Stop the Frickin’ Presses Dept:

Washington Post: Why Won’t We Read the Manual? And so it has come to this: Americans buy the most sophisticated computers, the coolest digital cameras, the most advanced automobiles, the most versatile cell phones and handheld organizers, and then . . . and then we forget, or decline, or flat out refuse, to read the directions. [Tomalak’s Realm]

In a long piece — and God knows it’s a fruitful topic — here’s my favorite blip:

In the not-too-distant future, many of those questions may prove unnecessary, at least for frozen dinners and such. Some microwaves are being designed to read a bar code that will be printed on the side of the package and cook it automatically. “The consumer won’t even have to read directions on how long he needs to cook the meal; he’ll just have to eat it,” Laermer said.

And people will learn to use this feature, exactly how?

There is no shortage of Dumb User (a/k/a “Luser”) stories. They are more than amply balanced by all the tech support people whose very first line of defense is to tell you to format your hard drive and re-install Windows.

I’ve written a few manuals, many for products that didn’t actually ship. I’ve also written some “after-market” books; unfortunately, before publishers got the idea that technology books could actually be entertaining.

My favorite user manual stories came from when I was Director of Documentation at Headstart Technologies — one of the first computer companies to sell through consumer electronics stores. We produced a computer called the Headstart Explorer, an easy-to-use XT clone with a custom graphic interface, the first-ever implimentation of DOS on ROM, and a couple of interesting problems:

There was a small problem with the hard drive. The bay in which it sits does not have adequate ventilation. If you left the drive running for a long while, it would really heat up. Eventually, it could heat up to the point of softening the plastic around it. If you weren’t using the monitor stand, and had just set the monitor on the main unit, that side could start to smush down. 

We generated an extremely simple “words-of-one-syllable-or-less” kind of manual that people seemed to enjoy and was a major pisser to produce. One user in Los Angeles didn’t think much of it. Less than pleased with the machine or the docs or his coffee that morning, he pulled out a .45 while on the phone with tech support, and in the blessed name of Elvis put a hole in the monitor. Crude, but an effective critique. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t get his money back.

Back in the day at winmag.com, I wrote a few times about Echelon, a supposedly top-secret project by the NSA to monitor all international communications to and from the U.S. Echelon, it was said, could pick out key words from among the flood of information traversing the American border.

I expressed my doubts about whether something like Echelon could exist, or whether it was the product of Oliver Stone-fevered minds.

Danish journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, who apparently have been following the Echelon story for a while, landed an interview with a gent named Bruce McIndoe, the lead architect for Echelon II. He basically confirms the whole thing.

Of course, he could be lying, too.

From [bOing bOing]:

Roger Kaputnik: kaput at age 81. Here’s an obit for Dave Berg, the pipe-smoking guy with the Reed Richards-style two tone hair who wrote and drew “The Lighter Side of…” cartoons for Mad. His sense of humor was quite a bit different from the rest of the usual gang of idiots, and it is strange that he was even in the magazine. I like his stuff though.

My mom’s mom used to save her pennies to give her two grandkids when they came to visit her in The Bronx. I don’t remember what my brother did with his, but I would invariably march down to the corner store and buy the latest copy of Mad. It was a true high point of my adult life when I ran into Dick DeBartolo on a commuter train to New Jersey; I still have his Mad Magazine business card.

Dave Berg’s drawing was much more mainstream and realistic than, say, Jack Davis’s or Al Jaffe’s (let alone Don Martin’s), and his humor was more rooted in suburbia and adulthood than in parody.  More than other artists and writers, Berg gave kids a clue into how adults really thought. It didn’t matter that he recycled ideas nearly as much as Milton Berle.

I took a college course on Satire back in the mid-70s. On the first day, in order to fix the idea of what satire was, the professor asked the class to places one might find it. I suggested Mad, and some snotty sorority girl said, “You mean people read that?”

Several weeks went by. Responding to something or other, the sorority girl mentioned something she’d seen in Cosmopolitian. Sez I, maybe slightly louder than I meant to (but maybe not), “You mean people read that?” I don’t think she spoke to me for two years….

You know those fish magnets you sometimes see on the backs of cars? You’ve seen them — cars driven by Christians who feel the need for some kind of identifier in case the Rapture comes and the archangels look for a tag as if they were cosmic AAA towtruck drivers?

Anyway. Some of you might have seen a similar magnet, with the word “Darwin” inside and small legs coming out the bottom. Blogspace has alerted me to this new one (and some others):

The Shifted Librarian also finds a luscious piece in Darwin Magazine. Prepare to rethink your analogies: it turns out that apples and oranges are actually pretty similar.

Scott Sandford gives the impression he wishes he never did the damn apples and oranges paper. He admits to having nightmares about his own obituary: He has devoted his life at NASA to studying how chemicals that rained down on the earth billions of years ago may have seeded the world with the materials to create life; he’s published 200 scientific papers on astrochemistry and the delicate intertwining of stellar dust and human existence. Comparing his serious work to that one stupid thing he did years ago on a lark, it’s a joke. It’s like comparing apples to quartz.”

Fabulous piece on The Shifted Librarian about the House of Representatives approving a new .kids.us domain.

For those tuning in late, there are two domain systems on the Internet. One is the TLD system like .com and .biz and the new .info and .name. The other is a system of country domains like .us, .uk and .za, used more widely outside the US than within. Each country controls its own. In the US, country domains are more typically used by schools and government than business.

Congress has been trying in vain to get ICANN (the folks who like to think they govern the Internet) to approve a top-level .kids domain, so they went with the seemingly clean compromise of .kids.us. But, of course, there are problems with making a kid-safe place on the net. Read the article.

From Internet Product News:

Microsoft Gets Defensive About Open Source Software. According to a report in The Washington Post, Microsoft is “aggressively” trying to convince the Pentagon to abandon its use of freely distributed software, claiming open source software threatens Department of Defense security.

What’s wrong with this picture? In his testimony for the Microsoft anti-trust trial, MS bigwig Jim Allchin said that revealing Windows’s source code — one of the possibly remedies sought by the non-settling states — would let hackers find the operating system’s security holes, thereby jeopardizing national security. As eWeek put it:

A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

So, Microsoft is saying that closed-source software isn’t secure, and open-source software isn’t secure either. MS seems to have missed the bulletin that says opening source code to public scrutiny allows vulnerabilities to be found and plugged. It’s that last part that Microsoft never seems to get around to talking about.

A data point:

The heightened alert in New York City is indeed having an effect. Traffic crossing the Brooklyn Bridge this morning is being restricted and apparently closely examined, with attendant delays. The bridge was closed for a half-hour to investigate a suspicious package. And there are helicopters patrolling the neighborhood.

I need to go into Manhattan this morning, and the bridge is how I do it. Oh joy.

[Later:]

It took 45 minutes to drive the two-block approach to the Brooklyn Bridge this morning; police were screening on a car-by-car basis, and turned back several that didn’t meet the HOV2 requirement. (Presumably, suicide bombers don’t work in pairs.)

Otherwise, the city seems pretty normal. The 34th Street Heliport had about six takeoffs/landings in the hour or so that I was paying attention. It’s the start of Fleet Week today, so there’ll be a ton of sailors around from all over the world. Some might say this presents a target-rich environment.

Other than the traffic checkpoint, the most out-of-place thing I’ve seen today is the NBC News truck with the big-ass satellite uplink antenna (big-ass — that’s one of my technical terms) parked at the end of my block at the entrance to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The film crew has a pretty good overview of New York Harbor and the ships coming in, but when I saw the camera about 10 minutes ago, it was aimed squarely at the Statue of Liberty. Just in case, presumably.

This is from Robert Scoble. I wanted to post it as is, because it gets at some interesting questions about weblogging that I don’t have time to develop just now but need to get back to.

Weblogging Success Based on Traffic?. Is weblogging all about the traffic? This writer seems to think that traffic is all that matters. Hogwash. I don’t want the unwashed masses reading me. I want to link to smart people. If all you measure is traffic aimed at your head, then you’ve gone astray. To me, it’s “what can I learn by visiting you?” Do you entertain? Teach? Inspire? If you have only one visitor, but you teach that one person something that will change his/her life, isn’t that more important than having 1000 viewers of intellectual sewage? The National Inquirer has lots of readers. Is that what we should be aspiring to? If it is, weblogging will be an awfully shallow activity for most of you. I’d like to measure my weblogging success some other way.

Robert Scoble and some others point out a new search engine, Vivisimo, which organizes results in some interesting ways. It’s not really a search engine, actually; more properly, Vivisimo organizes information it finds at other people’s search engines. (No, I don’t entirely understand it either.)

Vivisimo is a spinoff of Carnegie Mellon University, and has some interesting people behind the technology. One of them is Oren Etzioni, who was a founder of Netbot, an early e-commerce search engine. [Source: Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]

Google isn’t standing still. Its home page now features a new Scott Adams (Dilbert) cartoon every day. And check out the public demonstration of Google’s technology toys.