There are times when I wonder whether Steve Jobs' leadership is really a good thing, long-term, for Apple. The MacBook Air happens to be my latest cause for bafflement.
Hey, it's not a bad computer, per se. It's very light and elegant, and certainly will look good when you whip it out in a cafe or on an airplane. And the idea of focusing almost exclusively on wireless networking is not a bad one, though I don't really want to be forced onto wireless (attention TJ Maxx shoppers). But I have never seen Apple ship something like this -- a total slap to 24 years worth of Apple power users. It's the underpowered junkheap in a nice case that the Mac development team went behind Steve's back to avoid shipping back in 1984.
Why am I paying $100 extra for the privilege of a DVD drive? Where is my FireWire connector so I can edit video? (And don't tell me to switch to AVCHD -- iMovie 8 is awful, group-of-pictures codecs are evil, and I don't have a venue for HD productions anyway.) And please, do not tell me that maybe the MacBook Air just isn't for me. Apple may have a tremendous amount of cachet, but they're still a niche player, and they don't have room in their product grid to create something that delivers new features but caters only to a certain section of their market.
Apple produces great hardware and great software. I've always thought that, even as the quality has slipped some in recent years. But that only gets you so far with those who actually know what they want -- I don't like being told that what I get is enough for me. (After all, there's a reason Macs ship with development tools -- as MacOS X is a Unix system, it would have a big credibility problem without them.) Unlike Windows, which is layer upon layer of designed-by-committee cruft, MacOS retains a fair amount of elegance. And I do want a MacBook -- a regular one, not the Air -- for my next computer. But after that, all bets are off -- I'm not averse to getting a PC laptop and installing Linux on it. The tools I need may be more baroque and less consistent on Linux, but they are there, and they do work for what I need. Don't drive your power users away, Apple. You need us as much as or more than you need the Brookstone crowd. (After all, who else was out there touting Applescript as a vast improvement over batch files a decade ago, or laughing at people because plug-and-play Nubus, PCI, and ADB peripherals meant that the control DOS users bragged about having was nothing more than the ability to repair grave defects inherent in the system?)
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
You're a sellout, man!
I got the '08 catalog from Ramsey Electronics, and I must say, I'm a little disappointed.
Ramsey has always had the reputation for selling interesting and slightly sketchy electronics kits, and among other things has long been one of the suppliers of choice for American radio pirates (even earning themselves a raid from the FCC a number of years back). That stuff is still in there (though an old joke about one of their products, a robotic bug, is no longer in the catalog), and the catalog is actually quite a bit thicker than last year's. But, interestingly, not with more kits.
No, the big addition has been in the pro audio section. Lots of cool stuff -- high-end, rackmount CD and MP3 players, advanced recording equipment, even a full-on 24-track digital audio workstation for $800. It's all very impressive... and seems to have little or nothing to do with their traditional business.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm of a mixed mind regarding pirate radio to begin with; while I do support the need for low-power community radio, there are technical and political issues involved (FM Capture effect, inadequate sideband filtering on home-built gear, religious broadcasting spectrum grabs crowding out other broadcasters) that make an unregulated radio spectrum impossible. And anyone who's ever driven down the street while running an FM transmitter from an MP3 player or satellite radio knows what it's like when a transmitter from a nearby car scrambles your signal. And it's not as if that market is getting slighted -- they don't seem to have actually removed anything from the catalog.
But I do wonder if this is a symptom of the same problem as amateur chemists have -- in the interest of avoiding trouble with the DEA and the DHS, science supply companies have moved over the years to restrict the sale of chemicals and even glassware to those who don't work in scientific fields. Maybe Ramsey is doing something of the same thing -- as the government and hypersensitive litigators continue to try to chip away at freedom of speech, and as the FCC continues to allow large broadcasters such as Clear Channel, Salem, and Infinity to gulp up larger and larger quantities of broadcast spectrum, maybe Ramsey is paving the way for a shift in focus so they don't get raided again. It's pretty sad, especially as most of the new gear, impressive though it may be, is generally out of the cost range of the hobbyists they've catered to over the years.
It's pretty sad when corporate influence and scaremongering raise the barrier to entry on a mere hobby.
Ramsey has always had the reputation for selling interesting and slightly sketchy electronics kits, and among other things has long been one of the suppliers of choice for American radio pirates (even earning themselves a raid from the FCC a number of years back). That stuff is still in there (though an old joke about one of their products, a robotic bug, is no longer in the catalog), and the catalog is actually quite a bit thicker than last year's. But, interestingly, not with more kits.
No, the big addition has been in the pro audio section. Lots of cool stuff -- high-end, rackmount CD and MP3 players, advanced recording equipment, even a full-on 24-track digital audio workstation for $800. It's all very impressive... and seems to have little or nothing to do with their traditional business.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm of a mixed mind regarding pirate radio to begin with; while I do support the need for low-power community radio, there are technical and political issues involved (FM Capture effect, inadequate sideband filtering on home-built gear, religious broadcasting spectrum grabs crowding out other broadcasters) that make an unregulated radio spectrum impossible. And anyone who's ever driven down the street while running an FM transmitter from an MP3 player or satellite radio knows what it's like when a transmitter from a nearby car scrambles your signal. And it's not as if that market is getting slighted -- they don't seem to have actually removed anything from the catalog.
But I do wonder if this is a symptom of the same problem as amateur chemists have -- in the interest of avoiding trouble with the DEA and the DHS, science supply companies have moved over the years to restrict the sale of chemicals and even glassware to those who don't work in scientific fields. Maybe Ramsey is doing something of the same thing -- as the government and hypersensitive litigators continue to try to chip away at freedom of speech, and as the FCC continues to allow large broadcasters such as Clear Channel, Salem, and Infinity to gulp up larger and larger quantities of broadcast spectrum, maybe Ramsey is paving the way for a shift in focus so they don't get raided again. It's pretty sad, especially as most of the new gear, impressive though it may be, is generally out of the cost range of the hobbyists they've catered to over the years.
It's pretty sad when corporate influence and scaremongering raise the barrier to entry on a mere hobby.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Church shootings in Colorado
Not one, but two church shootings in Colorado on Sunday, including one at Ted Haggard's old church. Now I am no fan of religion, and I think megachurches are a blight on the landscape and lives of Americans. But there is no justification at all for violence like this, no matter who deals it, no matter who the target is. Though I have no prayers to offer, I give my sincerest condolences and best wishes to the families and fellow churchgoers affected by these atrocities. There is probably not a Godless person in this country, at least not one in his/her right mind, who is rejoicing at this, no matter what paranoia some preachers like to spread, and given the senselessness of the murders, no political point to be made here, save one.
One nation, indivisible.
One nation, indivisible.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Ode upon a calculator
Okay, no poetry. But I've had for a few weeks now a TI-30XS and I would like to make a few comments -- on the calculator itself in this post, and then later some thoughts I have on the dominance of TI gear in the educational calculator market.
As calculators go, I'm decently impressed with it. The appearance shows TI's usual flair for design, with a white and slate-blue case with neon green accents, making it stylish but not childish like, say, the TI-108. The interface is almost identical to the one that TI has been using for years in its low to mid-range graphing calculators going back at least to the TI-81 -- you turn it on, you get a cursor instead of a simple number display. If you wish to use it as such, it's quite easy to do so, but the new thing the XS brings to the party is the MathView mode, in which you can, with a bit of practice, enter the problem exactly as it appears on the page. Fractional and exponential notation both come out quite nice without being crammed into the space of a single fixed line.
I'm not quite sure what I think of this -- certainly by the time you get to a class where you might want to use a scientific calculator, you'll probably need one. In that regard, it's quite functional, though it does lack hex and octal modes and a couple of other things that a calculator being used in the Real World might want. (For that, we'll have to wait until they bring MathView to the TI-34 series next year.) But I'm torn -- is doing this a way of reducing copying errors, or just dumbing down the students by removing one more opportunity to check over their work? I really don't know. I do know that for overall usability, it's a significant improvement over the awkward two-line display used in the TI-30IIX, and a damn sight better than the old-school one-line TI-30Xa.
Another issue I have with this is that it's a TI, which automatically implies a premium price. The peculiar thing about Texas Instruments' calculator marketing is that it comes explicitly through their educational division. If you buy a graphing calculator for a math class, the software your teacher hands out will be TI software (most likely for an 82/83/84 series). I'm a little unsure what's going on here -- one could argue that TI is merely responding to a market, but given that CVS, one of the big three drugstore chains, doesn't carry TI product at all, and that Rite Aid rebrands gear from Chinese OEM builder Karce for much cheaper than TI gear, I'm very curious how TI still manages to command the prices they do for equipment that's not the absolute top of the line for its category. (Hell, HP's HP-50g costs exactly the same as the TI-89Ti and TI-Nspire and includes infrared and an SD slot. The Nspire gives you swappable keyboards, true, but that seems almost as self-defeating as Commodore's 3-system-in-1 architecture for the C128 proved to be.)
So, it's a nice calculator. I may try to replace it with something a little more advanced when the TI-34 gets the new display, and honestly I'll still have my comparatively ancient TI-83 around for games anyway. But the 30XS is a pretty nice calculator for general use, and it looks like the future of scientific calculators, especially since Casio is now shipping a very similar model.
As calculators go, I'm decently impressed with it. The appearance shows TI's usual flair for design, with a white and slate-blue case with neon green accents, making it stylish but not childish like, say, the TI-108. The interface is almost identical to the one that TI has been using for years in its low to mid-range graphing calculators going back at least to the TI-81 -- you turn it on, you get a cursor instead of a simple number display. If you wish to use it as such, it's quite easy to do so, but the new thing the XS brings to the party is the MathView mode, in which you can, with a bit of practice, enter the problem exactly as it appears on the page. Fractional and exponential notation both come out quite nice without being crammed into the space of a single fixed line.
I'm not quite sure what I think of this -- certainly by the time you get to a class where you might want to use a scientific calculator, you'll probably need one. In that regard, it's quite functional, though it does lack hex and octal modes and a couple of other things that a calculator being used in the Real World might want. (For that, we'll have to wait until they bring MathView to the TI-34 series next year.) But I'm torn -- is doing this a way of reducing copying errors, or just dumbing down the students by removing one more opportunity to check over their work? I really don't know. I do know that for overall usability, it's a significant improvement over the awkward two-line display used in the TI-30IIX, and a damn sight better than the old-school one-line TI-30Xa.
Another issue I have with this is that it's a TI, which automatically implies a premium price. The peculiar thing about Texas Instruments' calculator marketing is that it comes explicitly through their educational division. If you buy a graphing calculator for a math class, the software your teacher hands out will be TI software (most likely for an 82/83/84 series). I'm a little unsure what's going on here -- one could argue that TI is merely responding to a market, but given that CVS, one of the big three drugstore chains, doesn't carry TI product at all, and that Rite Aid rebrands gear from Chinese OEM builder Karce for much cheaper than TI gear, I'm very curious how TI still manages to command the prices they do for equipment that's not the absolute top of the line for its category. (Hell, HP's HP-50g costs exactly the same as the TI-89Ti and TI-Nspire and includes infrared and an SD slot. The Nspire gives you swappable keyboards, true, but that seems almost as self-defeating as Commodore's 3-system-in-1 architecture for the C128 proved to be.)
So, it's a nice calculator. I may try to replace it with something a little more advanced when the TI-34 gets the new display, and honestly I'll still have my comparatively ancient TI-83 around for games anyway. But the 30XS is a pretty nice calculator for general use, and it looks like the future of scientific calculators, especially since Casio is now shipping a very similar model.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
On ministries for profit
Many years ago I attended an evangelical-dominated high school. It was decent academically, but the bulk of the student body was shooting for middle-of-the-pack Christian colleges and seminaries, not small liberal arts schools or elite public (UMass) or private (Ivies, Boston College) schools. At one of the weekly chapels, we had a minister there to speak about "cults". Now, to those of you who aren't steeped in the evangelical tradition, the term "cult" means, in evangelese, something roughly equivalent to "heretic sect", not the expected definition of "coercive religious movement". As a result, this ministry happily grouped the Unitarian-Universalist Association (one of the least coercive of any churches) and the Baha'i in with groups such as the International Church of Christ (still the Boston Church of Christ at the time) and the Moonies, both of which are known to be quite coercive in their teachings and social structures and which would qualify as cults in most people's books.
Well, I dug up some of the booklets they gave out at that assembly the other night while searching for an old calculator manual, and went to look and see whether the ministry was still in business and whether they'd updated any of the tracts or not. The ministry is still there (and I will not dignify them with a name or a link). The pamphlets are still in print... but not online. They have to be ordered, hard copy only, at a price of $2-$4 each (some of them being no longer than 4 pages in length, plus a relatively elaborate cardstock cover). This flabbergasted me -- even Jack Chick, as reprehensible and outright insane a human being as he is, still posts his tracts online for people to read. They do have books for sale -- that they would not put them online is understandable -- but selling what are essentially short, poorly written FAQ lists for such high prices strikes me as being anathema to the very concept of a ministry. If the truth is so important, why are the curious forced to pay to hear it?
I've always thought the most blatant example of a Christian money grab piggybacking off someone else's work has to be Jason Gastrich's Skeptic's Annotated Bible, Corrected and Explained. Gastrich, a particularly odious minister with a string of false credentials and a marked tendency to ignore "keep out signs" (he is a major nuisance on Wikipedia, having been banned repeatedly but refusing to take no for an answer), has for several years been marketing a CD-ROM that claims to contain a complete refutation of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (an admittedly somewhat sloppy but indispensable Bible reference for the anti-inerrantist). The kicker: the SAB is open-content. It is free for anyone to reference and costs nothing. The SAB-C&E is not. Whatever Gastrich's refutation is, it is apparently not important enough to him to make sure that as many people see it as possible -- instead, he'd rather make a buck off it. Such are the Elmer Gantrys of our age.
On a larger scale, what are we to do about James Dobson, the "evangelical Pope"? Focus on the Family is a huge ministry, spreading its ideas on childrearing and society far and wide and raking in substantial sums of money tax-free, to the resentment of many smaller commercial Christian publishing houses. Again, why is the money seemingly more important than the message?
I'm an atheist. I do volunteer work for a small Christian homeless outreach ministry, mostly on the TV production side helping out with public affairs programming. I have much respect for that sort of work, because even though I have no meaningful belief in God, I truly do believe it's the sort of thing that would-be messiahs throughout the ages, including most prominently Jesus and Buddha, preached to be done. It's my humanist mitzvah. I do it because getting good information out, with as few restrictions as possible, is something that greases the wheels in almost everyone's life; I'm a supporter of open source software for the same reason. Like I said, Jack Chick -- paranoid, hate-mongering, batshit-insane Jack Chick -- understands this point, even if his message is rotten to the core. What is so hard about this that we apparently can't get rid of the money changers in the temple?
Well, I dug up some of the booklets they gave out at that assembly the other night while searching for an old calculator manual, and went to look and see whether the ministry was still in business and whether they'd updated any of the tracts or not. The ministry is still there (and I will not dignify them with a name or a link). The pamphlets are still in print... but not online. They have to be ordered, hard copy only, at a price of $2-$4 each (some of them being no longer than 4 pages in length, plus a relatively elaborate cardstock cover). This flabbergasted me -- even Jack Chick, as reprehensible and outright insane a human being as he is, still posts his tracts online for people to read. They do have books for sale -- that they would not put them online is understandable -- but selling what are essentially short, poorly written FAQ lists for such high prices strikes me as being anathema to the very concept of a ministry. If the truth is so important, why are the curious forced to pay to hear it?
I've always thought the most blatant example of a Christian money grab piggybacking off someone else's work has to be Jason Gastrich's Skeptic's Annotated Bible, Corrected and Explained. Gastrich, a particularly odious minister with a string of false credentials and a marked tendency to ignore "keep out signs" (he is a major nuisance on Wikipedia, having been banned repeatedly but refusing to take no for an answer), has for several years been marketing a CD-ROM that claims to contain a complete refutation of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (an admittedly somewhat sloppy but indispensable Bible reference for the anti-inerrantist). The kicker: the SAB is open-content. It is free for anyone to reference and costs nothing. The SAB-C&E is not. Whatever Gastrich's refutation is, it is apparently not important enough to him to make sure that as many people see it as possible -- instead, he'd rather make a buck off it. Such are the Elmer Gantrys of our age.
On a larger scale, what are we to do about James Dobson, the "evangelical Pope"? Focus on the Family is a huge ministry, spreading its ideas on childrearing and society far and wide and raking in substantial sums of money tax-free, to the resentment of many smaller commercial Christian publishing houses. Again, why is the money seemingly more important than the message?
I'm an atheist. I do volunteer work for a small Christian homeless outreach ministry, mostly on the TV production side helping out with public affairs programming. I have much respect for that sort of work, because even though I have no meaningful belief in God, I truly do believe it's the sort of thing that would-be messiahs throughout the ages, including most prominently Jesus and Buddha, preached to be done. It's my humanist mitzvah. I do it because getting good information out, with as few restrictions as possible, is something that greases the wheels in almost everyone's life; I'm a supporter of open source software for the same reason. Like I said, Jack Chick -- paranoid, hate-mongering, batshit-insane Jack Chick -- understands this point, even if his message is rotten to the core. What is so hard about this that we apparently can't get rid of the money changers in the temple?
To Lauren
Don't do anything stupid. One day you may realize that people are trying to help. When that happens, all will be forgiven.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Shakeup at the Weekly Dig
I've been reading Boston's Weekly Dig for a few years now, and always enjoyed it, to a great extent because of its lack of the Boston Phoenix's notorious Ivory Tower stuffiness. So it's with a bit of confusion taht I write about the firing of editor Michael Brodeur after eight months on the job. While, according to the local media blogs, it was a highly unpopular move with the staff, I'm not so sure his firing was actually a bad thing.
In the comments of one blog entry on the matter, Dig contributor Lissa Harris said that Brodeur had removed a lot of "extraneous junk" (my words) from the paper, and I find myself wondering -- does she not understand the concept that "content is king"? While I consistently like what the Dig does do, it oftentimes seems like they don't really do enough. A weekly David Thorpe column, while utterly awesome in its snarky majesty, still does not make up for no more than half a page of record reviews. The Dig's movie coverage, somewhat light at the best of times, does not even measure up to that of the Improper Bostonian (whose editor, Dig "Media Farm" stalkee Veronica Chao, has now coincidentally gone to the Boston Globe at around the same time as Brodeur's ouster -- maybe the Improper can go back to some of the investigative journalism it used to do?). And the "Department of Commerce" section, once consisting of several pages of interesting and cockeyed looks at current retail tchotchkes, is now a single page, more picture than text. (And then there's the glossy covers, which were received about as well as April's drastic redesign on Fark.com, and the debacle surrounding syndicated incomprehensible possibly-gossip columnist Cintra Wilson.)
I suspect there's quite a bit more to the story than the publisher, Jeff Lawrence, has said, and it sounds like a staffing train wreck in progress. I hope Lawrence can right the ship, though, and get the Dig off its diet and fill it out with top-notch content.
And regarding the Phoenix: Tom and Christine are a cough drop when you want a roll of Thin Mints. Can we get some decent sex/relationship writing back in the rag without pilfering Dan Savage from the Dig again? Even Barstool Sports does it better than the Phoenix. (And while you're at it, can you go down the hall to Stuff@night, get Booty Call back in print, and have Jeannie Greeley stop with the navelgazing or find a different beat? She's a great writer, but she comes off more like a sober Caroline Knapp than a lesbian Emily Pepper.)
In the comments of one blog entry on the matter, Dig contributor Lissa Harris said that Brodeur had removed a lot of "extraneous junk" (my words) from the paper, and I find myself wondering -- does she not understand the concept that "content is king"? While I consistently like what the Dig does do, it oftentimes seems like they don't really do enough. A weekly David Thorpe column, while utterly awesome in its snarky majesty, still does not make up for no more than half a page of record reviews. The Dig's movie coverage, somewhat light at the best of times, does not even measure up to that of the Improper Bostonian (whose editor, Dig "Media Farm" stalkee Veronica Chao, has now coincidentally gone to the Boston Globe at around the same time as Brodeur's ouster -- maybe the Improper can go back to some of the investigative journalism it used to do?). And the "Department of Commerce" section, once consisting of several pages of interesting and cockeyed looks at current retail tchotchkes, is now a single page, more picture than text. (And then there's the glossy covers, which were received about as well as April's drastic redesign on Fark.com, and the debacle surrounding syndicated incomprehensible possibly-gossip columnist Cintra Wilson.)
I suspect there's quite a bit more to the story than the publisher, Jeff Lawrence, has said, and it sounds like a staffing train wreck in progress. I hope Lawrence can right the ship, though, and get the Dig off its diet and fill it out with top-notch content.
And regarding the Phoenix: Tom and Christine are a cough drop when you want a roll of Thin Mints. Can we get some decent sex/relationship writing back in the rag without pilfering Dan Savage from the Dig again? Even Barstool Sports does it better than the Phoenix. (And while you're at it, can you go down the hall to Stuff@night, get Booty Call back in print, and have Jeannie Greeley stop with the navelgazing or find a different beat? She's a great writer, but she comes off more like a sober Caroline Knapp than a lesbian Emily Pepper.)
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