A lot has changed since then. But sometimes I wonder if the computing industry — all of it, from software to hardware to web services — really has the right priorities in mind. So here’s my list of the things that I hope to hell are working flawlessly by 2018. The frustrating thing is that every single one of these things can be done with today’s technology (except possibly for #7).

1. Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.
2. Automatic configuration syncing. The younger, hotter sister of automatic file syncing. Now that we’re all starting to use web applications for everything instead of sending files around, these web applications all need to be able to talk to each other. My bookmarks should follow me from machine to machine, and from browser to browser. Every time I configure my Firefox or my Windows Media Player just the way I like it, I shouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking customization process on every machine I touch.
3. Automatic backups. Macs now do this as a matter of course with Time Machine software. But Windows doesn’t. Well, let me qualify that — Windows will back up important system files as a matter of course, and create confusing “shadow copies” of documents in the background that you can roll back to. But it’s confusing as hell and inefficient to boot. What’s more, I want my computer to back up to an online storage facility, not some clunky piece of crap that’s hogging space on my desk.
4. Automatic upgrades. I’m not just talking about the operating system software here — I’m talking about every piece of software and hardware should automatically check for upgrades on a regular basis from a single, unified interface. And then give me the option to install or not install. Linux does this, and Microsoft has made efforts towards this with their Windows Update facility. But right now I have separate programs on my desktop working in the background to check for updates from Java, Logitech, Apple, Adobe, ESET, Mozilla, and Dell. And that doesn’t include all of the programs that check for updates when you fire them up.
5. Integrated security. This whole system of remembering a million different passwords in a million different places is unworkable. Not only that, but it’s not secure, because everyone on Earth except for Bruce Schneier either a) has their passwords written down on a Post-It note, b) uses ridiculously insecure passwords like their dog’s name, or c) has a handful of relatively secure passwords that they use over and over again, because we can only remember so many garbled strings of letters and numbers. I’m not a security expert, but it seems to me that biometric security would be a step up from where we are today.
6. Centralized identity management. Why do I have to constantly retype the same address information, the same email address, the same websites? Why is it that when I update my official bio to reflect a new book release, I have to log in to 4000 different websites and manually change my bios one by one? I understand the need to respect privacy — but if I want to share my information with a particular website, application, or company, shouldn’t I be able to do that with a click or two? We need trusted, universal services that can verify your identity wherever you are online.
7. Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.
8. Everything wireless. I’ve got connecting cables for my BlackBerry and my iPod. The printer’s wired to the desktop, as are the quad speakers and the subwoofer. The keyboard and mouse aren’t wired anymore — but the wireless transmitter for the keyboard and mouse is wired. I want, at most, one power cable snaking from the back of my computer to the wall. Apple is leading the way on this one, as usual. But with Bluetooth moving onto more and more devices, we’re getting close to achieving this one on all platforms.
9. True, modular upgrades. For years, I’ve had the dream of having a single system that could be upgraded in a modular fashion. I’ll snap in the newest processor every couple of years. I’ll beef up my sound card on alternate years. I’ll upgrade the video card as circumstances warrant. But it seems that no matter how hard I try, I have to scrap everything and start from scratch after a few seasons. Is it really that difficult to future-proof hardware so I can upgrade my systems one piece at a time?
10. True plug and play. Let’s say it together: every piece of equipment I buy should be able to interface with every other piece of equipment I own. I should never be in the position of having to struggle to get photographs from the camera to the printer, or having to figure out whether the DVDs I burned on one computer can be read on another — much less have trouble networking my Linux, Mac, and Windows boxes together.

Agree? Disagree? And what have I missed?

The list of apps with Vista compatibility problems is truly mind-boggling. We’re talking about stuff I use every day. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Eclipse, iTunes, Irfanview. Add to that the fact that my Photoshop disc is on the fritz and you’ve got a major productivity roadblock. But perhaps the app that I miss the most is one that works in the background: Diskeeper.

Diskeeper is (or was) probably the best defragmenter available for Windows. It’s got a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which allows you to configure the program to defrag your hard drive in the background whenever it sees the need, and then, as advertised, forget all about the damn thing. But the bastards at the Diskeeper Corporation want me to pay $30 to upgrade to their new Vista version, even though I already bought an upgrade less than six months ago. So I decided to look at alternatives. (Update 3/8/07: Never let it be said this blogging thing is a waste of time. I just received an e-mail from a nice fellow at Diskeeper Corp. apologizing for the upgrade confusion and offering to make it up with a coupla extra licenses. Thanks, Diskeeper!)

I opened up the built-in Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter, and I was astounded to see this:

In case you’re looking at this image and wondering what’s so astounding, the only thing you can configure here is the schedule. No setting priorities, no setting unmovable files, no program menus, no help file, no nothing. I wasn’t expecting a robust interface like Diskeeper’s that allows you granular control over what files get positioned in what place on the hard drive, but I wasn’t quite expecting this either.

Windows Vista is full of these kinds of user interface decisions. Places where the operating system presents you with a limited set of options and tells you, “don’t worry, Windows Vista will handle it.” We’ll defragment your disk for you, we’ll switch color schemes when necessary, we’ll block you from handling the nasty files, we’ll decide when the computer should sleep and when it should wake.

Remind you of anything? It reminds me of a Mac.

Mac OS X doesn’t have a built-in disk defragmenter. Why? Because every Mac comes with a team of Magic Disk Gnomes that scrub your hard drive every night? No, because OS X does all of the disk optimization it needs to do in the background. It defragments as a routine process of the operating system, and just doesn’t tell you about it. (See the article on the Apple website About disk optimization with Mac OS X.)

Macs are famous for making things easy on the user. But along with that usability push comes a configurability hit. As far as I know, there’s no Registry Editor sitting right off the Apple menu that will allow you to muck up your system with a few mouse clicks. There’s no “Run” command that lets you wreak havoc willy-nilly just by tapping random keys. People claim that things “just work” on a Mac, and that’s because the engineers that built OS X have taken out most of the options that don’t. (Update 3/7/07: Oops. See Toby’s and Brian’s comments below. Didn’t realize a command line was so close at hand on OS X.)

The *nix operating systems (i.e. Linux and Unix) lie on the opposite end of the scale. You can do practically anything on a Linux command line, from rebuilding the kernel to deleting crucial files to rolling your own device drivers. (Where disk defragmenting is concerned, however, Linux, like OS X, does its thing in the background. See the article Why doesn’t Linux need defragmenting?)

One of the reasons I’ve always liked Windows is because it occupies the middle ground. You get 60-70% of the Mac GUI experience and 60-70% of the Linux command line experience. The best of both worlds, some might say. But now, with Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to be wising up to the Apple way of thinking. Let the computer do the work for you in the background. After all, who really wants to worry about how fragmented your computer files are? The geeks and the code monkeys do, and they can go buy a third-party utility or just install Ubuntu like they’ve been threatening to do anyway.

The implications of this philosophy go beyond mere disk defragmentation. They go to the heart of the question of what computers are supposed to do for us in the first place.

The whole reason we use computers at all is that they’re supposed to simplify things for us. Many of us seem to have lost sight of that. We get caught up in fetishizing the computer itself and forget that every minute we spend tweaking and configuring a computer is, in essence, a minute wasted. The ideal computer would be a completely invisible computer, one that could anticipate what you’re going to do and then make that task quicker, easier, and more efficient when you decide to do it.

It’s only now, however, after 20 or 30 years banging our heads against these things, that computer technology has grown and matured to the point that it can begin to achieve that goal. Your measly Pentium II processor couldn’t spare enough cycles to try and figure out everything you were trying to do ahead of time; all it could really do was respond to your commands and give you a few shortcuts. But now your smokin’ Dual Core chip can churn through a thousand possibilities and contingencies in a millisecond. (Stop snickering, readers from the year 2017.) It can figure out the trivial things you don’t need to figure out, like whether you’re using the latest device drivers or what kind of screen resolution you have.

What this means is that starting now, operating systems won’t have to present you with options that will mess up your system. In fact, they’ll be presenting you with less configurable options rather than more. The computer will anticipate what you’re trying to do and automatically give you the configurations that make the most sense for you. The era of humans trying to figure out how programs work is coming to a close. The era of programs trying to figure out how humans work is now underway.

A seemingly small semantic shift, but one that will change your relationship with technology in the very near future. What this means is that at some point you’ll be able to boot up a computer and it will just instantly know that you’re a left-handed attorney in Taiwan that doesn’t care about the engineering functions on the calculator.

There will be lots of privacy issues to sort out, you betcha. And lots of amusing fuck-ups along the way. (What happens if you’re a left-handed patent attorney in Taiwan that does want to see the engineering functions on the calculator?) But it means that those Disk Defragmenter controls ain’t coming back anytime soon.

(For further thoughts on the topic, see my previous article Look Ma… No Program Menus!)

In all that time, I’ve never been hit by a computer virus, worm, or malicious piece of spyware. Once, not too long ago, I actually double-clicked on a virus-infected e-mail attachment without thinking, but my computer security package quickly caught it and disabled it.

That’s not to say that I’ve never received a virus over e-mail, or suffered an attack on my firewall. These things happen all the time. I’ve been to web pages that could conceivably have launched various bits of nastiness onto my machine had I not been running Firefox with a pop-up blocker and lots of Javascript restrictions. I’ve just never suffered the effects.

And why have I never suffered from a virus outbreak? Because, despite what you see and hear all over the Internet and the media, the security problems of Windows are vastly overblown. Windows is and has always been a fairly secure operating system, if you know what you’re doing.

True, I’m what they call a computer professional, meaning that I make my living on these things. I can program PHP and ColdFusion. But when it comes to the operating system, I’m not some technical uber-wizard that can pinpoint obscure DLL failures using the command line. I know how to edit the Windows Registry, I know how to start and stop Windows Services, I know how to use the Event Viewer. These are all fairly basic computer troubleshooting skills, and yet these skills and some readily available off-the-shelf security software are all it’s taken for me to keep my computer safe for nearly 20 years.

(And no, this is not an invitation for someone out there to try and craft something that will infest my computer. I’m sure you can. But the point is that you haven’t bothered to try yet.)

The security problem, therefore, does not lie with Windows software. The problem is with Windows usability.

Most of you reading this blog may be astounded to realize this, but Microsoft’s most pressing problem is not the encroachment of free and open source Linux. It’s not the growing popularity of the Firefox browser, or the lagging performance of its online properties in relation to Google’s and Yahoo’s, or the activities of a small population of malicious hackers and crackers. The thing that keeps the Microsoft brass up at night, believe it or not, is that most people feel like Windows is too darned hard to use.

To us in the tech world, it seems like every Joe and Jane you pass in the street reads Slashdot and has contemplated switching to Ubuntu. But the vast majority of people aren’t nearly that technically savvy. I found a study from 1997 that gives the number of IT jobs in the United States at 2,063,000. Even if we’re charitable and say that, despite the IT bubble burst, the number of tech jobs has doubled since then — or even tripled — we’re still only talking about roughly 2% of the U.S. population. We’re a lot more computer-literate than we were a decade ago, but I’m willing to bet at least 70% of the Windows users in the United States have never even heard of the Registry.

And so these are the people that your standard Russian underground hacker types devote their energy to attacking. After all, if you’re a burglar, why bother carrying around lockpicks when two-thirds of the houses in the neighborhood leave the back door unlocked? When you read about zombie PCs that are unknowingly sending out tens of thousands of spam e-mails every hour, you never hear that the victim was a sysadmin for Smith Barney. It’s the people with the usability problems. It’s the guy who downloads porn screen savers from untrusted sources. It’s the guy who believes that Chase Bank really did just send an e-mail requesting that he go to www.chase-banc.com and reset his password. These people don’t know how to secure their computers.

So it strikes me that Microsoft has, on the whole, emphasized the right things in the development of their new Windows Vista operating system. They’ve concentrated on security, usability, and reliability. They’ve added in long-needed User Account Control, which will pop up a big, flashy warning message when your 73-year-old grandmother tries to add a worm to her Startup folder. They’ve built in anti-spyware, a stronger firewall, phishing protection, desktop search, and parental controls. Similarly, their workover of their Office software package has focused on cleaning up the user interface and bringing little-used features that have skulked backstage in sub-menus up to the spotlight.

Now whether Microsoft has actually done a good job is another question altogether. All of the early indicators say that Windows Vista is a less user-friendly operating system than XP was. They also point out that, since Microsoft spent so much time rewriting things from the ground up, there are bound to be a rash of new security holes in the first few months. (And I’m not even going to get into the whole Windows-vs.-Mac-vs.-Linux thing here.)

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to judge Vista first-hand until I either a) get the free reviewers’ copy that Microsoft is supposed to be sending me, or b) bite the bullet and buy that new laptop I’ve been talking about buying for months now. And if option a) comes first, I won’t be able to give a full review, because neither my desktop nor my laptop have strong enough video cards to handle the new Aero interface.

But our opinions aren’t necessarily the ones that matter in the grand scheme of things. No matter how convoluted the new user interface is, us relatively knowledgeable folks will get used to it pretty quickly. If Microsoft can help that 70% of people who’ve never heard of the Windows Registry to take better care of their computers — and maybe throw in a few goodies for the rest of us — they’ll have achieved what they set out to do.

It starts by making it easier for people to lock their back doors.

My existing Toshiba Satellite 2435-S255 has served me well since 2003, but now it’s showing its age. I banged the left corner at some point, making it difficult to open and close the display. About 33% of the time, the laptop doesn’t wake up from hibernation properly, and I have to shut the whole thing down and reboot (losing whatever I hadn’t previously saved). No matter how careful I’ve been, the keyboard is carpeted with crumbs from a million Starbucks muffins and the screen is a little splotchy. The battery life is down to about 45 minutes — which is generally fine, because I almost always use a power outlet.

So now here’s the big question: should I buy a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, or a Linux laptop? And what brand?

Here are the primary things I’m looking for:

• A nice big, clear screen
• Just enough horsepower to run office applications, but not totally choke when I try to crank up Photoshop
• Light weight
• Good battery life
• If I choose a Windows laptop, it’s got to be Windows Vista and Office 2007 ready, in case I decide to upgrade
• Cooooool look and feel

As you can see, this doesn’t have to be a real powerhouse of a machine. It’s mainly going to be used for word processing, Net surfing, and the occasional light web programming/Photoshopping. I won’t be playing Quake 4 on it, and I won’t be storing my music collection on it — that’s what the desktop’s for. I do keep multimedia reference materials on my laptop (e.g. Encarta), but nothing that’s gonna really smoke up the microprocessor.

I’m leaning towards sticking with Windows, for all of the standard reasons. It’s familiar and I already own all the software I need to run. You can find Windows laptops all over the price spectrum too, from bargain basement to luxury. And despite what everyone says, Windows XP is quite a stable and secure operating system if you know what you’re doing. (Turn that Remote Registry off, people.)

But I’m certainly open to switching to Mac. I’ve admired many a MacBook Pro from afar, and they definitely meet the coooooolness test. Macs are also reputed to have that “it just works” quality that Windows sometimes has, given the right hardware and phase of the moon.

Yet there are always the standard caveats to switching to Mac: it’s much more expensive, I’ll need to rebuy all of my software, and I simply don’t know all the cool OS tricks like I do with Windows. How do you boot one of those suckers in Safe Mode? Is there such a thing? What’s the keyboard combination to call up the Task Manager (or Mac equivalent) to kill frozen programs? Is my Firefox Google Browser Sync gonna work?

As for Linux, I’ve heard plenty that Ubuntu is a professional-class operating system that rivals Windows or Mac in usability and stability, while eating their lunch in price point and configurability. But the learning curve for switching to Linux is much steeper than switching to Mac, and nobody’s ever convinced me that it’s worth the effort. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I’m skeptical.

Here’s the bottom line, folks: I want to write Geosynchron and thus finish the Jump 225 trilogy as quickly and comfortably as possible, with as few oh-shit-I’ve-lost-two-hours-of-work moments as possible. What’s my best option?