Sam Iles's Blog

Last week, Apple unveiled an application called iBooks Author which allows companies or people to make text books for use in schools and to sell those text books through Apple for direct delivery to iPads. It can also be used to create sales brochures and training manuals for companies and so on, but right now, it’s about text books.

I’ve thought a lot about this and whether or not I think it’s a good idea. And I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s bad. Here’s why:

Firstly, I think it’s a major threat to the free and open dissemination of information. With this plan, Apple becomes the arbiter of information, with the ability to pick and choose which text books it allows into its store. Information becomes reliant on every student in the school having an iPad. With text books, there is absolutely zero barrier to entry. If you have £15, you can get a text book. With iBooks Author, text books require a £500 investment. (I say £500, not £400, because these text books are apparently 3 or 4gb each, meaning a 16gb iPad just won’t cut it). Of course, this money needs to be supplied by the state as the majority of parents can’t afford to furnish all their kids with new iPads when they start school (let alone replacing them during their many years of education). This means schools need to buy loads of iPads and replace them when they get old (which, in a school system full of moronic teenagers, is likely to happen quickly) and by tons more books than they’d need to and these can’t be used year after year by different students as they are now. And, of course, the resale market is killed by this.

Not to mention the fact that I can’t this working. Give the people I went to school with an iPad and tell them to open a text book, and they’ll sit at the back and play Angry Birds. I know I would have. We had these little laptops in secondary school which had a penguin game on them. Half the teacher’s time was spent walking around telling us to stop playing the game when we should have been working. But I digress.

This isn’t free and open information – what should be the basis of education – but is an expensive tie-in to Apple’s iPad market. The point of open standards is that information remains free, with infinite possibilities. But, iBooks Author is propriety and owned entirely by Apple. Information, especially in education, is the crux of democracy and freedom and we’ve spent centuries railing against the idea of one company or organisation controlling all of that. iBooks Author wipes all of that work away.

Of course, Apple is a commercial company, and this move is pretty smart. If it can get even one US state or even an entire country, or just few school counties, to agree to give all their students iPads then Apple is in the money. And that’s not even including the 30% Apple gets from selling the books.

So. More expensive for schools and considerably less open. And, what exactly is the benefit to iPad text books? Oh, you can embed video in them? Well, a) the teacher can show us a video with his whiteboard, and b) education shouldn’t really be about watching videos anyway, should it?

Text books are a perfect standard. You don’t even need electricity. Anyone can make them, anyone can buy them, anything can happen with them. With iBooks Author, you’ve got an incredible important standard controlled by one company which can only be enjoyed by those who buy and continue to buy their expensive gadgets. It just doesn’t seem right to me.

Here’s why I don’t use Spotify and why I continue to buy my music:

With Spotify, if I stop paying my subscription or Spotify shuts down, that’s it – all my music is gone. However, by buying my DRM free music, it’s mine forever, no matter what happens.

It’s like the difference between buying and renting a house. When you rent a house, you’re sinking the money into it but never getting anything back. But when paying a mortgage, the house is yours at the end of it.

If I decide I can’t afford Spotify or – more likely – it goes out of business in the next 60 or so years I am alive, everything is gone and I’ve wasted potentially thousands of pounds. But, if I download music or buy CDs, it’s mine forever. When I’m sat in my rocking chair and Spotify is just a stagnant Wikipedia article about some long gone company, I’m still listening to my music.

When the Xbox 360 was released way back in March 2006, it was launched with a game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It turned out to be one of the best games every made.

Last week, the fifth instalment in the Elder Scrolls series was released, ‘Skyrim’. And it’s as good as one would expect. It’s getting full star reviews across the board and is already being called game of the year by a lot of people.

But this isn’t such as much a review as a gentle suggestion that you just buy it.

If you go with the masses upon masses and buy Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3, you’re getting six, maybe seven, hours of gameplay. Of course you get the multiplayer – but that’s just mindlessly repetitive shooting of other people with not much fun, in my opinion. MW3, six hour campaign. Skyrim? Over 300 hours of gameplay.

Skyrim is a perfectly crafted, beautiful designed, wonderfully fun and exceedingly rewarding 300 adventure of combat, magic and varied monsters. You even get to pick your own character (I’m a high elf called Cthulhu) and level up how you want, taking your character wherever you want.

I could go on about Skyrim for days. I’m only 10 hours in, and it’s already the best game I’ve ever played.

Just get it.

I want to tell you about the web host I use: VPS.net, a great company who provide Virtual Private Servers (VPS). For those who don’t know, let me explain what a VPS is.

Typically, there are two types of web hosting solution: shared and dedicated. If it’s shared, you’ll be paying (usually a set monthly fee) a web hosting provider for a set amount of bandwidth and storage to be hosted on a single physical server with many other websites (often around three hundred or so). A dedicated server is exactly that – a single piece of hardware which you host just your site on. It would be roughly the same effect as buying your own Dell server and having it in your house.

Generally speaking, the people choosing shared hosting will have small hosting needs requiring little power and people choosing dedicated will either need a lot of power or a lot of control (i.e., different programming languages or database support).

VPS.net is a compromise between the both. They offer “Virtual Private Servers”. They are essentially virtual instances of an operating system installed onto one machine (much in the same way that Parrallels or VMWare allows you to run Windows within Mac OS X). Each virtual machine believes itself to be the sole owner of the hardware and doesn’t believe there to be any other servers sharing it, whereas several virtual machines will be on the server hardware itself.

This allows the user to have full and total control over the operating system (in our case, Ubuntu Sever Edition) and to do whatever you want with it (as if you were paying for a dedicated server) while keeping the cost down because the hosting company can have several accounts of the same hardware.

The way VPS.net does this is great. They offer your VPS dedicated, guaranteed processing power and RAM. They sell their VPSs in nodes – one node represents 0.6Ghz of CPU, 376Mb of RAM, 10Gb for the storage and 250Gb of bandwidth. You can have a server with just one node or go all the way up to 16 nodes, giving you a huge 10.8Ghz and 6788Mb for the CPU and RAM respectively.

You can install everything you need for a server (Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, PHP for LAMP for example) on your VM with just one node. Or, you could separate the database off onto an entirely different VM to increase speed (depending on your usage need, of course). You can also edit the number of nodes your server has on the fly very quickly. As your website gets more popular (or you anticipate more popular periods) you can add a node or two and your server instantly gets faster and able to handle more traffic. Needless to say, you can’t do this so easily with a traditional hardware server.

VPS.net make the creation of servers very simple. They offer a number of Linux and Windows templates for you to use. For example, you can get an Ubuntu template with full LAMP installation or you can just get Ubuntu and configure it all yourself (I always choose the later – server admin is FUN!). Each server can be created in a number of locations in the USA and Europe.

The uptime they give is great. In year or so I’ve been using them, the only uptime we’ve had is from faults of my own (pushing new server configs with reckless abandon then rushing to fix it). Literally – no downtime that’s their fault.

The speed is amazing, too. They seem to be always updating their hardware and, despite me being on one of their slightly older cloud locations without their newest architecture, they remain exceptionally fast.

VPS.net offers many services for free. You can get ISP manager – for free, Blesta – for free, SSL certificates – for free, Ksplice – for free. The list goes on. They also have a great DNS system which is free and offer a CDN solution through their partner, Level 3.

And one of their best traits – support. Their forums are populated with wonderfully helpful people and are great for general support but, if your problem is more specific, you can open a support ticket. They’re like email, only within the VPS.net website. And, they are fast. I think the record I’ve experienced is getting a response to a ticket in just under two minutes. Often, it’s like having an IM conversation with them! They are super fast and super helpful.

If you need a web host and are hosting multiple websites (we have around ten sites on a singe server) or need the power and customisability and you have an admiration of awesomeness then VPS.net is the way to go.

The cheapest new Kindle is $79 in the USA.

The cheapest new Kindle is £89 in the UK.

“BAH,” people are crying “the exchange rate should make the kindle £50.4889116! How dare Amazon!”

But, the Kindles are different. The USA one is subsidised with ads. The UK one isn’t. Without ads, that same Kindle costs $109 in the USA.

$109 at the exchange rate is £69.661916. Add the 20% VAT which we have to pay (and the Americans don’t) and you get to £83.5942992.

That’s only £5.40 off the asking price. Which is easily accounted for with import duties and the “increased cost of doing business in the UK”.

Please, people: let’s use some perspective here.

The Walking Dead comic has an iPad app which lets you download all of the comics for £5.99 each.

It has three stars.

What is probably the best comic of the last decade has three stars.

I read the reviews and all the negative ones are from people complaining about the price. “£5.99! That’s an outrage!”

What they don’t realise is that the actual paper copies, which I buy, are £10.99. So you’re saving £5. Not to mention that Apple takes £1.79 of that price for themselves, too.

Saving £5. In theory, that is the cost of printing the paper. Your money goes to the publisher and the author and the artists and the rest.

One person even said he wouldn’t pay “more than 99p for them”. Really? You only want to pay 99p for an incredible comic which costs £10.99 in the shops?

Do these people really have no concept of value? Saving £5 seems like a bargain to me.

In the face of blatant evidence of Apple’s superior quality and user experience in its products, Apple ‘haters’ usually resort to calling Apple expensive and – most usually – overpriced.

While you can’t really disagree that Apple’s products are expensive – anything which costs £1000 is expensive regardless of what it is – they certainly aren’t overpriced.

Hardware

Take the MacBook Air. I looked around a few companies websites to find the closest matching product (ultra-thin design and specs) and noted their prices.

So, the Dell has a smaller screen, weighs more and a slower processor but it’s still £10 more… Apple’s not so overpriced now, is it.

The misconception that Apple is overpriced comes from the fact that Dell do sell laptops from around £400 and Apple’s cheapest laptop is £849. You can see why someone would get confused but what they don’t realise is that that cheapest Dell is a much worse product than the cheapest MacBook. It makes sense for the Air to cost more because it’s a lot better. And, even when you get a Dell which is specced near the same as the MacBook the Dell is more expensive!

Bottom line: Apple’s hardware is not overpriced. It priced according to what it is.

Software

So the hardware is a lot better than its competitors, but, even if it weren’t, could Apple still be justified in charging more than for a PC? I think so. Namely because of the software.

Mac OS itself is supremely better than Windows, whichever way you look at it. I’ve known many people who say they want a Mac over their PC but they can’t afford it. And, they all say that the reason is the software. Everything is so much simpler on a Mac. Installing software involves dragging an icon to the Applications folder. No silly installer. Viruses are a thing of the past. Everything just works. In fact, you can probably cut hours and hours out of your work by using a Mac.

Also consider iLife. Windows users have nothing close to iLife in its power and simplicity. ‘Windows Movie Maker’. Please. That silly Windows Gallery app for photos? For a Windows user to replicate the power of iLife they would need to spend hundreds of pounds on iLife. Already they’ve lost all that money they think they saved by not buying a Mac.

Software is a major value add and makes the Mac very worthwhile.

Support

When you buy a Mac you get a one year guarantee. You ales get 90 days of phone support included (which you can extend for a small fee). That means that for 90 days any problem can be solved over the phone. Try doing that with Microsoft.

Longevity

I know people still using PowerBooks. Macs seem to last forever and, treated well, hardly ever break. You can easily stretch a MacBook out to last you five years. A cheap £400 Dell will last a few years tops. For every one Mac a Mac user buys, you’ll probably have to buy two PCs. Macs last ages.

Cheap ≠ Value

If you want to buy a fridge or cooker in the UK you can go to Currys and Comet or John Lewis. Currys sell the cheap, horrible ones which quickly lose efficiency and break and John Lewis sells brilliant stuff that lasts – but it’s expensive. (This makes it worth noting the fact that John Lewis sells Macs whereas Comet and Currys don’t). When shopping for food, you can go to the cheaper Tesco or to the more expensive but higher quality Waitrose. Dell, HP and Acer found themselves trapped in a race-to-the-bottom, each trying to make their products cheaper. What happened? Crappy products and slim margins. In fact, there’s so little money in the PC business for these guys that HP recently called it quits.

Apple decided to stay out of that game. They avoided making awful products and instead made high quality stuff. Apple went for a different market.

Sure, Macs can cost more than PCs. But, they’re better. They are better value and you get a lot more out of a Mac.

Besides, I’ve never understood how people say Apple makes worse computers because their stuff is “overpriced”. A Ferrari costs more than a Volkswagen, but nobody would argue for hours that the Volkswagen is a better car. Sure, it may be cheaper and it may be better for a person with little money, but that doesn’t mean the Volkswagen is better. Just that it’s cheaper.

Today I had to file a company tax return with the government. It was the most technologically awful experience of my life. Let me explain it to you.

First of all you log into the ‘Government Gateway’ and select that you want to file a Corporation Tax return. I clicked through a few pages, carefully reading what turned out to be irrelevant drivel. “I’ll start entering figures soon,” I thought. Not so.

The website eventually asked me to download a PDF saying that would be how I file my return. “No,” I thought, “the whole point of this was to file it online – not print a PDF and send it to them…”. But, I acquiesced.

My Mac opened the PDF in the wonderfully lightweight Preview.

The PDF was just a white page with the words “make sure you are using the latest version of Adobe Reader”.

Hmm. I acquiesced and downloaded Adobe Reader. All 450mb of it.

To my slight amazement the PDF prompted me to enter all my login information where it then validated itself (in the clear, I wouldn’t be surprised). I then had to clumsily click through pages of the PDF entering values. The only help provided was by clicking a ? which gave a popup with bold, unformatted and unpunctuated barely readable text.

After struggling through and entering lots of duplicate information while being offended with bright red errors and ugly green tones everywhere I had to validate the PDF with some ridiculous 16 step process of fiddling with deep Adobe Reader settings which basically gave the app root access to my Mac.

I then had to enter my ‘Government Gateway’ login info one more time, click submit and stare expectantly at a blank page for several minutes until – to my amazement – it declared that it had worked. It then advised me to print a copy of my billion page return which, surprise surprise, wouldn’t work on my Mac.

So there you have it. Submitting a company corporation tax return to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs through a macro-laden PDF.

Why don’t they just have a website? A website which could do have the sums for me, save my progress (why not let me enter it month by month throughout the year), actually function simply and operate like everything else on the website. I could code such a website in a matter of hours. Paying tax should be a simple process.

And, you just know that the government was scammed out of millions by some IT company for that PDF.

A PDF.

I’m sure the Pros and accountants have software which does this for them. And, no wonder. I’ll be buying that next year.

A PDF.