the name game: calibrating the nominative

Various monikers have been suggested for the yet-to-be-announced Apple tablet(s), with varying degrees of evidence in the form of domain names and trademarks already acquired by Apple or others acting on behalf of Apple. These include iPad, iTab, iTablet, iPod tablet, iBook, Macbook touch, and now iSlate and Magic Slate.

It's good that there's an assortment of names to choose from, as there are at least three potential products in need of one, including, besides the two I've already described, a touchscreen peripheral to be connected to (or integrated into) your laptop or desktop keyboard, as described here.

While you might see iBook touch and Macbook touch applied to versions of those laptop lines with integrated display touchpads, that would suggest an intention to continue to produce versions without display touchpads, which, if it happens at all, is practically certain to be a temporary state of affairs, and Apple would find itself in the position of having to either keep around or unceremoniously drop a designation meant to differentiate one model from another within the same line.

iTab just seems awkward, so I'll eliminate it from further consideration.

Approaching the question from the direction of specific devices to be named, and starting with what is presumably the smallest, we first have the i/o display touchpad, which may appear first as a peripheral then later be integrated. The integrated version doesn't necessarily need a name, as distinguished from a description, but the peripheral version certainly will. It might be called iPad, or iSlate, or Magic Slate, or Magic Pad. (Note that there is an iPhone app called Magic Pad.)

Then there's the smaller, more portable standalone tablet device. It also might be called iPad or iSlate, or iTablet, or maybe even iPod tablet.

Finally there's the larger, less portable semi-standalone tablet device. (I say semi-standalone because most of its use cases are sure to include continuous communication with some other device, and it's likely to need more frequent recharging than the smaller tablet device.) It too might be called iPad, iSlate, or iTablet, but probably not iPod tablet.

The peripheral and the smaller standalone tablet device might actually use the same screen, but the peripheral wouldn't have more of a radio than Bluetooth/Wifi, if that, and might not even have a battery. As with Apple keyboards, it could come in both wired and wireless versions.

My personal preference (not a prediction!) would be to call the peripheral device Magic Pad, the 7-inch tablet iPad, the 10-inch tablet iTablet, and reserve iSlate for an even larger, less portable device, on the order of those depicted in the newly released movie Avatar.

rumors of announcements of forthcoming products

The Apple-rumor mill is nearly as energetic as if it were anticipating yet another Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld. Well, Steve has been on the heal for half a year now, so an appearance by him at some sort of event isn't all that unlikely, and there are media distribution deals to be discussed as well as new devices and new models of existing products - plenty of material for a stage appearance by Mr. Jobs.

High on the list of anticipated announcements, is an Apple tablet device with a touchscreen, running some variant of OS X, and most likely capable of running iPhone/iPod Touch apps unaltered. Most such speculation has revolved around a tablet with a 10-inch screen, suitable for use as a reader or as a personal movie player. But there has also been a persistent secondary rumor regarding a smaller tablet, with a 7-inch screen.

If you're reading this then you may recall that I'm already dangling from a twig, having gone on record predicting that Apple will market two, rather different tablets, the larger of which will be better suited to the office or living room, and the smaller of which you'll want to keep with you all the time, wherever you go.

The larger (10-inch) device is likely to have a camera facing towards the user, whereas the smaller (7-inch) device is more likely to have one that faces away, the same direction that the user is looking. The larger device is likely to have enough of a battery to get through just about any movie without a recharge, but most use cases will presume that the charger is handy and there will be a premium on keeping the device light. The smaller device might actually weigh more that the larger one, but its battery should be good for at least 12 hours of constant use, without an active datalink, or at least half that with a datalink.

I'd expect the system software to fall somewhere between iPhone OS and Mac OS X, mainly differing from iPhone OS in allowing multiple simultaneous applications and user background processes, and to be nearly identical on the two tablet devices. I don't expect either to run unaltered Mac apps using AppKit, although I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised on that count.

I'm also expecting both to sport a system-on-chip CPU (or something leaning heavily in that direction) containing one or more ARM cores, rather than anything Intel.

I don't expect the larger device to have any long-range wireless capabilities. I half-expect the smaller one to have a single radio unit that can be used to connect to any cellular or consumer data network, as well as Wifi and Bluetooth, but no dedicated cellular hardware.

Chariot Skates, a.k.a. Wheelskates

Something very much like what you see in these videos...

Testing 1st samples from new moulds in Sydney & China from Chariot Skates on Vimeo.

...has been batting around in my head for years. The difference between me and Michael Jenkins is that he turned his idea into a design, and then into a succession of prototypes, and is now close to being ready to put that idea on the market as a real product, one that's sure to be a huge success, for which he has both my congratulations and my thanks, for following through.

a patent, its implications, and their implications

This Ars Technica article describes an Apple patent application relating to adjustment of the display of 3D objects in response to changes in the position of the observer, presumably to create or reinforce a sense of depth in the display. (For example, a slightly different perspective could be presented to each eye.)

While that article doesn't go into any detail in this regard, one implication of such a system is that the 3D objects which are being adjusted must exist as software objects having a particular shape, orientation, and position, and not just as 2D projections of 3D objects.

This isn't new, not even for Apple. OpenGL, which is built into both the Mac and iPhone versions of OS X, is all about defining and displaying 3D objects, and a system like that in the referenced patent application could probably be implemented in OpenGL, or as an extension of it, without implying extensive new libraries.

On the other hand, it might involve an object representation layer to be inserted underneath OpenGL, which is mainly concerned with surfaces and doesn't know or care about the physical properties of objects beyond their optical properties.

Assuming that's the case (no small assumption), this new object representation layer would greatly ease the development of many types of software, including but not limited to CG animation, games, industrial design and architecture, navigation, etc., by providing standard, supported, primitive data types and basic behaviors (scaling, rotation, and translation) for the representation of 3-dimensional objects - data types which could easily be elaborated as needed through subtyping.

An open question is whether Apple would keep such a system to itself or turn it into an open source project, in the hope of generating some momentum behind it, as they have with both OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch.

Here's another take on the patent application.

And yet another take from a website that features news and advice about construction-related software.

the right man for the job

You may not agree with President Obama on every issue, but surely it has become abundantly clear, for the situation facing us today, that he's the right man for the job.

expectations of traction, appropriate and otherwise

We've all got a bill of goods for sale, an accumulation of notions we believe to be true (or at least serviceable), some of which we may only part with in exchange for compensation, some of which we give away freely, and some of which we may push upon others aggressively, recoiling in astonishment if they react to our largess as though it were an invasion, or worse if they challenge our motives or the substantiality of the ideas we have striven to share.

"What do you mean you don't agree? How can you not agree? It's obvious!"

Well, no, quite often our cherished notions are not obvious, anything but in fact, if viewed in the cold light of reality. Sometimes they lack both validity and relevance, or more often they are relevant only for the fact that we believe in them, that fact constituting an element of our shared cognitive environment, complete with consequences, despite the notions themselves utterly lacking validity.

We should have a care how much traction we expect to result from decisions to share our cherished notions, or from actions taken in lieu of sharing. Others have their own notions, which may or may not align well with our own, and they may not appreciate our efforts to substitute ours for theirs, or to impose consequences. They may take umbrage, and in their eyes we may appear to be scoundrels or devils. This is often the story when cultures clash.

Generally speaking someone with valid, relevant notions to share has no need to push them on others, rather others seek him/her out and invest effort in understanding his/her thinking. In the best of all situations, this effort to understand is mutual.

We all live both in our own heads and within a milieu composed of the tangible behavior of others, also living in their own heads. None of us is competent to dictate to another how they should live their life.

barking up the wrong tree, good money after bad, and the Intel's Larrabee

A few years back, just before Apple's official preannouncement of the iPhone, Intel sold off their XScale assets, ostensibly to concentrate on their x86-64 architecture (although they continue to move the Itanium forward at a modest pace, and hold the rights to other ISAs they've never brought to market).

But concentrate they have, convincing most naysayers they could indeed squeeze a good deal more performance out of their flagship processor line, with even greater improvements in performance/watt.

Larrabee, intended to be a GPGPU, and originally to have begun shipping about now, in 24-core and 32-core versions, was to have been the next stage in this x86-everywhere strategy, by combining many, relatively simple x86-64 cores with a single, very wide vector processing unit.

The problem with this strategy is that the x86-64 architecture isn't optimized for such use, and the advantage it would have enjoyed a few years ago, due to instruction compatibility with the chips powering nearly every laptop and desktop computer, has been rendered largely moot by developments in software (OpenGL, CUDA, OpenCL, and Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, recently turned open source).

On the other hand, Intel's investment hasn't necessarily been wasted. They can take what they've learned in developing Larrabee and turn it into improved x86-64 processors and improved compilers to generate code for them. The 512-bit wide SIMD unit may find its way into dual, quad, and eight-core chips, making them radically faster for some purposes, in many cases obviating the need for dedicated GPU hardware.

x86-64 has a lot of life left in it, and folding the Larrabee project back into the mainstream processor line would help extend that life span far into the future.

of estimates and bias in the error

It is widely accepted as a given among financial analysts that Apple makes a practice of lowballing its revenue and earnings estimates for the near future, and those estimates are routinely treated as a worst case baseline.

Apple has apparently also begun using best case estimates of sales in calculating what to tell component suppliers about how many units of their products it may be purchasing, and then waiting for the prices to come down before actually making those purchases. Taken together, these behaviors have been characterized as bullying.

You may recall that just a couple of years ago, Apple was implicated in an effort to monopolize the market for flash memory, via extended contracts for nearly all of the production capacity of the main suppliers, and that at about that same time the U.S. DOJ began an investigation into price fixing on the part of those suppliers. That investigation ended without any indictments, but it seems clear that the struggle over the price and availability of high density, non-volatile memory chips continues.

Gadget manufacturers (not just Apple) want the latest, highest density chips at commodity prices, but will substitute a larger number of lower density components in their designs if the total cost of production ends up being lower. Chip foundries need higher prices for the latest, highest density chips, to cover the costs involved in development and upgrading their production lines, and they need something above production costs generally to cover the costs of building new factories to meet the seemingly insatiable demand, which can go soft at any time with a downturn in the economy or the advent of some new technology that renders their own products obsolete, so amortization schedules must be relatively short.

The question is what is a reasonable profit and during what phase of a product's life-cycle should the foundries be able to expect to turn a profit. If they attempt to take the bulk of it early, they end up pressuring their customers to keep using older, lower density components. If they postpone profits until later in the life-cycle, they run the risk that their customers will move on to the next new thing before they've completely covered their development and production upgrade costs. Undoubtedly, it ends up being a balancing act.

Apple's recent approach, if understood for what it is, merely complicates the calculation. Gadget manufacturers are always competing to provide a better perceived value to their customers, while leaving some room for a profit of their own. One of the ways they go about this is to attempt to get a better deal than their competition on components used by all. That they are out to get the best deal they can while securing the availability of the components they need shouldn't surprise anyone, least of all the foundries.

Supplying estimates of future component purchases based on best case sales is just a way of improving the chances that the components will be available, if needed, should that best case turn out to be reality. That subsequent orders typically don't total to those estimates shouldn't surprise anyone.

It's something of a given in any business that a change in the per-unit price as a function of an increment in volume is always either negative or zero, never positive; maybe that needs to change. Maybe, in this situation, per-unit pricing needs to follow a model where it decreases from small lots to moderate volume, and then begins to increase again above moderate volume, combining the volume from all customers, with rebates based on the same formula if some customers end up canceling their orders because the price went too high, vaguely like the market for electrical power works, but operating over periods on the order of a week rather than fractions of an hour. This would provide gadget manufacturers with an incentive to spread their orders out evenly over the entire life-cycle of any component they made use of, and provide some systematic moderation on the substitution of newer, higher density components.

Such a system may require a disinterested, third-party broker.

the lengths to which a point must occasionally be carried

Sometimes it's just not enough to state your case in a reasonable manner. Lunacy must sometimes be addressed with intense sarcasm.

journalism in the age of the internet

When was the last time you believed something because you heard it on FOX News? How about MSNBC?

Do you settle for any single source these days, however reliable, or, whenever something happens that really moves you, such that it becomes important to know the truth, do you turn from your television to your computer to track down the real story?

Even if you don't understand the relevant terminology well enough to look up references, Google does.

Even if you're not personally acquainted with someone living near the scene of the event, someone else on Twitter, or AOL, or FaceBook, or MySpace is.

You may have to settle for second or third-hand accounts, but you don't have to settle for what passes for journalism in this age of media consolidation, which while sometimes excellent is also sometimes abysmal.

That ability, to fact-check what you're fed by corporate journalism, is an important new factor in the few-to-many dissemination of information that is print and broadcast journalism. Journalists are constantly at risk of having their bullshit called, not just by other journalists, but by members of their audience or readership. This constitutes pressure to get it right, and may well be the single most important reason many working in the news media still aspire to call themselves journalists rather than entertainers, and mean something by it.

It also constitutes pressure on the corporate "news" divisions themselves, on the editors and publishers, on the people who make the decisions about which stories to go with and which to bury, to keep their corporate agendas in check and not allow them free rein to dictate what the news is. Before the Internet people had little idea of what they weren't being told; now there are other ways to get the story out, and other bases for determining whether a story that is run is being spun.

The Internet doesn't replace journalism, but it can empower individuals to take on the role when the professionals fall short, their curiosity enhanced by advanced search engines leveraging the huge resource of available information, and their soft voices amplified by ad hoc networks driven by others's need to know.

Bloggers are the semi-pros in this environment. The best of them gather followers who value something about what they publish, whether subject matter, sources, process, or perspective, and they frequently put the professionals to shame. Because they typically read other blogs, a story which finds its way into the blogger network can take off like wildfire. The most important reason for corporate news organizations to keep bloggers on staff is for the early warning they can provide of a breaking story the blogger network got ahold of first.

Even casual bloggers, like myself, play a part in making this network happen, passing along tidbits that interest us and contributing our own ideas and insights. One needn't make a career of it to participate.

Don't settle for less than real journalism - by which I don't mean professional journalism, although the two certainly aren't mutually exclusive - and don't be afraid to take on the role of journalist when the ball lands in your hands. You may be the person in the best position to tell a story others don't yet know they need to hear.