Are my eyes really blue?

When the One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, and Asus followed with the EEE PC, they probably thought they were inventing a whole new type of device – a laptop, certainly, but of a different sort than the kind business types lugged around. But as the netbook emerged, the new-look interfaces slowly gave way to Windows XP. Ultimately, the netbook pretty quickly became just the smallest and cheapest style of laptop, rather than something new.

This is about to change non-trivially. When Google finally gets its Chrome OS on netbooks and into production, the result will be something that is less than a notebook – essentially a large-screen portable web terminal. Meanwhile, the Kindle has exploded as a whole other type of portable device – and one with an underappreciated permanent wireless connection, at that. And then there’s that gadget of Apple’s…

We have computers, desktop and laptop, and we have phones. This third device is meant to combine the relative portability of a phone with some of the enhanced power and larger display of a computer. There are necessary tradeoffs for size and power, and they have been met with various techniques (e-ink display by the Kindle, a phone OS by Apple, custom Linux OS and interface by many netbook manufacturers, etc). We’ve been comparing these things to computers, but it might be more reasonable to compare them the other way…to phones.

Set against this, the netbook becomes the flip phone. It relies on a hinge to give you two equal-sized spaces for input and display, and as a result tends to be a bit on the thick side. The Kindle and its peers are the bar phones: one piece, light and thinner, but compromised in terms of display and input by the limitations of space. And the iPad is, of course, the iPhone: one big display, virtual keyboard, trusting that its input model will minimize the compromises posed by a software keyboard.

I bring this up because I’m still struggling with the netbook. 1024×600 is a bit of a show to squint at, especially with all the other UI bits and bobs that go along with Firefox – because the web browser is pretty much the sole app in use. Sure, I have Skype and something to stream Absolute Radio and a Twitter notifier, but 96% of what happens on that netbook happens in a browser window. And its performance in full-screen streaming video, compared to the iPad, is abysmal.

(It doesn’t help that I’m doing less text entry than I’d anticipated. I should be, but I’m not; this is being pounded out on the same MacBook Pro as ever. Maybe once I get Drivel reinstalled things will be different; I just can’t handle blogging from a web interface.)

This is not to say that I will be putting my netbook on the market in any hurry. There will be no major shakeups in the home electronics situation before September, in all likelihood, owing to the necessary wait for the new iPhone and the debate on whether to let work start picking up the check for good rather than just reimbursing my personal phone. And the temptation to lay out for a Nexus One and use T-Mobile’s monthly no-contract scheme for a while is very strong.

Look, there’s no excuse by now. We’ve been over this a hundred thousand times, and there is simply no logical ground on which to argue that the President of the United States is anything other than an American citizen born on American soil. To argue otherwise is a sign of profound ignorance, racism, or mental defect.

And yet, this is apparently still quite a thing, judging by the recent spat of what I can only describe as Confederate protests. Let’s be blunt: the “Tea Party” movement is nothing less than the manifestation of 20th-century Southern politics on a national scale, in which assorted “big mules” (financial interests and the property-owning elite) whip up a frenzy among the working classes to lash out against The Other – usually the implacable menace of the Negro, but just as frequently some combination of communists, Jews, Papists, Yankees, or whatever. The communists have been made over as socialists and Teh Gheys are now up where the Catholics used to be, but for the most part, the forms and styles of the clowns out honking their horns on April 15th are not materially different from the crowds that howled Strom Thurmond to the Dixiecrat nomination in Boutwell Auditorium back in 1948 – or who boosted the Ku Klux to its highest membership in the 1920s.

The key thing you can say about the teabaggers is that they tend to be 1) white and 2) old enough for segregation to be living memory, which would presume roughly age 50 and up. This is not just limited to the South – even if they weren’t out there cheering Wallace with their parents, they are old enough to remember a time when “we didn’t have all these problems.”

In the long run, you can make a case for containment. We can circle the wagons and wait for the majority of the teabaggers to die off, while long-term demographic trends surrounding immigration and racial minorities grind away at the power base of their movement. But as Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. So what if we require relief now?

This is not to say that we should be dragging teabaggers into the street and shooting them. I am assured that “the son of a bitch had it coming” is no longer a legal defense to murder even in the state of Alabama, and besides there’s that whole five thousand years of Judeo-Christian morality in the way. What I am suggesting is that the movement itself needs to be defenestrated – that something has to happen to lance the boil such that marching around with guns telling the President to go back to Africa is so patently unacceptable in society that even to be associated with it is poisonous.

Here’s the problem, though: the teabaggers have their own society and their own media environment. They have an entire cable news network, several national talk-radio outlets, and endless Internet commentary to tell them how right they are. They live in a reality they have constructed themselves, and anything that conflicts with their reality can be rejected out of hand as a creation of the enemy’s media machine, or “political correctness”, or some such. There’s no recourse to reason or logic, because they have their own reason and logic. When an entire political sub-class can turn on a dime in a year with regards to the menace posed by the unchecked executive power of the Presidency, good faith bargaining is not on the cards.

The really scary bit is this: I don’t even think something like Oklahoma City in 1995 would break through the shell anymore. I really do think that a major incident of right-wing terrorism would be greeted by the ‘baggers as either a proud blow against government tyranny or as some sort of government trick to try to discredit them, and they’d plow right on along. At that point, I guess the only question is whether the shock would be enough to shear off the less fanatical and reduce the numbers even further – but given this country’s attention span, I’m not sure that’s feasible. And to be honest, I absolutely believe that another September 11-style attack would not result in a rally-round-the-flag-and-President effect. If some mass-casualty catastrophe happened now, I guarantee that Republicans in the House would enter articles of impeachment the next day. To be honest, if the Republicans get control of the House, I fully expect that before January 31, 2011, some GOP member will introduce articles of impeachment – or at the very least, commence hearings on “the birth certificate” or some other talk-radio fabrication.

So what’s my solution? I don’t have one, because there isn’t one.

Ecto 3, testing…

In a move that should surprise nobody, Facebook is once again arbitrarily making entire categories of user info public. This is not surprising, any more than a dog humping your leg should be surprising. But it’s time to cut this dog’s nuts off.

Much like Google, Facebook’s whole business model revolves around finding ways to monetize your information and sell you ads based on it. However, don’t think this is just limited to shady Flash games – Facebook’s big plan apparently revolves around becoming the official login service of the Internet. In essence, Facebook would very much like to be the keeper of your online identity.

And you know what? They’ll go far with that. Facebook has turned into the sort of thing that non-techies will flock to and spend hours with, if the user base I support is any indication. It’s the 21st-century AOL, the face of the Internet for people who just want to see their elementary school friends and play Farmville. Hell, even for me, it’s become the simplest way to see what’s going on with people I know. Sure, I’d much rather they all had blogs and I could just RSS everything, but it’s probably not going to happen.

Once again, horses for courses – it’d be lovely to have a Twitter-type stream for short stuff, a Tumblr-like service for quick pix and clips and brief comments, and the usual array of blog options for long form. But for most people, that turns out to be Facebook. And it’s picked up steam in ways that none of its predecessors ever did, and it’s insinuating itself even more into ordinary life. Hell, I see more Facebook references in advertising now than I did URLs in ads in 1996.

It should be a piece of cake to make something happen. TypePad has a micro version that does what Tumblr does, and it couldn’t be that tough to whip up a quick interface that would let you aggregate everyone’s various info streams in a single space. I think FriendFeed was supposed to be this, but hell, Facebook owns FriendFeed now. Besides, everything I see now seems to be focused on getting your Twitter into their stream as well, whether it’s Facebook or Google Buzz or what have you.

I’ve been on the Internets for over fifteen years now. I don’t need the training wheels, and I suspect a lot of other people don’t, either. The next big thing will come from whoever can find a way to give you social networking without a kung fu grip on your sack – and don’t expect it to be Twitter, Facebook, or Google providing it.

So supposedly Gizmodo has a prototype that is, in fact, the newest iPhone. Quick thoughts:

* To all appearances, the hardware has been upgraded in the places you’d like to see it upgraded. There appears to be noise-cancellation technology built in, the display is a higher resolution, the back camera has a flash and the front camera exists, the battery is non-trivially larger than before. It’s not possible to tell RAM, storage, or processor speed, as Apple was able to brick the phone remotely and there’s nothing inside that tells. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the phone will probably be at least the equal of the Nexus One in all specs.

* I’m only half-joking when I say that whoever lost this phone has a lifespan measurable against a fruit-fly’s. In all my time with the Cupertino Hexachrome Produce Concern, Ltd, I only ever saw one pre-production prototype outside the building, once. This thing should be on super monkey lockdown, and whoever let it get away is in massive, MASSIVE violation of the standard Apple NDA. Right now, for whoever Mr. X is, the best case scenario is that he loses his job and that’s it.

* The phone uses a micro-SIM, like the iPad but unlike most every other phone out there. This is a new wrinkle, and one that so far is on the radar of every major GSM carrier but not in practice with any other hardware maker. The bigger issue is that it will make it difficult to move back and forth between the iPhone and another GSM device using the same SIM card – which is another form of hardware lock-in along the lines of the frequency band problem that makes AT&T 3G incompatible with T-Mobile 3G devices and vice versa. Long story short: it will be damn near impossible to use this notional new iPhone simultaneously on a single account with a Nexus One, barring the adoption of micro-SIM by Google and HTC.

* Apropos of nothing, HTC just launched a new Android phone on the Verizon network: the Droid Incredible. Wait, isn’t the Droid a Motorola phone? Yes, but it’s the Motorola Milestone everywhere else in the world (esp. on GSM abroad), and as it turns out, the “Droid” trademark is licensed to Verizon, NOT Motorola. So let’s see: Motorola releases the hottest Google phone in the world, only to see themselves sandbagged with the Nexus One a couple months later – and now, the big V has given the Droid mark to the maker of the Nexus One for another non-Moto phone.

If I were the CEO of Motorola, I would have taken a flamethrower to the place.

Not only is this a great explanation, but it also casts some light on why Apple gave the Heisman to Adobe’s Flash-compiler tool. (Short answer: because of how multitasking works, you can’t just cross-compile for different operating systems and get it to work.)

So I’ve started watching Carl Sagan’s landmark PBS miniseries again. Thirty years on, we tend to forget that until Ken Burns produced The Civil War for PBS, Cosmos was the highest-rated PBS program of all time. I don’t know how I came to it, but I distinctly remember being allowed, even encouraged, to watch it. Looking back now, I didn’t really grasp now much of an anti-nuclear-war jeremiad it was, but then a lot of stuff from the era looks dated as hell (The Day After, anybody? Amerika? Hell, Red Dawn? How exactly do they plan to remake that? Why exactly do they plan to remake that?) Also, it’s clear that I really did have that line of demarcation at a young age: God created the universe in six days on Sundays and in 4.5 trillion years the rest of the week. Anybody who’s ever done any quality time in Nashville is well aware of the duality of Saturday night and Sunday morning. What can I say, I am large, I contain multitudes. Even then.

It’s amazing how well the thing holds up, though. This was at the apex of space science in this country – Pioneer, Viking and Voyager had all gone off in the 70s, we had landed man on the moon as late as 1972, we had Skylab, we had the Shuttle coming any minute now and the promise of the Hubble…it’s not hard to see how somebody as distinctive as Sagan could turn into a celebrity. I honestly can’t think of a hard-science celebrity that would turn up routinely on The Tonight Show these days. Stephen Hawking maybe, but not really. Anyway, so far, most everything they talk about – historically as well as scientifically – is still germane to the present day, enough so that you could still use the whole trick in science class anywhere about third grade up.

It’s comfortable, like finding one of your favorite old jackets from decades ago and realizing it still fits. For some reason, though, the opening makes me feel the slightest twinge of sad – it’s been a long thirty years, and maybe I’m just regretting that I didn’t make it as a Jedi astronaut, but what can I say – it’s hard as hell to find a place that offers that as a major…

An aside: in my previous job, there was a wizened old scientist who I privately grumbled about as “America’s Silliest Scientist” (or worse) but who was foisted on me as the new guy – because he’d exhausted everyone else’s patience. And yet, there he is, looking very capable as he pipettes some mysterious substance into the cosmic brew. I think that’s because there wasn’t a computer involved…

This guy has it figured out. Honestly, nobody should attribute any sort of sainthood to the folks in Cupertino (and as somebody who was one of them for three years, I oughta know) but to pretend like Adobe is some innocent babe in the woods being done wrong by the Beast of Infinite Loop is the height of foolishness. I would think that the paste-eater cognoscenti would be thrilled to see somebody pushing back against proprietary technology in favor of reasonably open formats not under the control of any one company, but for some reason, pressing for HTML5 and H.264 to replace Flash has somehow become the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Hun butchering the Belgians.

Look, any idiot should have been able to figure this out by now: Apple, in the era of Jobs II, is not interested in being beholden to anyone else. I can only imagine how much it chafed Himself to have Bill Gates up there pledging to keep producing Office for the Mac, knowing what a delicate thread the company was hanging by and how the decision to cut off Office would have effectively killed the Mac by 1999 or so. Anybody who thinks that the guy in the turtleneck is ever going to make his products dependent on the fruits of another tech company is smoking crack – thus the Quattro acquisition, a firewall against Google’s control of AdMob, and the PA Semi acquisition, and the map company they bought a while back – hell, the Great Mentioner periodically mumbles something about Apple and search, for crying out loud. Why do you think Apple had a version of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware for six years before making it public? Because Jobs had all he wanted of being in hock to Motorola to make a faster processor, and he had a backup plan.

For better or worse, Apple now has a survivalist streak a mile wide. IL2 is full of whatever is the high-tech equivalent of 9mm ammo, dried food, flashlight batteries and water purification tablets. The Sons of the Hexachrome Fruit haven’t holed up in the compound, and probably don’t want to, but if it comes to that? They are prepared to go it alone with no Adobe, no Microsoft, no Google. And given how much time they’ve had to prepare and bank resources, I’m not sure they couldn’t pull it off. Don’t forget, the big new data center in North Carolina opens any day now…

ETA: This Android engineer breaks down how Apple’s “multitasking” will work. Long story short: it’s more or less the same technique used by Android, although Android doesn’t kill the original task after switching until real RAM is close to running out. I suspect this means faster return-from-switch on Android, at the risk of crashes if the OOM handler is overwhelmed by too many big-RAM apps and cannot free enough memory in time.

So I went to a couple different surplus stores today. Look, I’m as free trade and globalist as the next guy, but it kind of bothers me when every single military jacket in the Army-Navy store is labelled “Made in China.” Anyway, the MA-1 apparently doesn’t have the velcro patch on the chest and is huge and bulky besides (probably warm, and it weighs NOTHING, but it’s just too damn big around).

Honestly, what’s driving me here is the notion of Cayce Pollard Units. If you’ve read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Cayce is the heroine of the tale. She has a unique “ability” if you want to call it that – she is allergic (to the point of psychosis) to branding, to the point where she can only wear clothing that would be generally regarded as fashionably indistinct anytime from the Second World War to the present. The one thing she has out of the ordinary is a Buzz Rickson’s replica MA-1 jacket, in black – and while Buzz Rickson’s is in fact a real Japanese company whose reproduction is almost artistic in its precision, they never made a black one until after the novel came out.

To be honest, this is as close as I come to a fashion statement. From the time I moved to California until about a month ago, the only jeans I’ve bought are the standard blue Levi’s 501. My daily footwear runs to Dr Martens in black or occasionally brown. My default work shirts are solid color collared sport shirts with no logo other than the WWDC logo on a couple of them. My off-hours shirts run largely to identical gray 2XL American Apparel t-shirts.

Only the jackets tend to run wild – and boy, do they. In the current rotation alone, you see the Vanderbilt softshell, the dark green oilcloth engineer’s coat, the canary-yellow Community Emergency Response Team coat, a plain black rain shell, a black National Geographic fleece that goes under that shell, a couple other Eddie Bauer cold-weather coats, a poorly-chosen jean jacket in brown suede, and (most distinctively) a brown leather Indiana Jones jacket from US Wings. That last was my signature jacket for most of the decade, but it’s proven largely impractical in a place where I have to wear a backpack to and from work every day – and it’s not the best thing for travel. Also, I’m not entirely sure I want to deface it with a couple of patches, even if they are germane to my history.

The big problem is that out here, it’s all layers all the time – it legitimately gets cold at night during the summer, and it’s legit too warm to wear the jacket during the day. It’s like those spring conditions where you always forgot and left your jacket at school. Which means that most of the time, I need something to wear in the morning that will ball up in the backpack in the afternoon. And the Stuff White People Like “performance outerwear” starts to make sense…which is why that Vandy softshell has become the go-to for most of the last year. I’m not sure I want to take it through Europe for two weeks, though – especially since it’s looking like “warm and rainy” is the default condition through much of where we’re going…

Well, my brother-in-law and I were looking at a WordPress migration. Then he was distracted from looking at the CSS issues in Movable Type 4 by the need to put the little one to bed, and while he was doing that, it occurred to me to archive and reload the templates – which got the MT4 CSS working properly, and in turn allowed me to switch to the nice gray layout you see here. Enjoy!
Now I just need to figure out how to get a blogroll going…