Steve Jobs

Becoming a "Mac Guy" has been one of the happier accidents of my life so far.

I had used them in childhood - memories of playing Oregon Trail, first on an Apple IIe and later on some of the earliest Power Macs, are vivid - but when our family finally got a computer it was a hand-me-down, and it ran MS-DOS. I familiarized myself with the operating system (and later, Windows) and in high school and into college I adopted the popular dissenting viewpoint regarding the Mac question: Macs were expensive, and they were weird, and only stupid idiots used them.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007, and I've just landed my first job in IT, albeit as a part-time student worker. Higher education being what it is, Macs were in abundance, and despite barely knowing the first thing about them (I didn't figure out how to install programs for weeks. Weeks.) I now had to work with them if I wanted my ten bucks an hour. And I needed that ten bucks an hour.

Over the next four years I amassed much knowledge of Macs, almost entirely through trial and error and vigorous, frequent Googling. This newfound expertise was instrumental in getting me a new job over this past summer. I can say without hyperbole that I owe a debt of gratitude to Apple for my current employment and the perks thereof, and to my profession I owe much of the experience and expertise I employ daily in writing about technology. That's the happy accident.

And that's just professionally. Even when I'm not working, I can't get by without my MacBook Air's low weight and high battery life. I depend on my iPhone all day long. I'm using Apple products for much of the time that I'm awake, and whatever you think about them or the company that makes them, they've had a visible and beneficial impact on our day-to-day lives. It's hard to deny the innovations they've made and the trends they've set, even if (perhaps especially if) you're a Windows die-hard or an Android fandroid.

No one person is responsible for any of these inventions: behind each of them is a dedicated and talented team of engineers; designers; programmers; marketers; laborers. But Steve Jobs, perhaps more than any working CEO today, contributed incalculably to the products his company makes. His fingerprints are all over every single one of them.

He died today, and that's really, truly a shame. Continue...

Sunday Reading: Mac OS X Lion Review

As you may or may not know, Apple released a new version of Mac OS X this week.

Doing an in-depth review is a bit outside of the scope of what we do here, but I wanted to make sure y'all knew what I thought, so if you've got time you should read the massive review of it that I helped write for Anandtech. A quote that sums it up:

"For those of you worried that Apple's "back to the Mac" marketing push would result in an OS X version that sacrifices functionality in favor of imported iOS features and reduced capability: those fears are, by and large, unfounded. The iOS-inspired functionality is mostly laid over top of a foundation that's more or less OS X as it has been since Leopard - a solid, mature and full-featured desktop operating system. 

That said, the usefulness of individual Lion features will likely come down to your individual needs and work patterns. Most should appreciate solid new features like Versions, the new Mail, and the much-needed enhancements to FileVault, but features like Launchpad and the UI overhauls of iCal and Address Book are of dubious benefit to users, and other heavily-promoted features like multitouch gestures and the Mac App Store are already available to Snow Leopard users. 

Even so, at $29, there is really no reason not to buy Lion..."

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Spotify is Here!

Before last week, you might have heard rumors of Spotify, the music streaming service that has taken Europe by storm. For the past couple of years, Americans have had to make do with vague stories of the Promised Land - a realm beyond the ocean where you could legally stream any track...for free! For those of us stuck toiling away in the United States, it was hard not to greet these tales with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is Spotify really all that great, or is this another case of our cultural inferiority complex?

Last week saw the long awaited debut of Spotify in the United States, and now we Americans can judge for ourselves. It's currently invite-only, but it's relatively easy to garner an invite (I got one in thirty seconds after a quick Google search led me to a Spotify promotion on the Coca-Cola website). And it turns out that our European counterparts were not wrong, and Spotify has a lot of promise. If it really takes off, it could conceivably change the way we listen to music in the same way Netflix changed the way we watched movies. 

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Google+ Impressions

Between moving and packing and unpacking and starting a new Real Life job, I'm afraid my presence around these parts will be sporadic at best this month. I'll still try to make something happen up here on Thursdays, though.

Today: a loose collection of off-the-cuff thoughts on Google+, Google's newest stab at the whole social networking thing.

The Good:

• My very, very first impression of Google+ was that this is sort of what Facebook was like back when it started - streamlined, uncluttered and filled mostly with people I know and the people they know. Where Facebook has become a den of aunts and People You Knew From High School, Google+ still has that exclusive-new-thing vibe that so many people like. I mean, part of that is probably because of its semi-closed beta status, but still...
• Google's minimalist interface is hit-or-miss depending on the product: it works for Gmail, where a long list of chronologically-sorted items makes the most sense, but it works less well for Google Docs or Google Buzz, which dump a bunch of information on you stream-of-consciousness-style with too few effective ways to sort it. In Google+, the simplicity and the open white space on the pages work mostly in the service's favor.
• Google+'s "circles" give you convenient ways to group your friends and control what they can and can't see, getting over that age-old social networking bugaboo of staying connected with both personal and professional contacts using the same profile. Many of the other privacy controls in Google+ exist in Facebook, but are often obfuscated.
• Integration with other Google services makes it easy to bring in media and find people, depending on how deeply you (and they) are invested in Google services.

The bad:

• Social networking sites thrive on interpersonal interactions, and frankly there just aren't that many people on Google+ to interact with (though the few who are are generally pretty active users). It's early days yet, but Google will need to capitalize quickly on its early, um, buzz to build and maintain a userbase.
• While finding people and associating Google-hosted pictures and videos is pretty easy if you and your friends use Google stuff all the time, there's no automated way to pull in media and information from the other social networking sites that you're almost assuredly using already. If the point here is to chip away at Facebook's dominance (and that's got to be at least part of it), you need to make it as easy as possible for Facebook users to make the jump.
• Don't fool yourself: Big companies don't care about your feelings. Google may not be as openly apathetic about user privacy as is Facebook, but the company is collecting information from and about you all the time. Their "don't be evil" mantra is famous and oft-repeated, but they're a huge company built mostly on advertising revenues, and in pursuing those revenues they're bound to be at least a little evil, inadvertently or otherwise. To those of you looking to flee Facebook in exchange for better privacy, Google+ may scratch that itch, but only to a point.

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What's the Deal With CPUs?

Welcome, friends, to another episode of Andrew Explains Stuff To You. This week, our topic is processors! Computer processors, I mean, not food processors or word processors - this week I'm all about the Pentiums.

Computer processors are mysterious things. They have to be relatively efficient at processing everything from typing to streaming video to image editing to gaming, and they've got to keep getting better at it while also consuming less electricity and taking up less space. This all ties into something called Moore's Law, which you should totally read about.

While the fundamental architecture of a given computer's Central Processing Unit is the same now as it was three decades ago, its efficiency has increased dramatically, and what's coming down the pike is only going to change it more drastically. This is going to enable all of the tiny, speedy computers that you'll all be buying in the next few years, and this post is all about what's enabling that technology.

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Ultrabooks: The Future of Netbooks

Netbooks, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

First off, you're exactly as slow as balls. Like, exactly. That's because you all use identical, anemic Intel Atom processors, slow-spinning cut-cost hard drives, and a mere 1 GB of RAM. Just because Windows will run on you doesn't mean that it should - in fact, part of the reason the netbook experience is so bad is that Windows 7 was, at its heart, designed for computers with more oomph.

But, netbooks, it's not just your wimpy internal hardware that makes me cringe: it's also that you're so damn cheap. Not, like, cheap in price, which we'll talk about later, but cheap in construction, all flimsy plastic chassis and bad, washed-out screens, and cramped keyboards are the order of the day.

Netbooks, as originally conceived, were about running a simple OS designed to check email and browse the Internet, while maintaining good battery life. Netbooks, as executed, are disappointing, cheap, hard-to-recommend little machines that try to do everything a PC can do and fail miserably and only last for a few hours while they're doing it.

The failure of netbooks as they are shouldn't distract us from the real market demand for a computer that does what the netbook set out to do - deliver the essentials of the computing experience in a small, lightweight form factor with good battery life. Enter Intel's Ultrabook, which aims to be just such a product.

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LulzSec – The Lulz-Focused Hacktivist Successor to Anonymous

Shh. No, really. Quiet down. If anyone finds out I’m writing this, this website may cease to exist – for a few hours, anyway.

I want to talk to you about LulzSec. Yes, that LulzSec. Shhh! If they hear us, they’ll shut us down. They’ll use their network of botnets and whatever-the-hell-else-they-use to slam the site with traffic. They’ll find our phone numbers and unleash outdated auto-dialing machines to tie up our phones like that episode of The Simpsons.

Why? Why would they deliberately screw with strangers on the Internet, potentially damaging digital commerce and divulging private information?

For the lulz.

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Life-ification of Games: Facial Recognition in L.A. Noire

In the recent past we've seen a rise in the "Gamification" of various aspects of our digital life. Developers of websites, mobile apps, and computer programs have begun appealing to our natural inclination to accomplish objectives in pursuit of some goal or achievement in an attempt to make mundane tasks, such as filling out a list or completing a survey, more enjoyable. The idea is to make people associate certain products with gameplay rather than tedious work, so that people return to said products with more frequency and with a better attitude.

Foursquare lets you earn achievements and titles. LinkedIn provides you with a progress bar, tracking the completion of your profile. All over the Internet, we're seeing creative applications of every gaming mechanic except the boss fight. But how have games themselves reacted to the gamification craze? Some games have further gamified themselves, turning the mirror inward onto additional mini-games and rewards (such as Mortal Kombat's system of virtual currency). Others, like L.A. Noire, have taken the completely opposite path and decided to "life-ify" their game.

In order to progress through the story of L.A. Noire, your character (an LAPD detective in 1947) has to interrogate suspects and determine whether they are lying or telling the truth based only on their responses and subtle facial cues. The game is able to accomplish this feat with absolutely stunning and state-of-the-art software created by Australian company Depth Analysis, and put to use by game developer Team Bondi. But what this technology does is make your success in the game contingent not upon your gaming skills, but on your real-life conversation skills.

A novel idea, to be sure. But what does it mean for the gaming community when Gamification and Life-ification start to converge to a single point?

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Acting Unnatural – Technological Changes to an Old Art Form

I work in theatre. Yes, that’s r-e not e-r. I often spend time inside of theaters, but when I’m talking about the craft/industry as a whole I use the r-e spelling.

I’m primarily a director, though I’ve done my share of collegiate acting. Even in my young career, I’ve worked with a lot of actors. I like them (for the most part). Whenever I’m pondering my career choice or plotting out my approach to a given play, I hold one truth as my organizing principle: theatre needs actors.

That sounds a little too intuitive to warrant mantra-like repetition, so let me explain. Theatre does not exist without the actor. A beautifully painted, cleverly designed, artfully constructed set is a failure if it does not support the actor, his character, and his conflict with the other players onstage. The relationship between the audience and the performer is integral to a play’s success.

In other media, the actor’s role is often defined by the technology used. It often feels like film brings the audience remarkably close to the actors, but there’s no denying that there’s a lens, a machine, a cinematographer, an editor, and a director between us and the performer. Then there’s animation – be it for movies, TV, or videogames – which cherry picks the tools of the actor most salient to the project, often valuing the voice above all others.

Advances in technology are changing the way storytellers use actors, as well as how audiences appreciate them. There’s a parallel to be made with the advent of gas and electric lighting, the invention of motion pictures, etc. But the changes here are so drastic they bear investigation.

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Streaming Music is the Next Big Thing

Time has nearly forgotten the Old Days when you'd buy recorded music on a flat, round platter and stick it in your Victrola to get your fix. These days, the kids are all about putting together N3P mix tapes, putting them on their iPods, and dancing all around. You know, unless you're one of those Vinyl-Has-A-Richer-Sound assholes.

Just as we'd gotten used to hitting up iTunes instead of the Virgin Megastore, along comes an even newer new: streaming music. I'm not talking about Pandora, though it and other Internet radio stations certainly should have a place in any music-listener's diet - I'm talking about on-demand audio streaming, the kind that replaces the storage capacity of your iPod with storage capacity on someone's server somewhere.

The theory is that online music stores will now keep track of the songs you've purchased online and allow you to listen to any of it, anywhere, from any device. This gadget-agnostic idea is another blow for fans of media that is in some way tangible, but it makes a lot of sense for users of Internet-enabled devices where extra storage capacity comes at a premium.

There are three major players in this field at present (well, more or less, keeping in mind that it's still early days): Google with their Music Beta, Amazon with their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, and Apple, with vague rumors of a product that hasn't actually been announced yet but is probably real and probably called iCloud.

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Everything's Coming Up Google: Android and Chrome at Google I/O

There's been quite a bit of new coming out of Google I/O (Google's developer conference) this week, and a lot of it is pretty damn noteworthy, whether or not you're a user of the Android operating system or the Chrome web browser.

With some simple hardware and software, Google is planning on fighting both Apple and Microsoft on multiple fronts: the company's Chrome OS is targeted toward light-use Windows machines, Android continues to poke iOS with a pretty big stick, and Google is very much knocking on the doors of businesses (who like Microsoft products) and educational institutions (who like Apple products). Let's check out some of the stuff they're selling.

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The Twitter News Network

The ever-present news story this week (you know, the one about that guy the U.S. has been in search of for a decade) has me thinking about the way we get out news. Almost as central to the story itself was the way the news spread. So how do I really get my news? Yes, I listen to NPR in the mornings while shaving (it's my "me time," thankyouverymuch), and sure, my personal choice in the Big Four is NBC, but where do I really get my news from first? Sad to say: Twitter.

Let me tell you my "Where Were You When Osama Died" story, in an effort to illustrate. I was working at my restaurant that fateful night. The bartender, a "seasoned vet" of the industry, came running over. He spun on me, his crackling voice tight with excitement, "Did you hear? One of the guys at the bar said they found Osama! Shot him down, too!" Knowing our bar crowd to be a proud and boastful lot I dismissed this story at first. Then I thought to check Twitter. Let me reiterate: My home base for fact checking is now a social media website. Sure enough, my feed was full of the news and Osama was a trending topic. Why didn't I turn one of the TV's to CNN? Why didn't I ask the cooks to turn the radio to NPR for a second (well, because I would have lost a finger to their butcher's knife)? Why, oh why, did I turn to Twitter?

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Netflix To Offer Original Programming

Raise your hand if you have a Netflix subscription. Given this site's target audience, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of you are sitting at your desks or on your couches right now, hands upraised, suddenly aware that every eye in the room is on you.

Not content to kill the dated Blockbuster Video model by sending DVDs straight to your house, Netflix is now hoping to succeed in creating original, Internet-only content that it can stream directly to subscribers. The company is perhaps the first with the infrastructure, business model, and subscriber base to make this feasible - in its most recent earnings call, Netflix claimed to have 22.8 million subscribers in the US and an additonal 800,000 in Canada, for a combined total of 23.6 million. As some sites have noted, this makes it larger than any US cable provider (Comcast, the largest of those, claims 22.8 million subscribers).

I can't really say anything about the show itself (a David Fincher-Kevin Spacey drama called House of Cards, based on a BBC miniseries and book of the same name), but I can talk a bit about the implications, both good and bad, of this move. Put your hand down, and I'll meet you after the jump.

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Bad at Science: Particles, Teleportation and Aliens!

I’m beginning to love science. I used to loathe it. I had a biology class that was way above my head in high school and I decided from then on that science was for people other than or smarter than me. How foolish! I still don’t get very much of what’s going on in the scientific community, but I’ve begun watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on Netflix (it’s on instant, why aren’t you watching it right now!?) and I’m hooked. I’ve got the companion book, I picked up an illustrated version of A Brief History of Time and I’m ready to learn.

It has me thinking that I’ve been hating on science all my life for no good reason. If a teacher in my high school would have just popped an episode of Cosmos on in ninth grade, who knows what my life would be like now. I’m trying to understand the scientific world, and I know we’ve got smarter people doing it better on this site, but for now you’re stuck with me. And two big (or, interesting at least) science stories popped earlier this week, and I’m going to try and explain them with no knowledge of the scientific mechanics behind them. Sound good?

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Windows 8: What's Next for Windows?

A couple weeks back, I did a piece on the next version of Mac OS X and what it was set to bring to the platform. Now, I want to cover the other 90% of the world's computer users and talk about what's next for Windows.

This will involve a bit more mystery and conjecture than the OS X preview, not because Microsoft has suddenly become as secretive as Apple but because Windows 8 is at least a year and a half away at this point, and as such most of what we know about it has either come from Microsoft shills who don't understand how "marketing" works or dubious Russian websites that aren't exactly known for their fact-checking.

That being said, as far as I can tell Windows 8 is shaping up to be quite the release. Let's have a look.

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Mac OS X 10.7: What's Next for OS X?

Much like Apple itself, I write a bunch about iOS for this site, but not a ton about Mac OS X. That's for a reason, really; iOS is still a relatively new product, and Apple is still harvesting some low-hanging fruit and bringing major new features to it on a regular basis. Mac OS X, on the other hand, has been a reliable workhorse for most of the last decade, and major new features have been few and far between since the 10.4 release really finalized the then-fledgling OS in 2005.

For version 10.7 (codenamed Lion and due out at some point this summer), though, Apple has made a conscious effort to improve Mac OS X in meaningful ways, chiefly by tightening the integration between the solid Mac platform and the new-and-exciting-but-still-limited-in-some-frustrating-ways iOS platform. I'm here, as always, to tell you the features you need to get excited about, and why you should be excited about them.

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Opting Out of Opting Out: The Latest Round in the Google Books Saga

There's a lot of long-running legal cases currently trickling through our judicial system. The recent health care law gets the most press, but there's also the possibility of an AT&T and T-Mobile merger, which would have to be approved by the federal government. 

Google Books isn't as politically volatile as health care, nor is it as sexy as smart phones and data networks. But the recent opinion delivered by district court judge Denny Chin is perhaps just as important in the long-term. Nominally, the ruling is about Google's desire to create an all-inclusive digital library. But the conversation also touches on the United States' arcane copyright law, the supposed "freedom" of information, and the implications of a commercial company pursuing a supposedly humanitarian project. 

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The AT&T/T-Mobile Buyout: Whoever Wins, We Lose

Nestled in between New York Times headlines about Libya and Japan (Donate!) this weekend, so small you'd almost miss it, was an unrelated story: AT&T announced its intentions to buy T-Mobile for an estimated $39 billion.

This buyout, if it gets past government regulators, would make AT&T the country's largest wireless provider by a fair margin, and would shrink the number of companies with serious national coverage to just three: AT&T, Verizon, and an increasingly tiny-looking Sprint. Most other wireless providers are regional at best, and they're so far outgunned by the larger companies that they can't hope to compete on the national stage.

I've got plenty of opinions on both Libya and Japan, but as we're not a "new millennium humanitarian crisis" blog, I'll have to content myself with writing about the lesser of these three stories.

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iOS 4.3 Review

Sup dudes.

I'm on my way to New Orleans later today, so no time for a big post about Mario or Internet Explorer or whatever - I'm taking the lazy man's way out and linking to another something I wrote over at Anandtech last week - a review of iOS 4.3, the latest incremental update to Apple's phone and tablet operating system from last summer.

I've previously reviewed the major iOS 4 versions for this site - 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and ancillary pieces about travelling with my iPhone and the Verizon version of Apple's handset.

iOS 4.3 brings a few nifty improvements, most prominent among them increased browsing speed in Safari, but it's not available for everyone. iOS 4 originally cut off owners of the original iPhone and first-generation iPod Touch from receiving updates, and iOS 4.3 adds the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod Touch to that list.

Anyway, enjoy the review! I'm off to enjoy a much-needed vacation. Continue...

Ding Dong! The Zune is Dead

That’s right, Microsoft is axing its Zune music and video player. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Microsoft has no plans to introduce new versions of the device due to lack of demand.

Microsoft released the Zune in 2006, attempting to claim a share of the mp3 player market with its song-sharing features and non-click wheel interface. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy buying iPods to care. Microsoft tried again in 2009 with the Zune HD, which was generally well-received but failed to compete successfully with the iPod Touch.

The Zune brand, however, is still alive and vaguely kicking. Microsoft rolled the Zune software into its Windows Phone 7, and “Zune” remains the name of Microsoft’s music/video marketplace on the Xbox 360. The company said in an email statement to Bloomberg, “Our long-term strategy focuses on the strength of the entire Zune ecosystem across Microsoft platforms.”

Does anyone else find the phrase “Zune ecosystem” amusing?

If you’re one of the five people who own a Zune, you needn’t worry. Microsoft will continue to support and sell its current devices – that is, until it comes up with another nonsense-named device to replace the Windows Phone 7.

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