Software expert Robert S. Swiatek says revamp technology to ease cyberstress
COMBATING COMPUTER RAGE
Along with road rage, therapists now treat “computer rage.” Nearly 2,000 complaints against Dell have been made to state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, recently prompting a state judge to order the computer retailer to more clearly disclose, among other revelations, that most consumers don’t qualify for “next day” repair service. Even more complaints about the Xbox 360 video game system have been reported to the Better Business Bureau.
If you’re one of the Buffalonians struggling with the Xbox 360, a relatively new Windows Vista operating system and laptops from the firm that rhymes with “hell”— meet Robert S. Swiatek, a tall computer software consultant from Amherst who has worked for decades at major corporations locally and throughout the country.
Swiatek has debugged computer problems at companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, helped with programming puzzles at places like Citibank, Keycorp and Welch’s Foods, and did consulting work with firms ranging from Nestle Foods to Sea World to Xerox Corp.
Now he is calling for a revamping of technology.
Swiatek has analyzed systems, designed them and written computer programs in various languages. He’s also worked on mainframe computers as well as microcomputers and minicomputers. And yet, even with his expertise, Swiatek says he personally continues “to suffer the defects of personal computers and the Internet.”
“Technology needs a huge revamping,” declares Swiatek, who holds a master’s degree in computer science from Binghamton State University’s School of Advanced Technology, another math master’s from the University at Buffalo, with an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Canisius College.
“First of all,” says the former high school math teacher, “technology has to be user-friendly.”
He feels we’re living a version of “the-technocrat-has-no-clothes” that few people discuss.
“I cannot understand how any programmer would accept a paycheck with all the defects in what he produces. Some people call these things challenges, but I call them bugs,” the computer expert says. “It’s time to come up with some innovation and replace the mouse and Windows with processes that all will welcome, no matter what age, and eliminate crashes, restarts and calls to the help desk.”
Swiatek reintroduces a fanciful sparring between one tech mogul and a car firm representative, in “This Page Intentionally Left Blank — Just Like the Paychecks of Workers,” his relatively new, award-winning treatise, where the computer industry is compared to the auto industry.
As a driver, Swiatek says, imagine putting up with this:
• For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
• Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
• Occasionally, your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would accept this, restart, and drive on.
• The airbag system would say “Are you sure?” before going off.
In continuing his comparison to cars, Swiatek wonders whether every time a new model was introduced, “car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.”
Or one company “would make a car that was powered by the sun, more reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.”
“Spam,” Swiatek maintains, “can be eliminated, with a bit of enforcement and policing.”
“I realize that spyware and viruses create jobs,” he continues. “However you can create some other jobs that will remove all these annoying hazards completely from our lives forever. It can be done and the people will be eternally grateful. I know I will.
“Internet service providers,” Swiatek feels, “can be more responsible to make our lives easier.”
“There are a few things that can be done to make e-mail what it was supposed to be. The elimination of this junk ‘correspondence’ will go a long way.”
Swiatek will read from his work at 2 p. m. Saturday in Borders at 2015 Walden Ave. in Cheektowaga. He also will speak at noon next Sunday at the Pearl Street Grill and Brewery at 76 Pearl St.
Computer firms did not return calls for comments in response to Swiatek’s complaints.
E-mail etiquette
Now that we have a “good manners” cell phone coming out where an incoming call supercedes iPhone music, computer users can be more responsible as well, says Swiatek, who turned from fixing computers to writing about them.
He proposes some e-mail etiquette that includes:
• If you plan to send jokes or humor of any kind, make sure it’s funny, not racist, sexist or condescending and above all, get new material.
• No Ponzi schemes of any kind.
•An e-mail with no subject should never be sent.
“Why have an e-mail address?” Swiatek asks, “if you’re not going to check to see what is in your inbox?”
And don’t wait three months to respond, he urges.
Swiatek says apply the Golden Rule in cyberspace: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Revealing his enthusiasm when he first learned of e-mail’s possibilities, “I realize that I was hallucinating since it never came anywhere close to what was promised. I need only remind you of spam, viruses, spy-ware, e-mails with FW (forward) in the title and racist, degrading jokes that you see over and over,” he notes. “I spent a great deal of time on e-mail and all its headaches.”
Within a two-year period he changed his own e-mail address twice.
“The first was necessary since I was getting bombarded with obscene overtures, having nothing to do with music,” he recounts. Another change was necessary because he was getting flooded with a tsunami of junk e-mails every day.
“E-mail was created to keep everyone connected and promised instant communication,” Swiatek points out.
“Unfortunately, the designers forgot about the fact that some people only check their messages every three months. They also didn’t take into consideration that every transmission doesn’t take place. I’ve sent e-mails that people have not received and simultaneously have not gotten stuff that others have directed to me. It’s possible these correspondences were accidently or otherwise deleted, or perhaps the sender didn’t press ‘Send,’ but it still points out the flaws of the system.
“This new creation was supposed to help us be more productive. When someone goes on vacation, on her return, she will have to spend hours checking the messages that have accumulated.
Technology professor Richard R. Reilly agrees that perhaps “the greatest problem with e-mail is the sheer number of e-mails we get every hour of every day.”
“Like a river with no end, the e-mails keep flowing and flowing, threatening to drown us all,” notes Reilly in his new primer “Uniting the Virtual Workforce,” penned with Karen Sobel Lojeski, an expert on the virtual workforce.
Lojeski points to a movement “afoot to deem specific days ‘e-mail free,’ adding that the underwater metaphor represents “our general inability to separate really important messages from those less important or completely irrelevant to our work or lives.”
She notes that some organizations now “use artificial intelligence to interpret messages and decide whether they’re important enough to read and answer.”
Inspired by online video games like “World of Warcraft,” there’s now software allowing “users to attach virtual currency called ‘serios’ to their e-mail messages,” she explains, noting that “it’s clear that we need better ways to manage our e-mail.”
Some users get thousands of junk e-mails a day, even with spam catchers. Employers who police a rare, well-meaning personal e-mail at work, seem to turn a blind eye at abusive spam that fits the definition of sexual harassment on the job.
The word “crash,” Swiatek notes, brings “fear into the hearts of computer aficionados.
“Users accept this as a normal activity in the life of a computer,” he says. “I was under the impression that computers were meant to make our lives easier.
Swiatek says he designed software and always had pride in what he created. “But that doesn’t seem to be a consideration today when it comes to PCs or the Internet,” he adds. “There are many reasons for that — the major one being greed. The computer manufacturers of software and hardware only want to make money. Who cares if the software works? The product is rushed out to beat the competitors and the bugs can be worked out later. Just think what would happen if car manufacturers used the same approach. You’d be driving on the interstate when all of a sudden the car exploded.”
PCs not user-friendly
“PCs just aren’t user-friendly,” he maintains in his upcoming book, “Press 1 for Pig Latin.”
“If they were, people wouldn’t do so much complaining. You can ask someone how she spent her weekend and she will mention that it was three days of fixing the PC after it crashed, and she only had a two-day weekend. Too many people curse the computer.
“No one needs to replace her computer every six months. It should last as long as an automobile. Make a better product and people will pay more for it.”
Perhaps instead of, for instance, creating a printer keyed to every language known to man for global marketing, it would be more consumer-friendly to concentrate on just a better printer.
And don’t get Swiatek started on passwords:
“When you really think about it, the people who these magic combinations of letters and numbers are supposed to keep out of the system — namely the hackers— don’t have any problem with passwords. They’re in without them while the normal users are locked out.”
And probably raging against their computers.
