greenpoint design

RIP Old Tech

In the rush toward new technology and new solutions, we often forget to discontinue old or outmoded tech. Old technology has a way of lingering on, sapping productivity, costing us money, and generally annoying the hell out of people who still use it. Rather than limp forward with a legacy of tools that no longer work, we should resolve in 2007 to make a clean start.

In the spirit of new beginnings and progress, I submit this short list of tools and technologies that should be discarded in the New Year. The list is roughly ordered in terms of cost; the most egregious money-wasters are at the top.

1. Fossil-fuel burning automobiles. This is an obvious choice and yet this centuries-old technology lingers on. Apart from the enormous social costs of automobiles, pollution and danger associated with cars, there are real and substantial individual costs. But, in an economy predicated on the automobile, good alternatives have been slow to emerge. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: move closer to where you work and sell your car. Take public transport to work — or ride a bike — and you will find that you have more money and more time.

2. Television. Who has the time for broadcast TV or cable? Who can afford to waste an hour of their life to get 18 minutes of dubious content? Use TIVO if you must, or better still; select your content online according to a schedule that suits you.

3. Incandescent light bulbs. Yesterday Australia’s government recognized just how dead this tech is by mandating a phase-out of incandescent bulbs by 2010. The shift to compact fluorescent bulbs is expected to save Australia 800,000 tons of carbon emissions annually. LEDs are even more efficient, as much as 60% more light for the money than fluorescents, according to industry estimates.

4. Fax machines. Don’t even get me started. What seemed like a miracle in 1980 is merely a nuisance today. What possible excuse can there be for maintaining this pterodactyl tech in offices now? Need a signature on a piece of paper? Sign it, scan it and attach the PDF to an e-mail. As an added bonus, you don’t have to call to make sure someone picked up your fax at the other end.

5. Phone Books. When was the last time you looked up a number in a paper phone book? Arguably, phone books are still useful to senior citizens and in places where internet service is not available, but the cost of printing and shipping these doorstops means their days are numbered.

6. Newspapers. As with phone books, this method of information dissemination has been superseded by far cheaper solutions. At the same time, the advertising model that supported the dailies has changed. Classifieds have migrated to the net and display ads look likely to follow. While newspapers may persist for a few more decades, publishers would do well to curtail their print runs and concentrate on publishing to the net.

7. IM. Instant Messaging can spell Insistent Migraine for people who are trying to work through a complex problem or follow a train of thought. Part of the beauty of e-mail it that it is asynchronous. You read it when you’re ready; not when your over-caffeinated colleague is bored and wants to chat. Persistent communication is not necessarily better communication.

8. Anonymous E-mail. The days of unverified e-mail identity are over. Now that majority of all e-mail is SPAM (see Akismet or MSNBC ) and the annual cost of handling/filtering SPAM is in the billions, the net should move to a verified identity system. In the next year or so, clearinghouses will emerge for identity management and verification. Systems like Shibboleth, which is used in academe to identify students, will vouch for the identity of senders. Savvy recipients and sysadmins will block any mail that does not have the imprimatur of a recognized clearinghouse.

9. Hard Disc Drives. Spinning HDDs all fail eventually. Flash memory looks to be more durable. Right now cost and capacity have prevented a mass flight to flash memory, but that equation is changing.

10. Signatures. I don’t know about you, but my signature is more of a graphic spasm than a valid identity verification device. Given that signatures are a voluntary form of identification and easily forged, their anachronistic persistence is a mystery. In the near future, I expect to retire my John Hancock in favor of retinal scans or some form of hand/finger scanning and verification.

Many of these systems and technologies are already out of my life. I’m hoping to be free of the rest by this time next year. What about you?

Somewhere in Colorado a Cat is Having Kittens …

. . . and here in NYC it’s a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Del.icio.us led us to the Yahoo Time Capsule. For 30 days, from October 10 to November 8, Jonathan Harris and Yahoo are collecting a digital record of life on earth. The archive assembled will then be handed over to the Smithsonian.

One day this will be an advanced search feature on Google — ‘give me all of the MP3s uploaded to Asian IP addresses last Sunday morning’. For the time being it’s a user-generated record. So chip in your little piece of reality.

The City That Never Thinks

Arch New Yorker Fran Lebowitz once said, “Polite conversation is rarely either.” A website called Overheard in New York proves it.

One of the free pleasures of living in this great metropolis are those little snippets of conversation one overhears in the course of a normal day. Overheard in New York has made a business of this urban hobby, posting a steady stream of secondhand banter from the streets and subways of the city.

The appalling thing is how dumb it all sounds. I mean, I like to think that my fellow New Yorkers are a little smarter than your average red-stater, but you wouldn’t know it to listen to us. Maybe it’s another harbinger of the apocalypse, or maybe there really is a correlation between excessive cell phone use and brain damage. I was a bit depressed about the whole thing until I found Overheard In the UK.