Here is the crux of it: Rosetta Stone is more concerned about preventing software piracy than they are about existing customer satisfaction. These things always come from the top down. Some big important MBA has a spreadsheet which tells him how much richer he could be if their software wasn’t pirated. So they spend a ton of money and create all sorts of processes to prevent piracy. That alone would be fine – I am anti-software-piracy for the most part.

But what has happened psychologically at Rosetta Stone is that everyone, including good, loyal paying customers, is viewed through this lens of suspicion. The focus is not on making sure customers are happy, it’s on making sure they are not pirates. The goal is not to make sure customers get what they want, it’s on making sure Rosetta Stone gets what it wants.

This is completely backwards. It’s a cancer in an organization. You can never put a corporate goal above the goals of your customers. Without your customers there is no corporation.

I’ve tweeted many times about how much I like Rosetta Stone. Now I am tweeting about how much I hate Rosetta Stone the company. That is a colossal failure of management and a sign, frankly, of a company in decline.

UPDATE: Someone at Rosetta Stone came through, solved my problem and took responsibility for the runaround I had been getting. They even said they read this blog post! I can’t say how or if Rosetta Stone will address the big picture ideas I mention above, but they did, in the end, make sure I was happy and I appreciate that a lot.

I love it. It is really awesome. Here is why.

1. It’s not backlit. This is a huge feature. The “digital paper” technology is very cool and very pleasing to read. You can read even in low light conditions and it uses very little power.
2. It’s small but not too small. My laptop is too big to curl up with like the Sunday paper. My iPhone is too small. The Kindle is perfectly sized to hold in one hand with a cup of coffee in the other. It’s very lightweight as well. I’m currently reading Anathem, which is 900 pages long and weighs almost 3 lbs. The Kindle weighs less than 1 lb. Reading Anathem on the Kindle is much more pleasant than manhandling the large tome.
3. It’s magic. The New York Times shows up automatically. I don’t do anything, it’s just there, ready and waiting every day.
4. It appeals to the bibliophile in me. It is dangerously easy to browse and buy new books. And the device makes me want to read more. It’s a very pleasing little device, in a very book-like way.
5. It’s not a computer. You can browse the web if you want, but there are far less distractions than a computer. No email, no IM, not Facebook or Twitter. When you read, it is a book and only a book.

The price point for the Kindle seems too high to me but the cost of the books is quite economical, I paid only $8 for Anathem and it downloaded in seconds. The Kindle is a great gift for the bibliophile in your life, including you.

Says a Microsoft spokesperson:

We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time]

They claim this will make their software more accessible to emerging markets. In reality, it looks like it will force people to pay more for the more sophisticated versions.

So why is this so dumb?

Because it costs Microsoft money, probably lots of it, to create, market and support a crippled version like this. They expended extra effort to make their software less capable. That is retarded. Only an MBA is capable of that level of stupidity.

After the very public failure of Windows Vista, one has to wonder why Microsoft still wastes so much time crippling their software.

…I hear/see a lot more jeers than cheers in the Microsoft press rooms and events…

Umm maybe that’s because they make products so shitty even Windows users don’t buy them? (read: Vista)

Daniel Lyons, a rude and inarticulate fellow from what I can gather, apparently thinks that Steve Jobs’s medical records should be published on a daily blog. If not, the media is to blame!

My personal belief is that if Apple can’t thrive without Steve Jobs Apple can’t thrive. If Jobs is that necessary, they are fucked.

The Apple Blog has a lot of links if you want to follow this silly topic around the ‘net. It’s the same old shit — people do not like that other people like Apple. Some weenies make a living at not liking us for liking Apple.

Me thinks thou doth protesteth too much. Daniel Eran Dilger basically rips them up.

I think the Obama comparison is telling. If you really get excited about something, people just can’t resist characterizing it as some sort of fanboy infatuation. They just can’t give us credit for using our brains. It must be some personal failing on our part.

WRONG. Quality is a mysterious thing but we know it when we see it. And, perhaps more importantly, we don’t apologize for seeing it.

I’m very sorry your operating system sucks. I’m sorry that you are willing to put up with the second-rate Windows Empire. I’m really sorry that Steve Jobs is not dying fast enough for you. Please, dear Windows Weenies, go fuck yourself. Thrice.

But it could be a great little box if Apple hadn’t screwed up a few major things. These include:

1. You can’t use a keyboard and mouse. It has USB and Mac OS X running inside of it, but if you don’t have a little white remote, you can’t operate it.
2. Nor can you use it for web/email/etc. Major fuckup.
3. It doesn’t have a DVD player in it. WTF? Those things cost like $80 and they are very slim. If their heads are not up their asses, the next AppleTV will have a Blu-Ray drive.
4. DRM.
5. The relative paucity of available movies and TV shows. There’s a lot, but it is a small fraction of what it should be.
6. The lack of other web content. Boxee might eat Apple’s lunch if they don’t get on it. We want to watch Hulu, BitTorrent, Flash — all of it.

With all that said, I love the AppleTV and it is a glimpse of things to come. We won’t talk about “TVs” and “computers” in the future, there will just be displays and things we show on them*. The network will certainly be the delivery mechanism.

It is getting more common for people to gather around a computer to look at photos or watch video clips. The giant TVs that people have these days are the perfect place to do that. In many ways, once again, Apple has realized this first. So the AppleTV is, perhaps, an imperfect step in the right direction.

* The ancient X-Windows system for Unix got it right by totally separating the notion of display/keyboard/mouse with the physical system. Linux makes use of this to this day.

1: NSMutableArray *particles = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
2: [particles addObject:newParticle];
3: ...
4: Particle *p;
5: for(n=0;n<[particles count]; ++n ) {
6: p = [particles objectAtIndex:n];
7: [p setName:[self ownerName]];

In line 1 we see the Obj-C way of initializing an object. First we send an alloc message to the NSMutableArray class and then send an init message to the object returned by it. We then assign it to a pointer variable of the appropriate type. In line 2 we add a new object newParticle to the particles array. Later, at line 4 we create a C-style pointer to a Particle object and in line 5 we find out the number of objects in the array particles by sending it a count message. In line 6 we pull out a specific object from the array and in line 7 we send the setName message to our Particle object (the normal "setter" for the instance variable name) and send as a parameter the value from the "getter" of the class we are in (self) for the instance variable ownerName.

You can see there is an odd mix of traditional C and object stuff.

It's also quite flexible. For example, if you have an instance variable named isEnabled you can refer to that variable in 3 different ways:

isEnabled = NO;
self.isEnabled = NO;
[self setIsEnabled:NO];

In the first two we access the variable directly and in the third we call the setter method. As we saw in lines 1 and 7 above, you can nest these as much as you like.

self.currentParticle.size = 10;
[[self currentParticle] setSize:10];

But at any time you can whack in some normal ol' C:

size = (sizeFactor *2.0*arc4random() / (float)UINT_MAX)+sizeFactor;

Pretty cool.

2. Foreign policy experience is required to be President!
Obama doesn’t have any!
Neither does Palin!
Both McCain and Biden do!

3. Washington insiders are bad.
McCain is a Washington insider!
So is Biden!
But Palin isn’t!
Neither is Obama!
But see #2! The only way to get foreign policy experience is to be a Washington insider!

4. The liberals are being mean to Palin!
CNN is being mean to Palin!
Palin is being mean to Obama!
Giuliani is being mean to Obama!

5. Obama is an elitist!
An Ivy League education is bad!
Community organizers are lame!
McCain is so rich he doesn’t know how many houses he has!

Let the hypocrisy reign!

Google Terms of Service

Welcome to Google!

1. Your relationship with Google

1.1 Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google.

In this day and age of malware, viruses and trojans, someone thought it was a good idea to download things to people’s hard drives without permission. L.A.M.E.

Not to mention some fleet of fucking lawyers are whinging to Google that they should even consider something this stupid.

Google, just letting you know that I hereby do not accept your terms of service. Please feel free to prevent me from accessing your services. By continuing to allow me access to your services you are agreeing to MY terms of fucking service, which I am under no obligation to disclose to you.

So they started a site: Save Windows XP.

Microsoft plans to end most sales of Windows XP on June 30, despite a deep reluctance by many business and individuals about moving to Vista. InfoWorld believes such an expensive, time-consuming shift with problematic benefits should not be forced on Windows users, so we have decided to rally XP users to demand that XP be kept available.

I like to point out at times that Apple successfully went from the Motorola chipset to Intel and from the legacy “classic” Mac OS to the modern, unix-based OS with barely a hiccup. Not only did they not create a cry of whiners like those above, people actually had the reverse reaction: they liked it! The evolution of the Macintosh from a 1980′s toy to a modern computing platform has been managed beautifully. It is now just as common to see scientists, engineers, sysadmins with a Mac as designers and web hackers.

But I digress. Let me clear this up for the folks at InfoWorld: XP was a finely polished turd. Vista is really no worse and probably much better. Leave the past behind, folks. Don’t be scared. Change is good. You can handle it. Really, you can.

Or, if you can’t, you can always move to something better. Like say Linux (ok, Cairnarvon?). Or a Mac.

But I am constantly disappointed not just by Microsoft’s software but by almost all software written for Windows. They try to make the software “easy” in totally the wrong way. They hide useful information, they don’t give you options, they infrequently use tool tips. They sort of assume you are dumb and they manage to alienate both the dumb people and the smart people.

Steve Jobs said, if this was just about money Microsoft would make great software. It is confusing to me that Apple can make such great software and inspire such great software and Microsoft manages to inspire a lot of very poorly conceived, poorly executed and hard-to-use software. Some people will claim this is because there is so much more software for Windows, so there is going to more bad software as a result.

I don’t buy it. My latest complaint of shit-ass software was written by Intel. It’s horrible software. It is software to configure and managed RAID. It has told me there is an error on one of my disks. It hasn’t told me what the error is! It has no help for me to repair the error. It’s only advice is I should back up my data. There are no tool tips and the help is incomplete and sucky. It is supposedly logging events somewhere but they are nowhere within the Event Viewer. There are no other logs I can find. Apparently you need to be a Microsoft Certified Retard in order to diagnose this goddamn problem. I know RAID inside and out. I have run Windows for a decade and computers for 3 decades. It is an absolute failure of leadership by Microsoft and Intel that they let shitty software like this into the marketplace.

And yet Windows Weenies will defend this backwards-ass hegemony with all their lives. They love the mediocrity. They love the unintuitive nature of things, the constant annoying little popups, the DLL conflict hell. They love the shit ton of crappy software they can run on their crappy OS and feel they are on the “business” operating system.

This is why Apple is gaining market share and market capitalization. From the very top down, Apple manages quality. Microsoft, from the top down, clearly does not understand their users or the marketplace. The only reason they are surviving at this point is because of Office and because so many business users think they are required to use this inadequate shit.

The only company that is really competing with Apple right now is Google. Microsoft is falling.

You can also run Ubuntu on directly on a mac, without virtualization, if you want to dual boot.

I know virtualization is not unique to Macs, but I think it is pretty cool that I can run every other operating system on my mac. No other operating system can do that.

Parallels is pretty cool.