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tithonium
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irrationalrobot
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Eyes of skull has a secret
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A city-state is a city which is also a country, having its own autonomous government.

Ancient Greece had a lot of city states. Hong Kong is a modern city state. China has benefited a lot from Hong Kong, setting up economic “free zones” in several major Chinese cities to emulate the Hong Kong model.

Today our societies are massive tapestries of interdependence. A lot of our infrastructure is naturally centralizing. Noxious coal burning power plants need to be located away from urban centers. Concentrated industrial farming precludes diverse zoning. And TV has homogenized the culture and language of large swaths of the planet.

But distributed energy, farming, and manufacturing technologies are coming. Rooftop solar, small-scale nuclear power, desktop manufacturing, recycling warehouses, high-rise urban farming.

It’s lovely to imagine a new era of independent city states, each with its own cultural and economic values. Each of these cities will be free to experiment with its own way of life, and to discover new and better ways of structuring a society. The Internet has allowed like-minded individuals to find each other and to form cliques, and modern transportation technologies make migration more inexpensive than at any time in human history.

People will assemble in the city states that best fit their own values and dreams, and cities will compete to attract the best people. This has already been happening in the US with its hyper-mobile population. People move to places with specific values like Silicon Valley or Portland or New York. Books like Who’s Your City encourage us to choose our home city based on what kind of person we are. City identity is strengthening.

Cities with different identities have different laws, economic models, and cultures. This is already true today: Gavin Newsom allows gay marriage in San Francisco and Bloomberg bans trans-fats in New York. The question is whether new technologies will make it feasible for cities in the future to have even greater autonomy and freedom to define their own rules of civilization.

[info]xkcd_rss
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[info]natfriedman_rss
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58%

That’s the portion of computer experts who report getting helpdesk calls from friends or family at least once a week, according to the survey I ran on twitter the last two weeks.

My survey was not very scientific (163 samples) and definitely has a selection bias (most people who answered use Linux in one way or another, for example, although that doesn’t mean their friends and family do).

But that doesn’t change the fact that 58% is a big chunk of pain.

And a big opportunity for people who want to make computers simpler and more reliable.

How often do family and friends call you about computer problems or to ask how to do something in a particular piece of software?

What sorts of issues prompted computer novices to call their computer-expert friends and family for help? I went through 163 free-form responses in a spreadsheet and tagged them all to find the trends.

Here are the top 15 issues, in order of frequency (percent of issues mentioned):

Skype setup came up surprisingly often; I guess a lot of people are installing it lately. I was distressed to see how common printing issues still are, and curious to note that five different people reported that their friends and family cannot attach files to emails.

About a third of these issues could be addressed by webbook efforts like ChromeOS and litl, although the webbook model will probably raise new issues as well.

It will be interesting to see where Internet/WiFi setup, currently #1 with a bullet, ranks five years from now as the wireless infrastructure matures.

I also asked whether computer frustration has waxed or waned among family and friends over the last five years. There was some disagreement on this.

Based on your personal experience with family and friends, in the last 5 years, would you say the amount of computer frustration people experience has</p>

The top theories for a decline in computer frustration were: increasing skill and comfort with computers (25%), and “they switched to a Mac” (23%). Some people also noted that software quality has improved (13%).

But on the other hand, people are doing much more with their computers, and there are many more computer users.

So your parent who five years ago struggled to do email is now comfortable with email and struggling with online banking or video editing.

Some people also cited an increase in the complexity of computer software.

Computer frustration is not limited to our less-skilled friends and family. Even though 90% of the survey-takers consider themselves either 4/5 or 5/5 on the expertise scale, 32% of them report getting frustrated by their computer at least once a week.

Rate your computer expertise.

Novice                             Expert

How often do you get frustrated trying to do something on your computer?

The list of issues which frustrate experts was more varied and detailed. A few key things came up again and again, however: bugs, bad docs, poor user interfaces, and interoperability/compatibility issues. Not the same as the novice list.

I was hoping to find a strong correlation between operating system use and personal frustration, so I asked people which operating systems they use. They could select multiple operating systems, and 61% of respondents did.

The sample sizes were small, but there was a trend. Here’s the percentage of experts who claim to be frustrated with their computers at least once a week (sample size in parentheses):

I also asked people for their age, and we can make the groundbreaking observation that younger people don’t get frustrated with computers as much as older people, or at least they don’t admit to it. Here’s the percentage of experts who claim to be frustrated with their computers at least once a week:


So what does all this mean?

Mostly I see a huge opportunity. People are so frustrated with computers that products and services that make things simpler and more reliable have a huge market.

Best Buy has figured this out. They don’t break out Geek Squad revenues anymore, but it’s safe to say that they’re pulling in well over a billion dollars a year helping people with their computers (at a healthy 10-20% margin – very decent in Best Buy’s universe).

But that’s just a small piece of the pie. Most people still lean on the nerd in the family. As one commenter on my survey wrote,

Not only am I contacted daily, everybody expects the help that I provide to be free.  Why is it that most people feel that computer people love to work on computers, therefore, they do not mind helping me just this one time for free?  If they experience an electrical issue, or clog their toilet, do they expect the electrician or plumber to fix their problem for free? No they gladly pay them and move on.

That probably won’t last.

(You can view or download the raw data.)
sevoo
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I sent this to Move On while unsubscribing from their newsletter:

A healthcare bill with a huge anti-abortion restriction is 'a big victory on health care'? Do you have mothers, sisters, daughters? The house healthcare bill with the Stupak amendment is no victory. The Stupak amendment CRIPPLES healthcare for women, not just in the public option, but for all insurers who want to participate. You clearly do not have *my* best interests in mind. I'm giving my money and my attention to organizations and candidates who are actually pro-choice. Not just "pro-winning."

EDIT: In retrospect, I should have skipped the ableist slur. Mea culpa. I should know better. If you're swiping this text, try "The Stupak amendment UNDERMINES healthcare for women..."

And I sent this to the JT News, a weekly jewish newspaper in Washington state:

I noticed on the front page of the October 30 JTNews a little note that said, "Celebrate Women! page 12". I turned to page 12 and what I found was: an article about a female singer ejected from the Arts & Entertainment section, surrounded by ads for electrolysis, weight loss, and other cosmetic procedures.

This is not a celebration of women. This is a marginalization. Women are being told to look pretty and stand aside. I'm not putting *this* issue of JT News out where anyone can see it -- I'd be ashamed for people to see it and think I agree with the idea that women be segregated into a women's section (what's next, exclusion from Torah studies?) or valued primarily for our looks.
evan
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Two of my favorite bug reports we've gotten.
  1. (Regarding the absence of a Linux version.)

    "Alright lemmie get this straight.... Android is all Linux and all of the google campus is Ubuntu linux sooo.... Why the hec is chrome still in development for linux? It absolutely makes no sense! Also very sad that well I HACKED IT through Virtual box LOL WTF! I had to use windows based codes to havk something to run in nix LOL! Who ever is reading this please just take the time to sit and ask yourself... WHY IS THAT?!? We do use linux at work and out PRIMARY software for our phone is linux WTF are we doing! I will tell you biting the hand of the community that feeds you and keeps helping with FREE DEVELOPMENT YOU PUNKS! Part of the reason that Google has so much money is because of LINUX go ahead and tell me Im wrong! Because I know that Im not! So I will end this by saying it is insulting that the community that develops your software is the same community that has to wait for a stupid browser... To be honest I tride it in windows and thought it was a bit lack luster and IF you had the sense to distribute it in linux MAYBE development would go quicker EVER THINK ABOUT THAT ONE.... No you honestly did not LOL..."

  2. (Regarding how our rounded CSS corners are now antialiased, but the antialiasing looks bad.)

    "Oh noooooooooooooo!!! I MY GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

    Why did you release officially this new bug for the public version??? I'm choked! I just updated Chrome to version 4 and it now includes this new awful bug! WTF happened??

    Why are you going backward? Adding completely new bugs instead of fixing the old ones?

    Ok, lets calm down... I'm really outraged by this, I never saw such attitude in software development... ever, in my entire life, and I have 10 years of experience in software development..... this is just unbelievable, such irresponsibility! Going public with this!!! come on!! WHY!?

    Who decided to go public with this new bug? Who is responsible? You know, there might be only a couple of people responsible for this failure, but the whole world will see it as Google's fault, they don't care if it was only 2 irresponsible guys and that "Google" wasn't really aware of what was happening...

    I don't know if you understand how deeply it takes Chrome down by ruining its reputation and adoption.

    The broken anti-aliased rounded-corners look A LOT more awful than the non-anti-aliased at all. Now not only it looks unacceptably shocking but it catches the eyes immediately and makes people asking themselves "WTF is wrong here??!".

    Leaving aliased rounded corners until the Pri-1 bug would be fixed, OK, it's understandable, but making it worst (!) and releasing it to the official public version is an incredibly stupid decision.

    It seems that the people responsible for this massacre are brettw@chromium.org, dglazkov@chromium.org and tony.

    I have decided to take this issue to a higher level at Google."

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giantlaser
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent link to the issue number. Hint: hey guys, sort that out.

The article was about configuring ACPI hotkeys to support your specific laptop. IE, the buttons for “sleep”, “brightness up”, etc. For most laptops this already works on Ubuntu. On my Dell Vostro 1500, every button except for “sleep” worked right after install. This is Linux, so there is always some way to fix that.

Read the rest of this entry »

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[info]status
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The heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems.
irrationalrobot
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Dodongo dislikes smoke.
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C.J. Adams-Collier
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Name: C.J. Adams-Collier
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