The Tech Night Owl Newsletter

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #626

2011-11-27T14:35:27Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #626
November 28, 2011

PLEASE CONSIDER A HOLIDAY DONATION TO THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK'S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

In the wake of a published report that Android OS malware had grown tremendously in recent months, you had to wonder whether the notorious Windows virus problem was due for a replay. At one time, it was said that you could connect an unprotected Windows PC to the Internet and have it infected with malware within 15 minutes. But it's not nearly as bad now, inasmuch as Microsoft began to take the problem seriously and started to offer built in security enhancements.

But the Android OS is relatively new. It's distributed free to wireless handset makers, and the official Google app repository is basically not curated. Sure, Google will remove illegal and infected apps if they are alerted to the problem, and make needed OS updates. But it's not as if owners of Android gear are assured of ever getting such updates. That's up to the carrier, who evidently ceases to care about customers after the contracts are signed, except to deal with call quality issues and, of course, questions about your bill.

Well, John Martellaro, a Senior Editor for The Mac Observer, decided to do his own investigation, and so he contacted media and industry experts on the subject. He wrote an article about it, and also reported the surprising results of his investigation on our latest episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE. John also discussed the curious troubles he encountered upgrading his aging DirecTV DVR to the latest version. It appears that DirecTV cannot always guarantee you'll get a current model, and that is a really foolish move on their part. I hope I don't face a similar obstacle when my DirecTV set top box gets long in the tooth.

We also talked about the ongoing problems with iTunes Match and other topics with outspoken commentator Peter Cohen, of the "Angry Mac Bastards" radio show and Executive Editor for The Loop, who also offered some offhand observations about the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.

Author and commentator Kirk McElhearn revealed why Apple won't let him use iTunes Match on his desktop computer, and he also detailed his ongoing and downright strange Mac hardware problems.

On this week's episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris explore UFO sightings through the ages during wartime with Mack Maloney, author of "UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn't Want You To Know," which covers a number of compelling and not always well-known cases from our early history until modern times.

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt -- Now with New Design! We're taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: "Separating Signal From Noise." We've also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

DOES AN iPHONE 4 TO iPHONE 4S UPGRADE MAKE SENSE?

So the manager at our favorite pharmacy takes out a white iPhone 4S from his pocket and announces, sadly, "I really didn't need this. My iPhone 4 was working just fine, and Siri isn't of much use to me."

I asked him if he'd tried it much, and he said, "yes, but I don't need to ask about the weather. I just tap twice and there it is. Besides, how would it look if I started to talk to my phone while working?" With a smile, I thought about his customers staring at him as he filled their prescriptions.

Of course, Siri isn't the only attraction of an iPhone 4S. The interface feels noticeably snappier than its predecessor, and the camera is good enough to have made more and more people set aside their regular point and shoot models. Wasn't that sufficient to justify the upgrade?

That appears to be debatable. Sure, better performance is always good, but if you're not into gaming or performing other chores that tax the processor, maybe it won't make so much of a difference. The camera? Well, if you don't actually print 8x10s and expect photo quality to match up with a traditional high-resolution digital camera, the upgrade may also be less compelling.

But what about that sophisticated diversity antenna system, where the antenna that grabs the best signal is used? Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the so-called "Death Grip" problem for most anybody? Won't superior reception mean the difference between holding a solid connection and dropping the call?

Again, that only matters if you live in a region where your current wireless carrier's cell phone reception is sub-par and you need all the help you can get. Some of you might suggest that this condition exists pretty much everywhere if you use AT&T. But it's also true that recent surveys indicate that Sprint customers with iPhones have an even higher incidence of dropped calls, but maybe they just need to tune their networks better.

Now I doubt skepticism about upgrading your iPhone 4 should necessarily come as a surprise to anyone. The critics lambasted Apple for failing to deliver a compelling product refresh, though beyond a new case -- assuming you agree it looks better -- and perhaps a larger screen, they surely improved the iPhone as much as you have a right to expect. Besides, isn't Siri becoming a sort of cultural icon? I've seen some of those YouTube videos lampooning Siri, such as the one where a husband and wife use Apple's personal assistant as an intermediary in an argument. Funny stuff that!

As you've heard, the editors of Consumer Reports downgraded the iPhone 4S because it didn't offer a larger screen, or 3D capability. The former might make sense if it can be done without seriously enlarging the case. Today's iPhone fits perfectly in your hand; making it noticeably larger may make the fit less than perfect for many people. But CR isn't in the business of actually testing the usability of tech gadgets in real world situations. If one product has more bullet point specs, and no obvious performance deficiencies, that product earns a higher score.

And please don't get me started about 3D! That gimmick has yet to prove itself even on TV sets.

For me, I'm on the fence about the upgrade. Now that Apple has fixed the "case of the wrong ID" problem on my iPhone 4, everything is working just fine, thank you. My lingering problems have more to do with iTunes Match bugs, such as failing to match all the tracks even on mainstream albums that are in their catalog, than with general usability.

But I doubt very much that I'm in Apple's target audience. There are millions upon millions of iPhone users who don't have an iPhone 4 and are anxious to buy an upgrade, now that their contracts are up. Besides, the addition of Sprint to Apple's carrier partner list has to have brought in customers who might have otherwise considered deserting this nation's third largest cell phone company.

There are also people buying smartphones for the first time, or ready and willing to depart the Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone universes, and the iPhone 4S may prove to be just the ticket. Certainly those stellar sales tallies indicate that Apple is really on to a good thing, even if current iPhone 4 users decide to sit this upgrade out. For them, the possibilities of a real iPhone 5 and a major overhaul in 2012 will be really tempting, helped along by the expiration of their carrier contracts.

THE WILD WORLD OF HIGH-END AUDIO

When I was very young and very foolish, my parents bought me a cheap record player. It lasted through my teen years, and I didn't actually get a real hi-fi system until I was well into my 20s, although my brother did give me a few spare components from his music system.

Over the years I had some middle-priced systems and one that was to me at least, relatively expensive. It consisted of a set of Carver Amazing Platinum speakers, in a black shiny finish, plus an assortment of other gear from Carver and another company Bob Carver founded, Sunfire. Indeed, my preamp was a tube-based affair, although I can't say it made any audible difference in sound quality.

That system was a casualty of downsizing some years ago, and I hope it continues to serve the new owner well. But I still follow the audio business from time to time. Just recently, I got an issue of Stereophile magazine, a publication that caters to mostly well-heeled customers that, depending on your point of view, crave audio perfection, or merely hope to return to the 1950s, where LP records and tube gear ruled the roost.

To the editors and writers of Stereophile, every single component or accessory you place in your audio system can color the sonic experience in some drastic or subtle fashion. Merely swapping cables, and they tout products that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per pair, can change the quality drastically. It doesn't matter that level-matched double-blind listening tests have failed to demonstrate the existence of such audible differences, except, of course, when the cables are damaged or inadequate for the purpose used. An example might be a long run of thin speaker cable, where signal degradation is heard and measured.

There's also a story where the founder of one of those exotic audio cable companies failed to discern differences between his very own expensive products and cheap cable.

No matter. Those who write for these audio magazines regard themselves as possessing golden ears. They claim the ability to listen into the music and discern the subtle differences created by swapping out any single component in their system. Although such magazines as Stereophile will include detailed measurements, there appears to be no measurement that accounts for why one amplifier with basically similar measured results as another will deliver more "air" in reproducing woodwinds or give vocals more depth. To them, the engineers who design such gear, many of whom are worshipped as heroes in those publications, design gear from a artist's palette rather than employing sound scientific principles. Change a part and they can make the sonic experience less involving, remove a part or slightly alter an almost unmeasurable spec, and strings become luscious and warm.

And, of course, vinyl is king. Forget about CDs and all that "digital haze." Real music is meant to be heard on a records, even though the audio quality will begin to suffer after just a few plays. The loving ritual of preparing for the experience is cherished. You slowly and deliberately take the LP out of its sleeve, being careful not to put your fingerprints on the surface, and you use some sort of exotic and overpriced cleaning solution to make sure dust is wiped away. You place the LP onto the turntable, gently place the needle on the groove, sit back and listen. Well, at least until it's time to turn the record over.

But understand that automatic turntables or record changers are verboten, and the turntable and cartridge will often have five-figure price tags. And, yes, I've heard such systems, and they're still phonograph records with scratches and all the other artifacts of surface noise. They are also far from perfect reproductions of the original master tape, but they alter the sonic experience in a way that seems more pleasing to some listeners. You see, they deliver a sense of warmth, and perhaps comfort, to many dedicated music listeners for whom the iPod and iTunes are travesties.

Regardless, you'll find an amazing selection of equipment. A lot of it can get costly, particularly when you're dealing with hand-wired parts, sporting gold-tipped wiring, tubes, fancy chassis layouts and well-finished cases. The workmanship, from a visual point of view, is simply stunning, and you wonder if Steve Jobs was ever influenced by the high-end audio industry. And a lot of this gear is even made in the good old U.S.A. if you wish to make a patriotic statement.

Yes, exotic audio systems can sound mighty good, if you can afford them. But whether it's taking you closer to the master recording, which is what I presume they want, is highly debatable. But that shouldn't stop you from having a great time anyway. Then again, some people prefer rebuilding old cars.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #625

2011-11-20T13:12:40Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #625
November 21, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK'S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

This has been a somewhat irritating week. Since "daring" to subscribe to iTunes Match on Tuesday, I have suffered from my iPhone's inability to connect. I keep getting the message that it's attached to a different Apple ID than the one I use for iTunes. This, of course, isn't true, but Apple support has been utterly obtuse about the issue. They claim it is, despite the fact that I sent screenshots that show otherwise, and thus I must wait 90 days to set things right.

Now I understand that iTunes Match is a work in progress, and things will change over time. There are still problems with properly matching one's songs to the ones in Apple's library, for example. But the Apple ID conflict can be a disaster for some loyal Apple customers. They need to figure out a solution, and, in the meantime, do something to try to avoid these 90 day limits. While I understand they might want to reduce the problems occasioned by switching back and forth, an accidental login by a customer, or some problem on Apple's servers, shouldn't result in such an inconvenience.

Since writing columns on my little odyssey with Apple, some of you readers have chimed in with reports of similar troubles. Why am I not surprised?

Certainly, the iTunes Match fallout was just one of the topics covered on our latest episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, where we focused not just on the arrival and teething pains of iTunes Match, but how the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet stacks up against the latest Barnes & Noble Nook and, of course, Apple's iPad.

Along for the ride were Dan Moren, from Macworld, Adam Engst from TidBITS and Take Control Books, and Sascha Segan, Lead Mobile Analyst for PCMag.com.

On this week's episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present long-time paranormal author and researcher Jeff Danelek, author of a number of books that include "The Great Airship of 1897: A Provocative Look at the Most Mysterious Aviation Event in History (Popular Beliefs Controversial)." Were those early UFO reports the result of balloons, dirigibles, or something totally unknown?

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt -- Now with New Design! We're taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: "Separating Signal From Noise." We've also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

SO ARE PEOPLE REALLY PICKING ANDROID OVER THE iPHONE?

If you look at the sales figures, you can't help but notice that Google's Android platform is still doing exceedingly well. Yes, Apple continues to chart huge sales gains for the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone 4S is still backordered. But the conventional wisdom from the media is that it's Google's game to lose.

From a pure market share standpoint, maybe they're right, at least until you begin to see why there are more Android phones out there. Suddenly, the picture isn't clear-cut.

Part of the problem is that some commentators want you to believe that the Apple versus Google competition is nothing more than a replay of the old Mac versus Windows wars. There can be only one, as they said in some of those cult movies, but that's not necessarily true. In fact, it's no longer true in the PC world.

At one time, there were a number of PC platforms. Do you remember Atari and Commodore? Some suggest the latter, sporting a spiffy graphical interface, was actually better than the Mac, although efforts by third parties to restore the failed Commodore OS to its former glory, such as it was, were doomed to failure.

But early on, businesses took the safe route, which was to stay with IBM. In turn, IBM licensed MS-DOS from Microsoft, probably unaware that Bill Gates bought the rights for the OS from another company before licensing it to IBM. It's the stuff of legend, but Gates was and is a smart businessperson. The ultimate coup was to make the deal with IBM non-exclusive, meaning other companies could build so-called PC clones.

Some suggest Apple should have granted the rights to the Mac OS early on, but the company's failure to dominate was due to other issues, none of which are worth summarizing here. But it didn't take long for the PC world to be confined mostly to Windows and the Mac, with Linux being largely centered on the server market. However it's also true that, nowadays, Mac sales growth continues to outpace the sales growth of most PC makers. The Mac remains a viable minority platform.

In turn, the mobile handset market is far too large and far too fragmented to ever be dominated by a single player. Apple, Google and, if they can get their act together, Microsoft and RIM, can all succeed admirably with decent shares of the smartphone market. It's possible Amazon may enter the fray, assuming they really want to get involved.

But when it comes to tablets, it's all Apple, with very little presence from other makers. Even if the Amazon Kindle Fire is highly successful, it may carve out a separate market for its own, for pure media consumption devices, particularly ebooks. Amazon is selling them at a loss, reportedly, expecting to make up the difference by selling products and services. They may even be successful, but they may end up simply killing off iPad alternatives rather than substantially hurting Apple.

Now in the smartphone space, don't forget that there are dozens and dozens of products powered by the Android OS, sometimes modified from Google's original code, built by a number of manufacturers. They are available to most any wireless carrier with, apparently, few restrictions.

In turn, the iPhone comes in basically three models with various storage configurations and carrier contracts. There's the 2009 iPhone 3GS, the 2010 iPhone 4, and today's iPhone 4S. The first are available in a minimal 8GB configuration, to keep the prices as low as possible.

When you compare Apple's simple and clearly-defined choices with the "Droid of the day" mess that prevails in the Android OS universe, you can see how incredibly successful the iPhone has become. Even though the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are older models that do not, when it comes to specs, compete with current Droids and other smartphones in pure benchmark tests, they still register high sales.

The Android market is so fragmented with so many different models that no one maker, other than Samsung, can attain a decent market share. When going into a consumer electronics store or dedicated mobile phone dealer, the customer is confronted with a bewildering array of possibilities. They don't necessarily follow the proclamations in tech media, and have more important concerns. They are just looking for something that seems to offer lots of features at an affordable price, and no doubt sales clerks push specs, which are more clearly defined and explained than the subtleties of usability and interface elegance.

Of course, Consumer Reports and other publications that focus heavily on those specs don't help matters any. In the end, the customer looks for what appears to be the best bang for the buck; that is, if they aren't strictly shopping for an iPhone. With so many choices available, just closing your eyes and picking one from Column A will afford Android a much higher share of the market than Apple.

Customer surveys, however, reveal a higher level of satisfaction with an iPhone compared to any Android-based device. At the same time, Apple does better in customer retention, meaning that once you own an iPhone, it's going to be hard to consider an alternative.

None of this necessarily reflects on Apple's ongoing lawsuits against companies who build Android gear. Again, most people don't read about or care about such things when they visit a store to buy a smartphone.

In the end, so long as Apple can demonstrate consistently high year-to-year sales growth and great profits, it doesn't matter if another platform moves more product. And it doesn't mean that people who don't buy an iPhone necessarily chose Android, Windows Phone, or even BlackBerry because they thought they were better. Such fineries may do not always come into play when choosing a smartphone and a wireless carrier.

Of course, there may come a time when the smartphone market is utterly saturated, but as more and more people in developing nations begin to earn a little extra money, they will continue to seek a better lifestyles and classy tech gadgets. But some day, the smartphone may morph into the next great thing, and the real question is which company will provide that solution. How will Apple answer future market changes? That indeed may be the biggest obstacle CEO Tim Cook may have to overcome going forward.

THE NIGHT OWL'S BROADCASTING TOOLBOX

When I first plotted my return to broadcasting in 2002, I wasn't offered a job by a radio station or network. I hadn't even sought one. But someone wanted to establish an Internet-based radio network, and asked if I was willing to participate and develop a weekly show.

Having worked for a decade as a broadcaster, the performance part of the equation meant recovering old abilities, and rediscovering myself, more or less. It was all a matter of time, energy, and lots of practice. Once I had the format details ironed out, the next step was to build a home-based recording studio on a shoestring.

Since the advent of podcasts, the task has proven quite simple. There are a number of fancy but affordable USB-based microphones out there, and Apple's GarageBand makes it easy for most anyone with a modicum of practice to produce a reasonably professional recording.

But the debut of my first new radio show came before podcasts, and thus I had to improvise. So I visited the neighborhood Radio Shack and acquired a cheap analog mixer and a pair of mics. Actually streaming the show to the network's server involved setting up Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster; they ran QuickTime Streaming Server on their end. So long as my broadband connection was solid, it was a relatively easy process.

The network flagged, so I finally decided to go out on my own. The equipment portfolio has since expanded to encompass somewhat more professional gear, largely because my tech show -- and the paranormal show -- are both syndicated by a traditional network and I need to provide a fairly close simulation to a regular radio studio in my home office.

As a renter, I opted not to invest in installing special implements in my office to reduce ambient noise. Instead, I compromised, relying on a standard single directional or cardioid mic to pick up my voice and reduce unwanted echoes and other annoying artifacts. It's not perfect by any means, and those of you who are sensitive to such things will quickly realize the limitations, but I haven't had many complaints.

Right now, I'm testing a $249 Yeti Pro from Blue Microphones. Call it a hybrid, since it works with a standard USB connection, and also via a professional XLR connection. The audio quality is solid, robust, and you don't have to "kiss" the mic to get good sound. I prefer the standard broadcast setup, where I'm six to eight inches away. Rather than hook it up to my Mac, it's attached to my old Yamaha MG124/4FX mixer.

The headphones come from Grado, one of the few audio companies left that actually designs and builds gear in the U.S. The model they sent me for review is the $299 SR225i, from their "Prestige Series." It has a comfortable foam surround, and offers a rich, accurate sound with solid bass and crisp treble. The SR225i has gotten great reviews from the audio press, and no wonder. And, unlike some other over the ear headphones, you can actually hear what's going on around you, unlike the Bose headphones I'd been using up till now, which attempts to filter outside noises.

The audio for the shows is captured in Skype. It's not the best possible solution, but has the virtue of offering free peer-to-peer calls, and relatively inexpensive paid services to telephones around the world. Connections to traditional phone lines are usually clear and robust, at least when the person at the other end of the hookup is using a landline. Cell phone calls are saddled with the expected digital artifacts, but it still sounds better than the traditional JK Audio professional broadcast audio capture device I had previously used.

Fortunately, some of my guests use regular mics for their Skype hookup, but audio quality still isn't perfect by any means. Sometimes there's distortion and breakup, and I am still limited by the quality of the mics these guests are using. Quite often, it's just the onboard mic on their personal computers, and other times they're using a cheap USB based mic/earphone combo that may sound little better than a telephone.

For software, I am relying on such audio capture apps as Ambrosia's WireTap Studio and Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro to grab the signal from Skype. Basic editing is done in Bias Peak Pro 7.0.3, with an occasional visit to Martin Hairer's excellent shareware app, Amadeus Pro 2.0.5.

GarageBand? I suppose if I wanted to record music, I'd use it. Maybe I'll break out my son's black Fender Stratocaster some day and get back to strumming on it a little. But not today.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #624

2011-11-13T09:51:05Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #624
November 14, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK'S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

It's nice to be proven right. And perhaps Steve Jobs, wherever he is now, is smiling because his disparaging comments about Adobe Flash have been proven to be correct. Adobe has decided not to develop new versions of mobile Flash, choosing, instead to support HTML5. While I'm not going to suggest when it might happen, I expect that the future of the desktop version of Flash is also uncertain. Web designers are going to want one version of a site to work on all platforms. Having a dual-mode setup, with Flash for Mac and PC, and HTML5 for mobile gadgets, may work in the short term, but not as a long-term solution.

Meanwhile, on our latest episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, prolific author Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus discussed the still-delayed iTunes Match from Apple, and his ongoing quest to find a replacement for Intuit's Quicken, a personal finance app, on his Mac. As most of you know, Intuit is causing big trouble for some Mac users because their only Intel-compatible version of Quicken is feature limited.

Commentator Kirk McElhearn was in rant mode as he complained about problem's he's had with Apple support in resolving iCloud issues. Since I had a few myself, I could only echo the concerns.

From ZeoBIT, spokesperson Jeremiah Fowler described the major features of the company's all-in-one Mac utility, MacKeeper.

Daniel Eran Dilger, from Roughly Drafted Magazine and AppleInsider, returned to address the iPhone 4S battery woes, Apple's recent fix, and Adobe's decision to stop developing Flash for mobile gadgets, such as Android smartphones, and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

On this week's episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present long-time paranormal author and researcher Jeff Danelek, author of a number of books that include "The Great Airship of 1897: A Provocative Look at the Most Mysterious Aviation Event in History (Popular Beliefs Controversial)." Were those early UFO reports the result of balloons, dirigibles, or something totally unknown?

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt -- Now with New Design! We're taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: "Separating Signal From Noise." We've also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

THOSE SILLY SURVEYS

So a survey is published this week claiming that growth of Mac OS X Lion is unaccountably stagnating. A marketing firm, known as Chitika's, has released the survey, which alleges that growth in Apple's new OS, after an initial spurt, has slowed down seriously. If true, you'd think Apple has a problem, but are these figures to be believed?

Let's just say, the results raise loads of questions.

Consider that, each and every month, Apple is selling more than 1.5 million new Macs. Since late July, every one of those Macs, other than a small number of units remaining in stock, were preloaded with 10.7 Lion. Most of these models cannot be downgraded. So where does Chitika get its figures? Unfortunately, when you examine their site, you'll find precious little information about test methodology, though I did learn the company had to settle with the FTC last year over complaints about online ad targeting. Seems there were complaints about the opt-out process, involving people who didn't want to receive such material.

In reporting the results of that survey, company spokesperson Ryan Cavanaugh claims, in a blog entry: "Historically Mac users are quick to adopt the latest Apple software, as in the case with our iOS5 report, leading us to believe there are some real issues preventing users from making the $29.99 upgrade."

So where does he get those figures? Does he not realize that Lion's growth will be automatic so long as people continue to buy new Macs in large quantities? Besides, it's not as if Mac sales slowed in the wake of the Lion launch. Apple sold nearly 4.9 million new Macs in the September quarter and, unless hard drive shortages due to massive flooding in Thailand (where a fair portion of hard drives are assembled) cause production slowdowns, there's no reason to assume that sales this quarter won't meet or exceed the five million level.

Unfortunately surveys can be made to prove anything, if you just manipulate the questions and the methodology in an appropriate fashion. What's more, the latest stats from Net Applications, which surveys online activity, indicates that Lion has a 30% share among the active Mac user base as of the first three months of availability. That's a pretty high percentage.

So which survey should you believe?

Certainly, I wouldn't presume to suggest you only believe the numbers that favor your point of view or expectations. But if someone is going to deliver a survey with results contrary to logic, they are duty-bound to explain where they are coming from. Instead, it appears that Chitika is attempting to reach conclusions that favor a predetermined point of view or vendetta, rather than explain how the figures were devised.

Now I suppose those curious numbers might be based solely on people eligible for upgrades who haven't purchased new Macs. If that's the case, and it's not altogether clear, it's possible the survey may have somewhat of a basis of fact. It's quite true that the larger portion of people buying an OS upgrade will do so early in the product's lifecycle, and that the growth curve will diminish after that. It wouldn't necessarily impact the total Lion user base, since that also includes new Mac purchases.

Indeed, there are legitimate reasons not to upgrade to Lion. First and foremost is that you're using software that requires the Rosetta PowerPC emulation app, which Apple has discontinued for 10.7. I can imagine the plight of, for example, users of Intuit's Quicken, who chafe at the lost features of the only Intel-savvy version of the app, dubbed "Essentials." But there are loads of other apps that date back to the PowerPC era that either require expensive upgrades, or will never make the Intel transition.

It may also be that some potential Lion purchasers are concerned about the iOS-inspired eye candy. They don't care about having to deal with reversed scrolling (although it's easily changed), the vagaries of Auto Save, and the other Lion features, such as enhanced gesturing, which aren't so compelling. There may come a time when they are prepared to upgrade, but that decision will be postponed. Besides, buying a new Mac will be a better idea.

In the meantime, Chitika must enjoy their brief presence in the spotlight, having challenged the prevailing meme that Apple can do no wrong. Few will question the survey's meaning or methodology, only that it was done, and the numbers must be believed.

As far as The Night Owl is concerned, we aren't married to good or bad results for Lion. Besides, its success or failure as a retail product is not going to materially upset Apple's bottom line. So long as more and more new Macs are sold, with a large portion involving customers new to the platform, there's little incentive to address concerns over Lion. Apple seldom looks back, except to address a known hardware defect, such as those reported overheating issues with the first generation iPod Nano.

Meantime, far too many people want to put down successful people and companies. Being in the spotlight can be hazardous, and every little perceived flaw is generally exaggerated. Consider those reported battery life woes with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S. Android smartphones have had similar issues, but how often do you hear about them?

PLEASE CALL THE INTERFACE POLICE

This is a familiar experience. You're on the checkout line at a store. When you reach the cashier, after your purchases are tallied, you're confronted with a touch-based pay terminal with a slot to insert your credit card. These devices typically use a stylus for customer interaction, such as entering a PIN number or your signature. But the touchscreens aren't always responsive, so you sometimes have to click a button twice to activate a function.

Well, if you're using an ATM debit card, you have the choice of paying via debit or credit. It's a simple enough concept, but choosing the credit option usually requires pressing the Cancel button first, then picking Credit from the next screen's menu. Does that sound intuitive to you? Did any of the companies who designed the checkout software ever think that requiring such an unintuitive step to select one of your payment options doesn't make any sense? How does canceling the transaction, which is what you'd expect from a Cancel button, do precisely the reverse?

And I haven't even begun to consider the clunky 1980s look and feel, with blocky, dim lettering against a green or similarly darkened background. Don't you sometimes think the people who designed these interfaces from hell need a sharp smack in the head?

Of course, obtuse user interfaces are nothing new in computerized gadgets. Just check out a setup menu on your new TV set, a Blu-ray player, or the settings screens on a standard feature phone. What do they remind you of? How about Windows 95? Although the interfaces of today's versions of Windows are somewhat better organized, and the lettering is smoother, Microsoft still observes some of the same poorly conceived conventions.

This lack of elegance and usability is rampant throughout the tech industry. Just the other day, I set up a new Brother MFC-J825DW All-in-One printer that I had received for review. At a street price of $149.99, it's actually a good value. You get decent printing, scanning, faxing and copying in a relatively slim form factor. Even better, consumables are reasonably priced, but I'll have more specifics to offer after I've had more face time with the product.

Typical of other print makers, Brother's interface designers don't have a clue. The touch menus have that same infamous Windows 95 look, and status messages are typically obtuse. If it's not a "Please Wait…" label, consider the "Receiving Data" status message when you're printing a document. Receiving Data? Why not just "Printing"?

The setup utilities are also poorly designed. Consider the Remote Setup Program, designed to allow you to configure the J825DW on your Mac or PC rather than on the unit itself. Although the software is evidently compatible with Mac OS X Lion, the interface would make Apple's developers freak. While the labels are clear enough, the activity buttons have tiny lettering, and clicking OK will dismiss the app, even if you actually intend to make further changes. I suppose they expect you click Apply instead. So why not change OK to Quit? Why indeed!

Of course, reviewers who favor specs and benchmarks over usability are only encouraging endless interface stagnation. Consumer Reports magazine ranks first among many as a prime offender.

Maybe Apple should set up an educational program for peripheral interface designers. Whether you use a Mac or a PC, you deserve simplicity and elegance. Label text should be clear, and the buttons should clearly express the intended function. Sure, Apple makes mistakes, but at least they try.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #623

2011-11-06T13:54:10Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #623
November 7, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK'S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

According to Apple, the final leg of the iCloud launch, iTunes Match, will be available by the end of October. It didn't happen, evidently, because some quirks still need to be resolved.

Once it's available, iTunes Match will, for $24.99 per year, work with up to 25,000 tunes that you didn't purchase from iTunes, and supply the equivalent tracks from a library of millions. Regardless of the quality of your copy, you'll get the 256K AAC version that Apple supplies, and for most people, that ought to be sufficient to provide great audio quality.

There are questions: What if your music collection includes tunes that you downloaded from a source that's not quite legal? Does iTunes Match somehow allow you to come in from the cold, not in danger of running afoul of the RIAA or individual music companies? What if you have an older version of a CD, which has since been remastered? Does Apple consider the remastered version in their catalog to be the equivalent? I consider this because I bought the original CD albums from The Beatles in the 1980s. These recordings have since been digitally remastered and enhanced, evidently used as the basis for the ones now available in iTunes. Would this get me, in effect, a free upgrade?

I suppose the answers will come our way once iTunes Match is up and running. Maybe this week. In the meantime, on our latest episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, Macworld's Dan Moren delivered an Apple update in which we talked about the forthcoming iTunes Match service, the prospects for an iTV, or Apple connected TV, and other hot topics.

Ross Rubin, an industry analyst for the NPD Group, discussed sales trends, the possibilities for an Apple connected TV, and whether 3D TV is ever going to catch on.

You also heard a mobile gadget update from Avram Piltch, Online Editorial Director of Laptop magazine, who covered the trials and tribulations of Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, and the prospects for the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.

On this week's episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris explore the amazing legends of ancient astronauts with Philip Coppens, author of "The Ancient Alien Question: A New Inquiry Into the Existence, Evidence, and Influence of Ancient Visitors." Did extraterrestrials visit Earth in our early history, and perhaps influence the development of human civilizations?

Coming November 13: Gene and Chris present long-time paranormal author and researcher Jeff Danelek, author of a number of books that include "The Great Airship of 1897: A Provocative Look at the Most Mysterious Aviation Event in History (Popular Beliefs Controversial)." Were those early UFO reports the result of balloons, dirigibles, or something totally unknown?

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt -- Now with New Design! We're taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: "Separating Signal From Noise." We've also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

THE BATTERYGATE MYTH

To some misguided pundits, Apple's supposed "Antennagate" scandal last year is an episode they will never live down. Even though other smartphones exhibit signal loss if you hold them the wrong way, meaning that you manage to cover the antennas with those big bad bags of water we call hands, the iPhone 4 got the bad rap. Of course Consumer Reports only reinforced that myth when they falsely claimed that particular device was the only one that had the problem.

Clearly sales didn't suffer. Maybe Apple could have done a better job in handling the initial PR fallout, but a media event pretty much set the matter to rest, although giving away free bumper cases for a while didn't hurt. Maybe a few lessons were learned along the way, and certainly one is the improved antenna design in the iPhone 4S.

Now when it comes to the iPhone 4S, you have to expect there will be early release bugs. There almost always are with new products of this sort, so it's inevitable that early adopters will report problems. So within days after the refreshed iPhone got into the hands of users, some complained about subpar battery life. Another crisis in the making?

As is their wont, Apple didn't respond on Day One. Their approach is to confirm the existence of a problem, and it's possible source, first. At the same time, there were published reports that Apple engineers reached out to some customers to work with them to test the conditions under which battery life dropped. This past week, Apple confirmed the problem existed, and that a 5.0.1 update would be made available in the next few weeks to fix some bugs to eliminate that and other early-release problems. At the same time, developer versions of 5.0.1 have already even seeded, to give the App Store software community a chance to test the update before it becomes available to the public.

Now remember that the iPhone 4S first went on sale on October 14th; iOS 5 arrived two days earlier. Less than three weeks later, Apple announced a forthcoming update to fix the most serious issue reported by users so far. Remember, too, that reduced battery life is also evidently impacting some people who updated their iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS to iOS 5. It's not necessarily a bug limited to the newer model.

In the scheme of things, it appears Apple is doing the right thing. They didn't respond to the issue until they had some facts to go on, and I have little doubt that they are acting as quickly as you might expect under the circumstances. It would be worse to just rush out an update, only to have to push yet another a few days or weeks later because it wasn't fully baked before release. That would look worse for Apple.

In the meantime, there are loads of online suggestions as to how to shut down the background processes that may kill battery life. Even then, it doesn't appear that a large number of iOS 5 users are experiencing the problem. The battery life on my iPhone 4, for example, doesn't seem altogether different after the upgrade.

That, however, hasn't stopped a certain misguided, maybe I should say dumb, blogger for a major tech site from accusing Apple of stonewalling, of hiding the dirty truth about "Batterygate." Obviously, the blogger in question doesn't deserve the publicity, so I won't mention the name or the source. I would only hope that those of you who are unfortunate enough to read the article will pepper the site with comments pointing out the piece is just plain wrong.

As I said, Apple does screw up in small and big ways. In retrospect, maybe they could have done something different when testing iOS 5 to better isolate potential battery problems. But it's not as if developers didn't have copies of beta versions. If battery life was routinely sucked dry, the problem would have been obvious and reported often enough for Apple to attempt get a handle on the problem. Of course, if the iPhone 4S is more vulnerable to these bugs, and it doesn't happen very often, it's understandable that the real problems wouldn't reveal themselves until the product went on sale.

I do not pretend to have all the facts, so I'm not going to say that Apple could have done better. Besides, unless you expect to use your iOS 5 device in a setting where you can't get to a charging station, or a Mac or PC, to recharge the unit, it may only be a minor inconvenience. At least you're forewarned.

But consider the plight of the owner of an Android OS smartphone. If an OS bug causes an undue drain on battery life, what's your recourse? Yes, it's possible Google will patch the bug, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get that update. Support remains the province of your wireless carrier, not the handset maker, and certainly not Google, and I won't consider the issue of rooting or jailbreaking the smartphone to get that update. Customers shouldn't have to put up with that nonsense.

Now in Android land, if battery life is bad, you can always use a utility to kill a process, to see whether it's sucking too much juice. This sort of thing may appeal to power users, who want the nth degree of control over their gadgets. But for regular people, it doesn't make sense, and it makes less sense if there's a critical OS update impacting security and performance that you can't get.

Whatever you say about Apple, about their walled garden or their secretive approach to public information, when something serious happens to one of their products, they will definitely try to do right by their customers. Can you say the same about other handset makers?

IS SATELLITE RADIO WORTH THE BOTHER?

Let me age myself again. I remember driving across the country long before satellite radio was a gleam in the eyes of corporate executives and investors. There was no iPod or iPhone, and, when making a long trip, I'd bring a case of CDs of my favorite songs, at least after CDs arrived. I was never a fan of cassettes or 8-track, so I'd just make do with the radio, having to constantly change stations as I left the useful signal area of one and switched to another.

In this century, the iPod, and convenient connection kits, made it easy to take along all or most of your music library and play your favorite songs through your car's audio system. But satellite radio has its own advantages, such as being able to hear the same talk show or music channel across the length and breadth of the continental U.S.; well except in tunnels or other areas where there's no clear path to the satellites.

I gather truck drivers have really taken to satellite radio, and there are a couple of special talk channels catering to their needs. You can also get regular weather and traffic information for larger cities. For myself, I find the modest investment totally worthwhile, especially since, as a talk show host myself, I enjoy listening to specific shows that are otherwise, alas, only available on local AM radio. AM reception can be hit or miss in and around my home. In my office, for example, I sometimes have to rely on a station's Internet feed to receive up a signal that isn't static-laden, and, yes, I've tried several fancy radios that promise better reception without success.

Getting satellite radio is essentially a no-brainer if you buy a new car, or a recent used model. It's often standard equipment even on lower priced compact vehicles, or it can be dealer installed for a modest sum. The standard new car deal is three months to one year of free service, and, even though Sirius and XM are one these days, the channel lineups remain slightly different. Car audio systems will have one or the other, although they were supposed to merge the systems at some point in time.

Some of the best parts of satellite radio are the commercial free music channels. Sirius XM has signed up all the famous disk jockeys of old, even New York's "Cousin" Bruce Morrow, now 74 years young, who sounds almost the same as he did when I was a kid. Yes, it's the same patter, mixed on occasion with interviews of both new and vintage artists. Other famous DJs are in on the act with their own music specialties, and some artists, such as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, do their own shows from time to time.

Just the other day, I was listening to rock keyboardist Keith Emerson talking about his musical history on a station devoted to classic rock. A press of a button, and I could hear a 1950's crooner with a vintage tune. Another station features classic radio shows, dating from the 1930s through the 1950s, where you can hear "The Shadow," "The Lone Ranger," and various and sundry comedy acts of old.

Now as far as audio quality is concerned, it's pristine enough, free of noise, although it's highly compressed with noticeable digital artifacts. Satellite sound is on a par with FM radio in most respects, which means that even the most expensive car audio system can only do so much to improve matters, but it's more than acceptable for all but serious audio critics.

It's not as if free radio is taking satellite and Internet radio sitting down. There is HD radio, where the AM and FM stations are digitized and thus deliver superior audio quality. AM sounds near as good as FM, and FM comes close to CD, assuming the stations aren't messing up the audio quality with heavy limiting to get more "talk power." But it also means buying an extra radio, and not all car audio systems support HD. Last I checked, I couldn't find HD in any Honda sedan, and it's hit or miss at Hyundai or Kia (some options include it, some don't). Besides, it's not as if HD allows a station's signal to reach a wider range.

For now, I'm perfectly satisfied with satellite radio, and the price is even more acceptable now that I've abandoned Netflix.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #622

2011-10-30T13:22:45Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #622
October 31, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK'S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

They say time flies when you're having fun, and Apple has delivered plenty of enjoyment and, in fact, information, to hundreds of millions of iPod owners over the past decade.

Certainly the iPod seemed a modest exercise at the beginning, a tiny device that stored some 5,000 songs for a "mere" $399. It's not that digital musical players didn't exist. There were a number of gadgets of that sort available when the iPod made its humble debut. I know I reviewed some of them for CNET, and my general opinion was that they weren't so good. It wasn't just the slow transfer speeds, but the obtuse interfaces. This was not a potential Walkman successor.

As has become the case with Apple, they found out what was wrong with existing gear, and managed to find ways to make it all work seamlessly. Those first iPods used FireWire for speedy file syncing with your Mac. PC support was later added, although Steve Jobs reportedly objected to that idea and had to be persuaded to agree to make the product cross-platform.

At least Jobs was flexible to see where he might be wrong, and history shows that the iPod really pushed Apple onto an incredible growth path, leading them into new directions as a consumer electronics maker. Had the iPod failed, would there be an iPhone, or an iPad? I think not.

Now on this week's episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, we observed the 10th anniversary of Apple's iconic iPod, with author and commentator Kirk McElhearn. You also learned about the gadget's humble beginnings, and how its future shapes up.

We also featured a special interview with legendary audio equipment designer Bob Carver, who discussed his history of creating audio equipment for your home, plus how the quest for perfect sound has fared so far in the 21st century. One fascinating tidbit: Years ago, Bob participated in a three-way roundtable about the future of home audio. The other participants? Steve Jobs and the famous science and science fiction author, Isaac Asimov.

Macworld's Lex Friedman and Gene discussed the best-selling biography, "Steve Jobs," from author Walter Isaacson. Have all the revelations about Jobs' mercurial personality made people less apt to admire Apple's co-founder? We covered lots of questions and possibilities.

On this week's episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present long-time UFO researcher Norio Hayakawa, who has devoted many years towards unearthing the mysteries behind the alleged base at Dulce, New Mexico and Area 51. Is it all about secret weapons, or is there a UFO related element to all this?

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt -- Now with New Design! We're taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: "Separating Signal From Noise." We've also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

THE iOS REPORT: WILL APPLE RUN OUT OF THINGS TO CHANGE?

There's an interesting article at Macworld, from my friend Lex Friedman, which focuses on the rapid growth of Mac OS X in the early years, and how, as the frequency of upgrades has slowed, the changes have been less drastic. Lex assumes, perhaps with a reasonable amount of justification, that things will settle down with the iOS before long.

Now when it comes to Mac OS X, consider that, before Lion arrived, it had been four years since Apple released a major OS upgrade. Yes, Snow Leopard came between Leopard and Lion, but there were few feature enhancements. Mac OS 10.6 was meant as an OS upgrade to deliver new system-level capabilities that would improve performance and reliability. Well, at least when app developers made their software compatible.

Indeed, if you didn't migrate to Snow Leopard, 10.6, you may not have noticed much of a difference, at least until the Mac App Store arrived and gave you an iOS-inspired method to acquire software. Of course, that also became the main destination to upgrading to Lion, so many of you might have been forced to upgrade to Snow Leopard anyway if you craved 10.7. Yes, Apple has a costlier USB stick version, but they really want you to download Lion. And, for now at least, Lion is the only route on the Mac to iCloud.

Now some of the main improvements in Lion, on the surface, appear to have been adapted from the iOS. It's not as if Apple devised that many major improvements. Other changes were simply extensions of existing concepts. Auto Save, for example, is a feature available in some applications, and courtesy of third-party utilities, for a number of years. Version is basically a subset of Time Machine, allowing you to examine or revert to older versions of documents from within the application.

Going forward, you have to wonder just how many things Apple can change about Mac OS X within the existing environment before they have to consider a wholesale user interface alteration of some sort. There have been suggestions from some commentators that Apple's goal is to ultimately merge the iOS with Mac OS X, though it's likely Lion has too many gestures as it is. There are just so many ways you can manipulate your fingers before you begin to feel you need to take lessons as a guitarist or pianist for the digits to become sufficiently flexible.

When it comes to the iOS, Apple has yet to run out of ideas to flesh out a 200-plus new feature wish list on an annual basis. That Apple has been able to accomplish this task without materially changing the basic look and feel is a tribute to smart design, and a sensible development process.

At the same time, you have to wonder just how many features Apple might want to pack into an OS meant to serve the needs of small mobile devices before it becomes too complicated for regular people. This is a constraint that doesn't seem to bother Microsoft, though. As much as some things may be a tad simpler in Windows, you have to think that all the changes are only making things more complicated. Even with the new tiled veneer in Windows 8, once you get past those ugly widgets, it's still just plain old Windows. And why does Microsoft continue to believe we really don't want menu bars?

Now this doesn't mean the iOS is feature complete, or close to feature complete. As much as Apple finds ways to improve Mail, for example, it only makes the missed features seem more significant. Why, for example, must you be saddled with a single system-wide signature? Why not have a separate signature for each email account, which, to me, more closely mirrors reality? This way, you can have the personal signature and the business signature. Is that so hard to do?

The other email concerns are rules and spam protection. I'm sure many of you wish to funnel messages to a specific folder (or even to a folder in another account). That's easily done in many email clients, including the desktop version of Mail (the iCloud variant is simplified). The problem arises when your Mac or PC isn't on, so your supposed "PC free" iOS 5 device won't filter the incoming email to different folders. That's something that will require manual labor later on, but why? The same holds true for spam filtering, unless, of course, your email provider does a good job protecting you from junk.

My comments about mail represent a tiny subset of things that can still be done with the iOS. I'm sure you can provide a healthy list of the changes or improvements you'd like to see. It doesn't appear as if Apple is going to run out of great ideas very soon. On the other hand, I can think of some things that are still lacking in Mac OS X, but don't get me started.

The other factor that will encourage Apple's developers to keep improving the two operating systems is competition. Clearly Google isn't standing still, and Microsoft just recently shipped a reasonable upgrade to Windows Phone 7. Apple doesn't have an exclusive on all the good ideas. Consider the iOS 5 Notification Center, something that was clearly inspired by the way such messages are displayed in the Android OS.

It's certainly clear that features are routinely borrowed and adapted across the various operating systems. Consumer Reports, for example, has already listed several examples of how other services inspired iOS 5, although they seem to be going a bit overboard in suggesting that Apple is just copying ideas from other companies.

If OS innovation from Apple's competitors slows down, however, you would have reason to worry that Apple might follow suit, and that wouldn't benefit anyone.

CABLE, SATELLITE AND CONTENT PROVIDER BRINKMANSHIP

In the very, very old days, TV was free. You put up an antenna, fiddled with it as appropriate, and you were able to receive your local stations, assuming there were any. Things got difficult if you lived very far from the nearest station, so some smart people devised a "community antenna" system, setting up a single large antenna tuned to receive stations from the larger cities and retransmit them so you could get decent reception on your local set.

From there came cable systems, which connected households and businesses across an entire city to the receiving center, or head end, and soon you could receive TV almost anywhere. Well, there were places where it wasn't convenient to lay wire, and I suppose that was one of the inspirations for satellite TV. That way, the only wiring you need is to connect the receiving hardware, or dish, to the sets in your home or apartment complex.

As cable spread across the land, opportunities for new networks arose. Instead of depending on the handful of broadcast stations, the few cable-only networks expanded to hundreds. Some charged you extra to see commercial free and sometimes explicit content. But even the ones providing so-called "free" access requested what are called "carriage fees," which is more or less a payment from the cable or satellite company for the privilege of carrying that network. That source of income, of course, is in addition to that earned from running ads.

Now the larger entertainment companies, such as the Fox division of News Corp., have a number of networks that are fed to cable and satellite providers. Clearly they are in the business of deriving as much income as they can, and so they routinely request (or demand) higher carriage fees from the cable and satellite providers when the old contract is up.

This negotiation process can sometimes result in the threat to withdraw permission to carry certain channels if the cable or satellite company doesn't agree to give them a raise. I recall one instance in which part of a World Series game became unavailable to many customers because the network and the provider couldn't agree on a new contract until the last minute.

That annoying game is playing out all over again this week as negotiations continue between News Corp. and DirecTV. This particular contract involves several networks that include FX, along with 19 regional sports channels. News Corp reportedly wants a 40% increase, and DirecTV is balking over that request. If a deal isn't consummated by November 1st, DirecTV will stop carrying those stations until they can agree to terms.

Although there has been some confusion over the dispute, partly as a result of some misleading ads from DirecTV's rival, Dish Network, contract issues of this sort are almost always resolved, although there may be a brief interruption of service. Even if DirecTV pulls those stations, they will still carry local Fox affiliates, Fox News, Fox Business and other Fox content.

Regardless of how this is resolved, the customer loses. The greedy entertainment companies may indeed exact higher fees, but that only means that customers will, in the end, have to pay more to compensate. While I can understand the content providers might feel they deserve higher fees to cover what are no doubt increased production costs, they need to also consider their viewers. These are difficult times, and few people can afford paying even a few dollars more each month for the same service.

In the end, if customers cut back on channels, or give up on cable or satellite entirely, as many of you are dong now, the content providers and delivery services will both suffer. Is that what they really want?

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #621

2011-10-23T13:17:41Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #621
October 24, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

While Mac OS X Lion seems to be settling down when it comes to lingering bugs and performance issues, following release of the 10.7.2 update, Apple’s latest attempt at building a set of online services, iCloud, is still highly ragged at the edges.

In recent days, I’ve outlined my problems and concerns, and I can only hope Apple will fix the most serious bugs and, even better, allow you to merge your disparate Apple IDs over the next few months. It really ought to happen before iCloud’s predecessor, MobileMe, goes away next summer. You listening, Tim Cook?

Now on this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, we presented prolific author Joe Kissell, author of “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” and “Take Control of iCloud,” who offered hints and tips for upgrading to Apple’s newest OS, and migrating your stuff to iCloud.

Tech expert Steve “Mr. Gadget” Kruschen came aboard to tell you how to harness the power of a connected TV, Internet phone services, affordable printers, and lots of other great tech gear.

Columnist Jim Dalrymple, Editor in Chief of The Loop, reviewed the iPhone 4S, and offered an on-air demonstration of the Siri personal assistant. In order to flesh out this interview, I asked Jim, without warning mind you, to stage that demonstration, so you could actually hear the telltale “beep” and Siri’s computerized response. Yes, the voice, that of a female, comes across as decidedly non-human. It’s nothing like the famous voice of the onboard computers on the various “Star Trek” movies and TV shows, which, by the way, was performed by the late Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, keeper of the “Trek” flame as it were.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present noted Brazilian UFO expert A.J. Gevaerd, editor of the Brazilian UFO Magazine. He’ll be focusing on the ongoing disclosure of UFO documents by the Brazilian government and the key cases he’s investigated.

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt — Now with New Design! We’re taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: “Separating Signal From Noise.” We’ve also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

MACS FLOURISH IN THE POST-PC ERA

Although Wall Street freaked over the fact that Apple sold fewer iPhones in the last quarter than their inflated expectations, few predicted the level of success of the Mac in that quarter. Some 4.89 million were sold, amounting to a 26 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010.

Sure, that increase was not much higher than the increase in the number of iPhones sold. But what’s more significant is that Apple is moving more Macs in a single quarter nowadays than they could sell in an entire year not so many years ago. This is a pretty significant development, considering that PC sales, for most manufacturers, are relatively flat.

Also please take a look at Microsoft’s financials for the last quarter, where earnings for the Windows division were up a mere two percent during the same period in 2010. Sales of new PCs were up roughly 3.2 percent to 3.6 according to estimates. Quarter after quarter, Apple is reporting that the growth of Mac sales are far exceeding the rate reported by most PC makers.

I suppose the numbers make sense. Part of the ongoing migration is no doubt due to the fact that Macs just work better. But it’s also true that more and more people are eschewing PCs and going to tablets, with Apple the major beneficiary. Even Apple admits that Mac sales might have been higher if not for cannibalization from the iPad, but the PC universe is losing out more.

You can see this trend continuing. Year after year, Apple has announced that roughly half of the people buying Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform. Now I’ve wondered how these figures are derived, and assume there’s some level of surveying at the point of purchase, or when the Macs are registered. I’ll assume they are accurate for the sake of argument.

Some attribute this phenomenon to the so-called “halo effect,” where people who buy an iPhone, iPad, and even an iPod, come to appreciate the relatively smooth integration among all Apple products. So next time they need a personal computer, they choose Mac. Apple recently made the migration process easier by adding a PC transfer feature in the Lion Migration Assistant. This is something that used to be the province of third parties, although the folks at an Apple Store Genius Bar will offer to perform the task for you.

I realize that no migration system of that sort can possibly be perfect. A Windows power user, who reorganizes the locations of their stuff, or who has data from apps for which there is no Mac equivalent, will have some manual labor to perform. But most PC users can pretty much go through the process without encountering any serious issues. It involves installing a Windows Migration Assistant, connecting the two computers, and, with the Lion Migration Assistant, checking a few boxes, and letting the process proceed.

According to Apple, here’s what’s supported: “Lion automatically transfers your home directory folders (music, pictures, desktop, documents, and downloads), browser bookmarks, and user settings, including localization, locale, and customized desktop picture. Lion also transfers your contacts, calendars, and email accounts (Outlook and Windows Live Mail) and puts them in the appropriate applications.”

And, by the way, Apple has long posted advice on the PC migration process on their site, to ease the process even before there was a built-in OS feature perform the transfer.

Granted there are apt to be glitches along the way, and there is going to be a learning curve as the PC user explores the differences between the two operating systems. Some PC users may, in the end, still prefer the Microsoft Way and will thus return to their old computers. Indeed, during the 1990s, when Apple was on the ropes, that’s precisely what happened, as Mac market share tanked, and more and more application developers abandoned the platform.

These days, many ads for computer products and services will mention “PC and Mac,” with the exception of just one key category, and that’s malware protection. You no doubt hear those frequent radio and TV ads for PC fixer-upper products, promising to speed up your computer, rid your PC of malware, spyware, and all the rest of those standard Windows-based irritants. If you check the product specs, there are strictly for Windows users, although the ads generally don’t mention which platforms they support.

Sure, there have been outbreaks of Mac malware from time to time. Some suggest the “obscurity” of the platform makes Macs safer, that the situation will quickly change for the worse as sales and market shares improve. That hasn’t quite happened, although businesses will often still install security software on their Mac systems.

What makes the continued growth of the Mac most intriguing is the fact that Apple doesn’t really invest very much in advertising Macs these days. I’ve seen a rare ad for a MacBook Air, but can’t remember where or when. But you sure know about that nifty Siri digital assistant in the iPhone 4S, because Apple is spending a bundle on TV ads to show you how great it really is.

As I’ve said in the past, there will come a time where Mac and PC sales will both fall, as more and more customers rely on mobile computing devices. Some of you might suggest that overall computer sales will improve as the economy grows faster, but I’m not sure about that. I think the die is cast, but for now, Mac sales look to continue to outpace the PC industry. Folks who stood by the Mac for years, as I’ve done, should feel vindicated that they made the right choice.

THE QUEST FOR PERFECT SOUND FOREVER

When the CD first appeared in the 1980s, the promoters of the new digital recording format boasted of “perfect sound forever.” But that didn’t mean you’d suddenly be able to hear an exact replica of the original performance in your living room, or other chosen listening area. What it meant is that the recording wouldn’t deteriorate, unlike an LP record that can exhibit audible wear after just a few listenings.

In practice, CDs do sometimes deteriorate and become unplayable. But the real problem was that, in transferring the sound from the master tape, something can get lost in the translation. In the old days, when engineers made a vinyl recording, they had to fiddle with the EQ, alter the sonic balance, so it sounded better within the limits of the playback format. If you took that same master and made a CD from it, a medium that didn’t audibly alter the original recording, it would be unlistenable.

But the real problem is that you still would only hear an approximation of the original performance (be it a studio performance, or a live one) in your home. Sound reproduction equipment, regardless of cost, was simply unable to perfectly reproduce the real thing, even if the original only existed as a studio-based product.

Some suggest that old fashioned tube amplifiers have a greater ability to deliver a presentation that’s closer to real music. Others suggest tubes are simply applying their own form of EQ. The end result may be pleasing, but not necessarily accurate. But the larger problem is the loudspeakers, and their interaction with your listening environment. And remember that, if you attend a live musical event, you’re not just listening to direct sound but reflected sound too.

Some speaker makers have devised clever ways to deliver what they believe to be the correct sonic balance. First invented in the 1960s, the Bose 901 was originally designed by an MIT-educated electrical engineer, Dr. Amar Bose, to deliver what he felt to be a true simulation of a live performance on your home. The 901, still available after being updated over the years, uses an EQ box to optimize the system for your listening area. But don’t forget that Bose products are also disdained by some diehard audiophiles, who claim the company charges more for inferior gear.

Other speaker systems offer to provide the proper direct and reflected balance in a dipole configuration. Instead of sealing the rear of the speakers, they are left open to allow the sound to bounce off the real wall. Of course, you have to place the speakers carefully for optimum reproduction.

Years ago, I bought a set of speakers that provided this dipole effect, a Carver Amazing Platinum system, consisting of a pair of tall, thin speakers that employed a ribbon for most of the audible range from upper bass to highs, and several subwoofers to handle the bottom of the recorded spectrum. They sounded best with a powerful amplifier or receiver, and the result was simply glorious.

At the same time, many prefer the sound to emanate, as much as possible, direct from the speakers with as few external reflections as possible, relying on any room or auditorium ambiance, real or simulated, to be part of the actual recording.

Now I have long since downsized my possessions. As with many of you, I’ve chosen convenience and price over ultimate quality. About six or seven years ago, I purchased a Bose 3-2-1 GS system, which includes two speakers, a subwoofer, and a control module with an upconverting DVD player (one that converts regular DVDs to simulate high definition). Bose designed this system to allow two speakers to mimic the effects of five, by simulating the effects of surround sound using a technology they call TrueSpace.

I have the system connected to my TV set, and, with the appropriate Blu-ray DVDs, especially action movies with loud special effects, you do actually sense sounds coming from the sides and rear. It’s not quite the same as having those extra speakers in the back of your listening room, but it presents a more user-friendly installation scenario for apartments and smaller homes.

Most of my music listening, however, is done on my iMac, using another Bose system that simulates surround sound, the Companion 5.

But a larger and larger number of people probably listen to music through via earbuds courtesy of their iPod, iPhone or iPad, or similar devices. With decent earphones, the audio quality is actually quite pleasing, but you lose the impact of room reflections, that final frontier of delivering a close simulation of a real music performance.

Now when it comes to faking surround sound, legendary audio engineer Bob Carver was doing that in the 1970s, when he invented Sonic Holography. Nowadays, a number of audio equipment manufacturers have developed similar schemes to emulate the effect or having extra speakers with varying degrees of success.

As to Carver, he’s still at the audio game. His original company, Phase Linear, is long gone, as is a successor company, Carver Corporation. In 2005, Bob sold his interest in a third company he founded, Sunfire, which specialized in higher cost audio systems for music or home theater setups. These days, Bob is building expensive tube amplifiers for his newest company, one that, again, bears his name.

Now I’ve known Bob, off an on, for a number of years, and speaking with him on the phone is always an education. So I’ve asked him to join me on The Tech Night Owl LIVE, on October 29th, to talk about his history in the audio business, and whether we’ve somehow lost our way in the quest to discover perfect sound forever.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter

2011-10-16T13:00:50Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
***Issue #620***
October 17, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

This week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE featured a return visit by Daniel Eran Dilger, of Roughly Drafted Magazine and AppleInsider, who recounted his encounters with Steve Jobs during Apple shareholder meetings, where he asked a number of questions. He also attempted to dispel some of the rumors about Jobs’ public behavior, where he states that the alleged excesses of Apple’s co-founder have been greatly exaggerated.

Now it’s not that Daniel was a friend of Jobs. But he felt that the answers to his sometimes hard questions were thoughtful and sincere. During the session, he also pointed to an example of where he felt the media totally distorted Jobs’ conduct at one of those meetings.

From the NPD Group, industry analyst Stephen Baker discussed the initial prospects for the iPhone 4S, and the state of the PC industry.

You also heard from Avram Piltch, Online Editorial Director of Laptop magazine, who covered the iPhone 4S, and the fallout from the serious network outage experienced by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion last week. Certainly nobody is immune to network issues. Apple had a few during the Wednesday rollout of iOS 5, iCloud, Mac OS 10.7.2, and various and sundry updates.

It is very possible that cloud-based systems of this sort still need a fair amount work. Apple and RIM are just two of a long line of companies who have confronted occasional service issues when trying to integrate massive server networks. In Apple’s defense, perhaps they just couldn’t prepare for the onslaught of traffic, despite that huge new data center in North Carolina. But it brings back memories of the 2008 debacle where Apple, once again, tried to do too much in a single day. And, yes, there were activation glitches during the launch of the iPhone 4S on Friday.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present a very unusual episode, featuring Aaron Kaplan, author of “Deep Analysis: Frightening Conclusion,”which purports to link a number of historical events to create what he believes to be a compelling picture about humanity’s future. With the permission of the author, we have posted a copy for you to download in The Paracast Community Forums.

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt — Now with New Design! We’re taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: “Separating Signal From Noise.” We’ve also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

THE iOS 5 REPORT: DID I SAY GLITCHY?

To understate the obvious, the iOS 5 upgrade must have been a huge undertaking for Apple VP Scott Forstall and his hardworking crew. They are to be congratulated for carefully crafting a useful set of changes and feature improvements and yet keep performance of your Apple mobile gadget at a high level.

Yes, I did encounter some glitches in performing the upgrade on an iPad 2 on Wednesday, but, after all is said and done, it appears Apple’s servers just weren’t ready to handle the load. That’s something hard to predict, and difficult to scale for, so I’ll cut Apple some slack. It’s not as if Amazon, Google, and certainly Research In Motion, are free of server problems.

I also have iOS 5 also running on a GSM iPhone 4, where the upgrade went smoothly. Just as a quick test, I worked on a friend’s iPhone 4S and, despite claims of stellar performance boosts, only sensed a modest improvement in launching apps, navigating through apps, and getting online. Then again, the friend has a Verizon Wireless account, which may account for Internet speeds that do not task the device’s limits.

My main interest, though, is how well Apple addressed the iOS’s shortcomings in the new release, and how well new features have been implemented. Certainly the Notification Center overhaul was long due. The previous Push Notification system simply popped modal prompts on your screen, which you had to dismiss to get anything done. To me, that felt like the early Mac OS, which is not a good thing.

Overall, the new implementation is far better, but it’s not without its faults. Despite disabling notifications about new email messages on the iPad 2, by turning the Notification Center option to OFF, my wife still complained of getting them. Yes, that setting and three switchable options were all turned off, but one of two alert display choices was still selected, so the messages wouldn’t go away. To me, when you turn something off, it should stay off.

My solution was to change Alert Style to None. Has anyone else seen this oddity?

I remain displeased with the App Store update setup. In theory, you should see a badge at the left of the app icon indicating how many updates await you. In practice, the App Store has never automatically notified me of new versions of the apps I own, not once, not ever. I’ve always had to check them manually, and, during that checking process, the badge finally displays. This particular problem has existed over all of my iPhones, from the day of the initial App Store launch. It’s also present on the iPad 2.

I would think such notices were of some importance, particularly as apps are updated to improve performance, fix bugs, and, of course, add support for a new OS. Then again, iTunes also requires that I manually download new apps, even though there is a badge indicating how many updates await my attention. But maybe I’m just too stupid to find the hidden setting that will set things right.

My larger concerns, though, are the features that are still missing. Take Mail, one of the most important apps in Apple’s arsenal. The new formatting capabilities, though clunky, are probably as good as they can get within the limits of a tiny touchscreen. But why can’t you configure more than a single signature for all of your accounts? Why are the rules you set in the desktop version of Mail not supported? What about spam filtering?

As it stands, you have to depend on Mail for Mac OS X to move messages to the Junk folders, and follow your regular rule settings. If your Mac isn’t running, the messages are planted in the Inbox, even though that’s not what you want. If you can do all those other tasks in iOS 5 Mail, such as basic formatting and the ability to search text, surely these additional features aren’t too much to ask.

On the positive side of the ledger, the occasional app crashes I’ve observed in previous iOS versions are even less frequent. I can recall just one, an app intended to access a news site, which did not repeat itself. Overall, I did not notice any obvious performance difference, except for the speedier Safari browsing experience.

Meantime, a new blog about the iPhone 4S at Consumer Reports claims that iOS 5 “borrows heavily from Facebook, Amazon and the Android, BlackBerry, and Windows operating systems.” A handful of features are cited as examples, but since there are over 200 new features in iOS 5, it’s hard to say that Apple has done anything unusual. They’ve always taken their inspiration from different sources, carefully integrating the “borrowed” features in a typically elegant fashion. I’m just waiting to see how CR handles the reported enhancements to the antenna system, and whether they will recommend the product this time. Or whether they will manufacture a new “death grip” fault, even though other testers have found that problem to be largely history.

Understand that this is a very preliminary evaluation of iOS 5. There is more to do, and more to test, and perhaps the Notification Center glitch I encountered was atypical, something that might be addressed in a maintenance update in a few weeks after things settle down. So stay tuned.

THE 10.7.2 UPDATE SMOOTHS LION’S EXCESSES

No, Apple hasn’t given up on reversing the direction of scrolling or hiding scrollbars when you’re not using them. At least those settings can be defeated in System Preferences, so you can return your system to sensibility, or at least the sensibility you accepted on your Mac before Lion came out.

But it’s clear that Apple has been busy massaging the edges, to clear up the rough and gruff behavior you always expect with a new system upgrade from Apple, or Microsoft for that matter.

Mission Control, for example, seems to function in a smoother fashion. This is the Lion successor to Exposé (though the latter still exists), where all of your application windows and virtual desktops appear in a single display. A notable improvement is the ability to rearrange those desktops, which may eliminate some of the flaky behavior some of you may have experienced when switching from apps in different desktops. Another is the ability to drag “files between desktop spaces and full screen apps.”

Unfortunately, still missing in action is the ability to rename a virtual desktop, a feature that appears on Apple’s site, when you examine the promotional material on Mission Control. But it’s never existed in the real world. Curious that Apple hasn’t changed the screen shots, or are they taking poetic license?

A key problem I’ve encountered in the past is the possible loss of Internet access when awakening my iMac from sleep mode. According to Apple, the issue results in “a delay in accessing the network,” so maybe if I was more of a patient person, the situation would right itself. Or maybe the description is not quite accurate. Regardless, it hasn’t happened since 10.7.2 was installed.

Unfortunately, Apple is notorious for all-too-brief explanations of software updates. Over time, other fixes and changes may be discovered by those who take the time to examine everything as carefully as possible, even to the extent of cataloging lists of changed files.

One unannounced improvement, for example, is the possibly reduced use of system resources compared to 10.7 and 10.7.1. I base that conclusion on a Dashboard widget (remember those?) known as iStat Pro, which displays the condition of your Mac, including the speed of the cooling fans and the temperatures established by various components, such as hard drive, CPU and power supply.

It’s not that you can do anything about a report of an anomalous condition, but if you see something running too hot, I suppose you can restart and see if the problem rights itself. Certainly, if your Mac seems to be running slowly, you can see if a runaway process is consuming too many resources. Sure the latter can be consulted in Activity Monitor, but iStat Pro is just more convenient. And it does display a somewhat lower resource use with 10.7.2.

Returning to Lion, granted some early adopters have reverted to Snow Leopard. Some of the flashiest features, spawn of iOS influence, may not appeal to you. It’s questionable whether many of the changes in 10.7 will actually improve your productivity, although Auto Save and Version might ultimately make for a more efficient workflow. If you don’t have to remember a Command-S, you’re not apt to lose significant amounts of content if your app crashes or there’s a power outage before your save your document. Version simply lets you use a Time Machine-style interface to restore your document to as previous state.

The problem with such enhancements is that they depend on app developers to get with the program and build Lion savvy versions of their products. That will come in time, though it may take months for the heavy hitters in the Mac developer game, such as Adobe and Microsoft, to consider adding them. Then again, such apps as Word already have built in automatic saving capabilities, though they are not as smoothly executed as the one in Lion.

When it comes to improved productivity in Lion, the increased viewing options in the Finder make it easier to organize your stuff, and I do like Mail’s message preview feature, something inspired by the way it’s done on the iPad. Less obvious is the fact that Mail doesn’t seem to freeze as often as in the past when accessing a message with a possibly corrupt image. Or maybe I’m not getting those types of messages anymore.

But I’ve not taken to Conversations, which organize messages to and from a single set of recipients in a single window. I continue to organize my email the old fashioned way, separate messages with separate content. If I want to track a previous message, I use the search feature. But maybe I’ll grow accustomed to a more modern approach. After all, I did take to the iPhone pretty quickly.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Copyright 1999-2011 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #619

2011-10-09T14:06:05Z

THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #619
October 10, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

Some of you have asked why we continue to ask for donations if we also have paid ads. Well, the answer is simple: We do not receive near enough income from those ads to cover all our expenses, and we receive no revenue from ads carried by our network. So we ask those of you who enjoy reading our material to help make up the gap. But that's up to you. If you do want to help, just click the Donate link in our sidebar on the site itself, and send your payment. No amount is too small, because our expenses keep on rising. Or you can send it using PayPal direct to gene (at) technightowl (dot) com. Thanks always for your generous assistance.

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

This week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE was not the show I planned, nor the show that I expected to have to schedule for a number of years yet. But we are constantly reminded just how fragile life really is, and that it’s seldom possible to know when the end is near.

This week’s episode was supposed to focus mainly on Apple’s media event last Tuesday. However, on Wednesday, as the news of the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs spread around the world, I had to change my plans, sadly.

So, instead, we devoted a hefty portion of the show to honor the life and times of Steven P. Jobs, first with Peter Cohen, of the “Angry Mac Bastards” radio show and Executive Editor for The Loop, and later with Adam Engst from TidBITS and Take Control Books. Peter also discussed Apple’s media event that featured the launch of the iPhone 4S.

You also heard more about the latest and greatest iPhone, along with the shortcomings of Google’s Android OS and Microsoft’s efforts to deploy Windows everywhere, from Daniel Eran Dilger, of Roughly Drafted Magazine and AppleInsider.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present a return visit from UFO historian Jerome Clark, author of such works as “The UFO Encyclopedia” and “Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds,” delivers a fascinating overview of UFO research and some of the related mysteries. He’ll also answer the questions you posted in our community forums.

Now Shipping! The Official Paracast T-Shirt — Now with New Design! We’re taking orders direct from our new Official Paracast Store, where you can place your order and pay with a major credit card or PayPal. The shirts come in white, 100% cotton, and feature The Paracast logo on the front. The rear emblem states: “Separating Signal From Noise.” We’ve also added a selection of additional special custom-imprinted merchandise for fans of our show.

APPLE’S LEADERSHIP AND THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

Over 14 years, Steve Jobs had the opportunity to remake Apple’s history. His youthful exuberance, and many say his excesses, resulted in his forced departure from Apple in 1985. I doubt anyone at the time would have predicted how the company would fare in the years to come, or that Jobs would return to find Apple on the ropes.

The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple and took over, first as interim CEO, or iCEO, had become a seasoned executive with a vision. He stripped the company of non-performing or underperforming products, focusing strictly on reclaiming the Mac’s glory. The iMac was the first proof that things weren’t going to be the same.

Beginning with the arrival of the iPod in 2001, Jobs remade Apple as a consumer electronics company that, with the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, resulted in incredible sales and profits. Apple is clearly the envy of every tech company on the planet.

At the same time, it’s also true that many corporations have suffered seriously after their founders departed. Sometimes it happens almost immediately, sometimes it takes years for the decay to set in.

Consider, for example, the Walt Disney Company. After Walt Disney died in 1966, his company began to flounder from corporate indecision and lack of vision. It took years to right the ship and get things on track once again. Certainly HP has suffered greatly, with a procession of mediocre executives coming and going and moving in different directions. The legendary HP “way” became a relic of the past.

These days, HP, while selling more personal computers than any other company on Earth, cannot seem to figure out how to increase profits beyond the single digits. Indeed, if new CEO Meg Whitman doesn’t change course, the PC division might be spun off or sold. Unfortunately, it appears that Whitman, once CEO of eBay, is not, so far at least, able to express a compelling vision for HP.

Let’s not forget that the HP of the 1970s served as an inspiration for the young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in creating Apple. Today’s HP would serve as the inspiration to nobody other than as an example of the unfortunate decline of a great corporation.

Now there’s no guarantee how Apple will fare in the years to come, but from published reports, it’s clear that Steve Jobs, understanding how other companies have fared when their guiding lights left, worked hard towards instilling his vision into Apple, embedding his DNA, so that everything he built would continue in his “image” when the time came for him to go.

With his original diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, no doubt he understood his time was short. One example of preserving the culture he established at Apple was to create something called Apple University in order to pass on his ideals and vision to new employees. Some liken the approach to a parent guiding their children in their formative years, hoping they’ll be successful in traveling life’s treacherous path.

At the same time, imagine attempting to guess how Steve Jobs might have reacted when making a specific product or marketing decision. On the short term, that might be productive, but on the long term, it could result in tunnel vision, the failure to recognize critical changes in the industry and react appropriately.

Perhaps the best thing Jobs could have done would be to create the climate where creativity and risk-taking were encouraged, something that doesn’t often happen in the corporate world, where they try so hard to rely on past successes. Indeed, when Tim Cook worked as acting CEO when Jobs took longer and longer sick leaves, it’s clear the company never missed a beat, and achieved greater and greater successes. Clearly Jobs’ efforts to guide Apple towards a future without him at the helm have proven successful.

It is said that the products Steve Jobs envisioned can fill Apple’s product catalogs for several years yet, after which it’ll be up to the new leadership to move on. By having a wide and deep bench in the executive suites, it’s clear to me that Apple has the ingredients to attain even greater heights in the years to come.

Of course, success is guaranteed to no one. It’s always possible that some tiny startup somewhere will develop products and services that will be far superior to anything Apple can deliver. That’s something you can’t predict, but so long as Apple doesn’t simply try to depend on past glories, their survival seems assured for quite a number of years yet.

Compare that to Microsoft, which still wants you to believe that Windows is the be all and end all of the personal computing experience, and that they can somehow, if they throw enough darts at the wall, devise a strategy to make a difference in the mobile computing universe. Sure, Microsoft is struggling to become relevant again, and it’s a sure thing they will continue to register high sales and profits at least in the near term, but a gradual, constant erosion is assured if they don’t change their ways, and soon.

WILL PEOPLE BUY MORE APPLE GEAR NOW?

According to published reports over the years, the heirs to rock legend Elvis Presley have taken in far more money than the “King” earned during his entire lifetime. That’s because his vast recording catalog and Elvis merchandise was regularly exploited in order to garner as many sales as possible. From LP to cassette to CD, you were assured of newer, better-sounding versions of his greatest hits, not to mention so-called undiscovered treasures.

And I haven’t begun to consider the income earned from admitting fans into the Graceland complex for tours.

But there is nothing new when it comes to famous people who are no longer around. Certainly sales of music from The Beatles and the solo works from John Lennon soared after his assassination in 1980. Clever merchandising by Lennon and Harrison’s heirs, not to mention the surviving members of the Fab Four, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, have resulted in significant ongoing sales of Beatles music. Releasing alternate takes and demos has only enhanced interest in their music.

When the music was remixed for CD in the 1980s, you can bet millions of fans bought everything all over again, as I did; the same is true for the more recent digital remastering. And, frankly, having heard the two versions, it is amazing how much high quality was captured by the team of smart engineers who got access to the master tapes. Indeed, it happened all over again when The Beatles’ catalog was released on iTunes, although I have opted not to acquire the digital versions, at least not yet.

But this is just recorded music and, other than complete collections, the cost is relatively modest for those of you who simply want to get better versions of the music you already own.

Now when it comes to the death of Steve Jobs, some tech pundits are wondering whether it’s at all possible that Apple will sell more product because fans of the company’s gadgets will want to capture more of the magic before it’s too late. I suppose the fact that people have shown up at Apple Stores in greater numbers, particularly the flagship outlet in New York City, does present the possibility that they also made purchases they might have otherwise not considered, at least in some cases.

On the other hand, other than the iPod shuffle at $49, or perhaps an iPod Nano, buying an Apple product is not a casual purchase. I suppose some people who might have been planning an upgrade, or want to try something from Apple for the first time, might use the passing of the company’s co-founder as an incentive to take the plunge. But it’s not as if many people are apt to spend $499 for a basic iPad 2, or $999 for an 11-inch MacBook Air on a whim, or out of a sense of grief. Flowers yes, messages of sympathy yes. I may be wrong, but I do not think most Apple customers have enough disposable income to make a larger investment before they’re ready.

I suppose some skeptics might want you to believe that Apple is already on the way down. Certainly the mixed media reaction to the iPhone 4S indicates there’s skepticism. On the other hand, the new iPhone has substantial internal changes, and how would it work any different if the casings were changed? That’s the question they cannot answer when they continue to present the fake premise that Apple somehow shortchanged customers by concentrating on the substance rather than the form, although they did that before with the iPhone 3S and iPhone 3GS.

In short, Apple’s iPhone upgrade is following a tradition already established with previous versions. There is a major redesign, followed by product refreshes with new parts and new features, followed by another case redesign. You should also consider the feelings of the companies who build iPhone cases, who may be able to build the same or almost the same products for the iPhone 4S. Besides, if yours is covered by a case, would you even notice much of a difference anyway, so long as the Home button and other controls work efficiently, performance is good, and the display is sharp and crisp?

Now as I’ve said many times before, I always reserve the right to be wrong. I had expressed my hopes that Steve Jobs, after resigning as CEO, would be around as Chairman of the Board to continue to plot Apple’s strategy for quite some time. Clearly he made the decision to step down when he knew the end was near, and maybe it still gave Apple fans more time to digest the leadership change, not to mention Wall Street. Do not forget that Apple’s stock price was minimally impacted after Jobs’ death was announced.

In short, do I think Apple sales will suddenly soar simply because Steve Jobs is no longer with us? Maybe by a small amount, but not to any significant degree. I do not believe those higher iPhone 4S preorders were the result of anything more than the fact that loads of customers were waiting to get one for quite awhile. Period.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Oct. 3, 2011

2011-10-02T13:58:18Z

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THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #618
October 3, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

This week, Amazon attempted to upstage Apple’s upcoming media event, by introducing revised Kindles. The cheaper ones are ad driven, so you pay a low price only to have to put up with advertising. I suppose that’s little different from Google’s playbook, where they hope you’ll click on targeted ads to keep the cash registers ringing.

This is a topic that got coverage this week not only on The Tech Night Owl LIVE, but will be the focus of the next article.

On the show, you heard from Macworld Senior Editor Dan Moren, who offered his expectations for Apple’s October 4th media event ahead of the event (this may be outdated by the time you hear the show), and his reactions to the announcement about the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet computer.

Macworld Lab Director Jim Galbraith updated you on their new SpeedMark tests, and the results posted for the slowest and fastest Macs on the planet.

From Avram Piltch, Online Editorial Director of Laptop magazine, you learned his reactions to Amazon’s Kindle Fire press conference, and its potential as a rival to the iPad. He’ll also give you details about a new business-oriented tablet from Lenovo.

We also featured Jake Levant of fring, discussing a new text, audio and video chatting app that’s available free for the iOS and Android OS platforms. It’s an intriguing product, and, although I know it’s not their focus, I do hope they’ll consider providing a version for the Mac and PC, the better to compete with Skype and other telephony solutions.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris explore the amazing world of cryptozoology, as we discuss such amazing creatures as Bigfoot with long-time researchers Eric Altman and Dave Dragosin, from the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society. You’ll learn about what we’ve discovered about these beings and whether their reality can be proven. And, yes, these things go far beyond what you see in those silly comedy and sci-fi movies from time to time.

DON’T FORGET THAT APPLE, AMAZON AND GOOGLE HAVE DIFFERENT BUSINESS PLANS

I suppose you might think that companies who build or license competing products are in the same business, with similar business plans. But that’s not always true.

Take Apple. You know precisely what butters their bread. They are in the business of selling hardware and services. Just about everything they sell is intended to deliver a good (some say high) profit, and they are experts at it. Consider how they manage to maintain those profit margins, even in areas where you just know their prices are equal or better than the competition. The struggles makers of tablets face to meet the cost of an iPad comes to mind.

With the release of the new Kindle Fire, you have to think that Amazon is in the business of making consumer electronics gear. That may be true, but not necessarily to do so at a profit. Indeed, what surprised some is the revelation that it costs more to build a Fire than the $199 sale price. Well, at least that’s the price that Amazon will charge when the gadget goes on sale in November. Some speak of a loss of up to $50 for each unit sold.

As you might expect, some members of the tech media have decreed that this new low price should be adopted by any company hoping to compete with Apple, and it comes not long after they were saying that the $99 blowout price for the failed HP TouchPad was the ideal price. So, therefore, tech companies need to lose money on every sale in order to get more product into user’s hands than Apple.

I suppose Apple ought to wish and hope that’s what those other companies plan to do, because they will be putting themselves out of business before long. But if you actually look at Amazon’s game plan, you’ll see that it’s quite reasonable, and not at all about showering the company with red ink.

Amazon is in the business of selling merchandise. They became ascendant, first, as a book seller, essentially killing many brick and mortar book stores, although Barnes & Noble has remained afloat also by doing lots of business online, and, by the way, selling an ebook reader, the Nook, to compete with the Kindle.

Because Amazon hopes you’ll buy ebooks, stream videos, and order other products from their vast online catalog, they offer Kindles as loss leaders. It’s the same scheme that any retailer might use by offering something at a super discount to get you to order something else. You see that at your supermarket, consumer electronics store, so there’s nothing strange or unique about the practice. It often works.

Besides, what good is a Kindle if you don’t fill its meager storage space with content? It’s not as if it’s loaded with useful apps, beyond Web browsing and email.

More specifically, the Kindle might be marketed similar to a printer. Such devices are sold are profits that are slim to none, with the realization that you’ll need to replace the consumables before long. So they offer ink and toner, quite often at exorbitant prices, with the expectation that they’ll earn healthy profits. HP, despite having trouble making a good living off PCs, does quite well with printers, and don’t appear to be giving any thought to unloading that division of the company.

With Google, they license the Android OS to handset makers free of charge. But their apps contain targeted ads, which, when clicked, cause their cash registers to ring, more or less. Advertisers pay for the clicks, and Google is happy.

The Android gadget makers may be less happy these days. If they’re not being sued for intellectual property infringement by Apple, they are paying royalties to Microsoft for patent rights. When it comes to tablets, few customers are interested, and even though the Kindle Fire uses an older version of the Android OS, it is so heavily laden with interface customizations that you won’t readily recognize it for what it is. It doesn’t help the Android ecosystem.

Worse, Amazon is reportedly interested in acquiring the failed WebOS from HP. If that happens, the Android universe will lose what is potentially a large player. What’s more, the Fire appears to be restricted to Amazon’s own app repository, so you cannot just run any old Android app from other sources, although I suppose you could hack the unit and change things. But we all know that the iOS ecosystem also restricts you to one app resource, but it’s not as if you don’t have a rich selection of software. Amazon’s selection is much, much smaller.

Of course, none of this is of any interest to most end users. The real issue is whether Amazon’s new tablet, or any tablet other than the iPad, suits their needs. So far they don’t. It’s also an open question whether the 7-inch form factor has a future, other than, perhaps, for reading books. But even here, the Fire is limited by the fact that it’s Wi-Fi only, and there’s no 3G support. So if you want to catch up on some great books at the beach, make sure that beach is close to a hot spot, or you’ll be out of luck. But maybe that’s the price to pay to keep the Fire’s price really low; it doesn’t have a camera or mic either.

At the same time, I can see where the skeptics are now going to tout the Fire as the ultimate iPad killer, even though it’s not exactly in the same category. But if such statements deliver traffic to the sites where they’re posted, isn’t that enough?

In the end, though, the tablet market, such as it is, is still Apple’s to lose. The Fire might catch fire for those who want a cheap and portable consumption device, and are willing to put up with its limitations. At least Amazon hopes that their losses will become profits when customers load up on ebooks.

APPLE’S MARKET SHARE IS WHAT?

Just about every quarter, Apple announces that at least 50% of the customers purchasing new Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform. I assume most are Windows conquests, though some, admittedly, migrated from Linux, or perhaps never owned a personal computer before.

I’m not at all certain how Apple comes by these numbers, since it’s not as if they routinely survey customers in the stores, though I grant that a customer who doesn’t have an Apple ID might be regarded as new, even though it’s possible that customer may have several Apple IDs for different family members, business or personal use, and so on and so forth. At least I’ve never been surveyed on the few occasions I bought a computer direct from Apple (I usually go to independent resellers), but they know who I am for better or worse.

Now comes a new survey from Net Applications, which records Web traffic at thousands and thousands of sites. Their latest results show Mac market share as 6.45% worldwide; it’s 13.7% in the U.S., showing that Apple has loads of room for growth around the world. That, of course, assumes the survey truly represents actual OS use.

Windows, in contrast, is down to 92.44%, so it’s not as if Microsoft is on the ropes. Seriously speaking, Apple could grow the Mac platform to twice the current share and still leave Microsoft with an unshakable dominance. What’s more, Apple could chip away at those numbers for years and still remain a tiny minority of the PC world.

At the same time, if this is the post-PC era, it means that the number of personal computers sold will decline in the years to come, as more and more users embrace other computing devices, such as smartphones and tablets. For Apple, this trend hasn’t hurt Macs, at least not yet. Reports of Mac sales for the current quarter tout numbers in the range of 4.5 million, a record for Apple. Some estimates are higher, some a bit lower, but all claim to be based on surveys of dealer sales. If true, it would mean that the Mac remains a significant money-maker for Apple, even thought the lion’s share of their profits come from mobile gear.

I suppose the really difficult question to answer is how many Mac users are postponing purchase of new Macs in favor of the iPad, and how many people, new Apple customers, choose an iPad instead of a Mac. I would think there is a certain level of cannibalization, something Apple admitted at one of their quarterly conferences with financial analysts. But they aren’t being very forthcoming as to how much. At the same time, Apple might end up selling close to three times as many iPads as Macs in the current quarter, and that disparity will continue to increase over time.

Certainly, corporations have begun to equip employees with iPads instead of personal computers. They’re not just cheaper, but may provide superior functionality for certain uses, such as plant managers keeping track of production lines and quotas, or medical practitioners consulting and entering patient information. I wonder, in passing, whether hospitals would make fewer errors if doctors and nurses used portable computing devices rather than pen and paper with which to record a patient’s condition, and the medications that are being prescribed.

That Apple continues to benefit from the changeover in the marketplace is only one piece of information that you can take from those surveys of Web traffic. But I wonder when and if the sales and traffic of the Mac and iPad will ultimately be combined. Certainly, Apple’s rivals would freak, but that should present the most accurate picture of all.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #617

2011-09-25T12:36:13Z

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THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #617
September 26, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

When I prepare the guest list for The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I look at the tech news of the week, and concentrate on the key issues. I also look at new products, and occasionally have company spokespeople on to talk up a new gadget or service.

Well, on this week’s episode, we covered a wide variety of topics. They included Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8, the curious decision of Netflix to split streaming and DVD services into two separate companies, the good, bad and ugly aspects of Apple’s OS X Lion, the case of the smoking iMac, Mac speech recognition software, and possible replacements for Intuit’s Quicken for the Mac to manage your personal finances.

The guest list included: Peter Cohen, of the “Angry Mac Bastards” radio show and Executive Editor for The Loop, Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus, and commentator Kirk McElhearn.

Now when it comes to Netflix, I’ve actually yet to hear anyone outside of the company actually speak of the changes in a favorable light. First and foremost, rates for those opting for both video streaming and DVDs have gone up approximately 60%. But you don’t have to take both, if you don’t, for example, want physical media. But to complicate matters, Netflix has split the services into two separate companies. Netflix will handle the streaming end, while a new company, Qwikster, will support DVD rentals. Worse, you’ll get a separate entry on your credit card bill for each.

Granted, streaming and shipping physical media are different from a logistical standpoint, but why should you be forced to go to two sites and handle two queues to manage your content? I just wonder what drugs Netflix’s executives are taking, because they are sadly in need of rehab.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present a “Great Debate” on whether there is UFO secrecy with John B. Alexander, Ph.D, author of “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities” and nuclear physicist and UFO authority Stanton T. Friedman. We also ask the questions you posted in our forums.

ARE WE PAYING TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO APPLE?

Over the past week both the tech and mainstream media have carried a number of reports about a rumored Apple media event, supposedly taking place October 4th, where the next iPhone will be launched. This speculation has been buttressed by still other reports, that Apple employees won’t be allowed to take vacations the following week.

If true, it would mean that the press event would occur a week ahead of the actual release of the products, to give customers a chance, I suppose, to place online preorders. Certainly too lengthy a wait for iPhone 5 gratification might wreck sales of the current model, so Apple is running a tight schedule.

Still other rumors suggest that iOS 5, along with the iCloud debut, are set for October 10th, with the actual hardware release coming a few days later. This will give time for Apple’s servers to sustain the high initial demand for the new software update, while creating the usual weekend media splash for the iPhone’s on sale events.

Understand that we are talking about a smartphone here. Sure, it’s an important product for Apple and for Apple’s customers, but how is it going to change your lives? It doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t improve the iPhone or that you don’t need to replace the smartphone you have. More than likely, the iPhone 5, or whatever it’s called, will run noticeably faster than the current model. Perhaps the notorious “death grip” effect, where the signal dips if you hold it the “wrong” way, will be minimized.

With iOS 5, there will be loads of new features that will enhance the user experience on an iPhone and iPad. Consider the Notification Center, which puts repairs that awful Push Notification feature for app and system messages, and makes it actually useful. Virtually every popular feature of the iOS is enhanced. As a free update, it will make your iOS device will suddenly become much more useful.

Compare to an Android OS device, where you can’t even be assured of getting a software upgrade, where feature enhancements are rolled out without a whole lot of fanfare for the lucky ones who can get that upgrade.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing new in Android land. In fact, I found a site, Android Central, where they list which smartphones are getting updates and carries reviews of the various products. But it’s so filled with specs and coverage of the minor distinctions from one company’s product to the next that it’s really difficult to see what Google has changed, and it’s impact to customers who do get the updates. In case you’re wondering, Android 2.3 will offer a copy/paste scheme that seems similar to the one in the iOS, “faster, more intuitive text input,” “improved power management,” along with enhanced gaming, rich media, application management, and a new download management feature.

Now while it’s good to see that Google continues to improve upon the Android platform, it doesn’t seem as if the breadth of features is in any way as extensive as what Apple is adding between iOS 4 and iOS 5. And, as I said, Android device customers are never assured of getting the updates without jumping through hoops that may include jailbreaking.

It’s also true that the Android upgrades weren’t announced with major media events that received major worldwide coverage. It’s almost as if the gadget is more important than the software that runs it. That’s also true with the ads for Android gear, which are filled with noisy special effects, and little indiction about what makes one gadget better than another, or where Google’s OS might be involved.

So it comes down to the core question I raised at the start of the article, which is whether Apple is getting too much attention from the media. Maybe it’s because they actually have something interesting to say, and have the marketing muscle to deliver that message. Maybe that’s something Google ought to learn, although certainly nobody is disputing the fact that Android smartphones are good sellers, even if no single model can match the iPhone.

What makes it worse in the Google space is the fact that it’s not just one manufacturer, but several that are competing not just with Apple, but with each other. More often than not, the ads you see are actually pushing the wireless carrier’s products and services, rather than the handset maker. Maybe if Google learns anything after its acquisition with Motorola is finalized, it’s to deliver a unified, sharply focused message that is compelling enough to attract the media.

Meantime, we’ll continue to talk about the goings on at Apple, and, right now, whether you should upgrade to the next iPhone on the day it’s released, assuming you can find one in stock.

REMEMBERING THE ROTARY ENGINE

In 1970, while unemployed and struggling to keep food on the table, I happened to read an article in an auto magazine about a new type of engine without pistons, known as the Wankel rotary engine.

Based on an invention he first patented in 1929, German engineer Felix Wankel actually developed working prototypes in the 1950s. In passing, this wasn’t the first rotary engine to be developed, but Wankel’s version actually reached mass production in regular autos, and, for a time, became reasonably popular.

The promise of the rotary engine was amazingly smooth performance, and loads of power for its size. Indeed, after reading that article, I drove on down to a local dealer (I was living in South Carolina at the time) to take a test drive in the Mazda R100. I had to see this thing for myself, even though I knew that, even if I got a job very soon thereafter, it would take a year or two to get on my feet financially.

Well, in person the R100 was an undistinguished compact car, in the tradition of a Toyota or a Datsun (which is how Nissan motor vehicles were named in those days). Accommodations were perfectly ordinary for a two-door coupe, but oh that engine! It seemed to have gobs of power, yet it sounded like an electric motor. I was hooked.

Well, I got that job, at a radio station in the Philadelphia suburbs, but it was a couple of years before the Mazda franchises expanded to the northeast. My turquoise blue Toyota Corona was on its last legs, leaking oil, when I took delivery of four-door yellow Mazda RX-2. While performance was certainly less compelling then even today’s inexpensive compact cars, it was quite good for its time. Indeed, once you revved past first gar, the RX-2 seemed to accelerate like a rocket. While observing the speed limit, I delighted in leaving drivers in much larger cars in the dust at a stop light. OK, I was young and foolish.

Unfortunately, the RX-2 didn’t acquit itself as a reliable vehicle. Within the first 1,000 miles, I had already had an engine overhaul, in which they replaced the rotor seals because they were leaking oil. After that repair, the car would occasionally leak coolant as well, a problem they never seemed to be able to fix. Yet I persevered, for otherwise the car was fun to drive and reasonably comfortable on the cross-country trips I’d take in those days.

Well, by 1976, with over 60,000 miles on the odometer, the exhaust began to smoke for a few minutes after a cold start. The mechanics said I needed another engine overhaul, but I opted to keep it running until I was able to afford a new car. This model had a manual transmission, and the clutch’s master cylinder nearly gave out on my trip to the dealer to pick up the Mazda’s replacement, a blue 1976 Buick Skylark. At every traffic light, I had to force the car into gear several times before it would “engage.” Since the dealer gave me a pittance for the trade-in, they really weren’t concerned. Or at least they didn’t complain.

Well, I thought about that RX-2 when I read the other day that Mazda’s last production rotary in the U.S., the RX-8 sports car, had ceased production. Yes, the reliability issues had been resolved, but not the car’s pathetic gas economy, which ranged in the upper teens with premium fuel if you were lucky.

I once took a test drive in an RX-8, a slick low-profile sports car with wonderful handling, a reasonably comfortable ride, and great seats. The familiar rotary hum was there as well. Some things never change. Now equipped with rear seats and curious reverse-opening rear doors, you could carry four people in a pinch, but you’d hope your rear passengers were short. It wasn’t a family vehicle, but since it cost roughly the same as a top-of-the-line Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, it would make a terrific second car.

But with faltering sales, and the inability to pass European Union emission regulations, Mazda pulled the plug. But, rotary fans, don’t despair. According to information at Mazda’s Web site, it appears they are developing a new generation 16x engine, said to offer more power and 30% better fuel economy. So it may well that the rotary will return in yet another guise. So maybe I should start saving.

THE FINAL WORD

The Tech Night Owl Newsletter is a weekly information service of Making The Impossible, Inc.

Publisher/Editor: Gene Steinberg
Managing Editor: Grayson Steinberg
Marketing and Public Relations: Barbara Kaplan
Worldwide Licensing: Sharon Jarvis

Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!

Go back to Gene Steinberg's Tech Night Owl

Your Tech Night Owl Newsletter -- Issue #616

2011-09-18T13:38:55Z

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THE TECH NIGHT OWL NEWSLETTER
Issue #616
September 19, 2011

HOW YOU CAN HELP THE NIGHT OWL

THIS WEEK’S TECH NIGHT OWL RADIO UPDATE

As the media, and millions of Apple customers, waited for announcements about the next iPhone and, to a lesser degree, the newest iPods, we focused most of our attention elsewhere on this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE. On the front burner was Windows 8, Microsoft’s forthcoming OS upgrade that will combine mobile and desktop systems, which is widely expected to arrive in 2012. Along to discuss what he regards as some of the questionable aspects of Windows 8 was cutting-edge commentator Daniel Eran Dilger, from Roughly Drafted Magazine and AppleInsider. You also heard from Seth Rosenblatt, from CNET, who had a hands-on encounter with an early beta of Windows 8.

As you regular readers no doubt realize, I am skeptical about the reasoning behind Windows 8, not because I don’t expect Microsoft to sell hundreds of millions of copies. That’s a given considering the company’s continuing dominance of the PC market. I’m skeptical because I do not believe Microsoft understands what makes Apple and its iOS gear so successful. They seem to believe you want Windows everywhere, more or less, and that taking interface schemes that have already failed will somehow succeed when transferred to different products. But I’ll get into more details later in this issue.

Also this week, Macworld writer Lex Friedman discussed the curious disappearance of gift card balances from some iTunes accounts, and what might be responsible for these cases of online theft. The sordid details are simple. Some people who add the gift cards to their accounts will, not long thereafter, find the balances zeroed out. Yes, Apple will make good on the loss, but why it’s happening remains an open question, although Lex had some credible suggestions to offer about the possible causes.

On this week’s episode of our other radio show, The Paracast: Gene and Chris present a return appearance from Peter Robbins, a founding member and Advisory Board member of Budd Hopkins’ Intruders Foundation, and author of “Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-up, and Investigation,” which was co-authored by Larry Warren.

Coming September 25: Gene and Chris present a “Great Debate” on whether there is UFO secrecy with John B. Alexander, Ph.D, author of “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities” and nuclear physicist and UFO authority Stanton T. Friedman. We also ask the questions you posted in our forums.

SHOULD WE BE GUSHING OVER WINDOWS 8?

It must be frustrating for Microsoft. Apple gets nearly all the attention these days, even though Windows still dominates the world’s PC desktops by a huge margin. Yes, the share is eroding somewhat, mostly because the Mac is growing faster, but Microsoft still makes loads of money from Windows licenses.

At the same time, Microsoft has failed to spread the joy to other markets. Although the Xbox has done all right in the gaming business, Microsoft has struck out when it comes to tablets and smartphones. These days, Windows Phone 7, though praised for a good-looking user interface, is essentially a non-issue. It’s all about the iOS and Android.

When it comes to search, Bing’s market share has increased, but largely at the expense of Yahoo!, which continues to flail after agreeing to use Microsoft’s search engine. In the wake of the sudden firing of their CEO, Yahoo! is reportedly looking for merger partners in the hopes of staying afloat.

So the pressure is on Microsoft to get Windows 8 right, not to mention devising a workable solution for tablets and mobile phones. It seems to me and other commentators that Microsoft simply looked at what Apple has accomplished by melding some iOS features into OS X Lion, and decided to attempt to go one better.

With Windows 8, you’ll see the same basic look and feel on a tablet and a regular PC, dubbed Metro. If the colorful tiles are familiar to you, it’s because you’ve seen them before in two failed products. If any of you have a Zune around, just turn it on, and have a look, or maybe check out your Windows Phone 7 smartphone. Then again, I wonder how many of my readers have such gear, but if you do, the Metro interface would be quite familiar to you.

So the first question Microsoft needs to answer is how they expect to take a user interface that has failed on two other products, and make it work on their flagship product? I’m not sure I understand the logic behind Windows 8. Surely Microsoft has enough talented interface designers on hand to devise something with a better chance of success. But that’s just me.

This isn’t to say that Metro is bad, although I consider the basic look rather ugly and just too busy for casual users. I’m also concerned about the choice to place white lettering over a color tile, because it reduces visibility. Isn’t that simply Web design 101, although the text will certainly be sharper on a regular computer, right?

Now commentator Daniel Eran Dilger, a frequent guest on my tech radio show, likens Metro to a magazine, with the same flat or two-dimensional look and feel. But aren’t magazines passé these days, what with the growth of online content? So why would Microsoft take yesterday’s look and feel and somehow believe that’s what customers will accept?

Now I realize some of you might criticize me for commenting on something I haven’t used, but I’ve installed the developer beta of Windows 8 under Parallels Desktop 7 for the Mac. Performance is not that snappy since Parallels hasn’t delivered a set of optimized drivers for the new OS, but I’ve seen enough to give me a sense of the damage Microsoft has wrought.

Take the initial setup screen, consisting of white lettering against a deep green background. As I said, it’s not quite as readable as one ought to expect from a casual glance, but I was able to get through the simple setup process, since I used the “Express” option, which merely requested my Windows Live ID. My Hotmail address sufficed. Indeed, only moments later, I got an email in my Hotmail Inbox asking me to confirm that I wanted to add my new “trusted PC” to the account, which I did.

As you’ve probably seen from the screen captures already published, the Start screen is laden with tiles. Confirming my first impression, some of the white lettering was so thin it almost faded into the background. As I said, it doesn’t make sense.

More to the point, I just wonder how the enterprise will adapt to this ill-thought user interface. My impression is that they won’t. They’ll just disable Metro and revert to an interface that looks little different from Windows 7. So why bother?

Now Microsoft’s argument is that Windows 8 will offer performance advantages, particularly when it comes to boot and shut down times. While I couldn’t evaluate performance fairly on a virtual machine, it seemed to boot quickly enough, though it took far longer than the eight seconds Microsoft demonstrated on specially configured tablet computers handed out to the media. At the same time, those computers included powerful Intel i5 processors and 64GB solid state drives, and the latter would surely ensure a quick startup process.

Less certain is how Windows 8 will fare on a true mobile gadget using an ARM processor. Will you get decent battery life and snappy performance? That’s not a given. Even the failed HP TouchPad, with reasonably powerful hardware, had troubles with the WebOS. I suppose we won’t be know for certain until Windows 8 is further along in its development process.

But the real problem for Microsoft is that Metro is just a veneer, not something infused with Windows 8 that somehow makes it better. You will not, for example, be able to run regular Windows apps on an ARM device powered by Windows 8. You’ll only be able to share a new class of Web-based apps on both devices. And, yes, Microsoft will have its own app repository designed in the spirit of Apple’s App Store, complete with the requisite 30% take from software sales.

I really have concerns as to how this smoke and mirrors scheme will catch on with the business customers on whom Microsoft depends. As to consumers: Since they’ve already given the Zune and Windows Phone 7 a pass, what makes Microsoft believe that using a similar interface on Windows 8 will somehow succeed? That’s the larger issue. For now, color me skeptical.

THE END OF A LONG AND HOT MOVIE SUMMER

In the movie business, the summer blockbuster season begins in May and ends by Labor Day. During that time, they earn most of their box office revenue and, one hopes, the major portion of their profits. But this year’s tallies are troublesome, as some of the flicks Hollywood hoped would become smash hits ended up being duds.

So while we tolerated new entrants in the “Transformers” and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, and gave “Harry Potter” a rousing send off, films based on comic book super heroes were a mixed success. Yes, the mighty “Thor” had a pretty decent audience, earning nearly $450 million worldwide. The “X-Men” reboot, “First Class,” and “Captain America: The First Avenger” earned modest profits for their studios. But the public gave thumbs down to a DC comics character, “Green Lantern,” and to a peculiar sci-fi themed western, “Cowboys and Aliens.”

Now the latter arrived with high expectations, sporting an A-list production team that included Steven Spielberg, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, and Roberto Orci. The latter three are famous for various J.J. Abrams TV hits, and Kurtzman and Orci were the scribes for the “Star Trek” reboot. The film’s director, John Favreau, is known for his success with the first two “Iron Man” films. But even stars Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig couldn’t save this curious concept, based on a graphic novel about alien marauders in the old west.

And please don’t get me started about yet another super hero flick from earlier this year, “The Green Hornet,” based on a radio show back in the 1930s and 1940s, which got lost between bad comedy and bad action.

This won’t stop next year’s comic book onslaught, which includes “The Avengers,” sporting a team of Marvel superheroes, including the Hulk, all in one film, and Christopher Nolan’s third entry in the Batman trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

At the same time, it appears the entertainment industry’s bigwigs have begun to watch their wallets, and they have passed on some projects, including a $250 million dollar remake of “The Lone Ranger,” with Johnny Depp as Tonto. Go figure! Now it’s possible that the masked man will still get the green light with a more sensible budget. But you have to wonder why moviemakers would need so much cash to film a western. Just what sort of state-of-the-art special effects do you need for gun fights and galloping horses? Well, actually, they were going to add some strange creatures and other sci-fi elements, but you’d think that good writing, snappy dialog, great performances, and lots of physical action would be sufficient to carry a film. Or maybe not.

In passing, I do hope the 3D craze will fizzle out. Sure, adding 3D, even to a film originally photographed with standard 2D cameras, lets the local movie theaters charge you much more for a ticket. But that doesn’t necessarily make the film more enjoyable. Unfortunately it may take a while longer for the multidimensional craze, which returned with the success of “Avatar,” to settle down. The consumer electronics makers are busy struggling to sell 3D TVs, but there aren’t as many takers as they hoped, largely because the market for flat panel TVs is saturated, and there are few sources of 3D material. Cable and satellite providers are adding some, and there are a small number 3D Blu-ray discs, if you care to buy a new player on which to run them.

In the past, when box office receipts were down, Hollywood hoped to recoup the losses with DVD (and now Blu-ray) sales. But the great revolution from VHS to DVD, where most people simply bought the same content all over again, is over. Those who have DVD versions of a movie aren’t very likely to buy a Blu-ray equivalent. Sure, it looks better, but not that much better.

This won’t stop the movie industry from wishing and hoping for better box office receipts next year. And don’t forget the Superman reboot, “Man of Steel,” due for 2013, the inevitable sequels for the few comic book movies that did succeed in the last couple of years, and lots of other special-effects laden fare. Sure, the industry will possibly retrench for a while, but it only takes a few blockbuster hits to convince them to take out their checkbooks all over again.

THE FINAL WORD

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