| Thursday, July 24, 2008 |
20:28 - Chicken at the Outback, cost a lotta dough
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Blog comments take on the tone of the blog they're on. If it's a snark blog, the comments get snarky; if it's a profound philosophical blog, the comments get deep and notable. If it's a blog infused with relentless humor, so will the comments be.
The same goes for comic strips that have comments, and in particular I call to witness Achewood.
The strip inspires its commenters to a level of comedic performance art comparable to the strip itself. It's bolstered by the "chubby" system by which pithy wit is modded up by community vote and lame chaff is modded down; the result, far from resembling Coach Z attempting to freestyle, is extemporaneous exchanges like the one that begins with "sarrk's" comment, "Dang. I wish I could shout sweet piano music too" and continues from there—which I will forever imagine whenever in the rest of my life I hear a certain song.
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20:05 - Can't give this away
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It seems to me that the trend is for all the non-iTunes DRM-based music stores to shut down, one by one—and DRM-free MP3 stores, first with Amazon (and iTunes Plus) and now with Rhapsody reinventing itself yet again, springing up in their place.
To the pundits, this is all a very compelling case study in the efficacy and ethics of DRM, and will result in many solemn chin-rubbing conclusions. But I wonder... will this trend reverse iTunes' stranglehold on the market at all? Will consumers' buying habits appreciably change as a result of these moves? In short, does anyone who's not a pundit care?
iTunes' DRM always reminded me of some comedian's impression of Bob Dole back in the 1996 election: a snarling, petulant "You're not as happy as you think you are!"
I think most users just use what works and is obvious. The DRM in iTunes never presents a serious obstacle to the typical user, and it makes music accessible and cheap. Nobody wants to think about what company even makes the software that they use to sync up their music library to their MP3 players, let alone what happens if they want to try mixing music from a variety of different online stores and window-shopping among them to find out who offers the least onerous buying experience and the best long-term service. People just want to pick a solution and go with it. And while for a lot of people that solution is "anything that sells unencumbered MP3 tracks, even if they're not produced by anyone anyone's heard of", most people just buy an iPod, install iTunes, and make with the clicky clicky. Nobody else can offer that level of obviousness.
And so I look forward to seeing whether people like Rhapsody can succeed even by touting the fact that their music plays "everywhere, including on your iPod" now. One way or another, it'll make for some great punditry.
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| Wednesday, July 23, 2008 |
22:09 - Oh for the days of the Y2K problem
http://www.aol.com.au/news/story/Zimbabweans-battle-money-shortages-as-collectors-bu
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Egads:
President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai signed an agreement Monday to hold talks about power-sharing to end the crisis and restore economic stability. But the news failed to move the exchange rate, since little cash is available.
House prices and lottery prizes are quoted in quadrillions _ that's with 15 zeros. Zimbabweans says it's only a matter of time before big ticket items will be priced in the quintillions, which have 18 zeros.
Official inflation is quoted at 2.2 million percent but independent finance houses say it's closer to 12.5 million percent.
One major commercial bank said its automated teller machines are not configured to dispense multi-zero withdrawals and freeze in what it called a "data overflow error." Software writers are busy writing programs to try to overcome the problem.
Urgent electronic transfers in trillions also take several days as electronic accounting systems grapple with transactions in 12 zeros.
Hurry, get your 100 billion dollar notes before they're worthless...
Via Mark.
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| Tuesday, July 22, 2008 |
14:52 - A lotta Loti
http://www.lotusevora.com/
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Geez, who saw this coming? Lotus is unveiling three new models, starting with a new 2+2, the Evora:
This after four years of being essentially a one-model company—just the Elise and Exige, which are for all intents and purposes the same thing, and the Europa, which is about as distinct from the Elise as the Mini Clubman is from the Cooper. Looks like all those Elises that the Silicon Valley and New York markets have been snapping up have driven Lotus to an Apple-like level of confidence—the kind that spurs them to make a play for markets they'd all but abandoned.
Man, that's a sexy interior.
And it's got that two-intersecting-greenhouse-contour-lines thing from the Ferrari 575 Zagato, which I've never been a particular fan of, but it works pretty well here—and feels at home with the Elise-evolution tail treatment and front cowl. Very, very nice-looking car.
Plus it comes with a 6-speed manual. Exclusively. Take that, industry trends!
(It's funny, though: just as I'd figured Apple had run out of big cats to name operating systems after before going the "Snow Leopard" route, I was sure Lotus had no more "E" words to work with in either English or French, yet I was somehow sure they'd dig up some word out of left field that I'd never heard of before. But no, they went the Shadowy-Tech-Company-Conglomerate route and made up their own word, à la Acura or Elantra. Somehow I didn't foresee them doing that. But, hey, it could have been worse—I was ready to point and laugh at the upcoming Lotus Eclair.)
And to think I'd all but considered Lotus to be irrelevant a few years ago, and bought my Esprit at least partially because it was a relic of a nameplate that I thought would soon be just a memory. Hell, this might mean they'll still be around to make spare parts for a while yet. To say nothing of those two further models they've got in the pipeline, one of which is the new Esprit, something I'd all but dismissed as wishful thinking. I mean, how many of these kinds of dreams really do come true?
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13:22 - A retrospective of failure
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2325941,00.asp
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Interesting article at PC Magazine showcasing a pageful of great-but-unsuccessful ideas each for Microsoft and Apple.
Rather than making fun of obviously doomed flops, though, it focuses on ideas that actually were good, but failed for reasons unrelated to their own merits or lack thereof. Though sometimes just because an idea can't be made to work by the people who first envisioned it doesn't mean it won't be realized by someone else. The Microsoft list includes things like WinFS:
Bill Gates, in his own words: "There is a famous quest of mine called integrated storage, where you have not just a file system but more of a flexible object-type database: Things like your contacts, calendars, favorites, your photos, your music—and how you rate those things—are stored in a structured environment." WinFS was this system, the next-gen underpinning to Windows, and it was planned as part of Cairo, the code name for Windows 95. It's still a great idea. But making it happen? Not so easy.
I'm sure the Spotlight team would agree, but they'd do so with the satisfied smile of those who actually made it work.
What I enjoy, though, is the tone of both the lists in the article. It's clearly not written from the perspective of a partisan on either side, but it is well-informed, and the writers (assuming it isn't simply that one took one list and the other took the second) are well versed in the underground forgotten history of both companies, referring to their "dark days" and early successes with genuine sympathy. It's not snarky toward either company, but rather paints an appropriately wistful picture of how many different ways the tech world could have developed in those chaotic, euphoric times.
It makes me reflect on the fact that now that Apple has come out so dominant in the post-iTunes world, body-slamming its way to the top of the heap with one resounding success after another and taking investors and speculators alike on a white-knuckled space-tourism ride since the iPod's debut in 2001, and now that nobody treats it as a pariah or a subject of pity anymore—it hardly seems worthwhile or necessary to write all those reflective philosophical pro-Apple essays that were such the in thing a decade ago. When people were rubbing their chins over the "visible", floppy-less iMac and struggling to wrap their brains around what NeXT was and why it was a part of Apple now, it was a time that demanded philosophy, or at least encouraged it—a die-hard fan community that felt itself marginalized and misunderstood, with nothing else to really contribute besides a couple thousand dollars in solidarity/pity purchases every year or so, really couldn't do anything else but write.
But nowadays it's no skin off anyone's nose to say they use a Mac or use an iPod; hell, it's all but assumed to be the case, if you occupy anything resembling the frontiers of the tech-geek landscape. The Apple Store isn't a lame or dorky place to hang out, as some people have discovered to their complete surprise. Nobody whines about Macs' high prices or slowness anymore (partially, to be sure, because now that they're on Intel, there's no argument to be had on either count anymore); nobody even complains that the Mac gamer world is so small, because anyone for whom gaming is that important now has the option to Boot Camp or VM their Windows world right off their Mac. All the classic arguments against Apple have been addressed and, dare I say, settled. So there hardly seems a need for any of the old-school nervous, twitchy, screedy petulance that we—heh—I indulged in so frequently.
In other words... is this what "victory" looks like? Or "vindication"? Either way, Apple had better be enjoying it, because from here there's usually only one direction a company goes.
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| Saturday, July 19, 2008 |
16:37 - What makes a supervillain?
http://www.drhorrible.com/
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Okay, this is freakin' awesome:
Neil Patrick Harris in his own Joss Whedon-helmed musical.
Stick it out past the first few minutes where it seems like it's not going anywhere. Trust me, it does. Damn, I'm glad to see that the art of musical theatre still finds expression in this day and age.
I do, however, wonder about the by-now well-worn "ironic superheroes" genre. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, it's not even really possible to play a superhero story "straight" anymore; the blockbuster movies do their best, but it's all they can do to avoid homages and injokes that render the whole thing tongue-in-cheek. The fertile ground these days is in this Venture Bros.-ish table-turning, where we empathize with supervillains and watch their political triangulations as they try to get in good with the Guild of Calamitous Intent/Evil League of Evil/Council of Doom/whatever guise the concept takes. It's all a much more "human" style of storytelling, and thus lends itself all the better to humor, acclimatized as we are to the kind of comedy that derives from people on the screen acting according to impulses that we all can relate to to an absurd degree of detail, right down to the mumbled turn of phrase and the passive-agressive apartment argument and the petty rummage for cash at the food court. Nothing's epic anymore; everything's personal. The world of fantasy has shrunk to human scale.
This may be hyperbole, but really—how many new productions do we see these days that aren't parodies or tweaked retellings of well-loved memories from childhood? We've been doing it for decades, what with The Wiz and Wicked and the like, but nowadays it's almost all we do.
Not that this is inherently a bad thing, or anything. I just wonder how the trend might reverse itself. We've exposed all the stories we know as a culture to several peanut-butter-thick layers of ironic reimagining by now, parodying and re-parodying them until there's nothing left to appreciate with any sincerity, but rather with a smirk and a knowing grin. So how, I wonder, does this culture manufacture more sincerity? How do we create something new that isn't a parody of something we saw as kids? How does Superman come about again?
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| Thursday, July 17, 2008 |
21:59 - Man, I can't wait till this thing debuts
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Via Mark.
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20:20 - There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium...
http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos
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Via JMH, the Periodic Table of Videos.
I used to spend my lunch hours in middle school poring over an old Time/Life book on chemistry; in the middle was a multi-page section with a picture and blurb for every element describing its nature, history, and name. I got to the point where I could call to mind the etymology of any element you cared to name—which Greek myth inspired the name Niobium, for example, or which fivefour elements were named after the town of Ytterby, Sweden.
But they didn't have videos of them all. Not until now.
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19:39 - You will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g
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Wouldn't you know it: Apple is the new Microsoft—and the new Standard Oil, the new DeBeers, the new East India Company.
"This is the phone that has changed phones forever," Mr. Jobs said.
We agree. A snake oil salesman not satisfied with his business of pushing proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology into your home, Jobs has set his sights on getting DRM and proprietary software into your pocket as well.
Yeah, that's his nefarious scheme, the end short of which he'll never stop: forcing us all to accept DRM. Because DRM isn't a means to an end (e.g. making money); it's an end in itself.
And wasn't the concept of "snake oil" a reference to something that didn't work as advertised?
There is a reason so much emphasis was put on the visual design of the iPhone. There is a reason that Apple is so concerned about unsightly seams that they won't even let you change the battery in your own phone.
And everyone just wails and gnashes their teeth over their inability to change their batteries.
Unfortunately, we are not. The extreme here is represented by Jobs and Apple. The iPhone is an attack on very old and fundamental values -- the value of people having control over their stuff rather than their stuff having control over them, the right to freely communicate and share with others, and the importance of privacy.
And the right not to have to pay a toll when you walk on the sidewalk, right? Right.
Apple's DRM system monitors your activities and tells you what you are and are not allowed to do. What you are not allowed to do is install any software that Apple doesn't like. This restriction prevents you from installing free software -- software whose authors want you to freely share, copy and modify their work.
You mean they get to dictate the terms by which you can use their service? Fie!
You can crack the iPhone and install whatever you can get to run on it, sure; and then feel free to bitch when your warranty is no longer honored, updates don't work, and you can't get any software that actually runs from the App Store.
Free software has given us many exciting things on the desktop -- the GNU/Linux operating system, the Firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org suite, the Apache webserver that runs most of the web sites on the internet. Why would we want to buy a computer that goes out of its way to obstruct the freedom of such creators?
I love how they could only think of two examples of free "desktop" software before listing, uh, Apache.
I'm also reminded of the scene a few years ago in front of an Apple Store opening. Some old guy was walking past, saw the huge line, and asked nobody in particular what it was. Someone said it was for the new Apple Store. The guy looked nonplussed, and said, "Who'd want to buy an Apple?"
Um, all these people.
"Why would we want to buy a computer that" does all this vile stuff? Be... cause... it works?
But it's been a year and a half since Jobs, under pressure from the public, spoke out strongly against DRM and in favor of freedom. With great hesitation, he allowed a handful of files to go DRM-free on iTunes, but kept in place the requirement that they be purchased using the proprietary, DRM-infected iTunes software. Since then, he has done absolutely nothing to act on those words. In his movie and video ventures, he has continued to push DRM. And now he's bringing it to mobile software applications as well. It's become clear that those words were a ploy to defuse opposition.
Oh, yeah, it's his fault that nobody but EMI has opened up their libraries for iTunes Plus. It's his fault that the movie distributors won't allow their material to be bought or rented without a mechanism for enforcing playback rights. And it's unreasonable that you be required to buy iTunes music through, well, iTunes. Which, by the way, will happily catalog and play and sync any music you rip from CD or download from EMusic or get in MP3 or AIFF or whatever format from wherever. But no, no Ogg Vorbis, so no cookie, I guess.
These are people for whom MP3 is too encumbered, I have to keep reminding myself.
The truth is that there are thousands of software, music, and media creators who want to share their work more freely. It's funny -- as in reprehensible -- because Apple's OS X operating system was in fact largely built on software written by people who voluntarily made their work free to others for further copying, modification and improvement. When people have the freedom to tinker, create, and innovate, they make exciting and useful creations. People have already been writing their own free software to run mobile platforms. The telephone network is still standing.
Yes, it's built on software that was written under licenses less hollow-cheeked and muttering mad than the GPL, like the BSD and Apache licenses, which allow it to be freely incorporated into closed-source, for-profit products. The developers in question did this on purpose. Turns out that having corporate sponsorship dollars and telephony infrastructure behind you lets you make even more exciting and useful creations.
We know Jobs is afraid of competition, and is manufacturing threats and excuses. This is simply a business decision, and it's a kind of business we shouldn't support. Jobs wants the iPhone to restrict you because he wants your money and increased control is a means to that -- he wants to take as much from you as possible, give you back as little as possible, and keep his costs at the absolute minimum. He's trying to make sure that nobody writes software for the iPhone to do things that he doesn't want the iPhone to be able to do -- such software might make FoulPlay less foul, play alternative media formats, show the user exactly what's being communicated from the phone to the people monitoring it, or even disable transmission of that information.
Or, perhaps, nobody cares what they can't do with the iPhone, because they're all too busy enjoying what they can.
Damn sheeple!
But this, this is the best part. This is where this veritable sonnet of navel-gazing paranoia undergoes its volta and offers us a grand alternative vision:
Fortunately, we will soon be able to have all the convenience of a mobile computer that also makes phone calls without selling our freedom to Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or anyone else. The Neo FreeRunner is a promising free-software phone, being developed in cooperation with the same worldwide community responsible for the GNU/Linux operating system. These are creators who want to share their work and who want you and others to be able to do what they did -- build on the work of people who came before them to make new, empowering devices.
Jobs built on the work of people before him too, only his answer is to kick away the ladder and try to prevent anyone else from doing what he did. His customers are fighting back -- according to Apple in October 2007, over 250,000 of the 1.4 million iPhones sold were unlocked by their users. Rather than embracing this, Jobs thinks it should be stopped.
We have a choice. The FreeRunner doesn't yet do as much as the iPhone and it's certainly not as pretty. But in terms of potential, the fact that it's supported by a worldwide community of people rather than a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity puts it light-years ahead. We can trade our freedom and our money to get something flashy on the surface, or we can spend a little more money, keep our freedom, and support a better kind of business. If we want businesses to be ethical, we have to reward the ones that are. By not enriching companies that want to take away our freedom and by rewarding those that respect us, we will be helping to bring about a better future.
Go... go and hit the link to see the picture. I'm laughing too hard to embed an image here.
Can you even imagine? It took Apple with its willingness to break the logjam of bad smartphone interfaces in order to make a platform that people were actually willing to write good apps for, and this is going to show people the error of their ways, tear the veils from their faces, shake them from their hypnosis? This is what people would voluntarily carry around in their pockets and play Mah-Jongg on?
What iTunes sells is a promise of quality. That's the concept behind the App Store as much as it is behind the DRM-locked (and non-DRM'd iTunes Plus) music and video in the library: it's all organized properly and guaranteed to work. You don't have to do any of that tedious crap yourself.
And that's the division at work here: on one hand are the people who don't have time to do bookkeeping and quality control and who just want their technology to work, even if they have to pay a little more for it; and on the other, there are the people who actually enjoy it when things don't work quite right. Because then there's something to do, some mess to clean up, some Makefile to tinker with, some dependency to sort out, some angry Pravda editorial to write. And where would the world be without those?
I can't believe I once seriously considered listening to these men.
Via Gruber.
UPDATE: J Greely goes for the pithy one-liner, much like the Kung-Fu Master of yore.
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06:20 - "More Than a Feeling", do my bidding
http://www.square-enix.com/na/company/press/2008/0707/
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LOL WHUT?
Square Enix, Inc., the publisher of Square Enix™ interactive entertainment products in North America, announced the release of SONG SUMMONER™: The Unsung Heroes, on sale at the iTunes® Store worldwide (www.itunes.com) and available for play in English and Japanese on the iPod nano with video, iPod classic and fifth generation iPod.
SONG SUMMONER: The Unsung Heroes is a Role-Playing Game that transforms your iPod® songs into powerful "Tune Troopers" that you can control in battle! As the protagonist Ziggy, you will embark on an epic journey to rescue your brother from the clutches of the Mechanical Militia! Intriguing characters, an epic story and a tactics-based battle system combine for a rich RPG experience previously only available on home and handheld game consoles.
Um. All right then.
Via Steven Den Beste.
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Brian Tiemann
