Common sense and the iPad

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Dave Winer is one of the wisest people on the Net, so I was wondering what he thinks of the iPad. Here are his initial thoughts. They make sense to me.

It’s definitely not a writing tool. Out of the question. This concerns Jeff Jarvis, rightly so. This is something my mother observed when I demoed it to her on Saturday. Howard xxx writes that not everyone is a writer. True enough, and not everyone is a voter either, but we want to make it very easy for people to vote. And not everyone does jury duty, but we require it. Writing is important. And experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don’t become platforms. There are exceptions but it’s remarkable how often it works this way.

Most of this is negative, and it reflects my feeling about the iPad, which is generally negative, even though I have a lot of fun discovering the problems with the device. It feels so nice to use. It’s so pretty and the nice touches are so incredibly nice. I like using it the way I like driving my BMW.

And the battery performance is astounding. Apple, who seemed never to understand how important battery life is, has achieved it. My iPad still has 44% of its battery left after flying with me across the country, in use the whole time, and on the train trip from the airport, and reading the news this morning at breakfast. That's remarkable, not for Apple, but in comparison to the netbook that I admire for its battery life.

Further, in the iPad’s favor — the screen is uncluttered with the 30-year history of personal computer development, and my netbook screen is. As a result, even though the netbook has a slightly larger screen, the iPad feels larger, and effectively is larger. That’s why the map application feels so much bigger and more useful, because it has more screen real estate to play with. But this comes at a substantial cost. There is lots of missing important functionality. And even where the functionality is present, it's hard to find, and because it works differently makes it hard to use both the netbook and the iPad. And I believe that, for me, the netbook will win, for a variety of reasons…

The iPad and the CD-ROM

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Lovely post by Danny O’Brien.

For those of you blessed with senile amnesia or youth, CD-ROMs were the first wave of “interactive media” in the mid-eighties, and the great hope for publishing houses struggling to understand what they might be doing in the 21st century. Companies from Dorling-Kindersley to News Corp threw millions into CD-ROM publishing, with very little ultimate return. They’d do some fancy-schmancy David Bowie joint project, or an incredibly complex animated re-working of their existing bestsellers. Each one won more awards than it sold copies, and eventually those “interactive divisions” were rolled into the “online media” departments, where their designers would get drunk and bitter, until one night they were sacked after uploading 640MB Adobe Director files onto the website front page.

Back then, geeks were unused to other industry sectors barging into our little rustic byte farmyards with their fancy suits and corporate expense accounts, braying triumphantly about digital convergence, and then, seconds later, striding into the business-model threshing machine that thrummed in the corner. We did not know then that there was a queue of people like this, waiting to dance past us into the bloody knives. We watched their cockiness with alarm, not with the disdain that would come later and definitely not with own brand of hubristic Internet rockstar smugness, the smugness that tempts us all to look a bit less closely at ourselves, and a bit more closely at that thresher.

No, back then it was all a bit shocking. We assumed these people knew what they were doing.

This is a very sharp essay. His point is that developing iPad Apps is one thing, but making them into sustainable income-generators is quite another.

I know that publishing companies will be tempted to go for the all-singing, all-dancing iPad application. But what they’re doing that, my suspicion is that what they’re aiming for is a product which exudes credibility, status — an aura of a professional media product. And when you’re spending the kind of money that a professional application requires, solely to improves your status in the world, you’re not selling a product, you’re buying the love of your audience. That may be an investment in credibility, but it’s not an incoming revenue stream.

The goldrush economics of the iPad will hide this for a little while, because everything will be briefly profitable. But to be sustainable, you need to either be producing something that consistently costs you less than it earns, or will produce regular super-hits among a string of drabber products, or just makes you so much money in its first few months that you never need work again. You can’t just make some single wonderful shiny demo product. You need to keep producing them; you need some way of economizing that process. And you need to stop others from making their shiny thing cheaper than, yet interchangeable with, yours. Otherwise you’re just throwing nice fancy gee-gaws into the thresher’s hungry mouth.

The “best newspapers in the world”? I don’t think so.

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Hooray! Someone else who shares my scepticism of the deluded hubris of the British newspaper industry. Vigorous polemic by Kevin Marsh.

Of all the arguments in favour of newspaper paywalls, one is utter tosh. It is that we – the readers – must pay online to preserve what one tabloid editor once called “the best newspapers in the world”. It’s a description that’s reared its head again this week.

Now, as a general rule it’s always a good idea to reach for your revolver when you hear anyone say any country has the best TV/health service/newspapers/football teams … anything “in the world”.

Not because we/they don’t, necessarily. But because life’s more complicated than that. But one thing we absolutely, certainly, assuredly don’t have here in the UK is the best newspapers in the world. Full stop.

If we did, a quarter of those who used to buy them wouldn’t have stopped doing so over the past 20 years – a desertion that long predates the web, incidentally. If we did, our press wouldn’t be one of the least trusted institutions in the land and our newspaper journalists the least trusted in the world.

We wouldn’t have journalists sent to prison for hacking into mobile-phone mailboxes. Nor editors fired for printing fake photographs or “setting the agenda” while, by their own admission, still drunk from the night before, or admitting that they pay policemen to breach their public trust and give information to journalists.

A newspaper group wouldn’t have had to pay the McCanns hundreds of thousands of pounds for quite literally making up over 100 separate defamatory articles.

Right on. The truth is that Britain has some quite good newspapers, and a larger number of truly awful ones which — among other things — make it impossible for society to have a grown-up discussion about the really hard problems that our society needs to address: like what to do about our over-crowded prisons; immigration policy; the NHS; the BBC; the environment; etc., etc.

The truth about Cameron’s Svengali

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Excellent Observer piece by Peter Oborne about Dave’s key apparatchik, Andy Coulson, the former editor of the Screws of the World.

First, there is no question at all that the News of the World routinely used private investigators during the seven years that Coulson was running the paper. Though much of what they did was legal, some was not. One of these investigators, Steve Whittamore, ran a network of specialists who concentrated on “blagging”, or tricking information out of confidential databases run by banks, credit card and phone companies, Revenue and Customs, the police national computer and other sources. Whittamore, who provided intelligence for other Fleet Street titles as well, was convicted in 2005 of offences committed under the Data Protection Act.

Mulcaire was an expert in intercepting voicemail messages. However, Mulcaire, who was on a full-time contract worth £100,000 a year until his arrest in August 2006, was also a skilful blagger. In all, four investigators who worked for Coulson’s News of the World have been convicted of criminal offences. One of them, whose name cannot be revealed for legal reasons, was actually re-employed by the News of the World after serving his prison sentence. This happened in 2005, while Coulson was still editor.

It is no exaggeration to state that under the editorship of Coulson the News of the World was running what was effectively a large private intelligence service, using some of the same highly intrusive techniques as MI5. This illegal surveillance was targeted at the most famous and most powerful men and women in Britain, including footballers, politicians, members of the government, police and military. The budget stretched to hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, probably more. As deputy editor, and then editor, Coulson was routinely commissioning and editing stories to which these investigators had contributed vital information.

Yet when Coulson gave evidence to MPs last year, he insisted that throughout the time he was editor he had been wholly unaware of any of this, with the exception of the “very unfortunate rogue case” of Clive Goodman.

By these standards, Alastair Campbell was pretty clean.

Techno-hysteria

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There are a lot of smart people out there today who ought to be ashamed of themselves. The spectacle of so many geeks surrendering to Apple’s Reality Distortion Field over the iPad has become positively nauseating. For many years I’ve been influenced by Neil Postman’s conjecture that our future would be book-ended by the insights of two authors: at one extreme is Aldous Huxley, who thought that we would be destroyed (i.e., rendered passive and happily acquiescent) by the things we love; and George Orwell, who thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

The iPad is the latest embodiement of Huxley’s Soma. It’s a seductive, closed device designed for passive consumption of pre-approved objects. That’s why the old ‘content’ industries are slavering over it. They see it as the way to undo all the damage wrought by the openness of the Web and its TCP/IP underpinnings, a way of rounding up all those escaped couch-potatoes and getting them back into the pen. And of being able to charge them for everything they use — and collect the money via Apple’s toll-gate.

All of which is predictable. What wasn’t predictable is the way the hive-mind of geekery would check out its formidable collective intelligence at the door and go all gooey over Mr Jobs’s latest coup. A puppy lying on its back and asking to have its tummy tickled is a paragon of stern objectivity by comparison. My Twitter stream — which is largely fed by people whose intelligence and judgement I respect — has morphed into a drip-feed of drooling acquiescence that Huxley would have recognised.

Here and there I’ve found vestiges of independent thinking. Cory Doctorow, for example, has written a terrific essay likening the iPad to “the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products.” Quinn Norton has a moving post about the socio-economic dimension of all this:

I live a really rich intellectual life and get to do lots of things most poor people don’t, and I appreciate that it’s because almost none of my social group are poor. But sometimes my social group kind of goes crazy and forgets that while they have a lot of power, my class is a whole lot bigger than theirs. And none of them will be buying iPads.

A few of them do have iPhones, because phones are one of those durable goods we need to survive and that’s most of their meager disposable income. A few probably have iPod touches that they got as gifts, hand-me-downs, or because that was their one nice thing they wanted. But the iPad does absolutely nothing vital, and nothing a cheaper piece of electronics doesn’t already do well enough to get by. I’m pretty sure Apple knows this, and couldn’t care less. Poor people do buy iPods, sometimes even new, but they’ve never bought anything else Apple has ever made. And that’s fine. I’ve never felt the urge to get me some Tiffany, and they’ve never felt the need to try to get my money. Similarly, Apple’s just not a brand very open to the poor. But why does this mean anything to the political arguments? Because other vendors out there do want to take our money. We don’t have much, but there’s a lot of us, and unlike the other classes, we’re getting a lot bigger.

And Aaron Schwartz is characteristically thoughtful about the brouhaha:

A lot of people have argued that requiring Apple to approve every application for the iPhone OS is some kind of “mistake”, something they’ll remedy as soon as they realize how bad things have gotten. But recent events — Phil Schiller’s personal interventions, comments on their call to analysts, etc. — have made it clear it’s not a mistake at all. It’s their plan.

The iPad is their attempt to extend this total control to what’s traditionally been thought of as the computer space. This is just the first step, but it’s not hard to imagine Apple doing their best to phase out the Macintosh in the next decade, just as they phased out OS 9. In their ideal world, all computing will be done on the iPhone OS.

And the iPhone OS will only run software that they specifically approve. No Flash or other alternate runtimes, no one-off apps or open source customizations. Just total control by Apple. It’s a frightening future.

There are doubtless some more signs of independent thinking out there, but they are exceptions that prove the rule that the tech-savvy community has succumbed to mob hysteria. In the newspaper business a recognised way of stopping journalists from becoming too enamoured of their own importance was to remind them that the brilliant story they had just filed (and of which they were so proud) would be tomorrow’s fish-wrapping. Perhaps the geek community should be reminded that Mr Jobs’s shiny new wonder will be eWaste in a couple of years?

The Flickr effect

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This morning’s Observer column.

Because Flickr is so prominent, it’ll get most of the blame for the destruction of yet another venerable profession. But in fact the rot had set in long before the site launched in February 2004. The main culprit was the idiot-proof digital camera, which enabled almost anyone to take a decent photograph, or at any rate one that was accurately exposed, in focus and sharp — and to delete it and try again if it hadn’t turned out right.

Digital cameras had a powerful ‘levelling-up’ impact on amateur photography. Once upon a time, only professionals could consistently deliver images that were technically excellent. And even then, analogue technology often let them down. I’ve just been looking through a book of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s collected portraits, for example. Out of 94 images, only 66 approach contemporary standards of sharpness and focus. That doesn’t mean that most of them aren’t memorable pictures; but it does illustrate how digital technology has levelled the playing field…

The Irish mess

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If you thought Greece is a mess, think again. My homeland is, in significant ways, worse: more like Sicily without sunshine. There’s a great column by Elaine Byrne in today’s Irish Times that sums it up.

Appropriately enough, Black Tuesday coincided with the birthday of Vincent van Gogh, a man consumed by madness. By the end of that day, the Irish taxpayer was the owner of one debauched bank, two building societies and now holds a majority and minority stake in two other banks. On our behalf, the Government committed some €32 thousand million to the financial sector as a consequence of their mistakes. By the end of year, the taxpayer, through the offices of Nama, will also own €81 thousand million of property loans.

Wednesday’s front-page Irish Times report outlining Brian Lenihan’s banking plan contained 22 references to “billion”. That word has no meaning anymore because it is too big to appreciate fully. As Des O’Malley observed yesterday, the UN estimated cost to rebuild Haiti is a quarter of what we will spend on bailing out Anglo Irish Bank.

Those that seek to remember, to call to account, are often chastised for their anger. The capacity continuously to forget, our lack of memory or collective amnesia, has been a destructive virtue of Irish public life.

There will be no apologies or statements of regret from the political, financial or regulatory authorities. As Seán FitzPatrick said on RTÉ radio days after the September 2008 Government guarantee: “It would be very easy for me to say sorry, but the cause of our problem was global so I couldn’t say sorry with any degree of sincerity and decency but I do say thank you [to the Irish taxpayer].”

Patrick Neary, the financial regulator, was rewarded with an early retirement golden handshake of €630,000. Irish Nationwide’s Michael Fingleton retired with a €27 million pension fund and a €1 million bonus.

Seán FitzPatrick enjoys a large pension and got a €400,000 golden handshake. Former Anglo chief executive David Drumm went to Cape Cod with a €659,000 bonus. Anglo doesn’t expect €109 million of some €155 million owed by former directors to be repaid…

It’d be nice to think that FitzPatrick and the other rapacious creeps who ran the Irish banks into the ground will eventually go to prison. But somehow, although he has been interviewed for 30 hours by the cops, I suspect that he will go unpunished. Think of him as Ireland’s very own Fred Goodwin. But at least Goodwin had his windows broken and his car vandalised…

My, my, MiFi

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For over a year I’ve been using a 3G dongle to access the Net when on the move. My experience has been patchy, but one of the main irritations is having to hook the gizmo to a laptop using a USB cable. (Another grouse concerned the fact that the drivers for some Linux distros seemed erratic.)

So I’ve cancelled the network account for the dongle and bought this MiFi on a pay-as-you-use tariff instead. It’s a really neat gadget. It hooks up to the 3G network and then becomes a tiny WiFi hub which sits in your pocket but gives anyone around you a connection if you’re willing to let them have the password. This means, among other things, that my iPod Touch now has a serious mobile capability. And no more drivers to worry about: if your device does WiFi, then it can talk to this device. Why can’t everything be like this?

Full disclosure: it was the inimitable Michael Dales who gave me the idea.