Cobb

The Case for AirPods

#1 They fit better than any other earplug, because they're not plugs. They don't stopper your ears, so they have the best of both worlds - audio transparency to the air, and good bass like an earplug.

 

#2 Stereo mic. They work better than the line-based mic in the old wired Apple headset. It's as good a mic as any for everyday non-professional use.

 

#3 As a wireless device, they last all day easily.

 

#4 Actual, very good sound quality. I miss nothing from any headphones I would take outside. So I don't count my Grados.

 

#5 At first I felt stupid wearing airpods in public, now I feel stupid wearing 'DJ' headphones in public. On a plane, maybe less so. But I expect noise cancelling airpods are coming.

 

#6 The wireless convenience is real. Popping back and forth with the bluetooth pairing is simple and painless. They are light - perfect for running, hiking, etc. They are so comfortable you can wear them for hours without a problem.

 

#7 They are actually easier to keep track of. You never forget the case is in your pants because it's expensive. But it's something you don't take for granted, you tend to treat it like an expensive watch. I would easily ruin 3 pairs a year of the old style.

 

#8 The big plus comes if and when you get the Apple Watch. The coolness of being able to leave your phone at home cannot be overstated. There are a lot of things that just make more sense with the watch and headphones.

 

On this point and #5 I can see that me being in the IT industry and being a gearhead make me more flexible. But I also do pay more attention to human factors than the ordinary Joe. I kind of hate that the Apple Watch has made me, practically, less of a watch guy. My other 12 are sitting jealous. And I still feel that it's a little less cool than goiing two fisted like i used to with my Fitbit. But for the health monitoring, the Apple Watch is such a huge advantage that it's worth it. So I have really transformed my subtleties in going out in public with my electronics.

 

The interesting thing is that I treat my phone as a bit more precious. And now I see that some apps, like weather and health monitoring and music are just more appropriately done on the wrist. I'm liking messaging on the wrist too, which demonstrates to me that it's rather overdone elsewhere.

 

I really hope Signal makes a watch app.

The Streaming Creek is Drying Up

I have a big enough music library to recognize some dimensions of the market. The recent change in policy by Amazon Music has killed off some of my more interesting selections. I was warned.

My reaction is to spend a bit more money and time on vinyl, and to never again sell a CD. It's tricky to maintain several terabytes of digital music, but the convenience of streaming music is seductive and risky.

For example. I once had but no longer have an album of the Dave Rose Orchestra. This guy recorded 'The Stripper', a classic. You may immediately recognize the music, although not the girl, from this video.

I would be provocative to suggest some censorship is going on. I wouldn't doubt it but I cannot prove it. It makes little difference in a renter's market whose tastes are crowded out. But I suspect that the renter's market is only marginally larger than the buyer's market when it comes to digital goods online, and what's going on is the shrinkage of the renter's market to the minimum. Some understanding of the economics of 'ultimates' and 'superdistribution' is in order here.

The bottom line is that the major cloud providers are out of ideas and can no longer provide cheap or free storage for the long tail of digital goods and streaming services. The internet is no longer and infinite library.

I'm looking forward to TBL's SOLID, and forming some online collectives. Books, movies, and music are disappearing.

Cloud 101

There are two things to understand.

Virtualization & Economies of Scale.

First let’s remind you what you should already know about the world wide web. It’s millions and millions of computers that are web servers hosting content that you can see in your browser. It doesn’t matter where these computers are or what they look like. Some geek is going to make it easy for you, and the structure of the internet disappears. You just use it. That geek is like your mechanic, or your attorney, or your dentist. He understand the complexities of technical stuff, and there isn’t really an easy way to understand the how, but you can understand the why.

Virtualization

Virtualization is like a game of ‘telephone’ played by robots who can speak any language perfectly.

There are several layers of software that run on the hardware of your computer. Each computer’s CPU requires specific instructions to do the same thing. Your smartphone, your calculator, your desktop, your videogame console. They can all compute 1 + 1 =2. But they all have different CPUs that need to be programmed differently.

But you can write a program that makes your smartphone run the same exact program as the one that runs on your desktop computer. All it needs is what’s call an abstraction layer. What is an abstraction layer? In the game of telephone, one robot whispers English to the second robot, and the second robot speaks perfectly translated French into the ear of the third robot. The third robot has no idea what language the first robot whispered. That makes the second robot an abstraction layer.

A virtual machine puts an abstraction layer above the hardware of a computer CPU. It now can pretend to be any computer. It can speak any language. It can run any program. It can pretend to be

Virtualization has been around for about 40 years. IBM invented something called VM/CMS back in the 70s. (I think). It is now perfected to the point at which the performance cost of the abstraction layer is about 2–3%.

Virtualization works because of something called Turing’s Law or Turing completeness, which essentially states that any string of 1s and 0s can be translated into any other string of 1s and 0s given a set of proper rules. So any computer can emulate any other computer. The limiting factor is efficiency.

It also means any 10 computers can be made to seem like 1 big computer. Also, any 1 big computer can be made to seem like 10 ordinary computers, or 6 and a half bigger computers, or 37 very small computers. You just do the equivalent of turning a dial.

It is important to remember that over the years, compute hardware has become specialized. So you have special hardware for your self-driving car and special hardware for your talking refrigerator. But given the right software, your refrigerator could drive your car. Anything can be done in software, just a little bit slower, again, depending on the efficiency of the abstraction layer.

—

Economies of Scale

So what if I decide to take virtualization to the max? Lets say I build 20 data centers and each one has 500 racks of compute hardware. I could set up my virtualization to make those computers pretend to be web servers, or car driving programs, or videogame servers or basically any compute thing there is. If I have good business sense, I can rent out compute hardware like Hertz rents cars. I can sell compute capability to anyone. I take the risk and make a big capital investment in my data centers, and now all I have to do is get people to rent the compute power.

At some point, the volume discounts I can get buying chips from Intel exceeds whatever any single business can get. So to handle the equivalent amount of work in my data centers it’s cheaper for me to sell computer time to you than it is for you to buy your own computers and do it yourself.

At a big enough scale, I can borrow money cheaper than your business, I can hire smarter folks. But I still have to solve all of the details of virtualization so that you can do on my compute platform the same thing you would do in your own data center.

—

A cloud is a large set of compute hardware that runs many different virtualizations at an economically sustainable level.

Now if you want to look under the hood and see what makes a cloud good, you need to get into details of both what the technology has done and what the market has sustained over the past 20 or so years of cloud computing.

The three leaders in the space, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform and Microsoft Azure all started differently. Amazon by doing e-commerce and building out data centers to sustain that business. Google by doing web search and building out data centers to sustain that business. Microsoft partially by doing search and then determining not to be left behind. Because of this history, they are developing different kinds of services, and thus have different priorities.

The cloud will offer particular architectural advantages that are interesting to the geeks who dig looking under the hood. But these will always be dictated by market forces. The question about what is computable and what computers can do was answered a long time ago. 1s and 0s can represent just about anything humans can see and hear. The game is only constrained by compute efficiency and money.

 

The Rebirth of the Wall

"How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"
"None. That's a hardware problem" -- old joke

What a lovely thing is work. Putting your brain to somebody else's business and being paid to do so is the desire of every prisoner of the mind. And thus I have been reinvigorated from an unexpected corner. Operations. Hard drives. Routers. /opt. I have just recently discovered the joy of Linux server administration. I have to admit it's a lot more fun when you have three dozen very large servers to administer and everyone around you is quite comfortable that you have root. But this was the joyful gap that I didn't realize existed in all the years I endeavored to pull teeth in corporate IT and get the environment my brilliant developments deserved. I am three degrees of separation from end users, and for the first time in memory, I don't particularly mind it at all. I'm working for the machines.

What's doubly ironic about this is that I made a fairly loud exit from the world of Enterprise six years ago in abject frustration, looking desperately to find my place among open source and the clouds. Now, I want nothing more than to build my own datacenter in my garage. I want a DIY cloud, which is to say a big rack of hardware and some virtualization software. What would be lacking from a real cloud would be a real API, but that will be me. I'm the API of my own cloud and the captain of my soul. I think that making this move towards the machine is the fulfillment of yet another yearning on par with my move to stoicism. I had only thought I was dealing with reality in politics, but what I actually hungered for was the history of political philosophy. Similarly what I want in computing is access to the evolution of hardware and networks. Applications and clicks are as ephemeral as slogans and votes. Everybody does it without thought, what really counts is infrastructure.

Only I see where the whole cloud infrastructure game is going. It's going to oligopoly, with the fourth wildcard. Between the intellectual, legal and industrial capture of Google, Amazon and Microsoft is that nasty fourth thing called the Dark Web, and its next monstrous intervention will be the zero-trust tier of blockchain computing. If you don't know, then consider the history of Bitmain, and know that a man named McAfee is still alive. There is a future out there populated with hackers and systems that are much more immune from the sorts of ordinary disasters and bugs that destroy the lives of Enterprise IT jocks and their sheepy user base. There are two kinds of systems in the world, those who have survived hurricanes of DDOS attacks and those who are still wearing bunny slippers when it sprinkles outside. They don't know what a torrent is. They may not ever learn until it's too late. For those of us who will populate masts we would rather not be lashed to in the coming storms of cyberwar, the hedge is personal hardware and power, private networks and circles of trust. Or so it seems to me right now.

It turns out that grepping log files and shooting pistols are both loads of fun, and skills that require years of practice. But they're also fun. Shooting the zombies of tomorrows apocalypses will not fall merely to the burnt out crusaders longing like for the halcyon fields of home and bipolar yearning for honorable death. It will be fun.

So the first thing that I've done is resurrect a couple old machines from the scrap heap. My old MacBook Pro is now an Ubuntu machine. There's nothing in the Mac world that I need on that machine when I think about it, and bloat has really taken over. It's getting rather obvious and tiresome, Apple. Cut it out. That and an old 386 Dell will host lightweight stuff as yet to be determined. But right now they're running Consul and Zerotier (more on them later). Next I want to get a physical rack and a discarded Dell MD1000. That, I will fill with 7200 RPM terabyte hard drives and lower my cost of S3 storage, which I can and probably will just move all to Glacier. My S3 bill just peaked over $40 a month. No can do. Since I have gotten the new 256GB iPhone, there is essentially no reason for me to have that extra duplicate copy of my 100k pictures on S3. And I'm pretty sure that I have everything Flikr on my own drives too.

The big deal and central object of The Wall is my investment in Vertica and reference data. So I'll have a relatively high powered database server running so that I can practice spinning up entire orchestrated things around referenceable datasets. IE. click on this package and get a full 'enterprise' quality query space, stuff that almost nobody does. I expect to get under the community wire with open source tools, and I am especially looking forward to using Fugue as its applicable to instant-up a data reference stack. The collaboration between AWS and VMWare will help a lot, as will a lot of Hak5 reruns and r/homelab.

Big fun coming.

IOS7

IOS7 ROCKS

There is something about it that is light and clean and airy that is annoying in the way that Apple's obsession with lightness and thinness has always been annoying. I'm having a hard time holding on to my thicker, squatter, steel-framed masculine iPhone 4S whose new innards are betraying it. I have my Otter Box and my Pelican Box for my 4S and Apple wants to sweep me forward with new gear. But I'm invested in the old, and the old is still fast enough to run the new system. So no 5S for me, unless my camera fails become intolerable. You see I've repaired this bad boy. I've lived with it two years. 

The animations are nice and unobtrusive, unlike that madness on the Android pocket slabs. I like very much that Apple uses iconography that is sophisticated and simple, implying the right ideas without spelling it all out. The new software download symbolism, for example, is a masterpiece of simplicity. I like the new alarm tones. I like the pull up menu. I like that the clock icon tells time, duh. The new calendar is righteous. If the Bauhaus had color and Debussy's piano music, it would be like this Apple design. The pastels are not flat nor glaringly vivid. They look like advanced, functional colors, warmer than the clinical sci-fi but precise nonetheless. Rich and spare at the same time. 

Apple is full of Yahoo now. That's very interesting. It makes me remember that Yahoo used to be something awesome. A fruitful partnership could develop some compelling new goodies whose synergistic realization on IOS can produce a new generation of happier devotees to the jesus phone.

As it is, there are many things to discover that I'm enjoying. It's a major rediscovery of my own phone. 

On the 5C & 5S - Pink Plastic Polka Dots vs Brushed Grey Aluminum

Apple's CEO was off his presentation game today, but that's OK. The SVPs were doing just fine. I think they all need to tone it down a bit and stop using so many awesome amazing stupendous tremendous adjectives. Apple's days of Barnum and Bailey are over. They are a highly respectable design and engineering company and now would be a good time for them to act like it. Like Zeiss. Like Raymond Weil. Take a cue from some old school Europeans. Apple is very righteous to call out California and they do represent us well, but have a walk through Johnnie Ive's house why don't you. Awesome and stupendous are not the adjectives that come to mind. World class design does, and it's not always about fun fun fun, but perfection in harmony.

I take the cue that Apple understands this, and there is some element in their presentation, in the duality of this double launch that they serve colorful spontaneous markets and 'space grey' markets. You know me, I'm definitely in the space grey realm, but I also wanted to hear them say what they said specifically. Yes I do carry a lot of secure and important information around on my phone and no I do not want my fingerprint to ever leave it. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the presentation of the iTunes Festival. Bravo. A free concert streamed live globally. Take that, NBC! Apple *is* a big media company and a serious facilitator on the technical end. I was amused and entertained by the clip which had a very Cirque du Soleil feel to it. That's a classy kind of wildness and it is appropriate for Apple as an upscale designer kind of firm. Apple is feeling very global eurotrash these days, in a good way. I like that their edge is not edgy for its own sake, but that they are moving with confidence. Yes, this is our new designer retail store, 8 times the size of the old one, go see it if you have time. So very Porsche Design.

So right now the Apple SVPs are looking good, and enthusiastic and this is the right way for them to be. But I think they have established a casual precedent that cannot be maintained forever. One billionaire CEO in jeans and a t-shirt is one thing, but four multi-millionaire global corporate officers in casual clothes? I don't want to call them disingenuous, because I honestly buy that they are passionate about their products and exacting in their designs. And really, when you compare the flawless pressing of their casual shirts to that of the 3rd party game presenters, you know that they are meticulous about their casual image. But I gotta think these guys really actually do appreciate caviar and private jets, things they deserve in spades. This casual act is starting to wear thin. Let Google have that - that's all they've got. Now, OK I know that they are probably wearing Ecco shoes, and if there are $200 denim jeans, that's what they're wearing, but really? You guys don't eat hotdogs and hamburgers. Give us a break, huh? Quit acting like you never dress up, and use some adjectives representative of the confidence you actually have. Quit acting like the leaked picture of the gold 5s is going to destroy your shareholder value, or that if fanboys hate, you're going to take them seriously. (Did they really have to mention the antennas in the steel frame of the 5c?) 

Think about it for a moment. Recall the film 'Helvetica'.

 

 

It is impossible for me to imagine that fewer than 90% of Apple designers have seen this film. I bet they speak about it with reverence, and have considered at length how their products influence the thought process of creative people. This is the seriousness I appreciate in Apple, and I'm sure they appreciate in themselves. It's OK for them to come out and say so.

I like what Apple has become, a design and engineering world leader. I really do hope they begin to act just a little bit more mature. I think Apple can produce a pink plastic and brushed grey aluminum products, but they should quit acting at times like a jiiterbugging teeny bopper just because such people buy their products. 

 

 

My Brick is BRCK

It turns out that one of the original ideas in my novel-in-progress Borky's Beach, is becoming a reality. Now I have to keep my ears closed. It's rather strange that they've come up with the exact same name with the exact same purpose, but it makes perfect sense with regard to the fact that I've been talking about it for some time. As well, one of the premises of my near future novel is that most people can no longer afford commercial broadband. Ushahidi is the new inventor and their use case for rural Africa is exactly what I predict.

In Borky's future, ordinary people generate huge amounts of data they cannot afford to share. All of their experience goes into their brick, which is a personal storage device of massive capacities, some fractions of which are bursted to backup or for communications on a periodic basis. One of the radical elements of change in the novel is that bursting is hosted by a sort of rebel network. But there is also foafmesh...

The first time I thought about a personal brick (using the term 'brick') came to me sometime back in 1998 or so when I was thinking about what I wanted my smartphone to do. Now I have to go back and see exactly what I've written. But what I vaguely remember at this moment was that I wanted a wireless device that had about a couple gigabytes I could access any time - I don't remember that there were iPods at the time, if there were, I wasn't paying attention. There was another brand that had my attention, behind Palm. Palm, was the ruler back then, but there was another, I think Creative MP3 player whose form factor was brickish. The primary form factor that I recall was the Altoids box shaped 2GB modular disk drives that we used in ThinkPads of the era. That was what I thought of as a brick. And so I wanted one of those that I could put in my pocket and have it talk to my Palm Pilot and laptop - because back in those days, 2-5GB were all the digital assets anybody ever needed to be mobile. 

The older idea I had about a 'brick' was a nightmare that I kept having most of my adult life - which was that at some point in my life, as a very successful person, I would have the last backup of  my life's creations embedded in a chip in my left thumb. In the nightmare, I step onto a private jet whose door jam contains a scanning device that erases my thumb chip.  

---

Anyway here's an excerpt from Borky's Beach, which needs work but puts a lot of the bursting and bricking into the context of which I've been thinking of the digital future:

Zack took a token and pre-swiped some credits into his Archon Zyro identity. It would be enough to put a lease on a nice SUV and head out to the Emerald City. Molly was already nervous enough about this, so he wanted to spare no expense, or at least give her that impression and make everything smooth. He dropped his tablet into his backpack and grabbed a Gator from the fridge on his way out. 

 It was a short walk to the rental lot, but he wanted to make sure that he had something to drink along the way. Especially for a baller, he didn’t want to be tempted by the shops between his house and the lot. His building was just three in from Reseda but he would have to walk several long blocks down Reseda and this was college campus territory. Though only a fraction of the students attended Northridge than had in years gone by, somehow all of the businesses around the campus managed to survive. There was something about what it felt to be a freshman away from home for the first time that was appealing to more and more people of all ages these days, and all of the storefronts, restaurants, clubs and chillout zones were magnetic to the that crowd. Zach couldn’t blame them, most were probably on some balance of Blue Lively, like the majority of the population here in California, especially families and Groups still missing members from the Big P.  He knew there was temptation between here and there.

 Here was Reseda Boulevard, and so he made a right turn south and his eye was immediately caught by the Jack Denny’s on the corner. It shone a picture of Molly, looking bustier and leggier than she actually was in a one piece maillot luxuriously pouring a bowl of Panang Borky’s all over herself. Damn! He forgot to turn on Archon Zyro. He turned away before the smell of panang curry tied his guts into a pang of hunger and did his best to sublimate the creeping boner in his pants. He tapped the side of his glasses three times and pushed them back up his nose to remind his tablet to broadcast him as Archon Zyro. He took a swig of Gator, darkened his shades and started moving faster down the street. 

Across the street there was a Floradonna store, bright and menacing;  brilliant seduction of Lipson glass, light and color.  Several youth were spilling out giggling over a small bottle. 

 The Super A Foodmart stood as supermarkets usually do, backed into a corner of a large flat parking lot with its strip mall arms reaching to the main  streets. This was no exception to the architectural rule, except that when it was looted and burned during the Big P, nobody bothered to build it back. It's arms remained untouched and rather dowdy but in the strange way that things that seem out of sorts eventually come into their own meaning, this strip mall had its own special sense of security. The exposed steel girders making the flattish A framed which before the fire held an actual roof now served as a kind of hallowed reminder of the chaos, of the loss of life in the way of the dark, anonymous world before LastID.  Zack began crossing the lot diagonally. He could see the bronze SUV ahead of him parked a few meters from a lightpole.

As he approached, he could see that this lightpole was the same Zulu tower he used to use. Today he had no use for it. In fact, now that he had his promotion, he hadn't needed them at all. He was a node and there were only 255 nodes in LA County. Still, he retained the habits of not being hardwired into important networks.  As he approached the area in the middle of the mostly empty parking lot, he instinctively addressed the tower as if he were actually using it, just in case somebody realized exactly who he was. Then, moving towards the SUV, slowed his pace slightly until he heard it pop its locks, recognizing Archon Zyro with a welcoming chirp. 

 Zack drove east past the university several miles and then under the 405 with its stream of quiet vehicles blurring by in a rush of wind. He reached Panorama in 15 minutes taking the back streets towards Molly's place. Zack always liked to cruise the ghetto, rolling deftly through alleys and the streets with cars parked end to end on both sides narrowing to what is barely a lane and a half wide.  He practiced the stare of an agent on teens too young to get Lively or any kind of Blue. He gave them the look, and when they tried to ping him, they got the 404. That's right bitches, I can see you but you can't see me. 

 Molly was waiting out in front of her apartment building. Zach pulled up and double parked with flashers for a moment to get out and hug her. She smelled like something fresh and clean and orangey. It cleared his head in an instant. As she got into the passenger seat, her brick took over as DJ in the SUV. Zach noticed the blatant switch, it didn’t fade into her song, but clicked.

 “Let me adjust your fade pattern. You can set that up you know. Pull out your brick and thumb it.”

 Molly hesitated for a moment. It was a rather dangerous request. Once you thumbed your brick, a level of interface became available that allowed lots of important changes to be made. She would be confiding much in Zach by doing so.  Zach’s eyes said trust me, and she did. Molly reached into her backpack and produced an aluminum box with rubberized corners and a small black glass window. It was smaller than an actual mason’s brick by about half in all dimensions, yet Zach’s eyes widened at the sight of it.

 “You’re kidding me right?”

 “What? Oh. Yes I know it’s kind of old..”

 “Kind of? It looks like first generation.”

 “It is. I got it when I got my Orals. You know how Grandmother feels about these things.”

 “Yes but it… Wow. When’s the last time you ran an integrity check on it?” 

 “I don’t know, every year on my birthday, I guess.“

 “Molly, you are living on the edge, babe.” 

 “Well, it’s still backed up at the bank. I mean, I couldn’t prepay or subscribe if it didn’t work, right?” 

 “I know but you need to check it out all the time…”, Zach broke off. He was about to mention if you’re married to an Associate, but he didn’t want to press the issue so much as make sure that she’s OK and backed up. Talking about hacking was not a good idea right now. “Well, we’ll make sure it’s all good right now, OK?”

 Molly thumbed her brick and handed it over to Zach, the expression on her face like a child handing over a kitten to the vet. She let her fingers linger on it a second longer and looked shamefacedly down for a moment and then back full to him, trusting. The moment was awkwardly pregnant. Zack leaned over and kissed her. With the brick firmly in his hands like a football, he make a joke of clutching onto it. They relaxed into their seats in the SUV, exhaled and then fell into spontaneous laughter. 

 “God’s blue! Ok lets do this.” Zach tinted the windows to dark brown. Correspondingly the interior lights came up, as the vehicle wasn’t moving and he got to work using his own tablet now hooked to Molly’s brick. He brought up the maintenance screens and ran a simple diagnostic. Everything seemed to be fine, except that he noticed that there wasn’t much usage. Contemporary bricks, now in the fifth generation, held enough local storage to handle triple redundancy of almost four months. The first generation held six months but didn’t have adaptive redundancy. The idea that somebody would be running foafmesh for more than six months without bursting was pretty much unthinkable, but adaptive redundancy allowed a person to go from triple to double to single redundancy, at the end of which time, it would autoburst. But that almost never happened and most people had autobursting on a weekly basis, monthly if they couldn’t afford the bandwidth. There were still people who were not billies, not completely off the grid, who ran the older, first generation protocols, and of course people with luxury subscriptions could have all sorts of interesting things, or so he had heard. Zach had even heard that there was a secret seventh protocol of LastID. Now that he was an Associate, it seemed that a lot more was possible than he'd ever imagined. 

 

Jump!

From the Redbull site:

 

Red Bull Stratos: Mission Accomplished

Austria's Felix Baumgartner earned his place in the history books on Sunday after overcoming concerns with  the power for his visor heater that impaired his vision and nearly jeopardized the mission. Baumgartner reached an estimated speed of 1,342.8 km (Mach 1.24) jumping from the stratosphere, which when certified will make him the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall and set several other records* while delivering valuable data for future space exploration.

 

ROSWELL, New Mexico - After flying to an altitude of 39,045 meters (128,100 feet) in a helium-filled balloon, Felix Baumgartner completed Sunday morning a record breaking jump for the ages from the edge of space, exactly 65 years after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier flying in an experimental rocket-powered airplane. The 43-year-old Austrian skydiving expert also broke two other world records (highest freefall, highest manned balloon flight), leaving the one for the longest freefall to project mentor Col. Joe Kittinger.

Baumgartner landed safely with his parachute in the desert of New Mexico after jumping out of his space capsule at 39,045 meters and plunging back towards earth, hitting a maximum of speed of 1,342.8 km/h through the near vacuum of the stratosphere before being slowed by the atmosphere later during his 4:20 minute long freefall. Baumgartner's jump lasted a total of 9:03 minutes. Countless millions of people around the world watched his ascent and jump live on television broadcasts and live stream on the Internet. At one point during his freefall Baumgartner appeared to spin rapidly, but he quickly re-gained control and moments later opened his parachute as members of the ground crew cheered and viewers around the world heaved a sigh of relief.

"It was an incredible up and down today, just like it's been with the whole project," a relieved Baumgartner said. "First we got off with a beautiful launch and then we had a bit of drama with a power supply issue to my visor. The exit was perfect but then I started spinning slowly. I thought I'd just spin a few times and that would be that, but then I started to speed up. It was really brutal at times. I thought for a few seconds that I'd lose consciousness. I didn't feel a sonic boom because I was so busy just trying to stabilize myself. We'll have to wait and see if we really broke the sound barrier. It was really a lot harder than I thought it was going to be."

Baumgartner and his team spent five years training and preparing for the mission that is designed to improve our scientific understanding of how the body copes with the extreme conditions at the edge of space.

Baumgartner had endured several weather-related delays before finally lifting off under bright blue skies and calm winds on Sunday morning. The Red Bull Stratos crew watching from Mission Control broke out into spontaneous applause when the balloon lifted off.

 

* The data on the records set by the jump are preliminary pending confirmation from the authorized governing bodies.

Pictures: Joerg Mitter, Predrag Vuckovic, Balazs Gardi, Stefan Aufschnaiter

 

Apple Crushes Samsung

I've been trying to figure out, for the past month or so, what is so fabulous about Android as an operating system. I'm basically convinced that the answer is, Google created it and Google can do no evil. But outside of the basic open way in which Google has licensed it's mobile OS presumeably (I must presume due to the nature and tone of the general complaints of Android developers) it's just another operating system. 

We in the US have a patent office that essentially supports the actions of unsavory characters known as 'patent trolls'. Whey they do is buy up relatively simple ideas and then trade and sue in a contentious marketplace. 

I'm going to have to give automobile analogies to expose my bias and illustrate what I think is going on.

We have a nation of tens of millions of people with the surplus income to buy a new generation of electronic devices that do somewhat interesting things. And we have hundreds of thousands of developers who stake their careers on coming up with new interesting things to put into these devices. These developers work, by and large, from the designs set forth by a small handful of companies you could conceivably call The Big Three.  The analogy is an eager public who can buy cars, and hundreds fo thousands of mechanics and well, three big automakers. The King today is Apple, and Apple just invented a new kind of luxury car that has power windows, power brakes, moving seats, automatic transmission and crazy styled fins on the rear. It turns out that the difference between windows that crank and power windows is a patenable idea, even though any one of those hundreds of thousands of mechanics could build power windows from scratch.

Well, in this environment where you can patent not only power windows but the style of the buttons on the power windows and the color of the felt in the door that wipes the windows as they move up and down, Apple is making all the legal hay it can make over the fact that others of the big three have decided to make luxury cars as well. And guess what, all these copycat luxury cars have power windows, power brakes, power seats, automatic transmissions and fins. 

The reason all this matters is that Apple's luxury car was originally considered overpriced. All those mechanics laughed when they heard the luxury car was in the works, and they laughed when it came out. Nokia, they said, was the industry genius when it came to phones. Nobody will pay for all that stupid luxury. Well they predicted wrong, and this new category of luxury car became very profitable. It didnt' do much more - it just made simple things everybody already had on their cars easier to do. 

But then, seeing the success, they did the same thing, and they called it innovation even though the design of power window buttons is not really innovative and most anybody can design one. 

The complaint of Android developers and the failure of Samsung to defend its own 'innovation' is that now Apple will have a virtual monopoly on the market they created - of high priced premium designed luxury smartphones and tablets. The irony is that those thousands of mechanics can't really think of a new way to use the Android operating system, or can they? Is it just Samsung? 

The Amazon Kindle uses (last time I checked) the Android operating system. If Apple decides to go to war against Amazon, matters will really heat up. But what I read into today's decision is that the patent infringment charges were very specific on a product by product basis. In other words, there were plenty of products using Android that were not infringing. 

From my point of view, it seems completely right and proper that developers should complain about any legal and regulatory constraints that lead to monopoly. But there are two qualifiactions on that. The first is whether or not these 'innovations' are really that. You see if somebody patents a power window button, what's to stop you from making a power window lever, or drawstring, or voice control, or dial? It is ultimately a matter of superior or inferior design and if Apple has the exclusive rights to the superior design, then how can they be wrong? So I find it hard to buy the idea that Apple's defense of rights stifles innovation. 

The second qualification is whether or not the thousands of developers who voice this complaint are actually capable of building something materially different. To use the automobile analogy again, all of the mechanics are complaining that the patents for piston rings cost them money and stifle innovation. But that's only because they are thinking about the market leading engine technology. Rotary engines, the kind used in Mazdas don't use pistons or piston rings at all. If you were truly innovative, you'd put your own engine out there. But most mechanics are incapable of building engines from scratch, they need prior designs.

At some point in the future, the market is going to show that the marginal value of Apple's luxury products is minimal. As it stands, Apple's strategy strands their own products into the bargain bin a mere three years out. Apple's strength is that they deliver their innovations to the market like movie studios deliver summer blockbusters. And those blockbusters and their sequels deliver the big profits up front, and then dwindle in value over time. The complainers want the big summer movie audience. Whoops, two analogies. 

There's something else here too, and this to me is the more important thing. That is that I smell a sense of entitlement in the air.  The basic theory underlying all digital computing is that any one 'Turing complete machine' can emulate the exact same functions of any other 'Turing complete machine'. Which is saying that any computer can compute anything any other computer can compute. The possibilities are limitless, but the market opportunity is not. 

I believe that there are programmers right now at JPL or CERN, scientific programmers, who could build systems of increible beauty, capability and longevity. But instead they choose to serve other purposes than consumer markets. The idea that such programmers are limited by the decision against Samsung today strikes me as preposterous. To make a third analogy, what we have seen is the vindication of the Big Mac. Nobody else can use three slices of bread with sesame seeds and the same special sauce. The hamburger market has patented the sliced pickle, and it's really a shame that pickles and sesame seeds can be patented, but people do eat more than hamburgers. And maybe these wannabe market leaders ought to learn to cook something different, really different for a change.

 

From a Wish To a Cure

Yesterday I bought a fifth of gin, a bag of Doritos, a six pack of blood orange sparkling water, and a package of dishwasher soap tablets. We were running low so I stopped by the local Vons. As I swiped my card and entered my numbers, I noticed that there were shopping bags for sale. If you live in a less politically correct district than I, let me explain. The moms in our community have been convinced that neither paper or plastic shopping bags are environmentally friendly enough. The truly sustainable solution is to not use anything disposable. In this matter they are correct. It is a solution that scales. 

The proper shopping bags are generally made of canvas and can hold heavier items. Most moms have a couple. I'm sure that we have at least four. But what really caught my eye on this two dollar item was its baby blue color and its slogan written in Chancery Script with nice curly underlines and glittery stars. "From a Wish to a Cure". I was given to know that if I purchased this particular bag, I would be contributing to fund cancer research. 

What immidiately flew to mind was the enormous break in logic, but the absolute symmetry in rationale. How do you save the environment? Well, if everybody buys a bag instead of sending disposable bags to the dump... How do you cure cancer? Well, if everybody buys a bag instead of sending disposable bags to the dump...

I encounter this kind of consumerism all the time. It annoys me dispropotionately, and I always get so angry about it that I cannot give it a decent name so that I can refer back to it when I see another example. I suppose I should call it the Wishful Thinking Economy. But that's so broad...

--

I told my daughter yesterday that she should apply to colleges that weigh essays heavily. It's because she's a very good writer and a lousy test taker. She used to be bad at math, but now loves algebra because she's now very good at picking out the duplicity and inconcistency of her social studies classes. When exactly did History become Social Studies anyway?  My longer lesson was that I wanted her to understand what I understand, which is that picking an alternative lifestyle does not change the shape of the world, you just get expert at dodging the real world. Math always exists, reductionary tests always exist. Dodge the scantrons today, but know they lurk. 

You know the cliche. "Nobody" uses algebra in the real world. Yeah, nobody in the unemployment lines. These days, there are adverts for jobs that pay 80,000 for two years experience programming Java. Something you can learn in two years. Or at least it seems that way to me, if you've decided not to court the alternative lifestyle. 

So there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who seek the alternative lifestyle where you don't have to learn whatever it is you didn't get the first time around in high school, like science or History or PE, and then there are those who capitalize on your ignorance by giving you 'solutions' to buy at Vons. 

--

It turns out that Chrysler, back in the mid 50s, perfected the gas turbine engine. Jay Leno has one of the 6 remaining. There were several dozen prototypes that the company ordered destroyed. According to the author I saw on one of the many videos I watched yesterday, it was the oil embargo and new CAFE standards that killed the program. 

So we had a smogless vehicle 40 years before the Prius, made in America. 

Amazon: The Next General Motors

At some point, we must consider the basic needs of humanity and figure out how the economy is arranged to provide for it and what goods and services the markets can sustain beyond those of necessity. In America, we can predict beyond necessity because ours are so well spoken for. It is that interesting gap that I spend hours thinking when I try to distinguish our 9% unemployment rate from the poverty of the second and third worlds. 

Several years ago, the NYT published a survey about the most prestigious professions. I was mildly surprised to see that Database Administrators ranked third, behind doctors and lawyers out of 447 job titles. But what has not been surprising is how much of our economy has moved into what I must call industrial dependency on computing services. We are at a point in our history where taking away the computers would be like taking away the automobiles. Information technology and telecommunications are where what we know must live or else die. The efficiencies and effectiveness of this industry too compelling to put aside. In this world there are as many microchips as grains of rice, and the trend is irreversible.

Clay Shirky, among many inquisitors into the phenomena of this age has written a book entitled 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In i, he shows how many ventures on the internet capture human efforts quite effectively - in ways heretofore impossible. Imagine the creation of a global encyclopedia in fifty languages written by nobody in particular in their spare time. That's Wikipedia. The ability for a literate population of billions to create products and services for the intellect is the world historical process that is emerging now. 

The Industrial Revolution as we know it come to be because it generated a great surplus in one basic human need, clothing. It turned out that once properly organized, ordinary people had the skill to produce in factories, a product everyone needed. By applying a process that scaled up the ordinary work of an individual tailor, people were able to earn more money, make more clothes and create for the population of ordinary people, choices in what clothing to wear. What started as clothing, once individually crafted, moved on to other sorts of manufacture with its ultimate expressions in the automobile and jet aircraft.  For an ordinary person to have choices in how to get to a destination, and have many destinations to choose from drastically changed the shape of the world. We don't talk much about the 'jet set' because now frequent flying is commonplace. It's hard to imagine rolling back to a time when an automobile was not an option or when jet transport did not exist. FedEx overnight delivery was created in our lifetimes. In America, 'allow six weeks for delivery' used to be the standard.

In these ways the future of IT are certain to create surpluses for the common man. What is necessary is for the high cost of craftsmanship to be surpassed by the low cost of mass production. For manufacturing, that required the factory. For computing it requires the cloud. What is a factory but a streamlined and standardized version of a craftsman's workshop scaled up for mass production? The cloud is certainly that as compared to the typical corporate IT shop.

In 1908, the head of Cadillac in England famously put on a remarkable demonstration. He had three Cadillac Model Ks race around a track and then disassembled. Then he scrambled the parts and even took out some and replaced them with off the shelf replacements. He then had the cars reassembled. All three of them worked perfectly. Today, most software is built in such a way that this would be impossible, but the cloud and the open source movement are rapidly changing that condition. 

Amazon is the leading cloud provider and I predict that the services, products, standards and practices that emerge from what it is learning about computing, networks, and security at massive scale will be every bit as influential in society as the paradigms that emerged over the 20th century for the automobile at Ford and General Motors. Moreover, the effect of these new ideas will provide similar surpluses. 

It was 1903 when the Wright Brothers first succeeded. It was a mere 14 years later when the Red Baron emerged as the combat 'ace' of WW1. That is how quickly people can adapt and master something that didn't even exist, on a world scale. Amazon and its rivals now host the software solutions of companies like Netflix. 14 years ago, in 1998, high definition video on demand to mass markets of mobile devices was considered impossible.

General Motors became the world's largest business and ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Even today we have a hard time not thinking about those businesses organized around the automobile when we say the word 'industry'. Glass, rubber, plastics and steel were all made that much more important owing to their place in the autombility manufacturing. Today oil is king because it is the consumable part of the worlds automotive needs. But it is *an* economy, not *the* economy. The next economic progression will come from the real fact that we will have more literate people on the planet than ever before in our history. Their cognitive needs and wants will fuel an even larger economy than that based on the clever assembly of glass, rubber, plastics, steel and oil. 

It begins with enabling a new class of database administrators, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all of the various kinds of creative, thoughtful knowledge and communications workers we can assemble and setting them loose in the cloud - the scaled up information factories of tomorrow. 

Today, we sit on the verge of enabling the common man a choice of thought previously only available in the same ways a choice of clothing was scarcely affordable in an age of hand sewn tailored garments. He will demand his choice and those who provide it will profit. The economy of intellect is at hand and it will be the Americans, once again, who light the way forward by providing the infrastructure necessary - the largest and most advanced software factories in the world. Considering what Microsoft and Oracle have been, I do not see how Amazon can lose. 

The Bastards of Class Boundary Transgressions

I watched a lecture by Richard Stallman this morning and it was brilliant, and then I watched another by him and it was awful. The difference was that in the first one he was summarizing the lessons of his work and life and in the second one he set himself up as an example.

The problem with self-righteousness is related to another problem that I understand but have not yet given it a term. I'm usually pretty good at doing so, but this particular phenomenon escapes my ontology. It will take a minute to explain. 

We all know that hackers can own our computers. But they don't. Why? Because we're not worth it. And even if they steal 10 million credit cards, it's not really a profitable business. Why? because the average Joe doesn't have that much credit. We are beneath the radar. It's safe to be ignorant because ignorant people aren't particularly dangerous. That's the phenomenon. Let me describe it one more way. If you are the ordinary Joe and you wear jeans and a t-shirt it's not a scandal, but it would be if you were a UN diplomat. 

Let's call it, for the time being, the Class Boundary Scrutiny Problem. 

Stallman, in his odious lecture was explaining how Apple Computer was closed and proprietary and for that reason he would not even accept an iPad as a gift. He did a little browbeating of a person who brought up the question about a jailbroken iPhone, the questioner was being a little obsequious and Stallman was being a little self-righteous. 

When you are a tenured professor, you have the luxury of time to develop the skill of not using many cultural idioms. You can speak directly from knowledge without the necessity for idioms. But for most people in the world, we are trying to find ways and means to secure our lives. And the world is very complicated and doesn't readily yeild up sinecures like tenure. So we search. And in our searching we communicate with one another trying to make sense of our lifestyles, our religious, politics, diet, exercise, educations, job skills. There's a lot of information to process. But we'll alwyas be ignorant of something and until we reach the point at which we might be a tenured professor or acknowledged expert, there is always some detail or nuance that we do not know. We are in an inferior class of skill or knowledge. But that is acceptable because of the Class Boundary Scrutiny phenomenon which makes us good sports almost by default.  

Except Stallman didn't respect that. He said, you should be like me. He is the diplomat scandalizing the Joe for his denim.

This is not about Stallman per se. It is about whether or not people can be safe in their ignorance. I say they should, according to gerneralizable class boundaries. 

You see, I have a choice on a Saturday night to go out and watch a popular movie in theaters, or stay home and watch videos of Richard Stallman and write arcane essays about my insights. The former unites me with the masses, the latter alienates me. Well, let me qualify that. Knowledge alienates only when it is applied with discipline. But whether or not that discipline is applied, I at least have an additional layer of dissonance between myself and others who are not possessed of that same knowledge. That is because it takes me time to learn it and it takes me time to explain it to those who have not learned it. That's the minimal amount. If I apply the discipline as Stallman does, it seems like self-righteousness until I preach.

So today, the young man in the video and I both learned a lesson about the fact that certain chipsets, hidden within machines that might claim to be open, are not in fact open. Stallman bragged about his open source BIOS. The very idea of having an open source BIOS never crossed my mind, and I'm a programmer. Naturally, if I applied the discipline, then I alienate myself not only from Apple fanboys, but from the people who are completely satisfied with Apple products. 

You see, if you are of a certain class, you have complete freedom within that restraint. How then could you be equal to any other human at a higher level? You cannot, but you pay the price with the implied contempt of the superior class, and you reap the benefit of the neglect of the superior class. You are not important enough to merit attention, and thus escape the brutal scrutiny of a would-be peer. Unless, you find someone who, like Stallman in the second lecture, is unctious with his contempt. Those are harsh words to apply to that particular lecture, but since much worse has been said about Stallman, I only use it to make clear the social nature of such a class boundary transgression. 

BTW, when I think of the epithet 'bastard' this is exactly what I mean. A bastard, someone whose father doesn't recognize them, is the recipient of the worst kind of contempt. The bastard never gets the benefit of the doubt, is obsequeous and defensive at once. At some point they either transcend and find peace within themselves or they become a Bastard, which is someone who harries the newbs without mercy. A bastard is thus a person who possesses no grace and offers no quarter. 

So you see in this regard we do and should use class to protect our honor and our ignorance. We can merit this by not being salf-righteous bastards but still make efforts to reduce the dissonance between ourselves and those who are more or less informed. It works both ways you see. You cannot assume that simply because something complicated that you don't understand is not going the way you expect, that you should immediately whip out the torches and pitchforks. As Chris Rock said, that's when 'keeping it real goes wrong'.

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

--

It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

--

I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

--

The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

--

I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

A New Class of Stock

I just had a bit of genius idea. I'll share it.

(I keep writing stuff on Google+ which swallows up my comments and gives me no way to search for them). I've been considering the similarities and differences between the Tea Partiers and the 99ers. I have less sympathy for the 99ers because they don't know their enemies and are even more incoherent than the Tea Party rabble. But within their ridiculously large scope of concerns are some legitimate ones about public bailouts.

In one of those discussions on G+, somebody mentioned the pain problem of golden parachutes, with which I actually have no beef. No corporation dispenses with all that moolah if it needs it. In other words, no board of directors worth beans would allow for a CEO or other exec to take shareholder money out of the corporation. But then you have to ask questions about shares...

What if corporations, in order to receive a lower tax bracket, were required to issue a certain fraction of their shares as voting shares? And what if these voting shares could not be proxied? That would mean that such corporations, in putting significant questions before the shareholders would have to hold the sort of elections that probably have not been possible. But we can certainly do that with our new technologies.

This would bridge the gap between the foolishness of these populist movements and the recklessness of the boards of directors by empowering shareholders.

Steve Jobs & The Batcave

About 4 years ago my youngest daughter asked me what job I would do if I could do anything I wanted. I thought about it for a while and then told her that I would design lairs for evil scientists who wanted to take over the world. I'm pretty sure that's what Steve Jobs and I have in common. 

Over at Bogost, Ian suggests that Jobs was a corporate fascist.

That's what everyone loves about him: he tells us what he wants, and he convinces us we are going to like it. And we do, not because he's right (despite popular opinion), but because it's so rare to get such definitive, brazen, top-down, abusive treatment in this era of lowest-common-demoninator wishy-washiness. It doesn't matter if he's right because his design sense is so definitive, it outstrips truth in favor of legend.

I think it does matter that he's right, but it took him a long time to be right enough. Jobs is something no other great computerist is, which is an enemy of interoperability. He alone had the nerve to build a set of products that needed nothing to do with the rest of how the world did computing. And from that basic premise of purity, everything else follows.  Jobs basically said, I don't need to cooperate to build something I would love. He is your basic idiosyncratic perfectionist, and to my way of seeing things, exactly like every other entrepreneur who said, I built the thing I wanted and I hoped everybody would be just like me.

All his presentations have been about telling us how excited he is about the thing his company built just for him to his most exacting standards. And he had been doing it for years until all the right things clicked. There is so much weirdness in Apple's closet. By what standard is the original iMac anything but atrocious? The NexT cube, that was beautiful. And back in those days (take it from an old Xeroid) computer companies built everything proprietarily. There was nothing wrong with that, ever. Except Oracle took market share from IBM and began the necessity for interoperability standards in the lucrative world of enterprise computing with SAP and others contributing to make corporate IT what it is today - an ungodly mess. But Apple didn't give a crap about all that. They wanted to make what they wanted to make. Quadras. PowerMacs. And when Power Computing came around and made it cheaper and faster, Jobs killed them. Murdered them.

Apple is now like Mercedes Benz or BMW. It is the single mass market premium brand for computers. It's fair to compare Apple the brand to any luxury car brand for whom its parts are hard to find and not quite interchangeable. That Jobs stood alone is more curious than anything, because for the most part we're suckers for that obsessive who builds the spare-no-expense, ultra-hip, status symbol of perfection with its own walled garden of accessories. 

I want to compare Jobs to Ferdinand Porsche or Enzo Ferarri or Frank Lloyd Wright or Dean Kamen, but I don't have the patience to make the appropriate contrasts. Except I do want to stress that had Kamen's ideas for the Segway pan out, he would have continued on to the sort of fame Jobs new enjoys. There's no comparison though. Kamen is by far the more prolific of the two and towards greater ends. 

Apple Without Steve

Apple without Steve is like a metaphor without a simile. You always think of them together, but they are actually two separate distinct things. The problem is that it takes a bit of thinking to distinguish the two, and admit it, you'd rather be lazy. 

I have hated Apple because of things that Steve Jobs did, most notably killed Power Computing. But also, Apple completely failed to provide a good business computing platform by going its own stupid way away from ODBC. But the things to love about Apple have much to do with decisions that are now already evident in the culture and product line. Apple makes premium products. Steve Jobs, however brilliant he may be, is not the originator of insanely great ideas. Those ideas are all out there and everybody with a computer science brain knows them. The only question for Apple's intermediate future is whether or not its new CEO will be able to continue to make premium products and execute them well. 

The rest of the computing industry will pull its own weight with products downstream of Apple's quality, but with equivalent functionality. You can't stay in business if your product can't match features with what consumers can afford. 

As I've said, the future of Apple is the legacy of Sony. They will become the world's transcendent prosumer supplier. They will infiltrate the world of media content creation, distribution and consumption with tools that interoperate completely within their walled garden. That means the reinvention of televisions, cameras, phones, etc. They will obsessively focus on human factors, ease of use, elegance and high performance. As soon as you can envision that global market, it's a no brainer to see what Apple can possibly do.

It's difficult to believe that Apple could possibly do worse than it has before Jobs set them on this track. With Amilio, Scully, Gasse, we got into the various guts of Apple. But now with Johnny Ive running design, that kind of thinking has been transcended. Let Hackintoshes do what they must. but the product is hardware and an experience with hardware. Sony has done it. Samsung is doing it now. So what it's all about now is execution, and what's good news is Tim Cook is all about execution. 

What nobody can do that only Steve could have done was to corral the music industry, the film industry, telecom compaines and the book publishing business and convince them that their future is with Apple. You have to be larger than life to do such things. Alfred P. Sloan was that big. Walter Wriston was that big. Michael Bloomberg is that kind of man. But such greatness is not necessary for a company to be great, it is necessary for a company to become legendary. Apple can be great for many years to come without Jobs as CEO and ultimately without him as Chairman. 

Aside from all that, it's all about Bezos. Remember I told you so. 

Social Software Seduction

I had an imaginary fight with some bureaucrat and my killer line had something to do with the ability to write recursive algorithms. But I haven't written one in decades because in the ordinary course of my business, nobody can think of a purpose for their systems that might call for one. 

I write custom code, but around a small universe of systems for which most of the creativity has been squeezed out. It's interesting to do balance sheet forecasting considering the effect of inventory on cash, but only for a short while. 

This got me to thinking about who gets to write interesting code and for what purposes. Like who gets to write interesting books or music, you would be daunted by the mediocrity of the best-sellers. And this is a thing I keep seeing in social software. 

Yesterday, I was actually bored enough to watch ABC news with Diane Sawyer, and there was a segment in which some Silicon Valley dude offered $100,000 for kids with ideas to skip college and go directly into business (with him). All predatory jokes aside, they interviewed a kid who built an electric car. An electric car, well - I never heard that idea before. There's lots of money in the idea of the new, but really. Does anybody actually believe that kid is going to get market share? Market share - especially the mass market, belongs to the big money. Big money grows monoculture. Big money social software expands monoculture.

Now think of all the social software you can. What does it do? It does very little, but it does do it in the same way all software does - by narrowing human focus into the range of interactions the programmers can come up with. In short, it runs you through a maze. 

The interactivity of software is why using it is more mentally stimulating than watching television. I'd take a video game over a tv show any day. oftware does allow to interact but all the right actions are already known, and in some ways it's more restrictive than watching TV. If you are watching I Love Lucy, then you know there is a laugh track. If the joke isn't funny, you don't have to laugh. But with software, you have to interact precisely as the programmer wants you to or you don't get to the next level. Imagine not getting past the commercial break unless you laugh at Lucy's silly foibles.

In this way, even social software is close-ended. It gives you a transaction or two to generation and lets a zillion other folks see 'you' and your transactions. But you must transact to be seen. Social software is never so immersive as any sandbox video game, and never should be (unless you actually prefer There and Second Life to Facebook), but it still directs your attention. It seduces you into believing you are actually being social when you press its buttons, but what is 'social'? Social software processes the means toward shallow ends, like shopping, getting directions, going to a movie, clipping a coupon, getting something to eat. It's marginally more active than being a couch potato, but I say it's creating a new class of morons. Call them mombies. Mobile zombies. 

It's Saturday. You leave the house but not without your e-leash. Heaven forbid you wander into some area where the houses have burglar bars, or even worse no signal bars. You need to occupy yourself and your social software tells you where you can find other mombies who are about your speed. You can follow and friend and like and tweet and yelp and google each other all day long. Mombie verbs, all in sentences with social as the adjective. 

The programmer who sits next to me at work knows better. He spent three weekends putting down new flooring in his house. The programmer who sits across from me knows better. He installed race-quality rollbars in his convertible car. The programmer who sits across the way knows better. He went to catch some 8 foot waves.  I think I know better, I finished two books last week. Call us anti-social. We've always called programmers anti-social. Maybe that's not such a bad thing to be considering what's called social.

The news is that Google stole the executive that Pay Pal wouldn't pay. So now Google is going to create a new market for the masses that makes that very important part of shopping their business. Google will never invent, nor need to invent something as useful as cash. But mombies will use this new fungible as they buy their Starbucks. 

You need to know that there's money involved in all of this. People are figuring out another way to monetize your spare time. The advertizing dollars that once went into television commercials will be distributed to a new set of players in the interactive social software game. Slowly but surely all of the ads that are trapped in your TV will follow you in your mombie quests, so long as there are enough bars.

There will be better and worse social software, just as there are better and worse songs, books and movies. But what I see out there right now is pretty shallow, very seductive, and reflective of the same mass market appeal of television. So far, it ain't literature.

 

iPhone Brats & Haters STFU

When the iPhone 4 launched *just last year*, there was all kinds of blather about how lousy AT&T continued to be, and of course, all of the media determined themselves to be experts about antennas and the physics of cell phone reception. I wrote then:

The opportunity to hack an iPhone or to modify your car comes from the same motivation. If this thing is so perfect, I wonder if I can change it. The video below gives the technically unsophisticated individual an opportunity to say they're smarter than Steve Jobs. It is the easiest hack in the world: just pinch it in the right position. Crippling the miraculous iPhone is like blowing up the Death Star, or solving Rubik's Cube. It gives one a sense of power and accomplishment. If Steve Jobs is so smart, why did he make this mistake, one might ask. And hey, what's up with AT&T? Everybody 'knows' that AT&T is inferior to Verizon even if only 4% of the population could even tell you what kind of cell technology lies beneath the '3G' marketing.

Yes people would stop me and ask me if putting my thumb over the line changed my reception. The answer was basically no. I've seen reception get better, I've seen it get worse, I've seen it do nothing. I've seen the same thing without moving the phone or touching it at all. What I said then and what I say now is that somebody ought to build a signal strength application with the GPS locations for every cell tower on the planet. Until then, everybody except RF engineers is guessing. Nothing wrong with guessing, it's just the second guessing and getting famous for it that annoys me. The iPhone is an engineering marvel, but people find a way to crap all over it. This defies reason. And so it goes.

Of course AT&T suffered even greater crapstorms. But now they've been vindicated, twice. I like the Ars Technica article.  But let's start with Boy Genius.

The Verizon iPhone 4 performed decently at first, though I was quite surprised that Verizon had dead areas in most places AT&T did up in Connecticut. How could this be possible, I thought to myself? I have the best phone on the best network. I needed to head into Manhattan for a couple meetings that day, so, let’s just see how it holds up on the drive down, I told myself. First phone call on I-95? Dropped. What made things worse was that I was stuck on 2G a lot of the time, even in the heart of New York City once I was out and about.

How is this happening?

Well, after a couple calls to Verizon Wireless — and everyone I spoke with was extremely helpful — it turned out my phone didn’t fully activate. I believe the PRL and roaming configurations weren’t updated properly, and after I reprogrammed the phone (something most people won’t ever have to do, as iTunes discreetly does this on first plug-in), I was doing much better. Or was I?

After the “fix” was performed, I still saw 2G on the Verizon iPhone as much or more than I had seen EDGE on the AT&T iPhone that I have used for years (I realize it’s not the same exact phone — I’m referring to the signal quality and coverage). Back in Connecticut, I was still experiencing dropped calls, and it was almost comical. “Dude, I thought you got a Verizon iPhone finally?” I did… it’s just… not that different.

 In the end, my personal experience with Verizon’s iPhone in and around New York City ended up being about the same as it was when I was on AT&T. This, combined with other advantages AT&T’s network has, has made me finally decide to switch back. Literally moments before I wrote this article, I synced up my Verizon iPhone and restored it to my AT&T iPhone (I can do this because the OS on the Verizon iPhone is lower than the AT&T iPhone — if I ever wanted to switch back, I couldn’t restore my data until the Verizon iPhone OS is updated to version 4.3). I missed the ability to talk on the phone while data is still flowing (even though I hate talking on the phone). I missed AT&T’s extremely fast data speeds. I missed knowing that if I ever travel outside of the country, I don’t have to get a new phone (even though I hate flying — no, seriously, try me). I missed feeling like I’m in the digital age instead of the stone age.

 

From Ars Technica

At least in Chicago (and, according to anecdotal evidence from our readers, mostly everywhere else too), AT&T's network performance on the iPhone is consistently faster than that of Verizon when it comes to bigger downloads. (This is the case even when the Speedtest numbers put Verizon first, showing that Speedtest alone isn't the best real-world example.) When it comes to moderately sized or even small downloads, the two aren't going to seem much different to the naked eye without a stopwatch.

The hotspot feature of the Verizon iPhone is definitely a plus, especially for those who regularly need a 3G connection on their laptops or tablets while on the go. The battery life when using the iPhone as a hotspot is amazing—much better than most standalone hotspots we have used—but the lack of simultaneous voice and data on Verizon could hamper your experience. The AT&T version of the iPhone is expected to gain hotspot capabilities in the near future, though, so this may not be a differentiating feature for very long.

So there. And of course the personal hotspot is a fait accompli as of iOS 4.3 just a month after the publication of the Ars article back on Feb 11th. Of course I don't want to spend 40 bucks a month for it. 

 

Thinking About Watson Thinking

My buddy Lee knows a thing or two about machine learning and I still have his flipchart in my trunk, but I never really bothered to read it and figure it out. It uses terms that I don't understand and am not familiar with. Today, suddenly, I am more interested in machine learning than I was yesterday and now I'm taking the opportunity to write about it. This is a form of learning.

Watson is the computer that just beat Ken Jennings and the other dude in a game of Jeopardy. I watched the final last night and was quite impressed. As well, my understanding of computing gave me some idea of which answers Watson might get and which it might not. I remember quite clearly that when it came to short lists of answers that required a question, Watson did poorly and the human contestants did well. The category was Actors who Direct, and an answer was 'The Great Debaters'. I knew the question without looking at the second answer, it was 'Who is Denzel Washington'. 

What struck me there was that there are 'top of mind' questions that we can answer very quickly when it's trendy to know these. They are hot narratives and we all *feel* that it's important to know them whether or not the subject matter itself is important. The fact that I never liked and therefore never watched "I Love Lucy" strikes my wife as odd. I cannot for the life of me recognize a Taylor Swift song or distinguish it from a Katy Perry song - something my teenaged daughter can do in a heartbeat. 

When I come across a problem in designing a computer solution, I use a narrative form. I do the same thing when I try to get to the root of understanding something complex. I block and tackle, I mark decision points, but most importantly (I think) I invent new terms. These terms stand in a larger philosophical framework and are references. Let me give some examples.

The first of these terms that come to mind is 'Boohabian Hate Crime Standard'. This is something more than a 'tag'. It represents a time, a place, a context, a set of decisions and a framework for thinking about something complex. But it has a neat four word handle that stays just below my top of mind. I leave it to Google to search my own blog to get to that information. The second one is 'Sherwood Forest' which is an extended metaphor that I use to explain my theory of the lower and uneducated classes. There is also 'Gay Banana Split' which I use to explain what I believe to be the root of the controversy over gay marriage. 

What I believe Watson may not have but needs is the ability to come up with narratives and terms that fit which can be made important and thus brought to top of mind. In the Nova documentary, something similar was one of the last minute tactics employed by the team to kick his performance up a notch. Watson was informed of the correct answers given by his opponents thereby forming an additional prioritized level of understanding in a category where he didn't get it. 

The whole thing Watson does not do that we do is come up with our own learning strategies. Watson was fed everything and was not allowed to create his own narrative. He doesn't know that he's a Jeopardy machine and he doesn't know how to study. He knows how to search and remember and the programmers know what to teach and feed him. 

What I would be interested to know are the ways in which Watson's programmers become aware of Watson's awareness in a metacapacity - above the level of the game itself. That's the interesting area. 

 

Google Translate

Google Translate is here, and it is one of the first steps towards the Singularity. My prediction is that what Google may be ultimately responsible for is building the system with the best understanding of natural language. That understanding, put into real-time voice recognition, translation and synthetic speech would make for a miraculous invention, the Babelfish telephone. With the perfection of such a device, one could speak into a cell phone and have one's own voice emerge on the receiver's end in the language of the other party. 

As it stands, Google Translate is not fast enough for real-time duplex conversation, but it is pretty fast, and from what I can tell of French, what my youngest can tell of Spanish and what my middle can tell of Mandarin, it's pretty accurate. 

Everyday people having the ability to understand foreign languages will not change the world so much, because the world is not run by people who don't already. But it can make an interesting difference in ways we have yet to understand. What do you think the reality of 'Esperanto' would mean? 

Nuclear Dimensions

I'm fascinated by nukes. Always have been, always will be. They are the great open secret of our era. We all know they exist, they can kill us, we don't understand how they work and we don't trust the people that have anything to do with them - and yet they haven't killed us in over 60 years. Here are a few things I've been browsing on the nuclear subjects.

Minot
Here is a list of all of the Minuteman Missile Sites in North Dakota. I only figured it out that they used the place close to the northern border because they would fly over the pole. I always thought it was because the place was remote and it would be difficult to find them. Now, obviously not.  

Nuclear Naming Conventions
The guys who put together these nuclear projects had pretty good imaginations when it came to Project Such and Such. For Operation Plumbob, there were shots named Kepler, Hood, Diablo, Wheeler, Whitney.  

Military Industrial Complexity
According to a dude named Thomas Park Hughes, the project that put together the national defense system called SAGE was one of the four greatest projects of the 20th Century. SAGE was the first national integrated air defense system and it put together Lincoln Labs, IBM, SDC, Burroughs, Western Electric and hundreds of subcontractors to make our early warning system. And this terminal is pretty cool looking too, complete with ashtray and rotary phone.

The Good Old Days

When The Techs Take Over

I have heard it said that there are now as many semiconductor chips on the planet as grains of rice. It is an arresting thought. And as I take my technical interests towards open source software, cloud and devops, I am breathing a whole new gulp of oxygen in what goes on in the state of the art. Take these guys for example. 

There are several ideas behind the speculation I'm about to lay down. The first is based on this reality. The computer sector is outperforming the rest of the economy by leaps and bounds. It's not only doing well, it's doing very well. Somewhere over at TableauPublic, which I can't find and has been making me leave this draft in Park for too long, is a set of charts that show which companies have cash and which have debt. When you look at companies like General Electric it's downright scary. When you look at companies like Apple, they seem to do no wrong. Times change but what if the double dip comes and times get desperate?

Over the long term, there doesn't seem to be any end to the number of excellent and productive ideas that have always been basic to IT. And it gets easier to see them become reality. Back just 10 years ago, I couldn't even imagine today's future and I'm in the industry. Everyone was saying 'the last mile' could not be overcome - that is fiber to the home. Everyone was saying that video on demand was impossible. Now Netflix is bigger than Blockbuster. People were trying and failing. After the dot com bubble, nobody had any idea what to do. The idea the Amazon would do what it has done with EC2 was inconceivable by most of us. When Microsoft was forced to separate IE from Windows and allow other browsers in, they speculated that a company like Netscape would take market share by doing things just through the browser, but nobody dreamed that Google would become what it is. In the year 2000 only the geekiest of us had MP3s and the consensus was that nobody could break the hammerlock of DRM. Now Apple runs a DRM free universe of music on demand. Moore's law has ten more years, at least. That means that the iPhone 7 might have a terabyte on it. 

All of those innovations are extra cool, but the fundamental economics of IT can still be expressed in very simple ways. The key term is 'disintermediation'. What will computer and communications tech allow people to do for themselves that they used to need third parties for? To jump the gun a bit, I will suggest banking, and when that happens ohh doctor!

First off, the fundamental thing that IT gives is the ability to overcome time and distance. It enables human intercommunications on levels never achieved in the history of mankind. In and of itself, this is an economy pulled out of a hat. Without disintermediating planes, trains and automobiles, there are new ways that people interact that make IT a non-zero sum game. Look at a movie from the 80s and find all of the plot holes and crazy situations that could have been obviated by today's cell phone networks and GPS. 

Whenever I hear it said that reading and writing online saves a tree, I also know that it saves oil and electricity. What people tend to forget is that computing owes its very existence to the ability to engineer devices that sense very minute changes in electrical state. IT is energy efficient by definition.

What's happening to crowds these days is something very unusual. People have their own networks, and communicating with them and their paths makes an extraordinary difference in attention and focus. Many people may not quite know what to think about virtual friends, but the opportunity to have multiple online networks is a new social skill. Your telepresence will be a bigger status symbol than your car.  The hardware and networks into your home will be more important than your lawn. For those of us in the business, that future is now. 

Let me ask you. Do you remember the classified ads? 

Newspapers and broadcast TV are being redefined. You might laugh about Hulu today, but people laughed at Tivo five years ago. If you think Apple TV is important now, wait until film is completely passe. What's happening on the edges of digital networks is critical. Devices like the Red camera system and the iPhone are changing everything. Given what I know about the infrastructure that is coming, YouTube and Facebook and eBay are just the beginning. 

I think that in the not too distant future, much of banking is going turned on its head. If you think about banking as a collection of discrete trusted financial transactions, there are many classes of these things that can be disintermediated from the banks of today. It's already happening at Square. And look at what people are doing for themselves at Prosper. 

Back in 1996, I was thinking about the cloud before it had such a name. In my conception, I couldn't imagine that people would trust ISPs to retain their digital assets. So I imagined that only banks would have the financial ability and trust. Now Google does it for free, and Backblaze does it for $50 a year. When you accumulate about 10TB of digital assets, you're going to have to trust people too, and they will be a different set of names. Let us not forget that when I started out in this business, corporate managers would not *think* of using computer systems to transact trusted financial matters. The idea of a manager approving an expense reimbursement without physically touching a receipt was unthinkable in 1990. Now think about Western Union, and money orders. That's a shrinking business. 

In short, there are more and more ways the American economy is going digital, and there are fewer and fewer barriers. Young entrepreneurs are building software systems that disintermediate back office protocols. Every workflow in every business is being optimized by IT - it may be some time before you don't have to go to the DMV to renew your license, but I bet you a team of 10 people could build the system in six months. 

White collar and intellective work is changing. Permanently. That is going to have a tremendous positive effect on the energy efficiency of the American economy. In education, in the professions, in business, finance, banking, insurance, medicine, law, publishing, music, film and all the visual arts.

The New Latin

There are days like today when I believe that I should belong to a secret society. Last evening as I worked with my son to study for his AP US History class we talked about the Anti-Masonics, the Whigs, Andrew Jackson and a bunch of other stuff I never learned in high school. In fact, I did not have an American History class at all in high school. That was the 70s for you. 

My buddy Lee was out here on the weekend, and he's the one guy I know who retains something ineffable despite his academic achievement. Regularness? He's been recognized as one of America's top young scientists (young <= 46) and as such was regaled with a presentation of the state of the art of what we know at the National Academy of the Sciences. They've got a nice conference center down in Irvine. I perused the presentations out in the lobby as the last session was breaking up but decided not to take any photos. His was about machine learning. I remember very little about the others, but here's something he explained to me of one of the subjects discussed.

You have taste buds in your stomach and intestines. They are the same kinds of taste buds that are on your tongue, and their function is to serve as an early warning system. Imagine that you're drinking a diet soda. It tastes sweet and so you like it. When exactly should your body start producing insulin to deal with all that sugar you are tasting? Insulin stops the use of fat in the body as an energy source, so when insulin is present the body will depend on the sugars and carbs you eat. The taste buds in the mouth would signal too soon, but the taste buds in the gut would signal right on time. Except what you're drinking in that Fresca is not sugar, so you've got all this insulin ready and no sugar to process. For the sake of the pleasure in your mouth, you're freaking out your body. Diet sodas are worse than water. That should be obvious, but now you have another reason.

When I developed the ideas around XRepublic, and now for the Lorite Interrogator, I had some very specific things in mind concerning the melioration of knowledge via computer mediated communications.  The term "CMC" penned by Howard Rheingold is so influential and central to my thought process that I named my son so that his initials would be CMC Bowen. It worked out that we had ancestors other than Cobb for the second C. One of the biggest problems is the level of patience the learned have for the unlearned, because while there are thousands who know what the millions do not, only hundreds are willing and able to teach. One of my solutions is to maintain separate 'houses' for debate, and that may or may not work - we'll have to see in practice. Despite the existence of such houses, there would be transparency. For example, I have just declared Nulan personna-non-grata in this house, but in the act of doing so I also asked for him to trackback to our common subjects, and I presume that I would remain on his blogroll. Obviously I can't stop anyone from going over to his own house, and I would encourage that. MIT has some of this kind of transparency in its OCW, but I imagine Yale does not.  It is the transparency of CMC that has allowed more to learn indirectly from various universities and learned individuals than would ordinarily be admitted through physical gates. This is, indeed how you have come to know that the stomach has taste buds - Lee as a top scientist invited to the private gated affair shared with me and I shared with you. But the many were not and will never be invited to The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. 

In the prior post 'Vox Populi', the ancient aphorism rings true, that is if you know the whole thing: And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. It exactly what I say about the Denizens of Sherwood Forest. It should be what people say about the Tea Party. It is the proper warning against populism. Then again on occasion, it is wise to trust the revulsion of the masses against the corruption of the few. But looking in the other direction there are often things the millions feel that the thousands do and only hudreds can communicate. These are the edge conditions of mass communication and they have not been solved to my satisfaction. 

When I am pessimistic about this problem, as I generally am when I consider American politics in its current state, I seek to take shelter from a public and public debate I find debased. I would much rather listen to and hang out with my friend Lee. We talked exactly zero about politics. Lee shares a certain epistemological modesty. If there is something true to be said about geeks, it is that they accept the isolation their interests and arcane knowledge bring. Geeks seek the company of other geeks, happy to find a confidant or someone else who gets it. This is reward enough for the dissonances from the millions. Nerds, on the other hand, seek revenge. In a social apocalypse, what happens to destroyed nerds and geeks? Their presentations are photographed but who has the patience to teach Morlocks? I search for the signs of the mood towards cloistered knowledge, the arrogance of nerds, the desperation of geeks and the madness of crowds. 

Computer literacy is something very different in CMC. It is the ability to sniff out the good content from the zettabytes of spew. It is in its own way the New Latin, a way of recognizing the style of a website of value, of tracking one's way towards the company of the hundreds from both directions. It is a facility with the many tools of the internet. 

The New Apple TV & Things

It's wantable. Two reasons and an implication not explicity spoken by Steve Jobs.

1. It's cheap enough to be a disposable item. It's quiet enough to make me abandon my XBox as the alternate video source. I like Boxee, but it takes too much power for my worthless netbook to handle streaming to my TV. Boxee takes over everything and doesn't quit gracefully. I think it's time to admit once and for all that we need dedicated hardware. This is the right price.

2. It's small enough to take travelling. That means I'm going to check into my Marriott room and unplug the HDMI behind their flat screen and plug my Apple TV in, whip out my iPhone and stream the movies I have via AirPlay. How sweet is that? Very.

--

What's new and significant about this release of Apple stuff is that they have clearly turned the corner as a consumer products company, and they have simply destroyed Sony. Mushed Sony's face into the pavement. And they are still, evidently passionate about their product innovation. Apple is where Nike was a year or so after they went huge. Apple has gone huge and they've kept the quality high.

--

I thought about something this morning. I overheard the words 'clock radio'. I have a clock radio, but I only use it as a clock, and not even an alarm clock. That's in my phone.

My iPhone Four

I went to the store
For my iPhone 4
It does what I want
Need I say more?

I went to Cerritos
expecting a line
within 20 minutes
The iPhone was mine.

It's faster than blazes
and brighter than day
I didn't get bumpers
My bars don't go 'way

My old iPhone 3
was slow as a pig
now I'm future proof
with 32 gig.

I don't understand
Why knuckleheads moan
I'm already bored
Because it's just a phone

I went to the store
For my iPhone 4
It does what I want
Need I say more?

Apple's Revenge: Death Grip Contagion

Witness the new art of propaganda. Serves manic consumers right.

Apple Antenna Song

Apple licks the boot anyway.

The Most Dramatic Blimp In the World

It's funny until you realize that it's Skynet.

Apple Behind Bars

Oh man. You absolutely have to love this. Apple plays the hand. Put up or shut up.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

Yes. There are starving pirates in Somalia who would gladly take your iPhone, you spoiled brat.

UPDATE: If you want to get technical about it. Check out AnandTech.

Apple iPhone 4 Antenna: Courting Hysteria

There are two kinds of hysteria. Good hysteria and bad hysteria. Apple has had its share of the good and now it's getting some of the bad. Apple has recently put itself in the enviable position of the company its customers trust to put the latest and most fabulous technology into the hands of the most technically unsophisticated people. One of their mottos: It just works. Now it turns out that unsophisticated people who appreciate all that technology can hack it too. Is that karmic or what?

For years, like a lot of pros in the IT business, I resisted the smarmy swooning over the iPhone. I had a smartphone that could do everything it could do, plus some things it could not and still has not done. So I observed the hysteria and madness with a bit of perplexity, like watching fans swarm the Rolling Stones when you don't see what's so great about their music. Or seeing a dead Michael Jackson suddenly matter more than when he was alive. 

Like with any technology, even if it's advanced enough to pass for magic, there are always limits. And of course people try to hack those limits. There are jailbreaks and knockoffs, deliberate exploitations and there are bugs and glitches at the end of the performance envelope. Still, you can make a perfect product with imperfect technology. Hysteria helps make that leap from good to great. 

Yesterday, I was reminded that the last time there was this much public love over a product, it was the New Beetle. I got one the first year, a black turbo, and people used to stop to talk to me about it in gas stations. Kids would wave. Chicks would stare. Drivers would honk. Chicks would stare. Ahh those were the days. One time... nevermind. Anyway. The brakes on that car were great, but they would burn through pads like crazy.  But you put up with such flaws.

The opportunity to hack an iPhone or to modify your car comes from the same motivation. If this thing is so perfect, I wonder if I can change it. The video below gives the technically unsophisticated individual an opportunity to say they're smarter than Steve Jobs. It is the easiest hack in the world: just pinch it in the right position. Crippling the miraculous iPhone is like blowing up the Death Star, or solving Rubik's Cube. It gives one a sense of power and accomplishment. If Steve Jobs is so smart, why did he make this mistake, one might ask. And hey, what's up with AT&T? Everybody 'knows' that AT&T is inferior to Verizon even if only 4% of the population could even tell you what kind of cell technology lies beneath the '3G' marketing.

Now I'm an iPhone 3 guy, and I've got my hands on the new one and I like it. For me, the three most important things about the new product are the improved speed, the video camera and the high resolution screen. The improved look and feel is a nice to have, as is the battery life. Multitasking? Meh. If I'm that focused on my phone, something's wrong with me.  I've made a logical decision to hold off on purchasing, primarily because the rest of my family is on Verizon and there's marginal value in the hand me down. I've been rather surprised by the number of people lined up at the local Apple Store, and the number youth I've seen around my town with this phone already. But it's a public phenomenon and that goes beyond logical decisions.

I want Apple and Jobs to succeed. I like their approach to the entire market and I wish there were three such companies instead of one, just like I'm glad there is Mercedes, Audi and BMW. But you get the audience you deserve, and when hype can make you, hype can kill you. 

Starbucks, Not FedEx

Starbucks just announced that it will have free wifi on its own internal network staring July 1. In this, finally, Starbucks is becoming what it had the potential to do, but almost missed. I have been a fan of Starbucks for the past three or four years now, and although I don't do a daily run, I always know it's there - an oasis of the business and chatting classes from coast to coast. Even in West Virginia.

I have also observed over the years something that started as a Los Angeles institution become something of a nationwide phenomenon. That something was Tam's Bookstore. 

Tam's was the bookstore on Jefferson Boulevard that was more than just a stationery store, more than just a bookstore. It was a college hangout just across the street from USC and a place where people who put together this and that artisitic project could be found. Pops used to go to Tam's on the regular. I think of Tam's and Silvertone, the old photo processing lab for top black & white reproductions, in the same artistic breath. People forget that access to a Xerox machine was not as democratic in the 70s as in the 80s. Desktop publishing didn't exist in the heyday of Tam's.

Tam's became legend and legend invited competition. That competition was Kinko's, and soon there were Kinko's stores near every college campus. And for the millions of us who could not afford a computer *and* a printer, we went there for our flyers and term papers, resumes and presentations. Do you remember overhead projectors? Of course you do.

Kinkos scaled up nationally and then was purchased by FedEx in the era of the fax machine and the color copier.

It doesn't surprise me that FedEx is not interesting in shipping bits. They have their hands full with freight, parcels and mail. But it seems to me that Kinkos has got to be a little bit too heavy. There was a time when I might go into a Kinkos to hang out but that time has passed. I don't need a heavy duty PC with Photoshop to blow up my JPGs and print on a color machine. That's all affordable at home.

So when I went the other day and found myself among the pay per use workstations and copy machines, I thought about how long it has been since this technology was rare and you needed to go to a Kinkos because your small business or office didn't have the machinery.

Enter Starbucks. Sure yuppies like me use the place for chilling, and we use it as a pre-sales meeting when we're about to make a sales call in a different city. No longer do we use those office suites right near the airport (remember those?). Starbucks, Borders and Barnes have changed the complexion of brainy socializing. This is all good. 

There's another joint which is on the rise and may happen out here on the West Coast but hasn't yet. That's Cosi. There are only two in Southern California but they dot cities in the East like Philly and DC. Cosi is a lot more food oriented and social than Starbucks. Cosi expects you to eat healthy and lounge around socially. It's a distinctly more cushy atmosphere than the more clinically clean Starbucks with its hard tables and chairs.

I should also mention Chipotle, which has got its industrial game on full tilt. The model Chipotle for me is the one at Dulles' Terminal B. But they are still behind the curve for Wifi. The new smartphones cry out for it - forget laptops. Think iPads and Android phones.

FedexOffice is going to lose a lot of foot traffic. It's walking over to more comfortable places to hang out and do business.

FaceTime

Apple has changed the way I look at technology and perhaps the way we all do.  I'm looking at the video promo and introduction the FaceTime and in all the time I've known to a reasonable degree of certainty that it would be a feature of the new iPhone, it never quite motivated me. It does now, but not because I need it. Apple has returned a sense of wonder to its products. What I'm suggesting is that Apple is a new kind of brand.

Apple of course is a gear brand, and it appeals to people like me who are gearheads. When I think of gear brands, I think of that niche of prosumer goods that I grew up loving as a boy and a teen growing up in Southern California. That means Porsche & BMW, Oakley & FMF, Nike & Body Glove, Viking & Calphalon. Gear makes you feel as if you can suddenly do things that you couldn't before. The right gear both encourages and enables you to extend your abilities. There is something both extreme performance about them and natural extensions of your body. They make you feel like you, plus. That's not really something new to mankind. Weapons do this. Great clothing does this.

What's new is that Apple is both extreme and comfortable and it has mass appeal. This is kind of a killer brand. It begins to represent more than just something that the select few can buy. We always know there are Porsche people, and they are a world apart from us mere peasants. But Apple is offering this at prices its own low level employees can affords, like Henry Ford. It feels as though the whole of society is enabled. That's what different about new Apple stuff. It begins to feel like science fiction, like *we* are all making progress because of this stuff.

That's a very powerful illusion. One that may or may not be sustainable as the world economy flops around like a beached swordfish.

But there it is, straight from 2001. FaceTime. Your videophone, brought to you by AT&T, just like Arthur C. Clarke envisioned.

Microsoft: Too Big And Failing

Maybe it was Cringely who suggested it, but I'm sure the idea has been thrown around a lot. Break Microsoft up. I with the wisdom of that idea would finally get some traction inside Redmond. Or at least it's my interpretation that the big shakeup there is not going to result in the spinning off of companies.

The news is explained thusly:

Robbie Bach and J. Allard, both of whom were both instrumental in creating consumer products through Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, both are leaving the company as part of a broader reorganization, reports TechFlash. As a result, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, will initially gain greater control over the division, which includes the Xbox, Zune and Windows Mobile products.

Ballmer? I'm trying to imagine how exactly Ballmer helps Microsoft do anything new or exciting. New and exciting is what must occur... What am I saying? That's never going to happen. Microsoft is a bit too far up in the woods for the culture of 'exciting' to permeate. Microsoft is a university and a universe. But it's sluggish and bound up in the slow that never quite leads the market. Of course, I'm biased. There are some outstanding things that Microsoft does, just not quite as great as they ought. They leave a lot of tech on the table - I mean an entirely too large chunk.

What I learned about Microsoft in my months in Redmond is that it's a Bank and a Marketing Machine, and because of those two things, all ideas are shaped in very particular ways, meaning stuff is matrixed out to the infrastructure and a lot of good stuff doesn't survive the process. Stuff that with the same amount of attention in a smaller organization might work just great. What saves Microsoft is the leverage the good-enough stuff gets when the market share gets past the adoption tipping point. Take Sharepoint for example. It is my studied opinion that Sharepoint is craptastic squared. There are so many other better ways to provide the functionality of Sharepoint that it's almost impossible for me to imagine somebody as smart as Ray Ozzie would be involved. It may have ingested all of Groove's technology, but it completely lost all of Groove's appeal. But now Sharepoint is too big to fail, and mediocrities all over the world will support it from now until doomsday. Proprietary lock-in. Leadership through religious fanaticism. That's what the Microsoft machine produces. Choice is the enemy, and therefore Microsoft has very few choice products. Yeah I use BaseCamp, and I'm looking at Google Sites.

Microsoft is the king of Gaming. So what disturbs me about this development is that the golden egg that is the XBox360 franchise is in jeopardy. Yes the Zune is a disaster. Everybody in that portable music player market got owned by Apple, just demolished. Window Mobile too. I never took that seriously - I mean did it ever even really compete with Nokia? Now that HP has Palm, there's no place for Windows Mobile to go. HP was the killer hardware for Windows Mobile back in the day. Those days are over. And that new roundy thing that looks like it feels like the Palm Pixi from Microsoft is probably going nowhere. So 2/3rds of this division is a nightmare. Painful.

If I were Ballmer what would I do?

I would abandon Microsoft technology and get some designers to design consumer products from scratch. It has to be as radical as GM spinning off Saturn. It might be too late, but it's got to be that independent. Let Microsoft use its money to allow multiple brands to emerge. XBox is a brand. Nobody cares that it's Microsoft. It works fine on its own. 

Here's what I'm suggesting - here me out. Look at your small consumer electronics companies. Microsoft has brain overkill for that product market. They only have to be marginally smarter and use their cheaper money (big deal) to make an impact in those markets, and downmarket from Apple's entry into the home electronics space, they can win. They can use the Microsoft mojo to hire top creative talent and try some really cool things. I'm going to list a handful of players I think Microsoft could outwit.

VTech. Audiovox. Jensen. Cobra. . But here's a real killer - a company and business that could have been inside Microsoft: Vizio. Yes them. Microsoft did nothing in TV, and now it's never going to catch up to Google TV whatever that might be. Before you knock the idea, consider Sync. Microsoft partnered with Ford and now their tech is making a big difference in car audio. If I was Ballmer, I'd be buying up shares of Panasonic, Sharp or Sanyo.

If Microsoft is going to survive as a huge company, then it needs to understand how to brand like a small company. It can learn from consumer goods companies like P&G, SCJohnson and Clorox.

My Stallman Moment

It was some time back in 1984 or so. I don't exactly recall. I attended a symposium at USC and the debate was free software. This was back when most people concerned thought of Richard Stallman in godlike tones, perhaps on the verge of the time when he began getting on people's last nerves.

I just recalled this moment when I stood up, having listened to all of the debate and questioned the sincerity of all involved. You see I did not own a computer nor was I a student in a college that had access to UNIX. So I questioned the value of free software given that only this select and elite fraternity of programmers had access to compilers and machines in the first place. Where were they going to distribute their free software and how was somebody like me going to get some? Egghead Software?

You could hear the crickets. And so I sat down wondering if anybody was nodding their head or if they all considered me to be an idiot. It was an uncomfortable moment.

Since I've gone Mac, I have gone back to recall the extent to which the Unix wars were so bitterly fought and how tenuous that fraternity was. I remember SCO and Kodak's Interactive Unix. I remember HP's visual programming environment and OSF-1. I remember when Apollo Domain was considered the most powerful operating system ever. Hell, I remember ADA.

I grew up in a very small memory model.

Fifty Thousand Apps

I came across that figure. The headline read that now that Android had 50K+ apps, they could be a serious challenge for the iPhone. It is impossible for a telephone to be that useful.

There are exactly 13 applications that make any reasonable sense for a handheld portable telephone and three of them have yet to be invented. Those three are telepresence, credit card and positive ID. The other ten are obvious because you already have them on your smartphone. The other umpdeumpthousand are inflation.

Steve Jobs is Tiffany. Once you understand that he is selling glamourous nothingness, you recognize how much time and money people have to waste. 

On the other hand, Steve Jobs is brilliant because he has found a way to make money by redefining talk. People don't talk to each other. They communicate via devices.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

It's coming.

I'm just not sure if it's a good thing or not.

More Macthink

Computing is fun again. It's new and mysterious. There are unexpected surprises and so far, no unexpected headaches. It has been just a few days, and I'm digging my Mac.

The first surprise is that many of my finger disciplines are working OK on the new machine. The Alt-tab is pretty much the same and everything that's CTRL is Command. I think Pops used to call that symbol 'splat'. 

The second surprise was how easy and quick it was to setup Time Machine, and what happened when I launched it for the first time. Whoa. Dizzy, trippy. Check out the background.

I has been many years since I built websites with BBEdit and I am proud to date myself as an old head. Now I'm ready to make the next step. Here's a little story.

Once upon a time, meaning between 1991 and 1994, I was a complete devotee to Mac. When the first PowerMacs hit the market I was all over it. I cashed in part of my 401K to buy a 7100 with upgraded memory and a huge honking' NEC 19 inch monitor. I came from the spoiled side of the tracks - Xerox, with object oriented and client server paradigms dancing in my head. So I was already sold on multimedia and deep UI. But UNIX was not to be trifled with - despite the fact that the entire Unix area was mired in legal morass, I had faith in these new things called Pink and Taligent. They were going to pickup where Xerox failed and left off. So I believed.

I had dismissed Microsoft. Everybody knew that MSSQL was, in its infancy, some sort of non-ip stack runt child of Sybase. Also, everybody knew that as pretty as Mac was, DAC, the Apple initiative to connect databases with all that GUI goodness was a total failure. It never competed with anything but OLE. Yes that, OLE. As primitive as ODBC was in 1992, it was far and away superior to anything the Mac Quadras or PowerMacs could use. Yet I held out hope that there could be a visualization suite or something that could compete. In fact, I seriously considered getting out of the EIS business altogether and getting into multimedia. Does anybody remember Voyager?

So I studied more of my Unix, got a subscription to Codewarrior, just in case, watched Applix with anticipation and gritted my teeth as the Sybase / Powerbuilder juggernaut steamrolled over just about everything - especially after the debut of Windows 95. Watcom was king, and I had to start relenting on the promise of the Mac - Pink and Taligent continued to be vapor.

Sometime after lusting after those PowerPC clone Macs for several months, I had to concede. The cool advanced UI and visualization power just wasn't going to happen. So I stayed where the data was.

Now there were a lot of things going on that would change the landscape. An important thing was the Web. I saw Mosaic early enough to be wowed by it, but it was all read only at the time - nothing dynamic. So I think it was that combination of things, including Citrix that led enterprise software towards the whole monster that 'thin client' turned out to be.

I don't hate thin client with a passion, but it basically killed the beauty that was visual programming. And if you have ever had the privilege of building end user apps in a visual programming tool.. ah but enough with the nostalgia. Thin client is dumb. Thick client is the bomb, and the nicest thick clients are called 'instruments'. IE forget keyboards and mice, unless those keyboards are ARPs or Rolands or Yamahas. To deal with the next level of computing requires the beauty of a richer interface and we have the entire history of music production to guide us, as the geniuses who put together Rockband understand. Thin client reduces, thick client and instruments expand.

The Mac is a thicker client than Windows. More time has been taken with UI on the platform. That's a good thing. But it's still primarily using the mouse/keyboard paradigm. That changes with the iPhone and iPad.  I'm looking forward to great collaboration between the instrument builders and virtuosos of the future. My direction is to build a multi-touch data browsing and visualization instrument. First stop - XCode.

Mac Plunge

I done did it. I've put my money where my mouth is and begun a new adventure into the land of Mac. I went and purchased me a MacBook Pro. I opened the box today in my bedroom and the first thing I said was, "It's beautiful". I have to admit it. The love is back. It has been 13 years since I last played with a Mac of my own, and I can say that it looks finally to be what it should have been. I have a lot of relearning to do, but it helps that this machine is gorgeous. By this time next year I will likely be some kind of diehard.

Right now I'm just doing the preliminaries. Getting a bunch of open source software. Synchronizing bookmarks via XMarks. Getting Dropbox. Some of the transition will be easy. Some will be difficult. Right now the toughest thing is finding a password tool that is as good at PasswordSafe.

I need to hook up with Mac people of substance and experience. Save me some time.

A Nation of Stooges

Something is becoming apparent to me. Slowly dawning. Because I know that people are flexible and susceptible to following whatever other people do.

I started watching YouTubes this morning. The first was office rage. It was YouTube's suggestion. I don't remember what the original thing was that left YT in the state to offer up its advice that perhaps the next thing I might want to see is a fat man in a tie destroy a dot matrix printer with his CRT. The video was in black and white from a stationary camera that could see the entire cube farm full of employees stand agape as the man went ape. So I watched a few more. A man in an elevator goes berserk after the fifth time someone opens the door at the last second to get on. And then there were the fakes. Obviously not from security cameras with the focus pulling and the two camera cuts. I sat for 3 minutes analyzing a chair commercial and how unspontaneous was the rage of the actor. From the opening frame, I could see the snow shovel was a prop of desk destruction.

Somehow connected was bouncer footage. OK I get it. People fighting. There's a documentary called 'Bounce: Life Behind the Velvet Rope' out there somewhere. I knew an ex-cop in NYC with fascinating bouncer stories. I thought about it once, one night drunk with my homie; why not become bouncers? We were going to be twin stereotypes with big gold hoop earrings, bare chests and pointy shoes. But we sobered up and stayed in the software business. So I watched people get kicked out of clubs and even one with some excellent verbal judo by some professional fighter named Michael Kuhn. But his way of restraint didn't stop the YouTube suggestions, because next came broken arm and I was still curious. After broken arm came compound fracture, Joe Theisman and DeAndre Brown. At that point I had to stop.

How grisly did it have to get before my curiosity killed my appetite, and what if my appetite were beyond the mere viewing to the shooting of the video, or even to the participation in the act. My senses deceive me into thinking this kind of behavior is everywhere, but I should know better. These acts are rare. That's why they have to be faked. That's why they have long tails. There are millions of viewers of the extreme, several hundred recorders, a handful of producers, and YouTube is the aggregator and distributor. It takes a global village to show me mayhem on demand.

Google Buzz invited me without my permission. Because Google wants to out Facebook Facebook. And Facebook wants to out Twitter Twitter. And Twitter wants to replace ordinary conversation with tweets, turning humanity into a flock of seagulls. Usually it takes several months for me, a first adopter who doesn't have to put numbers behind my email name, to get a new Google service. Then I send out invitations as the trickle them down to me. I guess they figured that didn't work with Google Wave. And of course it defies one of Google's old principles which is that they don't scale up their applications, they develop at scale. So Google gets tens of millions into their beta programs that go on for years. Cheeky, but since it's free, we go for it.

I now have 2.7 terabytes in a box on my home WAN. I can put all of my pictures, music, documents, website sources, all on one disk. And I use MediaMonkey and Picasa to manage all of that. It works very well. Google made Picasa and in the version I have, it does facial recognition. I can tell you that it has over 800 pictures of me and it knows the pictures are me. I've been up 90 minutes this morning helping it distinguish between my children. It's 80% correct anyway, but I perfect it. I don't know how many digital images I have of my family, but I estimate that out of the 1500 folders each with an average of 75 or 100 photos each, some ungodly number is all there. But these are all child's play for Google and YouTube. They process that much stuff every second.

Why does Google Buzz exist? Why does Twitter exist? Neither of them serve any economic function. We all eat free food, not because we're hungry but because it is free. If somebody can invent a weather machine that makes it rain meatballs, we'll all stop working. Teach a man how to beg for fish and he'll never learn to fish. Nobody is paying for Google Buzz directly. It's like the memory of the cop who is guarding the bank. He gets to see you every time you come in even though you're not the reason he's there. The memory of the cop is focused and fleeting. The memory of Google is unfocused and permanent. With a few algorithms it could be 80% correct. With some human help it could be perfected.

What might we humans perfect if we were given the chance to play with 700 terabytes of free content? I suppose that question as a practical matter might go the way my YouTube browsing went this morning. I mean I'm just wasting time driven by a bit of morbid curiosity. But what if I was purposeful? What if millions of us were?

No fewer than eight people told me how they contributed to the disaster in Haiti. I didn't ask to know. I consider my curiosity quite normal, and perhaps a little on the oblivious side when it comes to such matters. I know that there are many millions who prefer such opportunities. I have no doubt, nor should you, that our President chose the New Orleans Saints to win the Superbowl, not because he knows anything nor cares anything about football, but because of Katrina. The opportunism of Progressivism knows no bounds and has no scruple. Its morbid curiosity always attempts to perfect. It's a human hack, an emotional exploit, a political phishing scheme which is virulent, wild and successful. What might we humans perfect if we were given the chance to play with 700 billion dollars of free taxpayer's money?

It's kinda like Google. Nobody quite knows where the money comes from - yes of course it comes from somewhere but the point is that we get to use the products for free and they keep giving them to us at massive scale and their principles are to do no harm so why not?

There came a moment, as DeAndre Brown held up his destroyed leg at which I knew I couldn't stand to watch any longer. But it was too late. The rare incident that I never planned to watch when I woke up this morning became part of my experience because the infrastructure to provide that experience was already in place. All I needed was a little suggestion and I became part of the conspiracy. But what if it was something I actually cared about? What if YouTube suggested that I eyeball this mug shot and contribute to the discovery of child molester Moe? What if Google took their promise to do no evil and subtley suggested that they would be fighting evil? What if my eight friends and 8 million others just needed to click a button or put a name to a face to help Katrina, or Haiti or whatever heartbreak is next?  Or conversely, what if I decided to opt out and complain? Complain against Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Flickr and all the rest of the digital reality aggregation? What if my restraint became controversial? What if my refusal to participate in the eyeball mob that funds YouTube somehow, made me 'part of the problem'? How many millions would point a finger at me?

It wouldn't cost them much.

I'm not paranoid. I don't care for my own safety much beyond that which I must do to raise my children. I've already made my contribution to society through procreation. I am many ways blessed by that and I never have to consider abstract ways to contribute to society. That's how I'm different than David Sedaris and Sarah Vowel and all of their subjects who are somehow rescued through the miracle of Public Radio from the stigma of being non- and bad- parents. If you merit an hour of 'This American Life'... well, let's put it this way, being a good parent will never get you an hour of 'This American Life', not for that mainstream act. You'd have to be the producer of rare and extreme incidents. That's what hacks the ears and eyeballs for the aggregators.

And it's different than imagination. Imagination give you Huckleberry Finn. We still don't know on which little boy he was based. And still he fascinated us. But today it's all about reality shows, and reality is authentic and that's what draws the eyeballs, the real and the drama and the anger and the crime and the violence. So much that we make videos of fake violence and fake drama to approximate what happens to the worst of us when we are at our extreme worst. Not when we sacrifice for values. And let's not confuse texting some number to give 5 bucks to Haitian relief with sacrifice. Let's not confuse punching a chad in support of universal healthcare with sacrifice.  Let's not confuse the drama of participation in an infrastructure that exploits your emotions with work or sacrifice. All you need is a little suggestion, to click or not to click, that is the question. Pump it or dump it? Would you hit that?

Every day I play Mafia Wars on Facebook an ad pops up. "Cartoon Yourself" it says. Yeah I play Mafia Wars. They have aggregated a mountain of clicks from me, and I have built myself to level 350 in some global online game. But I know it's a worthless game, an entertainment that has nothing to do with reality. I don't ever get the notion that I'm doing myself or anyone any favors by my participation. And I feel foolish every time I send Zynga some real money to by fake points. But Zynga is but a small fraction of Google or Facebook. I can understand the game I'm playing with Mafia Wars, but what is Google Buzz really for, and why are we all getting it for free?

Nobody knows where Osama Bin Laden is. Or so goes the popular opinion. Neither the NSA nor Google has the balls, algorithms or data centers to go and find him, his family, his friends, his Yelped restaurants, or any of his clickstreams. He is immune to our reality networks, or so it seems. But you and I? We're not just knee deep, we're totally deep. We have an economy of bouncer videos and 140 character speeches of pathetic jihad. I don't even want to go to #TCOT to find one example. And we can't even stop it. We can't even get a 'Hate It' button on Facebook. Not only has Friendster died, Hatester died too. All of our digital expression, save this, the blog, the one where you have to think and type rather than just click and connect, well they're all directed. And the godless reality is taking over the imagination - well, I'm just old and cranky enough to think so. Yeah, I think the ad is redundant. We've cartooned ourselves without the benefit of Zwinky. Zwinky and Zynga. Any other Web 2.0 names you can think of? There are thousands of them, all trying desperately to become verbs like Google. by getting millions of hacked ears and eyeballs and mouse fingers to do their bidding.

Well, I've got one for you. Fink.com.

Oh we'll call it something heroic for a long time. We'll call it whistleblower or watchdog or sentinel or patriot or underdog or something like that. But I know that sooner or later, and by later I mean past the internet statute of limitations - the point at which quality news and reference information disappears beyond the time horizon of free into pay per view - all of that dog watching becomes selective. When the short attention span theater has left the stage all the activity goes down the memory hole. It'll all come down to finking. Because that's what millions of us can do for free. I see there's a program on TV called 'Cheaters'. No, I'm not paranoid. I just know that 15 years ago all the conversations were a lot less n-way. As n increases, so does Twitter's importance. How many people are following you? And now that they do, what can you actually say?  When you actually say what it is you have to say, what difference is it going to make? That depends upon whose infrastructure you're finking on. There's a Progressive solution out there just waiting to be born.

Did you ever read this book? It's called Fatherland. I highly recommend it. I'm sure Amazon has a link for you. I could probably get a nickel if I cared to be in that referral economy, but that's not why I'm writing today. I'm writing because I want to draw your attention to what is given to you for free without your asking for it and to help you understand what infrastructure is enabled by your participation in it. To make clear the distinction between sacrifice & charity and the harvesting of whims and sentiments at a massive scale. 

It is this final distinction that is most important for its moral distinction. The aggregation of sentiment can take us towards a nation of stooges. Reality entertainment is bad enough through its passive enjoyment - just wait until it's interactive.

eBook Wars

My first impression is that Steve Jobs is overconfident, and the reason is that I don't buy classical music from the iTunes store. So I wonder what kind of books are going to drive Apple's iBookstore revenue. No matter what size the reading market is, people who are accustomed to buying books at Amazon, are going to need a powerful incentive to switch their hardware and content formats. 

How big is the Kindle market? Forrester says 2.5 million. How long will it take for Apple to sell that many units? Hard to say, but they won't all be for eBook reading. So it would have to be some goodly period of time before Apple starts eating into the Amazon base - let's remember that Amazon was first to go pure MP3. Will there be a price war? Privately, there's surely a bunch of negotiation going on right now behind the doors of publishers. But for the public, I don't think so. That won't get current customers moving one way or another until the market is relatively standardized, and then it will have to be loss leading.

In the meantime, you've got to be wondering what's going on in the minds of publishers that they would switch from Amazon to Apple or Google. I find it very difficult to believe that relations between Amazon and its publishing keiretsu are so dismal.  But Jobs did talk last year about his new extended digital format. Whereas Amazon has multiple copies and versions of a number of low priced titles, I don't expect to see much of that on Apple. So I expect market differentiation with Apple taking a multimedia theme, Amazon taking traditional bookbuyers and Google taking the long tail. 

The latest word is that Amazon just bought a little six man team of touch specialists out of NYC. They will join the leagues of extraordinary folks at Amazon and work big things. My advice to Amazon is to stay a low price vendor and make up the difference in retailing. Which is to say don't be afraid of the hardware business but do those things at cost and make the money on the content, which you've always done. Amazon will never be as good in hardware as Apple, and despite what's said about the iTunes Music and Apps Store, I don't think Apple will ever be as good in retailing as Amazon. Amazon knows how to make low cost items pay dividends, and Apple will never do that. 

--

I'm a little disappointed that Adobe isn't front and center in this mix. Coming as I do, originally from Xerox and document-centricity, I have always been very impressed with Postscript and the PDF. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it is the cool beans behind Acrobat. Now despite the fact that it was hacked by the Chinese and that's what got them on Google's bad side, PDF is a brilliant technology (and the hole has been plugged) Now that I've found my old copy of Acrobat 6, I'm using it more and more. I might even upgrade. But when I stick a PDF of mine on the Kindle, it really fails to perform. That for me is a big disappointment and even though there aren't many PDFs I'd like to read on my plane ride home, it's a shame that my iPhone works better on the format.

While I'm at it, I should add some obligatory seriousness about the eInk technology. Sometimes, as with my GShock Casio watch, LCDs are just better for reading outdoors. Bezos was smart to have the Kindle marketing emphasize that sort of portability, and I'd go that one better as he goes upscale to have the Kindle ruggedized. I'd like the Kindle in my backpack when I'm hiking the Sierras, the iPad is for Starbucks, Virgin America and the lounge at the W. 

--

Anecdotally, Kindle folks are going to stay Kindle folks, or they will be gearheads and whales like me who will have both. But seriously, does the Apple demographic even read, you know like books?

iPad: First Thoughts

I have been wanting an iPad for two years now, ever since I started looking at surface computing. Finally, here is the real platform. 

Ordinary people, who are not called to think beyond consumer stuff, and this includes just about every mainstream tech writer, will not get it. But if on occasion, one is called to be a visionary or one is at the top of a stack of mature technology, then you may see some of what I see in the future of this new computing paradigm. I have been speculating for a few years about the classes of applications that this platform will serve and I'm very glad that Jobs has made this happen. It's going to be huge.

One can immediately and easily say and see how the iPad is a Kindle killer. It is not. It is simply the high end device that is getting about as high end as it is possible to get for handheld touch. Let's think about that for a moment - because Apple's pricing is phenomenal. When could the absolute highest end device for a brand new technology introduction be had for under 900 bucks? To tell you the truth, I think Jobs is actually rather amazed himself. The Kindle and other eBook readers will survive just fine. I have the basic G2 Kindle and at $250, it was an easy and worthwhile purchase. I'm having no regrets. I didn't expect for the Kindle to do web browsing, and it is marginally better than that old CLI browser, Lynx. But the free Whispernet is worth its weight in gold, as is the multi-day standby battery life, not to mention the wealth of 99 cent books. I haven't seen the marketing detail for the iBookstore, but the overview looks extraordinarily retarded and retro, like a screenshot from Myst. Wrong-o Charlie Brown. However, like the iTunes store and iTunes itself, a lot of maturity is on tap for the future. Apple will have to earn its way forward in the eBook world, and it will not kill the Kindle any more than the iPhone killed Nokia. 

The bold and proper pitch for the iPad is the consuming experience which has never been quite distinguished  from the producing experience. So far all personal computers have striven to be all things to all people. Surely product lines have emerged over the years to make distinctions between business computing, home computing, gaming and mobile computing, but here finally is the right device to do it. "IPod Touch on steroids" is truly a positive way of thinking about the machine. A year ago, when I was working the combination of the Treo and the Touch, I was extraordinarily grateful for the ability to browse on the Apple device. I was frustrated by the lack of free wifi, and so chose my lunch locations with that in mind. Getting the iPhone last summer cleared all that problem up. This Christmas, I got the Kindle and it's a great reading experience - all about the format - but not quite the browsing experience I'd want. So Jobs and Apple are right on in placing this product between phones and laptops. Three devices are not too many. The phone is always with you, the iPad goes to lunch, the laptop stays in the office until the weekend.

So all in all, Apple is correct in making this device a sweetspot between work production devices and smart phones. As an all purpose browsing and media consumption device, it is what people will want when and if they become mature sophisticated consumers of digital content. I'm not convinced that it will be a stellar gaming platform, but it certainly will do what slates before it did not. 

Next time I talk about the Pad, it will be with an angle towards the kinds of applications touch will bring out in this two handed format. Beyond the content deals that are certainly being negotiated as Apple counts its pre-orders, that's going to be the next big thing.

Apple + Amazon + Adobe > Google

Somebody out there thinks that an Apple gaming platform would be really nice. That somebody is obviously not a gamer. 

The quick and dirty answer to the question of whether or not Apple could float a decent gaming platform out there is yes. yes in lowercase letters. If a reasonably priced Apple game plaftorm came out, it could do as well as the Nintendo DS in 2 years, but that's about it. It would have to be the iPhone or iTouch when they cost less than a Wii, which is when? Then they have to be as good as the Wii. But what drives the console market are blockbuster games with millions of units sold and DLC that keeps online players happy for months. There are NO games that compelling for the handheld market. Even Twitter can't make that kind of money.

But what Wingert was thinking was that Apple TV could be a gaming platform and a convergence appliance. It can under one condition which is that Apple uses leapfroging technology for HD on demand and makes their deals with studios to get them into everywhere DirecTV, Comcast and Verizon FIOS already are. Perhaps many people don't recognize that I can get Netflix on demand right now through my XBox360. You've got to go a long way to beat out Netflix market share, and I already went through all the deliberations of thinking through Apple TV. The bottom line is that the people at Microsoft were already ahead of me and offered me cool stuff I never imagined I'd want. So I paid 150 bucks to get the big hard drive for my XBox and haven't looked back yet.

To compete with the $400+ platform that is the full blown XBox360 + XBox Live is a tall order for anybody. Apple is probably the one company that could do it, but they would have to make a big strategic investment and really desire to take over the world. I just don't see Jobs doing it - not when there's the publishing industry opportunity out there. Apple's entry into the eReader market (ha, I just named it  - the iReader) is 75% certain according to a Wall Street analyst I heard a few weeks ago. The entry of Barnes & Noble's Nook raises the stakes. So I was particularly intrigued when I got a notice on my last Apple Store download that the terms of service were changing. The first incredibly large paragraph of fine print was all about Amazon's 1-Click. That's enough cozy to make me think that Apple is doing the very right thing if it is partnering with Amazon and the iReader will be the high-end machine. For Apple and Amazon to join forces... well cloudwise it could be the beginning of a new era, and suddenly Google doesn't sound so cool any longer. I believe that Amazon is as technically smart as Google when it comes to infinite scalability, and Amazon has been around longer and I'd bet is better managed. 

Speaking of well managed. I have to say that I have a fresh coat of respect for Adobe. In my ridiculously vast personal library of software, I dug up an old copy of Acrobat for which I spent 300 bucks several years ago. It's still packed with features I haven't even bothered to learn, and it actually does things that I let my imagination imagine - like embedding interactive goodies into pre-existing PDFs. It's truly brilliant. So now I'm going to give Adobe Flex a good look, because I'm really starting to get fed up with my browsers.

Speaking of which, I turned on my process explorer and started tracking which of my applications are giving me the most page faults and gobbling up memory. It turns out to be SQL Server, which apparently launches itself with no prompting from me and no good reason. But right behind that is Chrome, which sprouts all kinds of pseudo-independent processes yet locks up all of them when one starts farting up the system. I don't know WTF is up with Firefox, but the latest version 3.0.13 has been a huge disappointment, which is why I'm using Chrome. Oh wait. I left that on there to have the Google Notebook Add-In.. Hmm. Maybe I should upgrade. 

But back to Apple gaming. There's one great game for the iPhone (and it wasn't Myst). It's called geoDefense. Awesome. I knew it the first time I saw it across the aisle on my plane home from San Jose. We'll talk if and when the tablet comes out. 

There Are Only Five

I am reminded tangentially of an axiom of belief of silicon Valley.

If you build it they will come.

I'm not sure if that's a supply sider's argument or if people championing economic stimulus at any cost tend to favor the sentiment. But I am rather sure that it's a sucker's bet. But I must confess that I am thinking particularly about Web 2.0 and 3.0 and social network software in general. 

I keep coming back to the simplistic models of business the Internet has provided. If you ask me there are only four or five real business models in use on the web. 

iTunes
One is iTunes which is, as far as I can see, the only real client server application out there with a fat client. The problem with iTunes is that the client is a real pig, which is rather what all the champions of thin clients used to say when that whole thin client megatrend began around the limitations of Windows 95. 

Amazon
Amazon is B2C personified. It is online retail perfected and with nary a brick, has shown the perfectability of that thing everyone once said could not be done. Jeff Bezos is one of the very few high tech moguls that I would dare to call an industrialist. The other is Larry Ellison. I continue to think that Bill Gates was just lucky. If Linus Torvalds had been born first, Microsoft would not exist any more than Lotus Development. It is poetic justice the Ray Ozzie is (sorta) running things at Microsoft. 

Google
Google is really the only game in town for eyeballs. Back in the day it was easy to understand that DoubleClick ruled the internet with regards to selling online advertising. But all of the content on the planet, which is to say, the disintermediation of print and video which is bankrolled by the monetization of clicks and impressions, all goes to Google. That basically means every site that is Googlable and does not charge a subscription. News, weather, sports, all that. In the end, it is searched, and in the end it is Google.

Bloomberg
I don't know what the most successful online subscription model is, but I tend to believe that it is something like Bloomberg or Lexis/Nexis. This is people paying for a real online service. But it also would include Verizon FIOS HD Pay Per View. The bottom line it it's some big piece of data or many small pieces of data you consume but don't keep (as contrasted to iTunes, which you keep). 

eBay

eBay enables C2C. It's the winner. I don't even know if anything else came close. 

There is something to be said for CRM-ish applications. Cars Direct or Online Banking. Their money is not made by having the website it is part of their customer interface and experience. That's understandable, but... 

It is my opinion that everything else everybody else has built has seen them come and watched them go and 10,000 Web 2.0 etc companies will die for lack of a better business model. What else on the web is really different? Porn? Porn is subscription like iTunes. It's arguably bigger, but the business model is the same, minus DRM. Online gaming is subscription, like Bloomberg. Blogs are Google. Online dating is probably the exception, now that I think about it. That's affinity profiling.  A kind of eBay with a smart search algorithm. 

And since you asked me, that's where I think the opportunity is. 

Palm Pre. Uh Oh.

Just when I was about to throw my hands in the air. Palm has done it again. 

Several weeks ago my Treo lunched. It lost all of my contacts and really pissed me off. So I started looking for a new phone, but mostly new excuses to buy an iPhone. Except iPhones don't tether and I'd be stuck with AT&T. I'd much rather get on Verizon, but merely for one reason which is that I'd get better coverage. But that mostly means better coverage at my house which is a Sprint dead zone. I love Sprint's plan - unlimited digital for a simple flat rate, but their coverage leaves me wanting.

The reason my Treo lunched has to do with my PDANet application which stresses it out. Before using PDANet my Treo never ever gave me any problems. It rebooted maybe 6 times a year. But 6 times a day is not unusual when I've got it tethered to my laptop. 

The last phone I looked at, having decided that all of the Verizon phones bite, is the E71 by Nokia. I gotta have a keypad for my texting, period. So I get over to Best Buy just last weekend to put the Nokia in my hands. Yuk. It feels like an eye makeup kit. I mean it looks great but you pick it up and it's too light and too square and too thin. Don't these Nokia guys know anything about ergonomics?  HP figured this out 30 years ago with the 12C. What's wrong with you people? Same thing with the HTC Google Phone. Man those HTC phones look awesome in the glossy print ads and the big billboards at OHare, but when you touch them, the feel like they were made by Hasbro. Hasbro Vietnam that is.

So I have waited several months and have been giving my Treo a second chance and now I'm in luck because this Pre looks pretty awesome, so do the hands-on demos that I've seen. I get the feeling that this might be the phone for me. Now I can just be patient.  

The Death of DRM

It took about ten years but it looks as if the death of DRM is pretty much done. Thank God that's over.

The bell started tolling yesterday as Apple declared that the iTunes store is changing its pricing and removing DRM from here on out. That's superb news, but I think that it was Amazon's MP3, DRM free store which truly signalled the beginning of the end. For the past two months or so, I've basically done all my music downloads from Amazon MP3, which while not as slick as iTunes is faster to find a song. 

All of this change reminds me of what may yet be now that these cats are out of the bag. Which is to say, what about Torrents? 

Once upon a time I tried doing that P2P thing. I don't think I stopped for a good long time. What I found was a whole lot of low quality labeling, odd versions of songs and very little of what I really wanted, especially when it came to classical and jazz. I still have multiple versions of songs in my reasonable good sized library at 96Kbps which indicate to me that I got them from one of the old P2P sources. I was a member of eMusic. I toyed with Shoutcast and of course used Winamp for a long time. WinMX was my P2P client but after a while their servers became too slow and unreliable. I'm sure I was done with it by 2002 or so - but certainly starting in 98 a good 10-20% of my MP3 library was gotten through P2P, the rest through ripping my own CDs. 

Interestingly enough the songs I got P2P were songs that I simply couldn't bear to by the album for, like one or two cuts from Blink 182 or the Offspring. Remember those guys? Yep. I still have it at 128. Title 'Keep em Separated'. But the real name of the song is Come Out and Play. I didn't know until I got the disk some time later. These were the pop songs that I had to have and that I think the industry made the biggest fuss about - the same sorts that kid hackers were interested in. 

In fact now that I think about it, the last songs I P2P'd were those from Soul Coughing back in the days they were all that. I probably went through three or four generations of trying to get their stuff before I gave up and found the CDs. The lessons were learned. P2P was for geeks with no money and lots of patience. When it came to good music, I could come up with the buck - for the pop crap, I'd take the P2P version.

Anyway, I'm on the verge of setting up some multiple servers at Vault 107 (The new name, following Fallout, of my at home IT) one of which is going to be a media server. The lack of DRM is useful just for my own peace of mind. I've got three kids buying music from iTunes and some of that could be simplified. But I'm really interested in the implications of being able to have that kind of dedicated server and now sticking a Torrent client/server type of deally there. For me, I'd certainly want that to be a secured circle of trust for my family rather than a defiant Pirate Bay sort of joint.

It does finally come down to money and whether or not business are smart enough to figure out a business plan with the masses that is adequately profitable *and* accessible. The music market has always been a mass market which was always profitable enough to be DRM free, it's just that in the days of Kazaa and prior, a larger percentage of the market was 'hack capable', and this grated on producers nerves. But a large part of the animosity between this small hack capable community, which was essentially all of Computer Science and IT, was generated because of the perception that these grungy Dot Commers were going to eat the entire lunch of old media - and through the entire irrational exuberence of the era, there was reason to believe they were right. Instead it turns out that only somebody like Steve Jobs could make the right product and that he could do so without being the sort of pompous ass that Shawn Fanning was. In the end, Fanning got millions, but not billions and it was the hedge against the possibility of a Fanning like character eating some company like Viacom that created the legal fudge and farce that is now the legacy of RIAA's bitchslapping Congress into complicit submission.

It wasn't really until iTunes exploded the market base with a user friendly interface and kids like mine started trading iTunes music gift cards, that the mass market grew enough with a large enough balance of 'hack incapable' consumers that the economicsof DRM-free digital music made sense enough to back off the legal horse. This is the market teaching a lesson that the DRM hardliners can now easily learn. Let's not forget how many Groksters have gone bust before now. But I think it is also the buildout of VOD and the big fat price elasticity of digital last mile triple-play which has emerged over the past couple years that is making the industry turn the corner.

I should also say that without Netflix and Gamefly, the entire on-demand model would not have emerged. Those two companies have shown that digital distribution on a subscriber basis can be profitable. The DRM dependence of both models, I think, is a bit overstated. I think that the simple fact is that they proved that the market would scale up larger than big media companies thought on-demand would go. In other words, the VOD buildout by big media companies with or without DRM would not have happened had Netflix and Gamefly not proved something. Yes it's true that video arcades are a thing of the past, but that really was a long time coming.

As for the XBox, Microsoft found a very good pricing model that didn't have to change. For a $300 box, and a $50 annual subscription rate online interactive gaming was always a bargain, even on $60 titles. That is simply because it's worth $60 to get 60 hours (at least) on online interactive gaming, which is actually a lot cheaper than your WoW style PC games. The upside of hacking an XBox was not value, simply geek appeal, whereas the upside of getting the latest Blink 182 single for free against the cost of a CD was big.

People also forget that there are a lot of 'hack capable' ways of getting DRM free music that have been grandfathered into other deals. I could get a high quality audio feed from my cable TV's 200 music channels and rip thousands of MP3s without running afoul of any law.

I, for one, support digital watermarking. Even in a DRM-free world, like the open source world, there should be some easy way to get a certifiable product. I would even support a third party service that would plug-in to a good music or video player. I'd actually pay more for a multimedia client that accommodates such a validation service. But anything that limits my ability to take my collection of digital content anywhere for any reason for the rest of my life? Niente!

I don't suppose I could complete this matter without talking about podcasts and Tivo. The habits of the new generation of digital entertainment consumption are set. The genius of Brandon Tartikoff is a thing of the past. It doesn't much matter what time things are scheduled to be delivered, so long as enough people know that it's coming and it's in-season. The other form of this, by the way, are boxed-sets. So long as I can get a 'boxed-set' of any serial content, its value changes. Companies understood this with regard to movies 10 years ago which is why the accounting of 'ultimates' came into practice. 'Ultimates' accounting value content products based on current and residual cashflows, plus as an asset. I haven't looked at that part of the industry in a while, but I don't think that was a mistake. Podcasts enable not only a long tail, but a longer asset value - so does the Netflix library. But the primary change is that the consumer wants control of where and when. Indefinitely. In other words, the consumer wants all entertainment content in their own cloud and they want it available on demand.

Guys in the software business, like me, understand this. And we sit and watch as it take multiple combinations of companies with small parts of small business models do bits of the big picture over multiple years. It's going to eventually go our way. Why? Because we build the technology.

Grand Am Highlights

Very cool.

Scared Bill Gates

I think that I just did what scares Bill Gates to death. I did it almost without thinking.

I was browsing news about the new XBox 360 services from a feed about E3, and clicked a link on the XBox website. This launched Windows Media Player and started streaming video to my laptop. Except it bogged down halfway through because there's some proprietary codec that Microsoft used. So I clicked to download the new software and approved for my machine to use it, being satisfied that it was actually from Microsoft. Three minutes later the damned thing still wouldn't play.

So I watched the exact same video on YouTube. It started two seconds after I clicked play.

As far as I'm concerned, the XBox franchise is just about the only new thing Microsoft has done right and well since Server 2003 and XP Pro.

Me Can't Handle It

Apple has seriously flubbed their launch of MobileMe and iPhone. Their stuff is dead slow and their updates are bricking iPhones and iTouches. I'm sure they're going to tell everyone that they've been hacked - a day0 hack on this day has got to be a treasure for any black hat. But I suspect that the same thing that didn't work when Jobs was announcing a month ago crapped out today.

Remember we were hearing that the new iPhones have been out almost a year already? My spidey senses were telling me something wasn't quite done if they didn't release the same day they announced. But hey, it's a reasonable way to get a month of buzz right? Who could fault anyone with a 200 buck superphone? Sure, wait a month. Surely they knew what kind of activation nightmare was to come. Surely they were overprepared. Yeah right. It looks like a total disaster of a launch. Check out this comment from the Macworld forums:

This has been a horrible week for Apple, and it has only gotten worse with the 3G activation disasters and 2.0 upgrade bricking fiasco.
 
Attention Macworld: start doing some journalism!! The current articles on your website read like Apple PR and do not reflect reality!! This is quite possibly the worst rollout in Apple's history. To have 36+ hours of downtime for a service that was already overpriced and poor is simply disastrous and is not going to win new customers. It is simply not reliable; why should users pay $99/year for webmail that is subject to this kind of downtime when gmail is free and solid.
 
To add insult to injury, the 2.0 bricking epidemic is just outrageous. To not build in any way for users to restore their old OS is just unconscionable. These are phones, not iPods Apple! People rely on their phones and their webmail to communicate, and you've broken both for millions of people within a 48 hour period. To the apologists who say "oh, just give them time, there's bound to be problems on the first day" - I say no, that's not right. Apple should do load testing and anticipate the kind of demand they're going to see (it should be obvious). If they can't prepare adequately, then they shouldn't do this kind of rollout. It's extremely unprofessional.
 
This is disgraceful, and a serious tarnish on Apple's reputation. "It just works," my ass!!
 
Wake up Macworld - get on the ball and start reporting this!!! The MobileMe crisis is nearly 2 days old now!

Oof!

Me.com is slashdotted. So here's the meme, which is caveman talk for Me. Me slow. Me stupid. Me having hard time scaling. Me not all me cracked up to be.

My Terabytes

For about two or three years now, probably more - who's counting - I have had a personal terabyte at the pad. I keep anywhere from 3 to 7 computers up and running at anytime at home, plus the 2 DVRs, the XBox 360 and now four iPods. (The Spousal Unit hasn't joined the revolution).

My thinking about convergence has changed significantly since I got the iPod Touch this year. I am astounded by the usefulness of those 16 portable GB. A couple movies, a couple dozen podcasts, several hundred songs, several thousand addresses... I could easily see that in 32GB I would need almost nothing else to carry around with me. In my pocket that is.

The biggest problem I have had in enterprise sales and development is that I've had to take a USB drive around so that I could have about 50GB of music and 100GB of  models, data, demos and methodology templates around to my various prospects and customers. I happen to use the Porsche Design aluminum ones like Will Smith in his 'I Am Legend' laboratory. But about a year ago I evolved that with the use of GotomyPC which allows me to have my own 'cloud' at home and access it from anywhere.

So now I have a fairly fine grained understanding of where all my data is but what I don't have is the right combination of access and portability through all of my devices. These are going to be the issues I would like to address considering the prospects for mesh computing in the next generation of software and hardware. I'm also going use myself and my family and associates as models, fictionalizing my ability to afford everything all at once.

I'm going to invent a new category here and echo it at Cubegeek called Mesh when I speak about this whole thing because there are a lot of interesting tangents and capabilities that I'd like to discuss. I've going to get rather sci-fi about it and cross pollinate it with Biome stuff which I haven't really worked on for a number of years.