May Contain Nuts

I am so so so so so SO tired of Obama’s bizarre insistence that the people in charge on the other side of the aisle are even remotely sane. The people who already know there’s nothing to be gained (and SO much to be lost) from ongoing capitulation to Republican demands are just utterly sick of watching it happen over and over again, and he’s not going to win over anyone else by keeping it up.

The Republicans in government don’t give a flying fuck about jobs, or poor people, or old people, or the sick, or the hungry, or the young, or the underprivileged, or the disenfranchised. They haven’t passed a single jobs bill since the election. Instead, they live in a fantasy reality where everyone could afford gold-plated health insurance if they weren’t so damn lazy, scary immigrants have taken every job in the country, gay people are destroying families and the military, the unemployed are (again) lazy, mooching slobs, and a secret Muslim socialist fascist nazi foreigner lives in the white house. They believe we can solve the debt crisis they’ve manufactured by dismantling Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, WIC food stamps, children’s literacy programs, the national parks, NASA, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education… but NEVER by taking ONE FUCKING CENT from our IMPOSSIBLY MASSIVE war machine, or asking the 1% of people with more wealth than the other 90% of us COMBINED to do anything with all that money but SIT ON IT (ideally in offshore accounts so it can’t be taxed at all, of course).

The Republican party is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to control who you can marry. The power to force you to have your rapist’s child, to prevent you from voting, to keep you under the crushing thumb of your corporate employer, to stop you from getting an education, to bar you from getting health care because you’re poor. They sell a vision of success by rugged individualism, where everything would be fine if the government just stopped doing its job. But the cold, hard truth of the matter is that they don’t care about you. They want to be in charge, and anyone else’s success puts that in jeopardy. So the rugged, freedom-loving patriots in the Republican party pass laws banning abortion, banning gay marriage, barring gays from serving their country, requiring a photo ID to vote, making it harder to unionize in the workplace. They rail against immigrants heeding the call of Lady Liberty. They argue against giving you a decent minimum wage for your work. They decry the common decency of caring for the old, the sick, and the young when they cannot care for themselves. They demonize peaceful religions to feed their engine of fear and bloodlust. They mock the idea of sharing anything with anyone.

You can’t build a functioning society with 300 million rugged individuals all just looking out for themselves with an attitude of “I got mine, jack”. It’s a lie. That’s all it is: a lie. Because it’s the only way they can hold onto their power: by promising over and over again something they know they will never deliver, all the while distracting us from their broken promises with fear and division.

And the truly, truly maddening part of this whole nonsensical charade we call a government is that the Democrats have decided to buy into the Republican lie and follow it all the way down the rabbit hole. There is so much moral high ground being abandoned in the name of bipartisanship with a party that wants to do nothing but drive this country into the ground so that they can be heralded as its saviors come election time. The Republicans have been allowed to frame the debate in our corrupted “marketplace of ideas” for years now, where multinational companies interested in nothing but profit drown out the voices of the actual human beings who live and work here.

All of the brilliant accomplishments of this country, past and future, now stand utterly beyond our reach, because as a nation, we’ve stopped caring about each other and the rest of the world. We are reduced to arguing over how many lives we have to destroy so that the rich can swim in their oceans of money, and the military can destroy even more lives abroad. Is it any wonder nobody cares what happens in government anymore?

Passing this along from elsewhere on the internets…

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither. Pass it on.

Senator Ben Nelson asks:

“Who wants to go backward and tell 220,000 Nebraskans they can’t have health insurance? Who wants to deny young adults coverage on their parents’ plan? Who wants to deny children health insurance because they have pre-existing medical conditions?”

Um, that would be the Republicans, sir. 47 Republican senators voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act today. Zero (that’s zero with a 0, or perhaps 0 with a “zero”) Republicans voted against the repeal amendment.

On the subject of stupid, I should point out that this repeal amendment was being attached to a bill authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. Because that’s relevant (and to be fair, the amendment to repeal the widely-derided 1099 tax provision portion of the ACA was also attached to this bill by a Democrat, and was passed).

Knowing as much as I do (which admittedly still isn’t much) about how this works, I would expect to see this repeal amendment added to every bill Mitch McConnell reasonably expects he can get away with.

Notice, however, that while Republicans are SUPER EAGER to take away the protections and advances in availability and care that the ACA provides, they haven’t said a single word about what they actually plan to do once they get rid of it. They have no plan. Which makes their “repeal and replace” strategy sound more like a “repeal and then hope everyone just forgets about it” strategy. The ACA may not be perfect (though it is certainly better than the FUD and bullshittery from the right would imply), but it’s still a far sight better than what we had before, so let’s keep moving forward and stop trying to go backwards, shall we?

(I debated writing that as “repeal and replace” “strategy”, but I felt that the sarcasm quotes around strategy were ultimately unnecessary, damaged the flow of the sentence, and defeated the efficacy of the actual quotation marks around repeal and replace. We need more punctuation… maybe we could make little superscripted ‘S’es for sarcasm quotes! ^sstrategy^s!)

So a couple of weeks ago, I had a surprisingly rare problem with Windows Update: one of the updates failed to install. The few times this has happened in the past, a reboot and re-run of Windows Update fixed the problem by itself, but not this time.

Today I finally got tired of seeing the “Updates Available” badge in my system tray and decided to find a way to either get rid of the failed update or force it to actually install properly. Since my virtual machine at work is still running WIndows XP, this meant a trip to the Windows Update site in IE (ugh). The update history informed me that I had encountered error 0×80070003. Helpful, thanks. LMGTFY, Microsoft.

Google led me to this knowledge base article on Microsoft’s website. For those not interested in clicking the link, what it basically says is that Windows Update successfully downloaded and extracted the update in question, but that files were missing from the update which prevented its successful installation. I’m not sure how that even happens, but whatever.

What kills me about this whole thing is that Microsoft knows what went wrong here. Windows Update spat out a very specific error code (useless as it might be to the average computer user, and buried in such a way as to make finding it next to impossible for people who don’t know their way around Windows Update). Microsoft has a knowledge base article for this error. And yet, Windows Update has absolutely no idea what to do when this error occurs. This is lazy and shoddy programming, Microsoft.

Incidentally, the “Fix it for me” application totally failed at its designated responsibility, so I had to perform the manual fix steps in order to get Windows Update to realize that it needed to re-download the stupid update files before the installation would work. Incidentally, the manual fix steps are the functional equivalent of nuking the site from orbit; it destroys your entire update history to get around the problem. Again, this is lazy and shoddy programming, and it’s lazy and shoddy problem-solving to boot.

Here’s an idea for you, Microsoft: if an update fails to install, and you’ve recorded why it’s failed, and the reason it failed is because of this specific error, why not have Windows Update actually re-download the update automatically the next time it runs, rather than forcing me to wipe out my update history to force your stupid program to realize it needs to do something about the problem?

Grr…

No. BAD Apple. Bad. Stop taking design cues from Adobe.

Bad.

Seriously.

No.

Stop it.

Because Ars Technica doesn’t seem to understand what “back to the Mac” means (seriously, the number of iOS and iDevice mentions is mind-boggling), I decided to put together my own list of what I’d like to see, and what I expect to see (because the two don’t necessarily overlap) from their press event Wednesday. First though, I am super pleased that Apple’s finally actually getting around to making a big Mac-related announcement for once.

So, what do I think we’ll see Wednesday? Well, based on the event’s invitation graphic, I think it’s a pretty good bet we’re going to see some demos of OS X 10.7, which will presumably be termed OS X Lion. Updates to the iLife and iWork suites are likely candidates, and probably some new portable hardware updates since the laptop lineup is coming due for a revision. But that’s sort of an easy guess, so what, specifically, will we be getting?

OS X 10.7 Lion

I think Quicktime updates are a pretty certain bet for 10.7. Quicktime X is still pretty nacent, and doesn’t seem to have gotten any attention in 10.6.x updates. Considering Apple’s ongoing quest to sever all ties with old frameworks in their OSes, some expansions to the new Quicktime X framework are almost certainly a lock. I don’t think these will get much presentation time because this is a press event, not WWDC, but I do at least expect them to show up on one of Steve’s giant “word cloud” slides.

FaceTime support in iChat is practically a lock too, and something that could chew up a good bit of time with an unnecessary demonstration. Apple’s been pushing this hard on the iPhone, and perhaps even harder with their new iPod Touches, so it makes no sense for it to get left out of their next desktop OS. Reports that FaceTime supports a multiple caller flag seem to support this theory as well, since iChat has supported 4-way video chat for a while now, and I don’t think Apple would cut that out just to support their new video chat protocol. Additional IM protocol support in iChat would be nice to see as well, but I’m not exactly counting on it, nor am I really pinning my hopes to a serious overhaul of the application. I know a ton of people would love it if iChat supported Facebook Chat, but given Apple’s current rocky relationship with the One Social Network To Rule Them All, that may not happen for “political” reasons (also, I don’t use Facebook, so I don’t really care). I’m also an Adium junkie personally, so unless iChat suddenly does everything Adium does (including letting me turn off the speech bubble chat theme), I’m not exactly going to be clambering to put it back in my Dock.

There will probably be some iPadification of a few core apps, if Apple’s web services are anything to go by. MobileMe’s Mail and Calendar apps have both gotten UI overhauls to more closely relate them to the iPad apps, rather than the traditional OS X application look-and-feel. Given the explosion of growth and mindshare that iOS has provided the company, I think it’s perhaps only natural that the UI bleed back into the Mac a bit to provide a more consistent experience for users, particularly those getting into the Mac because of the iPhone or iPad. I must admit, a better iCal would be awesome, and Address Book could use some love, because I don’t think it’s seen a material update since 10.2. A UI revision on Mail is also probable, though if that doesn’t happen, I may switch over to Sparrow at home once it supports more than just Gmail, because I’m something of a fan of Loren Brichter’s Tweetie for Mac/Twitter for iPad UI, and the full-blown Mail.app UI exceeds what I need from my mail client at home (work is another story, obviously).

I’ve heard a coule people bring up the fabled UI overhaul for the OS in general that was supposed to happen in 10.6, but I don’t really buy it. Discounting the larger radio silence on OS X in general since Snow Leopard’s release, I haven’t heard anything UI-related for OS X since the rumors of an overhauled UI for Snow Leopard were making the rounds pre-release. Rumor mill aside, I don’t think even Apple is ballsy enough to totally revamp the OS interface just two cycles after totally revamping and unifying the UI for Leopard.

A file system change to ZFS is a remote possibility, but probably not going to happen since, last I heard, Apple had stopped development work on building it into the OS. Given that 10.7 has been totally off the radar so far though, it’s possible they’ve been doing a lot in extreme secrecy (alternatively, it’s possible that not a lot has been going on at all, given the comparatively small size of Apple’s OS engineering teams).

Hopefully someone at Valve has been able to put their boot sufficiently far up Apple’s ass to get them to take graphics performance seriously, and support more of OpenGL in the process. Game performance demos would make a pretty decent Stevenote demo, though Steve may be a bit gun shy after showcasing Bungie back in the day and having them get bought up by Microsoft.

On a similar note, given the increasing importance of resolution independence on iOS devices, it would be interesting to see some of that work get back-ported to the Mothership OS. Resolution independence is probably a ways off in OS X though, given the long backlog of legacy apps that would probably break rather terribly if it were used. iOS doesn’t have this problem as much (though it does a little) because the developer community is smaller, more agile, more involved, and the platform is new enough that not as many apps have had a chance to fall off the update wagon.

Beyond these, OS X is a markedly mature product, so I’m not sure how much newness can be crammed into a typically flashy Stevenote. There’s certainly plenty of polish needed around the OS, but that’s mostly technical niggling stuff, and not something I expect Steve to spend a whole lot of time on in his presentation. I’ll tell you what I’d like to see in the final OS, though…

• Better SMB networking. The Vista/Win7 machines on my home network never show up in Finder’s sidebar. Granted I can manually connect to them, but frankly that’s annoying. While HomeGroup support would be awesome strictly from an interop standpoint going forward, it’s not on my personal “must have” list since there’s only one Win7 box in the house, and it’s the one hooked to the TV that we use for Boxee and Firefox.
• Thread out accessing externally-mounted hard drives. I swear to god if I have to see my computer beachball one more time just because my external drive has fallen asleep…
• Improve the fault tolerance for mounted network shares. If the network drops, please re-mount my stuff when it comes back. Please. You can even disappear the mounts while the network is down, just bring them back when it comes up again. I feel like I’m talking to a hostage-taker…
• Stacks, the way they were demoed in Leopard during WWDC. Namely, being able to create a pile of files on the Dock that I can use to keep track of stuff in a project I’m working on without having to manually create folders for everything. If that doesn’t work, then how about treating docked smart folders just like any other docked folder, instead of just a shortcut?
• On that note, how about maybe cacheing Spotlight search results for smart folders so I don’t have to wait for the search to re-query when I open a saved search folder?

Huh. Maybe I’m more of a FTFF guy than I thought… though I think I may actually have a crush on Column View. Seriously, Microsoft, get on that. Explorer drives me nuts because it doesn’t have Column View.

iLife and iWork

I will be pleased, but not exactly shocked, if iLife and iWork make appearances tomorrow, if only because I think the Stevenote isn’t going to have much to say about OS X. Barring something earth-shattering nobody could have predicted, I’m not expecting a lot of detail there because this isn’t a developer conference. So, because I think Steve is going to need more to talk about, and because they’re due for an update anyway, I think iLife and iWork are likely to come up. This is more of a wishlist of stuff I’d like to see from Apple’s suites than a “this is what we’ll get”-list, because I haven’t really heard a thing about the new suites other than that they might be coming soon.

Everyone’s talking about iDVD getting pulled from the line-up, and I think that’s likely… Apple’s been moving to media-less distribution for a while now, and iDVD in iLife ’09 didn’t even get an update. I forget if it even got any new themes. It’s definitely the least-used of the apps in my personal usage (aside from iWeb, which I never use), and I don’t think there will be too many crying if it goes, however great it is for tossing together something to show to grandma (though blessedly, I didn’t have to teach her how to use the DVD remote ). It might get put up in its current state as a downloadable app on Apple’s website for the DVD aficionados though.

iMovie will, hopefully, get some more pro-ish updates and more flexibility to its bevy of filters and effects. I think Apple lucked out in the personal movie editor arena versus Windows Movie Maker, as both companies seemed to go for a full reboot of their software at about the same time. I think Microsoft may actually be a little ahead at this point, but I haven’t used Windows Live Movie Maker in its latest incarnation to know either way. In any case, a more expansive –and better-performing – iMovie would not go unwelcomed.

I’d like to see iPhoto pick up photo-stitching support. Windows Live Photo Gallery’s photo fuse feature is also nice, if a bit creepy for how easy it makes it to fabricate photos of moments that never actually happened (seriously, digital image editing is starting to creep me right the frak out). Still, nothing wrong with adopting useful features. I don’t think it will get any broader social networking support, since it already has Flickr and Facebook uploads, and doing something like TwitPic integration seems to be a bit counter to the spontaneous “on-the-go” nature of Twitter.

iWork needs better Office document compatibility. It just does. What’s there now kind of works, for the most part, but not for anything beyond the extreme basics. Pages and Numbers are great programs (I never need to use Keynote for anything), but Pages chokes on the Word document “screenshots” that get sent to me with text mark-up all over them on a nearly daily basis at work, and I had to rebuild our Excel timesheet spreadsheet almost from scratch because Numbers exploded all over the calculation formulas. Again, I think this may be one of those bullet points that gets tossed up but not really talked about during the presentation tomorrow, but it would still be good to see.

It’s possible that there may be some announcement regarding iWork.com, which was launched as a beta with iWork ’09, and has been floating around as an undiscussed feature ever since. There’s never been any announcement of a “final release” launch, or any discussion of pricing (because it’s not supposed to be free once it leaves the beta, whenever that is). The iWork apps on the iPad have picked up the ability to access it, but that’s about it. If nothing else it would be nice to know that Apple realizes the server is still plugged in.

Hardware

A new Macbook Air is almost certainly a lock, but possibly also spec bumps for the rest of the MacBook lineup. Rumor has the new Air coming in at 11″, with a minimalist RAM-shaped SSD and tons of battery. I have no idea how plausible that all is, but we’ll find out tomorrow I guess. Not a whole lot interesting to say about the hardware, really… I don’t have much of an opinion on any of it; what comes is what comes. Faster processors, bigger graphics cards in the Pro lineup, and perhaps an SD card slot in the 17″ Pro is all I’m really looking for in the updates. Nothing major to be sure, because otherwise the rumor mill would have spun out more Mr. Blurrycam photos from China by now.

No touchscreen Macs. Just, no. Not happening. It makes no sense. Microsoft has been proving every day of the year that Windows is not suited for touch interfaces regardless of how much it supports it, and the Win7 Touch Pack is a pile of bolt-on hacks to try and make the experience not absolutely atrocious. Apple is not going to follow them down that rabbit hole.

Also, because it has to be said every freaking time, no headless consumer Mac tower either. Not happening. Get over it.

MobileMe

This is sort of the black sheep of the announcements that are likely to be made tomorrow. A new version of OS X seems like as good a place as any to slot in new MobileMe functionality, because OS X’s sluggish release schedule (versus the breakneck pace of iOS releases) is ultimately the lag point for those sorts of changes. As ever, it would be nice to see some sort of free MobileMe service get announced (maybe just email, contact, calendar, and bookmark sync, without iDisk, desktop sync, or Backup), or lower prices on the plans, but Apple is notoriously bad at lowering the price on stuff, and I don’t think they’re willing to ditch something that’s bound to be making them a fair amount of bank.

What’s possible is that Apple will use this event to discuss their new data center in North Carolina, and what exactly they plan on doing with it. iTunes streaming is a very remote possibility, but still more likely than a subscription music service, because there should be rumors to go along with that (as there have always been every time this hasn’t happened in the past), and there haven’t been any. More likely, I think, is expanded iDisk storage. What would be cool, but also probably unlikely, is a remote Time Machine backup service for 10.7 (ala Mozy, Carbonite, etc.), even if I did just spend a fair chunk on replacing my dead backup drive with a Drobo.

Pro Applications

New Final Cut Studio? Aperture? Maybe? I dunno. Possibly. It’d certainly give Steve something to show off, but I don’t know how interested the press at large is going to be in being shown super high-end software for the creative crowd. Of course, since Apple doesn’t do trade shows and FCS is a pretty big deal that doesn’t (or shouldn’t…) just get tossed into an Apple Store update, it’s a possibility. Not a big one, but I won’t rule it out.

My thoughts, as always, are a bit lengthy to be able to cram them into 140-character fragments with any semblance of coherence (that was 127 characters right there), so here we go. Hopefully I can keep things punchy, even without the arbitrary character limit…

In fact, let’s try something new. I’ll do a one-word reaction followed by a more detailed commentary (hopefully still brief), so you can TL;DR as you see fit.

New iPods

Shuffle: Buttons!

Nano: Slick. Looks like Apple may be either branching iOS again for the new device’s itty bitty square screen, or they’re aping the UI totally and running something else entirely custom underneath. My money is actually on a device-specific branch of iOS, since it seems like they’re trying to provide a stepping stone to the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch now. With the iPod Classic not even warranting a mention as part of the “complete iPod line update” this year, it seems clear that the purpose of the Nano is no longer to give people experience with the bigger iPod Classic’s UI and controls, but instead to get their feet wet in Apple’s new hotness.

Touch: Sexy. Interesting to see that its design is still using the rounded back rather than iPhone 4′s squared-off sides, despite being even more of an iPhone without the phone now. It’s also interesting that the back camera isn’t 5 megapixel like its cousin on the iPhone, but only just big enough to do 720p video recording (iPod Touch photos are 960×720 max according to the specs page). Guess they were a bit desperate for a point of differentiation between the two. Sweet that it supports FaceTime using email addresses; less sweet that it needs to be an email address that’s registered with Apple to work. Not helping the “open standard” mantra there, guys.

Classic: Who? Apparently still around, but unchanged in design, specs, and price.

iTunes 10

Ping: Eh. I get the feeling Apple decided to roll their own social network because of Facebook being a total data mining ad whore, and nobody gets to data mine Apple’s customers but Apple. I think Jobs kind of tipped his hand to that when he explicitly mentioned the simplicity and ease of use of Ping’s privacy controls. Beyond that, I really don’t care. It’s getting increasingly difficult to succeed in being anti-social on the internet anymore these days…

UI: WTF? The new list view + album art is … interesting, I guess, but ultimately not a huge thing. The vertically-oriented traffic lights are just bizarre (way to stick to your HIG guns there, Apple…). Honestly, I’m actually more annoyed about the monochromatic Source List icons, though, because at least the close button is still in the same place. The lack of colorized icons in the source list is just frustrating, since color is one of those oh-so-important elements of UI design that help users quickly distinguish between objects (especially small ones). At least they tweaked the icons themselves to be more shape-oriented to compensate, but seriously. That’s just annoying.

Icon: Glowy. I’ll miss the CD, but given the sprawling nature of the app, I understand why it’s gone. The fact that it retains the musical notes seems like more of a formality than anything else at this point.

I’m at work on a limited-user account, so I can’t actually install the app here and get a feel for how it actually feels, but dear god I hope someone has bothered to do a code review of the thing, if only for the sake of the Windows users of the world.

Apple TV

Design: Teensy. I really don’t have an opinion one way or the other on the new design beyond that, except to say that evidently Sony has decided that matte black plastic with glossy inlaid text is in, and the world (including Apple) is following suit. At least Apple isn’t trying to pimp the Spider-Man font like it’s going out of style (because it is)…

Hardware: A4ATW! Interesting to see Apple continue to consolidate its chipset lines into Intel multi-core and A4 divisions on usage lines. The general-purpose Mac “truck” (lawl) computers get the Core 2 Duo and iN chips, and specialized devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and now Apple TV get the A4. It’ll definitely cut down on the thing’s power draw, which is always good because the current one is a beast. Not sure how cool I am with the total removal of internal storage… streaming HD video content seems to be a little hiccup-prone on our wifi network. Of course, it’s sort of locked down to 802.11g speeds because of the iPod Touches in the apartment, and I haven’t bothered to spring for a dual-band router to fix that problem, so maybe bumping the network would solve that problem.

Software: Yay? I guess? I’m guessing the move to the A4 processor necessitated this, but, it’s being backed by a custom build of iOS with a 10-foot UI. At least, so sayeth The Gruber… Beyond that, there’s not really a whole lot new about the UI compared to Apple TV Software 3.0, just some reorganization. It’s cool that Netflix got added to the list of internet content portals, but the rumors of an app store for the device, and my associated musings on Apple taking on the console market are apparently unfounded. Stupid hobby… I would totally go for an Apple set top box that had a gaming controller and access to an App Store for games and entertainment titles, in addition to access to the iTunes media store, and cost $99 to $149. Given how dead-simple setting up an Apple TV already is (and how dead-simpler it is with the new version) and how easy it is to get your content onto it, with the right pricing structure and offerings, this could blow past the Wii for casual living room gaming and give Apple its much-coveted entry into the television space for content delivery. And speaking of content…

Content: Woo? Nice to see HD TV show rentals make an appearance (and assuming you’re not paying for cable and a DVR, 99¢ isn’t a bad price), but it sucks that it’s limited to ABC and FOX right now. Also, it kinda sucks that there’s no way to actually buy content on the Apple TV anymore… so much for that iTunes cloud-based streaming service that would store your stuff in the cloud that everyone was so sure of. As far as pricing is concerned, I’ve never actually had a problem with movie pricing for purchases or rentals. TV shows – especially HD ones – are frequently annoyingly expensive, but the season passes tend to be much better deals for that. Heck, I got the whole fourth season of BSG in HD for the cost of half of Season 4 on DVD (I paid something like $54 for it, and the DVD release for 4.0 was like $52). Warehouse 13 Season 2 is $30 in HD… even if SyFy does their stupid half-length season thing, that’s not a bad price for the show in 720p and near-immediate access to episodes past. (Of course, having gone to look up the price, Season 2 is no longer listed in iTunes. Awesome. Here’s hoping NBC/Universal isn’t being a douchebag again and I get the rest of the episodes I’ve already paid for. And people wonder why torrents are so popular…)

Boxee: Doubtful anymore, especially since the patchstick-friendly USB port has been replaced with a micro-USB port. Plus there’s the whole switch to the ARM processor thing… Not that I’ve bothered to Boxee-up my Apple TV in recent history. The only thing I ever used Boxee for was Hulu, so I could watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report without fuxing with the TV-attached computer, but between Hulu blocking Boxee and Comedy Central leaving Hulu, I really don’t care. The rest of my content is already Apple TV-compatible (sometimes by force), and the rest of the stuff accessible through Boxee just carries no interest for me. Plus, having a remote mouse/keyboard app on my iPad to operate the computer removes the annoying obstacle of dealing with tangled keyboard cords and insufficient wireless mouse range.

So Proposition 8 has been overturned, thank the gods. And now the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, and the demonizing of innocent, upstanding Americans by the bigots has begun. Again.

There’s a storm coming, and it’s in your teapot.

Read more…?

A list of facts, for your consideration:

1. Microsoft discontinued their FrontPage product following Office 2003′s release.
2. Microsoft replaced FrontPage with Expression Web.
3. Microsoft officially deprecated FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) in 2006.
4. IIS 7 lists FPSE as an unsupported feature.
5. IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 won’t even run FPSE.
6. IIS 7 has integrated WebDAV support.
7. Expression Web supports WebDAV connectivity.
8. Visual Studio 2005 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.
9. Visual Studio 2008 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.
10. Visual Studio 2010 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.

Microsoft, you are a multi-billion dollar company. How hard is it to get your software IDE team to talk to your server OS and webserver platform development teams to actually provide consistent support for connection types across your product line?

Frankly, it is inexcusable for you to have a professional product that costs thousands of dollars fail to support such a basic and fundamental internet connectivity method as WebDAV, but soldier on with FrontPage Server Extensions over 4 years after they were officially deprecated (by you, no less!), and 2 years after you released a version of your operating system that won’t even run them anymore.

I realize that it isn’t the end of the world for IIS 7 to not support one of your flagship development platform’s primary internet connectivity options, but seriously, it comes across as incredibly lazy and unprofessional. Get your act together, guys.

First off, can we stop appending “-gate” to the end of any and every major or minor “scandal” – real or manufactured – in the US (and how many non-manufactured scandals actually use the “-gate” suffix anyway… seems like something to research someday)? How many people even remember at this point that it was named “Watergate” after the damned hotel of the same name? “Scandalgate” just seems lazy, uninformed, and in search of sensationalism. But I guess that’s American “journalism” in a nutshell these days.

Wow, anyway, moving on before I drift any further off topic…

There’s been more than enough said by the tech press about the iPhone 4′s antenna issues, but I’ll go ahead and pile on with what I hope is a more level-headed commentary than what the rest of the internet has been flinging around this past couple of weeks.

Apple’s not had a good time of things in the press the last few weeks, and the bumbling public response to the outcry by their PR department hasn’t exactly helped. I was interested to hear that Jobs was in Hawaii on vacation last week, which is when the Apple PR-signed “it’s totally a software problem that has nothing to do with the phone even though every phone has this problem” press release weirdness happened. I’m wondering if Steve has taken over the public management of this issue, including calling the press conference, as a result of that, and whether he was involved in crafting the PR response that had everyone shaking their heads.

To a certain extent, while it’s demonstrable that iPhone 4 has a reproducible signal attenuation issue when held in the lower left corner, I think the impact of the problem has been considerably overblown by the media, and the tech press/blogs in particular. It’s something of a complex problem because in areas of good signal, it’s not even an issue (even though the problem still exists), and the antenna design by itself seems to result in getting better signal in more places. Locations with already-poor signal quality seem more likely to be affected by this, and the iPhone’s wonky bar reporting algorithm made it more likely to make you think you were outside of a problem location. Given AT&T’s spotty network quality track record, it’s possible that like previous iPhones, this may disproportionately impact people in places like NY and SF, while users in other markets have no problems at all.

I think this is backed up by four bits of data that are floating around now. First, Consumer Reports’ signal strength testing does show signal loss on a consistent basis. At the same time, however, the increased rate of dropped calls compared to the 3GS and its more traditional (and oft-stated “better” by tech press) cell antenna design is marginal at best: less than 1 additional dropped call per 100 calls made, according to Apple and AT&T. Still, it is marginally higher, and if Steve is to be believed, it’s not something Apple is willing to consider acceptable. Apple’s rate of return is also 1/3rd of what it was for the 3GS, coming in at just 1.7% (though there’s no breakout for why the device was being returned to provide more granular numbers on returns based on signal issues). Finally, Apple’s own customer complaint data indicates that just over one half of one percent (0.55%) of all calls they’ve received concerning iPhone 4 are related to the antenna. Put together, these data seem to indicate that while there is signal attenuation, it has little to no impact on the actual performance of the device on the network. I think that a lot of the perceived enormity of “antennagate” is due almost entirely to the breathless coverage by the online tech press, which has used its massive echo chamber to artificially magnify the severity of the problem.

The echo chamber’s already at it again with the dropped call delta, with people using percentage magic to claim that iPhone 4, assuming a low dropped call rate for the 3GS, is dropping up to 100% more calls, because 1/100 dropped to 1.9/100 dropped is a 100% increase, you know. If only the number were 0/100, then we could have an infinitely larger dropped call rate on iPhone4! The anti-Apple folks are spinning the number Jobs cited as either a massive increase in the dropped call rate assuming a low 3GS dropped call rate, or a condemnation of Apple’s phone line as a whole assuming a high 3GS dropped call rate. Where’s this “less than one additional dropped call per 100 means .9 additional dropped calls per 100″ logic coming from, by the way? Why can’t <1 additional dropped call mean .4 additional dropped calls?

In reality land, however, an increase from 1/100 dropped calls to 1.9/100 dropped calls means you’re a whopping 9% more likely to experience a dropped call on average, not 100% (or even 50%). Still not a good number, but miles away from the backwards percentage assumptions being thrown around in the Engadget comments. Bottom line: if you rarely experience dropped calls, you’re still not likely to ever experience one. If you experience dropped calls a lot, you probably won’t notice the minor increase. I’m also inclined to think that areas with high dropped call rates like NY (which is frequently quoted as having upwards of a 30% dropped call rate on earlier iPhone models) and SF are negatively impacting AT&T’s national dropped call rates, and outside of those areas the chances of a dropped call are dramatically lower than the national rate would imply.

As far as additional data go, I’d be interested in seeing the results of a Consumer Reports test of other cell phones when held in similar positions, to see whether there is any attenuation in them as well, and how severe it is. That would shed some light on the veracity of Apple’s claims and testing showing that other phones experience this issue as well. I’d also be interested in seeing dropped call deltas for non-US carriers to see if this is an AT&T-specific issue (as most network problems with the iPhone in the US seem to be).

Apple’s near-term fixes are largely band-aids to mitigate the problem, but based on Steve’s comments during his intro and during the Q&A, it doesn’t sound like they’re done researching ways to resolve the problem long-term, and hardware fixes within the phone itself may be pending down the line if they can figure something out. I think Apple has done the right thing by offering a free bumper with the phone, and while it won’t impact the hardware itself, the modified signal indicator algorithm seems likely to provide a more accurate indication of the impact of the attenuation on your network connection. In most cases it will probably result in a drop of a bar or two at higher signal levels where there wasn’t any drop before, but reduce the drop in areas where the signal was already low (2-3 bars). The indicator also reaches to a lower dB level now, so the signal indicator will stay at one bar in weaker signal areas than before. Whether this lower db level will be sufficient for making or retaining a call, I’m not sure. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think AT&T had anything to do with the “wrong” signal algorithm that was used prior to iOS 4.0.1, given their “more bars in more places” marketing campaign, but that’s the conspiracy theorist in me taking.

If I had $199 burning a hole in my pocket, could afford the cost of the monthly plan, and didn’t already have a 3G iPad to do most of my mobile stuff on, I would get an iPhone 4. In my estimation, the improvements to the hardware outweigh the apparently limited impacts of the signal attenuation problems in daily use. And for full disclosure, I hold my phone in my left hand.