2006: Year of porn where it was least expected

In Madden NFL 07 for Xbox:

Christmas became XXX-mas for a 14-year-old Layton boy who discovered hard-core pornography on a video game he received as a gift.

Kolton Mahoney was shocked when he put the Madden NFL 07 game in his new Xbox 360 console Christmas day and an explicit image popped up on his television screen.

In a Zune purchased at Wal-mart:

When Derrick Woods and Chanell Martin decided to surprise their 12-year-old daughter with a Microsoft Zune media player, they had no idea how big of a surprise they were in for. The gadget, they said, came preloaded with more than an hour of raunchy pornography.

“It was a homosexual orgy that they had video taped for an hour and 44 minutes,” Martin told FOX News affiliate WFLD reporter Michelle Gielan.

In a refurbished Macbook (maybe):

An Apple customer was shocked, shocked, when he bought a Macbook from the London Apple Store for his 11-year old daughter, and the desktop was full of pornographic JPGs.

Moral Equivalency

Dealbook (NYT) has a rundown of the stories that garnered the most attention in 2006. The last story was about a hypothetical merger between Microsoft & Apple:

DealBook said upfront that a merger was a “crazy-sounding notion” and “absurd on the face of it.” But, as with anything that contains both the words Apple and Microsoft, it could not help but draw some emotional commentary (“kill me now,” wrote “katemuse”). Much of it degenerated into the “Mac versus Windows” debate that has been raging since Steve Jobs of Apple lifted the idea for a graphical user interface from Xerox Parc and got more heated when Microsoft’s Bill Gates co-opted the idea from Mr. Jobs.

Nothing gets my goat more than lazy journalism. I know journalists shape (twist?) quotes and stories to fit a pre-determined theme. In the above case, the reporter equates a visit by Jobs to Xerox PARC with Microsoft reverse engineering Apple APIs that they were using for Word. Not the same is it? Andy Hertzfeld writes:

Microsoft’s main systems programmer assigned to the Mac project was Neil Konzen, a brilliant young Apple II hacker who grew up in their backyard in the suburbs of Seattle. Neil started working at Microsoft while he was still a high school student, and single-handedly implemented the system software for their hit Z80 card that allowed the Apple II to run CP/M software.

Neil loved Apple, so it was natural for Microsoft to assign him to their new, top-secret Macintosh project. He was responsible for integrating Microsoft’s byte-code based interpreted environment (which actually was a copy of a system used at Xerox that favored memory efficiency over execution speed, which was appropriate for the Mac’s limited memory) with the rapidly evolving Macintosh OS, so he quickly became Microsoft’s expert in the technical details of the Mac system.

By the middle of 1983, Microsoft was far enough along to show us working prototypes of their spreadsheet and business graphics programs, Multiplan and Chart (they were also working on a word processor, but they neglected to mention that, since it would compete with MacWrite). I would usually talk with Neil on the phone a couple of times a week. He would sometimes request a feature that I would implement for him, or perhaps complain about the way something was done. But most of the time I would answer his various questions about the intricacies of the still evolving API.

I gradually began to notice that Neil would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn’t really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.

Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn’t that worried because he didn’t think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.

In November 1983, we heard that Microsoft made a surprising announcement at Comdex, the industry’s premier trade show, held twice a year in Las Vegas. Microsoft announced a new, mouse-based system graphical user interface environment called Windows, competing directly with an earlier environment announced by Personal Software called “Vision”. They also announced a mouse-based option for Microsoft Word. When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.

Apple visit to Xerox PARC and being inspired to develop a GUI from scratch != “lifting”. Microsoft stealing code from Apple API that they were developing Word with = not just “co-opting” but also “copying”.

Microsoft Aqua

Sadly, true:

Vista will make billions for Microsoft – driven by the warm embrace of those who hated the MacOS X interface when Microsoft didn’t sell it

You call is Sydney, I call it Sidney

This has to hurt:

A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.

Someone get that poor man some warm clothes.

BTW, if this is the state of contextual ads, there’s a long way yet to go. Why am I getting a link to eBay for a weather search? Note that the link leads to zero results. How pathetic:

YouTube & iTV doesn’t make sense

I can’t understand why people still fantasize about YouTube on iTV. From ZDNet:

Only a fraction of the songs on an iPod originate from the iTunes store. So why would Steve Jobs adopt a different strategy for the iTV? The combination of iTunes and DRM-free MP3s provided the ‘killer app’ for the iPod, and YouTube could well do the same for Apple’s soon-to-be released set-top box.

Well, for one thing, people were downloading MP3s from Napster and had a backlog with their CDs that they could readily load to their iPod – all the stuff they were familiar with. Nothing like that exists with YouTube. YouTube is a hodgepodge of stuff and amateurish – Steve Jobs hates amateurish. Trust me, no one wants to watch low quality crap on their LCDs.

iTV is going to do to movies what iTunes did to music: make people rip their DVD collection.

This is scary

Beyond the obvious fear factor, is this something that consumers are clamoring for? Sigh. I re-iterate, Microsoft has no idea what consumers want. Envision monkeys throwing darts.

Ford Motor plans to unveil a deal with Microsoft in January that will put the software company’s technology into some of the automaker’s cars, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The system, to be called Sync, includes a hands-free Bluetooth wireless system and an in-vehicle operating system that eventually will be an option for the entire Ford brand lineup, the Journal said.

Sync is designed to enable hands-free mobile-phone communication and other wireless information transfers in the car, including e-mail and music downloads, the sources told the paper.

I am sure XM and Sirius will get involved with this soon.

Neat!

Via Business 2.0, originally posted at Bad Astronomy:

Closer look of that speck:

#9 on the list is funny:

#1 is lickable:

No innovation, no iLife, and no interest: has the development community abandoned Microsoft?

There was a time when the main attraction of Windows was the overwhelming choice of applications when compared with the Mac. No one really seems to have kept count (or at least I can’t find the data), but the number of apps for Windows platforms is alleged to be around 100,000. Well, that’s just great except, of course, that number has no meaning since no one really knows if it covers everything from Windows 1.0 to Windows Vista Ultimate Professional Business Edition. Microsoft’s excellent marcom team used that fuzzy and vague number to consistently drive home the message that Macs had no software.

Well, lookie here. It’s about 10 years later since Microsoft started that whisper campaign and today, I wonder if there is anything else other than familiarity (something not be discounted, of course) which attracts users to continue to use Windows. Microsoft’s desktop choices seem to have dwindled. People consistently use Microsoft’s own apps, IE, Works or Office, and the only third-party apps are all security software and the year-end tax applications. Here’s NPD’s annual top-selling PC titles for 2003 and 2005 (I couldn’t find 2004 but I doubt that it matters):

2003	2005
TurboTax 2002 Deluxe	TurboTax 2004 Deluxe
Norton Antivirus 2003	Norton Virus 2005
TurboTax 2002	Spy Sweeper Tech Bench
Norton Antivirus 2004	TurboTax 2004 Multi State 45
TurboTax 2002 MultiState 45	MS Office 2003 Student/Teacher
Taxcut 2002 Deluxe	Norton Internet Security 2005
MS Windows XP Home Upgrade	Norton Security Bundle
MS Office XP Student/Teacher	Norton Antivirus 2005
Taxcut 2002 State	Taxcut 2004 Deluxe
Norton Internet Security 2003	TurboTax 2004

Note that the list doesn’t include games (popular titles on the top 20 included Half-Life 2, WoW, and Sims 2) and specialized titles (Quicken). Ten years ago, Windows adoption was vastly driven by consumers seeking to install their Office applications on their machines at home because Microsoft allowed rampant piracy (remember the “People want to use the same software at home as they do at work” theme?) It strikes me that there is hardly any particularly must have application that Windows claims over the Mac. The ones that continue to develop, for example, Symantec and Intuit, offer pretty much the same titles as before (and in these cases serve to remind users that Windows is insecure). The times have changed and Microsoft missed the train completely – they didn’t realize that in a networked world, people can’t be administrators, and in an activation world, consumers wouldn’t go out and buy a new version of Office.

Nick Bradbury addresses suggests that people eschew desktop software are afraid to download and install applications:

When you try to download something, you’re presented with a security warning about how the software could potentially harm your computer. If you install the program despite this warning, your firewall often displays an intimidating dialog asking whether you really want to trust this application enough to let it talk to the outside world. It’s a one-two punch that’s driving away many would-be users of desktop software.

I don’t discount the fear issue, but I have to wonder what apps is he actually referring to. Fear certainly doesn’t seem to have affected users from downloading and using Skype and Firefox. The bigger question Nick should be asking is this: where have all the desktop developers gone?

In my humble opinion, the problem lies with Microsoft and their campaign against third-party solutions. If people recall, throughout the nineties, startups were dissuaded by VCs from developing any unique desktop applications for fear of being crushed by Microsoft. In addition, there was Microsoft’s own heavy-handed actions: using vaporware announcements to dissuade other solutions or exercising their monopolistic power to delay ISV development. Finally, Windows users, and I may be guilty of over-generalization, may have become accustomed to using software from Microsoft alone because of the precedence.

Look at the result – there are virtually no popular third-party desktop applications in use other than security (and that may soon end), finance, and tax. Developers have jumped off the VB/C# ship (at least on the consumer apps side) and moved on to PHP, Ruby, and, yes, Cocoa. If you look out into the future, the pipeline is even bleaker – that’s why Microsoft has had to create its own version of iPhoto and iCal. It remains to be seem that a UI upgrade and a couple of copied apps is sufficient to drive consumer adoption (other than the usual upgrades through hardware purchases) or be sufficient to draw new developers.

In contrast, there seems to be a lot of excitement and activity with Mac desktop application development. iLife has been the face of the rejuvenated Apple platform attracting consumers and developers alike. The exact number of apps is hard to nail down, but it seems to be anywhere from 2,691 actively used apps that Iusethis lists to the 16,777 that HyperJeff reports. In addition, there are community driven efforts such as Ironcoder, MyDreamApp, Sourceforge, CocoaDuel, O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest, iDevGames, independent of Apple driven development efforts.

Ok, I am not completely blown away by the end-result (the finalists of MyDreamApp were underwhelming), but find me recent consumer solutions as compelling and successful (and good looking) as NetNewsWire, Parallels, and Delicious Monster on the Windows side. Maybe it’s just that I have not been in tune with Windows applications since the days of Napster (the old one). Some time back Om Malik pointed out back mac users are early adopters and actually willing to pay for useful third-party software and the activity may be a sign that development community believes that too.

The lack of Microsoft consumer software development, Vista or no Vista, is equally telling. Unsurprisingly, CIO Magazine finds that adoption is slow. And this won’t help:

Windows Vista won’t be broadly available for another month, but already a cluster of security vulnerabilities has surfaced to dent the armor of what Microsoft describes as its most secure operating system ever.

Doh!

Dismal Science

The Economist puckers up and delivers this junk in its latest issue:

But the real difference between Unix-like operating systems and Windows is their design philosophies. Windows may squander computing power through its clumsy architecture. But by favouring simplicity of use over simplicity of design, Microsoft has been able to leverage cheap but powerful commodity hardware, to provide cost-effective software solutions. These may be complex in design—and full of bugs to boot—but, boy, are they easy to use and maintain. That’s a winning formula in anyone’s book, and the reason why Windows rightly rules the world.

There are a lot of firsts in this article, for example:

1) An OS with (evidently 250,000) bugs is desirable
2) Windows is easier to use than Macs
3) Windows is simpler to maintain than Macs

How much for that pony in the window?

Weirdest news related to iPod

What the:

Real estate developer Omniyat Properties is planning to launch projects worth more than Dh3 billion in 2007, starting with a tower inspired by Apple’s iPod MP3 player.

If it’s good for a MP3 player it must be good for people to live in, I guess?

The tower will sit atop a docking station angled at six degrees to give the exact look.

Why do I get the feeling that there’ll be a line outside the building.