Sorry doubters: if this phone doesn’t suck due to major hardware problems, it’s about to dominate. Here are some ads that just started airing:

[ Link: iPhone Ads ]

Lickable > Features

So the iPhone is getting ready to come out in June and I’m hearing a lot of press about how this phone or that phone is better than it already, and that it’s too late for it to make a splash. I disagree. People keep talking about features, and I think they are missing the point. Sure, there will be many people who don’t get an iPhone because it doesn’t have a certain feature (or 5 certain features), but again — I think there’s something else to this.

I think the iPhone is simply going to be superior (demand-wise) to these other offerings despite lacking features such as 3G, a real keyboard, etc. Look at the music player market; there are a number of other players that are “better” than the iPod, but they don’t have the same feel, the same interface, the same…”I don’t know what” that the iPod has.

So while people are saying, “I need x, y, and z and iPhone doesn’t have it.”, when they get a hold of one for two minutes they’re going to be like, “Holy crap. I’m getting one of these.” The phrase, “More than the sum of its parts” comes to mind.

Of course, it could suck horribly and die a painful, humiliating death. I accept that as a very real possibility, and will be getting a Blackberry Curve or Helio Ocean shortly afterwards if that happens. But I don’t think so. I think it’s going to become the next “must-have” device — not because of what all it can do — but because of how it feels when you do it.:

There’s an interesting article over at SecurityFocus about a security guy running OS X who got cracked into at Shmoocon. The scary part is that he still doesn’t even know how the attacker got in.

So just a reminder — no OS is flawless…and being arrogant about your supposed invulnerability is precisely the worst thing one can possibly do.

And remember, I’m a big OSX fan. It’s not the fan part that gets people in trouble — it’s the fanboy part. People need to keep their perspective even when they love a particular product — as I do OS X.

Over the next few months, as OS X gets more and more popular, and as more and more attacks are found, I want to see how Apple reacts. I don’t much like their current approach to security; they’re too quiet about it. I’d like to see more of an open approach to the whole thing, and I hope that’s where they head as things start to heat up.

In other words I want to see a Mozilla approach rather than, say, an Oracle approach. As weird as it sounds, coming from a security guy, Microsoft’s current approach is a very good one. They are facing the problems head on, and I applaud that. Now if they could just stop the FUD campaigns agains Linux I’d have a lot more respect for them.

Hopefully Apple won’t go down that same path of throwing stones and calling names while being no better off themselves.

So being in a new state and all I had to get a new license plate for my car. When making my selection of which “skin” to use (wildlife, colleges, etc), I remembered that I could go the personalized route too if I wanted to.

So, as of tonight, I now have my very own “GENTOO” license plate. I’ve been highly enthused about getting it, but to be honest it feels kind of lame now that I have it. I’ve never liked the whole “display” thing too much — bumper stickers, flags, etc. But here I am not only sporting a glider on my car, but now a Gentoo license plate.

I guess my only saving grace is that nobody knows what they mean. That makes it better, I think, but not much. The question I keep asking myself is, “What would I think if I saw a Gentoo plate on someone else’s car?” The answer is that I would simultaneously think it was two things — cool and lame.

I’d probably go up to the guy and share some Gentoo stories, but I am inclined to think less of people who fly flags for their causes. It’s so…”look at me”.

So what the hell was I thinking in the DMV when I got a damn Gentoo license plate? Oh, I remember, I didn’t want to get one randomly assigned to me. I wanted to define myself what went on it. I tossed around a few ideas and settled on Gentoo. Bah.

Oh well, most people won’t think it’s custom anyway. I went with the default theme and it’s not a common word by any stretch of the imagination. Most everyone seeing it will assume it was assigned to me.

So what are your opinions? Is it ok to support a distro like this since it’s obscure enough to not stand out, or is it lame to do anything that’ll be recognized? That’s my problem — I’ve always liked to blend in. I’ve never liked to stand out, and that’s what this runs the risk of doing (at least with a few people).

Thoughts?

… inside a Linux-hosted VMWare session.

(Sad, but true.)

So Apple’s released a new line of Powermacs, and the new high-end model has four CPUs.

OMFG.

As enthused as I am about the new Intel lineup, I really want to get one of the G5 models before the switch is made. Ideally, it’d be one of these quad beasts.

Someone pointed out this Gentoo flame article the other day and I just got around to finally reading it.

Well, it was lame. Not because the guy likes Slackware better than Gentoo, but because of the reasons he gave. His major gripe seemed to be that it was difficult to get KDE running in Gentoo.

I say bovine fecal matter. I just showed two relative Linux novices how to do this exact same thing in very short order, and I’m not even a “Linux on the desktop” kind of guy. Do you know what the key was? RTFM. Gentoo’s documentation is utterly sick. Between the official offerings and the Wiki, you can essentially do anything you want by reading the literature. That’s anything from getting sound working to getting Snort to report to MySQL.

Look, I’m a fanboy, to be sure, but I’m an inclusive fanboy — meaning I love singing the praises of my distro but I don’t get off on trashing the alternatives. My basic philosophy is that which is highlighted in my article called Geek Battles: A Call For Perspective.

Essentially, if you like a given tool and are able to use it to effectively create things, then that’s all that matters. How leet that tool is, or whether or not leet people use it, is irrelevant. You can’t be leet by using leet tools but failing to do anything with them.

Anyway, I digress.

I love Gentoo for a very simple reason — it’s the Linux distro I’m the most comfortable with. I have a good friend that spent a lot of time in a Redhat shop, and he keeps finding himself going back to it. Why? Because it’s familiar to him, and that’s the most natural thing in the world. Any fool running UberLeet Distro version 7 better know some serious Kung Fu if they intend to give my buddy any flak for running what many idiot’s think is a “lesser” distro. They’re likely to be severely embarassed. Ken knows crane style, and if uberboy isn’t versed in defecating chinchilla he’s in for a rude awakening. :)

Look, use what you feel comfortable with. For me that’s Gentoo (and Debian to a lesser degree). But for the love of God, if you don’t feel comfortable with a distro, don’t embarass yourself by claiming it’s trash — especially when the main problem you had with it was based on not reading the instructions. People like this need to seriously get a grip.

So evidently a creation of Apple’s called Vingle is generating a ton of buzz. Here’s the language they used to describe it:

Telecommunication services, namely, electronic transmission of streamed and downloadable audio and video files via computer and other communications networks; providing on-line chat rooms, bulletin boards and community forums for the transmission of messages among computer users concerning entertainment, music, concerts, videos, radio, television, film, news, sports, games and cultural events; web casting services; delivery of messages by electronic transmission; provision of connectivity services and access to electronic communications networks, for transmission or reception of audio, video or multimedia content.

I am quite unsure of what the hell that is, but given their track record lately I can’t wait to see it.

An awesome book came out a while back called “The Wisdom of Crowds”. It was basically about the fact that groups of people making independent decisions have a highly accurate, nearly uncanny predictive ability.

In other words, if you take a group of 1000 people and ask them to guess about something, their collective guess is likely to be far more accurate than even people who are supposedly good at guessing. Or, to put it another way, the wisdom of a crowd can often exceed that of trained professionals when it comes to making predictions.

Anyway, very cool concept. So the news now is that Google is now using this very concept to decide how to shape their business. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Google pwns joo.

By the way, hasn’t it been too long since a good “Google = NSA” meme got started? I thought so too.