HAL 9000
Although I haven't practised law in nearly twenty years, I still rely on my legal training to keep me out of trouble. For six months or so, I've been wondering why nobody ever developed a screen saver to simulate the HAL 9000. HAL, as you must know, was the computer that really ran the USS Discovery in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was about to write words to this effect for posting here when a dim recollection of what lawyers call 'Shepherdizing' prevented my making a fool of myself. Lawyers 'Shepherdize' a case by consulting what in blogging terms would be called the comments posted to a given entry, to see what later rulings had to say about it; this is very important, because from time to time a higher court posts a comment that reads 'Overruled.' Before expatiating on the pressing need for a HAL 9000 screen saver, I turned to Google.
So you don't have to. Get your own HAL 9000 screen saver today.
In 1968, we thought that the screens were cool, even though we didn't know what they meant. Now that we have computers, they're still cool, perhaps even cooler, but we know that they're meaningless. There is no point in feeding information to a screen unless someone is expected to act on it; a genuine computer reports situations requiring response as they arrive. Still, as anybody who's worried about 'hanging' knows, it's nice to know that something is really going on inside the CPU, that it's not stuck or running in loops. That's why completion bars are so comforting (although Microsoft has, of course, screwed things up by littering their installation programs with a profusion of completion bars that renders them pointless).
There is still something to be said about a computer's thinking out loud, which is pretty much what HAL did until it got deadly. Windows used to put on a full-screen show whenever the defragmentation utility was doing its thing, and that could be fun to watch. There was nothing for you to do, but the blinking colored squares - it was squares, wasn't it - had a sort of low-grade fascination. More recently, I've found that I can stare at Cute FTP's screen whenever I'm uploading a clutch of files from my computer to the hosting server - as I had to do two weeks ago when I moved to Hosting Matters. That's what got me thinking about HAL again.
Now the only problem is that I can't sit still long enough for the thing to kick in.
