Monthly Archives: January 2012

Wake up, Android device manufacturers

Apple’s Q4 results were its best ever. They even managed to claw back some marketshare from Android. This should be a loud wakeup call for Android device manufacturers. I’ve been an Android user for a couple of years now, but let me say that there are some areas where Apple wins hands down.

Choice

Too much choice is a bad thing. I like that Android has phones with and without keyboards, phones in a variety of sizes, and so on. Unfortunately, HTC, Motorola and Samsung seem to crap out a new phone every couple of months, most of them indistinguishable from each other.

HTC Amaze, Wildfire S, Sensation, MyTouch 4G, Evo 3D, Evo Design? They’re all keyboardless. Apart from one of them being 3G, I’d be hard pressed to decide between them, or even tell them apart in the store.

And yet, the amount of real choice is less than ever. The phone I want is nowhere to be found (see end of posting).

Support

If you get an iPhone, you know there will be OS updates for a couple of years. In contrast, Android handset vendors have screwed over customers so many times that I won’t buy a phone unless I know for sure it’s supported by CyanogenMod. People who don’t care about freedom so much will just take the easy option and buy an iPhone. Trust matters deeply when you’re not technically minded.

I want to buy a tablet. Right now, I’m waiting, because I don’t trust any of the vendors to actually ship Android 4 for their tablets in a timely fashion, even if they’ve promised that it’ll be here in weeks. (I learned that lesson from HTC with my phone.) Again, people who don’t care about freedom so much will buy an iPad, because at least they can trust that Apple will ship OS updates for a year or two.

Experience

Part of the reason why manufacturers say they have trouble shipping OS updates, is that they all insist on layering extra crap on top of Android. But that’s not the only reason to dislike the value-subtract which handset makers keep applying.

My phone used to have HTC Sense. Installing CyanogenMod was the best thing I ever did to it. Suddenly the address book worked properly and I could star favorite contacts. The launcher lost the horrible bubbles around the icons. The useless social stream app and the voice search that never worked were gone, and the phone search button did something useful again.

I went to T-Mobile to look at phones. The HTC ones still have Sense UI crap all over them, and it’s still ugly. I don’t want it. And if you’re one of the people who does want it, there’s nothing to stop HTC from offering it as an optional add-on exclusive to their phones, without forcing it on people.

Motorola have claimed that the carriers are forcing them to layer UI crap on top of Android, because otherwise they’d end up with a half dozen identical Android phones on their shelves. Well, yes, see “Choice” above. Screwing up the UI so your multiple identical phones will look different is solving the wrong problem.

My perfect phone

OK, so support and experience suck, but at least we have choices, right? Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me. Here’s what I want from a phone:

  • A good camera.
  • A microSD slot for music, so I can replace my aging iPod.
  • A hardware keyboard.
  • Stock Android 4.x.
  • GSM compatible with T-Mobile.

So many Android phones out there, and yet precisely zero of them seem to meet my fairly mundane requirements, even if you relax the demand for Android 4. In fact, right now T-Mobile has no stock Android phones at all. Yet it wasn’t too long ago that they were selling the HTC G2, a stock Android phone with keyboard.

Something is very wrong here, and unless Google and the phone manufacturers can do something about it, the iPhone might get back the position of #1 smartphone platform.

Compare and contrast

“‎I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” — Mitt Romney.

“I think all righthtinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not! And I’m sick and tired of being told that I am.” — Graham Chapman, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Dodging issues the Ron Paul way

I’ve come to realize that Ron Paul’s rhetorical positioning is extremely clever, in that it allows him to appeal to both sides of many issues. To put it another way, he is able to take a theoretical stand against bad things while advocating policies that would lead directly to them.

Consider racism, for example. Ron Paul believes that the Civil Rights Act should never have been passed. He thinks that companies and individuals should be free to be as racist as they like. Want to post a “No blacks need apply” sign? He thinks you should have the freedom to do that. And yet, at the same time, Ron Paul states clearly that he personally thinks that racism is a bad thing. It’s very unfair, no doubt about it. It’s just that he feels that we should wait until everyone voluntarily decides to stop being racist, rather than passing laws. It’s regrettable that giving people the freedom to be racist would result in a lot of racism, but what are you going to do, eh? It’s just human nature.

So his liberal supporters get to point at his statements against racism; and his neo-Nazi supporters at Stormfront get to point at his statements against the Civil Rights Act and his desire to repeal laws against discrimination. And he gets to shrug, grin, and dodge the issue.

Well, I think this is an ingenious position. Why don’t we try it with some other laws?

Sure, theft is bad. But we shouldn’t have big government forcing people to stop thieving. Instead, we should patiently wait until everyone voluntarily decides to stop. In fact, it’s the statists who cause theft with their legislation, dividing people into “have” and “have not”, “owner” and “not owner”, and leading to people’s obsession with property, right? But you know, theft is really really bad. Making it legal shouldn’t in any way be seen as condoning it, OK?

LA Noire review

It was just another treacherous night in the big city when I opened the “LA Noire” case. You doubtless saw the headlines—big name publisher picks up well reviewed game from independent studio. There was another story I was interested in, though. According to the police files, there had been accusations of appalling working conditions, and the whole shebang had been deep sixed a few months later in mysterious circumstances. That left me with a few loose ends to tie up.

I sat back and pondered the cocktail I had been handed. A fifth of hidden object puzzle, a generous dash of choose-your-own-adventure, a touch of cover-based shootout, and I could definitely detect a hint of sandbox. It added up to something, but what? There was only one way to find out. I slipped the disc into my PS3.

The graphics hit me first, a one-two combo punch of lush environments mixed with uncanny valley facial animation. The story moved like molasses on a winter’s morning. Yet it wasn’t long before I was hooked, as hooked as the morphine addicts who were turning up dead on the streets of the city of angels. I wandered the lovingly rendered streets from crime scene to crime scene, chasing down perps who were seedier than a parakeet’s breakfast.

It takes a strong stomach to be a detective. When there’s a serial killer beating and slashing his female victims, someone has to kneel over the desecrated corpse and turn it over for clues. I won’t even go into my time working the arson desk; suffice it to say I’ll never look at a rack of ribs the same way again.

Maybe that was the hook, the unflinching attempt at realism. Maybe we all want to be heroes, or maybe I was won over by the delight of there being something different in the world of console adventures. Whatever it was, I’m glad I was there. The story may be more of an interactive movie than is good for it, but entertainment is entertainment as long as your expectations aren’t out of whack.

Would I recommend that you follow in my footsteps? Well, if you’ve got patience and determination, and pay attention to detail, you could do worse. Sure, the path’s as linear as the proverbial straight and narrow, and if you wander off track the illusion of freedom in a living city falls apart faster than a shanty town being hit by a tornado. But hey, those are the breaks. Me, I think it’s worth it for the chance to take part in a car chase in a Tucker Torpedo and a shoot out around the Spruce Goose.

Google+ is going to mess up the Internet, says someone who really hates Google+

Back in December, Jon Mitchell wrote a post about a week of jury duty. He posted it to his personal web site, posted it on readwriteweb.com, and posted it on Google+.

Around ten days later, he did a Google search for ‘Jon Mitchell jury duty’, and discovered that the Google+ postings of the article were being ranked higher than the ReadWriteWeb copy. For some reason this made him angry, so he wrote a posting on Google+ accusing Google+ of being sleazy.

Anyone familiar with how Google ranks pages could probably guess what was happening here. Google’s algorithm ranks pages higher if they are more recent, more frequently updated, or linked to from pages that are more recent or more frequently updated. As people shared and discussed the G+ posting, that was boosting its page rank.

I made a comment in reply to his whiney article that apparently pissed him off so much that it was featured in his new article about how Google+ is going to mess up the Internet. Not just the web—the entire Internet. Gosh!

His complaint starts with the following observation:

It all crystallized for me this morning when two Google+ transgressions presented themselves at once. Mike Elgan, “The world’s only lovable technology columnist™,” re-shared a post by Rohit Shrivastava, a manager at IBM. Elgan’s post bore an awfully familiar headline, although the punctuation and capitalization had been maimed. It was familiar because I had written it. I didn’t see any attribution, though, let alone a link to the story.

Page down, and you get to his repost of my comment:

But then another guy offered this gem:

“Speaking as a user/reader, to me the G+ version of your posting is more interesting than the readwriteweb.com version, because I can comment here without having to jump through hoops.”

This might be the Googlest thing I’ve ever seen.

That’s right—after complaining that Google+ is transgressing by not attributing content, he goes and reproduces my entire comment without attributing it in any way. No link back to the thread, no link to my profile, not even a name. Just “some guy”.

But I’m not writing this to point out the blatant hypocrisy; I’m writing because he apparently didn’t understand my comment. He could have asked me to explain it, but that would have meant actually carrying on a conversation on Google+ where I might see it. Instead, he wrote another article about how evil Google was, and set out to mock the comment there.

First of all, he designates himself a “user/reader,” which is just spectacular.

Thanks, Jon. I thought the reason for the two words was pretty obvious—I was a reader of your article, and I’m a user of Google+. I was commenting from the point of view of someone who wears both metaphorical hats. My comment would not apply to someone who read the article but didn’t use G+, or who used G+ but didn’t read the article. Hence my use of both words.

And he goes on to say that he’d rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, “I can comment here without having to jump through hoops.” Hoops like reading the article?

No, Jon. Hoops like having to register on yet another fucking web site. Reading the article was certainly no joy, but the thing about Google+ is that I use it. Therefore I can reply to something posted on Google+ simply by typing my reply and hitting the submit button.

If I wanted to reply on ReadWriteWeb, I would have to jump through the following hoops:

  • Enable cookies for ReadWriteWeb.
  • Enable JavaScript for ReadWriteWeb.
  • Reload the entire page.
  • Log in to Disqus, selecting an appropriate ID.

And that’s given that I’ve already used Disqus at least once and that I’m willing to link an existing ID to it; otherwise there are additional steps to link an ID to Disqus or create a new one. That kind of hassle is why OpenID hasn’t taken off, according to ReadWriteWeb. It’s why I confidently predict that Jon Mitchell won’t reply to this article on my web site.

In fact, the fact that all the comments on ReadWriteWeb are invisible without JavaScript is likely one of the reasons why G+ discussions are being ranked above ReadWriteWeb pages. Again, anyone familiar with how search engines work should have realized that.

This darling “user/reader” has hit on the most touted feature of Google+: the conversations. Everybody finds it so much better than other forms of conversation on the Internet.

Actually, no. It’s nowhere near as good as Usenet conversations were 20 years ago, from a functionality point of view. I could easily come up with half a dozen improvements that could be made to Google+. There are other sites I use, like Reddit, that I’m pretty much equally happy with. I use G+ to share links to things because it’s convenient, supports discussion, and respects privacy reasonably well. (And, alright, because it’s not Facebook.) I’d really rather we were all using something decentralized like Diaspora, but so far hardly anyone has followed me over there.

And yes, I’d be more interested in a Reddit posting of a Jon Mitchell article than the copy on ReadWriteWeb, for exactly the same reasons mentioned above—I already have the account set up, I’m already logged in, I can join in a discussion with zero hoop-jumping required.

So basically, there are a number of big obvious points that Mr Mitchell apparently hasn’t grasped.

Firstly, conversation about something on the web is far more interesting than sitting back and being a passive reader of it.

Secondly, friction matters. People are lazy, and will engage in conversation wherever it’s most easy and pleasant for them to do so.

Thirdly, friends matter. People will tend to converse on sites where their friends converse.

Because of these fairly obvious human tendencies, if you expect people to register just to comment on your web site, you are likely to be disappointed. If you expect people to pick your web site for their discussion in preference to systems they are already using, like Google+ or Reddit or Facebook, then you are even more likely to be disappointed.

This is exactly why I re-post the things that I write on Google+: so that my friends can discuss them without having to deal with OpenID-type registration hassles or learning yet another threaded comment system. I assumed that was why Jon Mitchell posted his stuff on G+, but apparently not.

There are other points in the article I could criticize, such as the ridiculous idea that it’s Google’s fault when the crappy iPad browser crashes trying to render Google+; my iPad crashes on Facebook too.  Sure, the G+ app on iOS isn’t as nice as the Android one; but given the way Apple has treated Google in the past, I think iOS users are lucky they’re getting an iOS app at all.

While writing all this, I noticed that two G+ postings about Jon Mitchell’s jury duty are once more appearing above the ReadWriteWeb article in the search results, so now he can get angry all over again. Or perhaps he’ll quote me anonymously and without attribution in another article complaining about being quoted anonymously and without attribution. Wouldn’t that be ‘darling’ of him?

Wrong Paul

With the current focus on Ron Paul’s newsletters and his claim that he was unaware of their content or did not approve of it (yeah, right), I thought it would be educational to take a look at quotes from articles explicitly written by Ron Paul himself.

Ron Paul defends a gay person’s freedom — unless it’s the freedom to get married, in which case he thinks federal interference in your personal life is just fine:

“If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’s constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a “same sex” marriage license issued in another state.” — Ron Paul, article on the Federal Marriage Amendment

Ron Paul supports state governments in their attempts to criminalize sex acts between consenting adults, saying that the state has the right to enforce sodomy laws:

“The Court determined that Texas had no right to establish its own standards for private sexual conduct, because gay sodomy is somehow protected under the 14th amendment “right to privacy.” Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states’ rights — rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. But rather than applying the real Constitution and declining jurisdiction over a properly state matter, the Court decided to apply the imaginary Constitution and impose its vision on the people of Texas.” — Federal Courts and the Imaginary Constitution

Ron Paul is strongly anti-abortion:

“I am strongly pro-life. I think one of the most disastrous rulings of this century was Roe versus Wade. I do believe in the slippery slope theory. I believe that if people are careless and casual about life at the beginning of life, we will be careless and casual about life at the end. Abortion leads to euthanasia. I believe that.” — Ron Paul, speech to Congress

Ron Paul believes government should actively promote religious beliefs:

“The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.” — Ron Paul, ‘The War On Religion’

As for the Civil Rights Act, that was a bad thing, because the right to post “No coloreds need apply” signs and run whites-only businesses and clubs was infringed:

“However, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. [...] The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.” — Ron Paul, ‘The Trouble With the ’64 Civil Rights Act’

In fact, Ron Paul goes further, claiming that people who attempt to promote diversity within organizations are the true promoters of racism:

“By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups.” — Ron Paul, ‘What Really Divides Us?’

Got any more good ones?