The fabled Google Android? It is entirely the piece of junk one ought to expect from a development process driven by committees and steered by non-creative minds. And it appears that many would-be buyers know it. — Stanislav Datskovskiy’s in Non-Apple’s Mistake
This is the single best (and short) essay I’ve read on the current state of computing that wasn’t written by John Gruber.
What’s really interesting is the author’s clarification about the fact that he “loathes Apple products”. In a conversation with George Kokoris yesterday I got a somewhat similar impression from his stance on Apple. Oddly, the design, focus and aptitude as tools that Apple products have is completely coherent with people like George who still feel compelled to keep them at a distance.
Datskovskiy also says this (as a MacBook Air owner):
Edit:
A number of people linking here seem to think that I like Apple or forgive its sins (as if Apple needs my forgiveness.) This is a mistake. I loathe Apple products, and chafe under the straightjacket of their aesthetic whenever I use one. I simply happen to despise their competition that much more. At least Apple has an aesthetic. Its works, however flawed, are the works of a person, rather than an amorphous blob.
I argue that this straightjacket that Datskovskiy describes is vital for creative minds. Freedom is of course the ideal of many Makers, but I think it’s often their worse enemy. I take fiction as an example. As a kid I fucking despised all those rules that forced me to stick to an idea per paragraph, I didn’t understand why poets were torturing themselves with rhyme schemes and extreme concision, I thought TV shows should never end or that episodes should run longer than 45 minutes. But these iron bars are often there for good reason. To keep you focused, to have you think about substance, and stop obsessing about form.
In the world of computers the best highly subjective anecdote I have is my own dad. He started “building” computers in the 1990’s with Compaqs. The only problem is that Compaqs weren’t supposed to be built. They were supposed to work somewhat out of the box. Yet tinkering wasn’t an option (and you could tell) it was an obligation. And my dad got so much into the habit of opening up the box to fix whatever was wrong with hardware or software that he spent more time disassembling his computers than actually doing what he thought a computer would actually help him do when he started.
His focus shifted so much than aside from his day job I don’t think my dad ever did anything substantial with his home computers in 15 years. The best example of this, is that now that he doesn’t have to fuck around with DOS to get Windows 3.11, 95, 98 or Me to work without, it seems that my dad doesn’t really know how to use a computer. He knows how they work, he knows the parts, but he forgot the purpose.
PS: If you think what I mean “trains run on time in a dictatorship”, fuck off.
Posted in Unsorted | 2 Comments »avr 16 2010
To the estate of Ernesto “Che” Guevara,
I represent the Association of Dictators, Warlords and Other Mass Murderers of America (heretofore refferred to as “ADWOMMA”) and would like to license the likeness for Ernesto “Che” Guevara (hereby referred to as “Murderer”) for exclusive use on a series of highly original fashion items such as t-shirts, baseball hats, headbands and hoodies.
While we do not expect these items to remain on the market for longer than a season considering the inherent contradiction between Murderer’s philosophical convictions and those of our prospective clients we reserve the right to extend our usage and reproduction rights in perpetuity based on the market reaction to our product.
Murderer’s likeness will be plastered on as many of ADWOMMA’s products as possible. We wish to use the “rebellious” and “anti-establishment” notions associated with Murderer’s face and name (which, in fact, may be used on the products) while hoping our customers will remain blissfully ignorant of all the pain and suffering Murderer has caused (to his credit) on generations of compatriots.
Although Murderer may have objected to our proceedings during his lifetime since we recall he didn’t acknowledge the existence of “private property”, the usage we will make of his likeness will be of a commercial nature. We intend to produce items including but not limited to the ones described and proceed to resell licenses to these products to other manufacturers around the world in the (unlikely) event that they become profitable.
As compensation, we offer to pretend the values of Murderer still have any relevance in our modern (i.e. non-barbaric) society. We considered offering monies but ultimately decided against it with the understanding that such a proposition would be an insult to Murderer’s memory and legacy.
Very sincerely,
Olivier Lacan
sales@adwomma.org
PS: written for an intellectual property and law class I was taking yesterday.
Posted in Serious Stuff | No Comments »mar 5 2010
Note: This post is a work in progress. It had to get out of my system. Please bear with me and apologies for the weird syntax, digressions and general half-assedness.
I don’t have respect for James Cameron simply because he directed The Terminator. I didn’t see this movie and its sequel until late in my teens therefore the technological superiority didn’t make it a better or more entertaining story. For everyone who still has fond memories of the original Terminator movie, I urge you to go and see it now. See how badly it has aged, how dated it is, and how it relies too heavily on action and effects to prop up a clumsy story.
Sure at the time it was one of the few forays of modern cinema into time travel, but boy was it a bad one. I won’t go into details, unless someone cares to contradict me in the comments, which I invite you to.
Then there’s Aliens, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s original effort. And sadly I don’t remember it enough to have an opinion. True Lies is a good movie, not an original work since it was a (good) remake of the french spy movie La Totale. Then the ocean liner in the room, Titanic. Far from his best movie, it’s still a solid story and a very good excuse to see Kate Winslet naked.
After Titanic and before Dark Angel, his TV project (don’t get me started), rumors about his next movie project leaked out. As Wikipedia tells it best:
“Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote a 114-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, “technology needed to catch up” with his vision of the film”
Talking about technology brings me back to what I think is the most interesting (if not the most accomplished) movie of Cameron’s career, The Abyss. As his underwater documentary adventures following Titanic and the flora on Pandora have shown, the guy’s more than a little passionate about sea things and ocean stuff. From the bull-shark-nosed rhinoceros to the concentric flowers that retract on touch the world of Pandora is rich with nods to underwater Earth creatures. It was a very classic story of scientists Vs. soldiers, involved a misunderstood otherworldly creature and revolved around an ultimatum against mankind because it has been destroying its environment. Remind you of anything?
The Abyss is an old movie, its effects are surely not as shiny as Avatar’s. But it sure was awe-inspiring the first time around. The characters weren’t incredibly complex, they were archetypes. They were suited to the story.
Out of World, Out of Body
A few months ago I was listening to the leading skeptic podcast on the intertubes — The Skeptics Guide to the Universe — and they were discussing what skeptics dream about, where lies their hopes for the future. 90% of them, despite having thoroughly debunked silly claims of Alien abduction explained that they wished we could discover and/or meet Alien life on other planets in the Universe. Better yet, they all thought this was very likely.
Science gives a high probability to the existence of life given the vastness of the universe. Unlike what is said in most holy books the Universe didn’t conspire to create on Earth an environment for Humans to strive, circumstances were simply (quite an understatement) so. Life is possible, but how about humanoid life? Relatable life? Give our millions of years of evolution and the billions of variables that influenced how we look and function nowadays, this is also probable, but less so. Unless another planet in the Universe has very similar gravity, atmosphere, fauna, minerals, water ratio, distance to a sun, etc. Unless many of these factors correlate, it is likely that alien life will be exactly this — Alien.
What I don’t know and always wonder about is how different humanoids can be, how wide the wiggle room is for something to walk on two legs, breathe, see, hear, think and reproduce. Can they many color or instead of a skin, fur? Can they have more or less limbs without making their survival too unlikely in the long term? In other words, are we highly optimized humanoids in the way we are today, or is there still room for difference and improvement, beyond size and skin color?
The other topic the skeptics touched on was future technology. Some of them were especially fond of life extension technology. Having one’s body frozen until a cure is found for whatever disease you died of, but most importantly if a cure for aging is found. But there also are problems with freezing. Cryogenics is a destructive method for conservation. Apparently our cells are a little more complex than bread.
There is a better way though, and Avatar explores it a little bit. The Internet is one of the greatest if not the greatest invention in my lifetime. Simply think of whatever you do in a week and then imagine yourself doing it without using the internet at all. No emails, no Skype, no Amazon, no podcasts, no downloadable music, TV, movies, no online schoolwork, no weather except for TV and radio bulletins, messy paper maps. These are but a few things the Internet has changed forever, and for the better. Pandora’s flora is very similar to our Internet. It’s a huge network, it creates value out of connectivity and also creates a global memory.
In Avatar, a human being is placed inside a very comfortable box and a mesh of receptors is placed over on top of the human. Then, the human’s brain is “synchronized” with the brain of a compatible host (the Human-Na’vi hybrids) which look almost exactly like the local inhabitants of the planet save for minor details like smell and the number of fingers (5 instead of 4). Once the link is established, only three things can break it: waking up the human driver, killing him, or killing the avatar.
While driving on Paris’s “Peripherique”, a circular highway that surrounds France’s capital, I realized what had resonated so much with me in Jake’s discovery of Pandora. This is going to seem silly, but two years ago, thanks to a very dear friend of mine I went to Florida for the first time. What this conjures up in your mind is surely visions of concrete hotels, Disney characters parading around and old jewish seniors have a good old time in squeaquy clean private residences. To me it was much more than that. I arrived there with barely any expectations, my only experiences of the US had been fleeting and I had never seen it through the “natives’” eyes.
What I mean by this is that I had never lived as an American lives inside his own city. I had been a tourist in New York City, albeit an adventurous one. And my first time in this part of the continent had been the most memorable road trip of my entire life, on the West Coast from Los Angeles to San Fransisco via the Mojave Desert, Monument Valley, Bryce Cannyon and the great wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. I had two very extreme visions of life there, the Urban jungle, and its wild counterpart. But despite having met quite a few characters on the road, I had never actually “gone native”.
My first time in Florida was just that. Someone who has now become a very good friend took me around and showed me everything she thought I should see, as I had taken her through the streets of Paris at night the previous summer. She and her friends and family showed me parks, restaurants, lakes, schools, stores. Places that tourist see and others they ignore completely. This place had the best of both worlds, rich wilderness just across the road from most houses and vibrant urban life, although a very different definition of Urban from that of New York City, a much less dense and intrusive one. I remember the last of the seven days I was there in November 2007 because on the way to the airport I was again noticing how the colors were all too bright, how the sun had this light that we only get to see in the few best days of Summer in France, and never again till 8 months later. On that last day I was standing outside the airport, I put on my headphones, listened to Your Hand in Mine by Explosions in the Sky, and I cried. At the time I wasn’t sure exactly why I was crying. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back. Go back to a life I see today on the Peripherique while I type this. A life of grey, a life of others having a say before I do, a life without legs.
Now if you’ve seen the movie you surely understand what I refer too. I’m not one to assign clear significance to themes and subtext in movies or books. This is a job for circlejerking literature teachers who like to give definite meaning to things that most authors didn’t intend to. But this is my main argument in favor of Avatar’s story. Of course it is a mashup of myths, legends, and other modern stories. A short list would include Pocahontas & John Smith, the massacre of the Indian population of America, Colonial wars, the Gulf Wars, and quite a few more you might have in mind. Some critics of Avatar’s story point this out as if it were uncommon, I invite them to take a course in any culture’s literature to discover how silly a contention point this is. Authors from all eras have used existing myths and incorporated them in their own stories to create what is referred to in literature as intertextuality. In plain english it’s simply a way to make stories resonate not just on a single level, but with all the stories one might have heard or read before this one.
Bring People In
The first time I saw Avatar it was presented after a trailer for The Clash of the Titans with Sam Worthington (Jake Sully in Avatar) playing a demi-god fighting against the Greek gods and monsters as Hercules in Homer’s myths. This helped me grasp exactly how well Cameron had written his main character. Demi-god in Greek myths were surely there to help the mere mortals reading or hearing the stories to identify with people like Hercules. Sure they have incredible strength and much more dangerous in-laws than most people, but they also lead human lives, with wives and children. In some ways, they are like us, which helps us see the story through their eyes.
In Avatar’s first trailer, which was shown before District 9 last summer in the US, there wasn’t a single shot revealing that the hero of the story was paraplegic. I can understand why it was decided to omit this important fact. Maybe to surprise the audience, or to simplify the trailer. But I think this explains some of the negative reactions to this trailer, especially since the rest of it consisted of too many different shots of diverse (and some really crucial) scenes of the movie. It was too fast, to confused and never achieved the feeling of awe that the discovery of this new world does in the film. While still containing too many shots of the movie, the second trailer was much better handled. First it included some original score, instead of tension inducing “action” sound cues, but most importantly it showed Sully in a wheelchair, vulnerable. It also showed faces reacting to Pandora and Michelle Rodriguez’s character Trudy Chacon saying “You should see your faces”. The music included tribal voices, there was an establishment of stakes: natives with arrows and flying birds against helicopters and mechanical suits with heavy weapons. And as such, many people I know and with which I discussed my lack of interest for the movie (hard to believe, eh?) agreed with me that this second trailer was a big improvement and actually peaked our common interests.
The Good Savage
One of the worst concepts to ever come out of French philosophy is Rousseau’s Good Savage myth. Being a bit of an explorer, Rousseau discovered primitive tribes in remote parts of the world, and concluded hastily that their primitive state and simplicity proved that civilization had corrupted mankind and made them become liars, thieves and murderers. Of course he didn’t notice that the tribes he was marveling about had been in constant tribal wars since times immemorial or that mortality (especially in children) was incredibly high. He was one of the first to experience of what was dubbed The White Man’s Burden, a misplaced guilt created by the incredible contrast between modern (wealth, health, peace) and primitive (poverty, sickness, war) societies.
Gaia Killers
Talking to my iPhone on the way home after the movie I said that I didn’t care about the point of the movie — the morale of the story. I also recognized that you could care, just like you could care about the somewhat cynical view of humanity in Pixar’s Wall-E. But just like any good story, what comes second is what the artist thinks, his worldview. What comes first, is plot. The journey the characters take takes precedences over the “educating” message. After having seen the movie again, I want to qualify this, since there is one important scene in the movie when the message almost overtakes the story.
When Jake Sully returns on the wings of the “Last Shadow” (the mythical bird that is on top of the food chain in the skies of Pandora) and rallies the Omaticaya people together telling them that they need to join forces with the other Na’vi clans on Pandora against the RDA paramilitary forces. Except that isn’t what he does. He rallies them against the “sky people” (i.e. the Humans) who “destroyed their mother”. It’s a quick point in the movie and it has some dramatic relevance I think. More importantly, this is James Cameron’s universe, and if in his universe he decides that the Humans’ neglect of the Earth caused its destruction and the disappearance of “the green”, then fine. It’s his story.
But while respecting the author’s vision of his story, I can decide that with this over-simplistic and naive comment on ecology, I will ignore anything else he has to say on the subject and concentrate on his story instead. Thankfully, I don’t think there is any other occasion in the movie when the parallel is quite so heavy handed.
Posted in Neurons | 2 Comments »fév 5 2010
Gowalla’s been evolving these past few weeks. First there was the introduction of the Incase challenge with several real items (such as sleeves, bags and other accessories) that could be won at Apple Stores when you received the virtual icons and tweeted about your checkin, then the User-created Trips — a much requested feature — were introduced tentatively in a somewhat sandboxed mode and finally at the begining of this week Gowalla for iPhone 1.4 hit the App Store with several game enhancements and user interface improvements. I’d like to linger on the latter first.
Gowalla for iPhone 1.4
This release was dubbed minor by the Gowalla team but there were some very interesting — if subtle — modifications included. First there was an obvious nod to the beautiful “slide and release” refresh system Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 2 uses. Previously you had to go back up one level and back to refresh a list of spots for instance, which was really inefficient. Now if you slide downward when at the top of the Spot list, the interface will follow your finger and a the Gowalla kangaroo will pop out to signal a refresh. If you slide back down, nothing happens. If you instead release upon seing the kangaroo, a refresh is launched to display a more up-to-date list. Anyone who whined about the iPad being just a bigger iPod Touch (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) this week won’t notice or care, the rest of us will see it as the crucial experience improvement that it is.
Drive-By Gowalling
In an upcoming post I will discuss more in-depth the two major game dynamics one can decide to adopt towards Gowalla, but in this 1.4 update a clear step was taken to limit the excesses of one of them.
The Scavenger Hunting aspect of Gowalla is a very satisfying but unsustainable way to play the game. It basically implies you will try to checkin (and maybe found) as many spots as you can not because you actually went — and stayed — somewhere, but because you want to accumulate items in the hopes of finding spots with rare item. You can either receive rare items at certain spots (upon checkin) or swap an exiting item in your pack with a rare item that was previously dropped (by a founder) or swapped by a visitor.
Previously, this way of playing was made easier by the fact that as soon as you checked in somewhere you would be prompted to drop an item to become a founder and would be able to see directly what items were currently at this location.
1.4 changed that and now you are taken to the Spot Details tab instead of the Spot Items tab. And to see a spot’s items and eventually drop an item to become a founder, you now have to take an additional step by tapping the Items tab.
This may seem very subtle, but it suddenly makes it a little more tedious, time and attention-consuming to swap items and found a spot. Which might be good news for the people who worried about hordes of Gowalling drivers out there becoming a worse scourge than serial texters.
Challenges, Trips and Friends
The Trips interface was also refined slightly prior to 1.4 with the addition of My Trips and Friend Trips. Currently the only user-created trips you can see are those of your friends (as in people you added on Gowalla) and your own. Team Gowalla explained that depending on the popularity of these trips they will selectively (good) feature some of them as actual trips with custom Gowalla-made icons. A very nice community touch if you ask me and again a good way to use crowd-sourcing with an editorial touch.
There is another new category (I believe) in the Trips page, it’s called Challenges and used to be bundled with real trips.
Challenges are different than trip and correspond more to the Scavenger Hunt side of the game. You can unlock these with quantity-based achievements rather than checking in a specific spots. For instance you become a Wayfarer as soon as you checkin at 250 different spots. I listed these in a previous post. There are more exotic challenges (like Code Monkey and Get Out With Incase) but generally it’s an underdeveloped feature of Gowalla that could welcome some more original ideas.
Posted in Neurons | No Comments »fév 3 2010
