Things that p*&s me off - part 1

There's many things that p*&s me off but I suppose I can start with a select few:

• Since this is online - the New York Times. It's a great paper, a great website, but do I really need a pop up definition of every word I click on in an article? Maybe the NY Times thinks Americans can't spell? Well...


• Car drivers that don't indicate their turns - or if they do, they do it right as they are turning. How hard is it? Grrrr! Related group - who are these idiots that get hit by trains at level crossings? Usually having ignored flashing lights, ringing bells and sometimes driving around the barriers - what are these people like driving in cities? "Oooh, look at those pretty lights!" [If you want to commit suicide, do it where you're not going to stop a train full of travellers - suicide should be solitary]


• Overall group - British plumbing. Careful flat searching can avoid this but Britain seems to have a lack of: reliably flushing toilets (a button flush? How hard is this?!); water pressure in taps (and notably showers); a lack of mixer taps (and some that look like them but don't actually mix!); crappy electrical in-shower heating (power shower my foot!); and unreliable water heating. How hard is it to have a good shower here?! [touch wood, my flat seems OK at the moment]


• People who use the speaker phone capability of their mobile phones in public. Not only do we not want to hear who you're talking to (anything really interesting is probably being whispered into a phone) but it's a speaker phone - you don't need to speak louder - that's the point of a telephone!


• British bureaucracy (well, some noticeable examples of it) that, by default, will say no to any question if they don't know the answer rather than finding out if they can say yes. If you don't know, say so and find out. Rare but notable exception - the Post Office, despite being unglamorous, usually seems to actually have lots of answers (and help) once you've made it to the front of the queue.


• Tourists who come to London and complain about the weather - if you want sun go to Greece.

I'll need to post a things that make me smile to balance this :)

Feminism

It has been said that as soon as men and women are truly equal there will be no need for feminists - kind of like how China isn't keen on revolutionaries as they're supposed to be the revolution. The common view is that the opposite of feminist is a chauvinist (I'm sure the dictionary wouldn't approve) but we can do without them now really.

While some countries have appalling equality (and I hope we do get equality - although that doesn't mean men can't be men and women women - or women men and men women, etc, etc) most western countries aren't too bad (although this is a man talking).

As I was walking though Sloane Square and Chelsea (posh and trendy shopping areas in London) I realised that I'd know there was equality when I saw lots of horrendously good looking men walking around with successful (and probably unattractive) women i.e. the reverse of the situation now.

Back to Macs

After my brief dalliance with financial commentary it's back to Macs - yesterday was the annual Macworld keynote speech by Steve Jobs.

Some can be letdowns and some can be exciting. This year's seemed to be somewhere in the middle.

Apple seems to be more and more about strategy rather than just releasing cool boxes and software to run on them. The original iPod turned into a major industry irritating the music labels to the point that they've dropped DRM (and they were the only ones to want it) just as a way to spite Apple (which may have very little effect anyway). The Apple TV is turning into something that may be the future of video viewing - or maybe not. Either way, Blue Ray or HD DVD may not necessarily be the future of HD viewing in our homes or on the road.

The big new items from Macworld were movie rentals through iTunes (from all the major studios), the iPhone update (heavily leaked earlier), the Time Capsule (an Airport base station with a hard drive you can back up to), and the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air looks delicious although it's bigger that I would have thought - pretty much the same depth and width as my existing MacBook but much, much thinner. If you were to look at it entirely on specifications you'd probably buy a MacBook Pro or even a MacBook but if you travel a lot, have another Mac you'll be keeping, and if you just want a simple life - the MacBook Air looks ideal. It'll certain make most Mac users think about buying it.

As a person who troubleshoots Macs for a job, and a person who only has a laptop, there are a number of issues with troubleshooting. It has no optical drive (barring major software updates I've barely used mine in the last year but I did need it when I did) and no Firewire ports (invaluable in helping a sad Mac by booting from a Firewire hard drive).

Despite working in an office full of Macs, if I was to buy the Air I would need to buy the external optical drive. The Macs in my office don't have wifi (yes, they are that old) so I'd want to be able to fix my own Mac in an emergency.

I wonder if the Air can actually boot from that optical drive (if so, that would be new on Macs)?

The Air also suffers from only one USB port. If you charge an iPod, then you can't plug in a camera to take photos off it or anything else for that matter. A simple life is required - or an equally sexy USB hub.

The announcement of the Time Capsule seems to go hand in hand with the Air - a great wireless backup option (Time Machine isn't nearly as convenient for laptop users) although being able to boot from the Time Capsule would be a revelation as you may not be able to boot from anything else in an emergency.

The hard drive in the Air is smallish though (and slow) and as we transfer more of our lives into these machines, I'm seeing an increasing need for a "server" of a sort. Time Capsule may be that (can you partition it so one could be a simple drive and one could be dedicated to Time Machine itself?).

One day I can see that there may be a need to have an iTunes for Macs (no, not for music ON Macs - for the whole Macs). On an iPod that won't fit my music collection (it's not a big collection I've got to admit) I make playlists so I can sync a subset of my library to the iPod so it will fit. I can see the need (and am already archiving stuff off from my existing laptop) to do that on laptops.

Whether the Time Capsule can act as that server or maybe a souped up MacMini could play the role is another question. An ideal world would have a "headless" MacMini (with a huge hard drive) that you could netboot (via wifi) off - now that would be cool. I want that extra storage (and ability to install software) but don't want to buy a keyboard, mouse and screen just for a few occasions - that, and I don't have the space for it.

The iPhone update is a great improvement although, like the update to the iPod Touch, could be seen as delivering what should have been on the iPhone already (texting more than one person at a time is hardly revolutionary). It is good though and the iPhone is still proving a temptation even though I'm in the harder to sell to UK market. Maybe when there's 3G or a newer model?

The movie rentals in iTunes is fundamentally a good idea - and definitely a challenge to the new HD formats and the declining world of shop-front video stores. I can't help thinking it may have arrived too early though. The questions are: how big are the movies to download (especially the HD versions) and how long will the average user take to download them? If they are as enormous as I would expect (especially with the HD versions), it could take hours (if not the whole day) on many DSL connections to download a full movie.

When you normally rent a movie you tend to do it in an opportunist way (go to video store - choose one you think won't bore you to death - go home and watch) - you don't want to have to set the download going and watch it tomorrow. Most people aren't going to get instant satisfaction and they tend to like that.

Who knows how it will go and how will this go in international markets? It takes long enough to get licensing sorted out in the UK (which shares the same movie companies and is a big market that doesn't need language customisation) let alone smaller markets that tend to come at the end of a long slow Apple delivery line (like my native NZ or places with different languages).

It may take a few more years for that to be viable. Then again, Apple always has had an eye on the future.

Buying lemons - banking in the US

I've watched the housing market for years (having been left behind by it, it has to be said) and laughed as people (seemingly everywhere in the world) have insisted that property couldn't go down in price. They justified this in so many ways - stable investment, shortage of houses, huge immigration. But what they never did is realise that like most "fad" markets, it was people investing in a market just because there is a "guaranteed" crazy profit. It may have taken longer for it to happen but just like time shares, calling card collectors (remember them?), and any other seemingly one way market - it burst.

If any idiot can make a profit by doing the same thing as everyone else then that profit will stop. Simple. Just like in any free market, if the barriers to entry in a market are low, anyone making large profits in a market will cease to as competition arrives to take their share of that profit. The housing market is hardly a place of restrictive entry (barring the ridiculous prices now), and certainly not with today's (or rather last year's) credit controls.

I've just read an article where an eminent economist said that the Federal Reserve should admit to its part in causing the credit bubble. A good point but there are a number of other perpetrators out there - unwise investors (one can side with a poor family trying to get a roof over their heads but not a person buying and selling their home every 2 years for the "guaranteed profit" - they should face the possible loss too), governments who do nothing to stop the bubble (why don't they base the property rates on the last sale value of your home - in England they certainly don't), and especially banks.

Banks should know better. Their business is lending. They should know who is a good person to sell a credit card, a loan or a mortgage to better than anyone else. That may not be exactly what a sane person might think (credit card companies seem to love people "on the edge") but it is fairly clear.

However, they have marketed mortgages with ridiculous entry requirements: bad credit history, no saving, little or no down payment and the most serious error of them all (and so far mostly unique to the States) not holding onto the loans themselves. This gave the lenders little reason to care about the quality of the loan. When a huge proportion of lending gets sold onto Fannie Mae or whoever, where's the incentive to make sure you're lending money to good risks?

If it was as simple as that, we'd just watch Fannie Mae implode and watch the US government sink further into the red (with the respective fallout for that), but banks went one better - they repackaged bad loans and sold them on with a top credit rating. Not only does this show that the credit rating agencies ought to be sued into destitution, it show how bad banks are - creating these things - then actually buying them themselves. Not only American banks but supposedly intelligent foreign ones like UBS, Barclays and HSBC.

Now, just to make a few more idiots in the world, the biggest losers of the lot (and if you count monetary performance as the way to measure a business - especially a bank - then the companies who make the worst losses are the worst of the lot) are repackaging themselves in a way. Selling themselves off to rich sovereign wealth sums at billions of dollars a pop.

Is it just me or is selling spectacularly badly run businesses for sums that previously hadn't been thrown around banks a great case of the Emperor's New Clothes again? "Please invest in us - we're spectacularly good at making losses small countries would be scared of, so we're a great bet for your investment dollars."

Maybe the sovereign wealth funds think it's a better option than leaving the money in a US bank...in US currency? Funny world.