But we did wander into Zigzag Cafe last Saturday night, knowing that nearly everybody in town was at Tales, but that Murray had decided not to go. So we knew we could get the best cocktail experience in town for an hour or so before we headed off to an outside table at Place Pigalle.

Murray wasn’t there. Erik served us, and we had a terrific experience and met new cocktail enthusiasts (as we always do sitting at Zigzag). A month or so ago, when I asked Murray if he was going, he smiled a secretive and sardonic smile and alluded to not wanting to get involved in all that, and being sort of pissed about the nominations. I didn’t ask further, but I assumed he was alluding to the fact that not a single West Coast bar made the nomination list this year (a criminal shame, given the quality of what Daniel Shoemaker is doing, not to mention many others).

After a delightful discussion about cocktails, Continental philosophy, and many other topics with Erik and our newfound friends at the bar, we headed off to Pigalle, and enjoyed a terrific dinner and sunset on the patio. Midway through, Nicole and I poked at our iPhones and told each other, “Murray won American bartender of the year.” Suddenly it all made sense.

Not only was Murray not at Tales to avoid the attention that seems to embarass him so much, but he wasn’t even behind the stick at Zigzag that night. Not that he won’t have to endure many, many nights of his peers and customers congratulating him, but in characteristic fashion he avoided spectacle.

I can’t add much to the rivers of digital ink now being spilt in adjective-laden paen to the local Hercules of the shaker and bottle. I haven’t known Murray for decades, except in the old days as a barely noticed presence at Il Bistro, in days when I was far more concerned about the wine list.

But for those who haven’t spent time at the counter with Murray, you’re missing something very special. The skills Murray possesses are not necessarily what you expect. With sufficient research and the willingness to chase down ingredients, and the near-OCD-ridden hobbyist attitude that comes naturally to those who work with computers or software for a living (especially those that write the latter), it’s not hard to mix a technically amazing cocktail, or wax loquacious about the late 19th century history of the Martini.

Heck, it’s not even hard to stump Murray by naming an obscure cocktail you just quarried out of some book. Nor does Murray follow any of the “rules” of modern craft cocktailing — I mean, good god, the man doesn’t even measure!

But none of us go to sit at his bar because we care about those things. Murray is a master of his craft, of course. But most of all, he’s a master of hospitality. Not only does he keep dozens of people happy with superbly made cocktails at all times, but he’s keenly and almost supernaturally aware of dozens of conversations happening simultaneously. More than once, Murray has been at the other end of the bar, mixing drinks for a different party, and someone I’m hanging out with will ask about an ingredient or ask for my preference in gins for this particular cocktail, for example. Just in passing, you understand.

Five minutes later, often after the conversation has moved on to other topics, Murray silently places glasses in front of everyone in our party and pours a tasting sample of the ingredient, or a comparison between gins so folks can see the differences. He heard the whole thing — the question, my answers, the interest level of the people — from across the bar while doing five other things. He heard *everyone* and their conversations, and is ready to expand horizons, satisfy curiosity.

And ready, always, to build loyalty, especially in those who are loyal customers in return. I suspect that many of us now think of ourselves less as “customers” of Murray’s, and more as “ambassadors,” our job being to find those friends whose interests and sensibilities will vibrate in sympathy to this peculiar and rare treat, and introduce them, so that they can begin their relationship with the place, with the staff, and most importantly, with the Best Bartender in America.

Thank you, Murray, and whether you’ll admit it or not, this is well-deserved. Expect to be congratulated a fair bit, because I don’t know anybody who doesn’t feel the same way.

Since then, I’ve slowed down.  The MBP 17″ labeled “#1″ is now sold on eBay.  The Mac Mini is decomissioned, awaiting refurbishment and redeployment, and the Air has turned into my “backup laptop,” quiet except in an emergency and resident in the laptop bag in my office, periodically refreshed and sync’d with Dropbox.  The current lineup is:

Macbook Pro 15″ Unibody, Core i5, 8GB RAM and SSD

This is the best laptop I’ve ever had.  I’m holding essentially a 4 processor, 8GB RAM machine with ultrafast disk in my hand, and if you measure the curve from here back to the beginning, it’s exponential.  When I became an NSF Graduate Fellow in 1989, part of the award in addition to tuition and stipend was a few minutes of supercomputer time on one of the NCSA supercomputers.  I’m pretty sure nothing I could have done with those minutes would be out of reach with this laptop, and more.  This thing is, pace Andy Clark, literally part of my mind.  I’m brain damaged without it.

Mac Apple TV

This replaced the Mac Mini downstairs, and does the job better, once you hack Boxee onto it and get used to the hacks to get third-party movies and video.

Mac Apple iPad

This really is the next-generation tablet and handheld we’ve been waiting for.  So if it bugs you that it’s an Apple fan product, wait for a knockoff that actually does all the functions well.  That’s Android to iPhone, by the way, so revel in your late-adopter ethos.  But the iPad really untethers computing from the traditional computer, and is pretty much what Donald Norman has been talking about for decades, not to mention Alan Kay.  And Gutenberg would have loved this fucking thing.

Basically, I’m going to call this 30 personal computers I’ve had during the course of my life.  I’m not counting the literally thousands of servers, or phones, etc that I’ve had, been responsible for, been around, or cursed at.  This 30 is a solid and serious trajectory of computing within one individual’s life.  And one I’m proud to describe and have.

Four years ago today, I loaded up the used Land Rover (bought off Craigslist), and headed to the Anacortes ferry dock, and sailed for San Juan Island.  I’d worked here the summer of 1987, part of the summer of 1988, and intermittently visited my colleagues in 1990 and 1991.  My mother and her twin sister (my aunt), had graduated from high school on Orcas Island (having moved up for their senior year to board with relatives while my grandmother ran off to Vegas for one of her marriages).  So I had history.  Of the places one could flee and reinvent oneself after a decade or more of hard work — six companies and four more as board/investor advisor — this called to me.

And so here I am.

That first day, I rolled off the ferry, familiar from past trips, into a town coated with nostalgia and memories, and stopped at Thane Bolger’s office and picked up the keys to my house.  The packing in Seattle wasn’t completely done, and the moving truck wasn’t arriving up here for another 3 weeks, but today was the day, because the house closed the day before.  I wasn’t willing to wait any longer to draw a line under the previous daily life I’d led, and start a new one.  By the end of the day, I’d set up a temporary futon bed in the room that is now my office, a card table in the dining room, Rockisland had installed my internet connection, and I had some minimal patio furniture.  It would turn out to be all I needed for the best three weeks I can remember.

Once set up, I headed to Friday Harbor for dinner at Steps Wine Bar and Cafe, run by my friend Madden Surbaugh.  I’d met Madden the day I found my house, while sitting at the former Pelindaba cafe across from his (then) front door.  I popped my head in, saw Madden wilting an utterly massive pan of greens, and much of my island life since then has been shaped and determined by that moment.  I sat at the window table, and had a terrific meal (documented, along with my impressions of that day, here).  I had a bottle of 1988 Vieux Telegraphe that I’d brought up for the occasion.  Later, sitting on the deck, I finished the Chateauneuf-du-Pape and enjoyed the sunset.

Today, four years later, after 1460 days on the island, I still love it here.

As I reread each of my yearly anniversary dispatches, I am struck by how I lived a relatively charmed life for most of the first two years.  I read, I studied, I enjoyed a bit of socializing and a lot of meals at Madden’s, but I had relatively little impact or influence, or was influenced by, the local community.

That all changed about a year and a half ago, when I ended up replacing my friend Cloud on the board of the San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild.  Our current project, the Permanent Farmer’s Market in Friday Harbor, quickly became difficult and contentious.  Increasingly I found myself puzzling about the community to which I’d moved.  I clearly didn’t quite understand the demographics, the political makeup, the needs and wants of this community.  I entered a period where my impressions of the island, quite frankly, were mixed at best.  I loved the physical setting but I was clearly rebelling and coming to terms with the community itself.  Tellingly, I didn’t even write a 2009 dispatch on my anniversary, a fact I didn’t actually know until I just went looking for it to link in the previous paragraph.

I’m not going to go into the FM project or other projects I’ve become involved with in depth.  Each deserves better than random reminiscences.

But suffice it to say that I’m starting to come out of the valley….which I now recognize as the “holy shit” reality check about the enormity of how I’ve changed my life…and am starting to be at peace again with my decision.  I’ll say it again, I love it here.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t grind my teeth about the difficulties of establishing a permanent downtown Farmer’s Market, or at the difficulties of simply disposing of one can of trash given the Solid Waste debacle, or at the regular delays and irritations of island life.  Those things aren’t temporary parts of adjusting.  They’re the grievances of an island resident.

But it does mean that I sit on my deck tonight, four years from the day I arrived, contemplating what the fifth year will bring, with something approaching optimism.  Much has changed — Madden is on Orcas at Rosario, I’m on the Library board and we’re selecting a new Director to replace Laura, and I split my time between here and Seattle in order to spend as much time with Nicole as I can — but much also remains the same.  I sit here outside with a laptop and a glass of wine, music playing, writing and watching the sunset build, and recall Lawrence Durrell’s words, that spell out my own affliction with such poetry:

Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people, as Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication….But like all Gideon’s theories it was an ingenious one. I recall how it was debated by candlelight in the Villa Cleobolus until the moon went down on the debate, and Gideon’s contentions were muffed in his yawns; until Hoyle began to tap his spectacles upon his thumbnail of his left hand, which was his way of starting to say goodnight….Yet the word stuck; and though Hoyle refused its application to any but Aegean islands….we all of us, by tacit admission, knew ourselves to be ‘islomanes.’

I can’t wait to see what Year Five in my very own Paradise Terrestre brings.

We’re supposed to believe that this overwhelming traffic load was unprecedented and brought their systems to a screeching halt.  Well, at least AT&T’s systems — Apple’s systems seemed fine if you weren’t going through the eligibility portion of the check.

Here’s the problem, though — if you run the numbers, and know something about web/database applications, it just doesn’t add up.

13 million database queries sounds like a lot.  But let’s say that all of these queries largely happened in the first 12 hours of the day yesterday, instead of spreading them out over the full 24 hour cycle.  That’s 1.08MM queries per hour, or 300 queries per second, on average.

I don’t know if it sounds like a lot to you, but it’s really not.  Here’s a Google query on “mysql queries per second” just to get a general idea of what people are doing out there.  Many of the results range from 2003 through the present, and folks are doing a LOT more than this.  With clustering and various attempts to scale out, folks are doing 10-20K per second.  Oracle, properly tuned, can do thousands to tens of thousands of transactions (operations that change data, not just read it) per second.

I’m not a database expert, but I’ve worked around and with them for years, and I’ll say that 300 queries per second on average is not something that should cause one of the largest (and oldest, if one considers them the heir of the Bell System) telecom companies in the world to crumple under the load.

But traffic is bursty, not uniformly distributed.  So even if they saw periods with 10-50x greater load than average, we’re still in the ballpark for reasonable performance on a pure database query.  Note that I’m assuming that eligibility is a somewhat simple database query; we gave three items of data which obviously form a compound primary key, and AT&T is supposed to return some information about eligibility for upgrade:  perhaps date, perhaps a few other bits of info.

Let’s be generous and assume that 1K of data per eligibility request is returned (i.e., there’s little concern for efficiency).  That’s still only about 300K bytes per second of query results flowing back to Apple from AT&T, or about 2.4Mbps.  Again, perhaps bursting to 20-100Mbps for very brief periods of time.  In other words, a couple of DS3s or a fast ethernet cross-connect are sufficient to carry the data back and forth.  One imagines this shouldn’t strain AT&T’s internal network too much, despite random claims yesterday.

Of course, maybe the problem here isn’t database performance or bandwidth, but that AT&T did the eligibility checks as API calls through a large enterprise system where a single check builds and then tears down many EJBs or other enterprise objects. This might be closer to the truth for a performance bottleneck here.  Maybe the system was built to handle tens, but not hundreds or thousands, of requests per second.  That’s plausible, but kind of stupid for a large engineering company used to having millions of subscribers and doing business globally.  But I could buy it.

But you’d imagine that they’d have learned something from three previous “major” iPhone releases, and the iPad 3G release, and figured out an easier way to quickly respond to eligibility requests.  After all, my eligibility isn’t a rapidly changing variable — I’m eligible on a certain day, and they know what that day is.  Which means that the eligibility of every iPhone owner on the planet could have been precalculated easily just before the iPhone4 launch, and cached.  It’s not that much data, frankly.  You could have cached a table with the user’s phone number, last 4 SSN, and zip (the keys they ask you to enter) hashed, and a eligibility “price code”, in a few gigs of memory on all the app servers, and just statically responded to queries for the first 24 hours, if you were worried that your enterprise systems wouldn’t handle “first day” load.

Anyhow, these are just ballpark figures, and they could be wildly wrong about the instantaneous loads experienced, etc.  But the general point is, 13MM eligibility checks and 600K preorders isn’t really a lot of load and traffic.  Ask Amazon or eBay what “a lot” of transactions looks like.

Or better yet, AT&T, before the next launch, hire some of their ex-employees to take a look at your databases and systems.  Please.

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Douglas Adams, the pre-eminent social and political philosopher of our times.  Right behind Monty Python.  Then probably Jon Stewart.  With Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls taking a joint and distant fourth.

Happy Towel Day!

As part of the festivities, I taught a short class on cocktail making fundamentals — the bare minimum one needs in order to mix any drink recipe found in a book, etc.  When to shake, when to stir.  Why the dilution from ice is critical to making a balanced cocktail.  How the various ingredients “work” to produce a tasty, balanced beverage.   And then I simply mixed good drinks for the rest of the evening, with food catered by Market Chef in Friday Harbor.

Each person attending also got a booklet which covered the basics of cocktail making, and a bit of cocktail history, in addition to the evening’s menu of cocktails (with short recipes).  I focused on the history of “martini-like” cocktails, beginning from combinations of Old Tom gin and italian vermouth in the mid-1800’s (e.g., Martinez), down through the transition to dry gin and dry vermouth, to the martini as we recognize it today.  Most of the information, of course, is derived from online sources and the incomparable book by David Wondrich, but it’s fun to have a nice summary.

I wanted to post the menu, for folks who were interested.  And, of course, to pique the interest of others who might want a similar party and class.  It goes to benefit a terrific cause — a permanent, year-round home for the farmer’s market on San Juan Island.  Whether you live up here or not, consider supporting the cause!

But one exchange is worth analysis and our attention, whatever the details of the device and our first impressions. Cory Doctorow, open-source freedom fighter extraordinaire and speculative fiction author, published a widely discussed, negative essay concerning the very idea of the iPad. By now, you’ve probably read it, or seen the link. If you haven’t, you should.

Cory’s essential points are two (with apologies if I’m missing something serious). First, that open platforms (think Linux, Android, FreeBSD, etc) are structurally designed to foster innovation at minimal entry cost, and with minimum friction to the innovator, and minimal interference between the innovator and the eventual consumer of those innovations. Second, Doctorow argues that the justification everyone is citing for the closed system — “making computers easy for mainstream users” — is insulting to mainstream users.

Joel Johnson responds that Doctorow’s principal arguments miss the point. In particular, that openness and innovation are not causally linked to the extent that open-source and Linux advocates claim. That innovation will thrive on the “nearly closed” platforms like the iPad and iPhone.

The argument is one that technologists and designers ought to think about pretty deeply. In fact, whichever side of the debate you tend to come down on, I believe you ought to sit and think hard about reasons why the other side might be right. Because I believe something like the sum of Doctorow and Johnson’s arguments represent the future of computing.

It’s undeniable that truly open systems (as opposed to the controlled openness of late 1980’s “open systems”) like Linux have fostered a Cambrian explosion of innovation and tinkering. Many of us, including myself, got their start in the computing world just as the Internet took off as a public phenomenon, with Linux, Apache, and Netscape as the principal “rocket boosters” for its success. But there are signs that the Cambrian explosion has begun to slow from a proliferative to a winnowing phase, at least in some areas.

There is still huge innovation on the server side, with new server-side frameworks and web toolkits, even new languages (i.e., the close coupling between the origins of Lift and Scala) and computing paradigms (clouds, Hadoop distributed computation) appearing monthly. When one examines the server and deep application side, it’s hard to imagine that Doctorow isn’t exactly right. Preservation of the openness of systems, the malleability of interfaces and even programming paradigms, is crucial to keeping the recombination going in this server-side cauldron of computing DNA.

Winnowing is occurring on the user experience front, however. The winnowing-out process really began when we all decided that the web browser was the main arbiter of client-side experience. In fact, that seems so obvious today that we forget that the browser used to simply be an HTML display engine, not a general-purpose UI framework for multi-language code execution. We forget things like Pointcast, and other “rich internet client” examples, since for years they largely went away in favor of browser-based apps. Even in “thick” applications like Microsoft Office, when internet interaction was required — say, for Help or looking up a template, the thick app would spawn a little unmarked IE window to do the “internet stuff.”

Johnson’s point, as I take it, is that this winnowing process on the user experience front has been a good thing, and should continue. And I agree. And Doctorow is wrong to focus on the “making a computer my mother can use” trope. The intuition behind the trope is fine, as far as it goes, but the metaphor fails to dig down to the core of the issue. Certainly, we nerds have done an insufficient job of hiding the underlying execution model of our software, and a poor job of interface and experience design, by and large. Despite the efforts of Don Norman, Alan Cooper, and others, we in the open systems community continue to focus on the computational underbelly and not enough on the user’s experience.

Which is where Apple comes in. We all know that the reason their devices continue to delight and appeal is that they are designed in every detail, by teams of design fanatics, led by our industry’s chief design obsessive. And we all tell ourselves that the degree of design fanaticism that continues to suck us in is only possible with closed or semi-closed systems.

And this is where we find ourselves today. Those, like Doctorow, who value open systems for their innovation- and freedom-enhancing qualities, steer clear of Apple devices. Those, like Johnson, who value the progress we’ve made toward highly usable, well-designed systems, eagerly await new Apple designs.

I’d like to suggest that the distinction isn’t as sharp as we think, however. The design fanaticism displayed by Apple is not inherently a feature of their approach to closed systems; closed systems simply make it easier. The closed system is really just a choice, not a necessity, if one wants design excellence. Similarly, the lack of design excellence displayed in most open-source software (I’m thinking about Linux desktop apps in particular here), is not inherently a feature of an open-source community. Open-source projects simply make it harder to create and enforce design excellence.

One of Johnson’s points, as I read him, is that if we want innovation in applications, coupled with performance and design excellence, we need to stop reinventing the wheel on everything else constantly, and innovate at higher levels. And that’s easiest when all you have to worry about is the application you’re designing, not the platform as well.

Personally, I would love to see a world where we continue to see huge innovation on computing models in general, and free access to the fundamental tools for development, and options for retaining control over security and privacy. But in that world I’d also love reliable, gorgeous, high performance platforms like the iPad, as the mechanism by which the innovation that openness engenders is available to everyone. That’s likely possible, in practical terms, only with a mixture of openness and closed systems.

The downloading process exposes some seriously irritating bugs and/or design flaws in iTunes, however. I live at the northern edge of civilization on an island (well, my Canadian friends would say the southern edge, and after reading coverage of the Tea Party Convention I’m inclined to agree…) and I have “difficult” internet connectivity. This is no fault of my local ISP, who do an amazing job considering where I live.

But I often encounter TCP resets in long downloads given the Motorola Canopy point-to-point wireless I use, and iTunes really behaves badly. Despite having typed my Store password to begin the download, upon resumption, iTunes will ask me again. And again. And again. Possibly once for every stream that needs to be resumed, but it doesn’t seem to be as well patterned as that. The application hasn’t restarted, I haven’t logged out, it’s the same hardware underneath, why can’t the application cache the Store password used to initiate a given set of downloads for the duration? Perhaps only asking me to retype if the application closes and restarts?

This seems trivial, but if it happens frequently, and you’re not sitting in front of the computer to type your password whenever needed, downloading a season of episodes can literally take days. Three thus far, in fact, for a show I’m subscribing to at the moment. With 29 more items to go. Basically, it’s going to take a week of retyping my iTunes Store password to get the entire season down, given my internet connection (which is normally pretty decent for browsing and other purposes).

Doesn’t anybody in Cupertino test this type of use case?

Of course I recognized the name, and that I’d been a user since their beta release, and I remembered renewing my license again this year, but what I couldn’t immediately remember was whether that software was still an integral part of keeping my information current, sync’d, backed up, etc. Basically, is it necessary, or is it cruft?

That’s a general problem these days, and arguably it’s a worse problem on the Mac platform than on Windows, though of course it exists there as well. It’s more of a problem because Microsoft tries to build more of this stuff into Windows itself and its major desktop/server suites. Apple leaves more of it to the ISV community.

And as I noted in a previous post, good Mac software can be had for twenty, forty or sixty bucks. So people, especially professionals and developers, have a tendency to buy new apps just to see if it’s a bit better than the previous generation. I’ve done that with notetaking software, outliners, todo list management, and a bewildering variety of synchronization, backup, and storage apps and utilities.

All of which means that my laptop consistently has more than one “appendix” running — part of the system but functionally useless because it’s not being used.

And all which contributes to complexity and difficulty in troubleshooting. When my contacts database suddenly is empty, or has three or four copies of every contact (both of which seem to happen to me), which link in the synchronization chain is responsible? Is it syncing Address Book to Google Contacts? Plaxo syncing with Address Book?

Ultimately, to manage all this complexity, we’re going to need to be able to map the information flow between applications, so I can ask the question and get an answer. Today, I have to sit down and check each app’s preferences and configuration, and sort of make a list of where things are flowing, and rebuild the picture every time something goes wrong.

In complex systems, just as much vital information is contained in the links between things, as in the things themselves…

There’s a lot of criticism about what the device doesn’t have built-in, or doesn’t support. And there’s been a lot of “why, it’s nothing but a big iPod Touch.” And the usual lists of “must have but missing” features from engineers and developers who are already gnashing their teeth about how useless the iPad will be.

Here’s why we should ignore premature predictions of doom for the iPad.

Sure, there’s nothing shockingly new here. In a sense, it’s a big iPod Touch. Or it’s a slimmed down Tablet PC with integral Kindle. Actually, it’s all of those things.

What we’re forgetting is that Apple’s main strength isn’t necessarily inventing a new category (marketing spin aside), it is in bringing hard-core user research and industrial design to bear on creating devices which end up “crossing the chasm” to the mainstream for a given technology. THAT is what Apple, and Steve Jobs, are good at. I know it’s hard to remember this far back, but in the late 1990’s many of us had MP3 player devices. I had a big clunky one from Creative Labs, that was crafted to look exactly like an old-school Sony Walkman CD player – despite the fact that I was playing MP3 files, somehow it seemed like a good design decision to make the player flat and round and consequently bulky. MP3 players existed, but let’s face it, in 1998 the “mainstream” didn’t have them — your grandparents didn’t have them to take golfing, or walking the beach, etc.

Apple changed that with the iPod. And it wasn’t just the device, it was the ecosystem, and the support, and the deals they made with record labels who were in the midst of watching digital music eat their business.

We also had smartphones. If you’re like me, you probably had several generations of smartphones before you touched an iPhone. I had several Palm phones, a Treo running Palm, a Treo running Windows Mobile, a Blackberry or two, etc. With the exception of Blackberry in business and government markets, smartphones became a “mainstream” phenomenon with the iPhone.

“Tablets” in various form factors have been around awhile too. There are the modified laptops like the Toshibas. I had one at Microsoft, and it was a “tablet” only in the sense that the screen turned around, rendering the entire 6 pound, 2 inch thick laptop a bulky version of a paper writing tablet. Personally, I think the guys at Motion Computing have been the “tablet” makers to watch — thin, small, and I lusted after one apart from the fact that it ran Windows and was underpowered to do so.

So what I think we’re going to see with Apple and the iPad is that they’re taking the best of the tablet PC tradition — i.e., devices like Motion Computing — book readers like the Kindle, and the app ecosystem of the already successful iPhone, and blending it with their unerring ability to do solid industrial design for high technology.

I have no idea what applications the iPad will find. Will it become big in health care, where Motion Computing has made inroads? Will it replace PCs at home for many people with the need only to do email, browse the web, look up information, and manage photos? Who knows at this point, really.

But if you’re betting the iPad will be a failure at this point, just from looking at the specs and what components it does or doesn’t contain, you’re ignoring the big picture. Which is that Apple has an absolutely stellar track record of looking at developing technologies and areas of application, pushing their engineers and designers to produce something easy to use and gorgeous to look at, and then marketing it relentlessly to large, mainstream audiences.

That’s not a guarantee of success every time. But if Jimmy the Greek were still with us, he wouldn’t give you good odds betting against Apple on this one.