Banapana

Chrome OS Breeds Metaphors and Debate

I’m going to do something I don’t often do on this blog and that is jump on the blogging band-wagon that is the discussion of the Google Chrome OS announced today. From MacWorld to the Washington Post, Google has clearly made an impact on the world with its announcement that it will be working on a new operating system that will largely be centralized around the web and Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. But one idea, that’s been fairly pervasive in the conversation: that file systems and other “onboard” applications might go away—seems to point to a new paradigm to computing, and it’s spawned a lot of metaphors in the discussion. It’s also wrong.

My favorite metaphor so far hails from Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast. In his editorial he mentions that the current desktop regime that got its start in the late 70s and early 80s was a development akin to road-makers requiring new cars and car manufacturers requiring new roads. The hardware got faster, so the software got more bloated, so the hardware needed to be faster. On that point, I would have to agree. There’s no question in my mind that some software bloat is totally out-of-control as well as overpriced—so much so that I made a concerted effort to opt-out about a year ago. To this day, Adobe’s software is the only software on my Mac that regularly (and predictably) crashes and I can’t stand that I can’t find an alternative for Illustrator even when I’ve found a great alternative for Photoshop. However, I digress.

The software got more bloated and sloppy and especially-so among some camps but it didn’t have to. There was very little market pressure in the OS industry and that really just made for a feature-focused attitude (read: Vista), rather than a fine-tuning attitude. Snow Leopard (Apple’s latest Mac OS version) will actually decrease the memory footprint of the OS, as well as speed it up during wake up and shut down. So it’s not by necessity that software-makers let their software get bloated, it’s that the bloat stems from misplaced incentives. When your the dominant player in the market, the incentive is to use your economy-of-scale (read more coders) to out-pace the other guy in innovations and features, not clean house. Google won’t escape this incentive. People have already hinted that as the company as moved away from its core technological expertise (search!) the search results are not as good as they used to be.

But this positioning of Google Chrome as an OS, and it’s focus on the network, still overlooks the fact that people view their own media as valuable (and as property) and keeping all your photos on Flickr is not as good as sharing photos on Flickr while still having them in some file archive on a local machine. I would predict that’s never going to change.¹ However, I also don’t think that the netbooks that Google Chrome will most likely end up on are any different than iphones (with the exception of being much, much less slick)—they’re not anyone’s first and only computer–they’re certainly not going to become the hub of the media center in a household. And just like with the iPhone and iPod, the model that naturally evolves is a cloud-desktop hybrid. There are layers of privacy to these sorts of hybrids and as people become more and more aware of threats to their media, they will want more protection. That means that some stuff, meant for my eyes only, stays on my computer, in my vault, while other material (like my twitter messages) gets pretty much permanently embedded online.²

I think the metaphor that best suits what will happen because of the Google Chrome OS is not really much of a metaphor at all. It will be a component in an iTunes-like world. I have my music (without DRM now) all on a personal machine. I can back that up. Occasionally, I allow some of it to be streamed to others in my office. I can move it up to an online back-up resource or I can move it to my iPod. (I even occasionally—with the permission of the artist—host a file for Blip.fm.) It’s not all in the cloud. It’s not all on the desktop. It is however rarely on only one device.³ Google wants to run software through the browser and that makes some sense. I think it will force software developers to re-consider their design strategies and worry more about reliability and speed and be more tentative about new features (though I hope they learn how to come out of a beta phase). But I don’t think that will at all change the fact that people will run want to run programs offline. I see no point in an online version Illustrator where I create my art (in utero) entirely online. I don’t want anyone looking at my work in its middle stages. I will want to store things locally and only locally and I don’t think Google plans to stop them.

To understand why I predict that, ask yourself why the DRM dragon has largely been slayed. ↩
That is to say, much like email, if I wanted to pull down all my twitter messages, I’m not sure that I could. There’s liable to be copies in lots of places. ↩
Also, despite some “walled-garden” naysayers of Apple, iTunes has always played mp3s and there are lots and lots of places for my to buy music, other than on the iTunes store. ↩

A Holographic World

“World Builder” is a very nicely produced (and touching) short film by Bruce Banit. From the Vimeo page: “A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.” This is the kind of virtual reality I long for, even if it were just on the Xbox. All the first-person shooter games are great fun, but I wish developers would invest more time in games/open-ended environments like this. I know, of course, that some will point out that Second Life is close, but their rendering engine still doesn’t match what the shooter games manage.¹

Of course, I haven’t been in Second Life for about a year and a half–maybe it’s time to re-visit. ↩

Looking At Ants—Really, Really Looking

To quote Jon Gruber: “The intersection of horrifying and wonderful.” This is a massively high resolution image of an ant that you can zoom in on to an extraordinary degree—positively awe-inspiring.

The Beernet

In Jalalabad, Afghanistan there is a unique little tiki bar called the Taj (apparently the only bar for hundreds of miles) that has hit on a unique proposition for creating “social media software.” Since the bar is the only one around, there is a unique mixture of individuals, from military personnel to consultants for NGOs to mercenaries.¹ Any of the patrons are made the offer that if they will deposit some information that they have (photos, white papers, GPS coordinates) on the bar’s terrabyte server, they can have a free beer, as well as download any information they want from the server. I’d call it a beernet!

You can hear more about it at length in this video interview of Smari McCarthy by Vinay Gupta.

[via the Humanitarian Technology Network]

Mos Eisley ring a bell? ↩

Attention Corporate Overlords: Your Idiots Are Coming Home to Roost

This article over at Scatterbox (dutifully maintained by Steven Silvers) really caught my ire. Apparently two moronic employees at Domino’s utilized 21st century technology to illustrate to the world what total disregard they have for the customers of Domino’s, sticking ingredients in their noses and spitting in sandwiches, all on video tape and all on Youtube. Of course, this caused no end of trouble for Domino’s and got the suits asking themselves, “Oh crap! What do we do when our employees can use social media tools to cluster bomb our brand?” The normal reaction is likely to put a corporate policy into zzzzz… Sorry, ever since getting out of the rat race, I can’t finish sentences with “corporate policy” in them any more. And it doesn’t matter, because what they’re going to do is precisely the wrong thing to do.

Maybe part of the problem is that monolithic US corporations choose to keep large amounts of profit for their executives and choose to pay monkey pay to their counter jockies rather than see those people as a major interface with the public and invest in them. Service jobs in the US are some of the only jobs that aren’t going to get outsourced and yet they’re the butt of the joke of entire movies. When was the last time you went to a fast food restaurant and thought, “What nice service.” And yet when all you sell is a pretty crappy pizza, maybe you should consider for a moment whether good service is an important element of your business model. You know when the last time was that I did think, “What nice service.” Apple. And nearly every time I’ve dealt with them. Not only do I think an Apple store employee (well-trained, carefully picked, paid decently with benefits) would know better than to pull a stunt like this, I don’t think they would want to. I know several people that work for Apple and they would never jeopardize jobs they genuinely like. Of course, Apple’s not a great example, since they’re doing so poorly of late. Even then, their success couldn’t have anything to do with their customer service.

I would put money on what Domino’s knee-jerk reaction to this event will be, asking “How do we use technology to become the big brother of our employees, whom we clearly cannot trust?” That’s great, pay them squat, and then oppress them so that they love you so much more. Consider how well that’s worked out for Wal-mart. How many resources will they now have to waste just trying to get their employees to like them again? Companies are going to have to become aware that their brands are increasingly vulnerable to brand sabotage by employee access to wildly loud new communication mediums, and that the best medicine will be to make employees happy. And in case these dolts in suits forgot their management 101 theory, happy employees will make a better product and/or service for you. If you don’t want idiots like the above working for you, pay decent wages and give good employees incentive to hang around.

Instead, suits like Sharon Allen, chairman of the board of Deloitte, says things like this: “While policies are important, you have to create a solid values-based culture… that encourages employees to make good decisions about how they act inside the company and externally.” I couldn’t synthesize my concurrence more! Ugh. I’m beginning to think that MBA stands for Masters in Bogus Antispeak. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. In plain English: treat your employees with dignity. This is basic, basic stuff that corporations have been able to neglect for a long time because without unions, service employees haven’t really had an opportunity to fight back. The playing field is leveling though and if Domino’s is afraid of what their employees do on accident, just wait and see what happens when their craptastic attitude toward employees actually ticks off a media savvy one.

Memeburst

As I mentioned in my recent note on memes, the phenomena make good use of twitter. And with a new tool called Twist you can see mentions of words quantitatively, illustrating trends that are possibly occurring. The obvious one for today has been the mention of “Michael Jackson” or “MJ” which at the peak of the discussion of the news was actually trending at 26% of all messages on twitter.¹ It turns out that the King of Pop reigns supreme even after his demise. However, I spotted a sillier trend in investigating Twist as a tool. Being in possession of the mind I have and maybe because it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to see how the word “penis” fares on Twitter. It turns out that the word is fairly consistently used in roughly .03% of Twitter messages. But then I wondered, why the spike on June 24 at 11:30pm EST? For a brief time, the usage of the word penis spiked to practically double its normal mean at .07% of messages. Why the blip? I looked into some of the messages that were being posted and noticed that it was likely the fault of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show—a satirical show about current events²—airs at 11:00pm EST. During that particular Wednesday episode, discussing events surrounding SC governor Mark Sanford, said “…another conservative politician with a liberal penis.” Voilá! Instant memeburst.

I’m not going to use the word tweets. I already tolerate blogging. One stupid internet noun is enough. ↩
And the bright stuff surrounding you now is called daylight! People who don’t live under rocks get to see this all the time!—when we’re not watching the Daily Show. ↩

Bothering Innocent Support People OR What I Did for Lunch Today

I’d been dreading making this support call. It was one of these things where a company gave me credit card protection for six free months and then they were going to start charging for the service ($1.35 / $100 in credit / month to be exact—exorbitant to say the least!). I didn’t want to make the call to tell them to stop the service because you always encounter like the last bastion of “but wait, but wait, but wait” and you just have to keep repeating yourself: “No. Do not want.” It’s annoying. Anyway, they always ask you for the reason why you don’t want to continue the service and I thought, You know, I’m going to give them a reason that they just can’t be ready for. If you use a reason that they’re ready for, they’ll keep you on the phone that much longer trying to find a deal in their script or database that will keep you around.

“It’s too expensive.”

“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”

I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%¹ I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”

Yeah, I’ll tell you why.

I responded, “You charge $1.35 / $100 in credit per month, correct?”

::Looks some stuff up:: “Yes that is correct, but only if you have a balance on your credit card.”

“Well, let’s say I often do. Let’s say it’s $100 a month in fact. That means you would charge me $16.00 annually. And if I, for some reason, ran my card up to the max and tried to pay it down, you might charge me $300 and up annually.”

::Long silence::

“The thing is, I’ve calculated the probability of my injury, loss of employment and death and that only comes out to be a 3.645% chance per year.”

“Did you really–is that–?”

“It can be done.”

“What we do is cover your payments and bill in case of–”

“Oh, I understand what you do; that’s why I calculated the probability. You see, you’re asking me to place a bet for a $1.35 per $100 per month per twelve months that I won’t die or get injured, etc. And the percentage of losing my money on this bet are roughly 96%. Does that sound like a good bet to you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s a little bit more tricky but essentially at your lowest rate, you would be charging me an additional 16% interest per year on my credit card.”

“So I will get your cancellation confirmation…”

I have to admit that doing this in the interest of saving time was obviously a red herring. I just relish the opportunity to harass corporations. However, I did figure out some interesting stuff about interest and credit protection and mortality statistics and corporations. And here’s the real value of working out the calculations: a credit card protection program like this is a scam, plain and simple. A credit protection program will only help you if you don’t pay off your balance every month, but then, if you pay off your balance every month, why would you need protection? It is better in the long run to put the money you would otherwise put toward protection, toward the bottom line of the credit card, especially because in the long run we are all dead.

The other thing that occurred to me was that this girl (fairly obviously a girl, fairly obviously Indian) that I was harassing had done nothing to deserve the harassment—I also wasn’t that harassing; technically I was just being factual. But even so, we have to stop thinking of corporations as monoliths and the “poor” people working for them as innocent drones. We all have a choice in this. Like so many things in post-postmodern life, it’s like the Matrix. Those who are in the system are part of the system and you can’t pretend that they are not the enemy.

But I don’t like saying things like that either—that she’s the enemy. It’s just that all the metaphors for economics and business that we use that stem from concepts of war aren’t appropriate anymore. They’re just the leftover detritus of the testosterone-filled suits of the 1980s who couldn’t stop reading “The Art of War.” You’re competitor shouldn’t be your enemy, you shouldn’t talk about your customers’ loyalty. People should give loyalty to hearth and home, not financial products and cars and soap. The customer support woman was not my enemy, but she was in my way. I wanted to cancel the account and move on with my day. They want to use the opportunity to up-sell me—at my inconvenience. Business shouldn’t be about war; it should be about quality of life. Corporations that deliberately take action to cut their bottom line while keeping you on hold or, even worse, to keep you on the phone so they can trick you out of your money are not the kinds of corporations that US consumers should be supporting. It’s our support of these corporations that is going make the phrase “Where’s my bailout?” the most popular phrase of 2009.

Some mortality statistics: * http://www99.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+accidents * http://www53.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=heart+disease+risk+33yo+male

If you’re curious about these numbers, don’t be–they’re really mostly for show. However, I did find out that given my health and former smoking habits, I have a 1.7% chance of developing heart disease in the next ten years. That number gets lower every year I don’t smoke (~.3 at the moment). However, every year, your chance of dying in a fatal car accident is 1.90%. Since I’ve been riding my bike everywhere lately (which is also good for your heart!) I felt pretty good about that. ↩

Memes Love Twitter

While scientists have really yet to hit on a good model for the concept of the meme, it still serves as a great metaphor, the genes unit of culture, spreading through minds at sometimes rapid paces. It seems that all we’ve done with the web and the web and the Internet have given memes even greater opportunity to spread and spread further. In a showing of solidarity with protesters from Iran, twitterers are putting a transparent green overlay on their profile icons.

You can see the virus spreading...

Unlike other memes, which seem to pop into your life or your inbox intermittenly, you can watch this meme spreading in real-time just by watching twitter feeds. I feel like I’m watching people get colds, though. Yuck.

Opera Unite, Typical Marketing Hyperbole

I’m not going to do an analysis of Opera Unite. The long and the short of it is that Opera (the browser maker) has made a play for the social networking space. Their claim to fame is that clarion call to freedom! Be free from your social platforms, your servers, your oppressors in the cloud! But as this razor sharp analysis from Chris Messina FactoryCity will illustrate to you Opera Unite is selling you anything but freedom. I have a few things to say about that as well. Among the things that the astute FactoryCity critic points out are that:

Opera makes you use their domain name
Opera sets condition on what you can and can’t share; among those things:

upload, transfer or otherwise make available files, images, code, materials, or other information or content that is obscene, vulgar, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, hereunder but not limited to third-party intellectual property rights.

In other words: anything we don’t like.
You have to use their software and their software is closed source.
Also, Opera marketing makes claims to be peer-to-peer, that is, direct from your computer to your friend’s computer, but… you have to go through their proxy servers. Oh well.

If you care about this sort of thing, I strongly encourage you to read Messina’s full in-depth piece. It’s worth it. For me, this is just yet another example of marketing bullshit, and by bullshit, I mean the technical term. Marketing of this kind isn’t really lying inasmuch as it is bullshit. Lying would imply that the lie-teller was aware of the truth and is conniving to keep you from it. Bullshit is a total disregard for the truth or falsehood of any claim. Opera is “reinventing the web.” Bullshit. First of all, no one’s going to revolutionize the web until something comes along that is something other than the web. And second, why is reinventing something a claim worth making? We have an old expression: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” The web is the wheel. Do something new. Stop reinventing what works perfectly well.

Is the Mainstream Media More Accurate Than New Media?

It’s not hard to listen to the mainstream media discuss new media because they’re clueless as to how to use it—they generally are. But people being generally ignorant of the latest trends on the Internet and the Web is not such a bad thing.¹ The new media move fast and it’s only some of us that take it upon themselves as a hobby to find out what’s out there. What is difficult to listen to is how much credibility the mainstream media gives themselves. In a recent panel at the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) several members of the mainstream media discussed how they felt about the new influence of twitter.

Frankly, even the author of the Techcrunch article made some questionable statements that sound like typical journalistic hyperbole: “The pursuit of ‘now’ is conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it’s accurate or developing.” In other words, you can have it now with a greater probability that it’s wrong, or you can wait and it will be more accurate. Since when are accuracy and immediacy mutually exclusive? I’m sorry, but I happen to think that being present at an event is kind of critical. But that sort of conundrum is just the sort of drivel that established mainstream media ventures want the public to believe—”Fair and balanced”—it is a perspective that distinctly benefits them. The author of the article goes on to point out that, “Fact checking is a vital part of the news business and is ultimately what separates amateurs from experts.” Right. Because the mainstream news always does it’s fact-checking. Yes sir, the pros are always on top of the story and they’re always near the story too! And when you consider their track record, it’s hard to argue with them, right? Right?

Ali G must be laughing in his fake grave to hear this rubbish. The news media have always been slanted and especially so when it is commercially driven. When the bottom line matters more than the facts do, the business turns to making a fuss, not reporting the news, because making a fuss gets ratings. Worse still, the making of a fuss is monolithic, given over only to those with the means (i.e. communications systems) to decide what the news is going to be. With twitter, at least you can gather the facts for yourself and make your own judgement rather than having someone make the judgement for you.

Don’t be fooled. News is a business and businesses have PR wings. The mainstream media would have you believe that they are the de facto organization they are because they are relevant and because they do the hard research. The truth is that they are sensationalist in order to get ratings, and research costs too much money to do well. That makes them irrelevant and inaccurate more times then they get caught. If the mainstream media ever did it’s job, why in the world would we need Factcheck.org or The Sunlight Foundation?

via Techcrunch

Update

Apparently, someone out there agrees with me (and he’s a LOT funnier about it):

Including not knowing the difference between those two entities. ↩