Grammar 101

February 7, 2010 · Musings, Writing · Comments Off

A recent Slashdot poll asked readers what should be in a 101 course that everyone had to pass, with a wide variety of acceptable options. Like most of these polls, both the question and the options are set up poorly — no context, an option that doesn’t work (“other, listed below” implies an AJAX-y box which one can fill in), vague options (“basic math & science”), etc.

Being a writer, I gravitated toward the “grammar/communication” option. I do admit that I first moved my mouse pointer to “computers,” but like several posters indicated in the poll comments, we already have an overabundance of Computers 101 courses that tend to be nothing more than glorified Microsoft Office training sessions.

There’s nothing wrong with IM/text-speak — it’s acceptable to tell someone “k np” or ask “how r u” because of the short, real-time nature of instant messaging and texting. It’s a different story when a professional level of writing is required, even if it’s an “informal” memo going around the office. In written communication, you want your reader to focus on the message, not spend time deciphering your paragraphs.

Many times it’s because we’re in such a hurry to hit the send or print button. We’re always working on something that was due yesterday, or needs to go out ASAP because the server is going down in 30 minutes. The art of patience is, well, a lost art.

Write once, edit twice. Find a colleague to review your draft — preferably someone who doesn’t know the backstory, someone who will read it the way your audience will. It might delay dissemination for 15 minutes, a few hours, maybe a day, but it’s worth the trouble.

Personally, I think a book like Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss should be required reading. (I know there are shelves of books like this, but Truss’s is one that I’m familiar with and actually have on my shelf.) I’d rather force that on someone than a copy of Strunk & White, which can get into some really mundane, archaic, and occasionally misleading grammar usage. Some of my college-level writing courses used Diane Acker’s A Writer’s Reference, which is a more middle-of-the-road text.

So the next time you’re writing something, take a few minutes to re-edit it twice — even if you’re confident it’s finished — and have someone else take a look at it. And don’t forget some light reading, as suggested above.

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In Absolute Terms – “Unbreakable”

January 18, 2010 · Musings, Writing · Comments Off

As a writer, proper terminology in both fiction and nonfiction is key — the wrong word can ruin even the best idea. In marketing, the same princple holds. So one would think that the use of the adjective “unbreakable” to describe a product is more than just irresponsible, but outright dangerous. Describing a product in such absolute terms is akin to a dare or posing the question “Will it blend?”

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) featured a mobile phone from Sonim designed to take extreme abuse, much like Panasonic’s Toughbook laptop series. The product is designed to the company’s “Rugged Performance Standards,” one of which includes an unconditional guarantee, which states that if the phone breaks or malfunctions within the warranty period, it will be replaced the same day, no questions asked.

In Sonim’s defense, the marketing materials don’t directly call the phone unbreakable; a Google search of the website proves this. Here are the three results explained:

As a brief aside, we’ll examine the word “unbreakable” with the reference of record, the Oxford English Dictionary. The word “unbreakable” first refers back to the prefix “un,” which in the form “un-” + adjective + “-able” is generally accepted as negation starting the 14th century. Widespread use of “unbreakable” as referenced by the OED began in the mid-19th century, which followed the use of “breakable,” or “capable of being broken, frangible,” starting around the 17th century. “Unbreakable” clearly means something not capable of being broken or frangible.

So now we’ve come to the apex of this story. It appears that “unbreakable” can be entirely attributed to the company’s CEO, in theory leaving the company clear of any controversy. So when a BBC reporter at CES smashed the phone against a fish tank after the CEO said “It is basically unbreakable, and if you find a way to break it, we’re going to give you a free phone,” those words became the joke of CES.

CEOs be warned – do not speak about your product in absolute terms unless you are absolutely sure your product meets all of your claims. And don’t use the adjective “unbreakable,” because somewhere, somehow, someone will find a way to break your product.

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The Problem With Fan Films

January 2, 2010 · Musings · Comments Off

I have nothing against dedicated fans wanting to make films deriving from a movie or video game. In some cases, the original work gets a PR boost, and it’s hard to argue with free advertising that attracts more fans. However, when the IP holder hasn’t set a clear precedent for fan-created works, that’s when the problem starts.

Fan films, as derivate works, usually make use of trademarked names and characters. For instance, a quick hop over to Nintendo of America’s page for the most recent Legend of Zelda™ game, Spirit Tracks, shows that Nintendo makes  a trademark claim for not only the name The Legend of Zelda, but also for the name and character Link™. So a fan film like The Hero of Time would likely make use of Nintendo’s IP, namely characters covered under trademark.

Some companies are known to be lax in their enforcement of trademarks; for instance, IP holders of the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, as pointed out in the Slashdot story, tend to permit not-for-profit fan films. But this is not the norm, and most IP holders tend to guard their trademarks closely, so that they can maintain full control over their image.

Why would a company not want their fans to cook up some free derivative works?

  1. Quality: It’s unlikely that fans would pour enough money into a fan film to reach the standards of quality that the IP holder would be satisfied with. The chance of a film with a $1,000 budget looking like a $20m Hollywood-style production is almost nil.
  2. Content: The IP holder might object to the content for various reasons. Nintendo could easily make the argument that a fan film could be “too” adult, e.g. due to violence. The storyline and plot might conflict with the actual games or movies and blur the line between what’s the “true” story and the “fan” story. (This is a particular issue with fan fiction.)
  3. Bad PR: If a fan film ticks off the fan base, the original work could suffer. Someone mentions The Legend of Zelda and the first thing that comes to mind is “that crappy fan film” doesn’t do the original work any favours.

It’s hard to feel bad for the group that put together The Hero of Time. They clearly went along without an explicit blessing from Nintendo and spent years (and an unknown amount of money) producing a film and showing it in theaters.

Fans make the argument that the film’s creators did nothing illegal. It is illegal in that the registrant can, under the Trademark Act of 1946, seek civil action against any person infringing a trademark. They make the argument that the film is free advertising. Free advertising != good advertising. They also argue that the film was “not for profit” and should be protected. 15 U.S.C. Sec 1114 does not exempt these so-called “not for profit” projects, as merely distribution can be grounds for infringement. (The same principle holds for the use of P2P to distribute movies, music, etc.)

Since Nintendo only uses the standard trademark symbol and not the registered (®) trademark symbol, it’s reasonable to assume that the marks are not registered. If this is in fact the case, the producers of the fan film could’ve fought the claim, but I doubt they would’ve had the funds and the counsel to do so, not to mention the negative press they would’ve received.

This is the problem with fan films. Fans dive into projects like these without respect (unintended) for the creators of the works they know and love. It’s unfortunate for those who spend a considerable amount of time and money, but content holders do have the right to protect their work, which sometimes means protecting it from fan films.

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Urging Smartphone Users to Browse Less?

December 12, 2009 · Musings, Technology · Comments Off

AT&T’s president and CEO of Mobility and Consumer Markets, Ralph de la Vega, has called out the smartphone crowd in recent comments to the press and investment analysts. In the days of more primitive phones, “mobile” versions of websites were necessary; small screens, small amounts of available memory, and poor image quality all brought forth trimmed-down sites and the .mobi TLD. Then came the iPhone.

Suddenly, carrying a smartphone was considered cool. Crackberries were no longer just for the business traveler, and Google felt threatened just enough to wade into the smartphone market by developing a phone OS. Today we have the Blackberry Storm, the Motorola Droid, HTC, and others as viable (and in certain features, better) alternatives to the Apple iPhone. With their big, vibrant screens came real web browsers and “apps” which could pull data from the Internet. While it’s hard to believe that AT&T didn’t think the iPhone would be a hit and end up in the hands of quite a few subscribers, the other carriers never had an excuse once AT&T woke the sleeping giant known as iPhone.

After the initial success of the iPhone, the carriers knew full well what they were dealing with. Just like the widespread availability of broadband Internet services to the home in the U.S. (cable, DSL, FTTP) caused an explosion in overall bandwidth, the average customer took advantage of the higher throughput rates. Those of us who remember the days of 56.6k or even 28.8k modems know how hard it was to listen to streaming audio, much less watch streaming video. (My sympathies for those who are still stuck with dial-up, out of the range of the CO for DSL.) Now that we have 10Mb, 20Mb, even 50Mb pipes coming to our homes, we don’t think twice about watching a Youtube clip or downloading the latest warez…er, buying the latest game on Steam.

de la Vega’s argument is simple: three percent of smartphone users make up 40% of total data usage on AT&T’s wireless network, and their usage is impacting other customers on the same cell tower. According to a Computerworld report, “We have to get to those customers and get them to recognize they have to change their patterns,” de la Vega said at a UBS analyst conference this past Wednesday, “or there are things we will do to change those patterns.” The Godfather-like tone was clarified by other statements indicating some sort of tiered or pay-per-unit pricing. He was quoted by Computerworld, saying “there’s got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users.”

The New York Times quotes an “independent wireless analyst,” Chetan Sharma, as saying that data usage should be treated like voice usage. “You use more minutes, you pay more,” he said to the Times. And AT&T’s de la Vega said that “The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data[...].”

Therein lies the problem: Sharma has fallen into the trap called non sequitur, and de la Vega wants customers to tally something that a human can’t estimate. The carriers don’t get it, and neither does this one analyst. (It’s hard to say whether the wireless analyst community as a whole gets it, as the Times only quoted Sharma, and Computerworld didn’t interview an analyst.)

First, to address the non sequitur: You use more minutes, therefore you pay more, so you use more data, therefore you pay more. In the U.S., most ISPs do not enforce a hard cap, i.e. a bandwidth limit for each billing period, instead warning high-usage customers and occasionally threatening disconnection or moving them to a more expensive “class” of service (either a faster tier or “business-class” tier). Customers generally pay based on max throughput, with a bigger pipe costing more, and for all intents and purposes the connection has unlimited bandwidth. This is neither what the carriers currently do (charging for a certain amount of bandwidth per month, or for “unlimited” service, without really offering tiers of throughput) nor is it what AT&T is proposing with tiered bandwidth pricing.

Second, de la Vega thinks this is an education problem. Teach a customer what a megabyte is, and they’ll consume less of them. Without pulling out the calculator, tell me how many megabytes the following are:

And how do you provide a real-world definition of a megabyte? A megabyte might get you 7 seconds of a standard-def TV show episode, or it might get you the full front page of Slashdot, or it might only give you the photos on the front page of CNN.com. And a picture at 1 MB could easy turn into 20 MB, if the smaller version from compressed from a RAW format; conversely, it could be squished into 100KB, if turned into a low-quality GIF.

Urging smartphone users to browse less is a bad PR strategy. Think about it: a customer has shelled out $150-$200 for a contract-tied phone, plus a “required” data plan usually costing $30 a month, and now you’re telling them to not use the phone’s features all the time? The natural Internet response is to create an online petition and vote with your feet. Sadly, because of the state of wireless networks in the U.S., hopping to a different carrier may not be viable (e.g. no coverage) and even the threat of a government investigation into text-message pricing hasn’t kept the major carriers from steadily increasing the rates over the past few years.

I call this looming AT&T policy a bad PR strategy because it’s unlikely that implementation will cause a mass exodus to the other carriers. Many customers are perpetually in contract for the subsidized phones, while others won’t budge because of a particular phone (e.g. the iPhone) or coverage areas or employers (work phones only serviced by one carrier, or employees get a special discount with a single carrier).

Captive audiences make a great business strategy. Only time will tell whether this is the future of wireless data plans, or if the carriers realize that metered data with a meter that no one can estimate or predict might draw the ire of legislators and government regulators.

(As a sidenote, if bandwidth caps are implemented, does that mean we get to run Adblock on our smartphones?)

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Putting Computers on One-Year Layaway

November 15, 2009 · Musings, Technology · Comments Off

A number of tech news outlets reported a Federal Trade Commission memo filed this past Thursday in an ongoing case in U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York) against a firm called BlueHippo. The FTC, which had successfully reached a settlement with the firm in April 2008, alleges that the terms of the agreement have been violated, and attorneys for the FTC are not amused — they are seeking restitution for customers, as well as a ban to prevent the company from offering financing with goods or services, selling consumer electronics, and regulating its refund practices.

BlueHippo touts itself as a consumer electronics seller, offering weekly payment plans and financing options without a credit check. For products which offer the payment plan and finance option, the customer agrees to pay an initial fee plus 52 weekly payments, and after 6 to 13 weeks’ worth of payments, BlueHippo will ship the product, as if it had been traditionally financed. In fact, they even offer to report your payment history to the trio of credit reporting agencies if you want the good karma on your report. Their FAQ states that they are not a rent-to-own or leasing company.

Before getting into the current legal tussle in U.S. District Court, let’s consider a few things:

  • At a minimum, you’re putting up an initial fee plus 6-13 weeks’ worth of payments before they order your computer. This alone is playing with fire — unlike Kmart, you don’t get to hand over the physical product at the store, and you have no way of verifying that they physically have your product as you make the payments.
  • The people at BlueHippo don’t know what the $*&# layaway means. (Clue: get a dictionary.) Consider the following sources:
    • Oxford English Dictionary: the word “lay-away” has a vague definition in the 1997 update, nothing more. Unusual, so we take a quick trip to Wikipedia to see if there might be a geographical (i.e. U.S./U.K.) difference in spelling.
    • Wikipedia: now we find a more specific definition, but it’s Wiki…so not using it as a valid source. However, it does point out that there is a different term for some countries, including Great Britain. Time to head back to the trusty OED with “lay-by”…
    • Oxford English Dictionary revisited: the word “lay-by,” according to definition 2b, specifically states that the customer pays an initial deposit and then pays the full price over time, while the seller holds the product until it is fully paid off. This is not what BlueHippo is doing — it is letting customers have their computer with less than 25% of the product paid off, not to mention they don’t hold the computer while the layaway payments are being made. They do state that they are financing the balance of the purchase price, but that means the customer would never make 52 “layaway” payments, only 6 to 13.
  • They expect users to use their Social Security number and mother’s maiden name as their username and password on their online account system. In fact, they let you retrieve “forgotten” login information given certain combinations of the following:
    • SSN (!)
    • Home phone number
    • House number
    • ZIP Code
    • Bank account number (!)
    • Password (!)
  • Their computer prices are only slightly higher than the manufacturers’ MSRPs. For instance, take the HP Mini 5101, which is sold in two configurations at $399 and $425. The BlueHippo price is $466.76 — it’s unclear which model is being sold, since they don’t provide specific model numbers — which is a 10% to 15% markup on MSRP. Using the cheaper model, HP would finance the same laptop over 24 months with a $1 buy-out option for $19/mo. or $456 total. Since BlueHippo is offering a shorter term, one would expect the BlueHippo price to be lower.

So now on to the legal fight between the FTC and BlueHippo. The firm had previously been sanctioned for not shipping products when promised and not disclosing that installment payments were non-refundable. To ensure that they were in compliance with the settlement, the court ordered BlueHippo to provide a compliance report and various other documents; the court found them in contempt and forced BlueHippo in April 2009 to cough up $12,500 in sanctions (five days) before it filed the compliance report, and $20,000 in sanctions (four days) in May 2009 before providing responsive information to FTC requests. An information request in May 2009 remains unanswered, despite the Court ordering BlueHippo to produce responsive information.

These FTC requests provide insight into why the commission has been so aggressive in pursuing legal action. In the memo filed on Thursday, the FTC discovered that customers “pay an activation fee (generally $99) and then make weekly payments of approximately $35 or bi-weekly payments of approximately $70 for a year.”  You don’t even need to do fuzzy math to realize that those numbers add up to a very expensive computer. (It’s $1919, given the previous numbers).

Of over 36,000 computer orders that the FTC examined through responsive documents, only one was financed. However, the FTC doesn’t even consider that single computer shipment to be accurate — according to the memo, “The shipment of this computer was most likely in error [...]. The consumer [...] only paid $185.32 towards a computer with a total sale price of $2,515.00 and never entered into a financing agreement.” BlueHippo finally shipped computers once the company was found in contempt, ordering most of the computers during the three-month reporting period over the course of just seven days, or over 3,300 computers. Thrown bone, meet FTC and court.

Then there’s the matter of the firm’s return policy. Consider the following policy:

  • Cash refunds within 7 days, store credit after 7 days. Cancellations permitted until order is shipped. Second part is pretty standard; first part is restrictive (usually see 14-30 days on refunds) but not outrageously so.
  • Store credit cannot be used on shipping, handling, and taxes. Anyone who has used a gift card knows this is not standard. This is not disclosed on the website.
  • Costs not covered by store credit must be paid in advance via money order. Yes, they really don’t care that you’re buying a $14 gaming controller and have $300 in credit — you’re paying the shipping, handling, and taxes out of your own pocket, plus the money order fee, and they won’t ship until they receive your payment. Again, not disclosed on the website.
  • Only one order paid with store credit will be accepted at a time; order must be delivered to customer before a new order can be placed. [There's just nothing to be said for this.] Not disclosed on the website.

Like the computer orders, the majority of customers who have store credit didn’t agree to paid the extra fees to use their store credit, and the majority of those who did order with store credit never had their orders fulfilled.

In addition, the FTC alleges that BlueHippo was not permitted to represent itself as a financing company or extend credit on the basis of preauthorized bank account transfers. The company apparently logged revenue of at least $15.1 million on unfulfilled orders, a truly shocking amount. It looks like BlueHippo has hit the end of the road, especially after thumbing its nose at the court multiple times, but then again, consider how long it took for SCO Linux (ding dong, la de da de da) to finally bite the dust.

Computers have become relatively inexpensive in the past year or two, especially due to the success of the so-called “netbook” market segment. (I don’t consider most of the computers in this group to be netbooks, but clearly the retailers disagree. It’s an argument left for another post.) It’s not uncommon to find a laptop in the netbook category for $300, and desktops can still be found in the sales circulars for $400 and $500. You’d be better off saving ahead of time than playing around with layaway and financing if you just need a cheap computer for the Internet, e-mail, and a few documents here and there. It isn’t worth risking your money with firms like this out there, and there are better ways to fix your credit, if that’s the goal.

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Sidekick Trips, But Blame It On the Cloud?

October 12, 2009 · Musings, Technology · Comments Off

Quite a few T-Mobile subscribers are steaming after a recent meltdown of the infrastructure supporting the Sidekick mobile phone, culminating in a dire warning: keep your device powered at all times and do not restart them, or lose all of your data. Apparently Microsoft/Danger, the phone’s developer and data service maintainer, screwed up translating the Mayan calendar, because The End as We Know It isn’t for a few more years.

It’s a classic datacenter horror story — a hardware and/or software failure corrupts data, but by the time it’s noticed, it’s too late; recent backups are toast. Or, to make matters worse, the backups are overwritten so often that there isn’t a backup to restore from. Oh wait, your idea of backups was ten racks of matching RAID-10 SANs to match the ten racks where the production data is stored? Silly rabbit, RAID is for redundancy!

The news coverage keeps calling the Sidekick infrastructure “cloud computing,” that “Web 2.0″ term that’s all about “software as a service” and “thin clients.” One of the cool features of cloud computing is the ability to run applications on the server side — instead of a mail client, word processor, or Photoshop installed on your computer, just hop onto any computer with a browser (though you may need a plugin like Flash here or there) and log on to mail.google.com, officelive.com, or photoshop.com. The application, the data, the processing are all handed “in the cloud,” i.e. through some Internet-facing infrastructure that you only know as the domain name. To you, the user, it doesn’t matter whether they have hundreds of homogenous servers and you’re sitting on (for example) mail1420.google.com versus mail3293.google.com, or if they have separate clusters of application and data servers with clearly-defined tasks; you’re asking for the service, nothing more.

Say it with me: Sidekick is not cloud computing. Never has been, never will. You aren’t free to access it from any Internet-enabled device, which goes against the whole concept of cloud computing being more flexible for the user. So stop calling it a failure of cloud computing.

Where does the blame fall, then? Certainly on Microsoft/Danger, but for a shoddy backup system. As cited in an earlier example, the data corruption would have forced the customer to accept a week-old backup — not acceptable, but at least they could offer a backup. It’s not clear what happened, and Microsoft engineers have told T-Mobile there is an “optimistic” chance of recovery for their users’ data according to The New York Times, but if your first response to a data corruption problem is “I think all of our backups are screwed,” then as the meme goes: Backups, ur doin it wrong. And stop blaming it on the cloud; it wasn’t the one who kicked your kitten and flipped bits on the fiber channel switch.

(By the way, T-Mobile is showing the Sidekick as temporarily out of stock. How surprising.)

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A Short Discourse on Cantaloupe

June 12, 2009 · Musings · Comments Off

There are some strange and bizarre things that come up on CNBC. For instance, Rick Santelli, the reporter/commentator at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, tore into colleague Steve Liesman, the network’s senior economics reporter, over claims that senior executives of financial firms failed to disclose material information to “save the world.” The FCC may have had its way with CBS and the “wardrobe malfunction” but I haven’t heard them go after on-air editor Charlie Gasparino’s little four-letter slip up. And then there was the time Gasparino didn’t have what he got. Where else do you go from there?

Cantaloupe, of course.

Jim Cramer, the understated voice of CNBC, and Erin Burnett, notable as the only one at CNBC to have her own show during market hours, have a daily segment called “Stop Trading,” where Burnett asks about certain stocks, and Cramer gives his opinion. They have some pretty good banter, but yesterday’s bit takes the, uh, melon. Have a listen. (You’ll find the link in the paragraph above, or you can just go here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1149483419. I recommend skipping to 1:45 and then 3:48, unless you’re interested in hearing the whole piece.)

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“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal”

June 11, 2009 · Musings · Comments Off

The Fox television series “Firefly” had its own little bit of wit and charm before, as many viewers would agree, it was prematurely snufed out. With creator Joss Whedon firmly working on a new series, “Dollhouse,” it’s been assumed for quite some time that a revival of Firefly isn’t a possibility in the near future.

So it came as a surprise to see a commercial on the SciFi channel of a movie with the following:

  • A smuggling spaceship
  • A girl in a box (naked)
  • Fight scenes on a dusty, rocky planet
  • The line “We’re all trying to get off this rock alive”

Sounds familiar, except for one thing:

  • Giant insects trying to attack the characters

Yes, the wonderful team over at SciFi greenlighted a movie that brings together the elements of Firefly with the baddies of every bad sci-fi film. There doesn’t seem to be much info on it over at IMDB but it does star James Kyson Lee of NBC’s “Heroes.”

Writers understand that pretty much every possible premise and most plot lines have already been written. I’ve read that Firefly was similar to a previous work, and I always expected someone to duplicate it in some form. Mimicry and flattery, right? I assumed that most screenwriters would leave Firefly alone because of the significant and rabid fan base; those fans had mixed thoughts about the movie, showing how protective they were about the original series. So when it comes to this SciFi channel movie, only one thing comes to mind: in the words of Firefly character Wash, “I curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.”

And in related news, the SciFi channel just ran a commercial confirming a story that ran on Slashdot a few months ago: the network is changing its name to “SyFy.” I never did understand the reasoning behind that one.

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Primary Day Article FAIL

June 9, 2009 · Musings · Comments Off

[Writer's note: The use of "FAIL" in a title definitely flies in the face of the subtitle, "Old-style musings on new things." But there are times when new-style musings are needed, and this has the needed effect.]

As a writer, I cringe at the glaring front-page errors in the local daily paper. As a former newsletter editor, I know it can be tough to catch every error every time. But at some point, one has to draw the line. I probably drew that line years ago.

Today, voters in Virginia went to the polls to choose the Democratic candidate for governor and lieutenant governor; some precincts had local races, as well, on the ballot. Virginia primaries are open, meaning that voters can participate regardless of party affiliation. Despite this, turnout was expected to be low, based on absentee ballot returns. Naturally, you’d expect some sort of front-page coverage of the election, and sure enough, the local daily paper offered such an article. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the article on the paper’s website.) When it came to the page turn, I read this:

Primary article - News & Messenger

Again, I understand that mistakes happen. But how can you screw up something like this:

Primary article highlighted - News & Messenger

How many people only read the first part and didn’t go to the polls today?

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