Monthly Archives: March 2010

Dan Lyons on the iPad (updated)

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Dan Lyons is well-known in tech circles as being Fake Steve Jobs. But he is also a technology reporter, and offers his personal take on the impact of the iPad in the current issue of Newsweek. I would note that he had a much more negative view at the launch event in January.

Perhaps more important, this elegant little device comes loaded with Jobs’s grandiose ambition and is yet another example of his willingness to defy conventional wisdom and bend the ethos of Silicon Valley to his own will. The Internet is supposed to be all about freedom and choice—yet here comes Steve Jobs with an Internet that is a completely closed system. Apple not only sells you the device, but also operates the only store on the planet that sells software for it. Such “walled gardens” were supposed to be a thing of the past, cracked open first by the freewheeling PC revolution and then demolished by the anything-goes-and-everything-is-free World Wide Web. Jobs figures he can get away with this radical lockdown because the products Apple makes are so good, outstripping the imaginations of even the most engaged consumer. Jobs argues that this tighter control allows Apple to create a more seamless user experience—your iTunes account stores your credit-card information, which makes it very, very easy to buy stuff. There’s no friction. Thinking about an old song from high school? Go to iTunes, grab it, pay a buck, and listen. I do that all the time now on my iPhone, and I’ll probably make bigger purchases—movies, books, TV series—for my iPad. In fact, a closed system may be the only way to deliver the kind of techno-Zen experience that Apple has become known for.

Update: In other iPad news, it appears Apple entirely sold out its first week allotment of iPads.

The end of reputation

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Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, warns of the problem defending one’s reputation on line in an era of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media. His concern is based not only on the anonymous claims that can easily be made online and located via search engines, but on new services that are expressly designed to solicit input on everyone. He suggests (or at least hopes) that the end result of this progression will be that we simply disregard anonymous, unsourced or unprovable claims and finally realize that everyone has past events that they would sooner forget. The whole article is worth a read.

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.

That picture of you making out with two guys in college up on Facebook. Or perhaps doing a bong hit after winning a few Olympic gold medals. The random slam against your restaurant anonymously left by the owner of the competitor around the corner. The Twitter flame about how bad a driver you are, complete with a link to a picture of your license plate.

And it’s about to get a lot worse. Next week a startup is launching that’s effectively Yelp for people (look for our coverage in a few days). If someone has something good or bad to say about you, they’ll be able to do it anonymously and with very little potential legal or social fallout.

I share his concerns.

Pot legalization in California?

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This week the California Secretary of State certified a voter initiative to appear on the ballot in November. The initiative, if approved by the voters, would legalize the personal possession and consumption of marijuana, and would allow cities and counties to regulate and tax commercial sales of the drug.

I predict it will pass. Probably the support will come from both users and farmers, but it also may get support from taxpayers. According to the New York Times, supporters of the proposition believe it could raise $1.2 Billion in taxes each year for a state with a $10 Billion deficit.

“We need the tax money,” said Richard Lee, founder of Oaksterdam University, a trade school for marijuana growers, in Oakland, who backed the ballot measure’s successful petition drive. “Second, we need the tax savings on police and law enforcement, and have that law enforcement directed towards real crime.”

Political quote of the day

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The Republicans fought long and hard for people’s right to wait three hours in an emergency room for someone to take their blood pressure, and they went down to defeat, and now they should stop and rethink their Waterloo strategy. The picture of the grinning GOP congressmen holding “Kill the Bill” posters was not an attractive one. Those guys all get excellent hrothgar from the government, at bargain prices. If you choke on your shoe during a speech in the House of Representatives, you’ll be whisked away to Walter Reed, and specialists will extract your hoof from your mouth and your head from your colon and clean you up and all for a tiny annual premium. It does not behoove men who are enjoying a huge pork sandwich to deny a few pork rinds to others and to grin in the process.

* * *

Now Sen. McCain says there will be no further cooperation with the administration. OK then. Thanks for clearing that up. Now that bipartisanship has been buried for good, Democrats can get about the business of running the government, which is their duty as the majority party, and let the Republicans sulk in their rooms and work on their Facebook updates. They’ve made it clear that if Mr. Obama suddenly decided to come out in favor of Mother’s Day, they would fight against it as a ruthless exercise of federal power and a violation of due process. Fine. Talk to the hand.

– Garrison Keillor

Republicans are crazy

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For those who remember, there was a poll commissioned by blog Daily Kos a while ago that showed many in the Republican Party where insane.  Fox News and conservative commentators attacked the poll as purposefully inaccurate.  Well there is a new Harris poll out that shows Republicans are even more insane than I thought (I have cut and pasted below an excerpt from a recent article).

  • 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
  • 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
  • 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
  • 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”
  • Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”

National ID cards: just say HELL NO

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The Feds (or at least a couple of lawmakers) are now pushing for a new kind of national ID card.  The lawmakers are Lindsay Graham (R-SC and John McCain’s unacknowledged husband) and Charles Schumer (D-NY and Wall Street bitch-boy):

“We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information,” they said. “The cards would not contain any private information, medical information or tracking devices. The card would be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.”

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, suggests the plan would undoubtedly lead to a national database. He added that “there is no practical way of making a national identity document fraud-proof.”

What’s more, Richard Esguerra, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s in-house activist, notes that a national ID card likely would expand from its stated purpose.

In this country we should not be required, when walking down a street, to produce our “papers” or face jail. That is where this kind of proposal leads. Stop it now. If the Tea Partiers want to identify a real threat to liberty, this proposal is it.

Steven Levy on the iPad

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Steven Levy has a good piece in this month’s Wired magazine outlining the possible impact of the iPad (and other slate devices) on the future direction of computing. Worth a full read.

The fact is, the way we use computers is outmoded. The graphical user interface that’s still part of our daily existence was forged in the 1960s and ’70s, even before IBM got into the PC business. Most of the software we use today has its origins in the pre-Internet era, when storage was at a premium, machines ran thousands of times slower, and applications were sold in shrink-wrapped boxes for hundreds of dollars. With the iPad, Apple is making its play to become the center of a post-PC era. But to succeed, it will have to beat out the other familiar powerhouses that are working to define and dominate the future.

There’s a lot to love about Apple’s vision. As we start to establish the conventions made possible by advanced multitouch, we’ll perform ever more complicated tasks by rolling, tapping, and drumming our fingers on screens, like pianists tickling the ivories. The iTunes App Store model gives us a safe and easy means to get powerful programs at low prices. Rigidly enforced standards of aesthetics will ensure that the iPad remains an easy-to-navigate no-clutter zone. And since we’re obligated to link our credit cards to Apple, micropayments are built in, providing traditional media companies with at least a hope of avoiding the poorhouse.

Also, be sure to check out Fake Steve’s take on the iPad and what it will and will not accomplish.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock and nothing on this website should be construed as investment advice.

David Brooks: Still living in fantasyland

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David Brooks’ column today is a long lament about the Democrats and his view that the Democrats are really not serious about reducing the Federal debt.

The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem.

Give me a break. Which party, over the last 50 years, presided over the largest increases in the Federal debt? I will give you one guess. Take a look at this chart.  To summarize: over the past 5 Presidents’ terms, the three highest percentage increases in the national debt came under Republican Presidents.

Reagan: 189%
Bush II: 89%
Bush I: 55%

David Brooks: Who does “feel the passion”?