New Years haiku
it was a done deal
come to find out it wasn't
i am the jackass
it was a done deal
come to find out it wasn't
i am the jackass
“Microsoft's core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts.”
“The lesson for any artist here has to be to sign a contract with any session musicians you use to ensure that you have set out any arrangement on copyright and royalties in the product. The vast majority of modern artists will be well aware of the risks, but we could see a great number of similar cases. An ounce of protection could be worth nearly 40 years of cure.”
from a British law blog, Ralli Solicitors. You know that tune “Whiter Shade of Pale”, that I always thought was a Steve Winwood tune? That's by a band called Procul Harum. The keyboardist on that tune claimed “that he wrote and was responsible for the main melody of “Pale”, and as such is entitled to a share of its copyright.” He won the judgment, 40 years after the tune came out. Good for him, right? It's a little more complicated than that.
This one comes from a marketing blog called Outspoken Media. It's a little over the top for me most of the time, and the girl Lisa that runs it most of the time has pronounced diarrhea of the keyboard (yes, I'm calling the kettle black). This post got me thinking, however...
The spark was with the “United Breaks Guitars” tune that's been stuck in my head all day. I'll ruin the surprise and tell you – she's not that impressed. She has some interesting reasons why =>
In case you don't follow the tech press as closely as I do, Apple will be releasing a small, supposedly cheaper tablet computer intended to compete in the “netbook” market. Those are small, cheap computers that can't really do anything but access the internet. I see them in airports a lot lately. They look annoying to use, but that's just me. So Apple's version will (according to rumor) look like a really large iPhone – a 9 inch or so touchscreen and no keyboard.
“Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple's iTunes software, executives said.” – via Financial Times
This sounds like what the iPhone's promise of a music player has been all along – crazy amounts of interaction with the content you've bought – but artists (save perhaps Trent Reznor) have been slow to get on board with realizing the potential. Let's hope this will stir things up a bit.
Apple, Labels Aim To Save The Album With “Cocktail” Project (AAPL)
This is very smart.
It happens to the best of us. We sometimes take our loved ones for granted. We don't remember the thrill of exploring the new relationship, and start to get annoyed when we're forcibly reminded that those days are over. We see others walking around arm in arm with their new love and you think to ourselves “enjoy it while it lasts” or “I bet you just play games on that thing, don't you, chump?” Soon, it seems like everyone has an iPhone. The 12 year old brothers across the aisle from you on the plane – why the hell do they need an iPhone? Your entire crew gets them and you just know they're gonna be borrowing your charger. Yes, I've got my charger with me. Jesus...
You've since moved away from actually programming the thing, since object oriented programming is one giant blob of convoluted shit for a 30 year old bass player with a kid to try and pick up in his spare time. Besides, web development really seems like more bang for the buck. Might not pay as well, but this whole iPhone gold rush is pretty much over anyway. You read all the tech blogs by this point – you've turned your manager onto NetNewsWire before abandoning it yourself to try Google Reader but you'll ditch that soon, too – so you know how annoying it would be to try and get your app through the Apple process were you even capable of coding such a thing. You don't even check out the App Store that much anymore, since there's nothing but a bunch of stupid games over there anyway.
This began in earnest for me about three weeks ago. In fairness, it's not completely the fault of the iPhone. A good bit of the aggravation is due to AT&T's service. It's just not that good. It was really good (or so I thought) when I first got the thing, but I swear since however many millions of people have bought iPhones the network has gotten noticeably slower and spottier. There was a voicemail outage this past weekend that affected nearly everyone on the network whether they knew it or not. I was in St Cloud MN last night with “full bars” and 3G service, but couldn't get a page to load all night.
This is pretty inexcusable to me. AT&T's one and only job – for which they are well paid – is to deliver the services that they promise. At Rothbury and Wakarusa the service was unusable and the 10,000 or so iPhoners that were at Rothbury (not an exaggeration, they were the only phone I saw all weekend, at least half the phones there it seemed) were reduced to communicating via text. Whaa, whaa you might say, and ordinarily I might agree with you, but you know what Verizon did at both of those festivals? They brought in a mobile antenna to provide service to the festival site for their customers. Does AT&T even have such a truck? Could they be bothered to bring it to the festival site in the middle of nowhere where 10,000 of their customers were going to be savaging their shitty network all weekend? Apparently, no, on both counts. Inexcusable. (The upside is that someone had the good sense to put together a Rothbury App which worked great for me all weekend. The schedule was imbedded so I wasn't reliant on the no-cell coverage and I always knew what band I was watching at the time. Very cool.)
The other thing that I've noticed in the last weeks is that the new OS 3.0 is a good bit slower than the previous version. Boot up time and app launch time, both slower. This is ostensibly because there are new features loaded into the new OS, but many of those features aren't even available to 3G and OG iPhoners. So all we get is copy and paste and a dog of a phone. I'll be getting the new one, whatever version it is whenever I get it, but in the meantime I'm left avariciously playing with Stacy's new 3GS.
The iPhone is awesome, but if you don't have one – wait. It will most likely be coming to Verizon sometime in the next year. I will be jumping ship when it does. My advice for the meantime – get an iPod touch and stick with your cell phone that works. There will be a new phase for me after the resolution of this current dark period while AT&T gets their act together (I hope), or it goes over to Verizon, but in the meantime it's #attfail for me.
Here's a link to a techCrunch article that links to yet another cute little video that someone put up on YouTube. The gist is that designers and programmers hate the stupid quirks and security holes that are present in IE6 and have mounted a vigorous campaign to get corporate IT departments to finally get on with the upgrade.
But, I actually work a bit in corporate IT, at a call center full of computers running IE6. They're running that way by necessity, because many of the computers in that place are so old that they won't run an OS newer than Windows 2000. How about that techCrunch? There's a mixture of all kinds of computers in that place and some actually do run XP, but they're all on IE6. IT departments don't want to have to service two different sets of software across their company, and I don't blame them – resources are always tight and are absolutely the reason that IT depts don't upgrade. I know IE8 is free, but what about the 40 computers that we can't afford to replace right now that aren't capable of running it? That and the cold, hard fact that upgrading systems across an entire company brings with it the spectre of having to teach people how to use the new way – repeatedly – and having to listen to everyone from the agents on the floor to the boss at the top complain that “there was nothing wrong with IE6, why did we have to upgrade?” To make some f-ing web designers happy?
Woah, People Really Don't Like IE6
edit : I love web design. We all do. I'm envious of knowledgeable web designers. We all are. It is beyond argument that the world would be better off if IE6 were banished forever from all computers. In addition to being a security risk for everyone (not just IE6 users), countless hours of otherwise productive programming and design are wasted trying to support it's dumb ass. It is, however, a larger and more complex issue than you may realize.
I've been killing time the past couple of weeks with Digg and Reddit. Yes, I just recently discovered them. The Digg experience is more polished, but Reddit feels a little bit more real. They're both essentially services where people submit links to interesting articles that are then voted on by the crowd – up or down – and the ones that the crowd finds more interesting naturally float to the top. Reddit's edge for me though is that users can submit their own essays for display/storage on the site – sorta like the rants and raves section on Craigslist. The health care debate has been raging (literally) for the the past couple of weeks, and I find the discussion on articles and essays to be as good as the articles themselves.
Here's a nice rant on the Blue Cross. I can certainly identify.
The beauty of Reddit is that it has a great iPhone app. It's functionally just like the normal website, which is to say a little spartan in terms of design. The fantastico part of the app is it's integration with InstaPaper. I discovered all of these services at the same time, since they basically feast off of each other (much like the tech press). InstaPaper is totally made for somebody like me. What it does is let you save stuff you want to read on the web, but don't necessarily have the time for right then. You install a little bookmark in your browser which send the page to InstaPaper's server. Their server then downloads the page (I think) and pulls it up for you when you go to the site later.
This is where it gets really good. Say you're on the plane getting ready to pull back from the gate, about to lose cell service for however long. InstaPaper also has a great iPhone app that will pull the article off the server and cache it on your phone, meaning you don't need access to the web to read the article. It even formats it for the iPhone by pulling the stuff from between the “content” div tags, which is presumably the article that you want to read, and does away with all the bells and whistles and CSS and ads and all that. The end result isn't perfect, but it'll keep you busy on the plane for a while.
So the process for me last week was this : Reddit –> find interesting article –> click Save to InstaPaper. Before I got on the plane –> open up InstaPaper and download everything I had marked for later. Kept me busy for most of the flight. Enjoy, news geeks...