-to-day interaction with the company. He is very involved in product and vision, but it should never be imagined that the day-to-day operations of Apple are controlled directly from him. He has a circle, a cabal if you will, that handles most of the company already. He is probably more accurately viewed as a figurehead, pitchman, and a court of last resort than as an octopus in a turtleneck (a Steveopus, if you will) (ed. note: Devotees will know how terrifying that image is)

Having said that, one of the most important rules for continued success in business, sports, or personal relationships is communication. Open communication channels between people working together helps focus the goals, as well as provides a knowledge continuum that allows people coming after to pick up the work from where it was left off. It's not a marathon, or a sprint. It's a relay race.

Mr Jobs has a strong vision for Apple, and hopefully he has communicated that to the inner circle of people who may succeed him, and hopefully they too have communicated that to the people under them, and so on. There might be some change in the message as it filters down, but the important thing is that there exists a message and a corresponding mission. If this exists, then that's the best Apple, and its adherents, can hope for.

If not, then that is fine also, because then either two things can happen. 

In one a new vision comes in which might be different than the current one but which might also bring a fresh perspective. The presidency of Harry S Truman is an example of this.

The other is that the company flounders and fails. This is unfortunate, but is the net result of poor planning. If something is built and relies too much on one person for its direction then it's not built upon a strong foundation. It will leave a lot of people in the lurch, but due to the poor planning and poor communication this is inevitable. The presidency of Gerald R Ford is an example of this.

All is not lost in the case of a collapse. People may pick up the pieces, go on, and create greater things. This is the net effect of Fermat's Last Theorem, where there was no transfer of knowledge but picking up the pieces allowed a lot of great work to occur. 

The best course of action would be for Mr Jobs, when he returns, to take less of a public role with the company, and move those who would succeed him into more visible roles. This way investor confidence would be assuaged knowing that the vision of Apple is being passed down, as well as preparing the next generation of leadership. A similar thing happened at Microsoft, where Bill Gates faded more into the background as Steve Balmer took the reins. When Mr Gates finally stepped down last year, there were many that thought he had done so years before.

The Times realizes this can be a cold and ultra-Darwinian view. As well, our business knowledge is very minimal (we have been content to mind our own). Regardless of how the change at Apple happens, it will happen, and the important thing to worry about is what might already have happened, as opposed to what will happen