May Contain Nuts

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.

So I’ve had my iPad for a few weeks now, and frankly I’m addicted to the thing. I’ve taken to bringing it with me pretty much anywhere I go, even in situations where I’d figured it would be too much of a hassle. Admittedly, some situations actually ARE awkward, and I’m marginally more comfortable with leaving it locked in my car under a sweatshirt than I was the week I got it, as long as the truck is in a direct line of sight while I’m away from it. I think the biggest reason I’m so reliant on this instead of my iPod touch is because my iPod is really starting to show its age. It’s a first generation device with a broken headphone jack running iOS 3.1.3, so its overall utility is somewhat reduced from where it used to be.

It’s also interesting to me that, performance differences aside, the iPod touch just feels way more cramped after using the iPad so extensively, particularly when it comes to the home screens. The added icon spacing that seemed so excessive on the iPad when it was first announced really makes the tight grid of the iPhone-sized devices seem claustrophobic by comparison when coming back to it after a long absence.

In other news, I bought a stylus for doodling with, because my motor skills are lacking in the finger painting department. Unfortunately, it has a very soft rubberized tip, so it drag a horribly on the glass display. Fortunately, it was a set of 2 for $3.50 on eBay with free shipping, and I have a workaround: tape a piece of tissue paper (or straw wrapper paper in this case) around the tip. Voilà, a perfectly serviceable stylus.

It’s not, however, all unicorns and rainbows with the iPad, and there are a few things I wanted to bring up.

First, I want the timer/clock app back. Failing that, give me short timers built into my 3rd party alarm clock app once local notifications come to the device this fall. I’ve had to scrounge for my iPod a couple of times now to time oven usage, and it’s just kind of irksome when I’m already roaming the apartment with my iPad.

Next, what’s the deal with leaving out Voice Control? Or the voice recorder app for that matter? All of the hardware is already there to support both apps. Is Voice Control just considered too much of a mobile thing for the merely-portable iPad? ‘Cause let me tell you, it’d still come in handy when driving and trying to pick music to listen to.

Speaking of using while driving, is the iPad’s power draw just too high to charge via the cigarette adapter in the car? If not, someone needs to build an iPad-charging FM transmitter. For serious. It’s not a huge deal given that the battery life of the iPad anyway will very probably outlast any stint of driving I may be using it on, but it’d be a comfort having it charged when I get where I’m going and not in need of a wall socket to leech off of overnight.

I really hope iOS 5 comes with a better notification system. Push notifications never really bugged me this much when I was on my iPod because using it for hours on end or for “primary” computing wasn’t really an option for the most part. On the iPad, though, they get a bit tedious, especially where IM services are concerned. I might experiment this week with not having the dialog notice enabled, but keeping badges and sound alerts on and see if that’s more tolerable.

I can’t wait to get folders and fast app switching. The tendency for apps to remember their state when closing them in iOS 3.x seems to be decreasing rather than increasing as the platform matures, which is annoying to say the least. Apple’s stuff is generally pretty good at state persistence, along with some other apps like dropbox, but other apps are a serious grab bag ranging from great to suck. I’d also like to be able to put more than just games on an entire page of my home screen, and group some handy but simple and infrequently-used utility-type apps into a single slot on my home screen. The six available dock slots are a godsend though… I’ve got iPod, Safari, Mail, IM+, Osfoora HD (Twitter), and Settings lined up down there, which covers a good 75% of my primary usage (another 15% probably comes from FeeddlerRSS, which is on page 1).

Something else I really hope gets put into iOS 4 for iPad: using retina display-compatible graphics and text in apps that are built to support iPhone 4 when running them in the iPad’s emulator. There is no reason a retina display-compatible app should render all fuzzy and blocky at 2x on the iPad when its the exact same pixel dimensions as the iPhone 4 screen (albeit at a lower pixel density). Anything is better than the double-sized 320×480 pixels though. Maybe I should email Steve and make sure that idea is on his radar. It’d make using iPhone apps on the iPad a lot more pleasant.

Irksomely, I haven’t been able to find an Apple case for this thing since I bought mine and opted to drop the $40 for it later. Nobody else’s cases seem to get the whole notebook sleeve/stand idea that Apple’s has, and I really like that. Also, it seems I may not have a camera connector before Mysterium. Wonder if someone else will have one I can bum off them for a few minutes… Mine isn’t supposed to get here until the 18th of August. Sigh.

Yesterday, Hulu announced Hulu Plus, a service that users can take advantage of to watch Hulu content on mobile devices (such as iOS devices) and consoles (such as the PS3 and Xbox 360). The service costs $9.99/month, and retains all advertisements currently embedded into the free web service (their release calls it an “ad-supported subscription product”, which seems rather oxymoronic if you ask me). It’s not entirely without additional benefit though, as many more back episodes of many shows (such as X-Files and American Dad) will be available to subscribers, and they can be watched at 720p (the website only offers video in 480p).

As interesting as it is to see Hulu come to the iOS platform, I feel like someone in the executive offices still doesn’t really understand the way the internet works, or how converged our devices are becoming, and is trying to artificially segment the availability of their content to score additional revenue according to outdated concepts of viewership. Ultimately I guess it’s not that surprising of a move, since “Big Content” (ugh, now I feel like a conspiracy theorist/dirty fucking hippie) has historically proven itself to be completely opposed to changing its business model in the face of new technological challenges, but it is still disappointing nonetheless.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that the content providers are still trying to distinguish between television screens and, well, everything else. They’ve even taken it one step further now and turned mobile usage into a premium-only experience that goes completely counter to the trend in video consumption over the past few years. This all started, of course, with Hulu’s media overloads expressing displeasure with the fact that Boxee was allowing users to legally consume content from Hulu’s own openly-accessible feeds, ads and all, without using Hulu’s website to do so. Worse, you could do it on your television! The horror! So, Boxee got banned from accessing Hulu, and they’ve been in something of an arms race ever since to get around the arcane distinction that Hulu has created between watching their content on a computer connected to a monitor, and watching that same content on a computer connected to a television screen. The EULA for Hulu’s own Hulu Desktop application actually expressly forbids you from installing it on a computer connected to your TV. Like that’s even remotely enforceable.

It’s like Hulu understands that the internet is an important platform, and even goes so far as to make their service trendy and modern with things like show queues and RSS feeds for available content, but totally misses the point of the internet as a ubiquitous-access platform, and is instead trying to protect their existing distribution methods while making token concessions to the internet-savvy crowd.

I think advertisers are also behind the curve on this one, which isn’t helping the adoption of internet-based services by content providers. Online ads are notoriously less profitable by a wide margin, compared to television ads. I understand why this is true for traditional web advertising, where banners and buttons are incidental content that can be easily ignored (or even blocked) by users. But when it comes to advertising on services like Hulu, where ads can be highly targeted, and are shown in a way that creates a captive audience, I would think that despite the smaller number of eyeballs, such ads would be more valuable to advertisers because viewers are more likely to actually pay attention to them.

Hulu really could make a strong case for charging premium prices for online advertising. The ads themselves already exist in most cases, since they’re just running existing TV ads, so there’s no additional overhead for creating them. They can be targeted to users based on their preferences, so they’re immediately more relevant to the end consumer than TV ads. There are a limited number of ads that run in a Hulu-broadcast episode or movie, which should again increase their value, not decrease it. Finally, because of this limitation on the number of ads being run, users are more likely to actually watch them than they are TV ads, which run for upwards of 5 minutes per break, giving users ample time to leave the room and perform quick tasks, and thus decreasing the viewership of your ad. With Hulu’s 30-second to 2-minute ad breaks, it’s much harder to go to the bathroom without missing something (assuming it’s more convenient to stay seated than to have to scrub back to the start of the segment, which for me it generally is).

When it comes to the whole Hulu Plus thing, I again think someone in the board room has misunderstood what I think could be called a generally-accepted social contract for advertising online. Namely, free content is very probably going to have ads. That’s understandable – and even acceptable –though depending on how the service provider chooses to implement them, folks may get grumpy about it. Paid content, however, is usually paid for so you can skip or avoid the ads. Hulu Plus doesn’t do this, instead opting to double-dip with both subscription and ad revenue. I think this is the source of much of the angst being expressed online about paying for content with ads, even though we already do so in so many other venues (cable TV is the oft-cited example, but it also applies to newspapers, magazines, DVDs, and even movies at the theater). People are used to buying into a web service to remove ads, and Hulu Plus doesn’t provide this convenience. That, combined with the $10 price, leaves a lot of people (myself included) feeling a bit put off.

As I mentioned earlier, this is further compounded by the fact that Hulu is only available on mobile devices with a Plus subscription. There’s no access to the existing free service through the Hulu app in the App Store, you have to pay for Hulu Plus in order to be able to use it. Again this strikes me as a move destined to leave money on the table. There are hundreds of millions of video-capable mobile devices that Hulu could put itself on to increase its viewership pool and thus improve its leverage against advertisers for more expensive ad rates simply by offering a free Hulu app. Instead, they’ve made a move that looks greedy (even if it actually isn’t) by instituting a pay wall on mobile devices.

Ultimately, for a company whose stated goal is to offer TV anywhere, they’re going pretty far out of their way to put up a ton of road blocks to that goal. Whether this is because of an internal lack of understanding of the internet (which I doubt… the Hulu guys themselves seem pretty savvy), a panicked move to try and improve their revenue stream (which is possible considering how many PSA ads get run these days), the result of external meddling by their largely technology-inept content overlords, or a combination of the three, it’s just frustrating to see such a promising service continue to shoot itself in the foot when trying to connect with its most fervent supporters.

I’ve actually come pretty much full circle on Hulu since it launched… at first I was initially skeptical of the obvious stick-it-to-Apple nature of the service’s unveiling just after NBC ditched the iTunes Store a few years ago, and was not even remotely interested in it. It eventually won me over because of the breadth of its offerings and the convenience of being able to watch shows whenever I wanted without tediously long ad breaks. Then they started doing week-long delays of new episodes (again, a concession to a media empire that just doesn’t “get it”) and losing providers, which decreased its value. The final straw for me was when they banned Boxee for entirely pointless and completely stupid reasons at the demand of their primary stakeholders, who happen to be NBC and Fox. Since then, the service seems like it’s been on a downhill slope in terms of mindshare and usage share, and Hulu Plus is a rather desperate bid to try and regain lost revenue without actually bothering to understand the reasons for their declining popularity in the first place.

Needless to say, I won’t be subscribing to Hulu Plus. I would almost certainly have put the app to decent use on my iPad if it offered the same level of service for free as their website, but I don’t need it nearly often enough to justify spending $9.99 for the convenience of being able to watch on the go a show or two a month that I might have missed, or want to revisit. I just don’t watch that much TV in the first place. I also tend to prefer buying the few shows I do watch on iTunes, since it’s generally cheaper and faster than waiting for the DVDs (even in HD), and the episodes are almost always available the following day if I miss one.

So earlier this week, al-Qaeda apparently released another one of their bizarre anti-American videos. This one, notably, was in English, and had production levels not dissimilar to a news report filmed for a high school broadcasting class. It’s really ridiculous. This video prompted Rachel Maddow on Monday to say this:

I know al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda, right? But is it OK to point out that they‘re ridiculous, that their propaganda is inadvertently funny as in, “Ha-ha, I‘m laughing at you”? These guys are like the reject pile at talk radio tryouts.

My response: yes. It is absolutely OK to point out that they’re ridiculous. In fact, that’s perhaps the best thing that we and the media could possibly do. I’m not suggesting that our government not take them seriously as a threat, because they’ve proven themselves to be a lot deadlier in the battlefield than they are in front of a video camera. However, I think it gives al-Qaeda far more power than they actually have to continually portray them in public and in the media as some kind of superhuman fighting force the likes of which no man has ever seen; an existential threat to the very fabric of society unlike any the world has ever known, and against which all of our quaint notions of criminal justice and civil liberties are useless impediments to victory.

By all means, laugh at them. It takes the wind out of any asshole’s sails when you refuse to be intimidated by them, and this is doubly true of terrorists. Yeah, they destroyed the World Trade Center, made a good try at destroying the Pentagon, and could very well have been aiming to destroy the Capitol Building or the White House with United 93 on 9/11. They’ve killed thousands of American soldiers and native civilians in the countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

However, they also seem to have been getting increasingly desperate and incompetent in their attempts to launch assaults on foreign targets. There was the guy with explosives in his shoes who failed to blow up a plane in 2002 (thanks, asshole, for giving the TSA one more way to make it a pain in the ass to get through security). There were the guys who thought they could blow up JFK airport by igniting the pipe that fed jet fuel to the airport over a mile away (news flash: Mythbusters has shown us that jet fuel doesn’t burn especially readily. Also, you’re idiots). Back in October, someone apparently tried to blow up the Saudi royal family by stuffing a bomb up his own ass to sneak it past security (he only succeeded in blowing himself up, ass first of course, and not much else). More recently, there was the guy who stuffed explosives in his underwear to try and blow up a plane (I swear to god, if the TSA makes me take my pants off on my way to Mysterium, I’m going to go find that Nigerian punk myself and give him the biggest atomic wedgie in the history of mankind). And let’s not forget the moron who tried to blow up Times Square with an SUV full of unopened propane tanks and non-explosive fertilizer, left the keys to his getaway vehicle in said SUV, and had to call his landlord to let him back into his apartment when he finally made it home at 3:00 in the morning. Al-qaeda in Pakistan disowned that guy, he was such an embarrassment to their cause.

How do they expect us, the public they’re trying to scare the shit out of, to take them seriously when they’ve been so astonishingly bad at their primary objective of inciting terror since 9/11? It’s like watching an Austin Powers bad guy or something. Perhaps the thing that confuses me most is that there are so many people in this country still convinced that we can’t risk putting these people on trial after we catch them being complete dipshits because somehow they’ll execute some bizarre X-Men-type stunt of sucking all the iron out of the court bailiff’s blood, escape into the street, and become American citizens on the spot (as if this would incur some additional level of magical protection against being found guilty as fuck).

For god’s sake, laugh at them. The point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of you and make you do things you would otherwise not do in a rational state of mind, in an effort to drive you to your own brand of extremism in response to theirs, thus perpetuating a cycle of violence and destruction. Osama bin Laden’s own publicly stated goal was to draw the United States into an amorphous conflict it couldn’t win, thereby bleeding it dry and destroying it from within without expending anywhere near the same level of resources. If you refuse to actually be terrorized by their actions, however occasionally horrifying and devastating they may be, you undermine their goals and purpose far more successfully than any bomb or bullet ever could. Also, laughter is way cheaper than guns, tanks, ammo, bulletproof vests, and human lives.

The full video segment from Rachel’s show is after the break.

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I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll agree that you’re doing a good thing for both yourselves and the environment by biking to work. In exchange, you’ll agree to stop riding on the line that separates your four-foot-wide bike lane from my vehicle lane. Seriously, scoot the frak over.

Apple made some upgrades to MobileMe’s web services last night. While I don’t use them terribly often (since I have a Mac at home and at work, plus an iPod Touch and now an iPad), I do still find myself dropping into them occasionally. With that in mind, I took a look at the new site to see what’s what.

Overall

Apple has replaced the gray color scheme with a somewhat higher-contrast blue one, extending all the way into the login page, which has also gotten a facelift. I don’t recall if it was there before, but there’s now a quite prominent link to sign up for a 60-day trial right next to the news block. I like the new color scheme, as it feels a bit more engaging and interesting than the previous austere gray. Oddly (though perhaps intentionally, to illustrate the importance of the task), the gray scheme is retained on the re-authorization dialogs used to access Find My iPhone and the Account settings page.

What I don’t particularly care for is the new app switching method. Prior to today, switching from Mail to the Gallery was a one-click process. Now, probably because of the new design of the header toolbar and the way it ties into the various applications on the site, all of the applications are hidden behind a MobileMe cloud button, which brings up a patently oversized OS X-style task switcher display. Switching apps now requires two clicks and a considerably larger amount of mouse movement.

The new MobileMe Task Switcher

I would much rather have preferred that the original switching method was retained, since it provides more immediate discoverability of features. Since the new design precludes that, however, I think a better approach would have been to tie the MobileMe cloud icon to a pop-out menu, similar to the one used in the account drop-down on the right side of the header. The design could even be kept similar to the current design (either horizontal or adjusted to vertical), but by making it a fancy drop-down menu and ideally resizing the images, it would have greatly reduced the amount of travel time and distance required to perform such a simple and frequent operation.

Mail

The New MobileMe Mail

I don’t intend to touch on every app individually, but I do want to talk about Mail in particular, because it’s seen the largest amount of improvement and alteration over the old design. Apple launched this as a beta about a month ago, and has now made it available to all with the web services upgrade. It’s frankly miles above the old web app, and much more pleasant to use. The service loads data much more quickly, and the new widescreen viewer mode is really nice. It retains a number of desktop-y features like multiple (and discontinuous) item selection, as well as drag-and-drop message moving (and adding drag-and-drop folder reorganizing, yay!), while adding more web-ish things as well, like the Move icon in the toolbar, which functions similarly to the move command in iOS.

Perplexingly, Apple has decided to roll their own scrollbars in Mail, something it has not done for any of its other web apps. This has the net effect of overriding my preferred scrollbar behavior of having the up/down buttons split instead of joined at the bottom of the scroll area, and makes the UI inconsistent with both the rest of MobileMe and the rest of the scrollbars on my machine. I can understand the condensed scrollbar overlay for the folders listing, but the redundant full-sized custom scrollbars in the message list and preview pane are kind of annoying.

They’ve also added an Archive feature, pretty much pulled straight from Gmail as far as I can tell. It will be interesting to see if this feature manages to migrate out of the web application and into Apple’s other mail clients in the future.

Other new features include push mail in the web client, some composition window improvements (including some slick auto-completion and a nice “add contact” dialog with live filtering and To/CC/BCC checkboxes for all contacts, but lacking the self-contained pill items on recognized contacts from the desktop Mail client), fetching of mail from an external address, the ability to send an email from an alias (or said external address), support for vacation auto-response setup, server-side mail rules, and a long-overdue implementation of https communication.

Overall, a very nice upgrade to the Mail app that brings it on par in many ways to the web apps offered by other mail services. It also still retains some of the desktop application feel that Apple seems intent on maintaining on the web, and brings some iPhone/iPad-like additions into the fold as well. Very solid, though obviously more evolutionary than revolutionary. This feels like what MobileMe should have been from the beginning, but I’m glad Apple has been busy putting effort into polish since the original launch 2 years ago.

Other Apps

As a whole, the entire set of web services feels much faster than it did yesterday. I have no idea if this has anything to do with Apple’s new data center in North Carolina, or if they’ve just gotten better at query optimization, but in any case, it’s welcome and appreciated. Pretty much the only service that’s still sluggish is the Find my iPhone page, but that has some external limitations that I don’t think are nearly as easy to overcome. The UI is much improved though, and features a really nice custom Google Maps integration with some slick pushpin annotation stuff for device location features.

As an interesting side note, the Gallery icon has changed from the iPhone’s “Photos” icon to the iPhone’s “MobileMe Gallery App” icon. While this provides some consistent branding, I think I’d much rather have the MobileMe Gallery functionality built into the iPhone/iPad Photos app than tucked away in a separate location on my device. Considering that the Photos app already allows you to upload files to MobileMe, it seems like it would make more sense to keep those files all accessible and manageable in one spot. This is more of an iOS rant than a MobileMe rant though, so I’ll leave it at that.

Summary

As a whole, the upgrade isn’t a huge change from what was previously available, but it’s a solid evolution of the service (Mail in particular seems to have been the focus of this update), and I hope that this is a sign of more good things to come.

As those who follow me on Twitter are probably aware, I bought an iPad on Monday. Specifically, a 64GB WiFi+3G iPad, which will make traveling to Mysterium far less dull since I can load the thing up with easily a dozen full-length movies and still have room to spare for music and photos. But I’m already digressing. This is a long-ass post, so the rest goes after the cut…

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