Sony confirms PS3 controller redesign

The PS3 controller in itself isn't that interesting to me, but the larger problem of physical interface design, a.k.a. ergonomics and usability, is. With handheld devices so popular and component sizes shrinking, we probably have the capability right now to make a Zoolander-style cell phone. But have we seen it? No, because the human hand is too big and fingers are too thick. At some point, anything "handheld" has a threshold for miniaturization, beyond which it's just too small for most people to use. And since companies don't seem to be into releasing multiple versions of gadgets for different hand sizes... we have an interesting problem to solve. If you want to frame it that way.
I think the solutions will be, in no particular order:

a) Ear-hanging phones, voice dialing, no hands
b) Eyeglasses/sunglasses displays
c) Clothing-integrated devices
d) Folding screens
e) Implantation

That last one is going to be a hard sell, as are the glasses displays (especially the kind that project a laser onto the retina). People get squeamish when you talk about violating their bodies for the sake of convenience. Cosmetics, yes, but electronics?

Why do I feel like one of those lame futurists who predicted automats in your house and flying cars and robot butlers?

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Macworld News Analysis: Setbacks won't stop Dual-boot Mac efforts

So new info (to me) in this article - EFI is not new technology, and has existed on the server side of the Windows world since the early 90's. Interesting. Then I found this series of posts by Daniel Eran, which explains it all better than I ever could have, and definitely sides with the Funke camp of Virtual Windows on MacIntel in the end. It's an excellent read, and if I were a teacher I'd make it required reading. The dude knows what he's talking about!

So EFI is a decade-old attempt by the PC industry to get away from the legacy hell of BIOS and move into the modern age of extensible firmware, much like Apple and Sun have been using on the PC side for years now. Apparently MS and Intel found it too prohibitive to migrate to EFI with their new systems, presumably because it would have broken all backward compatibility between new hardware and old OS software and caused all sorts of driver hell that would have alienated consumers and driven them toward alternate platforms, a.k.a. Macs or Linux. Apple naturally went with EFI over BIOS because of its extensibility and similarities to Open Firmware - they needed to keep their special boot modes and all the other firmware features that Mac users have come to expect and that OS X incorporates. They must have also accepted EFI with a sly wink, because it quite dependably blocks any easy attempts to boot XP. It will take, and is taking, a substantial amount of skilled, low-level work to emulate BIOS in EFI, which according to Eran shouldn't be too difficult for the right person, just time-consuming. Hence the delay in booting XP.

But wait, there's more. Once XP is booted on an Intel Mac, Eran notes that there's a fundamental incompatibility in the way BIOS motherboards and EFI motherboards handle the partition table, the crucial piece that tells the OS where to look for the OS and other data on the hard disk(s). BIOS uses the ancient MBR standard while EFI uses GPT. These standards are so incompatible that they cannot even exist on the same hard disk! Thus dual-booting between a BIOS-dependant OS like XP and an EFI OS like OS X will required separate hard drives. Yet another barrier to dual-boot.

Beyond that issue is the problem of device drivers, which would need to be custom-written for the MacIntel hardware devices. Eran notes that this problem could be solved by the release of VirtualPC for MacIntel, since the developers would be facing that same issue and would presumably have access to internal Apple hardware specs that third-party developers don't. Still, it's only a matter of time before the open source community reverse engineers all the hardware and writes drivers for the Apple devices.

Eran concludes, and I'm seeing the sense in this, that dual-booting isn't (and hasn't ever been) a good business model or a very usable configuration, and is especially unlikely given all the obstacles to "native" booting that MacIntel hardware presents to XP and 32-bit Vista. His conclusion is that virtualization is the wave of the future, and I'm forced to conclude, not unwillingly, that he's absolutely right. A virtualization layer between OS X and XP/Vista would eliminate the booting problems and the partition table problems by simply writing a low-level emulation layer between them. Beyond that, Windows apps that send instructions to the CPU/GPU would not need much, if any, translation at all, since the hardware is the same stuff that they would see in a pure Windows PC. Eran points out that MS was kind of caught with their pants down with respect to Virtual PC, however, since there has been nary a mention of when a MacIntel version will be released. It's a ground-up rewrite, but I presume that that rewrite will strip most of the emulation code out of the product, save for what I mentioned, and will thus run blazingly fast compared to the VPC of old. Throw in 3D game support and you've got a nice profit-maker for MS - MacIntel owners buying off-the-shelf copies of XP and Vista, maybe even in businesses that are mostly Mac but need a few PC-only apps, like Access or AutoCAD. Heck, I could use those in my Language Lab, where they use a Windows-only language program but otherwise don't do anything that couldn't be done on a Mac.

The only compatibility bummer remaining is that the Intel Macs don't support OS 9 "Classic" mode, which is a huge loss for the education community. I've already written them about this, begging them to reconsider and alter Rosetta to include Classic support. It's shaping up to be a major dissatisfaction point with technology teachers around the world, since the moribund education software market has abandoned many quality products in OS 9-land, never to be Carbonized, much less Universal Binarized. Sucks!

Interesting take on the Intel Switch

This guy, BadAndy, seems to know a heck of a lot about the switch, and quotes some very interesting articles about it. Essentially, the way he paints the picture, Apple was getting painted into a corner by the IBM Freescale road-map, the evolving partnerships between IBM and Sony and Microsoft, and the fact that because of those partnerships Apple was seriously losing negotiation leverage with IBM when it came to CPU prices. On the other side, Intel is facing serious competition by AMD for pretty much the first time, and profits were falling to the point where Intel needed to pick up a PR win and some more business along with it. BA seems to think that Intel gave Apple a major price break on the Mini Core Duo, given the retail price of that unit, which would indicate a fair amount of willingness on Intel's part to play Steve Jobs' well-known game of demanding ridiculously low prices from CPU vendors on the strength of optimistic sales projections.

BA also quotes analysts, and includes his own opinions, saying that Apple's switch is the beginning of the end, and that their marketshare is doomed to slip even further now that they're beholden to Intel and not occupying a diversity niche in the hardware industry anymore. It sounds like the typical analyst FUD we've been hearing for decades now, which I think nearly always discounts the user loyalty and the added value that OS X and the Apple software gives to the Mac platform. Even if Vista is amazing, I'm betting that MS will still be months if not years behind Apple in sheer strength of design and ease of use. And while this clearly hasn't won the war for Apple, it also hasn't led to their imminent demise that's been predicted, oh, every year since they were founded.

Read the thread. It's a good one.

OS Cross-pollination - What makes sense?

"Can you post your point of view on:
1) OSX on vanilla Intel and
2) Windows on Macintel?
Specifically, which should/will be possible/embraced by Apple/Dell/Microsoft. Which is useful, which is just an exercise?"

Happy to, but first, a bit of background for the uninitiated.

In many ways, Apple migrating to Intel hardware is the final step in that company's journey to non-proprietary hardware. They began life with almost completely proprietary and/or rarified parts - SCSI drives, homemade motherboards, different CPUs, funky RAM - and have gradually migrated to industry-standard stuff. This has made it ever easier for offshoots of Linux to run on Mac hardware, and for third-party manufacturers to consider the Apple hardware a target market. Ditching the PPC and its firmware and motherboards looked to be the final step to complete hardware agnosticism, allowing all sorts of cross-installs and VMware to run any permutation of Windows, Linux, or OS X. But it would seem that both Apple and MS are taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen.

At first blush, this seems odd. MS has never been opposed to running Windows on Mac hardware via Virtual PC - indeed, after they bought VPC they still sold it and promised updates to make it compatible with the latest Mac models. And why not? Every Windows license sold (assuming no VPC pirates out there) is money in MS's pocket, no questions asked, doesn't matter what the platform is. This is still their attitude, which they'd be stupid to change since Windows is by far their biggest cash cow. Apple, however, has thrown a spanner into the works by going with EFI instead of the old-school BIOS, and it's starting to look like they did it for a reason.

The thing about Apple is that they've always been much more caught up in the overall computing experience than Microsoft. By controlling the hardware and the software they've been able to guarantee an end-to-end process that is seamless for the user and results in far fewer driver hiccups and strange behaviors that Windows sees because of the huge variety of hardware it can run on. Apple has famously stuck to their guns about this and steadfastly refused to license their OS, with the exception of brief period when they did license it and the resulting hardware was pretty crummy. Jobs rescinded that right quick, and Apple maintained their miniscule market-share and amazing "it just works" usability experience. So it's not surprising that when they switched to the Core Solo/Duo systems, they:

1. deliberately crippled OS X so that it won't run on standard PCs easily, and
2. used EFI in the hardware to ensure that running existing versions of Windows would be equally difficult (and, as it turns out, darn near impossible with XP)

Apparently the management has all still drunk the "end-to-end experience" Kool-Aid that Jobs is serving, and is loathe to see OS X on non-Apple boxen.

So where do I come down? I have a hard time, from a business-model perspective, understanding why Apple holds on so tightly to the non-licensing of OS X. They could win over oodles of users and probably sell more Macs if they allowed it to run on Dells or Alienware, because in my experience even fairly hardened anti-Mac people are won over by the OS if they just use the damn thing for a week. That said, however, as a loyal user the "it just works" experience is a not-insignificant part of why I became a Mac fan in the first place. I don't want to spend my precious time fighting drivers and figuring out which hardware interrupts are conflicting - I just want to use the tool to make stuff, write blogs, and play games. Putting OS X on non-Apple hardware would open up Apple to all kinds of development headaches that they probably don't have the manpower for and certainly don't want the bad PR about. The core of the OS X marketing is that it's user-friendly and intuitive, and without insane micromanagement that's seriously in danger once you migrate away from making the hardware yourself. Not to mention that all the style of the OS X interface would seem a bit incongruous next to the vanilla design of a budget PC. Seems silly, but it's all part of the experience.

I'm all for Windows on Mac hardware, however, primarily because hardware is a big profit driver for Apple and the hardware itself is just damn good stuff. If somebody is smart enough to want an Apple box and then for some reason wants to install Windows onto it, I say go for it! This would probably be the minority of Mac buyers anyhow, though in the long run perhaps it wouldn't be. My only fear is that without OS X licensing to go along with this "open platform" policy, Apple will trend toward being a hardware developer (they could live on the iPod alone!) and support for OS X development will die off. That would suck a LOT.

So no surprises there, I think, although I'm still on the fence about OS X being un-crippled and available for PCs. I like the suggestion I saw in this Cringely column where he says

Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.

I think this would be very, very smart of Apple to do, and I can only hope it comes to pass. It's a nice straddle between holding it back entirely and having to support all the hardware headaches.

Even as U.S. Invaded, Hussein Saw Iraqi Unrest as Top Threat - New York Times

I really can't wait for the full-length book to come out about the invasion of Iraq, because I'm fascinated by this stuff. Hussein was obviously paranoid as hell and trusted very few of his people, and why wouldn't he? He got to power by being ruthless in the first place, and the flip side of that is to trust no one and act as if you're always about to be overthrown. Trouble is, constant vigilance in this mindset is tantamount to delusional thinking, and that's what it shaded into when the U.S. troops arrived. Interesting to think that the battle for Baghdad could have been much bloodier and harder fought had Saddam actually let his armies fight properly.

Trust, or the lack of it, factored heavily in both sides of the battle. It seems very likely that the American people were gulled into "approving" a "war" that was based on faulty intelligence, because we were told to trust that those in power knew more than we did. Then, of course, the administration turned around and said "we based this war on the same intelligence that everyone else had access to." Huh? I've read Woodward's book - the comedy of "leadership" that led to these decisions will be picked apart for decades. Too much trust by the people in America's leadership led to war without basis. Too little trust by the Iraqi leader in the people led to a delusional leader making stupid military decisions and being run out of town.

Trust is, in part, the basis of an open democratic society, and it's what came under assault after September 11th because we no longer felt we could extend the level of trust to the people that we once had. Trust + regulation makes bureaucracies possible - you can't regulate (or monitor) all aspects of human behavior, so you have to create a system that trusts its components won't accept bribes, rig bids, gerrymander districts, or go around existing laws and then retroactively justify their behavior. These days I feel like Saddam must have all the time - I don't feel like I can trust anyone in my own government. The evidence suggests they're out to strip me of my rights and poison my environment. Can someone restore my trust, please?

Vista looks to be a no-go on Macs

Agh, this sucks. What the hell is MS thinking? EFI is clearly the BIOS of the future, and Apple is of course out in front in implementing it, but for MS not to support it with Vista is clearly a mistake. Not because it won't boot on the new Macs (at least until Conroe-based desktops come out), but because they are being short-sighted and limiting the hardware makers who build the new boxes. If I'm Dell, I want to ditch BIOS and go to EFI for my techie customers now, and if I do that I'm going to want to standardize my motherboards quickly to lower costs. But hey, wait a tick, this goddam OS still doesn't support EFI, so now I'm stuck straddling the old and new technologies, and maybe I don't even go to the new yet, and why the hell did we bother inventing a new standard anyhow?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Are Apple Product Launches Crashing to Earth?

Crave on CNET.co.uk talks about the talk of over-hype at the last Apple event, where the Amazing Leather Case of Awesomeness made its appearance with a Jobsian flourish. It got me wondering whether or not there was more planned for this announcement that was delayed at the last minute. Probably not, given the downplaying that happened on the invitation itself, and given that Apple is so eager to move to an all-Intel line-up that they'll even upgrade CPUs in the MacBook Pro without upping prices. And I guess it really did merit an in-person intro for something like the Mini's switch to Intel, so it makes sense to throw in a couple of new iPod products that are in the hopper just to round it out and bump it longer than 30 minutes.

I'm still wondering what they're going going to call the Intel-ized iBook. The MacBook Amateur? The iBook "Core Solo"? The MacPamphlet? Given that the "Power" part of the name was taken out because it referred to the old CPU, I think it's likely that the more interesting conjecture is what they're going to call the revamped desktops (and whether they'll get an enclosure overhaul at the same time). "iBook" will likely stay, but "Power Macintosh" has got to go, leaving them with a bit of a dilemma. Do they add a new prefix, or just stick with "Macintosh"? No Mac since the original 128k and 512k models has been simply "Macintosh", so it seems likely they'll make up something new, but what?

Apple thinks big(ger): video iPod to pack 4-inch display!

Apple's forthcoming "true" video iPod will feature a 4-inch display with a quarter-inch border, allowing the device to maintain dimensions typical of previous iPods, further sources have confirmed.

This only makes sense, but it's nice that it's happening so soon. They could have waited to release a video iPod until this model was available - the current screen, while bright and sharp, is really too small to properly watch video - and it's interesting to me that they chose to go ahead with it. If this rumor is true, they're going to piss off lots of current video iPod owners who jumped early and missed out on the big screen. Maybe they had the content deals lined up and didn't want to wait in case competitors jumped into the space early.

What I haven't read a lot about is how the touch-enabled wide-aspect screen will blow open the iPod's abilities as a PDA with true input capabilities. Up until now iPods have been very read-only when away from their base computers, save for the lame "on-the-go" playlists, but with a 4-inch touch screen, true input is possible, even if it's likely to be a bit clumsy. Full-screen keyboard floating atop the input fields? No sweat. Heck, they could even squeeze a phone in there if they wanted to increase the costs a bit (no side-talkin', please). Even just Bluetooth text messaging capabilities, like the DS, would be cool. Every time I ride the Boston subway I see tons of students listening to iPods - it would be fun to be able to blast a text message to them. :)

Can't wait to see this thing, and the commensurate upgrade of the ITMS. Movies, anyone?

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Reactions to Apple announcements

So the "big" event came and went yesterday, and I have to say that I too am underwhelmed. Why does a leather case merit a big announcement? And why does the damn thing cost a hundred bucks? The Hi-Fi is a nice concept and all, but it lacks what I was expecting, which is wireless streaming like Airport Express. And don't get me going on that price. Sheesh.
The Mini going Intel is the newsworthy item here, but I'm still ambivalent because it means that's one more model that doesn't support any OS 9 apps, which are critical to my job as a K-6 computer teacher. Losing those apps pokes huge holes in the curricula of many grades, and the moribund education software market is doing nothing to update most old titles. Thus a huge body of cool, useful software is just abandoned, alienating thousands of us in education and creating no small amount of ill will toward Apple and the OS X team. I just wrote an email to my local Systems Engineer and the OS X feedback page saying as much, and I hope that many others do the same so that they sit down and reconsider such a devastating decision.
It may sound weird that I am such an adherent of the Classic environment, but there truly are some awesome programs out there that have not been duplicated in OS X. It would be a real shame to lose them.