If I have to hear “engagement” at another meeting this week, I am going to run out screaming (psych! I’ll just quietly whimper to myself like I always do.)
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I am not. What am I missing?
Cooperation? Definitely.
Specialization? Nope.
The appearance of specialization? Maybe.
Every single last computing device on this planet does the exact same thing at its core. The generality of the machines is what people should be educated about 1st and foremost. Specific applications are just waves on that ocean.
I was thinking more broadly - that I am trusted to write (some types of) programs and I cook a pretty good roast chicken, but I am not well suited to performing surgery, designing bridges, conserving old books, diagnosing vision problems, performing root canal surgery, tailoring, practicing law, creating Pixar level animation, blending perfumes, navigating an oil tanker or a few other things.
At a pinch I could do surgery on you, but you might be better off consulting someone who’s had more practice.
Maybe they mean,
“Everybody should have a GitHub account and the power to edit and recompile the apps they use.”
But on the other hand modern hardware and software is really complicated and expecting the masses to keep up with it is not going to work. Look what happened to amateurs trying to maintain their own cars a generation ago.
Ive noticed that there is more than one way for my pc to be “off”… as if they cant stand to let me disengage with the damn thing on my own terms, they want me to decide how much or how little “off” I think the machine will handle. But theres only one mode for me to choose, for it to be “on”. And thats a pity, because sometimes I am only going to want to process words, no internet or gaming needed, thank you very much. But no, I have to sit and wait for every possible contingency to load and fill up the machines capability, so that I might be encouraged to upgrade, never mind that I still play the same games now that I did 20 years ago.
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I’m not sure if this is fullblown conspiracy thinking or just stream of consciousness Hunter S Thompson writing that isn’t designed to be engaged with, but here I go!
Modern computers (at last since Windows 8, maybe earlier) have essentially three ‘off modes’, sleep, hibernate, and shutdown. Nothing about any of these is designed to ‘increase engagement’.
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Sleep is a power-required setting that essentially moves your computer into low power mode, and then when it wakes up, it goes back to normal operation quickly. Downsides are constant low-level power drain, but it’s fairly minor - a check I did around the internet indicated that this is around 15 bucks a year for a random place in the US and a normal-spec PC.
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Shutdown is a pretty standard shutdown of your computer, turning off power and resetting the state.
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Hibernate is interesting and I think mostly deprecated in Windows 10 at least, but it involves saving the state of your computer to disk and then turning off entirely. This means you don’t lose open files/etc, and everything is exactly how you left it, and it doesn’t use power while it’s off. But the downside is that going in and out of hibernate takes a while.
None of these are phantom conspiracies mongered by the Windows Borginati to increase engagement. In fact, honestly if your concern is ‘my computer doesn’t boot fast enough when I only use it for word processing/etc’, then sleep mode is exactly what you want, unless your computer is a laptop or otherwise power-limited. Literally all of these settings are useful and pro-customer, with real benefits.
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This is 100% what I was thinking about in my earlier mention of corruption of KPIs. Thanks for the great example.
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Thanks for explaining the mechanics of something I use every other day. That really drives your point home. You’ve clearly missed mine.
Television sets for many years have been drawing phantom power during their “off” cycle, so they dont take as long to warm up. Is this some nefarious conspiracy by our lizzardmen overlords to spy on us? Of course not. Its just designed to make it easier t o engage with the television.
Theres nothing wrong with encouraging engagement. Even when computer makers add nice features like USB sockets in the front of the box. Multiple off modes is no different.
Its just that the thinkinking about this stuff stops abruptly once the profit motive no longer applies. Using an error mode to put a safety cover on the off button is hardly a nefarious move… but it shows some laziness on the part of the programmer, that no one thought to correct.
I miss Steve Job’s musings on how many seconds he could shave off the boot process, to save consumer’s time. He rationalized the the cumulative effect could add up to several lifetimes of useful work, if added up.
And thats where I get frustrated, theres no easy way for me to boot up my machine to do only one kind of thing, and then next time I use it, boot it up to do something different. Easy enough if some linux nerd owes me a favor I guess, but not for me to just buy a machine and have it behave the way Id like.
This laziness of design can get spectacularly obnoxious, like Boeing with its MCAS and antivirus software for voting machines and video monitors. Lets not go assuming evil intent, when laziness and stupidity are more than powerful enough to explain these effects.
I get a version of that problem when I try to click on a button before the screen has finished building. Would it really be so hard for the browser to hold off accepting input until the buttons are in their final position?
You should investigate power profiles.
Can you give some examples of the different kinds of things?
It sounds like maybe multibooting OSes? Or something?
Worth mentioning laptop makers tried super low power modes where you had a small subset of functionality on a small external display.
They did not sell and they are gone now. Every so often weird and wild laptop designs come along, with similar results. See: IBM Transnote, the Sony Viao with a built in DV cam and camera mount.
So far, the masses want mostly to buy general purpose computing devices. This generation’s convertible laptop/tablets (both Android and Win10) are a surprising win for multi mode functionality, however.
If someone can fix that I will give them All Of My Money.
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