Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

A Little Gratitude

Penn Jillette, commenting on the frequent bashings that Christians receive on his Showtime program:

Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.

I spend my fair share of time saying things about Christianity that would have gotten me killed, in interesting and horrific ways, back in the 18th century. I don’t say this enough, but I’m profoundly grateful to live in a place and a time where I don’t have to die for stating my opinion.

Apple Splits Hairs, Insults Our Intelligence

So Apple appears to have tweaked section 3.3.2 of their draconian iOS license agreement to distinguish between “non-compiled code” and “meta-platforms” — the former being acceptable, the latter naughty. Flash CS5 is still forbidden, but games built on libraries that use interpreted languages are ok — or might be ok, if Apple deigns to give its consent.

This is in addition to some recent hairsplitting regarding who can and can’t advertise on their platform — the blanket ban has been lifted, but only if you’re an “independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads”. Which is to say, if you’re owned by a company whose name is not Google.

From the beginning, it’s been pretty clear that these “general” policies were just thinly veiled maneuvers to eject Adobe and Google from the iOS ecosystem. But now, as Apple hones their license agreement to alleviate some its unintended consequences, the veil is becoming increasingly, diaphanously, scandalously thin.

Apple and its apologists will tell you that this is just business. Capitalism is tough, man. And, besides, Google started it! But if these kinds of exclusionary policies are really ok, then why not just come out and ban Flash CS5 and AdMob, and whoever else you find threatening? Why go to all this trouble building papier-mâché frameworks around your real intentions?

The question answers itself. Apple is playing a painfully obvious game of cat and mouse here, both with their public image and — more importantly — with the various regulatory agencies whose ears are beginning to prick up. Apple now has the second-largest market cap of any company in the US. They might have been able to fly under the radar with this kind of bullshit in the bad old days. But those days are over.

Specious Argument Watch

Jonathan Chait pretends to make a reasonable argument about the Gaza tragedy:

I consider settlements a very major problem. I do think, though, that the more important problem is the refusal of Palestinians to accept the legitimacy of any Jewish state. In a 2009 poll, 71% of Palestinians said it was “essential” to have a state that encompasses all of present Israel and the West Bank. Only 17% of Israelis said it was essential to have a Jewish state controlling all that territory.

In other words: “Wait, we’re continuously building settlements on Palestinian territory, imprisoning the residents of Gaza in what little land they have left, cutting off their access to the rest of the world, and throttling their supply of basic goods and services … and they still don’t like us?”

Massive Chutzpah Spill

From the chutzpah files:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

So tell me again why the company that has caused what may be the greatest ecological calamity in a generation, and has no idea how to stop it, gets any say in the matter? Big Government? Hello?

C4 Cancelled

Wolf Renztsch has cancelled C4, his popular Apple developer conference, because he feels like he’s lost the fight:

Section 3.3.1 makes developers wholly reliant on Apple for software engineering innovation.

By itself Section 3.3.1 wasn’t enough to cause me to quit C4. I’ve weathered Apple lying to me and their never-ending series of autocratic App Store shenanigans.

But unlike previous issues such as the senseless iPhone SDK NDA, the majority of the community isn’t riled by 3.3.1. On this issue, Apple apologists have the loudest voice. They offer soothing, distracting yet fundamentally irrelevant counterpoints to Apple’s naked power-grab.

With resistance to Section 3.3.1 so scattershot and meek, it’s become clear that I haven’t made the impact I wanted with C4. It’s also clear my interests and the Apple programming community’s interests are farther apart than I had hoped.

On the one hand, I applaud this decision: a lot of us bitch loudly about Apple’s terrible business practices and then do nothing about it¹, but Renztsch is actually putting his money where his mouth is, and making a difficult decision based on nothing more than principle and ideals.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think this is the wrong way to go. C4 seems like a truly independent conference, completely separate from the propaganda swamp of Apple’s own developer events. Killing it is a bold statement, but I wonder if it’s bold enough to actually change anything: it feels like he could do more good by keeping it around, and using it as a platform for his ideals. If you want to convert developers over to your point of view, a well-respected and much-admired Mac conference seems like a really great place to do it.

Author Bio

I’m trying to write a bio for a short story I’ve got coming up, and am having the usual terrible time figuring out what to say. Here are some options:

Lapsed Cannibal splits his time between working on his perpetual stillness machine and looking for the end of Pi — where, he is given to understand, there are leprechauns. Sometimes he says the word “gastroenterologist” to himself, over and over again, because he very much enjoys the way it sounds. Occasionally he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal abandoned the sex-and-drug-addled life of a professional kazoo player to become a computer programmer, and has never looked back. He has taught himself to travel through time — but only forward through time, at normal speed. Sometimes he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

There is presumably some version of Lapsed Cannibal who enjoys alligator wrestling, blindfolded hand gliding, and small-island-nation-conquering, but this is not that version. This version did once put some uncomfortably spicy hot sauce on a taco, which he ate all of, but he doesn’t like to brag. He’s also written some stories about a bumbling wizard and his familiar, an invisible chair named Door. This is one of those stories.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal recently became Dictator of English, and in that capacity will soon abolish the words “utilize”, “incentivize”, and “productize”, and then unbanish both split infinitives and sentences that end in prepositions (victims of the pitiless hegemony of Dictator Strunkenwhite). He will also introduce a new pronoun, “glubmar”, to fill the gender-neutral gulf between “him” and “her”. As in: “Hmmm, I wonder if glubmar is a boy or a girl?” He realizes that this is an ungainly pronoun, but he is Dictator, and can do what he wants. This is a story he wrote.

I could also write something accurate about myself, but my god that would be boring.

Update: Ok, I’m going to write something accurate and boring. Sigh.

iPad Hyperventilation

From the TidBITS iPad review:

In contrast, the iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated – it’s just a screen, really – and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

First: Gag.

Second: if the iPad were able to, say, transform itself into a live ostrich that does your taxes for you, then I’d be prepared to call it magical. But what we’re talking about here is a beautifully-engineered, impeccably-designed tablet computer that only knows how to do one thing at a time. This is decidedly non-magical, and everybody really just needs to calm down.

The Dungeon of Hyperbole

I spent some time this evening watching iPad promotional videos, and came away seriously impressed with (a) Apple’s technical chops; (b) Apple’s design prowess; and (c) Apple’s hyperbole machine. That last in particular: nobody slings adjectives like Apple slings adjectives. Here’s a little sampling of some of the breathless modifiers one has to sit through to get a demo of this thing:

• Magical
• Stunning
• Unbelievable
• Incredible
• Phenomenal
• Unprecedented
• Extraordinary
• Gorgeous
• Amazing

And more. Much more.

I can’t imagine it’s easy to achieve this level of psychotic overstatement. They must have a small army of hyperbolizers working on it. I picture a roomful of enslaved linguists in the dungeons of 1 Infinite Loop, sitting in a dark windowless room, in two rows, chained to their desks. There’s an iPad suspended from the ceiling at the front of the room. A man stands beside the iPad, legs spread, arms akimbo, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, screaming at the assembled linguists, while an intern bangs steadily on a drum.

Feudal Lords

Lately, some Apple enthusiasts have been citing recent improvements in the App Store’s approval process as proof that the state of affairs in iPhone OS development has been getting better — and that people need to stop complaining about it. Marco makes that point in this otherwise excellent post:

But the problems keep getting fixed, and there’s very little left to complain about. Even Apple’s app-review process has dramatically improved over the last few months to be much faster and offer more detailed feedback for rejections, which eliminates or trivializes most of the problems with app review.

I don’t doubt that the process is getting better, I just think it’s besides the point. None of Apple’s process improvements change the fact that the contract under which developers operate is ridiculous. The EFF recently managed to dig up the details of that agreement, and it’s eye-opening:

App Store Only: Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you’re prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone. [Emphasis mine]

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can “revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time.” Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That’s pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer’s reputational and commercial value in its hands—it’s not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

This is what a monopoly looks like: the App Store’s feudal lords get to dictate insane/surreal/draconian/should-be-illegal terms, and — if you want to develop software for what is arguably the most exciting platform out there right now — you just have to deal with it.

It’s impossible to deny that the App Store has led to a fluorescence of innovation, and has on balance been a good thing for developers — today. But it seems to me that focussing on the current state of affairs, and effectively ignoring the havoc that Apple could wreak if they wanted to, is dangerous. Apple gets away with this shit because they can — not because it’s right.

Idealism

Ever since it became apparent that the iPad isn’t going to support Flash, John Gruber has been on a tear, throwing up post after post about Flash’s obsolescence, trying to single-handedly usher it into an early grave. And more power to him! I have no love for Flash. It’s a closed product that breaks the web in fundamental ways, overtaxes my CPU, makes online advertising even more annoying, and tempts web designers to do unseemly things.

But there is one area where Flash really is quite necessary: video. This is where Gruber has been mounting his harshest assault. His basic point is that the emerging HTML5 video standard — already supported by most browsers — is more than a capable substitute. This is true. The problem is that most sites still don’t stream HTML5 video. Flash is still, far and away, the most prevalent technology for watching stuff on the net.

Apple is going out on a limb here, dropping support for something before there are really any well-establishment substitutes. This is something they do. They were the first computer maker to drop internal floppy drives, back in 1998, and they did it before there were any good alternatives — this was the era before widely available broadband, USB sticks, cheap CD-R drives, etc. It was the right decision, if slightly premature, and the rest of the industry eventually caught up. Apple’s doing the same thing here.

I don’t really have a problem with any of this. I mean, yes, I would like to see the iPad fail, but that’s only because it’s going to be another platform for their horrible App Store. But as far as the Flash issue goes, I really can’t help but admire both Apple’s chutzpah and Gruber’s indefatigable cheerleading — because I suspect that this is at least partly an irrational decision on Apple’s part. There are good technical reasons to turn your back on Flash, but I can’t help but think that Apple’s main motivation is aesthetic: someone important in the company’s executive suite (whose name may or may not rhyme with Cleave Hobs) finds it distasteful. This is one of the things I love about Apple: aesthetics are at least as important as financials in their worldview.

Gruber’s kind of jumped the shark of late, though. He’s getting down into the weeds in recent posts, making the argument that H.264 — the proprietary, patent-encumbered video format that Safari’s HTML5 implementation supports — is preferable to its free, unencumbered-by-patent alternative, Ogg Theora. More specifically, he’s been ridiculing the Mozilla corporation for refusing to support H.264 in Firefox:

The practical effect of Mozilla’s current position will not be to drive adoption of Ogg Theora. What’s going to happen is that Safari, Chrome, and even IE9 users will be served HTML5 video, and Firefox users will get Flash.

..

So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.

I don’t disagree with the substance of what he’s saying here — the imperatives of the market really do trump open source idealism, more often than not. What boils my blood is his casual ridicule of openness — dismissively enclosed in snark quotes — in the face of market realities. This is a remarkable thing for an Apple enthusiast to say: the modern Apple would not really exist without open software. OS X is based on BSD, a free and open operating system developed in the seventies. Safari started out as KHTML, an open source Linux browser written by the good folks at KDE. Apple Mail, Aperture, and both the iPhone and iPod Touch use SQLite for data management. And there’s more: a lot more. It’s no exaggeration to say that Apple’s technology stack is predicated on openness.

The story of the modern internet is, at its core, a story about idealism: people with a passion for writing great software and sharing it freely with the rest of the world gave us the backbone of the internet, and the unprecedented, egalitarian explosion of information that it precipitated. Companies have made huge profits off of that idealism. The computer I’m typing this post on, the blog in which it will appear, and the web server that’ll distribute it, are all children of openness.

So I really admire Mozilla for sticking to its guns here. They may have to back down, eventually, but it’s nice to see someone at least trying to stand behind an idealistic commitment to the openness that built our networked world.