Kindle-ing for the fire
Back in September (If you are going to be late for the party, be spectacularly late for the party), Amazon launched the new line-up of Kindles, at new price points.
- The base model Kindle, simply called the ‘Kindle’, only comes in a Wi-Fi model, exchanges the keyboard for a few navigation buttons, has a smaller battery, and comes with 2GB of storage, half the storage of the previous generation Kindle. This comes in at just $109, making is amazingly cheap and really taking any barrier to entry out of buying an eBook reader.
- The premier model Kindle, called the ‘Kindle Touch’, comes in both Wi-Fi and 3G models, exchanges the keyboard for a touch screen, is lighter, but in other specifications identical to the previous model. $139 for the Wi-Fi model, $189 for the Wi-Fi/3G model.
- The new ‘Kindle Fire’, an Android-based Kindle that is a more general purpose media device, is the new flagship model. Rather than the eInk screens of the traditional Kindle, this device has a 7” ‘Vibrant Color IPS’ LCD screen. $199 is still fairly cheap for a full-fledged Android Tablet.
I was amazed at how cheap the Kindle can now be built and bought for, and a great amount of credit needs to go to Amazon for pushing eBooks forward in a way that traditional publishers were unable and unwilling to, somewhat similar to what Apple did with iTunes to the music industry. I’ll leave you to ponder that further, and move on to the point of this post.
Visiting the main Kindle page reveals an interesting fact, there are in fact 5 variations on sale. Depending on where you visit from, the page may hide the ‘Kindle DX’ at the top of the page, but scrolling down should reveal the full line up in the “Compare Kindles” area which shows that the old 3rd generation Kindle is still for sale as the ‘Kindle Keyboard’ with the price at $139 for the Wi-Fi version and $189 for the 3G version (the old standard prices) and the ‘Kindle DX’ still at $379.
I initially thought that it was a really good thing that Amazon was still selling the old version. Personally, I’ve never had any use for the Kindle keyboard, but if you did prefer it you could still buy it; solving a complaint that people may have about the new versions; it seemed like that was the reasoning and fairly sound reasoning at that, especially considering there is still stock of these in Amazon’s warehouses.
But now that I’ve sung the praises of Amazon, it’s time to examine more closely and see if my praise is misplaced. Let’s look at what is available in Australia…
It turns out that the only new Kindle available in Australia is the base, non-touch, Wi-Fi only ‘Kindle’. You can also buy the old Kindle Keyboard as well as the Kindle DX.
As a side-note: It is a shame that the Kindle DX is still so expensive, this was supposed to be the Kindle perfect for textbooks, and it’s super expensive still. I think Amazon missed an opportunity to build a cheaper large screen Kindle. A Kindle DX without a keyboard and without 3G would have been fine and far cheaper (most Schools, Colleges, Universities and Workplaces now have Wi-Fi) and may have got some traction in this market; as it is its just far too expensive.
So is the reason Amazon won’t sell the new Kindle overseas because they have old stock and don’t value the overseas market nearly as much as the US market? I would say yes given the information available. While I accept that the Kindle Fire has reasons to be limited to the US, due to Amazon’s agreements with publishers for media being US only, I find it hard to fathom that the Kindle Touch has any such restrictions. Perhaps when they have dumped their old stock, they might deign to provide people outside the US with the new model, hopefully sometime before the next new Kindle refresh. As it is, as far as I see it, it’s another black mark against Amazon, and while they are so US centric they will never compete effectively with Apple worldwide. They are lucky that Apple is their own worst enemy when it comes to eBooks currently, or they might be far keener to woo overseas consumers.
While I was annoyed at Amazon last post, I did at least make the point that this was not their fault. In this case, I’m afraid the finger points directly at Amazon. If you do manage to get your hands on a Kindle Touch from the USA, you will be out of luck as it is locked to only allow US IP Addresses, and you will not be able to buy or transfer any books using the device outside of the USA. Say what you want about Apple, at least they don’t treat people outside the USA like second-class citizens when it comes to their hardware.
How much is a book?
Down the rabbit-hole
I had read this review on goodreads which made me chuckle about a book called “Mistborn: The Final Empire” by Brandon Sanderson, and decided to investigate further. Little did I know I would spend the next 48 hours in the dark underbelly of book pricing.
Trusty iPad in hand, I used the Amazon application to look it up. Preferring the electronic version to the printed version for reasons of space and convenience, I found myself on the Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, Book 1) [Kindle Edition] page, where I was informed:
Kindle Price: $7.99 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
Sold by: Macmillan
This price was set by the publisher
“Cheap enough to take a shot at.”, I figured “Might as well buy it”. Now an odd side effect of Apple’s App Store policy is that an app that is essentially a web page is still bound by the whole in-app purchasing rubbish (as stated before, a great example of Apple not doing the right thing by their customers). You cannot purchase Kindle books via this application, so I opened the browser, logged in and went to the page.
When I visited this same page via my browser, I was greeted by a friendly little message, where the “Buy Now” button normally is, that stated:
This title is not available for customers from:
Australia
This page, interestingly, also tells you “Pricing information not available.” where normally the price would be displayed.
My curiosity was piqued when I noticed the little information box still said there was a Kindle version available, but for $13.53. How strange…
The link takes you to the page for Final Empire: Mistborn: Book One (Mistborn Trilogy 1) [Kindle Edition] published by Gollancz and sold by Hachette Book Group, instead of the previous Tor Books edition sold by Amazon Digital Services. The price information states:
Kindle Price: $13.53 includes applicable taxes & free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
Sold by: Hachette Book Group
This price was set by the publisher
OK, so it’s published by someone else, but it’s quite a bit more expensive. Let’s investigate further by parking ourselves behind a US proxy server, and visiting the above pages as if we are in the USA.
The first page informs you of the same price as the iPad app when visited, but the second, Gollancz edition, now states:
This title is not available for customers from:
United States
Interestingly, the Tor published Mass Market Paperback edition is exactly the same price as the Tor published Kindle edition, and is available for me to buy, even in Australia. So the price differential might be because the Gollancz edition is more expensive and (surprise!) is the one available outside the USA, whereas the Tor edition is cheaper and the only available inside the USA. In this case, it’s easy to see why Amazon insists on the “This price was set by the publisher” disclaimer on their pages.
As a final note, setting the proxy to appear as somewhere in the Middle East changes the Gollancz Kindle edition to be:
Kindle Price: $9.59 includes free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
which tends to imply that the publisher is tailoring their prices to the region they are selling to(remember the “This price was set by the publisher” disclaimer we saw?).
The Other Amazon
Given that Gollancz is an arm of Orion Publishing Group, a UK company, the next stop on our adventure is to investigate whether our theory of this edition being more expensive than the Tor edition hold up. Let’s head to Amazon UK and see what we can find.
Here we see that only the Gollancz editions are available which makes sense; as we saw before, Tor is publisher inside the USA, Gollancz outside. Here is the Final Empire: Mistborn: Book One (Mistborn Trilogy 1) [Kindle Edition] pricing information:
Kindle Price: £4.99 includes VAT & free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
You Save: £4.00 (44%)
Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT.
This price was set by the publisher
and here is the The Final Empire: Mistborn Book One [Paperback] pricing information:
Price: £4.74 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions.
Notice how similar the price is inside the UK between the Paperback and the Kindle edition? This makes sense, encourages people buy the one they prefer, and mirrors the US situation closely. It also shows, in contrast to the US pricing, large discounts below the RRP for the Paperback, which may have an effect on our theory.
The Local Situation
Lately, local Australian retailers have been complaining that shopping online overseas, for items under AU$1000, is basically tax free as customers do not pay our 10% sales tax (GST) on these imported items, whereas local retailers have to pay this tax, making their prices more expensive than overseas counterparts.
I decided to check out the sites of the local big booksellers and get prices for the paperback and eBooks (of any type) and see how they compare to the previous prices.
Dymocks is one of the biggest book retailers left, and their site tells me I can buy the Tor Mass Market Paperback edition for AU$12.95 while the Gollancz Paperback edition can be bought for a whopping AU$24.99.
Borders, a purely online presence in Australia after their bankruptcy, will sell you the Tor Mass Market Paperback edition for AU$13.95 while the Gollancz Paperback edition comes in at AU$23.99. They also carry the Gollancz ePub eBook version for AU$12.99.
This seems to reinforce the idea that the Gollancz edition is simply more expensive, but as we’ll see soon, there is more to this story that that simple case, and the implications are worrying.
The Breakdown
Let’s tally this all up and convert everything to one currency and see where we stand. I used the XE currency converter to determine exchange rates used for calculation, which were:
1.00 USD = 0.967029 AUD
1.00 GBP = 1.51007 AUD
One thing to note is the sell-price vs. the RRP. Let’s quickly look into this for this particular book:
UK Gollancz Paperback RRP: £8.99 becomes: AU$13.58
US Tor Books Mass Market Paperback RRP: $7.99 becomes: AU$7.73
So now we can make a table to look a all the data so far, and add a baseline of the US Tor editions which we theorized would be the cheapest:
| Item | Price (AUD) | Difference |
| US Tor Paperback RRP | $7.73 | 0 % |
| Amazon US Tor Paperback | $ 7.73 | 0 % |
| Amazon US Tor Kindle | $ 7.73 | 0 % |
| Amazon US Gollancz Kindle | $13.09 | +69.3 % |
| UK Gollancz Paperback RRP | $13.58 | +75.7 % |
| Amazon UK Gollancz Paperback | $ 7.16 | -7.4 % |
| Amazon UK Gollancz Kindle | $ 7.54 | -2.5 % |
| Dymocks Tor Paperback | $12.95 | +67.5 % |
| Dymocks Gollancz Paperback | $24.99 | +223.3 % |
| Borders Tor Paperback | $13.95 | +80.5 % |
| Borders Gollancz Paperback | $23.99 | +210.3 % |
| Borders Gollancz ePub | $12.99 | +69.0 % |
Let’s look at this table and re-evaluate our theory. It turns out that the Gollancz Paperback is in fact the cheapest and comparable to the pricing of the Kindle version and both of these are comparable to the pricing of the US Tor editions due to heavy discounting in the UK.
Given the complaints voiced by local retailers, let’s see the effect GST actually has on the local prices by modifying the above rows to remove the GST effect entirely:
| Dymocks Tor Paperback | $11.77 | +52.2 % |
| Dymocks Gollancz Paperback | $22.72 | +193.9 % |
| Borders Tor Paperback | $12.68 | +64.0 % |
| Borders Gollancz Paperback | $21.81 | +182.1 % |
| Borders Gollancz ePub | $11.81 | +52.8 % |
As you can see, there is more at play here than the GST. These retailers are selling close to or at local RRP, and the prices set by the local publishers are way out of touch with reality.
Finally, A Summary
Our theory of the Gollancz editions being more expensive than the Tor editions seems to be quite valid if you ignore the massive discounts in the UK, but it turns out that the Australian book sellers are appreciably more expensive that the overseas retailers and can’t even compete with the standard UK RRP. The local retailers will not, or more likely cannot, reduce pricing down to where it needs to be to compete.
Kindle prices are set so as to not undercut the Australian local pricing (hence the “tailored” pricing from Amazon US), but even then, for some odd reason, the RRP of the Gollancz Paperback edition is bordering on double the eBook version, showing a lack of parity unique among the markets. I can only imagine this is to encourage the growth of the eBook market in Australia, at which time I don’t imagine the Paperback will drop in price; far more likely is that the eBook will increase in price.
Is the pricing of the eBooks fair? Compared to the US version, no. You could argue that the Gollancz Paperback is better quality than the Tor Paperback, and maybe that is the reason for the price differential between these editions, but that has little bearing on on why two, almost identical, Kindle books sold by Amazon differ in price so greatly. The pricing structure of eBooks is so artificial that it’s borders on ridiculous.
If I do end up buying this book, it won’t be the electronic version, it will most likely be the Gollancz Paperback version from Amazon UK (free shipping over £25 to Australia and New Zealand) and not any of the electronic editions because even with the cost to the manufacturer, publisher and retailer, I can still buy flattened, processed dead wood with ink bashed into it, and get it shipped to me in Australia from across the world, cheaper than a squirt of data which would take a minute to deliver and cost almost nothing to anyone involved.
Actually, after all this, I pretty much cannot be bothered getting the physical book. I’ll keep my money and spend it on something else, depriving an author, a publisher and a retailer of money they otherwise would have got from me had this whole, sad, state of affairs not existed. Imagine the outcome had I been able to hit the buy button that first time and received the eBook to my Kindle.
A truly international, fair-priced eBook only publisher is inevitable if this keeps up, or maybe Apple (or someone else) will give people powerful tools to build nicely formatted eBooks and publish them directly without going through a traditional publisher. The incumbents should beware, they may find themselves in an uncomfortable, indefensible position before too long.
What happened to Sony?
When I was writing my little diatribe on the iPhone, I tried to give a decent summation about Apple and Google and mentioned that I’d like to do this to other Companies. I thought the first cab off the rank would be Sony.
I’d like to preface what I’m about to write by saying that this is not an objective post, it is colored quite heavily by my frustrations with Sony; I want Sony to be something much greater than they have become. But let’s leave that for later.
Sony was THE brand when I was growing up. Sony products were sold at a price premium over other brands, but they gained the reputation for giving you what you paid for. Their products were better designed and made and lasted longer and did more than the other brands. Slowly, as they became dominant, they started to assert themselves in ways that were not good for consumers (remember the VCR format wars) but customers still tended to forgive them because they made good, nicely designed things.
Sony was an innovator, and was heavily involved in the creation of the CD, the 3.5 inch floppy disk (kids, ask your parents), Digital Video formats and helped drive Japanese industry to the forefront of electronics and manufacturing.
After the rise of other Asian manufacturers, Sony started to change everything good they were doing without changing everything bad they were doing. They looked at everything that made them unique and systematically removed them, except one thing: Price. Sony’s brand seemed to wane in general perception, but Sony has kept stolidly doing the same thing over and over. More importantly, they kept their attitude and the arrogance that built up from those days which was sadly misplaced now that they weren’t the company, and the landscape was not the same as, it had been 10-15 years earlier.
Fast-forward to today, and Sony posts a massive loss and Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony blames the earthquake, competition and a ton of other things which makes me think he doesn’t really know what is wrong. I know what is wrong, people like me are done with Sony as a brand.
I have owned a Sony PS3 for a long time. The way they’ve handled themselves, even aside from the hacking scandal, has been average at best. This very expensive machine was supposed to be a hub that did everything, games, video, pictures, but it stayed as one thing really: a game machine first and a blu-ray player a distant second. Don’t get me wrong, its a great game machine, but the whole cross-media bar navigation system is terrible, and the functionality of those other portions of it is patchy and can be hair-tearingly frustrating as the device spits obscure error codes at you. It can, in theory, stream DLNA video (in EXACTLY the right format, or another error code is diplayed) from your computer, but is broken in firmware upgrades so frequently that I’m ready to give up on it (I can buy a $150 blu-ray player that’ll do far more in terms of streaming). In short this device has never lived up to what Sony sold it as.
Add to this the hacking scandal, where Sony lied to its customer base and waited several days before owning up. The reduction of allowable PSN content sharing. The removal of PS2 backwards compatibility. The removal of other OS functionality. The EULA that forbids class actions (in the wake of the hacking scandal). The heavy handed approach to the security researchers that showed Sony’s own stupidity caused the PS3 system to be insecure. All these show a lack of respect to their customer base that is astonishing.
This is similar to another Sony device I own, the PSP. I bought this on the day it came out in Australia. I even drove a long way to pick it up and waited for the store to open in order to pick it up. But again, it was disappointing and oversold. The first-generation PSP has a battery life so short, you cannot play it for any length of time without it being plugged in; in short it was a non-portable portable. This device lasted about a month before it broke for the first (of many) times. I know far too many people with similar stories.
The headline game promised by Sony at the launch of the console, Gran Turismo PSP, took 5 years to be delivered which leads everybody, including me, to believe that Sony just flat-out lied at the launch and it never existed until much later. Talk about over-promising and under-delivering.
Given my experience with these two devices, Sony is going to have a hard time convincing me to buy a Vita and/or a PS4. I’d rather spend my money somewhere else, and that is the real problem for the Sony brand. If Sony cannot get someone who was basically brainwashed into believing that Sony was great from a young age to buy their products, what chance do they have of convincing younger people, without that lean towards Sony to do this?
Sony doesn’t respect their customers enough, oversells what they create and is now creating products less reliable than other manufacturers while still charging more. That is what went wrong; perhaps Sir Howard should not be so quick to blame earthquakes.
Password probability
After my post the other day, I ended up having a conversation about passwords which reminded me of this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/936/
This comic illustrates the password problem nicely for people that understand entropy in information theory, but I was attempting to explain this to someone without this understanding. I thought it might be good to demonstrate how quickly the number of combinations grow with password length versus how quickly they grow with greater combinations of symbols.
First, the raw numbers:
| length | style | ||||
| lower-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphanumeric | |||
| 4 | 456,976 | 7,311,616 | 14,776,336 | ||
| 5 | 11,881,376 | 380,204,032 | 916,132,832 | ||
| 6 | 308,915,776 | 19,770,609,664 | 56,800,235,584 | ||
| 7 | 8,031,810,176 | 1,028,071,702,528 | 3,521,614,606,208 | ||
| 8 | 208,827,064,576 | 53,459,728,531,456 | 218,340,105,584,896 | ||
now let’s look at the increase from a 4 digit lower-case password:
| length | style | ||||
| lower-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphanumeric | |||
| 4 | 1x | 16x | 32.33x | ||
| 5 | 26x | ||||
| 6 | 676x | ||||
| 7 | 17,576x | ||||
| 8 | 456,976x | ||||
This definitely looks good for password length versus the number of symbols, but we should check this further before jumping to conclusions. For good measure, let’s look at a 6 digit lower-case password:
| length | style | ||||
| lower-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphanumeric | |||
| 6 | 1x | 64x | 183.87x | ||
| 7 | 26x | ||||
| 8 | 676x | ||||
| 9 | 17,576x | ||||
It doesn’t look as good, it now took two characters to beat either symbol increase, but it’s still quickly outstripped. Let’s move the table up a bit and check 8 characters:
| length | style | ||||
| lower-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphabetical | mixed-case alphanumeric | |||
| 8 | 1x | 256x | 1045.6x | ||
| 9 | 26x | ||||
| 10 | 676x | ||||
| 11 | 17,576x | ||||
Again, the comparison improves the effectiveness of the symbol increase, but it still doesn’t take much to outstrip it with password length.
As you can see, while the increase of a single character on a lower-case password doesn’t necessarily beat moving to a mixed-case password, adding a few more characters quickly increases the number of permutations beyond that provided by the increase in the number of symbols as the growth rate is far greater.
So next time you use a password, don’t use something like 6d0nK3y8, use something like donkeybucketmondaytrumpet instead. It’s longer, but far easier to remember and more secure as well.
Know your keyspace!
I recently moved from Optus to Telstra for my mobile coverage in Australia because the Telstra plans have become more competitive and Optus’ network is woeful on the Central Coast.
Interestingly, when I set up my voicemail, I noticed that the PIN was six digits rather than four BUT there are some interesting restrictions. They are:
- No repeating digits;this means that the sequence 858 is fine, but 588 is not.
- No consecutive digits; this that 57 is fine, but 56 is not. I’m unsure whether 65 is acceptable.
This is, seemingly, an attempt to make PINs less breakable by brute force, but with my security hat on, it looked like it reduced the allowable combinations quite dramatically! So let’s take a moment to work this out. The number of combinations for a four-digit PIN is
10 · 10 · 10 · 10 = 104 = 10,000
In contrast the number of combinations for a six-digit PIN is
10 · 10 · 10 · 10 · 10 · 10 = 106 = 1,000,000
Quite an increase from two extra digits, now lets look at what happens when we just disallow repeating numbers. Every digit after the first now only has 9 combinations:
10 · 9 · 9 · 9 · 9 · 9 = 10 · 95 = 590,490.
With just this change, we almost cut the keyspace in half!
Now what happens if we disallow rising consecutive digits as well as consecutive; how many combinations do we have?
10 · 8 · 8 · 8 · 8 · 8 = 10 · 85 = 327,680
(This is slightly simplified as I’m not sure about the wrap around at either end and whether 01 and or 90 sequences are allowed, but this ends up at about the average).
It’s not looking great, is it? Let’s now disallow falling consecutive sequences as well and work out how many combinations we have now (Again, slightly simplified):
10 · 7 · 7 · 7 · 7 · 7 = 10 · 75 = 168,070
We have now lost more than 80% of the keyspace we stated with! So the rules enforced for the PIN means that an attacker has far less to attack than if the policies to improve security did not exist.
Moral of the story: Understand the side-effects of restrictions and what it does to the probabilities!
Blue Screen Analysis Time
Every now and then, I get a BSOD in Windows 7. It happens rarely but I like to find out who to blame. Ages age, I posted here about my solving a BSOD which implicated the VPN software I was using at the time. Now I’ve got another, let’s run through it again and see what we find.
1. Download the Windows SDK, and configure it to install the “Debugging Tools” item. (Don’t forget to use the x64 version if you are running Windows 7 x64)
2. Open windbg (Run as administrator so you can open the right crash dump)
3. File/Symbol File Path… or Ctrl+S and type in
srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
and press the OK button
4. File/Open Crash Dump… or Ctrl+D and type in
%Systemroot%\Memory.dmp
and press the Open button.
So, out spits:
BugCheck D1, {0, 2, 8, 0}
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for VBoxNetFlt.sys
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for Rt64win7.sys
Probably caused by : NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS ( NEOFLTR_710_18193+c867 )
Clicking the ‘!analyze -v’ link yields:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (d1) An attempt was made to access a pageable (or completely invalid) address at an interrupt request level (IRQL) that is too high. This is usually caused by drivers using improper addresses. If kernel debugger is available get stack backtrace. Arguments: Arg1: 0000000000000000, memory referenced Arg2: 0000000000000002, IRQL Arg3: 0000000000000008, value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation Arg4: 0000000000000000, address which referenced memory ... STACK_TEXT: fffff800`00ba1428 fffff880`00dee867 : 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 : 0x0 fffff800`00ba1430 fffff880`00dc1325 : fffffa80`0ffc1340 fffffa80`00000016 fffff800`00ba1600 fffffa80`00000000 : NEOFLTR_710_18193+0xc867 fffff800`00ba14f0 fffff880`0194bc75 : fffffa80`0f0fd850 00000000`00000000 fffffa80`0f0fd850 fffffa80`0f0fd850 : tdx!TdxEventReceiveMessagesTransportAddress+0x315 fffff800`00ba16e0 fffff880`0194584d : fffffa80`00000000 fffffa80`0f0fd850 fffffa80`00000000 fffff880`07a714a2 : tcpip!UdpDeliverDatagrams+0x155 ... MODULE_NAME: NEOFLTR_710_18193 IMAGE_NAME: NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS
So now let’s see what clicking ‘NEOFLTR_710_18193′ yields:
0: kd> lmvm NEOFLTR_710_18193 start end module name fffff880`00de2000 fffff880`00dfd000 NEOFLTR_710_18193 (no symbols) Loaded symbol image file: NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS Image path: \??\C:\Windows\system32\Drivers\NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS Image name: NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS Timestamp: Mon Apr 25 22:26:29 2011 (4DB56875) CheckSum: 0001DFE7 ImageSize: 0001B000 Translations: 0000.04b0 0000.04e4 0409.04b0 0409.04e4
Opening ‘C:\Windows\system32\Drivers’ and looking at the properties of NEOFLTR_710_18193.SYS shows the culprit:
Yep, you may have guessed it, another VPN related crash! I may have swapped jobs, and VPNs, but they still get me. I really wish Microsoft would give VPN writers some alternative so that they don’t have to install kernel filter drivers that crash my machine.
Last time, I was able to get an updated driver directly, but it looks like Juniper don’t believe in that so I’ll have to go through more official channels in order to get an updated driver.
Hope you enjoyed another look into BSOD analysis.
Back to iPhone (the Last Part)
On the home stretch now. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.
Syncing
Syncing on the iPhone relies on iTunes and nobody loves iTunes, especially on Windows where iTunes is appreciably more horrible an experience. While this imposes some limitations, it does work. Update your apps and add songs in iTunes and they just show up on the iPhone. One great thing is that you are not dealing with a filesystem, you pick what you want on your phone and it shows up.
In iOS5, the syncing story got a little more complex in that you can theoretically do everything via the cloud, but as that is in the early stages, it’s too early to tell how that experience will pan out, so I’ll reserve judgement for now. Apple did add WiFi syncing,OTA firmware updates and computer-less setup in a nod that some people plug their iPhones in once and only once in their lifetimes. All of these are welcome additions to the experience.
In talking about Android, there are a mix of ecosystems; the Google cloud, and some sort of sync/filesystem experience. Let’s talk about the latter first. My personal experience is with Samsung Kies and is not full of glowing remarks. Kies tries to hide the filesystem and be iTunes but fails miserably and actively gets in the way, worse still it only does a portion of the job. If you throw that away and just use the filesystem you will notice something, the filesystem is full of random folders full of rubbish and there is seemingly no standards for any of this. Applications can create folders at the root level and spray files around the volume almost at will. Media like music can be in one of several places, there is no ONE “this is where your music goes” folder. Someone told me it is because prior to Android 2.0, there were no standard folders and that some apps still support old OSs; this is what happens if you don’t drag the OS everybody runs up-to-date and enforce this. It goes without saying that there is no AppStore review process to pick this up.
The Android Google integration experience is really good, but I’m not sure it’s any better that the iPhone. I sync to Google for contacts, calendar and mail on the iPhone and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything from Android, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.
The Companies
Let’s talk about the actual companies themselves. In future I may jot some observations on the other companies in the electronics/computing space like HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Sony but that can wait for another day.
Apple
I’m under no illusions here, Apple is not perfect and neither was Steve Jobs. However there is a philosophy of “less is more” that seems to underlie their design. As I said before I want 50 working features rather than 100 half-working features and Apple OSs have always been less flexible but more intuitive because of this. There is a reason why in the computer market, everybody seems to actively emulate, if not copy, what Apple does. Smartphones had been around for years before Apple, but most people couldn’t have cared less; “Ultrabooks” is a term coined for the non-Apple Macbook Airs; The “tablet” space was almost non-existent until the iPad. Like them or hate them, this is how it was.
I think Apple could do with a dose of humility and listen to their community a bit more in some cases, but overall I’m satisfied that the company has a single direction and is driving towards that. Let’s not forget that they are immensely profitable, so they must be doing something right.
Apple fanboys, old and new, do nothing to help. Not everything that comes out of Cupertino is amazing, and the company does have faults. Every large corporation does, and closing your eyes to this is simply stupid.
This is a hard one, because Google is such a leader in a few key areas. The Google search engine is still the best, and Google Mail is used by so many worldwide. But the company feels so unfocused and either the Internet is getting worse or their search algorithms are breaking down (or being changed) but Google searching is far more of a pain that it used to be. Anything past the first 3 search results tends to be useless and the syntax with the removal of the plus operator made things less user friendly. This is far worse than it was even 18 months ago.
A lot of output from google seems like someone’s pet project. It’s launched, open-source and then just sits there. How may toolkits, new languages, runtimes etc. have they put out that almost never get touched by anyone, or at least anyone outside Google. Either they are driven entirely internally and pushed out (Android) or left to rot either with no maintenance or with a few random people adding random stuff to them, but no direction. Surely “openness” can be done better with a bit more effort.
Google lovers are just as bad as the Apple fanboys. This is not a religion, and both companies are there to make money from you. Apple seems capitalistic, but Google puts itself up as some collective, but in the end they are selling you advertising and making a ton of money.
Last Words
In the end, Android is the UNIX (or Linux) of smartphones; you can do almost anything on it, but it eats all your time tweaking it rather than just using it to make your life easier. The iPhone is, well, the Mac of smartphones; it’s the tool you use to get stuff done on the move without having to screw around with it. Some people prefer the former, but I, personally, find I don’t have enough time to waste on mucking about solving problems that have already,or should have already, been solved. And that, ultimately (after about 2500 words), is why I’ve gone back to the iPhone.
Thanks for listening to this stream of consciousness and I hope you found it mildly interesting and thought-provoking. I’m interested in hearing your comments on the points discussed, so leave a comment please.
I will attempt to write something soon about some other things, especially Microsoft and Sony, two companies struggling with the changing market and mindset of their audience.
Back to iPhone (Part 2)
Here is part two of the series for you, the first part is here.
The next part after this will mainly be some summary points and some opinion I feel should be put down about both companies.
OS Asthetics
No two ways about it, Android is not pretty. Android 4.0 attempts to fix some of this, but it still feels like it’s a skin over the ugliness behind. A lot of Android’s controls are modal, which shows its heritage of a platform initially for low-resolution phones and so there are constant sheets popping up in front of the main display which disrupts the flow. The scroller thumb also has to be one of the most annoying controls in any mobile OS. In addition, even though users can install new keyboard interfaces, the iPhone keyboard is still more responsive and has better hit zones and heuristics that any keyboard I could find on my Android, and believe me I tried a lot of keyboards.
I find the asthetics of the iPhone UI pleasing and, as I’ve said before, things tend to be consistent so you rarely have the “What do I do here?” moment. Input tends to be inline and the drag scrolling (with the velocity component) works as it should.
The iPhone shines here, you don’t spend time thinking that it works so well. The best interface is not one that someone consciously loves, it’s the one someone doesn’t notice. When people notice your interface, it tends to be because it gets in the way or some aspect of it annoys them.
The App Store
Here’s the topic I wanted to avoid.
Apple’s App Store is not fantastic, but it’s pretty good and reasonably well laid-out. Search is annoying at times, Genius seems random, but by and large it does what you expect. The policies put in place make it a closed ecosystem and in some ways that is good. Apps bought through the Apple App Store do what they say they do and they tend to be of pretty good quality due to the review process put in place. Although I concede that there is probably a majority of semi-useless rubbish on the store (preempting this comment), there is so much in there that there are a huge amount of quality, well supported and, yes, cheap applications for your iPhone. I still believe that some of Apple’s policies (like the in-app purchasing and Kindle saga) hurt consumers more than anyone else and I wish they’d change their mind on this, but it is their ecosystem, their rules, and you need to understand that if you want to take part. Apple has softened some of the other policies that previously annoyed me, such as the virtual machine restrictions, which has shown that Apple can listen to their customers and developers on some occasion.
Now. The Google Android App Store. Hmm. Before some smart-Alec decides to tell me that “the Amazon store kicks butt dude”, I’d like to point out that I’m not in the US, therefore due to some reason (US branded data flow?) I cannot buy and be sent electronically an application for my device from Amazon (even though they can send me processed dead trees by plane to my door), so the only real option is Google’s Android App Store. So. Here we go.
So this is an “Open” ecosystem. Why is it so hard to use, navigate and find decent software? There are few compelling apps (that are not games) in the store and so many, even top-selling, applications are poorly supported, ugly and crash all the time it’s just not funny. The major good applications are official ports of iPhone applications and/or sometimes copies (or blatant rip-offs) of iPhone applications. There are even copies of the same application, under different names, submitted by different people and there is seemingly no recourse to the poor person who actually spent the effort to write the application. The Android App Store provides the application uploader with the ability to exclude certain devices in a nod to the fact that compatibility between handsets is a problem. As for the “New Applications” section, just don’t go there. There seems to be no oversight in the store, I doubt anyone at Google spends any time or attention on it and who knows what is ending up in there. The trust factor started to be such a problem that I stopped buying, or even downloading free, apps altogether.
This brings us to a common topic between both these stores, which is the race to the bottom on price. If your application that you wrote sells for $0.99, how many copies do you need to sell to recoup your time including the time it takes to support the application? As a developer, I cannot believe that people expect this, and on both stores I see comments like “$5 is a rip-off for this”. Really, you can buy a cup of coffee and a donut for that amount, but an application that you may use for the next month is not worth $5? That shows that some people just don’t value their time.
The Android store is the worst; if you go to almost any paid app and look at the reviews, you’ll see things like “This app sucks and is too expensive, try ABCDE which is a clone of this I wrote and is free!” (Well you would if you could see the reviews through all the spam that is posted in there). The stereotypical Android user puts little value on paid software and wants everything for free. I’d hate to try and sell an app there.
Development
Here is where Android should have a chance with me. Why? Because I HATE Objective-C. I find the syntax unappealing and the extreme looseness of the C underpinnings awful. Late binding all function calls is an odd thing when you must compile a monolithic app and serves little purpose but to slow down the application needlessly. Android applications are based on Java and I like using the Java language on the whole. It’s syntax is easy for most people and I’m a fan of the idea of virtual machine compilation.
What I don’t like is the Android development environment. Let me state this clearly, I dislike Eclipse with an intensity I can barely describe (When I found out that a job I was going for was mainly Java, my first question was “Do I have to use Eclipse?”). Aside from that, UI layout follows that stupid expandy layout panel method which I’ve come to loathe from Swing and other Java UI toolkits. Testing your application on the emulator is painful. It’s slow, the debugger drops out unexpectedly and it takes forever to start.
One thing I’ll give some great credit to Apple for is XCode. I can code, build GUIs easily, debug, profile, simulate all in XCode and it feels easy. It has so many performance tools that are easy to work that come with it that you find yourself profile “just to check” which no-one ever does (people are prone to pretending they are dying in order to avoid profiling application performance). While some of the changes in XCode 4 were jarring, it quickly became apparent that some things had become much easier because of them.
If XCode does not make programming Objective-C fun for me, it at least makes it palatable. I tend to drop into straight C or C++ for the real guts of an app still, but I can do a passable job. GUI layout in Eclipse, however, makes me tear my hair out in frustration in contrast. In the end, you drop to XML, tweak like mad, and it still looks terrible.
Most importantly, even with the indirectness of Objective-C function calling, the people from Apple have made a pretty fast and responsive language to write applications in and at the moment, even on a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM chip, the Android Dalvik/Java thing still feels slow and laggy in comparison.
Stay tuned for the final part…
Back to iPhone (Part 1)
The’s a well-known quote which states that it takes a brave man to admit he’s wrong.
April last year, I wrote of what I saw as Apple’s hypocrisy and egoistic practices and how I hoped someone would challenge them to make them more aware of this and hopefully drive them away from the worst of these.
In order to support this ideal, I bought an Android phone and embraced the Google ecosystem, thinking that the “open” and “collaborative” atmosphere I thought existed would be a great change after the “closed” and “secretive” atmosphere of Apple.
It turns out, I was wrong. While some of what I wrote before I still believe is true, it turns out that the some of the alternatives are as bad if not worse. I recently bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 4S and the great experiment is, if not over, at least suspended for a time.
In the next couple of posts, I’m going to outline some of the reasons why I went away from Android. Let’s start with a look at the “philosophy” of the platforms:
User Experience Philosophy
If you know how to use one iPhone, you can pick up any other iPhone and use it; you can navigate, launch applications, make phone calls just like you can on your own phone. Just as important to the experience is that applications have a consistent look and feel to them and things tend to look and work the same way in any application you run. This is a good thing, nobody likes a moving target. The iPhone resolution is consistent (iPhone 4 resolution is exactly double of the older phones) so things look the same on an old iPhone and a new iPhone.
This is in stark contrast to Android where even before you install any applications of your own you are dealing with things like Motorola’s (horrible) MOTOBLUR or HTC’s Sense which change, sometimes quite radically, the default experience. In addition, Android phone vendors tend to install their own replacement default applications (Samsung’s Music application is actually worse than the default Android music application shipped with Gingerbread). Applications on Android do their own thing and behave in inconsistent ways. In addition, Android was build for a range of resolutions and aspect ratios and some application are just unusable unless you have the right combination of these.
Hardware Philosophy
It’s safe to say that the iterations of the iPhone hardware are conservative, but I think this is a good thing. To take a counter example, let’s look at the launch of the Motorola RAZR Android phone. For a brief second, it was the headline Android device when it launched on November 11, 2011. Six days later, not even a week, it was trumped by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which introduced yet another new resolution and yet another different aspect ratio).
In contrast to this, there’s the iPhone which comes out once a year, regular as clockwork, so you don’t need to play guessing games as to whether to buy a certain model at a certain time. Also, although unstated, there seems to be a philosophy of a complete redesign every couple of years and a refinement of the model in the middle. There is a confidence that their hardware design will still be relevant a year later; when was the last time you saw an advert for a 12-month-old phone in media – the only example I can think of is the iPhone.
Software philosophy
While the claims of “fragmentation” of the Android platform may be overblown, there is certainly a different philosophy when it comes to firmware updates. I like the fact that Apple encourages everyone to run the latest operating system with the associated fixes. This stops people from becoming frustrated when there is a bug in the OS and you cannot update to a firmware revision where the problem is fixed (without jailbreaking and custom firmware). I believe this moves the platform forward as a whole quicker that otherwise would happen; features can be added for everyone to use, and for developers, APIs can be deprecated quicker and new APIs introduced.
Android as an OS is frustrating. In some cases, core functionality of the Android platform is broken and there have been some quite nasty bugs that are still in Android – the media stack especially is problematic for me personally. I want something that works, and my definition of works means that I do not spend several hours working around things just to play a song with metadata and cover-art without crashing my entire phone. It makes the OS feel like it has 100 half-finished features instead of 50 finished features. I prefer the latter.
Android true believers will tell you that you can “root” the device and install any firmware you want, and there are heaps of custom firmware images around that fix these problems, but how much do you trust some anonymous person on the internet to bake a firmware image is not a trojan, or does not have a back-door or security hole in it?
The “openness” of the Android platform is largely an illusion from what I see; development happens internally and is pushed out to people, but there seems to be little ability to get external changes wrapped back into the core platform (which others have complained about), and there is almost no good information about how to develop and debug at the lower levels of the OS if you do. Still more concerning, there is no governance model to encourage (or require) people to contribute to the core platform, and no requirement for vendors to stick to the core source, so the traffic appears to be largely one-way. You cannot help but feel that this allows Google to control the platform in a way that belies its “open” tag.
That’s enough for now. Next time I’ll delve into Look and Feel more, Syncing, the App Store, and the Development experience.
Archeology
“What’s this thing?”
“What’s what?”
“This.”
“…Oh… I think it’s a blog.”
“A blog?”
“Yep. Not very well written and mainly ranting, but a blog nonetheless.”
“It looks really…”
“Crusty?”
“I was thinking old, and decaying.”
“Yes… and crusty. I would wash my hands after picking that up.”
“Hmmm… I’ll just put it back where I found it then, shall I?”
“It’s probably for the best. Who knows, maybe those responsible will return one day.”
“You think so?”
“As far as you know… Who can say? Besides, I’m not dragging that thing anywhere.”
“Alright… Let’s get out of here.”
“Right”
