Commentary – Page 70

Believe in Yourself.

The ‘problem’ with God and miracles as I see it is that they devalue humanity. In early times, man could not explain the coming of rain and winds, why lightning flashed from the sky and why some were struck down by disease and others were spared. These mysteries caused men to fear nature as they … Continue reading “Believe in Yourself.”

The ‘problem’ with God and miracles as I see it is that they devalue humanity.

In early times, man could not explain the coming of rain and winds, why lightning flashed from the sky and why some were struck down by disease and others were spared. These mysteries caused men to fear nature as they could not control or predict it. Some men of greater insight could recognise the coming of these events and once recognised they could be predicted. However these men were still bound by their fear of the unknown. They interpreted these signs as portents from unknown, supernatural agents and when they saw no signs, they would appeal to these agents, placating them with prayers, sacrifices and complex ritual. This practice of magic in its most primitive form as a component of hysterical superstition formed the basis of early religion, fashioned gods from the sun and the rain and through religion man began to construct his first, great civilisations.

Customs and rituals developed over time from priest-magicians, descendants of those men of wisdom, who were charged with placating and divining the future from the gods. But this was done only in ignorance. It was only done because we could not explain what we saw.

The truth is, humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years due to adaptability and intelligence.

The trend with modern religion (and for the most part I mean Christianity here) is that it fosters dependence on a supernatural entity which has not provably done anything in 2000 years or so (if not more and if it happened at all).

Humans do not need to ascribe to the supernatural that which comes from their own wit, their own skill, their own temerity, their own will, their own desire. But thousands of them do. And they profess how it could not have happened without faith when, in every known case, it happened absolutely without faith.

Do not abdicate your victories to a myth. Do not give a fairy tale the credit for the success that you have worked so hard to achieve. Revel in your own ability, the strength in your arms, the beating of your heart, the ideas in your mind. These are yours.

This is why I do not describe myself as an atheist. I am only a humanist. Humans are brilliant. We don’t need to believe in a myth to get through the day. Belief in ourselves is more than sufficient.

The Internet without Flash

Is better than you think. Fewer ads to put a buzzing sound through your speakers, fewer jarring UI clashes, fewer weird pop-ups which obscure the content. With ClickToFlash, it’s like being able to wander through a dodgy neighbourhood but feel safe which is why the trap line for the plug-n is “your web browsing prophylactic”. … Continue reading “The Internet without Flash”

So in all I’m supportive that Flash ain’t coming to the iPhone at all. And I’m confident that we won’t lose Unity, Cocos or other useful frameworks out there.

ADBE vs AAPL

Eighteen months ago, John Paczkowski speculated that Apple may want to use their considerable war chest of cash to buy Adobe. Adobe is currently worth around $18 Bn and Apple has around $30-35 Bn in the bank (Apple themselves are, at the time of this writing, worth $215 Bn. This is why I think Apple … Continue reading “ADBE vs AAPL”

This is why I think Apple has been maintaining such a strong position against Adobe over the last two years. They’re trying to reduce the stock price (as well as maintain control over a platform).

Adobe made less than half a million dollars in income last year and has been increasing it’s debt. We know in comparison that Apple has no debt at all and reported $3.38 billion in profits last quarter (Apple will release their next quarterly results in about two weeks).

[UPDATE: The figures are in thousands so I’m out there. But it means the debt is in thousands as well which puts them about a billion in debt.]

@webtwozero writes:

@cimota why would apple buy adobe? they don’t like flash, which pretty much rules out director too, they after photoshop, and premiere?

They’re after Photoshop, to adopt it in. They’re also after Premiere and Lightroom, with a view to either enhancing or replacing Final Cut Pro and Aperture. I think they’re also after Acrobat, Flex, Flash I reckon they have no good intentions towards them.

GodsWearHats writes:

@cimota AAPL vs ADBE: I don’t think Apple wants them, tbh. Doesn’t strike me as Steve’s style.

They’d already done something similar to the music sector when they purchased eMagic and made Logic Mac-only. And they did the same with Nothing Real and Shake.

Lomifeh writes:

@cimota I don’t really want them to buy adobe. The companies seem too dissimilar in philosophy. I’d prefer them forcing adobe to act right

To my mind, Adobe made their bed when they stopped feature parity on the Mac with the Windows version. They still haven’t rectified this and as a result Apple and Mac users have been treated like second class citizens. On top of that, the use of Flash in video undermined QuickTime, Lightroom undermines Aperture and it’s possible they see Premiere as a competitor to Final Cut Pro.

Adobe has also dragged it’s feet on the releasing apps which take advantage of Mac OS X technologies and there’s no way that Apple would permit Adobe to control access to their OS features the way they already have manipulated the market with Flash. Adobe was one of the major reasons for Carbon due to their reluctance to rewrite their application portfolio in Cocoa – something which still hasn’t been done after ten years of Mac OS X.

If Flash is the real bone of contention here then I’ll be very surprised. Flash video has always been little more than a hack – a compatibility layer that locks video into a proprietary format for later display. the poor performance of Flash on Mac hardware underlines the need for Apple to react. While I may lament the loss of many excellent education and entertainment games which have been developed in Flash, the truth is that many of these games simply will not work with a touch-based interface. They use a lot of facilities such as ‘hover’ which is possible with a virtual cursor but not possible with a touch interface. As a result, running Flash-based games and education tools on the iPad or iPhone would result in a substandard experience with poor performance and in both cases Apple would shoulder the blame.

Is it any wonder that Apple now feels they have to take a strong position.

That said, I feel that last night’s presentation on iPhone OS 4 was a rush-job, meant to try and stop a drama from turning into a crisis. If Adobe had announced CS5 officially and then demonstrated it and Apple had refused to stock the apps in the AppStore, then it would have been bad for both. I do think, on the other hand, that Apple is being curiously heavy handed here.

One thing at a time is at an end.

iPhone OS 4’s big deal yesterday was multitasking. They announced Seven Services which provide multi-tasking components to developers. This fulfils pretty much what I was looking for in the iPhone OS: pull and background and goes even further than I had intended. It permits the backgrounding of music apps, VoIP apps, location-based apps and timers … Continue reading “One thing at a time is at an end.”

iPhone OS 4’s big deal yesterday was multitasking. They announced Seven Services which provide multi-tasking components to developers.

This fulfils pretty much what I was looking for in the iPhone OS: pull and background and goes even further than I had intended. It permits the backgrounding of music apps, VoIP apps, location-based apps and timers (local notifications). It permits apps which have longer processing to background their processing and permit the user to move on to do something else. To be honest, I’ve got everything I wanted.

David Kirk writes:

Following the Apple OS4 announcement today that the iPhone and iPad would be “multitasking” a lively discussion sprang up on Twitter. 140 characters is woefully inadequate for that discussion so hopefully @cimota will post this on his (soon to be) award winning blog.

First let me define my terms and concepts so we can get agreement on our vocabulary. And multitasking and multi-threading need agreement.

A general purpose computer is a collection of processors dedicated to specific functions [program execution graphics, I/O, communications, etc.]

Processors execute [we’ll not get into instruction fetch, operations, etc.] only one instruction at a time, and do so until they issue an instruction that causes the processor to “wait” for the specific completion of some other task (e.g. read / write to complete, packet received on communications line, timer to pop, etc.). If there are no other tasks ready to execute, then the processor itself will wait until it receives an interrupt from the processor handling the I/O or communications or timer. Then the operating system will “awaken” the waiting task, restore its context, and schedule the next instruction. Even non-multitasking OS’s need interrupts (DOS).

Multitasking was designed to take vantage of all those “waits” by scheduling other tasks – that are ready to execute. A multitasking OS, once one task “waits”, will restore the context of another task that is ready, and schedule it for execution. Of course if there are no other tasks ready for execution, the processor will itself wait.
One other wrinkle. Many multitasking OS’s have a priority schedule, whereby certain tasks get priority over others. For example, if a task is receiving bytes from a communications line into a buffer, its probably needs priority to empty the buffer before the next packet comes in else the buffer will be overwritten – so that task may need “priority”. This is implemented in the OS. Once an interrupt occurs, the OS decides if the task running is the highest priority task that is “ready to run”. If not the OS will store the tasks context and schedule the task which is the highest priority.
So, multitasking requires hardware interrupts and a multitasking OS that manages context and administers priority [for all compsc geeks, including the old timers, yes that is a GROSS simplification}.

Multi-threading is a concept that simplifies programming in software systems that support multiple users concurrently. In essence its performs psuedo multitasking between its own threads, but never “waits” or gets interrupted from the OS. An application that performs multi-threading can its – without awareness – be multitasked.

Finally, and to the point of the OS4, the act of multi-tasking (whether or not these are multi-threading or non-multithreading applications, is transparent to the application.

David is right, right down the last sentence. Users don’t care how multitasking is implemented. They really don’t. Back in the olden days on the Mac, people were happy with the simple ‘co-operative multitasking’ that was presented by the Mac and Windows 95 and didn’t cream out for pre-emptive multitasking which came with the Windows NT kernel and (eventually) Mac OS X. They just didn’t care. They cared about the symptoms – that under the co-operative model a single application could block the whole machine and they cared about the lack of protected memory on some of these operating systems insofar as one wrong write to memory could crash the device but in the scale of things they didn’t care. The system appeared to multi-task and that’s what was important. And it’s still what’s important.

Jeff LaMarche writes on the iPhone OS4 multitasking:

I’ve used Android’s “multitasking”, and I think that Apple has been 100% right not to just port the workstation model of “multitasking” to the phone. It’s hard to say how well these new “multitasking” APIs will meet our needs as developers, but the best that I can tell from the presentation, Apple seems to have struck a good balance. Battery life can really suffer with a traditional “multitasking” approach, as I’ve discovered using my Nexus One.

I think this is very valid. We don’t need a repeat of the desktop model on mobile. As long as multi-tasking is transparent to the user, it doesn’t matter which way it is done. And if these measures mean pausing apps which are not currently being used, permitting audio, VOIP services and location services and allowing longer-timed processing to continue, what else is needed?

Waiting for a 3G and a Micro-SIM

I’ve not yet touched an iPad and I just cancelled a friend ordering me a WiFi model from the US. I’m just going to wait for a 3G but who has a Micro-SIM or who will have one of the Micro-SIMs under contract? Micro-SIMs are not new – having been used in embedded devices such … Continue reading “Waiting for a 3G and a Micro-SIM”

I’ve not yet touched an iPad and I just cancelled a friend ordering me a WiFi model from the US. I’m just going to wait for a 3G but who has a Micro-SIM or who will have one of the Micro-SIMs under contract? Micro-SIMs are not new – having been used in embedded devices such as GPS units and power meters for years – but they haven’t generally been consumer-facing.

Hot on the heels of the iPad announcement, carriers were quick to respond. Micro-SIMs are going to be supported by O2 Telefonica, Orange, Three in the UK, T-Mobile in Germany and by AT&T, T-Mobile in the US and NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Maxroam in the Republic of Ireland has just announced support and I’m told that they are decreasing their prices for data usage abroad in the next 14 days which may make their offerings for travellers very competitive.

That said, my darling wife is pursuing her own WiFi iPad through other channels. A Mi-Fi is still a good option for many who either want to share their 3G between multiple devices or who don’t want to pay extra for the 3G model.

simply, how (most) computing should be

Alex Payne writes about his moderate stance on the iPad: Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will … Continue reading “simply, how (most) computing should be”

Alex Payne writes about his moderate stance on the iPad:

Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.
…
All in all, I stand by what I had to say back in January: that the iPad is a beautiful, important, transformative device released under a confusing regime of questionable ethics. That said, I think three simple changes would make a world of difference towards assuaging people’s concerns about the iPad and Apple’s direction.
…

Apple should not charge to put applications you’ve written onto your personal iPad (or iPhone, for that matter).

Apple should lift restrictions on running interpreted code on its mobile devices. Let people run Basic, Python, and Ruby interpreters on iPad and iPhone.

Apple should remove the concept of private APIs from its developer offerings.

In essence, I agree on all three points.

With respect to 1.: I agree that Apple should not charge for putting a build on your own iPad but I can understand why they do. They’re for the certificate and management of same. It’s a casual barrier to entry which most people serious about it can leap over.

But if they permitted interpreted code on the device, which is the essence of 2., then they’re halfway there. Allowing a PHP interpreter, a BASIC compiler or even an environment like MIT’s Scratch would go somewhere to assuraging some of the deep felt geek hurt. A lot of folk I know got their start programming either in BASIC or HyperCard.

Point 3 tells me that Alex doesn’t know how the Apple development environment works. Private APIs are not necessarily secret ways of doing things which cannot be accessed by other mortals due to their secrecy though it does seem to be that way. Private APIs are APIs which are eventually to be made public once they have stabilised or been sufficiently modified. They are commonly APIs which are new or in development. I say ‘commonly’ because Mail and iCal on Mac OS X use them. Even now.

Since when are geeks the only creative folk?

[I wrote this as a comment on Jeff Jarvis’s blog but decided to keep the text and expand upon it.] Jeff’s major bone of contention with the iPad is that the newspaper apps which are appearing on the device are not permitting the full gamut of conversation, of consumer input that he would like. The … Continue reading “Since when are geeks the only creative folk?”

[I wrote this as a comment on Jeff Jarvis’s blog but decided to keep the text and expand upon it.]

Jeff’s major bone of contention with the iPad is that the newspaper apps which are appearing on the device are not permitting the full gamut of conversation, of consumer input that he would like.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

The iPad is not built on apps and was not primarily advertised as such.

“The best way to experience the web, email and photos.”

Don’t believe me, check the title.

That’s HMTL, IMAP and JPG/PNG.

On one hand we have web developers telling us that you can create great apps with web technologies. On the other hand we have folk railing against the strictures of the app store. So where are the amazing HTML-based apps that should have been released on the iPhone in 2007 (when everyone was clamouring for a native SDK). Where are the web apps?

This is the same argument that Cory used – you can’t do on tiny fragment of the whole creativity spectrum on it and suddenly it’s a consumer trap. You can’t edit movies with “Final Cut Touch” so it’s useless. There’s no “LightRoom Touch” so it’s useless. You can’t self-host (as someone put it) so it’s useless. It doesn’t come with a web server, a print server and routing software so it’s useless.

On the other hand I spent an hour on the phone working with my 65 year old, 70% blind father as he navigated his way around his Mac mini using the built-in magnification. He can’t get used to the idea that windows in the OS can overlap. He thinks the OS is hiding things from him. for him, multitasking is a challenge that he finds difficult to fathom. He finds the spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination required to operate a mouse to be a huge obstacle. Can you think of a better option than an iPad for him?

But ignore this. This isn’t about the people for whom it would be a great enabler, this is about the micro-percentages of alpha geeks who really wanted something else and aren’t happy to just go out and buy something else. Just buy

So we have Jeff shouting that he wants USB? For a USB stick and what else? A printer? In 2010 we have someone shouting for sneakernet and dead tree + ink? this would be laughable if it wasn’t so ridiculous.

So, the argument is bullshit. Of course it allows us to create. We can load our photos in there, we can load our videos in there, we can write, we can record sound, we can create blogs, write missives, comment anywhere. It’s a better web client than most people are used to.

Flash: a legacy technology

More moaning and griping about the lack of Flash. How it means the web will be broken for most consumers. How it disables the useful content of the web. The only thing we realistically can’t do is use Flash. And what does Flash give us: A way to watch video on the web which was … Continue reading “Flash: a legacy technology”

More moaning and griping about the lack of Flash. How it means the web will be broken for most consumers. How it disables the useful content of the web.

The only thing we realistically can’t do is use Flash. And what does Flash give us:

A way to watch video on the web which was a hack back in the day and remains a performance and battery sucking hack
A way to play games on the web – games which may be aimed at education, training as well as throwing shoes at Dubya’s head.

I will not lament the loss of Flash video. It’s sufficiently abhorrent that I installed Click2Flash and haven’t looked back. As a result, my Mac runs faster, cooler and I’ve fewer Flash-based ads to watch. Yes, it was great when we needed it – when there wasn’t a standard, they stepped in and filled a gap and thanks are due to them for that.

I do think we’re missing a trick with the Flash games – especially those designed for education. The problem being that most of the Flash games out there won’t work on a touch interface properly. They’re based on hitting keys or waving the mouse around, hovering over items and as you can guess now – there is no ‘hover’ in a touch interface. So even with Flash, most of the games won’t work anyway.

The performance issues with Flash are my biggest gripe. I tried to access Flash-based sites using “Flash Mobile” on the Nokia N800 and was constantly disappointed with the performance. Slow, laggy and And this was on their mobile platform?

Adobe has had a decade to get this sorted out but performance always suffers. While doing nothing but watching Flash video, the MacBook Air here routinely hits a load average of 6.0 which is ridiculous. It can play HD video onto a big screen with much less effort. Flash is just sucking CPU cycles, lagging even when only watching video and generally ruining the experience of the web for the rest of us.

But for those ‘designers’ who have designed entire web sites that only work in Flash and don’t provide any sort of fallback? You suck as a designer. You suck.

Upset the Apple cart

André Torrez writes why he will buy an iPad this weekend: “If VHS home recording is made legal then our industry is ruined.” “If CD quality music is allowed to be sold then our industry is ruined.” “If DAT is made legal then our industry is ruined.” “If the Rio PMP3000 is allowed to be … Continue reading “Upset the Apple cart”

André Torrez writes why he will buy an iPad this weekend:

“If VHS home recording is made legal then our industry is ruined.”
“If CD quality music is allowed to be sold then our industry is ruined.”
“If DAT is made legal then our industry is ruined.”
“If the Rio PMP3000 is allowed to be sold then our industry is ruined.”
“If file sharing is permitted then our industry is ruined.”

The tactic is as old as the hills and used by some pretty dishonest people in the last few years to combat technology they feared would upset the nice apple cart they’d set up.

I don’t think this is justification enough to buy an iPad but it is justification for citizens of the United Kingdom to oppose the Digital Economy Bill. I support copyright, of course I do, but copyright is a human invention and the acceleration of human innovation is now hidebound by laws enacted when technology was in its infancy. Corporate interests now keep our writers’ works bound in law for 75 years after their death even when they have no descendants (I have a personal bet that copyright laws will be extended again in the UK before the end of 2012 – mark my words!). Wake up people – we’re being robbed of our heritage. In the olden days, we were DRM-free. We easily copied materials between us and making a living as an artist was fraught with peril. Copyright was introduced to help that and it helps artists make a living even when their creations are copied. But there has to be a sensible limit – it’s not meant to be in perpetuity. When you create something, when you have a performance, it’s not meant to secure an income for the entire length of your life and the length of life of your descendants. Let them create something too! Copyright, designed to protect the incomes of artists, ends up stifling artists because they lose one of their incentives to create, put simply: hunger

Here in the UK, we’re going to be paying 50 pence a month additional tax to fund an initiative which will put 2 Mbps broadband into every home in the nation. While I applaud the plan, I have grave concerns over how it has been thought through. Supplying broadband is part of the puzzle – what about the hardware to run it on? What about the electricity to power it? Will this empower or destroy smaller internet service providers?

But more importantly – what are the social implications of this. Just as there are naysayers who don’t think the iPad is a viable (let alone well executed) device and cannot see past their blinkers on what their definition of a mobile computing device is, there are similar limitations on what is possible with broadband for all. Will this broadband be delivered by a provider who gives set-top boxes to everyone which run a cut down thin client? Will the browser included be standards compliant? (I was present at a recent presentation to Belfast City Council where a solution was being offered for set-top boxes which would put everyone’s browser a version behind the current, control access to Facebook and Youtube, force Council-related advertising and was prepared to offer “Secure by Design, because it’s Ethernet”. Now, as a once-techie I have no fucking idea what that last bullet point was meant to mean but to be honest I’d already switched off from the presentation long before that porky-pie and considered it a very bad idea.

There is no way that the UK is ready for a 100% broadband uptake either in terms of social capability or technical ability. We need more than just lines into houses – we need social reform, we need the government to take charge and not be so lily-livered about “new” media. We need them to open their doors and allow complete transparency. Then, after all of that, maybe then we’ll be ready for everyone to be online.

Really Tediously Stale (RTS)

Over at Lost Garden they have a really good article which I don’t want to lose in the labyrinthine bookmarks I maintain so I’m blogging it. We believed that RTS games were the future and that we were the inspired game developers who were going to popularize this hitherto ignored genre. Some historical perspective is … Continue reading “Really Tediously Stale (RTS)”

Over at Lost Garden they have a really good article which I don’t want to lose in the labyrinthine bookmarks I maintain so I’m blogging it.

We believed that RTS games were the future and that we were the inspired game developers who were going to popularize this hitherto ignored genre.

Some historical perspective is in order. Warcraft wouldn’t come out until late 1994. Command and Conquer wouldn’t arrive until 1995. What many PC gamers today consider to be one of the most burnt out genres was at that time new, fresh and completely unknown to most gamers. The term ‘RTS’ hadn’t even been invented as far as I know.

As I write this in 2005, I’m bemused by the path the RTS game genre has taken from stunning innovation to stagnant maturity.

I remember playing Warcraft on a Powerbook 1400c – actually on two Powerbook 1400c laptops – because I wanted to test the InfraRed Appletalk connection and these were the first laptops I had access to. This then introduced me to Myth, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, StarCraft, Diablo and the game which I am most impressed with, HomeWorld – which takes the 3D nature of modern games systems to the ultimate extreme. The basic game formula then was simple. Collect a lot of stuff (Resource Gathering), build a lot of stuff (Base Building) and then attack (Fighting). As the article notes, this has been the mainstay of RTS games since and, frankly, for the foreseeable future unless someone does something.

We’ve had some breakouts from this – most notably Myth (and you might suggest the Total War series) but for the most part the RTS genre is stagnant. That said, when you look at the iPhone market, there has been a massive resurgence in RTS games. What is FieldRunners if not a focus on the Base Building subsection of the genre? What is Plants vs Zombies if not a focus on Base Building and Resources Gathering. What are games like Farmville or We Rule! but a focus on Resource Gathering. Tower defence games which have proven to be suprisingly popular with touch based interfaces played to the strengths of the iPhone – a small screen where it is hard to move around due to the screen size. With larger screens much of this difficulty goes away.

The problem being that many RTS games devolve into being puzzles. Plants vs Zombies, while I love playing the game with it’s quirky graphics and funny audio, quickly becomes formulaic. You know which units to build first, you know which units give best protection while you develop your resource gatherers.

The strategy goes away – but then this is as much an issue with playing against a simple scripted sequence or a very basic computer AI. You learn the patterns as much as commanders learned that cavalry were better than infantry and so they equipped infantry with pikes and so on.

Most folk who play games like Fieldrunners or Plants versus Zombies or Farmville may not see themselves a playing a strategy game and if you tried to tempt them into Warcraft, they’d likely baulk and lose interest. I believe we’re about to hit a new renaissance in Strategy gaming. Where the dust will be blown off and there will be new ways to act and interact. There will be victors and there will be casualties in this.

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