Iran

What's happening over there seems to me to be the first "revolution" in the 21st century sense of the word. Perhaps a bit smaller and more tentative than a "classic" revolution, but fueled by dramatically enhanced communication and media distribution at a grassroots level.

Perhaps this type of revolution will prove more effective and less bloody than others. We can only hope.

As an American, I feel that it is my duty to go on record supporting the people in Iran who want a government that is more open, a society that is more free, and a country that is more their own.

North Korea

Here's a thought:

The US should covertly airdrop satellite Internet enabled laptops into certain regions of North Korea. These regions should be carefully chosen to represent areas that are friendly toward the concept of gradual free market expansion, and not necessarily 100% in bed with Pyongyang.

The laptops should direct users to an open online marketplace designed to provide goods and services to North Koreans on terms that are fair to them, and which are worthwhile for outside investors.

Products ordered through this system would then be airdropped into the country.

After a while, if the system proved beneficial for the North Koreans who participated, the foundation for a market economy revolution could be developed. Best case scenario, it wouldn't even need to be a revolution, but rather just a silent readiness standing by for when the dictatorship loses its supposed ironclad grip on power.

Stranger things have happened.

My Apple rumor

Disclaimer: I do not want anyone to think that my intent is to make fun of someone's deeply personal life and possible medical challenges. That said...

What if sometime back in 2008- probably toward the end of the first quarter/beginning of the second- Barack Obama reached out to Steve Jobs and made him an offer? What if, working in partnership with a small team of executives from General Motors, Obama had assembled a shadow executive class within the company, comprised of GM's best and brightest, and a few visionary industry outsiders? What if Obama promised this team that, should he win the election, he would orchestrate a scenario in which they would assume responsibility for the company? And what if Obama offered Jobs singular and complete control over this shadow company within a company, and the mandate to do whatever necessary to completely revitalize the US auto industry?

If that were to have happened, it would be conceivable that Jobs would go on a severe diet to lend credibility to the personal illness cover story that had been concocted to explain his eventual need to leave Apple for a period of time toward the end of the covert operation at GM.

Under a scenario like this, sometime within the next few months we'd see a grand public unveiling of the entire operation, along with a business model and product line that would inject the US with a burst of excitement, a grand reintroduction to the world's industrial markets, and an economic revitalization on the order of the end of World War II.

I'd like to think that something like that is possible.

General Motors

I think the government's doing the right thing by orchestrating a "friendly" bankruptcy process for GM. It may not be perfect, but based on all of the readily apparent options, the administration's actions seem like the best choice.

Moving the company forward, however, is going to require real innovation. The government has wisely sent signals that it does not intend to micromanage the company's product or operations roadmaps. That means that the future of the company is going to rely on the ingenuity of its private management to make smart choices.

Good.

What GM's management should do is recognize the unique opportunity it has been given. The company commands a strong brand that is deeply woven into the fabric of American industrial history. Millions of Americans have a direct stake in the success of the company. And more than just jobs and economics, the success of GM is connected to feelings of nationalism and patriotism.

GM's product roadmap and employee compensation/benefit model has been broken for decades, but that doesn't mean that the essence of what lies behind a behemoth American car company can't be made relevant.

Stop thinking about cars and trucks. Stop thinking about graying executives in office suites making poor decisions. Stop thinking about unions holding the future of the company hostage. Stop thinking about politicians bending laws to make the whole broken system last just a little bit longer...

GM should set up something akin to the X Prize where individuals and small companies are dared to come up with innovative ideas that would take advantage of what the company could provide.

In essence, GM should outsource its innovation, but not pay for it up front. Rather, they should provide prizes and rewards in the form of GM stock, which would be extremely cheap to offer but have tremendous upside potential if the right ideas are made real.

With GM, we've got a massive machine that is surely capable of creating something of value- or of changing itself into something that can with the right type of innovative leadership. And with its stock so low, why not incentivize the very best of America's innovators to chart its course? Doing so would help them, help the company, help the largest share of current GM employees possible, and help America.

Photo essay

I call it "Woman Throws Cigarette onto Tracks and Then Truck Drives By on Tracks Catching Man's Eye"

Last Day Dream

Yikes- this is pretty moving:

Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo.

(Via DF.)

My dad, his PC, and his Mac

This post was inspired by a an exchange I had with a Microsoft developer on Twitter, who had a few things to say after I mentioned the fact that my father abandoned Windows after a bad experience with the Windows 7 release candidate.

The purpose of this post is to expand a bit on the situation and explain the context to support my basic theory, which has two parts:

Part 1: my dad's experience was unusual and not indicative of what most people would necessarily experience with Windows 7, and the fact that it involves pre-release software makes it somewhat of an aberration.

Part 2: none of that matters, though, because the bigger picture is that Windows is losing its connection with average users who don't like to deal with computer annoyances and who are finding out that there are alternatives out there.

So here's the context, the situation, and the resolution.

My dad's a pretty savvy computer user who's been at it for many years. I remember as a kid watching him use programs like Harvard Graphics and WordPerfect on DOS. As new software came out, my dad was all over it, taking me along for trips to exotic places like CompUSA and Egghead Software, where I marveled at all of the boxes of incredibly cool stuff.

My first job was at an Egghead, and I attribute my deep appreciation for computers in large part to the indoctrination I received through my dad.

In the years since, I've immersed myself in most of the common PC platforms, specifically Windows and later NT in the nineties, and Windows 2000 and XP around the turn of the century.

As Mac OS X matured, I became interested in the Mac platform, and switched my personal computing life over to the Mac sometime around 2002.

I've continued to stay interested in and current with Windows in the years since, and I've also taken a strong interest in Linux.

I appreciate tehnology and software, and I'm especially drawn to operating systems and learning about their design choices and heritage.

I've become a Mac partisan in recent years. This doesn't mean that I think Macs are universally the best option for all users all the time, but on balance, I've come to apprecite the Mac platform's elegance, simplicity, raw power, and focus on consumer media tasks and workflows.

My dad's remained a Windows user, mostly because Windows was the platform in use at the jobs he's worked and even today remains the linga franca for most business computing.

Every few years, my dad would get a new computer, and for a long time without exception the experience for him continued to improve, speed up, and evolve positively.

Windows served my dad well until about two years ago, when he purchased a Toshiba Satellite that came with Windows Vista.

The computer ran slowly out of the box and was incompatible with a number of my dad's existing peripherals- the first time a new computer brought with it such issues.

I had a few occasions to play around with it, and it just didn't feel like a great experience. Over time, as new hardware drivers came out and Vista matured, things got a bit better, but the system never felt as substantial, responsive, or stable as the previous Windows systems my dad or I had used over the course of many years.

My dad's experience with Vista is quite common. I use Windows daily at work, and have resisted the move to Vista for the past few years for similar reasons, based on lots of first-hand experience. The bottom line with Vista is that it shipped with big changes that had a negative impact on perfomance and software/hardware compatibility.

Most of the architectural changes introduced with Vista were sound choices made to increase the system's security and stability, and to modernize certain elements of the system that needed re-architecting (such as the display subsystem).

Vista was a sound release in theory, but all of the fresh changes, coupled with poor vendor support for new drivers, lead to the OS under-delivering for many users in the real-world.

Windows 7 aims to address this, and it succeeds dramatically.

Think of Windows 7 as Vista with more than two years of thorough tweaking, tuning, and polishing.

Driver support is much better than Vista because Win7 retains the same driver model as Vista. Vendors have caught up and Microsoft didn't force them to update anything.

The UI has been enhanced in ways that make it simpler, more flexible, and more powerful at the same time.

I've been playing with a few versions of Win7, starting with the public beta in January. My positive experiences have been consistent and seem to reflect the consensus of most people who've used it.

Performance is dramatically improved- so much so that Win7 is viable for low-resource netbook systems that are currently relegated to XP because of Vista's bloat.

So all in all, Windows 7 is a dramatic improvement over Vista, and is a solid version of Windows in general.

It was from this perspective that I decided to urge my father to do something a little unusual and install the Windows 7 release candidate. In many ways, he's the ideal test subject. His current system contains a factory install of Vista which hasn't been messed around with. He's savvy enough to understand what he's getting himself into. And- best of all- Windows 7 promises to address all of his issues with Vista.

Based on the stability of the betas and the RC, a near-consensus on the Internet that even early Win7 betas were superior to shipping Vista code in many respects, and the fact that my dad's base system was about as stock as can be expected, it seemed like the safest beta scenario I could imagine.

For good measure, I had my dad run the Windows 7 upgrade advisor, which told him all systems go for the upgrade.

So my dad downloaded the Win7 RC and burned the ISO. He ran the installer, performed a Vista to Win7 upgrade... and that's when the "fiasco" occurred.

There's not much to describe: the computer rebooted, showed the Win7 boot animation, and then displayed a message saying that there was a problem with the install and that the install needed to be rolled back. And then the computer rebooted to a Windows boot menu, which offered the option to roll back the installation or run Win7. Problem was, both selections resulted in the same thing: the Win7 boot logo ran, and then presented the same installation error.

We tried all of the available boot menu options, including various forms of safe mode boots, etc. Regardless of what we chose, Windows would begin to boot, fail, then reboot, and the process would continue. The resulting system was totally useless.

As a next step, I booted from the Win7 installer DVD and re-ran setup, this time opting for a custom (fresh) install, as opposed to an upgrade (which would not have been possible anyway, since Win7 can't run an upgrade when booting from the disc). The same problem happened when we tried this: the install failed midway through, leading to a never-ending reboot cycle and a useless system.

My next thought was to try to reinstall Vista. Problem is, my dad's computer didn't come with a Windows installation or restore disk. Apparently in the PC world, it's not uncommon for hardware vendors to ship systems without physical install media. That's a cheap thing to do. Sure, it may be possible for users to create their own media from files on the hard drive, or to contact the vendor and get a hard copy sent to them, but in the rare instance when you actually need to have an install/restore disk, it really sucks not to have been given one in the box.

So without a restore disk, we were really out of luck.

Finally, thanks to a bit of hacking and EULA winking, I was able to fashion a bootable Windows XP install disc based on a VM I had running on my Mac, and boot my dad's system with that disc. We installed good 'ol XP on the system, it worked, and my dad was finally able to regain access to the files on his Toshiba's hard drive. Don't worry, EULA cops: that system will only be in existence long enough for my dad to copy all of his data off the hard drive and onto his brand new MacBook, which we set up this afternoon while troubleshooting the Toshiba in the background.

So that's the "fiasco". In a nutshell: the Win7 RC installer rendered my dad's system completely unusable. I'm sure there's some reason somewhere why this happened, and as I admitted at the top of this post, the RC is beta software, so user beware. But the whole Windows experience for my dad over the past two years has been bad enough that today's encounter pushed him over the edge.

It started with a brand new computer with a brand new version of Windows that just didn't work as well as it should have. And while my dad spent the past two years coping with this barely adequate Vista system, more and more friends and family members began to switch over to Macs for the first time. While their experiences were not all roses, they were generally positive and refreshing.

Windows 7 could have been a positive experience for my dad. I was hoping that the RC would breathe new life into his PC and that he'd enjoy using it and all of its enhancements over Vista. And who knows- perhaps if he'd waited for the final release and tried that, things would have been different.

But the reality is, today's experience was the last in a long line of frustrations and disappointments that exist for many people who use PCs. The PC ecosystem is vast, with all manner of hardware and software vendors. It's a miracle that Windows works as well as it does, considering. The simple reality is, though, that it's very tough for a commodity system that combines hardware and software parts from a panoply of companies to come together in as smooth an end-user experience as the Mac provides.

The Mac's not perfect; not by a longshot. And I don't make this claim based on purely technical or theoretical reasons. Rather, there's something that feels very "nineties" about using a PC these days- the feeling that you need to be somewhat of a technician to be able to successfully understand and care for the complex system of hardware, software, and vendors that is constantly in flux when you use a PC.

The Mac does a little bit of a better job of masking that complexity from the average user, and I think that little bit goes a long way for a surprisingly large segment of people out there.

We'll see how things proceed. I'm interested to see how my dad fares with his new Mac. As a lifelong Windows user, he's in new territory, relying on his MacBook as a business machine.

But if my dad's experience is like everyone else I know who's made the switch from Windows to the Mac, it won't be long before he's telling me how much unbelievably happier he is with his computer these days.

Star Trek: It's great!

I just got back from the 7PM showing of "Star Trek" at the Ziegfeld theater. I can't think of a more exciting setting to see this movie.

Amazingly, the movie itself delivered.

Here's the thing: there are a lot of things "wrong" with the movie. Plenty of things that I didn't agree with, plot points that don't make sense, even some basic decisions that I didn't like.

But none of that matters, because the filmmakers and the cast really delivered magic here. This movie has that certain something that great movies have- the ability to convince you to come along for a fun ride. And they're with you the whole time.

As a reinvention of "Star Trek" 2009 style, this movie absolutely nails it. Bravo!

Starship Enterprise Destroyed by the Death Star

Snooth Developer Podcast

If you're into Snooth, startups, or web development, you'll probably find something of interest in the first Snooth developer podcast.

Speech to text on the rumored Apple tablet/iPad/netbook?

I was having a conversation with a coworker where I mentioned my skeptical thoughts on the rumored Apple tablet/iPad/netbook device, and he mentioned something that made me freeze in mid-thought and re-evaluate everything.

Suppose the device featured groundbreaking speech to text functionality, he said. And that was all I needed.

The idea of speech to text that works well enough for average people to use it to dictate email as effectively as they could type it on a keyboard is still off in fantasy-land as far as I'm concerned. I know there are some good software dictation products out there now, but they're aimed at niche audiences and haven't broken into the mainstream yet.

It's possible to imagine a future in which we speak to our computers instead of typing, but it doesn't seem imminent.

In other words, a really easy to use, highly effective speech to text interface is exactly the type of thing that Apple could develop and put into a slick, mainstream device. Imminently.

Apple's clearly going down the audio interface road with the iPod- the new shuffle is a case in point, as well as the fact that Apple's high-end iPod headphones come with a microphone (as do all Macs, of course).

So the more I think about this, the more I think it makes a lot of sense.

Perhaps Apple is about to do for speech what they've already done for touch...

Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle

There was a recent NYT article about the Kindle that mentioned that one of the drawbacks to reading on the Kindle is the loss of real-world copies of the books we read to serve as mementos on our bookshelves and conversation starters on the subway, etc. (Kudos to Jordan Barker for digging the article link up for me.)

That point is one that I've thought about frequently as I continue to use my Kindle (and the Kindle app on my iPhone), and as my Kindle library grows. The Kindle is now the primary way I read books. I won't go into a detailed explanation of my thoughts on the device right now, but it's got enough going for it to have convinced me to never buy another paper-based book again, so long as I can get it on my Kindle.

The most significant drawback to this transformation has been the freezing in time of my bookshelves. Each new book I read exists as bits in the cloud and on my device, but leaves no trace or signpost in the real world. There are many good things about this fact (particularly when you consider the environment), but I really do miss having all of my books collected on a few shelves for me to look at.

I draw inspiration from looking at what I've read, and how my collection continues to grow. How the books relate to each other, the themes that occur over time as I dive into a particular author and read several of his books, and then shift to a different writer and subject matter, often totally different. Particularly when I'm looking for inspiration for my own writing, it's nice to be able to walk over to my bookshelves and gaze across the spines that have resulted from other people going through the same process and ultimately emerging triumphant in their own way. Don DeLillo, Stephen King, David Eddings, Jonathan Franzen, Dean Koontz, George R.R. Martin- and so forth.

All of this thinking lead me to a simple idea: Amazon should give Kindle versions of books away for free with every purchase of a hard-copy book that has a Kindle equivalent. Let's take Michael J. Fox's recent memoir "Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist" as an example to illustrate my point. You can buy the Kindle version for $9.99. Amazon sells the hardcover for $15.59. Even though I'd likely never read the hardcover copy, I'd probably be willing to buy it for $15.59 if it came with a free copy for my Kindle. I'd read the Kindle copy, shelve the hardcover, and be done with it.

Not necessarily a prudent thing to do from a financial or environment perspective, but a lot of people make emotional decisions when it comes to things they're passionate about, and I suspect a lot of book lovers really love... having the books themselves.

So that would be great for people like me, but I think the real benefit to Amazon could be much bigger. If Amazon gave everyone who purchased a book from them a free Kindle copy, they'd be seeding all of their customers with content in Amazon's format, ready to use on devices if and when those customers encountered a device that could display it. In other words, Amazon would be creating a barrier for their customers to eventually adopt a competing format in the future. And if Amazon's goal is to become the dominant retailer of e-books (as I suspect it is), the name of the game to achieving that is penetration for both the hardware and the content. And this would take care of the content aspect instantly.

A deal like this would likely take some elbow grease with the book publishers to convince them to play along, but I think it would be possible.

The case against the Apple tablet

The Apple rumor mill has heated up to scalding levels of buzz concerning the notion that Apple will, sometime within the next year or so- quite possibly at June's WWDC event- announce a "tablet" device that will be larger than the iPhone and run the iPhone OS.

It's common to refer to this as either the "Apple tablet", the "iPad", or "Apple's netbook".

Most of the people who read this blog are probably already fully intimate with all of the speculation, so I won't repeat it here. If not, just spend some time on Google with the above-mentioned terms.

Much of the speculation I've seen makes sense, and I can see a case to be made that Apple is poised to attack the netbook market (or a market like it) in a way that they attacked the cell phone market: by introducing a device that doesn't play by the accepted rules, brings novel technology to the table, and does a subset of things people want to be able to do with it much better than anything else out there currently does.

The device would leverage the App store and the iTunes media store infrastructures, as well as integrate with other Macs and PCs, and possibly the Apple TV- and maybe even plug directly into widescreen TVs.

WiFi support is a no-brainer, and there would possibly be some sort of tie-in to a cell network, either AT&T or Verizon, and/or tethering to an iPhone.

Makes total sense.

But there's a case to be made against such a device. Namely, that I don't really see a practical use for something like it in the real world.

The single best feature about the iPhone is that it's always available to you. It packs all of its functionality into a device that comfortably integrates with your daily routine, right in your pocket or in your purse. This high level of availability has made it possible for people to casually and effectively integrate a ton of software and networking functionality into their regular lives, unlike any other device they use.

Anything larger than an iPhone would be impractical to provide the same level of ubiquity. Something roughly the size of Amazon's Kindle (which is more or less the form factor the rumor mill has settled on) would be simply too big to pocket, and would require that the user carry a large purse or some other type of case to carry it. It wouldn't necessarily be a huge deal, but it would demand intentionality for users to have it with them when they're out in the world- the same intentionality they'd need to bring a netbook or notebook with them.

Once you're out in the world with a case large enough to carry a portable device, you're likely bringing that device with you because you need to have a level of computing experience that's beyond what you can get from a device like the iPhone. Namely, for most people, that would be a more traditional and fully-featured web browsing and email experience. A theoretical Apple tablet would be great for browsing the web, but assuming it doesn't have a real keyboard, I can't see it providing a typing/email experience that is better enough than the iPhone to warrant taking it. Put the oppose way, I can't see a touchscreen Apple tablet providing a writing experience that's good enough to justify not bringing a real laptop or netbook along, if what you need to do is more intensive than what an iPhone alone could provide.

What about the media playback experience- could this justify the device? The rumored tablet would almost certainly provide a far better video experience than the iPod, and would be a natural gaming platform. Again, makes sense. But I'm not sure I can imagine large numbers of people carrying a device that size with them in order to get that experience out in the world. When you're at the office or at home, you wouldn't need it- you've got larger screens in both of those places. So the usage scenario would likely be for commuting, travel, and vacation. Perhaps there's enough of a market for more immersive content in a larger, non-pocketable mobile device- but I'm far from certain. And remember, to be able to use this thing out in the world, you'd need to carry it with you, as opposed to just walk out with it comfortably snug on your person.

I'd love to see an Apple device like the one people are talking about. And I have little doubt that if Apple is indeed planning to release something like it, they'll have anticipated these issues and quite likely have designed the product and its benefits in a way to obviate them.

We'll see- either way, I'm looking forward to the evolution of the iPhone platform, and I hope to be pleasantly surprised by what comes next.

Before there were special effects...

(Cheers.)

Inspired by Dave Hill

GM PUMA

Huh. Not sure how I missed this. Collaboration between GM and Segway.

Kevin Pollak in Dayton, OH

There's something magical about his Alan Arkin.

Hat tip, as they say, to Jordan.

Monday in Manhattan

Extreme Sheep LED Art

Valley Lodge Japan Invasion 2009