|
| Monday, July 2, 2007 |
 |
Like everybody else, fortunately 
Thoughts about the iPhone I don't have. Yet.
| | Dave has a long and very useful review of the iPhone. On the plus side, it's a way to buy a BMW every month, without having to pay $60,000. On the minus side, he lists work that needs to be done: browser prefs, openness to aftermarket earphones and mikes, a less DRMmy approach to "content" not from iTunes and the Apple Store, among other things. |
| | Meanwhile, there has been much kvetching about failures of AT&T (and Apple) to get phones up and running on the phone network (formerly — and still across much of the country — Cingular). Here I think we need a bit of perspective. |
| | First, what were Apple's choices here? If Apple wants phones to work outside North America as well as inside, they need a GSM carrier. That does away with Verizon and Sprint/Nextel. What's left are Cingular and T-Mobile. Cingular has the bigger network, by far. So they went with Cingular — in spite of all its shortcomings, which include Net connection speeds far slower than what you can get from EvDO (from Sprint/Nextel and Verizon). There they just have to wait for Cingular/AT&T to catch up and build faster mobile connections into future versions. Meanwhile, they connect over open wi-fi access points, and do it elegantly, which is a very good thing — not just because it's good for customers, but because it will encourage more access points to open up. In fact, we can be sure that 100% bad publicity the slow Cingular data network will hasten improvements. (Though not, I would guess, for the first generation of iPhones.) |
| | Second, this was something of a space launch for Apple. Everything, or nearly everything, had to be right, or damn close. Clearly they did a great job here. A friend at Apple told me how people there put their "hearts and souls" into the effort. Ya gotta respect that much, at least. |
| | Third, in the absence of customer numbers, Apple had very little bargaining power with big carriers and other potential "partners" in the telco world, going into this thing. Once they have those numbers, they need to do things carriers don't like, such as opening up the architecture. Customers need to tell them that. So do developers who want applications to work on the phone, or who want the phone to mash nicely with other services out in the world. |
| | One thing I'm waiting to hear is how well the thing works just as a phone. Is the sound good? That's what matters most to me, with my hearing slowly rotting away, along with the rest of my body. (Yes, I turn 60 this month.) The rest is all gravy. Good gravy, but still gravy. |
| | - More than 200,000 companies have signed on in the past year to create Apple-compatible products
- 70% of new U.S.-model cars have iPod connectors built in, and about 100,000 airline seats will have the same
- since the iPhone was announced in January, many observers have wondered if Jobs pulled another fast one, using his consumer cred to win unprecedented influence over the $140 billion cellular-phone business. Normally, carriers in the U.S. control how cell-phones are priced and marketed, right down to deciding whether they will turn on capabilities built into the phones, such as wireless music downloading. But that's not how Apple rolls. Apple defined the 16 services that are highlighted on the iPhone homepage, and users sign up for them via iTunes, not on AT&T's homepage or in its stores
- ...when it comes to a certain type of chip known as NAND-type flash memory, Apple ranks toward the top and will probably spend $1.82 billion this year, accounting for more than 19% of the world's supply of that type of chip
|
| | Oh, and one more thing. Some have also complained that the iPhone isn't good for business because it doesn't coordinate with Microsoft Exchange. Yet. (Mary Jo Foley says it will, after all.) Probelem here is that Exchange is a huge corporate lock-in, a major silo. Outfits like Gartner shouldn't be waving individual phone customers away from iPhone. They should be waving corporate customers away from Exchange. Easier said than done, of course. But freedom should be the goal, at every level. |
Attention all airlines
| | At the ProjectVRM blog, The downside-up survey in response to one from United, the large and extremely generic airline with which I fly almost exclusively. |
Life from above
Digging Dick
The fire this time
| | Knapp's Castle is one of the most enjoyable low-stress hiking destinations in the back country above Santa Barbara. Built by retired industrialist George Knapp in 1916, it was meant to be a "private mountain lodge that in natural beauty and grandeur will have few to equal it on the American continent". The same could be said of the whole South Coast of California. Or California in general. Still, with great beauty comes great risk. And out here the risk of fire matches or exceeds that of earthquakes. That's because rain here only happens in Winter, and not always then. Our fields, woods and mountain chapparal are made to burn over once every few decades. You know why our state tree, the redwood, has thick bark and branches that don't commence for up to 200 feet or more in mature specimens? Because it's adapted to fire. Humans are still learning, the hard way. Consider the fate of Knapp's castle, described by Santa Barbara Outdoors: |
| | There were seven buildings in all, carved from thick sandstone blocks. The main house had five bedrooms, a large hallway, dining room, observatory, and a room especially designed for Knapp¹s pride and joy, a pipe organ. Over 20 men were employed during the construction of the lodge, which took more than four years. In addition to the main house, there was a studio next to it, a workman¹s cottage below, a dormitory which housed six servants, and a superintendent¹s house in the hollow where the lower road forks away from the path leading up to the lodge. |
| | Soon after the lodge was constructed, Knapp discovered a series of cascades in the canyon east of the lodge, known now as Lewis Falls. Shortly thereafter an automobile road led down to them. If you look closely after you have hiked down this road about a mile, you will see the faint remnants of the rock steps he had built to the base of the falls, now mainly a dirt path with sandstone rocks lining the way. There he also added a bath house and a pool fed by the falls, installed lighting to illuminate the falls at night, and even had the organ music piped all the way down from the house! |
| | The music was provided by resident organist Dion Kennedy. Concerts were given at the rustic retreat from time to time by Kennedy as well as by invited guest artists of local and national repute, including Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer. |
| | Today all that remains of the Castle is the foundation and several chimneys rising like solitary spires into the sky. In 1940, Ms. Francis Holden purchased the lodge, but tragically five weeks later it was destroyed when a fire started in Paradise Canyon and raged out of control up the north slope of the Santa Ynez Mountains. |
| | Paradise Canyon, part of Paradise Valley, is the site of the Rancho Fire that started on Saturday and is still burning, though under control. To illustrate Santa Barbara's collective relief at the good work of the firefighters in Paradise Valley, consider this map here, which I just updated from one I found at the Montecito Fire Department: |
| | Knapp's castle is near the left edge of the large green perimeters of the 1964 Coyote Fire. I just added a colored dot to show the location of the Rancho Fire. Note the timeframes involved. The site of Knapp's castle was burned both in 1940 and 1964. If the Rancho Fire hadn't been contained, 2007 would have been added to that list. |
| | Because when fires get out of control here, they tend to burn large areas, often including homes and other structures. Last September's Day Fire ended up burning around 170,000, as I recall (though the InciWeb site is slow and times out, so I can't get the hard data — and Wikipedia's information is minimal). I was witness to the Oakland fire of 1991, and visited the devastation there (as a member of a nearby Red Cross board) and in Laguna Beach after the fire of 1993. That one was small compared to the Laguna fire of 1970, and the Cedar fire of 2003. Though I was almost forty years away from living in Santa Barbara, I remember the Coyote Fire of 1964, because it burned to within feet of the home of family friends who lived through it. I remember hearing about the Sycamore Canyon fire of 1977 too. That one burned to within a few houses of five of the places where we've lived in Santa Barbara. (Yes, we do move a lot.) |
| | So you'll forgive me obsessing a bit about the prospects of fire here. As terror goes, it's the Real Thing. And you don't need 'ists to make them happen. |
| | And, of course, the Racho Wildland Fire page at InciWeb. Stats as of 6am today: 626 personnel, 482 acres, 80% contained, no growth potential expected. |
| | As for media, we're kind of exposed here. Radio would be the first place anyone would likely turn for news. Yet Santa Barbara lacks a real news station. The "Santa Barbara News-Press Radio Station" on 1290 AM ought to be the first option, since it is a news station. But local news copy is usually recyled newsprint, and the rest of the day is filled with features. Signal coverage is also tiny. The station is just 500 watts by day and 140 watts by night. It covers Santa Barbara proper and that's about it. Other "news" stations mostly run syndicated programs from elsewhere. There are no local news-oriented public radio stations here, though some outside stations try their best with very limited resources to serve Santa Barbara. Under fire conditions I'm sure they'd offer minimal help. |
| | Citizen media have done most of the job on the Rancho Fire (and EdHat got the scoop), but there is no coordinated system yet in place to harness citizen power to the purposes of any kind of clearing-house, portal or other first-option place to turn in the event of an emergency. Here's how Craig Smith describes the situation: |
| | An anonymous reader e-mailed me late Sunday to say; "It would be nice to recognize that the Newspress (sic) has the best coverage of the Rancho Fire. You can't deny that." |
| | Well, I don't know about that. The News-Press had an article of less than 400 words on the front page of Sunday's paper and several large photos of the fire on the back of the "A" section. The same story appeared on its website. The Independent had two articles on its website about the fire, the first one posted by J'Amy Brown at 10:22 pm on Saturday and then an update on Sunday morning. Blogabarbra also had a post on the status of the fire just after midnight Sunday morning. And of course KEYT and KSBY covered the story on their newscasts. |
| | And what about that by-line on the News-Press fire story? "J. Marshall Craig." Better known around the newsroom as "Jeff" he's not a new reporter but rather works on the copy desk and is a page designer. With no reporters on duty Saturday night, someone had to fill in and write the story. Fortunately the fire wasn't any bigger than it was. Had it been, the inability of the News-Press to cover a major disaster would have been badly exposed. |
| | Craig is no friend of the News-Press, of course. (There aren't many left.) And I think he is being a little bit unfair in this case. The paper did its job. Credit where due. But Craig is right that the paper's gears would certainly be stripped quickly if we experienced a fire on the scale of a Coyote, a Sycamore Canyon or a Painted Cave. |
discuss
Copyright 2008 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
