via Modern Mechanix

Over at AllThingsD, John Paczkowski has Samsung’s response to the verdict in the Samsung-Apple patent trial:

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer,” Samsung said in a statement. “It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies. Consumers have the right to choices, and they know what they are buying when they purchase Samsung products. This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple’s claims. Samsung will continue to innovate and offer choices for the consumer.

This shows Samsung still doesn’t get it.
“It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners“
Because that’s all an iPhone is, some rounded rectangles. And a Ferarri is just a fast, red car. And Whole Lotta Love is just a song by Led Zeppelin. And The Sirens of Titan is just some book by Kurt Vonnegut.
Apple doesn’t and shouldn’t have a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, but that’s not this trial was about. Apple didn’t sue Samsung for copying them, they sued Samsung for the degree to which they copied them.
Samsung didn’t just take a few paperclips and and some pens from Apple’s supply closet. They emptied out the whole damn closet. Maybe that’s a little too antiquated an analogy. Samsung didn’t just torrent the latest pop music single, they torrented every album released in last 5 years.
Samsung could have easily avoided this whole messy trial if they hadn’t copied as much as they did from Apple, but they got greedy and when you get greedy there’s a good chance you’ll get caught.

I lived in New York City for 11 years so I know about great pizza. You need 2 things: great dough and great sauce*. Sounds simple, but it’s not.
It’s the same with gadgets. You need great hardware and great software. You take away one of those and it ruins the whole thing.
* For simplicity’s sake, yes, I left out cheese in this equation.

I had a conversation recently with a friend, and we discussed information. Nothing complex, we just marveled at the way we had seen the way we collect information change in our lifetime. We were going through stacks of records at her place and I mentioned that I had gone almost completely digital. I’m an analog guy, just ask Mulvey. But what I’m more interested in now is the compactness of information rather than quality. That is, the very weight of the information I was keeping in my apartment, whether it be printed books, or music and movies on discs, had become too heavy for me to accept in my life. I have purged much of this physical material from my immediate surroundings, shedding hundreds of pounds of weight in the process. (Most of it joined my paintings in storage, so it’s still a bit of an anchor. But the point is, my immediate surroundings are lighter.)
All of the music I own has been ripped onto a hard drive, and I won’t be buying any more cd’s unless it’s something that isn’t available online. The movies I don’t worry about unless I get a hankering to see something specific, and then it’s worth the three bucks just to rent it online. After all, it’s a good bet any movie I watch I won’t want to see again for years. As for the books, most of what I own I haven’t cracked open in the slightest since the day I finished them. They really were just taking up space and weighing me down. Intellectually, they are the most valuable items I own, but who has the time to reread a book?
It was painful packing them up, however. I’d grab a handful of books from the shelves to pack away, and there would be at least two or three that I loved. Just seeing them in my hand again made me want to drop everything and start reading. This happened dozens of times. When I realized how ridiculous this was, how impossible it would be to commit the necessary time, it became easy to just toss them in the boxes and seal them up. Into the storage space they went, along with the paintings, the only items I own in there that I truly cannot do without.
I’m not all the way there yet. I still have some real paper books; all the ones I haven’t read yet. And I have some DVDs. But like I wrote above, the music is all ripped and stored, at about 15% of the quality of the original media.
And that’s the problem with digital. It has made information lighter, but it’s done so by, well, making it lighter. And lighter information, unlike lighter human beings, is not necessarily a good thing. It represents loss of information. Incompleteness. Corruption. And it’s spreading.
What we are finding in the digital age is that, rather than information being preserved more effectively, we have shortened the lifespan of information. If a book is printed on quality paper with quality ink, and is bound well, it can sit on a shelf for literally thousands of years and lose none of its information. But manuscripts that were written by great authors only thirty years ago, and stored on big floppy disks, are now virtually inaccessible. Computer disks decay at a rate measured in years, not millennia, and storage formats and operating systems have changed so rapidly in the last generation that oftentimes it takes specialists in computer forensics to extract information first encoded not all that long ago.
Information is spreading more rapidly due to the internet, which mitigates much loss due to decay and formatting issues. But the corollary to that is inaccurate information is also spreading. Books are a useful example here, as well.
There is a whole segment of the population that no longer likes to pay for information. Representing mostly music and movies, pirating is costing media companies big. But there are also pirated books. And while the quality of pirated music and movies is pretty consistent, that is, there is little if any noticeable deviation from that available from legitimate sources, for books it’s another story.
Pirated books are generally rich text files made from jailbroken epub files or even scans using software designed to convert printed pages quickly. The result, especially with the scanned files, are typos. Lots of typos. Below is a comparison of three short sections from Isaac Asimov’s book Prelude to Foundation. The top of each is taken from a legitimate copy purchased from the iBooks store, while the bottom is from an epub file I made from a bootleg rtf file I got from a Torrent. Who knows what went on at the source. The sections are taken completely out of context here, so don’t worry if they don’t make sense (although the first section may have had something to do with my idea for this post). They don’t need to make sense. They only need to showcase the corruption that can happen to information, especially when it becomes free. I’ve highlighted the differences in the text.

Dors said defensively. “Records don’t last forever, Hari. Memory banks can be destroyed or defaced as a result of conflict or can simply deteriorate with time. Any memory bit, any record that is not referred to for a long time, eventually drowns in accumulated noise. They say that fully one third of the records in the Imperial Library are simply gibberish, but, of course, custom will not allow those records to be removed. Other libraries are less tradition-bound. In the Streeling University library, we discard worthless items every ten years.
“Naturally, records frequently referred to and frequently duplicated on various worlds and in various libraries—governmental and private—remain clear enough for thousands of years, so that many of the essential points of Galactic history remain known even if they took place in pre-Imperial times. However, the farther back you go, the less there is preserved.”
Dors said defensively. “Records don’t last forever, Hari. Memory banks can be destroyed or defaced as a result of conflict or can simply deteriorate with time. Any memory bit, any record that is not referred to for a long time, eventually drowns in accumulated noise. They say that fully one third of the records in the Imperial Library are simply gibberish, but, of course, custom will not allow those records to be removed. Other libraries are less tradition bound. In the Streeling University library, we discard worthless items every ten years.
“Naturally, records frequently referred to and frequently duplicated on various worlds and in various libraries-governmental and private remain clear enough for thousands of years, so that many of the essential points of Galactic history remain known even if they took place in pre-Imperial times. However, the farther back you go, the less there is preserved.”

Seldon said, dismayed, “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not. Hummin’s asking it. I must guard you. After all, I failed in connection with Upperside and should make up for it.”
Seldon said, dismayed, “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not. Hummin s asking it. I must guard you. After all, I faded in connection with Upperside and should make up for it.”

“I know,” said Seldon. “Sometimes I wonder what he really wants of me.”
“What he says,” said Dors. “He’s a man of strong and idealistic ideas and dreams.”
I know, “ said Seldon. “Sometimes I wonder what he really wants of me.”
“fit he says, “ said Dors. “He’s a man of strong and idealistic ideas and dreams.”

Most of the differences are minor. Only two turn sentences into nonsense. But all the typos in the bootleg version presented above happened within a few pages of one another, and there were others I didn’t include. Over the course of a 600 page novel, we’re now talking hundreds if not thousands of typos. And all this loss of information occurred in the merely thirty years since the book was first published. It gets worse. It didn’t take thirty years for the typos to happen. It took a day. The day the bootleg file was made. And now this file is proliferating across the hard drives of the world. If information does want to be free, then this free version of Asimov’s book could become the most popular version, even though its information is corrupted.
Preservation is one of the battles we face with all the information we’re producing these days. Recent past generations were known by their factories and machines, now turned to rust. It’s a virtual guarantee that what we will be known for, our information, will be indecipherable in the not-too distant future; collections of random squiggles in computer files, if they can even be accessed at all. Should science ever discover a way to store information without loss, that will be a good thing for longevity, but will have no effect on corruption due to flaws in the people or software that produces the information. The person or persons that bootlegged Asimov’s book and the software they used are now as responsible for the information contained therein as Asimov and his editors. So, I guess the point is, score another one for analog, even if it does mean you have to keep too much shit in your apartment.

There’s a great TED Talk with Kirby Feguson up on Vimeo’s Tumblr. It’s a 10-minute version of his awesome 4-part film series, Everything Is A Remix.

He starts off his presentation explaining how, at the height of his career, Bob Dylan was accused by “a small minority of dissenters” of stealing other peoples’ songs. He then fast-forwards to 2004 to talk about DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album, which was a remix of The Beatles The White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album.

The three techniques used to create these albums:

Copy. Transform. Combine.

But Ferguson says these techiques are not exclusive to music:

But I think these aren’t just the components of [music] remixing. I think these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everything is a remix and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.

He then goes on to talk about the patent wars between smartphone manufacturers going on today. He calls out the apparent hypocrisy behind Steve Jobs’ intention “to go thermonuclear war” on Android for copying iOS and the iPhone when seen in the context of the original Macintosh being ‘inspired’ by the pinoneering work by Xerox PARC on the graphical user interface (GUI). To his credit, Ferguson talks about the theory of loss aversion–it’s ok when I copy another person’s work, but it’s not ok when someone else copies me (To use Ferguson’s language, Apple didn’t just copy the GUI work done at Xerox PARC, they combined and transformed it into something completely new with the Macintosh, but I’ll leave this for another post). Which leads me to Samsung.

Apple’s beef with Samsung isn’t that it stole Apple’s hardware and software—it’s that they copied Apple’s hardware, software, marketing and retail store design (via The Loop). Samsung has had no intention to remix anything they copied from Apple. Samsung’s intention with all of it’s Android smartphones has been to align as closely as possible with the look and feel of Apple products. Bob Dylan took melodies note-for-note from old folk songs, but you’re never confused. You always know it’s Dylan. This is because Dylan copied, transformed and remixed old media into something new.

Samsung stopped at copying and never bothered to remix anything. This is why many people confuse Samsung phones running Android for iPhones.

Update: Jim Dalrymple talked about this the other day too:

Apple had two blockbuster hit songs and Samsung stole them, note for note. That’s not right.

Microsoft and Palm also came out with smartphones after the iPhone. It’s interesting Jobs and Apple never went ‘thermonuclear’ on them like they did Samsung. I have a feeling this is because both Microsoft and Palm took the time to remix (in various degrees, Microsoft more than Palm) what Apple started with the iPhone. Does webOS look a lot like iOS? Absolutely. It has the DNA of the iPhone in it (Makes sense. The VP of hardware at Apple, Jon Rubinstein, became CEO at Palm/HP during that time). But if you’ve used a Palm Pre, you know it’s a Palm Pre. It has many characteristics unique to it, like cards and the Quick Wave Launcher.

Windows Phone 7 did the same thing, but they went even further. I’m not even sure you could say Microsoft even started with the Copy technique. They turned icons into tiles. They threw away drop shadows and gradients. They transformed the smartphone into something that makes sense to them.

Competition is important. Apple should not be the only company allowed to make multi touch smartphones and tablets, but to copy, almost pixel-for-pixel, what Apple has created is to concede Apple has done everything perfectly with iOS and the iPhone. The thing is, they haven’t. When a company creates a new smartphone they have the opportunity to remix what’s been done and present something fresh and new.

Maybe all Samsung wants is a product approaching ‘iPhone-ness’, but I’d like to think they have a lot of talented designers, developers and engineers who could come up with something good, maybe even great. People with the ability to remix.

Then I always remember we’re talking about a hardware company that doesn’t know how to make software. Who seems to have no interest in learning how to make software. Who licenses their mobile operating system from another company.

The balance of power is going to shift from companies running people, to people running companies.

via designtaxi.com

It’s a hack of old technologies, aimed at creating a calmer vision of social networking. It’s a limited device that’s meant to fit into our day rather than demand attention.

via fastcodesign.com

Scroll down a bit and a reader will see that Michael linked up one of my Missile Test articles here at Daily Exhaust. I love getting shout outs like that. Yesterday he sent me an IM asking me to check out the stats on my site, as he was curious what sort of juice a DE link up is worth these days. So last night after work I logged on to Dreamhost’s basic stats page, and saw this:

Last week, well before Michael posted his link, hell, before I even wrote the article, Missile Test saw an over 30,000% jump in traffic. Trust me, this had nothing to do with me. I scrolled down further into my stats looking for anything else out of order, and there it was, page requests for a folder I know I did not put on my site. I looked on my server, and there was a whole other website squatting on my domain, selling vpn access to god knows who out of who knows where. I’d been hacked.
Know that feeling you get when you see a roach scuttle across your kitchen counter when you thought things had been clean? That’s what it feels like when you get hacked. Unclean. I was even worried about how the search engines would feel about me now that the vast majority of my traffic was criminal. Was I now an unsafe site? Hopefully I caught the disease in time. As you can see from the bottom of the screenshot above, things went back to normal quickly after I deleted the offending files from my server. But still…my skin is crawling a little bit.

John Gruber summarizing the App.net thing:

In a nut, App.net is a startup aiming to build a rival platform to Twitter, “where users and developers come first, not advertisers.” How? By generating revenue from users instead of from advertisers. They’re not using Kickstarter but they’ve built their own Kickstarter-like system.

Like Gruber, I respect what the people at App.net are doing but it’s not going to work, even if they do reach their funding goal.
The reason? App.net’s service is not a verb. I’m not saying every online service has to be a verb, but ‘googling’ and ‘tweeting’ have a tremendous amount of momentum with regular, non-nerdy, non-developer people. You might say, “Facebook isn’ a verb and look how big they are.” Sure, but they own ‘Like’ and before that they owned ‘Poke’.
There’s nothing I can see with App.net the general public can get behind. Even with all the negative moves Twitter is making with how it’s handling third-party developers, Twitter isn’t broken (yet).

“…and this transformation is going to make some people uneasy. People from the PC world, like you and me. It’s going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. And we like to talk about the post-PC era but when it really started to happen I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people because it’s change and a lot of vested interested are going to change and it’s going to be different.”

—Steve Jobs, D8 Conference

From the current Apple vs Samsung proceedings earlier today, here’s part of an email thread between managers at Samsung circa 2007, after the original iPhone launched (via Apple Insider):

All this time we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia, and concentrated our efforts on things like Folder, Bar, Slide, yet when our [product] is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It’s a crisis of design.

I believe it was T.S. Elliot who said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal and then there’s that shit Samsung pulls.”

The Curiosity rover touched down on Mars this morning. Today NASA released this image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the spacecraft in descent over the surface of the red planet. That’s damned impressive. The Missile Test wing of Daily Exhaust laments the idea that robots will more than likely be humanity’s emissaries to the stars, but it’s hard to argue with results. Now let’s get some boots and flags up there.

Ben Brooks decided a car (van) metaphor was most appropriate to explain the limitations he felt with the Google Nexus 7 tablet, so of course this gets a linkup on Daily Exhaust:

Let me use a car metaphor for you (because you love it when I do that). Imagine you own three vans: a “normal” 7-8 seat minivan, a 10 passenger van, and a 15 passenger van. Odds are that the two most used vans are the smallest and the largest. The 10 passenger isn’t that much larger than the minivan and isn’t that much smaller than the 15 passenger van. And so the 10 passenger van only has a 1,000 miles on it after 10 years.

I prefer to keep with Jobs’ metaphor of (desktop) PCs becoming the ‘trucks’ of computing as society becomes more mobile and urban and now needs tablet ‘cars’ to get around. Not only because I hate the idea of comparing tablets to vans, but because I have no point of reference for van usefulness.
[Digression: You know how bad a decade the 80’s was for cars? It was so bad, I thought the A-Team’s black van—with it’s diagonal stripe up the side ending in a spoiler on the roof (???)—was badass. I (and many other of my generation) thought a van was a cool ride. Let that marinate in your head for a minute.]
Back to the Nexus 7. It sounds like the Nexus 7 is more like a Smart Car in my world where the iPhone is a Ducati motorcycle and my iPad is a Volkswagen GTI. Sure the Smart Car is smaller than my GTI, but my GTI still gets good mileage and I have no problem parking it on the street in the city. Plus, I don’t have nearly as much fun with the Smart Car as I do with with my manual shift, turbo-charged GTI.
[Sidenote: my father bought himself a 2008 GTI a few years ago. Something fun to drive on the weekends. One weekend the two of us took a ride together and he let me drive. We reached a stop sign before one of the main roads in my home town and before we I pulled out my father said, “Drop it into 2nd gear and floor it” I did what he said and the car yanked me back on my seat. My dad laughed. What a fun ride.)]

rethinkdigg.com:

As betaworks and Digg both announced on their blogs, we are taking over Digg and turning it back into a startup. What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks.

Everyone always loves a good comeback story. Like a rocker coming back strong from rehab.
Let’s see if the new Digg team has what it takes.