Like the MacBook Air, Apple’s newest object for those who are technology and rationally challenged to spend their cash on, the iPad, is merely a packaged series of errors and mis-judgement doomed to failure. Wait, I take that back, in a reality where people are actually capable of reasoning about the value and utility products offered by companies the iPad would never see the light of day, but we do not live in such a reality. Instead, we live in a reality where, ironically, a company that produced one of the best TV commercials ever, the infamous 1984 commercial, has itself become the “big brother” of the book “1984″, mixed with the depressing cynicism of H.L. Menken.
As for the 1984 aspect of Apple it all boils down to DRM (a.k.a. digital rights/restrictions management), and a completely walled off garden in the form of the “App Store”. I will not belabor this aspect of the new iPad as the Free Software Foundation has already done that for me and then some. Instead, I want to concentrate on a number of assertions made by Steve Jobs during the iPad unveiling event. In particular, Jobs made a claim that a “new product area” would need to be better than both the smart phone (iPhone) and laptops (well, clearly he means Apple’s laptops) in some “key areas”. Those “key areas” are:
- Browsing
- Email
- Photos
- Video
- Music
- Games
- eBooks
I’m not making this list up, you can watch the video yourself and at about the 7:59 mark you will see this list up on the big screen.
So, as you might guess, Jobs’ final claim is that the iPad is better at doing the above “key tasks” than both a smart phone and a laptop. Let’s examine these claims a bit more in detail shall we?
Browsing
Frankly, it is a no-brainer to show that the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter) is not better at browsing, or providing a browsing “experience” than a typical laptop, hell I’ll put up any Netbook against the iPad any day for browsing experience. Some bullets:
- No flash support
- One page open at any time
- No rollover-effects (because no mouse), like accessing menu items
- Cut/copy/paste still a severe pain-in-the-ass
- Browser does not have plugin support (like FireFox or Chrome)
For many Apple product drones the problems associated with the above issues have already been erased from their awareness. For those that still retain their full reasoning capacity it’s like using a browser circa 1997.
Email
Oh come on now, seriously? The iPad is better than a laptop for email? On a laptop you can choose to use Web mail or from a wide variety of email clients with various combinations of ease-of-use and power. But of course, email clients need to be able to run the the background to fetch mail. Something that Apple outlaws (wrongly) on the iPad as well as the iPhone. Then there is the on-screen keyboard, you know, the one without a dedicated number row. Sucks I guess if your say, an accountant, and put lots of numbers in your messages.
Photos
Um, there is more to the world than looking at your photos forever. At a starting price of ~$500 makes for one really expensive digital frame. Also, what about integration with on-line photo services, like Flickr, Picasa, or on-line print providers? Again, the iPad is far worse than a laptop for anything related to photos. If your idea is that smushing around photos with your fingers offsets everything you lose on a laptop (or even a Netbook) then please, seek professional help. Oh yeah, you can run the Gimp on even the lowliest netbook, so you can even (really) edit your photos, unlike the iPad.
Video
What goes for photos goes for videos. Oh yeah, you can also really edit video on a laptop, and if you have a Mac you can get iDVD and go to town.
Music
Absolutely no better than the iPhone and clearly limited compared to any laptop or netbook.
Games
I really got angry when the issue of games came up, are the employees at Apple merely delusional to think that playing games on the iPad is better than playing games on a laptop, or are they merely slimbags for bold-face lying to people about what computers can really do? Even if the horrid joke of doubling up the resolution of iPhone games wasn’t bad enough, do they think that even the best possible game imaginable for the iPad could even compete with say, World of Warcraft?
eBooks
Granted, this is the only “experience” that may lend itself to the iPad’s form-factor, but the iPad is considerably more expensive than a Kindle, not even in the same league for battery life or weight. Further, many eBooks are used in conjunction with work, not merely pleasure reading. For instance, books about programming are really useful where you can cut-n-paste examples into a code editor.
Conclusion
Compared to a laptop and most netbooks, the iPad does not live up to a single claim made by Jobs during the unveiling event, and offers only a bigger screen, more CPU horsepower, and storage over the iPhone. It leaves off an integrated camera, microphone, audio jack, a multi-tasking UI, open application development that goes beyond the App Store, the lack of USB or even built-in flash media slots means you cannot even get photos on the thing without buying one form of lock-in (remember lock-in is a euphemism for money to business, and no, you don’t have to give into lock-in, don’t buy products that coerce you to work their way as opposed to them working your way, that is a friendly device, the iPad is not friendly) cable or another. Or by copying/downloading photos from another source via a network or bluetooth. The iPad is an iDud.
Now, all this said, and given the reality that I described at the beginning of this article, I still expect the iPad to be financially at least a moderate success. Why? Because Apple has been fertilizing the public for years now with their attractive, but dumbed-down products, and the consuming public seems to be eager for more dumbing down because look at how pretty everything is.
Almost certainly anyone who has their blogs pumped through Planet Atheism must know that direct engagement with theists is both necessary and a nearly impossible task at the same time. I have had arguments/discussions with many people over the years on the topic of theistic-belief and I can say that, as least when addressed directly, it has always been futile – the participants in the discussion do not unseat their beliefs in the light of reason and evidence. I can say that for the first few years this was a disheartening outcome, personally very frustrating and, in some cases, frightening. As Sam Harris has pointed out people with theistic belief structures in their head can be downright dangerous, I was well aware of this problem long before Mr. Harris set out to write books on the subject. Prior to the Internet I was an isolated individual, quite literally fighting a lone “battle” on this issue as I can honestly state that my concerns on this subject were not shared by family and friends. Fortunately, the Internet and the Web did take off and I now have access to and can share ideas with many like-minded people, but still, even the combined effort of many atheists demolishing every aspect of theistic-belief structures is not enough to directly unseat such belief structures – like smoking: the evidence for the harm caused by smoking has been with us for decades but people still take up the habit.
Although my failure to directly change people’s minds on the subject of theistic belief can be a source of personal frustration, the basis of this frustration: people not changing their beliefs in light of evidence, is a well-researched area of psychology and sociology. It turns out that, if we are Bayesian in nature, we’re not very good Bayesians. I tend to agree with Robin Hanson on this particular subject which is to say that most people choose their belief structures based on group membership signaling rather than skeptical, independent, and critical thought and analysis of evidence. This particular view comes across as a more plausible, and simpler (Occam’s Razor) explanation: being a social animals we will prize “social points” over “intellectual points” by default, and only occasionally re-align our thinking if we perceive that such re-alignment will achieve more “social points”.
So then, if “direct” engagement is almost certainly futile (as all of the “New Atheists” [blech, what a nonsensical title] have pointed out) why do it? Predominantly, we need to have the “discussion” to create a legacy of literature for new generations to work with. We live in an unprecedented time where the rational analysis, taming, and ultimate cure of theistic beliefs can be had comprehensively, but unlike the Polio vaccine the agent of curing humankind of the virus of theism are other humans discussing the topic directly, but the desired outcome is typically indirect. There may be some evidence that this new “public openness” of atheism is causing those with honest doubt about theistic belief to actually embrace that doubt rather than suppress it and go along with the overwhelming theistic population (in the United States), but the real win is in seeding future generations with the tools to judge theistic belief skeptically, rationally and empirically.
Being one of the more prominent computer geeks in my extended family I get a lot of requests for “tech support”. Recently, I replaced a hard drive for my father’s PC and recovered his XP partition from his old drive (dd is just a wonderful tool). After getting the disk image restored on another drive and fortunately getting the new drive to boot up and run a chkdsk, I managed to get the machine booted with a minimal loss of data – the computer was merciful this time. Once booted I took the opportunity to do some much needed house-cleaning: updated FireFox to 3.5, installed Google Chrome so my Dad can play around with it, updated flash and OpenOffice, updated to IE 8 (blech, but needed if going to minimize security problems and to access Windows Update), finally I started Windows Update. For me, since this has become somewhat routine I understand all the jargon that gets thrown at me during all these crazy uninstall/update marathons, but it is amazing how intractably and irreducibly obtuse computers are for the average person. The average person thinks of computers like a TV – turn it on and choose a channel and everything just works from there. But computers, like life, are a sublime combination of possibility, power, wonder, frustration, and heartbreak – computers don’t work like the TV, there is no program schedule to tell you what’s up next. Every time I have to jump into XP, or Vista, or even OS X to do computer surgery I’m constantly reminded as to how intimidating these devices must be to the average person.
My brother-in-law pointed me to this piece, very nice.
The piece is very enjoyable, and very familiar to any atheist. The typical break down is that you are either arguing with a wall (the theist), or someone with A.D.D. who cannot keep his arguments straight (the agnostic).
Tags: Atheism/Secular Issues, Funny, Why?
Reports continue to pour in from across this nation of embarrassing and despicable behavior with regard to the President’s address to school children tomorrow. Already the Ridgewood school system has decided to throw its support behind the idea that an as-yet-to-be-heard speech is controversial, I presume, much like the Brookfield, WI school system. Today we will get the chance to read the actual speech as it will be posted on the White House web site.
The controversy surrounding this speech has nothing to do with the speech of course. It has to do with the unjustified anger of a number of Americans. That anger is both irrational and not based on the facts. While you do not have to agree with Obama, or even like him, attempting to effectively silence the President of the United States through intimidation of schools, school systems, concerned citizens trying to actually help by contributing their ideas at town halls, or otherwise mindlessly and wrongly bullying people is fundamentally not acceptable.
UPDATE: The president’s speech is now online. It is short and sweet – no surprises, no hidden agendas, no code words to turn our children into mindless socialist/Marxist drones following Obama’s every command.
UPDATE 2: Just had to link.
Tags: Obama, Public Schools, Ridgewood, wrong
Today parents of students in the Ridgewood public school system received emails detailing how our schools are going to willfully contribute to the ridiculous ”controversy” surrounding a speech President Obama is going to make to students and parents this coming Tuesday. By willful contribution I mean the following:
- The schools have agreed to recognize this speech as “controversial”.
- Some schools have elected to not have the speech shown in schools while others will “record, and preview” the speech then decide later “what portions are appropriate to what grade levels”. (I.E. they will censor the content of the speech)
Firstly, this entire “controversy” is sheer lunacy and any rational person who willingly or unwillingly participates in bolstering the claim that a speech that has not even been made yet is “controversial” ought to be ashamed of themselves. Secondly, given all that is known about what the speech is likely to contain (also here) what is the supporting evidence that there is anything to be remotely concerned about?
FACT: The speech has not yet been given. Therefore, the “controversy” is not about the speech – the contents of the speech will be made available on Monday – so what could possibly be the problem?
Given that the justification “controversy” is utterly without merit, how do you think the Ridgwood school system should deal with this event? By quite literally shunning a speech by the President? Censoring his speech? If President Obama has any skills at all he’s a damned good orator, and there are a lot of batshit crazy stupid people who do not like President Obama as a person and will attack him any way they can. Getting people to not listen to his speeches through intimidation would be one pretty effective way to help erode support for our (duly elected) President. The Ridgwood public school system has chosen to either give in to this intimidation, or worse, actively support the notion that there is indeed a “controversy” of merit.
Is this what we want to teach our kids? That intimidation is an acceptable way to influence public discourse? That in a time of great national stress we should pre-judge more and listen less? That the proper and appropriate way to engage collectively difficult issues is to disengage from the debate?
President Obama’s speech on Tuesday will not be about health insurance, it will be about the important opportunities that exist with the effective education of our youth, and how parents, teachers and students can work together to maximize the potential of all students through education. Why is it that the Ridgewood school system seems to be such a willing partner in promoting and bolstering this ignorant and unjustified “controversy” as opposed to finding meaningful, direct and creative ways to engage students with the President I do not know. What I do know is that I am deeply disappointed in the way the school system has handled a situation that, to my thinking, literally requires no handling at all: there is no controversy.
Tags: Controversy, Obama, Public Schools, Ridgewood
I originally envisioned writing a large post regarding some of my thoughts on the implications of Jonathan Heidt’s research, instead I’ve opted for a series of smaller pieces that may make for interesting conversation on their own. For reference/background you can check out the following:
Some videos of Jon Haidt:
A couple rather fantastic essays on EDGE:
So, yesterday I went to a Confirmation party for a relative of mine, and as typical for one of these occasions we gave a card with money. Of course, getting a “confirmation card” is a bit of a trip, I hunted around for the least religious card I could find, but the event, a “confirmation”, is an explicitly religious event, a little hard to dodge getting cards with all sorts of “lordly” references. Clearly, this was a bit of bad planning on my part. If I were more on the ball I could have made up my own card (as opposed to a generic “congratulations” card) that said something nice without endorsing religious nuttery.
The idea of making atheist friendly cards, especially for an event like a confirmation was mentally very entertaining yesterday with thoughts such as the following:
So, your parents have sought fit to continue the brain-washing they began at your birth. Pity, I offer my council to re-acquaint yourself with the greater wonder of reality when you are ready. In the mean time I offer my condolences for your continued condition.
And all sorts of variations on this theme. Yes, I admit that this clearly comes across as arrogant, but it’s more amusing that way. Anyhow, note to self: plan ahead next time.
Recently, I had gotten together with a bunch of friends from my former company Digital Railroad (DRR). DRR had such a great team – such squandered opportunity. Among the numerous subjects brought up were estimates about how accurate my predictions were about what DRR ought to do overall, and in particular what important product features DRR should build and what they should look like. Now granted, the former DRR folks were out to have a good time and were relaxing over a few drinks so I listened to their flattery and rather generous estimates of my “DRR must do so-and-so …” dictums as being 80% (or more) on the mark. A few of these folks have remained in the “business” of professional on-line photo archives and basically have seen first-hand a number of “my ideas” become realized by other companies. At one point I was asked point-blank: did that reality upset me? My answer was a direct and succinct “no, not in the slightest.” Sure, I would love to have been the one to build a lot of cool stuff we didn’t get to do at DRR, but I’m not doing that, and I’m glad that even though I didn’t have a hand in it, what was blatantly obvious to me was at least as blatantly obvious to some other team of engineers and now professional photographers are able to use tools that remained mere twinkles in my eye at DRR.
But, what was unrealized by DRR is not the main subject of this post, rather the phenomenon of how/why people, in retrospect (and even when DRR was still in business), seem to attribute such a high accuracy to my claims as to what, why, and how DRR should do things. The reality is that if 50% of my claims turned out to be the things DRR ought to do (and are now being realized by other companies) I would be astonished. Furthermore, my former colleagues grossly underestimate their roles in “my” output of ideas. I recall vividly being wrong about my (literally) ideas most of the time. But, as it was discovered in the Biosphere 2 experiment that trees need wind to grow strong, I refined and iterated my ideas with input and direction from the very same colleagues that attributed those ideas to me. Many of my “original” ideas were merely direct extensions of what was already there in the photographic data we had available to us. For instance: all embedded metadata in photographs should be imported into our system and made available for viewing, editing, and searching is not really an Earth-shattering idea, such data is already in the file it only makes sense to make it available within a system like DRR, but we didn’t, we always worked with a very restrictive subset of the data. Many other ideas I expressed about UI, and work-flow, and our cart and licensing were distilled results of iterated conversations I had with my various colleagues around me, they did not spring forth from my head in their final form. The staff of DRR had (have) remarkable talent, that talent was exploited by me to help congeal succinct statements about what DRR ought to do through an iterative process; these ideas that seemed to have come from me were mostly refined and focused version of their own ideas. Somehow though, those ideas have been attributed to me. To my fellow DRR alumni, the next time you are sitting quietly at home or wherever and are reflecting on things DRR, tune in to memories of your own thoughts and the chatter in the office, realize that it was us, together that came up with great, unrealized, ideas not me. For crying out loud: give credit where credit is due, and you all are due a lot more credit than I am for those “ideas” you attribute to me.
So, what explains the phenomena of attribution to me? Even at DRR I was aware of some of the phenomena I described above, so the recent reiterations are not unexpected. I think that such an attribution comes down to personality and timing. For better or worse most who know me know that I’m brutally honest and often startlingly direct, I have no future in politics. I was just as tuned into the problems and stresses that flowed through the DRR aether as anyone else. When I picked up on chatter that related to something I could possibly do something about I got proactive (in my meandering sort of way) to talk to people about problems with our product. I could and did talk a lot, it is often said that talkers are not good listeners, perhaps we should have a talk ;-). I would listen keenly to what people would have to say. My friend Oren says that the best products spawn from the “that’s fucked up” mentality, so I listened to what people thought was fucked up about our product. I would often throw in my ideas and have them shot down, but in the process I learned something. Eventually, a reasonable idea would form that would clearly address a particular problem. Now, mind you, my “investigations” of this sort were not tied to any of our release schedules, often I would be directly digging into what I perceived as real issues with our product as opposed to the crap-o-rama featuritis product release circus that DRR got into (at the expense of fixing core problems with our site). After I had refined a solution to a particularly vexing problem that I thought got solved as a collaboration I did the blatantly obvious thing: I told people about it. Heaven knows that a number of my friends DRR were burdened by email tomes describing in painfully bad language sweeping plans to solve X or Y at considerable detail and length. Typically, like earthquakes, these emails arrived unannounced. These emails were not the typical “I’m fed up” kind of manifestos that often come from engineering types, but detailed designs on a fix and proposals on how we could accomplish the task. Some of these ideas we did like the DRR search system, and eventually the new image delivery system, most never got off the drawing board.
What I think happened at DRR (which was not unique in my history), is this:
- “Big” ideas would be injected by me into the aether of DRR in a way that was not synchronous to other activities at DRR, therefore, the ideas stood out with stark relief against the normal background activity. But everyone at DRR should know that those ideas were merely a collection, refinement and amplification of their own ideas put through preliminary engineering and design phases to provide a way for the engineering team to discuss them.
- Many people are uncomfortable with speaking plainly or taking risks with putting out ideas solo, I have neither fear nor discomfort in doing that. Many of the ideas that DRR scheduled were the result of featuritis and were pushed though with insufficient time or incorrect processes to develop ideas well. I took a slower route and bounced ideas back and forth until I got a square-ish peg to actually fit the squarish hole.
- I didn’t tolerate bad ideas, and would fight them tooth-and-nail, even if we were well into a feature design cycle. In my book momentum behind a clearly bad idea is not justification to move forward with such ideas. DRR’s design process would introduce so many “corner cases” and “edge cases” as to produce a tragic comedy. At one point I forbid the use of the phrases “corner case” and “edge case”, you simply fucked up, back to the drawing boards. I explained to people that thinking in terms of percentages of users who would encounter an “edge case” is the absolute wrong metric: with any sufficiently large population of users some significant minority of users are suffering because of your mistake. Solve actual problems, not convenient subsets of them.
- Finally, I explained to many people I was close to at DRR: it’s just a job, if I get fired, I get fired, I don’t care, but for as long as I’m there I plan to care about using my time in a way that I can look back and be happy with my accomplishments.
The confluence of the above points created a number of perceptions of me, among them: crazy, reckless, and bold. I would say that most people who worked in the New York office learned to see past the crazy and reckless aspects because bold certainly is closer to what I was looking for. Eventually those people realized that I really am just trying to help make what we were building better and trying to find ways, with their help to do it, but they also knew explicitly that I needed their help to get it done, I could not do it on my own: you could work with the cantankerous old fat guy. I think that most of the Seattle office basically hated me, which is a shame for the feeling was not mutual. The main reason I think is that I has no direct way to get past the crazy and reckless image with them so I came off as an asshole. Perhaps someday that gap can be bridged. But the other side-effect of the above points is that I came across as a distinct personality associated with ideas so undue attributions have been made and are still made to me. The reality of course is I has the singular pleasure of working with a number of fantastic people who were the true source and inspiration for ideas I thought were important to DRR’s customers, all I did was to try to do what I thought I could do best to get those ideas realized: open my big mouth (or write an email) and make some noise.
Recently, I’ve been having a rather nice FaceBook exchange with my friend Oren Clark (master of everything and designer of his own line of aeroplanes and guitars! ) on a number of subjects including issues surrounding the Singularity, growing up as the TV generation, the problems with democracies, and … FaceBook.
I’m on FaceBook mainly because everyone seems to be on FaceBook, but I really detest the site itself. I find the UI utterly abysmal (limits on post sizes, stuff is just all over the place, search simply does not work right IMHO [it searches FaceBook, not my stuff], wall items cannot be commented on, etc.), but also FaceBook is closed off. It’s a gated community, or a cult, pick the one you feel most comfortable with. It does not feel like the Internet, it feels like the olden dial-up BBS (bulletin board systems for those too young to know). Now, clearly FaceBook’s popularity empirically suggests that people want that gated community/BBS environment, or is it more that enough people want such an environment as to draw in others by sheer force of numbers? Given my experience on FaceBook I tend to think that it is the latter.
To my friends on FaceBook: please stop – get a blog. Let the world know what you have to say and stop nudging me, inviting me to causes, inviting me to games you already know you can beat me at ;-), throwing snowballs at me, remembering the 70’s, 80’s, or 90’s, and so on.
Just sayin’
Tags: Internet, Web
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