I sent a package to Canada this week. Sending this package took several tries because of paper work the package needed. While it took four tries to send this package was remained how far the computer has come and how small thinks humans still are in the age of ubiquitous computers. Paperwork still trumps computers in far too many places.
My trouble was sending a box of shoes to Canada from the USA via Fedex. Simple to do. Go to Fedex site, enter information about billing and address, print label, attach label to box and then drop off at the pickup location. Being in a rural area that is 30 miles from a FedEx Kinko's we just drop off at the local packaging store.
The trouble began when the the driver felt the package needed five copies of a commercial invoice form. Hmmm, the FedEx site made not mention of needing to do this in the label work flow. So home I went to do such. I went back to the label, explored the label work flow, followed along as best I could, and the site told me that "No, this destination and contents do not require extra paper forms". Okay, good, but I create a form to print anyway. Back to drop off site only to be sent home for more forms.
So back home, make more forms which I feel are not necessary to ship some shoes to Canada to placate the driver. Forms that I am pretty sure now that no one will ever see.
Why do I believe the forms will never be seen? 'Cause no one in Canada is really going to take the time to look at them. Why? Cause Canada is just going to Scan the Barcodes on the label then look at the form on a computer display and go, "Okay, weight and size and forms are all good" and off my package goes to Quebec.
What, what about the papers I printed out for a human to look at and file and store for years? Well, I am pretty sure neither FedEx nor Canada wants to pay to file paper work, store paper worked, preserve paper work, move paper work and then destroy paperwork and fill holes in Canada with boxes of shredded paper work. That is why Canada and FedEx bought Computers.
They bought themselves computers to eliminate paperwork not generate more paperwork.
In my second commercial software gig I worked at Reynolds & Reynolds which is a company that produces paper forms for Automobile Dealerships. Yep, they are in the business of making paperwork. My job was to create a work flow for a product. The system would have a user input data and then have the user print out the data to be then reentered by another person as data from the printout. This step was done about six times. Type in stuff, print out stuff, hand stuff to another person who then typed in the printout to print it out for another person to type back in.
After doing this cycle filled with data entry errors three times I had had enough. I raised my hand and suggested that since we had computers and were programmers perhaps we could automate the process to eliminate the printing and data entry errors. The response was that I was interfering with the process and a heretic for saying change was good. After defending my position my boss's boss took my challenge, handed me a copy of Turbo C 1.0 and said you got three weeks or your out. Oh and I had to still do my regular job.
Well, after three weeks I did my showcase with my friend and assistant Brent. We showcased our findings, design and plan to reduce 40 man hours of work down to about three minutes. My boss was not happy saying the plan was unworkable, stupid and would never work. She was not happy when we should here all of the next six months work had been completed by the new program the day before with plans to convert more of the workflow to a computer program soon. It was then I learned to be a bit more skilled at setting expectations.
But now 25 years later people are still using computers to print out forms to give to others input into more computers. Beyond frustrating me it costs money ( imagine if Amazon could eliminate the cost of labels and boxes) Paper is bad and some of us just don't get that.
In conclusion I fully realize that FedEx has removed the unnecessary paperwork by improving its processes using barcodes and putting computers at the boundaries and gateways. I am also pretty sure they do not want to would love to run their company with no physical paperwork to store, to file, to secure, to shred and then dispose of in a hole in Canada.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Give us Better Computer Games. Take a step up to Three Dimensional thinking instead of pellet machines.
End Game in both EVE and WoW needs more game play and less button pushing or dailies.
The stream of surprise rewards for pushing the button like a trained caged monkey still holds me in the game but I need more thinking content.
The quests, crafting, farming and dungeons are still to much about being able to comply with the rules of the dance and less to do with solving the problem.
I sail. I like sailing because while you might be sailing over the same water the conditions are always different. Where in WoW the fights are all the same to a great degree. No better than being graded by the Judges on Dancing with People who believe themselves to be Stars.
Wow is like driving to store, same road, same store, same items located in the same aisles. WoW should be much more like fishing or sailing in that while you might be in the same location the experience is different every time. The weather affects the winds, the Moon the tides, the temperature the fish, the Winds the waves.
Give me adventure. Give the thrill. Give me tension. Give me emotions in my gaming. Make the leap to three dimensional game programming and less Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise in a movie game programming because it gets boring after the third time.
I need better, I am paying you Blizzard now make it better.
The stream of surprise rewards for pushing the button like a trained caged monkey still holds me in the game but I need more thinking content.
The quests, crafting, farming and dungeons are still to much about being able to comply with the rules of the dance and less to do with solving the problem.
I sail. I like sailing because while you might be sailing over the same water the conditions are always different. Where in WoW the fights are all the same to a great degree. No better than being graded by the Judges on Dancing with People who believe themselves to be Stars.
Wow is like driving to store, same road, same store, same items located in the same aisles. WoW should be much more like fishing or sailing in that while you might be in the same location the experience is different every time. The weather affects the winds, the Moon the tides, the temperature the fish, the Winds the waves.
Give me adventure. Give the thrill. Give me tension. Give me emotions in my gaming. Make the leap to three dimensional game programming and less Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise in a movie game programming because it gets boring after the third time.
I need better, I am paying you Blizzard now make it better.
Computer Controlled Horse and Buggy or why can't my rental car meet me curbside.
A horse is smarter than any computer or robot. How can I write that with a straight face? Show me a robot that can feed itself, eliminate its own waste, and replicate. If you hitch a wagon to horse the horse will be able to find its way home or two work without GPS, road signs nor computers.
So why start with a horse and buggy thinking in the Second Machine Age, the grand computer era? Even with computers in front of every student most of them still cannot or will not read well nor do math well. And that is the problem in that we are trying to solve problems using computers instead of solving problems and then using computers.
Take the driverless automobile of today as the horse and cart of the last machine age. Our approach has been take a horse and buggy, eliminate the horse but retain the controls of the horse and buggy.
I see two approaches currently being taken to bring about self driving cars. The first approach is the computer driving a car in which your team of researchers purchase a car and then begin to strap computers on to the car to make the car find its way to work and home. The research team spends time researching which car to use, then the computers to use then the switches and actuators to use to computer control the car. All of these choices are then bolted on to the car and constant changes are made to software, settings and solenoids to get the car to do its job of driving itself safely. This I believe is the incorrect (read wrong) approach to the problem.
The automobile and the airplane of today are not 100 years old. Rather they are a few years old. The driving and flight controls of cars and airplanes from the past were very complicated and non-intuitive. The Wright Brothers planes had flight controls that were the reverse of todays steering controls. There first planes dove when you pulled back on the stick or banked and turned right when you push the control stick to the left. Early automobiles did not have the current two or three pedal arrangement we have now in our cars. Gone are the levers and hand throttles, multiple pedals that made driving a car complicated and dangerous because of distractions of just trying to operate the car. Cars and planes were sold that were easy to manufacture and design not so much that they should be easy to operate.
The second approach to the driverless car is to build a car that can drive itself. There is a subtle difference here. I am saying is to design and build a car built to work without the need of a human driver or pilot first then add the human back as the override control. Similar to how airplanes become remote controlled, or pilotless, in that they tried to strap devices into a human cockpit. They tried to make the computer use the human flight interface and yoke which required first making the computer act like a human.
I believe the better approach is to build a vehicle that can drive itself first. The controls, steering, braking, acceleration would all be first built to be controlled entirely by the computers and software. This decoupling of the Human Interface to the control of the vehicle would be similar to software design paradigms such as Model View Control or OOD where the implementation of the code is removed and hidden from both user and other parts of the software.
The entire design of automobile would be different in that the current arrangement of two seats behind or astride the engine and transmission. The design of the driver behind the wheel with the controls arranged within reach of the driver would not longer be needed. The need for controls where they are now because of the physical needs of the driver and passenger to be able to control the vehicle through rods, pedals and levers would be removed. Don't think it can be done? How many of you still walk to the television to rotate a knob connected to a radio tuner to receive stations?
So which is it going to be then? Strapping computers to cars is not a solution rather it is exasperating the problem. In the years of work done by Google to build a driverless car by glue computers to the car the could have just designed and built a new type of driverless vehicle with a passenger module that looks like a car from the outside. (I will leave the exercise of extrapolating the driverless [pilot-less, sans chauffeur voiture] vehicle with snap on modules for passengers, cargo, security and such to the reader.)
(rant continues from here, no real need to continue reading if you get the point)
Give us a vehicle we can purchase that we can sit inside and not have to occupy our minds with the safe operation of the vehicle on dangerous roads. No more having to train or make emotional decisions about about traffic and weather. We just need a device that can transport us as needed to where we want to go.
Eliminate the standard model of the passenger car with the steering wheel, the pedals, the levers and you get a transportation robot. This eliminates the problem of the Soccer Mom in that the vehicle is delivering passengers instead of the mom driving kids to school and ball practice. We would no could eliminate multiple trips to drop off a person, return home, then return to pick up the person. I just see so much time being spent driving about to retrieve people. Because I need the car while my wife is traveling I have drive her to the airport, then return home, then return to the airport to pick her up again then drive home. While a taxi system would be more efficient it is not the economic reality. To get my wife to the airport I have to be occupied driving at least 50% of the sequence. This is wasted driving when I could be studying or working.
Design a vehicle that can be told where I need to go, plan the most efficient route, get me there on time and then be there when I need it again. Think of the simple task of parking a car in garage where I approach the garage in the vehicle, open the door with the remote, park inside, squeeze out of the car because of the tight fit with the walls. Or the reverse in which I open the overhead door, get in the vehicle, start it, carefully back it out and so on. The first problem again is the vehicle is not where I need it when I want it. I should be able to tell the car I need it to be sitting in the driveway ready to go just by clicking the remote.
Same goes for parking my car at the airport, or renting a car for that matter. Currently I have to get my luggage, then take a bus or walk to the rental counter to get to the car. It takes a while and is unnecessary burden. Why can't my car, or the rental car, just come to my location outside the terminal? I have the key remote. I can know my current location curbside at the airport. I press button, car removes itself from parking space and drives to me standing at curbside pickup.
Don't give me crap about how is going to work with traffic as that is merely a simple queuing problem that can be fixed with all the fewer cars either clogging curbside pickup or circling the airport waiting for passengers. Fix the problem and profits will roll in.
So why start with a horse and buggy thinking in the Second Machine Age, the grand computer era? Even with computers in front of every student most of them still cannot or will not read well nor do math well. And that is the problem in that we are trying to solve problems using computers instead of solving problems and then using computers.
Take the driverless automobile of today as the horse and cart of the last machine age. Our approach has been take a horse and buggy, eliminate the horse but retain the controls of the horse and buggy.
I see two approaches currently being taken to bring about self driving cars. The first approach is the computer driving a car in which your team of researchers purchase a car and then begin to strap computers on to the car to make the car find its way to work and home. The research team spends time researching which car to use, then the computers to use then the switches and actuators to use to computer control the car. All of these choices are then bolted on to the car and constant changes are made to software, settings and solenoids to get the car to do its job of driving itself safely. This I believe is the incorrect (read wrong) approach to the problem.
The automobile and the airplane of today are not 100 years old. Rather they are a few years old. The driving and flight controls of cars and airplanes from the past were very complicated and non-intuitive. The Wright Brothers planes had flight controls that were the reverse of todays steering controls. There first planes dove when you pulled back on the stick or banked and turned right when you push the control stick to the left. Early automobiles did not have the current two or three pedal arrangement we have now in our cars. Gone are the levers and hand throttles, multiple pedals that made driving a car complicated and dangerous because of distractions of just trying to operate the car. Cars and planes were sold that were easy to manufacture and design not so much that they should be easy to operate.
The second approach to the driverless car is to build a car that can drive itself. There is a subtle difference here. I am saying is to design and build a car built to work without the need of a human driver or pilot first then add the human back as the override control. Similar to how airplanes become remote controlled, or pilotless, in that they tried to strap devices into a human cockpit. They tried to make the computer use the human flight interface and yoke which required first making the computer act like a human.
I believe the better approach is to build a vehicle that can drive itself first. The controls, steering, braking, acceleration would all be first built to be controlled entirely by the computers and software. This decoupling of the Human Interface to the control of the vehicle would be similar to software design paradigms such as Model View Control or OOD where the implementation of the code is removed and hidden from both user and other parts of the software.
The entire design of automobile would be different in that the current arrangement of two seats behind or astride the engine and transmission. The design of the driver behind the wheel with the controls arranged within reach of the driver would not longer be needed. The need for controls where they are now because of the physical needs of the driver and passenger to be able to control the vehicle through rods, pedals and levers would be removed. Don't think it can be done? How many of you still walk to the television to rotate a knob connected to a radio tuner to receive stations?
So which is it going to be then? Strapping computers to cars is not a solution rather it is exasperating the problem. In the years of work done by Google to build a driverless car by glue computers to the car the could have just designed and built a new type of driverless vehicle with a passenger module that looks like a car from the outside. (I will leave the exercise of extrapolating the driverless [pilot-less, sans chauffeur voiture] vehicle with snap on modules for passengers, cargo, security and such to the reader.)
(rant continues from here, no real need to continue reading if you get the point)
Give us a vehicle we can purchase that we can sit inside and not have to occupy our minds with the safe operation of the vehicle on dangerous roads. No more having to train or make emotional decisions about about traffic and weather. We just need a device that can transport us as needed to where we want to go.
Eliminate the standard model of the passenger car with the steering wheel, the pedals, the levers and you get a transportation robot. This eliminates the problem of the Soccer Mom in that the vehicle is delivering passengers instead of the mom driving kids to school and ball practice. We would no could eliminate multiple trips to drop off a person, return home, then return to pick up the person. I just see so much time being spent driving about to retrieve people. Because I need the car while my wife is traveling I have drive her to the airport, then return home, then return to the airport to pick her up again then drive home. While a taxi system would be more efficient it is not the economic reality. To get my wife to the airport I have to be occupied driving at least 50% of the sequence. This is wasted driving when I could be studying or working.
Design a vehicle that can be told where I need to go, plan the most efficient route, get me there on time and then be there when I need it again. Think of the simple task of parking a car in garage where I approach the garage in the vehicle, open the door with the remote, park inside, squeeze out of the car because of the tight fit with the walls. Or the reverse in which I open the overhead door, get in the vehicle, start it, carefully back it out and so on. The first problem again is the vehicle is not where I need it when I want it. I should be able to tell the car I need it to be sitting in the driveway ready to go just by clicking the remote.
Same goes for parking my car at the airport, or renting a car for that matter. Currently I have to get my luggage, then take a bus or walk to the rental counter to get to the car. It takes a while and is unnecessary burden. Why can't my car, or the rental car, just come to my location outside the terminal? I have the key remote. I can know my current location curbside at the airport. I press button, car removes itself from parking space and drives to me standing at curbside pickup.
Don't give me crap about how is going to work with traffic as that is merely a simple queuing problem that can be fixed with all the fewer cars either clogging curbside pickup or circling the airport waiting for passengers. Fix the problem and profits will roll in.
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