Marco.org

Oh no, please stop launching, I accidentally double-clicked an...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:52:48 -0400

Oh no, please stop launching, I accidentally double-clicked an .xls attachment but I really want it to open in Numbers, why won’t this force-quit, it’s still bouncing, damn it, this takes longer to launch than Photoshop, why do I even still have this installed, I never use it, at least not intentionally, what’s with that awful icon, it’s like they designed it to look terrible so people would use Windows instead, I can’t believe some people have to use this all the time.

Fake Steve Jobs on Chrome OS

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:45:10 -0400

Fake Steve Jobs on Chrome OS:

It was hard to pick just one quote from this.

What the fuck is going on inside Google? How much more out of control and undisciplined can this place get? How many new goddamn operating systems are they going to create? They’ve already got Android, and nobody wants it. Now they’re going to make yet another operating system, this time out of a browser that nobody wants. What’s next? A Gmail-based operating system? A YouTube-based operating system? Honestly, Google, is there anyone in charge over there?

This article said everything so well that I don’t feel the need to write my own long post about it.

It’s not that I think Chrome OS is a terrible idea — although it’s certainly not the best use of Google’s time and focus — but that it’s completely overrated and being massively misreported by the press as being a serious competitor or threat to Windows and OS X, which is about as accurate as saying that a RAZR is a serious competitor to a laptop.

Ted Dziuba on Chrome OS

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:40:16 -0400

Ted Dziuba on Chrome OS:

Much in the way that everybody who saw Sideways is now an expert on wine, the tragedy of blogging is that anybody with a laptop and a Gmail account is an expert on technology. So now that Chrome will actually be a full-fledged operating system, let’s see what the experts have to say.

A voice of reason with far too many excellent quotes for you not to read the article.

IRC challenged me to graph something. (click for full...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:04:00 -0400

IRC challenged me to graph something. (click for full size)

Made with Paintbrush.

I love the MacBook Air. It charges so quickly!

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:30:08 -0400

I love the MacBook Air. It charges so quickly!

"Now you never have to leave your browser. And can’t. It’s exactly where Google wants you to be."

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:57:11 -0400

“Now you never have to leave your browser. And can’t. It’s exactly where Google wants you to be.”

- Jeff Rock on Google’s Chrome OS

I had my first cup of coffee from the semi-famous $11,000 Clover machine today. (Cafe Grumpy,...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:54:00 -0400

I had my first cup of coffee from the semi-famous $11,000 Clover machine today. (Cafe Grumpy, Park Slope.)

I actually didn’t like it. The bean, a Yirgacheffe, had a bit too much of an earthy, almost dung-like flavor and scent that tasted slightly offensive and left a long-lasting, unpleasant aftertaste. Obviously, this could be improved by using a different bean or roast and isn’t the Clover’s fault.

But, ignoring the poor bean choice, I wasn’t incredibly impressed by the brew. It was certainly a lot better than the average Starbucks (or worse) drip brew, but I’ve had better coffee from roasters (which Cafe Grumpy is not, and I don’t know how old their beans were) brewed in standard commercial satellite drip pots.

The Clover seemed to extract more body from the beans than a French press, but less than a vacuum pot, with less flavor strength than a commercial drip brewer. The short brew time may be to blame: the entire brew cycle takes a bit over a minute, and I prefer press or vacuum coffee to be brewed for 2-4 minutes.

While it seems that the Clover offers decent quality with short brew times, which is convenient to keep customers’ orders moving quickly, it doesn’t seem worth the cost: a good roaster can make amazing coffee with a standard Bunn drip pot that takes far less labor, is easier to maintain and repair, and costs a lot less than $11,000.

Not to put a damper on anyone’s fun, but doesn’t the Google Chrome OS sound a lot like...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:41:18 -0400

Not to put a damper on anyone’s fun, but doesn’t the Google Chrome OS sound a lot like this?

I need to very occasionally take an Albuterol inhaler for light asthma. It’s so rare that I...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:06:14 -0400

I need to very occasionally take an Albuterol inhaler for light asthma. It’s so rare that I only need to get a new one every 2-4 years, so every time I run out, I need to get a brand new prescription, usually from a brand new doctor since I’m young and tend to move every few years. And it’s nice to have more than one on hand so I can keep them in different places.

Is there a legal, non-shady way to get 1-3 of these in the U.S. without having to find a brand new doctor in my new neighborhood, set up an appointment, take the morning off from work, fill out the new-patient paperwork, and waste both my time and the doctor’s with such a trivial matter?

First impressions of Windows 7 from a Mac user: I’m...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:34:04 -0400

First boot: updates, security warnings.

Lots of text and heavy use of wizards.

Unicode glyphs. Rough edges on the star.

What's the add-on?

Your default state of high alert.

Even Paint has received the Office look.

First impressions of Windows 7 from a Mac user:

I’m slightly amused that there were 8 updates already.
There’s an odd dichotomy with using text labels. They removed text from many of the icons in the interface, like the Dock (excuse me, Taskbar) and system-tray icons, so you have to hover over them to figure out what they are — and unlike the OS X Dock, there’s a delay before the text label shows up, making this a pretty tedious process. Yet the interface is absolutely plastered all over the place with descriptive text labels to explain what everything is, what it does, what else you might need to know, and what else Microsoft would like to tell you about (like related products or services).
I’m glad that a stock installation includes most common Unicode glyphs, such as arrows and stars, that Windows XP lacked. (Don’t know if Vista had them. Probably.)
The use of color is odd for OS X users. Most of OS X is monochromatic, leaving the use of bright colors up to user content, not interfaces. Windows 7, like XP and Vista, liberally applies many different shades of blue, green, and yellow all over the interface. I’m not a designer, so this may have some validity, but it’s definitely not my preference.
A lot of stuff has moved around in the interface, similar to the Office redesign. Even Paint now looks like an Office app, with all of the good and bad that comes with that.
It seems like Microsoft is really hammering the Windows branding into your face as frequently as possible. Everything has Windows logos, the Start button’s logo glows eerily on hover, and everything is called Windows-something. Apple is much more subtle and conservative with the use of their name, the Mac name, and their logos.

Here’s a great Microsoftism from today’s...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:26:05 -0400

Here’s a great Microsoftism from today’s experience.

Trying to download the Windows 7 beta slides down the Information Bar (that dialog is my favorite Microsoftism in history) telling me that I needed to install the Download Manager. Sure, web browsers have supported downloading files without requiring plug-ins for well over a decade, but I’ll give them a pass on this.

After the file downloaded, it just sat there. Why do I need it after the file’s done? So I closed it and got this warning.

The OS X world encourages software to value people’s time, only interrupting them when absolutely necessary. Was it really necessary to confirm whether I wanted to close this when it’s no longer doing anything? What benefit would I gain by leaving it open? And if there is such a benefit that I’m not seeing, is that really so common that you’d want to prevent accidental closings with this dialog at the cost of making every user confirm this common action before doing what they asked?

I just started Windows XP (in Parallels) for the first time in a while to do some IE8 testing and...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:44:34 -0400

I just started Windows XP (in Parallels) for the first time in a while to do some IE8 testing and try to download the Windows 7 RC for future testing.

It’s astonishingly bad. Everything about it. Windows. IE8. Windows Update. Microsoft Update. Automatic updates. Windows Geniune Advantage™. MSN Messenger. The Desktop Cleanup Wizard. Everything. I can’t believe how many people use Windows every day, and how much collective aggravation, wasted time, and damage to our industry has been caused by Microsoft’s sloppiness.

Using Windows for 10 minutes after using Macs full-time for 5 years really helps put all of this in perspective.

I’ve truly never used Vista. Not even once. But I bet Windows 7 won’t be any better — none of Microsoft’s deep-rooted issues that caused Vista’s problems have changed.

Another amazing review of Instapaper Pro 2.0.

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:11:59 -0400

Another amazing review of Instapaper Pro 2.0.

Everyone else is arguing about HTML 5's video codecs. Why can't I?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:24:00 -0400

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica wrote this great overview of the argument. In short:

HTML 5 includes a native tag so people don’t need to rely on Flash or other proprietary plug-ins to play video in pages. It’s currently only supported by the absolute newest versions of Firefox and Safari (including Mobile Safari), and Google will add support to Chrome shortly. Internet Explorer is unlikely to ever support it in a useful way. Opera has probably supported it since 1997, but nobody remembered to ask them.
Nobody can agree on which video format should be the standard.
Apple and Google want the extremely popular and common H.264 video and AAC audio codecs, presumably in .MP4 containers, to be the standard. But these formats have patent and license restrictions, and are therefore not free (as in freedom, not necessarily price) to use.
Mozilla, and the FSF and other free-software groups, want the standard to be the free, open-source Ogg Theora video and Vorbis audio. But these formats are less advanced, they need more filesize and bandwidth for the same quality, there are almost no tools to encode them (especially Theora), and they have no hardware-acceleration chips to make them easier to play on low-power devices such as phones and set-top boxes. In short, nobody uses Theora.
Neither group’s browser(s) support the same format as the other, so there’s no single format that’s supported everywhere.

It’s pointless to argue whether the adopted standard should be a free codec. The H.264 camp screams about practicality and the Theora camp screams about principle. Both are entrenched in their positions: Google is a toss-up for Chrome, but they’re unlikely to support Theora on YouTube, the biggest and most influential video site by far. Apple will never support Theora. Mozilla will never support H.264. (I’m on the H.264 side for numerous practical reasons, but it doesn’t really matter — I’d love it if everyone supported both.)

Effectively, the bickering has killed any chance that the HTML 5 element had of being used on any meaningful scale.

The purpose was to remove complexity for browsers, authors, and users, but it has only added it.

Know what’s a lot simpler?

Flash.

Yes, the Flash that we were trying to get away from.

Because Adobe doesn’t care that H.264 isn’t free. Flash supports the same formats on every browser. Even IE. And authors only need to encode, store, cache, and track one file per video.

In fact, you can use your choice of numerous tools — free or commercial, command-line or graphical, all-in-one or specialized, Linux or OS X or Windows — to encode H.264 video with AAC audio in an .MP4 or .MOV container. Then you can play that file on:

Every browser on every OS with Flash installed, which is more than 90% of browsers in use, including most installations of Internet Explorer and all versions of Firefox and Safari released before June.
Every Mac browser, or every Windows browser with QuickTime installed (and if you have installed iTunes or Safari on Windows, you have QuickTime), with an tag.
The iPhone, both directly and in Mobile Safari, with an tag.
Safari 4 and Mobile Safari in 3.0 with the element.
Any video-capable iPod, optionally delivered as a podcast.
Every Xbox 360 and PS3, and many advanced DVD players and set-top boxes.

How does that list look for a Theora/Vorbis .OGV file?

It doesn’t matter that H.264 isn’t technically free: it’s near-universal and incredibly practical. MP3 isn’t free, but it’s everywhere, except where it has been replaced with the also-not-free AAC. Until last year, JPEG was under possible patent restrictions, but it has been supported by every version of every Mozilla browser.

By not supporting the practical format, Mozilla isn’t making a brave statement or taking a stand: they’re just keeping everyone on Flash and preventing meaningful adoption of HTML 5’s element.

Spytap in response to Carrier dynamics: While I think your assessment is probably accurate, I...

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:20:19 -0400

Spytap in response to Carrier dynamics:

While I think your assessment is probably accurate, I wanted to point something out regarding coverage:

While their CDMA towers, like Verizon’s, cover larger areas than AT&T’s GSM towers, they have significantly fewer of them than Verizon.

The above statement is true, however sprint phones, when away from a sprint tower, roam on verizon’s network without any additional roaming fees. So yes, Sprint has fewer towers overall, however Sprint handsets use other towers transparently as well.

This is true, but there’s a major caveat:

A Sprint phone will hold onto any Sprint signal, no matter how weak, before it will roam onto a Verizon tower.

I found during my month with Sprint in 2007 that I passed through plenty of places where my phone would hold desperately onto the 1-bar Sprint signal, preventing any real use of the phone, even though Verizon had full coverage in the area. In practice, I found very few areas that Verizon covers that Sprint has absolutely no coverage in, so the Verizon roaming was of very limited usefulness.

Carrier dynamics

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:33:42 -0400

There’s an interesting dynamic between the U.S. cellular carriers, Apple, and Palm if you pay attention and read between the lines a bit.

Sprint has been teetering on the brink of death for years. But they managed to get the Palm Pre exclusive, seemingly for at least 8 months.

Palm is effectively betting their company on the Pre. By most accounts, it’s the only current phone that has a good chance of taking marketshare away from the iPhone. Palm needs it to succeed, so they’re challenging Apple on one of the iPhone’s biggest drawbacks and possibly the biggest remaining reason why many people don’t buy it: the mediocre AT&T network that it requires.

In the U.S., that leaves T-Mobile (smaller and slower network than AT&T), Sprint (bleeding customers like crazy), and Verizon Wireless. Verizon would be the obvious choice: usually, people who don’t like AT&T’s network are comparing it to Verizon’s, which has wider and more consistent coverage with much faster and more reliable data service.

Sprint is an improvement over AT&T for data service, but not for overall coverage. While their CDMA towers, like Verizon’s, cover larger areas than AT&T’s GSM towers, they have significantly fewer of them than Verizon.

Clearly, Verizon is the much more desirable network to get the exclusive for both Palm and Verizon. Palm needs to kick Apple’s butt in carrier quality, and Verizon needs a killer device to win back a lot of the customers they lost to AT&T for the iPhone.

Think of how different the Pre’s launch and first year would have been as a Verizon exclusive, especially now that iPhone users are increasingly feeling the limits of the strained AT&T network. It would have been a very strong competitor to the iPhone and the cause of a great deal of worry for Apple. But with Sprint, it’s much more tame, and it’s not really causing a significant disruption.

So why didn’t Verizon get the Pre exclusive?

I can think of two explanations:

Sprint paid Palm a lot of money or made other extremely significant concessions in Palm’s favor. But I don’t think Sprint could pay Palm enough to make up for the value of a Verizon exclusive.
Verizon refused.

The latter is a much more interesting possibility, and I think it’s more likely. Verizon is notoriously difficult to work with, and has exhibited a consistent delusion in the past that they don’t need specific blockbuster devices and can make their own knockoffs that are just as good. But I don’t think that’s what happened this time. Verizon has lost enough customers specifically to the iPhone that I think they finally noticed at a very high level and are taking steps to fight back.

I think Apple gave Verizon an incentive to turn Palm away.

The public assumption so far is that Apple will never make a CDMA iPhone, waiting instead until the big move to LTE — but that’s still many years away from practicality. I’m betting that Apple will release a CDMA iPhone next year. They’ll face a few inconvenient issues by making a CDMA version in parallel with a GSM version, but the massive Verizon customer base makes the cost well worth it.

Remember the rumors a few months back that Apple had been meeting with Verizon? I think this was why, not the “iPhone mini” that rumor sites assumed.

I think Apple offered Verizon the iPhone — not some other device, and not a cut-down version, but the real iPhone — for 2010, and part of the negotiation was that Verizon wouldn’t take the Pre exclusive. Apple needs to be on Verizon before the Pre gets there, and they’ll do anything to make that happen. Similarly, Verizon needs the iPhone, having potentially lost 5 million subscribers to it so far.

I can’t think of any other explanation that makes sense. And this one makes a lot of sense for every party involved.

AT&T's massive iPhone blunder

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:53:00 -0400

Some numbers:

Verizon Wireless has about 87 million subscribers. (ref)
Before the iPhone’s release, Verizon had about 61 million subscribers (ref). Much of their growth to 87 million was from the recent acquisition of Alltell, which brought about 15 million. (ref)
AT&T has about 77 million subscribers. (ref)
Before the iPhone’s release, AT&T had about 62 million subscribers. (ref)
About 21 million iPhones have been sold worldwide. (ref)
Most new subscribers to AT&T since the iPhone’s release have been iPhone buyers (ref, ref). Presumably, a very large portion of them had previously owned another mobile phone, so they came over from another carrier. And, given Verizon’s size, it’s likely that a very large portion of them came from Verizon. By the numbers and their relative growth rates, it seems reasonable to assume that Verizon has possibly lost 5 million subscribers to AT&T just for the iPhone.

Getting the iPhone exclusive could be the best thing that AT&T has ever done for their wireless business.

And what have they done with that great fortune so far?

Well, one thing they haven’t done is adequately expand their capacity. Cellular networks have been able to add major features (such as web browsing, conference calling, photo- and video-MMS, media streaming, and tethering) quickly in the past because an incredibly tiny percentage of people would ever figure out how to use them. The networks were hardly touched for anything except voice calls and SMS. Most people didn’t buy smartphones, and those who did rarely used anything beyond a regular phone’s data capabilities except email. They hardly even browsed the web because mobile browsers were so awful.

The iPhone has dramatically changed that. iPhone owners actually use the data network far more than owners of other devices because the functionality is finally accessible and pleasant to use, and many iPhone buyers have never owned another smartphone — they came straight from dumb flip-phones.

So while the iPhone has been a boon to AT&T — not only did they get a huge influx of customers, but iPhone users spend twice as much as AT&T’s average on their monthly bills — the additional network burden is significant. As soon as these trends became apparent to AT&T (easily within 2 months of the original iPhone’s 2007 release), they should have scrambled to expand their data-network capacity.

Instead, they sat on their asses and enjoyed the extra profits. AT&T has always been a “cherry-picking” network, building out coverage and upgrading speeds only when absolutely forced by competitors, and then only doing the bare minimum and only serving the most profitable areas.

Their mistake was in the assumption that AT&T was getting a bunch of new, loyal customers. In reality, iPhone owners are loyal only to the iPhone. The carrier is just a required utility given a few pixels in the corner to show their name. That’s it. We’re as loyal to AT&T as we are to our electric company.

The same passion that drove all of these customers to abandon the excellent Verizon network for this awesome device is also pushing them to demand more functionality and more bandwidth. iPhone users pay twice as much as flip-phone users, but AT&T can’t just pocket the difference — we have high data needs that we expect to be served for that additional money.

And now, the network is so strained and AT&T is so slow-moving that they’re holding Apple back, cramping the iPhone’s growth, and leaving them vulnerable to competing devices on better networks.

AT&T was given a great fortune with the iPhone exclusive, but they’ve completely failed to do anything to hold onto it. As soon as there’s a better option, they’ll lose a big portion of iPhone users who feel no loyalty to them because they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve any.

"My theory is that the things that you own that you’re not using or don’t need aren’t just a waste of..."

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:05:34 -0400

“My theory is that the things that you own that you’re not using or don’t need aren’t just a waste of money and space: they’re draining you of your energy. Every time you walk past that cookbook that you never opened, or that model airplane kit that you meant to assemble, or the oscilloscope that you haven’t turned on in a year, a little neural pattern fires that says “Someday I should..” or “I always meant to…” or “God, I really ought to take care of that.” Each of these tiny feelings of obligation or regret is almost imperceptible on its own, but their accumulation throughout the day is a burden that you may not even know you’re bearing until it’s gone.”

- Nat Friedman (via azspot)

The CrunchPad: How different would the world be?

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:13:56 -0400

Fusion Garage, the soon-to-be-subsidiary of TechCrunch that’s building the OS for the CrunchPad, has a comically ridiculous motto:

What if the browser could boot without an OS? How different would the world be?

I’ll try to answer this question.

Technically, they’re probably just bundling a minimal, fast-booting OS (with a fast-booting BIOS, presumably, that can quickly wake from sleep) with a browser as the only application. They’re most likely not writing their own kernel or basic frameworks, since they can just use GNU stuff and Linux. And they’re definitely not writing their own browser, because that would be insurmountable by such a small team (and really stupid). They talk about running Flash, so it’s almost definitely just a stripped-down Linux distribution with the minimum support required to run a GUI, a custom-chromed Firefox (or Konquerer?), and an on-screen keyboard. So the OS is there — it just hopefully gets out of your way and you don’t need to know about it.

It seems like the worst combination of two products:

Netbooks: Extremely small, cheap, low-end laptops, usually running Linux.
Slate-type tablet PCs: Laptops without keyboards that run normal applications but rely on touch- or pen-input directly on their screens.

Geeks think both products are awesome and will take over the world, but neither have come close. The CrunchPad is much more like a slate-tablet than a netbook, but without the software flexibility. It has the terrible hardware of netbooks with the impracticality of not having a keyboard. If you’re going to spend $300 on a small, limited computer that you’ll only ever use for web browsing, I don’t see why you’d get a CrunchPad instead of a netbook. (An iPod Touch would probably be a much better choice than either.)

The presumption that this will change the world, at least on the software side, seems predicated on an implied shortcoming of browsers requiring operating systems. I don’t see why this is a problem, nor do I see how this would solve such a problem even if it existed.

Back to the original question: How different will the world be if they actually release this thing?

Well, Michael Arrington will have less money and a handful of geeks will have a $300 slate-netbook that they use a few times before it gets tossed in their gadget pile because everything it does is better accomplished with something else.

That’s about it.

"Palin’s resignation on July 3rd guarantees her a front page spot on basically every American..."

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:04:53 -0400

“Palin’s resignation on July 3rd guarantees her a front page spot on basically every American newspaper on the most America-focused day of the year […]. She is playing on the emotions of her supporters and its a brilliant move. The x < 50% of the population that hates Barack Obama wants to get behind something, and right now she is it. This isn’t a scandal. This is her implicit 2012 announcement. It’s a wink to the republican base that absolutely adores her (Yes, New York and California: millions of people LOVE Sarah Palin). She’s playing on the emotions of her supporters who will be all about beating the secret-Muslim-deficit-spending-baby-killer on this Independence Day. […] If we don’t take this seriously, she can win. Do not brush this off.”

- Less is Mohrer: Regarding Palin’s rapid departure.

Good points, and it’s pretty convenient for that effect. I think the real story is more likely to be elements of both: she’s being forced to resign because of a scandal, and she chose the most convenient nearby time to do so.

Her supporters are so rabid, paranoid-delusional, and selectively attentive that she just needed to appear somewhat positive on her departure to maintain their support throughout the scandal that’s probably about to become public. They’ll be reminded of her image in this positive light on a nationalist holiday, and that’s all the help they need to convince themselves that anyone who says anything bad about her in the coming weeks hates America and hates freedom and hates women and hates the troops and eats babies and kicks puppies and loves Osama bin Laden.

As a result, most of the mainstream media, especially the television “news” outlets, will be extremely, negligently soft on their reporting of any scandal that comes out of this, because if they imply anything bad about her, all of her loud, idiotic cult supporters will foam at the mouth and write letters and make angry phone calls and rally their idiotic friends and boycott the networks for a day until they forget why they were angry and get lulled back into their fat corn comas watching their sorry excuse for news on their plasma credit-card-debt TVs in their giant subprime McMansions that are surrounded by nothing but other giant subprime McMansions and are a convenient 45-minute highway drive in their “compact” SUVs to their bullshit jobs at the insurance or financial-services companies that we love so much these days.

Happy 4th of July!