Category: Me Myself&I

The title couldn’t be truer: If You Already Hate Windows 8 Then You Hate Technology.

If you’re not intrigued by Windows 8 and Metro, if you can’t recognize that it’s a big leap forward, if you’re not excited about what it means for you, personally then you don’t really care about technology; you care about brands. You care about platforms. You care about politics. You’re a fanboy.

Bam. And I work in this environment. Fuck me.

Guys, it’s retarded. The Windows Phone/Windows 8 Metro UI is great, no question about it. The tile system with direct information is much better than a boring icon grid. Sorry. You’ll see when you’ll try for a while.

But it’s made by Microsoft. So the tech world just can’t process that the company they love to hate is doing a better job in UX than the companies they love to love. Some people are still bitching that XP is lame and yet are still running the ten year old OS. Retards.

It’s plain sad to see someone saying “so I tried Windows Phone/iPhone/Android, the Windows Phone is the best but Jesus it’s made by MS so your cock is going to fall and your kids will die in a fire”.

I thought we were not in high school anymore. It’s business and innovation is welcome from anywhere, shutting it down just because it comes from one particular company or another is so childish, it’s embarrassing! I can’t believe I have to protest that shit.

How a developer/designer -yes you too Adobe sluts- could not get excited at a brand new UI running through new devices like Kinect, tablets, phones and not-so-distant Surface, for all of which you can use the language you want to build cool stuff, using the computer you want, sorry they were probably short on blow and hookers… It is exciting, like the iPhone was too. But bigger, by scope and possibilities. The only thing that should be booed is the future Windows Appstore and its 30% BS. That, sucks.

There’s so much denial, for obscure personal, stupid reasons (“loved that brand hated that brand when I was young” shit).

It’s the same in the sub-tech world that is game development. Developers defend Nintendo to death but there’s nothing to defend right now: Wiiware/DSiware are more than underwhelming, developing for Nintendo today is a terrible experience compared to others and the 3D in the 3DS was LAME. It was gimmicky. It wasn’t as big as touch screen or motion control. We all know that. It was Nintendo saying “shit, we are printing money with the Wii/DS but we need to stay at the top; let’s do something trendy”. Wrong move. High price, wrong, showing the world that you expected to make a shitload of money out of tech demos and remakes. Sony called, they want their business plan back.

Nintendo is just getting old and greedy as every single leader in the tech world is getting at some point. They might get back, they might not. We shouldn’t give a damn you know? Nintendo has sold more games and more game systems than anybody else in history, why the hell would I care that much about them making mistakes, because they don’t want to see or listen? I don’t. I want them scared so that they move their asses.

Meanwhile, a dude from Sweden offers three fucking files on his website, minecraft.exe minecraft.zip and minecraft.jar, makes insane money and people are like “oh my god I never thought it could work, I always wanted to develop for [that brand] anyway so I win” . No, you don’t. You are interested in the social status of bragging about developing for [that brand] and don’t care about the business part, crucial for your job. You can’t afford to say I don’t give a damn, see current layoffs. And the business is massively shifting, terraforming these days.

How development became so shallow that you have to code in the trendy language du jour or a specific platform if you want to have some friends? What happened? Did the web inject this superficiality?

It should not be about the name or emotions tied to a brand, it should be about what tools are offered to us, the creators. Nothing more, nothing less. We have to review the tools available and compare them to build these crazy complex experiences and computer games. If Nintendo had helped game developers like MS or Apple did instead of being a bitch who doesn’t even want to talk to indie developers who don’t own an office, they would be in a situation where they’d have a clue today.

I never wanted to work on Xbox or 360 that much, but I knew they were dead serious by looking at their second gamepad, while Sony the King was dicking around with a boomerang. I saw Apple having no clue about what to do with their iPod Touch until they saw that people were downloading so many games. They hate games at Apple, they never, ever got it. They probably think games as things chimps do.  As long as it allows them to sell hardware… Anyway, it was pretty cool to make a game on their stuff because at least they understood that ease of access to build and sell apps was kind of a big deal.

I wanted to love Android development and it turned out to be pretty bad in many ways. I’m still watching.

I don’t care about brands and loyalty, I care about what all of these huge players have to offer, if they are really trying and not just faking it, and what I can do with that. So when I see an opportunity like the new Microsoft eco-system is showing, and that people are dismissing it just and only because of the “Microsoft” part I’m like, “what a bunch of whore ass bitches”. Competition kicked MS ass, they got busy and brought something nice and innovative. It should be positively welcome. That’s how things move forward.

It’s funny because tech people are the most atheist-like people I know and yet, they are more religious and afraid of change than a scientologist mixed with a zionist.

For real.

Panic

Fixed my headphones. I know! It seems so lame to care about that but I swear, wearing the same pair for ten years almost daily creates a habit to the most precise organ the human body possesses: ears.

This is a Sennheiser HD200, a 60-80 bucks at the time “DJ” headphones. The thing is lightweight, has a great FLAT frequency response and protects from outside noises. It’s perfect to monitor my work. they’re also very easy to disassemble.

By the way, a flat frequency response should be what you search for when you want to buy headphones or speakers because you want to be the closest possible to what the artist wanted to paint, right? And you also don’t want to feel tired as fuck listening to over-EQed music. So screw Dre shit and any hardware pushing basses so much. You want bass? Dude, pump up the volume. Good headphones almost sound lame. Flat. You got it.

So the right ear stopped working, just like that. I’m like OK, I have other headphones so I try them… Holy shit. It’s like having someone you don’t know in your bed. Gross. I had to put them down 30 seconds later. Who the fuck cut the entire mid-range?

Sennheiser discontinued this particular model. Bummer. I don’t understand why but even the damn manual isn’t available anymore. I saw one pair on eBay. And I see people searching about them. /saves eBay searches

The new 200 series are awful, cheap, not as comfy or even good-looking. I just don’t get it because their technology and speakers are so good. And before the HD200 they had even more comfortable same-looking headphones that of course, I couldn’t get my hands on at that time. Discontinued!

I guess you can’t have a growing “niche” business with products that last more than ten years… The equivalent of my HD200 is a HD25. It costs 200 bucks.

A global study shows that more gender equality leads to more sex. It seems pretty logic to me. That’s what feminists always said about heterosexual relationships, they just didn’t market that part enough I guess. Didn’t want to look “slutty”. It’s complex.

Anyway the end of the article is interesting to me:

"In countries where women are at a big disadvantage, they restrain sex, so the price is high and men make a lifetime commitment to support them to get sex," Baumeister says. "Men will do whatever is required for sex."

Men do whatever is required for sex and yet they don’t even know their own body well enough to know that they can achieve unbelievable orgasms on their own. They think that a juicy vagina is required to have the best sex and yet they never try a different approach other than simulate the said Holy V with warm noodles (never did that though, I’m too lazy; also, it’s pretty fucking gross). I am no longer in this situation since I found my p-spot and learned how to stimulate it. You guys are missing out so much I want to punch you in the throat for harassing so many women when you should just stick your finger in your butt and shut up.

You wouldn’t have to trade anything, you would have a “true” relationship, would it be for a night or ten years. It wouldn’t be based on a ridiculous “deal”. God, am I the fucking only heterodude to see benefits from the situation of knowing more?

Homosexuals, bisexuals know that. They use their clitoris or prostate stimulation a lot, they don’t just think penis hole penetration. Sometimes I believe that it makes them superior compared to people stuck in this awful sex/protection, protection/sex trade which is the traditional and no longer required way to have a relationship, thanks progress. But in the collective mind it is still the way to go, unlocking every kind of physical and sexual abuses that men usually perpetrate much more than women. It legitimates that shit, guys. You need sex? Just fuck yourself.

It’s crazy that we have so much information about stupid solar systems light years from us, but female orgasm remains an evolutionary mystery? In 2011, you are kidding me right? It’s insane how men are full of resources to send a space ship to the fucking moon but can’t touch theirs without screaming like little girls.

I think we all know who the pussies are, out there.

At some point after reading about economic history of the West, it seems that everything went down with the 80s.

It also seemed like the 50s/60s/70s -what we call in France Les Trentes Glorieuses- were like the best years ever. Looking at these charts you can see very distinctly why: redistribution of wealth was successful, people were working more, for more and everything was cool. Everything made sense.

I love to keep in mind that my grandparents and parents grew up and prospered with this environment. But you can already see on the first graph that at the start of the 60s, productivity was gaining traction faster than pay, thanks machines! It was almost invisible but it was happening. It’s amazing to see that it follows social progress or lack of:  after 68-70 the hippie fantasy is over and oh, this is where we’re starting to get screwed with a productivity rising much faster than pay, again thanks to machines and social consciousness withdrawal.

But that was nothing. I’m born in 1979. Look at the motherfucking graph! The next 30 years define what it is to not give a fuck and screw people over. Now we’re talking.

Today, I mean it’s really hard to not think about giving up just about everything. Older generations don’t or barely understand the insane world, paradigm we live in: we are asked to be multi-talented, to work a lot for a small pay and to not be upset about the fact that we’re struggling to get a place to live. I mean, if all that stress and work were paying, I’d be OK with it. That’s what happened during the “Glorious Thirty” in France and the West.

But mastering so many skills, fighting for a good pay -within your company, with your client or with taxes- and fight to have a place, probably making yourself bleed to get it… It doesn’t make sense and I feel so angry about that. Because we obviously know the solutions but the system profits a bigger generation than ours…

The good part is, I think it made us tough as shit. We’re capable of facing problems, we’re starving to find solutions and truth, we’re extremely flexible and these are strengths that both generations around us -boomers and Yers- don’t really have. These are good survival skills so we shall continue to do our thing and just stick to it.

“The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?”
Douglas Rushkoff

Looking at the past 60 years and thinking about all the kids you guys are making, I’d say we need to shift pronto.

Word? Word.

I don’t know how to describe the feeling. I’m jetlagged ten hours in the future from the Pacific coast but my stream of information still comes from the past, from the US. Which is weird because it’s news, from Facebook to rss. It’s like total reverse from how time works on Earth. I’m in the future, getting the now talking about the future, from the past. It’s freaking me out.

Before when you were changing time zone you didn’t have this problem as you would have a strict cut from the location you were before. With our digital lifestyle, it’s so much blurrier. And I have both timezone wired in my brain now. The vicious part is that it’s more comfortable to wake up and read the news from the day before (which are the news of the day too, a looong day) than having them during the real day, compromising your productivity. It’s cool to end the day and have the time to check tweets and links from the US, the source control of 90% of what’s happening online (most of the interesting links I see in my US Twitter stream show up in my French Facebook stream, a week to three months later). I can really dig a subject instead of saving it for later that is, never go through it when I’m in California.

Problem is, it’s not that sane.

I’m here in France with my English name, my English writing, my English thoughts, my English reading, my English music and a hell lot of English culture. Which obviously raises the following question in the neutral-logic part of my brain: “so… What are you doing here again?”

The line between “it’s complicated” and “what a clusterfuck” is often thinner than expected.

Sun coming up Europe

It’s kind of something to eat some not bad cheese omelette fruit and yogurt with coffee, while comfortably watching the Earth waking up at 30 000 feet. It’s hard to beat that sunrise view and it makes me think about the engineering of planes, the past knowledge and that humans sort of kick ass with their mechanic birds. Isn’t it amazing? God damn it always gets me.

Heat in Paris felt like having a 15,000 t warm blanket stuck in my face, classic. Funny how the same temperature doesn’t feel the same at all.  After ten weeks sans water from the sky in L.A. a tropical storm decided to dance in Paris tonight. Feels better already…

That’d be great if UPS could ship my place to CA.

Weird to think that there’s so much information in saliva.

I think I’m scared. Here I have this 23andme DNA kit ready to go. This DNA kit would give me answers about predisposition to disease and also where I come from, pretty exactly.

32 years later and finally, I have the opportunity. But I’m right in the middle tendency I-don’t-want-to-know right now.

For disease we’re now pretty sure that genetics play a small role in the life of an individual compared to his/her environment which tells much more, as Dr House knows it.

And for knowing from where I come from… I’m scared it’s going to change me. Not knowing this fact was the first playground for my imagination when I was a kid. Where do I come from… Awesome I can be whatever I want! Let’s say my grand grand grand-father was a pharaoh and then my mom was from the US OK? Or maybe an alien, a black Super Saiyan. Yeah sounded good.

I’m scared the results would give me a sense of affiliation that is just not relevant to my life. From the beginning until now I feel that this reduced sense of affiliation gave me an advantage, I get to see the big picture much faster and clearer.

Let’s take an example with a situation where people feel a need for affiliation: 9/11. Now across the world, some people said it was horrible and some people felt that it was right. Some people created conspiracy theories and some others, like me, are like “this shit is not so tight”. There’s no feeling, just no definitive answer.  Now if I was affiliated to a part of this world let’s say, Egypt or Tunisia, that would probably make my blood turn differently and affect my thoughts.

Another example, when I was a kid and would receive a French ”son of whore” insult. In my mind it was like “well, it’s technically totally possible that it is the case”. I was already “above” these primitive concepts of insults, it very soon in my life felt like afraid puppies barking at me or each others. Directly in the position of looking at a system instead of being involved in it. The big picture. Often in my face.

It’s great to be “out” of this sense of affiliation, by design. It’s great to not be like well, most of you. Now I need to exploit that shit.

Six months that I use it daily for various tasks. I have now enjoyed the market, bought apps, bought games, played with more services etc.

299 bucks unlocked on Amazon. 

What to say? It’s a fantastic product. The phone, a Samsung Omnia 7 is flawless. I made it fall on a brick ground so I fucked up a corner but everything works fine. Only rebooted it after updates so yes, the OS is stable.

+ + +

-The dedicated camera button is more than great. Weirdly, kind of a game changer.

-The Metro UI. Not only in itself -sleek, fast- but because it becomes truly, deeply personal. I take pictures on vacation, people change their pictures on their Facebook and all that gets alive on the tiles of the home screen. The more you have content, the more it feels personal. The picture hub is mesmerizing -it shows up random pictures you took on the home screen-, it’s simple but absolutely perfect in terms of experience because it’s automatic customization. I never felt that kind of engagement with a device before. It’s like after a while, the UI sweats you.

-The back button: once you get the back button (it works as a browser back button and not like back buttons on Android/iOS), it is a joy to use it. Imagine you’re in the middle of a deep research in your Ebay app. You push the home button, go to your email, answer something. Instead of going back to the home screen, re-launch the app, retrieve your search you instead just tap the back button twice and you’re back to your search in Ebay. No multitasking sucking your battery like a vampire and yet, fast, fluid app switching. Can’t go back -haha- after tasting it.

-The battery life: extremely good, the best I have ever seen on a smartphone with a huge screen. Every time I think it’s going to die it keeps up for quite a while. Sweet.

-The marketplace is better than I expected it would be. All the standard apps are here and the overall quality is I would say between the iPhone and Android but closer to the iPhone. Prices are higher (3 bucks instead of 1 for example) which is a bit annoying for users, but a great deal for developers. For now it drives quality up and creates a better relationship than the race to the bottom and bad schemes low prices apps are allowing.

– – –

–The marketplace weird region lock: you sign up on the phone with a hotmail address and mine is US, hotmail.com but my credit card is French: can’t buy anything. I can get all the free stuff and trials. I know it’s a relatively not common problem but that’s just lame. Totally fixed.

-The marketplace confusing mess outside the phone. You have zune.net, marketplace.windowsphone.com and xbox.com, three websites with different names for three different things: music and videos, apps and games with ID identification through hotmail or live.com. Let me tell you: unify the fuck out of this shit! It is fluid on the phone, but it’s awful on the internet (different UIs, emails from zune/xbox/hotmail etc).

Despite a great service in the US, Zune is a dead brand and a lame sounding word, sorry. Xbox is a strong hardcore gamer-related brand and you can’t change that, especially with this word, Xbox. So I would use a live.com/music live.com/apps and live.com/games, one account, one interface. Even better, offering people to only use Facebook to connect to all that because the Live website interface is horrendous. You have to make it much more cleaner and simpler. Which leads me to…

-Skydrive. Great service but god, please make it cleaner and simpler, drag and drop from the homepage, a right click menu or even a special command to send files automatically from Windows, I don’t know. Also why calling the desktop app “Live Mesh”? Brand/service: Skydrive. Download Skydrive for Windows Desktop (built-in for Windows Phone), is that difficult? Is that hard? Geez. It’s depressing to see such embarrassing mistakes in terms of marketing and usability when on the phone it’s so sumptuous. I guess and hope changes are coming.

-No built-in screen capture tool. Again, how is that possible to miss a small feature that people love to use. /facepalm Is it to save battery life (no background task)? Sometimes I wonder because the excellent battery life has to be paid somewhere.

-Lazy developers who try to make a quick buck with lame ass apps. Come on, son.

-I wish you guys in Redmond would buy Flickr and integrate it so that pictures are taken and sent there without any sort of effort. Or at least please make their app because though it’s beautiful, it sucks quite a bit (weird UX, weird crashes).

That’s about it. The next phone update, said to bring in 500 new features is about to land next month. Yes. YESyesyesyesyes…

A lot is going on these days about ecosystems and I think the dream of One Ecosystem to Rule Them All aka The American Matrix Dream will not really happen.

Two Worlds

Technologically, we need both hardware and software. The more both can communicate and work together reliably, the better. The more consistent they are, the better. So it makes sense for a lot of analysts to say that the company who has the hand on both can provide the greatest experience and thus, the biggest success. Right.

The equation

Problem is, hardware is made in Asia, software is made in the West. This is a crucial point. Nobody can really compete with Asia’s 30 years of experience building computers, motherboards, graphic cards, monitors etc. We can’t, just on a worker salary basis. It’s pretty much the opposite for software with the West having a huge advantage and experience since Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley. Despite the availability of a robust open source OS, nobody in Asia really conquered the world with its software (except for Nintendo, who does hardware too). But they are listening, trying, testing (HTC Sense). And when a company like Apple ask Asia to build beautiful devices, Asia learns, copies and does it more and more precisely  (Samsung’s laptops and lawsuit for their successful Galaxy Tab) and innovates too (Asus netbooks, EEE Pad).

It’s a fascinating relationship where I believe the separation will stay this way: It will take a long time before Asian job cost equals the West one so that a Western company can really invest the hardware department and it will take a long time before Asia figures out how the West works in front of a monitor (massive culture shift there, very clear when comparing Western/Japanese game developers and their creations). Everybody needs everybody.

Therefore the scenario of a  few companies having control over their own hardware/software ecosystems, vertically, seems unlikely. There are way too many players in the game and the patent mess will maintain a very slow progress.

The past

Every single closed architecture, super great closed ecosystem controlled by one company died, but one (resurrected through the music lie of “being fair” with artists via iPod/iTunes back in 2003). Technology follows Darwin’s law: the one who can adapt faster and more than the others wins. Apple is a good case as the once really closed company had to switch to Intel and make iTunes available on Windows to touch more people and more than just survive, make an insane profit and be the company we know today. It’s not just about innovation, there’s a fine balance to find between design and business model.

So an ecosystem controlled by one company either die through the complexity or overhead of two distinct businesses in one (hard/soft), or subtly, massively change. That fact plus the Western-software/Asia-hardware separation makes sure that ecosystems can only work through multiple companies and partners through multiple countries at huge scales (I’m talking about the half a billion computer/phones sold every year, not the 28 million iPad or 100 million Wii sold to this day). At smaller scales, it’s a double-edged sword: When it works, it’s awesome (Wii) but when it doesn’t, hardware makes it hard to be flexible (what to do with the 3DS now?). At bigger scales it becomes very risky.

The future

I think we’ll see hardware manufacturers offering full hardware ecosystems (cloud@home+sensors+monitors+sound bars+tablets+phones) like Ikea is selling full kitchen and then you will have the usual players for the full software ecosystem part: Microsoft, Google and always Linux, which will probably get more stronger as generations of computer wizards will emerge. And when Asia will be capable of producing software for the entire world, the West will probably be able to produce hardware too. We’ll then see what happens. A new loop in our history.

At the end what really counts is the software, which runs the world.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs just resigned as CEO of Apple. Interesting.

CPU wars, 1080p features and Display-Lightning 9000 ports, whatever. Tablets fail on one major point: our human interface heritage.

READING

One of the very best and natural use of a tablet is to read something. On one hand it’s unreadable outside or not different from a laptop (iPad), on the other hand it’s B&W (Kindle). E Ink is awesome but just barely started to feature colors.

I’ll buy a tablet the day I can read Akira in Palm Springs without a problem. We’re a couple of years from this.

Reading anything, anywhere. That’s the goal of the perfect tablet. 

WRITING

I can’t believe how device makers are slow at taking small risks and set trends (I would have pointed out how iPads are exactly for big fat baby fingers and play on that). Of course the stylus is awesome. Not in itself but because humans have wrists, absolute marvels of mechanics, and that we learned to use them to write, draw, sketch and so much more that in thousands of years of that diet we’re now pretty good at using them, especially with a stylus.

You don’t want to use all that precision? You crazy.

I’ve always been bad at drawing, being lefty and having my hand ruining nice attempts traumatized me. The problem would be solved with magic electronic ink. If we could sketch precisely, sync drawings, ideas, lyrics, in the cloud/send them anywhere from a friend phone around to social networks, that would be super neat and a great addition to our digital lifestyle. And what ideas and ways of communication young generations would come up with a device like that? An encrypted handwritten new language? Collaborative penis drawings? Who knows.

 

Now that’s interesting! An electronic device that makes me able to do two really human activities I can’t do with my laptop or my smart phone as well, a real value that I don’t see in what tablet makers offer today.

Forget about watching movies on them, we have computers and TVs. Forget about games, we have computers and phones. Forget about surfing the web, we have computers and phones. These are not selling points, these are lame ass selling points.

Give us something we CAN’T do properly with what we already have. Add VALUE. Create an eco-system of devices.

I think that the first manufacturer to nail the reading/writing aspect of tablets will have a huge player if not a winner in its hands. HTC is on a good path. (too small, no e ink, next!).