This one is certainly closely related to Sturgeon’s Law but contains the fruits of further research which I think pushes the subject in fascinating new directions.

For any grouping of humans, 90% of the people within that group will be stupid. This includes the group of non-stupid people.

 There are some aspects of the theory that still need work. One problem is that it would appear that a group of entirely stupid people can’t exist. There are two possible solutions to this that I hope to incorporate in to my Theory of Special Stupidity. Either: 1) 90% may be a minimum rather than a constant or 2) a simple exception clause is needed:

…Except for the group of stupid people. They’re just a bunch of jerks. 

There is some exciting, new research into this second possibility. Please refer to the exceptional work of Palin, et al for further details.

Rather than having to reply to each email and explain that Nasa didn’t spend millions developing a zero gravity pen rather than using a pencil or that a blond did not spend an hour holding what she thought were her brains in I came up with a handy rule that I could impart to the undeserving masses to help them lead better lives and save them countless hours hitting the “forward” button and adding further exclamation marks.

I therefore bestow on the world “Young’s Incredulity Principle”:

The amount that you’d like to believe something is true is inversely proportional to the probability of it actually being true

…where “like” includes the comfort of confirmation of long held prejudices rather than just simply making you happy.

I’m sure it’s not an original thought and it’s probably just a corollary of Sturgeon’s Law but who asked you anyway. Jeez. There’s no pleasing some people.

All right then. New Who is objectively not entirely made of finest, hand-tooled, machine-washable Fail and in reality is actually rather well put together and largely acted with laudable sincerity and charm. But man, does the writing suck.

Yes, yes, not entirely. The dialogue can be great and the plots engaging. In fact, generally it’s actually all rather good. Except for the endings.

The conclusion of every storyline is always, always utterly arbitrary, never makes any logical sense, never has anything to do with anything that preceded it and really, really just sucks.

What I think I’m trying to say is that Doctor Who is 95% rather good and 5% concentrated suck. Unfortunately, it’s the most important 5%.

No matter how promising the build up, the conclusion always resembles the opening scene of Toy Story:

Alien: Not so fast Doctor. I brought my attack dog with a built in forcefield.
Doctor: Well, I brought my dinosaur, who eats forcefield dogs
Companion: You saved the day again, Doctor!
Doctor: You’re my favourite deputy.

* Doctor puts hands in pockets and stares off into the middle distance pondering loss and loneliness *

I’ve put up happily with all this for a while but for two episodes it just became too much to bear.

“Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” are dirty, rotten conmen. They make you think you’ve just watched the best Who story ever and then sneak back later while you’re sipping your evening Ovaltine to stab you in the back. As your brain slowly gets itself around to plugging the conclusion back into the preceding events, a sneaky suspicion arises that actually, now I come to think of it, that didn’t actually make any sense now, did it.

Suspicion leads to disappointment. Disappointment leads to anger. Anger leads to blogging. And nobody wants that.

I’m not going to go into a conclusive deconstruction of the story. That would require effort. Instead I’m going to focus on the plot device that the entire house of cards was built upon and take cheap shots at it.

The Communicator.

The communicator has to be the most disastrously ill conceived piece of consumer electronics ever devised.

Ostensibly, it’s just a plain old walkie talkie, a simple device for members of the crew to keep in touch with each other. Unfortunately, this is the 51st century and the internal communication device market is rather mature and it’s terribly hard to break into the lucrative archaeologist space suit sector. Luckily, this is why we have marketing departments.

At some point during his morning’s 5th Frappuccino, one marketroid had the idea that what a space suit communicator really needs is ThoughtMail(tm). No self respecting space suit wearer would ever dare step foot outside the capsule again without having a ThoughtMail enabled comm system and that, my friends, means big bucks. Get the tech team to make it ready by Tuesday. Frappucinos all round.

We’re not shown thought-mail in action; it’s only mentioned in an amazing sleight of hand by the Doctor as he casually explains to Donna why the silly dead woman won’t shut up. However, it’s massively hard to imagine a situation where thought-mail could be handy and all to easy to imagine situations where it could be catastrophic.

Day 5 of 17 year mission of 2 man craft to explore strange new worlds:

SpaceMan 1 – Thinks: “SpaceMan 2’s personal hygiene is even worse than usual today. I think I may vomit over his misshaped head if he comes any closer.”
ThoughtMail communicator: “Message sent”
SpaceMan 1: “Bugger”

The UI suffers from comparatively minor issues. The device at first glance appears to be of Jobsian simplicity, only possessing a single button and a level indicator. The little button acts just like a button on a regular walkie-talkie; you press it when you want to transmit. This is all well and good except let’s not forget that this device can READ YOUR FREAKING MIND so I think we’ve passed the point of needing to press any damn buttons.

The level indicator seems not to indicate battery life or signal strength but rather the time since the device last had a really good look at your brain. Maybe this is a configurable option. It may be that as the level indicator isn’t actually viewable to the user

Mind reading could easily be considered severe feature bloat for a comms device in and of itself but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The device also appears to have full blown consciousness storage and brain simulation linked to a voice emulator. This actually gives the device autonomous cognitive and communicative ability.

This functionality is seemingly not apparent during normal usage. However, for some reason it kicks right in immediately and seamlessly upon user death.

Now if I had that kind of tech at my disposal, I think I’d probably use the ability to detect a sudden catastrophic lack of existence with, say, a little red light rather than elaborately pretending the user is still alive despite all evidence to the contrary. There *are* times when run-time errors are the correct way to handle things.

The only circumstance that this may possibly come in handy is if the user is a myriad swarm of flesh eating particles with a collective consiousness that wishes to communicate vocally with humanoids.

I think that can safely be dismissed as an edge case.

It’s a curious thing but Apple really bring out the stupid in people.

I’m not talking about the fanboys. We know about them. I mean the knockers too.

Not that there’s anything wrong with knockers. Hell, no. I like knockers. Just not dumb knockers.

I imagine there’s a whole lot of dumb going on out there about the iPhone (Technorati currently lists about 5000 iPhone entries) but who has the time. I’ll just point at Guy Kewney and laugh for a bit.

He kicks off his analysis with a curious ad hominem. He compares Jobs with Saruman, presumably because this is his only frame of reference for dealing with charisma. But then he appears to get a bit confused and thinks Jobs *is* Saruman. He proves the folly of criticising Jobs by using a quote from Tolkien rather than, say, an example from The Real World™.

Whatever. That’s not the issue.

The really actually worrying thing is just how much he missed the whole point of the new iPhone touch screen interface. However, it does make it easier to understand how a random person from the Congo could have been used to comment on Apple instead of him.

Ignoring all the new (at least allegedly) revolutionary user interaction in the iPhone, Guy is solely concerned, maybe even disorientated, by the lack of the iPod scroll wheel.

How will we, The Public, cope? How is it even possible to consider browsing a music collection without a scroll wheel? Even on the iPod shuffle, “Apple decided people wanted the scroll wheel.”

Except of course that

• the Shuffle didn’t actually have a scroll wheel
• Apple didn’t really have the choice of implementing a touch screen UI instead

But let’s say Guy was right. Let’s say that maybe maybe maybe people really can only use the scroll wheel now. However, Guy comprehensively demonstrates that he really doesn’t get it with his closing words.

“This time next year, we’ll have to see if they decide to launch a version 1.5 with the scroll wheel on the back…”

Sweet Teen Bejesus. They spend millions developing a virtual touch screen interface that can be programmed to act as any 2D UI imaginable, only to be told that they should stick a physical scroll wheel on the back.

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As Pratchett apparently said, “I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”

But thinking in the box, or just plain straight, doesn’t a guru make. Nope. Far better to pick up your axe first and then find something to grind it against.

“And so, the question that I’m amazed that no blogger seems to have asked is why didn’t they send out the OS and let us install it on our own computers?”

Rather than contemplate the possibility that Microsoft gave away a laptop with Vista pre-installed because:

• being given big, shiny things makes people more predisposed to you
• people don’t just install a new OS on their computer (except Mac users who are just soooo excited about Parallels still) to see if they like it and therefore the bloggers would never actually get around to trying Vista

…Dave exclusively reveals the reason using only the power of his MBA *and* MSEd. educated super brain:

“The answer, once you think about things this way, is obvious, and that’s the real story here:

Microsoft Vista is in fact a bear to install and has prohibitive hardware requirements.”

The faithful are grateful that he is humble enough to share his unique thinking with them:

“That’s really an excellent point, Dave, and I agree that it’s surprising that it hasn’t been made up till now. I’ve mostly dismissed the whole discussion as a rehashing of the PayPerPost debate, so I’m guilty of not really thinking it through, too. Thanks for the illumination of common sense.”

It’s all a bit odd really as he then goes on to make the other uniquely insightful observation that people don’t like upgrading their OS.

I guess the strain of being published over 1,000 times and frequently appearing in podcasts can get to you.

Or maybe you need to troll to get traffic to your blog so you can slip into italics at the end and and subliminally suggest somebody from Apple send you a brand new MacBook Pro for being such a good boy and Thinking Different™.

]]> http://no.no.youdontunderstand.itsallreallybad.com/2007/01/05/get-back-in-the-box/feed/ 0 http://no.no.youdontunderstand.itsallreallybad.com/2006/12/26/damn-lag/ http://no.no.youdontunderstand.itsallreallybad.com/2006/12/26/damn-lag/#comments Mon, 25 Dec 2006 21:41:48 +0000 loser http://no.no.youdontunderstand.itsallreallybad.com/?p=6 For months I was suffering from terminal keyboard and mouse lag when trying to to play Half Life 2. The keyboard would seem to lock up momentarily which often meant I would glide forward even after I had stopped pressing any keys and the mouse would become unresponsive. As this coincided with a graphics card upgrade and had seen something in the Source FAQ about keyboard lag I presumed it was just some weird config thang. Time went on and nothing I did seemed to help. I then noticed it was happening in every single game I tried no matter how low the graphics settings were.

I finally gave up and swapped my old graphics card back in.

No difference.

Googled once more and found a post suggesting killing off a Logitech task. I don’t have a Logitech anything but it gave me the somewhat belated idea of wiping out all extraneous processes. So I did. With extreme prejudice.

Well, what do you know. It was gosh darn Google Desktop.

Yup. Google Desktop. It seems they can afford to pay $1.6bn for a boatload of skanky video clips and its zombie teenage passengers but they can’t write a routine that detects a double control key click without messing up the entire input buffer for everyone else.

Posted in the hope that other poor lagged out souls (and it seems that we are Legion) may find and be comforted.

While advocacy can only go so far, Godwin’s Law is absolute.

Ahmadinejad may not have actually made his comment on a website but he might has well have done. His absolutist position, repetitive childish insults and complete inability to deal with facts shows all the hallmarks of an experienced forum troll.

Someone really needs to mod that guy down.

And so much fun too.