After months, even years of speculation and rumors, Apple introduces a brand-new product intended to revolutionize a neglected product category. Upon the release, naysayers all buzz that it doesn’t have enough features, is way overpriced for what it does, and competitors will soon outstrip it with cheaper models. And since the announcement, surveys claim that fewer people say that they are more likely to buy one.

So, which does that describe–the iPhone or iPad? As you probably guessed, it describes both. After the iPhone was announced, only 15% of those surveyed said they were “very likely” or “extremely likely” to buy one, while 26% had answered that way just before the announcement.

With the iPad, the number who said they plan to buy one stands at 9%, up from 3% before the announcement–but many who were previously interested decided they were not so much interested after seeing it, similar to the iPhone.

Still, that 9% figure is a key one. 9% is a pretty big chunk of people. Just like the iPhone in Japan, where a similar 9% was projected before the launch here; many dismissed the number as anemic, but that’s a lot of people. And for a tablet computer, 9% is higher than any interest shown for any other model.

But let’s also remember that in all of these cases with the iPhone, actual purchases after release far outstripped what the surveys expressed. Even in Japan, where the iPhone occupied #2 and #3 of the top-selling smartphones for December, before occupying the #1 and #2 slots last week. In the U.S., the iPhone continues to gain market share, having blown past the survey predictions about who is likely to buy one. The iPhone is now ubiquitous.

And then there’s the App Store, which took the iPhone’s success and made it stronger. The App Store will do more for the iPad’s popularity than it did for the iPhone’s, as the apps delivered will be one of the biggest reason for getting the tablet, in addition to the draw of holding and using it, something people also can’t experience yet.

Just a reminder for those predicting a flop. The iPad may well not take off like a rocket–in fact, I expect more of a slow but steady rise–but it is way too soon to count it out yet.

Senator John McCain on October 18, 2006:

My opinion is shaped by the view of the leaders of the military. … We have the most qualified, the bravest and most capable military we‘ve ever had in our history, and so I think that the policy is working.  And I understand the opposition to it, and I‘ve had these debates and discussions, but the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, Senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on February 2, 2010:

Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.“

Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, on February 2, 2010:

Last week, during the State of the Union address, the President announced that he will work with Congress this year to repeal the law known as ”Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.“ He subsequently directed the Department of Defense to begin the preparations necessary for a repeal of the current law and policy.

I fully support the President’s decision. The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it. We have received our orders from the Commander in Chief and we are moving out accordingly. However, we also can only take this process so far as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.

Senator John McCain, Ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, upon hearing Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen say that we ought to change the policy:

I’m deeply disappointed in your statement, Secretary Gates. … your statement obvious as one that is clearly biased, without the view of Congress being taken into consideration…Again you are embarking on saying it’s not whether the military prepares to make the change but how we best prepare for it, without ever hearing from members of Congress, without hearing from the members of the Joint Chiefs and, of course, without taking into considerations all the ramifications of this law. Well, I’m happy to say we still have a Congress of the United States that would have to pass a law to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, despite your efforts to repeal it, in many respects, by fiat.

This lame-ass excuse–that the military is moving without permission of Congress–after Gates expressly said that ”the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.“

To Mullen, McCain had words just as weasely:

We owe our lives to our fighting men and women, and we should be exceedingly cautious, humble, and sympathetic when attempting to regulate their affairs.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been an imperfect but effective policy.  And at this moment, when we are asking more of our military than at any time in recent memory, we should not repeal this law.

In the same statement, McCain accused Admiral Mullen of playing politics, after Mullen had specifically said that it was his personal opinion and had nothing to do with presidential decree.

I guess McCain only respects the leaders of the military when they agree with him.

Favorite news headline:

“World gasps as nerd unveils most expensive rectangle in history!”

– Charlie Brooker, Newswipe

Only seen a few episodes, but it’s quickly becoming my favorite show. Brooker makes just as sharp critiques of the MSM than Jon Stewart himself, except with a British accent. His humor is more hit and miss, but when he hits, it’s hilarious. And I love the Doctor Who references.

You have undoubtedly heard the expression, “there’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole,” used to the point of cliché. It has been proffered by many in the outwardly religious set to flaunt what they perceive as the true ubiquity of faith–that, when it comes down to it, everybody believes in god, and atheists are just fooling themselves when they say otherwise.

Me, I find that a terrible argument, and a conceit which is as flawed as it is condescending. When you consider it, what it really means is that religious faith for many is primarily a reaction to the fear of death. The natural concept of death is that we cease to exist and it would be as if we never were, and that scares the crap out of people. Offered an alternative, people will want to believe that they continue to exist after death, so instead of hanging on to that itching, near-crippling fear, many accept a worldview that instead allows them to feel reassured. Many resist this fear by simply denying it, by avoiding thinking of death–but when confronted in a way that the idea of death cannot be avoided, as one might be in a foxhole under enemy fire, they undergo the transformation then and there.

I see this as a cop-out. If you believe in god simply because you fear oblivion, then you believe for the wrong reasons. Something is not true simply because you want it to be true. If someone doesn’t like you, but then claims to be your best friend only because you won the lottery, how much would you trust and respect that brand of friendship? Faith for self-serving reasons is not faith at all, it is empty of meaning. Any religion that thrives because people will grasp at any alternative to confronting the end of their existence is a sham.

The same thing happens with “deathbed conversions,” or with people who become religious after a near-fatal illness or accident–or even just from dealing with fears of their own mortality. I can fully respect someone who takes a broad, objective look at religion, considers deeply what it is, and concludes that it is something which they feel is true. I can respect someone who has a revelatory experience not associated with fear and sees this as a sign to pursue religious beliefs. But I cannot respect faith born of fear, and cannot imagine how anyone else can, either.

So in my view, to tout one’s religion by saying that people believe it for that reason is hardly a good argument. The next time someone uses the “atheist in a foxhole” saying as a way of supporting religious beliefs, bring the argument to them. “So, you’re saying that religion is just a reaction to the fear of death? Isn’t that shallow?”

Besides which, it just simply ain’t true. Not only are there many, many atheists who have dwelt in foxholes without converting, there are some people who became atheists while in foxholes. At least that is what happened in the case of Milton Christian, celebrated and decorated WWII veteran, who earned a veritable collection of honors: Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, European-African Middle Eastern Campaign medal, Victory Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge 1st Award, Honorable Service Lapel Button, and a Marskman Badge. Christian received, belatedly (better than posthumously!), the Bronze Star which he earned more than 60 years earlier. After the ceremony, he said this:

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. But as we sat in those holes, praying that God would save us, I thought about the fact that the other side was doing the same thing. And then I wondered if God is just playing some kind of game with us. Pretty much I decided at that point there was no God.

Now, that’s something I can respect–the formation of a belief, through reason, in spite of the fear of death. He noted that in order to believe in god, however comforting it may be, there were contradictions that he simply could not accept. Courage is to do what you know is right even though it scares you more than you can say; Christian was courageous. Those who went the opposite way were, well, not.

Textbooks. At least, that’ll be just one killer app, for anyone in higher education.

Right now, the students at my school hate the whole textbook game, and I bet they’re not alone by a long shot–I remember the same thing back when I was getting my degree, and got another taste recently with a few online courses that required expensive textbooks. $100 for a single text is often the low end.

But prices are just one of two major complaints. The other is the weight and bulk of the books. More and more you see students who use travel cases on rollers, like carry-ons for airplanes, because backpacks are just getting too heavy for them. My school has lockers, but not enough; everyone wants to store their textbooks in them. Sometimes they’ll even store texts in classrooms, stashing them away around the room. They even refuse to bring in their laptops, as they just add to the weight.

What they need is something like this:

ScrollMotion takes digital files provided by publishers for the iPad, adapts them to fit on the device, and then adds enhancements such as a search function, dictionaries, glossaries, interactive quizzes and page numbers.

The features of its iPad deal with publishers include applications to let students play video, highlight text, record lectures, take printed notes, search the text, and participate in interactive quizzes to test how much they’ve learned and where they may need more work.

If my students could get access to those textbooks and use them on the iPad, I think a lot would go for that deal. Even if textbooks were priced identically to physical copies, a lot would want it–but if there were a discount on the texts, it would likely be a very hot item. If, for example, they could save enough over the course of a year to pay for the iPad, then it would be a no-brainer. And there are several ways they could save–no physical printing of the texts, no shipping to Japan, and the potential for buying chapters instead of whole textbooks all are possibilities for savings. The built-in dictionary, ability to search text, and multimedia add-ons would all be features they currently either lack or have poor substitutes for, and would be extra enticements. Add a cool touchscreen computer with all of its abilities and a planned school-wide Wi-Fi network… you get the idea.

The Wall Street Journal reports that McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson Education, and Kaplan Inc. have all signed on, and one would guess that whomever is left will buy in later on. Just the ones announced today would account for most textbooks in my school, I believe.

My own question: will desk copies for instructors still be part of the new paradigm? Gotta find out about that.

Today, after finishing work a bit late, I got suited up and ready to go home. As I left the building, I walked up to my scooter, parked–as always–next to the side of the building. But the helmet wasn’t there. Huh, I thought, I must have left the thing upstairs. Didn’t make too much sense as I usually take it up to the office only when it’s raining, which it wasn’t–otherwise, I lock it to the bolt under the helmet well.

I supposed that I must have absent-mindedly taken it with me this time. So, I turned around, went back up to the office… and it wasn’t there, either. I looked a bit more closely, thought of strange places I might have put it, but… it’s a big item, a full-face motorcycle helmet. You can’t hide it very easily.

At that point, I started considering scenarios about where I could have left it. Did I take it to the elevator, put it on the floor to take off my jacket, and then forget it there? Maybe a student saw it and put it somewhere. Or did I take it to class for some bizarre reason? Or maybe it was in the office, but I put it on a desk without thinking and someone put it away somewhere? I went up and down, trying to figure out where I could have placed it. Nowhere, it seemed.

Finally, I went back out to the bike. Could a car have sideswiped it, hitting only the helmet and knocking it off the bike, depositing it in the street where someone disposed of it? No, there would had to have been more damage to the bike had that happened; at the very least, the mirror would have been bent.

But as I looked more closely at the bike to look for damage, I noticed something: the helmet’s chinstrap clasp was still there. I unlocked and opened the helmet well, and lo, the end of the chinstrap was still locked to the bolt.

All that’s left of the helmet.

Someone had come along with a sharp blade, and sliced the helmet off at the closest possible point to the lock, close enough that barely any strap was left. That would require holding the hemet back while maneuvering in with the blade under the edge of the seat. Probably a practiced hand.

But that puzzled me even more: who would bother slicing off that helmet? Seriously, it’s no prize. About the cheapest full-face helmet I could find, oversized for Japan, and old & worn to boot, the face shield plastic scratched. Not a prize to be coveted, even if they could easily and cheaply replace the sliced chin strap. And they left the clasp, which was hanging by a thread and easy to take–an item which would cost more to replace than just some length of strap. Not to mention that slicing it so close to the lock makes little sense–it’s harder to do and doesn’t seem to help them at all.

There are only two possibilities I could think of. The first is referred to in Japan as “itazura,” a prankster or vandal. I have never understood that mentality: you don’t know this person you’re hurting, will not be around when the deed is discovered, but you will ruin something of theirs or steal it to no benefit of your own, greatly inconveniencing or angering them. Is it the thrill of doing something wrong? I know some people get jollies by imagining how mad someone will be, but seriously, I just don’t get it.

Not to mention that had an itazura wanted to be destructive, they would have been far better off slashing the seat itself, or slashing one or both of the tires. It would have been easier to boot. They didn’t–instead they carted off an old helmet, more work for them, and a much lesser expense to me.

But as I stood out there with a student and staff member who were helping me puzzle it out, another possibility occurred to me. The staff member asked if my scooter would be OK outside overnight, as I couldn’t ride it home. In Japan, it’s illegal to not wear a helmet on a motorbike, so I was kind of stuck. But then I realized that the helmet theft might have been designed to do exactly that: get the scooter to be left outside overnight. The school is not on a major street, but there’s enough traffic out there most of the day to discourage the theft of something as big as a 125-cc scooter. But if the scooter were still there at 3:00 am, then maybe a small flatbed truck loading up a scooter wouldn’t be noticed as much. How to make it stay put? Just slice off the helmet and trash it somewhere so the owner couldn’t ride off with it, and the bike would be much easier to steal later on.

So as a precaution, we made room in one of the building’s storage rooms right nearby and locked the bike up for overnight. Just in case.

Tomorrow I hope to contact the cops at the local koban, not in hopes of getting the helmet back, but instead to alert them as to what’s going on–and maybe they’ll be able to tell me what the most likely purpose of the crime was. But I don’t count on them to do anything about it–not their usual gig, to be honest. In fact, I could have driven the scooter home if I wanted–cops never stop bikes at night except in highly unusual cases; I am pretty sure I could have driven straight home had I wanted. But the night air right now is freezing cold–I’d have been seriously uncomfortable bare-headed (and fully expect to be when I drive the scooter home tomorrow using my spare helmet, which is essentially just a plastic cap).

This is not the first time something like this has happened to me here in Japan. Three and a half years ago, someone stole my last scooter from the parking place on the first floor, carted it off to a shielded location in a nearby mini-park, and stripped it for parts:

A few years earlier, I had to pay for repairs when someone had apparently jammed a screwdriver into the ignition, making it impossible to start. Not an attempt to steal, apparently, but either an itazura having fun, or else a local bike repair shop looking for business. Apparently it was a common enough form of vandalism that current models now have an “itazura guard,” a metal plate you can slide to cover the ignition with by using the back of your key.

Apparently, Japan is not the safest country ever for motorbikes.

It’s inevitable: Apple releases what is to be a hit device, so smaller companies line up to sue Apple for “copying” or “stealing” from them, hoping the deep-pocketed company will settle and cough up the cash. In fact, it is so established an industry that some companies are designing their wares so they are set up to sue Apple. It only took a few days for Wu Xiaolong, the president of “Shenzhen Great Long Brother Industrial Co.” to announce that they were furious:

I was very angry and flabbergasted when I saw the news of the iPad presentation two days ago… It is certainly our design. They’ve stolen because we present our P88 to everyone six months ago at the IFA (International Electronics Fair in Berlin).

Now, if you’ve seen the iPad, you may be wondering: how can you copyright that design? I mean, it’s a rounded rectangle with a metal bezel and black border. You can’t get more simple than that. Zillions of devices have that basic look; it describes half the monitors on laptops today. Besides which, one of the major grouses people have been lobbing at the iPad is that it looks exactly like an oversized iPhone or iPod Touch–so if Apple’s design is just like the P88’s, then isn’t the P88’s a copy of Apple’s handhelds?

According to Wu: “[Our machine has] nothing to do with it, as they have completely different functions.” Ah, I see. And so the P88 and the iPad have identical functions? Well, not quite. The iPad has a 9.7“ capacitive multitouch screen, the P88 has a lower-resolution 10.2” resistive touch screen (no multitouch) and uses a stylus; the iPad runs the iPhone OS on flash memory in a closed ecosystem, the P88 has Windows on a HDD and is essentially a PC crammed into a tablet form; the iPad gets 10 hours of battery life, the P88 less than 2 hours; the P88 is thicker, heavier, and sits on an ugly metal bracket. But the real difference is in appearance:

What was even more funny was that when the P88 was released, it was called a “non-existent Apple Tablet Clone,” as it resembled most mock-ups and estimations of what the iPad was supposed to look like.

But it gets even better. Want to see another computer made by the Chinese company?

OMG! Apple stole the iMac from them too!!

Expect this lawsuit to fizzle. As Wired so aptly put it, “Anyone confusing the two products deserves the P88.”

This part of Obama’s response to Republican accusations bears repeating often:

Jeb, with all due respect, I’ve just got to take this last question as an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.

Now, look, let’s talk about the budget once again, because I’ll go through it with you line by line. The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. — $1.3 [trillion.] So when you say that suddenly I’ve got a monthly budget that is higher than the — a monthly deficit that’s higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that’s factually just not true, and you know it’s not true.

And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade — had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000 when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren’t paid for.

You had a prescription drug plan — the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades — that was passed without it being paid for. You had two wars that were done through supplementals. And then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession. That’s $8 trillion.

Now, we increased it by a trillion dollars because of the spending that we had to make on the stimulus. I am happy to have any independent fact-checker out there take a look at your presentation versus mine in terms of the accuracy of what I just said.

It shows up the stunning hypocrisy of the GOP: to take a budget surplus and a promise to start paying off the debt, and immediately turn that into massive deficits and $8 trillion in debt–but the moment Obama takes office, pretend that he created it all and was fully responsible for it being there. Garrison Keillor expressed the Republicans’ mendacity best:

The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, “Throw the bums out!”

Let’s make it clear: this is not Obama acting like Bush and trying to blame his current failures on the previous administration. Obama owned up to what he added to the debt. But he also pointed out that you could not blame him for losses incurred before he had the chance to act, nor could you fault him for having to start working deep down in a hole created by someone else. Republicans may be desperate to do so, but Obama’s having none of it, and rightly so.

Remember, Clinton left office with a jobs report that had only 16,000 jobs lost in one month, after several months of sporadic gains and losses (the gains were greater), with only a possibility of downturn; it took Bush 16 months before he broke even with that level of job creation, and it took him two and a half years before he had regular job growth again.

Obama, on the other hand, was handed job losses which for 3 months straight had exceeded 680,000. In just one year he has almost brought us back to jobs being gained again, and by relative terms, is about 600,000 jobs per month in the black from what Bush left him. In fact, the news may be better than that: job numbers for November were revised up to show the first job gain in two years, and although December job numbers came back down to 85,000 losses, that number could also be revised upwards, if things go well.

Unemployment rates are high mostly because of the massive losses that Bush generated, and Obama had to make huge strides upward and go into positive job gains again before the number could come down–and Obama is nearly there after only one year.

Take a look at the differences; below are two charts, showing job gains and losses for one year before the transition, to 11 months after the transition (the latest numbers we have for Obama), keeping in mind that the December ‘09 job numbers are preliminary:

Jobs gained/lost: Clinton to Bush

Jobs gained/lost: Bush to Obama (Dec. 09 may be revised)

See the difference?

Add to that the surprisingly high Q4 2009 GDP numbers, even after mitigating factors are removed, and you have very strong promise for the economy right now. Hopefully, the jobs report due out in a week will show the first growth since December 2007.

Make no mistake: Obama’s economic performance so far has been astonishingly good, extraordinarily better than Bush’s at this point–despite the fact that Bush had already committed the country to far more debt at that point with his tax cuts than Obama has at the same point with his stimulus.

The idea that Obama is not doing a good job with the economy is purely an illusion created by the deep pit Bush had dug for him, an illusion that the Republicans are attempting to reinforce and amplify. And Obama was 100% correct for swatting them down.

A lot of people are panning the iPad, voicing a variety of complaints. It’s not revolutionary, they say; there’s nothing new here, it’s just a giant iPod Touch. It’ll be too heavy, too awkward, I don’t see how I will hold it or use it for such-and-such an application. It doesn’t replace other devices like the iPhone did, putting the features of the cell phone, iPod, and PDA all in one place. There’s no multitasking, no front-facing camera for video conferencing, there’s no USB or video out without an adaptor, no HDMI at all, and Flash doesn’t work on it. The battery can’t be replaced. The screen is a bad aspect ratio for watching widescreen video, I hate touchscreen keyboards, and an LCD monitor is bad for my eyes when I read. And the name is terrible, just look at all the feminine hygeine jokes.

So, the iPad is the biggest disappointment in history relative to its hype, right? From how these people are complaining about it, you would think so. It seems like articles based on the “iPad sucks” thesis are in vogue now. The question is, are they right? Is the iPad being trashed for good reason? Well, you can easily see from the title of this blog entry that I disagree. So let me explain why. It helps to break down the complaints into categories: lack of features, lack of novelty, and the user experience.

Lack of Features

Many people are upset that the iPad lacks many things they expected. This is often because they heard about such features in pre-release rumors, and came to think of them as part of what the iPad should be. It has a powerful enough CPU, so there should be multitasking; why won’t Apple support Flash animations; the device is a natural for video conferencing so where’s the camera; and why doesn’t it have the ports I want?

There are three answers to cover all of these questions. First, some features are software-specific, like multi-tasking. As with the iPhone, multitasking can and will be added with a software upgrade. If you get an iPad today, expect improvements to come without having to purchase a new device. Just like early iPhone adopters eventually got features like the App Store and cut-and-paste despite them not existing on the original device, your iPad will similarly receive updates, and multi-tasking is an obvious one–not to mention that it is implied in OS upgrades even now being tested.

Second, some physical features were not included in the original model, but they will be eventually. Yes, there’s no camera–but you can fully expect the feature to come with a future model. Again, just like the iPhone originally had no GPS, no video camera, and no compass, the iPad comes with a relative paucity of features. This was an obvious thing to expect; I predicted it myself in a blog post published ten days before the iPad was announced. This is simply the way many products are released. If you feel that a front-facing camera is a must-have, then simply wait for the next model to come out.

Third, some features were not included for design and esthetic reasons. We all know that Steve Jobs is a stickler for seamless designs; it’s the reason he never added a separate, physical right-click button to any Apple mouse. Few people agreed with him, and maybe this aspect of his design preferences is unnecessarily off-base. But this is part of the overall package, both the good and the bad, and what it means in the end is just that there’s no seam for a removable battery, and fewer ports along the edges. Fewer ports may also be a pricing or manufacturing concern, but whatever the case, most of these issues can be worked around, or don’t matter as much as many may think. You can add USB, SD card, and video out with adaptors. HDMI adaptors may come in the future (just as third-party HDMI adaptors came out for the MacBook Pro), but VGA should suffice in most situations if you want to use it as an output device. As for the battery, ten hours is more than almost anyone would use the device in a single day, and plugging in the device to recharge at night is not a hardship.

Some people complain about the lack of sufficient storage. I myself am peeved by Apple’s pricing tiers: $100 is way too steep for an extra 16 or 32 GB of memory. They clearly want to lure people in with the base price, but get them to end up spending the extra cash on more memory after having decided to buy one. However, there is a possible reason why the amount of internal storage won’t matter as much: networking. The iPad is not designed to be a storage device any more than the iPhone is. You don’t store your entire film and music libraries on the iPhone, you leave them on your main device and then sync the media with iTunes; same with the iPad. With the iPhone, wireless syncing was not included due to certain issues, battery life being the most significant. With the iPad, that may not be an issue. If you need a file, then from what I hear, you will be able to get it from your main computer using the WiFi network. Most stuff will be stored over the network, and so more storage on the iPad won’t be a big issue.

That leaves the lack of Flash support, and that was not an oversight: Apple intentionally left it out. They did so because they see Flash as more of a vulnerability than a benefit. Flash is slow, buggy, and opens up security holes. Personally, I detest Flash; although it can be used beneficially in controlled moderation, most Flash designers go way overboard, creating a web-surfing blight unmatched by any other, including the animated GIF and the “blink” tag. Apple is right to abandon it–and not just because it would open up the iPhone and iPad to hacking attacks, which is a good enough reason by itself. Flash is so Internet Explorer 6, it’s the Floppy Disk of software. Apple abandoned floppies years ahead of Windows PC makers, and they are similarly ahead of the curve where Flash is concerned. HTML5 is where it’s at.

Lack of Novelty

The next category of complaint is that the iPad isn’t revolutionary. We again see the problem–once more, as I predicted before the iPad was debuted–where expectations raised by the rumor mill led to disappointment. Everyone was looking forward to something completely new, a revolutionary OS or a stunning new design. Instead, Apple came out with what was essentially just a big iPod Touch. Why did it takes years for the Apple design team to start from scratch several times over to come up with something so basic?

It helps to remember that Apple’s challenge here was not to make something completely new and unexpected; Apple’s challenge was to make a tablet computer that would be practical and fun to use. People just assumed that this would naturally involve something new and revolutionary. I was personally nervous about the rumored “steep learning curve” of the tablet: if Apple made it too revolutionary and different, then people might not be able to use it. Just look at the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard–hardly a huge new concept, but people freaked out at the idea.

The lack of novelty in the iPad might be explained by the old saying, “That’s a feature, not a bug.” As Steve Jobs pointed out in the unveiling, there are about 75 million people who will know exactly how to use this device from the word go. Apple chose the exact opposite of a steep learning curve, and once you think about that in light of the challenge of making a tablet computer easy to use, it makes perfect sense. The iPad is not intended to wow you with its novelty, it’s intended to be comfortable and convenient. People who complain that it’s just a big iPod Touch are completely missing the whole point of this new device.

One other consideration along these lines is the iPad’s place in the spectrum of usability. Many have noted that it doesn’t replace anything, save possibly for ebook readers. The iPhone, for example, replaced the need for lugging around a cell phone, PDA, ipod, digital camera, and video recorder. That’s wonderful, but that doesn’t mean that every device has to accomplish the same goal. The iPad was not design to replace existing products, it was designed to fulfill an existing need. That need was for a mobile device which was more capable than a smartphone, but easier to tote and carry than a laptop. It may not be the widest category of need you can imagine, but a lot of people will greatly appreciate and desire exactly such a device. Students will go nuts over what this will do for textbooks, for example. People who want color, backlit ebook readers will love it. How many people have complained about laptops being too heavy, or burning their legs with the excess heat, but can’t do what they want on a tiny smartphone screen? And then there are the uses that nobody thinks they need right now, but the iPad will open up for them–a holy grail in product design.

The User Experience

That brings us to the last category of complaint: it looks like I won’t like it. It looks too heavy and awkward to hold, the size is wrong, the screen won’t be good for me, the touchscreen keyboard is no good. The problem is, people who have only seen the device and have never held one in their hands are already making judgments about what it feels like to use one. That may be why almost all of the criticisms are coming from those who have never had a hands-on with the device. Look at the reviews by those who have played with the device, however, and you’ll encounter the same advice that Jobs gave: you have to use it before you understand how right it is. Once you use it, you may find that your concerns were unwarranted or have easy solutions. It may be heavy, but so are some books; we compensate by holding such objects while resting them on our laps or whatever surface is available. The touch keyboard may seem awkward, but so did the iPhone’s, and most people seemed to have little trouble adapting to that. I myself took just a few hours to get used to it, and now type on my phone almost as fast as I do a full-sized keyboard (a miracle relative to the numeric-keypad hell that I avoided for so long). The screen may be brightly backlit, but that’s what the brightness control is for.

This is not to say that the iPad will be for everybody. Some will never get used to a virtual keyboard; others will never be comfortable holding it; many may be bothered by any level of light from a backlit LCD screen; some may hate the design and esthetics, or may never get over their high expectations from the pre-launch days. Apple has always had its haters, and always will. That doesn’t mean that the product is bad or doomed to failure.

Dispelling Criticisms Is Not Proof of Excellence

You may have noticed that I have spent the entire blog post so far explaining why the negative reviews are off base, and have not really explained why the iPad is “Deceptively Good,” as I claim in the title. So let me take a whack at it. The answer lies in two aspects: the user interface, and the product’s future potential. Both are inextricably linked, and both are right now vastly under-appreciated.

The UI

When the first “personal computer” came out, it was fully a geek’s plaything. The Altair computer had no monitor, no keyboard–just a few rows of switches and blinking lights to allow for communication in binary code. Very few people could actually use one for anything. A few years later, the “trinity” of PCs–the Apple II, the Commodore Pet, and the Tandy TRS-80–introduced a “CLI,” or a text-based interface. You either remember or have somewhere seen the old “green-screen” text displays. This allowed people who were not comfortable in binary to use the machines, although you did usually have to learn the language that the computer understood, which still kept most people too distant from the PC experience.

It only took seven years after that for the first commercially popular PC to use the GUI–the graphics user interface with visual metaphors like the Desktop, folders, icons, and menus–that we have become so accustomed to. The GUI was a godsend because it made the computer interface more recognizable, something we could relate to more easily. We understood that a desktop is a place where you begin your work, that you choose from menus, and that folders contain documents. Suddenly, almost everybody could use a computer, and PC sales took off. But we’ve had the GUI for a quarter of a century now, and it’s beginning to show it’s age. What’s next?

The answer is multitouch. Using a mouse may be a step up from a text-only interface, but it is still uncomfortable and clunky. Surely you have seen people trying to move something on the screen farther than their mousepad gives them room for, and clumsily attempt to pick up the mouse and reposition it–in fact, you may well have been that person, several times. The flaw with the mouse, and the trackpad as well, is that you are not directly controlling the content on the screen. It is one step removed from a “hands on” experience.

To get a good sense of how significant that is, try drawing a picture. Do it on paper first–I draw a pretty good Snoopy, for example. Then open a drawing app on your computer, and with the mouse, try drawing the same picture. You’ll most likely find the results appalling. A trackpad may not fare much better, unless you’re experienced at it. Whenever your hands and fingers are removed from the immediate action, you lose dexterity and control. Current cursor devices like the mouse and trackpad are remote devices; multitouch allows direct access, which is far more natural, comfortable, and accurate. However, you won’t realize this until you’ve actually used a device like the iPad where multitouch comes into far more appropriate use than it does with the smartphone.

The problem with multitouch is how the screen is placed when you’re doing your hands-on controlling. A desktop screen is much too distant, and even a laptop screen would require holding your hands out in an unnatural fashion. A smartphone screen is more suited for that, but it’s too small to do much with. The tablet PC is, if you’ll forgive the cliche, just right. Anything you control with your hands has to be in your hands. Yes, there are disadvantages, but the payoff in control will far outstrip any of those.

A good example is Apple’s multitouch trackpad on the MacBook Pro. When it came out, I thought it was cool, but not really revolutionary. I figured that I’d be able to do a few new things on it, but did not expect it to change they way I use computers. However, I only recently realized that I had completely stopped using a mouse–something I had depended upon for years with previous laptop models. The multitouch screen is the next step up from that; after getting used to it, you’ll laugh at how clunky a mouse is. But the catch is, you won’t realize it until after you’ve used it for a while. The true utility of the touchscreen sneaks up on you.

One Word: Potential

That brings us to the real promise of the product. A lot of people look at the iPad’s current state, and what we already know about using iPhone apps, and see that as the end result. That’s a big mistake. What you have seen is only the beginning. Most of what the iPad will wow you with hasn’t come out yet.

To get a better sense, watch the keynote, and pay special attention to the software demos. Pay attention to how Jobs used the photo viewing app. Watch what Phil Schiller does with programs like Numbers and Keynote, how the multitouch comes into play. Watch the Nova game demo, and note the grenade-throwing and door-opening gestures. Be sure to watch the users’ hands, not just the screen. These are just a few examples of what can be done, but there is far, far more. It is limited only by what software developers can come up with, and you’ve seen the amazing stuff people have come up with on the iPhone App Store. The closed ecosystem provides a sheltered environment which not only helps prevent malware incursions, but slows piracy so that apps can be sold more cheaply. But most significantly, it allows the individual, the small-time software tinkerer, to immediately offer their wares for sale in one of the biggest marketplaces in the world. And now the iPad blows that wide open by combining the novel and powerful multitouch interface with enough real estate to make almost anything possible.

I can appreciate the benefit to apps whose layouts have traditionally been hard to control, like Filemaker Pro for instance; creating, resizing, and placing fields and buttons has always been a bit of a pain. I can easily imagine multitouch being used to make that not only easier, but a lot of fun to boot.

Conclusion

The features most people have focused on so far–the music playing, movie viewing, browsing and email, and even the ebook reading–are all just background. They are little more than examples of what can be done with the machine. Once you take in the full potential of the device, you will come to understand that the concerns people are airing today miss the point entirely. Panning the iPad because the screen size doesn’t fit the aspect ratio of certain movies is like saying that your Porsche is abysmal because the gas cap is the wrong shade of grey. The iPad is way, way more than just one application. Watching movies on it is a perk, not a raison d’etre. Same goes for many of the other concerns.

Apple’s mission was very simple: make a platform, and they will come. The idea was not to introduce something with whiz-bang flashing lights that would knock people’s socks off, it was instead to do what computer makers have been trying for nearly a decade and failing at: creating a tablet computer which has enough going for it that it can succeed as a product category. Apple has, by all appearances, succeeded in doing that. By building on the achievements of the iPhone platform and the introducing full-scale multitouch UI in a low-cost product where that feature can flourish, Apple has created something which is truly groundbreaking.

Remember, ground-breaking innovations are not always appreciated or understood when they come out. A lot of people sneered at the original Mac, many thought the iPhone would fizz out after the buzz dissipated–heck, even the PC itself was dismissed as an expensive toy at first back in the late 70’s. So don’t count the iPad as DOA before it even arrives. It’s far more than it seems.

Hey

So, by now, you have probably thought, “If you’re criticizing others for coming to conclusions about the iPad sucking before they get their hands on it, how can you claim that the reverse is true if you’ve never held one yourself?” Well, you got me. Part of it is an educated assessment–I’ve been looking at this kind of technology for a while. But that’s not enough.

Call it an article of faith.

Obama went to the Republicans’ home turf and fielded unscreened questions from House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore. Below is the full White House video (video and transcripts part one & part two) of his opening remarks and of his one hour and seven minutes of answering questions lobbed at him by his political opponents.

Now, one thing I would like to observe: when did Bush do this? Right-wingers make claims that Obama and Democrats are “afraid” of “journalists,” meaning they won’t allow Fox News to stage a right-wing political ambush under the pretense of a debate hosted by a “news outlet.”

The thing is, Obama has put himself not just up in front of the media, he has put himself directly in front of very aggressively challenging right-wing forums. Obama went on O’Reilly’s show on Fox; did Bush ever go on Olbermann? Hell, no. Now, maybe I missed something, but I sure as hell don’t recall Bush ever opening himself up to answering more than an hour’s worth of unscreened questions from Democratic lawmakers on live TV. No, I think I would have remembered that.

So, right off the bat, you have to give Obama huge props for going where no Republican leader would ever have the guts to go, namely into the lion’s den of opposition. On this, Obama is the courageous, bipartisan leader, and Republicans are the weak-kneed sissies afraid to be held accountable by the opposition. There can be no argument on that.

Next, watching the opening remarks and much of the questioning, you have to give Obama big marks for bipartisan outreach. He made several excellent points about how he has compromised and worked across the aisle, gave Republicans their due on many things, and publicly committed to working with the other side. Compare that to most of the questions, and you’ll see that while the Republicans in the room had some conciliatory remarks, they most definitely were way more partisan in their remarks than Obama was. Clearly, they felt that Obama had stumbled into their crosshairs and they were going to make a shooting gallery of it. But under the most challenging of questions, Obama more than held his own. He did not allow his record to be misrepresented, and did a good job of beating down the untrue accusations lobbed at him.

And there were quite a few incredibly biased and unfair “questions” (often couched in partisan speechmaking–just listen to the first “question”). I nearly gagged when one guy actually had the balls to say “We have not been obstructionist.” I had to remember that a few moments before, he had said that he represented freshmen in the House. I don’t know what their record is, but maybe among that small group, there has not been the same level of obstructionism as has been iron-clad amongst Republicans as a whole, and especially Senate Republicans. What this guy said may have been true in its very limited sense, but coming from a Republican lawmaker, and clearly intended to represent Republicans in general (note how he did not say “House freshmen have not been obstructionist,” but instead removed the classification to a preceding sentence therefore giving a false impression in the claim), it is one of the more outrageous claims ever spoken. And sure, freshmen House Republicans may not be as obstructionist as their party as a whole, but that’s because they can afford to be: there’s no filibuster in the House, and the Democrats have a clear majority, so 100% opposition is not necessary, and they can afford to cross lines more often. But if Democrats held a razor-thin majority, you can bet your ass that these guys would be exactly as obstructionist as their Senate brethren are.

Obama scored huge points in pointing out how Republicans have demonized Obama:

Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that’s not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that’s how you guys — (applause) — that’s how you guys presented it.

And so I’m thinking to myself, well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist — no, look, I mean, I’m just saying, I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans — is similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.

So all I’m saying is, we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.

And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It’s not just on your side, by the way — it’s on our side, as well. This is part of what’s happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.

Truer words have not been spoken. Watch the whole video, and I think you’ll be impressed with how Obama does. I have to say, he is very motivational; listening to him speak, especially seeing him stand up to and hold his own and then some against a crowd so pitted against him almost gives me hope again. But then I remember that it’s not House Republicans who are the problem, it’s Senate Republicans, and for all the tiny morsels of outreach the crowd claimed they were offering, none of that means squat if Senate Republicans don’t end their record-breaking filibuster marathon and stop their monolithic obstructionist campaign.

UPDATE: Amusing point: Obama was doing so good a job at defeating Republican attempts to make him look bad, and doing it so adroitly and effectively, that Fox News, which was airing the event no doubt in hopes that Obama would get his ass handed to him, cut away from the event 20 minutes early. To those who would claim that they planned to or had to go to another event, I ask this: if Obama were getting embarrassed instead of the other way around, do you think they would have cut away? Not to mention that they cut away to “analysis” of the event, and spent a lot of time bitching about how Obama was “lecturing” Republicans. Um, yeah.

This reporter makes an interesting observation I hadn’t thought of before: Japanese people don’t do ebooks. You just don’t see them here. And the idea is that it’s not because they just haven’t arrived, but rather that Japanese people are not really that interested in them. From what I can gather, Japanese do read quite a lot (though not as much as 30 years ago), but most ebook reading is done on a cell phone. What drives most ebook reader sales in Japan is obvious–I knew even before I looked it up that manga would be what drives the ebook reader market. They come out often, and come in thick tomes that resemble gaudy, small-format telephone books. The bulk, graphic format, and large number of constant releases would make manga a natural ebook target.

So people do read ebooks here. And from what I found from a quick search, the market is taking off–it just hasn’t developed nearly as much here as it has in America. So the question is, will the iPad change that. The answer might be similar to what we saw with the iPod, then the iPod Touch, and then the iPhone: an initial lukewarm reaction, everybody says that Japanese people aren’t interested… and then a few years later, you start seeing them everywhere.

Unless you have some very specific needs, I can’t really see how the Kindle could outclass the iPad as an e-book reader, especially if you compare like sizes–the iPad vs. the 9.7“ Kindle.

Now, that’s all subjective, and depends on what you prefer and what you can stand. Some people will prefer the Kindle no matter what because the e-ink screen is less a strain on their eyes. Others will very much prefer a backlit display (my father sent his Kindle back because he couldn’t read in bed with the lights off).

I decided to make an impromptu chart to compare the two. Advantages are colored in orange. Note that I did not give either machine an advantage for the screen type (depending on visual preferences), WiFi vs. 3G (Amazon’s 3G connectivity is free), keyboard type (some people will always prefer a physical keyboard), or even the USB / VGA comparison (despite the video out, the iPad requires adaptors which many dislike).

The Kindle DX has an advantage with slightly higher resolution and pixels per inch (ppi) screen density, a slightly lighter body, and far superior battery life. If e-ink and long battery life are critical for you, then the Kindle wins hands-down–with all cylinders firing, it gets more than 4 days of continuous use; with the 3G used only sporadically and when used even at heavy reading rates, the Kindle can last weeks on a single charge. Some also claim that weight is an issue when you’re holding that device up for hours on end, and a 5-ounce difference is a difference some will balk at.

The iPad, meanwhile, is not limited to being an ebook reader, but if only used for that, it could still hold its own. For the same price as the Kindle DX, you get full color, a backlit screen, and four times the storage in a smaller form factor. But in addition, you get… well… a computer. You get to run apps, read email, play games, and most anything else a computer can do. You can run an office suite, watch movies and TV shows, all that and more–virtually no limits within the allowances of the hardware.

So the question becomes, what are you looking for? Just an ebook reader geared toward general ebook reading preferences? Or an all-in-one device with loads of potential? Comparing the two is a bit jarring because they are different beasts, but like comparing the iPhone and the Zune, they both cover the same territory, and then one goes a lot further, for about the same price. And we all know how stunning a success the Zune has been.

Sometimes being caught between countries sucks. I want to buy software item “A” in English. You can buy it in America just fine. In Japan? Not available–just in Japanese, sorry. And retailers in the U.S. won’t ship it to you, as it violates the license for the Japanese seller, even though the language makes it a different product. And the Japanese seller can’t be bothered to sell an English version, even if it’s a download which would be dead simple to sell. Seriously, they’d just have to spend five minutes altering their web site, and they’d have more sales. But nope, can’t be bothered.

It is especially frustrating for my college, an American college in Japan. We are essentially a bubble of English language, a small bit of American soil in the heart of Tokyo. Our model is to replicate the experience at home campus. Except, of course, that those who sell software and media usually don’t recognize this. Can’t have the U.S. version, Japanese version doesn’t fit, you’re outta luck too bad.

I fear this will be the case with ebook purchases, in that we have lots of students here who would love to use ebook readers for textbooks, but international licensing agreements will probably frustrate us. Because of our location, we won’t have access to the textbooks we need–America won’t sell and Japan won’t offer.

Essentially, being a stranger in a strange land is a niche that businesses haven’t paid enough attention to, something which makes zero sense in a digital world. There are some businesses which address us, but they usually see us as prey more than customers, people who are left out and so will pay a premium to get what everybody else takes for granted.

Apple is one of the few businesses which has done a fair job of addressing this. When Apple makes software, they allow for a variety of languages to be used. Their OS software, whether for computers, the iPhone, or iPad, comes with at least a dozen base languages built-in. Apple’s software architecture allows for “localization,” or various languages to be built into every software package. Switch your OS to a new language, and all apps with that language in their localization files will automatically run in that language. Which means that if I buy Apple software in Japan, it simply runs in English for me, because my OS is set to that language.

You see this in a few other places–for example, the “Ultimate Matrix” Blu-ray set is sold in English, but put it in a Japanese player and it switches languages. Unfortunately, such setups are rare. Windows, for example, refuses to do this, and even many Mac software makers stodgily refuse to localize, instead issuing different packages for each language.

One word: potential. Remember how I mentioned people hyping it up too much? This is what I was talking about. Clearly Apple wanted to start from bare basics and then upgrade. Essentially, this is exactly what people heard since a while ago: a giant iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple clearly wants to ride the familiarity people have with the iPhone, which may or may not be a mistake. People were expecting something revolutionary, and instead they got the familiar, just bigger.

In one respect, the iPad is disappointing in that it really doesn’t do anything new. No 3-D interface, no use of advanced multi-touch, and no steep learning curve. It doesn’t even have multitasking, which people expected the iPad would bring to the iPhone. Instead, we’re all trapped under a single app at a time, which is virtually inexplicable for a device with a 1 GHz CPU that reportedly performs very quickly. I can only guess that Apple wanted to prevent the device from slowing down after opening up too many apps at the same time.

What Apple did right: the price. The base unit, 16GB WiFi and no carrier contract, starts at $499, which, if you recall, is exactly what the original 4GB iPhone cost with a contract. The 16GB price is obviously meant to sell, as I seriously doubt that doubling the memory really costs an extra $100. Apple wanted the low-end model to be at a price people wouldn’t gag at, and they did it: $500 for a tablet computer is actually pretty damn good. Add the pre-existing app base and how comfortably anyone will be able to slide into using this, and you begin to understand Apple’s strategy.

And that, I suppose, was a key point: make it available for most people, get the basics down right, and then follow up with more features every model. You can fully expect a new iPad in 8-12 months with a front-facing camera, Bluetooth and a compass, then another one after that with new screen sizes and multitasking, and so on. This is what Apple does. I called that one spot-on in my prediction 10 days ago:

Like the iPhone, one should expect a relative paucity of such features upon the initial release, allowing not only for everyone to focus on the core innovations of the product, but also to allow for Apple to make the subsequent generations of tablets more attractive.

See?

Apple is indeed going with the closed ecosystem; again, they are going with their strengths. Hopefully, you will be able to “authorize” the iPad so it can use all of your purchased apps right off the bat, without having to buy them all over again. Apple is adding iWork to the mix, so we get a long-overdue office suite. The apps are priced at $10 a pop, I presume no discount to buy all 3. But $30 for an office suite seems quite acceptable to me.

Missing from the presentation: any indication of how the file system will work. Now that we have an Office-style set of apps, surely we’ll need a place to save them. How will that work? If they introduced that, I haven’t seen it yet.

And textbooks! What’s up with that? No mention of textbooks in the keynote? Surely there will be something coming, but Apple better not make it so you have to buy a separate textbook app for each publisher. Even free apps from each publisher would be a pain in the ass, as you’d have to remember which textbook you’d gotten from what publisher, and you’d have to switch back and forth.

My predictions for the tablet were not bad–I got a lot right, probably more wrong, though I probably fared better than most analysts. The iPad is slightly larger than I thought, in order to accommodate the border/bezel, which I believe I accurately predicted–I think that’s about a half-inch, maybe a bit wider. I nearly nailed the pixels-per-inch prediction, guessing 130 (it’s 132), and was right that there’d be at least a 720p resolution–I guessed 1080 x 720, it’s really 1024 x 768, not spot-on but fairly close. I predicted that viewing angles would be an issue, and was right–Apple went with a special type of LCD called “IPS” which was a wide viewing angle. I don’t recall many other prognosticators addressing that issue. I was right about the camera not being there, and why not; I was right about the price but for the wrong reasons; and I was right about the importance about there being a Wi-Fi-only option.

I was wrong in my expectations for the interface to use advanced multitouch, though I fully expect Apple to start from the familiar base OS and upgrade gradually instead of shocking people with a new, hard-to-learn UI. I was wrong about the home button location, but right on all the other buttons. I was wrong about the mini-USB and the mic, and missed it on the CPU.

Overall impression: Jobs did not hit one out of the park like he did with the iPhone, in that this is not a huge, awe-inspiring device. Instead, it is far more subtle and subversive: it will slide people into a new way of computing, slowly acclimating them instead of diving right in.

In the end, the question is, will people buy it? It’s a very nice, familiar tablet/ebook device for an affordable entry-level price. I think people will indeed go for it, though not in the excited droves they went for the iPhone. Jobs is playing this one safe rather than taking risks. It’ll be a sleeper, slow in the short-term, but a long-term hit.

But as I explained recently, this will never happen.

When you read it, you keep thinking, “My god, they are really going over the top with this one,” and then you remember who they’re talking about and go, “Well, maybe not.”

All indications now seem to point to Republicans picking up at least 4 or 5 Senate seats and who knows how many House seats come the midterm elections.

Let me see if I understand the causal chain correctly:

1. Republicans spent the last eight years in power trashing the economy, starting quagmire wars, and generally mismanaging things so badly that most people agreed they sucked
2. Obama elected because people want change
3. Obama and Democrats get to work addressing major problems: economy, health care, etc.; early results were startlingly good as stimulus sharply reversed job losses, and large majority wanted some form of health care reform
4. Republicans throw biggest hissy fit in memory, rage with over-the-top histrionics, throwing about outrageously obvious lies like “Obama’s creating death panels to kill your grandparents”
5. Republicans throw 100% of their weight in obstructionist effort to grind business to a halt for the openly stated reason of wanting the president to fail so they can gain politically from it
6. People respond by thinking Obama is doing a bad job and reward Republicans with election victories and more power

Whatever low opinion I had of Joe Voter just dropped through the floor. I know that the Dems have been more than a bit weak-kneed and ineffective in doing what they’re doing, but at least they were intent on doing well for the country, and no matter how bad they may have been, they are far more preferable than what the Republicans have to offer. It’s as if the people have completely forgotten about what happened the past ten years, and like gullible saps, are willing to believe just about anything the right-wing propaganda machine feeds them. I mean, really, does anyone believe that giving Republicans more power will result in more action being taken? Exactly the opposite: get ready for Obstructionism on Steroids as the GOP sets its sights on taking the White House in 2012.

If Americans are so astonishingly stupid as a group, then I suppose we get what we deserve.

A new concept has been released by a Polish student showing a new take on the Apple tablet idea. The concept is certainly stunning, and I agree with commenters that it is a far more interesting mock-up than the standard ones proffered, which tend to simply be over-sized iPhones. Check it out:

The illustrations make it a bit hard to see the second, slide-out touchscreen LCD panel, but that’s what that is.

Now, I will be the first to admit that this is an incredibly cool concept, and like many of the fanboys out there currently raving about the design, I would like nothing more than to have something like this. However, there is one small hitch: the design is, by current standards, simply impossible to achieve.

The depth, for instance, is supposed to be only 7mm. Well, that’s nice, but the iPhone is currently 12.3 mm thick, and even the iPod Touch is 8.5 mm. Each LCD screen would have to be 3.5mm (roughly 1/8th of an inch) thick, have a sturdy enough back panel to protect a 10“ screen, and still somehow pack a computer inside there as well. Somehow I just don’t see that happening.

Furthermore, the designer decided to add a 1-Terabyte solid-state drive (SSD). A look at the only 1TB SSD I could find out there shows that this part alone requires a case 25mm thick; even spread out over a broader plane, the SSD alone would take up more space than the device would have. Not to mention that such an SSD would cost upwards of $3000, even if it could be crammed into the casing. That, the two LCDs, 4GB of RAM, and other impossibly small components would surely price this baby over $10,000 even if it were possible to make with current technology.

Now, there was one design element which was both interesting and possible with today’s technology, and would not break the bank:

The best word for this is perhaps ”cute.“ As for practical, that’s another matter. Maybe if the stand could tilt back a bit, it would be better; with such a small screen, so low to the desk, I imagine one would have to hunch down to see it well if it’s standing upright at 90 degrees. This also mostly negates the touchscreen, so it would be a less-than-perfect way to use the device. But the idea of sliding it into that little frame and it becomes a tiny iMac, there’s something almost irresistible about that. The charger-connector would have to be on the long edge of the tablet for this to work, but if it is and even if Apple doesn’t do this, I bet a third-party manufacturer could make some bucks selling a stand like that.

So, I’d have to give this guy an ”A“ for originality and coolness, but from a design perspective, especially if one must be constrained by realistic technological and cost restraints, this simply isn’t feasible.

Which brings me to a slightly different point: stuff like this isn’t helping. At least, it’s not helping Apple, nor is it helping those who want to be suitably impressed by what Apple comes out with this week. People see concepts like the one above and get impossibly high, pipe-dream expectations–and it just makes the actual device seem a lot less impressive, and unfairly so. Now, if people came out with more realistic designs, then that’s fair. For example, there have been a few iPhone design concepts for the ”4G“ model that could work, and may be cooler than what Apple comes out with. So, actual designs which don’t defy reality or break the bank, that’s a fair comparison which Apple should be expected to live up to. But to break the rules helps no one; I might as well imagine an Apple tablet with a 4 GHz, 16-core CPU with 32 GB of RAM and that terabyte SSD, with 3-D holographic displays in a 4-mm razor-sharp case made of unobtanium. Oh, and did I mention it’s a quantum computer? That would certainly be cool, but it’s also cheating–and to expect anything close to it would be pointlessly self-defeating.

I have kind of cut myself off from politics recently as it was just too stressful and held little if any hope of ending happily. While I was looking the other way, somehow a Democrat lost Ted kennedy’s seat to a Republican, the people of Massachusetts apparently believing that (a) Obama was spending too much time on health care instead of helping people without jobs (hopefully I won’t have to explain how immensely wrong and stupid that idea is), that (b) the correct response would be to scuttle health care which is effectively what they did, and that (c) somehow this was not the fault of the Republicans who have done their best to crap on the people of the United States, and therefore they should be rewarded with a fantastic victory and a vindication of their hateful, lie-filled obstructionism which works to deprive the American people of health and livelihood.

In short, I am glad that I missed all of that.

Had I been around and watching closely, I probably would have become as angry and calloused as Keith Olbermann did, when he called Scott Brown “an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Note the slim difference between an accurate description of Republicans (say, at the end of my first paragraph in this post) and the over-the-top description Olbermann offered. They are “hateful,” not a doubt about that; they lie constantly, something that has been well-documented on this blog and in many other places; they are obstructionist, obviously so; they clearly wish to support insurance companies and big pharma at the expense of the people and leave them without adequate health care; and whether they intend to or not, they have made it far more difficult for people to find work at livable wages. All these are substantial facts. But Olbermann stretched way too far with allegations like “supporting violence against women”; I saw that clip, and Brown either didn’t hear the curling iron comment or just ignored it.

John Stewart, in an excellent example of how he makes fun of all people who deserve it and is not just a leftist taking partisan stabs at right-wingers (right-wingers simply provide far more material for him), did a longish segment pillorying Olbermann for that comment and the rationalization he gave in a later broadcast.

Now, had someone like Rush Limbaugh or really any of the gasbags on the right been subjected to this attack, they would either have ignored it or argued with it. Olbermann, however, aired the segment in its entirety on his own show, and then after a bit of lame humor, ended with a refreshingly truthful and humble statement for a political talking head of this day and age: “I have been a little over the top lately. Point taken. Sorry.”

True, he could clarify better that he is being ironic with the “a little” over the top comment, but even if he were serious about the degree, it’s still a lot more humility than any other partisan commenter I can think of. Watch the whole segment:

Maybe I’ll start watching again next week.

I have been pricing them because we want to get one for my school; we have a lecture series and we want wireless mics that’ll be amplified through a speaker–should be a simple setup, right? But the cheapest setup I can find in Japan is priced at about ¥130,000 ($1,450), which seems ridiculously, even hideously expensive for two mics and a speaker.

I look at Amazon.com in the U.S. and I find a solution for about $350.

I know I have posted here before about price differences, but differences on this kind of scale are highly unusual, for specialty products. So, maybe I’m doing something wrong, looking in the wrong places or something.

Does anyone know what that is, or are we just going to have to shell out huge amounts of money here?