Using your computer for everything but regular computing needs.

This was first brought to mind when I was working back in Ohio upon having a conversation with a fellow employee that wanted me to purchase a computer from him.  I brought up cable television, and he said that he uses his computer for everything and his primary bill was from his Internet service provider.  This was of course like 5 years ago and DSL was still a novelty, but he insisted that it was worth the time to sit by and allow content to load up, because he had complete control over the content.

Fast foward to 2008 and the average computer user is creating the content themselves, and can do for rather inexpensively.  Internet connections are a lot faster; yesterday’s dial up connection is now today’s low speed DSL service and cable companies and telecoms like Verizon are aggressively pushing their fiber services.  Most people do not realize that fiber is part of the infrastructure with your average cable company these days, only difference being that Verizon uses fiber throughout, whereas cable companies run it up to the equipment in your ward.

The way in which the Internet has democratized networking and made it easier to anyone and everyone to create content poses somewhat of a threat to network television, and all other forms of media available.  The first signs of angst were seen amongst record companies, who now realize that peer to peer file sharing networks are not the only way to distribute digital recordings among the masses.  The irony is that computer hardware manufacturers had the technology available back in the nineties, but it took a major name to both popularize MP3 players and legal downloading.

Apple could have taken the low road and just put their iPods out there and left it up to individuals at home to find music.  These days, anything you want to do with multimedia is offered online; high definition content is still in it’s infancy, but you can enjoy it with the right monitor (most analog monitors are still tapping out the limits of their technology, which is often a mere 768 lines of resolution), you can also sit back and choose from more protocols for video on a computer than you can in television, where only the most popular schemes are built into the hardware.

Your operating system probably already supports high definition, just that your monitor may not be up to speed, nor your graphics card.  I barely watch television, and even though great sites such as Hulu exist that allow me to watch higher quality television than I do on YouTube, it doesn’t really fit my needs.

YouTube and Google Video are about the only places you can still find an old videotaped commercial advertising early RCA VCRs that were actually recorded on an RCA VCR.  It’s the only place you will find someone exploring the urban landscape of dead shopping malls, girls showing off playing up the camera to get their 15 minutes of fame and guys doing the latest crunk/snap dance.  On YouTube you can watch thousands of prisoners in Manilla doing choreographed moves to Thriller; or the High School cheerleading squad dancing to Crank Dat Batman.

Before YouTube, you had to pass videotapes around, or watch America’s Favorite Videos.  Those days are so over; so why can’t a decent site like Hulu compete with the eternal amatuer hour over at YouTube?  For one Hulu lacks enthusiasm; I don’t want to see snippets of Die Hard or be told that the only movies available is a B rated movie from 1982.  I’m not interested in seeing the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show.  I most certainly do not want to see Family Guy or Friends, because those shows are probably playing in some distant part of the world every hour of the day anyway.

Hulu is a cold, corporate approach to rebroadcasting material, though it is slick and has an easy to use interface it lacks the authenticity that sites like YouTube has.  Sure you can often find the latest music on YouTube months if not years before it comes out, and Google needs to do something about that because while those songs are often AM radio quality they are still there.  But on the other hand Universal has a channel on YouTube where they post their own music videos, and at times without commercials being inserted into the video.  Artists are posting their own videos up there as well.

So why even have a television, other than the slow download speeds?  It still takes about as long as the movie plays to download one on DSL, and that’s not even as DVD quality.  But quite honestly, I’m not even that interested in downloading movies because I’m not that interested in what Hollywood does anymore.  Insulting my intelligence with tripe like another installation of Indiana Jones or yet another remake of the Incredible Hulk movie.  It’s no wonder why Sex in the City the movie broke box office records.

Speaking of Sarah Jessica Parker they have Square Pegs minisodes online.  If you want to watch your video on the run you can watch an entire episode in like 4 and a half minutes.  For those old shows that’s all you really want; watching Square Pegs is more about reminiscing about choppy eighties style video editing and bad acting, nothing more nothing less.  I wouldn’t buy a copy of Square Pegs unless it was in a bargain bin for like 75 cents, and even then you would have to include more than one episode.

I wouldn’t watch an old commercial from the eighties for any amount of money either; but there is a huge interest on YouTube for that type of content.  Often it’s a poor videotape as well; companies should take note of which ads people are watching and then start unloading high quality content on the site.  A Coke ad from 1980 is just as effective as one is today, and can still drive sales; in fact these are commercials that people actually want to watch.

So why let them down, why continue to fight them.  One of my favorite commercials is for something that doesn’t even exist anymore, the World Trade Center.  I don’t know how effective that ad was at the time, but it brings back memories of better days, so I’ll hunt it down and watch it every now and again.  I’ve never been to the World Trade Center, so that is my way of paying homage and keeping the memory alive until I can get back to New York to actually visit Ground Zero.  Unfortunately the movie World Trade Center doesn’t do that for me; too morbid and lacking the disturbing violence that actually occurred on that as the approach was a bit abstract.

I just now got my high-definition working without the picture freezing up; the solution was an old antenna from 1980 that I used to use a cheap 75-300 adaptor for.  The adaptor was $5 and the antenna $3, but it works like a champ.  I can finally watch CBS in high definition again, and you would think that I would but it still pales in comparison to actually being able to make content and have control over what you watch.  I can use software to record the flash and create a playlist and burn all of that to DVD and sit back and watch the games begin.

These days the only reason I even deal with CDs is because I have a player in my car.  CDs are a non-starter these days as everyone has graduated to using hard drives, so I can get them for like 30 cents a pop, could pay less but what for.  I don’t even keep them in my case anymore in fact I can’t even find the CD wallet. 

High definition television is about the only saving grace of broadcasting these as I might watch something I normally wouldn’t just to see the quality of the picture.  The color issues that plagued analog television are a non starter with digital; now you’re just plucking more color depth out of the signal with a better television and aren’t confined to the poor color reproduction that analog offered.  Your cheapest digital television showing high definition content is probably giving you better color than the best media that analog set could ever reproduce.

Whatever happened to actually using your computer for, well, computing?  Well other than writing and visiting some social networking sites like Answers it rarely gets any use.  In fact it’s the non computing needs that are tying my computer down; I insist on loading an hour or more of high-definition content into memory and then have the nerve to get upset when the audio is out of sync or the picture freezes. 

Today the computer is a multimedia type of appliance instead of a real computer.  Everything is pretty and we complain and moan when we are forced to watch anything less than the 24-bit color we’ve become accustomed to.  A command line or a script of any sort, let’s not even mention actually programming the computer for a change, is our worst nightmare.

We’re content to pay the next guy to worry about that; you can’t complain about rock star music producers getting paid a million plus for a beat on a song you’ll forget about in three months when you not only do not play any instruments but haven’t time in your busy schedule to sit down and listen to someone else play one.  No you’d rather get that ear candy; the right sounds at the right pitch with the perfect rhythm to get you into the mood.  The instant gratification that only the most advanced drum machines can afford.

We’re living in a society dominated by cheap content on disposable interchangeable hardware made as quickly as possible in order to get on with it and move on to the next big thing.  No one has a relationship to content anymore, even less so to the actual medium that content is on.  Even the computers themselves, at $400 a pop, are pretty meaningless these days.  I purchased a computer for $100 at the thrift store and installed a Linux cd and suffered through a lot of frustration and angst trying to get it do certain tasks.  But I miss that computer, my Vista machine, which takes care of everything and idiot proofs the operating system, is administrating itself.  It tells me when a website is questionable at best, what hardware I should install and what steps I should take to make the computer faster when it is non responsive.  In fact I rarely have to do anything with this machine so of course I am not learning anything whatsoever about computing.

I have to force myself to do something; there are solutions out there that will work for about anything and everything you need to do, and it’s hard not to.  But this is a day that technologists were anticipating, though I bet few ever realized that computing would eventually render everything else that technology used to offer meaningless and worthless.