Tuesday, April 26
Not content to imitate Mac OS X Tiger, today Bill Gates unveiled that Longhorn is going to contain a giant rip-off of Delicious Library, as well!
I know this sounds like a joke, but check out the screenshots above from his keynote at WinHEC. Hey, if only there were some way that you could have an online catalog of books, movies, music, and videogames... and what if you displayed the full-size covers of those items, and there was a search field to refine your choices, and a slider to zoom in and out, and you could buy an item with a single click? Yah. Someone should invent something like that.
The amazing thing is THERE IS NOT ONE INNOVATION IN THIS. 100% of the things in this screenshot are things we did first in Delicious Library, except for the über-ugly look of their shelves. That's theirs. (And apparently you can view the BACK of the cover in theirs. Man, they are thinking OUTSIDE THE BOX!)
I'm amazed, yet appalled. Seriously, if there were ONE SINGLE THING in there that wasn't a copy of us, I'd think maybe they came up with the idea on their own. But... exactly the same categories as we have? You couldn't add any others? Like, say, software titles? I mean, you're Microsoft, why would you not have a category for software? Oh, because WE didn't think of it for you?
Zoom slider at the bottom? Couldn't be anywhere else? Search field at the bottom? I mean, come on, guys. Sure, you moved the categories to the top, but, seriously. This is just embarrassing for you.
Next week: Bill announces that he's going to invent the "laptop" computer, if we all just wait two years.
--
ADDENDUM: I should point out that it's my personal opinion that this demo is a rip-off of Delicious Library. Mike actually disagrees -- he thinks it's a wild coincidence that they have all the similarities.
Some people have pointed out on this and other forums that the program in question was just a "technology demo" of the kind of the thing people "might" do when and if Avalon ever comes out. But what's funny, to me, is that they take someone else's idea and say, "Look, this is the kind of thing we can enable in two years! Wait for it! It's gonna be great! Ignore that the interesting part of this is available today!"
Now, you can argue that it's not the same idea, that they came up with it independently. I admit that's a possibility (and Mike's on your side), but I think there are too many similarities for it to be coincidence.
Also, I should point out that in my view Microsoft has EVERY RIGHT to make an app similar to mine, or do a demo of one. I don't believe in software patents and all that crud.
For instance, check out
mCatalog.
Note that this nice fellow actually copied the Delicious Library interfaces directly (and said as much). All I asked him to do was give us credit on his site, and I granted him a permanent license to use our interfaces for free. (Plus, he has our product name on his page, so it comes up if you search for open source versions of our program.) So, I'm not claiming "the idea of a library is mine for all time and nobody can touch it."
All I'm saying is, I think Microsoft's demo was based on my work, and I don't like seeing it copied without getting credit. There. Also, Mike disagrees. Of course, I disagree with Mike's blog sometimes, and that's cool.
Labels: mac community
Monday, April 18
Some, weak of constitution and small of mind, might say "no." I would argue, "yes."
Yes, yes, a million times yes. Yes it is yes I will yes.
So, I was driving around Bellevue (population: mini-malls) today, somewhat aimlessly, mostly feeling sorry for myself but also checking out the latest growths in mini-malls. The great thing about a mini-mall is it's like store roulette -- you drive along and each storefront is something entirely different. Sushi! Tires! Motorcycles! Aquariums! Tacos! Unknown business with generic name! Car customization! Possible CIA front! Nail salon! Gun range! I'm not making these up!
My putative errand was to see if I could get a bid on a stereo for my new car (everyone asks the same thing: "Is it fast?" I like to answer, "Nope!"), because I'd decided not to just walk into the nearest stereo store and take the first thing they recommended to me. I'm rather proud of this decision, as it represents something of a watershed moment in my maturity as a consumer.
The car weasels had told me there was an audio store that had experience with my particular car, and even gave me a convenient map to said store. Possibly, a lesser man might suspect there are some sort of kickbacks involved if a car dealer gave him a map to an obscure audio store he recommended. Not I.
The audio place was on "2st Street", which I naïvely assumed might be 2nd Street (possibly in some language other than English or French, since I know in France they have, like, "bis" and crap instead of "st" and "nd" and "rd"). In fact, they meant 21st street. I did ruminate briefly on the irony of going to the trouble of printing up a map to show people to your store and then not actually checking to see if, you know, the actual street is represented in a way decipherable to your potential customers. Ah, well, life's full of mysteries.
So I found the audio place by random driving around, but of course it was closed. I did see that there was an orange duplicate of my car inside their showroom, which struck me as an expensive way to advertise that they work on this car. I mean, couldn't they use a poster? Are they going to buy one of each kind of car in the world, to demonstrate that they can, indeed, put stereos in pretty much anything? Or was this like those asian places that have those plastic mockups of the food you're considering eating, and the car was actually a big shiny fake? (And, if so, where can I buy a full-size plastic car, because that seems like a fun thing to, like, bring to the beach and throw at people. "Hey, Bob, think fast!")
Possibly it was just a car in the middle of a stereo install. I'll never know.
A little more driving around found me at a hobby shop, which is kind of the "home of my people." (I dated a girl once who was notoriously cheap (think money, not morality), and we always joked that the outlet mall was the "home of her people.") Something called to me from within... I'd been thinking about starting up a tabletop gaming campaign among my friends; maybe I'd find some inspiring miniatures inside? (Snicker if you want: gaming allows me to get together with my buddies every other week and get drunk and laugh for four hours. Also, seriously, some people throw candle parties. Is this lamer than a
candle party?)
Once inside, I asked the guy if he had any, you know, small helicopters. His eyes lit up, and he showed me a box, which, sure enough, contained a tiny, remote-controlled helicopter. "Oh, you mean
this one, yes?" Apparently, he thought I had something particular in mind. Really, I was just wondering if there were such a thing as small helicopters. [Answer: yes.]
Well, I think we all know that I bought it, because this story would be pretty lame if I ended it here with, "So, I decided this was a completely frivolous purchase and went home to sulk for a few hours. The end."
The best part of the purchase was when he showed me the giant wall of replacement parts they kept on hand just for this particular copter. Hmm, bodes well! At least they weren't selling, like, crutches and eyepatches and shit.
So I took the copter home, and after charging it up for a while I decided to try it out. Now, it's pretty small, and it's electric, and the blades are made of nylon. This isn't like the LAST time I bought a
RC helicopter, which was gigantic (like, five foot blades) and gas-powered and required advanced degrees just to start and came with a warning that THE ROTORS COULD CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF. I'm seriously not kidding about that. We think we eventually got it put together correctly, but we never knew for sure because we never started the engine, honestly. (It still sits at Omni, and if you make them a reasonable offer I'm sure they'd part with it.)
So, yes, the living room seemed like a reasonable place for my first test flight. My thinking was: (a) the rug is soft, so the rotors won't be destroyed when I tip the thing over and auger it into the ground, and (b) the rug is clean, so the rotors won't get dirty when I tip the thing over and auger it into the ground, and (c) there's lots of soft furniture and/or cats around, which will keep the copter from flying away at high speed before tipping over and augering into the ground. Also, (d) it's the middle of the night and the only light is inside, and (e) I'm in a robe and don't want to go outside. (If you think flying a helicopter in a robe is stupid, consider that originally I was padding around naked, but suddenly had a flash of a possible consequence of naked-indoor-helicopter-flying.)
Did I actually "fly" my new helicopter indoors? Well, that depends. Do you consider what Orville and Wilbur did on December 17, 1903 to be "flying," or just "hopping off the ground for a couple seconds with potential?"
I would answer, yes, it flew. Yes it did yes it will yes.
And then it tipped over and augered into the ground.
Labels: stories
Saturday, April 2
I've had a number of people ("one" is a number) ask me if I'll write more about programming, I guess because my views on pop culture are actually more boring than lectures on code. When your audience is asking you to go back to the lecture from the jokes, you know you've lost it.
I guess I already knew that, though, since when I showed my airplane entry to a friend, her only response was (in a Seinfeld voice), "Hey, what's UP with airline food? It's so bad! Am I right? And what about coach? WHY are the seats to SMALL?"
The public has spoken. Thus: my views on Battlestar Galactica.
Ok, I admit, I used to watch Battlestar Galactica back in late 70s. I loved it. It was, in my mind, an incredibly gorgeous and thrilling space opera. At the time it had the distinction of being the most expensive show on television, with effects done by the guy who'd just won an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars 4. I have no idea if I'd like it if I saw it nowadays, and frankly I have no interest in finding out.
So, some genius producer thought to himself, Battlestar Galactica was a great show, there's a lot of Generation-Xers who would watch anything with those words in the title (short of "Battlestar '80"), and I've got ideas on how I could make it mature and dark and thrilling. Rather than making a sequel, I'll rewrite the original version and use the same themes (a rag-tag, fugitive fleet, looking for a shining planet, known only as... Earth), but with all the details changed. So he pitched it to the Sci-Fi channel.
The amazing thing is, he's created something that's MORE
true to the spirit of the original show than the original show was. It's Battlestar minus the fluff. It's dark, the plotlines are intricate, the characters are flawed and realistic and compelling, the acting is incredible (Edward James Olmos broods; Mary McDonnell is commanding and presidential). The new series is REALLY incredible.
Here's the deal: 40 years ago, the twelve colonies of humans created robot helpers, called cylons. The cylons rebelled. The humans beat 'em back to a single planet, and we haven't heard from them since. Suddenly the robots re-appear and nuke the crap out of the 12 colonies and chase the remaining 49,000 humans (who managed to get into spaceships and get gone) across the galaxy, kicking our butts.
The smartest decision of the new show was to go retro with the technology. There's no banks of computers and crap. The Galactica itself looks and operates more like a 1940s naval carrier than a spaceship.
Believe me, I could go on for hours about this show. I have, in fact, on a date recently. Believe me, the girl was
riveted. I can't remember exactly, but I think I would have gotten lucky if she hadn't had an urgent appointment to floss her cat.
Anyways, I post all this because I'm about to bust; I think figured out the incredible twist to the new show: the 'humans' we've been following are actually cylons from a thousand years ago.
A bit of background: in the new war, the cylons have come back with some of the models imitating humans perfectly; they look, feel, and operate like humans, so much so that they can get pregnant. All throughout the season the humans have had this religious text that says things like "everything you are going through has happened before," and the cylons justify their actions because they see themselves as an improvement on mankind, which they feel has become corrupt.
So, recently the humans captured a cylon (and tortured him!) and he prophesied that the humans are going to find Kobol ("the birthplace of the gods") and there find out "the truth," and how to get to Earth. Then, in the second-to-last episode of the season, the humans did indeed find the ruins of the planet Kobol, where "gods and man once lived together in peace."
Throughout the first season, we've seen cylons who look and feel human interacting with humans, and the humans trying to grapple with whether to treat them as soulless machines: Is it OK to torture a machine for information? Can machines feel love or fear? If they are designed exactly like humans, what actually separates them from us?
So, I think the modern-day "humans" are about to discover that the ancient humans on Kobol also created artificial life (their own "cylons") a thousand years ago, and those life forms also rebelled, destroying Kobol. That much seems pretty obvious, since the human bible says the current war has happened before.
My guess is: in the
last war, the
real humans lost, and fled to Earth. The existing 12 colonies, and thus the entire rag-tag fleet of "humans," are the VICTORS from the previous war; they are the robots who rebelled and won. They are the old cylons, who over the course of a thousand years turned their origin into a creation myth that few of them still really believe. The "humans" that we love killed their gods, just as the cylons are doing now.
I love the symmetry of this. I hope I'm right. It's the season finale tonight, so we'll all see whether I'm an idiot or a prophet.
Update: My Replay didn't record Part 2 tonight, so I'm still in the dark. I did watch the deleted scenes from Part 1, which include
this scene which I think helps to build my case: the priestess says, "One god wanted to be elevated above the others," which I take to mean that one human felt he was better than the other humans and betrayed the ancients to the robots, much the way Baltar feels he's better than everyone around him and ended up betraying humanity to the cylons.
Six says "Blasphemy, there was only one God, ever," because the Cylons feel that the betrayer of humanity was the real god, since they're, you know, big on betrayal. It all makes sense. At 3AM.
Labels: stories
Delicious Monster
