I’ve always complained about printers, somehow in the last 15 years they really haven’t improved much.  They are cheaper, they now use USB instead of the parallel port, and they now have a bunch of features that also don’t work.  However, they are unreliable, contain expensive ink, and did I mention they are just unreliable?

In a recent post at Gizmodo, I found someone who had expressed the same sentiment in a much more detailed and hilarious style than I ever have been able to.  Here are a couple of points I find particularly funny and true:

First let me give a brief description of what a “network externality” is from Economic Theory.  Many products benefit from having others use the same or compatible products.  For example, there is no benefit to being the only person in the world with a fax machine, the benefits of having a fax machine depend on having many people own a fax machine and having a compatible standard to send messages between them.  The more people you want to send messages to that have fax machines, the more benefit you receive from the product.  The same could be said for services such as text messaging and instant messaging.

For many years one of the biggest difficulties in owning a Mac vs. a PC was in compatibility.  For example, a majority of the software and hardware devices were not compatible, and thus you had to buy special hardware and software that you could not easily swap with friends.  While previously Mac used SCSI hard drives and RISC processors that were very different from interfaces and processors used by PC’s and thus caused many compatibility issues, the emergence of USB has a universal standard for devices on both PC and Mac as well as the adoption of Intel processors in Macs has lowered these network externalities by making hardware (and subsequently software) much more compatible between the two.

I prefer a PC for many reasons, but the biggest for me is still these network externality reasons.  I use fairly esoteric software that is not widely distributed and built for Macs, mostly for research and statistical analysis.

In a recent conversation with a college student they seemed confused by why there are compatibility issues since “everyone they knew used a Mac.”  They were somewhat astounded to discover that Mac is far less than 10% of the market, roughly 6% as of this writing.  When your peer group is hip college students, Macs may indeed be ubiquitous, but in the real world, especially businesses, PC’s still continue to dominate.  Which brings me to wonder whether this “niche” market of college students perceive high network benefits from their friends owning Macs, and thus assume the network externalities of owning a Mac are greater than a PC.  In their case it may be true for now, but not later when they graduate and enter the real world, or have to run software other than Word, Safari, and instant messenger.

Are we in for (A) a group of very disappointed college graduates in the future, or (B) a change in greater marketplace as students and other artists and hipsters demand more compatibility from their Macs.  Software already exists such as Boot Camp and Parallels for Mac to run Windows applications, but my thought is that if you buy a Mac and still have to buy Windows, something is wrong.  You are not running an alternative system, you are running an additional system.  You are paying for two operating systems, with all the difficulties and problems of both.

Every futuristic movie or book  that includes some kind of year in the title should receive some kind of acknowledgment when that year finally arrives.  In 2001, our predictions about an intelligent computer taking over the mission and having space exploration to distant planets did not quite arrive as in “2001:  A Space Odyssey.” This year, following the 2001 tradition, is of course a much lesser known Stanley Kubrick fictional work, “2010: The Year We Make Contact”. While it may be possible that this will be the year we encounter alien life, I’m willing to put a few dollars betting it will not. Of course, we have the year yet to determine what the future will look like.

While the previous two movies were released in the 1980’s, film makers have apparently decided that movies that begin with years in the title do well, however, they are less ambitious about how far into the future they are predicting.  The book 1984 was written back in 1949, while the new movie 2012 was just release this year.  Perhaps this works as a good marketing ploy, you better see this movie soon before its futuristic visions don’t come true and you lose the suspension of disbelief.

I will soon be putting together a Windows Home Server from a spare computer and parts, and consolidating hard drives into that, in doing some reading on the new product I came across this ad gimmick from Microsoft, an entire children’s book explaining to children why there is a server in their home.  Apart from laughing historically about this for a few minutes, I feel like there is possibly a market here.  We have children’s books to describe animals, sounds, shapes, and colors, but where are the children’s books to discuss with them the important lessons they will need to know before kindergarten, like when to send a text message vs. an IM vs. an email, or how to configure your firewall?  Perhaps children’s authors should team up with the tech people and educate our children early on about these important issues.

For some reason lately a reoccurring topic of conversation has been when and if the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) will arrive? In talking with people who work in industry the feeling I got was that the end was a long ways away, mostly because land lines are everywhere, in every home, and with technological improvements ISP’s are planning to continue to increase the internet speeds available for serving the internet over DSL.

Part of my interest in this is close to home, I have family that work in the telecomm industry. Other interests arrived from a podcast of one of my favorite NPR programs, On Point, discussing the end of landlines.  I also recently came across this article about AT&T asking the FCC to set a date to end land line service.  I’m sure there is some game theoretical argument about why the FCC should shut down POTS rather than waiting for the market to take care of it, but I fail to see why the government should need to intervene in this case.  I understand their intervention in the recent digital television conversion this year, but why the FCC should shut down POTS is beyond my understanding.  It seems to me there is a great opportunity for someone somewhere to take advantage of this small but significant amount of bandwidth going to every home that will eventually go unused.  Entrepreneurs of the world take note!

The Onion (yes, headquartered in my hometown of Madison, WI) recently posted an article about local Pittsburgh students being among some of the best in the nation at spelling “Roethlisberger” (the last name of the Steelers’ quarterback). It’s a proud time to live in Pittsburgh.

The New York Times has an article [here] about the declining cost of supercomputers and what that means for “citizen scientists.”  From my (albeit limited) research experience it seems to me that very little research that would benefit from computing power is there is little research not being done because of lack of computing power.  The difficulties in crunching huge amounts of data are analyzing it in a meaningful way, cleaning it, and asking questions of interest.  But before you can get to that point, you have to have the data collected in one place, which seems to be a much greater bottleneck to research than is supercomputing power.

In general I disagree with the “flattening” power of cheaper supercomputers, for those with technical knowledge to query and analyze data from supercomputers they have always had access.  Those without the knowledge would not benefit from it to begin with.

NYT – Shared Supercomputing and Everyday Research

I recently came across an article in Time magazine stating that the fall of Wikipedia was inevitable, and cited how Wikipedia is not growing as fast as it once did.  I find it very fascinating that the commentary is that Wikipedia is becoming more and more bureaucratic, and in order to successfully contribute the barriers to entry are high:

Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by élite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your edits to stick, you’ve got to learn to cite the complex laws of Wikipedia in arguments with other editors. Together, these changes have created a community not very hospitable to newcomers.

I am continuing research on Wikipedia Administrators and I find the organizational problem of how to “manage the crowd” a very interesting area.  Is it really inevitable that any organization must get more bureaucratic as it gets larger?  What organizational levers exist for Wikipedia to be able deal with its current issues as the contributor base grows?

Time Magazine – Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

I recently added my two cents to a panel of students discussing the pros and cons of having children while in graduate school. The website is for doctoral student in Organizational Communications and Information Systems (OCIS) within the Academy of Management.

See the posting here.

My wife, and several friends are attempting to write a full novel in a month as part of an online group of writers all attempting the same thing called nanowrimo. I’m curious what papers or book chapters would look like if academics attempted this same thing, cranking out a few pages a day on an idea, then doing all the editing later.

In the book I’m reading now about writing your dissertation (Writing the Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, a terrible title if you ask me) the author suggests a similar idea.  The first phase of writing is the zero draft, in which your goal is to write 5 page a day, everyday.  The idea is to establish a strong connection between your thoughts and the paper by dumping everything that is in your head to overcome block or self criticism.  Later, several rounds of editing the zero draft put it into more finalized form.  I’m not sure how this works exactly with literature reviews, methods sections, and theory sections, but perhaps it is beneficial early on in the project.

I came across this article the other day that is an interesting study of personal networks and computer use. Here’s an interesting come back for anyone receiving flack for spending to much time on Facebook/Twitter and not enough in the real world…

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Social Isolation and New Technology