Obama has strong words as Gulf spill spreads

'I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick,' Obama said in an interview with NBC News' 'Today' to air on Tuesday."

When you have a disaster spreading, threatening the economy of large areas and getting worse no matter what you try to do to contain it... then asses need to be kicked.

Obama should know... our oil slick of a depression still hasn't been contained despite the trillions of dollars of that he and the Democrat controlled Congress have dumped on it.  Of course, from what I hear of public sentiment, it'll be Obama's ass getting kicked in November of 2012.

(Via Reuters)

Safari 5 is out. Slower startup, still slower than Chrome.

Yup... Apple snuck in a major update to their Safari Web Browser today.  It was pretty much a "silent" upgrade and for good reason.  Not much has changed. Certainly not enough to justify a major version change (4.x to 5.x).

While Apple claims that it runs javascript 30% faster than Safari 4, on my MacBook Pro it takes longer to load web pages than Safari 4.  Chrome is still the speed demon of web browsers for either HTML or Javascript.  Independent benchmarks show that Safari 5 is still running javascript at 2/3 the speed of Chrome 5 or Chrome 6.

Why do I care about javascript speed?  Well for one, I play three games on Facebook and two of them use HTML5.  Ok, HTML and javascript which are two of the three big deal features of current proposed specifications for the proposed HTML5 standard, the third being H.264 video.

If Mr. Jobs gets his way and the world+dog drops Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Java for the year 2022 W3C HTML5 standard, then javascript speed will be THE yardstick for web browsers.  (Current Safari 5 runs in 3rd place behind Opera 10.6 and Google Chrome from what I've read on the net.)  Keep on those Apple developers Steve... you only have 12 years to catch up.

There are a few tweaks to tabs and the like... the biggest feature is actually a thing called Safari Reader.  In a nutshell, after a page is loaded and Safari detects a large block of text down the middle and smaller blocks on the side, it offers a "reader" button up in the address bar.

Clicking this button blacks out everything but the central column of text and formats that text for easy reading.  While this cuts down on distractions and may make it easier for the vision impaired to read, it also hides all sidebar information and more importantly, things like Google Ads.  Yup another shot across the bows in Steve's ongoing battle with Google.

Oh yes, any artistic design choices made by the author of the site are wiped out at the same time, leaving a black on white screen using one standard font.

As far as I'm concerned the biggest improvement in Safari 5 is that it finally remembers the windows and tabs you had open last time, thus bringing them into parity with Chrome, Opera and Firefox on this feature.

So far though, I see nothing worth the 5.x moniker, nor the upgrade.  Apple being Apple though and wanting to ensure "the best possible user experience" they make it extremely difficult, if not impossible to revert back to Safari 4.

Then again, that is what backups are all about. ;-)

 

WWDC: iPad/iPhone 12 years too early! Apple Paying Companies to Leave Flash/Silverlight?

For those who have a life or a job and didn't watch Steve Jobs drone on for two hours at the WWDC Keynote this morning, there are summaries all around the net.  I've prepared a synopsis of them and all the "magical" new features along with my comments.

Please remember that I love my Apple products, but I'm not in love with Apple, Inc nor with Steve Jobs.  I've yet to drink the kool-aid.  I believe that this allows me to still keep an open mind and to think for myself.

Early on in the keynote, Mr. Jobs said that the iPad is changing the web. "A whole new way to interact with the internet, apps..."

Yes... screens smaller than 12", no flash, no java, no silverlight, just HTML.  Umm Steve, the 1990's called and want their internet back.

Later he says that Apple browsers lead in HTML5 support and that Apple is behind HTML5 100%.  Great... and in another 12 years, W3C (the governing body for web standards) is expected to actually finalize and approve HTML5.  Meanwhile, HTML5 is a moving target, changing and being developed right now and for the next 10-12 years.

Mr. Jobs then made a big deal over Apple selling an iPad every three seconds since launch.  Impressive numbers.  Using later figures of his, they've sold about 2 million iPads.  Nice, but doesn't sound as impressive does it?  By comparison, Amazon's Kindle has sold "in the millions" (tracking of various non-Amazon sources reveals about 3 million Kindles in use), Barnes and Noble's Nook e-reader has outsold the Kindle.  Just to compare some numbers.  On the wow side, Apple has done this in just a few months while the other products I mentioned have been out for months or years.  It helps to have a cult following and have people believing that they are buying something other than a large screen iPod Touch.

For some reason a lot of people are going nuts over a new "feature" on the iPad... the ability to read a PDF file embedded in an eBook.  I've no idea why that is a good, bad or even neutral thing.  Sounds to me like being able to listen to a .wav file embedded in an .mp3 file.

Now some REALLY  big news... Netflix is on the iPad and soon the iPhone.  Why is this big news?  Netflix offers streaming movies and TV shows as a benefit of your Netflix DVD subscription.  However, to comply with copyright holder's DRM and reporting requirements, Netflix using Silverlight (Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash.)  And remember, Mr. Jobs hates everything Adobe and doesn't allow things like Flash or Silverlight on his appliances.  So far Netflix to be able to stream movies to the iPad and soon iPhone, it means that Apple has likely funded a Netflix project to find a way to do that in HTML5 and still keep the copyright holders happy.  Otherwise, the combination of HTML5 and H.264 video is incapable of replacing Flash or Silverlight.

Of course I'm sure that AT&T is thrilled at the prospect of iPhone users further bringing the network to its knees streaming movies.  Unless that'll be a WiFi only (i.e. limited use) option.

Speaking of conversion, the mostly popular game on Facebook is Farmville by Zynga.  It is a social game with 70 million playing each month, that runs in your web browser, using Adobe Flash.  Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus, demonstrated Farmville for iPhone at the keynote.  Either Zynga developers wrote a native iPhone version (which they have for their non-flash based facebook games) or they used the new Adobe Flash product that produces Objective-C native iPhone code.  Nah... couldn't be the later as Steve has already banned those products from the iPhone/iPad.

Another "This is how great we're doing" fact from Mr. Jobs.  Last May, 58% of people browsing the web using mobiles were using an iPhone and that this is 2.5X the number of Android users.

That's very good for an OS (iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad) that is in 4th place out of 5 for Smartphones.  The current rank seems to be Nokia (Symbian) in 1st place, RIM (Blackberry) in 2nd, closely followed by Android, then iPhoneOS and finally Windows Mobile.

Of course Apple's interpretation of the figures is just a little bit different.  Mr. Jobs claims that the experts are wrong and that Apple has 28% of the U.S. smartphone market and is in first place with Android in 2nd with 9% of the share.  Plus Apple only has 2 models at a time (this year's model and last year's model) and only 3 dealers: Apple, AT&T and recently Walmart (used to dump the old models at $97 each) while Android is on over 60 current models of phones from 23 different manufacturers and hundreds of different dealers.  So yeah, Steve, of course Android would be in second place to you.

Now... everyone paying attention to the keynote wasn't doing so to hear Steve tell everyone how great he is... they wanted to know what Apple was doing to get the iPhone to catch up with technology.

The new phone sounds wonderful!  25% thinner but with 40% more battery life.  Switching to Apple's A4 chip and from a sim card to a microsim card allowed them to stick a larger battery inside.  A good thing as you still can't change the battery on the new iPhone.

Sadly, Steve couldn't really demonstrate network connectivity of the new iPhone as the new stainless steel external antennas didn't seem to help the inherently weak WiFi radios in the iPod/iPhone/iPad products.   After blaming the problems on the attendees using all the WiFi channels, the new iPhone again reached massive FAIL when he couldn't get an AT&T 3G connection.  One wag in the audience gave Steve great advice... "Try Verizon"

Then he goes on to say that the new iPhone will support 7.2 mbps download speeds. "once a carrier supports it."  Hmm my carrier, Sprint supports it right now.  In fact my phone (HTC Evo) supports it right now.  Much like his HTML5... once everyone supports it...

Other new features of the phone sound like cribbed right off the Evo spec sheet, dual cameras, tap to focus, LED Flash, 720p camcorder, two way video calls... (Note, two way video calling only works over WiFi, not over the cellular network though Apple is trying to get "FaceTime" designated as THE standard for two way video calls.)

So in a nutshell, the two hour keynote was spent showing how great Apple is, how much AT&T sucks, how much the iPxx devices suck at WiFi, justifying Steve's fear of using other people's standards and pretending that 90% of the new features of the iPhone aren't in our hands already in Android phones.

The new iPhone 4 Screen sounds really cool though.

Prediction:  There will be thousands of people standing in line for hours and hours on June 24th, happy to pay Apple another $200-$300 for this year's iPhone and paying AT&T another ~$1,100 for a year of crappy service.