Gordon's Notes

Friday, January 29, 2010

Memories of Auschwitz

Samuel Pisar was 16 when, in the last days of the war, he escaped from Auschwitz ...

Samuel Pisar - Out of Auschwitz - NYTimes.com

... those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.

After so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims — all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in recent days.

These actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act; they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony are, thankfully, still intact.

Computing for the rest of us: The iPad and the ChromeBook

Steve Jobs is infamous for parking his license-plate free Mercedes in handicapped reserved parking.

He's a genius, but I've never thought of him as a humanitarian - or even as much of a human being. Yes, Bill Gates was also a right bastard, but he's paid his dues since.

Age, and mortality, can change people though. The iPad's a pretty thing, but the combination of iVOIP and the return of the Mac Plus and the keyboard and $10 iWorks apps and the $15/month no-contract 250MB limited data plan might shorten Jobs time in Limbo.

Yes, that mysterious $130 bump means the 2010 iPad is more than $500 - but by 2011 the device will sell for under $500 with 3G-equivalent capabilities. An additional $15 a month will provide basic VOIP phone services (uses very little bandwidth) and access to email and Facebook Lite -- even before the advertising subsidies kick in. Of course free Wifi access, such as in libraries, McDonald's, schools and so on will provide access to full internet services.

Why is this a big deal?

Think about your family. If it's big enough, your extended family will have at least one person who's, you know, poor. They may have cognitive or psychiatric disabilities. Or you may have a family member who, like most of American, can't keep a modern OS running without an on call geek. These people are cut off. They can barely afford a mobile phone, and they won't have both a mobile phone and a landline. They will have little or no net access. They may have an MP3 player, but it's dang hard to use one without a computer.

By 2011 the combination of a $400 iPad (and iTouch for less) and $15/month VOIP access will start to replace a number of devices that are costly to own and acquire, while providing basic net services at a rate that other family members can subsidize. Not to mention something pretty, which, speaking as someone who grew up poor, ain't a bad thing.

Steve Jobs - friend of the poor and the outcast. I wouldn't have guessed (ok, so I did predict this a year ago).

The Google Chromebook is on the same side of this revolution. The connected world is about to get a lot bigger.

Update 1/30/10: The OmniGroup, who know their computing, are saying the same thing. Maybe you have to have been around long enough to remember the original Mac, or the PalmPilot, or GEOS/GeoWorks. It helps to be old enough to have seen parents, friends and neighbors trying, and failing, to keep modern computing platforms working. There have been many attempts to break the computing divide, but this one has iPhone momentum -- and the ChromeBook is coming (recent pricing rumors are now below $100 - but the network connection price is what matters). It's a revolution guys.

Update 2/1/2010: Another one - Fraser Speirs - Future Shock. At this rate the meme will hit the NYT in about 3 days.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

First contact: we're cool with that

From the Royal Society 2 day conference on SETI, commentary on the most likely response to news of LGM ...

Even if we found aliens, how would we communicate? -
News, TV & Radio - The Independent

... If we do detect signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, one question posed by scientist attending the conference is how to cope with the public response. Will it result in fear, mass panic and riots?

Professor Albert Harrison of the University of California, Davis, believes this is unlikely, based on what he calls “historical prototypes”. In any case, social policies could be used to ease humanity into the “postcontact” era, he said.

“Many people already believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists and are confident of their own ability to withstand the discovery but doubt other peoples’ abilities to cope,” Professor Harrison said.

“It is easy to imagine scenarios resulting in widespread psychological disintegration and social chaos, but historical prototypes, reactions to false alarms and survey results suggest that the predominant response to the discovery of microwave transmission from light years away is likely to be equanimity, perhaps even delight,” he said....

Hear that Zorgonian containment module 34141434? You can turn off the signal scrambler system now ...

iPad take 3: $130 for iVOIP?

My first iPad impression was surprise that Apple had allowed a keyboard. That makes the iPad a potential alternative to the $1500 Macbook Air. Then I saw it as a high-end netbook competitor.

My second impression was that the iPad is the beginning of the end of OS X. Sounds extreme, but, separately, Mac mega-pundit John Gruber said the same thing.

That's impressive enough, but one thing has nagged at me. How could the inclusion of a $7 3G chip boost the cost of the iPad by $130? Yeah, I know Apple likes fat margins, but that's extreme even by their standards. It's not like it's subtle, and it's not like the AT&T wireless service is free. It's still $30/month, same as for the iPhone. [See Update, below]

There's one explanation that makes sense. The money is going to AT&T -- in addition to the $30 a month for data services.

How could AT&T possibly extract that much money? What hold could they have over Apple?

Well, one might imagine various contractual obligations, but Apple's lawyers are famously vicious. Apple is getting something for this money. Possibly, a lot.

One clue is that VOIP services are reported to be a part of the iPad version of the iPhone OS.

What if Apple is giving AT&T the lion's share of that $130, but in return AT&T has agreed that Apple can provide SMS, VOIP and iChat (optional webcam attachment) services over the iPad's 3G connection?

In other words, iVOIP.

Take that Google Voice.

Might explain why Apple was willing to go to war over Google Voice on the iPhone.

This is going to be an interesting year in tech.

PS. Oh, yeah. And balanced DRM for eBooks is going to turn publishing upside down too.

Update 1/31/2010: See Andrew W's comment. Basically, I'm wrong about the $130 going to AT&T, it's probably going to Apple and it reflects development costs for the 3G integration. To quote Andrew:

... I don't think AT&T is getting a taste of the $629. I've never heard of that happening before, and Apple has way too much leverage against AT&T. I suspect the iPad price plans were part of some larger negotiation. (e.g., I wouldn't be surprised to start hearing rumors that AT&T's exclusive contract is extended.)

Also, don't forget that Apple gets a cut of your monthly iPhone bill. Apple/AT&T negotiations probably focused on that more than anything. My guess is that Apple reduced their cut in order to get a monthly price that they thought consumers would tolerate for a new and unproven device/market...

iPad take 2: the end of OS X

When a colleague asked why the iPad runs iPhone OS rather than OS X a wee bulb went off. Kind of like those little bittie bulbs that came with a camera flash in 1967.

The iPad with iPhone OS is the second coming of the original Macintosh. It runs an OS that anyone can use, including the 50% of the US that doesn’t really engage with the net or with personal computers. This is the OS for all those people who keep every photograph they’ve taken on a 4GB flash card in their camera.

Yes, I know the first Mac soon became far more complex. Twenty-five years ago the personal computer was growing into a geek market. Satisfying that market meant the platform became more and more powerful. That increasing power pleased geeks like me --- for a while. Even we, however, noticed that it was a lot of work to keep these machines happy.

Around the same time, a poor grad student in 1986 accidentally unleashed an internet worm. We know what came after. Security issues combined with platform complexity to give us a world in which non-geeks shouldn’t touch a connected computer.

The iPad and the App Store though, that can work for most anyone. The dependency on iTunes will fade away over time – look soon for online backup. I assume there will be viruses, but the iPhone world will be a very tough, locked down, target.

Chrome OS will be playing in the same big field – non-geek computing.

The geek environments won’t go away immediately, but the end is in sight. Ten years from now we may say that the iPad killed OS X.

My first iPad impressions were cautiously positive. I think I missed the real target. The iPad isn’t aimed at Microsoft or Google or even the Macbook. It’s aimed at everything.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

iPad impressions

The iPad is more interesting than I'd expected.

For one thing, even though it's not cheap when you get memory and a 3G chip, the fact that there's any model near $500 is better than I'd expected.

Most of all though, I'm surprised by the keyboard (though I'd like to see mouse support). This is going to steal some Macbook and Macbook Air sales, including in the student market. I wonder if we'll see iPads bundled with textbook contracts.

Between the price and the keyboard this is Apple's preemptive response to the Google-branded Chrome OS netbook due out this fall. Another front has opened in the Apple-Google war. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft announces any software support for the iPad, or if they optimize their web version of Office for the iPad.

It was mildly disappointing that, as on the iPhone, only Apple is allowed to multitask. I still hope we'll see something with iPhone OS 4. The bigger downer is that adding an AT&T 3G chip cost $130!

The cost of the 3G chip is probably about $10. That's a lot of margin, even for Apple. Are there astounding licensing fees? Is this partly to keep AT&T's network from melting down in two months?

Speaking of AT&T, how the heck can they support an iPad with a $30/month unlimited data plan? Their network is already broken; can you imagine the hit from a media-oriented iPad?

Even so, I'm pleased. I'll take a look at Andrew's when it arrives, but I'm also due to get a new iPhone this year. I'm hard pressed to justify an iPad too, especially if the iPhone gets the keyboard option. As for the kids, it comes down to price. If the GoogleBook gets in below $150 it will be hard to resist.

PS. Cringely got taken.

Update: Steven Fry really likes the iPad.

Update 1/29/10: Things are looking a lot like what I predicted in 3/2009. See also: Computing for the rest of us: The iPad and the ChromeBook

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Royal Society - video presentation on SETI II

I share the common geek interest in the failure of SETI and it's possible relationship to the Fermi Paradox. So I was pleased to read that the Royal Society will record a lecture by Paul Davies on "The Eerie Silence"...

Fifty years ago, a young astronomer named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus began one of the boldest scientific projects in history: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). But after a half-century of scanning the skies, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence, eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we've been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. In this lecture Professor Davies will offer a new and exciting roadmap for the future of SETI, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact.

Professor Paul Davies is a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and best-selling author. He is Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, at Arizona State University...

The lecture is roughly today, but the video should show up in on Feb 2 on the royalsociety.tv page. It's "view on demand", so I'll have to use my copy of Audio Hijack Pro to get the audio to my iPhone. I don't see a feed to notify of Video availability, so I tried to use Google Reader's new feed creation feature to create a notifier, but it failed.

I've subscribed to the Royal Society podcasts feed, but I don't think that will include this lecture. If they look interesting I'll add them to iTunes.

How to unlock a padlock - handy reference

Every so often you'll have a combination-free master lock padlock stuck somewhere.

It's easier to pick the padlock than cut it off.

Handy to have this as a reference.

Monday, January 25, 2010

My Gwynne Dyer feed - at last

Gwynne Dyer is a curmudgeonly military historian journalist. He's 66, I think I read him when I was a kid in Montreal. You can't read him there any more, Conrad Black owns much of Canada's press and he doesn't like Dyer.

I've followed him for years, but he's remained resolutely stuck in the early 1990s. His web articles are ".txt", not ".html". Feeds are impossibly futuristic for Dyer, which is a problem since he publishes erratically.

I tried monitoring him with ChangeDetection and Page2RSS and Feedity, but not Dappit. They were all finicky, and nothing worked for long. I finally gave up last year.

Today, though, Dyer 2010 has a Google generated feed: http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/3585261901611337376

All you need to do to get a feed like this is to put a page URL into the Google Reader "Add a Subscription box". If GR can't find a feed, it creates one.

It doesn't show anything yet because I just created it. It won't show anything until Dyer posts something. For now though I see quite a few 2009 and 2010 articles I can catch up on. I'll use the "Note in Reader" function to comment on those I like, you can get a feed on my Google Reader items here: My Google Reader Shared items (feed).

Update: Oops. "note in reader" doesn't work with .txt pages.

Update 3/13/10: The Google Feed isn't working. I suspect they can't process .txt files served up by http! An anonymous commenter suggests using the NZ Herald Feed for Dyer and reveals he has a twitter feed as well. I'll try both.

Incidentally, most of my posts show up when I do a Google search scoped to kateva.org. This one doesn't. Curious.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Living with technology regressions in the post-performance era

I'm slowly getting used to living with the post-Moore's Law era of technology regressions.

It's taken a long time to get over my early computing experience. Switching from an 8086 to an 80386 in the DOS era was pretty much pure progress. The transition to OS/2 then to Windows 95 involved many regressions, but I imagined that was a one time anomaly. Win 98 to NT to 2000 to XP was pretty much all improvement (I skipped ME of course).

Same story in my early Mac days. Things just got better - until MacOS 7 ran into TCP/IP. That was a train wreck, but it did get sorted out. When I returned to the Mac I was using OS X 10.1 (or 10.2?) and that was good too.

Ok, so some great software died without replacement. I should have adjusted my expectations. What can I say? I'm a geek. CPUs kept getting faster. It helped me overlook a lot of things.

Alas, the decrepit state of the Wikipedia entry on Moore's Law speaks volumes. We may get more transistors, but clearly we're not getting more performance. We're in the post-performance era.

In our new era some things get better, some things get worse. Personal computing is middle-aged. Progress is uneven.

I'm in the midst of one of those tech churn transitions now with my backup systems.

I'm not paranoid about backups, because the universe really is trying to destroy my data. I'm just realistic.

Realism means I've long had fully automated rotating off-site backups, and, as backup software quality has regressed, I've moved to having two completely distinct automated backup systems. (If two distinct systems each have a 90% reliability rate, then the probability one will work is 1-(0.1*0.1) or 99.9%. It's almost impossible to equal that reliability from a single affordable product.)

So I probably still have a reliable backup system, but it's more work to maintain than my old system. In some ways it's also less flexible, in particular my laptop backups are less reliable. I'm having to adjust my workflow to the new environment, and that means some functional regressions.

Middle-aged post-Moore computing means living with regressions. The trick is realizing when a true functional regression has occurred, and then being able to say good-bye to the better for the sustainable.

Update 1/25/10: I just found this 2006 tech post of mine complaining about the backup market. It's been a bad few years for backup. I should also highlight a comment Andrew W made (see below):

On Windows there's Home Server, which is about as carefree a centralized/networked backup solution as you can get.

The Apple equivalent to Home Server is Time Capsule. I would like to see Apple do a more complete backup/media server/file server home server solution.

Friday, January 22, 2010

xkcd

I'm a late comer to Randall Munroe's xkcd.

Wikipedia tells me the web comic will be five years old next September.

I'm sorry I've missed out, but both the Achive or the feed are helping me catch up. The loving Wikipedia article includes many annotated comic citations.

Munroe is a genius. He must also be a rebel, for it's not at all clear how he makes any money. He reportedly donated all the proceeds from his one book, and there are no ads on the immensely popular web site.

Phishing with the post-Turing avatar

Blip. The wall is showing the bright smile of my personal medical attendant. Just on time, as always.

I'm delighted to see her, and I can see her quite well thanks to my new lenses and corneal stem cell transplants. My 90 yo brain doesn't work that well, but my eyes are better than they've ever been.

She's lovely to my eyes. Early middle-aged, asian with a dazzling smile I work for. If my brain were forty years younger I'd realize she looks quite a bit like my daughter.

Katie gives me a big smile. She chats about my medications and exercise program. I've been working hard -- I don't want to disappoint her. That part of the conversation goes quickly. We have time to chat. I know Katie works for my health care insurance program, but we always have time to talk about my life and especially about her life.

If I had a younger brain, I'd wonder why Katie has so much time to talk. But I don't.

Katie is sad today. It's not the first time, but this time she opens up. Her son is ailing. He reminds me of my own younger boy. I've got to help. Katie resists, but I insist on authorizing a credit transfer ...

This is so going to happen. Even if we don't get Skynet before 2050, we'll definitely have three dimensional avatars that can pass the Turing test of a lonely mildly-demented 90 year old. They'll provide many services -- such as encouraging medication compliance. The real return, however, will be on launching massive phishing attacks against billions of people.

Health care. We lost.

Sometimes, the good guys lose.

We lost this one. We're no closer to universal good enough care than we were four years ago. Maybe further.

It was close. In retrospect, with perfect knowledge, there were alternative routes that might have worked. The route we took had too many opportunities to fail.

I'm saddened, but not surprised. I thought the quality of discussion during the failed Clinton reform was poor (for which I blame Hillary actually), but it was golden compared to this go round. The vast majority of educated middle class Americans had absolutely no idea what was going down. No idea ... and little interest. Without that core support the politics were awful.

So what happened to the educated middle class? Age is a part of it. We're an older, graying, fear-filled nation in transition. The boomers imagine medicare will be there, and gray American hates change.

The collapse of the fourth estate was another contributor. In the 1980s media coverage of the Clinton plan was superb; twenty years later it was almost worthless. It was easy for a fearful, sclerotic, population to stop paying attention.

Above all, though, I finger the same mixture of complexity and corruption that led to the Great Recession. We're paralyzed.

So now what?

It goes to the states. The only congressional action that would help at this point would encourage states to experiment widely and to create inter-state health care plans.

At the state level, I expect real change to come under Republican governors. Only Nixon could go to China, and perhaps only GOP governors can transform American health care.

So maybe losing isn't all bad. I've long believed achieving affordable universal health care in America would require the same kind of massive disruption that destroyed General Motors. That kind of disruption is not politically feasible; but markets will do it. The best GOP governors are capable of wedding the destructive forces of markets to socially desirable outcomes. That's the path that's left to us now.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Google trouble: Blogger and Search

Google’s getting a lot of flack for a less than spectacular launch of the gPhone (Nexus One). I’m not too worried about that, I think they’ll get it working. I’m also still optimistic about the Chrome OS netbook – though if it costs over $200 I’ve got yet another public mea culpa waiting.

On the other tentacle, I am getting bad feelings about two Google services I have long relied on – Search and Blogger. I think the problems may be related.

Blogger is the proverbial coal mine canary. It is clearly not thriving. There’s still no iPhone or DROID app for posting or editing, there’s an undocumented and unfixed 5000 post limit, there’s no mobile-optimized version of blog pages, the BlogThis bookmarklet was never updated to support categories, the rich text editor has many longstanding bugs, there’s no spam detection on comments, the Blogger in Draft blog was silent from Nov 28 through Jan 20 (yesterday!) and so on.

Why isn’t Google investing in Blogger? My best guess would be some mix of

Inability to manage Blogger spam blogs (splogs)
High success rate of search index poisoning comment spam
High rate of click fraud related to Blog associated adwords
Low rate of revenue from Blogger adwords
Declining readership numbers
Failure of the confusing “Follower” and Google Reader note/comment programs
Confusion from the rise of Twitter (confuses me too) and Facebook

Several items on my speculative list implicate search index poisoning problems. These “Search engine optimization” scams degrade search results, which leads to a spiral of click fraud and declining ad word revenue.

Which brings me to the bigger Google problem. The quality of the search results is deteriorating. On technical topics that I search on, I’m getting a large number of junk web sites. I have to use my Google custom searches to find good results. When I search on hard-to-find answers that I know I’ve addressed in my own ad-free tech blog, I don’t get any useful hits at all. It’s not just that I don’t find my marvelous stuff – I don’t find any answers anywhere.

In several instances, Bing has done better. In particular, Bing seems to find fewer splogs and fraudulent ad-heavy pages – perhaps because the scummy SEO gang is still optimizing for Google. (Bing’s time will come.)

Google is only as good as their search engine, and that engine is under relentless attack from the same emergent attacks that killed usenet and severely wounded email. At the moment, the parasites are winning – and threatening to kill their current host.

Google needs a winning response. They’ve got bigger problems than lousy phone service.

Update 1/21/10: See comments for a response from one of Bloggers Product Managers, it's an encouraging rebuttal. Per that comment I corrected the name of the Blogger in Draft blog; the official Blogger blog is http://buzz.blogger.com.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Is there a club for people who hate OS X permissions?

I'm looking for a club made up of people who hate Apple's brain-dead OS X permissions/security scheme.

In the latest installment of OS X misery consider a file on a shared 10.5 drive. Whenever I edit the file from a 10.6 machine it's saved in such a way that my wife loses edit permissions -- even though both she and I have read/write permissions on the parent folder.

OS X needs to abandon its broken unix-style permissions and imitate Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000/NT. (The admin/user issues with Vista to NT weren't related to the permissions model - but that's another post.)

Grrrr. I wish the OS X customer base were way more demanding. Insufficiently demanding customers are one of the three banes of modern commerce (Two others: lock-in and fraud/deception).