Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Intel Stammers Apology to Customers: “They aren’t dull!”

Apple’s current TV ads apparently are not all that popular with Intel’s other customers. The voiceover apparently claims that Intel’s processors have been “trapped inside PCs — dull, little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks.”

If suppose if you are a PC maker, that has to sting a little bit. But let’s be fair, most of what Intel puts out is slapped in a cheap beige box and spends most of its life trying to run while carrying the bloat of Windows XP on its back. The criticism isn’t entirely unfair.

When freed from the shackles of trying to load Microsoft products and the history of a zillion bad decisions, Intel’s chips (and, frankly, AMD’s as well) are free to do what they really are designed to. From the quoted article:

…if Intel’s work with Apple inspires some PC makers to think more creatively, Intel wouldn’t complain.

Indeed. If you are a manufacturer who used Intel chips, I’d say it’s not a time to get mad: it’s time to get creative. Apple certainly will be.

Intel: Our other customers aren’t boring | News.blog | CNET News.com

[tags]Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Advertising[/tags]

In Digital Music, Its Gates Vs Jobs

Om Malik writes about what he sees as an inevitable collision of industry juggernauts, Microsoft vs. Apple, Gates vs. Jobs in a battle for downloadable music supremacy. But I’m confused by one of his comments:

The MTV’s Microsoft-powered Urge online music service will be selling to the ultimate demographic: the teen set.

I’m left wondering why he thinks teens are the ultimate demographic. You want guys like me in your demographic: guys from about 25 to maybe 45. Why? Because we are still young enough to be gadget conscious, but old enough to have disposable income. Trying to get money out of teens to young adults is essentially a zero sum game: they already spend all the money they have, so you have to make a product more compelling than any other product they are already spending money on. I suppose it is possible that URGE might be such an endeavor, but I doubt it, particularly when some kind of annoying DRM is going to be part of every Microsoft solution.

Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote

Engadget blogged with Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote, and I’m left with a couple of questions/remarks:

  1. Is this really what a keynote is supposed to be? It seemed like little more than a presentation of a particular company’s product plans. That is normally not what I think a keynote is for: even at CES. (Okay, it looks like Intel did it too, but sheesh.)
  2. Gates pulled out lots of gadgets, none of which (as far I know) you could actually go out and buy today, tomorrow, or even within a month. He lead with “I though I’d start off and show a scenario that we think will be real in the next four years”, with no indication how we are actually going to get there. That seems pathetic.
  3. Then, the demo of Vista. Oooh. Quicktabs. Transparency. Parental controls on games. Oooh. Big deal.
  4. Join venture with MTV. Wow. I’m asleep with excitement. Justin Timberlake makes an appearance. Wow. That’s really innovative: using a celebrity to sell a product. How ’bout using a product to sell a product?
  5. You’ll see more Tablet PCs, apparently from Gateway. Reviewing their product lines, you might actually be able to buy one of these, but Gates’ message is diffused by generality. No clue as to why the average human might think a tablet was a good idea.
  6. Discussion of Windows Mobile and Palm. Fine, whatever. Phones are phones. It’s a pretty low margine business, I’m not sure why its good that Microsoft is participating, but I have a Smartphone and a Windows Mobile PDA, so I guess I understand.
  7. We’ll see more Media Center stuff, including portable devices. Doesn’t seem like they have anything actually new to see though.
  8. “We’re all going to have fun using these systems.”

Someday. Really. You can’t buy them today. You can’t order them today. But they are coming, and you should be ready.

Next week, when Mac World is underway, compare and contrast this keynote with what Steve Jobs does.

Addendum: David Pogue writes in the New York Times a sentiment that I can empathize with:

But I think that what most people want from the next Windows isn’t more stuff added, but rather stuff to be taken away–like crashes, lockups, viruses, error messages and security holes.

Amen, David, amen.

Microsoft Moves Graphics out of the OS

Techworld.com – Microsoft to move graphics outside OS kernel
Microsoft will move the graphics for its next version of Windows outside of the operating system’s kernel to improve reliability, the software giant has told Techworld.

This also in: temperature dropping in hell.

It only took them fifteen years to make the change. Ironically, it’s not done for things like “it makes our software cleaner, more straightforward, more modular, more useful”, but instead “our graphical subsystem is buggy enough that it will often bring down the entire system, and if we make this change all those annoying blue screens and freezes will merely be annoying application restarts”.

Ah, progress.

Photo Fraud on Survivor!

Last night I watched the final episode of Survivor Guatamala (yeah, I know, reality television is the opiate of the masses, so sue me) and I spotted something that made me stop the TiVo, rewind, and note something to my wife.

The particular video shot is one of their classic “night vision” pictures of one of the Mayan pyramids, obviously meant to be a timelapse, with the Milky Way whizzing around and a lovely full moon. But there is one big problem:

The full moon and the stars weren’t moving in the same direction!.

The moon will visibly move against the background of stars since the moon take about an hour longer to go around the earth each day than the stars do, but the difference is pretty small (about 45 in rate) so in a shot like this, the moon will mostly look like it tracks the background stars. This shot was assembled from at least two different and possibly three different video layers.

For shame!

Terrible User Interface Design

44 Keys of Confusion

Well, as a stop gap measure to replace my dead Philips DVP-642 DVD player, I went ahead and picked up a TruTech TT 320 DVD player ($34.95 from Target). It’s small, and plays VCD and SVCD (although not DivX like the Philips). I figured I will use it for a while until I figure out what to spend a more serious amount of money on.

It seems to work fine, but it triggers a pet peeve of mine: bad remote control design. I mean really, look at that thing. No less that 44 buttons, all EXACTLY alike, with labels that are printed in gray on gray. Holy crap, how are you expected to actually be able to use this thing? Good remote controls should be able to be used in the dark (yes, kudos to TiVo!). This thing not only needs light, but good lighting, and some glasses.

Bleh.

DVD Player Craps Out…

Bummer. My 6 month old Philips DVP-642 crapped out. Seems like the drive just went belly up, it doesn’t spin up at all or eject. I really liked this DVD player because it could play regular DivX avi files, but I must admit, I’m not really all that pleased with the longevity. Harumph.

Update: It’s officially over!

I’m personally declaring that the whole “more cowbell” thing is officially over. It was funny when Walken did it. It was perhaps amusing the next million times it was repeated. But the next day, it was already stale, and it’s only gotten worse. Why not just go back to saying “You are the weakest link!” or “Aye Carumba” or “Where’s the beef?!”

Have some comedic mercy.

Addendum: Google reports ::google(“more cowbell”, “729,000 hits for ‘more cowbell'”)::.

Re: Why IP owners should worry

Slashdot recently linked to this rather strange article by Melanie Wyne against the OpenDocument standard. She’s apparently executive director of the The Initiative for Software Choice, a group funded by many large and small companies, seemingly to combat recent moves by governments to specify open source solutions as part of their procurement processes.

Her article is puzzling, as is the website for the Initiative for Software Choice. She said:

But there’s also something bigger going on. It points to a perfect storm that can’t be good for those who depend on intellectual property, or IP, to prosper.

Yes, it does, doesn’t it? The problem is that the oncoming storm is unavoidable. If you are a company who is dependent on intellectual property to prosper, I might suggest that you start worrying about your business model.

What’s puzzling is Wyne’s stand on the OpenDocument standard. After all, one of the main thrusts of the Initiative for Software Choice is to promote open standards for document interchange. Microsoft could just adopt this standard in the line of Office products and could conceivably battle it out in the market place on the basis of having one of the most widely used office suites on the planet. But they don’t want to do that. Curious. One can only imagine that it is because whatever their stated purposes are, the real purpose behind them is to protect the markets of their member companies against intrusion by new competitors.

Wyne continues:

It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further “develop” it.

It seems odd to me that she’s complaining about the confiscatory nature of government regulation that would suck the IP of companies back into the public domain when, in fact, it was a confiscatory policy of government to grant intellectual property rights at all. The underlying philosophy of this group seems to be “if it helps our members it’s a virtue, otherwise, it’s a vice.” That’s not a philosophy that has paid benefits to society as a whole.

Secondly, the OpenDocuments standard doesn’t reassign any intellectual property rights. It is an attempt by the government to ensure that the citizenry will have good access to the documents produced by them in the course of their governmental duties by establishing a highly interoperable format for the exchange of office information. Nothing about this really falls under the kind of “innovation” that intellectual property law really was meant to cover. The precise format the Word uses to save documents really isn’t very important, unless of course, you have to use it. Then, the secret of how Word files are organized has to be worth at least $200 to you (the going rate for Word disks on amazon). Microsoft is gambling that it will be worth it to you because they already have a huge lead in this market. I think they are betting unwisely. Office suites like OpenOffice may not be quite as nice, but they are capable, and are likely to undercut Microsoft significantly in terms of price.

If you are an IP holder, stop your whining. Protect your rights that you have under the law, that’s fine. But many of you are like the buggy whip manufacturers of old. Open source software and standards are helping to accelerate the downward trend of costs for computation and communication, and you better have some idea about how you are going to survive in the world when you begin to get clamped out of these traditionally lucrative but suddenly marginal markets.

I hate CSI: Miami!

Oh, dear, lord.

Could the episode I watched have been any more ridiculous?

In the episode Urban Hellraisers, the plotline featured a gang of young college hoodlums who decide to play a live action version of Grand Theft Auto Urban Hellraisers. It featured the following incredible plot points (I’d normally fear spoiling the plot or someone, but the writers beat me to it):

  • About fifty beauty shots of the Hummer H3, interspersed with ten minutes of Hummer H3 commercials, and followed up by a plea to go to cbs.com to watch a special ending, featuring even more Hummer commercials.
  • The usual plot device of having an “infinite resolution camera” which happens to allow them to read the sticker in the window of a car from hundreds of feet away.
  • Cliché about gamers gone crazy, who are playing the game for real.
  • Cliché about gamer playing himself to death and dying of renal failure.
  • The “winner” of the game turns out to be a nerdy girl who was “just trying to fit in.”
  • The mastermind behind the entire crime spree was an unscrupulous game developer who planned the whole thing to please his stockholders by driving up interest in the game, who comically asserts that “I’ll never do a day behind bars!”

Could this show be any more stupid? Honestly, I’m beginning to look back at Three’s Company for instances of plot sophistication. If you are a writer for this show, send your paycheck back: you are ripping of the company you work for.

100% Crap.

The Real Value of Podcasting

If you really are doing it for the love, why bother assigning a number to it?

Let’s put it another way: if my goal is to maximize the value that I create, I obviously can do that in a couple of different ways, I can either choose to concentrate and create things which are truly of large value to a smaller number of people, or I could settle for quantity over quality and pander to the lowest common denominator. There has to be more to how you choose to live your life than spamming lots of individuals with trivial thoughts.

Aren’t gnomes supposed to be tiny?

Look at this dump from the system monitor on my box at work:

System Monitor

This box has a staggering 4gb of memory, and half of it is listed as occupied, and I’m not running any applications of my own. I mean honestly, a clock applet requiring 119 megabytes? The mixer, 133 megabytes? The panel, 135 megabytes?

What the heck is going on here?

Windows Live!

Microsoft announced “Windows Live” yesterday. What is it? Well, that seems to be the question of the hour. Apparently lots of Robert Scoble’s readers are asking the very same question. I’m not sure how live.com differs from the other beta portal project that Microsoft was touting. To me, they both seem like crude Ajax-ware which duplicate functionality done better elsewhere.

What it seems to really be about is Microsoft’s rush to convert their business model for web services into a Google one: support yourself by advertising. I’ll probably make that the subject of a future podcast rant (I’m not thrilled of the world where I need to view ads everytime I wish to use my computer. I pay lots of money to buy DVDs and Tivos just because the 20 minutes an hour that broadcast television steals from me annoys me… but I digresss).

But what’s really fascinating about the posting that I linked are all the comments. Microsoft, are you listening? You are doing a terrible job of explaining yourself. You are holding press conferences announcing products which aren’t ready, and then telling people that “don’t get it” that they should be patient. “The really cool stuff is coming.” I can’t think of a company that does product announcements worse than Microsoft.

Look at these comments:

  • It does seem typical though “We are Microsoft, we are all smart, we know better than you do. If you can’t see why you should buy our stuff, you’re just stupid.”
  • You enbarrased yourself with this *launch* (without actually launching anything)
  • What’s the difference between this and start.com?
  • It’s … err… a new PLATFORM! that’s it!!! It’s the new Web DNA!
  • I thought this Joe Wilcox post would explain what Live was, but it looks like he’s wondering what the rest of us are: what the hell is Live?

I think there are some positive signs in this announcement. It seems to be saying that they will support multiple platforms, including Firefox. But think about it: for other companies, this decision was made a long time ago. The marketplace made that decision. Firefox is winning marketshare, and if you want to reach the maximum number of users, even ones that run Microsoft Windows products, you need to support Firefox. It’s just a given for other companies. They don’t spend a lot of time considering not doing it, because they don’t want to piss off the significant minority of people who’ve moved from IE to Firefox.

Microsoft, in the meantime, is left with what they perceive to be as a dilemma. At the risk of presenting an overly dramatic metaphor, it’s like those idiots who are trying to keep young women from being immunized against the the virus that causes cervical cancer. They think “oh, gee, without the threat of cancer, young women will go out and have sex.” Of course, women will die as result of their indignation, but you have to crack a few eggs…

Microsoft in the meantime has been slow to deploy technologies which are browser agnostic because of the fear that without browser lock-in, nobody will buy their stuff. But what they are trying to do is to get their customers to serve them. They want their customers to say, “we need this product, and I’m running Microsoft stuff, so you should use Microsoft stuff too, for that extra baked in flavor!” That would work if Microsoft was the only game in town, but other companies (Google, Yahoo!…) are delivering better stuff for the customer, on platforms which are at least as attractive for the consumer. Microsoft is slowly awakening to the notion that lock-in is a poor strategy, and has been for a while. That they are only figuring this out in 2006 is somewhat surprising, given that pretty much everyone else has already figured it out.

Addendum: Oh dear lord. Twice in one day. More “launches” that actually don’t launch anything..