Are my eyes really blue?

This post is coming to you from an iPad. I have the Apple folio thingy, it is sitting on top of my net book on the coffee table, and I'm already seeing some of the compromises on the keyboard. It does a good job with some of the autocorrection, but also makes two words of netbook and doesn't give me an apostrophe without using the shift. It also makes ozone curious decisions on what not to correct. That should be "some", not "ozone". You see the problem.

in the grand scheme of things, though, it isn't bad. I daresay it's as least as typable as the much maligned keyboard on the Dell Mini 9. Obviously I'm in landscape mode and counting on the spell check, but even so - it's miles beyond trying to do the same on an iPhone. I wouldn't dare try to write anything this long on there.

(An aside: Duke got freerolled into the Sweet Sixteen with a one seed they didn't deserve, then managed to be two points better than a five seed in a game where the refs basically let them play Red Rover under the baskets. Least impressive champion of the modern era. And I'm all the more bitter that Vandy got skunked in the first round, because that Duke team is one we could easily have beaten. Douchebags.)

I'm not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It's not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can't stop thinking over and over is "it's the Dynabook". Alan Kay's landmark vision of a super-thin 9x12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them. One device the size of a magazine, pound and a half - and it's all your textbooks, all your notebooks, your mail, your TV, your damn near everything. If I were starting college this year, I would move heaven and earth to have one before I headed out the door.

Well, now to see if it can replace the DVR for strategic "V" purposes...

* It's got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn't draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple's usual markers for industrial design.

* If it's a big iPod Touch, the key word is definitely BIG. Having 1024x768 scale changes everything, making for a better UI experience and a lot easier time with things like mail or reading complex websites (you don't need a Facebook app for the iPad, you just go to Facebook).

* The killer app, for me, is the battery life. This is the thing Apple has done: they have used a phone OS to get light and lean, while still including a first-rate browser - the net result blows away any netbook you like for speed while offering ridiculous battery performance (after almost 7 hours of off-and-on browsing and mail and even some video, I've still only blown off 1/3 of the charge). Better than my MacBook Pro, better than my Dell Mini 1012 (in Ubuntu OR WinXP), better than my iPhone - hell, I could use all three of those one after the other until the batteries all died, and I think an iPad would outlast them all. Now in fairness I've been using it on a college campus with pervasive Wi-Fi, not taxing it with the need to hold a 3G signal, but even so - this is something you can take around for email and web surfing all day and not have to worry about when you're going to plug it in. For that reason alone, I think it has a lot of potential not just as a netbook killer, but as a MacBook Air killer.

* I mean, seriously, think about it. What do you do on a netbook? What CAN you do on a netbook? The physical keyboard may give it a slight edge on the text-entry front, in theory, but (in horizontal mode at least) the iPad's virtual keyboard is every bit as viable as my netbook's physical one in practice. I can check my mail, I can surf the web - well, the iPad does those things as well if not better (I'm generally stuck on webmail with the netbook, because using Thunderbird or Evolution is painful on that screen and with that processing power.) I could input with Google Docs or Evernote if I wanted text, I've got the WordPress app right there for blogging things - hell, right now the only thing I absolutely need the netbook for over the iPad would be video chat. And that's not exactly a huge part of my life.

* If you're doing all this stuff in the cloud anyway, you can get by fine with 16 GB of storage. Hell, get all your movies from Netflix and you don't need to use your local space. I guarantee you that the notional Google Chrome OS devices aren't going to have 16 GB of local storage. All the "cloud" really consists of is a move back to the old client-server days, and the iPad is the thinnest of thin clients.

* Yes, you can RDP back to your Windows machine - just not very well. Similarly, I expect VNC would be kind of a show. I don't think you're going to get Apple Remote Desktop for iPad for some time, unfortunately.

* The iPad, at its root, is a consumption device. You read mail, read books, surf the web, watch video, listen to audio. It's necessarily compromised for things like churning out flashing newsletters or hammering out the Great American Novel or administering a rack of servers. I certainly wouldn't undertake NaNoWriMo on one. But the people breathlessly intoning "this is your new TV" - I think they're onto something. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, this is going to be a big part of how you see your shows. (The notional Hulu app will go a long way there.)

* I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come - I don't think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word - in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android.

* All of this said, I'm probably going to pass it along to the next tech by the end of the week if not sooner. When you have a laptop and an iPhone, it's definitely a device too far. It's not a substitute for a laptop for people who legitimately have to work remotely or on-the-go (by contrast, it's the IDEAL device to give your CxO so he can look slick in the first class lounge). And for my purposes, it's neat...but it's not really suitable for Twitter, or text messaging, or walking around with the headphones in on a constant stream of the Junks. I downloaded a ton of the free iPad apps, but most of them are things I don't use or aren't practical - Pandora, ABC Player, Y! Entertainment, two or three news apps, stuff like that. Until portable devices become the prime way of consuming media, the iPhone is still the best horse for the course for me.

It's quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It's incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you'd never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I'd had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it's incredibly fast to get going - button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load...it's like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great - work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out.

It does seem excessive for things like Foursquare or Twitter, but those are so location-specific that they really do belong on the phone, not the iPad. You could take the iPad most anywhere, but you definitely will take an iPhone everywhere, so - horses for courses.

If I hadn't bought the netbook, I would be sorely tempted. As it is, I find that I tend only to use Mail, Safari, Notepad, and the e-book readers. Other things are nice, but I don't get the mileage out of them on a routine basis.

Long story short - does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it's too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing.

iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, back to ecto - now that I know what's happening, it's a lot easier to manage. For whatever reason, new posts show up in MT4 as "scheduled" but never actually post. But that's an easy fix from the browser, so I'm better off with the WYSIWYG approach. MarsEdit means riding bareback on HTML, with tags and everything, and that's just more trouble than it's worth.

So anyway, I've been looking through my ridiculous collection of outerwear, and I have the oddest urge to fit something with some patches. Not like my patch jacket of yore, with everything from shuttle mission patches to a UPS logo - this would just be something simple, almost military-ish, something that would work out for cyberpunk dress at Maker Faire or some such. Blame William Gibson and Cayce Pollard, but I keep being drawn to the MA-1 nylon flight jacket despite the fact that it's far too warm for most winter days (and too short to be an effective raincoat).

Actually, I should be working harder on a steampunk getup (despite my misgivings about how warm it'll probably be) and some sort of attire plan for the Europe trip in June (cool to warm, rain likely). Most of all, I kind of need to go through my dresser and plow through whatever I can get rid of - there's a lot of old sox and drawz that need to go away and make space for the new stuff...

Sad to see AJ leave Vandy - I doubt he'll even be a first-round pick - but I almost wonder if we're better off with the three-headed monster in the lane plus the new recruits (Kyle Fuller and Rod Odom are both top-100 prospects nationally) and just turning into a run-and-gun team. We'll still have plenty of beef down low - I daresay that more slightly smaller guys who can get up for offensive boards would help things a LOT.

That's pretty much all I've got at this point...no politics, precious little tech talk, ain't that something?

Well, my brother-in-law and I were looking at a WordPress migration. Then he was distracted from looking at the CSS issues in Movable Type 4 by the need to put the little one to bed, and while he was doing that, it occurred to me to archive and reload the templates - which got the MT4 CSS working properly, and in turn allowed me to switch to the nice gray layout you see here. Enjoy!

Now I just need to figure out how to get a blogroll going...

So I went to a couple different surplus stores today. Look, I'm as free trade and globalist as the next guy, but it kind of bothers me when every single military jacket in the Army-Navy store is labelled "Made in China." Anyway, the MA-1 apparently doesn't have the velcro patch on the chest and is huge and bulky besides (probably warm, and it weighs NOTHING, but it's just too damn big around).

Honestly, what's driving me here is the notion of Cayce Pollard Units. If you've read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Cayce is the heroine of the tale. She has a unique "ability" if you want to call it that - she is allergic (to the point of psychosis) to branding, to the point where she can only wear clothing that would be generally regarded as fashionably indistinct anytime from the Second World War to the present. The one thing she has out of the ordinary is a Buzz Rickson's replica MA-1 jacket, in black - and while Buzz Rickson's is in fact a real Japanese company whose reproduction is almost artistic in its precision, they never made a black one until after the novel came out.

To be honest, this is as close as I come to a fashion statement. From the time I moved to California until about a month ago, the only jeans I've bought are the standard blue Levi's 501. My daily footwear runs to Dr Martens in black or occasionally brown. My default work shirts are solid color collared sport shirts with no logo other than the WWDC logo on a couple of them. My off-hours shirts run largely to identical gray 2XL American Apparel t-shirts.

Only the jackets tend to run wild - and boy, do they. In the current rotation alone, you see the Vanderbilt softshell, the dark green oilcloth engineer's coat, the canary-yellow Community Emergency Response Team coat, a plain black rain shell, a black National Geographic fleece that goes under that shell, a couple other Eddie Bauer cold-weather coats, a poorly-chosen jean jacket in brown suede, and (most distinctively) a brown leather Indiana Jones jacket from US Wings. That last was my signature jacket for most of the decade, but it's proven largely impractical in a place where I have to wear a backpack to and from work every day - and it's not the best thing for travel. Also, I'm not entirely sure I want to deface it with a couple of patches, even if they are germane to my history.

The big problem is that out here, it's all layers all the time - it legitimately gets cold at night during the summer, and it's legit too warm to wear the jacket during the day. It's like those spring conditions where you always forgot and left your jacket at school. Which means that most of the time, I need something to wear in the morning that will ball up in the backpack in the afternoon. And the Stuff White People Like "performance outerwear" starts to make sense...which is why that Vandy softshell has become the go-to for most of the last year. I'm not sure I want to take it through Europe for two weeks, though - especially since it's looking like "warm and rainy" is the default condition through much of where we're going...

This guy has it figured out. Honestly, nobody should attribute any sort of sainthood to the folks in Cupertino (and as somebody who was one of them for three years, I oughta know) but to pretend like Adobe is some innocent babe in the woods being done wrong by the Beast of Infinite Loop is the height of foolishness. I would think that the paste-eater cognoscenti would be thrilled to see somebody pushing back against proprietary technology in favor of reasonably open formats not under the control of any one company, but for some reason, pressing for HTML5 and H.264 to replace Flash has somehow become the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Hun butchering the Belgians.

Look, any idiot should have been able to figure this out by now: Apple, in the era of Jobs II, is not interested in being beholden to anyone else. I can only imagine how much it chafed Himself to have Bill Gates up there pledging to keep producing Office for the Mac, knowing what a delicate thread the company was hanging by and how the decision to cut off Office would have effectively killed the Mac by 1999 or so. Anybody who thinks that the guy in the turtleneck is ever going to make his products dependent on the fruits of another tech company is smoking crack - thus the Quattro acquisition, a firewall against Google's control of AdMob, and the PA Semi acquisition, and the map company they bought a while back - hell, the Great Mentioner periodically mumbles something about Apple and search, for crying out loud. Why do you think Apple had a version of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware for six years before making it public? Because Jobs had all he wanted of being in hock to Motorola to make a faster processor, and he had a backup plan.

For better or worse, Apple now has a survivalist streak a mile wide. IL2 is full of whatever is the high-tech equivalent of 9mm ammo, dried food, flashlight batteries and water purification tablets. The Sons of the Hexachrome Fruit haven't holed up in the compound, and probably don't want to, but if it comes to that? They are prepared to go it alone with no Adobe, no Microsoft, no Google. And given how much time they've had to prepare and bank resources, I'm not sure they couldn't pull it off. Don't forget, the big new data center in North Carolina opens any day now...

ETA: This Android engineer breaks down how Apple's "multitasking" will work. Long story short: it's more or less the same technique used by Android, although Android doesn't kill the original task after switching until real RAM is close to running out. I suspect this means faster return-from-switch on Android, at the risk of crashes if the OOM handler is overwhelmed by too many big-RAM apps and cannot free enough memory in time.

So I've started watching Carl Sagan's landmark PBS miniseries again. Thirty years on, we tend to forget that until Ken Burns produced The Civil War for PBS, Cosmos was the highest-rated PBS program of all time. I don't know how I came to it, but I distinctly remember being allowed, even encouraged, to watch it. Looking back now, I didn't really grasp now much of an anti-nuclear-war jeremiad it was, but then a lot of stuff from the era looks dated as hell (The Day After, anybody? Amerika? Hell, Red Dawn? How exactly do they plan to remake that? Why exactly do they plan to remake that?) Also, it's clear that I really did have that line of demarcation at a young age: God created the universe in six days on Sundays and in 4.5 trillion years the rest of the week. Anybody who's ever done any quality time in Nashville is well aware of the duality of Saturday night and Sunday morning. What can I say, I am large, I contain multitudes. Even then.

It's amazing how well the thing holds up, though. This was at the apex of space science in this country - Pioneer, Viking and Voyager had all gone off in the 70s, we had landed man on the moon as late as 1972, we had Skylab, we had the Shuttle coming any minute now and the promise of the Hubble...it's not hard to see how somebody as distinctive as Sagan could turn into a celebrity. I honestly can't think of a hard-science celebrity that would turn up routinely on The Tonight Show these days. Stephen Hawking maybe, but not really. Anyway, so far, most everything they talk about - historically as well as scientifically - is still germane to the present day, enough so that you could still use the whole trick in science class anywhere about third grade up.

It's comfortable, like finding one of your favorite old jackets from decades ago and realizing it still fits. For some reason, though, the opening makes me feel the slightest twinge of sad - it's been a long thirty years, and maybe I'm just regretting that I didn't make it as a Jedi astronaut, but what can I say - it's hard as hell to find a place that offers that as a major...

An aside: in my previous job, there was a wizened old scientist who I privately grumbled about as "America's Silliest Scientist" (or worse) but who was foisted on me as the new guy - because he'd exhausted everyone else's patience. And yet, there he is, looking very capable as he pipettes some mysterious substance into the cosmic brew. I think that's because there wasn't a computer involved...

So supposedly Gizmodo has a prototype that is, in fact, the newest iPhone. Quick thoughts:

* To all appearances, the hardware has been upgraded in the places you'd like to see it upgraded. There appears to be noise-cancellation technology built in, the display is a higher resolution, the back camera has a flash and the front camera exists, the battery is non-trivially larger than before. It's not possible to tell RAM, storage, or processor speed, as Apple was able to brick the phone remotely and there's nothing inside that tells. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the phone will probably be at least the equal of the Nexus One in all specs.

* I'm only half-joking when I say that whoever lost this phone has a lifespan measurable against a fruit-fly's. In all my time with the Cupertino Hexachrome Produce Concern, Ltd, I only ever saw one pre-production prototype outside the building, once. This thing should be on super monkey lockdown, and whoever let it get away is in massive, MASSIVE violation of the standard Apple NDA. Right now, for whoever Mr. X is, the best case scenario is that he loses his job and that's it.

* The phone uses a micro-SIM, like the iPad but unlike most every other phone out there. This is a new wrinkle, and one that so far is on the radar of every major GSM carrier but not in practice with any other hardware maker. The bigger issue is that it will make it difficult to move back and forth between the iPhone and another GSM device using the same SIM card - which is another form of hardware lock-in along the lines of the frequency band problem that makes AT&T 3G incompatible with T-Mobile 3G devices and vice versa. Long story short: it will be damn near impossible to use this notional new iPhone simultaneously on a single account with a Nexus One, barring the adoption of micro-SIM by Google and HTC.

* Apropos of nothing, HTC just launched a new Android phone on the Verizon network: the Droid Incredible. Wait, isn't the Droid a Motorola phone? Yes, but it's the Motorola Milestone everywhere else in the world (esp. on GSM abroad), and as it turns out, the "Droid" trademark is licensed to Verizon, NOT Motorola. So let's see: Motorola releases the hottest Google phone in the world, only to see themselves sandbagged with the Nexus One a couple months later - and now, the big V has given the Droid mark to the maker of the Nexus One for another non-Moto phone.

If I were the CEO of Motorola, I would have taken a flamethrower to the place.

In a move that should surprise nobody, Facebook is once again arbitrarily making entire categories of user info public. This is not surprising, any more than a dog humping your leg should be surprising. But it's time to cut this dog's nuts off.

Much like Google, Facebook's whole business model revolves around finding ways to monetize your information and sell you ads based on it. However, don't think this is just limited to shady Flash games - Facebook's big plan apparently revolves around becoming the official login service of the Internet. In essence, Facebook would very much like to be the keeper of your online identity.

And you know what? They'll go far with that. Facebook has turned into the sort of thing that non-techies will flock to and spend hours with, if the user base I support is any indication. It's the 21st-century AOL, the face of the Internet for people who just want to see their elementary school friends and play Farmville. Hell, even for me, it's become the simplest way to see what's going on with people I know. Sure, I'd much rather they all had blogs and I could just RSS everything, but it's probably not going to happen.

Once again, horses for courses - it'd be lovely to have a Twitter-type stream for short stuff, a Tumblr-like service for quick pix and clips and brief comments, and the usual array of blog options for long form. But for most people, that turns out to be Facebook. And it's picked up steam in ways that none of its predecessors ever did, and it's insinuating itself even more into ordinary life. Hell, I see more Facebook references in advertising now than I did URLs in ads in 1996.

It should be a piece of cake to make something happen. TypePad has a micro version that does what Tumblr does, and it couldn't be that tough to whip up a quick interface that would let you aggregate everyone's various info streams in a single space. I think FriendFeed was supposed to be this, but hell, Facebook owns FriendFeed now. Besides, everything I see now seems to be focused on getting your Twitter into their stream as well, whether it's Facebook or Google Buzz or what have you.

I've been on the Internets for over fifteen years now. I don't need the training wheels, and I suspect a lot of other people don't, either. The next big thing will come from whoever can find a way to give you social networking without a kung fu grip on your sack - and don't expect it to be Twitter, Facebook, or Google providing it.

Ecto 3, testing...

Look, there's no excuse by now. We've been over this a hundred thousand times, and there is simply no logical ground on which to argue that the President of the United States is anything other than an American citizen born on American soil. To argue otherwise is a sign of profound ignorance, racism, or mental defect.

And yet, this is apparently still quite a thing, judging by the recent spat of what I can only describe as Confederate protests. Let's be blunt: the "Tea Party" movement is nothing less than the manifestation of 20th-century Southern politics on a national scale, in which assorted "big mules" (financial interests and the property-owning elite) whip up a frenzy among the working classes to lash out against The Other - usually the implacable menace of the Negro, but just as frequently some combination of communists, Jews, Papists, Yankees, or whatever. The communists have been made over as socialists and Teh Gheys are now up where the Catholics used to be, but for the most part, the forms and styles of the clowns out honking their horns on April 15th are not materially different from the crowds that howled Strom Thurmond to the Dixiecrat nomination in Boutwell Auditorium back in 1948 - or who boosted the Ku Klux to its highest membership in the 1920s.

The key thing you can say about the teabaggers is that they tend to be 1) white and 2) old enough for segregation to be living memory, which would presume roughly age 50 and up. This is not just limited to the South - even if they weren't out there cheering Wallace with their parents, they are old enough to remember a time when "we didn't have all these problems."

In the long run, you can make a case for containment. We can circle the wagons and wait for the majority of the teabaggers to die off, while long-term demographic trends surrounding immigration and racial minorities grind away at the power base of their movement. But as Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead. So what if we require relief now?

This is not to say that we should be dragging teabaggers into the street and shooting them. I am assured that "the son of a bitch had it coming" is no longer a legal defense to murder even in the state of Alabama, and besides there's that whole five thousand years of Judeo-Christian morality in the way. What I am suggesting is that the movement itself needs to be defenestrated - that something has to happen to lance the boil such that marching around with guns telling the President to go back to Africa is so patently unacceptable in society that even to be associated with it is poisonous.

Here's the problem, though: the teabaggers have their own society and their own media environment. They have an entire cable news network, several national talk-radio outlets, and endless Internet commentary to tell them how right they are. They live in a reality they have constructed themselves, and anything that conflicts with their reality can be rejected out of hand as a creation of the enemy's media machine, or "political correctness", or some such. There's no recourse to reason or logic, because they have their own reason and logic. When an entire political sub-class can turn on a dime in a year with regards to the menace posed by the unchecked executive power of the Presidency, good faith bargaining is not on the cards.

The really scary bit is this: I don't even think something like Oklahoma City in 1995 would break through the shell anymore. I really do think that a major incident of right-wing terrorism would be greeted by the 'baggers as either a proud blow against government tyranny or as some sort of government trick to try to discredit them, and they'd plow right on along. At that point, I guess the only question is whether the shock would be enough to shear off the less fanatical and reduce the numbers even further - but given this country's attention span, I'm not sure that's feasible. And to be honest, I absolutely believe that another September 11-style attack would not result in a rally-round-the-flag-and-President effect. If some mass-casualty catastrophe happened now, I guarantee that Republicans in the House would enter articles of impeachment the next day. To be honest, if the Republicans get control of the House, I fully expect that before January 31, 2011, some GOP member will introduce articles of impeachment - or at the very least, commence hearings on "the birth certificate" or some other talk-radio fabrication.

So what's my solution? I don't have one, because there isn't one.

When the One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, and Asus followed with the EEE PC, they probably thought they were inventing a whole new type of device - a laptop, certainly, but of a different sort than the kind business types lugged around. But as the netbook emerged, the new-look interfaces slowly gave way to Windows XP. Ultimately, the netbook pretty quickly became just the smallest and cheapest style of laptop, rather than something new.

This is about to change non-trivially. When Google finally gets its Chrome OS on netbooks and into production, the result will be something that is less than a notebook - essentially a large-screen portable web terminal. Meanwhile, the Kindle has exploded as a whole other type of portable device - and one with an underappreciated permanent wireless connection, at that. And then there's that gadget of Apple's...

We have computers, desktop and laptop, and we have phones. This third device is meant to combine the relative portability of a phone with some of the enhanced power and larger display of a computer. There are necessary tradeoffs for size and power, and they have been met with various techniques (e-ink display by the Kindle, a phone OS by Apple, custom Linux OS and interface by many netbook manufacturers, etc). We've been comparing these things to computers, but it might be more reasonable to compare them the other way...to phones.

Set against this, the netbook becomes the flip phone. It relies on a hinge to give you two equal-sized spaces for input and display, and as a result tends to be a bit on the thick side. The Kindle and its peers are the bar phones: one piece, light and thinner, but compromised in terms of display and input by the limitations of space. And the iPad is, of course, the iPhone: one big display, virtual keyboard, trusting that its input model will minimize the compromises posed by a software keyboard.

I bring this up because I'm still struggling with the netbook. 1024x600 is a bit of a show to squint at, especially with all the other UI bits and bobs that go along with Firefox - because the web browser is pretty much the sole app in use. Sure, I have Skype and something to stream Absolute Radio and a Twitter notifier, but 96% of what happens on that netbook happens in a browser window. And its performance in full-screen streaming video, compared to the iPad, is abysmal.

(It doesn't help that I'm doing less text entry than I'd anticipated. I should be, but I'm not; this is being pounded out on the same MacBook Pro as ever. Maybe once I get Drivel reinstalled things will be different; I just can't handle blogging from a web interface.)

This is not to say that I will be putting my netbook on the market in any hurry. There will be no major shakeups in the home electronics situation before September, in all likelihood, owing to the necessary wait for the new iPhone and the debate on whether to let work start picking up the check for good rather than just reimbursing my personal phone. And the temptation to lay out for a Nexus One and use T-Mobile's monthly no-contract scheme for a while is very strong.

A few years ago, over a few too many glasses of sangria at the local tapas lounge, a bloggery friend of mine opined that there's something generational about the current approach to privacy. They've taken Andy Warhol to the logical endpoint, she said, and it doesn't matter anymore what you're famous for, as long as you're famous. Thus we wind up with a bunch of orange mooks with too much hair product as America's biggest entertainers of 2009-10.

This also sprang to mind as I considered Facebook's continuing sodomy of user privacy. Today they announced that sites using Facebook Connect data - that use of the Facebook ID as a login for other sites - will now be allowed to retain that data indefinitely, rather than deleting it after 24 hours. Which basically means that any site that touches your Facebook identity now has the right, in perpetuity, to all the data of every other site or resource you access via your Facebook identity.

Basically, Facebook's arrogating itself the right to sell your whole presence online.

The whole appeal of Facebook was based on three things: it was exclusive, it was granular, and it was authentic. You were pretty much entering a gated community, and though you had to trade under your own name, you had control over who saw what and when. It was pretty much the key to putting everything online, knowing that you would control who got what.

Well, the gates flung open in 2006 - first some carefully selected corporations became the first non-edu addresses from which you could sign up (disclosure: I was at one of them, and did, largely out of the need to sign up for everything but also to keep track of our recalcitrant campus sales reps). Then before long the floodgates were thrown open and anybody could join. Big problem, which made the ability to have granular control all the more important.

And then, over the last twelve months, Facebook has used its seemingly endless redesigns to slowly cut away at what you can or can't hide. Your friends list. The groups you belong to. Your interests. Your location. Things you probably filled in without considering that Facebook might unilaterally decide that all that information would be made public.

But they did. And with today's announcements at f8, Facebook has nailed their colors to the mast: they stand for maximizing the amount of connections and mineable data, and user privacy be damned. So the first two essentials have been tossed, and that makes the third worse by far: all of this is traceable to your actual honest-to-God identity.

I don't know if this is all down to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is of the generation that has made an idol of celebrity, or if maybe he's just too young and too geek to think about the bigger picture. Or maybe it's because Facebook's growth has continued despite all these shenanigans. Or perhaps it's just the bottom-line realization that getting money means coming up with an ever-greater crop of data to harvest (an apt metaphor in the land of Farmville). But mark my words: the next big thing will be a way of social networking that returns granularity and privacy to the system.

Back to the netbook. I am actually composing this one live on the website rather than falling back on some sort of client-side piece. Besides, the MacBook Pro is currently doing a Time Machine backup from scratch and I don't expect it'll be done before morning.

Largely this is just so I can write a long-form entry. My fingers are slipping a little more than I remember, but it pummels the hell out of working on the iPhone to compose a blog post. I'm sure my fingers and wrists are going to be sore tomorrow, because the posturing involved in having this thing in your lap is kind of a show.

I think I heard somewhere that iPhone OS 4 incorporates the Bluetooth keyboard support currently in the iPad. If that's true, I might sell this thing outright and just pack a Bluetooth keyboard to the old country at Christmas.

I should be watching the Giants - they were doing well at first, but as soon as my attention slipped they started losing. Kind of a show.

I'm actually starting to wonder whether it's worth trying to put together some ridiculous outfit for Maker Faire. It's going to be hot as hell, most likely, and unsuitable for things Victorian or Chiba City-esque.

Okay, four posts in a day is plenty. I think I should be working on anonymizing everything anyway...

Years ago, when one of the ten most pivotal books of my life finally got a film adaptation, it was derided as liberal fantasy and a sure sign that Hollywood was full of radical whackjobs. And I shot back in some online forum - I wish I could remember where and link it - and said that if V for Vendetta had been released in the 90s, every right-winger imaginable would have done himself physical harm pleasuring himself at the notion of one lone man striking back against the oppressive hand of big government.

And sure enough, now that it's 2010 and "I fear my government" is again the acceptable default conservative position, here we go, right on cue.

It's not often I can truly be a FIGJAM, but this is one of 'em.

Well, it looks like the Nexus One isn't coming to Verizon after all. Don't know what the logic is there, but given that Google is actually pimping the Droid Incredible on the Nexus One ordering page, one suspects that the Nexus One in CDMA form is less capable than what will be out there later. It's also very possible that Verizon was not amenable to the notion of ordering a phone elsewhere and using it on their network, where by "very possible" I mean "I would bet my house, my car and my testicles". It's not like you can easily pop back and forth between networks, or like Verizon offers monthly service without a 2-year contract, so there's no percentage in paying $530 up front when you have to eat a contract anyway.

Couple that with the whole "we're not doing any more work on the 3G" reports coming out about the Nexus One, and you can make a good case that, as we always said, I need to wait until the contract is up in September before making a decision on which way the phone should go. More than ever, though, it does look like it's going to be the new iPhone, and the combination of iPhone OS 4 features and presumptive iPhone HD hardware modifications make that a worthwhile wait. Now if it would just come unlocked so I could get it on a Euro SIM for travel...

So now one of Gizmodo's editors has gotten a search warrant executed and his house raided. It appears as well that Gawker Media is going to push back claiming immunity under California's shield law that protects sources for reporters.

I have a sneaking suspicion that dog ain't gonna hunt. Mainly because the law says "no warrant shall issue for...the source of any information." A full description of the notional iPhone 4, with specs and stats, would certainly constitute information. Even pictures could be so construed. But that ain't what's doin'. What's doin' is that Gawker Media, through its employee, took possession of actual property in a manner that, under California law, probably rises to the level of stolen goods.

Now I'm sure there will come the usual parade of First Amendment absolutists who think all reporters should be protected from everything for all time, to which my usual response is: you obviously have never seen NBC. But Jason Chen's little exercise in balls-to-the-wall journalism is not going to get the same protection as, say, Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers, and rightly so - because while details of the iPhone are certainly newsworthy, they do not rise to the level of a compelling public interest. Even so, with California's shield law, he would probably be in a position to skate if they hadn't paid $5000 - a felony-theft level of cash - for property that was not the seller's to sell.

As it is, if I'm Gawker Media's lawyer, I'm skipping over the righteous pontification and heading to the part where I hope the DA might be open to pleading down to something that doesn't involve jail time.

My first review at NewestJob went pretty well, all things considered. I did ask outright "what does 'exceeds expectations' work out to in percent salary?" but nothing came of it. After, as I sat out at the cafe under the overhang and watched the rain drift in, I thought about what an easier environment I'm in relative to 1997-98.

Think about it - we have Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 instead of System 7.5.3. More to the point, we have Windows XP SP3 instead of Windows NT 4. Our operating systems are a hell of a lot more robust than in years past. And they run simpler computers, too. No more mucking about connecting a Jaz drive via SCSI, not when thumb drives with more storage than a Jaz are handed out as promotional items and tossed as too small to be useful. No Zip disks. No floppy drives. Precious few CDs and DVDs, and those burned internally from within the OS rather than on an external burner with Toast or some other third-party contrivance. And of all my currently supported users put together, I can't think of more than two with personal printers - neither of which I can recall ever supporting.

The network is so much easier to deal with, too - all TCP/IP all the time. No AppleTalk. No Netware. No NetBEUI. No more mucking about with print queues and waiting for Novell to turn out a Mac client. Getting on the Internet is no longer a function of what floor you're on, and having a Mac no longer means pulling cable three floors through the closet to find the one Ethernet switch set up to pass AppleTalk. No Token Ring cable, no LocalTalk cable, hell, no cable at all half the time thanks to pervasive 802.11 coverage. No screwing around with modem pools. Or modems. No "dialing up" into anything. VPN connects in about 5 seconds. Email is based on IMAP, instead of some hodgepodge of gateways and proprietary LAN mail systems - or worse yet, Lotus Notes.

And most of all, Apple Remote Desktop. Any of my Mac users are just a couple clicks away, whether I'm at my desk or off in a shared cube - or at home on a couch, or on a couch at the cigar store, or in a Starbucks in Birmingham. Only the need for a physical presence when network connectivity is inoperative keeps me from running my operations full time from the third-floor balcony by Peet's - or from the third base line at Pac Bell Park.

The point is this: after some time and distraction, I am back doing the same sort of thing I was doing six years ago, and in the intervening years, the job itself has become simpler than ever. And six years ago was miles easier than six years before that, when I first came to the business. Maybe by 2016, I really will be able to do the whole thing off an iPad while lounging on the patio at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans....

So ever since Himself posted his small note on Flash, the chorus has come up loud and long from the paste-eaters. "How can he criticize Flash for not being open when Apple controls the whole iPhone ecosystem WAH WAH WAH FREE FREE FREE FREE SOFTWARE FREE MUMIA WAH" et cetera. As usual, they are missing the point.

Obviously, Apple controls the iPhone ecosystem - it's their product. You can disagree with this if you like, and you can build a good case that they shouldn't keep such a tight grip on it. But when Himself is beating the drum for open standards like H.264 and HTML5, it's because nobody else controls those. As long as Steve Jobs runs Apple, you will never - EVER - see support on the iPhone OS for any sort of closed system run by somebody other than Apple.

The tedious workup again: Adobe makes tool. Apple allows tool. Tool becomes necessary to a non-trivial percentage of iPhone/iPad applications. Suddenly, Apple's production is dependent on making sure they don't break support for Adobe's tool - and more importantly, Apple is at the mercy of Adobe for upgrades and fixes to said tool. Do you think Himself will ever yield that kind of control to any company, let alone one as Mac-negligent as Adobe (who have JUST NOW, nine years on, released a fully-native version of Photoshop for OS X)?

As an aside, I'll point out that I think the assertion that cross-platform makes for shit is pretty apt. Remember the early days of Java, with "write once crash anywhere"? How about now? Java apps are insanely slow and look like shit - unless you employ native API calls. At which point you're not cross-platform anymore, and you may as well skip the Java.

Now, all of this sets aside stuff that should be obvious to anybody who supports computers for a living: Flash is a buggy, CPU-hogging, security-breaching sack of shit whose main application in 2010 seems to be stupid Facebook games and insanely annoying ads. I have yet to see a use case for Flash on a phone - which is handy, because I have yet to see Flash on a phone (other than lecture demos and Flash Lite, neither of which gives me any reason to think the whole thing would run great on a mobile handset).

The ongoing wailing about Flash on the iPhone boils down to one thing: people are still trying to create the desktop computer on a handheld device. It's not going to happen on Himself's watch at Apple. It's just not. Whether it happens in Mountain View, or Redmond, or with HP's acquisition of Palm, is up for grabs. But "Windows Everywhere" was an actual Microsoft slogan for a while, and the need to tie everything to Windows is what killed their mindshare and made them an also-ran everywhere off the desktop. Apple is taking it one step further and asserting that the future of mobility computing bears no resemblance to what you'd do on a desktop - and that it is THE future of computing to go in that direction. If you don't buy it, just count the number of OS X sessions at this year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. I'll wait. Oh, back already? You see my point.

...everybody from the EFF to Jon Stewart is howling about mean ol' Apple sic'ing the San Mateo DA on the poor Gizmodo blogger who is a shining martyr to freedom of the press WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAHHHHHHMBULANCE. I will now puncture this self-righteous circle jerk with one word:

Engadget.

Go back and look at that again. More specifically, look at their archives. Two days before Gizmodo's big breaking story, they published more or less the same thing - with specs and pictures, no less. And what have we heard from Apple? Not a mumbling word. Not so much as a takedown notice for the pictures.

So quit with your crocodile tears, people. If Jason Chen and Gawker Media don't want to be treated like criminal suspects, maybe they shouldn't have committed a fucking crime. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Pity level = NEGATIVE INFINITY.