Terrific essay by Matt Gemmell, and a scathing critique of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent declarations against gay marriage:

The idea that a consensual relationship, between adults of sound mind, could be somehow immoral is itself repugnant. If the charge of immorality arises from nothing but the sexual orientation of those people, we must upgrade that judgement to literally criminal.

To even make the association, much less to openly invite others to adopt it, is bigotry – and to create or perpetuate a system where such people’s actual rights are negatively affected, is another thing that religion has long and rightly been accused of: persecution.

I find it quite impossible to understand how an ethical, enlightened person can read His Holiness’ appalling, scurrilous and slanderous statement without repugnance. I also strongly doubt the character, moral fibre, and critical faculties of any person who would defend it.

More than criticizing the Pope’s views, Matt is reflecting on religion itself, be it Catholic or otherwise. So much of what he so skillfully says resonates with my own views on the topic, so much of it feels right, that I cannot help but beg you to read it in full.

The legacy of religion is not peace, or morality, or comfort. It is war, and terror, and persecution. The legacy of religion is the Crusades, and tent-revivalist preachers stealing from the poor, and Afghan women who can be imprisoned for being a victim of rape, and can then be murdered by their own families if they will not then marry their rapists.

Such a legacy is clearly subhuman, and part of humanity’s fading childhood. It is to be discarded, after it has been fought to extinction. As a thinking, enlightened, rational person, I’m compelled to be its enemy.

Thank you so much for writing this, Matt.

Introducing, Allthis.com. They list themselves as being in “beta” on their website and claim to be “the ten-minute exchange”. Apparently users can bid on and purchase blocks of other users’ time! How exciting!

Apparently there are still plenty of douchebags getting funded on the Internet to do bad things to other people. Enter AllThis, the newest-but-already-pretty-fucked-up startup that decided it would be a great idea to steal the profile pictures and info from some of the most followed and respected tech writers on the Internet in order to make it look like they’re using their service. Which, of course, they’re not.

Also, they’ll happily sell you 10 minutes of these people’s time. And they don’t even need to own it, that’s just how they roll.

This is despicable. Fortunately, they messed with the wrong guys. You see, Marco Arment, Mike Monteiro, Andy Ihnatko… These are not only nice and knowledgeable guys, they also know how to deal with Internet thieves. Unfortunately for them, they’ve had some practice before.

Also worth checking out: The much better, much more honest and much more close to reality (and also much less official and I’m guessing pretty soon to be removed) AllThisPR Twitter account. You gotta love the Internet for giving us things like these.

Via MG Siegler.

Anyway, the main attraction of Amazon’s Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 page is the big comparison table. Other people’s feature-comparison checklists always leave out factors that are important to me, so I made my own additions that Amazon is welcome to include on their page.

This is pure awesome. Well done, Marco.

It’s hard to believe that he was only 25 at the time. The Macintosh would not exist for another 4 years. We’ve come a long ways since then.

Via Daring Fireball.

Frank Sinatra (1915-1998).

On a day much like today in 1915, Frank Sinatra was born. Here’s a small playlist for today with my favorite songs. Play it to yourself, relax and enjoy his gentle, soothing voice. Play it at work, play it on your way home, or play it to your significant other. Better yet, to your future significant other. This is romance the way it should be. Simply put, nobody makes music like this anymore.

Frank Sinatra was a man of his time. He enjoyed each and every day as if it were his last. He was just as proud of his failures (and there were quite a few) as he was of his successes, and he really went through life with a cavalier attitude until the end, maybe like no one else has.

Here’s to your very good health, sir. You are still, as always, very sorely missed.

I was skimming through my Twitter feed when I found this gem in Matt Gemmel’s timeline. The developers of the shoot-em-up game Serious Sam 3 have embedded a great way to discourage piracy in the game: a giant, immortal, pink scorpion that relentlessly mauls you to death as soon as the game starts, but of course only on illegally obtained copies of the game.

Which in turn led me to the aforelinked piece by Brian Howe about DRM. The real, hardcore DRM, mind you:

Standing five metres high, covered in dense hair and ropy muscle, our Digital Rights Minotaurs are eternally vigilant deterrents against product use. Where did we find them? Don’t ask. These mythical beasts never seem to eat or sleep, and we’ve got a crapload of them. There’s probably one grunting softly outside your cubicle right now, waiting. Since we agree that hand loss is a fair penalty for attempted gaming, it hardly needs to be said that going so far as to make a backup copy for personal use results in an instant deathblow.

The entire piece is filled with rage-inducing awesomeness.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Words to live by.

Two lines from this poem (If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same) are featured on the player’s entrance to Centre Court in Wimbledon. Here’s a video featuring none other than Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal reading a few lines prior to their classic Wimbledon 2008 final.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster… It’s difficult to find two other lines with so much meaning.

This was the 200th post on Analog Senses. I thought it was appropriate to dedicate it to something that’s important to me. I don’t know what it will mean to you. It may serve as a reminder. Or maybe as a motivation. Or perhaps, if I’m lucky, it may stir something inside you that you didn’t know was there.

We’re all athletes in our lives in one way or another. And we all need to work hard, stay strong, and learn to accept that, though on any given day we may lose, what we should never accept is defeat.

The 13-mile ride elapses in only five minutes, but it shows a huge swath of architectural and economic diversity.

Have you ever asked yourself just how big Manhattan is, really? Well, it’s REALLY big, but the great thing about it is not its size.

Join in for a bike ride across all of Broadway, the oldest avenue in New York City: starting from the Bronx and all the way down to Bowling Green, it is a wonderful tour of the City that Never Sleeps.

New York is a city with many different faces, and there’s a version that is just right for each one of us. You just have to find the one you like best ;)

Via @counternotions.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910).

One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.

Just read it. Thanks John.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011).

Amazing. This is one of my favorite videos of Steve.

Best tribute I’ve seen, from Jonathan Mak. And there have been some good ones.

That’s how I knew. It was 8:00am here in Spain, and the Internet had been bursting with activity over the news for a few hours already. It still seems unreal. I knew he was very ill, and I knew that his recent resignation as Apple’s CEO probably meant that things were looking bad, but somehow I thought, like many of us did, that Steve could beat this. Sadly, it was not to be.

Steve Jobs was one of my heroes. And I don’t have many of them. He was a unique person, who changed the world through sheer force of will. I never got to know him personally, but it’s difficult to understate the influence he had on my life, both personally and professionally. It wasn’t just me though, he touched the lives of many, many people through his work, and he changed the way we think of computers forever. But he was so much more.

What really made Steve Jobs different was his ability to inspire those around him, to encourage them to be the very best they could be. Whatever you do in life, give it your absolute best shot, and don’t stop until you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished. That’s his legacy. That’s the critical role he played both at Apple and Pixar. He will be remembered, not for being the inventor of the iPhone, or even the original Macintosh, but for being the most compelling leader the industry has ever known.

What he leaves behind is a company built on those principles. A company that has taken the world by storm. It’s the work of a lifetime, and what a lifetime that was.

Here’s to the crazy ones. Thank you, Steve.

What a sad day. Thanks for the inspiration, Steve.

So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

Unbelievable.

Also interesting about yesterday’s keynote was that somehow, I managed to get each and every single one of my predictions wrong. That’s got to be difficult. It certainly gave me a greater appreciation for the people that make these sorts of predictions for a living, and get them right most of the times. In retrospective, I probably should have called them “wishful thoughts” instead of predictions but hey, at least it was fun to try.

Apart from my very well deserved claim chowder, I’m actually pretty excited about yesterday’s announcements, and not disappointed at all. The iPod refreshments were really just minor changes, mostly on the software end, but there was no need for drastic improvements there. The iPhone, however, is a different story. I think the iPhone 4S will be an excellent follow-up to the iPhone 4. It’s got just the right hardware improvements to keep it leading the industry, and I’ve always loved the design of the iPhone 4, so I didn’t feel they needed to change it in the first place. And boy, that sweet new camera. I’m dying to try it. I understand that some people were expecting bigger news, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every year.

On another note, the new iPhone comes with a built-in personal assistant, which is just unreal. The Siri voice recognition software is amazing. That was clearly the most exciting moment of the entire event, and probably the only thing we will still remember 5 or 10 years from now. It is another example of what Apple does best: they take a technology that’s been around for some time, and they make it usable for everybody. Some writers, like Paul Miller from This is my Next, are already weighing in on the possible implications of such a service, especially for people with disabilities: as a Biomedical Engineer, the possibilities of integration that Siri provides are really exciting.

The only thing I found surprising is that there was no new Apple TV. This seemed like a no-brainer to me, but perhaps Apple just couldn’t focus on everything at once, and the Apple TV got pushed back. After all, it is “just a hobby”. I still think we will see an A5-equipped Apple TV soon, but maybe it’s not important enough to mention on a high-profile event like yesterday’s. Or maybe they’re just making A5 chips as fast as they can, and they still can’t make them fast enough to put it into all of their products. Between the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2, those are a lot of chips.

Then there’s the keynote itself. The presenters were all correct, and for the most part Steve’s absence wasn’t noticed too much. The structure of the presentation was the same as the last few times: a general presenter (Cook) introducing the global areas, and then the responsible for each team (Forstall, Schiller, etc.) diving into the technical details. Hey, that’s one prediction I didn’t get totally wrong. Yay me. What I didn’t like was the pace. The first part of the keynote was just a rehash of the features that were announced at WWDC, and apart from a couple minor new apps, nothing new was introduced there. I think they should just skip that part, or make it as brief as possible.

And that was pretty much it. Apple continues to steadily improve all of their devices while maintaining or slightly reducing prices across the board. It’s a winning formula, so why change it? They also continue the naming convention they introduced with the iPhone 3G S, which I don’t particularly like, but maybe this time there’s a significant change there. If the “S” on the iPhone 3G S stood for “speed”, I don’t think there’s any doubt that this time around, “S” stands for “Siri”.

Here it goes. My first prediction is this: by the end of the day, my wallet will be thinner and lighter. A few hundred bucks lighter, to be precise.

Let me elaborate: I’ve been a happy-but-seriously-frustrated-as-of-late owner of an iPhone 3G since its release, back in 2008. I got it on day one. That was the first iPhone to be released in Spain, which means that so far I’ve only owned one iPhone. For me there have been no multi-tasking, no compass, no AirPlay, no fancy iOS 4.3 features. None. The phone itself works great, and the battery still lasts almost two days, but the whole thing has been slowed down to a crawl with the last few software updates, ever since iOS 4.0 and up to iOS 4.2.1. How Apple allowed those updates to be installed on this device, I will never know.

The point is I’m clearly due for an upgrade, so I’m the ideal audience for today’s keynote. They would have to seriously screw things up for me not to buy the next iPhone as soon as I can get my hands on it. And even then, I would probably just buy an iPhone 4 instead. But I digress.

What we (don’t) know

There has been much talk and the usual crazy rumors about the next iPhone: some purported leaks, some mysterious sources “close to the matter” and even a lost prototype that nobody saw, but for the most part we all remain in the dark about how it will look like, its new features, etc. We don’t even know if there will be more than one new iPhone. iPhone 4S? iPhone 5? No clue. Bigger screen? I doubt it. It’s remarkable how Apple has been able to keep everything under control this time around.

There are several points of agreement among the different rumors: pretty much everyone believes that the new iPhone will be built around Apple’s A5 chip, the one that debuted in the iPad 2. There is also a general consensus that it will probably be thinner and lighter, and possibly with an aluminum back. My opinion is that the A5 is a sure thing, but that’s about as much as we can say with some degree of certainty. So instead of speculating about it, I will focus on the rest of Apple’s product line and analyze how today’s event might affect each one of them, individually. Take these predictions with a grain of salt.

The Apple TV

First, let’s state the obvious: there will be a new Apple TV today, and it will include the A5 chip. It seems appropriate that Apple will use this event to present all of their next-generation iOS devices, not just the new iPhone (except for the iPad 3, which we won’t see until early 2012). The A5 is a sure bet for the new Apple TV because it enables the one feature that was sorely missing from last year’s version: Full 1080p hardware video decoding. If you ask me, that’s more than enough to justify a new Apple TV. Whether it will get more new features, I don’t know. Definitely iCloud integration, and it will probably run iOS 5, but other than that it’s a mystery. Apps? I don’t think so, but it’s certainly possible. We’ll see. In any case, the price stays at $99.

The iPod family

This is where things get tricky. Will this event also affect the iPod line? If so, what’s going to happen to them? Will they be old history after today? I don’t think they will eliminate the whole lineup, but something tells me there will be blood. Remember, this is Apple. They have a knack for terminating successful product lines well before their commercial demise. It’s still a pretty big part of their business, but it’s been heavily dominated by the iPod touch lately, which is really much closer to an iPhone that an iPod if you think about it.

I could imagine the following scenario: The iPod nano and the iPod shuffle merge into one unique product. Call it whatever you want. I believe it will have a storage capacity between 4-8GB, definitely with physical buttons, and with a basic display. Gone is the 2″ touchscreen. It looked really nice and I was very excited about it, but then I bought one and it was a pain to use when jogging, and pretty much always. If I had to guess a price point, I believe $99 is the sweet spot for an 8GB model, and probably $59 for a 4GB model.

Then there’s the iPod touch. Call me crazy, but I think they’re killing it. It makes so much sense. Why do people love the iPod touch? Because it’s an iPhone without the phone. Or, more precisely, an iPhone without a 2-year contract and a $100 monthly bill. But what if Apple were to release a new, prepaid iPhone instead of a new iPod touch? Then the whole contract problem goes away immediately. Who wouldn’t want such a device? Besides, it would help Apple in the market share statistics against Android, because as of today, iPod touches don’t count. And they have sold a gazillion of them. If all those were iPhones, maybe Android wouldn’t be looking as dominant as it does today. Remember, this is a public perception battle as much as it is an economic one. Apple is beating the heck out of everybody else in the economic front, but such a move would help them in the other front, too.

This is just nitpicking, of course, but after seeing the invitation: “Let’s talk iPhone” I kind of feel they’re hinting at it. Surely any new features that may be included in the new iPhone would also find their way into a hypothetical new iPod touch, so why leave it out? Why not “Let’s talk iOS”? Or something else, less explicit, to make room for more devices? Nope. They’re just talking iPhone, maybe because after today it’s all about the iPhone, and there’s no new iPod touch. To me it seems clear: Apple needs a low-end iPhone, and the only way to do that without confusing people is to kill the iPod touch.

And what about the iPod classic? Well, I believe they’re killing it, too. Or at least they’re forgetting about it: no upgrades, same price, until everybody forgets it ever existed. Marco Arment has a good theory about why that makes sense, and I agree with him. Its role in the lineup is confusing, it’s more than ever a niche product, and its days of glory are way behind us.

The new iPhone(s)

My money is on a brand new top-of-the-line iPhone, probably called iPhone 5, with the same current pricing structure: $199 / $299 with a 2-year contract, or $649 / $749 contract-free and carrier unlocked. Maybe the unlocked iPhone will see its price cut  down to $599 / $699. Storage-wise, I’m not sure we will see any changes, after all iCloud will significantly reduce the need for on-device storage of most iPhone users, so 32 GB seems plenty. However, a 64GB version is not totally out of the picture.

Then, a lower-end iPhone, still on-par or slightly better than the current iPhone 4. I don’t like the name iPhone 4S. This one will be sold at the price of the current higher end iPod touch models: $299 / $399, but  for 16 / 32 GB versions instead of 32 / 64GB. The message is clear: sacrifice some storage, get a built-in phone instead. This one doesn’t get the 64GB version. It will be sold without a contract, and carrier unlocked. Maybe they’ll announce some deals with the carriers to provide voice + data plans at an affordable pay-as-you-go price, like they did with the iPad 3G.

The presenter(s)

The only thing missing from the picture is the actual presenter: who will take the stage to unveil the new stuff? There have been reports that it will be Tim Cook, and if we take the past as reference, it certainly seems logical. However, I haven’t ruled out a Steve Jobs appearance. Maybe a brief one, introducing the general ideas, and then leaving it up to other team members to walk the audience through the technical details. That was the arrangement on the past couple of keynotes, and it works. I agree with John Gruber, I don’t think Jobs gave all these keynotes in the past because he was the CEO. He gave them because he was the best presenter in the company, and he still is. If he’s healthy enough, why not have him do it? After all, he was on medical leave during WWDC, and that didn’t stop him from taking the stage. I realize this is a long shot, but I would really like to see him up there.

The take-away

That’s all I got. If I were to nail all of these predictions (and none of them seem too far fetched), the resulting product line would be a lot cleaner and more appealing in my opinion. There would be a very clear distinction between the different product ranges, and all of them would have a specific, well-defined role (iPods for music, iPhones for everything else). Besides, it would be a lot easier for Apple to manage the different iOS branches going forward, since they wouldn’t need to support a dedicated iOS version for the iPod touch anymore.

Anyway, we are just a few short hours away from finding out. Whatever they end up announcing, one thing is certain: we will all be watching closely. Some people will love it, others will hate it, but everyone will care. Everything we say or write about it will only be because we care. That’s a critical battle Apple has already won.

This thing looks good. It has all the strength of the Amazon ecosystem behind, perfectly integrated and ready to be used from the moment you take it out of the box. Amazon has taken everything they did right with the Kindle, and used it to build what will clearly be the best selling Android tablet on the planet. Not that it was difficult, but still. What’s funny about it is that, for the most part, people won’t even know it’s an Android tablet. Amazon has put their brand on every imaginable corner of this thing, and that’s a clever move. People will not buy the Fire for the Android part, they will buy it for the Amazon experience they already know and love. Just for fun, do you know how many times the “Android” word is mentioned in the official Amazon page for the Fire? Once. Just once in a whole page full of text. Clearly they don’t want you to focus on that.

Amazon wants people to think of the Fire as the Amazon tablet, not just another flavor of Android. For all we know, Android is just a commodity for them: if they had access to the Windows Phone or WebOS source code, they might as well have used one of those instead. And who’s to say they won’t do that tomorrow. What Amazon brings to the table is a consumer experience to rival Apple’s. Actually, they are the only company I can think of who has all the strategic components necessary to produce this type of device. It’s not about specs, it’s about covering the whole experience, end to end. And Amazon knows how to do that.

What does this mean for Google? Well, in a word, Amazon has screwed them big time. They have beaten them at their own game. Google has always used early access to the latest Android version as a negotiating tool to control their associated OEMs. They’ve used the rest of Google’s own services as leverage to make them play along with their rules, too. Access to GMail, Google Maps, etc. That’s what the OEMs get for free if they play nice with Google on the Android front. Take all those services away and the smartphone or tablet experience is significantly compromised.

However, enter Amazon: They have an entire ecosystem of services to rival Google’s, they don’t need their help to make this work, and they’ve made it perfectly clear that they don’t want them sticking their nose around, either: The Fire doesn’t include the official Android Market, but instead comes loaded with the Amazon appstore. That’s just one example. Amazon has taken the Android core and is running with it straight to the finish line. And they’re not looking back. Meanwhile, Google and the rest of the Android OEMs are still trying to tie their shoelaces.

In a market where trying to compete with the iPad playing to its strengths is pretty much a synonym for suicide, Amazon has made a genius move: they’re not trying to compete with the iPad at all. The price of the Fire alone tells you that: it’s just $199. As John Gruber pointed out, you could buy a Kindle Fire and a brand new top-of-the-line Kindle touch for less than the price of an iPad. And that’s just the entry-level iPad. It’s clear that this new device is aimed at a different segment of the market. At $199, it’s still within the impulse-buy range, specially with the holiday season getting closer. I’m convinced that if they manage to make them fast enough, they’re going to sell a gazillion of these during the holiday quarter.

Also, though the iPad and the Fire are very different, it will be interesting to see if the Fire cuts into the iPad’s sales this holiday quarter. The iPad is a great holiday gift, no doubt, but it is more expensive than most people typically think of spending on a gift. I bet that until now, some people ended up buying an iPad (and spending more than they would have liked) simply because there was no real alternative available that they knew about and that didn’t feel like a waste of their money. Now the Fire changes all that. I think many parents are going to choose to save some money and get their kids a Fire, thinking that it’s pretty much like an iPad (even though it’s not). Whatever happens, it may be difficult to judge, since both the iPad and the Fire are poised to have a terrific holiday quarter, but the question is out there: of the many million Kindle Fires Amazon will sell during the holidays, how many of those would have been iPads? It’s funny that the other way around is not so interesting: clearly when you buy an iPad you know what you want, so this may be a tricky comparison. We’ll see.

Truth be told, when all is said and done the Fire remains purely a content consumption device, although backed up by a huge content offering by Amazon. Now, some people may think of that as a critic, but it sounds pretty sweet to me. By the way, remember when they said the same thing about the iPad? It’s ridiculous. Who knows what kinds of apps people will come up with now, finally knowing that there is a device out there, selling well enough to turn a profit? Until know, Android development was hindered by too many devices, too many specs, too many screen sizes… developing an Android app had an extra degree of complexity when compared to developing an iOS app. The situation hasn’t changed dramatically overnight, of course, but now developers at least have a clear target when making a new Android app: make pretty damn sure that it runs spectacularly well on the Fire. Then, let’s see how it does on the rest of the Android tablets out there. If they’re still around, that is.

We have interesting months ahead. Let’s see how the rest of the industry reacts to this move. For Google and some Android OEMs, pulling their pants up might be a good way to start. For consumers, it’s clear that this is good news: it means more choice, more innovation, and a brighter future. For developers, it’s equally exciting. Now let’s sit back and watch how the holiday season plays out, and what the New Year brings.

Ready? Set? Go.