The wireless industry in the US is inefficient, because the carriers have set things up to protect income from sources that are sort of artificial.
A phone might be crippled so that you have to buy ringtones from the carrier, for example, or text messages might be priced in a way that has no connection to the cost of delivering the service.
Google's platform will be open. It will be like the Internet. The competition will be mostly closed. More like AOL was in the mid 90's (if anyone remembers that).
The open system will provide much better value, and it will allow people to introduce great services. People won't have to wait for a cell company to decide something is worth doing -- they can just do it, and if it's cool, they can share it.
Google wants to do this because they win in an open world. They're winning on the open internet. They'll probably win in an open wireless world too.
It's true that MS has a solid platform, and so do other companies. But those platforms are designed to collaborate with the carriers against the end users. The problem isn't that they're not good, or that they don't do what they're designed to do. The problem is that what they're designed to do is less attractive to people like me than what google's platform is designed to do.
Which is to kick down the phony and unnecessary walls the carriers have erected for their own benefit.
This whole thing makes perfect sense to me. I can't guarantee that it will work. But I don't think it's a stupid move by any means.
Also, as a business play, it's probably super cheap for google. They're releasing open source code. It's not like they're building factories to crank out zunes.:)
I just bought an iPod touch. And it's pretty much the greatest gadget I've ever owned. I love it.
I think a lot of what makes it great, though, is that the interface for Safari is heavily tweaked for web surfing. It's really easy to pan and scan around, and you can pinch and expand to zoom in and out. One of the most useful features is the ability to tap on a section of a web page and have it adjust the zoom intelligently to frame the text or photo you're dealing with. And then there's that turning the device on its side and having the screen roll with you thing.
The result of all of this is that you can surf really well on a very small device. I wouldn't have thought a full browser could be so usable on such a small device, but they did it, and it's great.
The other apps, though, aren't nearly as usable. The music player has cover flow, which is really quick and useful -- I didn't think it would be before I bought the touch, but it is. It's not that they're bad. It's just that all of that insanely great UI stuff is tweaked specifically for web browsing. The stuff that it does is aimed at that problem, and a lot of times the features aren't even implemented in other apps.
The point is that what they've done is different from making a new kind of widget set for portable devices. On a normal desktop system, and on a normal PDA, you have a widget set that lets apps run in GUIs and behave in standard ways. This has very specific gui tweaks for a key app, safari.
I think the philosophical change of the touch (and the iPhone, obviously) is that the designers seem to be working from the premise that usable UI on such a small device is challenging enough that you have to tweak things very specifically for the app of the moment, and not just use something more general like MFC.
So Safari is tweaked out brilliantly, and it's flat out amazing. The music player is ok, it's certainly functional, but it's not so amazing. It's not "I can't believe how cool this is" great.
I kind of wish I had my old iPod video interface back, honestly. Or I wish I could zoom in and out, to change the size of the type on my podcasts, because sometimes long titles are hard to read.
So the question is, how are you going to make a really great PDA? Do you have to have genius UI designers working on every app? I mean, how are you going to do IM on these things? How do you get around that "entering text sucks" barrier? And there's going to be some usability problem like that popping up over and over again in app after app.
(I think this is part of why they want to keep these things locked down -- I believe that Jobs really hates the idea of people running ugly unusable apps on his devices.)
I mean, they could make a PDA, and they could use the tech they already have, and it would probably be just another PDA with a standard general interface, and an insanely great web browser. And that would be cool. But I think they're more ambitious than that.
The Motley Fool points out that most people are honest, and want to pay for their music, so long as they can get what they want.
I think that's mostly true, but that it's far less true than it would have been if the industry had pursued different polices over the past several years.
There's a whole generation out there now that's grown up with piracy, and that's totally comfortable with it. Because this fight has polarized people so much, it's pushed a lot of people into the pro-piracy side who wouldn't have been there otherwise.
If you want freedom, go with open source. Write code for linux phones, support that ecosystem, make them better. But don't whine about Apple being what it is.
If you're in upper management at SCO, what do you do all day? Wait for the lawyers to call with an update about how it's going?
If they didn't appeal, I guess the people still on staff would have to go out and get new jobs. That seems inevitable, but I guess they want to put it off.
I think that this makes sense for IBM too -- IBM wants to do a little bit of everything, and to have access to customers with all kinds of different shops.
This deal gives IBM access to companies that are currently centered on Sun, and Sun is still pretty big.
I grew up with the space program, and I remember watching the moon landing on tv when I was a little kid. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. For most of my life, I've been a big space supporter.
I'm not any more.
We do a lot of cool stuff in space -- the Hubble is a great example. But I think it's mostly a military program. The program is thick with screcy, and so much of it seems to be part of this strangelovian plan to militarize everything.
If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest.
The cool stuff is mostly bait and switch to get us to accept the ugly stuff without examination or complaint.
I'd rather see bulletproof license control for commercial software.
If everyone who ran pirated software used open source instead, our user base would be several times as it is now. And that would encourage hardware vendors to give us better support, which is the main thing we need now.
Lots of top brands are sold through wal-mart now -- coca-cola and apple ipods come to mind. Dell's brand will rise and fall on the quality of their products.
I think this is a good move because it addresses a couple of the weaknesses in dell's model. First of all, there are times when you need a computer *now* -- maybe an old machine has died, or whatever. You can't wait 10 days. Now you can go to wal-mart at 2am and buy a new dell. You'll get a good machine at a good price, so you won't be penalized because you're in a hurry. That's cool.
Second of all, a lot of people (non-geeks, mostly) are squeamish about buying machines they can't play with first. It's a big purchase, they don't feel confident that they know what they're doing, and they're nervous. They want to thump the melon before they buy it. These people all buy HP's now -- that's why so many non-geeks you know have HPs. Getting Dells into retail stores will give them a crack at this market.
Wal-Mart conducts its business in ways that have a lot of negative side effects -- they kill off main streets, they pay their workers very little and treat them in ways that I would never want to be treated. All of that is real, and it's important, and people are right to be mad about all of it.
But they do pass it all back to customers -- it's all part of an all consuming push to get the prices on the shelves as low as possible. I think it's hard to make an argument that for customers -- not suppliers, not employees, but customers -- wal-mart is a bad company to do business with when compared to outfits like best buy or circuit city.
I have a lenovo 3000 series laptop. I got it new for $400 on sale at a local store about a week before vista was launched. 512MB of RAM, XP Pro, 80G drive, 1.5 GHz, fairly generic but good enough 1024x768 screen. About 4.5 hours off of a single charge.
It's not a thinkpad -- there isn't the same physical quality in it, it's pretty ugly, and you get a touchpad instead of a trackpoint. There's no titanium case, etc.
But I've been very pleased with mine. It runs ubuntu well, if you're willing to use ndiswrapper for the wifi. If I needed another one, and I could find a similar deal, I'd buy it again without any hesitation.
For me the price was the overwhelming factor. I'd love nothing more than to see lenovo churn out commodity laptops for $400 that run linux really well. All they really need to do is find a better chipset for the wifi card, and get rid of that awful cheap silver finish on the top of the case. I guess I'd like to see a trackpoint, too.
No one looks at it and says, "Wow, that's cool." But it's already outlasted an apple laptop a friend bought at about the same time.
As more time passes, my opinion of Moglen rises -- in a lot of ways, I think he's one of the most central people in the free software movement. A lot of times what he says seems too radical at first, but in the end I come to realize that he's probably right.
Obviously, Moglen is a smart guy, and I have to assume his theory here is at least plausible. But it seems to me that someone could make a counter argument that would also be plausible.
So it's something to be worked out in endless litigation. Look at how long the SCO trial has gone on, how expensive it's been, and how little substance there seems to have been in the claim.
In this video clip Moglen describes his take on MS's strategy:
The point, he argues, is to split the community so our interests are not all aligned with one another. Specifically, to create a situation in which large enterprise customers are safe, and small individual developers can be harassed.
Those developers need more than a theory that can be defended, very expensively, in an endless trial. They need a slam dunk, something that will prevent them from being sued in the first place. They need to be safe.
You can download a very small minimal iso and do a net install. I did it this evening -- the core system is pretty small, and comes down quickly. It's not as inconvenient as you might think.
Digg doesn't want to get sued. That's not unreasonable.
People are posting the same story over and over again. It's functioning as a defacto DoS attack on Digg, too -- they're not nearly as interesting now as they usually are.
That number is out there. It's not going away. It's not useful to many of the people who insist on posting it or reading it, either -- unless you're writing a player. So why should Digg get sued? How does that make the world a better place?
I had an early ISP in the 90's, and we almost went out of business when our T1 line went down, and they had that "We'll fix it when we get around to it" attitude.
In the early days, we plugged into a group called CICNet, which was one of the old regional NSF providers. And they were incredible -- if we unplugged our router to physically move it, we'd get a phone call making sure we were ok.
But during the later 90's, one provider kept buying up another, and service went down the tubes. I get substantially better service on my cable modem than I got from about 3 different companies who managed the same T1 line in those days.
At the end, we went down, and I went down to their sales office, and said, I'm not leaving until someone gets on this, and the guy gave me a VP's phone number. And I called and called and called, and eventually he gave in and put a tech on my problem. When it was fixed, and I thanked him, I mentioned it was a T1. And he said, "What, after all this you don't even have a T3?"
I expect it's better now that we don't have the same sort of churning and consolidation in the industry. But my experience with T1 lines both at my ISP, and at other jobs, where we had them brought in, has been a lot rockier than anything I've ever experienced on either DSL or cable lines at home.
Obviously, my anecdotal experience isn't a solid statistical picture, and I'm not claiming it is. And maybe this was epecially nightmarish because we were in Chicago, where the quality of these types of services is very low. But it was far and away the hardest and most nightmarish part of my job.
Slashdot Mirror
Editing PDFs is hard.
The wireless industry in the US is inefficient, because the carriers have set things up to protect income from sources that are sort of artificial.
:)
A phone might be crippled so that you have to buy ringtones from the carrier, for example, or text messages might be priced in a way that has no connection to the cost of delivering the service.
Google's platform will be open. It will be like the Internet. The competition will be mostly closed. More like AOL was in the mid 90's (if anyone remembers that).
The open system will provide much better value, and it will allow people to introduce great services. People won't have to wait for a cell company to decide something is worth doing -- they can just do it, and if it's cool, they can share it.
Google wants to do this because they win in an open world. They're winning on the open internet. They'll probably win in an open wireless world too.
It's true that MS has a solid platform, and so do other companies. But those platforms are designed to collaborate with the carriers against the end users. The problem isn't that they're not good, or that they don't do what they're designed to do. The problem is that what they're designed to do is less attractive to people like me than what google's platform is designed to do.
Which is to kick down the phony and unnecessary walls the carriers have erected for their own benefit.
This whole thing makes perfect sense to me. I can't guarantee that it will work. But I don't think it's a stupid move by any means.
Also, as a business play, it's probably super cheap for google. They're releasing open source code. It's not like they're building factories to crank out zunes.
Pretty much everyone in NYC has a blackberry nowadays, too.
Marketing Windows servers involves a lot of convincing people not to run Linux instead. Knowing about Linux probably helps.
Do you run a Linux box as your primary desktop?
If so, which distro? If not, what do you run?
I just bought an iPod touch. And it's pretty much the greatest gadget I've ever owned. I love it.
I think a lot of what makes it great, though, is that the interface for Safari is heavily tweaked for web surfing. It's really easy to pan and scan around, and you can pinch and expand to zoom in and out. One of the most useful features is the ability to tap on a section of a web page and have it adjust the zoom intelligently to frame the text or photo you're dealing with. And then there's that turning the device on its side and having the screen roll with you thing.
The result of all of this is that you can surf really well on a very small device. I wouldn't have thought a full browser could be so usable on such a small device, but they did it, and it's great.
The other apps, though, aren't nearly as usable. The music player has cover flow, which is really quick and useful -- I didn't think it would be before I bought the touch, but it is. It's not that they're bad. It's just that all of that insanely great UI stuff is tweaked specifically for web browsing. The stuff that it does is aimed at that problem, and a lot of times the features aren't even implemented in other apps.
The point is that what they've done is different from making a new kind of widget set for portable devices. On a normal desktop system, and on a normal PDA, you have a widget set that lets apps run in GUIs and behave in standard ways. This has very specific gui tweaks for a key app, safari.
I think the philosophical change of the touch (and the iPhone, obviously) is that the designers seem to be working from the premise that usable UI on such a small device is challenging enough that you have to tweak things very specifically for the app of the moment, and not just use something more general like MFC.
So Safari is tweaked out brilliantly, and it's flat out amazing. The music player is ok, it's certainly functional, but it's not so amazing. It's not "I can't believe how cool this is" great.
I kind of wish I had my old iPod video interface back, honestly. Or I wish I could zoom in and out, to change the size of the type on my podcasts, because sometimes long titles are hard to read.
So the question is, how are you going to make a really great PDA? Do you have to have genius UI designers working on every app? I mean, how are you going to do IM on these things? How do you get around that "entering text sucks" barrier? And there's going to be some usability problem like that popping up over and over again in app after app.
(I think this is part of why they want to keep these things locked down -- I believe that Jobs really hates the idea of people running ugly unusable apps on his devices.)
I mean, they could make a PDA, and they could use the tech they already have, and it would probably be just another PDA with a standard general interface, and an insanely great web browser. And that would be cool. But I think they're more ambitious than that.
The Motley Fool points out that most people are honest, and want to pay for their music, so long as they can get what they want.
I think that's mostly true, but that it's far less true than it would have been if the industry had pursued different polices over the past several years.
There's a whole generation out there now that's grown up with piracy, and that's totally comfortable with it. Because this fight has polarized people so much, it's pushed a lot of people into the pro-piracy side who wouldn't have been there otherwise.
That was pretty much my reaction to it as well.
If you want freedom, go with open source. Write code for linux phones, support that ecosystem, make them better. But don't whine about Apple being what it is.
If you're in upper management at SCO, what do you do all day? Wait for the lawyers to call with an update about how it's going?
If they didn't appeal, I guess the people still on staff would have to go out and get new jobs. That seems inevitable, but I guess they want to put it off.
It must be a really strange place to work now.
I think that this makes sense for IBM too -- IBM wants to do a little bit of everything, and to have access to customers with all kinds of different shops.
This deal gives IBM access to companies that are currently centered on Sun, and Sun is still pretty big.
Learn to read, and don't be such an asshat.
I said that the Hubble was a good program, but that it wasn't typical of space spending.
Your post reminds me of my favorite king arthur quote -- "Enough is as good as a feast."
I grew up with the space program, and I remember watching the moon landing on tv when I was a little kid. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. For most of my life, I've been a big space supporter.
I'm not any more.
We do a lot of cool stuff in space -- the Hubble is a great example. But I think it's mostly a military program. The program is thick with screcy, and so much of it seems to be part of this strangelovian plan to militarize everything.
If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest.
The cool stuff is mostly bait and switch to get us to accept the ugly stuff without examination or complaint.
I'd rather see bulletproof license control for commercial software.
If everyone who ran pirated software used open source instead, our user base would be several times as it is now. And that would encourage hardware vendors to give us better support, which is the main thing we need now.
I sort of feel like this is telling us stuff we ought to know anyway.
With everything that's going on now, I can't imagine putting geek issues on top of my list when I pick a candidate.
Lots of top brands are sold through wal-mart now -- coca-cola and apple ipods come to mind. Dell's brand will rise and fall on the quality of their products.
I think this is a good move because it addresses a couple of the weaknesses in dell's model. First of all, there are times when you need a computer *now* -- maybe an old machine has died, or whatever. You can't wait 10 days. Now you can go to wal-mart at 2am and buy a new dell. You'll get a good machine at a good price, so you won't be penalized because you're in a hurry. That's cool.
Second of all, a lot of people (non-geeks, mostly) are squeamish about buying machines they can't play with first. It's a big purchase, they don't feel confident that they know what they're doing, and they're nervous. They want to thump the melon before they buy it. These people all buy HP's now -- that's why so many non-geeks you know have HPs. Getting Dells into retail stores will give them a crack at this market.
Wal-Mart conducts its business in ways that have a lot of negative side effects -- they kill off main streets, they pay their workers very little and treat them in ways that I would never want to be treated. All of that is real, and it's important, and people are right to be mad about all of it.
But they do pass it all back to customers -- it's all part of an all consuming push to get the prices on the shelves as low as possible. I think it's hard to make an argument that for customers -- not suppliers, not employees, but customers -- wal-mart is a bad company to do business with when compared to outfits like best buy or circuit city.
I have a lenovo 3000 series laptop. I got it new for $400 on sale at a local store about a week before vista was launched. 512MB of RAM, XP Pro, 80G drive, 1.5 GHz, fairly generic but good enough 1024x768 screen. About 4.5 hours off of a single charge.
It's not a thinkpad -- there isn't the same physical quality in it, it's pretty ugly, and you get a touchpad instead of a trackpoint. There's no titanium case, etc.
But I've been very pleased with mine. It runs ubuntu well, if you're willing to use ndiswrapper for the wifi. If I needed another one, and I could find a similar deal, I'd buy it again without any hesitation.
For me the price was the overwhelming factor. I'd love nothing more than to see lenovo churn out commodity laptops for $400 that run linux really well. All they really need to do is find a better chipset for the wifi card, and get rid of that awful cheap silver finish on the top of the case. I guess I'd like to see a trackpoint, too.
No one looks at it and says, "Wow, that's cool." But it's already outlasted an apple laptop a friend bought at about the same time.
As more time passes, my opinion of Moglen rises -- in a lot of ways, I think he's one of the most central people in the free software movement. A lot of times what he says seems too radical at first, but in the end I come to realize that he's probably right.
Obviously, Moglen is a smart guy, and I have to assume his theory here is at least plausible. But it seems to me that someone could make a counter argument that would also be plausible.
So it's something to be worked out in endless litigation. Look at how long the SCO trial has gone on, how expensive it's been, and how little substance there seems to have been in the claim.
In this video clip Moglen describes his take on MS's strategy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YExl9ojclo
The point, he argues, is to split the community so our interests are not all aligned with one another. Specifically, to create a situation in which large enterprise customers are safe, and small individual developers can be harassed.
Those developers need more than a theory that can be defended, very expensively, in an endless trial. They need a slam dunk, something that will prevent them from being sued in the first place. They need to be safe.
You can download a very small minimal iso and do a net install. I did it this evening -- the core system is pretty small, and comes down quickly. It's not as inconvenient as you might think.
Digg doesn't want to get sued. That's not unreasonable.
People are posting the same story over and over again. It's functioning as a defacto DoS attack on Digg, too -- they're not nearly as interesting now as they usually are.
That number is out there. It's not going away. It's not useful to many of the people who insist on posting it or reading it, either -- unless you're writing a player. So why should Digg get sued? How does that make the world a better place?
What he said...
I had an early ISP in the 90's, and we almost went out of business when our T1 line went down, and they had that "We'll fix it when we get around to it" attitude.
In the early days, we plugged into a group called CICNet, which was one of the old regional NSF providers. And they were incredible -- if we unplugged our router to physically move it, we'd get a phone call making sure we were ok.
But during the later 90's, one provider kept buying up another, and service went down the tubes. I get substantially better service on my cable modem than I got from about 3 different companies who managed the same T1 line in those days.
At the end, we went down, and I went down to their sales office, and said, I'm not leaving until someone gets on this, and the guy gave me a VP's phone number. And I called and called and called, and eventually he gave in and put a tech on my problem. When it was fixed, and I thanked him, I mentioned it was a T1. And he said, "What, after all this you don't even have a T3?"
I expect it's better now that we don't have the same sort of churning and consolidation in the industry. But my experience with T1 lines both at my ISP, and at other jobs, where we had them brought in, has been a lot rockier than anything I've ever experienced on either DSL or cable lines at home.
Obviously, my anecdotal experience isn't a solid statistical picture, and I'm not claiming it is. And maybe this was epecially nightmarish because we were in Chicago, where the quality of these types of services is very low. But it was far and away the hardest and most nightmarish part of my job.
Is there some reason you can't just have all of the locks keyed the same?
Any locksmith should be able to do this for you.