Privacy Policy
Steve Jobs on user control of application privacy at D8:
People want to know what is going on upfront plain and simple. Ask them what they want to do, make them tell you to stop asking…
Exactly.
Books Versus Texts
The New York Times has an interesting commentary on the problem with e-books.
When it comes to digital editions, the assumption seems to be that all books are created equal. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the mass migration from print to digital, we’re seeing a profusion of digital books — many of them out of copyright — that look new and even “HD,” but which may well have been supplanted by more accurate editions and better translations. We need a digital readers’ guide — a place readers can find out whether the book they’re about to download is the best available edition.
Interestingly, for all of their foibles, the major newspapers “get” this far more than book publishers and the e-book merchants. The iPad apps for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Financial Times reproduce much of the character that makes print more enjoyable for reading than a screen. They are a pleasure to read, much as a printed newspaper is.
On the other hand, the aesthetic problem with e-books is demonstrated by the issue of the free Project Gutenburg books available in iBooks. In my own browsing, I noticed that the critically acclaimed translation of Dante's Comedy was marked down on there because some thought it was foolish not to use the free Gutenburg text. Never mind the superior translation, superior typesetting is also important — too many public domain e-books are atrociously “typeset,” apparently forgetting that the layout — a book's “interface” — is a critical part of an enjoyable reading experience.
Field of Innocence
From Origin, Evanescence's first full length CD (2000).
I still remember the world
From the eyes of a child
Slowly those feelings
Were clouded by what I know nowWhere has my heart gone
An uneven trade for the real world
Oh I… I want to go back to
Believing in everything and knowing nothing at allI still remember the sun
Always warm on my back
Somehow it seems colder now
-A. Lee, B. Moody and D. Hodges
Book Review: the Evolution of God
The new issue of the Journal of International and Global Studies is out and you can find yours truly's review of Robert Wright's the Evolution of God in it on pages 183-186. Wright utilizes game theory to propose a model for the development of religion and an agnostic argument for the continuation of religion that prove thoroughly interesting. He explains his ideas in a most engaging, often humorous style. But, the argument has significant flaws that you can read about if you hop on over there.
How Not to Do Market Analysis
Nick Farrell of the Inquirer writes:
Where Steve Jobs made his mistake was that he marketed the Ipad as a utopian device that can do everything that all his other products can. This is dangerous for Apple because if the Ipad can be a laptop, an Iphone, a e-reader and a music player then you do not really need any of those devices.
Save for the laptop and the iPhone, that's precisely the point.
While no doubt Apple could be hurt if a bunch of people stop buying MacBook Pros and instead buy iPads, that's assuming too much. I think what may happen is where you see families buy fewer computers, but more iPads. For example, you might see each child get an iPad, instead of several children sharing a slightly more expensive MacBook. Overall, that's a big gain for Apple. (And, just like netbooks, don't expect the iPad to entirely kill off more powerful computers needed for things like making home movies or doing major photo touch up.)
Farrell really misses the point when he notes, “Jobs may as well forget launching an Apple version of a Kindle or a PSP, then.” Obviously, the iPad is intended as Apple's answer to the Kindle and one of Apple's competitors to the PSP (along with the iPod touch and iPhone). The idea that Apple would still want to launch single-use models seems to go against the whole convergence direction both Apple and the general industry are following. Note that Apple didn't launch a phone and a widescreen iPod and a small web surfing device back in 2007, either. It launched the iPhone to do all three.
The iPhone is secure because, as its name implies, it is a phone and the larger, heavier iPad is not. If anything, Apple has untapped opportunities to make the iPad and iPhone work together. The iPod touch may be harmed, but if Apple can get people to pick up a $500 or $600 iPad over a $200 iPod touch, I don't think they will lose much sleep over that.
HT: John Gruber
Unfolding My Story: The Aftermath of Abuse
It began one year ago today. A simple plea that some questionable activities be stopped on the computers I administered at my old church turned into an all out war aimed at silencing me legally, vilifying me to my friends and destroying my work towards ministry. Eventually, the war grew so that it also took aim against my family and friends. I have discussed each one of those matters in the past and if I wanted to, I could document them meticulously. That's not my point today. Today, I am writing about the aftermath that makes it hard to even remember what life was like before.
iPad 3G Teardown
Incase you were curious, the good folks at iFixit have already torn apart an iPad 3G to see what makes it tick. The 3G model is, in my estimation, the more interesting option of the two iPad lines. Not only does it come with 3G wireless when you need it with no time commitments required, it also has an apparently quite good GPS chip for use with navigation apps like Navigon (and anything else location aware you might want).
Baking Soda Made from Pollution
A fascinated blurb over at Switched:
The company's SkyMine project, in San Antonio, Texas, uses a three-step process that pumps the fumes from burning coal into water that is heated and fed through a filter that isolates hydrogen, chlorine and sodium hydroxide. That sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, is then combined with the carbon dioxide also produced by the burning coal. When this new mixture is filtered, it produces sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda.
The iPad, Flash and Proprietary Integration
CNet blogger and Canonical COO Matt Asay wrote an opinion piece today in which he applauds an earlier piece at sister publication ZDNet alleging Apple to be on an increasingly proprietary path. The quoted ZDNet writer Jeff Foremski writes,
Since the introduction of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple is becoming less and less open, is using fewer standard components and chips, and far fewer Internet technologies common to Mac/PC desktop and laptop systems.
The iPhone and iPad, for example, don't support common Internet platforms such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. That means you cannot watch streaming video from Hulu, or Netflix.
And while iPhone chips are available from other manufacturers, the iPad runs only on the A4 processor—an Apple designed chip that no one else can buy.
Let's consider these claims. The Apple A4 processor that runs the iPad is based on the same ARM architecture pretty much everyone in the mobile space is focused on at the present time. While Apple certainly likes vertical integration — because it lowers its dependency on outside suppliers and drives down costs — to say that Apple is becoming proprietary because of an in-house chip design is absurd. An Apple A4 is compatible with other ARM processors. The iPad CPU does not make the iPad more or less compatible with other systems than the iPhone's chip; as a matter of fact, neither chip has any influence on Apple's devices being able to interoperate with competitors' devices.
Foremski's second claim that Asay quotes is that Apple is utilizing “far fewer internet technologies” (implied: “open internet technologies”). By this, he apparently means Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, neither of which are open nor standards. Only Adobe Flash is even a de facto standard, albeit one conspicuously missing from most mobile devices at present. And since when does omitting two plugins become equivalent to supporting “far fewer internet technologies”?
Foremski's other mutterings about Apple in the piece Asay links to are similarly bizarre for someone writing at a quasi-respectable tech media outlet. He suggests Apple came to the PC side, for example, by supporting USB. He fails to mention Apple helped drive the adoption of USB, with the original iMac making waves via its USB-only approach. He also suggests Apple made its “disk operating system files compatible with the PC world,” but fails to explain what he means by that. He can't mean that Apple finally supported reading PC-formatted disks (Apple has supported reading DOS/Windows-based disks for decades) nor that Apple has switched to Microsoft's formats for native disks (it hasn't).
As much of a pain as it may be that Apple is refusing to support Flash on the iPad and iPhone, the company is right in saying that it is pushing for something far more open than Flash. Call that decision whatever you'd like, just don't call it “being proprietary.” Asay, who is a smart chap, shows poor judgment in agreeing with Foremski on this.
Apple Targeting to Kill Ad Networks' Targeting?
Peter Kafka writes,
As I understand it, Apple is arguing that [iPhone and iPad] app makers can’t pass along information that incorporates each phone’s “unique device identifier” to ad networks and measurement companies.
This doesn’t expressly prohibit ad networks from selling ads, but it prevents them from selling targeted advertising, which is close to the same thing when it comes to mobile devices. The same problem would plague analytics companies, which might be able to compile very broad usage info about apps, but little else.
Nonsense. Your computer's web browser doesn't offer a unique hardware serial number to every web site either. Back in the late 90's when it looked like we were headed into such an invasive privacy situation with Intel's PSN (Processor Serial Number) system, people were rightly outraged and the system died a quick death.
An IP address, or in the case of an application in which a user logs into an online service (e.g. Facebook), the user's login and associated profile, are more than enough targeting data to create useful analytics. This seems to be a part of Apple's continued attempt to differentiate its practices from Google's. As Gruber observed recently,
I detected one other veiled insult against Google during the event — Jobs’s emphasis during the multitasking segment about how seriously Apple values the privacy of iPhone users, with regard to data and location information. In the way that the standard knock against Apple is that they maintain too much control over the App Store, the standard knock against Google is that they don’t value user privacy. Jobs’s message: You can trust Apple.
I expect Apple to continue to play up this theme as its war with Google escalates.
