Month: June 2012

This guy has it absolutely right. It also explains why the people in a perpetual uproar about how the Apple Store isn’t open are chasing a car.  The hobbyist market, the chip head market, the people who want to tear it down and tinker are a very small minority of the total market, no matter how much folks like Doctorow and the EFF wish otherwise.

And the thing is, you can still tinker.  You just have to be willing to live with the consequences.  Apple still hasn’t gone after jailbreakers – hell, they haven’t yet gone after people who are reselling developer access to beta versions of iOS! – so if you want to delve into your device at some level, hardware or software, the potential is there, with the eternal caveat: buy the ticket, take the ride.

But I suspect a lot of the stick Apple is getting over this has nothing to do with actual tinkering hobbyists and everything to do with driving page views.  You can bash the Beast of Cupertino and reliably draw hordes of angry MacMacs with their rainbow apple superimposed on the Apple Menu, convinced that it’s 1996 and Microsoft is still the greatest evil the world has ever known.  (Nothing makes being a Mac user harder than the Mac obsessives.)  And of course, there’s their opposite number, the rabid Apple haters who are convinced that this is what’s going to do Apple down for good – much like their failure to offer a 7″ tablet, or their failure to license the OS to third-party manufacturers (again), or the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone, or the lack of support for Windows Media formats on the iPod, or or or or.  These are the same people who are convinced that a stylus and a keyboard cover are going to let the Surface completely destroy the iPad as a viable tablet experience.

I’ll have that bet.

Think about it.  MacWorld 1997, Steve Jobs turns to the big screen, and there’s Bill Gates, to the shock (and hoots) of the crowd, investing $150 million in Apple to keep it alive as a hedge against anti-trust action by the DoJ.  Apple was, to all accounts, ninety days from bankruptcy.

Fast forward to this week in Los Angeles.

Microsoft was always content to make its money on Windows and Office.  That was the angle, the indispensable hammer they held over the PC industry.  Every desktop and laptop that went out the door everywhere but Cupertino was money in their pocket.  They didn’t have to do anything at all, and for the most part they didn’t.

Meanwhile, Apple dialed in on the post-PC world.  Sure, Mac OS X made the move to Intel and basically completely captured the market for consumer personal computers over $1000, but let’s face it – for all the glitz and glam of the MacBook Air and the new retina-equipped MacBook Pro, Apple’s making its bankroll these days off the iPhone and iPad.  They captured the market for the consumer smartphone, essentially stabbed Blackberry to death, and currently makes ridiculous sums of money relative to the half-dozen companies pushing Android-based phones.  They created the market for consumer tablet computing, scaling a phone OS up to a tablet instead of trying to cram a PC operating system into it, and nobody has even come close.

And now, Microsoft is chasing Apple.

Think about it: the entire Monday event was like a parody of an Apple rollout. The Microsoft stores opening in malls across America are essentially imitations of Apple’s brick-and-mortar retail establishments (which were roundly mocked as a failure in the making when they opened).  And now, Microsoft is attempting to do what Apple didn’t by cramming a PC operating system into a tablet – albeit by making it as much like a tablet OS as possible, and most of all, by making their own hardware.

Microsoft never made hardware.  Keyboards and mice, sure, but never computers.  But for some reason, they now feel like they have to make their own tablets to run their OS.  They’re joining Amazon, who decided to fork Android and make their own version of the OS to go with their own tablet.  And next week, at Google’s own developer conference, the Great Mentioner expects them to launch their own tablet hardware to run Android.

Today, in 2012, everyone – Microsoft included – is chasing Apple. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling.

Well the event is still going on as I type this, but apparently Microsoft is going to make their own tablet to go with Windows 8.  They’ve borrowed the 5-year-old name of the Surface tabletop-touchscreen device, so get ready for all sorts of Surface puns.

Short version: there’s no reason you can’t take a touch-tablet experience and cram a regular PC into it.

No, seriously. There are two versions of this trick: one running Windows RT, which is the Metro-touch-only version of Win8, and a pro version with last year’s i5 processor in it and vents around the entire perimeter of the device.  Yes, folks, this is a tablet with ventilation. I see no way this ends badly.

The unique selling point so far appears to consist of a kickstand (only viable in landscape mode), a SmartCover knockoff that has a quasi-membrane keyboard on the underside (so you get a sort-of-desktop experience, because this sure as shit isn’t going to fly in your lap), and of course the opportunity to run Windows on a touchscreen interface (though presumably that’s what the SmartCover knockoff is meant to handle).  

USB3 and HDMI, so they’re basically attempting to pitch this as the transitional best-of-both-worlds device that beats out your notebook and your iPad with a single gadget.  But as much as Microsoft is now just basically trying to clone Apple – which is the story of Microsoft, when you get right down to it, whether Apple or WordPerfect or Netscape – they haven’t managed the presentation bit, because the first Surface crapped out on demo and they had to pull the backup.  Some things never change.

When you get right down to it, that seems to be how high tech works now.  Somebody invents something crazy, that’s stage one.  Then somebody – usually Apple these days – perfects it and makes it something anyone can use, whether it’s an MP3 player, a consumer smartphone or a legit tablet computer.  And then a couple years later, Microsoft lurches into view and barfs up a knockoff that has as its principle virtue cheapness and compatibility with the existing Windows/Office ecosystem.

The problem is, that hasn’t worked.  The Zune was a joke from stem to stern.  Windows Phone seems to be rounding into a contender for third place, even if it’s about to undergo a compatibility watershed.  But the attempt to extend the Windows empire into tablets – to literally put a classic Windows desktop on a touchscreen tablet – suggests that Microsoft still can’t let go of Windows as the key to everything. And yet, Windows hasn’t been a part of the next big thing for a decade now.  One has to wonder whether the beast of Redmond wouldn’t have been better served by making a clean break – but at this point, that may not even be conceivable.  Microsoft is going to live and die with Windows, in whatever form that takes.

 

ETA: you have to think that Microsoft’s OEM partners are frisbee pissed.  And yet, this is probably what they had to do, and looking at the Android tablet ecosystem, it’s basically their only chance: partners are not going to craft a premium experience.  If Microsoft is serious about the touch-tableting of Windows, their only real choice is to do it themselves and demonstrate their vision, and hope the OEMs will play along.

That’s the recurring theme of our politics, it seems like.  Florida starts purging the voter rolls until told to stop by the DOJ – will everyone be legit in time for the Florida primary?  Who knows?  Fox makes its own campaign ad to slam the President and runs it twice on Fox and Friends, then says they will deal with the producer privately.  It’s the same problem as when the papers blast something in the headlines and then run the corrections buried on A14 somewhere.  And today, this very day, a “reporter” for Tucker Carlson’s “newspaper” – which, inexplicably, has press pool access – actually has the gall to interrupt the President of the United States – twice – and then walk out of the presser, live on cable news.  Which, of course, he knew would be carrying the whole thing.  I expect some sort of pro forma statement of regret from the Daily Caller in a couple of days, by which point its reporter will be the toast of the conservative world as a bold unafraid truth-telling hero instead of the asshole douche he is.

I know exactly how this works.  Of course I do, hell, I had a little brother growing up. I have almost half a dozen nephews now.  I have plenty friends with kids.  And everyone’s seen it at some point – the age-old move where the kid takes a swing at somebody or shoves his sister or grabs the toy out of somebody’s hand and immediately reflexively blurts “SORRY” at the first sign of adult notice.  (Makes me wonder how I didn’t beat the hell out of my brother more than the one time I did, when he wrenched my knee and inadvertently caused me to have surgery 21 years later, but I digress…)

This is of a piece with my theory of modern electoral politics: the GOP has become the Bully Party.  You see it in the opposition to anti-bullying laws, you see it in the likes of SB1070 in Arizona or HB56 in Alabama, you see it in the shenanigans of the Foster Frieses of the world. The ethos is simple: be the bully or be the bullied.  And that’s why it’s so critical they win – because they assume the whole world shares this outlook, and if we don’t bully the Middle East and Russia and China and the homos and the wetbacks and the hairy-leg feminists, they’re going to bully us, in fact we’re already being bullied because we have to pay for birth control and it’s a crime to beat up gay kids now and why is everything different from how it was in 1954* WAAAAAAAAH!?!?

And it’s only getting worse.  Multiple states down South are losing their shit over the library possibly stocking “50 Shades of Gray” (how the worse load of shit fanfic imaginable becomes a bestseller itself says a lot about American intelligence in the 21st century), while the board of Alabama Public Television is firing executives who resisted running Christian Dominionist propaganda on taxpayer-funded channels (god, remember when APT was the first public television statewide network in the country? Too long ago). Now comes word that the same casino magnate who essentially bankrolled the Newt Gingrich campaign zeppelin is now prepared to kick in literally tens of millions of dollars to the primary Romney SuperPAC.  Now the rich kids can just beat you to death with a wallet.

But there’s a larger problem, one I’ve mentioned elsewhere: the power of gall.  Of blatantly lying – worse yet, lying in a way that everyone KNOWS you’re lying – and defying anyone to call you on it.  This isn’t just a GOP political thing – you see it from everybody from Oakland cops to the RIAA to Hollywood studios.  You’re entitled to your own opinion, but when you decide you’re entitled to your own facts and insist on them – then what?  As I may have blogged before, it’s the problem of the asshole who stands on the train platform under the NO SMOKING sign puffing away on a whole bloody pack of Marlboro Reds – breaking the rules, annoying everyone else, but as soon as you call him on it, you’re the asshole for getting in his business.  And then, invariably, people who weren’t really paying attention or are late to the party, who might otherwise decry the smoker, will wash their hands of it by deciding that you’re both assholes, and just walk away from the whole thing.  And now you know why the GOP is running and ruining politics.  Now you know why there was a Romney campaign bus driving around the site of today’s Obama speech honking the horn.  Politics of the douchebag, for the douchebag, and by the douchebag.

So yeah, it’s going to keep coming.  It’s going to lie and dare you to say something, it’s going to be “do you know how much money I have”, it’s going to be punch first and then maybe say sorry once you’re knocked down – especially since this is real life and there’s no Daddy to grab them by the arm and stand their ass in the corner until they learn to behave.  The problem is that between an indifferent public and an incompetent press, America has a deadbeat dad.

Because in any other era, Neil Munro’s “journalism” career would be done.  Instead…just wait. 

 

* Again, nobody ever seems to remember that the workforce was one-third unionized or that the top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950s. When you see nostalgia for the old days, it’s for WASP social hegemony, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Jack Gilbert ran the writer development workshop at Warner Brothers for a decade.  He taught screenwriting at Azusa Pacific and elsewhere.  He has kids writing on or running at least a hundred shows (hell, probably more like two hundred) since 1994.  Every night, you can turn on your television and watch something that one of Jack’s acolytes had a hand in.

He was there in the early days of our misbegotten mailing list, always around the edges, definitely two decades older than anyone else in the bunch but never coming across as old. We found out years later than his license plate was YODA1 – which made perfect sense.  He was quietly funny, understated yet evocative, and on the occasions when he said something, you paid attention because you knew it would be something worth listening to.

We had birthdays only a few days apart (well, and a couple decades) and a favorite movie in common, but I first came to his attention when there was some silly dispute on the mailing list that led to some misunderstanding and hurt feelings.  Jack took it upon himself to make nice on behalf of the list, and as I was in the same town as one of the aggrieved parties, he tapped me to act as his agent in the matter.  Which is how I found out that Emma’s Florist and Gifts was the go-to for Warner Music when congratulating new artists.  Later, he would come to DC every year to visit friends – and he was always good for a lunch full of catching up and an insider’s eye on the new television season.  Everyone in the DC crew made sure to post for that lunch whenever they were in town.

He died too young. 62, pneumonia that he waited on too long before going to the hospital.  His memorial service packed a church on Mulholland Drive, because even though I don’t know that I ever heard anything explicitly religious from him beyond the “God bless us every one” closing of his Christmas letter, he was a more effective advertisement for Christianity than any sermon or tract or lecture I ever saw in my life. And I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say with some confidence that Jack Gilbert is what I want to be if I grow up.

It’s sexy, make no mistake.  A 2880×1800 display on a 15″ laptop is earth-shattering, especially at that price point.  It might be too big for my bag, though, and the step up from 3 to 4.5 pounds might make a difference with my shoulder issues, so we’ll have to see what’s doing.  I’m not ordering anything for a couple of days, I promise you that.

The Mountain Lion and iOS 6 stuff is of a piece – basically different interfaces to an iCloud-connected world.  The Maps changes were inevitable (cue Steve Jobs-Scarlett O’Hara clip) – sucks not to have transit directions anymore, but they weren’t that helpful and I was always using the Caltrain and VTA and BayTripper apps anyway.  The Passbook app seems to be a better solution than Google Wallet for now – different, but not requiring NFC technology; if you can scan a barcode you can make use of Passbook.  Moving to a Retina Display in iPhone 4 made that feasible.  Siri improvements are necessary and predictable, esp. since it was a beta before – basically this is all about getting the original Siri features into the iOS built-in version.

A little disappointed but not surprised that iOS 6 isn’t coming to the original iPad, but that sort of drives home that 512 MB of RAM is the price to play on iOS 6.  They say it’ll be on the 3GS, but I doubt the full feature set is there – and the A5 seems to be mandatory for Siri support, which is also not surprising.  If the viable lifespan of an iPad is two years, though, it doesn’t speak volumes for its viability as a laptop replacement.

The most telling stat for me was that 80% of iOS devices are running iOS 5.  Ice Cream Sandwich, which dropped one week later, is on less than 10% of Android devices.  That one stat drives home why merely pointing at units shipped doesn’t persuade me that Android has in any way surpassed iOS, not when the bulk of those devices are running an 18-month-old base OS release.  Hell, we’re coming up on a year since a point release.  The number one disincentive for Ed Earl Brown to buy an Android phone is that he has no idea when – or even if – he’ll be able to update it.  Whereas any iPhone you buy on a contract has always has updates to the OS, free, for the life of said contract.  Not a stat that shows up on paste-eaters’ feature-comparison charts, but one that cannot be ignored.

So far, it looks like Apple will survive without Himself.  Check back in a couple of years, though.

So let’s see: a depressed claustrophobe, going for an MRI to determine what’s wrong with his spine, worried that it might be similar to what afflicted his dead father, and having the MRI on the weekend of the anniversary of his father’s death? You’re goddamn right I ditched work for the whole day. And that means only one thing: an afternoon movie, in this case my third viewing of The Avengers.

Some thoughts after three tries, not all of which were revealed on the third try but all of which are clear after my third go-round:

1) Tony Stark arrived in Stuttgart by overriding the PA system and playing AC/DC’s “Shoot To Thrill” at top volume – the same song that heralded his arrival at Stark Expo. Tony Stark has theme music. That fact alone tells you tons about the kind of guy he is.

2) Similarly, Captain America’s throwaway line is significant: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.” In one stroke, we learn that Cap has the religious beliefs and values of his era, and that he is the kind of person who still feels compelled to address one of the world’s most dangerous assassins and spies as “ma’am.” A Boy Scout to the last, our Cap. That’s why his line to Agent Coulson asking of the starts and stripes on the costume weren’t “a bit old-fashioned” seemed out of place. I’d buy that coming from Stark, but I don’t think it would ever occur to Steve Rogers that the Stars and Stripes would go out of style.

3) Again, one of the best lines isn’t a line at all, but a callback to Steve saying “I don’t think anything could surprise me” and Nick Fury saying “Ten bucks says you’re wrong.” And then the SHIELD Heli-carrier rises up from the water, ascends to the sky, and cloaks itself to disappear…and without a word, Steve reaches into his pocket, pulls out his roll of bills, peels off a tenner, and passes it to Nick Fury without a word. Just perfect.

4) Tony Stark’s deepest moment is when he’s talking to Bruce Banner, the only person who can keep pace with him in the brains department. He points out how the arc reactor is part of him now, and how it saved and changed his life, and says, “It’s…a terrible privilege.” And if that line doesn’t hit you where you live, well, you probably didn’t grow up gifted in the deep South in the 70s and 80s. I strongly suspect that at some point in his life, Tony Stark has said “I AM THE GOD OF HELL FIRE!! I am, right?”

5) It needs to be said again: how many All-Star games are just complete clusterfucks? How often do you get to bring together a whole bunch of leading players and cram them together as a team and it works out? Joss Wheedon took full responsibility – story, screenplay-director – for delivering the payoff of five movies since 2008, and he delivered completely. People I know who have seen this movie without any of its predecessors loved it. That tells you what kind of movie it is – that it can pay off the buildup while still remaining accessible to those just showing up.

Actually when was the last time I saw a movie three times in the theater? Hell, I’m considering going again Tuesday night…

I can’t control it.

The year after it happened, when the anniversary came round, I planned on taking the day off work.  I ended up going in for just a couple of minutes to help get a writer set up for Eastern Europe, making sure the laptop had dialup numbers in Budapest and could use the right voltage.  A couple of minutes turned into nine hours, and in a way, I was oddly comforted, because I’d put in a good day’s work and done the best I could and not been a horse’s ass, and that was all the old man would have wanted as a memorial.

The next few years were turbulence incarnate. There was enough free-floating ambient rage that any other emotions around that date kind of got swept up and burned in the same fire that was propelling me forward.  The first seven or eight years were surpassing chaotic – hell, the eighth year after is more memorable now for being the day I sat on my bachelor party glasses in the course of moving my surrogate big sister in with us.

By the next year the darkness had started.  I don’t know if it was a byproduct of the year-or-so spent under the black cloud, or the assorted health nightmares of that summer, or just an increasing awareness of my own age, but it seems like every passing June is worse than the last.  It took a couple of days to catch me in 2008, but it got there.  In 2009, it salted an open wound of work issues and knee troubles.  In 2010, I was actually in Germany, with my mother and her new husband (about whom I have ranted elsewhere) and the days were fraught with enough peril that any angst about the date was tough to separate out.  And last year, I thought I was fine, right until the mere act of biting into a strawberry caused me to have a complete breakdown right in the middle of the farmer’s market.  And where did I go to be alone and clear my head? Oh, how about a movie theater showing Thor, because a film about family issues and lost fathers is exactly what I needed that day. Fucking brilliant.  A lot of people say I’m smart, but I say the evidence is suspect.

And now.

I’m going in for an MRI tomorrow, to see what’s going on with my neck.  Two years ago, there was a pinched nerve and a bulging disc, and there was a brief discussion of surgery, and then some painkillers and some prednisone (and isn’t THAT drug emotionally triggering for me), and eventually it more or less went away, right up until the day last month when I lost my shit at work – and it’s been bad ever since.  Post hoc ergo proper hoc, although who knows which one caused the other or contributed to it.

The cloud is always there this time of year. I never seem to think about why I feel like this in June until I’m already under its spell – which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but these things never do.  It doesn’t take much to start pushing the buttons, as the last couple of posts probably make clear (although being the son of two public employees will probably contribute to the snapping).  That’s the insidious thing about this…condition. It doesn’t adhere to any rules that make sense, it doesn’t respond to things that would make a person of ordinary circumstance feel better, and you can never tell if the drugs actually work – you can only tell when they’re not working.  And it’s hell on your loved ones, who can do literally nothing to help, so you end up spreading the badness around without actually ameliorating the symptoms in any way, and maybe get a nice soupçon of self-inflicted guilt to go on top of everything else.

So in the end, ride it out. Seek out some distraction. Try not to drink, or at least not too much. Try not to watch or read or think or dream anything that’ll set you off.  Just tell yourself that it’s only for now, that this too shall pass.

Then, for fun, try to believe it.

Miss you, pops.  You sure left us in a hell of a fix.

It’s been obvious for a while that when the GOP pines for the good old days of the 1950s, they’re thinking about minorities and women.  Segregation, the coloreds in their place, the fruits in the closet, the little woman at home with dinner and a pitcher of martinis for her man when he gets home, the works.  It’s nothing to do with things financial, because in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was 91%.  And more important, one in three American workers belonged to a union.

The union was the safety net, in a way.  It was the lookout.  It made sure that businesses didn’t balance the budget on the backs of the workers, that you couldn’t be pink-slipped just for the sake of making the stock bounce next quarter, that your working-class job would pay enough that you could put food on the table and a car in the driveway and send the kids to college.  And unions took the same thrashing as every other institution took in the 1970s, what with the mob ties to the Teamsters and the Nixonland encouragement of the politics of resentment.

But most of all, the nature of work changed.  Work moved into offices, to desks, in front of computers, and the people in those jobs forgot they were workers.  You’re indoors at a desk, you’re not blue-collar, you job doesn’t need organizing, unions aren’t for fine upstanding middle-class folk like yourself.

Horseshit.

This idea that the working world is somehow full of white-collar professionals is absurd.  Doctors?  Lawyers? Engineers? Probably.  But look at the tech sector, for instance.  My first boss had a marketing degree.  My tag-team partner had a doctorate (!) in psychology.  My wife’s degree is in environmental science, and famously, I have two degrees in political science that only get used in the service of blogging and trivia night.  We took jobs in the tech sector based on what we were mostly self-taught, and worked our way up through the ranks and learned as we went. And unless we were in management, many if not most of us were filling out an hourly timesheet.  The senior contractor at my first job, who was essentially the top non-com and the senior enlisted man, was typically sardonic: We’re bit-janitors, he proclaimed, we’re on the same level as general services and security and the maintenance guys.  They don’t put our names on our shirts, is all. 

He was right.  We had college layered over top of high school, but it was for show – when it came time to get a job, we went out and got a job, resemblance to our degree field not required, and played out our careers just the same as if we’d been down at the plant like our grandfathers.

Problem is, people don’t want to think they need a union.  They do if they work for the likes of Wal-Mart, but they don’t get it, not anymore.  You can be a warehouse picker and basically get wrecked, or do manual labor and have the threat of a truckload of illegals who’ll work for half held over you, or you can take an office job with two weeks’ vacation and sick leave combined and a big chunk out of your paycheck for your HMO coverage, which will get changed next year to whatever’s cheapest for the company, and you’ll get told that there’s 8% unemployment, you’re lucky to have a job, so shut up and get back to work.

The only place that still has unionized labor in any quantity is in government, the last employer that has to play by the rules and observe the letter of the law.  It’s not that union labor in government has special privileges, it’s that they’re the last ones to have to give up what everybody used to have.  And for the longest time, that was part of the deal if you worked for the city, or the state, or Uncle Sam – you’ll never get rich, but you have the benefits and security of the union to protect you.

And now, that’s going.  You can expect Wisconsin to open the floodgates for GOP-controlled legislatures and statehouses around the country: time to break the public-employee unions.  Partly because it’ll save money if you can slash salary and benefits without consequence, partly because it’ll hurt traditionally-Democratic organizations, partly because they’re government workers so they’re not REAL Americans, and partly it’s just the dog scratching its nuts.

The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled off was convincing American workers that somehow they weren’t actually working class, and that they should take the side of the bosses.  Social issues may have prized them off, but now it’s just loyalty to the tribe – vote for the Big Mules if you want to be on the side of the Real True Job Creator Americans.  And it worked, because there’s an amazing number of Americans who are happy to live on a slab of cardboard under a leaky bridge cooking a dead crow on a car antenna over a fire, just so long as the wetback/homo/feminazi/spade next door doesn’t even have the car antenna.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America.  But I pretty much fucking hate Americans.

 

…the theological deconstruction of the legend of Stagger Lee brings a smile to my face.