Live from Austin!

As the reality distortion field begins to fade, people are starting to wake up to the iPhone’s shortcomings. I’ve been assembling a list of issues I’ve seen mentioned:

• No SDK.
• No Flash.
• No Java.
• No Bluetooth file transfer.
• No DIY MP3 or AAC ringtones.
• Although the camera takes 2 megapixel photos, the only way to get them out is to e-mail them, which resizes them to 640×480.
• No Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Need a new battery? $80 and you have to mail the phone to Apple and wait 3 business days.
• Poor talk time.
• No instant messaging.
• No modem support for using it with your laptop.
• Recessed 3-pole headphone jack doesn’t work with regular headphone plugs.
• No video support from the camera.
• No MMS (multimedia SMS).
• Glass front invites disaster.
• No unread mark support in mail (IMAP).
• No filters in mail.
• No voice dial.
• Regular SIM cards don’t work, so you can’t get an overseas SIM and avoid roaming charges.

So yeah, definitely not buying one. But I bet iPhone 2.0 in a year or so will rock.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

[For more cases of LiveJournal Abuse Team behaving abusively, check out http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/.]

For several years I was a paying user of LiveJournal. Now I pay for web hosting and run my own content management system. It’s not by choice; this is the story.

In a nutshell, following an altercation with a racist troll, LiveJournal suspended my account without warning, even though I had not breached their Terms Of Service. They didn’t suspend the troll’s account–instead, they announced that (contrary to their written terms of service) racist comments were in fact perfectly acceptable on LiveJournal.

Attempts at compromise to resolve the issue were ignored and rejected, even when I offered to delete offending comments. The money I had paid for the service they were refusing to provide was not refunded.

Continue reading »

Google have launched Google Talk. It uses the Jabber protocol. Unlike MSN, AIM and the like, Jabber is an open standard, a series of RFCs that anyone is free to implement.

If you are running OS X Tiger, iChat is a Jabber client. There’s also the open source OS X instant messenger Adium. Linux users have Kopete and Gaim. Windows users have Miranda, Exodus, Psi, Trillian Pro, and many more.

If you have a Gmail account, you’re good to go. The system integrates your IM buddy list with your Gmail address book, automatically. Login is your gmail user ID (minus the gmail.com bit). Password is, duh, your gmail password. Server is talk.google.com. Protocol is Jabber. Google have detailed instructions available.

“Great,” you’re saying, “Another IM system.” Except that Jabber interconnects with MSN, AIM, ICQ, IRC and Yahoo chat. The servers can gateway the proprietary protocols for you, so you can use a Jabber client to talk to everyone, and don’t necessarily need a multi-protocol IM client.

If you don’t want to use Google’s server, there are many public Jabber servers available. They all interconnect in one big network.

I think this could be the tipping point, the thing that makes open interconnected instant messaging take off. In a couple of years the closed networks might be forgotten, just like nobody now quotes a CompuServe ID or a BITNET or UUCP address for their e-mail address. IM will follow e-mail into an era of open interconnectedness.

Google’s server seems to be having a few scalability problems this morning, which I take as further evidence of my thesis. So get with the program, and switch to Jabber. All the cool kids are doing it.

AOL patented Instant Messaging.

In 1997.

It is hence painfully obvious that the US Patent Office either isn’t concerned with prior art, or lacks anybody with any knowledge of computer systems before 1997. I’m not sure which is more depressing.

Windows 2000 is a piece of shit.

I now have a new(er) ThinkPad at work, which will run Windows 2000. People have often said to me “Yes, Windows 95 was awful, and Windows 98 was bad, and Windows ME was flaky, and Windows XP isn’t very good… but Windows 2000 is great. Stable, fast, reliable.”

I took their word for it. Yes, I know, paint the word “SUCKER” on my forehead. Now I’ve had a chance to experience it first hand, I’ve discovered that Windows 2000 is every bit as shitty as Windows 98; it just costs a hell of a lot more.

Let’s start with the bootup. Yes, it boots much faster than Windows 98. Then it sits there saying “Preparing network connections…” for over a minute (I timed it), doing nothing at all. No disk activity, practically no network activity. How long does it take to do a DHCP lookup anyway? It turns out that it’s faster to boot Windows 98 on the old Pentium II machine than it is to boot 2000 on the Pentium III that’s supposedly twice the speed. Crap, really crap.

Plug’n’play. Oh yeah. I have two devices—a PS/2 serial trackball and a 3com ethernet PC card. It took three attepted installs of the drivers, and two system crashes, before Win2K finally gave in and recognized the trackball. Getting the system configured to use the ethernet card was easy in comparison—at least, getting TCP/IP to work was easy. Getting Microsoft file sharing to work… well, I still haven’t. I’m using rsync under Cygwin to copy files. It’s faster than SMB anyway. (56 bytes for a 5MB file—now that’s what I call a low protocol overhead.)

Of course, every single networking configuration change requires a one minute wait while it ‘prepares’ the network connection, followed by a reboot, followed by another one minute wait during bootup. That’s assuming the system doesn’t crash, which it did once. Or spontaneously reboot, which it has done twice while trying to browse local SMB volumes. I think I’ll just stick to rsync. Obviously Microsoft couldn’t write a reliable, fast file transfer protocol if their business depended on it. Fortunately for them, it apparently doesn’t.

Mention of reboots brings me to stability. No more blue screen of death in Windows 2000, they told me. That’s true—it goes straight to the black screen, then the BIOS menu comes up and the boot process begins again. To think I used to think the bomb dialog on the old classic Mac OS was unhelpful! It’s difficult to see how Windows 2000 could suck more in this area. More frequent random reboots? Or perhaps future releases of Windows will randomly scramble the filesystem? I guess the workaround is not to use Microsoft file sharing, as that’s what seems to trigger the reboots.

Reliability? Last bootup web browsing worked, but instant messaging didn’t. This bootup I powered the machine off for ten seconds first, and now they’re both working. Any error messages or explanation? Nope. Windows 2000 just sucks.

Thank goodness I have “Windows 2000 Professional”, and not the crappy amateurish version. I wonder if I can hack the splash screen to put in the missing quote marks?

Probably not. One thing that’s clear about Win2K is that the iron fist of Microsoft is in control. Don’t like Outlook Express? Well, you’d better get used to it, because you can’t uninstall it. Try add/remove programs, and there’s no entry. Try to delete the files, and Windows arrogantly tells you that you’re not allowed to, even as Administrator. Hack around that restriction and forcibly delete the files, and you encounter the final indignity: the next time the system demands that you reboot, it copies all the files back again from a hidden directory.

Yes, in the wonderful world of Windows 2000, Microsoft waste your disk space with two entire copies of every piece of bundled crappy bloatware that you don’t want, just so that they can be sure it’ll be there whether you like it or not. Presumably the idea is that I’ll say “Oh, well, since I have to have Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and NetMeeting, I guess I might as well use them.” As you can probably guess, this sends me into a seething rage. I have resolved that I will delete NetMeeting and Outlook Express, even if I have to use a sector editor to do so.

The worst part of this whole Windows 2000 experience is that it’s chips away yet another piece of my faith in humanity. As long as I could believe that Windows 2000 wasn’t entirely a shoddily-written piece of garbage that an undergraduate hacker would be ashamed of, it was possible for me to believe that 90% of the computer users out there were not in fact deluded morons. I thought that they chose to use an OS which, although ugly and expensive, at least worked and would run lots of software.

Now I know otherwise. Now I know that the people who evangelize to the reliability, scalability and ease of use of Windows 2000, really are a horde of hopelessly brainwashed Windozer zombies. Why else in the name of sanity would anyone fork out money for crap like this? If Microsoft announced the new Microsoft Spiked Dildo at a price of $500 a year, I bet the ’dozers would be out there at midnight on launch day, bent over and greased up…

Today I was told that I can instant-message Al Zollar, the senior vice president at IBM who’s in charge of the Lotus software division.

To me, this is almost as bizarre as if someone were to tell me that Lou Gerstner wants a game of Hearts.

Maybe it’s leftover Harlequin angst, but I generally feel comfortable when kept as far away from CEOs as possible. Just put me in a back room and let me build stuff quietly.