BunkBlog

Fans of the unfortunately-named iPad got another piece of bad news today: Netflix won’t be on it.

So, not only can’t you get any Flash-based web sites (um, most streaming video including Hulu), you also can’t get Netflix (the biggest streaming video supplier).  I know Apple really likes having their own little walled garden, but this is getting silly.

Apple finally announced their much-anticipated tablet computer yesterday, and I still can’t quite figure out what the market is for this device. I’ve spent many hours working on various small computing platforms, and many more hours ruminating over what usage model the tablet computer world is looking for.

I’m one of those strange people who don’t have a cell phone.  It’s not that I don’t see how convenient they could be. I just don’t have a reason to own one. I can’t take it to work (security-crazed high-tech area that forbids almost every piece of 21st-century personal technology), my commute is less than 15 minutes, and I don’t really spend much time on the phone to begin with. Not to mention, cell reception in this town, based on calls I’ve experienced, is sucky at best.

But, even without a cell phone, I’ve been using lots of small computing devices. I had a Palm III, a Sony Clie, and I currently have a Nokia N770.  My beautiful bride has a netbook (also known as the Netflixbook).  I also have my home desktop computer and my homebrew DVR, for non-portable computing devices.  I’ve owned a computer since 1980, and I think I understand how people use them and for what purposes.  But I’m absolutely mystified by where a mass market for a tablet is, at least for something that costs more than $200. I didn’t even buy the N770 until it was clearanced for under 150, because I couldn’t justify the expense of a $300 portable to myself.

Let’s see what the iPad brings, compared to Kat’s netbook (an Asus Eee 1000HE):

• The iPad has wifi 802.11n.  So does the Eee.
• The iPad has a 9.7″ screen, at 1024×768. The Eee is 10″ and 1024×600.
• The iPad has 16-64 GB of solid-state storage. The Eee has 160 GB of hard drive space.
• The iPad weighs 1.6 pounds; the Eee is 3 pounds.
• The iPad runs its own special version of the iPod OS, and only works with programs from the App store (or jailbroken eventually I’m sure). The Eee runs Windows XP, with all that it implies.
• The iPad has 10 hours of hyped battery life. The Eee has 9 hours of hyped battery life. The realities are always different from the marketing, but usually assume 70% of hype for real life.
• The iPad has no keyboard. Eee – keyboard.
• The iPad has available 3G data for an extra $130 and monthly fees. Eee has similar capabilies available (we don’t use 3G any more than we use voice cellular service).
• The iPad will display multimedia and ePub books, but not Flash apps. Eee can do all that AND Flash.
• The iPad has no camera. Eee has a webcam.
• The iPad has no USB ports. Eee has three.
• The iPad has no VGA connector nor Ethernet nor any other standard ports. Eee – yep, got ’em.
• The iPad can’t multitask with non-Apple applications. Eee – yay for multitasking.
• The iPad costs $500 for 16gb and no 3G, up to $830 for 64gb and 3G.  The Eee cost under $350.

I’m sorry. I don’t know who wants these besides fanboys. It runs the same OS as the iPhone, but doesn’t have a camera or the ability to make voice calls. It costs more than an iPod Touch or a netbook, but the only thing it seems to bring to the table is a big screen for your iPod. The reason tablet PCs haven’t taken off, even though Microsoft and others have been trying for ten years, is because they are a solution to a problem very few people have.  For the “vertical market” segment, tablets are big business; that market itself isn’t all that large, but it’s a niche and it can be exploited by standard Windows or custom Linux machines. It isn’t likely to be broken into by a giant iPod, and it certainly seems the iPad isn’t aimed at professional markets but at consumers. Consumers with an extra 700 bucks for a device with a very constrained media-consumption experience. I’ve been amazed at a few things over the years, and if the first-generation iPad is a huge success for Apple, it’ll be another one of those things.

All that said, if someone comes out with a cheap handheld computer with keyboard an a real OS, I’m buying it.  Obviously, I’m not Apple’s market. But, who is?

Thank you, California, for finally diverting some of the “oh no they didn’t” attention from Texas. Menifee, a town in Riverside County, has decided to pull the Webster Collegiate Dictionary from their school library, because it has definitions of terms like “oral sex” and the poor children just can’t handle such things. Seriously, didn’t everyone flip through the dictionary looking for dirty words, just because you could? Our children are not so delicate and easily bruised, people!

Is Menifee in the 909?

Kat and I thought they should have tried to get some of these into the broadcast.

Conan O’Brien is right – the Tonight Show isn’t the Tonight Show if it’s actually tomorrow morning.

A student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee was walking home from work when four men pulled him into an alley and forced him to lie face-down with a gun to his neck. They took everything from his pockets, but when the gang leader looked in the victim’s wallet and saw an Army Reserve ID card, he told his accomplices to give him his stuff back. “The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me and he actually apologized,” the unidentified 21-year-old victim said. “The leader of the group actually walked back [and] gave me a quick fist bump.” Police note that 10 minutes later, the gang robbed another man, who had a Department of Corrections inmate ID in his wallet. They didn’t give him his wallet back.

When I’m on a road trip, or even just going to the park with The Boy, I grab a bottle of soda from a convenience store. I know that the fountain drinks are cheaper per ounce, but I justify this by telling myself I don’t actually need a half-gallon of any drink, and they seem to taste funny at times. There was this Arby’s my coworkers and I went to in Arizona – I’m sure the Mountain Dew was laced with some sort of detergent there.

Anyway, there is now a study which makes me glad I’ve been avoiding fountain drinks: they’re laced with bacteria. 48% have some form of coliform bacteria in the beverages. So, I’ll just keep getting my bottle of Vault and leave the e.coli for someone else. Ew.

2010. The year we make contact. Or not. Let’s see if I can beat 80% accuracy in this year’s predictions.

1. Tablet PCs will continue to be something which almost nobody has heard of or cares about.
2. President Obama will continue to be vilified by the Right as some sort of mythical evil being.
3. The GOP will make some gains in the 2010 midterm elections.
4. The US economy will improve enough that even people who watch Faux News have to admit it, although they will claim it’s improving despite anything that President Obama or the Democrats have done.
5. There still won’t be a good crypto system that the public uses, despite ever-increasing threats from man-in-the-middle attacks.
6. All the various ebook readers will continue to be incompatible with each other.
7. Sarah Palin won’t go away.
8. TSA flight restrictions will cause the airline industry to lose money.
9. And, of course, the weather will continue to be remarkable, which will still not mean anything to denialists.
10. Kat and I will still not fight.

I know, many predictions are just “things won’t change” – but they should change, and I’ll be happy if I’m wrong about them. We’ll see how that goes.

Apple Blue Beer

Eighteen workstations wasn’t enough for the boss, no sirree. I’ve now chalked up 23 workstation installs in the past two weeks. You’d think I was some sort of computer geek or something.

One year ago, I made a series of 10 predictions for the new year.  Let’s see how I did.

1. The right wing noise machine did find new and interesting ways to make themselves look silly while calling the new president a socialist, a communist, a nazi, and a racist – all at the same time. If President Obama were on fire, the GOP would call fire departments a socialist plot, as John Scalzi wrote this week.
2. Windows 7 did not save the computer industry.
3. Netbooks were a bit easier to find than I feared, so there’s one point against me. To be fair, the good netbooks were harder to get hold of, so maybe half a point.
4. Yep, suck.
5. No single sign-on system of any note, although Facebook is getting a lot of headway into “sign in with Facebook” on various sites.  Maybe we’ll count this as half and half.
6. No crypto.
7. DTV changeover was, although delayed yet again until June of 2009, not a crazy display of incompetence and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Got this one wrong.
8. Politicians continued to line their pockets by picking ours, and gave as much largesse to their corporate overlords as possible. Sadly, I got this one right.
9. Weather was much remarked upon. Denialists continued to deny reality. Climatologists turned out to sometimes be jerks, but that overshadowed that the science continues to be reinforced with evidence.
10. Kit dropped me from her “LJ Friends” list after 9 years (no idea why), so I have no idea how amusing she is.

Let’s see, that gives me 6 of 10 completely right, 2 partly right, one completely wrong, and one I can no longer assess, so I can’t use it for any statistics. We’ll call it 7-2 or 78% accurate. I’m sure that beats all the “psychics” out there.  Now, what shall I predict for 2010? Stay tuned.

A few years ago, I had a coworker who routinely burned microwave popcorn. I don’t miss him much. I do wonder, though, if it would have been better if he’d been burning bacon-flavored popcorn instead. Is everything really better with bacon? Is it?

This is just crazy – the past three days, I’ve been working all day long. This is just unacceptable; my boss is crazy to think I can keep up this kind of pace. Next he’ll expect me to accurately report my work hours.

Seriously, I’ve installed Red Hat on 18 machines in the past three days, and some of them have CPUs propelled by gerbils. Painful.

Why did I just see Deepak Chopra, a licensed physician who spends most of his time promulgating disproven medical treatments, speaking on economics during a CNN special?  What the…

This is a great video. You should watch it in HD, and full-screen and ogle at the wondrousness.

After listening to Orgy’s “Santa’s Creepy Secret” this morning, this comic seemed appropriate.

In order to complete the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, the Obama administration has proposed moving any “too dangerous to release but somehow we have no evidence of a crime” prisoners to Thomson Prison in Illinois. Because Congress forbade the Executive branch from using any funds to release prisoners in the United States, they’ll just keep them locked up forever.

Many people found it extremely distasteful that the Bush administration went through such lengths to find a location which was outside any jurisdiction in Guantanamo. Gitmo is not in the USA, so domestic laws don’t apply, but it’s not under Cuban jurisdiction either, so nobody rules there except by force of arms. Now, the great hope for change has proposed moving that extra-legal jurisdiction to the United States mainland. How can there be any justification for keeping dozens of prisoners under indefinite detention within our country? Gitmo was a stretch. Illinois is just venal political bullshit.

Change you can believe in.

Apparently Congress doesn’t have anything useful to do, so a subcommittee found time to debate whether the NCAA can call someone a “National Champion” if they haven’t gone through an elimination-style playoff.  Really?  This is something which is so important that the United States Congress must intervene?  People are stupid.

I have, over the years, frequently pointed out that most of the world’s great philosophical and religious movements can be boiled down to one phrase: Don’t be a dick.  Glad to see someone agrees with me.