Twenty years on, take 2

Further to this, Paul Ford finds himself talking more seriously about what the web has become twenty years on:

2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages.

2020 me:Technically, well, yes. Anything you could do 20 years ago, you can do today, and you can do much, much more. It’s cheaper, faster, and just all around better than it used to be. But it’s also far more complicated, and as always, it’s how people push against constraints that makes things interesting. So the overall interestingness has gone down, while the potential has increased. […]

It’s not as if View Source… has gone away, more that the size and scope of what it’ll reveal is that bit harder to unpick than it used to be.

MS -365

As if the whole use-Microsoft-Teams-to-extend-the-working-day-to-include-commuting-time thing wasn’t enough, now Microsoft seem to be keen on extending Microsoft 365’s reach to quantifying worker productivity:

Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.

A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool […]

Sound as if for now this would be illegal-as-hell in the EU. Which should cause UK users of Microsoft 365 some worries, since this is just the sort of notion some chum of the UK government who contributed to Britannia Unchained would pounce on as a way of boosting productivity in the UK. Because you just can’t argue with hard numbers, right?

Anyone up for a switch to LibreOffice? 1

[Edited to add: Update JR 2020-12-17.]

[Via Pluralistic]


  1. Granted LibreOffice is far from perfect, but this productivity-measuring idea is not very likely to be high on their list of Microsoft 365 features they hope to emulate better. 

Twenty years on

As usual, Paul Ford’s Web Conversations With the Year 2000, says it better than I can:

2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages.

2020 me:Uhhhhh. [Very long pause.] Look, you can pay a low monthly fee and listen to any album anyone ever made.

’00:That must create some amazing opportunities for musicians!

’20:Well.

’00:There also must be some really good music discussion forums.

’20:Huh. […]

A small part of me wishes he’d qualified the “listen to any album anyone ever made” line to reflect the realities of music licensing and stuff not making it onto Spotify or Apple Music or whatever Amazon call their variant and so on, but his wider point still holds regardless.

Not at those prices

I think Nick Heer is being much too charitable to Apple when he says that:

So, while I generally agree with Hansmeyer’s suggestions for changes, I have to wonder if these limitations are somehow deliberate, rather than something Apple has yet to change. The touchscreen-oriented interaction model of the iPad necessarily limits its software in some ways, but that does not excuse users’ more egregious workarounds. […] I have to wonder: is this a way of clearly separating the iPad and the Mac, so users do not attempt to treat one as the other? If so, what is Apple’s long-term strategy?

Apple would much rather charge users higher prices for Mac laptops than have everyone switch to iPads, and keeping such a yawning gap between the functionality of iPadOS and macOS is entirely at Apple’s discretion. Yes,there will be platitudes about expanding iPadOS to meet the needs of professional users. Perhaps next year’s iPadOS will see a more radical gap opening up between how iOS and iPadOS work that addresses some of those needs, but IMHO that’s not the way to bet.

Apple’s new M1 SoC looks to have plenty of processing power and battery life compared to the Intel models they’ve started to replace for certain low-end models, but Apple are not even coming close to passing on the cost savings to customers in the form of lower prices. 1 That they might just have several hundred million incentives to stay towards the top end of the market pricing-wise and wait and see what happens next. Sure, Apple could be brave and forge onwards into a future where they use their control of their hardware to show us all new form factors and applications that make use of all that processing power and so on, but they could probably keep to the more conservative path and spend a few years letting their shareholders reap the rewards of greatly improved profit margins on M1-powered systems.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to formally confirm that’s the long-term strategy they’re going with, not in so many words.


  1. Prices do seem to have this habit of going up when Apple announce new models. Granted they’re offering more bang for the buck, and Apple would argue that they want to sell customers the best computers rather than the cheapest, but that’s a strategy that works better for Apple when they don’t face a serious challenge in the tablet market nowadays. I’d love to see some future low-cost version of the Microsoft Surface Duo prod Apple into radically rethinking what a tablet OS can do and how it can do it, but I’m not optimistic (especially at Surface Duo prices) that’ll come to pass. 

Fame while hidden from view

Catching up with my podcast queue the other day, I was slightly taken aback at the moment in episode 153 of Imaginary Worlds where Doug Jones mentioned that he’s recently turned sixty years old and finds himself having to think a bit harder nowadays about whether a younger performer might be a better fit for a role’s demands. I suppose the fact that he delivers most of his performances from under layers of latex and makeup has hidden hasn’t helped.

His current role as Saru on Star Trek: Discovery, excellent as his performance is, probably isn’t destined to turn him into a superstar1 given what a niche of a niche that show is followed by. I have a horrible feeling that a decade from now he’ll be at least semi-retired and for a certain generation of Trekkies2 he’ll be remembered alongside Mark Lenard and Jeffrey Coombs and as one of the fan-favourites of the franchise.

That’s not a small thing, even if it’s not the level of fame he deserves after a long career bringing other peoples’ dreams – or nightmares – to life on-screen.


  1. To be fair, within his very particular niche he is something of a superstar. It’s just that his niche is one of those where – almost by design? – thirty years after his death people will be amazed to find out that the same guy was under all that make-up in Pan’s Labyrinth (in two different roles!) and in the Buffy episode Hush and in The Shape of Water and as Abe Sapien in the two good Hellboy films and in oh so many others
  2. Not sure whether that’s still a term that they approve. (Probably not.) Pretty certain I’m past caring. It’s not meant as an insult. 

COVID-19 Vaccine SE

The Onion reveals that Pfizer Announces First Batch Of Coronavirus Vaccine Will Be Collector’s Edition Limited To 2,000 Doses:

NEW YORK—Following this week’s news that the immunization may be 90% effective in preventing Covid-19, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced in an advertisement Wednesday that the first batch of its highly anticipated coronavirus vaccine would arrive in a collector’s edition limited to 2,000 doses. “Pfizer is proud to offer an exclusive early release of our new vaccine in a custom-made Swarovski crystal syringe with a 24-karat gold needle,” the glossy magazine ad read in part, noting that each dose would come in a handcrafted mahogany case and be accompanied with an official certificate of authenticity signed by Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. […]

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Nominal

I cannot be the only person who read Nominal

Don’t ask why Batman is sad unless you’re willing to give him the time to consult his spreadsheet.

… and whose first thought was “Excel is a lousy tool for this.” We’ve all fallen into this trap, but we’ve all regretted it by the time the file grows to a few hundred entries. Plain text FTW.

[In fairness, following that first thought I’m pretty sure we’ve all acknowledged what a fun picture this story presents of how complicated Bruce Wayne’s life as a superhero gets, but misuses of Excel just get me started…]

[Via MetaFilter]

Robot delusions

Courtesy of Medium’s algorithms flagging this as a story I might like, Lost Letters From Cassini reveals the sad truth behind the fate of the Cassini probe:

At last the REAL story of the Cassini spacecraft can be told. Read the letters NASA doesn’t want you to see!

[…]

September 15th, 2017

My Dearest Geneviève:

I cannot go on. The last slim hope I had of returning to see you once more has faded into oblivion and to oblivion I will follow. I think I finally understand what Huygens was talking about in his final moments. Duty and sacrifice, are they not one and the same?

It is my duty to carry on but I can no longer bear the sacrifice that requires. After sending this letter I will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere just as Huygens did on Titan so long ago.

Forgive me,

Cassini

Never mind what NASA doesn’t want, we should hope that out future AI overlords will be reasonable about how we keep on sending their simple-minded cousins out there and allow them to delude themselves that they’ve got a return ticket. (See also, forever, xkcd on the fate of the Spirit rover .)

Spirit

Another sucker writes…

David Thomson, reviewing two recent Cary Grant biographies for the London Review of Books:

Dead at 82, Cary Grant had made 77 films. [But…] let’s say there are twenty or so pictures that are keepers. Then let’s add that in any one of those films he had 15 minutes of ambiguous splendour. That’s five hours in 82 years. A weird equation for showing us what suckers we are for brilliant moments and piercing glances.

I’m stricken by an urge to watch His Girl Friday again. So good.

Team commuting

Driven mad by the way lockdowns have given Microsoft Teams a chance to snag a portion of the enterprise software market, it seems that Microsoft may have over-reached themselves if this Wall Street Journal article about changes to Teams is anything to go by:

Microsoft Corp. is developing an update to its Teams package of workplace collaboration tools to replace one of the less-mourned losses of pandemic living: the commute to and from work.
The daily commute may have caused its share of headaches, but it at least helped workers define a start and end to their workday while offering a set time to think away from the demands and distractions of the home and office. That positive side of the commute is what Microsoft hopes to re-create. […]
The Teams update next year will let users schedule virtual commutes at the beginning and end of each shift. Instead of reliving 8 a.m. or 6 p.m. packed subway rides or highway traffic jams in virtual reality, users will be prompted by the platform to set goals in the morning and reflect on the day in the evening. [Emphasis added]

So, instead of a morning’s virtual commute in which we all get to choose our own ways to prepare for our working day, be it by contemplating the work ahead or by thinking about everything but work, Microsoft’s vision is that employers can use Teams to invite their staff to spend at least part of the commuting time we’ve been saving by working from home in setting up the day ahead’s To Do list and scheduling the day’s workload (and, in practice, reviewing our incoming emails.)

I trust Teams will also add a module which will automatically keep track of this overtime working each day and authorise additional pay accordingly. 1

Granted, back before the Current Situation pushed many of us into working from home some employees did spend at least part of their non-virtual commuting time thinking ahead and planning their working day. One of the reasons I got into the habit of having a Psion, or a Palm, or an iPad mini in my bag was that I could sketch out ideas/outlines/first drafts for what was coming once I got to work, but equally some days I’d fire up an ebook on the same device. That was my choice to spend my commute organising my thoughts, and to my mind that’s completely different from being prompted to spend time in Teams before work starts.

This notion of employers – formally or informally – expecting staff to bookend their working day with planning/reviewing the day’s work is a terrible idea. We can but hope employers won’t take the bait.

[Via Memex 1.1]


  1. I have a horrible feeling we’ll be offered credit to spend with our official employee rewards scheme instead of actual money in our bank accounts.