Dry Bones on Obama's image

Million vs. Billion

Normally, I don't post comics here (I save that for my LJ, where I put the less-serious posts) but this one tells a world of truth.

xkcd

New iPod shuffle, now without any controls!

Update 3/17/2009: New information about the controls (seven operations on the middle button, not five), fixed a typo, and added a little more commentary.

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This week, Apple released the third generation iPod Shuffle.

This unit is even smaller than before, if you can believe it. 1.8" x 0.7" x 0.3".

So how'd they get it this small? Simple, they removed all the controls.

Well, not really, but it seems that way. On the iPod itself, there is only a slider switch (off, sequential play, shuffle play) and the headphone jack. It is charged and attached to computers via the headphone jack and a proprietary USB cable.

So how do you actually control the thing? It uses a special set of headphones, with three buttons on the cord. This is the same kinds of headphones introduced for the iPhone, for "hands free" operation. On the cord, the "+" and "-" buttons control the volume. Between the two is a big flat button, whose behavior will depend on how you push it:

• Click once to play/pause
• Double-click to skip forward a track
• Double-click and hold to skip forward within a track
• Triple-click to skip backward a track
• Triple-click and hold to skip backward within a track
• Press and hold and a voice synthesizer will say the title and artist of the track currently playing
• Press and hold until you hear a beep tone to skip to have your list of playlists recited to you. Click to select the playlist last-announced.

If you think this seems unusually complicated for an Apple product, then we're in agreement. It may be sleek and "kewl" to eliminate all the buttons, but when that design forces you to cram seven distinct features onto a single button, it's a bad design. Sure, it's documented, but let's be honest - how many iPod owners have ever read the documentation?

And, of course, there's the problem of what to do if you don't want to use Apple's headphones. Maybe you've got better-sounding ones, or you want to plug your shuffle into your car stereo or something. Without the proprietary earphones, the shuffle starts playing when you turn it on and stops when you turn it off, and that's all you can do. Not at all acceptable unless someone starts selling a set of controls you can attach in-line with a generic headphone/line cord.

My prediction is that this iPod is going to be quickly replaced with something more like the second-gen model, that has actual controls. Or there will be a new accessory to provide a more proper set of controls for those people who don't like the Apple headphone buttons and/or want to use a different set of headphones.

Yet another buraucracy overgrows its usefulness.

In recent news the Author's Guild has decided to take a legal stance against the Amazon Kindle. Specifically, they object to it text-to-speech ability (where it can read books to you.)

The guild thinks that this infringes on their right to license audiobooks separately from the text.

Neil Gaiman thinks this is BS. I concur.

And since I'm not a guild member that might have future retribution to consider, I'll go so far as to say that if the Author's guild thinks it's a good idea to follow in the footsteps of the RIAA and MPAA, screwing over content creators in favor of the lawyers, then their organization no longer has a reason to exist at all.

New Scientist: Our world may be a giant hologram

Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist

Nothing conclusive yet, but some very interesting data and conjecture.

Mitt Romney: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

This article is a few months old, but it's still relevant today (and I just got around to reading it.)

Detroit doesn't need wads of cash to prop up a system that has failed and will continue failing if it doesn't change. It needs to radically restructure itself, taking advantage of things like the bankruptcy laws to make the process less painful. Mitt Romney spells it out in the article.

Review: EFI-X Boot Module

Today's edition of MacInTouch reviews a new product, the EFI-X Boot Module. This is a $260 (currently discounted to $200) USB dongle that sets up an EFI boot environment on a generic PC.

For those who don't know, EFI is a new boot environment for PCs that is intended to replace the old BIOS environment that PCs have used in various forms since the first IBM PC shipped in 1981. EFI is much more advanced than BIOS, but only the most recent operating systems can boot on EFI-equipped PCs.

So why is this interesting? Apple Intel-based Macintosh computers (which is everything sold since mid-2006) use EFI and Mac OS X requires EFI in order to boot. (There have been some hacking efforts to make Mac OS X run on BIOS-based PCs, but they are of questionable reliability.) With the EFI-X Boot Module, you can get that same EFI software on a generic PC. It would appear that this alone is sufficient to allow Mac OS X to install on non-Apple hardware. (Assuming you have hardware for which Apple provides drivers, of course.)

Of course, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple's software license terms, so actually doing this might be illegal, depending on where you live and what the courts decide. And it is likely that Apple will update Mac OS X in some way to make it incompatible with an EFI-X-equipped PC. Nevertheless, it is a very interesting piece of news and an even more interesting product for PC hackers to play with. (And there's absolutely nothing illegal about using EFI-X to run Linux or the 64-bit version of Windows Vista - both of which have EFI support.)

The Ornery American: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Orson Scott Card deals out a much-needed blow against the media, who are lying through their teeth about the causes of today's financial crisis in order to get Obama elected.

Read the essay for the whole story.

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis

Back in July (sorry, I just read the article today), Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal that much of the science behind today's global warming panic has been discredited (he presents several specific examples) and that the arguments being tossed about today are based on religious and political ideologies, not scientific fact.

Read the article for the full story.

The entire universe

Today's XKCD depicts the entire unvierse, plotted on a logarithmic scale of distance from the Earth's surface.

Pretty nifty, eh?