unthinkable

The Apple iPad is out today. (In the United States.)

The device has generated many, many words even before being properly leaked, let alone announced, and more still after the January 27, 2010 announcement.

I’m not here to tell you the iPad is missing features, or underpowered, or overpriced. Features are relative to requirements, power is relative to needs, and price is relative to everything. It might be underpowered and overpriced for some, but others it will be just right. Poking fun at lack of USB ports or multitasking or Flash is cheap, easy, and popular, but it’s totally been done a thousand times over. Personally, I am intrigued by the slate form factor — just not the Apple implementation.

I’m here to tell you the Apple iPad makes me uneasy. Very uneasy.

Much of the more insightful commentary following the iPad announcement focused on the philosophy underlying the device, and not without reason.

I don’t have that much of a problem with iPad the movie watching slate or iPad the game console or iPad the ebook reader: iPad, the appliance.

I do have a large problem with iPad, the future of computing.

Apple seems very intent on expanding the deployment of iPhone OS. It’s spread from a smartphone, to a handheld device to a media slate. This from a company now calling itself a mobile device company. Of course, they should have an interest in expanding iPhone OS’s popularity: it’s likely cheaper and easier to develop and cheaper and easier to run, hardware-wise. I’m all for leaner, user-friendlier software. It probably doesn’t hurt Apple gets 30% of all the (official) software sales.

You will have no problem finding people to tell you the iPad is the future.

Many have commented on the tinkering, exploration, and play angles of the iPad Question; of those, Alex Payne’s and Mark Pilgrim’s posts caught my particular attention.

(Alex’s verdict: disturbing. Mark’s: a real loss.)

The general idea is that by encouraging playing, tinkering, and messing with things, computers of yore allowed their users to develop creativity, analytical thinking, and curiosity. Appropriately, for both the writers, the computers in question were made by Apple.

I have similar experiences — not on Apple computers, there weren’t a lot of those in Poland in mid-to-late 90s — but the personal stories are not the point here.

One of the responses to those arguments, by Faruk Ateş, charged:

When these men became programmers, they didn’t do so because tinkering was “so much fun”; they did it because there was no other way. [emphasis original]

He and many others manage to impressively miss the point.

Children don’t tinker because they want to become programmers, because they want to learn to program or learn anything else. Children tinker because it’s fun. There is no ultimate goal. They do not, at least initially, kick a football around because they want to be on Manchester United’s first team. They do not play in the kitchen because they want to become world-famous chefs, nor do they play with LEGO because they want to become mechanical or civil engineers. They play and tinker because they are curious and that is what children do.

Luckily, they do develop very important skills while tinkering, trying things out, pushing the boundaries, breaking things occasionally. This is a side effect — a very important and happy side effect, but a side effect nevertheless.

The iPad is a LEGO set that can only be assembled into what’s drawn on the box.

The iPad is a microwave. You can’t realistically do whatever you please with a microwave, and most people won’t expect to. But the future of food delivered from microwaves — quick, easy, user-friendly, one-button — is a bleak future. No one will become a world-famous chef by playing with making food in the microwave when they’re 12. The stove presents much more opportunity to mess up and spend hours cleaning up the aftermath, or even burn down the place. It also presents an opportunity for expression and exploration that just cannot be realized in the limited nature of the microwave oven.

It looks like Apple would really, really like it if more people would get rid of their stoves and only use microwaves.

The “it’s either secure, user friendly, easy to learn, or it’s tinkerable” line of thinking commonly used against these arguments is a false dichotomy. Mac OS X comes with a command-line terminal and a variety of other ways to mess with and, yes, break your system. Compared against the iPhone OS, the primary reason OS X might be considered more difficult is not because it’s easier to break; it’s because it’s more overwhelming with its functionality.

As Cory Doctorow wrote in a recent post that was otherwise less than pointed:

Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

This isn’t about us not understanding a paradigm shift. This isn’t about us not understanding how the new world moves. We understand it — and we are very afraid it will lack supremely important features of the old world.

Here’s to tinkering.

This is an expansion to my thoughts on Montreal, as threatened promised. (more…)

Much of this was written in mid-September, forgotten in draft hell, put off for months, and occasionally augmented. I’m not sure it’s perfect yet, but it’s good enough.

A friend and I went to Montreal for four and a half days in September before classes started. My first visit to the city, though with any luck it won’t be the last. Here are some random thoughts collected by the end of the week. Not a proper blog post, but spamming all of this on Twitter would have been excessive. I have pictures; they will make their way to Flickr eventually.

(more…)

• 3B, my best term by academic performance since first year, by a fair margin, not fully related to sudden spikes in intelligence or work ethic. Fun times with 4 midterms and 12 job interviews in four days just before the reading week. I finished with more job offers than midterms failed, so I consider it a success.
• Last work term, went reasonably well.
• 4A, went pretty okay in the end, though at some points it felt like more work and less results than 2B two years ago. Special thanks to ECE, as usual.
• Two projects I wanted to do, Take the GRT one of them, pretty much fizzled out. Not too thrilled about that, but that was the year.
• Fell in love with Toronto. Because every building is a shop and every person is a shopper.
• Fell in like with Montreal. The visit was too short, I will be back.
• Became significantly jaded with Waterloo. Not its fault, really, but on categories influenced by size it can’t compete, and those became important.
• Wheels fell of the Flickr train, and I now have a 11-month backlog. The fact I insist on uploading chronologically except in special circumstances does not help.
• Managed not to buy another camera(s), but it doesn’t look like I will last long into 2010.
• Completed my conversion into an appalling hipster. Music spam: Year of Broken Social Scene in the first half, and Cocteau Twins in the second half. Unsurprising, really. Four great releases to start off: Junior Boys, Metric, Phoenix, and Röyksopp. A new múm album leaked just before summer started and it proved to be the perfect summer album.
• Other notable new albums from Young Galaxy, Think About Life, Mew, The xx (just barely, listened in late December).
• Saw live: Bloc Party, Hexes and Ohs, Goran Bregović, Bell Orchestre, Broken Social Scene (@ Harbourfront, yes), M83, Think About Life, Young Galaxy, múm, Junior Boys.
• You don’t have a clue.
• Love and mathematics.

Randomly browsing around one day in October, I found a blog post entitled Lechistan 2150.

Apart from the Lechistan call-out (a name which I will always think of fondly due to a story I was told in grade school); the standard Eurabia stuff, which has been rebutted so many times surely I of all people don’t need to; and the mixed peoples note, which I can only applaud; we have:

The information revolution means that attempts to ban corrupting influences in the media are fairly pointless; those mobile phone-sized things have so much memory and power that it is as if you could carry all of today’s Internet in your pocket. But the availability of so much information, paradoxically, has led to many people paying much less attention to things electronic, and information from these sources is regarded rather as fast food, burgers etc. are treated today, i.e. insufficient, plastic, diversionary, dubious. The written word is the source of authority; calligraphy is once more a valued skill.

Is it going to happen? Whose opinion would you value more, your good real-life friend, or that of one of your 600 Facebook “friends” or 300 Twitter “followers”?

But will you think of a hand-written letter more than of an email?

As of my October bill, Rogers charges me 15 cents for incoming text messages. This is in addition to 15 cents for outgoing text messages I was being charged previously. The cost to the customer to get rid of this is $5 per month for a messaging pack with a generous 250 outgoing messages included. The cost to the provider to provide text messaging is essentially zero as the messages piggyback on the necessary control channel.

I also cannot get caller ID — an integral feature of the network since the first GSM standard, something that actually takes Rogers effort and costs money to disable — without paying an extra $10 each month for some insane cable-network-inspired value pack which in addition to fundamental GSM features includes a lot of crap I don’t care about. (It’s $10 because getting just the texting would be $5 and getting 500 MB of BIS data is $25. That’s a subject for another day.)

This is on top of my $57.45 (legally advertised as $50) regular monthly fee for some number of minutes and 500 MB of data and BIS access.

But wait! Rogers Wireless ends system access charge, a September Toronto Star headline triumphantly proclaims. So my bill will only be $50.50, right?

System access charge, in case anyone doesn’t know, is the marketing-produced gimmick in which a company claims to charge a fee for system access on top of your other fee for system access and gets to advertise only the second fee. Just like you pay $20,000 for a $20,000 Benz, and $40,000 to drive it off the dealer’s parking lot.

Only, to sweeten the deal in addition to dropping its $6.95 a month system access fee, Rogers will add a “government regulatory recovery fee” in the amount of “$2.46 to $3.46″ (presumably, $2.46 to those who worship to a makeshift Rogers shrine, $3.46 to others), as well as raise the “base price” of its plans — that’s the advertised one — by $5.00. Congratulations, your price to sign up for a $50 plan just went down from $56.95 to $57.46 plus worship (plus more additional fees).

Of course, the Canadian wireless industry is well-known for pampering its customers. For instance, they’re reducing your local-calling area to serve you better. Of course, the very concept of long-distance calling has stopped existing sometime in 1980s, but who’s keeping score?

Mine is the best deal in Canada I was able to find in January 2009 coming with my own unlocked GSM BlackBerry (carrier subsidy = $0). Even that required a 1 year contract.

I’d say it’s a pretty healthy industry.

It lives with me. I live with it, begrudgingly, against my will, unable to bring myself to fix it once and for all.

I shape it. It shapes me.

It obeys the laws of physics. Unless supported by a horizontal surface, it descends to the floor. I have never lived in a room that had quite enough horizontal surfaces.

I try to contain it. This never happens. I make plans to clean it up properly. This also never happens.

Every now and then, an assignment or a project causes me to concentrate specific parts of the mess in one area. I pretend this helps me focus. It works, kind of. After the project, the collected mess is immediately released back into the global mess pool. It might be swapped out for another mess concentration for use on the next project.

It defines me. And I define it.

My vision of heaven is a room lined with wide, horizontal shelves, with lots of wide, long tables.

This post has been updated; see bottom of the page for corrections.

The OpenOfficeMouse was announced today. I’m pretty sure it’s fake, but whether it’s real is actually far less interesting than how easily people became convinced it is real.

Engadget fell for it, as did the vast majority of their commenters. John Gruber fell for it, not that anyone was expecting anything else; John Gruber would fall for a press release announcing the bankruptcy of Microsoft Corporation on April 1. A PC World blog fell for it, quoting much of the page verbatim. Thankfully, preserving our collective sanity, Slashdot seemed pretty reserved, and the commenters actually had something resembling an interesting discussion.

Let’s be serious. I own and use several ThinkPads, my phone is BlackBerry, I use Opera. I’m pretty geeky and I generally enjoy things that don’t put form over function and that might look a little ugly but work. It took me about two minutes to figure out this had to be a joke, evidently a pretty elaborate joke, but a joke nevertheless. It doesn’t matter who perpetrated the joke, or whether the mouse shown in the press release is an actual working device. Francesco Poderico and T Beale, of United Kingdom and Switzerland respectively, may well have registered for a large conference, promising to present a revolutionary multi-button application mouse during a 45 minute presentation.

But I’m pretty sure the official affiliation with OpenOffice.org ends there.

No group actually capable of shipping an office suite is insane enough to believe an 18 button mouse that looks like that is a good idea. Not even experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project think it is a good idea for the general public or even the average OpenOffice.org user. No one seems to have taken the time to check out one of only two names given in the press release, “mouse designer Theodore Beale”. Otherwise, they may have paused over the fact Theodore Beale is a WorldNetDaily writer and author of The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens who is on the record as saying calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to National Socialism. He is also a musician, a game designer, and an entrepreneur, but mouse design, or residence in Switzerland, seems to be lacking from his résumé.

Even if the OpenOfficeMouse does turn out to be real down the line, the willingness of so many to believe an announcement of this mouse, with this press release, and those quotes is pretty interesting in and of itself. It’s an OpenOffice.org related product – so the worse it seems, the more real it appears. Cue the open source sucks, design by committee, and a good metaphor for Linux and OSS comments.

To be sure, the OpenOffice.org interface is not the greatest. It is also nowhere near as bad as most people think it to be. It can’t, considering it is as close of a copy of pre-2007 Microsoft Office as anyone can get without being sued.

People believe the OpenOffice.org interface is bad, so it is bad. This is the same problem Microsoft was facing with Windows Vista; it wasn’t so bad, really, but nearly everyone thought it was bad. How do you fight against that? You can’t run ads saying we are, in fact, reasonably awesome, because everyone is convinced you suck so much, what you think is awesome by definition isn’t. You can’t run ads saying we aren’t as bad as you think, because that’s just pathetic. You can’t keep on doing what you are doing – at least outwardly – because everyone thinks, knows it sucks.

Microsoft got around it by fixing up a few (admittedly well-chosen) things in Vista and pushing a “new” release out the door. How will OpenOffice.org? Radical overhaul of the UI is one way, but copying Office 2007′s ribbon will inevitably cause the “like Microsoft Office, only worse” label to stay firmly on. Anything new would probably be evaluated with extreme prejudice, as it came from the same open-source hippies people that brought us such a terrible interface in the old OpenOffice.org.

So, how to fix this? I’m not sure. I think a simplifying redesign coupled with a name change might stand a chance. Really, “OpenOffice.org” is not doing itself any favours appearing non-complicated. I don’t know what the name might be; the good ones, “Office” and “Works” are taken by the incumbent, although one of them might be freeing up. Apple’s taken the next obvious ones, “iWork” with “Pages” and “Numbers”.

One of the reasons the success of Firefox is so remarkable is that it came from a decidedly hippie open-source environment – Mozilla, of all of them – with a name that didn’t actually describe what the program does (cf. “Internet Explorer”, or even “Netscape Navigator”). Will OpenOffice.org be able to pull off something similar?

Updates: The mouse is apparently real, and the designer really is Theodore Beale a/k/a Vox Day. OpenOffice.org claims they’ve never given permission to use the name; Beale says they have, but they’ll change the name to “OOMouse” anyway. The status of John McCreesh quote in the press release was not expanded upon. I’d assume it’s a real quote, though I’d question how much of it is real. [Working] closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project might in reality end up just using their data.

A October 15 mailing list message from Elizabeth Matthis, member of the User Experience team for OpenOffice.org, called a proposal for the mouse [v]ery exciting stuff and said Thank you for this innovative addition to OOo, though how much this was anything than generic praise to keep people motivated and interested in working with an open source project, I do not know. (I heavily suspect not very much.)

In the end, I was wrong in calling this an elaborate joke. Perhaps there is a new internet law modeled after Poe’s law waiting to be formulated here: without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of open source culture that someone won’t mistake for the real thing… and vice versa.

I’d like to think the willingness to believe that press release, the lack of research into the mouse’s author and not bothering to confirm with OpenOffice.org still form a pretty decent basis for my claims in the latter part of the post. But even I can see the ground got significantly shakier. Live and learn.

If you have a computer built around a ASUS M3A78-EM motherboard, or more generally a motherboard with a AMD SB700 southbridge, running Ubuntu Linux and VMware Server, but very very painfully due to unduly ridiculously slow hard drive, blacklist ata_generic and add pata_atiixp to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules.

What was specifically happening in my case was somewhat different than the person in the linked thread was experiencing: DMA appeared to be on, and immediately after boot-up speeds were okay. However, using any VMs quickly killed the speeds. With the change, the speeds stay where they’re supposed to be. In my case, it’s consistently around 106 MB/s from a Samsung HD502HI when it’s idle.

The rudimentary benchmark I used was sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda.

I was going to post this to Twitter; then I thought about it and figured a bit more commentary couldn’t hurt, and this way I am not at mercy of Twitter’s hyperlink breaker shortener du jour.

Not to mention this should Google better.