Surface Tension

Microsoft has a new, cheaper version of its Surface tablet. The Surface Go is a 10” table for C$529, which puts it close to the cheapest iPads. That seems like a good move. I never understood Microsoft’s early attempts at a tablet. In general, I don’t understand why they feel the need to make tablets, but that’s another issue. The first Surfaces were very high-end, and I wondered how much market there is for tablets that are more expensive than nearly all laptops. On top of that, there’s the question of how many people want a super expensive tablet but haven’t bought them from Apple. It’s like when VW periodically tries making an expensive car; it may well be a nice car, but I’m not buying a luxury vehicle from Volkswagen.

But with the Surface Go, Microsoft seems to have taken a sensible approach to deliver an inexpensive but still powerful tablet, so they apparently think there’s a good market there. That’s interesting, because it’s been about ten years now that computer makers have been fussing around trying to make a new computing format, something that’s portable, affordable, and convenient.

First we had the netbooks. They started off as microscopic laptops with flash memory and custom Linux-based operating systems — essentially they were small versions of today’s Chromebooks. That seemed like an intriguing idea, but people weren’t ready to make such a big break with the past, and soon netbooks had hard drives and Windows, which made them less cheap, portable and usable.

Then tablets took off, and while they’ve been popular, they haven’t been super-profitable for manufacturers. And as a personal observation, they’ve been kind of an awkward proposition: you can get a really cheap tablet which you can use for many things, but it will be far from a replacement for a laptop/desktop. You can use it for e-mail and some web surfing, but many web pages won’t work well on a small screen and underpowered processor. And slightly larger jobs like typing this blog entry won’t be easy.

But there seems to be a new format coalescing: you can get a 9.7” iPad with a keyboard case for about $500, and now Microsoft is aiming at a similar price-point. I find that tablets at this level are much more capable what with their screen and computing power, and an unobtrusive keyboard opens up many more uses, while still keeping the device more portable than a laptop. And sure enough, I’m typing this on one of those iPad/keyboard pseudo laptops.

So I think we’ve finally figured out the formula for a new computing format. I don’t see this replacing anything: there’s still things laptops are better at, smaller tablets are significantly cheaper, and phones are much more portable. But the 9-10” tablet/keyboard is a very useful setup. My apologies to that kid in the “what’s a computer” Apple commercial. You were on to something. But it’s still a computer.

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Unready Player One

My very first post on this blog was a joke about Facebook games. I mostly stayed away from them, as they felt more like psychology experiments than recreation.

Since then, I've been playing a lot of mobile games. They have some of the same qualities, since free games need to make money somehow. But fortunately, they lack that hard sell you have to keep playing and paying to cheat. But they still have a structure that is built around at least the possibility of selling things. For instance, they’ll have some sort of power-up concept, because it will be easy to sell a power-up to the gamer when they get frustrated. And that’s becoming the accepted style for free mobile games.

It's weird how games can develop their own cultures. I first noticed this in university when some of us found out there was a 3d Tetris. Thing is, it was put out by Nintendo, and they had, well, Nintendified it. In contrast to the original Tetris, which was simple and minimal. When we tried playing it, it prompted the player to choose a character. That just seemed kind of childish. Sure, for a lot of folks this was natural, because they were Nintendo fans who were introduced to the original Tetris that way. But those of us who had loved the game as a work time-waster just felt stupid.

Now I sometimes find myself experiencing a similar clash of gaming cultures. For instance, I’ve wasted many an hour playing the Cell Connect game app. It's a simple abstract puzzle game. After playing it for a while, it was updated, and they've clearly decided to make it more in the style of app and social media games. The changes aren't too intrusive, but they are confusing.

Power up cards? Um, okay. Getting 5% bonus is nice, but it's not as exciting as invulnerability or something. The second card is a raccoon, what the hell does that mean? And now I've leveled up. This isn't an RPG, so I’m not even sure what that could mean.

In short, all these changes have made gaming rather complicated. Ironically, I just came across this article from Wired in which they examine the huge popularity of Fortnite, and argue that it is surprising since it is a fairly complex game,in contrast to lowest-common-denominator games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush. But it seems to me that even games aimed at the mass market have their own complexity, but it is within a culture of its own.

Chuck Berry

You’ve probably heard that tomatoes are technically fruits. Perhaps you’ve also heard the saying that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. And that brings up an important point: there’s a limitation to these technical classifications.

It gets much worse the more you look at these terms. Technically, a berry is “a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary.” Yes, plants have ovaries, try not to think about that right now, there are bigger things to worry about. So the following are not berries:
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries

...but the following are:
Oranges, tomatoes, bananas, eggplants, grapes, kiwis, avocados, pumpkins, watermelons

Vegetables are plants, and so are herbs. The only difference is that herbs are just to taste, rather than a main ingredient. But basil is usually a herb, but pesto isn’t pesto without basil, so does that make it a vegetable. Or a part-time vegetable?

This is turning into one of those pedantic, meaningless, non-trivia pieces of trivial information like the names of groups of animals. I (and others) argued that if no one uses the term, then the term doesn’t really have meaning.

I’m not one of those people who insists that scientific classifications have to conform to popular ideas. (Sorry Pluto, I’m with Neil Degrase Tyson on this one.) And it’s fine when we try to put some scientific rigour behind common definitions, only to find that there are exceptions we didn’t previously think of. I will still correct you if you try to call whales or dolphins, “fish.”

But if the scientific definition turns out to have nothing at all to do with the popular definition, then it’s time to admit that we need new words. How about we define "berry" as, "sort of fruit-like, but smaller." And then the scientific concept that they're calling "berry" — even though it isn't — can be something else; I don't know, name it after a great berry scientist or something.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #42

There will come a day when you no longer hear the traditional phone ring, as all phones — whether cell or cordless — are fully electronic. At first, they just use artificial beeps; then later they can use a recording of whatever sound the user wants to notify them of an incoming call.

And then there will come another day, about twenty years later, when you’ll hear that traditional phone ring all the time in all sorts of places, because lots of people thought it would be ironic to use a recording of the phone ring as their ringtone on their cell phones.

Check Republic

So Croatia has made it to the World Cup semi-finals. Good for them; I don’t have a connection to them, other than a Croatian community in KW, but it’s always good to see a country punch above their weight.

But watching them today, I found myself wondering: how did they come to own the checkerboard? They’ve kind of made it their thing. It’s on their uniforms — however subtly — and their flag, and their crest. They’ve decided that it is their symbol. Talk about punching above your weight: there are only so many patterns in the world, and they’ve decided to claim one of the basic ones.

I know, every country has its symbols. But a lot of the time, it’s something rare or unique. Here in Canada, we put the maple leaf on everything, but that’s something that you only get here or in the northern United States. There’s no one off in Burkina Faso who’s feeling cheated because they wanted to use it as their symbol.

It’s a wonder more countries don’t try this. Like why hasn’t anyone claimed polka dots? That might look weird, but you’d be distinctive. Surely that would be worth it to someone who doesn’t get a lot of the world’s attention. If you’re, say, Paraguay, you might figure it would be worth it to look a little ridiculous if it means that people think of you when they see polka dots.

I guess a few countries have just grabbed basic things as their symbol. Like Japan has taken the sun. Yes, there are lots of other countries that have the sun on their flag, but Japan just took it as their whole national identity. We’re the land of the rising sun. Yes, we know the sun rises everywhere, but we’re just going to put in on our flag and make it our nickname.

Now that I think about this, it could work. There are about 200 independent countries in the world, so I’m sure you could find 200 basic patterns and common elements that everyone could find one. Sure, Croatia acted first and grabbed checkerboards, but someone else can have lines. Okay, that’s too much like stripes, and everyone has stripes. How about wavy lines? Laos, do you want wavy lines? Papua New Guinea, you can have dotted-lines.

And someone could take clouds. They don’t have the life-giving worship-inspiring importance of the sun, but they are pretty universal. They could be like, we’re Estonia, and we’re the land of clouds. We re-drew the flag with a cloud on it, so now, when you look into the sky, you’ll think of us. Or Japan, depends what kind of day it is.