SOP On the Technofront

E ditors get a lot of mail, mostly press releases and other such detritus, but, fortunately, we also get letters from readers and manuscripts from aspiring authors. Let me emphasize right here that most of the mail sent to me actually does arrive. Once in a while I receive a piece of mail that's months late and badly damaged, enshrouded in a polybag affixed with an apologetic form letter from the USPS. Once a letter tattooed with tire tracks arrived on my desk. But these are the exceptions.

Electronic mail, however--now that's another kettle of bits. In his curmudgeonly treatise, Silicon Snake Oil (Doubleday, New York, NY, 1995), Clifford Stoll compares the Internet unfavorably with snail mail. He calls e-mail "undependable and annoying to access." I admit I took a certain degree of umbrage at his casting of seemingly gratuitous aspersions toward the Internet. On the other hand, Tyler Sperry, my eminent-albeit-cynical predecessor here at Embedded Systems Programming, agrees with Stoll's comments about the unreliability of e-mail. I bring this matter up now because technology has also let me down: my e-mail is, well, unreliable. My e-mail address, lvereen@cmp.com, lacks the concreteness, let us say, of 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco. E-mail gets bounced back. It disappears into the ether. It gets misdirected. It confuses our mail server. It shuffles off to Buffalo. Whatever.

The truth, as on all too many occasions, is that there are two sides to the story. Technology, whether you're talking about the Internet, TV, the automobile, or any number of other labor saving devices, has a downside. Oh, you knew this? Nevertheless, it's also true that despite whatever downside there is, once we get our hands on our new technological marvels, we generally don't want to give them up. Automobiles have been more conducive to sin than the Internet could be on its worst day, yet who among us does not own a car? Excessive TV viewing leads to lethargy and a shiny chin, and most of us own several sets. Microwave ovens are tough on pacemakers but great on popcorn.

One obvious problem with new technology is that it takes awhile to get the kinks out. You'd be amazed how long it has taken the automobile industry to clean up its quality act and achieve a decent mean time between failures, but as good as it may be now, it would still be totally unacceptable for a TV. Grudgingly, I have to admit that there is merit in Stoll's position, although it's probably too soon to give e-mail really bad marks.

If you have tried to e-mail me and I have not responded, chances are I just didn't receive your transmission. While we're waiting for the kinks to be wrung out of the system, rather than rail against the Internet as Stoll does, hey, just shoot me another copy of your message. Who knows, maybe a truck rolled over the original. As an additional small irony, our 600 Harrison Street address has expired. Because of space constraints, Embedded Systems Programming magazine, along with several other Miller Freeman publications, has packed its bags and trekked over to 525 Market Street. I wonder how long it will take to get our mail forwarded those five blocks.