When Old Companies Meet New Technology

This is a fantastic example of what happens when an old company tries to use old methods to manage new technologies:

It’s a minor triumph of Apple’s that all AT&T plans for the iPhone include unlimited data services. After all, Blackberries and Treos alike have spendy access plans that dramatically increase their cost of use.

But as Justine Ezarik (a designer based in Pittsburgh known as iJustine who is also a “lifecaster” on Justin.tv) learned recently, AT&T still has a very old-world view of billing for data services. The company broke out as a line item every data transfer her iPhone made, including 30,000 texts, most of which come up as a huge series of $0.00 transactions. The total heft to the package? 300 pages. And it shipped in a box, which can’t have been cheap, even leaving aside the environmental impact of a few hundred thousand folks getting extra-big bills printed on paper.

iPhone, Here iCome!

Finally, someone understands me well enough to offer a serious way to finance a new gadget.

iNsanity

I'm not quite immune from the rising fever of the Apple crowd for the new iPhone, which launches on Friday, but John Scalzi seems to know how to lower the temperature:

Anyone who's getting a first-gen iPhone is signing up to be a guinea pig anyway; practicality shouldn't enter into it. Fair enough, and I wasn't exactly camping out to get one anyway. But I feel the same way I did when the first iPod came out, actually. When it happened I watched all the cool kids stab each other in the eye to get to it, and meanwhile I, who had had a CD-player-sized Creative 5GB Jukebox for over a year at that point and had paid substantially less to get it than what the first-gen iPod went for, thought it would probably be best just to sit out the fracas for a while with my perfectly serviceable, pre-existing alternative.

University Library Google-licious

From today's StarTribune:

On Wednesday, the U was one of 12 Midwestern universities that announced they are joining Google's project to put every book in the world online. Google will scan up to 1 million books from the U and up to 10 million books from Big Ten institutions and the University of Chicago, digitizing them at secret locations around the nation with technology that's fast but doesn't damage old and brittle pages.

The idea itself seems very cool to me. The fact that digitizing will take place at secret loctions makes it seem cooler.

Internetastic

Maybe I'm too easily impressed or too easily boggled by techspeak, but this Times article on how Google manages its search algorithms blew me away, especially the part about how the company goes about

maintaining a giant index of all the world’s Web pages. Google has hundreds of thousands of customized computers scouring the Web to serve that purpose. In its early years, Google built a new index every six to eight weeks. Now it rechecks many pages every few days.

And Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster. Google recently developed a new system that can hold far more data and search through it far faster than the company could before.

The entire internet! I guess I can stop making those printouts now.

Bears, Hyenas, Walruses

iTunes is now selling higher-quality, higher-priced songs without digital rights management built in. Slate has taken the trouble to see if the average listener can tell the difference between the 128kbps and 256kbps versions of some well-known songs. Click the link to watch the video analyzing the startling differences.

Hell by the Dashboard

I don't use my Mac's "Dashboard" application much since ye olde PowerBooke is too slow for the app to work well. But the "Corporate Ipsum" widget for the Dashboard makes me feel like it might be time to upgrade. All it does is generate corporate-speak that's nonsense but at least as smart of what was in that last PowerPoint:

Synergistically engage cross-media human capital for out-of-the-box convergence. Objectively generate fully tested meta-services via market-driven sources. Interactively underwhelm long-term high-impact convergence rather than future-proof convergence.

(Link and text via 43 Folders.)

Joost

I'm checking out Joost in beta right now -- the new internet TV system from the folks that brought us Skype. Yes, I'm watching the pilot episode of Starsky and Hutch. I heard about Joost yesterday on NPR. The internet continues to transform traditional media in very interesting ways.

Wii-ding the News

I don't have a Wii, but I know some people who do, and I love Google Reader, and so I think Google's making their RSS reader work on the Wii sounds amazing.

Le Pew

The wonks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a report on the various kinds of information-technology users, abusers, and snoozers. Pew found that while heavily-wired "omnivores" constitute about 8% of all Americans, 26% of us are either very occasional and unsophisticated users of the web, cell phones, etc., or don't use such things at all. This seems like a staggeringly high number, but then I started to think about my extended circle of relations, and, yeah, about a quarter can be described with one of those descriptors.

You can take a condensed version of their survey to figure out where you fall in their typology. I came out as a "connector," a group which makes up 7% of the populace: "Connectors combine a sense that information technology is good for social purposes with a clear recognition that online resources are a great way to learn new things. Their cell phones have a lot of features, and they also try new things with technology; more than half have watched TV programming on a device like a laptop computer or cell phone."

Hey, I can't be faulted if I have to watch al-Jazeera over the web! Charter doesn't carry it!

Wait, Macs get sick too!

Apple broke one of their brand promises with me this week. Everything doesn’t always work with a Mac. In this case, a hard drive failure on my iMac. Thankfully, this happened within the first year of the warranty, so the replacement will be free. Data recovery, well that’s another story.

After multiple calls to Apple support and hours of verifying, reparing, and repeating, my hard drive finally gave up. I was living a definition of insanity, trapped in the closed-loop system of Apple Tech Support. Apple level-one phone techs refused to believe that it could be a hardware issue – telling me that we want to try this again, just one more time. After the fourth attempt at verifying, it was clear the hard drive wasn’t getting better, nor was the tech support. One stop at our trusted, local, Apple authorized, service center and it’s clear it’s a hardware issue.

Then, this week in the midst of the problems, I see the cart of sick PCs on a recent “Get a Mac” add. It was like a punch to the gut.

Hopefully, after the new hard drive and some other upgrades and restores, everything will just work on my Mac.

(x-posted at Sanctioning Agent)

Mac, Mate

The United Kingdom versions of the Mac-PC ads are pretty funny. Pie Chart" is best, though I don't see why a pie chart isn't the best way to represent your vacation...

Internet Addiction?

I love that Bill Gates' daughter is spending too much time on her Xbox:

Just because you're the daughter of Bill Gates does not mean you get to play on your computer all day long. The Microsoft founder said his 10-year-old daughter, his oldest child, was not a hard-core Internet and computer user until this year, when she started at a school where the students use tablet computers for almost everything... Gates said he and his wife Melinda decided to set a limit of 45 minutes a day of total screen time for games and an hour a day on weekends, plus what time she needs for homework.

Miss Gates should be glad her dad doesn't adopt Chinese techniques for curbing internet addiction:

Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation... The Chinese government in recent months has joined South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam in taking measures to try to limit the time teens spend online. It has passed regulations banning youths from Internet cafes and has implemented control programs that kick teens off networked games after five hours... [A] clinic in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, the capital, is the oldest and largest, with 60 patients on a normal day and as many as 280 during peak periods. Few of the patients, who range in age from 12 to 24, are here willingly. Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month -- about 10 times the average salary in China -- for the treatment. Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.

*bzzzt* Excuse me. *bzzzt* I have to get back to work.

Bored in a Northern Town

Some engineering students at Michigan Technological University, located next door to my hometown, spent part of their Winter Carnival building a "snow speaker" - a 20,000-watt megaphone that uses massive snow walls to project the sound.

This is what happens when you put a university in too cold and snowy a place.

Gadgets Go to Hell

This is getting a lot of play in the geekier corners of the net (Boing Boing, Kottke), but it's worth reading firsthand: a fantastic, Matt-level rant by a former tech-blog editor on the insanity of America's fascination with consumer electronics. It's a great corrective to early-adopteritis. A snippet:

Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose...

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it...

Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives.

This is bracing stuff - just harsh enough to make happy to not have a cell phone anymore, not so cruel as to keep me from coveting a new MacBook.

Cyber Crime

The near-continuous hum of concern in the media about identity theft has always made me wonder about the logistics of that kind of criminal activity. How do the ten thousand Social Security numbers on the government laptop lost by some idiot bureaucrat make their way into the hands of the criminals? Turns out, in much the same way any information gets sold these days, from sports scores and stock prices to software applications and naughty pictures - networks, the web, commodification, entrepreneurs. This long but engrossing article in Information Week covers the basics.

Hacking isn't a kid's game anymore. It's big business. Online black markets are flush with stolen credit card data, driver's license numbers, and malware, the programs that let hackers exploit the security weaknesses of commercial software. Cybercriminals have become an organized bunch; they use peer-to-peer payment systems just like they're buying and selling on eBay, and they're not afraid to work together.

While the independent hacker still exists (pardon us, but in this story, we'll refer to "hacker" in the layman's sense), the FBI sees true organized crime in parts of the hacking community, particularly in Eastern Europe, says special agent Chris Stangl, who works in the bureau's cybercrime division, the agency's third largest behind counter-terrorism and intelligence. "You'll have hackers cracking the machines, individuals collecting the data, and individuals selling for profit," Stangl says.

Getting a clear picture of the hacker economy isn't easy. It's a murky underground about which few people are willing to talk on the record. But the general outlines can be gleaned from inside and outside sources.

(A good companion piece is the recent article in Wired on "botnet" attacks, in which cyber-criminals use software robots to commandeer and control PCs and servers and use them for all manner of nefarious ends.)

Speedy Internet

A couple weeks ago, the Strib ran an interesting article on how Americans' desire to use the web in certain ways is being hindered by our country's absolutely primitive web infrastructure: "As video becomes a bigger part of the average Web surfer's diet, the heavy traffic could overwhelm the Internet. That could lead to slower service for everybody -- or higher prices for heavy consumers of video."

I was struck by this comparison to the bandwidth enjoyed by those damn dirty foreigners: "20 megabits per second widely available in Europe and the 100 megabits per second offered in Japan and South Korea." By comparison, my mid-range DSL connection from Qwest runs at speeds "up to" 1.5 megabits per second (too slow to be able to watch YouTube videos); a "fast" Comcast cable connection runs to about 6 Mbps.

And but so, I was elated to an embarrassing degree when this afternoon I heard that a new company is set to launch a municipal "WiMax" service here in Northfield next month. If all goes as planned, I'll be able to get wireless access at my house at a whopping 21Mbps - fourteen times faster than my DSL connection - for about ten bucks less per month.

Yee flipping ha! Nothing like busting up the Charter Cable/Qwest oligoplogy to make things better here in the town of cows, colleges, and contentment.

Cellular Memory

Forget flash drives; we're on the verge of hemoglobin drives:

Researchers have created an ultra-dense memory device the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over. The accomplishment represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.

Imagine being able to send a few terabytes of data swimming in your veins. What a great way to back up iTunes. But does this mean our kids' teachers are going to have to worry about blood doping as a means to cheat on the SAT, not the football field?

Winter Geese

Dumpr.net lets you set your Flickr photos in a faux-museum setting and in other formats. I like this one; it appeals to my pathetic pretensions toward art.

Winter Geese
Originally uploaded by Tassava.

Global iPod costs

If you need to satisfy your iPod jones before the iPhone comes out, you can save yourself US$4.80 by buying a nano in Canada.

In a move akin to The Economist's long-standing Big Mac Index, Sydney-based bank Commonwealth Securities has launched its own CommSec iPod Index... "A key difference between the iPod and Big Mac approaches is that Big Macs are made in a host of countries across the globe whereas iPods are predominantly made in China," CommSec chief economist Craig James told Australian Associated Press. "Simply, an iPod nano should broadly cost the same across the globe."

Ain't so, though. Canada is the cheapest place to buy a nano ($144.20), the U.S. is fourth cheapest ($149), all of the Nordic countries are near the top of the list (just over the $200 mark, about 30% more than the Canadian price), and Brazil breaks the bank ($327.71, more than 125% more expensive than Canada).