Thursday, February 04, 2010
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People are quick to throw stones at something they have never experienced. With the iPad I'm going to leave the rocks on the ground and take what I've seen at face value. Many have mocked its lack of certain features and 'simplicity'. It's not so much about simplicity, as it is another aspect of that. Maybe it's because I write software for a living, but I like to pay attention to the user experience of what other people write.
As many of you know, people don't like to think. It's not because they're lazy, stupid, or unintelligent. It's that when you are using a tool (by 'tool' I mean in the most generic of the sense), you don't want to have to focus on *how* to use it, or maybe even what it is doing. People want to focus on the outcome that the tool is supposed to provide. When people use a computer, they don't want to have to focus their energies on how to use it or be impeded because the tool seems like an unnatural means to the goal.
The iPhone software takes commodity hardware that all competitors have access to and makes it a *joy* to use. Now, that may sound silly to your ears, but when was the last time you drove a car, or road a bike, or sat in a chair, or cut a steak with a knife and thought that you just had an experience that far surpassed doing those things than with other capable, if clumsy, ways? The iPad is about taking that iPhone experience and not only making it *bigger*, but changing the fundamental way in which you consume media and interact with this tool called the computer.
We like the computer as we know it now just the way it is because it has always been that way for most of us. As much as we cling to it, the interface is clunky, doesn't work exactly what seems natural to us. We have shoehorned ourselves to fit it, not the other way around. The iPad is about changing that. And as someone who likes exploring new, better ways of doing things, that's exciting to me.
So, tell ya what:
I will be an early adopter for you. I will suffer the rotten tomatoes and eggs and name calling you throw at me. I will be a martyr of the new way of experiencing the world. And if I was wrong, I will take my tongue lashing and the missing chunk of change from my wallet, shut up, and go figure out what other 'joys' are to be had in the world.
But if I was right, I will relish in knowing that I found that joy before you and focus my energies using the tool in finding more joy in the other things in life as well and experience them in ways you cannot.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
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Now that the hype has died down a bit over the new Apple iPad, there are quite a few questions that linger over the yet to be released device. The forefront on my mind (and the question no one is asking) is this: Who can publish on the new iBookstore? Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, commented about the new device's revenue generator, hinting that it would 'inspire a whole new gold rush' for publishers. While certainly comforting for those already established, what for those who may now want to get into the market of ePublishing?
Like the much maligned recording and movie industries, the publishing market is fraught with the Good Ol' Boy mentality of crowding out competition. I can hardly think that Apple struck deals with the announced publishing partnerships to let small fry publishers, or even start-ups, to get a large chunk of the iPad pie. Paranoia aside, it would be incredible, like the AppStore, to allow anyone to step up and develop content for the iBookstore. The iPad is supposedly a revolution for distribution of the written word, why not allow the common man to compete against the Old World juggernauts of publication?
Apple only has one shot with this device. No Flash support, no web cam, no multi-task are massive detractors for purchasing this device, so Apple must win a core audience early on with its eBook strategy. Creating a level playing field for people to distribute quality publications will attract the masses in a way that the Nook and Kindle have not. Failing to deliver, on the other hand, could drive that pent-up publishing supply to those less-sparkly, if cheaper, devices.
Time will tell; I'm hoping for the best.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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Yesterday I ventured to get Windows 7 running on my Mac Mini and naturally ran into quite a few problems (quite unlike installing XP). Unfortunately, I could not get the x64 version of Boot Camp 3.1 installed; it would try to install the nVidia driver and then silently fail thereafter. I also ran into the road block of not being able to install the x64 version of Boot Camp 3.0 from the Snow Leopard installation media, but found a work around. You will need the following items:
- Snow Leopard installation disc
- Boot Camp 3.1 x64 installation package
First, insert your Snow Leopard installation disc and open a CMD prompt
As Administrator. Access your disc drive and navigate to the
Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple directory. Now execute the following command:
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi This will install version 3.0 of the Boot Camp software. This may take a few minutes, but after it is done, follow the prompt to restart your machine. For the most part, everything should be installed correctly, sans Apple's most recent hardware like the Magic Mouse.
After you have rebooted, you should then be able to run the Boot Camp 3.1 setup without any problems.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
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Research has found that a certain
species of octopus have the ability of using tools, in this case, two halves of a coconut. One Slashdot reader, upon hearing the news,
decided to rewrite a favorite Monty Python skit:
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Halt! Who goes there?
- PULPO: It is I, Pulpo, son of Leggus Tentaclus, from the castle of Cephalot. King of the Invertebrates, defeator of the Squid, sovereign of all the Ocean!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Pull the other one!
- PULPO: I am. And this my trusty servant Sucksy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the ocean floor in search of invertebrates who will join me in my court of Cephalot. I must speak with your lord and master.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: What, ridden on a horse?
- PULPO: Yes!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: You're using coconuts!
- PULPO: What?
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.
- PULPO: So? We have ridden since the Titanic sunk onto this land, through the kingdom of Laurentian, through--
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Where'd you get the coconut?
- PULPO: We found them.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Found them? In the Laurentian Abyss? The coconut's tropical!
- PULPO: What do you mean?
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
- PULPO: The dolphin may swim south with the sun or the humpback whale may seek warmer climes in winter yet these are not strangers to our land.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
- PULPO: Not at all, they could be carried.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: What -- a dolphin carrying a coconut?
- PULPO: It could grip it by the husk using its blowhole!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of grasping ability! A dolphin has no means to carry a 1 pound coconut.
- PULPO: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master that Pulpo from the Court of Cephalot is here.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Listen, in order to maintain the ability to breathe, a dolphin needs to keep its blowhole free from obstruction, right?
- PULPO: Please!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Am I right?
- PULPO: I'm not interested!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: It could be carried by a Great White shark!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: Oh, yeah, a Great White shark maybe, but not a dolphin, that's my point.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that...
- PULPO: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court at Cephalot?!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: But then of course Great White sharks are not migratory.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: Oh, yeah...
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: So they couldn't bring a coconut back anyway... [clop clop]
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: Wait a minute -- supposing two dolphins carried it together?
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: No, they'd have to have it on a line.
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: Well, simple! They'd just use the stipe of a bull whip kelp!
- OCTOPUS GUARD #1: What, tied to the dorsal fins?
- OCTOPUS GUARD #2: Well, why not?
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
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I have been looking for a NAS for a long time, so when Newegg had a deal on the Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E NAS Server, I jumped right on it. Selling itself with four internal SATA connections, two external eSATA ports and USB up the yin-yang, I thought this would be a good buy for my purposes. My primary intention was to create a 6TB (yes, terabyte) array where I could have all my ripped DVD, Blu-Ray, music and computer backups but still have plenty of space to grow into. To cut to the chase, I have had nothing but disappointment.
First off, you can only do configurations of two or four drives in RAID. What this means is you can do a simple mirror (RAID 1) with two drives, or a mirrored-stripe (0+1) or parity (RAID 5) with four drives. Those other eSATA ports? Just stand alone and cannot participate in the RAID array. This was disheartening because it dropped the maximum array size from 6TB to 4.5TB (using 1.5TB drives). What's worse, though, is that the eSATA ports would not recognize my orphaned 1.5TB drive plugged into it. After SSHing into it, I could see that the drive was mounted, but the web interface and SAMBA would not share it out. Plugging in a spare 500GB showed up just fine.
Security controls are very coarse grained. It's sad that this is running on Linux, but the web interface only does simple read/write/deny permissions. This device purports to support Active Directory integration, but it only supports up to Windows Server 2003. After digging into see what version of SAMBA it is running, I found bugs that were fixed in the next minor release that allowed joining to a Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 domain. Too bad the device does not make it easy on you to do the simple upgrade.
If those issues were tolerable, the actual performance of the machine was certainly not. While reads could almost saturate my gigabit network (which was very cool to see!), writes were woefully slow. When not doing anything but a dedicated write, maximum speeds topped out at about 20MBps (~160Mbps). Since this is primarily a machine for streaming media content, that wasn't too much a concern, however if I were streaming a Blu-Ray movie or even a DVD on the device while trying to write to it, the experience would become completely untenable. The movie would get really choppy and then outright fail. This was a completely unacceptable outcome, given I was transferring small photos to the device. Watching the CPU get maxed out for writes shows that this has a weak software RAID controller, which tax the CPU beyond usability. Granted, since this an x86 platform, you can upgrade the CPU and memory on the device, but I would opine that throwing incremental hardware upgrades would only produce marginal results. These dreadful results were experienced on both RAID 5 and 0+1 configurations. All in all the experience could have been greatly enhanced if the device would enable some sort of QoS so that streamed media received greater CPU priority, even if that meant that writes were slower.
I could have learned to deal with some of the other feature drawbacks this device has, but given its performance (or lack thereof) I cannot recommend this device for
any storage need.
Monday, November 23, 2009
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I'm only four chapters into
Atlas Shrugged, but the parallels to modern events are startling. The main industry that this book involves (at least so far) is the railroad business:
Then it was said that large, established railroad systems were essential to the public welfare; and that the collapse of one of them would be a national catastrophe; and that if one such system had happened to sustain a crushing loss in a public-spirited attempt to contribute to international good will, it was entitled to public support to help it survive the blow.
Substitute
railroad for
bank and we have just read the news for the past year or so. Scary isn't it?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
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Today
Google announced free navigation for the new version of its mobile software, Android 2.0. Seems like a pretty innocuous announcement until you consider who the players are in the market. TomTom and Garmin are two of the biggest players in the hand held consumer GPS market, so it came as no surprise that their business model might take a hit. Consider today's stock graph following the accouncement:
Ouch! It doesn't take a stock analyst to point out that anyone in the handheld GPS market is going to have an interesting time staying relevant in a marketplace where a once valued (and pricey) product is being given away for free. TomTom and Garmin are feeling the pinch, but they're not the only ones. The writing on the wall here is that the days of dedicated hand held devices are numbered. Even Apple themselves are
seeing it amongst their own product lines. The iPod Classic and even the Nano are seeing shrinking sales all because people have discovered that having an iPod Touch or iPhone, which in addition to being able to play music or making a phone call, offer users a vast array of useful applications that fulfill any number of functions.
Who's next? I target eBook readers. The Kindle, Nook, and Sony's dedicated reading devices are the obvious choice for extinction. Though the iPod and iPhone do not necessarily make a comfortable book reading device, one could only imagine what the rumored Apple tablet will bring. If Apple were to combine the power and extensibility of their current iPod Touch/iPhone application experience and marry it with a slick interface for reading electronic books, then it would certainly obviate the need to carry an eBook reader on your person.
Look forward to the future, kids. The power and knowledge of the world is at your fingertips and it is only going to get better.
UPDATE: Right after I post this, I read an article highlighting a
Twitter dedicated device. Wow. I am astounded. So what do people do when they have this device and people embed a link to a web page? While I agree that Twitter or Twitter
-like communication is the wave of the future (heck, it's already here!), why would I carry such a clunky, one-trick-pony device in my pocket? 1996 just called, they want their glorified pager back!
Friday, October 09, 2009
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I woke up this morning surprised, like every other American, that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I can't say that I'm really happy for him, nor I am I angry that he received it. When I had mentioned this to some coworkers who hadn't heard the news, the first question they asked was, "For what?" Considering that nominations had to be proposed by early February, Obama would have only been in office a few weeks before someone put his name in for consideration. The media were abuzz about this same question and apologists were quick to respond how much better the U.S. is perceived around the world for Obama simply being elected.
Now, I'm not against him receiving this honor just because he's not Bush. I'm not against it because he's black. I'm not against it because his aspirations tend to lean towards peaceful resolve (even though after his acceptance remarks he was whisked off to a war planning meeting for Afghanistan). No, I'm against it because now there is a certain obligation for Obama to behave in a certain manner. In a way, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is exerting a certain influence on U.S. foreign policy. If I were the President and had just received the Nobel Peace Prize
barely 9 months into my first term, I would feel a lot of undue pressure to live up to the expectations yoked upon me by this foreign organization. Think about it: if the platform of your presidency rested on restoring faith in your country in the eyes of the world, how much confidence would it instill if you received the Nobel Peace Prize and continued to wage war?
So Obama is now faced with a dilemma: Live up to the Peace Prize's standard of being a 'peace maker' at all costs, or risk violating the spirit of the Prize but continuing the path our nation is currently on. The former has implications for domestic sovereignty and security, whiles the latter risks the nation's perceptions with the rest of the world.
I think the world would have been a better place if they had waited for Obama to deliver on some promises and aspirations and then award it based on performance, instead of meddling with situations that are already quite precarious as they are.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
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And it is every bit as cheesy as it sounds.
Among other things I get a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, a puzzle, a deck of cards and napkins (napkins?!). I'm not sure that I particularly care for the 'Signature Edition' containing Monkey Boy's John Hancock, but I'm raffling it off anyway. I've assembled the tote bags (last pic below) that include coupons for discounted software from Norton, Kaspersky, Corel, etc. Check out the unboxing:
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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The music industry has an uphill battle to fight. On one hand they want to continue to enjoy the insane amount of revenue that music sales bring them and on the other hand you have the Digital Age sweeping in and casting that idea to the wind. Once a product goes digital, its value in and of itself is nothing.
The Old Days
See, when people bought phonographs, they weren't buying music, they were purchasing a piece of vinyl that happened to have music on it. They owned something. It was physical, tangible, cuddleable. It was
yours. You could lend it to a friend, swap it for another, but in all you owned a piece of property, one very difficult to reproduce yourself. Cassettes were the start of trouble for the recording industry because now people could create copies, pass them around, make mix tapes etc. Using cassettes still meant that you had to buy new media if you wanted to make copies, but in all it was fairly convenient. Same with CDs. For longer than a decade now, you have a collection of 1s and 0s. You can share it instantaneously with thousands of other people or duplicate it a million fold at the click of a button.
At that moment a song meant nothing, it is expected to be attainable for free. This of course runs contrary to what the music industry wants you to do, but the opportunity is there and you are not likely to get caught. So how can you compete for free? There have been attempts at giving away advertisement laced tracks. But why would someone savor what is perceived as an inferior product when one without advertisements can be obtained as easily? The RIAA has tried scaring people into submission with threat of lawsuit, but that doesn't seem to have worked. If not that, what?
Enter The New Business Model
Music means the most to people when it is associated with an experience. Listening to a song on an iPod is not necessarily an experience. A song on a radio while sitting in traffic is not exactly a highlight experience of music listening. So how do you create an experience, and more importantly, how do you monetize it?
Since music is now considered a commodity, you have to now start bundling it with value add items. For the cynics who think that's marketing-speak for 'giving away doohickeys', they're on the right track. Apple is trying out a new
LP Format to lure fans back into purchasing whole albums, but even that format has limited appeal. Why? Because once again, you're not creating an experience. Music needs to get back to brand. To image. To something tangible.
I think one of the more innovative approaches to word-of-mouth product advertising is
HouseParty.com. Companies can setup an avenue for people to invite friends over and try out products. In the case of the music industry, why not get your fans to sell crap for you? I'm talking about T-Shirts, buttons, stickers, posters, and other music group paraphernalia. Imagine teenagers across America having a place to facilitate getting friends together at their home to listen to a new album
FOR FREE and have them sell orders for T-Shirts and other junk. Fans eat that crap up! In those moments you are now creating an experience that people can relate to and remember. They remember the posters that the host had up, the music blaring, parents shaking their heads but glad that they know where their kids are and what they are doing.
That's just one idea.
How about another: Why not create kits with a CD, SD card, or other digital format of the latest Celine Dion album in a box set of chocolate, lotions, and aphrodisiacs? It's kinky and silly and you're laughing right now, but at the same time you are making an experience out of the music these artists are creating.
You can make money off of that!
The point is this: the music itself has no value. It's too easy to duplicate and get for free. That can of worms is open and can never be closed. The music industry needs to come to grips with that and invent other ways to add value to something that now has no worth. It may end up that the margins are not as lucrative as they once were, but as mentioned before, they weren't really selling music anyway, only the media upon which it was inscribed.
Good luck artists, you're going to need it.