Life is grand

The basic postal service in South Africa has become so corrupt that Amazon.com is refusing to send items to South Africa unless the buyer opts to use private, commercial couriers.

Another basic service failing in my homeland.

Firefox 3 is out and it is a good upgrade. The Mac OS X skin is welcome (and doesn’t have that big button from the Release Candidates or Nightly Builds.)

Ireland has voted No to the Lisbon Treaty. I’m guessing v3 of the Lisbon Treaty will carefully avoid any constitutional changes and get passed by the politicians, for the politicians.

The new iPhone will offer many goodies, but it continues to omit some standard features that a lot of people consider important: removable battery, memory-card expansion slot, video recording, voice dialing and the ability to send pictures to another cellphone.

I would love to know who “a lot of people” are.

Removable battery. I’ve had a cell-phone of one sort or another since 1997 and not once have I replaced a battery. Generally when a battery started failing to recharge it was time to get a new phone. I’ve had an iPhone for about a year now and not had any battery related problems.

Memory-card expansion slot. I had one of those on an older phone and never used it. Actually, I lost the pin-head sized memory-card, bought a new one because it was cool, and then never used it. What doesn’t fit on my iPhone’s 8gb I probably don’t need. Then again, I’m not one of those people who watch feature length movies on their phone so maybe I’m the wrong guy for this. Not to mention a lot of expansion slots on other phones are hidden behind batteries or cases which are fiddly as all heck. They only need them because they come with 1mb of on-board memory.

Video recording. My iPhone has video recording. I tend to use a Canon IXUS 860 IS for short videos though and just recently bought a Canon VIXIA HF100. I’d like a better camera and better video recording on the iPhone but it isn’t that important.

Voice dialing. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone outside of 3GSM/CTIA actually using voice dialing. I’m sure some use it in their cars when they are alone but is this something “a lot of people” need?

Picture messaging. The iPhone can send pictures, via email. The last phone I had with MMS I used once to test the feature and then decided that postage-stamps are a horrible thing to inflict on anyone. Someone sent me an MMS once and I told them to stop inflicting pain on my day. I can see some use for it but “a lot of people” need/want this?

Seems to me David Pogue is the typical “a lot of people” tech. journalist. I know I justify features to my boss by saying “a lot of people want this” when in fact I want it and a couple of my geek friends want it. My mom probably doesn’t even know about it, never mind want it.

The iPhone is far from perfect but these missing features are far, far down the list of improvements needed for the iPhone. How about better call quality and signal pick-up? How about a ToDo list app. that syncs. with my laptop? How about wireless sync. or proper BlueTooth or thinner, lighter and stronger?

Don Doge is dead right; you don’t want your data and services “in the cloud” when a denial of service attack on Amazon can render your S3, EC2 backed site dead.

What you want are 50 Amazon Web Service providers. 50 Google App Engine providers. A million Twitters. Twelve lords-a-leaping and no single partridge in a pear tree.

The Amazon EC2 APIs needs to be standardised, S3 too, Google App Engine needs to be open-sourced and all of it should be spread across the net. Companies big and small should be able to offer Amazon EC2. EMIs should be transferable between any of the standardised services.

It is like hosting is today, distributed, but with the “fire up a server in 2 seconds” ease that Amazon EC2 offers. If your backup is good then when your Oracle EC2 provider goes down you just fire up an instance on Verizon’s EC2 array and run your app from there. You can even automate this with the lowest-cost/best-service provider taking over as offers, policies and conditions change.

Live in the world wide cloud, don’t live in just Amazon’s cloud.

For people accustomed to the cold (if hidden) logic of purely algorithmic search, these are scary options. It means that your search results are, in part, up to the whims of capricious or crazy humans, or perhaps people trying to game the system to promote some sites while burying competitors.

That sounds a lot like what happens to “the cold logic of purely algorithmic” search engines already. Using PageRank and other link-affinity based algorithms Google, Yahoo! and others are gamed by “capricious or crazy humans” and those “promot[ing] some sites while burying competitors.” Posted in Post | Comments