General

These Terms of Service govern your use of the USATODAY.com website (the “Site”) only and do not govern your use of other USA TODAY services, such as services offered by the USA TODAY print newspaper.

Clearly this invalidates the agreement on the iPhone, since the iPhone App is not “the USATODAY.com website”.

This is mildly embarrassing for USA TODAY, and even more of a fumble for Mercury Intermedia, who built the app. But I can’t think of any way this actually hurts anyone, even in theory. Users are already bound by the App Store Terms and Conditions, so why bother putting your own EULA (that nobody’s ever going to read much less care about) in your app?

¹To see the EULA, tap that little i near the bottom left of the homescreen, then tap Terms of Service. The text above was copied from version 1.5 of the USA TODAY iPhone App.

Being able to program your own computer isn’t enough to make it open

As things stand today, Apple can’t stop you from installing any damn iPhone app if you build yourself.

To do that you have to join the iPhone developer program of course. And there’s a $99/year fee. That’s inconvenient, but it’s just using a subscription-based way of selling iPhone OS: Developer Edition.

That’s the kind of dirty money-grabbing scheme I’d expect from Microsoft. It’s a bit shady, because it’s not how most OSes are sold. But it’s not without precedent. And unless you are against ever charging money for software, I don’t think there’s an argument that it’s actually depriving people of freedom.

Yes, it’s an unaffordably high price for many. But the iPhone is a premium good that costs real money to build — it’s inherently beyond many people’s means, even when subsidized.

Observation: Only Binaries Matter

If you have a great iPhone app that Apple won’t allow into the store, you can still give it to me in source code form, and since I have iPhone OS: Developer Edition, I can run it on my iPhone.

But clearly that’s not good enough.

In fact, I’m not aware of any substantive iPhone App that’s distributed as source. By “substantive” I mean an app with a lot of users — say as many as the 100th most downloaded App Store app — or an app that does something that makes people jealous, like tethering (See update!), which we know is possible using the SDK. I realize this is a wishy-washy definition — what I’m trying to say is that distributed-as-source iPhone Apps seem to be totally irrelevant.

“It’s not open until I can put Linux on it”

I believe it’s technically possible to run Linux on an iPhone without jail-breaking it. (Although it’s not terribly practical.) Just build Linux (or an emulator that runs Linux) as an iPhone app, and leave it running all the time to get around the limitations on background processes.

Apple won’t allow such a thing into the App Store of course –but how does that stop you from distributing the source for it? As best I can tell, it doesn’t.

So as things stand today, yes you can distribute source code that lets any iPhone OS: Developer Edition user run Linux. It’s technically challenging, but it’s doable.

Conclusion

It’s possible to build open systems on top of closed systems. We’ve done it before when we built the internet on Ma Bell’s back.

But the iPhone remains a closed device. User-compiled applications have 0 momentum. And I think that clearly shows the irrelevance of the rare “programmer user”, who is comfortable dealing with the source code for the programs he uses.

UPDATE 2010-01-21: iProxy is an open-source project to enable tethering! Maybe the programmer-user will have their day after-all.

A common response to this story is that this kind of danger is inherent in “cloud” computing services, where you rely on some service provider to take care of your data. But this misses the point, I think. Preserving data is difficult, and individual users tend to do a mediocre job of it. Admit it: You have lost your own data at some point. I know I have lost some of mine. A big, professionally run data center is much less likely to lose your data than you are.

–Ed Felton

It’s easy to convince yourself of this anecdotally. Look around you, how many people people that you loosely know on Facebook have you seen complain about losing all their contacts when they lost their phone? I’ve seen at least a dozen such announcements. But nobody I actually know has been affected by this recent fiasco, or complained about losing contacts in any other “cloud” failure.

But people have a bias to overestimate risks they can’t control, and underestimate risks they can control. So we reinvent the wheel, and lose our own data ourselves.

Hey, I do it too. Actuarially, I really should be paying wordpress.com to manage this blog.

…the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart’s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn’t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system’s powerful, language-size command structure? It’s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.

–Buzz Andersen, summarizing John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, a history of the early personal computer industry

The title this post is something I’ve been saying as part of my personal statement on hirevincent.com for years.

Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.

Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?

Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).

But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)

Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

Things have improved since 1995, but there’s still a long way to go.

There’s more to say about how to fix things, but someone has already said it. The future looks bright,

(Microsoft) now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize. “It’s becoming rarer and rarer that anything that comes to us ad hoc isn’t already on our list” from Hotmail or user data, Calcagno says. According to a July 14, 2006, bug report, for example, the Natural Language Group harvested the following words that had appeared more than 10 times in Hotmail user dictionaries: Netflix, Radiohead, Lipitor, glucosamine, waitressing, taekwondo, and all-nighter.

I think the next step in spellchecking is to follow Mac OS X’s lead, and adopt a system-wide spellchecker. When there’s only one instance of a spellchecker running (not a separate one for every program that might work with text) we can make it much smarter, without requiring a supercomputer.

That’s why, we must make our software so that people can recover after making a mistake.

…there is actual precedent for creating value for people with technology. Think of word processors, databases, spreadsheets, web browsers, web publishing, search engines, email, etc. Social media is the first major computing revolution that as far as I can tell, has produced essentially nothing.

But the social media craze is perfectly fitting in a society where producing nothing has been in fashion for years. Mortgages without credit. Profit without product. Riches without risk. Oops.

-Hank Williams

And here’s Marlon Brando reading The Hollow Men in Apocalypse Now.

The PC version is awful too.

This was not something that was hard to predict. Rolodexes have been in every office for decades, because people want to look up people by name, not number. Only recently has software supplanted them.

I was very surprised when I found this unknown invention from the late 1930′s

A NEW desk telephone directory not only finds the number you want but actually dials it for you. All you have to do is slide the knob on the face of the device, called an Auto Dial, to the name you want, then press the small lever at the foot of the machine. When the lever returns to its normal position, in five or six seconds, your call is made and you pick up the phone.

The Auto Dial was invented by a German before (World War II). The only sample in (America) is owned by Alfred Altman, President of the National Dairymen Association. The machine can handle any 50 telephone numbers desired by the user, and changes can be made at will.

The signals can be made up of any number of letters and digits, according to the system used in the local exchange. The regular hand dial on the telephone can be used in the ordinary way when the automatic device has been attached.

What an improvement over memorizing and/or dialing a number! We all have these devices built into our cellphones today. Frighteningly, the original appears easier to use then my cellphone’s “Address Book”.

So why didn’t this invention catch on half a century ago, not just a decade ago? I don’t know. I can only speculate, and I don’t think there is value in writing uninformed guesses down. But understanding why the Auto Dial was never popular is probably very instructive.