Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [74]
48 A five-megapixel camera can create images at a resolution of 2,560 pixels by 1,920 pixels; that’s enough resolution to make photo-quality prints at eleven by sixteen inches—much larger than the standard four- by six-inch snapshot print. Two megapixels are all that’s necessary to create good snapshot prints. As New York Times columnist David Pogue wrote, “The Megapixel Myth...goes like this: ‘The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.’ It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding....” (“Breaking the Myth of Megapixels,” the New York Times, February 8, 2007.)
49 “The phone of the future,” The Economist, December 2, 2006.
50 One organization that fights corporate abuse of copyright law is the EFF, or Electronic Frontier Foundation, at eff.org.
51 In the December 3, 2006 New York Times Magazine article “Open Source Spying,” by Clive Thompson, NYU professor Clay Shirky put it best: “The normal case for social software is failure.”
52 The “paperless office” may also be within reach, at last, for some companies. As employees become more effective with bits, they will have less need to print out e-mails, documents, and other files. Paper will always be useful in some situations, but bit-literate users will avoid it when possible.
53 “Open Source Spying,” by Clive Thompson, the New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2006.
54 Popup text from Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.0.
55 The SANS Internet Storm Center monitors the average "survival time" of a Windows PC at http://isc.sans.org/survivaltime.html.
56 The name was coined by Helen Moriarty, mother of my business partner Phil Terry, back in 1999.
57 Here's most of what we add: QuicKeys for one-touch access to applications and the team contacts file; Default Folder for one-touch folder access; Typinator or TypeIt4Me as the bit lever; TextWrangler as the text editor; AppleWorks as the word processor and wireframing tool; FileMaker for databases; Now Up-to-Date for the calendar; Firefox or Safari as the Web browser; a Gootodo.com account for the todo list; Mailsmith for the e-mail program; Microsoft Office for compatibility to client files; and for really dedicated learners, the Dvorak keymap for the keyboard. We also add Classic Menu and ASM for the upper-left and upper-right menus that were so effective in OS9 but disappeared in OSX. We disable Apple's poorly-designed Spotlight feature and give users the choice of Quicksilver and EasyFind as a replacement.
58 "Pause Stirs Concern That Growth In Productivity May Be Flattening," by Mark Whitehouse and Tim Aeppel, the Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2006.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to many people who helped make this book possible. First and foremost I want to thank Phil Terry, my friend and business partner in two companies and many projects, for encouraging me from the beginning to develop this method, teach it to him and others, and write the book.
Thanks also to Richard Saul Wurman. His influential and prescient book Information Anxiety helped me better understand the problem of overload; it remains relevant today, almost twenty years after it was published. The words "bit literacy" first appeared in print in an essay I wrote for Wurman's sequel book, Information Anxiety 2. (Thanks to Nicholas Negroponte for introducing me to Richard.)
Thanks to the readers of my Good Experience newsletter, and the goodexperience.com website, who over the years have read and commented on my occasional writing about bit literacy. Thanks also to the attendees of my Gel conference for letting me float my ideas from the stage. Special thanks to the early users of Gootodo.com for taking the plunge before this book was even announced.
Thanks to friends and colleagues who advised me along the way: Dawn Barber, Zimran Ahmed, Laurea de Ocampo, Seth Godin, Karen Watts,