Dear Mr. Frost,

When.

Sincerely,
Rick

• I’d like you all to meet the poster children for the Get A Freakin’ Life Foundation.

• Me too.

• Shhh… don’t tell the boss. (Hey, it is Friday after all!)

• Is it just me or does it seem strange that any company would sue the FCC for a proposal intended to benefit consumers?

• There is no spoon (or for you Magritte fans: Ceci n’est pas une pipe.)

• So is it a Storm or a little drizzle?

• It’s good to see that Keanu Reeves still has enough energy in him to help ruin yet another sci-fi classic. I’m starting to think Keanu and Will Smith’s combined power might just be enough to do a proper obliteration remake of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

• A spokesperson for Microsoft has also denied that the earth is round.

• Answer: No.

• No native Photoshop, no deal!

• Awesome! I was hoping there would be more planets out there we could ruin.

• So what happens when a couple of local artists in Pittsburgh catch wind that the Google street view van will be coming to their neighborhood? They stage a medieval sword battle, of course, now immortalized in the Google maps street view. (In fact, Sampsonia Way is lined with oddities set up for the Google van to capture. Move down to where the street intersects with Arch and check out the bizarre sculpture.)

• Two questions: 1) Who the heck is Chunghwa, and 2) where’s my @#$%& refund?

• Thanks, Citrix. Now we can all carry work around in our pocket. Just what we needed.

• So does this mean Windows 7 is the good twin?

• Sure it’s fast, but what kind of framerate does it get on Halo 3?

So news broke today that Netflix will begin testing online movie delivery on the Mac (awesome!) and it’s going to require installing Microsoft’s Silverlight (not awesome!)

Sigh.

Okay, fine. I’ve put it off long enough. At some point, I have to give in and sell my computing soul (and what better deal than the promise of streaming Netflix?)

So I go to Microsoft’s site to install Silverfish, their much-vaunted Flash-killer, and I’m greeted with a static image that says “Install Microsoft Silverlight to light up this showcase.” And in smaller type underneath: “Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on this browser or operating system.”

There was a link for system requirements there so I click it and it takes me to a page that dramatically asks me to wait while it absorbs my personal information including my operating system version, processor type, network connection speed, browser of choice, cookie settings, high school GPA and blood type and swirls it around in a frothy stew of calculations somewhere in the heart of Redmond. Oh boy, am I just on the edge of my seat or what? I feel like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune waiting for that @#$%& wheel to stop on some big money! COME ON! YEAH!

And alas, my dreams are answered! The Web page steps forward in a regal fanfare of trumpets, and deems that, on this day, being the twenty-seventh day of October in the year two-thousand and eight, installation of Microsoft Silvertongue shall be granted to my lowly computing stratum. So I eagerly—nay greedily—click the link and start the download and install process that is, other than the burning sensation of my soul being yanked out of my body, painless.

When the installer is done, I restart my browser and go back to the Microsoft Suckerfish site and ready myself for the spectacular, mind-blowing, animated, interactive, buzzword-compliant multimedia awesomeness that will soon decimate all-things-Flash and bring about a revolutionary new Web surfing experience where the last remnants of the Old Macromedia Republic have been swept away.

But it doesn’t work. Not even slightly.

That realization begins to sink in as I find myself staring at the same static image with the words “Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on this browser or operating system.” I try clearing my browser cache and reloading the page repeatedly which, through my tears, has become somewhat more interesting and animated, in a Salvador Dali kind of way. I click the system requirement link but it just tells me that I have the most up-to-date version and refuses to hear my pleas.

So, it doesn’t seem to work and no amount of re-installing the software or reloading the page fixes it.

I’m bummed.

And I want my soul back.

So, Apple has officially punched back at Microsoft’s attempt to punch back at Apple’s successful albeit controversial “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads (well, controversial if you’re an oversensitive PC user.) And predictably, some of the more sensitive elements in the geek-o-sphere have come down with a severe case of jerky knee syndrome, including the overseer of Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows where the site owner has announced that “It’s Official: Apple Jumps the Shark”.

Paul’s overreaction is precious.

After Microsoft released its wonderful “I’m a PC” advertisements,

Paul, can we agree on at least one thing? No advertisement, no matter how close to perfection it gets, is not wonderful. Ever. Not Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” ads. Not Apple’s ads. None of them. They are what they are: an attempt to get you to buy something or color your view of a product. There’s nothing “wonderful” about that. George Orwell once called advertising the “rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” and that’s pretty much all it is. It’s like seeking wonder and enlightenment in the shouting of seller at the local farmer’s market. There’s nothing there to take personally or overreact about. If you want wonderful, buy a Hallmark card.

I wondered what was next for Apple. After all, it’s ingenuous and libelous “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads were instantly rendered moot by Microsoft’s more human and humble ads.

Libelous?

That’s a stretch. See, the last time I checked, for something to be libelous, it had to be actual libel which is a recorded statement, published in a permanent medium, presented in a context intended to defame a person, organization, product or business. Generally speaking, it’s most applicable when directed at a single individual.

For example, if someone were to write “Paul Thurrott is a reactionary, whiny Windows fanboy who has nothing better to do with his time than to sit around watching PC advertisements seeking personal enlightenment and deeper meaning in life,” that would be libelous. It’s a defaming, on-the-record statement presented in a context intended to appear factual.

Oh wait a minute! There’s that whole inconvenient context thing. Yeah, that’s right. It only counts as a libelous statement if the inaccurate or defaming statement is delivered in a context intended to push the statement as truthful. You would find such context in, for example, a news broadcast or a newspaper or some other source for ostensibly factual information.

I’m sort of betting that any claims made in the context of those oh-so-hurtful Apple ads aren’t going to be construed as defamation and won’t be presumed to be factual statements. And do you want to know why I think that, Paul?

BECAUSE IT’S AN AD.

How could Apple respond and not look like a bunch of arrogant jerks.

There you go, Paul! Now you’re getting it. That looks a lot like libel.

It’s official. Apple has jumped the shark.

Apparently when Paul Thurrott uses the phrase “jumped the shark” he means to say “has increased their market share and grown at a rate of more than six times the industry average and has announced fourth-quarter profits of $1.14 billion including more than 2.5 million computers sold in that same period.”

Gee, if that’s considered “jumping the shark,” sign me up for lessons.

The fact is that the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads are actually working. No matter how you feel about the ads, computer users are moving to the Mac and these ads are no doubt part of the reason. Apple has tried polite, informative ads before. And guess what? They didn’t work. That old ad about the guy on the airplane popping open his Powerbook and showing off what he could do in iMovie to the utter fascination of the passenger on either side of him was completely ineffective. Apple’s market share didn’t budge when those kinds of commercials were the norm. Apple’s market share for years languished around the 2-3% mark (dipping precariously at one point to 1.9%) and no amount of traditional advertising made a difference.

But these ads do. And in record numbers. The Mac is actually approaching a market share it has never previously attained.

Now be honest, Paul. If you were in charge of Apple’s marketing department, would you change course right now?

Here’s why. In this pathetic ad, Apple is actually criticizing Microsoft for spending dramatically more money on advertising than on “fixing problems with Vista.” That this is demonstrably untrue never bothers Apple, so we can just skip over that nicety immediately.

If Microsoft is putting so much money into fixing Vista, then explain why are so many Windows users have been so vocal in their opposition in switching to the newer version of Windows. And before you fall back on that old line about users being afraid to try something new outside the cozy confines of XP, try reading what PC World or InfoWorld have to say about it. Explain why so many businesses have purchased Vista but are loathe to deploy it or why Microsoft finally relented and granted XP a stay of execution.

For the past two years, Apple has been spending money on advertising designed to make Windows Vista look bad, while not spending money fixing the many problems in their own products.

Paul, Paul, Paul (insert face-palm here.) Fact-checking is your friend.

In the formal study of logic, what you just did is called a tu quoque fallacy. That’s Latin for “you, too.” Even if it were true that Apple wasn’t updating their operating system (and it’s not) how would that justify Microsoft’s behavior? Hint: it doesn’t.

And besides, Apple has been issuing updates and bug-fixes on a regular basis. We’re barely a full year out from the release of Leopard (AKA, Mac OS X version 10.5) and since then, Apple has released the following major updates to the operating system. Bear in mind that this list doesn’t even include numerous security and minor updates to system components. Each of these updates, despite the odd numbering scheme, are equivalent to a Windows service pack.

• 10.5.1 (released November 2007)
• 10.5.2 (released February 2008)
• 10.5.3 (released May 2008)
• 10.5.4 (released June 2008)
• 10.5.5 (released September 2008)

And 10.5.6 is rumored to be just around the corner (although quite honestly, 10.5.5 finally knocked down all my complaints so I’m in no hurry, but there you go.)

And Vista? It has been out a full 6 months longer than OS X 10.5 and Microsoft has released one major update.

One.

You really find Apple’s treatment of OS X comparable to Microsoft’s treatment of Vista?

It’s because Apple can’t help themselves. They want it both ways: To be arrogant jerks and schoolyard bullies and then, when confronted, claim, hey, it’s OK. Because we’re the little guy. See, it’s cute. It’s all in good fun.

Why is it so many Windows users take these Mac ads so personally, as such an insult? Other advertisers attack the competitors all the time and nobody says a word, and yet, once Apple does it, well, that’s an outrage. That’s a personal attack. That’s a slap in the collective face of all PC users.

Please.

Apple’s not insulting anyone. They’re just playing down to the lowest common denominator an ad can offer: entertainment value. And casting a competitor as a bumbling idiot is just good entertainment and doesn’t make Apple a bunch of “arrogant jerks and schoolyard bullies.” That tactic has been done many, many times in advertising and it’s hardly worth taking offense. Apple’s not the first.

It’s interesting because I haven’t heard one person utter a single word about the Alltel ads running that depict themselves as a hip, savvy kinda guy with a winning attitude and hairstyle and the other wireless service providers as bumbling, goofy-looking nerds. Same basic premise as Apple’s ads, but nowhere do I hear an outcry. Why aren’t the Alltel ads a personal insult to Verizon and T-Mobile users? Where are all those outraged Sprint and AT&T subscribers?

Put more simply, after being exposed as the charlatans they are, Apple responded, as always, in their usual arrogant and libelous fashion. I can see why so many people look up to these guys.

And before anyone complains about the use of the word libelous, look it up.

I did, and you’re wrong, your preemptive, prove-me-wrong posturing notwithstanding. What you’re missing is the context, which in this case is an ad. Nobody’s mistaking that as a source for factual information—except you, apparently—so it’s not libel.

You know, Paul, if you were on a Mac, you could have used the built-in, systemwide dictionary to look up the definition of “libel” by right-clicking on the word.

Hey, maybe you should switch!

I haven’t made it any secret here that I’ve been skeptical about Android, Google’s mobile device operating system. I still find it odd that a company that has no real track record with software is producing an operating system for hardware manufacturers that have been shown, with their continued upstaging by the iPhone, to have been remarkably uninspired in their efforts. Android seems to me like the worst of both worlds. I admit it. I just don’t get it. I’m confused about what there is to love about this arrangement.

And I stand by my confusion. Word that T-Mobile’s first Android-based cell phone, the G1, has sold 1.5 million in pre-orders does nothing to change my view on this. If, a year from now, the G1 and Android-based phones are still selling in these kinds of impressive numbers, then I will revisit my thinking on this. I doubt that will be the case, however. I predict that the G1 will sell in very large numbers right off the bat and then drop off precipitously.

One thing that hasn’t yet been mentioned in any of the awestruck articles I’ve read about the G1’s debut is the geek effect. With every new gadget or tech goodie that comes along, there is a significant number of buyers eager to get their techie little hands on it to see what the device can do. This happens with all new tech products. I suspect the geek effect largely accounts for this unexpectedly high number of pre-orders for the G1.

So, why don’t we see all new tech gadgets sell a million-and-a-half in pre-orders?

Because the G1 comes loaded with a full array of geek buzzwords.

Android is based on the Linux operating system and is open source, two favorite things of the geek crowd that rival even Star Trek and caffeine intake in their quintessence. The buzz about the first Android phone has been surprisingly strong, much stronger than anything I’ve seen recently. And when I say “buzz” I mean that as distinctly amongst tech geeks. Yes, the iPhone buzz was huge but that was primarily a consumer/nightly news kind of thing.

I’ll continue to follow the ongoing saga of the Android mobile platform, but I suspect this explosive debut is a one-time event and will be quickly upstaged by the next buzzword-compliant device that comes along. It has happened before. Remember the promising debut of the Zune, Microsoft’s iPod killer? You don’t have to search far to find old articles hinting at the future of the Zune, a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

The Zune, like Android, had quite the buzz amongst the geek crowd too. That made for a headline-grabbing debut, but it hasn’t done much for the long haul.

One of the biggest gripes that iPhone users seem to have right now is the lack of copy and paste (just judging by the incessant whining seen across multiple message boards as well as the emergence of an open source project that hacks those missing features into the iPhone.) T-Mobile’s Android phone, which made its debut this week, has copy and paste features, as do most smart phones, which is causing a lot of iPhone users to react, wondering why Apple is delaying the much-requested feature.

Somewhat in Apple’s defense, implementing copy and paste features is not nearly as easy as it sounds and from my experience, most platforms get it wrong in little ways that cause unexpected annoyances at the wrong times (yes, Windows, I’m looking at you.)

Apple has a long history of getting this feature right, however. In OS X, the clipboard is fairly complex and can hold multiple versions of a given thing once copied to it. If you, for example, highlight a file in a window and copy it and then try to paste that into a rich text document in TextEdit or plain text document in BBEdit or another window, different things happen.

When pasting that item into the rich text document, you get the fully rendered contents of the file (be it HTML or formatted text or whatever.) In another window, you get an actual copy of the file. In BBEdit, you get the name of the file in plain text. Did you ever consider why that happens or how it works? Probably not, and that’s a good thing. It shouldn’t be a concern for the end user. It should work as transparently as possible.

See, when you copy something, the operating system creates multiple versions of it behind-the-scenes. Whether you’re dealing with graphics or rich text or plain text or music or more complex data like cells from an Excel spreadsheet, there are multiple different versions of these things being copied. When you request that an application paste something from the clipboard, it looks for the most appropriate version of the copied data on the clipboard it can handle and uses it (assuming it’s available— and if not, it needs to know what to do next.)

Now, scale that down to a phone and consider some of the issues that need to be figured out in such an environment, consider the kinds of data that might have to be copied and pasted there. I don’t think Apple’s stalling or playing games when they say it’s going to take some time to implement and I doubt if the user interface is the biggest hurdle (which everyone seems overly focused on.) There’s a lot to sort out, and if it’s done wrong, it’s going to cause more headaches than not having that feature at all.

Dear Microsoft (and Jerry Seinfeld),

This is how you do viral advertising.

He’s smiling because he knows how to do the moonwalk and you don’t.

Who said nothing good ever came out of the 80s?

Joining the list of that decade’s dubious detritus—along with Flashdance, mullets and Rubik’s cube—is the emoticon.

Yes, that wonderful icon (pun intended) of the Internet era, was created in the 80s, back when the only people using the Internet were computer nerds (which was back when being a computer nerd was a bad thing and would guarantee you’d never get a date with a girl with big hair and leg warmers to go see The Breakfast Club.)

After many years of disputes over the origin and invention of those ubiquitous (if not sometimes overused) emoticons seen all over the Internet, a recently found backup tape reveals the earliest smiley posted to a Carnegie Mellon University message board. The official birthday of the emoticon turns out to be Sept. 19, 1982.

You can read about that 1982 post that started it all and the emoticon’s true creator, Scott E. Fahlman, on Wired.

Richard Wright from a Pink Floyd publicity still circa 1970.

I am a Pink Floyd fanatic.

When I say that, I need you to get the full meaning of it. I’m not just a casual fan of the band exaggerating for effect. I’m not just an admirer of their music. I’m a fanatic. Crazed. Borderline certifiable. A lunatic in the hall, as the lyrics to “Brain Damage” go.

I know most of Pink Floyd’s songs inside and out, can quote the lyrics of entire albums verbatim (including live and unreleased variants of songs), can recount obscure anecdotes about the band’s history that no reasonable and sane human being has any business knowing, can hum along with guitar solos note-for-note, and can play most of their songs myself, having been inspired by David Gilmour’s formidable guitar skills to pick up the instrument over 20 years ago. I’ve often said that it’s a good thing Pink Floyd’s music wasn’t a religion because I would have long since sequestered myself somewhere in a monastery to study the sacred lyrics of Roger Waters.

Of course, that’s just a joke.

Mostly.

I understand in writing such a confession that I stand the chance of giving off an image of myself as some kind of drug-addled, rock-n-roll groupie, but that’s far from the reality. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the band members per se. Likewise, I have never been interested in the backstage rock-n-roll lifestyle written about by people like Pamela Des Barres. That is about personality cults and rock star worship—something the members of Pink Floyd have always found detestable (and reacted demonstrably against with The Wall.)

Like most Floyd fans, I’m not in it for the band members. I don’t care what their favorite color is, what cars they own, or what celebrity they were seen in public with. As they themselves have eschewed those trappings and trivialities of their rock god status throughout their careers, so have many of their fans. And although I’ve gotten to meet drummer Nick Mason in person, it still surprises me how unremarkable the experience was, how superfluous it seemed in retrospect. That’s not to be disrespectful to Nick. He is very pleasant to his fans, but it’s not about the band members.

Floyd fans are definitely in it for the music.

And with good reason too. From the first time I heard a Pink Floyd album, the music has resonated with me in such a profound way that I sometimes have a hard time referring to the band’s work as merely “rock music.” That term denigrates what it is to me. Each listen is like a little transcendental experience in which every note and every word impacts the surface of my psyche in the same way millions of small meteorites have impacted the surface of the moon, reshaping it gradually, leaving it changed over time.

It’s hard to describe what their music means to me and it’s hard to talk about it without it sounding corny or pretentious too, but it’s the truth. It just connects with me, to the core, reaches me in some subconscious, atavistic way that no other music has ever done and likely no music ever will again. Their music is a part of me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the notes and lyrics of every Floyd song were somehow encoded in the spirals of my DNA at this point.

You might be wondering why I’m posting this to a tech blog. What does my fanaticism for Pink Floyd have to do with technology anyway?

Honestly, part of it is just to express in a public way my shock and sadness at news of the death of Pink Floyd founding member and keyboardist, Richard Wright. I felt the impulse to put this out there to share with other Floyd fans.

But as far as relevance to technology, there’s a lot to discuss actually. More than you might at first realize.

When it comes to pushing the technology of music production and stage effects, few bands have equalled Pink Floyd. The band’s notorious tinkering and/or abuse of studio electronics has yielded astonishing results over the years, not the least of which was an unusual (even by Floyd standards) track on Dark Side of the Moon called “On the Run.” Produced with a VCS3 analog synthesizer (not something many bands were using at the time) and made up of a series of repeating atonal notes, modulating frequencies, sound effects, looping drum beats and keyboard sequencing, it is often cited as the first techno/industrial track ever. The band’s affinity for experimenting with technology spawned an entire genre of music.

On stage, the band pulled off feats of technological greatness that were unheard-of for their day: elaborate laser shows, pyrotechnic displays, spectacular lighting and stage effects, films projected on stage (often timed with the live music), flying props—most famously, their trademark, giant inflatable pig—and in one instance, an entire wall consisting of more than 300 oversized bricks that spanned full width of the stage and stood 35 feet high, was constructed behind the band as the show progressed. And this was done in a day and age when computers were too expensive and underpowered to be an integral part of the process. Much of it was achieved with mechanical ingenuity and precise stage timing.

Even in their early years, before the juggernaut of Dark Side of the Moon propelled them to household name status, the band embraced entirely new on-stage technologies and used them in novel ways. Some bootlegs of early Floyd shows include a special version of the song “Cymbaline” which features a break midway through the song where the audience is treated to the sound of amplified footsteps walking around the stadium, an effect achieved with a quadrophonic sound system dubbed the Azimuth Coordinator. It allowed Rick Wright to pan sound effects around any section of the venue, creating a disorienting but immersive atmosphere of sounds swirling around the show’s attendees. Those recordings reveal an audience stunned to silence during the effect and immediately bursting into appreciative cheers once the moment ends and the song resumes.

During a similar mid-song break in “Echoes,” Pink Floyd once again showed their unrivaled technical prowess and willingness to push the technology of music to its limits. An ethereal and eerie whirlpool of sound created by some inspired abuse of the bass guitar and keyboards is interrupted by a primal, otherworldly wailing sound produced by a guitar plugged backward into a wah-wah pedal. (Click here to hear an excerpt from “Echoes.”) The total effect, the gestalt of that moment evokes Kubrick-esque mental images of the earth in its primordial stages. Quite a feat, especially when you consider that the band often reproduced the entire sequence live without using pre-recorded backing tapes or any other cheats.

A little known fact is that the mid-60s Pink Floyd was really ground zero for the psychedelic music movement. (This is commonly mis-credited to the Beatles who were in fact amongst the earliest to have commercial success with that style of music.) Pink Floyd first emerged into the music scene in 1964 under a variety of names and played at obscure venues for the first few years of their career. Despite that, they were soon at the forefront of this new music movement and were frequently referred to as the “house band” of the psychedelic scene. That reputation merited the then-obscure band a studio visit from the Beatles during the sessions for the Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in 1967.

Even in that capacity, as an underground phenomenon, Pink Floyd showed a willingness to experiment with the technology of the day. They were the first band to do the kinds of things on stage that would become staples, if not cliches, of psychedelic music—oil slides, colorful light shows, long and meandering improvisations, routing their instruments and voices through delay units and Leslie rotating speakers, incorporating fantasy and outer space imagery in their lyrics and stage appearance, etc. (They’ve often been called “the first band in space.")

And Rick Wright was there, playing his distinctive style of keyboards from the start, right up through Pink Floyd’s 1994 release The Division Bell which has unexpectedly become their swan song, the last we’ll hear of the band. The door has now incontrovertibly closed on the possibility of new Pink Floyd music. It’s hard for me to believe that there will be no more of that magical combination of David Gilmour’s guitar and Richard Wright’s keyboards—the thing I consider the true core of Pink Floyd. It’s done.

Anyone wanting to see Rick Wright and Pink Floyd in the prime of their musicianship should go find a copy of Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. At one time it was a difficult film to find, but has recently been re-released on DVD. Pompeii is a concept film of the band playing in the ruins of Pompeii without an audience. You get lots of great shots of Rick playing his trademark keyboard style along with classic, pre-Dark Side of the Moon songs. The rendition of “Echoes” is worth the price of admission alone, but you also get some rare studio footage of the band (and some of their legendary bickering) that is priceless.

“The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.”

—lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “Time” on Dark Side of the Moon, as sung by Richard Wright.

In 1999, I started an online Pink Floyd webzine called Spare Bricks along with a group of fellow Pink Floyd fanatics. The zine drew a surprising amount of interest and enthusiasm from fans and (according to some reliable sources) had also attracted the attention of the band and some of their associates.

Over those years, we gathered a great deal of information about the band’s work, interviewed friends and associates of the band, including musicians who appeared on their albums like singer and musician Roy Harper, radio DJ Jim Ladd and backing singer Venetta Fields. In 2005, a staff writer scored an interview with Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, on the eve of the publication of his excellent history of the band, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd.

In terms of fan websites, ours was a great success and Spare Bricks published for 8 years before wrapping up with a final issue in the fall of 2007—a decision prompted by a marked lack of activity from the band in recent years. The zine’s editor, Mike McInnis, and I had both entertained the notion of reviving the site should the band release a new album. Sadly, with the announcement Richard Wright’s death, that’s now unlikely ever to happen.

Still, I’d like to invite any fellow Floyd fans to check the site out. The final issue can be viewed here. We also maintain an archive of all past issues including a 2006 issue devoted to Richard Wright.

In their press release about their acquisition of digital music music company, Napster, Best Buy’s president and COO, Brian Dunn, offers these inspiring words:

“This transaction offers Best Buy a recognized platform for enhancing our capabilities in the digital media space and building new, recurring relationships with customers. Over time we hope to strengthen our offerings to consumers, who we believe will increasingly seek devices and solutions that enable them to access their content wherever, whenever and however they want.”

I’m pretty sure I got all the buzzwords and marketspeak phrases in there (made ‘em bold for you) but if I missed anything, let me know.

And you just know this is going to rock because clearly Best Buy’s executives really know music. I know when I’m looking to crank up some good tunes, I’m all about my devices and solutions enabling me to access my digital media space content on a recognized platform via recurring retail relationships wherever, whenever and however.

The Large Hadron Collider in action.

So, I stayed up late last night thinking I’ll get to see the end of the world before everyone else and it’s just… nothing.

What a let down the Large Hadron Collider has been. No seven seals. No angels with trumpets. No dead rising from their graves. This is worse than that time I waited up for the Great Pumpkin. This stinks.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the status of the Insane Large Hadron Collider’s ongoing campaign to destroy the planet and all of human existence as we know it, you can get updates as to whether it has succeeded yet at hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com.

So, finally the highly anticipated Windows Vista ads featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld have emerged after weeks of tech punditry ranging from outright denunciations to slight bewilderment and to the predictably sycophantic (thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen, that’s CNET’s Mary Jo Foley on the Microsoft fanboy drumbeat.)

But honestly, now that this much-hyped bit of advertising it out, I’m frankly a little puzzled if not vaguely repulsed. I mean, come on. They lost me with line about “You ever wear clothes in the shower, Bill?” Any commercial that threatens, no matter how remotely, to put the mental image of a naked Bill Gates in my head has failed.

Any idea what this “commercial” is supposed to achieve? I don’t get it.

“That’s no moon. It’s a browser.”

In the late 80s, the duo of Penn and Teller made an amusing but mostly forgettable movie called Penn and Teller Get Killed. There’s one scene in it that has stuck with me however in which a reporter asks Teller what he hates about magic, and he wordlessly (as is his tendency) responds with a wry grin on his face and an impromptu display of magic filled with colorful scarves and flowers popping out of his hand.

It’s hard for me not to feel a little like Teller when reading tech articles sometimes. I’m tempted to go into my own little mock routine to spoof the cliches and conceits that ensnare so many tech writers in their giddy attempts to get in front of the technology parade and prove themselves the ultimate seer of all things digital. The release of Google Chrome, yet another Web browser, has proven itself sufficient fodder for exactly that.

One such article by Thomas Claburn appears on Information Week with the startling headline “Google Chrome Reflects A Desktop In Decline” from which I quote selectively below.

A week after Google released a Web browser of its own called Chrome, it’s clear that despite the frailty of Chrome’s beta code, there’s a seismic shift occurring in the computer industry.

Every few months, some tech writer somewhere gets the itch to announce that some gadget, software, tech company and/or shiny object that has caught his attention is yet another seismic shift in computing. And invariably, the death of the computing desktop as we know it happens somewhere near the epicenter of this shake-up. Tech writers have been collectively crying about this particular wolf for the last decade, and if it doesn’t seem like it, it’s because they fool you by swapping the words “seismic” with with words like “paradigm” or “meme” or “metaphor” or exciting hyperbole like “game-changing” or “revolutionary” to keep you off-balance.

Let’s be clear. Google Chrome represents no shift of any sort. It’s an interesting new browser and that’s about it. And frankly, if Google’s desktop software track record is any indication, this chrome is going to lose its sheen pretty quickly. I know there’s nothing quite as paradigm shifty as that revolutionary Google Toolbar or the barren attempts thus far to provide a new platform for cell phone development in Google Android. Google Desktop and Google Earth, each having passed unscathed through the paradigm-shifting hype machine, aren’t exactly turning the tech world on its ear either.

The desktop is dying. Long live the browser.

I love these kinds of epic proclamations from tech writers. It’s a Mobius strip of a statement, the kind of thing MC Escher would have written (if he were a tech writer—well, a lame tech writer.) It never ceases to amaze me when people overreact to something novel like this, especially people who should know better. The enthusiastic response folds back on its own logic in a way that makes sense only if you’re not particularly sober or enjoy having some tech writer perform a flashy magic trick in front of you.

“Behold! The browser is going to defeat the desktop! And is this your card?”

When they speak of the desktop, tech writers refer to the icon/window/folder-based computer file system that we all know, love and reboot daily. The idea here is that somehow the way we work in the browser will overtake the way we work with files on our computer and will become the primary starting point of our daily computing experience. In this illusory computing galaxy far, far away, we will not have a desktop per se, but rather all our files and software and services and information will exist out there on the Internet and we will access them via the browser—the browser that can’t exist without some kind of desktop environment to support it.

Mmmm… I love the smell of a catch-22 in the morning.

Incidentally, this concept is nothing new. It used to exist in the early days of computing in what was then called the “dumb terminal.” And yes, there’s a reason it was called dumb.

It’s not that no one saw this coming. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) anticipated the threat the browser posed to its desktop monopoly when it killed Netscape. But it was too late. Netscape metastasized and Mozilla emerged with Firefox, stronger than its predecessor thanks to the open source movement and its corporate supporters like Google, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo.

Wow, this is some serious revisionism of computing history.

Microsoft went after Netscape not because they thought Navigator was going to replace the Windows desktop, but because they realized how significant a role the browser was going to play in connecting people to the Internet and they didn’t want a third-party controlling that interface. Does anyone in their right mind think Microsoft would have continued the expensive and labor-intensive development of Windows for the last decade if they really believed browsers were going to replace it?

The Web browser was the first user-friendly face put on the Internet (and by that I mean the real Internet, not some walled garden AOL-type thing.) Prior to that, Internet users sent and received information primarily via less user-friendly and less graphically pleasing methods like email, FTP, Gopher, Usenet, BBS’s and a whole host of other Internet-based protocols and systems, many of which have followed Netscape Navigator into whatever bit-shredding oblivion awaits outmoded software.

This notion that Microsoft somehow gazed into its crystal ball and saw in the fledgling technologies that kicked off the World Wide Web some kind of nascent threat to the desktop is beyond ludicrous, especially when one keeps in mind the not-often-repeated fact that Microsoft was actually somewhat late in coming to the Internet party. (Notice any companies conspicuously missing from the first 100 domain names registered?)

At least as far back as 2005, there have been credible attempts to de-emphasize the desktop with Web-based media-sharing and application services like TransMedia’s Glide. But such efforts have yet to reach critical mass.

De-emphasize the desktop? More like enhance. With no exception, every useful instance of “cloud-based computing” (a buzzword phrase that is rapidly becoming an effective emetic for me) has only been useful insofar as it extends the desktop user experience. In no way, have these Web-based services threatened to replace the desktop. In no way. In fact, their enhancement of the desktop experience only further solidifies the desktop’s importance in the entire role of computing.

I never thought I’d have to defend an idea so obvious, but there you go. Next week: 10 reasons the sky won’t be falling any time soon.

Chrome marks the coming of age of cloud computing, or software as a service.

There are so many words that come to mind when I read a starry-eyed statement like that, and if you’re a big fan of George Carlin, you know at least seven of them.

One of those words appropriate for a family-friendly blog like this is “nonsense.” The only instances where Web-based applications have any hope of keeping pace with the speed and power of their desktop peers is by the use of Flash or Java which, incidentally, are entirely separate and distinct development environments shoehorned into the Web.

As far as native Web-based development of applications, the mix of XML, (X|D)HTML, Javascript, CSS and AJAX has produced some impressive results but has come up considerably short of what the computer desktop is capable of doing. And since these technologies have all been bolted together like Frankenstein’s monster, that means would-be Web application developers have to deal with a level of uncertainty at this stage that developers of desktop applications can more easily avoid.

But if Chrome overpromises … the desktop has underperformed. Microsoft’s Windows Vista, by almost any measure, has been a disappointment.

But this is comparing apples and oranges (or Microsofts and oranges.) Windows Vista has problems largely because of the extent of the functionality it tries to provide and because—now pay attention to this part—Windows XP is so popular that users are loathe to leave its familiarity for something new. That’s right. Vista’s big competition is XP, another desktop computing environment, not cloud-based computing services.

Beyond all the obvious inanities of comparing limited Web-based services and software with the rich and powerful desktop equivalent, we also need to explain how “cloud-based computing” is going to connect to a USB device or a DVD or a printer. If there’s no desktop, some Web-based service is going to have to interface with peripherals. Explain how the desktop will be replaced for processor intensive work on large files that first need to be transmitted over Internet connections that are not as reliable or fast as they need to be. Explain how the Internet will outperform games installed and run from the desktop.

And let’s not even get started on the Pandora’s box that security concerns will open wide once we start trusting our personal data and files to “the cloud.”

Despite those obvious unanswered questions and concerns, the writer says of Vista that…

It’s been more “ow” than “wow.” And Apple’s upcoming operating system update, Snow Leopard, will be bug fixes and performance improvements. It’s “[t]aking a break from adding new features,” as Apple describes it.

This is misleading. Apple has promised that the new features of Snow Leopard will be under-the-hood improvements. When Apple says “new features,” they refer to things that alter the desktop interface for the user. The available user features will not change from the current version of OS X to the next.

Part of the reason for this is that Apple’s users have gotten so many new features in the last few versions of OS X that there has been some sense of user fatigue in learning how to take advantage of all these new capabilities. Apple has promised to slow it down by focusing on improvements that do not affect the user directly.

Did you catch that? The example cited in the article is in response to too many features being introduced to the desktop—something that contradicts the writer’s point that the desktop environment is running short on ideas and improvements.

One of the improvements Apple is bringing to the next revision of OS X is 64-bit computing across the board. And how do cloud-based services gain that? That’s right, by running on a desktop that has it. Once again, we come face-to-face with the Mobius strip logic at work here.

And speaking of interfaces and user fatigue, can we somehow get all these Web-based services to start using a standardized user interface instead of the ersatz quality they have now? Yes? No? Too much hassle to get all that together? Funny because on the desktop, the user interface is relatively consistent system-wide, even on third-party applications, a nicety that hundreds of Web-based services are not going to replicate easily if the current crop is any indication.

If you haven’t seen Chrome in action yet, InformationWeek has published a wide range of analyses of the browser that’s being touted as a game-changer.

You know, I’m going to go ahead and give that wide range of analyses a miss.

It’s not that I don’t want to hear what others have to say. It’s just that I’ve heard it all before. People have been predicting this shift to Internet-based software for so long but it has yet failed to materialize. I first heard this idea expressed in an issue of Wired Magazine back in the late 90s, and about four times a year ever since.

I used to be very excited by the prospect of this but I’ve come to the more sensible conclusion that the Web will never fully turn into its own platform in the way we think of computer platforms. If it happens, it’s a lot further off than first assumed and it will be radically different than anything we can conceive of at this point.

And no amount of flashy card tricks will fool me into thinking otherwise.

It is a common practice in the news business to have obituaries and related stories prepared in advance for famous people. It’s not common practice, however, to publish those stories on accident when the person is still alive, just as Bloomberg did today in announcing the untimely passing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. (Sorry all you Microsoft fanboys. False alarm. Put the confetti and party favors away.)

Note: the “TK” in the obituary notice is a standard placeholder used in news for information not yet available.

Finally, a 3D alternative to going outside!

I’m not sure what else to say about this one. The video tour of the LivePlace’s City Space 3D rendering is so amazing it defies commentary.

And I’m assuming this is for real and not an Internet hoax. Thus far, LivePlace’s meager website is not nearly as impressive as their video. If real, this will take the concept of online alternate worlds a la Second Life to mind-boggling heights—as well as bringing The Matrix a little closer to reality.

Rumors concerning T-Mobile’s plans to open an iPhone-like App Store are starting to gain traction.

The Moconews article where the story broke has been reposted to the Washington Post’s site, and a wide range of technology news sites including ZDNet and MacWorld are talking about it. But I wonder how many blogs and tech sites discussing the possibility are considering why it’s unlikely to happen.

Regardless of whether it’s a true or not, whenever I see a large company announce a major initiative like Google’s Android or Amazon’s Kindle or Blockbuster’s video downloads, I tend to look for the big missing piece… because there usually is one.

In this instance, we can find it in the Moconews article here:

“The App store was a big deal, but that’s one phone. This is an entire carrier.” In other words, we are talking about T-Mobile’s 31.5 million subscribers today vs. the 10 million iPhones…. It’s all pretty straightforward, but the more interesting aspect is that this will apply to all the carrier’s platforms from upcoming Android to Java to Sidekick and Windows Mobile.

Ooooh, sounds impressive huh? Imagine 3 times the success of Apple’s App Store launch (which we found out today was a surprisingly successful venture in its first month)? Who wouldn’t be excited by those kinds of prospects? You can almost imagine the slobber on the T-Mobile executive meeting room tables (or maybe not–that’s not a very nice mental image.)

The problem wth T-Mobile running an iPhone-like app store is that no single application is going to run on all 31.5 million phones the way programs at the App Store will run on all 10 million iPhones. All those T-Mobile subscribers out there are on different platforms which means different operating systems and different hardware.

For example, would Sega step up and create Super Monkey Ball (which at last report had sold 300,000 copies on the iPhone–a huge success by gaming industry standards) for Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and any other operating systems required to support the T-Mobile store? It’s unlikely Sega (or other developers) would waste their time developing several different versions of an app and try to sell each to several small subsets of potential buyers in that 31.5 million subscribers. Each of those subsets would, in all likelihood, be smaller than the 10 million potential iPhone owners.

Additionally, beyond the question of operating systems, T-Mobile must address the wide range of hardware out there. How useful is an app developed for Symbian that requires a touchscreen interface or an accelerometer or WiFi or a specific set of keys if not all Symbian-based phones have those features? Even when you produce an application for a specific operating system, it isn’t going to be a potential sale to all phones running that operating system.

So, 31.5 million customers or not, you’re subdividing that number down several times by operating system, hardware features, and possibly interface and available network features. Apple has potential customers all running essentially the same hardware that can use all the apps as-is. Frankly, I see more potential in the 10 million projected iPhone owners than T-Mobile’s 31.5 million.

But to discuss this in terms of phone subscribers is still somewhat misleading. iPod Touch owners are also part of the App Store party too so it’s disingenuous to compare subscriber numbers alone. When you throw the iPod Touch into the mix, a device that can download and run software from the iPhone App Store, you’re looking at a potential number of buyers that may be double what is suggested by the 10 million number already mentioned. Apple hasn’t released any sales figures specifically for the iPod Touch, so it’s hard to say one way or the other, but given the general popularity of the iPod line, it’s an easy bet that there is a significant number of iPod Touch owners out there buying from the App Store too.

So before tech pundits start kicking around this rumor with impressive sounding stats like that, they need to consider the details. It’s not going to be as easy for T-Mobile to implement an iPhone-like app store. It just doesn’t make sense, and that’s why I think it’s unlikely T-Mobile will do it.

Finally, an exhaustive list of Internet memes has been assembled for those of us who want to take an amusing, and possibly embarrassing, walk down the Internet’s memory lane. (Warning: some of the links on the page above may contain objectionable content… and by that, I’m not referring to just the Rick Roll link!)

Psystar’s Open Computer, an unauthorized Mac clone with looks only a mother computer could love.

After waiting quietly for a little over three months, Apple Inc. announced their intent in July to challenge Psystar Corporation, a Florida-based electronics reseller, in court to stop them from selling PCs with Mac OS X installed. And this week brought surprising news that Psystar may not be so quick to back down from making their unauthorized non-Apple Macs. (These PC-Mac hybrids are commonly called “hackintoshes” by participants of various computer hobbyist sites like osx86project.org which focus on running Apple’s operating system on a variety of non-Apple hardware.)

It’s no surprise that Apple would want to stop Psystar from selling hackintoshes but I think Apple may have some problems in pursuing this. Psystar isn’t technically selling machines with OS X installed. They’re selling the machine and OS X separately (in the box) and subsequently charging an additional fee to install it for the user before shipping.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong on any of these following points.

• It’s legal for a company to sell OS X in the box.

• It’s legal for a company to sell PCs they have assembled.

• It’s legal for a company to open and install shrink-wrapped software on a PC prior to shipping if purchased by a customer.

So, what exactly is Psystar doing that is illegal here?

Over the last couple months, I have heard many arguments against the legality of Psystar’s actions, but none of them stand up in my opinion.

Some have commented on the fact that this installation is forbidden by Apple’s end-user license agreement (EULA) for OS X. That may be the case, but bear in mind, those licensing provisions are applicable to the end-user (i.e., buyer) of the software, not the seller. And historically, EULAs have been very difficult to enforce in court because they have not yet been established as a legally binding contract between a software vendor and the buyer. The only instance where EULAs have some teeth is in cases where software piracy is involved—which, not coincidentally, was what EULAs were originally intended to address. Software companies may be overstepping their bounds in using the EULA to dictate how the end user may or may not use their legally purchased software.

Some have questioned the fact that Psystar must make alterations to the software once installed on their generic PC hardware to ensure that it runs properly. My understanding (and I admit that I could be wrong about this as I’m certainly no legal expert on reverse engineering and software hacking) is that you can hack and patch software that has been installed on your computer to your heart’s content and you have broken no laws. It’s when you take the altered version and try to distribute it that you’re in hot water. Psystar is making changes to the software after installation. This is software and hardware purchased by the end user already. It’s still debatable as to whether any laws are being broken here.

Apple makes the case in their legal filing that OS X software bought off-the-shelf is, in fact, an upgrade and therefore not legally installable on non-Apple hardware. This argument seems to me surprisingly desperate. The problem is that nowhere on the box, disc or packaging materials for OS X does the word “upgrade” appear. I’ve checked both Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5) packaging. Apple may want to call it an upgrade, but from the customer’s perspective, it isn’t.

Additionally, upgrades generally imply that you own a previous version already. I can’t think of any “upgrades” to software that don’t assume you already own a previous version. However, I can buy a Mac with the hard drive wiped clean on eBay, buy an OS X disc and install it on the machine. Legally. Apple would have to make the case that anyone doing that is breaking the EULA which is, of course, a ludicrous argument to make.

So what are your thoughts? How do you think this life-or-death struggle between Apple and Psystar will pan out? And more importantly, who do you think should prevail?