Soapbox

I keep noticing with dismay that many of the gadgets I consider for purchase are deliberately crippled in their US versions. It used to be only European consumers had to suffer from inflated prices and reduced functionality, usually self-inflicted due to bureaucratic EU mandates like the DV-In fiasco (most DV camcorders in Europe have digital IEEE1394/Firewire/iLink video out but not digital video in, as otherwise they would be classified as VCRs and be subject to various protectionist customs duties).

• Sony’s PEG-TH55 PDA has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth worldwide, except in the US where Bluetooth is omitted. This is incredibly annoying and rules the device out for me (unless I import one from the UK or Germany), as I have discovered from practical experience with my PEG-UX50 that WiFi access points are seldom available when you need them, and I often have to fall back to GPRS via Bluetooth. We are already saddled with the industrialized world’s worst mobile telephone operators and clunkiest phones, why add injury to insult?
• Canon’s new Digital Rebel DSLR is available in a kit with a 18-55mm lens. The lens has the smooth and fast USM ultrasonic motor in Japan, but uses the inferior AFD micro-motor in the US. Perhaps they believe US customers are too clueless to notice the difference.
• Many ultra-slim laptops available in Japan are never introduced in the US (this has created a market opportunity for parallel importers like Dynamism. Once again, the gaijin must lack the refined aesthetic sensibility to appreciate models like the Sony Vaio X505 and are probably content to lug their boat anchor laptops in their gas-guzzling SUVs. Nor is this attitude limited to Japanese companies – until recently IBM had an entire line of ultra-compact notebook computers available only in Japan.
• Epson’s Stylus Photo 2200, probably the favorite printer of professional photographers, does not include in the US the gray balancer, special software and calibration sheets used to improve the neutrality of black and white prints. Michael Reichmann puts it best when he calls this “The software that Epson North America thinks its customers are too dumb to use”.

The US is the world’s single largest market for consumer goods. Why is it treated with such disregard?

Update (2004-05-12):

Sony is relenting and will officially release the Vaio X505 in the US, albeit for the princely sum of $3000.

Starting tomorrow, the silver screens will be afflicted with a Disney mega-production on the Alamo. Presumably, jingoism will be slathered in the tasteful way one can expect from Michael Eisner’s firm. In an apparent bow to political correctness, however, the Tejanos (the original Mexican settlers of Texas) will be shown supporting the rebels (an act they still rue to this day, as they were later driven out of their lands by the Anglo settlers).

The Alamo is an illustration of the starkly diverging memories of Anglo and Hispanic Texans. The Senegalese poet (and later president) Leopold Sédar Senghor’s ironic poem “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” relates how French colonial schools in his country tried to teach African schoolchildren they were descended from Celtic Gauls, and beyond that the intrinsic absurdity of the colonial project. It seems Texas is not far behind, and I would be interested in knowing how many people cheer for Santa Anna’s army when the movie screens.

In what may be a coincidence, the supposedly respectable academic and media darling Samuel Huntington penned a viciously anti-Hispanic screed that just drips with the smug contempt of the self-described Anglo-Protestant. In his opinion, Mexican immigrants are not assimilating and are a future fifth column that threatens the integrity of the country. Other know-nothing demagogues said much the same thing about earlier waves of German or Irish immigration. I am not sure which regrettable trait of Mexican-Americans Professor Huntington finds most loathsome, the fact they are not Anglo or that they are not Protestants…

For all the brouhaha, one thing is seldom mentioned. According to one of my Texan cousins, the Texas War of Rebellion (1835–1836) was primarily waged to defend slavery, as Santa Anna had just extended, in a dictatorial act of oppression, the Mexican ban on slavery to Texas. One can only conclude the mythology surrounding the Alamo is merely a successful version of what Southern revisionists are trying to achieve, i.e. transmogrifying slavers into noble defenders of freedom.

Many e-commerce sites have session timeouts. Dawdle too long between the moment you enter the site and the moment you actually want to buy something, and you will be presented with an unpleasant message. The words “session timeout” will be there, drowned in a sea of technobabble, and you will have to restart from scratch. Using a bookmark will often have the same effect.

At this point, you may well be tempted to go shop elsewhere; indeed, it is the only principled response to such blatant contempt for customers. You will notice that successful sites like Amazon.com do not make their customers suffer such hassles – once you’re in, you are in, whether you have to take a lunch break or not. I don’t buy the security argument either – there is nothing sensitive about the contents of a cart, security belongs at checkout time, not browse time.

The reason why such crimes against usability are perpetrated is that business requirements too often take a back seat to technical expediency, paradoxically most often due to lack of technical competence. Many web development environments keep track of what you do on a website, the contents of your cart, and so on, in “sessions”, portions of memory that are set aside for this book-keeping purpose. They cannot be set aside forever, and must be purged to make room for new customers.

The tyro programmer will leave the default policy in place, which is to dump the session altogether and place the burden of recovering state on the customer. More experienced programmers will implement the session mechanism in a database so it can be kept almost indefinitely. In an era where disk space costs a dollar or two per gigabyte, and a desktop computer has enough processing power to crunch tens of thousands of transactions per minute, there is no justification for not doing so.

Homo trium literarum (man of three letters) is a synonym for thief in the 1922 edition of Roget’s thesaurus. The latin word for thief is fur, hence the pedantic periphrase. The only record I find of it ever being used was by Wedderburn, the British Solicitor-General against Benjamin Franklin, in front of the Privy Council:

I hope, my Lords, he exclaimed, with thundering voice and vehement beating of his fist on the cushion before him – I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, of Europe, and of mankind… He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoirs. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters; homo trium literarum (i.e., fur, thief!).

Franklin had made public letters from the governor of Massachusetts, where the latter urged the British government to take draconian measures against the colonists.

That said, with so many CEOs and CFOs implicated in corporate embezzlement, this quaint expression might be overdue for a revival…

I cancelled my TiVo service today, after more than two years with it. I upgraded to a Panasonic DMR-E80H, which offers more capacity than my old Sony SVR-2000, but the main reason for the upgrade was the fact I have for some time lost any vestigial trust for TiVo (the company). They spam you with advertising in the user interface (one of the items in the PVR main menu is a rotating ad), expropriate a portion of your precious hard drive space for the said spam, track your usage patterns behind your back, and have a nasty habit of disabling features in software releases.

The Panasonic is pretty much a hard-drive VCR with a DVD recorder (well, at least it can automagically determine the time and time zone to avoid the dreaded blinking “00:00”, let’s see how well it copes with Daylight Savings Time). The user interface is not as streamlined as TiVo’s (among other things, it is annoyingly modal and does not have an online program guide or the permament 30-minute buffer that allows TiVo to “pause” live TV), but it is capable of editing recorded programs (i.e. excising advertisements). Its chief redeeming feature is that it is not a networked device, and as such cannot be remotely disabled whenever the manufacturer feels like stooping lower to appease advertisers and copyright pigopolists that seem to matter more than paying customers. It is also unable to send back detailed activity data to be analyzed by advertisers riding roughshod over privacy.