Saturday, January 30, 2010
Apple needs to do its own Flash block for Safari
YouTube science videos - not exactly sterling
Dear Adobe: Please die and take Flash with you
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhULBeQWi1ux-DfAR8lilXK1Kjt6QxyXokJ9wcCSsksAgNPchNn4DaXHPM-YNyGGXWVcFHozx5GB0u_ojnsIBKIvO7NqgX0Mt5cxdos662VP3TVq7qmqAUEI2ZY1rETBLfvQ/s320/Picture+1.png)
Go away Adobe. Go away Flash.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Memories of 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
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
Even if we found aliens, how would we communicate? -Hear that Zorgonian containment module 34141434? You can turn off the signal scrambler system now ...
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....
iPad take 3: $130 for iVOIP?
PS. Oh, yeah. And balanced DRM for eBooks is going to turn publishing upside down too.
... 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
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.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Royal Society - video presentation on SETI II
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...
How to unlock a padlock - handy reference
Monday, January 25, 2010
My Gwynne Dyer feed - at last
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.
Update: Oops. "note in reader" doesn't work with .txt pages.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Living with technology regressions in the post-performance era
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
Phishing with the post-Turing avatar
- Slouching towards Skynet (Russian slutbots in 2007).
- Evolving Skynet by Gwap (Nick Carr)
- The evolution of comment spam - from parasite to symbiote?
- Google's Goals: Skynet 1.0
- The cat brain simulator. Game over?
- Rat brain flies plane -- organic neural network (2004)
- Aaronson critiques Kurzweil and the 2045 Singularity
- IEEE - The Singularity Issue
- The Economist predicts an early Singularity
- All the vulnerable people: eFraud, aging and special needs