The Sizzling Sound of Music

Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's presentation had a slide titled: "Live, Memorex or MP3." He mentioned that Thomas Edison promoted his phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison's cylinders playing a recording of the singer. More recently, the famous Memorex ad challenged us to determine whether it was a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald or a recorded one.

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like -- some like the sizzle and others like the crackle. I wonder if this isn't also something akin to thinking that hot dogs taste better at the ball park. The hot dog is identical to what you'd buy at a grocery store and there aren't many restaurants that serve hot dogs. A hot dog is not that special, except in the right setting. The context changes our perception, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it's more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It's that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.

On a related note, a friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

Capturing the Knowledge of Mill-Wrights

Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel so called because water pours on top of the wheel, directed there by a long "flume" that brings water from a nearby pond. The Bale Mill operated in the late 1840s into the 1860s, spanning a period of time when Napa was part of a Mexican province to its becoming part of the Bear Flag Republic and finally the State of California. This mill was grinding wheat grown in the Napa Valley long before there were any vineyards, and the flour was supplied to miners heading out to the gold fields in 1848.

Inside the mill are two different sets of millstones, one enclosed in a box for safety. A docent demonstrated the operation of the mill, setting the waterwheel in motion, which turned the gears underneath the millstones, and caused the wooden floorboards to rumble. Eventually, as the momentum picked up, the millstones themselves began to spin. Out came a steady flow of wheat flour. The docent said that the phrase "nose to the grindstone" comes from the constant attention required of the miller who has to smell the wheat to check for ozone, which is caused when the two large pieces of quartzstone are rubbing against each other.

After the demonstration, the docent held out a book published in 1795 called "The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide" by Oliver Evans, an early American user manual for builders, inventors and operators. Check out a scan of fifteenth edition of the guide from 1860 on Google Books.

Oliver Evans was an inventor himself, and Wikipedia says that "his most important invention was an automated grist mill which operated continuously through the use of bulk material handling devices including bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and Archimedean screws." His book played an important role in the spread of mills in American, explaining the design, construction and operation of mills, even pointing out areas where new inventions were needed. The docent believed the book was used in the construction of the Old Bale Mill, which was probably built by people who had no previous experience building a mill.

The docent showed us the detailed diagrams in the book.

Then he identified an unusual feature found in the first edition. At the back of the book, there was a section that listed the subscribers for the book, and at the top of list were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In those times, to publish a book meant getting readers to commit in advance to buying it. An enterprising publisher/author would try to cover his costs before incurring them. I understood that much about the subscription model. What I didn't realize was something that the docent pointed out. He said printing a list of subscribers was an early form of a social network -- the list identified others who were interested in the same subject and whom you might wish to consult for a variety of reasons. If you were studying Evans's plans, you might want to correspond with someone else who was doing the same thing. Pretty cool.

The preface to the fifteenth edition of Evans's book says this about his fame and fortune:

The improvements in the flour mill, like the invention of the cotton gin, apply to one of the great staples of our country; and although nearly forty years have elapsed since Mr. Evans first made his improvements known to the world in the present work, the general superiority of American mills to those even of Great Britain, is still a subject of remark by intelligent travellers. Mr. Evans, however, experienced the fate of most other meritorious inventors; the combined powers of prejudice and of interest deprived him of all benefit from his labours, and, like Whitney, he was compelled to depend upon other pursuits for the means of establishing himself in the world. His reward, as an inventor, was a long-continued course of ruinous litigation, and the eventual success of the powerful phalanx which was in league against him.

Still, I think about how this old user manual and this old mill have endured.

Big Mo' and The Bears

If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling up scores suddenly becomes tentative and defensive, as was the case with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game, even though they held on to win the game. A team that is getting badly beaten inexplicably begins doing good things again.

An alert game announcer notices these changes, and comments on them often in advance of the results having changed significantly. Usually in football, it's a turnover, such as a fumble or interception, that opens the door for the other team to change the outcome. Sometimes it's a dumb penalty that incites the other team to action and gets their collective head back in the game.

You can probably guess that I'm really thinking in terms of our dreadful economy. We're on a team that's worse than the Arizona Cardinals ever were. We're up against the Bears, which is unfortunately not just a team from Chicago. The Bears are overpowering and we're really getting beat. Nobody's cheering and a turnaround seems impossible. It's hopeless until we see a sign that things could change. If you're a fan, you watch for these things and hope they'll happen. If you're a player, you've got to make them happen or you're defeated.

An essay by Paulette Miniter in the Christian Science Monitor cautioned people not to panic about their 401ks because stocks will recover before jobs do. She wrote:

Our retirement funds probably aren't too far away from getting back to work. Stocks are down 40 percent from their last peak, putting us deep in the bear den. But since investors can exectute trades much faster than corporations can start hiring en masse again after a recession, stock prices will likely rise before the economic recovery is official.

Tim O'Reilly and I saw Web 2.0 coming because we spotted fundamental changes in the way the game was starting to be played and believed that these were signs that momentum had shifted. The Web was making a comeback, executing with a new playbook, like the West Coast offense of Bill Walsh. The Internet/Web space of late 1990's shifted from teams with me-too plans easily getting funding to teams in 2002 that were organized around plans that nobody was funding. The remarkable thing was the determination of these startups despite little or no prospects for success. That is, they had few people believing in them, except eventually their fans -- people who began using services like Blogger, Flickr and Etsy in greater numbers. It's like a team that re-discovers why they're playing the game, and they see that their effort and exertion are causing the cheering in the stands, which only makes them work harder. They stop worrying about losing and focus on playing harder, and on each subsequent play they are playing harder than their opponent. That's why the score eventually changes.

I don't know what signs will show that things are turning around but I know we need to be looking. The signs might be incidental or accidental, but they will get you to start wondering if change is coming. They'll be early-warning signs that the Bears can be moved back a little and maybe scored on. It will get you believing that the Bears can be beaten, and this belief will occur to you as it occurs to others who will begin playing harder, too. Suddenly Big Mo' changes sides.

Admiring Bill Gates

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.

This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a shift in focus, moving from defining strategy for Microsoft to a broader strategy for improving the lives of the world's poor. Bill Gates exemplifies what Tim O'Reilly is talking about when he says that those of us in the tech industry should increasingly "focus on stuff that matters."

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

These thoughts about Gates were sparked by watching Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Gates this week. What comes through in this interview is the optimism of Bill Gates and his belief that technology is a kind of magic. Good magic. Powerful magic. Software is magic that allows people to do things they dream of doing. What's most telling is Gates's belief that the best is yet to come, that we're still in the early stages of realizing what can be done with this technology.

The second half of the interview is the best part, when Gates is talking about his life after Microsoft and his interest in the work of the Foundation. (Many will find the first half of the interview about Microsoft's past and present product strategy and Gates's belief that they can compete with Google in search uninteresting or irrelevant.) The primary focus of the Gates Foundation has been to explore ways to reduce common diseases such as malaria and rotavirus that affect the world's poor. Here's a section from a letter from Bill and Melinda Gates.

More than a decade ago, the two of us read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that were long ago eliminated in this country. One disease we had never even heard of—rotavirus—was killing literally half a million kids each year. We thought: That's got to be a typo. If a single disease were killing that many kids, we would have heard about it, because it would have been front-page news. But it wasn’t a typo.

We couldn't escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

In the interview, you can't miss how committed Gates is to the efforts of the Foundation. He realizes that he's in a special position to see problems like the one above and formulate a plan backed by resources to do something about it. Yet he doesn't come across as a do-gooder. What excites him about the non-profit world is similar to what he enjoyed at Microsoft -- finding and working with smart people who are really engaged in issues and problems.

As much as I appreciate the goals of the Foundation, I found myself admiring Bill Gates as a person during the course of the interview. The truth is that while he was busy developing software, he's also worked on developing himself. He is the self-made American who has matured into a role model and leader. He is thoughtful and tactful where a younger version would have been brash and impetuous. Like Windows, improvement for Gates has required multiple iterations but the insistence on getting it right won out eventually. The newest release of Bill Gates is the best yet.

When he talks about improving education, he's not just analytical. He appears to be moved while describing his interaction with highly motivated teachers who see their profession "as a higher calling." Gates also tells us that he's watching courses on DVD while he exercises. He highly recommends "Big History" a series of lectures by David Christian, available through "The Teaching Company." I found it inspiring that he was "watching three hours on Modern Economics" over the course of a weekend while on a treadmill. That's lifelong learning in action. I just wonder how many present or former CEOs are that inquisitive.

Gates gives me hope at a time when I've grown tired of reading how the short-sighted schemes of Wall Street's top brass and other American executives have brought ruin to American business and our economy. They aren't leaders worth following. Gates is different. He deserves genuine admiration, in my view. He's more than a technologist. He's both a realist and an optimist. He's become a world leader worth listening to.

Clever Emoticarolers App

Open the door and smiley-face carolers sing a song that you can customize and send to others. That's the emoticarolers concept, worked up by Jason Striegel, our Hackszine editor, who leads the development side of things for Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis. The team created this clever holiday "text-to-sing" promotion for Yahoo Messenger at emoticarolers.com. A custom Make carol is here. (Reminds me of the Smileys book by David Sanderson that I developed many years ago.)

I asked Jason how they built the app and here's what he said:

The front end interface is written in Flash/AS3. It talks to a PHP backend, which uses the Festival text-to-speech software and some other Unix audio tools to render each of the four voices. Those all get compiled back into a single mp3 and sent back to flash, along with an xml file that tells the app how to animate the emoticons and custom lyrics. Aside from some of the animated bits, this could work as-is with an HTML/CSS/JS front end as well.

The process is pretty cpu intensive, so we had to use a number of load balanced machines to handle requests. They output files on amazon s3, all keyed by a unique id. If this becomes popular (fingers crossed), there's no database or anything that will bottleneck reads or writes, and it should just scale linearly as we add more boxes.

It's funny how the text-to-singing stuff ended up being only a small portion of the project.

The Visible Hand

I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon.

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Annals of the Patently Absurd

Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments."

Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

Full text of 7,415,666

Perhaps patent examiners are unable to tell what's obvious or not because the very language in which patents are written is so obscure. Try parsing this sentence:

A document viewing component, such as in the form of a control hosted in a program, controls the scrolling operation, such as by containing a scroll control.

Most likely this twisted language is the work product of Workman Nydeggar, the patent attorneys on this one. No doubt they are responsible for this closing flourish:

While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.

Patent 7,415,666 was submitted in March 2005 so it took three years for the patent office to take in all this mumbo-jumbo and decide to give its approval. So if the USPTO is going to approve nearly every patent -- and I'd love to see a list of rejected ones -- why does it take three years to do so?

Also, 7,415,666 was not the only good news for Timothy D. Sellers of Bellevue WA. This week, he had three patents approved, upping his own total to nine. He re-invented the toolbar, among other things.

Thanks to Richard Forno's of InfoWarrior for his posting to Dave Farber's IP list.

What A Tiger Can Do

This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in sports. Late Saturday afternoon, I began watching Tiger fight his way into the lead of the tournament as he hobbled around on a bad knee. I wasn't intending to watch much more than a few minutes but I watched until the close of play on Saturday, tuned in again on Sunday for every minute as Tiger lost the lead and then fought back to tie the leader, and then I could not possibly miss the eighteen-hole playoff on Monday. I was not alone on Monday. I saw a report that trading volume was down 9% on Monday, and it was attributed to the distraction of this playoff match. Who could work when Tiger was playing? Who could not be drawn into this story and find themselves completely swept away by the ups and downs, all the while wondering how it would turn out?

Tiger's adversary was Rocco Mediate, a delightful forty-five year old player ranked 158th in the world. Commentators said Rocco was the crowd favorite, and no one could root against Rocco. He was the everyman, given a special opportunity to "play the best player on the planet, one on one." No one truly expected him to win but he played well, fighting back after falling behind by three shots. He had to overcome his own nervousness and settle in to his own game. Incredibly, he had a one shot lead going into the 18th hole. Somehow, it became believable that Rocco might just win.

As much as I liked Rocco, I found myself pulling for Tiger again and again, as he fought back to tie on Sunday and at the end of eighteen holes on Monday. I have always identified with the underdog, and everything about Rocco made me pull for him. (I have rooted for the Dodgers and Red Sox, never the Yankees, who usually won in the end.) Yet, I realized part-way through the tournament that Tiger wasn't simply a favorite; he had become a superhero. I wanted him to win.

On the Monday broadcast, Johnny Miller remarked after Tiger hit an amazing shot out of a fairway trap: "That's a Tiger shot." It's like Tiger called on super-powers. I certainly wanted to believe he had such powers. What's more, Tiger's round of golf revealed a level of vulnerability that made yourself question if you believed in him. He grimaced after shots because of sharp pain in his knee. He was limping down the fairways. It was never automatic that Tiger would win. As the storyline developed, he heroically summoned his own strength, managed to overcome the physical pain, and obtain a victory. In the end, the real battle was not Tiger vs. Rocco; it was each man against himself, as the game of golf isolates for us to see so clearly.

Yesterday, we learned that Tiger won't play the rest of year, as his knee problems were more severe than he let on; he needs additional surgery followed by a long recovery period. It's bad news for golf and for the people who run tournaments. However, Tiger is not merely an action-hero and his accomplishments carry beyond the golf course.

According to Nike's ads, which feature Tiger's father, Earl Woods, Tiger's special strength is his mental toughness. His father says: "'I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will." David Brooks writes about Tiger in Tuesday's New York Times, adding that Tiger has become "the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude."

Tiger is the best. You want to watch "best"; you want to see what "best" does; you want to learn from "best". Even the best is not perfect, you realize. You wonder how you measure up against the best and you hope, like Rocco, you don't do too badly.

Does Woods vs. Mediate bring to mind the presidential race: Obama vs. McCain? There's the obvious: black/white, young/old, prodigy/warrior. Both seem worthy for different reasons. But, in the words of the old Exxon ad, who has a Tiger in his tank? I hope that we elect a leader who understands our vulnerability and summons our strengths. I hope that person can find the focus and determination to meet the challenges ahead and see us through to the end. I'd like to believe that one of them will prove to be a Tiger and inspire our confidence. I want the best to lead.

Hurrah for Home Chemistry

Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and experimentation. Nothing quite embodies the practice of science like a chemistry set, a home lab that once was a favorite childhood gift has now vanished from the shelves of toy and hobby stores.

In 1964, Robert Bruce Thompson got what he wanted most for Christmas and his first chemistry set introduced him to a fascinating, new world. He went on to major in chemistry in college. Recently, a neighbor's teenage daughter started asking him questions about science, which she wished to pursue as a career, but she admitted she wasn't learning much science in school. Robert wanted to introduce her to the chemistry lab but realized it was nigh impossible to buy a good chemistry set in a store and he couldn't recommend any of the exisiting books on chemistry. So Robert decided that he could write a book himself and that it would start with describing how to build your own chemistry set and set up a lab.

The
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is Bob's seventh book with O'Reilly; he's written previously about PC hardware and astronomy. A man of many interests, Bob has put together a wonderful book that I'm proud to publish and it completely fits with Make's DIY ethic. Bob's book has the subtitle: "All Lab, No Lecture." What surprised me most about the book was how much Bob had tailored the book to home schoolers and other students who might be getting "chemistry-lite" in school. ("A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry lab course.") It also works for adults, like me, who were bored by chemistry in school and did poorly yet could see the fascination of a lab filled with vials, flasks and burettes.

The book is also a great example of collaboration as Bob has worked with Dr. Mary Chervenak and Dr. Paul Jones, each of whom hold Ph.D's in organic chemistry. Their insights are featured throughout the book, not just as subject-matter experts but also as experienced teachers and practitioners. Says Dr. Paul Jones: "Most students are aware of acids and their dangers but are more or less ignorant of the dangers of alkali (base). For instance, aqueous sodium hydroxide can blind you in a matter of minutes if not cleansed thoroughly and I've seen lots of kids who are quick to put on goggles to work with 0.01 M HCI but throw 6 M NaOH around like it's candy. Aqueous bases are every bit as dangerous as aqueous acids."

Concerns about the liablity of practicing science in school have led schools to offer less of it. (Sports is a more common source of serious injury.) This book offers a "real science" alternative. Bob writes: "One of the recurring lessons throughout this book is the importance of assuming personal responsibility for useful but dangerous actions -- understanding the specific risks and taking the necessary steps to minimize or eliminate them."

Bob will be featured at this year's Maker Faire, talking about his love of chemistry and his new book. He'll be in the Maker Shed area all weekend, doing some of the experiments from the book. His talk on the Main Stage on Sunday at 1pm will be "What's Happened to the Chemistry Set?"

Good Devices Gone Bad

(This entry itself had problems after posting and it took a day to fix. A good entry gone bad.)

My sister, Doreen, who is seldom on the bleeding edge of technology, bought a Kindle in January and by March she was sending it back.

My Kindle was a clunker. I LOVED it and had about 15 books on it when it finally died. The screen kept freezing and I had to reset it. They did a factory reset download but it didn't help. Finally it would only turn on by the reset button on back. UPS is delivering a new one today so that's good news....they are replacing buggy ones. I still think it is great even though I got a first generation dud.

With my iPhone, I've had three replacements, meaning I'm on my fourth phone in six months. I like the iPhone just fine. I don't like that it breaks down and there's not much I can do about it, except get a replacement. The first one had a problem with audio. I wasn't getting stereo out the headphones. So it worked as phone, but not an iPod. I sent that phone to Texas and got a replacement but then they sent me a "new" phone instead of fixing the one I sent them. That phone worked fine until the January 1.1.3 update caused it to shutdown automatically when it was not in the cradle. I took that one back to the Apple Store and got a "new" one. I got home, opened the box and this phone, probably a re-conditioned one, mis-behaved badly, as shown in the picture below taken from a video I made of the wacky behavior.

I had to take the iPhone back again and get another "new" one.

I can't guess what it must cost companies to service and replace these devices. Early adopters know this experience well. Too often, what we're adopting is a problem child. One of the biggest frustrations is just convincing the company that there's a problem. The support person is often less knowledgeable than you are. You have to go through their script, trying resets and reboots that you've already tried just so they can check off that it was done. When I took my iPhone into the Apple Store and waited my turn to talk to an impatient "guru", I was worried that the problem might be erratic and irregular and not show itself at the appointed time. That's why I took a short video of the screen flashing in crazy ways. Please believe me when I say it's not working.

Is the true cost of manufacturing much higher than companies think? Is this the tradeoff for manufacturing in China? Low prices, fast turnaround and lots of flaws. I don't mean to blame China. My guess is that designers of products are too distant from the manufacturing process and too hands-off. They design to add features, not to improve the process to prevent failures.

There's an opportunity to take a new look at manufacturing based on reliability and quality. Build products that are well-made and designed to last. Make them easier to repair or make it possible for others to fix them locally. Take seriously the environmental impact of all our throwaway technology.

****

On Sunday, several of us from the Maker Faire team met at ACCRC in Berkeley. ACCRC opened its doors to makers, allowing them to go through heaps of dead devices and see what can be salvaged for Make Play Day or personal projects. We had about 40 makers show up and they were literally like kids in a candy store. Tim Anderson had to make several trips with a handcart to his car.

James Burgett of ACCRC had on display the skull of junked electronics. He could send text messages to it and it would speak the words, reminding me of the Wizard of Oz. I plan to put the skull near the entrance of Maker Faire so you can play the Wizard.
Bad devices doing good again?

Recent Posts

• Hazards of Wifi on March 21, 2008
• I Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4) on March 15, 2008
• The Shipyard Returns on February 23, 2008
• Wired News from the Past on February 7, 2008
• Slow Down and Read Make on January 22, 2008
• Hand of Google on January 18, 2008
• The Rest of the Rest of Us on January 16, 2008
• Designing for Fun on the Run on December 18, 2007
• A Passion for Reading on December 10, 2007
• Kith and Kindle on November 30, 2007