I love finding mainstream coverage of trends that are near and dear to my heart.  Wired Magazine has a great article on Einstein in it’s latest issue – "The World Needs More Rebels Like Einstein".  It argues that one of the reasons he discovered things that others missed is because he was a rebel and not constrained by the scientific dogma of the time.  "Imagination is more important than knowledge" goes his famous quote.  I couldn’t agree more.

FUBAR

This today from everyone’s favorite critic, John Dvorak – Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone

But I’m not writing to comment on the major topic of the article.  I want to point to a specific paragraph that everyone will recognize as an absolute truth of consumer electronics (bolding is my own).

The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well
as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough.
These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half
a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately
successful, will be passé within 3 months.

So what’s wrong with this?  On the one hand, nothing; style and fashion are fine and normal.  But the costs of this model are enormous.  I’ll break them down into three sections.

1 – High costs for producers – this is obvious but bears spelling out.  When your company’s survival depends on churning out (and supporting!) tens if not hundreds of different product lines each year it becomes difficult to reap any of the benefits that come from real economies of scale.  Every product line becomes an island (more like a sinking ship really) that is constructed, promoted (maybe) and set free into the world only to be forgotten about in the span of months by everyone, including the producer.

2- High costs for consumers – this may not be as obvious but it’s deeply and insidiously true.  You may get a cheap device based on the initial purchase price but it’s not cheap for long.  Add up the time you spend struggling with it’s shoddy design, getting it to work with other devices, backing it up, etc etc and the result may surprise you.  Another price we pay for high style is planned obsolescene.  I don’t know how many cell phones, MP3 players, portable video gadgets and/or gaming devices you have in your house but if you’re anything like me you have a bunch.  How many do you actually use?  How about power adapters?  You see my point?  The expense is not the initial purchase.  It’s the burden over time that this approach heaps upon us all.

3 – High cost to the environment – if you agree that we all have lots of gadgets lying around unused I would bet that a big reason is you can’t get yourself to chuck them.  Why?  Because we all know how much crap is in them and don’t want it to end up in a land fill somewhere.  Luckily this is changing and it’s getting easier to dispose of our electronics but you can’t tell me that the >1 billion cell phones sold each year are being safely recycled.   So where does all the heavy metal and other toxic stuff in these devices end up?  You guessed it.  Who pays for that?  We all do.  Or maybe our kids or grandkids.  Click here for an interesting article on the subject.

What’s a potential solution?  I think we can take a cue from this article in the NY Times titled "How to Improve it?  Ask those who use it".  It discusses a trend that is in it’s infancy but will completely transform what we, as customers, expect/demand from our vendors; namely a much bigger, if not total, say in what gets made, when, where and how.  We may actually ditch the notion of "vendor" entirely and just make everything ourselves.  Especially if Niel Gerhenfeld has his way.  The point being, we’ve seen enormous shifts of control from producer to consumer in the digital world (just think Tivo).  We’re going to see it happen in every facet of our lives – including CE.

What is a database but a resting place, however temporary, for bytes
(being an arbitrary unit of measure) of data waiting to be consumed by
some application.  It is useless otherwise.  But in essence, isn’t the
real world just a database?  Everywhere is information waiting for
consumption.  Our senses are applications that consume data.  Our
bodies themselves consume data (all living things do).  Evolution
itself could be seen as versions of applications responding to changes
in the Earth’s database.  What I’m trying to say is, there must be some
interesting way to make use of this fact. 

There is data everywhere. We
are all applications.  Why don’t we build better bridges between
ourselves so that we can better share our data?  Right now, as I sit
here, the application known as Peter is consuming data. Is this info of
interest to anybody else?  Depending on one’s knowledge, care and/or
use for me personally you could probably draw concentric rings
eminating from me that demonstrate levels of interest.  But that
interest quickly tails off.  My data becomes interesting only insofar
as it describes environmental or other sensory inputs (this may not be
strictly true – my editorial input may have value – e.g. The temp is 70
but that’s unusual for this time of year). What’s the barometric
pressure at my lat/lon, etc.  Do I see the Golden Gate bridge from
where I stand? Is there a line at the Starbucks where I am sitting?  If
I go out of my way to post this data, would someone be interested in it
(Flickr is a great data point)?  If everyone posted random bits of data
what would that truly provide?  Useful information or meaningless
noise? 

Perhaps the Long Tail concept applies.  It rapidly becomes a
problem of search and categorization to make sense of it all, but maybe
Google could help.  Maybe it’s self organizing. People are drawn to the
info they’re interested in and post the same.  Who would take the time
to make inputs?  It’s a social networking question but my bet is there
could be a healthy quid pro quo.  At least from a core initial group.

There are probably good existing analogs. Spies, for instance, make it
their job to constantly input data.  The unbelievably prescient book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson imagined individuals called Gargoyles whose business it was to ceasely collect any/all information in their immediate vicinity.  The latest incarnation is justin.tv.  If the value to the greater good
could be easily demonstrated, who knows?  There may even be an economic
model that could support it.  I become a data source, a streamer, that
people can rely on, subscribe to (RSS).  I could be a specialist on
parking spots at 76 and Amsterdam.

Perhaps even more interesting is what if I have hyper sensory inputs
from other devices that I can assimilate into the Peter app?  For
example, maybe I have a geiger counter with me that I can use to stream
radioactive data.

In this model, every person becomes a node in a
vast, distributed application running off the database known as real
life. And like other distributed apps, all nodes become more powerful
and resilient as their connectivity increases.  Through sharing, the
community grows, its resources increase, its efficiency improves.
Pretty cool.

Steve and co have done a great job of addressing some of the issues (the ones that were actually relevent to Eclipse) in my previous entry on Eclipse and OS X. One EclipseCON and three weeks later have produced some more information that’s probably better as a new post rather than continuing the comment thread.

Issues #1 and #9 has been fixed! I verified in the latest (I2007030313-1051) integration build. The menu fix in particular helps a great deal.

Comments on previous issues:

Item #3. This is an OS X issue. The dialogs don’t have hot keys. I envy GTK users, as it looks like all the eclipse dialogs have hotkey mappings. The closest thing on OS X is to Tab to the appropriate button and press space.

Item #4. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=177405

Item #5. I agree that with the amount of information surrounding this there is no approach at a solution. And it’s highly likely this has nothing to do with SWT. A friend suggested that Apple’s JVM could be doing garbage collection differently, and that could be the cause. It does seem to happen more often when there is some sort of File I/O. And it can be pretty bad; locking up for minutes at a time.

Item #7. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=177407

Item #8. This is not a browser problem. It’s always there, in both the latest integration build and in 3.2.1. But after some comparing with other peoples machines, it looks isolated to me.

Further Issues:

Toolbar Button Disable Image: On the mac the toolbar buttons that are disabled don’t change color. At least toolbar bottons that act as combo boxes. In the following image some actions are disabled. I find it difficult to tell.

Combo/Text Boxes: This is a little hard to explain. Text focus is always right justified. Edit a field that has text that is greater than the size of the Combo Box. You cannot see any text to the right without using the mouse to reposition the cursor. This is one that you have to try rather than just see, but here is a control that exhibits the behavior, in the JAR export wizard:

Property Pages: Read-only text fields to not have proper spacing or borders, and sometimes render extra lines that are not the background color. This screenshot is from a property page for a Java project:

Inconsistencies with layout and widget borders. I think this screenshot speaks for itself. Some things have borders, others do not. Some have scroll bars, others do not. Layout and sizing are inconsistent. Group controls title text is too close to the checkbox above and not close enough to it’s client composite (IMHO).

It’s ok, they hate me too.  I can tell that marketers hate us because
they are constantly attempting to distill whatever demographic we
belong to into simple slogans, product lines, and ad campaigns.  To
them we are merely consumers: giant wallets with tiny brains and no
free will; sheep, to be herded into groups and manipulated en masse.

Case in point is Calvin Klein’s new fragrance for hip twenty-year-olds called CK in2u, which I read about in the New York Times
last week.  CK in2u is the successor to the wildly successful CK-1
which was popular in the mid 90’s.  Calvin Klein is courting a
demographic they call the technosexual.  It’s a self-serving label.
Sex is easy to wrap up and sell.  Calvin Klein has access to beautiful
models and can capitalize on the implicit promise that if you use CK
in2u, you’ll get some.
According to the New York Times, "A typical line from the press
materials for CK in2u goes like this: ‘She likes how he blogs, her
texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right
now.’"  This is fantasy and the DIY generation, the "technosexuals",
won’t buy it.

Technically
savvy twenty-somethings are just too well informed for such an obvious
and insulting ad campaign.  They can learn about Neil Postman with a
quick search of Wikipedia and corporate viral ad
campaigns are old news.  They will not have their consent manufactured by ads
featuring gaunt teenage models.  They want to think, not to be thought
for.

Mostly, though, they want control–control over the
product, the style, and the message.  This is something that we will
talk a lot about in this blog.  The technically savvy are all about
control.  It’s not about group or demographic ownership, but personal
ownership.  They blog because they want to get their voice out there.
They think they are unique.  Their community participation is bottom-up
whereas ad campaigns like that of CK in2u are top-down.

How you
open up a fragrance line, I don’t know.  I write software and in
software it’s easy (open source and public API’s for example).
However, one way to get started in both product categories is to be
less hostile towards the purchaser.  Treat them more like producers
than consumers.  Don’t distill their motivations into sex and only
sex.  Let them create their own real groups instead of joining some
make-believe idealized club.  Finally, don’t hate the people who you
want buying your products.  They know all the tricks and they can smell
the hatred a mile away.

In the February 19, 1996 issue of Newsweek Steve Wozniak is quoted as saying:

" Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions"

Great stuff.  And who were those "most powerful institutions"?  They were the mainframe and mini-computers vendors of the day – IBM, HP, Digital, Prime, Wang, Data General, Control Data, etc.  Most people don’t remember those days too well because the micro-computer (or PC as it came to be known) has insinuated itself into just about every part of our lives.  And in the same way, it’s hard to imagine a world bereft of all the innovation the PC-revolution sparked.  For example, can you really remember a world without spreadsheet applications or the browser?  All of which points to something I think about all the time.  Ten years from now, what will we look back on and say "how on Earth could we have lived without…[fill in appropriate invention here]"?  Revolutionary possibilities are all around us.  There are many "powerful institutions" that are holding up innovation.  The key is finding those most vulnerable and then doing something about it.  I think the spirit Wozniak describes is alive and well and there are plenty more revolutions to be had.

This blog is not about politics.  It is, in part, about the benefits of putting power in the hands of people to decide things for themselves.  This link with the slightly misleading title "Vermont Votes to Impeach Bush/Cheney" is a terrific example.  Where else on Earth could this happen but here?  I almost wrote – what other country on Earth would allow… – and then caught myself.  In America we are not ALLOWED our freedoms.  They are ours from birth.  We, the people, allow the government to administer the country.  Democracy is bottom up.  There are so many things in life where we’ve been trained to believe that certain things are "allowed" us when in reality the power is all ours to begin with.  Anyone who’s ever gardened knows what I’m talking about.  "You mean I’m not just stuck with the crap I can buy at the supermarket??"  We’ve just been brainwashed.  The power to take control of things in your life is yours (to take ).  And it’s addictive.

So, you’ve chosen a free and open platform for your software development.  This platform is somewhat new, and growing pains are to be expected, but you’ve calculated it’s possible shortcomings and you’ve determined that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.  The community seems supportive and vibrant and in your estimation, things are just going to get better.

Months go by and things are progressing well.  A new version of the platform is announced and you anxiously await it’s release.  When it is finally released, there’s a blog entry, a list of changes, and finally a new edition of a book for you to buy.  So, you go for the upgrade and everything breaks.  That, too, is to be expected.  According to the blog entry, it should be easy enough using all of the automated tests you wrote to pinpoint the few problems and whip your app back into shape.  Hm, the best laid plans…

You soon discover that some major things have changed drastically.  Moreover, you find out that those flashy powerful tools you leveraged to get your app off the ground quickly were "only ever really intended as a demonstration."  That’s news to you and as the sense of abandonment sets in, you decide to find solace in the community and so you drop an email on a newsgroup. But nobody responds and so your sense of abandonment grows.

It’s similar to traveling in a foreign country–when you take the road less traveled and the guide book is useless and the last time you saw an English speaker was two days ago at some dumpy border-town hostel.  You have to trust yourself ’cause doubtless you’ll learn something, no matter what happens.  And when you do, and you come back to civilization, you can teach others what you’ve learned (I will mention here that I’m still in the enchanted forest with my current issues, but when I come out the other side, I pledge to share what I’ve learned in this blog).  And so hopefully the next lonely soul traveling down that road less traveled won’t feel so abandoned.

I bought a Sony Bravia LCD television last week and finally got around to looking at some of the paperwork that came with it.  One document caught my eye because it looked like a lot of fine print.  When I unfolded it and checked out the title I was stunned.  The title read "Required Public Statement for GPL/LGPL Licensed Software Used in This Television".  My curiosity piqued I continued to read.  Turns out Sony uses the following GPL executables in this TV:
- Monta Vista Linux Kernel
- busybox
- insmod

…and these LGPL libraries:
- libuClibc.so
- ld.so
- libc.so
- libm.so
- libpthread.so
- libgcc_s.so
- libstdc++.so

Source code for all the above is available at www.sony.com/linux (a link that right now, is not loading…)

The fact that Sony uses Linux surprised me.  Maybe it shouldn’t, I don’t know.  But it seems strange that the master of closed architectures is dipping into the OSS pool.  Are they giving back?  From the  looks of it they’re not really touting their participation nor do I recall ever seeing their contributions mentioned anywhere.  The document was "required".  There is no indication anywhere in the doc regarding what they’re doing with Linux or how it works.

I can’t put my finger on exactly why this bugs me, but somehow it does.

You have to love a company that is so full sure of itself that it can get up in public and say something like this:

"If we offer something that has
tremendous value, that is sort of this thing people didn’t have
in their consciousness — it was not imaginable — then I think
there’s a whole bunch of people that will pay $499, $599.”

From the Bloomberg article here.

Not in my conciousness?  Not imaginable?  It’s a cell phone for God’s sake.  Sure, it’s got some cool features but don’t try to tell me it won’t live or die based on it’s success at doing one thing – making phone calls.  That’s all people really want.  Forget the other fluff.  If it can’t do that one thing well, game over.

Is it inevitable that market power translates into unbearable hubris?  Or is it really just a reflection of who’s running the show?  Personally I think it’s the latter.  Quick, who’s the CEO of Proctor & Gamble?  Of course you have no idea.  Forget the fact that P&R have immense market power.  They’re a little more humble. 

Apple has come a long way over the past few years, cheered on by the weary, MS-oppressed masses (including me).  They used to be the radicals.  But now, their autocratic attitude is starting to feel very un-Apple.  Like Google, it they’re not careful, they’ll lose the prestige they’ve always enjoyed as the underdog.