Researchers at the Information Technology Center of Tokyo University have calculated the value of pi to 1.24 trillion places.

And we’re know they got it right because … ?

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It must have been in the early ’90s that I got briefed by Microsoft about their next-generation operating system, code-named “Cairo.” It was going to be a complete re-write. It had to be, because it was going to be “object-oriented.” Between what Microsoft told me (as the marketing guy for a “strategic partner”) and what my desire-fueled imagination assumed, I thought we were heading for an OS that at last got rid of files.

Just in case you’ve been using Windows so long that you’ve forgotten just how bad an idea files are, consider:

Things that should be treated as separate objects but are instead smushed within a single file:

Email messages

Attachments to email messages

A file in a zip file

Things that should be one object but are instead a mere set of files:

A web page with its associated graphics and CSS file

A word processing file and its backups and previous versions

Files rely on user-editable names and extensions to indicate how they are to be associated. Bad idea. They should instead be like the tracks and sectors on your hard disk: something you never have to think about.

So, whatever happened to Cairo?

Google to the rescue: In March of this year, Steve Ballmer announced Microsoft is returning to the Cairo idea.

(If in carpentry, the idea is to measure twice and cut once, in weblogging I guess it should be: Google twice and write once.)

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All I want is the world’s simplest email client. It’s for my in-laws who are very bright but completely untutored in computers. I’ve tried teaching them, but when they click off a menu they didn’t want and accidentally click on another window that comes forward obscuring the original window, they get lost. And who’s to blame them.

So, here are my requirements:

It’s got to run on Windows 2000. That’s what they have. And, frankly, the Mac UI isn’t going to be much easier for them.

They need to connect to the SMTP and POP3 servers that comes with their ISP.

It should all be in one window.

It should let them: Compose mail. Show the dozen or so addresses they use repeatedly. Delete. List received mail. Print out. Maybe let them search for old emails.

Have a clear, English, big-font UI.

I’ve done a fair bit of looking and can’t find what I want. I’m thinking of writing one myself. It’ll be crappy for sure, and it’ll be hard-wired and fragile. If you know of something that’ll fit the bill, lemme know. Thanks.

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Jonathan Peterson reproduces Peter Chernin’s (CEO of Fox) Comdex keynote, interpolating comments disputing not only its accuracy, but its most basic representation of what’s going on. Jonathan summarizes his own reaction:

They still see us as consumers only capable of digesting their offerings and handing over money. They really don’t seem to understand that the reason we are buying PCs, video cameras, digital cameras, broadband connections and the like is that we want to create and share our creations

I found a few places in the speech that made my see the inside of my own retina that Jonathan saw fit not to comment on. In particular, Chernin says:

The trumpeters of the Big Bully Theory may also be startled to learn that we have absolutely no problem with viewers shifting our content from their television to their PC, from their living room to their bedroom and to their bathroom and back again as many times and ways as they’d like.

First, “shifting” does not necessarily include copying. Second — and this is what makes my blood boil — he’s granting us permission to shift “our content” where “our” refers to the entertainment company? It’s not their content. When I buy a DVD, the DVD is mine and I can use it any way I want so long as I’m not reselling it or broadcasting it. The disk is mine. I can make a copy for my upstairs TV. I can mold it into a pretty little ashtray. I can roll it in a tube and sell it to Peter Chernin as a home colonoscopy kit.

Keep your hands of my property, you goddamn burglar!

The speech is long but well worth reading. As are Jonathan’s comments, chockablock with links.

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The Gartner Group says, according to the Center for Media Research:

More Europeans use short messaging service (SMS) than email… GartnerG2 claims that SMS has therefore become a powerful marketing tool, which can be more important than the web for a range of activities. Around 62 percent of all adults across the major European countries now use a mobile phone, according to the research. Currently, 41 percent of European adults use SMS, compared to 30 percent that use the Internet/email.

Last year, 28 percent of European adults used SMS, as opposed to 29 percent who went online. SMS isparticularly popular in the UK where 49 percent of adults use it, compared to 39 percent who are online.

1. Connectedness will happen. How? The basic answer is: Every way.

2. But it’s not as if email and SMS compete. Read Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs to see how no-location technologies (“no-loco tech”?) are letting us engage in new ways. (There’s a discussion of the book going on now at the Well.Vue. It’s long form and fascinating. Some great stuff, including a recounting by Dave Hughes of what followed from his boast that he could wifi every farm in Wales “by turning every Welsh pub into a wireless ISP.” )

3. I’m looking forward to the day when the announcement of a new type of human connection is not immediately followed by the phrase “powerful marketing tool.” How about something like: “Over 62% of Americans are using ____ to talk with, inform and entertain one another. It therefore promises to provide an antidote to powerful marketing tools.”

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Complexity Digest remains an excellent source, aggregating links to interesting articles. The archive is here. You can subscribe for free by sending mail to [email protected].

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Aha! I just learned how to override the definitions in a CSS style sheet!

Here’s the problem. I use a CSS style sheet to define the properties of the HTML elements on this page. In fact, I load four style sheets with different definitions and let you click on the “Are you color blind?” link at the top of the page to determine which style sheet is in effect. The style sheet defines the <p> element as having brown text. If I want some portion of the text to have a different color — as in the final paragraph of the entry below with the picture of Michael Jackson — the following will not work:

<p><font color=”red”>this should be red</font></p>

The CSS definition overrides the local change. But, if you express the font change in the syntax of a CSS definition, it works:

<p><font style=”color: red”>this should be red </font></p>

This is explained in more detail than I could understand by David Baron. And here I learned how to do a relative size decrease:

<p><font style=”font-size: 80%”>This should be 80% the size of the rest of the text </font></p>

Woohoo! Sure, I should have known this, but then would I have gotten the same kick out of learning it?

(No need to tell me that “<font>” statements are no longer considered acceptable, um, I mean they’re being “deprecated.” I’m not ready to span the gap yet.)

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The reams of paper your buy in your office supply store often have pictures on their wrappers illustrating Things You Can Put on Paper: color business charts, pictures of a buff guy water-skiing, newsletters, pictures of colorful hot air balloons, more business charts. This is in case you weren’t quite sure what paper is used for. I’m just surprised that they don’t say in small print: “Serving suggestion. Actual pages are blank.”

I felt a bit the same way at a forum at MIT I participated in last night. Panelists and audience members tried to characterize what the Web is used for and how it is used. Are Internet conversations degraded forms? Sure, came the response, just look at the stupidity of the chats at Yahoo. And then I’m tempted to reply: But look at the intelligence of the mailing lists you’re on, yada yada yada. The argument is as pointless as whether most real world conversations are stupid or not.

The Web is what it is. It is what we are.

Yet, I do think there are some types of generalizations one can make based on the nature of the medium itself: Web conversations are almost always mediated by a keyboard. There are no fists that can punch us if we go overboard. There is no immediate feedback in a group conversation equivalent to the antsy shifting in chairs or furrowed brows one sees when talking in the real world. And, of course, the temporality of Web conversations is hugely different from real world ones: I did a chat yesterday on Richard Seltzer’s Samizdat site and in typical fashion, questions and answers overlapped in a jumble of threads that looked like a kitten had been playing with it.

From characteristics such as these we can make some generalizations about Web conversations. For example, the intermittency of many forms of Web conversations means that the replies can be more carefully constructed than in most real world conversations. But does that make Web conversations more accurate or more artificial? And the lack of immediate feedback can lead people to exaggerate their positions just to get people to acknowledge they’ve heard it. But does this mean that people adopt more extreme positions or that they pronounce them with more distance?

In any case, this doesn’t address the issue when someone says, “Internet conversations are like professional wrestling.” The answer to that question can only be: Yes, sometimes, but so what? There are greasy spoons, 5-star restaurants and picnics. What sense does it make to characterize what eating is like? And, by the way, what do people put on paper?

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Note about Spam/Scam, added Feb. 25, 2005: Because of the mysterious ways of Google, this blog entry seems to be turning up when people are looking for information about various spam offers involving transferring huge amounts of cash into your bank account. There are lots of comments to this post about that.

Here’s the short version: These are among the oldest and best known scams on the Internet. They are prepetrated by professional criminals who send out millions of these offers every day hoping that you will end up giving them your bank account information. The spammers then transfer all the money from your account. You have no way of getting it back because, after all, you authorized them to make the transfer.

So, when you thought it was too good to be true, you were exactly right.

Do NOT engage with these folks. The scammers got your name off of some list of email addresses and don’t know anything about you. Nevertheless, these are not nice or reasonable people. They are criminals. In fact, The US State Department reports that 25 Americans gullible enough to go abroad to meet with these scammers have been murdered or disappeared. (Don’t be alarmed. To them you’re just an email address on a list of millions. On the other hand, don’t get on a plane to go pick up money from them.)

It does no good to write back to them to tell them they ought to be ashamed or that you’re not going to fall for it. That only tells them that your email address works. They’re mass mailers. They don’t care about what you think. They just want to get your bank account information. Instead, set up your spam filter to trash their messages. (I’ve been getting several of these messages a day for over ten years.)

Here are two Wired articles you might find helpful: One Two.

Now back to the original post…

DarwinMag online just published a column of mine that tries to explain the open spectrum issue to idiots like me. Here’s part of it:

There are three types of benefits from opening the spectrum: short term, long term and deep term.

Short term, we will see a sudden breaking free from wireless gridlock: New bandwidth available everywhere. New local radio stations. Wireless connectivity among appliances in the house. Innovations wherever action at a distance or ubiquitous access makes sense.

Long term, Dewayne Hendricks (founder of The Dandin Group and a member of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council) says that we’re in the position Marconi was in 100 years ago when wireless communications were first invented. We can’t begin to imagine what’s possible, including — and Hendricks is serious about this — Star Trek-style transporters before this century is out.

Deep term, the unleashing of wireless connectivity will eat away at one of our last remaining social dependencies on broadcast media. Right now, if you want to broadcast you have to get permission from the Feds and you have to have lots of dough. We end up with a society that sits on a couch, facing forward, listening to what people with money have to say. Our freedom is defined by the channel changer nearby. With open spectrum, a bottom-up conversation can begin over the ether, helping to make participatory democracy real.

I also link to David Reed’s page on Open Spectrum and Dan Gillmor‘s helpful column on the topic.

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Don’t forget to test your firewall at Steve Gibson’s stalwart site, Gibson Research.

[Thanks to Roch Skelton from a mailing list for the reminder.]

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