Even Apple’s discussion servers are crushed …

Apple’s iPhone authentication service is down. dotMac is down. MobileMe is up and down.

To add insult to injury, even Apple’s discussion servers are down.

Apple - Support - Discussions

We'll be back soon.

In an ideal world, Apple would do some post-mortem analysis of their culture and commit themselves to being a high-reliability organization.

In the real world, we shouldn’t expect Apple to deliver mission-critical services. It’s not what they do.

8/4/08: I don't expect Apple has really reformed, but I'll give them credit for some soul searching.

The descent of the PDA: Newton, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone

I turned into the parking lot of my small neighborhood AT&T outlet this morning, and there was a long line.

I didn't expect that. So, no iPhone today. If Apple is true to form they'll run out soon, and I'll have several weeks to wait. Not all bad, since Apple's initial hardware releases almost always have significant defects.

Apple is not a reliability company, just in case you didn't notice that they've cratered their .Mac service in a fumbled transition to Mobile.me. Of course Gmail was out of order too a couple of days ago. I've got to get over my boomer fetish for reliability, and remember how I lived in Bangkok in the 80s.

My pending iPhone transition means I've been working out how to transfer hundreds of notes and tasks, thousands of calendar items and contacts, and hundreds of encrypted passwords from my Palm Tungsten E2 to some combination of the iPhone and the Cloud. My preliminary investigations on the task side have had grim results.

This is going to take a while. A few years ago I confidently pronounced that I was done with my Tungsten E2. Then, after the initial iPhone disappointed, I figured I'd buy one more E2 -- but that was it. Well, now that the E2's power switch has died exactly like every Palm I've bought in the past 6-7 years I'm thinking there may be another cheapo Palm in my future. Maybe their very lowest end device.

The problem is that from a classic PDA/productivity perspective, the incredibly powerful iPhone is a shadow of my first 1997 PalmPilot/Palm Desktop, much less the uber-geek DateBk# Palm productivity app.

Which says something interesting about the nature of elegant design -- it's always contextual. From some perspectives the iPhone is a brilliant design, from other perspectives it's an empty shell.

No joke. Recently I wrote: "Both tasks and global search were well supported in the very first PalmPilot I bought around 1997 or so. From the perspective of native applications that I need all the time, the iPhone is a large regression from 1997."

Which brings me to the interesting bit of this post. The Palm/iPhone regression is part of a longer trend. The Apple Newton was a very serious productivity/calendaring/task platform. The Palm was an elegant but simpler solution to the same problem set. The endlessly incompetent Microsoft Mobile/etc products tried to tackle the same space, but suffered from truly lousy design. The much-worshiped Blackberry is significantly less elegant and competent than the Palm, and today's iPhone is yet another drop down -- even when combined with the Cloud.

I knew that the 1997 Palm Desktop/Palm device combination was exciting and impressive, but I really didn't think it was the best I'd see for the next decade!

We've just about hit bottom, but things aren't quite hopeless. Even with its currently crippled sync connector the iPhone is a powerful software platform. There once were millions of people who loved the Palm approach to basic calendar and task management. There's a niche for a small but (alas, this is essential) brilliant group of people to reverse engineer DateBk4 (for example), fully understand what it does and why, then to create a truly native iPhone/Cloud equivalent. The people who need this functionality this will pay $200 a year for a combination of iPhone and Cloud software and services. (Free hint, think about the work/personal and calendar overlay problem from day one.)

There are a million of us in the english speaking nations alone. $200 million/year, guaranteed, isn't a bad revenue stream for a small company.

Hmm. Maybe I can find a frustrated billionaire who wants a solution ...

Fake Steve Jobs ... time to move on

Steve Jobs, at best, is struggling with post-operative complications of his pancreatic surgery.

I very much enjoyed "Fake Steve Jobs", but it was time to move on. Mr. Lyons made the right call:

The ‘Fake’ Steve Jobs Is Giving Up Parody Blog - NYTimes.com

...Mr. Lyons said that he had grown tired of his fictional creation, but mainly he was worried about making fun of a real person whose health has been a recent topic of speculation. (After a reporter for The New York Times asked about his lean appearance at a conference last month, Mr. Jobs said he was healthy.)...

In addition to the humor, the analysis was often excellent. I'm looking forward to the Lyons blog to come.

There’s always another level - Korean Freestyle Slalom Inline Skating

Four million views: glumbert - Korean Freestyle Slalom Rollerblading.

In a world of 8 billion people, there is a level far above what you will ever meet in daily life.

Now we get to see it …

I inline skate, but not quite at this level.

Unintended consequences of the iPhone’s DRM requirements – Apple shoots the Mac

In my real life I’m used to hearing the myths that “software shouldn’t change how people work” and “software should adopt to people, not the other way around”.

If only.

The reality for every product is an ugly compromise between optimal functionality, costs, and dozens of stakeholders. Only one of those stakeholders is you, the user.

In any case, smart humans, and even groups of humans, are still much more flexible than software. In the medium to long term smart users are much happier if they adopt their workflow to optimal software, rather than use crummy solutions that support current workflow.

This is good by the way; when software becomes more flexible and adaptive than humans we’ll regret it.

So, even though I wrote “I will be buying my iPhone in the next week or so. I approach the date like a condemned man!” I realize that I have no choice but to throw out ten years of Palm/Outlook driven workflow for whatever Apple will choose to support.

No choice but to grind my teeth because the biggest iPhone stakeholder is not me, it’s the movie industry. A movie industry with DRM requirements that have led Apple to lockout the Phone cable connector.

Fair enough, that’s the way the world works. Lowest common denominator Apple iPhone applications and alternatives limited because they can’t sync to the desktop mean I need to look to the iPhone’s one strong point – connectivity and a very good web browser.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The combination of Apple’s lowest common denominator iPhone native apps (ex. no tasks, no work/home calendar management, no global search [1]), and the disabling of better alternatives by absent desktop synchronization, is going to drive me to Cloud Computing faster than I’d prefer.

So who owns the Cloud?

Not Apple. Google.

In the long run, despite medium term anguish, shifting to Cloud Computing will probably be an improvement on my current workflow. It will also put me in a very good position to switch to Android if Google is able to deliver a working version sometime in 2010. In the meantime I will save money by buying fewer Macs, since the Cloud will be providing my family’s processing and storage.

So, things will eventually work out for me.

On the other hand, I’m not sure this emergent solution is entirely in Apple’s long-term interests. Does Apple really want to shoot the Mac?

[1] Both tasks and global search were well supported in the very first PalmPilot I bought around 1997 or so. From the perspective of native applications that I need all the time, the iPhone is large regression from 1997.

I live in a fabulous city ...

Ok, so Minneapolis has much better bike trails, but really, Saint Paul is doing similarly well when it comes to urban parks ...

Minneapolis, St. Paul parks shine in national report

When it comes to ball fields, tennis courts and recreation centers, St. Paul and Minneapolis rank at or near the top in those and numerous other measures taken by a leading parkland conservation organization.

As for land dedicated to parks, 16.6 percent of Minneapolis is parkland, first among cities with similar population densities. St. Paul is second (14.7 percent) in the same category.

The nonprofit Trust for Public Land on Tuesday reported the following for the state's two largest cities:

RECREATION CENTERS per 20,000 residents: St. Paul, first nationally at 3.0; Minneapolis, second, 2.6.

TENNIS COURTS per 10,000 residents: Minneapolis, first, 4.9; St. Paul, tied for third, 3.7.

BALL DIAMONDS per 10,000 residents: St. Paul, first, 5.6; Minneapolis, second, 5.3....

PARK-RELATED SPENDING per resident: St. Paul, third, $224; Minneapolis, eighth, $151.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are really great cities.

The unexpected influence of OS X - an explanation

Scoble posts about a product he's excited about, but it has an unexpected marketing problem ...

Scobleizer 

... Right now it’s a Windows only thing and requires Internet Explorer. Firefox support is coming “within weeks” and Macintosh support is being built out, but probably won’t be here until sometime around the end of the year. That alone will keep the hype down on Vivaty, because most of the top bloggers I know are now using Macs...

Mac Classic was a Designer's OS (before it choked around 7.x). It was never a Geek's OS though, back then a Geek OS would have been Unix or OS/2.

OS X became a Geek OS. That alone would not have given it great influence, however. In the old days, the days when Ziff-Davis ruled and BYTE was suffocated, the trade media was fully advertising controlled. You read what advertisers liked. Ok, what Microsoft liked.

Then came the blog. The Geek could Speak.

Since Geeks have a compulsion to Speak, they (mostly) did it for free. Sometimes Geek Speak solves problems, so readers came along.

Ziff-Davis is almost gone now, killed first by the web then by blogs. I miss BYTE, I don't miss Z-D.

It's the combination of being a Geek OS and blog enabled Geek Speak that has given OS X such influence. So much influence that a non-OS X product will suffer way out of proportion to OS X market share. Developers seeing this realize that even if only 15% of their users will be on OS X, they have not choice but to deploy early on OS X.

Which increases the value of OS X.

It would be good if Apple understood this. Maybe they do. OS X 10.6 sounds like it's very much a Geek release ... (smaller, faster, less buggy, more cores ...)

Another wonder drug bites the dust - try to remember this.

We were told Avastin would be a wonder drug. A breakthrough. It would cure nasty cancers. Time, Newsweek, all the usual suspects loved Avastin. Turns out, it's just a good drug that's also incredibly expensive ...

Costly Cancer Drug Offers Hope, but Also a Dilemma - Series - NYTimes.com...

...Avastin, made by Genentech, is a wonder drug. Approved for patients with advanced lung, colon or breast cancer, it cuts off tumors’ blood supply, an idea that has tantalized science for decades. And despite its price, which can reach $100,000 a year, Avastin has become one of the most popular cancer drugs in the world, with sales last year of about $3.5 billion, $2.3 billion of that in the United States...

...But there is another side to Avastin. Studies show the drug prolongs life by only a few months, if that. And some newer studies suggest the drug might be less effective against cancer than the Food and Drug Administration had understood when the agency approved its uses...

Every journalist who covers healthcare needs to keep two headlines stuck to their monitor. One should be about Avastatin the wonder drug, the other about Avastatin the good but very expensive drug.

The next time I read about a new wonder drug that will cure Cancer, or prevent Alzheimer's, I'll link to this post.

Wonder drugs do happen (biphosphonates for Paget's disease of the bone?), but they're like baseball superstars. You can spend an entire career playing AAA ball and only see one or two of 'em.

Update 7/8/08: My wife noticed I'd spelled Avastin - Avastatin. She thinks I'm suspicious of the wonder-drug statins, that maybe I still remember studies showing they don't seem to increase lifespan in patients without a history of MI ...

The downside of building IE into Windows

When Microsoft integrated IE into Windows, this was generally assumed to be a good technical move with the desirable side-effect of destroying Netscape.

I don't remember anyone pointing out that this would make it difficult to deploy rapid updates to IE driven by relentless attacks.

Even today, I haven't seen that pointed out. This writer almost has it, but he thinks the trouble is integration with Windows Update:

Still more reasons to avoid Internet Explorer | Defensive Computing - CNET News.com 

...Not only is the Firefox self-updating system well designed, it benefits from only having to update Firefox. Internet Explorer is updated as part of Windows Update and Microsoft Update and thus lives in a bigger more complicated, more intimidating system...

A much bigger challenge is that IE is part of the OS, not to mention vast corporate applications used by key Microsoft customers. Updating IE has the potential to break everything.

If IE were walled off from the OS, a distinct application, it might be easier for Microsoft to safely patch and update it.

I wonder if IE 8 will reverse the Windows integration of old.

If anyone mentioned the update challenges of OS integration in 1998 or thereabouts I really would love to know. That person would be frighteningly prescient.

The endowment effect, and other defects of human reason

In an article on the "endowment effect" (apparently hard coded in our genes) the Economist provides a nice list of our irrational features.

If I can keep this list in mind, maybe I can recognize the behaviors in myself, and adjust for them. Apparently successful professional traders learn to overcome to endowment bias ...

The endowment effect | It’s mine, I tell you | Economist.com:

... once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it—an observation first called “the endowment effect” about 28 years ago by Richard Thaler, who these days works at the University of Chicago. ...

... Other “irrational” phenomena include confirmation bias (searching for or interpreting information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions), the bandwagon effect (doing things because others do them) and framing problems (when the conclusion reached depends on the way the data are presented)...

Distributed processing of the universe - Hanny's voorwerp

A Dutch physics professor discovered an unusual astronomical object from the Galaxy Zoo

The "Zoo" is designed for human visual processing and classification of galaxies:

... With your help, we've been able to collect millions of classifications, with which to do science faster than we ever thought possible... From now on, if you classify galaxies on the ANALYSIS page, your classifications will continue to be recorded and will be part of the public release, but it won't be part of the first round of papers. Don't be alarmed if the galaxies are odd, this is part of the process of checking our results.

But we still need you! As part of our follow-up work, we need volunteers to review our set of possible merging galaxies. If you're already familiar with basic Galaxy Zoo analysis, click here to read the instructions and click here to take part. Galaxy Zoo 2 will go live in the near future featuring a much more detailed classification system, while further off we plan GalaxyZoo 3 with lots of exciting new data...

Most humans are very good at visual classification. This is a return to the original meaning of the word "computer" -- which was a human profession. (Hand calculating logarithm tables, for example.)

After 9/11 mention was made of using humans to view satellite and surveillance and look for "suspicious" images (tall one legged men, for one). Nothing came of that, but classifying galaxies is a happier alternative.

When you don't know why someone does something ...

When you don't know why someone does something, assume the result is the intent.

Ok, so this sounds pretty stupid.

Try it.

When someone does something that seems boneheaded or obstinate, and either they can't explain their behavior or their explanation isn't credible, try assuming the result is the intent.

Then work backwards to understand the actor.

If Obama is President ...

The media claims McCain is embarrassed by this stuff:

GOP convention button asks - ‘If Obama is president…will we still call it the White House?

I don't trust most of the mainstream media, but Rove/McCain might be worried that his people are showing their inner raving loon. Overt raving loonhood might, someday, conceivably, possibly, irritate the GOP's corporate constituency and worry media ad buyers. That would be bad for McCain's campaign.

Should be a fun campaign season. 

The three meanings of peak light sweet oil and praise for rational speculation

I'm sticking with my March declaration that I'd make my call on "peak sweet" August 1st.

It's still too soon for a non-insider to judge. We can only distinguish psychological speculation (a bubble) from concrete speculation (expectation of demand/supply constraint) by how long it lasts.

Still, Peak Oil of one sort or another is an increasingly popular meme. So I thought it might be worth pointing out that, even if we speak only of "sweet crude", that there are three sorts of Peak:

1. Absolute: someday, even with magical technologies, we will have extracted more than 50% of the "sweet crude" on earth. This is kind of irrelevant, since before then we might be using vacuum energy (joke) rather than oil. Or we might be huddling in caves, and not need much oil. Or we might be extinct. So this is uninteresting.
2. Market: Demand exceeds supply until prices rise to increase supply and reduce demand.
3. Market predictive: Rational expectation that #2 will occur within a meaningful timeline (5-10 years).

Speculation about the timing of #2 is the foundation for "market predictive peak sweet". This kind of speculation is the brains of the market; eliminating it would be like using a frontal lobotomy to simplify a difficult decision.

Eliminating the "psychological speculation" (bubble) would be like getting a alcoholic on the wagon. That would be a good thing, but hard to do.

My August call will be about whether we're in the "Market predictive" variety of Peak Sweet Oil.

PS. It always bears repeating that Peak Sweet is a disaster for global climate, since in the absence of a wicked carbon tax we'll burn coal like there's no tomorrow. Which there might not be, at least for our civilization.

CH's guide to the ultimate office chair.

Coding Horror: Investing in a Quality Programming Chair is a classically over-analyzed CH post.

I am in the market for a 1st rate office chair, so I'll be following this advice.