Apple vs MS PR

by Sterlic

Microsoft’s Language Problem
[Via Daring Fireball]

Microsoft announces Windows Phone 7, in a press release headlined “Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun”:

The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.

Who talks like this? This bureaucrat-ese is intended, I suppose, to sound serious. But it just sounds like bullshit.

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And as Gruber says, Apple’s PR for the iPhone was titled: “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone”. compare with “Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun.”

One sounds confident and sure that people will get it. The other sounds like they aren’t sure themselves what it is and are just shoveling in words hoping some stick.

I wonder if the ads will be as bad? What do you think? Season of the Witch or Really? One of the Youtube commenters described Season of the Witch in a way that MS will not appreciate:

So what I am seeing here is a street full of people all totally consumed with doing something on their phone. Most of them are standing still. At the end is a crashed car – freshly crashed by the looks of it. What I get out of it? All of those people saw a car crash and are desperately trying to figure out how to get their damn Windows phones to dial 911! Ultimately no one succeeded until the guy turned the corner and pulled out his iPhone. They all died.

While these ads may highlight bad behavior they provide no insight into how Windows Phone 7 will alter that. A phone that makes you not use your phone? The problem with the other phones is people use them too much? Somehow, a Microsoft Phone will do what? Make you read faster.Make emails download faster. Have an extensible ruler to smack your knuckles when you exhibit rude behavior?

Awesome. The commercials are kind of cute but I wonder how many people will really remember what they are for?

The music is great.

Half a billion dollars on marketing and it does not demonstrate at all why we should buy the phone.

Of course, this reminds me of this golden oldey which was done as a spoof by a group in MS but is so true:

I feel safer, don’t you?

by banspy

US Offender Monitoring System Goes Offline Because Someone Didn’t Realize They Ran Out Of Storage
[Via Techdirt]

Apparently the system that tracks sex offenders and paroled prisoners and other convicts via electronic tags was totally unreachable for about 12 hours last week, because no one at the company who ran the system, BI, apparently noticed that they had run out of space on their servers. “In retrospect, we should have been able to catch this,” claimed a spokesperson for the company. You think? While the data as to their whereabouts was still collected, and the people being tracked were unaware of the lack of monitoring while it was happening, it still makes you wonder why so many governments trust such a system to a company that can’t even monitor when they’re running out of data storage space.

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So we have a private company that tracks criminals by electronic tags and they were not on top of their business enough to know that their servers were running out of space. I guess that was a big hole in their business plan.

Glad they fixed it after only 12 hours. Or so they say. How do we really know? The oversight was poor enough not to catch the server problem. I wonder who checks out these guys.

When a bank commits fraud and forges notary signature, it only gums up foreclosure proceedings. Here, criminals would have free reign. I hope someone is checking up on these guys.

Apple may rule the world because carriers do not get it

by { pranav }

Everything You Need to Know to Understand the Mindset of the Carriers, in One Short Quote
[Via Daring Fireball]

From a ZDNet story on Apple’s relationship with Australian carrier Telstra, quoting CEO David Tholey:

“We are Apple’s largest customer in Australia, yet with Apple we are still working through some areas in how to work.”

There you go. He thinks his carrier is Apple’s customer. Thus the conflict, because Apple treats iPhone owners as its customers.

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For every other phone manufacturer, the wireless carrier is their customer. But not Apple. And that makes all the difference.

That difference may be what changes the current paradigm, making Apple even more an integral part of our world.

Apple has made a lot of noise about not wanting to let companies control its future plans and destiny. It cut off Adobe Flash because of Jobs did not want them to have too much say in the direction of Apple.

How much more does Apple hate the control the carriers try and place on Apple’s future? That is why I think Apple is working to make carriers largely irrelevant for its future. Just as they are working on AppleTV to lower the hold that cable and others hold over Apple’s future, they are working towards the same thing with cell phones.

Combine White-fi networks and the huge server farm Apple has built and you have a pretty potent route around the carriers.

Slow motion detonation of nitroglycerine

Hitting droplets of nitroglycerin with a hammer in slow motion
[Via Boing Boing]

In the interests of science, the presenter from the BBC’s “How We Shook the World” hits a droplet of nitro with a hammer, over and over again, in slow motion. I am enscienced!

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I want to watch the whole thing. When is “How We Shook the World” on here? Here is one on blowing up a plastic wave:

White-fi in Houston

by izoom

Profs bring free “Super WiFi” to working-class Houston
[Via Ars Technica]

A couple dozen residents of the working-class Pecan Park neighborhood in Houston are about to do something few Americans have yet tried—access the Internet through a wireless connection that uses the empty TV-band “white spaces.” And the federal government is picking up the tab.

Rice University professors Edward Knightly, Robert Stein, Lin Zhong, and William Reed won a $1.8 million grant this summer from the National Science Foundation. Their goal: expand Rice’s free-to-use testbed network in east Houston from Wifi to white spaces.

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Looks like parts of Houston may be getting to experience the next thing, something that might make the wireless carriers tremble. White-fi approaches carry the possibility of accessing high speed internet nodes from a wide range, with better signal strength than we now have.

If we can do FaceTime through White-fi, why would we need a cell phone?

Cobblers does describe most science writing

by Adam Lerner

Guardian: The Sci Journalism satirist explains himself. If you’re in the biz, read this.
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

Remember that send-up of formulaic science reporting that Martin Robbins, science writer and blogger at the UK’s Guardian, put up last week and that promptly went viral and got noticed almost everywhere? If you don’t, see ksjt’s previous post, or go straight to Robbins’s post here. In this week’s Guardian he slaps himself a little sober, expresses amazement at this toss-off’s explosive spread (the pub’s most-read article of the week), and essays at length on what he was driving at:

• Guardian – Martin Robbins: Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix it.

I have quibbles around the edges and things I could discuss -such as not all his “scare quotes” are so scary or off-center from a study’s point – but the upshot: This is terrific. He puts well what I have sometimes referred to as the ability of superior reporters to take ownership of a story. Some commenters noted here that Part I last week was a quick and somewhat easy effort, i.e. perhaps on the shallow (if amusing) side. Read Part II – the author himself is not shallow. It’s BBC-centric, and thus illuminating in additional ways to US readers. It also is written in a land where there not only is the Beeb and a now-standard welter of on line outlets, but half a dozen or more daily, national newspapers with thriving, highly competitive science desks. Nonetheless the core message is universal to the daily science journalism trade

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I had mentioned the parody earlier. Robbins explained a little bit why many BBC articles fit the template – the same article has to be able to be reformatted into several different forms, resulting in a style that seems a little stilted in some of them, such as the web.

But, he hits some really important points, ones that many writers should listen to. Scare quotes is one. And this point is dead on:

The defence from some corners is that reporters should be neutral, that their job is simply to report what has been said without passing judgement on it or challenging it in any way.

Cobblers. Ed Yong recently explained how daft this is:

If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you’re not effectively ‘taking a side’, then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that’s your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.

A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion. A more reasonable excuse is lack of time. Full-time reporters are expected to cover breaking stories quickly, and churn out several articles a day. Under that sort of pressure, even if the journalist wants to delve deeper into the murky depths of a story they may simply not have the time to do it justice.

I have to look up cobblers. I’m going with Rhyming slang for ‘balls (testicles)’ especially since he uses bollocks later. The British have such wonderful slang.

He has many important tjhings to write. This one displays a very good perspective on science itself:

Another set of problems spring from the attitude journalists seem to have towards science – or at least those who aren’t still describing researchers with the faintly bigoted and dehumanising term “boffins”. Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.

Science is all about process, how a community of scientists provide context to a set of data resulting in new information leading to knowledge. Then the cycle starts again. Few articles provide the proper perspective on this, leading readers to see science as some sort of personality driven process, with every science paper being the pinnacle of research.

Science, particularly with complex, bleeding edge work, moves in fits and starts, sometimes having to move sideways or readjust itself in order to deal with new data. Science is about generating models to explain the world and then demonstrating whether those models hold up or not. It is seldom a one shot deal. The goal is to get a better understanding of the underlying principles.

And I am really excited to read that the BBC is moving to including links in its stories. The easiest way to tell whether a site gets it is whether they have links to other sites relevant to the story. I read and enjoy sites that give me easy access to the basic information, where I can vouch for myself the veracity of the story or find added facts that enhance it. I get frustrated and stay away from sites that require me to track down the paper myself.

The parody was wonderful but the essay ot led to is marvelous. I will be checking up a lot on Robbins because we have to support the 10% that are not crap.