Ars misses vital point: flash on the iPad

Everyone is talking about Macromedia Adobe Flash missing from the iPad. It's been missing from the iPhone for years. Today Ars Technica takes a poll, asking people if they care.

Ars says "Flash is necessary for a larger percentage of the Web to work properly". Those Flash-based sites, however, were built at a time when web users primarily used devices that either had Flash or could quickly install Flash for free. Apple is creating a new segment - a portion of web users that neither have Flash, nor can install Flash if they want to.

If that market existed over the last 10 years, we may not have a web where Flash is necessary for a large percentage of the web to work properly - and I would be OK with that.

If Apple holds steady on avoiding Flash on their gadgets, and Apple sells a lot of iPhones and iPads, the Flash-based web is going to change. That's a good thing.

Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News

Nexus Envy

Jon Hannibal Stokes twitters today about his Nexus One:

I accidentally pressed the voice input on my Nexus One right before a huge sneeze, and it Googled "sneeze." I am not making this up.

http://twitter.com/hannibalrex/statuses/7923029604

I want one.

Dear Internet: stop posting about not posting

Have you noticed that bloggers are always making excuses for not posting enough? I'd like to fill in all you bloggers on a secret: Nobody Cares.

I tried to read an article about Nexus One today, and the writer stops the story to talk about not posting enough, and then promises to post more. Promising to "get better" is even worse; it just leads to more apologies when the writer fails.

Here's why you all need to stop masturbating about post frequency:

1. Your reader has never heard of you. He has no idea how often you post and doesn't care. It's a world-wide-web of linked hypertext, and traffic comes from all over the place.

2. Your reader came here for a reason (in this case, for your thoughts about Nexus One). When you start talking about your blogging practices instead, you've failed to deliver on topic and they will leave.

Nexus One versus iphone: technical specs chart

I know, everybody is doing it: but here's a side-by-side comparison of new Nexus One tech specs versus the iphone. Green bold text highlights a superior feature. The summary is that Nexus if cheaper, smaller, lighter (if only marginally on all three), with better camera, bigger display, faster CPU, bigger battery, and more RAM.

We have to hand it to Apple for re-defining the worlds expectations for cell phones. Good job Apple, you blazed the trail again, just like you did with mp3 players, USB support, and the GUI. Apple is a leading innovator.

Google's advantage is that the iPhone's specs are public so Google knows exactly what they need to beat, and they do so in every category but base storage.

Also the wishlists for iphone are well-published, so Google can one-up Apple in categories that users actively complain about: removable storage, camera flash, battery life. Smart.

Chiseling my shoes free

The mud/clay near my home is so bad that I almost lost two pairs of shoes to it when doing some landscaping recently. The first pair I just threw away, the second pair I couldn't imagine a way to salvage until I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and started chiseling away these immense chunks of dried clay. The result was visually interesting - clayforms of my shoe treads below.