The Apple iPad could be the next big thing in Internet for your grandmother – but only after it cuts the apron strings to its desktop parent.

WebTV and Peek have proven to be great all-in-one solutions to getting older folks online at low cost, low complexity, and high reliability without a big need for tech support.

Will the Apple iPad be next?

Back in 1998, WebTV was the cheapest way to get on the internet without a computer. It wasnt the best experience, but it was definitely usable and filled an important void in the market.

I got one for my (then) 60+ year old aunt, who is very non-technical. I was glad to see she picked it up quickly and loved it.

At some point, she stopped using it, but it had a long run and it was nice to be in contact with my godmother.

Fast forward to Christmas 2009. Time to try to get my aunt back on the internet. Its 10 years later though, and she’s in her 70’s.

What’s the answer?

I needed something I could send her that she could setup and manage herself. Something affordable for both the device, and for internet access so I could pay it for her. Something she wouldnt need support for and was unlikely to break.

Answer: The Peek Email Device

Now the Peek ain’t perfect. It’s got its shortcomings. The screen and keyboard are small and there is no web – its an email-only device with photo support.

But the trade-off is that 3G access is only $14.95/mo with no contract and its as portable as a cell phone.

She set the device up herself at home, but she did have to call me for help. Although I was able to take over and do the setup over the web, I did talk to the Peek support line, which answered very promptly and could have easily talked her though it – they were outstanding.

Now she emails all the time and I can send her pictures of my daughter, which she loves. Its a great solution.

This morning I was thinking about how the Apple iPad could be the next great solution for internet for older folks.

It’s got email, its got a great browser, its got a great screen and it has an ebook reader (sorry Kindle
!). 3G Internet is only $30/mo with no contract. It sure isnt going to take up much room in a small apartment, and the SDK makes sure the apps are easy to use and understand from one to the other.

The $629 ( 16GB + 3G ) price point will be a big issue for those on a fixed income, however.

The one remaining usability obstacle is that iPhones and iPod Touches require a computer in order to keep themselves updated with the latest software and to manage media.

This is long, long overdue to end.

It’s been 3 years, and the iPhone and Touch still cannot live on their own in the wild without a computer parent (well, at least if you want to buy music and videos on it and not lose them forever, or keep the system software updated).

The Apple iPad launch would be a great time for Apple to provide automatic online backup services for user’s media libraries and to make their devices fully autonomous, cutting ties to desktop iTunes forever.

[Note, I had a lot of drafts piling up, so this post is a little late and some criticism of Train Time will seem out of place in previous posts]

Wow, I have so much going on lately I really can’t take the time to write the detailed post this announcement deserves (yet) – but I need to at least let you know…

MTA has made some significant and relevant features to its website – but most importantly the homepage.

The homepage is no longer a massive hodgepodge bureaucratic newsletter with little gifs of MTA branding piled along the side.

Its a homepage which is designed to provide online customer services.

I know, for commuters it may seem that 15 years on in the world wide web, MTA may have decided that maps, schedule information, transit directions and service disruptions should have taken center stage many moons ago, but better late than never.

Most notably, Google’s transit directions are right on the front page, allowing you to find your way from point to point and letting Google figure out the rest for you, much like HopStop.

There is also an app alongside it which lists service issues.

Metro-North also gets a Train Time app which alerts users to realtime train info – fantastic!

Unfortunately, a lot of the site beyond the frontpage has remained unchanged except for the new navigation banner – the Metro-North schedule form, for example. I think they also did an image resizing job on their Metro-North map to make it fit the new site width – unfortunately this made the station names very hard to read. If you have a 1024x display or larger, you might want to use our Metro-North Map.

The worst part of Windows for me is *activation*.

Activation is the secret mojo in Windows which gets all pissy if you change hardware in your computer too often and makes you disgrace yourself by literally making a phone call to Microsoft headquarters and asking their permission to keep using it.

First, you have to read off a painfully long sequence of numbers and letters to an automated voice system. Sometimes the automated lady is OK with the numbers you read off, and sometimes she’s not. If she’s not, then your’e going to get transferred to an call center and read some more numbers ALL OVER AGAIN to a tech. Chances are you will have to do this multiple times as you will be stepping on his words because of the phone delay to India (he’s trained how to avoid this, you’re not).

The third level of hell comes if this guy doesn’t like your numbers. At this point, statistically speaking, you are probably running pirated software. But there are tons of people who aren’t. There just isn’t anyway to be sure.

In my experience, he’s going to ask some questions, but depending on the version of Windows license you have (OEM/Vendor/Retail), how dramatically your hardware changed (reflected in the number sequence), and how often activation has failed before on that product key, he’s going to go ahead and give you a pass.

Which requires – what else – that he gives you another really long sequence of numbers and letters to type into the machine to allow you to use the software you paid for, now that you’ve lost an entire morning in productivity at a cost higher than the price you originally paid for the software.

This week I was swapping some drives around and I got hit with the activation message again. Luckily the automated lady was OK with my numbers and gave me a pass this time. But the fact that I even have to do that for any software is just really infuriating.

Earlier this week I discussed Wednesday’s problems with Metro-North Train Time, part of MTA’s impressive new launch of web, mobile, and social media customer services.

After re-contacting the passengers in Greenwich and Cos Cob who reported the issue, I found out that in addition to the cancelled train not being reported in Train Time – there also was no late announcement over the PA at the platforms.

Now, I give Train Time a lot of slack, because its MTA taking some information that they do have and making it available to customers. It has its limitations, but most of these are well disclosed in the FAQ. (My advice would be to put the important limitations on the front of the app and label it a beta for a while so users will adjust their expectations).

But there is no excuse for the PA system not announcing a cancelled train to passengers waiting over a half hour on a cold platform at rush hour in January. The systematic procedure for ensuring that announcement gets made as soon as possible when the cancellation is confirmed is one which should have been in place since the beginning of time. It should also be iron-clad and redundant.

Sometimes I feel like MTA’s approach to a cancelled train is just ‘well, they’ll just take the next one’ but this is not the case at all. Each individual commuter needs to know as soon as possible about a cancelled train so they can decide whether they will wait for the next (overcrowded) train and be late for work (and call in now to avoid problems with the boss), jump in their car and drive to the city so they won’t be late or miss their appointment, work from home or take the day off.

Without a timely PA announcement, riders do not have the information they need to make these important decisions.

Update: I received a note from a reader – Sandra – this morning that there was a similar failure to notify riders of a cancelled train (7:20 AM Express) out of New Hamburg this morning!

Hi Chris,

Yes, this was today, one of the windiest and rainiest…Here is a timeline:

7:20 – no train

7:25 – an announcement is made by a male about the 7:36 train having a track change (to the opposite side of the platform from us)

7:27 – an announcement is made again at the 7:36, and then he adds that the 7:20 is having a 10 minute delay due to some mechanical problems.

7:30 – a female announces the 7:36 track change and that the 7:20 train is north of New Hamburg

7:32 – same announcement from the female

A lot of people run over to other platform to take the 7:36, that they call an express but it is really a local and many of us opt to wait for the 7:20 since a late 7:20 is still better than a crowded 7:36 that makes a lot of stops.

We never hear another announcement about the 7:20 and we take the 8:10 local that comes by, meanwhile branches are breaking above the platform and my umbrella breaks — but not sure I can blame the MTA for that!

Thanks,
Sandra

About 12 years ago I went to my first of (admittedly few) Linux User Groups Meetings in Silicon Valley.

I was new to the Valley, and a bit bright-eyed (that would fade FAST). For a new transplant, I was looking forward to visiting the holy Cisco campus and hanging out with other developers of the first generation of internet superstartups to discuss Linux development with its inventor, Linus Torvalds.

He might as well have been God.

But I learned quickly that Linus is very open, honest, and frank about Linux’s shortcomings – much more than most of his followers.

He went on to talk at length, in fact, about the superiority of the Windows CPU scheduler, and how Linux had not yet been able to touch its performance. It was very important to him that it improve, but confessed that it was one of the most difficult problems to solve technologically.

[The CPU scheduler is the part of the operating system kernel whose purpose is to efficiently assign slices of time to all the running processes to the CPU(s)]

This was kind of disconcerting to some of the attendees, as there has always been this aura of technical superiority of the Linux kernel to Windows. But the reality is, and remains to this day, that all of the major operating systems have their advantages and disadvantages, and to religiously ignore that fact is to just ignore reality.

Recently, there was another big problem uncovered in the Linux kernel scheduler that remains unfixed in all major distribution releases today. Of course, as always there is the option for the user to download or compile newer forks of the kernel which fix the problem, but that is not an expectation of everyday users, nor is it something desirable to IT departments for whom stability and uniformity of production OS software is essential.

Users had started to notice that the popular x264 video encoding software, which is one of the most popular, if not the most popular applications which can truly exploit efficient CPU scheduling, just ran a lot faster on Windows then Linux on the same computer.

Now, we all like software that runs faster, but video encoding is a special case of where performance is far more important than most because of the time required. You might not even notice if your browser rendered a web page 50% faster between one page load and another these days, but that same level of improvement is a godsend for video content creators.

As it turns out, changes in the Linux scheduler over time had introduced performance problems for some multithreaded applications. For most of these apps – like a webserver for instance, the issue impact is negligible, so the problem was unknown for some time. But for x264, the problem was enormous.

How enormous?

Well, the version of Linux kernel most users are running today are likely experiencing a performance penalty with x264 of up to 70%. For a rendering farm this is a massive cost penalty, as they would logically need to spend 70% more on hardware to meet the exact same workload requirements.

The problem was so severe and obvious that once notified, Linux kernel developers checked in the fix overnight, and a patch was issued. Since there attention was already on it, kernel developers were to able to later add even more performance to the application through additional kernel changes.

However, Linux distributions like Ubuntu do not run the version of the Linux kernel which was built last night, they run a proven and stable kernel which has been around for a while, with good reason. Enterprise Linux versions from Red Hat and Suse tend to use these stable kernel versions even longer.

So, for one client, who does about 18 CPU-hours of x264 encoding on Linux DAILY, this patch was really important, as it returned large gains of efficiency instantly with no new hardware costs. But lacking a vigilance of the monitoring of kernel patch developments, the problem and solution had existed outside of our awareness.

[UPDATE] –

Metro-North was refreshingly prompt and helpful in getting me info about this issue today.

That agency is CHANGING I tell you!

Evidentially, the cancelled train was just cancelled, so there was no period where it was simply late, which Train Time would have caught.

As for the subsequent late train, Train Time only has a small window of time to report that before Train Time drops it from the table – they are looking to expand this window of time.

Hopefully one day in the future when our train doesn’t arrive after 10 minutes, we will be able to check Train Time and reliably get an acknowledgement regardless of the reason or how late the train is. This is goal, and its what riders absolutely deserve.

Until then, some growing pains, but its hard for me to get too critical as I am really impressed with MTA’s new initiatives and encourage them to keep up the good work.

I know from experience that a lot of hesitation on the part of Metro-North to get realtime information to customers is based on fear. Fear of action, fear of change, fear of being wrong, fear of being accountable, fear of failure.

In the online world, nothing gets done that way.
You take risks, make mistakes, fix them, and repeat.

What’s important is that instead of being fearful and keeping all of its info under its hat, Metro-North is trying really hard to get what it does know out there, so I’m behind them on this one.

Keep trying, Metro-North – keep taking risks, keep making mistakes, keep fixing them.

Yes, if our train is 20m late and we are standing on a cold platform in January and there is no acknowledgment on Train Time we are going to get huffy. We’re huffy because that sucks. But that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the effort and want you to keep working on it, and we definitely don’t want you to stop trying.

—-

The 8:57 AM out of Cos Cob (aka Train #1539), never arrived or passed the station this morning.

The 9:22 AM (#1741) out of Cos Cob was about 20 minutes late.

When my wife asked the conductor what happened to the 8:57AM, he said ’something went wrong’.

The only indication there was any issue whatsoever on the MTA’s new website was a brief 5-minute period where ‘Train Time’ for Greenwich showed the 9:25 (#1741) being late for a brief 5 minute period around the arrival time.

( FYI Cos Cob is not one of the stations covered by Train Time, neither is Stamford )

I could not check any of the other stops as it was a Greenwich express to GCT, and GCT Train Time only tracks *departures*, not arrivals.

The major issue with Train Time is that if your train is over 5 minutes late or so, it seems to just ‘disappear’ off of the Train Time table!

In other words, Train Time seems to only let you know if your train is on time or 5-10 minutes late. If the train is later than that there is no status.

Not helpful.

Anyone else have any experience with Train Time yet, good or bad?
Let us know in the comments!

In the wake of the attempted bombing on the Delta flight, an absurd amount of ’security theater’ has inevitably resulted. Steps that attempt to do nothing more than advertise ’some kind of’ bureaucratic action.

By far the most absurd and insulting humanitarian inconvenience recently implemented is the inability of passengers to use the lavatory during the last hour of the flight – this is completely unacceptable.

Already, restrictions on when passengers can get up from their seats make some flights incredibly uncomfortable for passengers – especially children, the elderly, and those with incontinence or other medical issues.

Some examples are when a plane is held at the gate or tarmac before takeoff (up to two hours under new regulations), and passengers are not allowed to get up from their seats – once the plane takes off, it can be another 15 minutes or more before the seat belt lights go off and passengers are allowed to wait in line to relieve themselves.

But that’s in the best case – in some cases, turbulence is encountered upon takeoff which may last for an hour or more (a situation which often goes hand in hand with a tarmac wait for weather clearance).

For me, I have a limit – if I have to go, and there is no foreseeable end to the turbulence, I get up and go. In my past experience, flight attendants will protest and tell me to sit down, but they will not stop or report me. In many cases when the attendants themselves are allowed to get up, they will say nothing.

It can also be an issue when turbulence in encountered just before descent – again, passengers are in lockdown until the plane lands.

As far as managing the seat belt light, it varies widely from pilot to pilot, which is probably the most annoying variable. Some pilots – especially international pilots, in my experience – are very good about making sure that the seat belt light is off as soon as possible and not flipping it on with the slightest bump.

Other piltos are just oblivious that there are human beings in the cabin. I have been on flights where the turbulence had stopped for over an hour before the pilot turned off the seat belt light, and that was only after someone complained and a flight attendant called the cockpit to remind them.

It’s obviously impossible to completely deny passengers access to the restroom on flights, and its already a frustrating experience for the reasons mentioned. Making it even worse for passengers by keeping them in the seat for the last hour of the flight is a massive inconvenience for thousands of passengers every single day while offering nothing in terms of meaningful security.

Just drop it.