Notes From the Rocket

DIY House JARVIS

2013-11-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

OK, this is sort of a rough thing to admit - but I have a lot of extra tablets lying around.

So, hear me out - first, I'm a CTO and so I wind up buying a lot of them for experimentation, plus they also sort of show up when you buy things these days. I purchased a new TV a few months ago, and...poof, tablet. Then, of course, there's the actual tablets that I use in my personal life.

The problem with tablet proliferation is: they are all really pretty nice, so you don't want to get rid of them - but as technology moves on, the older ones get left by the wayside. Either the operating system doesn't upgrade any further, or the hardware can't support the new operating systems. The two tablets I'm going to talk about fall into those last two categories: The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7+ and the Asus Transformer Prime.

The Hardware

The Galaxy Tab 7+ is one of the best tablets I've ever owned - seriously, I have no idea why Samsung messed with that tablet line as badly as they have, but the new Galaxy 7 series just doesn't do it for me. This thing had everything, a blazingly fast dual core CPU (before it was fashionable to have quad cores), expandable memory, front/back cameras, excellent wifi, and on and on.

Unfortunately, the 7+ is stuck on Android 4.0.x, and doesn't look like it's going to be updated any further. Pity, but... it's time for a new life.

The Asus Transformer Prime is another sad little character in the world of tablets. Although blazingly fast (and gorgeous) when it came out, it was soon plagued by issues relating to it's wifi and GPS. (Both radios were getting partially blocked by that snazzy metal case.) In addition, the unit only has 1G of system RAM - so as the Android world moved to Ice Cream Sandwich and beyond, even though the Transformer Prime was getting the updates, it was slowing way way down for practical use.

It's sad, because the screen was really phenomenal, but...now it too will get a second life.

For years I've wanted a kitchen computer (anyone remember Audrey?) - but they were always too large, too unreliable, and too difficult to install cleanly. Pre-iPad tablet computers existed, but they were extremely expensive and prone to overheating. Plus, they really couldn't do much in the way of home automation.

Enter 2013: tablets are plentiful (and lying around my home office, apparently), and home automation has seen a resurgence (Nest, Sonos, Media Center, alarm systems, etc.) - this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to use what I had to create a low-cost JARVIS for my house. One "JARVIS" would be in my bedroom (the Tab 7+) and the other would be in my kitchen (the Asus). This would allow me to experiment with different configurations and interoperability between the two units, and see what sort of additional kick to my home automation I could provide.

The Software

In order for these things to become "JARVIS," they had to have the right look. The naked Android interface wouldn't cut it, plus placing widgets all over the screen would get pretty clumsy and cluttered over time. I was looking for an interface that would suggest "JARVIS," but allow me quick access to all of the applications I know I wanted in both my kitchen and my bedroom: Sonos, Media Center controls, Recipes, Weather, and a few others. Not a ton of things, just those that were useful.

Fortunately, this is Android, and adapting the screen to my needs was just a matter of replacing the home screen launcher. I sat down for several hours and looked at all of my alternatives, and the one that made the most sense was GinLemon's Smart Launcher Pro. SL has the interface I was looking for (a circular flower of large buttons for the apps, plus a clock and date in constant display) and it was skinable. It took me only another few minutes to find a JARVIS skin that someone put together for SL.

Golden!

So, the next thing to do was to strip my tablets all the way down, removing all of the software that I had placed on them over the years. I wanted these things to be as lean as possible, so there was no chance of failure. I also created another Google account for my house. A generic one that I could mess with however I wanted, and it wouldn't effect my other Android devices. (Plus, house guests couldn't accidentally stumble upon my email, Evernote, Dropbox and other personal goodies.)

Next, I spent some time adjusting the default behavior of the tablets. I wanted the lock screen to go away, the screen timeout to be longer than 2 minutes, and the brightness and sound to be cranked up to a reasonable value.

The one thing I couldn't find a solution to in off-the-shelf software was screen activation. Android tablets do not have a face proximity sensor, and when an Android device turns its screen off, it really goes to sleep in a traditional sense. Without a proximity sensor running, the only way to wake up a sleeping Android tablet (aside from hitting the power button) was to shake it, since the motion sensors are still running. Shaking a tablet that is firmly mounted to the wall, though, is a losing proposition.

Waking the things up eligantly was something I was going to have to do mechanically in hardware...

The Framing

The first thing to consider was how to place these things in the house so that they were at once out of the way and still immediately available. Also, being a bit of a persnickety gentleman, I was concerned about the aesthetics. I wanted these things to blend into the rest of my decor, and not look like the geek toys I want so desperately wanted them to become.

Keeping that all of this in mind, I immediately began to seek out wall mounted solutions. There are plenty of wall mounts for tablets on the web, but most of them are cheap "stick this to your wall" sorts of affairs, and none of them provided power. I was going to have to construct my own in a way that fit in with everything else.

Even though I live in San Francisco now, I used to live in Boston and I carried that New England sensibility over to the left coast. That means I have a lot of muted colors, and my wall highlights tend to be white, wood frames. Fortunately, this makes for a relatively easy framing project, and a great way to hide cables to the tablets, give them ventilation and makes sure they are both securely hung on the walls and easily removable in case I need to get inside.

I walked down to my local frame store and picked up a couple of frames that were (a) larger than the tablets themselves, (b) made of wood, not plastic, metal or particle board (c) had thick frames that I could cut into in order to make channels for the cables and plugs.

Using a pullsaw, also called a Japanese saw (you see it there in the photo to the right), I very carefully cut the frames down to as close to as exact fit around the tablets as I could. I made the cuts on the 45degree corners, so that I could hide

the alterations easier. To be honest, I went through a couple of frames ($25/pop) until I got the effect I was looking to achieve. Once done, I had to do it again with the second frame, then paint over the new seams. I kinda impressed myself.

The next trick involved carefully carving out (or, in my case, haphazardly gouging out like an insane person) cutouts into the wood frames for the power plugs. Both the Asus and the Samsung use similar types of plugs that look nothing like USB jacks - in fact these are both quite large, about the size of a quarter, so the larger wooden frames worked great for hiding these huge plugs.

Whilest I haveth ye ole wood chisel in my hand, I continued my hacking away to place two screw mounts on either side of the frame. It was important to make these mounts as flush with the wood as possible, as it is important that the frame mounts tight and flush against the wall. It's a touch screen interface, and the rig can't bounce around on the wall when your poking at it.

The final cut to make into the frame had to be far more precise than my hack jobs. As I mentioned above, android tablets have a lot of sensors on board, but the one they do not have is a proximity sensor. On phones, the proximity sensor allows the phone's screen to either wake or go to sleep when the phone is placed close to, or taken away from, your face so your cheek doesn't accidentally hang up the phone or punch buttons. On a tablet, you rarely hold it to your face so the OEMs save themselves a sensor and just have the user touch the physical "on" button to wake the screen.

What this means for this project is that there is no software I can write, or applications I can download, that will allow me to wave my hand in front of the tablet to wake it up. I literally have to "punch the button" to get it to wake up. This is fine when the tablet is just sitting on the table, but punching the button is difficult to do when it's covered up by two inches of wood and screwed into the wall.

My solution to this problem was old-world mechanical: create a button mechanism that extends through the frame.

I don't own a drill press, so I used a vise and a steady hand to drill a 5/8th inch hole through the frame to where the tablet power button sits. I then cut a 2.5 inch length of 5/8th inch dowel stick, and shaped the end (with sandpaper) that would come in contact with the power button to conform to the shapes of the tablet edging. (Note: Aside from the Sony Tablet Z, there's no tablet I'm aware of that has a flat edge bevel. Both the Samsung and the Asus have tapered edges that need to be taken into account, otherwise the dowel will not seat properly against the button.) When I initially cut out the framing, I arranged the tablets so that their power buttons are on "top" of the frame, and the dowel stick just rests on top. I had to do a little extra sanding on the dowel stick itself to reduce friction when it was in the hole, otherwise I ran the danger of the dowel being held down against the power button causing the tablet to reboot.

Ta-da! A wooden "instant wake" button.

Keeping the tablets in place in their framing was easier than I anticipated. I cut poster board to fit the backing of the frame, drilling a hole in the back to allow the cable to come through. The poster board was then held in place by simple metal clips that you can purchase at any framing store.

That's it - both units are now ready for wall mounting.

The Wall Mounting

Ok, now for the tricky part. I have created two tablet mountings for two areas in my home: the master

bedroom, and the kitchen. The look I am going for is a free-float mounting, without any cables coming through from the framing. In order to obtain this effect, I ordered 6 foot long USB extension cables for both tablets and drilled holes in the wall behind each tablet, and again at the baseboard. This allowed me to thread the cable out the back of the tablet, down the wall and fish it out down below.

While this sounded simple, the mount locations of each tablet differed from each other in a couple of significant ways:

The mount in the kitchen was theoretically "easy," as the wall I was placing the unit on was an interior wall, without any exterior window framing. Therefore it was basically hollow, with simple 2x4 framing done every 18 inches. This would have been an easy effect to achieve, except the previous owners of the house crowded that wall with a security alarm control panel, and an intercom system for the front gate. Just slapping another piece of electronics on the wall would have looked junky if I didn't re-arrange the existing devices.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I took down the ADT security panel (revealing that lovely hackjob of a hole in the wall that the installation dude cut) and moved it down about 9 inches. Similarly, I pulled off the 40 year old security gate phone (70's wiring is amazing, uh....really) and moved it over about 5 inches. With the old equipment positioned as you see it in the photo, I was now ready to install the kitchen "JARVIS."

Fortunately, as I had hoped, the interior wall was completely hollow. "Wiring" in the unit, just
required me to attach the USB extension cable, electrical tape it together, and drill a 3/4" hole near the baseboard on the opposite side of the wall, which was next to an electrical outlet. If you are familiar with using a coat hanger to fish wires, the rest was very straightforward. (If you aren't familiar with using a coat hanger, uh, it's pretty much exactly what you are thinking: unbend it, make a hook in one end, and use it to fish the dangling cable through the hole.

Once all of that was done, placing the drywall screws in the wall where the tablet would be mounted was a snap. Just make sure you level the holes, measure twice, drill once. The tablet snapped right in without any trouble, and the dowel-stick mechanical button worked as advertised.

Voila! A neat, clean wall tablet installation.

Mounting the bedroom JARVIS would be a more difficult proposition, but I understood that going in. The wall location was not only an exterior wall, but it was between two windows - meaning that the framing would be intense. Exterior window placement means that the framing on either side of the windows consists of two 2x4's stacked against each other, and below each window would be a pair of stacked 2x4's to hold the window weight.

What this meant for the installation was, well, messy. I had to drill the 3/4th's inch holes for the USB cabling both at the tablet mount point, and down below by the baseboard, just like in the kitchen - unlike, the kitchen, however, I would have to locate the stacked 2x4's that were taking the
weight of the window frames and chisel a channel for the cable through them...which, of course, meant channeling through the drywall. This went from a simple drill-and-hang operation to one that involved wall patching and painting. So be it...I had extra wall paint in the basement.

Once the channel was cut into the wall, threading the USB cable was just like the kitchen, except I used anchor staples to attach the USB cable to the 2x4's so it wouldn't be able to move or slide around - once that was done, I patched the wall up and hung the frame for the bedroom "JARVIS" as intended, making sure that everything was level.

Because of the amount of patching that was done, I waited 24 hours for the wall to dry. Once I was convinced it was dry, it was just a matter of applying the wall paint and hanging the tablet.

Volia (again)! Bedroom JARVIS.

Conclusion

Because this is a woodworking and home renovation project as much as it is a tablet installation project, this may not be for the faint of heart. However, I'm guessing there's a few shortcuts you can take that would allow you to get the project done professionally if you were willing to pay out some coin. (You can probably locate a framing shop that would do your tablet framing for you, for instance, and an electrician could mount the tablets a little easier.)

However, if you have some extra tablets lying around and want to give it a shot, I highly recommend it. I've lived with the installations now for about a week, and I have to confess that I use them far more than I thought I ever would. Controlling Sonos from the wall alone is worth it, but once I added the software to control my Nest, the WeMo's, Epicurious, Cellar Tracker, Yahoo Weather, My Media Center and other applications by home automation nirvana was reached. I use both tablets differently in each location: Music control is a constant, of course, but in the bedroom I use the house Nest control, weather applications, security cam monitoring and video hangouts quite a bit. In the kitchen, I use the recipe and wine cellar applications as much as I use anything else.

So, let me just leave you with a couple of videos to tempt you into trying this yourself. (Yes, I'm saying "OK JARVIS," instead of "OK Google." I'd like to claim credit for that hack, but that's a Google easter egg I'm exploiting.)

Enjoy.

Google+ Quietly Becomes a Photographer's Best Friend

2013-06-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

Is Google+ where all the photographers have gone?

"Filtered" Image from My PicPlz Days

I rant about Instagram, but I use it because that's where my friends and family are...so I reluctantly go there. I'm as guilty as showing my food on Instagram as everyone else, I suppose. It's fun in its own way, but it mangles photos in a way that makes my blood curdle.

I tried Path for a while. Meh. Your photo's are presented the way you wish, but the community is small and oddly self-curated.

I never really post to FaceBook unless I'm experimenting with something, I can do without their spidering tenderals of data collection.

500px is good, but charges for their service and still has no mobile upload, which I find...amazing, actually.

I stilll morn the death of PicPlz , the photo-sharing service that was competing with Instagram....until Instagram was bought by FaceBook. Then poor little PicPlz threw in the towel... but it was lovely - photos were presented in a way that the photographer intended: the right framing, aspect ratio...and if you wanted to filter your photos, you still could. The community on PicPlz was gear towards showing it's art, it seemed, not whatever they were currently eating.

Flickr seems to be having a rebirth of sorts, and I like what I see there again. The website is gorgeous, and so are the new mobile apps (both iOS and Android)...so, maybe there's hope there again...

Then there's Google+... I started to notice photos from photographers early on in G+... but uploading photos conveniently to G+ in the earlier days was a little convoluted. Then Google bought SnapSeed and you could see how they wanted to compete with Instagram, at least in terms of photo filters. SnapSeed is significantly more powerful than Instagram filters (easy to use, as well), and allowed for easy uploads to G+... but as G+ was a streaming feed, it's possible that photographs would get lost in the endless stream.

Then, at the end of 2012, Google+ introduced the concept of communities, and everything seemed to change - almost overnight. I liken communities to the old school USENet News Groups. Conversations you could just monitor or contribute that keeps the dialog to a specific social niche. Photographers took to communities in droves. There are scores of photography communities specializing in everything from HDR to Black and White, to Selfies, if that's your thing. It's heartening to see people's work, some of which is really damned incredible, flood those conversations.

Suddenly, I don't miss PicPlz as much as I once did....

Update: I uploaded most of my PicPlz archive here.

72 Hours Under Glass

2013-05-18T15:47:00.003-07:00

In May of 2012, I was one of the 2,500 folks who chose to commit to plunking down $1,500 at the 2012 Google I/O to become a test subject for a device that few people had touched, and whose public face appeared to the world to be an expensive GoPro. (Skydiving stunt, not withstanding.) Still, it felt like something interesting was going on here - and I was curious enough to put my money down to see if there was fire under the smoke. Besides, $1,500 to test out the future, seemed like a good idea at the time.

This action caused me to become what Google calls a Glass Explorer, a clever term for beta field tester. Over the next year, I became indoctrinated into the program, which was being administered beautifully by +Sarah Price. I was one of the earlier classes, I believe - and met up with my particular pairing of 5 other lab rats. The first day there, after a brief orientation, I put on my first Google Glass headset -- essentially the same hardware that is now currently in the field, but the operating system and applications were severely limited. Still, it was very clear that this was more than just a GoPro device.

A full year after agreeing to pay out the $1,500, I received "The Email." A polite, brief note thanking me for my patience, and telling me how to place the final order. I have to admit, after the recent spate of #glasshole jokes, I began to second guess myself -- but in the end forged ahead with my original plan. As the days wore on, and people began to receive their units, the term #glasshole began to take on the air of a badge of courage, rather than the insult as it was originally intended.

As timing would have it, my Glass was ready to pick up at Google I/O 2013, just a few days ago in fact. There was a brief orientation in a hotel room suite, accompanied by a nice glass of prosecco, just to cement the whole "glasshole" thing. Putting on my personal Glass for the first time, it was immediately apparent that they had been busy at Google... the OS was clean, crisp and responsive. There were already a smattering (very small smattering) of apps from companies willing to put themselves out there.

I wore the unit over the next couple of days at the conference, which, paradoxically, was the worst possible environment to try these things out. Google I/O was so jammed with people with cell phones, tablets, laptops....and Glass.... that WiFi connections and most cell service connections kept timing out. I had T-Mobile and Verizon hotspots, and none could keep up...and even the conference WiFi was crapping out more often then not.

Still....there was something interesting here.

The Good....

...and by that I mean there was something to this whole Glass nonsense. Putting on the Glass I was immediately presented with information that I instructed it to feed me from the handful of available applications. eMail, CNN news, NYTimes breaking news, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, G+ (naturally), it was all there...and all available. The tiny little screen presents your eye with 640x360 images and text, and then disappears when its not necessary or needed. The little prism in the upper corner of your vision feels initially like a thumb-smudge on the top right of a pair of glasses. It becomes very easy to ignore.

As I said, the responsiveness of the unit was pretty incredible. Not only is scrolling around and looking at your timeline of events easy, it's easy to move to settings menus, maps, and nested levels of events from, say, your SMS history.

Some of the available applications, even in this early stage of things, are phenomenal. Both of the news services, for instance, provide timely, breaking news. They get out of the way quickly if you don't want to see anything right now, but allow you to drill down deep enough if you want to hear more about the story. The New York Times will even read you the news if you'd like.

Walking directional maps on this thing is pure Terminator territory. It will not only display your location on a map and direct you there, but it will track your head movement and indicate with arrows which direction you should be headed in... it's a lot more convenient than looking down at your phone to find your address, and - in sketchy areas of unfamiliar cities - it's probably a hell of a lot safer. Glancing at your phone and taking your attention from your surroundings makes you a target - if you have your eyes about you at all time with momentary glances up and to the right, you do not look as vulnerable...despite having a computer on your head.

The bone induction system for both the mic works surprisingly well - the mic was able to pick up and transcribe my voice without missing a beat, even in the crowded conference hall. In fact, I used it to compose a two paragraph business email, and it worked without a hitch.

Speaking of speaking, the Google Now implementation on Glass is an amazing experience. Tap and hold the sidebar and ask Google Now literally anything. Most of the time the answers are read back to you, but it will always display a proper response. I haven't been able to stump it yet, and what it tells you is specifically useful for the environment you are in.]

...the Bad....

I know it's early, but a lot of the basic apps are phoning it in. The Path app is pretty ridiculous, since it's not really an app so much as it is a giant G+ circle. I believe that anything shared to that circle is picked up by Path and sent. There's no way to comment on a Path "moment" during the initial send.

Similarly, Twitter setup is pretty messed up - Twitter has been on a rampage lately to funnel people to it's own applications, rather than use third party client apps. So, the initial setup for Twitter on Glass requires you to download the "official Twitter app" for your phone if you want to change the defaults, otherwise you will get unwanted tweets sent to your Glass unit, and the screen goes on and off like a Christmas tree. Even if you get the defaults set the way you want, if you were an early Twitter adopter you'll still have a bit of a problem: in the early days of Twitter, all new contacts had "notifications on" by default... this flag is recognized by the Twitter Glass app, and you will be notified every time one of your early contacts tweets. Again, this can wear the battery on Glass down pretty quickly - but the only solution I found is to go into those old contacts one by one and turn off the notifications flag. It's annoying.

The initial Glass release has made some very odd choices with regards to the UIX. Despite it's reputation of taking photos, videos, etc, Glass is currently a consumption device more than it is a creation device. There is no way currently, for instance, to begin a Twitter conversation (although you can contribute to an existing one). Likewise, in order to SMS a contact, you need to go to the MyGlass application on your phone and manually tell Glass which contacts you would like it to store locally on Glass - it does not import your whole address book. (I'm assuming this is because they haven't discovered an easy way to let you select from 1000's of phone contacts.) However, like Twitter, if someone SMS's you directly, you can respond right from Glass.

The contacts issue in general is one that the Glass team needs to grapple with very seriously before this is released to the public. Even Google's own G+ system needs to be manually curated by you on the MyGlass app, before you can share anything directly from Glass. I haven't played with the Facebook app yet, but I am assuming that it is similar.

Battery life is, of course, also an issue....probably the main issue....with the pre-release units. If you get 4-5 hours of battery life, you're doing very well. With 3 radios (WiFi, BlueTooth, GPS) constantly firing, I'm not sure how they plan to pull off power management -- but cell phones do it, so they should be able to as well.

...and the Ugly.

OK, so it's not as hideous as a first gen product could have been, but it does stick out like a sore thumb. In the 72 hours I've worn Glass, I've been interviewed about 7 times, and I get people coming up to me at the rate of about 20-30 a day. (Seriously.) That's fine, and I completely understand it, but that sort of attention is going to wear thin after a while. Making the unit less conspicuous and partnering with existing eye wear manufacturers is going to help quite a bit in this area.

Finally, the speaker. Hmmmm. What to say about it? It's also bone induction, but there's no volume control, and you cannot really hear it well in a crowded environment. I wouldn't really recommend it for phone calls in it's current state, unless you like saying "What??" a lot.

Oh, also, Glass crew? Please stop tagging my SMS and email with "Sent By Glass" at the end of each message...or at least allow me to turn that off.

My Conclusion?

Despite the warts, this is a direction that the world will head. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see the potential here, and Google is making it very easy to get involved. The development program is open to all, the operating system for Glass is Android, and the amount of help that the developers receive is truly impressive.

Is the current implementation of Glass ready for prime time? No, probably not - at least not until some of the UIX, battery and application concerns get addressed.

However, none of those things really matter - those are engineering and execution problems that absolutely will get solved. What is important to take away here is that Glass is, truly, a new paradigm for interacting with a computer. Everything from the display to the interface is new, and the immediacy of the system lends itself to a "Notification First" environment, which is a different world from which we currently operate. Plus, there is more that Glass can do than it is doing now. +Lance Nanek was able to dump an API that lists a surprising number of sensors on this current device: 13 in total. When those devices are revealed to application developers, the magical usefulness of Glass will increase tremendously.

We're beginning to enter a different world - people throw around terms like "wearable computing" (which it is) and "augmented reality" (which it is not), but those are just hyped up media terms. What does matter - what is truly important - is the connection between you, this machine and the growth of truly personalized social and information retrieval and dissemination.

Unlike the original Sony Walkman that caught media flak for isolating the wearer from his/her environment, Glass does the opposite: it peels back the layers of what is around you: people, places, things and events. It puts you more, not less, in touch with your immediate environment. It has the potential to increase, not decrease, communication and understanding in a way never before possible. It was my childhood belief in technology like this that made me get into this business in the first place.

I have gone from skeptic to believer in a very short time. I guess that makes me kind of a Glasshole, but that's sorta ok with me...

Update: 5/22/2013

It's been a full week under glass now, and I'm still digging the experience. Here's my interview on +Revision3's +Tekzilla being interviewed by the always-charming +Patrick Norton ...

Carl Sagan as a Candle in the Darkness.

2012-11-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning, checked the interwebs, and saw #carlsagan was trending. Curious, I clicked through and saw that today, November 9 2012, would have been Carl's 78th birthday. This is personally relavent to me, and a flood of memories instantly filled my head. I knew Carl personally, and that turn of events happened like this...

When I was a teenage boy growing up in the frozen depths of Northern Minnesota in the 70's, I took a strong interest in science. There were four reasons for this:

There were stars in the sky at night. There was practically nothing around my home in Minnesota, so the sky was unencumbered with man-made light. The sky was brilliantly lit. I saw things that I am sure most don't see anymore: meteor showers, lunar eclipses, aurora borealis, and the big, beautiful milky way. It is a vivid memory even now, looking back 40 years, that I have never seen captured properly in photos or video. (Well, ok, maybe here.)
Dale Gibbs. Dale was my astronomy teacher in high school - yes, we had an astronomy class. Several, actually. Dale taught me about a life in science both within and outside the frozen northland of Minnesota. His passion for what he did was infectious - a wonderful man with a quick sense of humor - another trait he shared with me. Dale, if you're out there, it's a debt I can never repay. Thank you.
Star Trek. Don't laugh, you snarky people. I think most people my age would put that out there - and there's a reason why NASA christened the first Space Shuttle with the name Enterprise. It was a show that taught those of us trapped in a pre-internet world (back when "nerd" was not synonymous with "cool") that there were others out there that thought as we thought, believed as we believed. Not just about science, but about cultural integrity and putting aside racism and outdated beliefs. IDIC lives.
Carl Sagan. When I was a teen, Carl started coming into his own, not just as an astronomer, but as a spokesperson for the power of science to change humanity. It was a grandiose thought, and one I had never heard expressed in the way he expressed it. To him, science was not a religion - it was a replacement for religion. The steadfast notion that humanity's belief in a higher power was really an attempt on the part of an adolescent human race to try to understand that which was unknowable. Paraphrasing from scripture, Carl felt it was time to put away childish things. To push aside a veil kept in place by dogma and really see what was going on. When he titled the now famous "Cosmos" a "Personal Journey," I found out later that he was serious. It was personal for him.

In 1984, I left graduate school with degrees in computer science, math and astrophysics - these things were important to me, they mattered. My first position in the working world was as a research science assistant at JPL - I was stationed at Brown University in Rhode Island, as part of an image processing and remote sensing team lead by Jim Head, a Distinguished Professor of Geologic Science at Brown.

I was thrilled. I was in it - working on spacecraft data, designing and building image processing systems, and meeting with people who I idolized in my youth: Hal Mazursky, Larry Soderbloom, and Carl Sagan. (While others were following sports personalities in school, I was following these guys.) I was placed on two projects out of the gate: The Galileo Spacecraft (which was to be launched in 1989), and the Russian Venus (Venera) landers, which were major milestones in the 80's. I was going to the Lunar and Planetary Science meetings, IKI in the former Soviet Union, JPL planning meetings, NASA planning seminars, and, of course, Cornell University.

It was in 1987 when I first met Carl - I was at Cornell for a Galileo planning meeting. Carl wasn't on that project, but he was a professor at Cornell, so of course knew everyone on the Galileo project, and so stopped by. Actually, when I first met him he was fiddling with a VCR connected to a TV set, trying to ready his presentation. I didn't know who he was, his back was to me and he was hunched over the old-timey video recorder making frustrating noises... I bent down to help him out, and let him know that it needed to be on channel 3 (remember that?). He laughed, and I immediately recognized him.

His participation in the meeting was interesting, especially looking back using a 2012 lens. In today's world, we understand the importance of marketing, social media and other tools to promote a cause. While some of it is frivolous, awareness of a cause is important in supporting that cause. In 1987, this was a concept that people relegated to a that's-how-you-sell-coca-cola mindset, not a that's how you raise awareness. But, this was 1987 - the Challenger had just exploded the previous year, and the public was questioning our involvement in space exploration in specific, and in a larger way science in general. People needed to see what we in the field saw - they needed to feel why were were doing this.

Carl, more than anyone else on the Galileo science team, knew that instinctually in 1987. He came to us and proposed something preposterous. The Galileo spacecraft was forced to take a long duration flight, due to restrictions that were placed on the craft at the time. Galileo had a small, radioactive payload to power it in the icy cold of the deep solar system - it was not understood at the time, how tiny this payload was - the public heard "radioactive," and refused to allow Galileo the fuel required for a direct flight to Jupiter, incase that fuel ignited and exploded in the atmosphere like Challenger. There was no need for this fear for a number of reasons, but there was no talking congress out of it: Galileo had to come up with a low-power way to get to Jupiter.

The Galileo engineering team came up with just that solution: the long way. Galileo would be launched towards the inner solar system (yes, the wrong way), use the gravity of the sun and two earth flybys to play "crack the whip." (I told you science was cool. )The resulting final velocity would get it to Jupiter - but after several years instead of several months.

Carl proposed using the earth flybys to create, what he called, "a postcard from space." Take a picture, or series of pictures, of the earth and the moon from an angle no one had seen before: an angle of someone from somewhere else approaching our home. Show the world why we doing this, how alone we are, how we are "on our own." How we need each other to cope, to comfort, and - more importantly - to understand where we are in the universe.

There was a lot of nerd-fighting about this. In the 80's spacecrafts had less processing power than even a modest cell phone: less memory, poorer camera, and - most importantly here - less power and bandwidth. What Carl was proposing seemed, to the distinguished men and women of the Galileo science team, a frivolous waste of precious power, memory and bandwidth. There was no science to be gained here, why do it?

Carl, of course, won out - Galileo's imaging system was turned on twice. Once in the first approach to earth, the earth and moon in full color in a single frame...lit by the sun, at once both beautiful and fragile. I've included it here - you be the judge, was it worth waking up Galileo from it's sleep, turning itself on and taking this photo?

The second photos taken by Galileo were during the second approach to earth - by that point, the Galileo earth/moon shot had sparked something in people throughout the world, and it wasn't a far reach from there for Galileo to do even more. Enough photos of the earth in space were taken to assemble a small video. I've included it at the end.

Over the years, Carl became a casual friend - whenever we were in the same city, we'd sit down somewhere and talk about the world, science, and the public's changing attitudes. These were some of the best talks I've had in my personal and professional career. How often does someone get to know, really know, a childhood hero - and have that hero know him back?

As time went on, I left JPL and Carl got sicker. We lost touch, and I didn't want to intrude on the family as things got bad for him... I never reached out, and that always haunts me. He passed just before Christmas in 1996.... it was pre-internet-everywhere, so I read about it in the paper.

I think about him often, and wonder (a lot) about what he would think of the modern world. He was spared the vision of the world descending into a darkness of the spirit and the intellect - total science graduates dropping; US schools appearing lower and lower in the "best in science" rankings; the rise of creationism; reading books being replaced by listening to sound bites, which in turn are replaced by 140 characters; religious jihads destroying lives and property; countries being felled as collateral damage; and so on. Would he still be the carrier of the candle of science, providing that light in the darkness?

I believe so - I believe that, somehow, it would re-energize him. The need for knowledge is still there, its just being fed by very different sources - Carl was a voice of reason and logic and poetry, and he had a certain something that people gravitated towards. A frequent visitor to the Johnny Carson show, I suspect he would make use of these new forums: YouTube videos, G+ hangouts, blogging....in some sense, getting his voice out would be easier, not harder.

So - on this his 78th birthday, it's left up to the rest of us. He was there when we needed him, he needs us now. We need us now. Protect that candle, keep it lit. Don't do it through name calling and posturing and illogic - keep it lit with eloquence, with intellectual discourse....with facts. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the world is strange and wonderful enough as it is, without having to invent any more of it.

Happy 78th Carl. Thank you for this video and everything else you've done and taught us. We should have gotten you something...

For the Record: Why my iPhone is in my Drawer

2012-10-05T19:39:00.001-07:00

Is This Just Another Anti-Apple Blog Post?

No...well, yes... but, no, not really. Really.

Over the years, I've used (and owned) a wide variety of gadgetry from laptops to phone to tablets to over-the-top connected TV boxes... and, with the exception of my laptop, I've consistently steered away from Apple products as personal go-to devices. Unfortunately, with the Apple community this behavior on my part is always labeled as some weird form of wrong-thinking Apple hatred...

...now, to be fair, my personal opinion of Apple The Company has taken a strong turn towards the cellar in recent years, but my opinion of the products has pretty much remained the same. With the recent release of the iPhone 5, I figured that this would be an excellent time to state, for the record, what I think about Apple the company vs. Apple the product line, and why - unless something radically changes over the course of the next few years - I will be unlikely to be swayed by an Apple product offering that isn't a laptop.

Full Disclosure: "What's in my Bag" Right Now

In the spirit of openness for framing a dialog like this, it probably makes sense to explain what tech I use in my daily life. Currently, I own several Apple devices, since my position as CTO for the past several companies has always included making sure that my engineering teams properly support their products. To that end, I personally own an iPhone 4S, an iPod touch, a second gen iPad, an Apple TV, and a Macbook Air. With the exception of the Air, which is really a great device that I use 10 hours a day, these devices only come out of my bag for testing my engineering team's product lines, or for studying the iPhone workflow for designing a new application.

In my day-to-day personal world, my phone of choice is a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, my tablet is a Asus Nexus 7 (or an Asus Transformer Prime if I need a 10"), and my "other" laptop is an Asus Zenbook UX21. Attached to my television is a Windows Media Center computer, an XBox, a PS3 and a Roku - all of which get used with relatively the same frequency.

My Life With Apple

As I've stated frequently, I'm 900 years old. There's a certain perspective of history one gets from that height, which comforts me in an otherwise sea of strange aches and pains in my body that weren't there a few years ago. One of those perspectives comes from watching the birth of personal computers, and the companies that formed around them.

In the 1970's, I had my first regular, professional computer-job-related paycheck - it came from MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium. MECC was a state-sponsored organization with the goal of putting computer facilities within reach of every K-12 student in the Minnesota state educational system. This was done through a variety of means (including teletypes and CRT terminals connected to a central mainframe in Minneapolis), as well as the new kid on the block: the fledgling personal computer.

I was the youngster (in a very literal sense) on an Request For Proposal committee to evaluate potential purchases of some of these new personal computers (called microcomputers back in the day, you young whipper snapper!), the winner of which was the venerable Apple ][, beating out Atari, Commodore and Radio Shack. Being awarded this state contract was a seminal moment in the history of the young company, as MECC placed a large order for the machines.

Throughout the next 3 decades, I've had various flavors of Apple products in my homes, along side equivalent DOS (and, later, Windows) PCs. My interest in the Apple product line was fairly strong, but I never saw them as anything other than another tool for my research or work.

It wasn't soon after this that the now familiar story played out: Jobs did or did not walk into Xerox PARC and did or did not see the Xerox Star system running a desktop analog with a new input device called a mouse. At that point, Jobs either did or did not return for a second look, and did or did not offer two lead engineers a position at Apple. Whatever happened is almost irrelevant, as a little while after those alleged visits, the hyper-expensive Apple Lisa appeared on the scene.

Few outside of Palo Alto had seen anything like it, with it's desktop analog and "intuitive" operating system - and, at $10K a pop, few would. However, from that device, the Macintosh arose, and we can all trace our own personal Apple stories from there.

While entertained and impressed by the little all-in-one Macintosh, I was more interested in other machines of that era, such as the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, due to their color graphics capabilities. If I think back, for right or wrong, this was the moment I lost interest in Apple as a primary machine in my life.

However, what I did see from the sidelines was a growing marketing presence from Apple, that I would later learn was driven almost entirely by Steve Jobs. Steve came and went and then came again, and drove Apple to become a genius center for product driven marketing, industrial and graphic design. When Apple got into the consumer electronics business with the first iPod, I was right there with it. I loved the device, but hated iTunes. (I had hoped iTunes would change over time, but, sadly, it never did. The iTunes of 2012 is basically the iTunes of 2001.) Until 2 years ago, I have had some form of an iPod as my primary music player.

In 2007, I co-founded a company to support video advertising on cell phones. 2007, it turns out, was also the year of the first iPhone. While the iPhone was raised up as a harbinger of things to come, at the time the industry viewed it as more of a "neat trick." Our company supported it, of course, and kept an eye on it - but most of our clients were more interested in support for RIM devices, Microsoft Phones, Nokia and other devices - this would change, of course, but it took time. iPhones have been a staple in my bag ever since that era - but even though I gave them a shot, I do not use them as my primary device.

My Inability to Separate the Device from the Company

There is a valid argument that goes something like "I can separate the artist from the art." I may not like a particular actor's personal view of the world outside of his movies, but I definitely love his filmography. (Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, Tom Cruise.)

In the case of media consumption devices created by companies that control the media pipeline itself, it's much harder to apply the "separate the artist from the art" philosophy. Business decisions created by the executive team at a company necessarily dictate specifics about a device such as the user experience, media aggregation and distribution, etc. Amazon became one such company when they created the Kindle, as did Google and Apple when they created their phone OSes.

Apple in particular has set about a course of common events and business models within the company that dictate a closed ecosystem ("walled garden") which each user tacitly agrees to join when he or she purchases an Apple product. This is nothing new, the principle of a closed ecosystem has always been present with Apple products from nearly the beginning of the company: Apple computers, for instance, originally would only work with Apple graphic cards, printers, etc. In the hardware arena, this sort of closed environment nearly strangled Apple from within, since it dictates that one company needed to produce every hardware component for their product line, rather than having a published set of standards that other OEMs could use to produce compatible products.

In the world of the consumer electronics however, that same philosophy worked towards Apple's advantage. By taking baby steps towards a closed ecosystem, Apple eventually walled off it's music service to apply to just Apple products, and carried that philosophy forward into the worlds of the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Apple devices were designed to take advantage of this philosophy, and the lure of the shiny "it just works" devices was too strong for the masses.

Less of a Liberal Arts and Technology Intersection and More of a GroupThink Cul de Sac

Apple became the successful powerhouse that Jobs always dreamed it would become. It also created a successful mythos in the process: "Apple creates beautiful technology," the conversation begins, "and therefore attracts those that appreciate it." People wanted into the Apple club, so they bought into the shiny, and became part of the artificial ecosystem.

The results were brilliant, as far as the Apple shareholders were concerned: People showed up to the party and they never left. To be fair, there was a point in time when they could not leave: iTunes purchases, for instance, were protected by DRM that kept people from moving their investment in music from an iPod/iTunes combination to, well, anywhere else. Eventually, that closed door was blown open as iTunes removed most of its DRM restrictions (for a fee, of course) from its music selection, but apparently there are still enough remnants of it that it pisses off Bruce Willis. (iTunes does still DRM protect it's video content.)

So, what's left to keep people in the ecosystem? Two things combine to keep people in the gate: The Shiny plus the "Members Only" effect.

Apple products are pretty, there's no doubt about it. There is a status symbol quality to Apple products - you pay a premium for it, but (and this is the brilliant part) it's not that much of a premium....even minimum wage workers can afford it if they squirrel away their rent money. What this does, of course, is create an insular environment comprised of members of a community who "get it" and who have paid the entrance fee. In a way, it's structured very much like a closed residential community: there's no reason to stray outside of that community, so there's no information coming from outside the community. Without any information flowing in, the members of the community feel that they are a representative sample of people outside the community. (It was amusing to see my niece's face when I showed her that neither iPhones nor Apple laptops dominated their respective marketplaces.)

This effect is called GroupThink, and it's been the rationale attributed to everything from the handling of the Bay of Pigs to Watergate. William H. Whyte, Jr coined the term in Fortune magazine in 1952, and he describes it the main principle of GroupThink with this quote:

The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.

In other words, Apple keeps its user base together by making them feel like they are members of an elite club. Positive re-enforcement for decisions made by any community member from the rest of the community allow the members to feel like every choice they make is rational, that they have all the available information to make a rational decision, and therefore puts them at a higher plane of reasoning from anyone not privy to exclusive information obtained within the group. Any contradictory decisions or thought processes would be ridiculed as silly or ill-informed, and so member thoughts return inward towards the community. The effect is only broken when a paradoxical evidence for discord is developed within the group itself - discord that cannot be explained away without external, or outgroup, reasoning.

It is important at this point to emphasize that I do not for a moment think that everyone that owns an iPhone is a victim of GroupThink - but when I see brand loyalty trumping logic in otherwise logical people, I do have to raise an eyebrow. An good example that illustrates the effects of groupthink applied to Apple owners relates to the release of the iPhone4. This example works on a couple of levels:

Internal to Apple.
The engineers at Apple are very smart people. I know many of them, and I respect those people and their judgement. However, something very serious happened internally at Apple to result in the production and subsequent release of the iPhone4. A number of very very smart people, including hardware engineers steeped in knowledge of radio technology and electromagnetics, got together and as a group came to the conclusion that, for the sake of design esthetics, it would be a good idea to take a radio antenna and place it outside the phone in a spot where it can be in constant contact with human flesh and, in essence, be grounded out.

There's a great paper on antenna mechanics (written by ATT, Apple's carrier partner for the iPhone at that time) which touches on the results of placing an antenna in an area where it is in contact with human hands...

If the product is to be hand-held or otherwise in contact with the human body, remember that interaction with the human body will introduce power loss external to the product in both receive and transmit operation. As a separate issue, interaction with the human body will also cause de-tuning of the antenna. Both of these effects seriously degrade performance. Testing should be performed to properly quantify the effects of the human body.

The GroupThink internal to Apple was so strong, that the fundamental laws of physics were completely disregarded.
External to Apple.
The iPhone4 was released with an external antenna cleverly wrapped around the body of the phone as a design element, resulting in a degradation of connectivity with the cell phone towers when in contact with human skin. This is not a software problem, or anything that could be fixed with product recall-style solution. The iPhone4 was a designed with a defect built-in to the phone.

The effect was so pronounced, Consumer Reports could not recommend that the phone be purchased. When alerted to the problem, Steve Jobs first declared the poor reception to be the user's fault ("You are holding the phone wrong.") Eventually, however, the company relented to selling consumers a $20 rubber band case that covered the antenna. Eventually (again), the company gave the rubber band case away.

Despite all of this, the iPhone 4 sold almost 20M units in the first quarter. People willingly spent several hundred dollars to purchase a product that was demonstrably defective at launch.

Lest you, dear reader, think this is an isolated event in the world of the iPhone, it just happened again...

The iPhone5 was shipped sans Google Maps, and in its place is Apple's mapping application - which is now the brunt of many a joke and even an unheard of apology from Apple itself... in addition, the new operating system, iOS 6, is showing issues with WiFi connectivity. (At the time of the editing of this writing, Apple just admitted a third fault with the phone concerning the phone's camera.) Once again, smart engineers at Apple released a mapping product that not only couldn't compete with the existing Google Maps application, but didn't actually work. Once again, consumers lined up to buy 5M iPhone5's on opening weekend.

It is difficult to have an objective conversation about products that are protected by the mindset of GroupThink, because it's difficult to convince the members of the group that you are actually trying to have an objective conversation. Any objective view that runs counter the group's faith in the product or service, is met with disinterest (at best), or name calling (at worst). Any conversation that begins with "I purchased product X over product Y," can label one a proponent for "the other side."

Nonetheless, here I go....

My Issues with Apple Products

I make the distinction between the Apple's CE products (iPhone, iPad, etc) and Apple's Computer products (Macbook, Macbook Air, etc) because the two currently have very separate usage philosophies. Apple's computer products are well made devices, with a rich, robust operating system build around a standard UNIX operating system original developed for Steve Job's other computer company, NeXT. There are signs in the recent releases of OS X that imply that many of my issues with iOS that I list below are in the process of bubbling over into OS X, but we probably have a few more years before that happens completely.

So, ok...I'm talking about iOS devices specifically. Allow me to outline five points about these devices that will more than likely keep me from ever desiring one beyond what is required for my work.

They just aren't that interesting.

Let's admit it: iPhones and iPads are the same basic devices they've been since 2007. They have the same cell top, they have the same single-button, they are just - as their patent case with Samsung recently pointed out - slabs of glass with rounded corners.

The iOS user experience, which was inspiring in 2007, is uninspiring in 2012. It's the same that it's always been, really. There's a notification bar now, sure, but even that feels like an afterthought thrown in to play catch-up.

Aesthetically, it just...kinda...lies there.
What happened to the "Think Different?"

Every iPhone is the same as every other iPhone - similarly for an iPad. A user can change the background image, create some folders on the cell top, specialize their ringtone, and slap a "Hello Kitty" case on it... but, it's the same system setup as your buddy next to you. For the most personal device in the world, it's really not very personal.
The devices claim to be something that they are not.

The iOS operating system has been multitasking since iOS4, but it's a limited form called "pre-emptive multitasking." With the exception of certain system privileged applications, iOS devices stop processes and cache them out to disk when a new task is called to the foreground. The original task is resumed from where it left off when you recall it.

There are good reasons for this - a single task running is faster, and avoids errant behavior over the rest of the system. The device's usefulness, however, suffers. iOS devices are only as interesting as the applications that run on them, but the device itself is a neutered version of what it could actually be.
iOS devices feel constraining.

Every time I pick up an iOS device, I feel like I was tossed into a cramped box. I have to go through the same two-step to move from one application to another. Running multiple apps doesn't feel slick or smooth, it just feels pre-emptive, which is, of course, my complaint from above.

iOS doesn't allow me to easily switch default browsers, but that doesn't really matter since other browsers are famously hampered by being restricted from using iOS's Nitro technology, a form of just-in-time compilation. Nitro makes Mobile Safari speedy, but no one else has access to it...which smacks of something that the antitrust people may want to look into.

The cell top is a rigid grid of squares, which is appropriate considering how it feels to use one.
These Things Are Fragile

Seriously fragile. The iPhone and iPad product like place esthetics and supply lines above practicality of owning a portable computer and communication devices. The things get wet, they get dropped, they get placed in a back pocket and get sat on. That's just the way it is... so, why not plan for it?

Broken iPhones alone have cost consumers $6B..that's "billion" with a B... since 2007.

My Issues with Apple, Inc.

Again, being 900 years old, I've seen IBM come and go, and Microsoft come and (nearly) go. In either case, there were complaints with these companies: too big, too bureaucratic, too out-of-touch with consumers, too monopolistic. All of these complaints were (and are) true - but Apple is in a different league all together.

The Reality Distortion Field

It's a cute name, but I have a more accurate one: the P.T. Barnum Effect.

Steve Jobs was a master showman - there really hasn't been anything like him before in the tech industry - but the willful disregard of reality (the iPhone 4 antenna issue is a great example), the flowery language to describe industry standard features and applications as though they were just invented (Facetime? Seriously?), and misquoting people and figures on stage without anyone fact checking (the first public volley in the Samsung/Apple feud was probably fired by Jobs when he misquoted one of their VPs) have all taken their toll on Apple's credibility.
I had a Mother, thank you.

Look, I get it - Apple wants to vet every application submitted to the app store to prevent malicious hackers from ruining your life. It also has another - probably intentional - side-effect: Apple has control over what you are allowed to see and use, and what you aren't allowed to see and use. I've had applications rejected for being "too much like" existing Apple applications, which sounds a little anti-competitive. Other apps are rejected for content - including Ulysses - which smacks a little like nanny-ism (at best) or censorship (at worst).

Additionally, there's some evidence that Apple tries hard to keep applications out that it deems are too similar to their own product offerings (keeping Google Voice out in 2010, for example, required that the FCC get involved). Other applications, like browsers competitive to Mobile Safari, are denied access to technology that allows the browser the speed advantage that Safari enjoys. These are the sort of tactics that forced the government to step in when Microsoft tried mating Internet Explorer too tightly to the Windows operating system.

If you want to "protect the children" or "protect my phone," fine...but put that control in my hands through ratings systems or "untested" categories, but don't make my decisions for me.
The Birth of a Litigious Culture

This is probably the biggest issue I have with the current incantation of Apple. It has taken a stance that draws on lawyers to protect what it declares as it's IP, rather than designers and engineers to invent legitimate IP.

There's not a lot I can add to the public discourse on Apple vs. Samsung that hasn't been written before. However, I will use this platform to harp on two things:

a) There is a difference between copywrite infringement and patent infringement. Should Apple go after a competitor for copying their icons, user interface design, etc? Absolutely. Should Apple go after a competitor for prior art (in the technology sense of the word "art") that they have both drawn on? No, of course not.

There is not a single UIX feature in modern smartphones (be they iOS, Android or Windows Phone) that does not have prior art. Take, for example, two-fingered multi-touch interfaces: a 10 second wikipedia search shows what I remember from SIGGRAPH papers back in the day: multitouch technology began at the University of Toronto in 1982. Yup, it's 30 years old. Just because you add "on a phone," to the end of a sentence, doesn't make it unique.

b) There's also a concept called "obvious art." Saying a phone is unique (or somehow infringes on a patent) because it is a certain shape or size falls into this category, especially since the iPhone was not the first cell phone to be a rectangular slab with rounded corners, just one of several. (LG/Prada and Sony all produced similar phones in the same time frame as Apple.)
The Proprietary Connector

OK, I know this sounds like it should be in the "consumer devices" column rather than in the company column, but it really does belong here.

Apple has a proprietary dock connector on all of its products. Apple isn't doing this for efficiency, or throughput of the connector itself (the "lightning" connector is essentially USB2 with a different wiring pattern), so why are they doing it? What is the point of making devices with proprietary connectors which forces users to pack one more adaptor into a bag?

Before the iPhone 5, the proprietary connectors kept the OEMs that licensed the rights to use the connector logic from Apple happy - whenever Apple changed the connector or configuration of a device, consumers had to by new products or converters. Now, the lightning connector on the iPhone 5 may inhibit the OEM's from being able to create cheaper chargers and connectors, forcing the consumer to purchase these products from Apple.

Either way, the proprietary connectors have been contributing mightily to Apple's stockpile of cash...
The Breaking Bad Syndrome

...and speaking of which, what, exactly, is Apple doing sitting on $117B of cash?

In a stalled economy, having $117B in appreciable assets is an amazing feat, but it's not clear to me what they are doing with it. They are not re-investing it in M&A activity, they are not returning it to shareholders, and while they have an active R&D department, it's R&D geared towards making better mousetrap versions of Apple products.

At this stage of the game, IBM created a venture capital arm and re-invested half it's holdings in an active R&D department (IBM Research). IBM Research group was responsible for unleashing on the world: Fast Fourier Transforms (which allowed everything from voice recognition to Pandora to exist), magnetic disk storage, dynamic random access memory, RISC architecture computers, relational databases, and...of course, Deep Blue, the grandmaster chess computer. All of these creations, and too many more to mention, were released to the world with licensing fees rather than aggressive patent protection litigation. The money spent on IBM's R&D not only fed back into IBM in the form of new product lines and licensing fees, but enriched the world.

Similarly, at this stage of the game, Microsoft was heavily involved in the R&D through the Microsoft Research project which has been involved in everything from data visualization to machine learning to computer vision projects. (Thank Microsoft Research for your Kinect.) In addition, since 2004, MS has been giving out healthy dividends to it's shareholders.

...and don't even get me started on Hewlett-Packard and Google.

So again, I ask, what exactly is Apple doing sitting on $117B of cash?

So...

..yeah. That's pretty much the story. With all of the choices out there for cell phones, tablets, convertible laptops...locking myself to a vendor who's business model includes ignoring standards, litigating to the top, makes unexciting products, and locking you into their ecosystem makes little sense in my life.

If you are an Apple user and you get legitimate use and joy out their products, more power to you. Really, I mean that with no factiousness at all. Enjoy it. Really.

From Dinosaurs to Birds: Wither Gaming Consoles?

2012-04-25T11:47:00.001-07:00

I'm a digital media, data mining and mobile advertising sort of fellow, and - although I am an an active, non-apologetic gamer - I have never touched a line of game code in my life. (Well, I did write a Towers of Hanoi application in LISP for an AI course once, but that doesn't really count.) So imagine my strangeness yesterday when I found myself at the LA Games 2012 Conference in Hollywood.

The experience was interesting - not quite "fish out of water," since I knew a surprising number of people there - but close. There were several people that I knew from my life in mobile, who apparently moved over to gaming through the mobile experience. Games on iPads, games on Android phones, that sort of thing.

Opening Slide for Ben Cousin's
GDC Talk

I got there early, which allowed me some time to walk around, network and - most importantly - duck in to other panels. There was a theme that ran through some of the panels, and the afternoon live-panel debate on what monetization strategy will win, concerning gaming consoles. Some of the panelists and industry insiders are predicting the death of high end gaming consoles. One panelist even went so far to say that the PS3, XBox and Wii consoles were "dead man walking," and would be supplanted by tablets, phones and PCs as early as 2016. (I suspect this sentiment was given credence last month when ngmoco's Ben Cousin's called the death of the console an inevitability at the Game Developer's Conference. It's a convincing argument - you can see Ben's talk over at Blog Games.)

Interesting theory - but it feels shortsighted. (Or, more to the point, surprisingly self-serving, since some of the advocates of this idea ran mobile gaming concerns.) There are a couple of reasons why this feels shortsighted to me. To begin with, there are two types of gamers. The first type I would call "arcade gamers" - sitting on your phone for 5 minutes a shot to play relatively simple, yet satisfying games, like Plants vs. Zombies or Angry Birds is a fine way to kill a few moments of time. And while I fully realize that the sophistication, and therefore gaming capabilities, of mobile devices will increase over time, there are just inherent limitations of gaming on mobile: the device itself is the controller, which limits the activity choices and availability.

The second type of gamer can be thought of as the premium gamer: on a couch with a controller, a gaming console connected to a television (or high end PC), and a beer, a premium gamer will spend hours at a shot immersed in a game (either alone or online) playing a complicated, cinematic game through to completion. Both types of gaming are completely legitimate, but they are completely different experiences.

However, the primary reason that the belief that the console is going away doesn't quite feel right is the reason I was at LA Games in the first place. I was asked to sit on a panel called "Entertainment on Consoles: Reinventing the Media Hub of the Living Room," moderated by Chris Marlowe over at Digital Media Wire.

Game console penetration, for just the XBox and PS3 alone, is around 50M units. Unlike other consumer products, the hardware refresh of a typical gaming console is around 10 years. The reason for this has to do with the complexity involved in developing and engineering games for these systems - a typical game for your iPhone can be constructed in months with just a few people, whereas a premium game for a high end console is more like a movie production: there are hundreds of engineers and game designers, voice and motion talent, set design, etc. It takes upwards of a year or two to create, so having a box that gets hardware refreshed in any timeline faster than a decade is not going to attract a lot of developers. (Why spend 18 months and millions of dollars engineering something only to have the hardware requirement change on the 19th month?)

So, in order to combat consumer fatigue, modern gaming consoles are designed to be as future proof as possible for the technology of the day: high end processors (both CPU and GPU) are designed into systems that can be reprogrammed with new firmware. Constant internet connections to the mothership are made so that new software, operating system changes and business models can be injected onto these systems through upgrades. (For instance, the ability to buy games directly through the Playstation Network wasn't available when the PS3 was launched, but it is now.) The systems are typically sold at a loss to the company that is making/supporting the console, with promise of payouts on the backend for licensing deals, game developer fees, and consumer subscriptions.

All of this makes these boxes attractive purchases for consumers - you are almost guaranteed that the $200-$400 you spent on a box in 2006 will still be a viable device in 2012.

It also makes these boxes excellent trojan horses: they are quite powerful out of the box, and once installed at a consumer's home, more and more functionality can be added remotely. Modern gaming platforms, most notably the PS3 and XBox have re-invented themselves to be more than just game platforms. These devices now allow users to rent movies from their in-device stores, or download applications such as Hulu+, Netflix and Amazon Instant Video to get film and television through these other sources.

Both the PS3 and the XBox have recently retooled themselves to reflect this additional tour of duty: the PS3 version of Netflix is the only one that outputs in 5.1 audio, and is the only gaming console at all to carry Amazon Instant Video. In January, Microsoft released a complete UI redesign for the XBox reflecting not only the "Metro Tile" look and feel to the XBox, but actually de-emphasizes games as the primary driver on the XBox in lieu of applications. The XBox app category downloaded most frequently? Video applications. (The HBO GO App on the XBox is a thing of beauty, especially when paired with the XBox Kinect.)

I suspect that the next game console hardware refresh we see (from both Sony and Microsoft) will contain quite a few changes. Some easy to guess predictions: no physical media, higher bandwidth connections, Thunderbolt output, easy mobile connectivity for session shifting (this has already started in the case of the PS3), options (either physical or wireless) to use mobile as controllers, and higher resolution output. They will be smaller, easier to connect, less power hungry, and more discrete devices - perhaps deals will get struck with cable operators similar to what Xfinity just released with XBox, freeing us from cable boxes forever.

So, is the gaming console really the dinosaur of gaming? Sure, but dinosaurs never really became extinct, they just morphed into birds...

Take Two Tablets and Call Me in the Morning

2011-04-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

Alright, they're everywhere now. I've seen them in San Francisco for the past year, but San Francisco doesn't really count - it's sort of a technical data point outlier. (What other city can you safely say that you've seen not one, not two, but 10 guys biking around town with webcams on their helmets "lifecasting" for Christ's sake?)

Now though, I see them in downtown New York: walking around the streets, in restaurants, bars, browsing in stores, on Wall Street... you see them too, I know you do: In Milwaukee, Amsterdam, Sydney in east bum-f**k Minnesota...they are everywhere: the Tableticians. Like Moses coming down from the mount, they're consulting their tablets for everything from the weather to local restaurants. Business travelers are trying (struggling in most cases) to slim themselves down to just their tablets. People who don't have one, want one.

You can get your television on them. Your music. Your social net. The New York times just erected the first "holy crap this might actually work" paywall, and USA Today and CNN's apps are available on iOS and Android. Books and magazines have already begun the switch. (Although, I've written about my own issues with reading on one, but these problems haven't really stopped anyone from adopting tablets as readers.)

The world is turning into an episode of Star Trek. Finally.

For the record, it's not just the iPad. To be sure, the Jobsian Tablet is the dominant force, of course, with its overwhelming share of the market, and will be for at least the next year. However, its no longer the only game in town. About every 10 tablet users I've seen walking around the NYC are pulling Galaxy Tabs out of their pockets. I personally own a Xoom, and have talked about it ad nauseum.

OK - so They Live Among Us. Got it. I've accepted it. I think its fair to say I've embraced it. But seriously, what the hell are they?

Are they, as some people purport, oversized phones? Not really - the use case is much different. (Even if they had voice service, a tablet is something you take out to study, to ponder over, to read...not something you take out to quickly use and shove back in your pocket.) Are they an evolution of the PC, as Steve Job's is trying to proclaim? Not really - try to use one as for business document creation, for instance. I can't really write this blog post on the Xoom without dragging along a bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and stand to hold the screen...and then, what's the damn point?

It's this last idea that is the most interesting - and probably the most salient. Back in the last decade, tablets were attempted before by none other than Microsoft. They weren't a failure....well, not exactly...but they weren't very popular either. Confined to specialized niches, like hospitals and factory floors, these early tablets never caught on with the general public for one very important reason: Microsoft tried to force the laptop use case into a portable form factor.

Microsoft tried to train people, both through marketing and through their operating system extensions, that these devices were just like laptops, except they had a screen you could interact with directly. So, in the public's mind, these machines had to perform like laptops - which, very few of them did. To keep the cost down, at least a little bit, the raw computing power of the machine was reduced in favor of the electronics for the touch screen. For those who may have seen the benefit of them as portable devices, this resulted in a device that was far too expensive - many of them topped $2500 - and even at that price point they were not powerful enough to perform tasks normally attributed to laptops.

People thought twice: even in 2005 you could buy a hell of a laptop for $2500.

When Apple entered this space in 2010 - and, sorry, but I chose my words carefully: Apple entered the space, they didn't create the space - they did so with a sense of redesign that they learned from their previous years of making the iPhone: Keep the device simple, and to the point. This is not something to replace your laptop, nor is it something to augment the laptop. This was to be something that had the same relationship to a laptop that a book had to a typewriter. This was a device for you to consume your media, not create it.

I misunderstood this basic principle myself. Back in early 2010, I wrote a commentary about the iPad called the MacBook Air, Mark II. I pegged the device as a "tweener." Neither iPhone, nor MacBook. And as a tweener, I reasoned, it was confined to that simple content consumption space - and therefore destined to satisfy just a niche market.

What I failed to recognize was that content consumption on a larger-than-iPodish-screen was exactly what people were looking for. I also failed to realize that it came about at exactly the right point in our history - the iPad would have been a niche product back in the early 2000's because there wasn't a lot of content to consume on it. There was digital music, but digital video hadn't yet caught on the way it has, and digital books were just a niche market confined to glowing PDA screens. In fact, tablets back in the early 2000's had no choice but to be full-featured laptops: other than MP3s there were no tiny, digital media files to consume. There were no app stores to deliver small, tightly integrated applications and wifi speeds were too slow to stream anything meaningful over the air.

So what does that make tablets? I don't buy into the "evolution of PCs" theory - but perhaps it is the evolution of something else. I just confessed to being wrong back in 2010 about consumers wanting a content consumption device. I also suggested that we are in a unique time in history - we are at a point where all media - printed, recorded, photographed - is digital. Gone is papyrus and printing presses and kodachrome and beta max. Everything is bits. Everything every written is available online, every note warbled can be found, every movie...every television show. What if tablets are not just a media consumption device, but they are the penultimate media consumption device?

What if tablets - in all of their flavors - is the evolution of all things informational? All things entertainment? Is that how historians 100 years from now will write about this moment in time? Probably - but chances are they'll write it with something other than a tablet....

Of Course, Of Course...It's the Famous Mister EDid

2011-02-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

My life with a permanent Windows Media Center as my central "TV hub," began back in 2007 when I upgraded all of my home components to Vista. (You can read about those upgrades very early in this blog.) Before Vista, Window Media Center was confined to XP, which meant there were problems with the system with regards to multiple streams, user interface, etc. In essence, XP Media Center was a toy (sound familiar?), and home entertainment components were still pretty crude devices when it came to interactivity: there was no nice way to have the components operate with more than one remote reliably, devices didn't understand what they were connected to, and multi-zone systems were in the stratosphere of the very rich - or at least the well to do - and even then those systems required intervention from a CEDIA installation expert if you wanted to be audacious and add a new DVD player.

However, things began to change pretty quickly at this point. Components began to catch a clue as to what was on the other end of previously-dead wires, remotes began to work and play well with others (although, that is still lagging and will never be completely solved until most components have an IP hook), and a old standard for displays called Extended Display Identification Data, or EDID, began to be taken seriously by not only display manufacturers, but systems connected to displays.

The idea behind EDID is a simple, yet powerful, concept immediately familiar to computer engineers. It's a simple handshake protocol that allows one device to ask if anyone is at the other end of a wire, and get an acknowledgement. Well-behaved EDID compatible displays not only say "yes, I'm here," but identify themselves in gory detail. Again, this is a familiar concept to anyone that's ever done client-server application work, but to the consumer electronics companies this was a magical, mystical idea. (Device acknowledgements and uni-directional, stateless remotes singlehanded kept home theater components in the realm of wizards for decades. I have my own theories about this almost willful ignorance which revolve around OEM A not wanting to play nice with OEM B via a standards committee so the consumer would be compelled to by exclusively from the same OEM for all of his/her components. Too cynical?)

In the blog posts involving my move from XP Media Center to Vista Media Center, I explicitly call out my first encounter with EDID. I had a first generation Sony plasma TV that was connected to my Vista Media Center through a direct DVI connection. The first gen Sony and the new Vista had an EDID communication problem. You can read about in that blog post if you're interested, but the short story is: the Sony plasma did not implement EDID standards correctly, and would not identify itself again to the Media Center once the plasma was put in standby and then revived. It would send the "I am going into standby signal," but never told the Media Center it was awake when it was brought back from standby. The end result was that the Media Center thought the TV was off, so never sent a video signal. (The only solution at the time was a hardware one. I bought a device from Gefen for $60 that stored the EDID from the plasma when it was first turned on, and then continually presented that EDID to the Media Center so it never realized the plasma was in standby. Idiotic, but simple.)

Flash forward to a later in 2007 - I started a company in LA, and moved myself from the east coast to the west coast. In the process, I bought a new plasma (a Pioneer Elite 60") and a new A/V Receiver, a Sony 5200ES which not only did video switching, but converted lower resolution, non-digital sources to 1080p output. It was cool, and it worked really quite well...until it didn't... read on...

Over the course of the next few years, I upgraded Vista Media Center to Windows 7 Media Center - the improvements were as dramatic as moving from XP MC to Vista MC. 7MC really is currently the best way to record, store, search, and broadcast video from many discrete sources around the house. Put a 7MC server somewhere, load it up with cable cards, place XBox 360s around the house and you've got yourself multizone, HD video. It can be done on the "cheap," with the highest pricetag going to a nice 7MC server with 1-2TB of drive space. I repurposed an old Sony VAIO desktop - this one here, actually - with a better graphic card (an ATI 5600HD) to push a true 1080p monitor, 2TB of RAID0, and a couple of cable card adapters. I put 7MC on it, and never looked back.

It's long about now that I started to notice some ghosts in the machine. I use the video switching on the AV Receiver a lot - I began to notice that when I would move between devices of different screen resolutions, the 7MC would try to hold the resolution of the previous device. (For instance, dropping the screen resolution to 480p and leaving it there.) More annoyingly, when I would bring the entire system out of hibernate, the Pioneer plasma would stay black. It didn't take long for me to realize that the problem was, again, with EDID identification. It took me a little longer to realize that the problem was, again, with another Sony component: the 5200ES A/V Receiver.

The receiver, it turns out, was replacing the EDID from the Pioneer with one of its own. In other words, it wasn't allowing an EDID passthrough, it was identifying itself to the 7MC as a Sony A/V Receiver. This was causing dozens of unwanted side-effects inside the Media Center. The problem didn't materialize in Vista Media Center because of VMC's caching of the EDID. 7MC does not cache the EDID (which is "correct" behavior) - so it was getting a new EDID every time a component switched on, and the identity was coming from the receiver rather than the display.

Because I didn't want to replace the receiver, for about a year my solution to the problem was: anytime the Pioneer never turned on properly, I would get up, walk over to the receiver, unplug it, wait 2 minutes until it reset itself, and plug it back in...

...12 months was enough. Two things snapped in my head:

another expensive purchase seemed worth it to counteract a lifetime of unplugging a receiver
I was no longer a Sony fanboy

Normally, my first impulse would be to search for another Sony component, but after disappointment after disappointment with Sony gear (both home entertainment and computer), I just couldn't re-invest. So, I began a search into non-Sony waters to find an A/V Receiver that:

had the most recent rev of EDID
the most recent rev of HDMI
handled video switching of a wide variety of components
was internet upgradable
uprez capabilities
excellent sound reproduction/separation
excellent video output
on screen controls

This lead me to a couple of choices: the Onkyo TX-NR808 and the Denon ACR-3311CI. The price points and feature sets were pretty identical, and the reviews were about neck and neck. I am a fortunate man, in that I now work with both Robert Heron and Patrick Norton, of HD Nation fame. After some quick email back and forths, and bugging them both at their desks, Denon quickly rose to the top. (Both Robert and Patrick both claimed the sounds were a bit warmer with the Denon.)

The unit came quickly, and now the weekend I dreaded: pulling out the old Sony 5200ES and putting the Denon in it's place. It sounds easy, until you consider the rats nest of cables I had to deal with, plus the reprogramming of my Logitech Harmony 900 remote. (As an aside: really a great remote. The RF-to-IR functionality cannot be understated.) The components going into the new receiver? The 7MC, of course, plus a PS3, XBox 360, Roku, and Sonos. This still left me with enough space for expansion - so I can begin to play with some of the other 10' experience boxes out there.

Turning the Sony on for the last time, I wanted to make sure that the 7MC was "inert," and not recording anything important. (I also ran the check on all my other components.)

After turning it all off, the Sony went into a box and into the ever growing "I need to eBay this crap" pile in the basement. (Home to another Sony receiver, an old Shuttle computer, a TERC HD roof-mount antenna, old car stereo equipment, some pretty great floor-standing Infinity speakers and a dozen laptops of dubious variety. Yeah. eBay. Next weekend.)

Flipping the cabinet around revealed the Thing I Hate Most in the World: stereo wiring. It took a few hours of getting it under control, but once I did I was able to pull out the Sony and slide in the Denon. A little cable management and I now have a new back end to the A/V center.... ok, fine, not that much better....but better. (You can see photos of all the steps on my Flickr stream, if you're up for it. Excuse the dog, she was just curious.)

Bringing the system back up, I ran the setup for the sound field, and then put the system through its paces. The EDID problem was gone. The system operates as it was intended, moving easily from input source to input source, properly switching from unit to unit.

So, is EDID your friend? Now, yes. Device identification is one of the two keys required for all of these systems to interoperate properly - and the display component is probably the trickiest problem to solve. At the beginning of 2011, most new components now handshake correctly using EDID - but if you are wrestling with older components that were once "cutting edge" in this arena, you may run into some of the difficulties I've had plaguing me for a while. (HDMI 1.4a, which supports 3D output, is today's version of "cutting edge," so expect your components to act oddly for the next few years while that standard shakes itself out.)

Best of luck with all of this, and drop me a line to let me know how dark your particular entertainment hell is...

Die Me, Dichotomy

2010-06-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

"We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business"

- Steve Jobs, Spring 2010

There are about 2 gwuad-zillion blog postings and articles out there highlighting the differences between the iPhone 4 (and iOS 4), and Android 2.x - and you know what? This isn't going to be one of them.

What I do want to talk about, however, is the above quote by Jobs during an all-hands meeting this past spring. Reality is what Jobs spins it to be, but the essence of what he said is largely (not mostly) true: Google, the search behemoth, and Apple, the restyled consumer device and services company began life in two extremely different places. Yet, here they are a decade and some-spare-change later competing head to head in the mobile arena. How, and more importantly, why did that happen?

There's an interesting slide that Jobs keeps displaying during his keynotes - one that no one pays attention to unless he calls it out, as he did at this week's iphone-a-palooza. Its a simple street sign meant to imply that Apple is on the corner of technology and liberal arts. Jobs likes to spin a tale about Apple being this magical place that brings these two worlds in alignment. In reality, however, that story could be told about Google (technology) and Apple (liberal arts) being dead center at that intersection. Stretching the analogy to the breaking point, I'd throw in two cars headed towards a collision at the intersection: one piloted by an android, the other by an apple.

Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 while they were at Stanford on the PhD track. It was pure platform play from a couple of hard core computer scientists. "This World Wide Web thing seems to be taking off," they reasoned, "and all the ways to find content on it really blow." (Hey! They were looking directly at you, Alta Vista.) So, they figured out a new way to do it, one which involved web crawlers and indexers and taxonomy engines and warehouses full of servers. They slapped a simple front door on it, misspelled the word "Googol," and the rest - as they say - is history.

The important take away here is that Google, from start to finish, was a research project born from the PhD thesis material of a couple of hard core computer scientists. They focused on ideas as numbers - the world as a large, three-dimensional grid of information that could be searched, indexed and sorted at bizarrely fast speeds. For the first time in human history, it became physically possible to categorize, classify and search literally everything representing the human condition. As long as there was a way to digitize it, Google could organize it.

To Google, the world is The Matrix.

Along the way, Brin and Page realized that they had a perfect way to generate revenue: the digital version of targeted advertising. Caching the entire internet in memory was gonna be pricy, but if they could sell search trends and results back to advertisers, they might be able to keep this thing going. It worked, and the company became one of the most profitable on the planet, able to afford multiple research-projects-to-nowhere, and perform mind-boggling "busy work" tasks, such as photographing every single square foot of street space in the world, just so they could turn the physical into bits.

Jobs, Wozniak and Wayne (the missing Beatle) founded Apple in '76, and their story was a very different one from the Google boys. As the legend goes, Wozniak, an engineering student who never finished college, hand-constructed a wood-wrapped computer to present at the Homebrew Computer Club, a computer hobby club in the Silicon Valley area that functioned as sort of a Lifehacker.com of the pre-internet, swingin' 70's. Jobs, a Reed College student, saw the potential, as he always does, and they incorporated and sold the first Apple computer (the Apple I) in 1976.

Now, I say this not as a denigration, but as a point of discussion: neither Wozniak nor Jobs finished college. When asked if he dropped out, Wozniak's response was a very odd "Not exactly." Jobs, on the other hand, is a self-professed dropout (in fact, I think he only attended a semester or two, and lists "calligraphy" as an example course that set him thinking about typography) - and, in true Jobsian style in a 2009 Stanford graduation ceremony speech goes on to market his "dropping out, and then dropping back in" as having a positive effect on his life.

Jobs brand of esthetics, innate marketing savvy and forceful personality created a computer company that capitalized on societal lifestyle choices. Through 30 years of iterative refinement, Jobs (and, it was almost entirely Jobs) drove the company's business and technical development via trial and error, measuring people's responses to products at different points in time. It was almost as though the man who never finished (or even really started) college, was able to predict (some say define) societal zeitgeist. He literally gave people what they never knew they wanted, and in return they consumed.

To Apple, the world is What Dreams May Come.

Initially, Apple computers focused on home hobby enthusiasts and gamers, but when the machines moved into the design and print publishing realm, utilizing designer's sensibilities and catering specifically to the needs of publishers things began to change. People didn't just like Apple computers as tools, they began to classify them as necessary objects. Machines that somehow "got" the essence of them as people and problems they faced in their work and lives, and through that understanding the computer company's adherents became almost fetishistic in their desire for all things Apple.

Google and Apple moved forward.

Google slowly became an information juggernaut fueled by an endless stream of advertising revenue. Fear of Google's knowledge about our every purchase, every web click, every move in the physical world was trumped by the public's craving for information about anything, anywhere. It was an uneasy truce with the devil: give them your innermost secrets, and you can find anything your heart desires.

Apple iteratively, and precariously (it famously almost went out of business), climbed its way past Microsoft's market cap. Amusement at Apple's lack of realistically playing in the grown-up world of spreadsheets and word processors gave way to the ease and grace at which its software and devices charmed the populace. People were vaguely aware that as Apple moved deeper and deeper into consumer electronics its ecosystem was slowly becoming a walled garden, but it didn't seem to matter. If they all vowed to never leave Apple, it doesn't really matter if the walls go up. Apple became the epitome of living in a gilded cage.

...and so, here we are. Two companies who, due to their contrasts, would seem to be perfectly positioned more as comrades than foes, yet now stand face-to-face on the current field of battle: your pocket. How did the emergence of the new media marketplace (your mobile phone) become the site of a war that will make the Apple/Microsoft skirmish seem like frivolous playground politics?

Jobs didn't often find himself on the defensive prior to 2010, but when the Android quarterly sales number zoomed by the iPhone's in Q1 of 2010, that's exactly where he found himself. When he made the now famous "We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business," statement in response, it must have sounded alien to Google.

From Google's point of view, you see, they did not enter the phone business - they merely extended their search business. This was not about competing with Apple in the consumer marketplace, this was about adding an additional query tool to their bag of tricks. This time, however, its a physical device, not a query field in a web browser. Google did not enter the phone business, they simply provided a mechanism for users to provide Google with more information about themselves.

Likewise, Apple really didn't enter the search business. What they did do, however, was enter the advertising business using these same little devices in everyone's pocket. Through these mobile devices, Apple knows what its users want, what its users do, what its users feel, really... all without resorting to search. They are able to know all these things because their users willingly tell them. They tell them with their dollars and their application downloads. Apple didn't need a search engine, they needed another "thing" that they could present to the faithful and the soon-to-be-converted. Something shiny and pretty that the loyal would offer up their inner most desires to possess in order to remain part of the group.

Mobile phones have evolved to be statements of who we are as an individual. A mobile phone is an incredibly intimate device (insert your favorite sex toy joke here, please), more so than your television set or your laptop. You would allow your friend or family member to use your laptop to check email, but chances are you think twice before turning your phone over to someone. It has your music, your pictures, your memories, your conversations. Your phone is your inward self reflected outward.

They are also your tools - you need them to work. Calls cannot drop. Text messages need to go through. When you want information, you need the immediacy of action. The mobile web cannot pause, you don't have time for it to buffer. The applications on the phone need to tell you things before you know you need the information. Display it. Process it. Search it. Tell it to me. Do that for me now, because in 10 seconds I don't need it anymore.

This is the dichotomy of the mobile industry, perfectly represented by two companies that started in the last century doing very different things and solving very different problems. They were created by very different sets of people, one by a couple of Stanford eggheads looking to change how the world understands its information, and the other by a couple of college dropouts looking to change how society communicates with its technology.

To sum all this up another way:

Google users ask questions of Their Oracle.

Apple users share their desires with Their Creator.

These two world-views which meet so sharply to define their mobile environments and devices is perfectly captured in the ad campaigns for both products - both of which are worth watching, even if you've seen them before.

This 'droid ad is from Verizon, of course, but Google approved:

From Apple, ad-as-documentary:

...as in "Oh God. Oh God. We're All Gonna Die."

2010-05-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, then... while all of us were worried about the LHC and whether or not iPad would have a porn app, we inched that much closer to that lovely Terminator-eque future. A charming, grey, lovely place where none of us have to worry about taxes, political differences, or racial tensions because we are all grabbing the kids and running from the little brothers of Big Dog

Sheesh... at least it's just Terminators we have to worry about, not Cylons....

Ahhh, crap! Seriously?!

Finding a Stellar Grandpapa

2010-03-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

On March 3rd, Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, issued a press release that her team had discovered a really old star. Really old. Dawn-of-time old. While not earth shattering to those of us living in the twitter-timezone, Ms. Frebel's team completed a missing piece of a cosmological puzzle that's been plaguing astronomers and cosmologists since before I was in grad school: where the hell are the old stars? It's been a bit of an embarrassment, really, but before we go there I just want to explain the backstory, silly bookkeeping, and why this discovery is so important.

For the past several decades, astronomers and cosmologist have based the operating assumption of the physical universe on a few principles:

The Universe started from a singularity in a massive explosion, commonly referred to as "the Big Bang." For many years there was a competing theory called "steady state," which said that the Universe always was and always will be, but the mountain of evidence to the contrary has basically shouted that viewpoint down. Steady State was poetic, and vaguely religious, but wasn't consistent with observed facts.
After the Big Bang, the Universe went through a rapid evolutionary process during its first 3 minutes of existence, in which the literal framework of the Universe was established: all of its physical dimensionality, physics constructs, the flow of time, energy distribution... oh yeah, it was quite a party time.

OK, over simplified, but that's the basic gist of it - everything flows from here. After those first few minutes, everything else began to shake out, including primitive stars. In the beginning of the Universe, you see, there weren't a hell of a lot of building materials. Well, really just hydrogen and a little helium. So, stars that arose from that first boom, were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium (with a smattering of the early metals: lithium and beryllium, but such trace amounts that it only counts when dealing with really off-the-beaten-path cosmology issues).

After they lived a few billion years (call it 13B) and burned themselves out, they exploded and sprayed crap all over the bran', spankin' new Universe. They were the frat boys of the universe, beer bottles everywhere the morning after the party. And, by "beer bottles" I mean "heavier elements." Helium, nitrogen... but more importantly: the beginning of the metals...well, "metaloids," actually. Check the periodic table, you'll see them there on the right.

OK, now the fun starts - when these bad boys pop, the crap they spill out is pretty much everything else you see around you: oxygen, iron, heavy metals, the gold in your teeth.... all the rest of the elements. Essentially, the now.

The weird bookkeeping comes into play when you consider how cosmologists categorized these three groups of stars: essentially, in the order of observation. The sun, and all the stars you see when you look up on a cold night are called "Population I" stars. See? They were seen first...

...the second group? The bad boys above that exploded and filled the skies with all the current stuff? They are "Population II," cuz they were found next. Get it?

And the last group....well, yeah, "Population III" stars. When were they observed? They weren't ever observed. Not directly anyway. They are long gone corpses, dried up cinders of their former selves.

(As an aside: I call the bookkeeping "weird" because it never made intuitive sense to me. The first stars should be Pop I's, in my opinion, but that's just me.)

OK, back to Miss Anna at the CfA, and the missing link she just found. If you were following my stream-of-consciousness explanation above, you get the drift that modern stars arose from the ashes of older stars. Similarly, the formation of galaxies (collections of stars bound together by common gravity) such as our own Milky Way underwent their own evolution. Outside the Milky Way galaxy, and other big spiral galactic formations which contain 10's of millions of stars, are these weenie little malformed galaxies called Dwarf Galaxies. (I know, not Politically Correct, but "Little People Galaxies" didn't quite flow off the tongue.)

Dwarf Galaxies have a few 10's of 1000's of stars at best. You see, in the Population II era, there just weren't a lot of stars yet, so not too many buddies to gang together with... so, the Pop II's did the best they could... hung out together, went to the movies, and watched why all the big galaxies made fun of them. Eventually, some of the Dwarfs hung around to the modern age, because when their Pop II contents exploded, they made some new Pop III friends to hang with. A lot of these bigger, heavier stars were ejected, and they banded together to form the larger spirals.

It wasn't an even distribution, of course, because life isn't like that. Some Dwarf's had Pop III stars in them, and some Spirals had Pop II's. But, as time passed, the distribution of old versus new stars began to change - heavily weighted to the newer Pop IIIs. If you look in our own galaxy, near the center usually, you'll find the Pop II's sitting in their stellar old age retirement communities, taking Viagra and trying to be interested in the television.

And in the remaining Dwarf Galaxies? The ones older than our Milky Way? They should be chock-a-block full of Pop II's, right? Right? Yeah...uh...oops. There's the embarrassment. None. Nada.

Enter Anna and her team - 290,000 light years away, in the Dwarf Galaxy of Sculptor - which, I know, sounds like a Farscape villian - lies Lores: the first metal-poor (Pop II) star found in a Dwarf Galaxy.

Whew. The difficulty in finding a Dwarf Galaxy Pop II makes sense - a Dwarf has fewer stars, remember, so therefore a higher probability that most, if not all, of the Pop II's would have been swapped out for Pop IIIs.... still, it made everyone nervous that no one ever found one before. It called into question the theory of stellar evolution.

But, fortunately, Ms Frebel found Lores: Old, decrepit, and pinching the nurses asses at the nursing home. The Universe is as it should be.

Respect your elders, kids.

Side note: I don't want to leave you thinking that this story is as simple as I describe. Observing Pop II and Pop I stars becomes confusing and interesting the further you look from earth. Taking the speed of light into account means that the farther you look from us, the farther back in time you can see - and the harder it becomes to register and understand the light (diffusion, red-shifting, and other interesting artifacts come into play.). Pop II and even Pop I stars have been observed in abundance by using this lens back into the past. The issues with finding Pop II's in Dwarf galaxies arise when looking at Dwarf galaxies near us, so they are in the same relative "time frame" as we are here on earth.

Also, I'm hoping that the press release from Frebel's team misquoted her. She almost certainly did not say that Lores was as old as the Universe, since that would make it a Pop I star, but she probably said it was as old as the Milky Way galaxy, which would make more sense.

There, I think that does it...

...well, unless you start talking about Multiverses.....eh, next time.

Another Timelapse of the Milky Way...this time over Mauna Kea

2010-03-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

I posted one of these before last year, taken by an amateur at a Texas star party. This one was taken at the optical observatories at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and is far more "produced." It is, however, no less stunning.

It's a great way to end the week - enjoy.

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

The New(?) Microsoft Give Us a Three-Way Horserace

2010-02-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

For the last few months, my personal party-line has been that the cell phone OS wars are over: it's now iPhone and Android phones, with all other OS'es (BREW, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc) playing the role of Dead Man Walking.

I had heard of the "Zune Phone," of course, as well as "Project Pink," "Windows Mobile 7" and a dozen other working names out of Redmond. However, like everyone else, I had made the mistake of counting Microsoft out of the game. They're old. They're slow. They have crappy marketing. Everyone hates Windows Mobile. (I mean, a stylus? Seriously? Who uses that?)

That was stupid not only on my part, but on all the Apple Faithful out there who have been taking joy at the iPhone's trouncing of the mobile market. I don't blame them, I blame myself. I'm 900 years old, you would think I would have learned by now: Microsoft iterates towards a goal line. They take the criticism, the market hostility. And they wait and they watch and they learn. That's what they do. That's what they have always done.

They watched Atari and Commodore, and they built MS-DOS (tricking the Great IBM into both paying them to write the OS and allowing the proto-MS to keep it for themselves). They watched Apple and Atari and Commodore create GUIs as a new interface paradigm, and they slowly iterated their way into it with the horrible Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.1 (all of which were just interfaces on top of MS-DOS), while the world laughed. Then Windows 95 showed up, and people stopped laughing. They watched as Sony and Nintendo duked it out with console game stations, and then they showed up with the XBox. What does Microsoft know about gaming and hardware? Apparently, a tremendous amount.

What's happening now is a renaissance for the company - again. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs (who is both a physical embodiment of the apparently hip, new crowd occupying One Microsoft Way, and representative of the "new thinking" going on there) garnered a standing ovation at the TED conference last week when he demo'ed the new Bing-based augmented reality maps. In the space of 15 minutes, Google Maps seemed old, stale and decidedly MapQuest-ish. This bears repeating: a hip, handsome, charismatic, non-nerdish, young Microsoft architect was given a standing ovation.

And then, back to my main focus here, there was this little ditty from the Barcelona World Mobile Congress: Windows Phone 7. The Zune phone. Project Pink. The thing that had been the behind-the-back snickering at every mobile gathering I've been at for the last 2 years. There it was...and it was...

...not damned by faint praise in the press.
...not thrown out for ridicule.
...not considered to be "too little, too late"
...not requiring you to use a stylus

It is, by all videos and hands-on experiences and advanced reviews I can get my hands on, gorgeous. Intuitive. Fast. Easy. And, here's the kicker: undeniably hip. Hip? From Balmer's Boys? Really?

OK, so the remnants of Microsoft of the last decade are there: "Windows Phone 7"? Seriously? Wake the eff up, Microsoft Marketing. Hire someone who didn't come from the enterprise software marketing world to name your software products. Hell, just walk down the hall to the hardware guys who named XBox, XBox 360, XBox Live, Zune... they could have called the Zune "Windows Media Portability 1.3," but they didn't. The world does not respond to the formulaic:

(Company Name) (Product Category) (Revision Number)

It's effing bullshit, we hate it, and its killing your reputation. Just stop it!

Lame-ass marketing aside, everything about this combination of redesigned phone OS (Microsoft is wisely killing off the prior versions of WinMo OS'es, and starting fresh here - bad news for the developers, great news for everyone else in the world) plus strict OEM guidelines for phone construction screams that there's something new going on in Redmond.

Comparing this phone to it's competition, it has also taken a completely different approach to its architectural philosophy: where the iPhone and android are application driven architectures, the Windows Phone 7 (dammit! OK, let me try "WP7" and see if that's easier) is data driven. It's not a new philosophy, it's actually quite old - going back to the 70's. The idea surfaced a few times in a couple of consumer products, most notably the original Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton, the latter of which dubbed this architectural concept as data soup.

As opposed to an application driven architecture, which relies on file transfers, data pipes and object passing at the OS level, and "copy and paste" exposed at the user interface level to move information from application to application, information on data-centric operating systems lives together, with all applications sharing the same underlying "like" data structures.

How this manifests itself to the user is the most beneficial on portable devices where the user is often in a crowded environment, or harried. Rather than opening up a contacts entry and then locating a person's twitter name, Last.FM neighborhood and phone number, the workflow on a data-centric device is more fluid. You may be listening to streaming music in the Zune marketplace on the WP7 device, and notice that a friend who likes the same music is online at XBox Live and so you tweet her about her gaming choice. It's all together, live and connected all the time.

This sort of user workflow isn't for everyone, and some people will not want to adapt to it - but the point here is that it truly breaks the paradigm that we are all used to. Actually, the paradigm that we have been taught (by Apple, Google, Nokia and others) is the way it has to be: that there is an app for that. It's new, it's different, it is often more intuitive to a handheld device - and, most impressively, it comes from stodgy old Microsoft.

So, I'm changing my personal party-line sightly: the mobile OS wars are over, but now it's a three-way race: iPhone, Android and WP7...uh, WM7....uh, Windows Phone Mobi....Jesus...and that phone from Microsoft.

UPDATE: March 4, 2010. Sigh, bamboozled again. OK, this little piece of data doesn't obviate my contention that Windows Phone 7 makes it a three-way horse race, but it does kinda crap all over my assertion that Redmond has it together. I had assumed that when WP7 comes out, that all other phone projects from MS were sent to the land of misfit toys. Not so if today's post from Gizmodo is true: Confirmed: Project Pink Lives. Steve, Steve, Steve (no, not THAT Steve, the OTHER Steve)...what are you guys doing? Combine Pink and WP7 or whack one of them - when has marketplace confusion ever worked?

Hey - 2, Maybe 3 Years Late is Better than Nothing

2010-02-15T17:17:00.000-08:00

Back in 2008, and again in 2009, I was all hot and bothered by the potential for OLED and MEMS display technologies for both roll-up color displays and low power color eReaders. Well, both years didn't pan out, and so - like a bad gambler - I took my chips off the table for this year's predictions.

Well, great. The rollup, flexible displays aren't to market yet, but the Qualcomm MEMS tech looks poised to make it to market this year. Watch as Qualcomm's marketing director, Cheryl Goodman laughs at me not sticking it out with a prediction:

Read more about this coolness at the LA Times.

Tales of the Sync Demon: Getting Android, PCs and Macs to Give It Up

2010-02-09T00:59:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, your life is an amalgam of mobile devices, laptops, operating systems, and "clouds" (or whatever the effing buzz word is today). You've also got a job - maybe two - and a personal life - or, maybe not. (Sorry man...but you know who you are.) You aren't on your phone 100% of the time, and you aren't on your Mac or PC 100% of the time - yet you want your information on all devices.

My world consists of androids, iphones, macs, PCs and ubuntu boxes - so this conversation is confined to those worlds. It's the flip-side to the closed ecosystem argument: dictatorships make the trains run on time, but openness requires diplomacy. However, since Apple, Microsoft and Google hate each other with the passion of 1000 white hot burning suns, diplomacy isn't the easiest thing to come by...

So, after an evening of experimentation at the expense of my sanity, here's the deal for reliable sync'ing between google apps, exchange, android, and exchange clients for BOTH the PC and the Mac. (I've left the iPhone and Windows Mobile out of this conversation since once your PC or Mac is sync'ed as described below, the iPhone and WinMo devices will just work properly. I left Blackberry's out of this conversation because, well, what the hell are you doing with a blackberry?)

So, boiling it down to just android, macs and PCs, here's what you want:

...to be able to use the native applications on the Android phone to interact with exchange for work, and google apps for personal work, and have all information available to all client applications - yet remain separated.
...everything to happen in the background and over the air (OTA)
...all three platforms (Android, PC and Mac) to sync within a reasonable time.

And, here's the problems with just setting things up using OEM supplied applications:

...exchange sync for Android only works reliably for email, not for contacts. There is no calendar exchange sync for the Nexus yet (although there is for the Droid, since Motorola modded the exchange sync app)
...other Android sync solutions (such as Touchdown) replace the email, calendar and contact apps on the handset, which blows enormous chunks
...Google Apps to Exchange server direct sync'ers require additional software on the server side, and since most people have IT organizations who will laugh at you if you suggest modifying their exchange servers, you probably don't have that as an option.

Here's the solution methodology I decided to employ (yes, I said "solution methodology"):

The idea here is to have Google Apps, NOT exchange, be the propagation root for calendar and contact information, while email is harvested directly from the exchange server. This way, the Android phone is NOT the source of the sync - which is desirable. However, since we do not control our own exchange servers, the calendar and contact sync is reliant on the PC and Mac client applications. This means that the syncs can only happen when either the PC, Mac or both are on and connected to the internet. However, in practice, you'll see this isn't such a big deal.

If you are using, say, a PC with Outlook when a meeting request comes through and you respond, the PC will sync with Google calendar immediately and it will appear on your phone. If your PC is off, and you are just using your phone and a meeting request comes through, it will arrive as email on your phone's email client. You will accept the meeting and it will be placed immediately into your phone's calendar client, and therefore into your Google calendar. It will not sync to your PC (and back to exchange) until your turn your PC on, but who cares? The only downside here is that no one else will be able to see you have a meeting at the time you accepted until your PC is turned back on. (The same scenario I just described works for the Mac as well.)

What you need on each platform:

On the PC:

microsoft exchange (available for $1B from http://www.microsoft.com/)
gsyncit ($15 at http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/) *

On the Mac:

iCal, Address Book, Mail.app (I could not find apps that worked for Entourage or the far superior Thunderbird)
SpanningSync * ($25 at http://spanningsync.com/)

On the Android:

Exchange for Android (for reliable exchange mail) - It is important for offline calendar sync'ing that you use Exchange for Android and not IMAP for your email if you want to have the email-calendar interaction

* both gsyncit and spanningsync allow for sync'ing to specific google calendars and contact groups, allowing you to keep work and play separate.

To set everything up:
On the Android:

install Exchange for Android. This comes with Android 2.0 and above, and is available at Android Market for free for Android 1.5 and 1.6
set up Exchange for Android to point to your exchange server

On Google Apps:

Optional: Separate your calendar and your contacts into separate work and home groups

On the PC:

Install Outlook
Install gsyncit
Optional: have different outlook calendars and contact groups pointing to the correct corresponding calendars and contact groups on google apps

On the Mac:

activate iCal, Address Book, and Mail.app
install SpanningSync
optional: have different outlook calendars and contact groups pointing to the correct corresponding calendars and contact groups on Google apps

...and that, as they say, is that.

Now your phone, google apps online, your PC and your Mac will all be in sync within a delta measured in minutes. (If one or the other of your laptops is off, the delta is measured in the time it takes you to turn on your laptop(s).) If you also use an iPhone or WinMo phone, just set them up normally, and everything should work just fine.

Also, please be careful: a change in one object (say a contact) will quickly propagate through everything you do. You can seriously whack out your information.... Outlook is the easiest to back up, of course, since you just copy the OST or PST file around. However, until you are comfortable that everything is working well, you should engage the sync's one at a time until you are convinced they will do what you need them to do.

Anyway - that oughta do it. When Google fixes their exchange sync application for android, we'll all be able to turn off the 3rd party sync'ers (Actually, I'll leave gsynchit running, since one of its unintended consequences is to back up my personal contact info and calendars.)

This has been a public service announcement from your friendly IT department.

My Humblest Apologies for a Few Bad Apples...

2010-01-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post about Rocket Upkeep.

When I started this blog 3 years ago, I wanted to keep it very open. Anyone could comment on here, no requirement to log in or register, no moderation.

Unfortunately, over the past few months I've had to do quite a bit of comment deletion to remove SPAM postings. (Apparently, my posts attract the "how would you like to make zillions in foreign markets?" crowd.) So, as of today, I'm moving to a CAPTCHA method of verifying comment posting authenticity. Still no need for registering, still no moderation.

I'll leave the CAPTCHA in place for a few months, but if that doesn't do it, I'll have to put in a registration policy. Apologies for the extra inconvenience folks.

...I now return you to your regular scheduled tech rants.

The Macbook Air, Mark II....er, the iPad

2010-01-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

OK, disclaimer: I have not seen this in person, I have not held one, I have not used one in any sort of fashion. This is a first impression from the specifications and cost factor only, and I am going to try to not be influenced by Apple media hype or naysayer responses.

So, like everyone else in the gadget-sphere, I was watching the various feeds this morning (ironically on an Android phone) when the Jobster was out in front of the cameras, fondling the latest Apple fetish device: the unfortunately named iPad. (The NYTime's "leaked" device name of iSlate was so much cooler.) When The Steve was finished, I was immediately struck by two impressions:

This is exactly what we all thought it was going to be...
This is nothing like what we all thought it was going to be...

Ultimately, the iPad is on a slider somewhere between an iPhone and a Macbook Air, with some of the capabilities of both, and a lot missing from each.

The Good

This is, like all Apple products, a pretty device. It's a perfect size for slipping into a brief case or leave on the kitchen table, and it looks as though it rests comfortably in your hand/lap when browsing the web. The optional 3G radio will increase its usability in the field (well, except for the whole AT&T thing again), allowing me to get Wired Online wherever I'd happen to be sitting.

It also seems to be fast - the live demos and marketing spiels showed this thing zipping through files, photos and film (you like my alliteration techniques, don't'cha?) like a device should behave. Time will tell if it bogs down as you start to fill it up with apps and images, but we'll give the speed points to it now.

The user interface experience has that Apple magic to it: the company has more than learned a few lessons from the iPhone, iPod Touch and the new Macbook multitouch trackpads. All of the gestures and motions look completely intuitive, now that we've been trained by 3 years of iPhoneage.

The always-on nowness of it is perfect... being able to pick it to check movie times and order tickets as you're dashing out the door is excellent.

The Bad

There was a lot of build up to the iPad in the days leading up to this morning's announcement, some of it was justified (Apple getting into the tablet business), but some of it was misleading. The Apple invite ads (like the one to the right here) don't actually say what the device is about, but they imply a lot.

People and analysts have been reading into these Apple invitations for a long time, and for the most part the invitations have given a clear indication as to what was coming - so it was inevitable that the same logic would be applied to this multi-hued beauty above. The unspoken message is: We hear you artists, thanks for being our champions through the years, here's something for you now...

...except, of course, that's not what the iPad was about. There's no stylus for drawing, no iPaint specifically designed for the iPad (at least none that I've read about), no iMovie for the iPad...nothing specific to the creative artist at all. The iPad is designed for the consumer of art, not the creator of art. You can flip through photos, view the web, watch videos and listen to music. Yet, bizarrely, it lacks the simple inclusion of a $10 pen stylus and enhanced iPaint applications would have gone a long way to making the invitation fit the device - not to mention cemented "Apple" with "Creative Freedom" in the minds of the digerati for another generation.

Instead what we are left with is either a large iPhone, or a keyboardless Macbook Air - and strangely, it has left out some of the best features of both. What it borrowed from the iPhone (overall looks, applications, slick UIX), it left out in functionality: no voice or communications at all? A simple webcam and a relationship with Skype would have been all people wanted.

And from the Macbook Air? It's got the thin and light thing going on, plus the integration with all your Apple products at home - but doesn't have a keyboard, seems significantly more fragile, and 64G (the maximum memory) would get chewed up by even the most casual business user in about a day.

The other thing it doesn't have from the Macbook Air? It's operating system. The iPad is based off the same OS X derivation that the iPhone is based off of - which means: no multitasking. How's that supposed to work if this is a slip-in replacement for a Macbook Air?

How about reading a book? The new iPad bookstore looks sweet. Yes, it does, but people are forgetting the main purpose behind eInk: eyestrain. eInk, as I've written about before, is all about mimicking paper reflectivity. It doesn't generate eyestrain. Staring at a screen (even a pretty OLED screen) does. OLED is awesome for magazines, less so for Moby Dick.

But, let's swallow that one and say I'm wrong. Let's say that the iPad is perfect for reading Moby Dick, then what Apple is telling us is that you now need three products:

iPhone - for communications
MacBook Air or MacBook for laptop functionality
iPad for media consumption

Now my briefcase has less room when I travel then when I started?

Middle Ground?

Ok, so maybe the iPad is for the home. It's meant to be shared by families and friends as a kitchen or family room utility object for reading newspapers and magazine, controlling your home iTunes center, or ordering takeout food. That would be fine at CrunchPad prices, but what we have instead is this:

Wifi only models:

16 GB - $499
32 GB - $599
64 GB - $699

3G plus WiFi models:

16 GB - $629
32 GB - $729
64 GB - $829

And, since it's AT&T, you're looking at additional pricing. Apparently up to 250 MB for $14.99, or unlimited data for $29.99. Free use of AT&T hotspots.

So...how is all of that middle ground? Is the average family going to spend another $500-$800 on a device that allows you to consume media (as a single viewer consumer...well, two if you snuggle), surf the web (like that laptop you already own), or just "leave lying around" ready to order Fandango tickets?

I'll stick by my previous prediction: It will sell to the faithful, but not be a major hit for Apple or an influencer for a "new category" of devices. (Unless that category is Tablet Computer That Can't Quite Do Everything A Computer Can.)

Maybe I'll change my mind when I get one in my hands...but I kinda doubt it...

The Rocket 2010 (minus 3 Weeks) Predictions!

2010-01-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

Remember how all those other tech blogs were doing 2010 reports back in 2009? Remember how you were reading them in that awkward place between Christmas and New Years, when you had nothing else to do but see Avatar again? Ha! Plebes! Anyone can do a prediction list in the weeks before the year being predicted...but it takes a true prognosticator to peer into the future year while that year is actually underway!!

OK, fine. I'm late. This prediction list is late by three weeks. Whatever. At least now I have claim being right if I "predict" something that happened last week, right? No? Fine. Here we go...

Apple Tablet Lives, Receives Traditional Apple Fanboy Responses

Considering that the Apple event happens in, oh, 5 days now and that you'd have to be completely asleep at the switch to not realize there's a tablet just around the corner, all that remains is the prediction over the response to the unit. It's going to be priced in Apple dollars, that's for damn sure, so will people buy it? Undoubtedly yes. There's the Apple contingent who would buy anything and everything that Cupertino puts out, so the market success of the product will carry it through release #1. What remains to be seen here is whether this will be placed in the "iPhone" or "Apple TV" category of success.

The reality will be that it will appear somewhere in the middle. While portable consumer devices are an overwhelming success story for the company - and for technology at large - the success of Apple from a market acceptance point of view gets murkier as the devices become productivity tools. The Apple TV and Mac Air products were not a success by any real measure, and for all the hype around traditional Mac computers, they still can't seem to break into the double digits and stay there.

The success of the Apple Tablet will depend on a few points that none of us will be clear on for a few days: pricing (people are guessing in the upper $800's at the time of this writing), connectivity (AT&T? No thank you.), content (Apple does amazing things with content partner deals), usability (long their forte), and lifestyle niche. (How does this fit into the users current computer ecosystem?)

We'll know the full extent of the story after all the hullabaloo of the launch dies down and the numbers start to roll in - definitely by the end of Q2 - as to whether or not this thing is an iPhone or an Apple TV.... but for my money, it's going to be more like their Macbook line: popular among the cool kids (and so a money and PR generator for Apple), but too expensive for the mainstream to be considered "a hit."
T-Mobile Moves to the Second Place Spot Behind Verizon
Every year I shoot from the hip (and often hit my own foot in the process - thanks Yahoo!) on at least one prediction, and this one is it. Dissatisfaction over AT&T's service and arrogance has reached an all-time high, Verizon's at tack ads on the lackluster AT&T service are having a measurable impact, analysts have come out and said that they need to spend $5B just to reach par with their competition, and de la Vega has lo st his fraking mind by putting the "blame" for the networks woes on the cutting edge early adopters of AT&T technology. (The 10-point powerpoint slide presentation the charmless de la Vega gave as a "keynote" at CTIA back in October was mind-numbing in both its blindness to its future and in its stumping for why we need to charge for tiering.)

What does all this have to do with T-Mobile? Well, while de la Vega is out there blaming all of you iPhone users for breaking his network, T-Mobile has quietly built out the most stable 3G network outside of Verizon in less than 2 years, and is currently retrofitting its brand new infrastructure to support 4G (via LTE) and HSPA+. Combined with the continued rollout of Android handsets, better marketing, GSM reliance, and a still failing Sprint, it won't take long before frustrated subscribers jump ship.
eBooks Open Up
With the floodgates of eBook opened up (you should have seen the eBook section at CES 2010...companies I never heard of had some form of eBook reader), and the impending semi-thud of the Apple table showing up, eBook OEMs are going to have to stop their divvying up of content providers and open the doors to all comers.

Steps have started in this direction late last year: Although they provided support for the open EPUB format in 2008, Sony changed its primary distribution format from its proprietary Sony DRM format to exclusively use EPUB. This means that books I purchase on Sony's eReader store can now be used on any eBook that supports EPUB. Similarly, Amazon recently announced that it was cutting new deals with publishers, and allowing 3rd party developers to develop "apps" for the Kindle. (What a weird, lame, step sideways.)

All of this will culminate this year with the Kindle, Sony eReaders, Nook and other entrants to focus on selling hardware on its own merits, rather than locking readers into certain hardware based off of which book or periodical you want to buy.

Apple, of course, will continue to do its own thing and lock you into their ecosystem...and you'll just continue to buy into it, won't'ya? Sheesh.
3D Television Makes a Frightening Sound When It Expodes on Impact, Scares the Children

I just bitched about this in my CES 2010 review, but Jesus Christmas...seriously Sony / LG / Pioneer / Toshiba / DirectTV / etc? No one wants this. No one.

Sure, we all loved Avatar. I loved Avatar. The new TRON is going to be awe inspiring in 3D. It really will. But, good God, man...we all just spent a crapload of money on flatscreens in 2008, and you just convinced us to buy Lawrence of Arabia again on Blu-Ray. Do you think we're all gonna throw those out to buy $3000 3D monitors and new content in 2010 so we can, do what, watch the occasional effects movie or sporting event while wearing dork-vision spectacles? Do you seriously expect us to put those freakin' things on to watch Jay rape Conan?

I only hope that the amount of money you have put into R&D and rushing these things to production, as well as the money you are about to spend on marketing, doesn't lead us all into another recession as your rocket flames out at high altitude and slams into the pavement below at supersonic speeds.

Jeez, call me when you can do this 3D crap without the glasses, please. I'll be about ready to replace my flatscreen by then.
The New Cold War Begins

Google and Hillary Clinton on the same side of the fence. Oh, what wonders have we wrought?

Unless you have been living under a rock, or really absorbed in NBC late night politics, by now you've heard that...uh, China has allegedly been trying to hack gmail to get email from potential dissidents. This prompted a response from Google (ok, it was self-serving for a number of reasons, but still...a response) as well as the US state department. For it's response to all of this, spokespeople at the Chinese Foreign Ministry have issued a "bite me" statement, claiming that China has an "open internet" and the US should mind its own business if it doesn't want to harm Sino-American relations.

Part of the benefit of being 900 years old, is that I do have a bit o' a memory the last time this sort of talk was bandied about - all that's missing at this point is someone banging their shoe on a podium claiming that they will bury us.

China is huge, and becoming an economic superpower in a world where information can no longer be tightly controlled by nation-states. The United States is an economic superpower recovering from a huge blow to its populace and ego. The stage is set for a showdown that has happened before, and the results are often not pretty - patriotism takes a back seat to xenophobia, the good of the people takes a backseat to national principles. Global economic recovery in 2010 could be hurt by an internet-fueled cold war redux.

By the way, Ms Clinton? China? My gmail password is "WishIHadAProperGavel2." Just trying to save everybody some time.
Porn Goes the Way of Do-Do-Dildo

Jeez, I had lot I could have gone with for the header.

"Porn No Longer Thrusts Hard into Consumers"

...or...

"Porn Runs Out of Viagra, Millions Disappointed"

...or...

Alright, alright...I'll get to the point. CES shares its venue each year with the Adult Entertainment Expo. While not as large or throbbing (alright, alright...I'll stop) as CES, the AVN is an important event in the porn industry. Like every other industry, they spend a few days doling out awards, patting themselves on their backs, and discussing new tech and film potentials. The event is seriously hyped, and traditionally takes up a few floors of the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas.

While att endance was up over last year by 10%, mostly due to the low $10 admission price to get walk ins, the size of the venue was significantly reduced, taking up only a quarter of its space last year. In an excellent piece in the Daily Beast, Richard Abowitz discusses "Top 5 Reasons Porn-for-Profit is Dying." Among his arguments is, of course, file sharing - but more interestingly he holds the confluence of two interesting issues higher than piracy (or at least equal to piracy) for the rapid demise:

1) It's no longer taboo. The internet has demystified porn, and made it "acceptable" to a certain extent. (Parents, close your eyes for the next part.) It's no longer considered a big deal if your girlfriend lets it all hang out online, sometimes its even a matter of pride. (Oh sure, you'll never get a white collar job again, but why quibble?) The end result is the same effect you are seeing in online media vs traditional media: there's more free content out there, so why pay?

2) World of Warcraft. OK, not World of Warcraft specifically, but online gaming. Let's face it, the vast majority of porn-obsessed fans are the adolescent-to-20-something crowd who have a limited amount of time and money. It would appear that the discretionary dollars that used to go to "Nurse Nancy's Bedtime Videos" (I made that up, I swear!) now get converted to Linden Dollars to buy a virtual pair of jeans. It turns out when competing for dollars and time, porn loses.

Online pay-for porn killed the back-alley porn shops, and this new combination of pressures looks like it is doing the same to online pay-for-porn. Still a financial powerhouse, porn is no longer the 800-pound gorilla it once once. Rocket prediction: by Q4 of this year, online pay-for-porn will realize less than 25% of its 2007 numbers.

What will Ron Jeremy do now? Become a Starbucks Barista? (All together now: ewwww!)
Pressure is on IPv6 to Not Screw Up

A lot of natural resources are scarce these days: clean water, oil and gas, IP addresses.

Quick recap: the IPv4 protocol is the system of 4, 3-digit numbers that most of you see when you are setting up a new computer or internet device (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), but is the primary "phone number" system used over the internet for moving traffic from place to place. IPv4 was developed in the late 70's and put into place in January of 1980, replacing its aging predecessor. Like all technology from that era, it was planned with remarkable shortsightedness, and lack of imagination for the future.

OK, that's a little cruel - IPv4 is based on a 32-bit addressing scheme, anything more back then would have been expensive to implement. Still, I maintain it was a failure of imagination to not conceive of a future where every lightswitch and RFID tag would have its own internet address.

Well, like the old MS-DOS 640K memory limit, time's up kids. IPv4 can hold only about 18M private addresses (or about 270M multicast addresses), and it doesn't take a research analyst to imagine that the world is dangerously close to that many internet addressable devices. Not everyone can just use these addresses, there is an agency in existence, the NRO (Number Resource Organization) that doles these things out, but according to their most recent accounting this month, there's less then 10% addressable space left...which is annoying since just a few months prior, they were saying we had 18% of the addressable space left. Why? Uh, the geek equivalent of an accounting error.

Fortunately, there is a savior. IPv6 is the next iteration of the IP addressing standard, and the addition of those two extra triple-octal numbers allows for 64-bit addressing, as opposed to 32-bit addressing. This effectively gives IPv6 enough room for 3.4×10³⁸ (340 trillion trillion trillion) unique addresses. Yay! We're saved.

Sort of. IPv6 has been around for a few years: the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, for instance, were a notable event in terms of IPv6 deployment, being the first time a major world event has had a presence on the IPv6 Internet at http://ipv6.beijing2008.cn/en (IP addresses 2001:252:0:1::2008:6 and 2001:252:0:1::2008:8) and all network operations of the Games were conducted using IPv6. As cool as that was, OS's have been slow to adopt, and when they have it's not been pretty. Vista, Windows7 and recent OSx incantations have included IPv6 in their protocol stacks, but have added them in a ham-handed way, often causing collisions between in-use IPv4 protocols and the newer IPv6 protocols.

Nothing like a little pressure to help clear the mind, and running out of IP addresses might be just what the doctor ordered. Rocket prediction: 40% of traffic carried via IPv6 addresses by end of 2010.

Yeah. I think I'll lose this one too.
Bye-bye Hulu

At least in its current viewership numbers. I take no great pride in this prediction, but I do think that Hulu will be seriously crippled by year's end, if not completely shuttered.

With the purchasing of NBC by Comcast, Hulu's future is in serious doubt. NBC is a major stakeholder in the internet streaming service, and Comcast has just rolled out Fancast as its own streaming solution for its customer base. You do the corporate math.

And while you're cypherin', Jethro, factor in the dozens of other papercuts that Hulu has been dealt recently: content providers pressuring them to shut off alternative access channels, like Boxee; worse than expected ad revenue causing it to consider charging; and restricting content to less than a seasons worth for many of the shows that it carries.

Again, it doesn't fill me with joy to make this prediction, but I hope Hulu didn't spend all of its dollars on Superbowl ads and Seth McFarland.
FCC Not Withstanding, Tiered Pricing Internet and Mobile is Coming.
In January the DC district court posed to blow the legs out from underneath the FCC, by stating that the Comcast/Bittorrent throttling argument was a compelling argument to keep the FCC's hands out of internet regulation. (See, if I had written this in December, like I was supposed to, I would have come to a different conclusion. Yeah yeah...I know.)

Oddly, rather than doing handstands, Comcast's response to this was to back away slowly while muttering...uh, hahaha...uh...that's not exactly what we meant. Herold Feld has a good analysis of this on PublicKnowledge.org where he claims that the reason for Comcast's reaction is that ISP essentially do not want the FCC pulled from the debate because they need an adult in the room. If the FCC is removed from the conversation, then when a crisis occurs the blame and responsibility fall on the ISPs, not the federal government.

Suffice it to say, the story is far from over - but it will culminate in a tiered pricing structure from at least one of the major ISP (land or mobile) by end of 2010. Let's hope it doesn't wind up being a disaster - a tiered structure is fine, actually, if implemented correctly. If not, however, it could mean the difference between the promise of the internet and the greed of big business.
Good Out of Horrible: Technology Breaks the Logjam of Giving

The recent natural disasters in Haiti were horrible. People's futures and lives will never be the same - and the outpouring of understanding, solidarity and support from the rest of the world (except for that jag-off Pat Robertson) has been heartening and awe-inspiring.

Now, we've seen this story played out before: natural disasters and human atrocities claiming the attention and sympathy of the world. Yet, while people are concerned and give support, few take action. The reasons for this are entirely human. When tragedy strikes someone you don't know half a world away, there is a disconnect between the empathy and a call to action. Those who do should be praised, but all too often, most of us do not. Finding your credit card and a number to call to send relief funds to take time, and that time often jars your mind out of the empathy you are feeling. If we are honest with ourselves, we've all experienced this.

This time, however, there was a different component added: this time, the International Red Cross set up an SMS toll road for its international response fund. By texting “HAITI” to 90999 from your cell phone, $10 is donated to the relief effort and added to your cell phone bill. In today's cell obsessed environment, it was a no brainer. The message was distributed by the Red Cross via Twitter and Facebook, and response was immediate. By January 19th, this SMS campaign has raised $22m, or a full 1/5th of the relief dollars generated by the Red Cross for Haiti.

This was a watershed moment - prior to this, the Red Cross' highest bar for technology-based giving schemes was $400,000. (In other words, an increase of 55 times.) Social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the ubiquity of cell phones, the willingness and generosity of ordinary citizens, and the ease of the methodology have all converged at the right point in time to create a new way of giving that decades of tax breaks, philanthropy, and doe-eyed children pimped by last years actors on late night television have been unable to accomplish.

Over the next year, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and other organizations will begin to combine their databases and cross promote, using cell phone technologies and social networking to redistribute the wealth properly to areas of the world that could use it.

And it bears repeating: By texting “HAITI” to 90999 from your cell phone, $10 is donated to the relief effort and added to your cell phone bill.

OK...that's it for this year, minus 3 weeks. Let's see how I do in 11 months. (The Apple thing's a shoe-in tho...)

The Newst Who in Whoville...

2010-01-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

....ok, a brief break from the usual techie stuff so we can spend a brief moment to acknowledge David Tennant's passing into Who History with an unfortunately muddled final two-parter. Despite what was easily the worst written send-off for a Doctor, Tennant is a tough act to follow - but I said that about Chris Eccleston as well, so we'll see if the youngest actor to man the TARDIS, Matt Smith, can pull it off. The BBC press release pictures of him (on the right here) make him look like a direct response to "Edward" in the Twilight films, but last week's few moments of Smith after the transformation seemed to have placed a wee bit of doubt in my skepticism. Smith seems to have absorbed the same manic brilliance, human alienness, and neurotic clear-thinking that have blessed/plagued the 10 who came before him.

So, I'm up for it, let's see what he's got. To check it out for yourself, here's the new season trailer:

...and check out IO9 for a nifty breakdown of the above.

CES 2010...now in Amazing 3D!!!!!!!

2010-01-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm gonna 'fess up to cheating. My 2010 prediction post is late. Very late. I was waiting until I got to CES so that I could take a peek under the covers to see what there is to offer. So sue me.

I had assumed it would happen - so had everyone. This year's CES was gonna be all about EYE POPPING, EXCITING 3D TV!! I guess I wasn't mentally prepared for it though... Walking into the Las Vegas Convention Center was a little like a trip to a Best Buy in some alternative reality. I have no idea how many bazillions of dollars worth of display technology was littering the walls, ceilings, and the occasional floor, but it sure as hell didn't look like we ever had a recession. (Hell, even the drifters from the Adult Entertainment Expo at the Venetian were floored, and some of those people have been "3D augmented" for years.)

I would like to blame the success of Avatar on all these panels, but the reality is that it takes years for this stuff to hit production, and 3D television has been bandied about for at least a decade. So, call it a happy coincidence for James Cameron that his 3D Blu-Ray edition of Avatar will now have something to play on.

Nonetheless, the question remains - will this transparent attempt by the consumer electronics industry to get you to ditch your plasma's and LCD screens pay off? The OEMs seem to have convinced themselves that all of us have convinced ourselves that televisions sets are commodity items, requiring repurchases every few years like laptops. I don't think that way (I love my energy gobbling plasma, thank you very much), and I suspect that without a compelling reason to switch, most of you don't either.

So, is 3D compelling enough for you to ditch the $3000 machine you just hung on your wall a scant 2 years ago? I'll get to that in a minute, but let's just go over what I saw this afternoon...

I didn't have to try very hard. Every major OEM is out here in full force promoting 3D, thin, or, yes, even transparent display technology. LG, Samsung, Sony, and even no-one-has-ever-heard-of-it TCL are all vying for top "WOW" factor. The opening image above was from the double billboard sized display for LG's new Infinia line of panels. These things are thin. Razor thin. At only about a quarter inch in depth, they are beveled in glass, causing the display to appear to float out from the wall mounting. The Infinia line is more a marketing brand play, and less a technology - as Infinia's can appear in LCD or Plasma flavors.

The Infinia line also boasts 3D technology, in both active (LCD shutter glasses required) and passive (polarized non-shuttered glasses required) flavors - but both behave about the same, with a slight dip in color brightness in the passive models. As far as I know, the Infinia line of monitors from LG is available now....

Samsung is introducing a similar fleet of thin, 3D capable displays - although these are active matrix OLED (AMOLED) powered displays, stealing the thunder from Sony's OLED attempt a few years ago. Unlike the Sony, the Samsung's come in sizes bigger, than 11 inches. (This would be a perfect time for another crack at the Adult Expo going on next door, but it's too easy....oh, the hell with it: "...yet, next door at the Adult Expo, 11 inch technology is considered to be all the rage..." There. Happy now?)

The Samsung AMOLED displays are stunning. Not only are the specs on these things off the charts (100,000:1 contrast ratio for starters), but Samsung developed a sense of design somewhere along the way. These things range in size from 20" up to what looks like a 50" display, encased in stainless steel. Really. I know I drool over electronics a lot, but this is something else entirely. Click on the images I provided and take a look for yourself.

Samsung also had a transparent display. Really. Straight from Minority Report, Dollhouse or Avatar. It was unnamed, and connected up to a standard Windows 7 laptop to give the display something to drive it, but the applications for this type of thing are way beyond "cool prop for TV show" categories. I couldn't get a clear picture of it, cuz this guy below was filming for Wired - but he did a great job, so lets just use him, shall we?

The most interesting 3D display technology for my buck though, came from a company I've never heard of. The Creative Life out of China created a 3D display technology that did not require glasses. The photo I've attached here does not do the display justice. You have to trust me here when I say that the images popped off the screen, and allowed for about 100 degrees of viewing.

The "however" part of this announcement (you knew there had to be one) had to do with the tech they used to achieve this effect. It order to trick your eye in to seeing a 3D image, TCL turned their entire display surface in to a giant, lenticular lens.

The resulting images look great for 3D - although I have my doubts as to whether the system can properly support 2D since the lenticular patterns are cut into the display itself. The whole thing would probably look like it was being displayed through a giant Fresnel lens. The literature for the device claims it does display 2D, but the booth ba...uh, helpful TCL personnel couldn't really answer my question and were unable to play a 2D video on these displays...so.... I dunno.

Which brings us to the whole practicality and desire of 3D displays that I mentioned at the start of this posting. Is the tech compelling enough for hordes of people to run down to Best Buy next Christmas? There's the content argument (there isn't much of it), but that's not really important. If there's a big rush of orders for these things, there will be content. It's more a question of...does anyone care? There are specialized, niche reasons where 3D makes sense: football games, over-the-top "event" movies.... but, really, are you gonna put on a pair of goofy glasses to watch Modern Family or Craig Ferguson? I doubt it - but lord knows I've been wrong before.

There is one exception to this, though: gaming. I wandered over to the Sony booth, and played around with PS3's running 3D versions of existing games. The results were pretty incredible (Little Big Planet is already addicting enough without the third dimension), and gamers are already used to festooning (Yes, it's a freakin' word! Look it up.) themselves with all sorts of crap. They also spend huge amounts of money on their gaming systems, so it isn't out of the question that they would toss down another $5K on a 3D monitor.

So that's the 3D and thinness fun in today's little CES excursion, what else was there?

Well, for one thing, everyone seemed to be all about the blue this year. All the giant Veridian Dynamics companies must have shared the same space designers, because everything looked like a crappy nightclub....or a Virgin America flight.

And...let's see....oh yes, Sony needs to fire the product marketing genius who came up with the name "Bravia Monolithic Design" for their new line of high performance displays. In a show filled with wafer-thin little anorexic displays, was "Monolithic" really the best word you could come up with?

Finally, there was, poor Toshiba. Still feeling the sting of watching HD-DVD get the living crap kicked out of it by Blu-Ray, they refuse to give up... kinda like the ugly America tourist who thinks that if you just talk louder and slower at the Spanish, they will understand what you are saying. In the face of all odds, Toshiba was touting its "Cell TV" technology.

What's "Cell TV" technology? I have no idea. Furthermore, neither did anyone at the Toshiba booth. Really. I was passed from booth person to booth person in a sort of "that guy over there knows" fashion. It was very bizarre. (Fortunately, Gizmodo figured it out.) However, gleaning what I could from obliquely phrase posters and marketing hype videos, it has something to do with a combination of a number of technology to make the pixels brighter, convert 2D to 3D and, ahem, upscale a 1920×1080 image to a 4K image.

Yeah. I crap you not. Apparently, someone at Toshiba thinks that 1920x1080 on a 50" monitor just isn't going to cut it with the kids anymore. So, we need to uprez! More pixelizerers! More! Better!! Yeah! And then...they'll grow tired of uprezing and want the real deal! Then they'll need a physical media to support it! YES!! HD-DVD is BACK baby! HD-DVD II!!! YEAH! 4K.

Sigh. Here's the deal. They had this display running. Split screen. 1920x1080 on one side, uprezed 4K on the other. As God as my witness, I couldn't tell the difference. At all. I tried, I really did. I stared and squinted, and I got closer and farther away, and I tilted my head. I even have bionic eyes now. Nothing.

Dear Toshiba: Enough is enough. It's over. Just...stop it. You're embarassing me and your mother. Just...I dunno. Make thin screens or something. Love, Rocketman.

The 2009 Rocket Prediction Tally...

2009-12-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

God, I hate the year-end prediction wrap-up. The PREDICTIONS are fun, I can just sit here with a whiskey pounding them out, but the wrap-up? Gah!!! Fact checking, looking things up. This is actual WORK man...sigh.

Fine, fine....alrighty then. Let's see what sort of a score I can give myself this year - and see if I can outdo my 2008 75% hit ratio. I kinda doubt it since 2009 was so flippin' all over the place, but...let's get started:

I made 10 predictions at the start of 2009, and tried to cover the gambit from consumer electonics, to services, to the tech industry in general.

Economic recovery begins in early Q3 for the tech and housing industries.
WIN

It may not feel like it to everyone, but the economy is definitely picking up steam. In my professional life, I have seen ad revenues increase significantly, and the number of available startup opportunities is on the rise. Both of these things began around August-September of 2009.

In more measurable, and less subjective, trending - the numbers show that the number of layoffs dropped significantly in November, and the leading economic indicators began rising in the US around the end of the summer.

The Obama Administration revitalizes the tech industry within 6 months of taking office.
TOSS UP

OK, I'm going to play fair here. The tech industry is in the midst of a recovery, but this "prediction" I made was pretty vague. Could have meant anything - so I don't really want to claim it. (Of course, I'm not claiming it as a loss, either.) Also, Aneesh Chopra is currently defending himself against Jon Stewart, so, uh....

MEMS technology for low power / flexible displays hits the market.
WIN

OK, second time is the charm, but I'm still taking it. MEMS (microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems) display technologies are moving mainstream - whether its from the cleverly named Qualcomm spinoff (although its probably not a good sign that their COO just left at the end of December), or the nanotech from eInk and others, smaller, flatter, less-power-consuming displays are appearing everywhere. It powers your Kindle, Nook and Sony eReader, and its making its way into still more displays, but it's clear that the nano-based, low-power displays are here. (We'll know more after the Consumer Electronics Show in January.)
Android phone sales hit iPhone numbers before end of year
LOSS

Eh, chalk this one up to wishful thinking. Android, however, has started to show its promise in a major way as the year progressed. The plethora of Android based phones that we were promised last year, has started to make its way onto center stage. TMobile has the CLIQ and MyTouch, and, of course, the Verizon Droid needs no introduction. I can tell you from my professional experience, that video access by Android devices is way up, and info from AdMob shows both the distro of Android handsets as well as Android claiming 24% of all smartphone usage as of the end of November - mostly due to the Droid.

Still, total Android units are well below those of the iPhone, although a number of industry research firms are claiming Android will move into the top two spots within the next year or two.
Digital delivery of home media makes a measurable change in broadcast TV numbers
WIN

The numbers are speaking for themselves here, which is why I liked this prediction - its easy to show. it may not be your grandpa and grandma, or even your parents, but viewers are beginning their shift to online - or at least - digitally stored media. Not only has iTunes, Amazon VoD, and Netflix experienced rapid adoption this year, but so has streaming services like Hulu, which now gets as many views as pay cable. In addition, DVR (digital recording and local storage of broadcast television) content has finally been started to be taken seriously.

In the fall, TheCW and Fox unwittingly entered an experiment. Both networks pitted popular genre shows (Fringe, and Supernatural) against each other. The result was that the Nielsen ratings for both shows (along with CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Flash Forward, and others) tanked. In fact, they dropped so much that Fringe, bizarrely enough, was moved to a "on the bubble" (for cancellation) category. However, once people woke up and Nieslen published it's DVR view numbers, it became clear that these shows maintained their viewship numbers, but were simply timeshifted. I suspect the viewing numbers will increase again, once digital downloads from Amazon and iTunes, and digital streaming from Hulu and the network websites are taken into account.

Significant drops in Blu-Ray player prices combined with content publisher pressure to release existing titles in a new format will push Blu-Ray disc sales past DVD disc sales
WIN

Note: all units in the graphs below are in millions. At first glance, this doesn't appear to be a win. Using sales information available from HMM/Nielsen, unit sale market share of Blu-Ray is about 14%. However, when plotted on a dual access along side of DVD sales, an interesting trend occurs.

Spurred on by a 12% drop in Blu-Ray disc prices throughout the year, plus the availability of inexpensive Blu-Ray players and the ubiquity of Blu-Ray titles, 2009 Blu-Ray sales trajectory is outpacing the 2009 DVD sales trajectory. This indicates the beginning of the adoption curve for Blu-Ray and the end of the adoption curve for DVD.

Although the raw sales numbers won't catch up until mid-2010 at this rate, I'm a big enough of an asshole to still claim the win for this prediction.
As Apple pushes deeper into double-digit territory for laptop sales, several serious viral attacks begin in the Mac community. Lack of adequate protection combined with consumer hubris will make the problems significant.
WIN

It began right in the beginning of 2009, actually, in late January - coming on board your lovely OS X laptop with, you guessed it, pirated versions of iWork '09. First recognized as a threat by Intego Securities on January 22, and calling itself Black Orange (these virus writers have awesome marketing departments, I must say!) it spread like wildfire through the community, indicating the number of people in the union of the Venn Diagram who think its a) ok to cop a piece of software, b) safe to be on a Mac. The virus was so efficient (well, the host was) that it was still prevalent as late as April.

The iWorks virus was followed by a parade of virus, malware and other yummy bits on the Mac, which - through no lack of coincidence - hit the 10% market share magic number briefly in Q2. The heightened sense of reality finally caused the "gold standard" in windows and linux based antivirus protection, Kasperksy, to release a version its antivirus software for the Mac....in frakin' October.

Mac boards have been all a swirl with confusion this year, some folks still claiming it wasn't possible for Macs to get a virus, and some irresponsible download services blogging that anti-virus companies were fear-mongering to get Mac users to buy anti-virus software. Yeah, not so much.

At least one other additional security exploits occur in the basic structure of the aging internet protocol and backbones, forcing a rethink of the way packets are carried over the Internets
Win

Late in 2008, Dan Kaminsky's now famous DNS security flaw was revealed to a stunned panel of internet backbone companies. Many complied (thank you Comcast) many did not (screw you Time Warner), but once patched, the 20+ year old security flaw seemed under control, and the fears were to be put at rest...

...until this year. When not one, but three other DNS flaws were uncovered.
- In January, a security flaw in BIND was quietly patched.
- In February it was revealed that a DNS caching error could allow people to redirect you to a false website, much like last year's Kaminsky error.
- On November 23rd, ISC reported another flaw with BIND.
Seriously, guys. It's over 25 years old. It was invented by a newly minted PhD at the request of guy who just wanted to clear up his own bookkeeping for 12 friggin' computers.

OK, I'm not giving these guys enough due, but come on. My bank records are using this thing. Let's clean it up and start again, please.
Windows 7 arrives at the latter-half of the year, but the PR damage done by the mishandling of Vista's public perception plus the stillborn Microsoft marketing campaign PLUS John Hodgman ensures a tepid reception to the new OS.
LOSS

Ok, I'm kinda happy about being wrong about this one. I'm not a big Microsoft torch bearer, but I'm not an Apple apostle either. Competition is a good thing, and having viable operating system on the market that hasn't been pre-tarred and feathered is an excellent thing. (Apologies, Linix ...but, come on...be serious please. And Google OS, you're still vaporware, at least in '09.)

Windows 7 is pretty damn remarkable - it made a 1G, 5 year old laptop of mine run like I just bought it yesterday, whereas Vista had it crawling to a stop upon boot up. All indications are that the market loves it too, and its been a critical darling since the reviewers got ahold of the alpha versions of the OS. If Microsoft's ass-backwards, destined-to-get-in-its-own-way marketing crew couldn't stop this product, Hodgman never stood a chance.
Yahoo breaks up into its original component companies, or at least puts them on the auction block, before Q4.
Loss

Effing Yahoos. No, they didn't divest....
...or spit up.
...or fall apart.
...or grow.
...or shrink.
...or fade away.
...or come on strong.

What they did do was spend the year playing c-tease with Microsoft, and coming up with this winning multi-bazillion dollar ad campaign. "Yahoo! It's You?"

Eff You! Seriously. What EXACTLY do you guys do for a living? Search? Ads? Email? IM? WHAT? Really, I'd love to know. Oh, that's right, you reactivated rocketmail! Sweet! You know what? I've been missing Compuserve lately, think you could re-animate that dead tissue, too?

Sorry...I'm just bitter at losing a point on this one.

OK...let's just total these puppies up and see how I did...

10 predictions...I was right or dead even....7 times. 7 out of 10. 70%. That's a drop from last year. Huh. Uh...well...uh....

...damn Yahoo.

Don't Cross the Streams...Why? It Would Be Bad.

2009-12-23T23:41:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is less of a blog post and more like one of those public safety announcement thingies... I spent the better part of today, when I should have been making damn certain I remembered how to fillet a bronzini in time for Christmas dinner, straightening out a Chrome and Firefox mess.

It started as all of these things do: an impulsive swapping out of a beloved piece of software over a minor "difference of opinion." I thought if I strolled around town with Chrome for a few days, Firefox would see the error of her ways and come crawling back on hands and knees...

It, uh, didn't quite work out that way, of course.

Like a lot of folks out there, I use XMarks (formerly "FoxMarks," until they realized that locking themselves into a specific vendor in this market was most likely foolish) to sync my browser bookmarks cross platform between instances of Firefox on windows, mac and ubuntu. I had previous played with Chrome before, but didn't use it in earnest because it never had addons/extensions. Now, of course, it does - meaning I could use most of the tools I had previously used over in Firefox, including XMarks.

After installing Chrome on Ubuntu, I added the XMarks extension, fired it up, and...Voilà! Bookmarks in Chrome, nicely organized. It worked so well, I installed Chrome + XMarks on Windows7 and OSX. (See where this is going?) Look! HA! See that Firefox? She new and shiny, and she has all the accessories that you have. I don't need you anymore...and I never think about you....

...well...you were really nice to me all those years. Maybe I can forgive your weight problem. I mean, what's a half a megabyte of extra poundage anyway? It's just baby fat! Oh....come here, you saucy minx....I'm sorry. Chrome didn't mean anything, she was just a fling...

Uh oh.

When Firefox came back up, XMarks engaged....within 15 seconds consumed 99% of the CPU, and the hard drive was pounding.

Now, XMarks has never been very good about admiting problems: they have a tendency to ignore the really tricky, hard-to-reproduce stuff and concentrate on the easier issues in their forums. (Last year when Foxmarks was transitioning to XMarks, 100's of us in their forums started complaining that XMarks would often not install in Firefox. There were little to no responses from them on the topic, and the problem mysteriously disappeared during one of their releases.) So, I didn't expect to find much in their forums about this issue, and then I happened across this little ditty:

"...after syncing Chrome, Firefox gets an "Other Bookmarks" folder added, which is really just the name of Chrome's bookmark root..."

Oops.

The XMarks people have yet to respond to this thread, and the other folks in the forum have so far just noted that its an "annoyance" to have Other Bookmarks in the bookmark tree - but, no kids, its much more insidious than that. Since Other Bookmarks is the root of the Chrome bookmark tree, but to the Firefox bookmark manager it appears as a folder, when sync'ing a Chrome-written bookmark tree back to Firefox, you've just established this nice little recursion:

Firefox Tree ->
Other Bookmarks Folder ->
Chrome Root ->
Firefox Tree ->
Other Bookmarks Folder ->
Rinse ->
Repeat...

And, as an added bonus, if you use the "automatic sync" function inside of XMarks, you are guaranteed to pass this recursion rule on to the XMarks Mother Ship, who will propagate it down to all of your other Firefox instances that have auto sync turned on. Yay! The longer you let XMarks attempt additional syncs while you figure out what is happening (yeah, that's me) the deeper the recursion layer, and very shortly your CPU and hard drive will be maxed out. Double yay!

How do you get out of this mess? XMarks isn't sayin', and if you try to delete the recursive folder Other Bookmarks from your myxmarks.com account, XMarks refuses to let you do it because it's identified that folder as the root folder of your bookmark tree - which, of course, it is on Chrome.

After a day of fiddling, there are really only three ways to do this, ranging in frustration from "Oh Thank God I'm so lucky" to "Sigh." (Oh, and needless to say, all of these methods require you to uninstall XMarks - or disable it - from Chrome first, or you'll be back where you started.)

Locate a machine that does not have XMarks set to auto sync, yet still has your most recent bookmark list. You can then use the XMarks "force overwrite of server" function to push your local bookmark tree up to the XMarks server, which will then propagate the corrected tree to your other Firefox instances. No harm, no foul.
Log into myxmarks.com and restore your bookmark tree from a point prior to your first Chrome sync. This will, of course, lose your most recent bookmarks, but stop whining like a little baby and grow a set...you'll find that porn again.
Turn off XMarks auto sync, then use your bookmark manager in Firefox to delete the Other Bookmarks folder. This will take some time if XMarks did many sync attempts before you figured out what was going on. Alternatively, you can delete it manually by going to the location of your Foxmarks bookmarks on your drive and blowing away the Other Bookmarks entry. On Windows7 this is located here:

..Users\[your XP user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\bookmarksbackups

So, there you have it. XMarks is a great tool if you have multiple browser installations, multiple laptops, or just want a good way to back up all those bookmarks...but, like all sync'ing solutions since the dawn of time, it's also a good way to propagate mistakes really, really fast.

The Nerdliness of Language

2009-12-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

I spent my college years (undergraduate and graduate) steeped in science and math. Practically every waking moment which was not spent studying science and technology was spent reading about science and technology. (Well, ok... there were illicit substances, poker, certain ladies of my acquaintance, and God knows what else ....but...after all that then there was science! ...well...bratwurst....then science...er, bratwurst and sandwiches. Crap. Ok: Illicit substances, poker, women, bratwurst, and sandwiches...and THEN science.)

Those hours were spent both in the pursuit of science (experiments, study, history of science) and in the camaraderie of people who - while not necessarily like minded - believed in the same constructs and principles. It framed our conversations, and moved us to a common point of conversation where we could agree, argue, discuss, and laugh. Thought of another way, it gave us a reason to drink together.

All of those hours, days, weeks, years of being in that community - the commonalities of prose became apparent. There is an elegance to this distortion of language that is very similar to any collection of people searching to find a common ground: sports fans, religious adherents, vegetarians, punk rockers, opera buffs, comic book fans...every subculture under the sun. It's a slang, of sorts, applied to descriptions of terms, ideas and concepts. A way of communicating complex ideas with a minimum of words. It's almost a subconscious attempt of the mind to contract the language. The slang is picked up from contractions of scientific, engineering or mathematics terms, of course, but more interestingly, some is picked up from the street, from pop culture, and from the daily banter of everyday life.

Limiting the conversation to computers for a moment, much of the slang is famously known - the world knows what a virus is when applied to computers, or morphing when it comes to computer graphics. Curiously, the language of the digerati sometimes migrates in the opposite direction, back out to the street: Crashing almost needed no explanation when it was introduced to a population newly enamoured with personal computers. People were more than happy to apply the term to themselves when they stayed up to late, or couldn't work any more for the day. Busy executives are quick to tell people that they are multitasking, even though few of them understand what that term actually means.

Perhaps it is because computers have a symbiotic relationship with the public that the language barrier between the geek and the street is two-way permeable, but other, more esoteric, fields of study that isn't quite the case. To the outsider, hearing common, everyday terms used in technical or scientific descriptions may sound odd, harsh, or lend themselves to misinterpretation. The field of mathematics is chalk o' block full of an odd juxtaposition of language, phraseology and street slang. The use of the word trivial doesn't necessary mean that something is easy, but rather that something is "well understood by everyone in the room, so shut the eff up so we can get on with the real conversation." ("There's no need to go into the proof of the prime-number theorem here, Bob, it's trivial.")

Because of this re-purposing of common words, whenever the outside world hears mathematicians, computer scientists, or comic book fanboys talk - the result is often confusion or misinterpretation. While this is understandable - and should be predictable by most of "inside language" participants - real trouble begins when the press gets involved. Having worked at government science labs for the first half of my career, I was often interviewed by the press and media - and the resulting, published "interviews" were most illuminating. I very quickly learned to change the use of my language whenever I wished to convey information to anyone outside the group.

This misinterpretation of common words and terms can lead to amusing confusion in the public discourse, often revolving around computers and the internet - a "computer virus" although likened to biological viruses, are not biological viruses. Other times, this language makes its way out into the public discourse and is disastrously misinterpreted. The Large Hadron Collider has captured the public imagination, largely due to these language misinterpretations. (Thank you, Dan Brown, for adding to the mess....and I'm sure the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and the Vatican also thank you for adding to the popularization of misinterpretation.)

Scientists, because of the nature of their work and the natural honesty that comes with scientific inquiry, cannot say anything is certain - even if all evidence brought to bear on a topic confirms a theory or model, a (good) scientist will always feel compelled to say "I am 99% certain that this is true." So, when LHC researchers were asked if the LHC could generate a singularity that could destroy the earth, the physicists responded that they were 99.999% sure that it would not. This, of course, was picked up by the news media and translated as THERE IS A SLIGHT POSSIBILITY THAT THE LHC COULD GENERATE A BLACK HOLE THAT WOULD DESTROY THE EARTH. Don't even get me started on the press and H1N1.

Occasionally, however, there are people who fully understand the disparity between language inside a specific group and laypeople, and deliberately exploit those differences to further their own agendas. This isn't comical misinterpretation or unfortunate misreadings, it is a deliberate manipulation of the media and, by extemtion, public opinion by using what looks like corroboratory evidence. Most recently, we've had the e-mail that was stolen (I won't use the word "hacked") from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit - apparently by...well, no one knows who, or at least no one is saying anything.

The American and British press were all over this, with the usual screaming headlines, like this doosy from, of all places, the New York Times:

Hacked E-Mail is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

In the NY Times article, Andrew Revkin discusses how the email appears to underscore a belief in a conspiracy of climatologists who seek to convince the world that our climate is crumbling before our eyes. The language device that Revkin uses to passive-aggressively enforce the possibility of a conspiracy is of the worst kind of direct manipulation: The infamous double-ditto! (Or, rather, "double ditto,")

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

There is more, of course. The article is laced with names, double-dittos, nefarious snippets from the stolen correspondence, and "I told you so's!" from fringe climatologists, like Patrick J. Michaels. Michaels may or may not have been a climatologist for the state of Virginia - no one really can tell - but he is most definitely a climatologist at The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank cum lobby group in Washington DC that strives "to achieve greater involvement of the intelligent, lay public in questions of (public) policy and the proper role of government." Conveniently located in DC, Cato Institute members are frequent guests on chatty panel and talk shows aimed at public policy. Michael's himself has a number of books on the market on how climate change isn't gonna be so bad, and potentially beneficial, so between the books and the Face-The-Nation circuit, he's doin' just fine, thank you very much.

Swinging the spotlight back on Mr. Revkin and his word-play article in the NY Times - perhaps I can help him out a bit. The email that was stolen (again, not hacked) from the CRU contained hand-wringing (choice bits like “the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t..." are sprinkled throughout the article), insults lobbed at the anti-global warming camp, and - most importantly - the use of the word "trick" in conjunction with showing trending.

To his credit, Revkin does include a not-quite-a-quote from Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State, where Mann explains the use of the word "trick:"

He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

Even thought Revkin didn't properly include a quote from Mann, that explanation is something any mathematician would understand. Having spent years in a math department at my university, "trick" was a word that was used over and over again. It is not used to imply that something is being covered up or misled, but rather that something clever is being done to remove some steps from a process. Essentially, it means that a sort of mathematical shorthand is about to be employed - a way to get from point A to point C by skipping B.

With the hand wringing, that's just good science. Predictions made in the 80's about warmer climates appearing in the 00's have not happened. The implication is not that climate change is wrong necessarily, but rather that the model used to show the climate shift in the 80's was most likely faulty. (Actually, if climatologists had not mentioned the temperature not fitting the model, then there would be grounds for a conspiracy.) In my travels through science, business and public relations, I have found that the hardest concept for laypersons to understand about science is it's most basic precept: science is, by its nature, self-correcting. It holds no public office, it has no allegiances, it is not loyal to the men and women who study it. No matter how beloved a theory is, no matter how many careers depends on a specific conjecture, no matter how old and established an idea is: if data surfaces to contradict the established model, the scientific method demands you throw the model out or find a way that a legitimate modification adjusts for the new data.

To the layperson, this mode of being is 0ften interpreted as waffling, knowing all along that a theory or model was wrong, or a simply as a reason why science doesn't work. Rather than a principle of great objectiveness, it's often used as an excuse to doubt the validity of the scientific method in public discourse. Is it better to steadfastly believe in something that has long been proven to be inaccurate, or is it better to course correct as you move forward, adjusting to new information as it comes in?

Finally, the insults. Yup - I don't doubt it. I think that anti-climate change folks have been insulted by climatologists who believe in climate change. I think that climate change believers have been insulted by anti-climate changers... both, probably pretty frequently. In public and in private. It's human nature. If you're honest with yourself, you do it all the time - I sure as hell do. (Allow me to prove a point by throwing myself on the alter of demonstration: vegans are dinks. There. Was that so bad, really?)

The point here is not whether climate change is happening, or if there is a Giant Global Conspiracy (tm) of climatologists to scaremonger, as some believe - the point is that, taken out of context, words are tools. If used as intended and left in the context in which they are placed, they are sharp, efficient, surgical. If, however, they are separated from their owner's intent through careless or malicious use, they are blunt, crude instruments causing more harm than good.

If you read something that sounds outrageous - in science or politics - chances are pretty good you should listen to your inner editor. Do yourself (and the originator of the words) a favor and google a few things: look up the author, look up the sources, look up the facts.

*Cartoon by Chris Madden http://www.chrismadden.co.uk/

LHC Whacked by Artifacts from the Future? ... or God? ...or... Something?

2009-10-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

Two points of disclosure here before we continue:

1) I am not religious. Not even a tiny bit. I respect other people's right to be religious, as long as they respect my right to not be religious. I have Omnipotence Avoidance Issues. New term. You like it?

2) I like soup. Often for lunch, I go and grab a soup. It's healthy. It's nutritious. It's relatively low-fat. Well, except for the cream based soups, but that's another story.

Here's how those two life principles of mine come into play: Sometimes after I grab my lunch-soup, I come back to the office to eat and wipe my brain clean by reading websites that have nothing to do with my line of work - a guy eating soup needs a break, you know? So, there I was today, slurping my soup (minestrone, quite good actually) and reading IO9, a pop-culture science fiction website, and this little diddy popped up:

Is the Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

I, uh, choked on my soup a bit.

Ok, IO9 is a Gawker property, which is all about the snarky, so I put my tongue in my cheek as I read the article...which linked to a more serious New York Times article on the topic...and, that led me to research this a wee bit more.

For those that have missed the story up 'til this point, the Large Hadron Collider is one of the largest, and, as of today, still unrealized physics experiments in human history. It is a particle accelerator - a 17-mile long loop of a giant circus ride used to slam high energy particles together, so that we can look at the wreckage to see from what the original particles were made. Particle accelerators are nothing new in physics, but the LHC is another beast entirely. At €3 billion all in, 10,000 collaborators strong, and 100 countries supporting the effort, the LHC has a lot of eyes on it, and a lot of tasks on its plate once it gets lit up. The most important of which (and this fits into our little story here) is the tracking down of the Higgs-Boson particle. Or, as the kids like to call it these days: The God Particle. (Fox News didn't even give it this name, physicist Leon Lederman did.)

To understand why the Higgs-Boson particle is called The God Particle, requires just a cursory understanding of the current theory of what is the base level construct of matter. This theory, referred to as the Standard Theory, posits (oh lord, I used the word "posits" in my own blog. Kill. Me.) that there are four basic interactions (from weakest to strongest, first the two you've heard of: gravity, electromagnetism, and then the two with unsexy, unimaginative names: the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) between all matter in the Universe. Those interactions are conveyed through physical particles operating at quantum level scales: massless photons, W bosons, Z bosons, bleh bleh bleh. Physicists have observed all of the particles in this soup that are vector particles - i.e. elementary particles that have a vector or tensor component. Theoretically, there are scalar particles (single, unitary particles that impart no vector component to whatever system they belong to)...well, ok, really just one scalar particle.

Guess which one?

If the Higgs-Boson particle exists, and it can be observed by the LHC, it is the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle to understand how everything is constructed. All mass. All matter. Everywhere. It's a big deal. It is the Thing That Binds Us All, and that is not an understatement. Physicists with more poetic bent like to say that observing the Higgs-Boson particle would be like looking into the face of God...

...but, hell. Poetic physicists say a lot of crap like that for dramatic effect, so that their spouses know that all those nights "working" down "at the lab" is really worth it...and...they're real sorry you can't relate to what they're doing. Sure, it's not making a new marketing slogan for beer...or...writing a new iPhone application that burps when you shake it...or...anything tangible, really....but...it's like looking at the face of God, dammit...doesn't that mean anything, Wanda? Wanda? No...don't leave...where are you taking the kids...? Hey!! Get back here!

...oh, sorry. Uh, where was I...?

Right... Standard Models...right right... ok...

So, finding the Higgs-Boson particle is the missing link, and has been a holy grail of particle physics since it's existence was first hypothesized in 1964. Attempts have been made before, most notably at Fermilab, and the results have been tantalizing, inferring that the particle does exist. Inference, however, is not enough to convince rabid physics wonks. Without a direct observation of the God Particle, the science community cannot accept its existence. (Which, honestly, is fair. I mean, the financial community accepted the existence of the viability of giving $1M home loans to people making $30,000 a year without direct proof they can pay it back, and look where that got us.)

Enter the Large Hadron Collider. First proposed in the 90's, costs on the LHC were kept down (hahah, I love saying that) by reusing a tunnel at CERN that was used to house the LHC's smaller cousin, the Large Electron–Positron Collider.

As the LHC startup date of Sept 2008 approached, the blogosphere and mainstream media alike were filled with crackpot theories about the LHC bringing about the end of the world because it could spontaneously call into existence a black hole, causing the earth to fall in upon itself in huge Michael Bay-esque sorta deal.

The world waited, and on the morning of September 10th, 2008 the fuse was lit (just kidding) and two tiny particles were whipped through the 17 mile long circular tunnel, 3 kilometers at a time. Successful first test! Yay science, yay! No black hole, no Michael Bay, no Bruce Willis, just two subatomic particles goin' for a ride.

The official inauguration of the LHC was to take place on October 21, 2008 with continuous operation after that date. However, on September 19th, 2008, 6 tons of liquid helium was found venting through several of the bends in the magnets. This was the high-energy physics equivalent of the Challenger disaster, and the LHC was shut down until the problem was sussed out, and the system shaken down...

...waiting time is over, as the LHC is scheduled to go into operation in a few weeks, sometime in mid-November, 2009.

Alright, back to my choking-on-my-soup story...

In early October, 2009, two of the 10,000 physicists connected to the LHC, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, published a series of papers on the Cornell University physics website arXiv.org with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC ." Yup, the wacky duo of Nielsen&Ninomiya are saying that some measurable, physical force from the future is preventing the LHC from starting up and showing humans the God Particle.

That isn't too preposterous -well, ok, it really is, but stick with me here for sake of argument. The main thrust of the theory is that exposing the Higgs-Boson particle propagates events backwards through time preventing the LHC from functioning correctly. There's precedent for this in physics already - it is not possible, for instance, to observe the actual physicality in spacetime that we like to call a singularity, an infinite gravity well which is caused by the existence of an infinite mass. A singularity can never be directly observed because it comes with a cosmic bathrobe called an event horizon, beneath which no observational evidence can escape. The outer boundary of the event horizon is observed as the object we call a black hole. (In other words, a black hole is not a thing in and of itself, but an effect caused by the thing at its center: the singularity. A singularity not enshrouded by an event horizon is called a naked singularity, and is considered to be impossible.

The effect of the theory put forward by the comedy stylings of Nielsen&Ninomiya is the temporal equivalent. In essence, they propose that the exposure of the Higgs-Boson particle causes a ripple effect in spacetime that propagates backwards (rather than forwards) and extinguishes the cause of the Higgs-Boson exposure in the first place. In this case, I assume, by causing the venting of the aforementioned liquid hydrogen.

I guess I would have been fine with a theory which was expressed along pure physical cause-and-effect (or in this case: effect-and-cause) terms, but....there's more to this story. In an unpublished essay referenced by the New York Times, Nielsen supposedly made the statement “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God...that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Yeah. God. That God. I'm hoping he's being glib, as when Einstein expressed his distaste for quantum mechanics with the now famous phrase "God doesn't play dice with the Universe." (Einstein was not literally saying "God would never do this," he was simply expressing a rabid distaste of any physical principle in which the outcome could not be mathematically predicted.) I'm hoping that's the sorta meaning that Nielsen had in mind, but...uh...I kinda doubt it.

In the early 90's, looking for the Higgs-Boson particle was attempted before - this time as a sole effort by the United States. The Superconducting Supercollider was another BASC (Big Ass Supercollider) in a tunnel underneath Texas. $3B in, the US Congress canceled the project in 1993. An attempt by congress to control spending? Maybe. A panic move by reluctant Texas Governor Ann Richards? Possibly. A Bill Clinton "fuck you" to a project championed by Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush in Bush's home state of Texas? Sure, why not?

Calling the cancellation of the project an "anti-miracle," Nielsen has a different explanation: the future called, and they want their Higgs-Boson back. The cancellation of the project, he is suggesting, was caused by the effect of reverse propagation through time with the cause being the actual observation of the Higgs-Boson particle. Can a pure physical effect like a temporal shroud cause the US Congress to cancel funding? Or is Nielsen suggesting that God did it? Is he suggesting that people from the future did it? I'm not sure that he's sure.

For all my love of making fun of them (and I do so enjoy it), Nielsen&Ninomiya are not idiots. Nielsen was one of the co-founders of string theory, and Ninomiya won the Partical Physics Medal from the Japanese CiNii. These are smart guys, who sometimes take a road less traveled a bit too far, perhaps. Fortunately, they realize how their theories could be viewed - and they proposed an experiment:

CERN, it is argued, should engage in a game of chance - sort of a physics roulette. The activation of the LHC to look for the Higgs-Bose particle, should be triggered by an unpredictable event. A random number generation method, of some sort, could be connected to the big, giant "GO" button on the device. They even wrote a paper on it: Card Game Restriction on LHC. If the experiment occurs as planned, there is no effect from the future, if it doesn't occur, then there is some sort of physical response propagating backwards through time to prevent the LHC from conduction the particle observation.

What Would Einstein Do?

UPDATE: November 7th, 2009: Yeah. A bagel bit. Dropped by a bird. I'm just sayin'...

UPDATE: Dec 10th, 2009: So far, no Hand of God or Future Mettling: LHC One Step Closer to Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe

Relaxing with a Book in the Age of Digital

2009-10-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I was (pretty) convinced that everything I was going to do for entertainment would be available to me in my pocket - or at least through some sort of magic panels in the walls of my home. This was back in the late 60's early 70's, so most people just assumed I was nuts. (Of course I also thought I'd be living on the moon, so they were sorta right.)

I blame Star Trek for these thoughts. People walked around the cardboard sets of the Enterprise with little "memory cards" (ok, painted pieces of wood) that they would place into ubiquitous slots in walls or desks and entertainment, information, communication, etc would appear on the nearest wall panel. When walking around the surface of a planet (or, more appropriately, the redressed backlots of Desilu studios), they would put their little wooden memory cards in their tricorders to get the same information. (Incidentally, when you are 10, a binoculars case makes an excellent tricorder.)

Now, of course, that scenario is pretty much my Life In Information. (Actually, I'm willing to bet it's pretty much the Lives of Information of all you folks that read blogs like this.) My home is wired for gigabit ethernet, which is wired to the outside world at whatever speed Comcast decides to give me for the day. My body is bathed in wifi signals capable of 300Mb/s transmission, and the little memory cards in my phone, laptop, camera and camcorders contain portable files that I just haven't moved to my house network yet. Whenever I wish I can call up information, communication or entertainment on panels throughout the walls of my house, or on portable devices when I'm not at home.

Gone are my CDs, DVDs, albums, photographic prints, and other paraphernalia of the era of physical media, which - for the record - lasted from 3100 BC until, oh, a maybe few years ago. 5000 years, give or take a few decades, is a good run for any technology trend, dontcha think?

One of the last pillars of the era of physical media to fall is the printed word. There's a myriad of conversations going on right now, of course, about the fall of newspapers and magazines - and as much as I love my beloved weekend New York Times, I easily made the transition to nytimes.com.

However, the one form of printed word that seems to be taking forever to make the transition from atoms to bits is the book. Ironically, this was the first physical-to-digital medium that came under attack back when the internet was young. It made sense that it should have been the first to go, since even Moby Dick can be compressed down to about 200K when converted to a text file. 200K was the perfect size for dialup modem transfer rates of the day. So, what happened? After music, television and now high-definition film has made the move, why has it taken about 15 years before anyone was considering digitally consuming literature seriously?

Back in the day, electronic books (eBooks, or digital books, or whatever you want to call it) were displayed first on computer screens, and later on PDAs. While there were adherents to this, they were mostly the bleeding edge crowd - people who didn't mind ruining their vision by staring at small, glowing screens of maybe a few sentences. It was a horrible experience, and a terrible way to read. (Society has a short memory, and it seems to have forgotten about this period of eReading - as is evidenced by the Kindle Reader for the iPhone. The type of folks that would use this little glowing perversion of a book are the modern day equivalents of those of us in the early 90's that would stare at books on our Palm Pilots. Good luck with that.)

The Kindle, Sony eReader, Plastic Logic and others have improved upon the experience by making use of a display screen from eInk, which manipulates physical particles to display text on a screen. I've written about this experience before, but in short eInk technology duplicates the reflective properties of paper almost exactly. The effect is astonishing, and reading Moby Dick becomes a pleasure again.

So, why are Amazon, Sony and others hiding their sales figures? Obviously because the success of these devices is moderate, not groundbreaking as it was with the iPod's conquering of digital music. The reasons for lackluster sales are many: licensing deals with publishers are still strange (the publishers still think it's reasonable to charge 80% the cost of a physical book), the eReaders themselves are still too expensive (think printer ink, Sony and Amazon), and the DRM issues are still too restrictive (why the hell can't I read something I bought on the Sony Reader store on my Kindle?). Marketing around these devices has also been terrible - there's still confusion in the market as to why someone would want a single purpose device that doesn't display color images when they have their laptops, macbooks and iPhones. The explanation is simple (i.e. my rant on reading long form content on glowing screens), but I rarely hear any of these companies come out and talk about it.

Nonetheless, all of these reasons are really just business problems which will get sorted out...but even when those problems are solved, there is still more to the story on the slow adoption rate, and it may be emotional and very hard to duplicate digitally. It's really complicated. Ready? Here is it is...

People like books.

Books are big, bulky, a bitch to move from home to home, they get lost at the beach or when you lend it to a friend, and they smell mildewy if left out in the backyard overnight. None of that matters.

People like books.

People like books more than they like DVDs, CDs, record albums, liner notes, or anything else that the digital revolution has supplanted. They line our walls, they tell people who you are and what you are about when they walk into your house, they have author's signatures, they just feel good when you pick them up and hold them. It's entrenched in us. In our culture. In all cultures. The oldest thing that you can call a book (no, it's not the Bible, chill the eff out) is probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, at around 2150BC. Books have been used for trade, for securing power, as seats of knowledge for kings, and have been the source of global memory since long before the internet. (Award for the Greatest Information Crash Without Backing Up has to go to the sacking of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.)

So, there is an emotional tie here that is going to be hard to move past - and I include myself in this mix. I have whole-heartedly embraced the eBook: you'd have a hard time prying my Sony eReader from my hands - its more convenient, takes up almost no space, makes my business travel load a hell of a lot lighter, and my book consumption has gone WAY up in the last few years since owning it. But....I like books. They still cover my walls. I still schlepped them from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Pasadena to Boston to LA to San Francisco, and all the intercity moves in between, over the years. It was expensive. It was a pain in the ass. Yet, I still did it. We all do it.

What kind of marketing does it take to move past thousands of years of emotional attachment to a bulky, inefficient, easy to destroy form of media? Honestly, I don't have one of my glib, well-you-just-do-this, technology-will-solve-it answers. I just pose the question.

Update:

So I put the Star Trek reference in as sort of a joking referral to what a proto-geek I was growing up, but it turns out - Star Trek was precognizant about the durability of books in the human condition as well. Check out the clip below from the episode "Court Martial," starting at about 3:30 as Kirk's lawyer explains why he doesn't use computers.