Now, some of the things they’ve done have just been misguided. For example, I really, honestly believe that when they sniffed people’s unencrypted wifi traffic while doing Street View mapping drives, they weren’t being purposefully malicious, just absent-mindedly misguided. (I also have trouble getting too upset about sniffing unencrypted wifi signals — yeah, it’s kind of bad, but if the people who owned those networks really wanted privacy, would it have been that hard to turn on WPA?)

And then there was the bit where they auto-subscribed everyone with a Gmail account to Google Buzz — which, by default, made huge amounts of information public that shouldn’t have been. This was a really massive mistake, but given the way Google backpedaled from it, I still believe that they were just misguided and didn’t think things through at all, rather than actively wanting to cause harm.

But when Google Checkout tried to impose a “no adult content” rule on Dreamwidth? That’s a lot greyer. In essence, what Google did was tell an organization devoted to enabling free speech that it had to muzzle its users.

Google has the right to choose who it wants to do business with, based on whatever criteria it wants. But just because their choice is legal doesn’t make it “non-evil”. It’s not clear just exactly what “adult content” would have included, but there’s a strong likelihood that it would have included things like:

• safer-sex information, including family planning, contraception, and how to use condoms properly;
• discussion of rape, including rape survivor groups;
• promotion of equal rights for sexual minorities

Keeping information like that off the Internet? Is not helping the world. Suppressing that kind of information harms the world, and I’d qualify it as a straight-up evil act.

It’s possible, though, that they only mean “actual pornography” (however you define that). As much as I personally may like both pornography itself, and the right to disseminate and receive it, I have to admit that simply choosing not to do business with a company that helps people publish it is not, in itself, evil.

So what about entering into secret back-room agreements to try to do an end-run around Net Neutrality and everything it stands for? And then promulgating a legislative framework proposal for Internet governance that would turn the principle of Net Neutrality into a defanged, loophole-ridden and corporation-appeasing shadow of its former self — while pretending, on the surface, to support it?

In effect, this means a full-scale attack on the core of a free Internet. This is something that reminds me of when Microsoft was going to try to “de-commoditize [the] protocols” that formed the basis for the Internet and World Wide Web, back in the first Halloween memo.

If there is a way in which this isn’t evil, can someone please explain it to me? Because it sure looks evil to me.

In the meantime, there’s one tiny problem with trying to boycott Google: They make some damned useful products. Still, if you want to start reducing your reliance on Google, here are some pointers that may help.

I’m not bothered by them. I’m far too aware of the great number of coders that, to put it bluntly, simply can’t code. It doesn’t matter to me whether they’ve risen to their level of incompetence, or they’ve been in sky-high architect territory for too long and gotten rusty at function-level coding, or they’re simply lying on their résumé and they were never able to so much as solve a FizzBuzz problem. The fact is, they keep winding up in interviews, and it’s (part of) the interviewer’s job to weed them out. As quickly as possible, to avoid wasting any more time than necessary.

Back when I was in my first tech job, as a Linux sysadmin, I was one of the people interviewing potential candidates. I decided it would be nice to set them at ease by starting off with a few easy, “warmup” questions. So I’d start off with things like, “What is a runlevel in Unix? What are the most commonly-used runlevels, and what do they do?” Or, “What port does HTTP use by default? How about SMTP?”

I was astounded to find that there were applicants who couldn’t answer these questions.

Not in the sense of, “I’m sorry, but I’d have to look that up” (though even that would be a little odd; these are things any Unix sysadmin should have engraved on their consciousness). No, this was in the sense of “A runlevel? Ummm… I think I’ve heard that term, but I don’t know those kinds of details.”

My only real quarrel with FizzBuzz is that, at this point, any developer worth their salt is familiar with it. And tired of it. It’d be nice to have a few slightly new and different tests of completely basic competence… but you know what? Any test that is so basic would have to be just as boring. That’s okay.

These tests are essentially saying, “Prove that you’re not lying on your résumé.” And while I may know perfectly well that I’m not lying, how is a total stranger to know that about me? I’m not bothered by the “trust, but verify” stance of modern interviewers, because there are so many people who do lie on their résumés (and fail at simple, FizzBuzz-style tests) that it would be lunacy to blindly believe applicants any more.

(What that says about our society is a topic for another post… a post on another blog. It’s outside Coyote Tracks‘ scope.)

For example, I can reasonably well say that I have 5 years of experience with AJAX: I taught myself AJAX in the summer of 2005, and have been using it pretty consistently since then. But how many “years of experience” do I have with SQL?

I started using it around 2002 or 2003, but if I say that I “have 7 years of experience” with it, I give the impression that I’m some kind of SQL expert… which is definitely not true. It’s the sort of thing I use about once every week or two. I’ll set up a database schema, maybe even type out some raw commands in a MySQL command-line client, and then I’ll just let whatever framework I’m using handle all the details for me.

So, what sort of answer should I give to the question? The sense in which I “use” (or “have experience with”) SQL is simply not the same as the sense in which I use things like JavaScript, PHP, or CSS. (The sense in which a DBA uses SQL is probably comparable to the sense in which I use CSS… but I can’t be sure, not being one myself.)

At least the idea of having “a year of experience with” SQL does make a certain sort of sense. What should I say when asked how many “years of experience” I have with XLM or JSON? These aren’t realyl “technologies” so much as data formats. It’s like asking someone how many years of experience they have saving files in .txt or .doc format (as opposed to using Notepad or MS Word).

The only metrics that are worse than “years of experience” are: “When did you start using Technology X?” (which, thankfully, very few people have asked), and the utterly subjective “How would you rate yourself with Technology X, on a scale of 1 to 10?” (I need to write an entire post about that particular metric, when I get a chance.)

I’d never realized there was so much variation just in one letter. I was converted into a fontaholic on the spot (though not so completely as my sister, who now designs typefaces professionally for a prestigious font foundry — way to go, sis!). But it’s easy to get too absorbed in the letters.

Like Debussy, who noted that “music is the space between the notes”, I’ve become enamored with the kind of typography that happens between the letters. It’s more important than you think it is, because: It makes your text easier for people to read.

Non-Breaking Spaces

The humble non-breaking space has been a full-fledged HTML entity code since the late ’90s. Entering   will produce one in any browser that’s still in use… and yet, nobody makes use of them. It’s a shame that this character’s being wasted; it’s very useful in places like:

Before dashes

I’ve got a couple of em dashes in my very first paragraph. Go ahead and try changing your browser window’s width so the text re-flows. No matter what you do, you can’t get those dashes to show up at the beginning of a line. Ah, but this dash — this one, you can get at the beginning of a line. Looks ugly, doesn’t it?

If you look at a properly typeset book, magazine, or newspaper, you’ll see that dashes work nicely at the ends of lines, but if they wind up at the beginnings of lines, they look awkward. Almost orphaned. Putting a non-breaking space before your dashes will ensure that the awkward layout never happens. (I’ve got a pair of keystrokes in my editor bound to the sequences “ — ” and “ – “ — note that each of those sequences includes a trailing space, to save me even more typing. And in laying out those particular quoted strings, I used non-breaking spaces at the ends, so that the closing quotes are always on the same line as the rest of the sequence.)

At paragraph endings, to avoid orphans

I mentioned things looking “almost orphaned” earlier. In typesetting, the word “orphan” can refer to either of two things: One is “A single line of text at the top of a (physical) page” — this is the meaning commonly used by word processing programs, which will apply “widow and orphan protection” to ensure that no fewer than two lines ever appear together at the top or bottom of a page.

But the other meaning is “one or two short words of text forming a sole, final line of a paragraph”. For example, consider:

This is the sort of thing up with which I will not
put.

Once again, this looks horrible. And once again, it can be avoided by using a non-breaking space between the penultimate and final words of your sentences. (Okay, this takes a bit of mindfulness, I’ll admit. Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that works best when you’re editing, not when you’re writing the first time around. And you only need it with short final words; there’s no need to bother if the last word of your paragraph is “elephantine”.)

At beginnings and ends of inline titles

The history of literature and the arts is filled with titles that start or end with very short words. Titles like As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

Depending on just how wide your browser window is, and what your font size is, probably at least one of those titles has a lone, orphaned word at the beginning or the end of a line. But you can resize your browser window however you like, and the titles in this paragraph will never have that orphaned-word effect. I’m sure you can guess exactly why. And the titles are: As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

If Only We Had Non-Breaking Hyphens!

All this talk about non-breaking spaces is pretty cool, but what do you do when you list a phone number, and you want to avoid having (415) 555‑1212 get broken across a line-break? Or a book’s ISBN, such as 020530902‑X or 030010699‑8?

For some reason, the W3C never bothered to provide a decent non-breaking hyphen code, like &nbhy; or &nbh; or some such. More’s the pity. But the Unicode code point U+2011 (or 8209 in decimal), found in the “General Punctuation” section, is defined as a non-breaking hyphen. (It occupies the next code point after U+2010, simply called “hyphen”.) So using either ‑ or ‑ should get you a nice non-breaking hyphen in any modern browser.

If that doesn’t do it for you, you could set up a .nowrap { white-space: nowrap; } definition in your sitewide CSS file. Then just wrap any hyphenated text that you want to keep on one line in span tags with the class “nowrap”, like so: <span class="nowrap">123‑456‑7890</span>

You probably won’t be surprised to find examples of these basic principles in the source code to many of my previous posts. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time.

I could say all sorts of things about schadenfreude, or how the developer — who goes by the nom de plume “Shifty Jelly” — should have seen this coming. But the guy’s already having a bad enough month, and there are broader issues to examine. Among them the thought raised by commenter Erik K. Veland:

Remember when Apple cracked down on Podcast downloaders? It was because they themselves were introducing this very feature in iTunes.

[I] would surmise [that] Apple is now bringing “widgets” to their dashboard in the near future, and that they are pre-empting any apps conflicting with the “duplicate functionality” clause. [historical links, added by Kai]

Once you’ve considered Apple’s penchant for banning apps that compete with features that are built in to the OS, you’ve got to consider how this compares against other companies’ competitive practices. I think one of the most insightful points comes in a comment by user “Adrock”, nearly at the bottom of the page:

the big difference between Xbox and iPhone/iPad marketplace is the unpredictable changes. I don’t know of any XBox game that got recalled after its release because MS changed its mind about something.

Honestly, it’s a despicable practice. Imagine Call of Duty getting yanked off the 360 a week after it’s released because it competed with Halo (an MS owned FPS). This is really no different. [spelling and punctuation corrected for clarity]

Other commenters noted that while Microsoft had often put third-party utility makers out of business, by folding that functionality into Windows itself, it never actually blocked the utilities from running on Windows. It just made them unnecessary, then let them die off as users lost interest and no longer bothered to buy them. (One thing I definitely noticed about Shifty Jelly’s blog: he’s got some smart and insightful commenters.)

So this raises the question: Why has Apple been getting such a free pass from geeks for so long? People who have been agitating for open document standards since 2003 (if not earlier) have happily accepted DRMed AACs on their iPods, and a single gatekeeper for apps on the iPhone/iPad ecosystem — a single gatekeeper that even maintains the ability to remotely auto-vanish apps after installation. That part is eerily reminiscent of the “only authorized/signed applications will run” feature of the TCPA/Palladium proposal that got geeks so very disturbed back in the early 2000s. We mobilized and managed to kill Palladium — and yet now we’re writing apps for the Apple Store, and some of us are even surprised when Apple decides to yank their certification?

For once, the US government is ahead of the tech geeks on this curve, with the Federal Trade Commission initiating a probe of Apple’s anti-competitive practices — coincidentally, less than two weeks after Shifty Jelly’s post. (Of course, given the Department of Justice’s record with the Microsoft decision, I don’t expect anything of any real importance to come of this probe. Even if it leads to a full trial and a win against Apple, the “penalties”, if any, will amount to a slap on the wrist.)

Microsoft never tried to use its dominance in the desktop OS market to keep us from accessing or storing porn on our computers. Microsoft never stopped small-scale, private developers from distributing software that would run on any and every Windows machine in existence. But Apple is on an anti-porn crusade that even denied the Gutenberg Project’s app simply because it could have been used to download a copy of the Kama Sutra, and exercises increasingly arbitrary-looking control over what apps can be distributed at all.

So, will someone please tell me: Why is Apple still considered a “good guy”?

Page Transitions

When a user clicks a link, they’re sending a specific message with a specific intent. That intent is “show me the information I’m interested in”. It’s not “show me a nifty animation effect that takes another 5 seconds out of my busy schedule”.

Users (rightly) consider page transitions to be the space in between what they’re actually interested in. Don’t force them to pay even more attention to them.

Reinventing Scroll Bars

This error is so common, and people screw it up so badly, that I’ve already written an entire post about it. However, I’d be remiss in not listing it here, as well.

Auto-Playing Sound

Speaking of things I’ve written about before… people have been complaining about auto-playing sound since Netscape Navigator first gave us the ability to include such an abomination, way back around 1994. Eleven years later, I listed auto-playing music as a “no-brainer”, in the sense that excluding it from your site should be a no-brainer decision.

Some people will apparently never learn.

Assuming Everyone Has Enormous Bandwidth

Yes, broadband is much more common in the United States now than it used to be. That means that people are less ready to wait a long time for your page to load, not more. And a designer, developer, or other professional who understands how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work can arrange things so that at least part of the page (or AJAXified web app, or whatever) is usable when only part of the code has arrived at the user’s browser.

If it’s possible to provide the user with something more useful than a “Loading…” indicator before all the code has arrived, then why do Flash developers never actually do so? (This is a real, not rhetorical, questions, and an open invitation for Flash designers and developers to answer it.)

Here’s Why So Many People Disparage Flash “Designers”

For a trifecta of awfulness, check out the site for Alembic, a bar in San Francisco. On my fiber-optic, 6 Mbit connection, it takes nearly 10 seconds just for the site’s intro to load. Then, once the little rocks glass is full of liquor, the page blasts some sound at me — sound that doesn’t even convey any information. (Believe it or not, I already know what a crowded bar sounds like.)

Then there are the slow transitions from sub-page to sub-page. All told, it took me a ridiculous amount of time just to find out what their hours were. But for a true dose of awfulness, try clicking on “Menus”. Then try clicking on one of the other main menu items. The site’s “background” doesn’t even realize that there’s still a “window” open in front of it… even though both the “background” and the “popup” are just visual elements of the same Flash object!

The real kicker comes when you try clicking on one of the menu pages. Rolling over zooms them a bit, but clicking? Launches a PDF document! A separate one for each page! That zoom effect was apparently just a red herring, and trying to get the place’s full menu would require seven separate PDF downloads.

I suppose they could, somehow, have disrespected their users a little more. At least the page doesn’t literally throw a drink in the user’s face. Just figuratively.

Please, if you’re designing your sites in Flash, don’t make them like this. Don’t be the web equivalent of “that guy”.

I think Facebook has now hit its “cap”. People who don’t yet have Facebook accounts now seem to be saying, “I ain’t gettin’ one now!” Others who do have accounts are finally abandoning them. And I’m one of those abandoners.

I have a little bit of interest in the Disapora* Project, but I don’t think it will really take off. On the other hand, in a recent New York Times article about the project, both its staffers and backers have some things to say about just how quickly they managed to raise funding — and all of those things point to a very clear demand for an alternative to Facebook.

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lately been saying that privacy is no longer a social norm, but lots of people don’t accept this. In fact, many of us think that Zuckerberg is saying such things in the hope of making them come true, rather than as observations of something that’s already come to pass.

When I joined Facebook, back around 2005 or 2006, it defaulted to private. For everything. The site was a walled garden, and without creating an account, you could hardly see anything besides its front page and its Terms of Service. People who put their information into the site back then had certain expectations of what would be done with it — expectations that have first been chipped away at, and now completely violated. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick does a very nice job of deconstructing Zuckerberg’s disingenuous stance on privacy, well worth reading.

Finally, I’ve said in numerous face-to-face conversations that one of the things I dislike about Facebook is the way it tries to blur or even abolish the distinction between users’ personal and professional lives. For a long time, I assumed that was an unintended consequence of the site’s architecture. At worst, I thought Facebook’s management was callously indifferent to the problem. But yesterday, I found out that Zuckerberg actually believes that keeping such a distinction is wrong. Michael Zimmer quotes from David Kirkpatrick’s upcoming book, The Facebook Effect, then supplies some of his own (beautifully scathing!) analysis. Zuckerberg says: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Zuckerberg says those days are “probably” coming to an end, but I think what he really means is they are “hopefully” coming to an end — that is, he hopes that they are.

I very strongly hope that they’re not. And I have good reason to hope: Not only are people deleting their Facebook accounts in droves, but this may just be the beginning of the departure. A recent Wired News story about a study showing that the privacy backlash was being driven by the over-35 crowd, and 18-to-34-year-olds essentially didn’t care, attracted a fair number of comments from users claiming to be under 30 and very concerned about Facebook’s privacy stance — many to the point of having already deleted their accounts.

And there’s a brewing investigation by the Federal Trade Commission that might also signal that society’s views on privacy haven’t changed as much as Zuckerberg claims.

For an example of how to make easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, fine-grained privacy controls, consider Livejournal (and sites that have re-used its open-source codebase, like Dreamwidth). A user can set their “default” privacy level for their posts to be public, friends-only, or private. Then they can easily override that default setting on a post-by-post basis, and create special lists or filters that contain only some of their friends-list. This makes it easy to post an entry that can only be seen by, for example, friends who are geographically nearby, or friends with an interest in a particular hobby (”only some of my friends are sports fans; the others don’t want to hear me talk about football”), or friends that one really trusts, or whatever. The UIs for these things are easy to find and understand, and any user who cares about privacy or visibility can pretty easily determine what the privacy setting on any one of their posts is.

Let’s try a biological analogy: Imagine you had some microorganism that could only survive in a Petri dish full of agar solution, between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 15 to 25 degrees Celsius). Make it too hot or too cold, and this thing will die. Change its food supply to some other, less plentiful, sugar source, and it can’t continue to reproduce.

Wouldn’t this organism be destined to die out?

In the real world, sure. But it might be able to thrive in a specially engineered, very gentle environment, like a climate-controlled lab.

The Internet is just such an environment, but for data and memes instead of living creatures. It’s an environment designed explicitly to propagate information — with no regard to what kind of information it is.

When we say something is “an Internet meme”, what we really mean is “a meme that’s too unfit to survive anywhere else”. Some memes — like democracy, or the works of Shakespeare, or fashion trends or the latest commercial jingle or catch-phrase — can survive and thrive outside the Internet, but some could never have taken off without the Internet making it easy for them.

They’re like hothouse flowers. Calling something “an Internet meme” is effectively calling it “an idea that could only thrive in the Internet’s no-fail sandbox”. It’s not a compliment to the meme at all.

It’s a trade-off, and I’m probably missing some aspects of it. What I’m wondering about, simply, is whether the trade is a net gain or a net loss.

Another way to put this — in harshly evolutionary terms, in fact — is: If someone with augmented reality and someone without it were competing for some life-or-death resource, who would win?

Of course, I’m not the first person to wonder this. In 1992, Neal Stephenson wrote about Hiro Protagonist going into battle with a high-tech combat suit and a bad-ass heads-up display:

He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time… a screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?

Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.

The [enemy who's shooting at him] has … whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). [...]

He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

As prophetic as Snow Crash was, though, Stephenson was nowhere near the first to tackle the topic of high- versus low-tech in combat situations. Way back in 1959, Robert Heinlein wrote, in Starship Troopers:

If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up on him and bash his head in while he’s trying to read a vernier.

Of course, Heinlein isn’t arguing against giving soldiers high-tech gadgets; this is in the context of the introduction of powered armor as a major sci-fi trope. The important part of the quote above isn’t “a lot of gadgets”; it’s ones “that he has to watch“.

Which is a good way of saying that maybe it was more of a user-interface problem. (And, of course, Stephenson was probably familiar with the Heinlein book, and may have even been deliberately tipping his hat to it.)

Smartphone users today don’t usually have to face life-or-death situations (unless you count crossing the street in a busy city). But it’s worth considering whether we could make our user interfaces any easier to use.

A lot of people have been, effectively, pointing and laughing at Stoll’s failed prediction. I’d rather consider it a cautionary tale: The man who was so totally wrong wasn’t just a random pundit who didn’t know what he was talking about. He was Clifford Stoll — author of The Cuckoo’s Egg, a man who had been online for 20 years at a time when most people were just beginning to hear that there was a such thing as the World-Wide Web, and the man who traced German cracker Markus Hess through umpteen layers of insecure computer systems and networks.

In short, the man knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t a Senator Ted Stevens. If he could be so wrong, how much faith can I place in my own predictions about where the Internet’s headed?

But wait, there’s more — how wrong was he? Sure, Stoll claims that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper”, which has turned out to be completely false. But how about “no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher”? No matter how interactive the CD, it can’t substitute for a good human teacher’s ability to guide and nurture a student’s intellect. (Not without AI, which is still at least 20 years away — just like it’s been for the past 50 years.)

And maybe you think it’s obvious that CD-ROMs can’t replace real teachers. But there have been, and there still are, people who claim their CDs are just effective as face-to-face teaching methods — or even more effective.

Stoll gripes about the problems of Usenet. Okay, the main bulk of Internet conversation has moved to blogs and comment threads, but his words still apply: “Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats.”* There’s a reason why many of my friends say, “Never waste your time reading the comments.”

I’ve written before about the effects of “harassment and anonymous threats”. That was just last year, and I doubt that all the anonymous threateners have suddenly left the Internet.

It’s very easy to look at Stoll’s rant and get distracted by the petty details: “Usenet? Hah! How archaic!” But that’s just a way of trying to remain comfortable, and ignoring the ways in which things haven’t changed one bit. Because the problems of anonymity aren’t technological problems; they’re problems of human nature.

But even in the places where Stoll was wrong — demonstrably, ridiculously wrong — it does me no good to simply point and laugh. Instead, I’d rather ask myself, “Could I have done any better?” Stoll claimed that online shopping would never take off:

[Internet hucksters promise that] We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

He’s wrong on almost every particular; the only one that might possibly be an exception is “negotiat[ing] sales contracts”. Aside from that? I’ve lost track of how many restaurant reservations I’ve made online and how many airplane tickets I’ve bought online; over the past ten years, I’m quite positive that I’ve done those things far more often online than by “traditional” methods. Even if you don’t consider PayPal to be quite trustworthy, online credit-card transactions are now safe and secure.

And salespeople? Most of the time, I can do without them. I can’t help but remember the last time my girlfriend and I visited a Victoria’s Secret; after being approached by 5 different salespeople in as many minutes, we left the store in frustration at being interrupted and distracted so much — to the point that we couldn’t even browse the merchandise in peace!

Great, so Stoll was totally wrong about online shopping. If you’d asked me about it in 1995, what would I have said? Would my predictions have been any better?

And more to the point: What am I predicting right now? And how wrong am I? And how can I learn from Stoll’s mistakes — or my own — and make better predictions?

That’s the real take-away from Stoll’s article. And those are question I don’t have the answers for yet. (If you’ve got answers, leave a comment and tell me!)

* All quotes from Newsweek edited to fix simple spelling mistakes.