November 2006 Archives
I wasn't expecting Microsoft to come out with an iPod killer, but I wasn't expecting to see so many bad reviews about the Zune either.
I just saw a Zune, and guess what? Its a piece of shit, by David Galbraith:
Zune manages to take the very few features of the iPod and over complicate or ruin them. For example, the navigation copies the iPod's in the way it looks, and for absolutely no reason, because the way the navigation works does not require the scroll wheel design. This tell tale sign of unergonomic design is known to product designers as a skeumorph, it's why cheap hifi equipment has lots of flashing lights to look 'pro'.
Avoid the loony Zune, by Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Time:
Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.
Zune, so you want to be an iPod killer? MacWorld:
The iPod is beautiful, sleek and simple. Microsoft will never sell a media player that is more elegant than the iPod. That's just not going to happen, given the DNA of each company. What isn't inconceivable, however, is that Microsoft could create a Zune that's more desirable than the iPod. After all, the Mac is more elegant than Windows, but most people prefer Windows. And that's how Microsoft can kill the iPod: make the Zune more like a Windows PC.
Zune, Creative Commons Don't Mix, by Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired News:
To see the insanity of the music industry's antipiracy paranoia look no further than Microsoft's Zune.
Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not, by David Pogue, New York Times:
At the very attractive but dog-slow Zune store, for example, you can either buy songs ($1 each) or rent them (unlimited songs for $15 a month). But Microsoft’s store doesn’t sell TV shows, movies or audio books. The music catalog is much smaller — 2 million vs. 3.5 million on iTunes — a fact that Microsoft ham-handedly tries to conceal by listing stuff that it doesn’t actually sell, like Beatles albums.
Installing the Zune... sucked, by Ryan Block, Engadget: a complete description with screenshots of a pretty usual MS software experience with as many useless dialogs and crashes as you can get ;-). Note that googling for "zune installation crash" returns about 596,000 results already!
Zune Swoon, by John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine:
If anything is doomed to failure, it is the Microsoft Zune. I have no idea who is marketing this device within the company, but from what I can tell, this is going to become a major turkey in the product mix. As far as I can tell, Microsoft should simply turn over all its marketing to the Xbox 360 folks—at least some of the people in that group have marketing skills.
Now, hacks are starting to appear:
- Zune has its own 100% MS-Windows (but not Vista yet) + Zune store ecosystem (excluding MS own PlaysForSure format, which gives a sour taste to their marketing slogan "Choose your music. Choose your device.
Know it’s going to work."), but people are already trying to plug it on their Macs: One small step towards Zune use on the Mac...
- Gizmodo tells How To Bypass The Zune's WiFi Sharing DRM
Barry Ritholtz takes a look at the sales stats from Amazon and see that the iPod continues to dominate:
Apple has all 5 first slots, 9 of the top 10, 11 of the top 15.Microsoft Zune?
# 18
(Sophie notes in the comments that it's now at #76!)
There's a Zune page on Wikipedia.
BTW, I hear from the press here that Vista sales are looking bad, and that Seattle is expecting record monthly rain falls for November. I don't think those are related though :-p.
Until November 28, 2006 there is a petition running against voting machines in Germany which may also be legally signed by Non-Germans. As of today the petition needs about 6,000 more signatures for a public hearing in the petition committee of the German Parliament. Read the explanation in English.
To sign the petition, fill-in the form with the following information:
Name = last name
Vorname = first name
Ort = city
Postleitzahl = zip code
Strasse = street address
Land/Bundesland = country
- click on "Mitzeichnen" after selecting the tickbox just above
You will not receive confirmation by email, but your signature will appear briefly on this list .
The ITER Organisation just came out, and embarked on a 35 years project to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, South of France. Its construction costs are estimated at €5 billion over 10 years, the reactor ETA being 2016.
Meanwhile, a US teen fires up a fusion reactor in the basement of his parents with bits and pieces bought on the internet and blagged from manufacturers at a discount.
Go figure ;-).
My advice to developers is to realize that “beta” is a warning, not an excuse. And if you’re going to release software that you feel requires a warning, don’t reach for a euphemism when a more accurate word is right at hand:
‘Beta’ Is Not an Excuse, a must read for those who think slapping the word beta is a good enough excuse for releasing buggy software.
Technorati is a great source for information, trends and numbers about the blogosphere. But one has to take figures coming out from there with a bit of salt, and make their own mind about the Technorati prism, which is not the reality.
Take for example the Oct 06 state of the blogosphere from David Sifry. Here in France, some are "worried" that French would be underrepresented. Without entering into any (useless) debate about the importance (of even merits) of French vs other languages, I strongly suspect that Technorati is actually incapable of accurately tracking languages, at least not automatically. The proof? The latest "top 100 French blogs" co-branded by Technorati and Edelmann misses out a lot of prominent French blogs that should have been listed. Why? Because each blogger has to 1) get a profile on Technorati, 2) claim their blog, 3) manually set their blog "primary language" in their Technorati profile. You can bet that most of them didn't go that far. I didn't even notice I had to do that until I investigated about the inaccuracies in the aforementioned listing. And if they don't, well, my bet is that they're "assimilated" in some way, most probably into the mono cultural prism that predominates in a certain part of North America1 ;-). Provided that the process works in the first place, which is far from certain2!
Come on guys, a $1,995 Google Mini is able to autodetect languages in any document. All prominent search engines do. How does Technorati deal with languages today? Manually? My bad, they're using languid to automate that, but David says it needs to be improved.
A second hint about the level of accuracy of the Technorati figures is this phrase from David (emphasis mine):
My gut feeling is that since we're better at dealing with Spam now, even some of the blue areas in last quarter's graph were probably accountable to spam, which would mean that rather than the bumpy ride shown above, we're actually seeing a steady increased (but slower) growth of the blogosphere.
Also, there are lots of sites that aren't blogs in their index. Evidence, how come this corporate site has a rank (and a totally false "updated" info), how is it counted or separated from blogs? Add to that they also exclude a very large chunk of French blogs by not indexing Skyblog (5.9M blogs as of today, not insignificant compared to the size of the French blogopshere).
Another dirty little secret I've been suspecting for a long time, is that Technorati doesn't go further than a blog home page for links counting, at least for the ranking that serves as the "authority" level. I'd like to be wrong on that one.
But don't get me wrong on this, I positively applaud the work David is doing with his regular states of the blogosphere and I have a lot of respect for the folks at Technorati. But I would really welcome a little bit more clarity about the methods they're using to get those numbers (and assumptions) out.
So far, you really have to read between the lines and make your own mind about the Technorati prism vs reality.
(1) Technorati isn't localized, so only those who read English can go through the registration process. I find it weird that they can claim any accuracy in following foreign blogs when they start by excluding those bloggers who don't speak English.
(2) I set the primary language as French for my French blog a few weeks ago. Today, verifying the process while writing this post, I discovered that my "primary language" preference was reset to "all languages". So I had to set it again to French, but this preference doesn't stick, it keeps falling back to "all languages". Funnily enough, the same information for my blog in English is correctly labeled as English. Something's really wrong here!
The documentary Hacking Democracy from HBO has been published on Google Video:
This follows another video demonstrating how to hack a Diebold voting machine.
Read Uninnovating Democracy for more information.
If these were ATM machines being sold to banks, the quality and security of these machines would have resulted in lawsuits, investigations, and firings many times over.
Funnily enough, ATM is precisely the core product of Diebold. Even funnier (or may be not), those can be hacked too.
At last, I've made my mind about what Web 2.0 really is!
Point in time where the powers-that-be discover that a significant and increasing number of people are effectively using the internet in their daily life.
Corollary, here is my definition of Web 1.0: Point in time preceding Bubble 1.0, during the development of the internet, where the powers-that-be discover the web for the first time while investors' pockets are full.
By Bubble 1.0, I mean the moment when investors —who didn't necessarily (or even tried to) understand what the heck this internet thing could possibly be used for— discover that nobody is using it, besides the geeks they funded. Had the notion of tag cloud existed back in time, the words ROI and business model would have popped up at size 72pt+ at the beginning of 2000.
Bonus, here is my definition of Bubble 2.0: correction phase, following Web 2.0, where the powers-that-be who discovered that lots of people are using the internet without really grasping why they use it, are asked by their investors to go play elsewhere.
Double bonus, my definition of Web 3.0: phase when those who brag about being "web enabled" or their SOA capabilities are looked down as if they'd just discovered the phone. Note that if you foolishly talk about Web 2.0 in front of a geek, you'll get a taste of that condescending look already ;-).
You'll note that I didn't make any reference about technology in those definitions. There are no new technologies in Web 2.0. You'll also note that I don't refer to specific concept such as collaboration, which to me is simply a consequence of the democratization of the internet, an effect of mass inducing a percolation of personal behaviors in a social space. To sum it up, we're talking about the temporal discovery of the social development of the internet. This is where the buzzword Web 2.0 starts to have substance.
