Obama Mitt Newt

I'm emerging from pessimism about Obama's chances. There is a decent chance that our economy won't be significantly worse by election day than it is now, and a small chance that unemployment will be marginally better. His Osawatomie, Kansas speech shows him beginning to grapple with the real issues for people, and could mark a new, Democratic trajectory for his campaign. European trouble makes Obama look good, and then there is the Republican field.

At this stage the Republican candidate will be either Romney or Gingrich (hard to believe). Romney, who was doing a decent job staying above the fray, is being weakened by the primary and a long slog against Gingrich will really damage him. Between being tarred by the Republican field's inanity and depressing his own base, Romney may hand the game to Obama. Gingrich is the perfect dope for Obama's favorite game, rope a dope. Going by primary state poll numbers Gingrich may win it.

An ascendant Newt may indicate my long anticipated collapse of the Republican party as a serious contender in national politics. They may be facing a period in the desert, like the 80s Democrats.

The origins of the financial crisis

What is the contribution of the financial sector?

via Krugman. A deeper view of what the financial sector's profitability was built on.

History repeats itself

 When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.

The fault is not in Steve Jobs, but in ourselves.

Siri, Why Are You So Underwhelming? 

AI is hard, replacing a human assistant is harder. For decades progress in AI stalled as researchers explored the dead end of building systems that mimicked how we describe our thought processes. Recent advances have come from Google style big data projects, but human interactions, systems that could pass the Turing test, are still out of reach.

Siri is another in a long line of attempts at a robotic assistant. These systems all suffer the same failures we are familiar from telephone voice prompt menu trees, they work adequately within a small domain but fail rapidly as you move outside that domain. It is faster and easier to use mechanical interfaces to computer systems, like a web site to book travel, than voice interfaces.

Jordan Cook at Techcrunch concludes his post with:

That’s the thing about the disappointment Siri brings with her — in the end it’s my fault. She’s a direct step into the future, and any one step into the future leads to a thousand more.

It's hard to imagine any company but Apple convincing a journalist to blame himself for their broken software. Something about Apple attracts the gullible. Some day we will build decent voice assistants, but not until we are much closer to AI. In the meantime these attempts are just gimmicks.

Lumia

Just Another Windows Phone

Keeping up with the Nokia coverage. Pretty phone, but hard to see how this ends well.

MG Siegler finds a new daddy

Oracle: Bad Ass Motherfuckers

I can't say it's surprising that Siegler adores the worst actors in the industry, but I wish I better understood the psychology behind it.

Libya

I supported Obama's Libya intervention from the beginning. It seems to me that after decades of enabling Arab dictatorships in various ways the United States has an obligation to help the Arab people, in this Arab Spring, take control of their own destinies. Strategically the success of the Arab Spring is our best hope to contain Islamic terrorists. In Egypt and Tunisia that support was public pressure and behind the scenes. In Syria it is necessarily through diplomatic and economic, rather than military pressure, unless the regime loses significant control. In Bahrain we have failed to live up to our principles. In Libya there was a clear risk of massacres which we had an opportunity to prevent. Once we chose to intervene the only real choice was to maintain the pressure until Gaddafi was gone.

I wonder whether our invasion of Iraq accelerated, delayed, or had no effect on the Arab Spring. If rising food prices were necessary to sustain a broad-based rebellion, you might argue that US intervention drive up the price of oil, giving the dictatorships extra cash to hold down prices. Combined with rising nationalism over the foreign occupation of a major Arab state.

Gaddafi's defeat is another foreign policy win for Obama, combined with withdrawal from Iraq and killing bin Laden and Obama has guaranteed his Republican opponent won't be playing the weak on defense card.

Android Tablet not there yet

I use my Nooks all the time, and the ASUS Transformer looks like a great replacement for a laptop, but Android isn't there yet as a tablet OS.

Nokia is Doomed on the Low End

Via the Android channel on Trove, via Forbes, Jeremy Ford reports that the Android based IDEOS from Huawei is selling like hotcakes:

this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies.

Nokia can't compete with that, certainly not with a bloated, proprietary platform.

Nokia president Chris Weber shows the way

over the edge.

Chris Weber, Nokia's new North American president, is making the rounds touting Nokia's smartphone strategy. Tim Bray has the most succinct response:

Not really sure this "phone" app on my pocket computer has much of a future.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyTim Bray
timbray

Microsoft and Nokia are trying to make the case that customers want a people-centric interface, not app centric. In an interview with Venturebeat Weber says that apps are 'outdated', that Nokia is putting customers, to him the end user and the carrier, first, and that this will differentiate WP7 and win the market.

This seems to me very far off target. My phone is about me more than my contacts. People who want a phone with nice contact lists and communications would probably be happy with a feature phone. Emphasizing carriers without even mentioning developers shows how this strategy doesn't incorporate the mobile Internet, the future of the mobile platform.

Om Malik is rightly skeptical:

If its current sales numbers are any indication, then Nokia’s on-the-fly reinvention is like Wile E. Coyote racing off the cliff in pursuit of Road Runner, and flapping hard before going splat. If there continues to be a global economic slowdown, then Nokia would find itself in a pretty bad place much sooner than the company can handle.

Going negative, forget the economy

Our economic situation shows no sign of improving, and in fact is more likely to deteriorate given shrinking state revenues and Federal austerity. But at least the White House has recognized reality, though their strategy to cope politically leaves much to be desired. Here's Robert Reich, via Krugman:

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

This strategy aligns well with their Romney strategy:

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

Unfortunately it means there is no chance the White House will do anything to improve the economic situation of most Americans.

Because he's black?

Harold Meyerson: Obama won't face a primary challenge because he's black.

The other reason Obama hasn’t faced a challenge, and isn’t likely to, is that he’s black. Any Democrat who would challenge Obama, whatever the basis of his or her candidacy, would almost surely encounter intense opposition from the party’s African American base, the one group in Democrats’ orbit that regularly votes Democratic at a 90 percent rate. Such a challenge could create a rift that might take decades to heal.

Should have figured Meyerson was projecting when he accused Hillary Clinton of racism.

Needless to say, this is not why Obama has no primary challenger. For all his faults Obama is an effective and strategic politician. He neutralized his most effective Democratic opponents, has taken great care to de-fund any potential alternate liberal power centers, and passed health care reform. As economists pointed out early on his economic policies were inadequate, his failure to spur economic recovery is the one major threat to his re-election. But he was never at risk of being primaried.

UPDATE: Now Eleanor Clift is making the same claim in the Daily Beast.

Anyone contemplating a run against Obama must consider the consequences of not only defeating the president, but the likely repercussions to his or her own career. “If he were white, he would have a progressive challenger,” says Bill Schneider of the Democratic group Third Way.

Clift and Schneider appear to have forgotten 1996, when a president with poor poll numbers, who just lost the House, and who was white, had no serious primary challenger.

Rove on Obama's chances

Karl Rove wrote a column in the Wall St. Journal arguing that Obama will lose in 2012. Rhodes Cook at the Center for Politics and Peter Lawler at Big Think responded. Neither engage Rove's points directly, but they make the general point that there is little sign of real opposition to Obama within his party.

Rove's primary argument is that the economy sucks, which is true, but if employment were improving Obama would win in a landslide. A bad economy just means Obama has to work harder for a narrower win. Rove's demographic arguments, that Obama is in trouble with Jewish, black and young voters, are a joke. Losing share among Jewish voters is a perennial and empty scare tactic. Democrats getting a smaller share of black voters is also unlikely, especially so in Obama's case. Rove only lightly touches on Latinos and other minorities, probably because the growing minority population in the states he cites swamps any diminished enthusiasm for Obama.

The rest of his demographic argument rests on job approval numbers, which don't have a strong correlation to voting patterns and are thus weak predictors of electoral performance. Rove's policy argument uses sleight of had to shift attention to an abstract 'Obamacare' from the massive approval, even among Republicans, of Obama's specific policies on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and health insurance.

Rove's last argument, that voters don't like politicians who point out their policy differences with their opponents, is absurd on it's face.

Oracle's case against Android narrows

In a report that should surprise no one, the USPTO rejected 17 of 21 claims of one of Oracle's patents. Patent claims are a poor way to maintain competitive advantage in software, and are usually a clear indication that the agressor is losing the technology race. Groklaw has the details on how many claims were rejected. Given Google Android's open source nature, I expect Oracle's case will at best result in minor changes to the Android Dalvik VM.

I'd prefer that Google deprecate Java and switch to their concurrent, elegant language go, but I doubt Oracle can effect that change.

Obama's Infrastructure

Mike Tomasky presents a nice review of Obama's 2012 swing state infrastructure in Newsweek: Obama's 2012 Game Plan. Fear replaces hope, and the machine supplants enthusiasm. These are the details behind the optimism for Obama's prospects I discussed previously -- infrastructure, demographic shifts and Republican overreach and misgovernment. Tomasky closes with the Buckeye State:

And then there’s Ohio. Big numbers in Franklin County—home to the state capital of Columbus, Ohio’s largest city—are crucial to Democratic hopes. Again, the trend is evident: Al Gore won the county 49–48 in 2000, when 414,000 votes were cast. Kerry won it 53–45, with 517,000 total votes. Obama: a 59–40 blowout on the strength of 575,000 total votes.

It’s pretty difficult to imagine another nearly 20-point win. But Greg Schultz, the county’s Democratic chairman and the state director for OFA, says an on-the-ground network exists today in a way it didn’t even in 2008. “There’s a structure that remains in place today that is self-organizing,” he boasts, even in Republican-leaning parts of the county like Westerville.

Another factor that might motivate Democrats in Franklin, and across Ohio: the unpopular Republican governor, John Kasich.

Has Stephen Elop doomed Nokia?

Yes.

Obama's prospects

I've been pessimistic about Obama's prospects, largely because of his abysmal economic record. But posts like this from London's conservative Telegraph persuade me that he is in good shape:

But there is also the distinct possibility of an electoral rout of the president if the economy goes further south. “Hope and change” might have played well in 2008, but it is a message that will likely ring hollow in November 2012, with an American public that is deeply disillusioned with the direction Obama is taking the country.

Gardiner's economic argument has some weight, but his political argument is fallacious. The Democrats 2010 loss was not epic, it was a mid-term, low-turnout loss. It seemed bigger because of the success of Obama's 2008 turnout, i.e. the turnout drop-off from 2008 to 2010 was larger than usual. 2012 looks good for Democrats because the Democratic base is getting energized for a number reasons, while the Republican base is becoming discouraged. One reason is the extremism of Republicans, nationally with the Ryan Medicare voucher plan and locally with unpopular governors and state legislators. Another reason is killing Bin Laden, which improved Obama's approval among older voters. A third reason is the effectiveness of the Obama campaign infrastructure.

Paul Ryan and the Republican small government agenda are deeply unpopular in polls, even among conservatives. The opposite of what Gardiner implies.

The muddled and contradictory arguments, and either ignorant or disingenuous poll reading, show me that there is no strong argument for an Obama loss. The economy will get worse, and the election will be close, but the infrastructure Obama is building and the collapse of the Republican infrastructure under Steele mean Obama wins a close election.

Wall St. notices Nokia's problems

Via Forbes, Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu notices that Nokia is screwed:

In a fast changing market, Nokia is losing ground very rapidly. The profit warning for the second quarter provided evidence that the next couple of years will prove very challenging, with the gross margin and market share trends of the last 4 quarters continuing, if not accelerating even more. The collaboration with Microsoft now appears to us unlikely to be successful, as Nokia’s brand is losing ground too fast and the window of opportunity for an alternative ecosystem is vanishing rapidly. Even modeling a scenario in which Nokia stabilizes next year leads us to believe that the stock will under-perform over the next twelve months.

Nokia's window is closing and analysts are underestimating how hard it will be to put the pig of WP into a low end poke of a Nokia phone. WSJ sees the same thing, and realizes the problem is Android (an OS designed for the low end) on cheap Asian phones.

(to plug my day job, I found these via Trove.com)

Nokia goes backwards

Techcrunch reports that Microsoft will take over Nokia's handset manufacturing. Hard to see how that will end well, given Microsoft's track record on hardware. It is very odd to me that people think the Nokia brand can survive being run by Microsoft. The brand has a reputation for quality because Nokia made good phones, not because of a Job's-esque reality distortion field.

Mashable on the pros and cons.

Microsoft, Windows Phone and Nokia

Microsoft continues it's downward drift, wasting billions on poorly conceived, non-strategic online efforts while Apple eats its Personal Computing lunch with the iPad. Meanwhile Nokia's partnership with Microsoft Windows Phone looks increasingly doomed. I can't understand how a company that thrived on low-end phones could choose an expensive, untried mobile OS that requires the highest end hardware and plan to compete with Chinese manufacturers using a free OS that is known for running well on low-end hardware.

IDC and Gartner claim that Apple will drop behind Windows Phone in market share by 2015, but the signs I see suggest that Microsoft continues to make the same technical and policy mistakes it always has in mobile. Microsoft's proprietary developer efforts can't compete against a well funded, open and vibrant Android community, and their OS sucks compared to the Unix derived iOS and Android. There is no virtuous cycle of open development and user network effects for them to exploit, as they did with Windows. The desktop development models of Microsoft's ISVs don't translate to networked mobile platforms any better than they translated to the web. Apple on phones and tablets has the same advantages it maintained in it's desktop niche, obsessive control of all aspects of the user experience, software and hardware. Microsoft tried to split the difference with Windows Phone, ending up with nothing.

President Typeface

Obama sees the presidency as a symbolic position, so it is fitting that the big news about his re-election is a new typeface. Meanwhile the barbarians are at the gate, our economy is shaky at best, unemployment is terribly high and a catastrophe for the generation graduating from college, and the country desperately needs an executive, not a 102nd Senator.

Obama's Shoulder Angels

The cherubic Mark Zuckerberg on one shoulder, and the death-like Steve Jobs on the other.

App markets

Lots going on in the mobile app market space, Google has a new market and is coming out with music and video marketplace. Windows Phone 7's market bans open source software (as has iTunes, though it is not enforced). And Apple has their new subscription service that requires content resellers to pay a 30% vig and offer the best price on their market.

It's easy to see which market is most open to developers and content providers.

Nokia

The Nokia / Microsoft partnership looks like two enterprises without a clue on mobile software development.

The iPhone is successful because of it's app ecosystem. iPhone apps are appealing because they are more responsive and engaging. iPhone apps are more responsive because iOS developers have more precise control, through Objective-C and C, of how their apps use device resources. Apple's smartest decision in iOS was to give developers access to the hardware, rather than mediating access through various virtual machines.

Most previous phone platforms used some form of the JVM and suffered for it. Java performs poorly in a client apps and is too much of a resource hog for embedded applications. Google tried to get around the problem with a careful re-implementation of the JVM in Dalvik, but Java's architectural problems show through and iOS apps just work better. Google has begun changing direction by beefing up their NDK.

Microsoft's problem is not a VM but Windows. Every mobile implementation they've done, including WP7, is too bloated for small platforms. And that is why Nokia's strategic partnership with Microsoft is doomed. Nokia's remaining strength is in low end phones, WP7 is too demanding to run on low end phones. Chinese manufacturers selling Android phones will own the low end, displacing Nokia.

Nook video conversion

ipod guide

ffmpeg 264 guide

The Nook Color will only play h.264 video with stereo.

ffmpeg -i INPUT -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -s 640x360 -ac 2 -vpre lossless_slow -vpre ipod640 -f ipod -crf 22 -vol 4086 -threads 0 OUTPUT.m4v