April 1st
Computer system Error Restore – The way to Trobleshoot and fix and Correct Most Laptop or computer Problems
As a software/system engineer, I can't help but compare the process I follow to provide a product vs. the process our legislatures follow. Maybe I just don't get political science. The process I use may seem a little dry, but even cool products like the iPod and cell phone were not produced by a continuous stream of pizza parties and happy hours (or backroom deals).
Intro
Verification and Validation or “V&V” is the process of making sure that a product does what it was asked to do (Verification) and meets its intended purpose (Validation). In other words, verification is “I did what you asked me to do” and validation is “I met your needs”.
In developing software, the process before V&V includes coding (writing the software), compiling (the computer converts your software into a program it can run), and testing (Make sure the program doesn't crash and appears to do what it should). For example, let's write a program that provides health care for every American.
Coding and Compiling
Which of the following two code samples will compile?
Code Sample 1:
for (american=1, american
“Next to the many problems the world faces today, debates about online culture may not seem that pressing,” writes Lanier early on in his missive. He notes that other orders of business, such as global climate and economic concerns, have a much higher priority. “But digital culture and related topics … concern the society we’ll have if we can survive these challenges.”
This perspective is hard to maintain, especially during some harrowing passages about the noosphere, trolls, and the Singularity, terms which aren’t discussed much outside of computer science circles but have massive implications for all of humanity.
The Singularity, as Lanier explains it, is simply the vague idea that at some point, a technology will be developed that is advanced beyond a human’s computational skill. In more radical versions, the Singularity becomes a kind of technological Rapture that includes, “people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious, or people simply being annihilated in an imperceptible instant before a new super-consciousness takes over the Earth.” One would hope that participation isn’t mandatory; I personally enjoy being human.
While the Singularity is not an imminent reality, the noosphere, a term describing the collective brain formed by those connected via the Internet, has already contributed to the degradation of individuality, according to our author. Lanier also refers to the noosphere as a ‘hive-mind mentality,’ a cognitive interpretation of digital culture with clear Marxist collectivist leanings. Lanier doesn’t find the ideology malevolent, but he provides evidence of its dangers.
When online users are presented with what Lanier calls “transient anonymity” (such as when a new e-mail address – something obtainable in seconds – is the only prerequisite to creating an account that allows a user to spew all the hatred in the multiverse on some poor message board), ornery feelings can snowball into malicious attacks. At least, that’s the most generous explanation for behavior such as the digital taunting of the parents and friends of Mitchell Henderson, a seventh-grader who committed suicide in 2006. The first sentence of the first entry pulled up in a Google search for “Mitchell Henderson” reads: “Mitchell Henderson killed himself over losing an iPod, listening to Morrissey and getting bullied for being an wimpy white kid.” The grammatical error is another backhand, an allusion to the apparently comic misspellings of classmates who were audacious enough to take up Web bandwidth in publishing condolences on a memorial MySpace page. Apparently, the first link, which comes from Encyclopedia Drammatica, a Wikipedia-style catalogue of wide-ranging topics with entries that are marked by parody and satire, was more relevant (at least according to the at times obscure priority hierarchies of Google) than an August 2008 New York Times article on the same subject.
In a chronology of what went wrong in the digital world, Lanier would probably begin with UNIX. UNIX is manipulated by users through a feature called the command line interface; instead of a mouse and cursor, you typed a command that could be understood by UNIX and pressed Enter. UNIX doesn’t care whether a human user hits Enter or if the command comes from another computer program. The computational speed of UNIX, much faster than any human can type, implicitly disparages the sloth-like experience of being human. “As a result, UNIX is based on discrete events that don’t have to happen at a precise moment in time,” writes Lanier. “The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized precisely in time.” People argue that the speed of technology aids human experience. Lanier believes technology’s speed confuses our experience, causing us to conform to what the computer asks of us instead of computers obeying human users, which is ideally how the whole gambit runs.
“People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time,” writes Lanier. “Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you just playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever?” It’s not that search engines are unhelpful. But digital technologies should be ancillary, Lanier argues; the boast shouldn’t be of “smart” technology but of the people who contribute to the meaningful depth of these technologies, from the website developer down to the casual forum wanderer who posts insightful gardening or pet-care tips.
The essential point here is that technology is dumb. Smart phones are not smart and the World Wide Web is not a large brain. A search engine can index more information in ten seconds than a human can in a lifetime, but it can’t cook a meal. A smart phone with voice recognition can dial a friend without the need to push one button, but it can’t tell you the right words to say. Our willingness to accept the prevailing advertising behind “intelligent” technologies is indicative of what Lanier calls the spiritual failure of digital culture, “redirecting the leap of faith we call ‘hope’ away from people and towards gadgets.”
“It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but … let me affirm that I am not turning against the internet. I love the internet,” Lanier asserts. In many respects, the Internet and technology in general has been a great boon to human experience, and Lanier understands this, even if his comments at time seem unreasonably harsh. For instance, he mentions an online forum for musicians who play the oud, a string instrument from the Middle East. Without the Internet allowing access to the forum, information on the instrument would be very hard to come by, and those who actually play it would be at a total loss unless they lived in the Middle East.
Lanier is trying to remind us of the great responsibility we all have to keep the evolution of technology honest and subservient to the human race instead of the other way around. He waxes poetic about songles, physical objects (within which song files are implanted) that can interact with media players in a local area, or Second Life, a 3D virtual reality world with a social interface that discourages trolling. He even proposes a compelling idea: paying for Internet access by the amount of bits accessed instead of a flat monthly fee. In Lanier’s proposal, you would be paid for the amount of people accessing your information as well.
Lanier’s manifesto lacks direction at points, and the jargon gets even worse than some terms I’ve included here (Bachelardian neotony? Holy crap…) But even if it can’t tell the common person what to change, You Are Not a Gadget gives you a clear idea of what to resist. Lanier even gives a short list of ideas early in the book that can help us remain individuals on the Web, including (ironically?) creating a website for personal expression or posting a video that takes one hundred times longer to create than it takes to view. Unless we actively take a stand to assert our individuality and create a culture of understanding instead of violation, we take the heavy risk of being reduced to fragments of data, with all the global social unrest that invites.
So turn your computer off and go for a walk. Soak up all the little things programs can’t even recognize, much less enjoy. Maybe even read You Are Not A Gadget, which is very lively company. And when you turn your computer back on (as you must, because that world wants – and deserves, let’s not forget – your attention too), think about it differently.
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Steve Brachmann is a freelance writer and actor from Buffalo, NY. Has had work published for Dissolver Magazine, Image Icon Entertainment, Northeastern’s Times New Roman and The Buffalo News. His personal blog can be found at http://scubasteve519.livejournal.com/.
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