Today marks the last day for John Murrell as blogger in chief for a wonderful blog called Good Morning Silicon Valley. His explanation of the difference for him between writing and editing:

“But for me at least, the process of writing is wearing. I’m a grinder, and there’s a lot of chair squirming and wandering around and staring at the stars and sometimes some cursing that goes into the production of the daily sausage. And it’s a largely solitary pursuit, which appeals to my inborn reclusive nature, but can sometimes result in getting cabin fever from living in one’s own head too long. Editing, on the other hand, has its own collaborative and craftsmanlike pleasures and activates a different synaptic configuration than writing. You start with a piece of work already in front of you, and the job is to turn it this way and that to examine all its angles and components, to check for gaps or loose fittings, to do a little tweaking here and polishing there, and finally to set it loose at least a bit better than it was (and never any worse).”

 

January 25th of this year I listed my predictions for what is now being called the Apple iPad. You might say that the implementation is a bit shy of my predictions.

  • It’s not as thin as I thought
  • The dimensions are about right; I guessed 11″ (I meant for the diagonal including the display, but the delivered display is 9.7″)
  • I was right about the SSD, but I thought that it would be of a useful size
  • Looks like it is inspired in part by the Mac Air
  • No USB – oops got that wrong — how could they omit USB?
  • As of this writing, it is not known how much RAM is in the iPad — dude, I would not buy the thing for that reason alone
  • Sure enough, the battery is not removable, so you’ll have to find some other way of extending life
  • Nothing special for handwriting recognition
  • The OS is iPhone OS 3.2, not Mac OS-X Touch — users will pay for that decision
  • WiFi and no WiMax
  • Cellular service from AT&T, a decidedly inferior data network to Verizon
  • Well, it does have speakers, microphone, and headphone jack, but no camera — you’re kidding — no camera
  • iTunes access for sure

In addition to those shortcomings, here are some others that are truly surprising:

  • The browser does not support Flash; you will suffer in your web browsing
  • No multi-tasking
  • No video output
  • The dock does not do what you expect
  • No printing to a connected device; get ready to buy a Wifi printer or make some other arrangements
  • No optical drive
  • Eye strain is likely to be a problem trying to read for extended periods of time due to the display technology choice
  • iPhone apps may display very small unless they have been re-written for the iPad

You decide. No iPad for me…maybe never.

 

Droid Update

My original post about the Droid was 2009-11-06. Three months into Droid and time for an update. The good news is that ones life can be divided into BD and AD, before Droid and after Droid. But not without some complaints of course. The camera is really slow, which means you are going to miss some opportunities. It is really easy to accidentally activate functions unintentionally.

These are the apps I use in order of most frequent:

  • Phone and contact lookup with integration to maps
  • Maps, especially with the traffic layer turned on
  • Music – listen to books on mp3
  • Gmail
  • Calendar to look up appointments, etc.
  • Sportstap – keep track of you teams
  • TED – view outstanding 18 minute videos from the TED conferences
  • CardioTrainer – uses GPS to track walking workouts.
  • Radar Now – show weather radar arond your GPS location
  • Trapster – avoid speed traps and photo enforcement cameras
  • WaveSecure – to locate Droid if misplaced, and erase everything if stolen
  • Wifi Analyzer – check on your wifi signal
  • Droidlight – use camera flash as a light
  • Google Goggles – scan business card to add to contacts
  • PageOnce – track financial accounts
 

The Space Debate

Steven Weinbeg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. He teaches in the physics and astronomy departments of the University of Texas at Austin. He has some important observations about space exploration funding in today’s Wall Street Journal, some of which are quoted below. It is gratifying to be able to report anything that the current Obama administration is proposing that would move us in the right direction and this is one.

One of my sons, Mark, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL in Pasadena, CA during the summers of 2004 and 2005. JPL is a NASA contractor and lead center for the robotic exploration of the solar system. JPL has done far more with it’s tiny budget than the massive NASA manned programs to improve life on earth.

What about Hubble? Weinberg notes:

It is true that astronauts made a large contribution to astronomy by servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. But if Hubble had been put into orbit by unmanned rockets instead of the Space Shuttle, so much money would have been saved that instead of servicing a single Hubble we could have had half a dozen Hubbles in orbit, making servicing unnecessary.

The Mars rovers were dispatched by JPL, and they did an incredible job, as noted by Weinberg here:

It is difficult to get reliable estimates of the cost of sending astronauts to Mars, but I have heard no estimate that is less than many hundreds of billions of dollars. The cost of sending Spirit and Opportunity to Mars was less than $1 billion.

Weinberg concludes:

The only technology for which the manned space flight program is well suited is the technology of keeping people alive in space. And the only demand for that technology is in the manned space flight program itself.

 

In a presentation yesterday, a McAfee representative stated that security experts thus far have not found a way to modify the “Operation Aurora” zero-day exploit of IE to overcome the defense represented by the combination of Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Protection (DEP). DEP alone is not sufficient. DEP is available in XP, but ASLR is not (from Microsoft). ASLR is available in Windows 7.

Quoting Wikipedia:

Operation Aurora was a cyber attack conducted in mid-December 2009 and continuing into early January 2010. The attack was publicly disclosed by Google on January 12 in a blog post. In the blog post, Google said the attack originated in China. The attack was aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks and Rackspace have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical were also among the targets.

By some counts, there were 34 firms affected. The Intellectual Property (IP) in each case was different. For example, it appears that a large amount of IP from an oil company was taken by the Chinese during this period. The property in question was bidding data on oil leases off the coast of Africa. The competition is China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

 

Apple’s Tabla Rasa

Tabula rasa (Latin: blank slate) refers to the notion that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.

We will soon know much more about the new Apple Tablet, on January 27, only two days from now. It could be entertaining to predict what sort of design Apple will announce and find out how far off I am once revealed. If I were designing a new Apple Tablet, this is what I would specify:

  • Thin…very thin…like an 8.5×11 paper pad.
  • 11″ touchscreen.
  • SSD – Solid State Drive…no moving parts, low power consumption.
  • Inspired by the existing Mac Air notebook computer.
  • Multiple USB connections and Firewire.
  • 4GB RAM, Intel low power processor.
  • Non-replaceable battery.
  • Mac OS-X Touch software.
  • Improved software for handwriting recognition.
  • WiFi and maybe WiMax.
  • Data plan for Internet access and media downloads, this time from Verizon Wireless.
  • Speakers, microphone, and camera(s).
  • All software in the iTunes library that works for iPhone will work for tablet device.
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    PeerGuardian 2 and Logitech Vid

    If you use PeerGuardian 2 (PG2) and Logitech Vid, you will notice that PG2 blocks NebuAd, Inc at 66.151.151.20:5062. It turns out that this IP address actually belongs to SightSpeed, Inc. Logitech bought SightSpeed on Oct 29, 2008. Because of the nature of the videoconferencing service provided by SightSpeed, one can see that it is necessary for the workstation to check in with a SightSpeed server on a regular basis in order to be able to answer in incoming video call. That’s because most firewalls are configured to block incoming protocols and ports except responses to outgoing http, https, ftp, etc requests.

    So far I can’t see an advantage of Vid over Skype.

    If anyone knows why PG2 would associate NebuAd (now defunct) with SightSpeed, please leave a comment.

    Also, If you see any significant advantage of SightSpeed/”Logitech Vid” over Skype, please leave a comment.

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    About Droid

    I have upgraded to Motorola Droid from what is now an antique. I’ve only had it for a few hours. I was surprised at how heavy it is. I was also surprised at how small the keys are on the slide out keyboard. I decided to add the desktop docking station and so far I’m glad I did. It’s convenient. Syncing with Google was a total no-brainer. I’ve been receiving notifications of new emails and calendar events.

    Nice feature: instant maps from Google for your contacts that include addresses. Very nice indeed.

    You may want to compare features with the Apple iPhone. See Mashable article for comparison chart.

    I have been accidentally hitting functions and activating searches more often than I thought. Since I carry the Droid in my pocket, the keyboard slides out slightly sometimes and that activates the “droid groan,” a robot-sounding “droid.”

    I was not reimbursed for this review. I’ll add comments as I begin adding features.

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    Giving a Second Life

    Reuters reported on November 27, 2007 that “People with severe paralysis could find new opportunities from shopping to doing business or making new friends in the virtual world of Second Life by just thinking about it, if experiments being conducted by a Japanese university bear fruit. In a recent demonstration, Junichi Ushiba, an associate professor at Keio University and head of the project, showed how electrodes attached to the scalp can pick up the electrical changes associated with brain activity.”

    Second Life has the potential to change the way we learn, and in this example, the way we do eCommerce. To give people with mobility problems a way to explore a virtual world should give everyone involved additional motivation to improve the Second Life technology.

    Keio University is located at 2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345:

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    Every once in a while you find a video that kinda leaves you breathless. Here is one:

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