My old answering machine, which I’ve had since I graduated from high school, needs replacing. It was the first digital answering machine, an AT&T Model 1339, which competed with tape-based machines. It had a limit of one minute per message, and could store less than 20 minutes of audio total. But other than the memory restriction and an on/off button that was too easy to hit, it was flawless.

So we got a new one, a GE brand. GE is one of the only companies that still sells stand-alone answering machines. (Actually, from what I can tell, GE just lends a brand name to an importer.) It has an annoying synthesized voice (versus a professional, recorded voice on the old one) and it sometimes cuts off messages in the middle. I could live with it if it were actually capable of reliably recording messages.

We returned it, thinking it might just be defective, and replaced it with an identical one with the same problem. We’re ordering another (also a GE, but maybe actually from a different company) and with luck it will work.

These days, answering machines aren’t considered high-tech. A standalone answering machine is going the way of the standalone spell-checking program. As a result, even though the chips inside it have gotten a hundred times more powerful and there have been a dozen years to refine the design, a we-don’t-care attitude from manufacturers has resulted in worse technology.

For $100 I could get a card for my computer that would let it take messages, redirect calls, and act just like one of the computers I program at work, just with 23 fewer phone lines. I could play chess or Adventure over the phone with it, if I took a day to program it. But then I’d have to take a weekend to set it up, and I’d either spend far too much time playing with it, or be disappointed that I don’t have the time or creativity to do all the neat things I could do with it.

Congress recently voted down a bill to enforce net neutrality. Net neutrality means that when you pay for your Internet connection, your provider doesn’t double-dip by charging Google or others an extra toll to be able to reach you at full speed. Right now you pay your cable company for a connection at a particular speed, no matter whose websites you visit. Soon, you might get high-speed for select services, and low-speed for everything else.

The reason for this is not, as cable and phone companies claim, because they can’t afford to give you the service you are already paying for. Rather, it’s control. Companies like Google, YouTube, and Apple are offering video that competes with cable. And companies like Skype (as well as free software like Asterisk) are letting you make phone calls over the Internet. If these catch on, fewer people will want regular phone and cable.

But I don’t think this will make much of a difference due to another technology called peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. Using P2P, you can already download all the bootleg music and movies you want, and at high speed. Or you can download legal, free stuff, such as Linux software. Time Warner has already signed up with BitTorrent Inc., a maker of free P2P software of the same name, to distribute their movies and TV shows.

The way BitTorrent and other P2P software works is that you don’t just download, you simultaneously upload as well. If you’re downloading a movie, you start out with a few random pieces of the movie, and then you trade your pieces with others until you have thw whole movie. It’s like a scavenger hunt where everyone shares their clues.
But by working together, the original host site for that movie just has to send out one copy, and thousands of copies of the movie end up being downloaded.

Unless (and that’s a big unless) the cable and phone companies manage to block P2P, companies like Apple, Google, and YouTube will be able to avoid toll charges by getting your friends and neighbors to help to distribute movies. It could turn into a cat-and-mouse game between the P2P software and the Internet companies’ P2P filters. Just as spam evades spam filters by pretending to be normal email, the movies you buy from Time Warner will pretend to be email, IM, or some other traffic.

As for me, I’ll be signing up for St Louis Park’s municipal wireless Internet access, so I can ditch DSL just as soon as Qwest stops allowing my DSL provider to use their phone lines. (Yes, the phone companies lobbied for– and won– the right to get rid of competition. With what excuse? That competition was “anti-competitive.”) The DSL speeds are lousy around here and cable is overpriced. And I trust my city council to be net neutral– since unlike cable or Qwest, they can be voted out if they annoy the public.

At work, I’ve been using the same computer since I joined the company in January 2002. Being in full low-budget mode, they gave me the cheapest desktop money could buy. Usually a programmer’s desktop is slightly beefier than the target platform, so that it can comfortably pretend be the target computer while simultaneously running all the programming programs. Mine has aways been significantly slower.

So I’ve been petitioning for a new computer. One that can simultaneously run my increasingly taxing development software while pretending to be a network of servers. We agreed that once I’d finished a crucial project, I’d get a new machine. A really fancy machine.

I’ve owned mostly Macs and Amigas, and my experience with mainstream PCs has usually been negative. Once you get a PC that mostly works, it’s fine. Just don’t upgrade it or use a weird keyboard, operating system, or hard disk. Whereas Macs and other custom systems have one company in charge of everything, PCs consist of dozens of components slapped together with nobody in charge of overall quality. (Microsoft works around Intel, Intel tries to work around Microsoft, the memory manufacturers don’t talk to the disk manufacturers, etc.) In theory Dell, Gateway, and Lenovo should be in charge, since they sell you the machine, but they have the luxury of being able to blame Intel and Microsoft– or others– for a variety of woes. In contrast, if something goes wrong with a Mac, Apple gets the blame, period.
In January I got a build-to-order dual-core Athalon with the latest fast disk drives and four gigabytes of memory. It’s getting returned today because I haven’t gone more than a day without it crashing on me. Among the issues I’ve discovered:

• The motherboard didn’t like the hard disks. It turns out that the manufacturer fixed this, and we installed a patch.
• The AMD Athalon processors crash when they send too many zeroes all at once to the memory chips. Mind you, the whole point of the processor– and digital computers in general– is to send zeroes and ones here and there. You’d think this would be unacceptable. But it’s a known bug, and it’s been around for over a year. The only reason it’s not more of a problem is that most of the time the computer gets delayed or interrupted before it can transmit a trillion zeroes in a row. The more inefficient the rest of the computer, the more likely it is to get interrupted. But since I was running the latest versions of Linux (instead of Microsoft Windows) with vast amounts of memory (which is initially all zeroes) I hit this frequently.

Dan (the system administrator) installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, and ran it in 32-bit mode (instead of the bleeding-edge 64 bit mode.) This made it just inefficient enough that we’d be less likely to run into the Athalon bug.

After over a week of back-and-forth between Dan and the store that built the computer, I finally got it back. My first test was to install my home directory from the old machine (backed up to DVD) onto the new machine.

It crashed before it could finish copying my files. I don’t know why or how, but that’s one too many problems. It passes all the tests that General Nanosystems (the local company which built it) could throw at it. But they didn’t try writing all zeroes. Nor did they try sitting down and using it as a programmer’s desktop. And the latter is what I need it to be capable of handling.
So I’m back to my four-year-old $500 computer. When he gets the chance, Dan is going to very carefully spec out a new machine for me. There’s a good chance it will be a server in a desktop’s body, rather than a ultra-high-end gaming machine with mediocre graphics and sound. Which means that, on paper, it will be very similar, but with parts that cost twice as much to do the same thing. But those parts will be at the low end of what’s used in $1000-$10,000 machines, rather than the high end of what’s used in $500-$2000 machines that people don’t mind rebooting all the time.