Marco Arment takes Apple to task over the decline in their software.

Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. “It just works” was never completely true, but I don’t think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.

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The canary in the coal mine?

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It makes sense that you’d need a special tool or kit to replace a cracked screen, but why should I have to send away my laptop in order to upgrade the hard drive? Why should I have to be without my phone or tablet for a week while the battery is replaced because it will no longer hold a charge?

A computer becomes more useful the smaller and faster it is. No one, other than geeks, ever cared how computers were put together, or how they worked. They only cared how they could use them to design a building, or research brain injuries, or plan a trip to Africa to drill a well. Real work.

The argument for repairable hardware is similar to the argument for open source; it misses the point of computers.

I’ve been administering Unix machines for many years now, and frankly, it kinda sucks. It makes me wonder, when sitting in front of a crisp, 2.3 million pixel display (i.e. a laptop) why I’m telling those pixels to draw me a computer terminal from the 80s.

I too have been administering Unix and Unix-like machines for many years. I admire Steven’s ambition, and his obvious programming and design expertise, but I believe his architecture with TermKit is a bit misguided. TermKit is a combination of Cocoa, Node.js, and WebKit, and while it works, there are a lot of moving parts to get it to work.

Steven seems to have missed the point of the command line, and why we are still use it after all these years. I like using a carpenter’s analogy. Sometimes, you just need a hammer. Sure, there are framing nailers and powder-actuated guns, but sometimes, the only way to get the job done is to hit something with something else hard and heavy. That’s the command line, that’s Unix.

Neal Stephenson uses a better tool analogy. Popping open the Terminal is akin to bringing out the Hole Hawg, it’s ugly, it’s powerful, and it gets the job done.

The most basic point for why Terminal.app still exists, and why the command line is still a preferred tool for systems administration is that Unix is a text-based operating system. All of the configuration files are text, much of the system information is available as text, and all input and output from the commands are text. So, when you are operating on the lowest level of the system, reaching for optimum efficiency, the command line gives you direct access. Anything built on top of that is an unnecessary layer of abstraction.

Being able to “cat” a PDF file is a neat trick, but I have a hard time imagining how it could help revolutionize systems administration.

When you pay for software/services upfront you know how much it is going to cost right away.

via: Fragility of Free — The Brooks Review

Great post from Ben Brooks on why he likes paying for things. I agree, I much prefer an honest transaction, where I am the customer, and I’m giving them money for goods or services. Of course, this is also a good place to draw a line between free and open source. If it’s free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold. This applies to web services too. Gmail is free, but it is not open source.

In Ben’s theory, if Gmail were to be shut down, there’s nothing we could do about it. If it were open source, we could open up our own Gmail on our own servers. Furthermore, if Tweetie were open source, we could create a fork without the #dickbar. I think what Ben is really concerned with is the continuance of software that he enjoys, which is where I agree with him, and why I prefer my software to either be paid-for commercial versions or open source. Both models have a greater chance of sustainability than “free”.

The devastation from weather related disasters in the past few years has been overwhelming. Japan was ready, as ready as you can be for a disaster of this scale, Haiti was not, nor was Christchurch.

If you’ve thought about giving to Red Cross before, now is a good time. Text REDCROSS to 90999. Information

Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Apotheker said.

via: Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth - Businessweek

Well, this will be interesting. Porting WebOS, which is Linux based, to run on x86 hardware should not be too difficult. What will be difficult is managing the user interface. How are they going to integrate the touch based UI of WebOS with the standard PC?

Apple is solving some of these problems with new gestures and interaction changes with OS X 10.7, but they are not porting iOS to the Mac.

Also, dual-booting is a pain. I used to dual-boot Windows and Linux, before I started using my Mac at work, and the problem I’d run into was that I never knew where my data was. Did I save that file in the Linux partition? Did I accept that meeting invite on the Windows side?

I’m going to assume that HP plans on including WebOS as an option for fast, almost instantaneous boot to use a limited subset of the computers capabilities, and not as a full-blown Linux install. In that case, no one will ever know its there, and will continue to boot straight into Windows.

If HP is really serious about this, I’d suggest that they not install Windows on their machines at all, and ship them with an enhanced, more desktop ready, version of WebOS as the one and only operating system.

We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn’t involve repackaging them as a product.

via: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)

Exactly. I’ve said before that I prefer an honest transaction with a company, where I am clearly the customer, and am not volunteering to be part of the product being sold.

This post by the owner of Pinboard is full of interesting information. For example, the service is hosted on three (now four) large, dedicated HP servers, which, according to Netcraft, are running Ubuntu and Apache. His database servers are MySQL, with a simple Master-Slave replication setup. I especially like this part:

It has become accepted practice in web app development to design in layers of application caching from the outset. This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one’s app like a high-level character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty “application stack”.

I had just come out of Rails consulting when I started Pinboard and really wanted to avoid this kind of overengineering, capitalizing instead on the fact that it was 2010 and a sufficiently simple website could run ridiculously fast with no caching if you just threw hardware at it. …

If you offer MySQL this kind of room, your data is just going to climb in there and laugh at you no matter what kind of traffic it gets.

Over-engineering is something we deal with at my workplace, and something I’ve been guilty of myself. Which is part of the reason I’ve been looking at moving away from virtualization, clouds, and other buzzwords and returning to the simplest, most reliable setup possible. A concept that Pinboard has nailed.

There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium service and priced it as such. We are unapologetic about it.

I’m always wary of free services. I like knowing who I’m dealing with and what our business relationship is, preferably with me being the customer, and them providing me with goods or services in exchange for money. Very simple. Services based on advertising revenue will eventually start preferring the advertiser over the user of the service.

For example, take the recent Twitter app update. Twitter is a great service, fun to use and interesting in how it allows you to connect to people. But, it’s free, and since its free we have never been Twitter’s customers. As such, the recent update introduces a new “quickbar” which annoyingly obscures the tweets we want to read with a trending topic we couldn’t care less about. This happened because Twitter needs to please the people who are giving them money. I would much prefer the ability to pay for the service. Paying for Twitter would reduce spam and refocus the company on what really matters; people.

I love these videos from Field Notes.

• Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from
• Coudal Partners on
• Vimeo.