I love that when I try to get something 50% improbable working on the Mac, like get some crazy piece of unsupported hardware working, it’s so absolutely chilled out about it. It doesn’t flip out and blue screen or freak out and start throwing errors at me. It doesn’t work, doesn’t work, hey, it works. It’s 95% less stressful than doing equivalent tasks on the PC.
Which, not coincidentally, is now on my desk in pieces and unbootable.
Here’s Google Wave. It’s a crazy casserole of Twitter, IM, email, Facebook… but what it really is fascinates me.
Let’s say you’re a company that wants to compete against Microsoft. First, that’s just not a good idea in general, but the most viable strategy you have is to reduce whatever Microsoft product you’re going up against to a faceless widget and then build around it. You don’t want to fight SQL Server (or Oracle, for that matter). You want to fund open database alternatives, standards, and go build stuff that runs on any database… and hopefully Microsoft doesn’t envelop and destroy your value-add.
If you’re an airline, you want planes to be a commodity that consumers don’t care about. If you’re Boeing, you’d really love it if people demanded to fly on your planes, so instead you’re duking it out with Airbus and the things that compose and service your planes are what you’re trying to reduce to commodities.
If you’re Expedia, where I work, you want to have a huge catalog of shiny things, but if one of those things was soooo amazingly shiny everyone wanted it and only it, you’d be screwed. And that one hotel could charge whatever they wanted and make ridiculous money.
Twitter and Facebook right now both have early eBay like advantages: your friends are there, so if you want to hang out, you have to go there. Any competitor has to either build on or extend them (which is good for the platforms, because it builds their user base and enhances their features), or offer full compatibility and migrate people over, or offer something that doesn’t look like it’s competition until it’s too late.
Like Twitter v Facebook: Twitter’s this dumb, clunky thing, has some users, and then bam, suddenly everyone’s on it so everyone wants to be on it, and soon Facebook’s dumping things it does right to offer an experience closer to Twitter…
Anyway. So say you’re Google, and your business is essentially contextual ads. You don’t get to put those on Twitter feeds, and any revenue sharing with Facebook’s going to have to beat the spread they can get themselves. So why not just take a shot at destroying their entire ecosystem?
Because say Google Wave works. Then, like Gmail, they can try and offer the best interface to this new wonder commodity and slap their super-smart contextual ads on it, and they’re off to the races. Facebook’s built a Facebook platform, Twitter’s built a platform for social media jerks to auto-follow and spam each other continually, but Google Wave puts Twitter in the same bucket as the Twitter competitors, leveling them all, and then it makes your social network home irrelevant, because who cares if you’re using Facebook or MySpace if Wave helps suck up all the interesting stuff in them?
I don’t know if it’ll work… but it’s brilliant as a business move.
I was trying to get Win 7 set up so I could do some… well, it doesn’t matter, but it involved VMware Fusion, the Windows 7 RC, a lot of reboots, and a ton of me staring at Windows config screens and scratching my chin occasionally. Anyway, it felt more and more off, like there was something I just wasn’t getting, and I got a little more anxious each time I’d try and hook up a network resource and get stuck on the domain, or try some setting tweak that didn’t quite make sense.
A good hour in, I realized the sounds just barely audible over my Mac Mini’s almost-silent fan were actually music. iTunes had shuffled to “Absolutego” by Boris (in fact, “Absolutego – Special Low Frequency Version” which is described by allmusic thusly:
And talk about buildups, this thing starts with a full 25 minutes of heavily down-tuned bass rumblings and doom-instilling guitar feedback before the drums and vocals finally kick in with the big payoff. From there, the band moves through about 15 minutes of thick, fuzzed-out trance rock (again, mostly instrumental) before the drums exit again, leaving in their wake a howling, droning mass of layered guitar feedback. The sound of this is truly massive and unsettling. It takes a good 25 more minutes for the wreckage to clear and the track to finally wind down to a close — it seems strange to say it, but anything less would have seemed like an abrupt halt, such is the magnitude of this track.
Kids… don’t attempt troubleshooting while listening to stuff like this. With your concentration focused elsewhere, it’ll seep into things, melting your brain, and will mess you up severely.
HOST: Is there some cost to you, psychologically or emotionally, in using these techniques?
TONY: Yes. When I came back I was experiencing intense guilt. I’m still dealing with that, and I think that any sane person put in the situation that I was of brutalizing a helpless person, it doesn’t matter who they are, you’re going to suffer psychological consequences. A friend of mine trained with me as an interrogator and trained in Arabic with me. She was sent to Iraq and asked to use these harsh techniques in the interrogation booth in Tal Afar. She refused, twice. She was ultimately taken off of her post. She… she killed herself rather than use these techniques. We’re asking our young servicemen and women to make a choice. To torture people or destroy themselves, and I don’t think that’s how we want to treat our service people.
I always do a little eye roll when I see crazy spec ads or package designs for cool products. Yeah, it’s great, you did a funny ad for condoms. I’m sure it made your friends laugh. I’ll throw it on the pile of funny ads for condoms. What else do you have? Quirky wine labels! Outstanding.
What I’m really interested in seeing is how you do something difficult.
#3, I Hate It When by Stefanie Stalder made me happy.
To criticize, it might be a little too much of the “clean look with text” thing. But our of those four, it’s not the most eye-catching or obviously clever. But wouldn’t you hire the person trying to find more difficult challenges and solve them?
Andrew Sullivan
One way to look at how the Bush administration redefined torture out of existence, so that it could, er, torture human beings, is to compare their criteria for “enhanced interrogation” with those for rape. Raping someone need not leave any long-term physical scars; it certainly doesn’t permanently impair any bodily organ; it has no uniquely graphic dimensions …. and although it’s cruel, it’s hardly unusual….
So ask yourself: if Abu Zubaydah had been raped 83 times, would we be talking about no legal consequences for his rapist – or the people who monitored and authorized the rape?
So the moon book… I wrote a new chapter two this weekend, and it’s all about thrilling stuff like server virtualization, network design, and other deeply geeky stuff. It’s probably totally hilarious and awesome to everyone who’s worked tech support or at a deeply underfunded school or government agency, and I’m equally sure any future editor’s going to read it, frown, and cross through the whole thing with a red pen.
And then I’ll publish it as the author’s cut or or something. Go all Piers Anthony “What of Earth” style.
My Mac Mini project is complete. I am soooo loving it. I’m already barely using my dying PC after only a few days, which is surprising. So here’s the scoop.
1: bought a Mini.
2: bought an ergonomic USB keyboard + mouse, hard drive, and the wrong RAM. What I should have bought was *204* pin RAM, not 240. I can’t believe I did that. It was a great moment when I got the case open (there’s a reason Apple considers it not user-serviceable)
3: installed the better hard drive
4: ordered and waited for the right memory, installed it
I really want to put some kind of massive super-antenna on it now, but I’m going to let that go.
What I ended up with is a fantastically quick, stable-as-a-rock, silent Mac that makes writing or doing dev work a pleasant, quiet activity. I love it, and doing a lot of the work myself, it cost less than I’d figured it’d end up taking to get my PC back up. Sometimes being a geek pays off.
Writing business plans is like writing a strange, high-level spec that causes my stomach to flip over a lot with anxiety.