| Wednesday, November 20, 2002 |
11:36 - A thought on network effect
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/01/fog0000000140.shtml
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Den Beste has mentioned "network effect" several times as evidence that Apple is doomed and Windows will achieve 100% penetration. From his original article on the subject:
There is a marketing term: "network effect". It refers to the fact that for some kinds of products, the product becomes more valuable to each individual customer as more and more people buy it. Companies love this if they can get it, because there's no manufacturing cost associated with network effect, so the value (and potentially the sales price) of the product can rise and thus profit margins can increase.
The effect exists; I'm not going to argue that. It's a truism of humanity that the more the people around you do something, the easier it is for you to do the same thing.
But I have to wonder whether the effect will lead to where Den Beste thinks it will. I find myself thinking that the result of network effect on any given niche depends heavily on circumstance; it's not a foregone conclusion that it will lead to homogeneity.
My thought is that network effect is only really potent when the choice in question is in fact a choice. I'd say network effect was absolutely instrumental in Windows attaining the critical mass that it achieved in the mid-to-late 90s. Back then, a new computer user was an informed buyer, someone with geeky tendencies, who knew what a computer was supposed to do and what he wanted to do with it. He had a choice between Windows and a Mac; he weighed the merits of each, and eventually the fact that all his friends were using Windows because it was cheaper and had more software won out. That's network effect in its purest form.
But that's not the case these days. Using Windows isn't a choice, it's a default. New computer buyers don't know what operating system their computer runs any more than they know what encoding standard their phone uses. Network effect doesn't enter into the buying decision; when someone is getting a new computer, it's going to run Windows. Only if the user is savvy does he weigh the relative merits of Windows and the Mac-- and such users, though it may not look that way from within the blogosphere, are vanishingly few. They're not a significant part of the numbers which drive sales.
It's at a time like this that network effect actually can work in favor of the niche player. My personal experience tells me this. Time was, after all, that nobody wanted to use any Apple products; the Mac was seen as a "toy", the Mac OS was seen as limited and restrictive and unstable, and Mac users were usually simply called "gay" and left at that. (Network effect in reverse.) But these days, the situation is quite different. People come up to me to see my iMac and my iBook and ask questions about it-- what it can do, how much it weighs, how much it costs-- quite unprovoked. They're seeking it out. If I flash my iPod while in line for burritos, people's heads turn my way and I get to show it off to a genuinely admiring audience, rather than having to hide it from people who think it makes a statement about my sexuality. (I just saw an iPod on the title-card sequence for "Modern Marvels: Boys' Toys" on the History Channel.)
And that, too, is network effect.
Using a Mac is starting to be seen once again as something real people do. Everybody has a friend who uses a Mac-- and such people are more common than they were a couple of years ago, at least in my experience, anecdotal though it may be. The "Switch" ads are putting memes into the water. Everybody knows what an iPod is and what an iMac looks like. OS X gets high-profile billing in movies like Men In Black II. People create videos in iMovie and photo books in iPhoto. Apple Stores present hip and inviting facades to passers-by in high-income malls. There are more games being produced for the Mac platform than there ever have been since the mid-90s. These things enter the collective consciousness. And they're doing it more now than they used to.
One of the most common refrains here at work is "When I get my Mac..." --and a big driver for that is the fact that there is already that crucial seed of shock troops within the company who have already bought Macs and are visibly happy with them. That makes it easier for more people to consider, "Hey, now, maybe these things are worth looking into. Sure can't be worse than this Windows box, can they?" And when a friend sees my iPod and plaintively says, "God, everybody has one of those except for me!"... it means an imminent sale is dependent only on whether it turns out to be in the guy's budget for the month.
When those around you are increasingly making a certain choice, you're more likely to make that same choice yourself. I see that happening with Apple products more and more these days. But I don't see it happening with Windows anywhere near as much, because to use Windows first has to be a choice that one has to consciously make.
I suspect that network effect is only really valid in a plural market, is what I'm saying. It confers the most momentum to a product or company while that company is a minority and on the rise, but its potency falls off as that product or company achieves near-total penetration. Beyond that, other effects take over-- more volatile ones, depending largely on PR, economics, design, and luck. Anything can happen. But in a situation like we have today, I don't think network effect is really something Apple has to worry about as much. Instead it's an ally, as long as they can keep it fed and don't blow it.
Popular opinion toward Apple is curious among the casual and respectful among the savvy; the zealous are zealous as ever, but the hostile are a vanishing bunch. This is a much different environment from what it was two or three years ago. Apple is no longer a pariah-- and whatever its products' numbers might look like, the environment is a rich one for growth.
OS/2 failed because while it was a niche player with a similar position to Apple's, it didn't bring anything to the table that was compelling and hip, the way Apple does now. Good as it was, it didn't have an exclusive "killer app" that IBM could show off on TV and build consumer lust. There wasn't any reason for the man on the street to think, "Hmm, OS/2-- that's cool stuff, right? I oughtta go get me some of that!" Nor was there for Be, which had cool idealistic prospects, but nothing concrete for people to latch onto. But aha... Linux started off as a niche player, and it had the crucial network-effect ingredient that it brought something desirable to the table-- something that would overcome its minority position and gather adherents even in the face of overwhelming opposition from the status quo. Somehow that worked. Linux brought a concrete benefit to people who wanted to make an informed choice and achieve something specific. And that's what Apple is doing too; that's why Apple is better equipped to survive in its current market than, say, OS/2 was.
Or maybe I'm just on crack.
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| Tuesday, November 19, 2002 |
23:42 - Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still doooooomed
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And as the volume of PC sales continues to rise, and as Apple's sales continue to stagnate or even drop, that price disparity will only become worse, with the PCs continuing to fall in price due to economy of scale while continuing to rise in relative value compared to the Mac both because of improvements in technology and because of network effect. What this really means is that the "Switch" campaign is doomed; there will be little in the way of switching, and most of that will be Mac users switching to the PC. Apple's primary business will continue to be replacement units for existing users in a declining overall customer base.
Quick, somebody tell the eight people at my company who have all bought iPods and/or their first Macs over the course of the past year.
Someone remind them that they're supposed to be all dissatisfied with them and stuff, and want to switch back to the trusty Windows world. They just won't snap out of it. What's wrong with them?
And for God's sake, do something about the numerous people I know, both at work and elsewhere, who have gone from outright derision of Macs as of a year or two ago to curiosity, intrigue, respect, and genuine, money-on-the-table interest. Someone warn them before it's too late!
Doomed! Dooomed, I tells ya!
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17:54 - Perceived Quality
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1272
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Here's a meta-article about a C|Net review of the 17" iMac and its build and design quality as compared to similarly-priced HP and Gateway PCs. (Gateway is a particularly eye-to-eye Mac rival these days, considering the recent stunts like the Profile 4-vs-iMac ad, their retooling of the Gateway Country Stores to be more like the Apple Stores, and the "You can do all this stuff with Gateway!" ads for them-- though one that I saw the other day, in a promotion run by AT&T Broadband, gushed about the great online services offered by AT&T and Gateway-- while the camera zoomed in on the Ethernet cable plugged into the side of the iBook on the laughing actress' lap. Hey, props for recognizing visual style when it suits the ad setting, but points off for Photoshopping a piece of graphical ad-copy onto the iBook's screen when the camera zoomed in.)
Anyway...
Yes, Wilcox even cites the cables, and their tangle-free properties, as a indicator of high quality.
But more importantly, the review shows what you don't get with low-end PCs: high-end video cards. But even on HP's mid-range 883n - lineball with the iMac at $2,000 - HP resorts to an analog video card with an LCD monitor, merely to save a few bucks. The result, says Wilcox, is a blurry LCD, which compares poorly with the iMac's bright, clear 17" display.
Of all Apple's purported weaknesses these days, one of the least-often cited is "fuzzy/blurry/dim LCD screen". The display on my iMac at work still gets admiring stares from passing co-workers. It really does look good.
The review does note a number of legitimate gripes, though (I'm still scratching my head over the iMac's power button being at the back and flush with the body so you can't find it no matter what you do). And that's fair.
But the tech press as a whole is being very pro-Mac lately-- and not in a rah-rah way (which would betray the presence of idiosyncratic Macophiles on editorial staffs here and there, using any excuse to blurt out a sycophantic paean to Jobs), but in a critical and even-handed way. That's money, baby.
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17:31 - Writing Without Reference
http://www.arizonarepublic.com/business/articles/1119e-komando.html
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I'm sure we all remember the last time Kim Komando poked her nose into the fray and talked about how the Mac failed to wow her through its dazzling and inspiring unique abilities to run Word and Excel, and ignored all the iApps because she didn't do things like make movies or listen to music-- evidently they just weren't something she was wired to understand.
Now, I'm glad she's continuing to pay lip service to the Mac in her insightful and informative articles ("RAM is the area where information is stored temporarily while the microprocessor works on it. Random means the data can be stored anywhere in memory, and the microprocessor can go directly to them. That really speeds things up. Many computers will run faster with more memory."). But sometimes, reporting erroneous information-- even if one's market is small enough that it won't really matter-- just makes you look like a doofus.
The procedure is similar on a Macintosh. If you're using Mac OS 9 or earlier, select "About this computer" from the Apple menu when you're at the desktop. In Mac OS X, choose the Memory control panel from the System Preferences application.
Yeah-- A for good intentions, C for effort. There is no "Memory control panel" in System Preferences. If you want to know how much RAM is in the system in total, just use "About This Mac" like in the old days. (Since it's UNIX, though, it's less straightforward to ferret out how much RAM each app is using. But these days that doesn't matter either, thanks to transparent VM. When was the last time you got an "Out of memory" error, anyway?)
That's an interesting point, though. Nowadays, the only clear reason columnists like her can elucidate for buying more RAM is that it "makes things faster" (rather than enabling apps to run that used to result in errors, the former obvious reason). RAM has now become a transparent and nebulous under-the-hood concept, like using higher-octane fuel. Isn't that veird?
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17:17 - Never is heard a discouraging word
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,45378,FF.html
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Speaking of journalistic "switchers", here's an article in Business 2.0 by Shoshana Berger, lauding not only the Mac laptops but also the Move2Mac software with the cool logo.
The Move2Mac software made the whole process less painful than popping a pill. Using a USB cable, the program transferred my documents, photos, MP3s, and Web bookmarks to my new Mac. Best of all, it threw all of my Outlook Express contacts in a knapsack and made like a hobo across platforms. Switching ain't the 12-step program it used to be.
She clearly likes the imagery on the box too.
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15:02 - The Mysteries of Life
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WHY are there always SHOES on the side of the freeway?
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11:12 - The Numbers Game
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/11/Thedifferencegrows.shtml
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In reading this article, as with so many others like it, one gets the impression that there's nothing more to a Mac or to a PC than a column of numbers that add up to a grade. Slip in the Scantron sheet, count up the little pencilled-in ovals, and give the kid his score. A high enough score gets you into Stanford.
Indeed, if computers were really like that, this argument would have a lot of weight. Den Beste would be 100% right. The whole world should be using Wintel PCs, and anybody who consciously chooses to use a Mac is either heroically stupid, or just insane.
Well, computers are more than numbers. And while I hate to use the "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" argument, I must point out that I can rattle off the names of eight to ten bloggers-- easy-- extremely high-profile bloggers at that, bloggers whose sites are read by tons of people, bloggers with very intelligent and educated readerships, bloggers whose opinions and judgments are respected and debated and talked about over the water cooler-- who all use Macs. Passionately, even.
I'm not prepared to dismiss their choices of computers and their opinions on technology as deluded lunacy from kool-aid drinkers who refuse to see the big picture. And I don't think most of their readers are either.
There is more to the Mac than numbers, and these guys all realize it.
This isn't necessarily a compelling case for existing Mac users to switch to the PC (though for some who are considering an upgrade anyway, it might be). That's not the point. The question is: why would any PC user in the professional graphics industry want to switch to the Mac? They'd pay more for a box which ran hotter, was substantially slower, was louder and provided fewer features. The only answer is a lame one: "Well, you'd be more productive using the Mac OS." I'm afraid you'll have a difficult time making that case. Ultimately, anyone can be productive on any system, and there comes a point where a 1.5:1 increase in compute speed affects productivity more than any esoteric issues about how pretty the buttons are on the screen.
Actually, there are two points to be made here. One is that compute speed is not the only reason why every DV and NLE house in the country is a Mac shop, standardized on FireWire paths and Apple software. Believe it or not, the user environment actually is important, as is build quality (my Dell server is popping components like a Yugo in summertime) and hardware lifetime (my three-year-old G4/450 is still eminently usable, but my PC at work-- which was built last year-- is already a pig) and vendor consolidation (who wants to play phone ping-pong between five different hardware and software vendors when trying to resolve a problem?). These are, granted, subjective issues to some degree. Statistics can be gathered for them, but it still tends to come down to taste.
The other point, however, is a very concrete one: ColorSync. It's the industry standard for color matching throughout the prepress and graphics industries. There's nothing like it in the PC world, and if it's not patently impossible because of the hardware variance or whatever, Microsoft has certainly not made any efforts to try. Some video card manufacturers have tools which try to sync your card to your monitor, but that's all these tools do. They should not be confused with ColorSync, which is a technology designed to be integrated throughout the production process. Color profiles for the output devices of the creator of an image are embedded into the image itself, and then when the image is opened on another person's Mac, the application-- all of which on the Mac are ColorSync-aware-- reads the profile, matches it against the recipient's own output devices' profiles, and displays the image with the same color characteristics as on the creator's machine. This integration is embedded throughout the output process, whether you're talking about printouts, lithography prep, or film. Professional graphics would be impossible without ColorSync. Printing houses charge extra if you bring in PC files for them to reproduce, because of the extra work they need to do in order to compensate for the lack of ColorSync data in the images.
And this is without even bringing up the Final Cut Pro argument. FCP has lots more features than Premiere and is a lot less expensive than Avid, and it's fast becoming the standard throughout the industry for those reasons alone. And here's the kicker: while all three of those major players in the professional DV editing market are available on the Mac, FCP-- the most popular-- is Mac-only. That might have something to do with it.
In other words, the reason why so many graphics professionals use Macs is that Apple caters specifically to graphics professionals.
Believe it or not, those graphics houses who know what the hell they're doing are aware that there is more to computing than whether you have a CPU that's twice as fast as last year's model or not. (These guys don't do a whole helluva lot of upgrades in any case; that's why, two years since OS X's release, FCP is still maintained synchronously for OS 9-- because so many professional studios don't upgrade, as a matter of policy as well as of expertise.) Without certain critical features-- among which can be counted such abstract concepts as "trainability", "consistency of interface", "stability", and "a single vendor", as well as such concrete examples as ColorSync and FireWire-- the work is impossible (or at least prohibitive) regardless of how fast your hardware is. Sure, do your DV editing on a PC if it's so much better for your productivity to do it on a 3.06 GHz processor than on a 2.4 GHz. But sooner or later, the process will have to pass through a Mac house, and then there'll have to be a price paid for breaking away from the established standard and taking the unnecessarily long and primitive way around, and you'll lose in days of overhead what you gained in minutes of saved rendering time.
There's a reason why journalists, like David Coursey, keep pulling stunts like "spending a month on a Mac" and then deciding at the end that they're not switching back. There's a reason why otherwise perfectly sane bloggers exhibit what must come across as complete irrationality by standing firmly by their Macs, dialing their iPods in bliss as they type out the columns that thousands of web-surfers read every day. And there's a reason why the "Switch" campaign says not one single word about speed and numbers. (Even in cases where the numbers would speak in favor of the Mac.)
That reason, as I've discussed before, is that anecdotes speak louder than numbers. And when a company has a vast grass-roots following that's determined to let the world know just how happy their Macs make them, let me tell you, it's not because the Scantron spit out a bubble sheet without any tick-marks in the margins.
It's because they know what's truly important in computing, and Apple fulfills it for them.
UPDATE: If you don't believe my second-hand observations on the nature of the video-editing community are valid, you can always try these first-hand observations instead:
You can't run a graphics house when every machine, even if they have the same brand and model of video hardware and display, will display colors and white balance differently. It's simply impossible to achieve reproducible results. Those who try and conclude that PC's are every bit as productive in the professional graphics industry are not in the professional graphics industry. They're little more than weekend warriors making uninformed decisions based on the fact that they can splack home videos together in Premiere.
Yeah.
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| Monday, November 18, 2002 |
23:26 - Everybody look what's goin' down
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While out back watching for the Leonid meteor shower (the biggest particulate cloud won't be for another couple of hours, but it was worth a shot), we saw a light show of a different kind: a long stream of large military aircraft-- C-5s and C-130s and the like-- rising from Moffett, droning southeastward over our house in South San Jose, and then banking right and heading out to sea. Possibly toward Guam. In half an hour, we saw at least three of these, rising along the same flight path, one that I've never seen taken before.
You'd think something was up.
UPDATE: The later part of the meteor shower rocked. We saw several bolides (exploding meteorite chunks that created long, hugely bright streaks, displayed a flare-out at the end, and left a visible trail of smoke in the upper atmosphere); one of which looked to have penetrated down to about 30,000 feet. Quite a show...
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17:50 - Grass roots grow a little deeper
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Network Computing recently ran an article which featured my company's product in competition with all the relevant competitors in its category (naturally, we trounced 'em); our PR guy, as he usually does, forwarded it around for our edification.
I filed it away after a brief skim. However, Kris noticed a few unusual details that had evaded my eye (the emphasis is his):
For client machines we used 10 Intel Celeron 500-MHz white box PCs running Microsoft Windows 2000 and an Apple Computer PowerBook G3 connected to the [devices under test] at 100 Mbps through an Extreme Summit48 switch, and then to a dual NIC Dell Computer PowerEdge 2450 running Windows 2000 with routing enabled. A T3 (45 Mbps) link was simulated with a Shunra Software's Storm STX-100.
Our server was an Apple Macintosh dual 800-MHz G4 with 1 GB of RAM. We ran FTP, Apache Web server and the Apple Darwin streaming server and used Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner 7.5.1 to generate as many as 100 real TCP sessions. We broadcast "live" a large QuickTime movie set to nonterminating continuous loop. This movie output was, on average, 1.6 Mbps per stream.
LoadRunner let us generate real Windows TCP sessions, and we always ran enough users to oversaturate the T3. Our Web tests included simulating users downloading several multimegabyte pages as well as multiple small pages in succession.
We also tested transferring Web and FTP data simultaneously. We set a policy for a minimum of 20 Kbps per connection with a burst of 50 Kbps, a minimum of 500 Kbps per connection for Web traffic, and 20 Mbps maximum for FTP. We also tested streaming video while concurrently running 100 large Web transfers.
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Looks like Macs are making a slow comeback!
Of course, everyone knows that in a totally rational market, this would never happen. I guess more and more people are just becoming irrational, what?
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13:08 - Doc Pemberton was so worldly and ahead of his time
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From the Ar-Rahman list, which has been blessedly free of blistering anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment for the past couple of months, ever since someone spoke up and mentioned that hey, this stuff is actually kinda offensive:
Oh. Yeah. Geez. No idea why I never saw that before. Hey, I've got some incontrovertible proof, by the way, that Barney the Purple Dinosaur is really Satan. See, just add up all the letters that can be interpreted as Roman numerals, and you get 666, or something. <yawn> Next...
Hey, and I thought all the good Doctor was trying to do was capitalize on the great taste of a narcotic with syrup. Time for everybody to switch to Mecca-Cola, eh?
(Ah well. At least our religious loonies more or less keep it within the family, or at least they keep the racist conspiracy theories locked up in their woodland cabins where they can't hurt anybody.)
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| Sunday, November 17, 2002 |
22:11 - Tribute (or nepotism)
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On Home Movies tonight, which is the first show Cartoon Network plays in its "Adult Swim" block, there was a scene at a public indoor pool where McGurk was trying to learn to swim.
On the wall in the background was a poster that said ADULT SWIM 10:00-1:00.
Sweet.
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| Saturday, November 16, 2002 |
00:42 - Preaching Laughter
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It's been remarked here and there in the blogosphere that comedians seem to be the public figures who most frequently exhibit that they have heads securely welded to their shoulders. Forget political demagogues and religious leaders; from the mouths of comedians does all-too-frequently come wisdom. Free of the strictures of political correctness, unafraid to offend any particular "aggrieved" group among their audience (who waives their right to be offended by the act of purchasing the tickets), comics get to say things that so many other figureheads with wide reach are muzzled from saying.
I just got back from seeing a Lewis Black show at the Punchline Comedy Club in Sacramento with my folks. Black is the "angry comic" guy on the Daily Show and elsewhere on Comedy Central; I haven't seen much of him to date, but I'll have to keep an eye out for him in the future. Nothing quite beats seeing him from four feet away and at ankle level, with our dinner-theater table actually touching the edge of the stage.
Anyway-- after nearly an hour of gut-busting material covering Halloween costumes, Enron-esque CEOs, candy corn, drinking water, his Jewish upbringing, and creationists, he suddenly dropped to a serious tone and posited that in life three things are really important: patriotism, faith, and humor. He said that the biggest reason that our current enemies are our enemies is that they've "been wandering the desert for thousands of years and never run into a knock-knock joke. ...Guess that's the price they pay for living in tents." He went on to claim that if only there were a tradition of humor in the Islamic world, nobody would have ever been able to stand in front of a group of men and say in all seriousness that if they blow themselves up in the name of Allah, they'd be met in heaven by 72 virgins. "They'd recognize it as the punchline of a joke!"
I've said that kind of thing before here, myself; after all, I haven't seen a whole helluva lot of evidence for comedy and not-taking-oneself-so-damned-seriously in that community. Unless you count the cartoons of M. Khalil of The Arab News, which I don't believe fits the description of "humor".
Anyway... on the drive home from Sacramento, I encountered what one of the featured comedians (whose name I can't remember) described in great detail having encountered the night before: an immense bank of fog-- "Tule fog", they call it-- that rolls off the Sacramento River and blankets Highway 80 all the way across the Central Valley. And when I say "blankets", I mean "fills with a palpable mass that light cannot penetrate". The Central Valley is our own little Midwest; it has Eppie's and Quizno's restaurants, which don't exist in the Bay Area, and used-car dealerships are closed on Sundays for church. But I didn't get to see any of that on the drive home. I got to see fog. It would be ineffectual to describe it in numerical terms: I could say how I could only see twenty feet ahead, or couldn't see past two of the reflectors on the edge of the freeway, and it would tell you nothing useful. It's only marginally more effective if I tell you that I couldn't see the approaching headlights of the cars going the opposite direction on the other side of the median, or that the only way I could tell I was going under an overpass was that the air and the sound suddenly and briefly grew thicker and darker-- after which the subtly changed light allowed me to see the beads of water gathering on my windows and migrating backwards. No, I think the only way I can convey what it was like would be to say how on a 75mph freeway, I was going about 60, hunched forward over the wheel, hands gripping it at the top, jinking back and forth as my vision-- which petered out after the second reflector, meaning that I couldn't tell whether the next reflector ahead would be in a straight line or a sudden curve-- told me to react on the basis that there might be a car right in front of me, or there might not, and I'd never see it until it was too late-- gritting my teeth and yelling Jeez! . . . Crap! . . . Fuck!! . . . into the night.
I shot out of the fogbank with a whoof sound right at Vacaville, which I could tell because of the giant tall tombstone-towers on the sides of the freeway which advertise malls and the stores in them. And shortly afterwards, I was back in the mountains, and then I was back in the Bay.
No wonder geeks like California. Travel fifty miles, and it's like you've traveled to a different state, only in virtual reality.
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13:18 - A different kind of "Switcher"
http://bantha.cjb.net/john
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Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncalled-for?
It's a whole "Switch" ad parody advocating moving north. Go watch it and see. And here's an article in The Ottawa Citizen which provides some more-or-less impartial analysis and background.
Now, I realize that Apple is a company whose clientele is not known for being a bunch of Limbaugh-listening, Falwell-watching flag-wavers. And I know what Mr. Jobs' personal leanings are like, as evidenced by the recent front-and-center Jimmy Carter tribute. But I for one really don't appreciate the ad campaign and the corporate trade dress being hijacked in order to spread "Bush is a monkey" memes. If Apple has any bones in its body, they won't appreciate it either.
I'm not saying it should be taken down or anything... I just think it's in poor taste, and I'm not used to seeing things in apple.com-looking trim that I consider "in poor taste".
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| Friday, November 15, 2002 |
03:06 - Zoinks!
http://corsair.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_corsair_archive.html#84529599
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Corsair has found a truly frightening photo. Go look if you dare.
Lance said it looked "like a doctored Michael Jackson".
I replied, wasn't that a redundant term?
By the way-- via InstaPundit, here's the page that the picture comes from-- it's a fully annotated chronology, and a laugh riot. But nowhere near so much as the estimable webmistress's hate mail page. Boy, they'll let just about anybody on the Internet these days, huh?
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19:44 - Duff Man is thrusting in the direction of the problem. Ooh yeah!
http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
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It's an ongoing documentation effort by one Michael Jennings, entitled Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. The author prefaces it with this statement:
The author wrote this article because of the need to give his customers fundamental information about the direction Microsoft wants to take them. Few people have the technical background to understand fully the advantages and disadvantages of software as complex as an operating system. Without fundamental information, it is difficult for non-professionals to understand the advice of professionals.
The author is not anti-Microsoft in any way. There appear to be management problems at Microsoft, but the author would like any problems to be fixed, rather than have the entire world suffer through Microsoft doing poorly. Because he has spent considerable time trying to understand the problems, and because he cares deeply about fixing the problems, the author is, in that sense, "more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates".
That said, give it a read. I'm going to bookmark it and keep an eye on future additions.
Then again, this guy seems like a bit of a ranter, with more concentration on making poorly-bolstered blanket claims than on listing empirical evidence. In contrast, the virtual memory feature in the Linux operating system works extremely well. Really?
Ah well. It's a good resource, but I'll probably have to keep looking if I want the Definitive Reference.
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| Thursday, November 14, 2002 |
23:18 - Easter eggs in plain sight
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I'd discovered this one a while back, but Chris just ran across it today, and I couldn't help but think it was a good candidate for a little bit of time-lapse blogtography.
In Mail, how narrow can you make the "Date Received" column before it loses all useful data? Let's fuh-find out.
One...
Ta-ha-hoooo...
Thrrree...
There's still more space-dust here...
The times go away...
The date collapses again...
The title of the column changes to "Date"...
Down to slash-delimited format...
It was at this point that Chris, who had concluded somewhere around the sixth variation that whoever coded this had had way too much fun doing so, looked at his screen with scrunched-up eyes and a tense smirk, and burst out, "SHUT up!"
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22:58 - Yo, yo! Ma! KnowhutAhmsayyn?
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/yoyoma.html
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Yo Yo Ma is a Switcher, according to the newest ad.
These are getting more fun, not less, with time.
(The ads from Japan are also up on the main TV ads page.)
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21:50 - Virii
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/11/Virusmarketing.shtml
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Steven Den Beste has a post which claims that the lack of viruses on the Mac is a sociological/economical phenomenon, rather than a technical one.
I'd rather not get into the speculation over things like the vulnerability of OS9 and prior releases to viruses, other than to mention that the biggest risk in a virus lies in its ability to propagate itself, which in Windows manifests as a gleeful romp through Outlook and IE and IIS (after all, I'm sure Klez does a whole lot more damage in simple dental chafing over how many times it appears in people's inboxes, rather than in actual damage to people's systems). The Mac OS, while potentially more fragile in its memory structure, was much less likely to be exposed to worm-style exploits because the Mac lacked badly-written and widely-used vectors like Outlook. But that's a separate issue.
I just wanted to clarify something:
MacOSX is protected against that if properly used, as is WinNT/2K/XP. Of course, if a user routinely runs with an administrator account, they discard this protection. I don't. I have an administrator account on my Win2K systems which I use when need be, such as to do installations, but I routinely run with a "Power User" account, which does not permit me to seriously damage the system by mistake. I do that deliberately. I'm not a fool and I don't generally do things which are harmful, but this represents a level of protection that I choose to use, in part because it protects me from hostile programs which actually do end up fooling me. Unfortunately, a lot of people have gotten in the habit of routinely using an administrator account and by so doing they are throwing away one of the best protections their systems give them, to protect them against the actions of those who write hostile programs, even for OSX.
You can't discard this protection in OS X, though.
The fact is that unless you go under the hood and perform some serious monkey-wrench tweaking, you cannot log in with an administrator or "root" account in OS X. Admin security in OS X is done via the "sudo" model, in which any system-altering action (such as new software installations, modifying file permissions/ownership, or the unlocking of system-wide preferences that you have locked) must be authenticated by a designated admin user (of which there can be more than one) entering his own password. This establishes that the person who is using the current login session is the rightful owner of that account, and has the rights to perform an administrator-level action. (Non-admin users, by the way, can install software and such from within their own login sessions-- by entering an admin user's username and password.) It's on-demand action-level security, not session-level security (which, by the way, is prone to hijacking by malicious local users if the rightful user leaves himself logged in). Each unique action is assumed insecure and prompts for admin authentication. System preferences which alter global settings are unlocked at login time for admin users, but can be locked again at any time. Thus, the "root password" is irrelevant (the root account can't be accessed in the default installation, even from the command line), and for any new and potentially system-altering action, the user is given a challenge to prove he's a trusted admin, and a psychological reminder that the requested action is potentially dangerous (which may in fact be the more important benefit).
I've written our project-management system at work based on this model. Any data can be viewed by anybody; but anytime a user attempts to execute a data-altering command, he is prompted for a login and password. This has the dual effect of authenticating the user and making the user think twice about what he's doing. It's prevented a huge number of user errors that were a matter of daily maintenance to fix in our earlier system, which happily and transparently accepted any data-altering action from any user who had logged-in and authenticated once upon starting the client app.
The fact that so many people choose to run their Windows machines via administrator accounts is a symptom of the "convenience and security are orthogonal goals" axiom; if the system makes it unnecessarily inconvenient to operate in a secure manner (e.g. by running as a standard user and only using the admin account when absolutely necessary, or by using a "Power User" account, which offers limited admin power), then the user will choose to operate in a less secure manner (e.g. using an administrator account for day-to-day computing). Logging in and out of desktop sessions is inconvenient, and, today, something a user rarely wants or needs to do. If admin tasks are not made a part of the standard and convenient workflow (as OS X and best-practices UNIX server platforms do it), then users will make them part of their standard and convenient workflow, regardless of the risk involved.
Whether OS X is or is not inherently more or less porous than Windows is, again, a side issue. The crux of this particular point (granted, only one part of the larger thesis) is, however, based on the assumption that OS X admin security is done on the same asking-for-trouble model that Windows uses-- and that isn't the case.
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17:50 - They're already doing remakes
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Last night I saw the new Fellowship of the Ring DVD boxed-set Director's Cut edition.
Well, let me backtrack. The evening started innocently enough, with a nice relaxing episode of South Park-- the new one with the boys in Tolkienian costume trying to return the One Porn Tape to the video store. Oh, how sarcastic. I love how Trey and Matt are clearly well versed in the real story, but they decided to cast the kids' version in a funky cross-bred D&D milieu for the purposes of the episode. (I didn't, however, enjoy watching it in the presence of a female acquaintance who insistently peppered the show with commentary that set my teeth on edge: The black kid's name is Token? <gasp> Oh my God! It's like, "the token black kid"! Ha haah hah! I wonder if they realized that?)
But the topic came up of the new edition of the actual movie that had just been released, so at 10:30 I decided to run down to Hollywood Video and pick up a copy, as well as some tacos on the way home. This I did, and we cast the One Disc into the DVD Player of Doom (never mind that there were three others remaining to be thus consumed). And lo, sleep was not to occur until about 4:00 AM.
This new version is for the fans. If nothing else were to make this evident, it would be the thirty minutes of alphabetized names of members of the official Tolkien Fan Society that has been tacked onto the end of the credits. I mean, good lord.
But the movie itself-- well, it feels more like the book now. The texture is completely different, and it's as much a result of a new and more leisurely sense of timing (supported by a completely rewritten and re-recorded score by Howard Shore) as of the new expository material that's been added throughout. There are more names, more fragments of history, more little pieces of texture tossed in-- and more of "Tolkien's Greatest Hits" (as defined at the infamous Bakshi movie review at the Tolkien Sarcasm Page), the memorable little quotes that punctuate the nice atmospheric little scenes that didn't add enough to the story to be included in the theatrical version. Midgewater Marshes, for example, gets coverage here: "What do they eat when they can't get hobbit?"
There's a new framing scene at the beginning, with Bilbo narrating a version of the "Concerning Hobbits" prologue. It's good stuff to have, and it fleshes out the Shire nicely. But my reaction to it was... well, ehh. What I found so fascinating about the theatrical version of the movie was how Jackson was able to allude to so much of the story, so many of the plot elements, through brief little scenes masterfully photographed and textured by music-- without having to make the scenes overly long or resort to too much exposition. Gandalf, as he holds out the envelope for Frodo to slip the Ring into it, conveys everything you need to know about the intensity of the contrast between the seeming innocence of the circumstances and the cataclysmic importance of this tiny little act. It's masterful directing that conveys the essence of several textural threads at once, all in a few crucial seconds of screen time. In the new version, scenes like that one (though not that one specifically) get lengthened just a teensy bit-- enough to change the flow and the rhythm of each one, just to the point of making it feel like a page read out of a book, rather than a multifaceted lens through which to view a piece of complex character interplay. The theatrical version had tight storytelling and timing. This one is more leisurely-- it takes its time, and it doesn't leave things to the imagination.
Many of the added scenes bring a great deal of depth to the story, and there are some great bits: Gimli's Khuzdul curse at Haldir, for instance, and the first look Frodo gets at the face of one of the stone trolls (which gives way to Sam's face sliding into view). Aragorn and Boromir nearly come to blows on a couple of occasions (in scenes that just don't seem to work properly, even if they do bring some more memorable book dialogue to the table). We hear the names Elessar and Valinor and Nenya and Sméagol. We hear hobbit drinking-songs. And we get to spend what seems like an eternity watching Galadriel pass out gifts, in what I knew would have been far too tedious to have made it into the theatrical version. (I was right. It's even sorta painful for me, as it is, and they still omitted several crucial gift-givings.)
Some sound effects have been changed in quite odd ways. The sound the palantír makes as Gandalf tosses the cloth back over it is now a very human snarl, instead of the staccato, bestial screech of the original version. And when Frodo sees the road go all fish-eye ("Get off the road!"), this version indicates the impending danger with a loud, high-pitched keening shriek. Subtle it ain't. I'd say most of the new sound effects are a bit over-the-top, in fact, and less than masterful-- as are a few confusing new camera angles, like the weird top-down shot with the blinding white back-light in Moria. (What the hell was up with that?)
Props to Howard Shore, though. The new score keeps the effective themes of the original, while bringing some new structural support to scenes in which the new melodies seem much better suited to the situation. Gandalf's The road goes ever on song as he arrives is now underlined by a score piece, to take just one example; the big heroic "adventure" theme that you hear as the party takes off from Rivendell is now tighter, without the weirdly off-tempo drumbeat, to cite another. But not all of the musical cues are improvements. Some feel distinctly out-of-place, like they were transplanted from a Disney movie or something Pouledorisian. The effect is that the textures of a whole lot of scenes have been changed very subtly but very deeply. It has a profound effect on timing, on mood, and even on character development. I'm still trying to decide whether it's successful overall.
In fact, I'm undecided on the whole movie, come to think of it. The new version is great for completists-- it has a lot more depth and world-building. But it's not as good a movie. It's just not as tight or as finely crafted as the original. It feels like a suit that's been altered over and over again, with material grafted from one place to another, and with a whole new dye job. It might be a better showpiece in the end, but it just doesn't have the purity of execution that the original had. If I were to pick a "definitive" version of the movie to point to and to prop up on a pedestal, I'm still leaning toward the theatrical one, even though the new one is so deeply geared toward the hard-core fans' cravings.
But I take heart regardless. Because in this day and age, when our most beloved directors are working full-time at hacking away at their own senses of integrity (E.T. with walkie-talkies, midichlorians, etc), Peter Jackson has shown himself to be one of those directors we'll be treating as a worldwide treasure and locking in a cryogenic chamber thirty years from now. He's doing something he loves, purely for the fans-- because he himself is the biggest fan there is.
From Meet the Feebles to the top of the world in one fell swoop. It's a phenomenon in the making.
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12:05 - Progress Bars
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I was just burning a CD in iTunes, something I don't normally do very often, while trying to reproduce a problem that Joe User described in burning non-iTunes-created MP3s onto CDs. (I wasn't able to recreate the error. I hate when this happens-- everything works perfectly for the self-described advocate, but things break unaccountably when performing for an impartial third party who is prepared to pull no punches about things that break.)
But I noticed something that I think is new in iTunes 3.0: a timer on the CD-burning progress bar. I don't think earlier versions had the countdown. I don't burn many CDs, but I seem to recall that the last time I did it, there were separate "Burning" and "Verification" stages, and no timer for either one. This is a nice change.
And it brings up a little example of the Mac OS design sensibility, something that I find makes Mac apps (particularly those written by Apple) consistently more enjoyable to use than their Windows counterparts. That is the guideline that If you must display only a single progress bar for a process, that progress bar should cover the entire process, not just whatever intermediate subprocess you're in at the moment.
For the longest time, for example, Windows was coded so that if you had dragged a group of files from one disk to another to copy them, the progress bar would show only the progress on each individual file-- resetting as each file was copied-- rather than the entire process of copying the files, which is the command the user gave ("Copy this set of files"). Recent versions of Windows fixed this, by showing two progress bars, one of which is for the overall process; but the second bar is still reminiscent of the uselessness of the old way, fluttering between "empty" and "full" in an endless seizure-inducing flicker.
(Another favorite of mine is how Windows 2000 has a progress bar in one of the text-based startup screens. It's probably the shortest phase of the startup process, and only one of four or five major steps, the rest of which don't have progress bars. You wait for thirty seconds to get to the progress-bar screen, which then takes five seconds; then you wait another thirty seconds for Windows to come up and log you in. Joyous. Whereas while the gray-screen initial phase of the OS X boot process can be quite long, the progress bar that comes up after that phase completes is much more representative of the time actually required before you can use the machine.)
OS X has been reaffirming Apple's commitment to the usefulness of the "whole process" method, in areas like app installers and CD burning. It does make tons more sense-- after all, the user wants to know how much time is remaining before he can start using the machine again, not how long it is until the next in an opaque and mysterious series of steps, its description meaningful only to the software itself, is undertaken. There is some unavoidable inconsistency, naturally, and different programs handle it differently: the Installer program has no way of knowing how long the update_prebinding task ("Optimizing") will take, so it continues to report "Less than a minute remaining" while the "Optimizing" phase takes the five to ten minutes or so that it ends up requiring (though recently they've added a live-updating percentage counter, which is helpful). And iTunes gives you the slowly-rotating "barber pole" bar during the "finishing" phase at the end of a burn process. But other than that, a progress bar on a Mac typically means your meaningful progress, not just a piece of moving feedback to reassure you that the computer hasn't crashed.
It's a minor thing, but it's the minor things like this that Apple engineers sweat over.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Borisch adds this rejoinder:
Silly Boy, the fluttering progress bar is part of the Windows PSYOPS campaign to make Windows appear much faster than the Mac.
"See look at that progress bar, this PC here is getting much more work done while the Mac whose progress bar just sits there practically still"
My point is, perception of performance is more important than reality.
My Mac advocate boss is repeatedly disheartened when he sits at the 2GHz Dell we have in the office and is astonished at how fast the screen redraws compared to his mac with 2 1GHz processors. I say "But do you get your work done any faster when you sit at this PC."
Not to mention when we unboxed said Dell, there was a clunking from inside the case. it was one of the exhaust fans and the baffle that sucks air over the processor flopping around unattached, doing no good at all. Good thing that P4s have that processor cycling overheating protection. Feh!
Touché.
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18:56 - Fine Olde Debate Fodder
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,692149,00.asp
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John C. Dvorak has a tirade in PC Magazine about the ubiquity of porn spam.
So where is the government and where are the anti-obscenity laws? According to most sources, anti-obscenity law enforcement had been largely curtailed by (gee, what a shock) Clinton. In fact for most of Clinton's administration, the various pro-family, Christian, Christian-right, and vocal conservatives complained bitterly about the whole situation.
PBS did a Frontline Report called "American Porn," which made the same accusations. Regarding the documentary, Ann Hodges of the Houston Chronicle wrote: "Frontline has no fear of placing blame. Bill Clinton's administration opened the door to a porn explosion on the Internet, it says. In her rebuttal interview clip, former Attorney General Janet Reno said dropping porn prosecutions was a matter of establishing 'priorities.'"
The worst offenders in this regard have been the free speech advocates who make the dubious claim that somehow a photo of someone performing an unnatural act with a horse is "free speech." First of all, who's talking? I have been a libertarian as long as I can recall, and have always been baffled by the concept that something other than words spoken constitutes free speech. Even the printed word, according to our Bill of Rights, needs to be mentioned separately (freedom of the press) since it isn't obviously covered by the definition of free speech. But I digress. There has been a long history of anti-obscenity lobbying in this country. Lenny Bruce got arrested for doing nothing more than cussing in a private nightclub in San Francisco some years back. What he did was deemed illegal. Today, graphic images pour out all over, and this is legal. What's wrong with this picture?
I'd argue that "speech" is in fact a larger concept than "people speaking", and "the press" is a very specific concept centered around the free flow of information. Free Speech does not imply Freedom of Press, nor is the reverse true.
Freedom of speech is invoked (and rightly so) to protect all kinds of artistic expression, including physical media and software, regardless of the medium, against thoughtcrime policing on the individual level. Freedom of press is about making sure that the government can't censor the newspapers, or restrict the flow of opinion and facts (beyond matters of classified information) through publicly respected news-dissemination organs.
The difference is subtle, but it's meaningful. It's just not meaningful in the way Dvorak means it.
But either way, obscenity laws have fought with the free-speech laws for a long, long time, and they've reached a balance. Dvorak does indeed have a point in that there should clearly be some form of regulation upon unsolicited porn being sent by traceable companies to minors' inboxes (to say nothing of other people's inboxes who aren't interested in, er, what they have to offer).
But how much of this stuff actually originates in the US? How much actually comes from Europe, Southeast Asia, or offshore interests specifically created so as to be free of laws banning this kind of thing? Crack down at home, and the business will just shift all the more to the Cocos Islands and Tonga and Niue.
The best answer may have to be the inelegant semi-solution of client-side filtering. Mail in OS X has a heuristics-based spam filter that is doing an excellent job for me-- I still have to weed out maybe five or ten pieces of spam per day, but lest I think it's missing a lot of the offending messages, I just have to look in the Junk folder to see that it's correctly catching and filing-away about a hundred per day. And the rate of false positives is extraordinarily low; the only ones I'm seeing are messages that can easily be construed as spam by all criteria you could name, but that I happen to want to receive. (This is easily fixed via the learning mechanism.) And my daily Klez ration has dropped from about fifty copies to maybe two.
I suspect all popular e-mail programs will do this in the not-so-distant future; most will probably not be perfect. Either way, it means lots and lots of wasted bandwidth, as the spam continues to be spewed all over the Internet, possibly even rising in frequency as spammers try desperately to raise their "hit count", while network administrators (with filtered e-mail) remain blissfully unaware of just how many of those little LED flashes on the LAN switch represent spam mail. I can easily see things getting to the point where over 99% of a network's traffic is spam mail, crowding out legitimate e-mail as well as other application protocols from the infrastructure. But that may yet be the best we can do.
It's not an easy solution, otherwise I'm sure we'd have found it by now. But I don't think things can go on like this much longer.
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Brian Tiemann
