The Technorati Apple Kerfuffle: I'm taking my toys and leaving!

It's the "tastes great/less filling" argument of the internet raging between recovering Apple fans and the Kool-Aid imbibing remaining faithful. Only this time it's taking place between parties that have voices heard by many thousands. Thousands of people that include me. Since I have this here little blog that nobody actually reads, I get to be the little guy and complain about the "new media elite".

Not that I want to be a little guy, so for the record, according to Google AdSense, I've made 3 cents since I've started this endeavor. Anyone using this against me in 5 years in some stupid comment flame war, please note that I don't choose to be either famous or unknown, I simply am (how Zen-like).

Now on to the back story. For those of you who somehow missed it or are uninterested and came here looking for a recipe for bourbon chicken, here's a brief rundown of the things about which I'm going to bitch and moan.

CEO of Mahalo.com (some may say internet blowhard) Jason Calacanis wrote a little missive to his mailing list and on his blog about his frustrations with some of the business practices in which Apple is engaged. Previous to that other notable internet-types like Mike Arrington publicly and proudly threw their iPhones into the virtual bonfire and said Apple had abused them for the last time.

Now, I don't want to repost the contents of these posts on this blog, nor do I want to inadvertently put words in others mouths, so I encourage you to, you know, go catch up on this stuff if you haven't already. Anyway, to summarize my understanding of these stances is that Apple is too restrictive, their practices kill innovation, Apple isn't the cool little beatnik writing 'zines and slam poetry it used to be, now it is THE MAN! As they go forward, they're going to be more and more closed and oppressive and one day will own your brain. Oh yeah and AT&T is teh suck.

To be fair, I'll now exaggerate and over simplify the other side's counter arguments. These arguments tend to range between "STFU you M$ Whore" to some well thought out point by point rebuttals. Many of the rebukes tend to go somewhat in the direction of Apple's control makes life easier for the consumer.

Since you didn't ask, here's my opinion on the matter anyway. I think both sides make a valid point. Apple's secret sauce is really its tight control over all aspects of the experience. The reason I love stuff like OS X and the iPhone is because the hardware and software design work together to form a solid experience. You simply can't get that from more diverse platforms, Microsoft has to support far too much hardware. Linux of course can range from really elegant stuff that works to frustrating technical problems and UIs that make MySpace pages look like zen gardens, it's all up to the user and the community so it's a complete mixed bag.

On the other hand, yeah Apple has made more than its share of bungles in the App Store, the latest of which as caught the ire of the government. It'd be great to have Blu-Ray and any number of other innovations that other hardware enjoys. I've jailbroken my iPhone before and managed not to bring down AT&T's network.

Of course, I restored my phone back to factory settings some time after jailbreaking because I preferred my phone to actually be stable. That's really the thing, I mean what's the point of these arguments about openness anyway? Should Apple just open up the doors until they're just another Linux distro? That would totally defeat the purpose of having a player like Apple, sometimes it's nice to have a little bit of a guided experience. It's sort of like the difference between a dune buggy and a monorail. Both will get you somewhere, but the experience is vastly different and appeals to different people.

Ok my dear reader (and I do mean that singularly I think there's only one of you). I promised to rail against the elite bloggers and "new media" bourgeois dammit! It's actually kind of nice to hear the classic Apple based flame war move on from Microsoft v. Mac and into the practices of Apple exclusively, but that's about the only new thing.

I've seen this exact same activity countless times on every subject imaginable. Anyone who has spent any significant time in a forum (or if you're old like me, BBSes and Usenet) has seen this whole thing play out. What I'm talking about is that disgruntled poster who threatens to leave but never actually does because they're attention whores waiting for someone to beg them to stay. Nobody ever begs them to stay. Here's a sample of the average discourse.

Poster 1: You guys are so ignorant and closed-minded about (movie/comic/starship captains/software/anything). I clearly am not appreciated here, so I'm going to stop posting.

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, this is just a waste of my time, I remember when this forum used to be great and everyone really believed in (x).

Poster 2: I thought you were leaving

Poster 1: I am

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, I'm really leaving.

Poster 3: sorry you don't like it here, good luck wherever it is you're going.

Poster 1: I just wish you guys would learn to treat everyone with respect

Poster 4: Can I have your stuff?

Poster 1: Hey guys, did you hear that (dubious news source) posted an article about (x) That's (fantastic/retarded).

That's kinda what this whole thing seems to be like to me. People just screaming at the top of their lungs.

Look at me! I'm going against the status quo! I think different. You can't fence me in!

- sent from my iPhone.

It's not that I think people shouldn't move on if they think a particular product isn't right for them. Different people have different needs, that's cool and all. But first of all, does it really need to be a federal case? And more specifically to this topic, if you're really against closed systems, my question to you is what flavor of Linux are you running?

And... Can I have your stuff?

Ubuntu - Initial impressions from a grumpy Linux skeptic

You'd think being a fan of free stuff I'd be all about open source and Linux. Well... not really. I've toyed with Linux over the last 10 or so years in various capacities. Generally, each of these flirtations is short lived and more of a passing curiosity or a desire to at least have some working knowledge of alternate systems.

Obviously, from a usability and compatibility standpoint, any operating system will evolve over the course of a decade. The same holds true for Linux, and specific builds of Linux such as Mepis and Ubuntu pop into mind when it comes to ease of use. In my mind, Linux's biggest problem is also what makes it great: the rich diversity of features and customizability of the system.

The fact is there's groups of people going in many different directions at once. Since there's no central company like Apple or Microsoft to direct the vision of armies of developers, things tend to scatter in many different directions. There are endless options of distros, applications, features, and even a fairly big schism in the actual main GUI of the OS (KDE and Gnome being the two big camps). In the desktop world, where end users, AKA consumers, live, this diversity is a detriment to wide adoption as it causes massive levels of consumer confusion.

Indeed, the Linux community itself is even divided over whether or not it cares about average end users. Some groups like the ones behind Ubuntu care deeply about making an easy to use version that anyone can use, while others believe that Linux should remain a mostly hobbyist/IT platform reserved for people who are true believers.

I personally tend to want the ease of use camp to win. While I love technology in general, I'm sort of over the hobbyist thing. I stopped building my own computers years ago, and I want my OS experience to be simple. After a prolonged absence, I've come back into the Mac user flock because I like the integrated hardware and software design, it just feels to me like a sold, flowing unit.

I think the hardware and software combo really is what makes the Mac a Mac. I've played with running OS X on my decrepit Dell E1505 laptop. While I got most of the pieces running, the experience just lacked something.

That Dell has seen a lot of different operating systems, and is the basis for my impressions of the latest build of Ubuntu. When I began this little adventure, I was running Windows 7 on the machine. 7 was working pretty well until recently where it just suddenly started thrashing wildly and generally misbehaving. Rather than go through the trouble of actually trying to figure out what's wrong, or consider the possibility that I got myself stuck in a botnet, I decided maybe it was yet again time to change operating systems.

I've pretty much been through the range of systems, and was kind of bored. I already had Windows 7, so didn't see much of a point there. I use XP at work all the time, and it's not really interesting. Vista? Yeah right. I didn't want to go through the OS X headache when I had real Macs at my disposal. That left Linux.

I knew I wanted to actually use this machine for general purpose browsing, so I didn't want anything over complicated. I like Mepis, so that was an option, but I wanted to be a little different. I briefly ran a couple of incarnations of Ubuntu on the machine, and version 9 (Jaunty Jackalope) had been available for a while, and was starting to gain even more buzz as the most likely winner of the desktop distro wars.

Based on my previous experience with Ubuntu, I knew there were some hiccups getting a fully working version on my particular machine. I went ahead and Googled all of the info I figured I'd need ahead of time (particularly the howto for getting wireless up and running). Interestingly enough, there were no specifics of that wireless card and version 9.04 of Ubuntu.

With the relevant information bookmarked on another machine, I downloaded and burned the boot CD (yes a CD, it still fits on a CD!). I booted from the CD on the trusty old Dell and went straight to the install mode from the boot menu. Testing on the live CD first is for wimps! The installer for Ubuntu has always been a pretty simple affair and fairly straight forward if you take the default options. I told it to feel free to destroy my hard drive and let it do its thing.

20 minutes or so later I was booted into the trademark ugly, ugly brown and orange desktop. Step 1 after any new OS install is to get networking up and running so you can consult with the wise sage, Google for next steps. Just as I figured I would need to get the Windows driver for the wireless card onto the machine, a window popped saying that I need a wireless driver that isn't open source, if I wanted to enable it, click here.

Wait, what? There's no way that would actually work. I remember you have to do all this stuff to blacklist the built-in driver and download and setup stuff like NDIS wrapper, light the black candles and sacrifice a rubber chicken. Well why not, let's just click it. A minute later, the little wifi light on the machine lit up. I still didn't believe it. I hit the menu bar icon for the wireless, and there right in front of me was a list of available networks, including my own.

I watched in amazement as it connected to the network and put me back in touch with my dear friend, Google. I wondered to myself how long it would actually stay connected to the wifi network as older versions of Ubuntu often disconnected me several times an hour. The network has only dropped me once in about a week of usage.

As for the rest of the system? Everything worked. Sound, track pad, video resolution, everything was good to go. I even found myself absentmindedly using two finger scrolling to page through a website (as I'm used to doing on Macbooks), only to realize that I was using two finger scrolling without having to do anything to turn it on or make it work!

I am just blown away with how well hardware recognition and configuration works in this version of Ubuntu. I think this alone is a huge leap in the potential adoption of Linux by more typical users. The appeal in Ubuntu also comes in its pre-packaged software offerings. Out of the box it comes with key things like Open Office, FireFox and Pidgin, and has a nice graphical front-end for downloading even more packages.

While the initial offerings are limited, additional stuff due to a number of reasons such as licensing and possible legality do prevent Ubuntu from having all of the features like DVD playback of a closed source system. A number of third party repositories by default are disabled as well which further limits software options for the uninitiated.

The good news is there are a ton of blog articles and how-to's to help a newcomer get up and running. It may be a little off putting for some as a lot of the steps involve modifying text files and running commands in the terminal window. Through the magic of copy and paste, the steps are easy to follow and will get a new system to pretty much be feature equal to any other system in short order.

Another tutorial covered how to get more eye pleasing themes in place. Going a little more advanced, I was able to turn on the Emerald theme manager and make some tweaks to the general appearance so I have at least some of the eye candy that I enjoy in the other systems such as transparency and window minimize effects.

After spending that first evening setting everything up, I actually found myself at a loss over what to do. For some reason I wanted to go do "Linux stuff" instead of just actually using the machine to surf the web. It was basically too functional, it already did everything it was supposed to without me having to mess with it as I was accustomed.

The OS had faded to the background of my computing experience, which really is what it's supposed to do. I don't think I'm quite ready to join the neckbeard crowd and cast away the evils of closed software, but I'm actually content using a Linux distro. I imagine modified versions of Ubuntu designed for specific manufacturers' hardware (like netbooks) could be even more seamless. Adoption of Linux has been mixed at best because of consumer choices. I certainly understand that, but then again I'd love to have the option to pay 100 bucks less for a new piece of hardware.

I do think that it should be an option since there still is a bit of a culture shock and learning curve going to Linux. I wouldn't really recommend it to someone like my mother-in-law or anything, but it may be a way to go if you have at least a middling level of computer experience, and for some reason don't want a Mac that is ;-)

I'm terrified of Twitter Trending Topics

I am watching with great interest, the activity on Twitter surrounding the current events in Iran. Based on the fact that there are seemingly hundreds of messages per minute with the tag #iranelection flying across the interwebs as I type this.

To be sure, it's both a fascinating thing to watch events unfold in real time (along with some serious cluelessness) and a horrifying thought to witness there are people experiencing some really horrible things at the same time as we watch.

Of course that really isn't my point, since there are hundreds of other blogs to analyze the actual events and how social media is changing the face of news or whatever. Use Google, go find 'em you're in the wrong place ;-)

No, rather as I watch this seemingly endless stream of raw data, I noticed one thing in common with most of them. There are links to other things. Shortened links. Shortened links that when viewed in the raw display no indication of where they might lead.

And?

Well since most people just follow the trending topic, they are getting random links from completely untrusted sources. Remember how you're not supposed to click on random untrusted links in e-mail? This is the same sort of thing, only I suspect people don't quite think about it since it's not e-mail, it must be safe, right? RIGHT?

So if I'm a bad guy, I just put a link to my site featuring the latest drive-by JavaScript attack on it into a Tweet with the most popular tag in trending topics. I will instantly have thousands of eyeballs looking at that URL and maybe clicking on it. No real work involved, no real need to even go through the trouble of injecting my naughty jscript into a legit site.

That was enough to keep me from clicking on anything I saw when I was following along with today's events. Sure, I use a cool (and free, remember where you are, after all) little Firefox Plugin called PowerTwitter that will go check the shortened link and translate that to the tile of the page. That's somewhat helpful, but really, how hard is it to simply put a legitmate looking title on your malware site?

Unfortuately, I don't really have anything resembeling a useful reccommendation besides use an aftermarket Twitter client or plugin that enumerates shortened links along with a little bit of healthy paranoia (try to go the the site independant of the Twittered link). So if anyone else out there actually stumbles upon my humble little musings and has suggestions or tips, I'd love to hear them.