Carsons Post

Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Automatic Transmission

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

I disagree with this specific analogy and would like to offer another.

Up until the 90s the car engine was relatively simple. This meant that, whilst you didn't have to, you could try to understand the mechanics of the engine. If something went wrong, you could pop the hood and figure it out. I don't know the success rate of this, but it was -at the time - an option.

In the 1990's this became much harder. The modern engine seemed to have become too complicated for the average armchair mechanic to engage with. This was either due to car engines becoming too complex, or car companies understanding that by making the car engine inaccessible, the punters will always return.

Now, I believe there is an element of each. I don't like the motives of car companies, but cars are more complex and more efficient than ever before.

The question is, does this analogy transfer?

I think so. I would have liked to "lift the hood" on my iPod Touch - and did so by jailbreaking it. By doing this I went to such extremes that nobody in the world could have argued that I hadn't voided the warranty and therefore dismissed Apple of any responsibility for product performance on my device.

So, why does Apple care about what I do to the device?

Well, if it was about shifting gears as @Gruber says, I'm opting to shift. I'm shifting down in order to pass. There are metaphorical reasons why someone would override an automatic gearbox.

However, I don't think its about shifting gears. I think Apple wants to keep people from understanding what is under the hood. To me, keeping people from looking at whats under the hood is a cynical idea. It ensures that people can't understand the mechanics of their machine in order to fix it themselves. I removes the transparency of understanding what the engine is doing. It makes the experience more dependent on expensive Specialists to fix problems. Mechanics who can say whatever they like because you as the layperson have not had access to assess the actual problem. Its not about shifting gears, it about ownership of a device.

The thing is, that as far as I understand, the most economical and technologically advanced code (the metaphorical advance car engine) is not found in closed systems that mimic a Porsche engine. Instead some of the most elaborate and exceptional code is open sourced, and therefore the antithesis of any Apple argument that restricting access to the code improves efficiency. So the car analogy only works if you say: by Apple restricting access to the blood and guts of the OS they are improving the possibility you'll return for repair or upgrade of a device rather than simply fixing it, at the trade-off of ensuring the code remains of an equal or lesser quality.

Personally, I'm not keen.

Regent's treat. Indeed.

What are we to make of No Logo a decade on? It remains a stunningly passionate and ambitious snapshot of the newly globalized youth and consumer culture at the end of the 20th century. It is also an often infuriating work of agitprop that marries old Marxist prejudices about the market economy to a paranoid and conspiratorial account of the business of advertising.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be enough to dismiss it as a period piece, the journalistic equivalent to a box of old Polaroids. Sweatshops, the McLibel trial, Brent Spar … weren’t those the days? But that would be a mistake, since it would miss the way in which, in its quest to undermine the branded economy and expose the capitalist-consumer propaganda that motivates all advertising, No Logo inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade.

Its on my shelf. Probably as ubiquitous amongst us somewhat politically minded left-leaning GenXers as our Pearl Jam albums and anti-boomer angst.

Follow the link to a very interesting look at the world of marketing in the ten years since No Logo was published.

"In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880"

Its almost as irrational as smoking (but not quite).

Realclimate has some thoughts on the recent revelation that the IPCC report isn't 100% referenced.

The desktop metaphor has been kicking around since the Mac made it hip and cool in the '80 - and for desktop computers it seems to work pretty well. Winactivity areadows picked it up with Windows 3.1 and Linux has also used a variant of the idea. But can it be better?

Its a good question. Sometimes the metaphor doesn't work - like on mobile phones or netbooks. With restricted screen space there is no point in using this analogy, so netbook-specific operating systems such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Moblin have dumped the desktop idea.

Linux and Macs have played with the virtual desktop idea, allowing users to switch between different virtual "desktops" - but to me it hasn't really made sense as it stretches the metaphor too far.

Gnome Shell is a new project that aims to put forward a new revision to the Gnome desktop idea for Gnome 3.0 next year (for those who don't know, Gnome is one of the most popular options for the "look and feel" of the Linux Operating System). It provides a taskbar, menu structure but also a virtual desktop manager. It changes the metaphor slightly, making it easier to think of each virtual desktop as a "workspace" than an arbitrary collection of windows.

An example: I am logging in to work in the morning. The first thing I check is my email. I can open my email application by double clicking in it in the menu structure or dragging it from the menu into my current workspace and it opens. After I've checked my emails I want to open yesterday's spreadsheets, so I create a new workspace and drag the files I was working on to the new workspace - where they open. Shortly after I need a file from my USB key so I open a new workspace and drag the USB icon on to the workspace so the file manager opens. I then open the document, then - from the Overhead space - drag it to the workspace I want to use it on.

Really, there is no great difference between the old virtual desktop idea and this new one. However the way it is presented changes the emphasis and the metaphor slightly. The result is that it makes more sense.

The Shell itself is coded in "Clutter", just like Moblin. Like the Moblin menubar, the animations are smooth and finessed. It feels nice. However, it is still very new and a little buggy. I like the idea a lot and am looking forward to its further development.

What changed in December: Facebook users are no longer allowed to restrict access to their profile photos and the list of pages they have subscribed to updates from. The list of any Facebook user's friends were made irrevocably public but after a very negative reaction from users, users were given a way to hide those lists from human view and leave them visible only to machine access.

User updates ("What's on your mind?"), shared photos, videos and links used to be private (visible only to approved friends) by default. If you'd never tweaked your privacy settings, then in December they were shifted by default to public (visible to the entire web) unless you decided when prompted to switch them back to private.

Those aren't simple changes to understand and there has been a lot of confusion about them. Many people do not like the way this is going. Here are some of the highlights of that debate.

The above post from ReadWriteWeb is really interesting and sort of shows why Facebook is pretty scary right now. It feels more scary than Google.

The post also references this post on another blog.

While I probably won't quit Facebook - I definitely will be more sensitive about what I put on there.