Slow Dance - An Internet Forward

Today I am unoriginal. This is an email forward that I just received and decided to put on my blog. I first received this one about 4 years ago. It may have started circulating even before that. However, when I received it today, I felt very much like the poet who wrote it, and I'd like to say the same thing to some friends. Thus, I am putting it up. Of course, I will spare you the mass/chain mail stuff.

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?
When you ask How are you?
Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done
Do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?
You'd better slow down
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.

Ever told your child,
We'll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time
To call and say,"HI"
You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift....Thrown away.
Life is not a race.
Do take it slower
Hear the music
Before the song is over.

Who killed Ayn Rand?

America's Swadeshi Movement

Quotation of the Day

"The South is religious. The rest of the country is educated. "
- one of my MBA classmates

Democracy: The Political Communism

The Pirates of the Cyberia

Quotation of the Day

"I wonder what's gonna happen to the next generation of Indians born in the US" (referring to the 'losing of roots' among American Indians or American Born Confused Desis/ABCDs, as they are called)
- My friend and senior at the MBA program

"I am more concerned about a graver problem. What's the next generation of Indians born in India be like"
- yours truly The Maverick

Who killed my DVD?

DVRs like TiVo sent shock-waves down the spine of marketing managers and advertising agencies everywhere. After all, they provide time-shift television and weed out the ads, making it difficult to reach the consumers. I foresee in the near future a time where ad-neutralizing devices would be commonplace, and would cover all media including TV, theater, music, movies, print, radio and web. Does that mean the death of advertising? Hell, no! Apart from creative product placements, I foresee an era of on-demand advertisements...essentially an era of pull-advertising rather than push-advertising. This isn't very different from The Yellow Pages or a web-search.

However, that's not what inspired me to write this piece today. DVRs have also unsettled the media and entertainment industry in general, and not just for the fear of loss of advertising revenues. Film-studios, for instance, worry about losing out on DVD sales. The reason broadcast of movies on cable doesn't kill DVD distribution is time-inconvenience, push-ads and etheral character. DVDs are on-demand, ad-free and ownable. Though on-demand channels overcome the first two barriers, they trip on the third. As of now, human psychology allocates a premium on physical ownership. And that's not about to change in a hurry. That's one of the reasons that the Network PC and Applications-on-Demand/Application-rentals fell flat on their face.

DVRs change the scenario. They deal with all the three issues satisfactorily. So will the DVR kill the DVD? The current statistics make that question appear ridiculous. And considering the number of DVDs I own, I want to stay in denial, and laugh the issue off.

However, this is no laughing matter. VHS killed Beta in spite of having a poorer picture quality merely because of the longer play length. VCD eliminated the need to rewind and provided longer product life; that was the end of VHS. DVD murdered VCD with the better quality, single-disc and bonus features cards. So is DVR the next king of content?

I'll give a rather diplomatic answer. It depends. Current DVRs use Winchester-discs/hard-disks to store programming. I believe that is on its way out. I see the minimization of moving parts. I see the end of fragile discs like DVDs or hard discs. I see the onslaught of solid-state media. This onslaught has already started. My roommate has a 4GB Flash-drive (a.k.a. jump drive, thumb drive, pen drive, memory stick, and USB drive), the size of a matchbox. I have a 1GB SDRAM card 1/8 the size. Presently the economies are not good enough to make these the preferred software distribution media. Within 3 years, however, movies will be distributed on solid state memories. And THAT will kill the DVD.

For all their strengths, DVR can not achieve the coup-de-grâce for two reasons:
1. Portability. There are times when you want to carry around your movies. DVRs are no good in that area.
2. Scalability. DVRs have a fixed memory size. As a computer user, you'd appreciate that however large a hard disc you buy, it starts feeling small within a half and one year. As your collection grows, you will hate being constrained.
3. Searchability. For another generation at least, people will prefer going through colorful physical stacks of movies to searching on a tiny screen using a cramped keypad of a DVR.

To be fair, DVRs will evolve on their part. They will become smaller and lighter. They will facilitate better search, typically through connection with a computer or with a plug-in full-size keyboard. And they will start accepting solid-state memory. But that will just make them DVD-player replacement, not a DVD-media replacement.

In conclusion, watch out all you DVD collectors. Your collection is about to be rendered obsolete and useless.

Of Product Life-Cycles and Technology Adoption

The Lament

Oh, my sweetest darling
What an angel face you've got
Would've been even more wonderful
If you also had a heart

Break my heart at will
Valuable experience for me
You've broken many toys
Another one should be easy

Presently you don't need me
You'll get many lovers
You are like the beautiful Eden
You'll get many flowers

Erase me from your heart
Sure, you may try and do
But I tell you, there will be left
A vacuum inside of you

When someone breaks your heart
And leaves you in pain and all blue
Come to me then, my love
My heart will always be open for you

My Visa works like Mastercard!

A bottle of Drumgray Cream Liqueur made with Deanston whisky and Scottish double cream.
£11.99

Two emails to invite a friend to come over and pick up her gift.
< $0.01

Watching a red-haired girl's face turn red, when you step out of your door to see her off and bid her goodnight.
Priceless.

The anarchy of the keyboard

Every once in a while, one runs into a nerd who rants to no end about how inefficient standards like QWERTY have taken over the world in spite of better solutions like Dvorak being available.

I have been told numerous times that QWERTY is really bad design and an ergonomic abomination. Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard in 1868 for typewriters in order to slow down the typists, and prevent the keys from jamming. Occasionally, someone brings up the fact that the first line of the keyboard (QWERTYUP) contains the word "typewriter", as an illustration of the assertion that this keyboard was developed for typewriters, not computers. The rights to this "new and improved" keyboard layout were sold to E. Remington and Sons, who promptly commercialized it.

Since then, so many people have gotten used to the layout that there is a lock-in/ path-dependence due to collective switching costs. The world could be a slightly better place if everyone switches to a more ergonomic layout such as the Dvorak keyboard.

The Dvorak keyboard was created in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, who was hugely inspired by Frank Gilbreth, the father of time and motion (efficiency) study. He called it the American Simplified Keyboard (ASK), which was the fruit of his ten years of research on increasing efficiency and reducing strain.

It would be reasonable to assume then, that such a well-researched, ergonomically-designed layout will win people over overnight and boost the efficiency of the world. However, there is one little problem called network effects. You may also call it catch 22. Typists will not train on Dvorak keyboards as they are hard to find in offices. And companies will not equip offices with Dvorak keyboards because typists trained on Dvorak are hard to find. And hence, the world lives on with a self-reinforcing inefficient layout.

Or so the story goes. The inspired anti-establishment enthusiasm of the Dvorak supporters is amusing because it is so misplaced. There is no empirical evidence of the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard. The most popular source cited as proof is a paper dated 1936 written by Dvorak et al. Of course Mr. Dvorak thought his keyboard was better.

Are there any impartial studies done on the subject? Well, it is claimed that the Navy ran an extensive test, though the Navy itself says, "we have no record of and did not conduct such a speed test." Further research reveals that there is, in fact, such a report in existence.

Unfortunately for Dvorak fans, the test was performed on severely under-qualified typists. Further, the experiment was conducted by "Lieutenant Commander August Dvorak" (surprise, surprise).

On the other hand, the case against Dvorak appears to be much more solid. According to Strong (1956), research shows that there is no advantage of retraining on Dvorak vs. retraining on QWERTY. A Miller and Thomas study (1977) found no significantly superior keyboard to QWERTY.

Norman and Rummelhart (1983) demonstrated most emphatically that there is no ergonomic advantage to Dvorak over QWERTY. Both layouts have about equal loads on right and left hand, with the split for Dvorak being 47-53 and that for QWERTY 57-43, making Dvorak only marginally better. Both keyboards maximize the load on the middle row - Dvorak about 67% and QWERTY just over 50%, making QWERTY significantly better. By putting successively typed keys apart, the QWERTY maximizes the frequency of alternating hand sequences and minimizes the frequency of same-finger typing.

These findings, though relatively recent, are hardly surprising. After all, QWERTY was not the first attempt at keyboard layout. No less than 51 inventions predated it. In fact, after Remington commercialized the design, it was met with fierce competition from other designs. Of course, QWERTY prevailed, and won many typing competitions at the end of the 19th century.

It is possible that a win in that era was a win for the typewriter layout, not for a computer keyboard. The QWERTY may today be inefficient, and may have given Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (a repetitive stress injury) to many a typist, but there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Dvorak's ASK layout is any better. Nor that there exists any other layout better than good old QWERTY. Till such an alternative is invented, rest in peace all you keyboard anarchists.