Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for March, 2008
Friday, March 28th, 2008
What they found is that, contrary to popular belief that Apple makes more secure products, Apple lags behind in patching.
“Apple was below 20 [unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure] consistently before 2005,” Frei said. “Since then, they are very often above. So if you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.” ^
Apple’s vaunted security originates in two pillars: the UNIX kernel of its operating system, which others coded and tested for 30 years before Apple touched it, and the relatively scarcity of Macs. As that second pillar changes, so will the perception of Apple security, especially as we the consumers find that Apple has been relying on this perception to avoid fixing many of the bugs in not only its operating system but its software fundamentals.
In many ways, Apple has had the benefit of being smaller and having less public scrutiny allow it an advantage when competing with Microsoft. Now that these shields are stripped away, the criticism is mounting. This is the same dilemma that faced open source software developers who steadfastly refused to update some parts of their popular software. They were OK until they hit a tipping point, then suddenly, they faced a howling dervish of complaint.
Miller, best known as one of the researchers who first hacked Apple’s iPhone last year, didn’t take much time. Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest’s organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. ^
In a security contest, the Mac gets pwnt before the PC. However, this had to happen through a browser exploit. What this means is that the basics of both systems are fairly solid. It’s only since 1999 that most Americans have been using always-on connections, which caused the security crisis of botnets and trojan horses to become a serious game, and it’s only since 2004 or so that Microsoft has really faced that howling dervish. They’re starting to get it right.
As with many techno-memes, what people chatter about online is often wrong or gives a skewed view of the reality. People who attempt radical brand loyalty, especially to an underdog company, are damaging to the market because they deny basic facts and so allow them to go unfixed. Whether that company is Apple, Microsoft, or pizza-munching volunteer developers, remains irrelevant.
Posted in Computer Security | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
I was stunned and angry when I saw Apple Software Update pop up on her PC last week. There were no updates for iTunes or QuickTime, the two Apple programs I installed for her. Instead, using the same mechanism that delivers security updates, Apple Software Update was offering Safari 3.1 for Windows, with the check box obligingly selected and the Install button awaiting her click.
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Companies that deliver network-connected software that contains potential security vulnerabilities have a responsibility to offer regular updates to repair those issues. The right way to do it involves these four principles
* Opt-in is the only way. The update process should be completely opt-in. The option to deliver software should never be preselected for the user.
* Offer full disclosure. The software company has a responsibility to fully disclose what its software does, and the customer should make the opt-in decision only after being given complete details about how the update process works.
* Offer updates only. Updates should be just that. They should apply only to software that the customer has already chosen to install.
* Don’t mix updates. Updates that are not critical should be delivered through a separate mechanism. ^
Every time this issue comes up, someone starts a petition for a user bill of rights. Since “rights” are mostly imaginary notions that by their uncompromising nature conflict with almost everything else, I don’t think that’s an optimal solution, but for all people who want to succeed in marketing, I think “treat the user right” is a mandatory dictum.
What Apple did was deceptive. In a format reserved for updates, normally, it inserted an entirely different software package. Users are accustomed to being able to recognize this screen, click, and move on. They do that because installing software is one of ten thousand things they’d like to do today, and if not the least exciting, darn close.
What enables them to click is that they have invested trust in the company making the product. True, we can always say “The user should check everything they install on their computer,” but that’s not realistic. It’s like asking you to check your car for bombs each time you leave home. You trust it will work.
I have always admired Apple’s visual design and interface design, and simultaneously loathed the way they use that ability as a justification for a supremacist, elitist, snotty class warfare attitude. “Oh, you’re using a PC? Do you live in a trailer and wear overalls?”
I have also found it disturbing that Apple, like an abusive husband, lures people into this weird cult of feeling better than trailer-dwelling, overall-wearing citizens. It then abuses them, and they accept this as part of the privilege of being an Apple user. A strange, ugly, sick cult indeed.
Posted in Interaction Design, Management Science | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself.
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When people post an article on a blog these days, the conversations are occurring offsite. The blog link could be submitted to Digg, Mixx, and/or FriendFeed, and conversations may occur around the topic on those sites instead. The original blog post, meanwhile, has 0 comments.
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If no one is commenting on the blog, will the blog lose readers? Will the blog lose traffic? ^
A look at history demystifies this situation. (I’ve taken the liberty of deleting social commentary and leaving hard fact in the above excerpt.)
Blogs were, around 1996-1999 or so, a rarity because they were mostly personal avatars. I credit Jorn Barger for having taken the blog in a new direction. Robot Wisdom is every part of the news media fused together: news stories, human interest, science and society with an eye for stuff outside the Britney and flag waving that characterizes CNN.com, for example.
Now, blogs are commonplace, with just about every business having one. I encourage this among my clients. There’s no easier way to post information than the short, informal, quasi-journalistic blurbs of a blog.
However, now that there are so many blogs, the aggregators like Slashdot, Digg and social networks are what rule because there are very few blogs with all the information one wants in one place. It used to be that you read four newspapers and distilled the results in conversation; now you read 12 blogs through your RSS aggregator.
How the blogosphere will adapt is going to be interesting. I think that, much as Twitter functions as an aggregator, more blogs will start to exist as link posts where a dozen or more sources are summarized daily with minimal comment. Maybe Twitter and blogging will fuse as the ultimate short information blurb — a half-paragraph plus link. Whatever the case, it’s a change in blogging brought about by the success of blogging itself.
Posted in Information Technology, Meme Trafficking | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
There’s two competing paradigms that are going to define the market for the future: web-based Software as a Service (SaaS), and its nemesis, old software industry styled computing as a service (CaaS).
 SaaS relies on you buying the OS or installing a free one, ditto for browser, and then using your applications online. Problems include: portability of your data, privacy, control of your data and its removal, the unreliablity of internet connections, and the unreliablity of browsers. Advantages: it’s free, no IT department controls it, and someone else updates it. Google is the champion of this paradigm.
CaaS takes the current computing paradigm, in which you buy a computer, buy or download an OS or software, and maintain it yourself (or have an IT department do it if your business is big enough) and makes it subscription based. Somewhat realistically, it insists on this being a pay service, which as the internet ad bonanza begins to fade, seems sensible. Problems include: what happens if you don’t keep up your subscription, unreliability of network software delivery, large companies like MSFT having knowledge of what’s on your computer. Advantages: your software stays current, you can buy additional software and services from a trusted vendor, you know what your patch level is. Old software — MSFT, Adobe, even Apple — are the champions of this paradigm.
My suggestion is a hybrid form of the CaaS model: people own software they buy, but subscriptions keep it up to date, and OS vendors like Microsoft sell software by other vendors in the subscription form. This will require MSFT make a pledge to ignore piracy, but that’s a sensible vision anyway. HCaaS — hybrid CaaS — as I define it fits into the new media model:
The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don’t go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don’t let people who aren’t your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor’s strategy, although the execution is different. Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose. ^
It’s a bigger win for the customers and software companies alike. The customers get what they always have, and then the ability to keep software alive via subscription, making it cheaper to update and reducing the per-year cost over a five-year period. The software companies gain a long tail advantage, which is that they can sell additional services and software, including ones they did not create. That’s the ultimate marketing win: take a cut for doing next to nothing.
Microsoft could expand into a software marketplace that tracks subscriptions, and makes backup/restore points it stores in an Iron Mountain-style backup system. When your computer goes down, and you put in a new hard drive, you go to one web site and log in with one password, and download and re-install all of your software, both free and paid, in one gesture. Maybe they charge you for bandwidth. Compared to the hours restoring software from backups, is it significant?
We’re seeing a consolidation of the market now because everyone now owns a computer, and they’re all powerful enough to not need upgrading. Instead, the software battle becomes a fight waged from the position of dominance. Now that we’ve standardized, we need to find out which software works well and repulses viruses the best. Software companies are scrambling to respond, and these two paradigms are the general theories they’re using to wage such warfare.
Posted in Information Technology | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
The music industry evokes the image of a boomerang passing gently through the pillars of a colonnade, always missing its target, but always returning to its odd circular path.
First, the industry decided to deny that in the coming digital age it would be even easier to copy music than home taping in the 1970s. After wasting years on anti-MP3 FUD, they finally drew iron on file sharers and tried to demonize them as a cross between hackers, criminals and freeloaders.
They missed the point in that they’ve given it to Americans for years with high prices and insubstantial content, so Americans have no “moral qualms” about stealing their material when it becomes convenient to do so. In fact, there’s no moral imperative anywhere here: if we all steal all music and movies, and the entertainment industry collapses, society will move on. Music and movies are not necessary for life.
 So recently the superannuated hipsters of the music industry have been playing with their computers more, trying to figure out this online distribution thing, and they’ve made some positive steps. First they ditched the copy protection schemes that thwarted innocent users more than malicious ones, who can always output the raw signal and re-sample it as a worst case scenario. Now, they’re trying to make buddy deals with Apple and others to sell music on a subscription basis.
The idea behind this subscription stuff is borrowed from the Canadians, who realized they couldn’t catch all the file sharers, so instead it made sense to slap a five buck monthly surcharge on every ISP account to pay the record labels. The Americans, who are less than the Canadians worried about making everyone pay for everyone else, have improved the model. Those who want to participate in the cultural void of American pop music and movies can choose to buy a subscription on a monthly basis, or pay a higher price for an iPod with one attached, and then they can download the full catalog if they want.
When all the dust settles, we’ll see this for what it really is: radio over IP. We had radio for many years, but when CDs began to be sold used as well, people no longer had as much need for it. The publishing base expanded tenfold, and all these indie labels pitched their wares into the pile too, so people started reading up on what they wanted and using that as their buying guide. Now radio is returning over our new communications medium which conveniently appeared last decade. Ta-da!
My hope is that these free subscriptions will allow podcasting, and so return to us the last real advantage of radio, which is having informed DJs who can research their form of hip and bring it to us as a whole package for sampling. The listener buys what he or she hears that’s good, and the DJ gets to have fun making sonic sculptures out of different works.
It could be quite a positive turn to an otherwise fairly stupid procession of stumbles from a dying industry.
Posted in Information Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
WIRED speaks the utter truth about the one positive factor regarding Apple Computers:
Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. ^
 Steve Jobs can be a jerk, but he’s a messianic fascist, a petite dictator with one goal: to unite design and function. While weak on the technical end, in terms of interface and industrial design his products are excellence: they look beautiful and fit easily into the hand or click of the mouse.
Some of us will never buy Apple because of the flip side of his company, which is its inability to pursue a consistent strategy, and the sheer dishonesty of it all. A computer isn’t a lifestyle. Apple isn’t a philosophy. Rather, as this article points out, it’s a reversion to the management thinking of 100 years ago:
Over the past 100 years, management theory has followed a smooth trajectory, from enslavement to empowerment. The 20th century began with Taylorism — engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion that workers are interchangeable cogs — but with every decade came a new philosophy, each advocating that more power be passed down the chain of command to division managers, group leaders, and workers themselves.
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Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager.
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But Jobs’ employees remain devoted. That’s because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God.
A completely well-designed product inspires faith. That faith inspires a sense of mission. Mission goals make people agree to work together because of mutual need. With this mutual need, they are able to cut out the busywork that takes up most of each office day and become far more productive by being more effective.
On the consumer end, Apple builds a brand like no computer company has recently. While I will argue that much of it is illusion owing to numerous technical missteps and betrayal of certain core audiences, it’s undeniable that for the average computer buyer Apple connotes reliability in the same way Mercedes did fifteen years ago.
Says Palo Alto venture capitalist Jean-Louis Gasse, a former Apple executive who once worked with Jobs: “Democracies don’t make great products. You need a competent tyrant.” ^
While the fascistic attributes of Jobs/AAPL are daunting, there’s no denying that two factors influence Apple’s success. First is the idea that employees don’t need empowerment as much as they need strong leadership, because strong leadership stays on task and eventually finds a strategy. Second is the idea that products cannot be produced by committee: somewhere, there needs to be a bottleneck where all aspects of design — interface, appearance, technical and marketing — are unified.
Posted in Branding, Industrial Design, Management Science | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company. “It’s funny — even if I write a generally positive piece about Apple, I still get more complaints from Apple partisans” than from opponents, Mossberg says. He has even coined a term for the effect. “I call it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.”
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On issues we’re passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable, Ross explains. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side’s arguments, it stings.
“If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it’s partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,” Ross says. ^
This article is from Farhad Manjoo, whose new book “argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called ‘objective reality.’” His point is that people polarize themselves, become partisan, and so find anything that does not agree one hundred percent with their views to be from the “other” that opposes them.
It often seems to me like society is breaking up into different special interest groups (SIGs) like a workshop at a conference.
You meet people, even the ones you marry or befriend for life, through your interests. Your interests are under assault by a myriad of marketing and social pressures, because everyone else wants you to see it their way. So you get a tough skin, filter out the other stuff, and focus on what you want.
At some point, you’re unable to see anything but that.
I wonder if this is similar to criminals who seem to think they will never get caught for outrageous and frequently transparent schemes. It’s an interesting development to watch, and seems to correlate to what Tom Wolfe calls the fiction absolute.
The fiction absolute is the idea that, whatever life we’re leading, it’s the best that it can be. Heck, we all need some kind of bedtime reassurances from whatever metaphorical parents or gods we have, saying that we’re on the right path and everything is going to be all right. But at some point, we might be sealing ourselves off from other experience.
Posted in Psychology | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Judging by the photos and Tech Corner’s writeup, the laptop is about 10-inches in size with a 9-inch screen, under 3 pounds, has 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD and standard internet connections.
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Tech Corner claims the Netbook uses a 900 MHz Celeron processor and would sell for around $400. This contradicts reports that the upcoming Netbooks would be using the Intel Atom Diamondville processor and fall between the $250-$300 price range. ^
The Ultra Mobile Personal Computer (UMPC) market is heating up ever since the Asus Eee enhanced the idea of the Palm Foleo (or, for that matter, Alphasmart Dana) and made this nifty, light, clean-looking, phone-like portable with mostly full size keyboard and monitor. Intel’s latest, the NetBook, misses the mark.
Setting full steam for failure, this device ignores the basic principle of industrial design: a tool’s success can be measured in terms of how easily it adapts to its use. In other words, what do they users want to do that motivates them to buy one product over another? In the case of UMPCs, they want simple, fast, hassle-less access to a few basic applications (web, mail, word processing).
Intel takes another tack, which is to assume that people want a miniaturized laptop. This is a classic mistake made by someone who finds a way to describe what they see others doing, and by doing so, creates a category which has nothing to do with its actual use. We can describe the Asus Eee as a miniature laptop, but that does not describe its actual function, which is more like a portable web/text platform.
The Intel Netbook is ugly like one of the cheap Dell or HP laptops, it’s heavy, and it seems to carry with it the interface weight of a normal machine. I think it’s a 180 degree miss that these corporate superstars have embarked upon here. The genius of the Asus Eee is that you unfold it like a phone, it comes up quickly, and for the few tasks that 90% of laptops do anyway, it’s painless and then you fold it up and put it away. You can stick it in your purse (or “man-bag”).
What makes the Asus Eee succeed is that it’s an appliance, not a computer. It doesn’t carry with it the baggage of trying to be everything that a big computer is, but smaller. It embraces its limitations. The positive tradeoff is that it becomes simple to use and maintain and people love its flexibility within the narrow range of tasks actually needed.
With UMPCs, it’s tempting to categorize them as classroom machines like the OLPC, but the real story here is that they are machines for a highly mobile group of people who are increasingly tired of maintaining computers. They have a big one at the office, and it gets upgraded every three years. They may have an older one at home. But their time is in high demand, and what they need to do outside of the office is very simple.
They also like their portability. I’m sorry, but unpacking cables and plugging in is not portability, nor is adding a three-to-five pound component with its own bag and accessories. People want minitops to be like their cell phones: slip it in your bag, plug it in once a day, use it in short bursts. They don’t need a desktop replacement.
There’s a market out there for these devices, but so far only the Asus Eee and MSI Wind appear to have a chance in (insert morbid afterlife place here) of meeting the demand. The difference is in realistic, aesthetically pleasing industrial design.
Posted in Industrial Design, Information Technology | No Comments »
Monday, March 17th, 2008
I think it’s good we take a good long hard look at what we’re calling literature these days and if it enhances our lives less than quality ice cream, chuck it out the window and start over. No one has the time for hollow lit, whether they know it or not.
|
submitted |
published |
| water |
19.9% |
24.8% |
| death |
14.1% |
15.2% |
| blood |
11.7% |
13.8% |
| stone |
11.1% |
16.0% |
| bone |
9.1% |
7.8% |
| poetry |
7.6% |
10.3% |
| heart |
7.5% |
6.7% |
| fish |
7.0% |
5.3% |
| birth |
5.5% |
7.4% |
| darkness |
3.9% |
17.0% |
| rust |
3.3% |
2.5% |
| cat |
2.3% |
2.8% |
^
The poor editors at the Virginia Quarterly Review just went through their poetry submissions and found that cliche trumps a lack thereof as far as getting published goes. While I think it’s vain to be totally afraid of cliche, generally its presence means a regurgitation of tired topics that no one really wants to read. As one commenter said:
The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.
Which may explain why it is a
dead
art form,
Practiced by many
but read by none. ^
On the nose!
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
Friday, March 14th, 2008
Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity. ^
It tears us up, how we rush. Someone we recognize as an authority, or as representing our target audience, tells us something is important, so we add it to the list and mechanically run through each item every day if we can.
I think this comes from the feeling of unpredictability to a modern world. We don’t know what the right thing to do is, as pagans “suckled in a creed outworn” were able to do. There’s no real unifying principle to the modern world. We earn money to live, and we find a place to live, and food, and insurance, and a car, and then what?
Back to the usual agenda: live, breed, die. But in this modern world, we find it hard to have a center. It’s not like being in the Army, where there’s a clear goal, or in prison, where the lack of goal substitutes for a goal. What’s the point? People often ask. They want a Lord of the Rings style quest.
Multitasking is not the latest of the many fads that attempt to convince us we can handle this overload. About two years ago it hit required buzzword status on the job application boards. Few stopped to question whether it wasn’t better to make more choices about what is important, and so have fewer things to do, and to do them better.
It’s like we’re trying to do everything because we lack a singular goal and so we’re trying to cover all our bases. From a psychological standpoint, it’s silliness.
 Individuals, like businesses, benefit from having mission statements. These mission statements are summaries of a series of related goals, and so you don’t have to make them laundry lists. “Be a good person,” for example, might include being a moral citizen, having a family, being well-rounded, earning a good living for that family, recycling.
Too often, managers are skittish and scared, and so become neurotic like housewives in movies from the 80s, and so can’t make a decision so end up trying to do everything at top speed. The result is chaos.
In your average office, you can see this mentality most clearly in the refrigerator. Almost all of them have signs that say “We throw out everything on Friday,” but in reality, this never happens until someone complains there’s a stinker in back. They are like a geological record of who went to eat where, who was too busy for the sandwich she bought, what excess soft drinks are floating around, the condiments left over from one or more all-nighters.
In the office fridge, as in life, people haven’t slowed down to figure out what they’re actually doing. They throw stuff onto the pile, and move on, because something else has distracted them. They are distracted because they are overloaded and so everything that comes to them is newly a crisis. Other people are also in this crisis mode and hand things along without thinking. Soon we’re just shifting piles of junk around from one desk to another.
But now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks.
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Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs’ expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. “I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it.” ^
A good manager fixes this by cutting responsibilities and projects, if even arbitrarily. You might end up axing something necessary and having to rebuild, but then you can do so in a focused, non-neurotic environment. For a long time, managers were afraid to make these cuts because of the myth of multi-tasking, which supposed that the most productive employee was simultaneously on the phone, taking notes, updating the company web site and sending out meeting alerts on his or her BlackBerry.
It’s good to see the press attack this fallacy.
Image from MethCola
Posted in Management Science | 1 Comment »
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