Seeking to Understand

Tonight we rented “Live Free or Die Hard” from iTunes. This is the first time we’ve rented a movie online and I must say I’m pretty impressed with how iTunes handles it. Considering the file was 1.51GB, I was amazed how quickly we could start watching it. The quality was excellent and the price isn’t really too bad, either - although I’d rather it be about a dollar cheaper, but it’s not too outrageous as it is, I guess.

Physical media will soon be archaic. While the quality on an HD disc is much higher than anything you can legally download (AFAIK), I’m not convinced that it’s enough better to matter for me or consumers en masse. Right now the best Blu-ray player (in terms of being future-proof-ish) is probably the PS3 which still goes for around $400. The cheapest AppleTV is $229, and with it you can download 720p HD movie rentals from iTunes almost instantly while never having to leave the couch - not to mention the TV show selections and automatic integration with iTunes.

Heck, without a box at all I can download rentals to my Mac (like we did tonight) and hook it up to our 1080p TV via DVI. From the distance of the couch, even an ordinary DVD-quality movie looks good enough to fully enjoy. While I very much like watching 1080p trailers in native resolution on the TV for kicks, it doesn’t fundamentally change what I’m seeing in the end.

I think that the only thing that could alter this situation would be a new form of filmmaking that results in an end product that simply doesn’t work without being presented in high resolution HD. I have a hard time imagining what such a thing would look like or be like to experience, but I have a feeling that it should be possible. The closest example of this that I can think of now is the TV show Lost which frequently hides fun clues and other interesting things in tiny places only visible to viewers using HD (and often only if you pause in just the right spots) - but they are using HD as gravy and not the main dish. It isn’t an integral part of the experience of watching Lost. If someone could find a compelling way to require the resolution that HD provides, it’d change the game completely.

In the end, there is no satisfying concluding paragraph. Bummer for you.

Here’s my iPhone review!

[THE GOOD]
The user interface is quite simply stunning for a phone. Having “real” Safari (although it does have a few quirks) with me and available for use all the time is awesome. I sometimes miss Flash, though, as it’d make for considerably better gaming possibilities. (Native apps would be better still, of course.) The iPhone itself is a thing of beauty. It’s sleek and sexy and feels really good in your hand. It has some heft to it - which I actually kind of like as it makes the thing feel substantial and solid. It’s really easy to use and the finger scrolling is so intuitive that after playing with my iPhone for awhile I often try to use the drag-to-scroll method on my laptop trackpad without thinking about it! Another thing is that the iPhone finally forced me to use the OSX address book because that’s how it syncs the contacts. The upside of that is I finally have a real database of people and their numbers in a non-phone-specific format that’s easily available on my laptop, too. Visual voicemail is a thing of beauty in terms of functionality and it’s much like getting a Tivo (or similar) - I can’t imagine going back to the “old” way now. The physical ring/silent switch is also a hugely good idea. Surprisingly, the onscreen keyboard works very well with a bit of practice and I don’t find myself missing the tactile feedback of the real thing too often - at least not when I have the “key click” sound turned on.

[THE BAD]
The darned thing can be really slippery - I don’t know how many times I’ve almost dropped it because it slipped in my fingers. Because the case is made almost entirely out of metal, the antenna is positioned behind a plastic cover at the bottom of the phone so the signal can get out. The problem is that it seems to be right about where I tend to want to hold the phone and I find that just having my hand there nearly kills the signal. In fact, if I cover the phone at that plastic panel with my hand, I can knock it off the cell/wifi networks easily - even when sitting right next to my wifi AP - so hand placement is sometimes the problem when getting a noisy signal or slow data rate. The SMS app is slow to load sometimes and that can be annoying because most things on the phone are quite snappy. The Mail app is functional, but lacking. I can’t find a way to send mails from a different email address, for instance, and the hosted gmail account I use for work doesn’t function properly. (There are workarounds that I’ve read about - but I shouldn’t have to do that, dang it!) The CPU is clearly not very fast and that can sometimes become painfully obvious when using Safari on Javascript/transparency-heavy pages. There’s also no way to see if you missed a call or have any messages without pressing the sleep/wake button. It’d be kind of nice if there was a small, classy glowing LED that was up by the sleep/wake button that lit up when there was a message of some kind or something.

[THE UGLY]
The worst three aspects of the iPhone are: price, 2 year contract, and at&t. Nasty, lame, and UGHARGH!$#*@^#!! (respectively.) AT&T signal quality is apparently not as good as US Cellular was because ever since getting the iPhone I’ve had complaints from almost everyone I’ve talked to of static on the line until I physically move my body. It might just be an issue of spotty at&t coverage here or a weak signal in my home office or something, but still… it’s annoying. A $600 phone, a two year contract with a somewhat evil company that likes to sell out to the NSA, and static on the line?! I must admit that’s kind of depressing when I think about it… (Sometimes just moving my hand away from the antenna helps - so the signal problem might not exclusively be an at&t problem but could be aggravated by the iPhone’s design.) There’s currently no native third party apps for the phone since there’s no official development environment from Apple. (Yes, it has been hacked… that doesn’t count for now.. it shouldn’t *have* to be hacked for this kind of thing.) The iPhone also has no built in iChat! What’s up with that? I suspect a software update will add that feature in the near future, though. It’s just too stupid not to have it on a phone like this. There’s also no ability to send or receive MMS (SMS messages with photo attachments and the like). I pretty much never used that feature on my old phone, but once again it seems silly that a phone of this magnitude doesn’t have that virtually universal feature. (It’s just software, though.. I see no reason it can’t be added.) There’s also no way to tether the phone to the laptop either via bluetooth or wifi so I can use my laptop on the road via the at&t EDGE network. (Again.. just software.. and I hear there’s a hack to actually do this via wifi, but once again.. I should not have to resort to a hack for this!)

[THE VERDICT]
While it has a lot of shortcomings, I do like the iPhone so far. I must admit, however, that much of my love for it is due to having never had a smart phone before - but maybe that’s beside the point? It’s a great device of compromises and unlike virtually every other cellphone manufacturer, I’m pretty confident that Apple will be releasing many software updates and adding a lot of fixes and features over the next couple years. I also believe that Apple will release a “real” SDK for it at some point in the future, too. Judging by the success of the hackers and the nature of the hacks, I’d say the phone was never meant to be entirely locked down anyway. My guess is it was a time issue - or perhaps they are waiting for Leopard? We’ll see…

It might be the media. They certainly glorify crazy. It is easy to imagine that their attention and obsessions attract the attention and obsessions of crazy people. I think it is too easy to blame the media alone, though. The people who actually commit these acts must bear the ultimate responsibility, IMO.

The way I figure it, the world is turning into far too muddy a place to put any kind of trust in the judgement of an organized “authority.” Personal responsibility and integrity and discretion is going to have to evolve on the whole or else I suspect humanity will face destruction from within.

Media, governments, corporations, religions, and other organized groups who have a vested self-interest in telling people how to live their lives, who to give money to, and what to believe aren’t going to go away and aren’t going to leave people alone because each of them tends to think they are the final word and the one answer the ignorant masses need to survive. They all insist on it to the point of war with each other. The only people who really lose in these situations are… everyone.

One of the only viable roads to survival as a species is, I think, personal responsibility, honor, mutual respect of beliefs, and a willingness to compromise one’s own prejudices for the sake of a better future.

Even if the media is a significant driving force in the actions of the crazy people, it is still the crazy people who did the deeds. They should have known better. The rest of society should stand up against that kind of behavior on its own. Rather than running in fear to a convenient authority at the first sign of potential crazy, people should confront it directly and take responsibility for not only their own well being, but the well being of the crazy person and the people the crazy person might hurt.

People who stand up to the crazy in its element do exist, but are rare. They serve as a powerful reminder that all hope is not lost. They are almost universally recognized as a force of good - even if that person’s religion or government or skin color differs from one’s own. There is one special word used to describe people who ascend to this level and that word is: hero.

There’s been a shooting at a NASA building at the Johnson Space Center in Houston today. Not many details yet - but that doesn’t matter. There’s just no excuse for this kind of behavior. Gah.

The big question now will be if this was triggered by the Virginia Tech thing or not. Many people (including the FBI) have been warning about the possibility of unstable people using prior tragedy as permission to put their own evil plans into action. Unstable people can also see signs of the instability of others as more evidence that they have to take matters into their own hands.

In some ways it is impressive that this kind of thing doesn’t actually happen more often than it does given the incredible complexity of the human mind and the multitude of ways in which things can break. As a software person, I’m intimately aware of just how much damage something as simple as a single character typo can cause. It’s hard to imagine how anyone stays sane at all, really. (Maybe no one is?)

Perhaps as our societies and technology and social expectations become more complex it simply overwhelms some of the brain models that are running out there. If that’s true, then we’ll be seeing a continuous increase in the crazy as the future crawls into the present - until our brains adapt.