I was at a Second Cup (for those of you south of the border, that is a chain of coffee shops here in Canada, sort of like Starbucks except with actual coffee instead of the piss-weak brown water at Staryucks) the other day and there was a mope trying to send an email from his Blackberry and he poked at the keys for a few minutes and then flipped the ‘berry onto the table in disgust and turned to his friend and uttered a concise and timeless phrase:
“This Blackberry sucks.”
The funny thing here is that there was nothing wrong with his Blackberry at all. It was working just fine, keys responding, screen updating, memory … er, memorying. What was wrong is that his wireless provider’s half-backed digital network had crapped out on him. He had the dreaded “data connection refused” result, and that led to his phone also not being able to make calls and eventually he had to pull the battery and SIM care out of the Blackberry to do a full hard-core reset. The whole time he muttered about how bad his Blackberry was and as he walked out the door he glanced at the trash receptacle and told his friend that he “should toss the fucking thing in the garbage.”
He blamed the device, not the carrier. Which brings us to the whole point of this post: Apple really made a mistake when they went with Rogers as their “exclusive” iPhone wireless partner in Canada. The Rogers wireless network sucks gigantic amounts of hairy balls, with an absolute endless parade of dropped calls, data rejections, and network failures on their “Edge” digital network.
The Edge. That’s a laugh. The Crap would be more apropos.
But the service provider is usually teflon in these situations. Geeks and gear-heads know where to put the blame when the network lets them down, but the average suit-and-tie kind of mope is clueless about this, so they think that their device is at fault. Which means, regardless of how good it actually is, there will be a brigade of young executives down at ye olde coffee shop saying “This iPhone thing sucks.”
Who are these awesome looking fellows? Take a moment to ponder while you gaze upon their awesomeness:
Why, those are the stars of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, the totally awesome Nintendo DS game that the even more totally awesome Elite Beat Agents is based on. And that image above (once again, you may want to pause to reflect on the awesomeness of it all) is the first bit of promotional art for Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Tamashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2. Yes, that is a “2″ as in a sequel which means that there will be even more awesome dancing and world saving. It also means that the chances are extremely good for a second installment of Elite Beat Agents, which means I am going to use the “a” word one more time here.
Awesome.
If you aren’t totally hip on the Kanji there, the title roughly translates to “Burn! Hot Blooded Rhythm Soul! – Jump! Fight! Cheer! 2″ which just makes me need to lie down and recover from the overwhelming wave of awesome.
It was no surprise to anyone at all that Apple and Cisco came to a quick agreement about the use of the “iPhone” name. No matter what happened from that point onward, Cisco knew that the game was up, and no matter what it was really called, everyone and their dog was going to call Apple’s new product “iPhone” regardless of what was actually stamped on the case.
What may surprise you is what Apple and Cisco were actually quibbling about, and why the deal fell apart in the first place. Cisco’s “iPhone” is not an actual phone, it is a set of VOIP technologies that will make it easy to roll out internet telephony without having a dedicated VOIP router. Some of this technology was supposed to find its way into the iPhone, giving Apple’s new toy on-the-fly wireless VOIP capabilities. The idea was that the iPhone would work as a regular ol’ cell phone under normal circumstances, but if you were within range of a wireless hotspot, the phone would swap over to VOIP calling. Both sides saw this as a win-win kind of deal: Apple was going to get seamless internet telephone as a selling point, and Cisco was going to get the average mope thinking about VOIP.
Everything was great until the Apple team floated hints at this capability to the drones at Cingular, who promptly took a bird. No way, no how. The gang at Apple decided to bide their time, and axed the VOIP parts of the phone. This led to all sorts of hard feelings with Cisco, and the whole thing went to shit.
So why the kissy-kissy make-up now? Easy – Apple didn’t take the VOIP function out of the iPhone, they just turned them off for now. As long as Cingular is the “exclusive” provider of the iPhone, those function will remain turned off. Once you can get the thing with other providers, though, all bets are off. Apple will remotely turn the VOIP firmware back on, this whole story will become public knowledge, and you will be making wireless IP phone calls from your couch or the local coffee dive.
So how long do you have to wait? How long will the iPhone be a Cingular exclusive? How about two weeks? And remember where you read that.
Check out the list of the oldest domain registrations – it was twenty years ago today that apple.com came into existence. No, there wasn’t a web site (duh) but it was interesting at the time because not only could you hit their email addresses from the FIDO network, but you could also request things from their gopher archives the same way – if you understood the deepest inner workings of FIDO, of course.
FIDO was unbearably cool.
The other interesting thing here is that Tandy beat Apple to the punch by a month. Huh.
Sometimes you need an epic game. And sometimes you need a quick little mental diversion. Monday morning tend to lean towards the latter. Which makes this exact time pretty much perfect for Stained Glass. The premise is simple – take the tiles from the window on the right, and put them in the window on the left so that the colours of all of the edges of every tile match. Each level gets bigger, but don’t panic – there are only five levels.
Two things to remember: One, every level does have a mix of tiles that do allow for logical solving instead of just trial and error. And two, hitting “reset” doesn’t put all of your tiles back to the starting spots, it gives you all new tiles. Found that out the hard way.
The Amgen Tour Of California is the first big stage race on the North American calendar and they are reporting race data to the web in an awesome new way.
Some dorks are trying to get you to spend five dollars to have them design your Mii.
Earlier this month I gave Steve Jobs giant props for both sticking it to the record labels regarding their ongoing efforts to punish legal consumers of digital music with DRM. Now I have to give him giant props again for daring to point out the real reason that most public schools system suck large. I have been saying this same thing for years. Great minds.
A fortnight and a bit ago I linked to an on-line Mii maker that would let you goof around with making an avatar for the Wii even if you didn’t have one yet. Anyone who tired it out probably realized rather quickly that anyone can make a pretty good Mii, and you would have to be a complete spaz – in fact, generally inept at life – if you couldn’t do it.
There must indeed be these spaz types out there, because a new venture has opened up shop to make a Mii for you for the low, low price of five bucks. Send them a picture and they will make you a Mii. For five bucks. Really.
Meanwhile, you can immortalize your Mii into meatspace with this totally awesome prototyping service that will make a faboo little desk statue of your Mii. There are only going to be 100 made, so get in on the action now. It’s a status symbol of undeniable awesomeness.
You don’t have to read between too many lines to eventually figure out that I am a cycling nerd – or, more specifically, a roadie cycling nerd. Back in the bad old days the only real coverage of the big races – either classics or full tours – was in the absolute smallest agate type on the very last page of the sports section. Then we started to see daily half-hour recap shows for the Tour de France, and eventually that turned into live coverage of the second half of every day’s stage, which is a little slice of heaven to be sure. But for the rest of the races that make up the pro season on both sides of the pond, well, it was like the old days never ended. Tiny type in the scoreboard pages, if you were lucky and there wasn’t some sack race at a company picnic that was deemed more interesting.
Dynamic web content finally changed all that. A few years ago the big races and tours started having real-time tickers, keeping you abreast on the race news every few minutes. Route maps, elevation graphics, photos from the finish … all of the data you could ever imagine, short of watching a broadcast or being there in person.
Well, all of the data we could imagine then.
Now, the bar is being raised one more time. The Amgen Tour Of California (February 18th – 25th) is going to break some seriously awesome new ground when the flag drops tomorrow – it will be the first pro tour or race to feed real-time GPS data from the bikes to a web application. The official web site of the race features the “Tour Tracker” – a very slick route and position tracker layered onto Yahoo Maps with the Adobe’s Presentation software package. If that isn’t enough for you, then check out the CSC team site – it not only feeds the data to a Google Maps framework, but also has the raw KML file so that you can whip up your OWN custom maps and feeds of the race.
Bike nerd nirvana.
Note: I purposely used the full “sponsored” name of the tour when I mentioned it – the Amgen Tour Of California – instead of the shorter form because I think it is important to recognize the sponsorship in a sport I love.
A buncha months ago I tipped off iPod owners to the release of TubeSock – a handy little tool that lets you rip video directly from YouTube to your iPod and iTunes libraries with a minimum of mucking about. It was, by all accounts, quite popular – most people who have video iPods understand the inherent need to have this available in the palm of your hand at all times.
Version 2.0 is now out, and it adds PlayStation Portable support, some new video codecs, and support for non-video iPods – if you want, you can just rip the audio of a YouTube clip to your iPod. That’s cool.
I don’t usually address comments with a new post – it has always been my belief that those sorts of threads should remain anchored to their origin, if for no other reason that to give them some context. Once in a great while, however, a comment provides an insanely awesome launch point for a full post that it would be criminal not to take advantage of the opportunity. For obvious reasons the comment in question must necessarily be insightful, and written by a thoughtful and intelligent reader.
It also helps when they are completely and tragically wrong.
Last week I mentioned Steve Jobs’ “open letter” on music, and applauded his stance that crippling electronic music sales with DRM does nothing to curb piracy and in fact accomplishes nothing beyond creating hassles for the legal music buyer. My man Terry took issue with this, his feeling being that the letter actually said nothing at all because he feels that Jobs knows (and secretly hopes) that the record labels will never agree to give up on DRM. Terry’s main points to support this belief are a supposition that the iTunes DRM gives the iTunes Music Store a captive audience, and an assumption that taking away the DRM would mean that the iTMS would lose vast swaths of market share to plucky little outfits like emusic.
Poor guy – he forgot three crucial things. One: People are stupid. Two: The average mope has simple and unimaginative taste in music. Three: People are stupid. Let’s examine how these basic facts of life pretty much shred both of Terry’s arguments.
Argument #1 – The market share of the iTunes Music Store stems from people being “locked in” via the DRM scheme. This is nonsense. iPod owners don’t stick with the iTunes store because of DRM, they stick with the iTunes store because they are complete morons. When the average mope buys an iPod he uses the iTMS because he already has the interface. Period. Finding another source of legally purchased downloads is too hard for their tiny little user brains. As far as they know, the iTMS is the only solution, because anything else would require them to be capable of actual thought. The simple fact is this: Anyone can load any song you want onto your iPod, whether it originates as a DRM-crippled file from the iTMS or as a clear MP3 / OOG / whatever file from a third party site. But 99.9% of the music buying public doesn’t have the brainpower to do so.
Argument #2 – On a level playing field, services like emusic would chew up the iTunes juggernaut. Er, no. Why? Because the big record labels will never ever go with a small service. Services like emusic will always be the province of interesting and creative independent labels and artists, and the mainstream music buyer wants nothing do do with interesting or creative. They want the mass-market pap that the major labels tell them they are supposed to like. The iTunes music store will never ever be in competition with emusiuc, any more than Fox Television will ever be in competition with The Louvre. I love emusic – so does Terry. But there are 200 million other music consumers that want absolutely nothing to do with it. DRM, no DRM, e-i-e-i-o, doesn’t matter … those people want the safety of major labels and mainstream dreck – the stuff they get at iTunes.
iTunes is entrenched. Period. As long as people continue to buy iPods then they will continue to buy their songs from iTunes. No DRM or lack thereof will change that as long as people are idiots. And believe me, people are idiots.
A more interesting and valid question would have been why movie studio mogul Steve Jobs called for the end of DRM on digital music but didn’t say word one about movies. It would seem that he left himself open to being called a hypocrite here … but Steve is smarter than that. In his letter he mentioned specifically that digital music is already distrubted by the record labels in non-protected form on CDs, and that applying DRM to downloaded music is akin to discriminating against some people. People who buy CDs are in the clear, but people who download get screwed. On the other paw, DVDs are encrypted, and any call for the end of DRM on digital movies would just lead Steve to shrug and say “hey, you get the same treatment if you buy them physically or electronically”. He gave himself an out without having to actually come out and say so.
If you watch any of the BBC World television services you will eventually stumble across the World Business Report. The presenter always sits in a fairly drab sort of office space, and they must have realized how dull that looked because they recently installed a big-ass monitor right behind the bingo caller to try and spiff things up. Perhaps make it look more like a newsroom and less like the third floor at an insurance company.
The monitor scrolls the headlines of the day in a big cheery format. Really big and cheery. So big and cheery that it is really easy to recognize that their “wire feed” is actually a Nintendo Wii set to the news channel.
Look! It’s yet another entry in the “roll something along until it becomes gigantic” gaming genre. This one is extra silly, but a nice little timewaster – you guide your snowball down the hill and as it gets bigger and bigger you can run over more stuff. Mowing down the little skiers is especially gratifying. But watch out for the avalanche, it will hose you no matter how big you are. Fun times for sure.
You may have noticed that the past few days worth of updates were invisible. This has not escaped my notice. Hot tip: If you use Ecto as your off-line blogging editor, don’t upgrade to version 2.4.2 … give it a miss, unless you like posting your stuff into some sort of cyber limbo.
You would think that these guys would eventually learn. Jack Tretton is the president of Sony Computer and Entertainment of America, and he made a statement to a member of the press that he probably regrets. He and Bill Gates should get together and take a class on “checking things out before you shoot off your yap”.
I once lived with a roommate who had a bad habit of constantly polluting the butter dish with toast crumbs. It wasn’t exactly the end of the world, but it was sort of off-putting.
Hi, Pete.
Anyway, what we needed was this – the One-Click Butter Cutter. You load in a stick of butter, and – click! – out comes perfect and untainted pats for your toast-spreading pleasure. It even comes in Fashion Colours!
I am tempted to point out that it also works for some unobtrusive portion control – something we could all use a bit more of – but that would get in the way of the whole “light-hearted” tone of this piece, so I will refrain.
A few months ago we mentioned SingShot, a faboo little online karaoke engine that lets you sing along with your computer and share the results with the online community. It did not escape the notice of those with Money To Spend that the terms “online community” and “music game” are all the rage right now, and the purchase of SingShot for beaucoup des bucks was inevitable.
That inevitable has come to pass, and EA has snapped up SingShot for a fairly large bucket of money. It’s fairly obvious that they don’t know exactly what to do with it yet – probably they made a pre-emptive strike because Activision was sniffing around – but they have given control of the thing over to the division that does the “Sims” line of games. And there is a karaoke stage in Sims Superstar. The obvious connection is a way to weld the two together and share your own vocal performances in the online Sims world.
If you are into digital photography at all, you probably have a real OS already and not some hacky Windoze thing. However, anything is possible and there may actually be some people out there who are both serious about their images and stuck with a Microsoft OS.
I feel for you, I really do.
In that spirit, here is a free tip. DO NOT UPGRADE TO VISTA. This comes from the MS Knowledge Base:
When you edit the properties of a photo to add metadata to that photo in Windows Vista, the software for the digital camera may no longer recognize the metadata that is automatically added to the photo by the digital camera.
What this rather innocuous-sounding caveat doesn’t say is that destoying the metadata has a non-zero chance of destroying the image entirely. The corrupted metadata actually ends up overwriting part of the header of the image file. Not good. You can pick through the whole mess here.
Google added a small but cool function to their “webmaster” tools today – there is now a new tab called “links” that shows all of the inbound connections to your site. Great – but why does the webmaster stuff still exist? Why dont they just roll these functions into Google Analytics? Am I the only person wondering this?
Yahoo has a new something-or-other called Pipes. It was launched today with pretty much no fanfare, and I am not really sure what they hope to do with this. It is supposed to be a way to gather and mash various RSS feeds together, and then do various processing things with them, but I dont – so far, anyway, – really see the point. Most people have an RSS reader anyway, and they usually like to keep their feeds seperate so that they can actually follow them.
And, apparently taking a page from Google, it’s beta.
Pipes is fun to play with, but only for a select few geek types. If anyone has better ideas for this, let me know.
