People and Computers

I installed a new version of Linux on my new toy Saturday and they've changed everything and it's all awful, and how can they be so stupid, and why would they change that, and it's just awful and I hate it. Actually, I can only think of two things that changed, and one may prove to be kind of useful. We shall see. This new thing is a column of icons along the left hand edge of the screen. Some of them are for useful things, some I don't expect to ever use, but maybe it can be changed. Whatever. One of these icons is for something called the Ubuntu Software Center, and it is pretty amazing, as in amazingly stupid. It takes dang near 30 seconds to load. For comparison, Firefox, my browser of choice, takes four seconds. What is this doing that it takes so bleeding long to get it's act together? I am so annoyed I file an actual bug report.

But I am doing some looking around, and I consider things and I realize there are two kinds of people using computers: people who understand how they work, and people who don't, and this second group, the people who don't understand how they work are in the majority, and it's a big majority. They certainly outnumber people who understand how computers work by a factor of a hundred to one. It could easily be as high as a thousand to one. I suspect that people who don't know how computers work are not bothered so much by these long waits.

My kids all got Macs when they went to college. On the whole it's been a good investment. They never come to me with tales of woe about their computers. It's a Mac, I don't know anything about Macs, I don't really want to learn, and there's nothing you can do about a Mac problem anyway. So I haven't spent hundreds of hours running anti-virus software and reformatting hard drives and rebooting over and over again trying to fix their stupid computers. They were expensive, but from my point of view, darn well worth it.

On occasion I have looked over someone's shoulder while they were using a Mac and I was astounded at how slow they are. Sure, you get cute little animations, but they take forever and a day to load an application. I suppose that gives you time to run to Starbucks and get a nice frothy latte, or whatever the coolest drink of the day is, but criminently, I've got things to do, and I don't like Starbucks.

Wait a minute though. There is something familiar about this, and now I realize what it is. It's Google. Google Documents specifically. It takes seconds to bring up a Google Document. Let's try it and see. Leaving this post at 10:25:45, 10:26:15 I'm back. That's 30 seconds. I don't like it, but I put up with it because I trust Google to preserve the document more than I trust my backup procedures. (Can you even quantify the amount of trust you place in something that does not exist?)

So there are at least two reasons for sitting and waiting patiently for the stupid computer to get it's act together. One, you don't know any better, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway, or two, you've made the conscious decision that waiting is worthwhile because of the value provided.

The big money in computers these days is in providing electronics to the masses, most of whom don't understand how computers work. In this market any kind of theoretical efficiency is irrelevant. There are numerous other factors that are important, but I am pretty sure I don't really give a rat's behind what they are. If I have to deal with an electronic gizmo, I want it to do it's job quickly, efficiently and reliably. So no mass market apps for me.

On the other hand, if it wasn't for the mass market, electronic equipment would not be so cheap. The last computer I bought is probably a thousand times faster than my first, has a hundred thousand times more storage capacity and costs a fifth the price of the earlier model. I purchased that one back in 1985 and it was a serious expenditure of cash. With inflation, the price factor doubles, which means my new computer cost, in real terms, one tenth of what the first one cost.

The lesson in all this is you need to pay attention. Machines as well as people will waste your time without regard for the consequences, after all, it's not their time they are wasting. Notice who or what is wasting your time and decide whether the value you get from this interaction is worth the time it takes.

That concludes today's lesson.