Geek Chic

My pre-emptive response to the next phase of Microsoft’s ad campaign:

It comes in regular and extra-snarky:

HooTow: Stanford's Requisite Ivy League Style Phallus

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.

Come on!  Free online courses in artificial intelligence AND robotics?  Can your college do that?  You can even download them to iTunes and watch them on the train.

I know, you thought your institute of higher learning was the coolest, but maybe you should think again.

It’s all part of Stanford School of Engineering’s Engineering Everywhere project

Full story on Device Guru

I just want to take a sec to give a shout out to the iPhone Dev Team — our friends who have come up with the most reliable way to jailbreak your iPhone.  They’re so fast, and so very good.

Case in point: Apple released the new iPhone 2.1 Firmware last Friday.  By Saturday morning, the Dev Team had cracked it.

If you’ve got an iPhone and you’re looking to do some Jailbreaking, accept no substitutes. These guys are the real deal.  I’m seriously looking forward to the point when these guys have a solution for actually unlock the phone for use on any network.

Or the day when Apple makes Jailbreaking (and even unlocking) irrelevant.  Their current pattern of rejecting applications for the App Store without having any sort of clear acceptance standard (AFTER developers have paid $100 for the privilege of being able to submit to Apple in the first place and invested countless hours of unpaid development time) is pretty tyrannical, imho.

I would fully support anyone who wants to Jailbreak their phone  — if it didn’t violate my service agreement, of course.  There are a lot of useful applications out there that, for some reason or another, Apple does not want you to use (iPhone Modem, NemusSync, Snapture, VideoRecorder, BigBoss Prefs, Searcher, WinterBoard, Customize, not to mention Terminal and OpenSSH for the hardcore nerds.  And that barely scratches the surface).

It’s my feeling that —  I paid through the nose for this particular piece of hardware.  Like any hardware that I own, I should be able to control how I use it.  Apple doesn’t dictate to me what color my MBP’s desktop is.  Why shouldn’t I be able to customize what my iPhone Springboard looks like?  The camera on the iPhone can record video.  Why shouldn’t I be able to use an application that takes advantage of that?

For more about how to Jailbreak your iPhone using the PwangeTool or QuickPwn, check out the Apple iPhone School.  Or just jump right in with QuickPwn.  It does all of the heavy lifting for you.

As I said, I cannot condone this sort of behavior.  And I’ve never even considered Jailbreaking my iPhone.  I mean, that would violate my service contract, now wouldn’t it? And I wouldn’t want to piss off AT&T…

I’m sure you’ve heard by now.  Google released a new web browser.  Chrome.

My first reaction to this is one of dismay.  Another freaking web browser?  What do I need that for?  I’m still having to check for bugs in IE6 — a browser that should’ve died years ago.

My second is one of anger at Google.  I like Firefox.  I think Mozilla has a good heart in addition to having a great browser.  If Chrome is going to steal market share, it’s most likely going to steal from Firefox — not IE.  Most of the people who use IE are either enterprise (and can’t download another browser) or not tech-savvy (don’t know how to download another browser).  If they haven’t downloaded a browser besides IE6 (like Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — they have plenty of choices and they’ve had plenty of time), it’s unlikely they’d download Chrome.

So great.  Google steals from FF’s market share.  And Google paid up on their Mozilla contract till 2011 to keep their bases covered, but if Chrome catches on, I bet you Google will kill that contract.  Leaving Mozilla broke with about half of it’s market share poached.

Great.

What’s even better is Google’s terms of service with Chrome.  Check this out:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

What?  I know I’m no lawyer, but what that says to me is if ANYONE displays a website in Chrome (ANY website), then Google then has the right to distribute that website, in part or in whole, worldwide.  What?  How can they claim to have that right?  If you’re looking at this site in Chrome now, does that mean Google thinks it’s their right to adapt, modify, publish, display, ‘publicly perform’, etc?

My favorite little logical twist is that technically, if you ‘submit’ your credit card # via Chrome, since you’ve agreed to their terms of service, they then have a right to ‘distribute’ it.  Now that’s a business model.  Stealing credit card numbers on a massive scale and then moving to Switzerland.

AND the real kicker is this: Chrome is distributed under the BSD license — which is a particularly open open-source contract.  You could logically say that if you submit your credit card number via Chrome that then EVERYONE owns it.  Resulting in something less like Switzerland and more like the end of Fight Club.

But really, what the BSD license means is that, if you don’t like Google’s terms for Chrome you can download the code in its entirety, take out their logo, recompile it under your own terms and use it however you want.

So, kids.  It’s time to get those compilers chugging.  Who wants to to follow Google’s rules when they can so easily walk right around them.

Google looks more and more like Microsoft every day.  Throw a few class actions lawsuits at them and the two would be virtually indistinguishable.

It’s interesting how much we take for granted when it comes to the design of the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

After jailbreaking my iPhone yesterday (!!!) I installed the Nintendo original NES emulator.  Which is awesome in theory — it’s nice to see my old friends Elevator Action, Super Mario Brothers, Metroid, Rad Racer, etc. again.  But there’s a problem: the games are almost impossible to play.

NES Emulator for iPhone

When we were using the original NES controllers I, for one, took for granted the fact that you get (and need) tactile feedback when you’re playing those games.  When you’re playing Spy Hunter you’re getting contstant feedback from your left thumb — as to when you’re pushing ‘left’ vs when you’re pushing ‘up’.  On the iPhone you don’t get that feedback — it’s just a flat surface.

The designers of the emulator tried to compensate for this by giving you visual feedback (there’s a little readout that tells you explicitly when you’re pushing up vs pushing left).  But this doesn’t solve the problem becaue it’s giving you cues that are a) not in the most relevant medium (visual instead of tactile — which slows down your reaction time) and b) not in a relevant part of the screen (you’re looking where the action is — not where your fingers are.  If you’re looking at your fingers to see where they’re pushing you’re in danger of having a Metroid suck off your face).

Old School NES

All of this, in my ‘I took Psychology of Perception 10 years ago so I totally know what I’m talking about’ kind of way, is to say that Nintendo did something right when they made those controllers.  We needed the little raised + of the directional pad (the edges, the clear spatially mapped directions, etc) to input directional data and get the kind of relevant feedback we need to play the game.

The things we take for granted…

Maybe next time we’ll talk about Nintendo Synesthesia (although maybe Rad Racer’s pseudo-3D is as close as most of us come to that… ).

I just took a bit of time to jailbreak my iPhone today… and it’s totally and completely awesome.  There are so many applications out there!

To figure out how to do this yourself, read these instructions and get the tools you need from the iPhone Dev Team.

Is this safe? Probably.  I’m sure it violates some terms of some contract I signed somewhere.  But I have to say — given the seemingly unlimited possibilities for application development that are realized in the jailbroken world — the folks at Apple are being incredibly lame in their furious protection of the iPhone App world.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look around to see what applications you can get when your iPhone has been jailbroken.  Like Snapture — that makes the camera acually useful.

I know Apple wants to be careful.  Yes.  If they didn’t have rules for what could and could not make it into the App Store the whole thing would have the potential to turn into the wild west.  But there’s got to be a middle ground.  Right now I’d say about 95% of the applications in iTunes are TOTALLY WORTHLESS.  Who on earth needs another version of Sudoku?  Some of the thigns there don’t even work (I’m looking at you AOL Instant Messenger!).

And I’m sure Apple has reasons behind what they reject from the App Store.  And they have rules for software development that some of these people are bending.  But I wish they’d loosen their grip a little.  Some of the things 3rd party developers are dreaming up are so much more innovative and useful than anything a developer could make given their current SDK rules.

Chill out, Apple.  You’re totally going to win and you know it.  Relax.  And maybe think about letting some of the big kids play in the playground too.

This came up in the blogosphere a long time ago — but it’s still funny.

At Giants Statium in San Francisco, Yahoo owns the ad next to the outfield marker for 404′.

If you spend a fair amount of time on the web, you’ll know that 404 is the server error code that is returned by a webserver when the page is not found.

This used to be just a funny coincidence, but it’s gotten to be kind of sad lately with the disintegration of Yahoo! over the past few months.

But it’s still gives me a bit of a chuckle that a web company owns an ad next to something that says 404.

Thanks to Michael Arrington for the photo.