Jack Shafer wrote an excellent article in Slate about the closedness of the new devices that Apple is foisting on us. Welcome to our velvet prison, say the boys and girls from Apple. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine. I hope people continue to buy the excellent Mac computers that Apple makes, which are open platforms, and shun the iPad until it also becomes open. Wepad, from Germany, is supposed to come out in the summer and be based on ANdroid/Linux. I am waiting for that, or any other open tablet device, and I will gladly accept inferior battery life to have openness. Also, I could easily move on to an Android phone, and I hear another great one is coming along soon.
Author: Dimitrios
Today the lame jokes about Steve Jobs being Moses carrying the iTablet down from the mountain turned quickly to much lamer jokes about iPads and feminine hygiene. But I think the name was not the only reason for this negative response. There are various ways that the iPad delivered less than was expected and definitely less than it could have. Instead of an open platform, like Apple’s superb Mac line of computers, it is an overgrown iPod Touch. It restricts you to the applications Apple approves. I don’t care that there are 140,000 of them; I care about the ones that will never be because of the Appstore Cerberus. Also, what’s with the refusal to allow multitasking? Under the constraints of a device as small as the iPhone, this is perhaps acceptable (but why can Droid phones do it so easily?) but for such a device it seems like a really stupid restriction.
What’s much worse, in my mind, is that the iPad may succeed wildly (Dave Parry, @academicdave on Twitter, tweeted today: “The problem with the iPad, is it just might succeed. http://bit.ly/c1DUPo (via @Chanders)”). Then we will have DRM’d e-books all over the place, competitors will try to have the same closed mentality embedded in their devices, people will begin to forget the freedom to install any program on your computer. I fervently hope we are not witnessing the beginning of the end of the consumer-oriented computer as an open platform.
Apple did choose temptingly low prices for the various versions of the iPad and I can see lots of attractions for students and book/textbook publishers. The device is not all bad. It’s truly tempting me, which made me sit down and articulate the above to stay level-headed.
Ideas for the above, and lots of good discussions, can be found at createdigitalmusic.com, siliconAngle, Ars Technica, CNET, the New York Times, and Gizmodo on (more than) eight things that suck about the iPad.
UPDATE: See this post for the point that the iPad does allow unrestricted Web apps, and these are truly open with HTML5 and other free technologies. Point taken, but why only web apps are unrestricted?
Incidentally, I am going to pay attention to the State of the Union Address, which is on right now, but not by watching it. My desire to hear oratory, even excellent oratory from people I respect, is non-existent any more. When it’s all summarized in a newspaper online so I can get the main points in less than five minutes.
All my projects are behind schedule. The semester started too early! Of course I have not improved my book-reading habits, so now I have more books I’ve started to add to that long list: My Name Is Red, by Turkish Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt. I will be sure to report here when I finish a book (I hope it won’t take months and months…)
On the positive side, I am enjoying making all new lecture notes for my undergraduate mathematical economics class, as it has been several years since the last time I developed my teaching materials for that. There are now many more cheap and very capable software applications for making useful graphs, for instance. Of course math and math econ don’t change all that much from year to year, but the ability to illustrate the topic better is now very tempting and, really, needs to be put to good use.
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Book read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
On the trip to Florida, I read one book from cover to cover. It helped that the weather was so-so at the beginning and that the book is quite the page-turner. The author, Stieg Larsson, is no longer with us, having died in 2004 shortly after delivering The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two more books to his publisher. This is just too sad; his approach to a murder mystery thriller is original and irresistible.
I was drawn to Larsson by a review in the Economist, as I wrote in a previous post. Now I intend to restart this again, as many details make much better sense after reading the Tattoo book. I suspect that the revelation about the meaning of “when all the evil happened” will come in the third book, which is not even published yet in English, as far as I know—OK, Amazon says it’s called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and is expected to be published in May.
I recommend Larsson’s books highly, but be sure that you have the necessary block of time to read each one right through, as you will probably be compelled to do. Lisbeth Salander, the Girl of all three titles, is truly sui generis, a terrific invention, and you can’t help but root for her to succeed (which you suspect will happen, as in all such books) and find personal fulfilment (the odds for this are even or worse).
We visited St. Pete Beach from January 11 to the 15th to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. The first two days we had cold weather, but it gradually warmed up and by the last day (why does it have to be so?) it was full-blown beach/pool weather. Since I was trying out Qik on my iPhone, there are plenty of little video clips to see from the trip, at my Qik site.
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John Stewart on “Simpler Times”
Very nice catch by Alex Tabarrok on marginalrevolution.com: John Stewart piece on why politicians always extol the past.
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Testing the iPhone WordPress app
Testing.
The 5th Annual Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas – NYTimes.com. It will be really hard not to purchase a MiFi now that I’ve read this…
I have not read anything for fun yet today-:(. Of course, there is always bedtime, and Good Omens is waiting for my patiently by my bedside.
I am reading a very interesting book on networks, a forthcoming textbook on the intersection of network theory, economics, and sociology. The authors have made it available online for comments, and I have downloaded and am reading it in tandem with a colleague as a winter break project. But it’s too early to comment on the book, apart from saying that it is very good, so far, and I am definitely looking forward to the time that I can buy it as a nice hardback.
No matter how convenient the downloading of PDFs is, nothing beats a properly printed volume in one’s hands. I challenge Apple to come up with an iTablet or whatever they will call it (the rumors about it have been coming fast and furious lately) to make me change my mind!
I have tried goodreads.com and shelfari.com for tracking the books I read and would like to read, but I simply don’t visit these sites often enough and the sheer number of books I am currently (pretending to be? trying to be? hoping to be?) reading boggles my mind when I look at even the partial list I have on goodreads.com. From now on, I will try posting short snippets about my reading here and I will try to make these updates regular.
The book I am reading these days at bedtime is a paperback M got me for Christmas this year, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990, reading the Harper 2007 paperback edition). It’s quite unusual to find a book written jointly by two successful writers, let alone as inventive and funny writers as these two are! I am currently on page 68 and I have found that every night it beats the alternatives (and they are legion, just counting the two tall piles next to my side of the bed).
Some of these books in the legion, likely to be finished (but we’ll see… as always with me, no bets are safe on finishing books) are:
- The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, Tor Books 2009. Science fiction about a future with fantastic nanotechnology that revives the dead but also an economic arrangement that has people as corporations with the majority of any given young person owned by the state and various corporations that financed the person’s schooling. Currently on page 74. The writing is pedestrian but the idea of incorporated individuals is intriguing. I am not holding my breath about the romance between the 20th entury tycoon who is revived 300 years later after being frozen to avoid death by lymphoma and the young woman who handles his rehabilitation. Of course the romance will have a good end. However, predicting the outcome to this society of the entrance of this pre-incorporation man, who has no intention of playing by the society’s incorporation rules, is harder, so I will keep reading.
- The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, 2008 (reading the US Pantheon hardback edition). The Romantics discover science. Joseph Banks lands in Tahiti and writes in his diary what might be the first anthropological study. Humphry Davy does chemistry. Astronomical discoveries abound. This is a wonderful book, mellifluous and fascinating in its topic. I am savoring it, which is why I am only on page 12.
- The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, Knopf 2009, translated from the Swedish by reg Keeland (original published in Sweden in 2006). The author was a journalist who worked too hard. He burned the candle from both ends so fast that he died at age 50 in 2004 shortly after giving the manuscript of this book and two others (it’s part of a trilogy). It’s too bad, and not only because it’s sad for anyone to die so young. The book is a fast-paced inventive thriller with a most unusual female hero. I was alerted to it by the Economist magazine, of all sources. Currently I am ready to start a new section on page 161, and waiting for a good chunk of time (waiting since the day after Thanksgiving, sadly) because once I start reading it goes really fast and demands my attention completely. Not great literature, I have to say, but a real page-turner.
- Family Album by Penelope Lively, Viking 2009. An understated English novel with deep emotional undertones. It recounts a family gathering that shows every sign of becoming tumultuous. I have only read a few pages and will likely restart, but the book shows promise and will probably merit the very good words I read about it in the Economist when I am done with it.
- The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 by Chris Wickham, Viking 2009. I got this in the summer on the recommendation of Tyler Cowen in marginalrevolution.com. I cannot hope to match Cowen’s super-fast reading, but I can still benefit from his recommendations. I have managed to reach page 176 on two trips and I should manage to finish this book (and maybe one or two from the preceding ones) on our forthcoming quick trip to warmer climes in January, shortly before the semester starts. Wickham gives a perspective on the decline of the Roman empire and how what the Romans had established pervaded the succeeding societal structures that I had not encountered before. Just reading a few pages makes me feel I understand the development of what we now know as Europe much better than I did before.
I’d better end here. I could go on and on, and this long list of unfinished books is embarrassing enough as it is. My promise is to post here daily about my recreational reading. It’s this, or being so swamped with all the work and web-design projects I have scheduled for myself that I will not be able to read for fun and general illumination at all. So I promise: more on my non-work reading tomorrow. An the day after. And so on for the whole new year.