Technology – Page 12 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Businesses Destroyed By Smart Phones

This is an interesting article on the top business that have been destroyed by the emergence of the smart phone. I have my doubts that PDAs were killed by Smart Phones so much as PDA’s became Smart Phones. Palm was destroyed because they failed to keep up. I think Research in Motion, who pioneered the Smart Phone with a truly awful product may not be far behind. Smart Phones probably will largely eat the MP3 player market, and the low end point and shoot market. That much makes sense.

But the GPS market? The PC market? Watches? Having once upon a time been a fairly serious hiker, my iPhone presents a serious impediment to being used as a GPS, namely that it won’t tolerate being dunked in water, rained on, smashed against a rock, or dropped. Those are important features for something going with you outdoors, and I’ve never seen a PDA that had a speaker loud enough, and mounting hardware good enough to do auto navigation effectively. That’s one function I’m looking for application specificity. What if I get a call while I’m navigating somewhere? As for watches, who wants to have to dig a Smart Phone out from under 10 layers of clothes during the winter just to see what you could easily see by turning your wrist? And the idea that Smart Phones having displaced PC is laughable. Until a smart phone can project two 1080p monitors side by side directly onto my retina, I’m pretty sure the PC has a future.

The fact that Gartner is quoted in this is really all you need to know. I don’t think Gartner has been right about any major computing trend, and I can’t believe people still pay them money to keep producing that drivel.

Blogging From iPad

It looks as if finally the official WordPress App for the iPad and iPhone supports blogs that use a self signed certificate. I couldn’t believe that it didn’t have that bit of functionality before. Now it’s actually pretty nice.

It would even seem that posting pictures works too. These are Honu, Hawaii’s native sea turtle. These ones swam right up to me.

UPDATE: After a bit of fiddling, this App still has a lot of problems. For instance, it seems to time stamp posts to GMT so that they end up scheduled rather than posted. Easy to fix via the normal web interface, but the whole point of the App is convenience.

Bad Encryption Policy Rears Ugly Head Again

Years ago there was an effort to create encryption that had a “back door” for law enforcement. Looks like Obama is reviving this idea. It’s a horrible idea, and not technologically feasible. You can’t have secure encryption that has a back door. I’m not sure how the government expects service providers to detect and disable encryption. Maybe I’m just sending gobbelty gook for my own personal edification.

This is like gun control. It’s not enforceable, and the only people who will comply will be those who have nothing to hide.Â It’s a bad idea that’s largely unworkable. Compliance is going to be very low. But I for one am so glad those civil liberty loving Democrats are in charge. If those authoritarian Republicans were in charge, I don’t know what we’d do!

I Have Found Nirvana

Three words. Hunting Friggin Dinosaurs! For the iPad. Very well done game for the iPad and iPhone that takes advantage of the touch screen. Here’s the game trailer:

I’ve been wasting my time with this for a week and have a hard time putting it down. It takes a little bit to get the touch pad sensitivity right where you want it, but they provide a “Survival Mode” where they just keep throwing waves of dinosaurs at you until one of them stomps or eats your twitching almost, but not quite dead corpse. The point of the game is to hunt dinosaurs, and build up an impressive trophy room. You can remove specimens and go try to hunt for better ones if you want. You can wound a dinosaur, in which case you have to follow its blood trail. This is not advisable if you’re hunting carnivores: you have to get more creative in your technique to land those, especially the Tyrannosaurus, which will just take round after round unless you shoot it in the right place. It takes more than one shot to bring one down. Obviously it’s not meant to be a completely realistic hunting simulation, but it’s good enough to be thoroughly addicting. Plus, who doesn’t like the idea of hunting dinosaurs?

The future is here, I guess

Robots made by General Atomics are patrolling the border of the US. Now, do I get a luxury vacation in orbit, or do I get to hide in a hole from Skynet’s minions?

Mr. Harriman, call your office

A couple of Danes are planning to visit the High Frontier using a rocket, catamaran launch platform, and submarine, all of their own design, funded by donations and sponsorship. Wonder if they’ll remember to bring the stamps with them this time?

H/T Tam

E-Mail Issues

My e-mail is currently not working, because the server it runs on is being moved from my friend J’s old house to his new house. That means I haven’t gotten my Google Alerts for this morning, which is why blogging is scarce. To top that off, thanks to the iPad, I left my Macbook in its bag all weekend, so all the crap I wanted to blog about is on that, and I can’t get it to the Macbook because of the e-mail issue. I can blog from the iPad without too much pain, but I do most of my work during the day from a laptop, and switching back and forth is a productivity killer.

Maybe it’s time to look into MobileMe or something like that. I definitely need a way to be able to save open tabs on one device, and open them on another. Currently if I find something on the mobile devices, I e-mail it to myself so I can open up on my laptop. To top all that off, I also have a Mac Pro that I cobbled together from parts running in my office now (mostly for X-Plane). So that’s three computers I’m regularly working on.

Can anyone recommend good practices for keeping my life synced between a desktop Mac, a laptop Mac, and an iPad?

2008 Called, And They Want Their Phone Back

This is a question I’ve wondered about for some time. Tam has the predictably amusing take on it. I’ve hated Blackberries from the moment I first put my hands on one. That went double when I had to support a few of them in a business environment. Crap, crap, crap. Yet they are very common in the business world, due to corporate America’s tendency to buy crap. By comparison the modern smart phones are light years better. I’m not surprised that Android based phones have overtaken sales of Blackberries. Good. Even though I may be personally partial to the iOS, Android is still 800x better than any Crackberry.

Even Apple needs to watch out, because Android is surpassing it in sales as well. The only way Apple is going to compete head-to-head with Google is to ditch AT&T and offer their phone on more carriers. Now that I have the iPad, my incentive to upgrade to an iPhone 4 is not that great. I’m waiting for the iPhone 4V, the V being for Verizon.

A Subject Near and Dear to My Heart

Before I got involved in gun rights, my primary civilÂ libertyÂ concern was laws governing the free flow of information, including overly broad intellectual property regimes, and restrictions on encryption technology, among them. Joe Huffman has some interesting observations about encryption and mobile communications. There are countries which ban encryption technology, and historically in this country there have been attempts to restrict its use, such as by providing the government with backdoor keys. Back when I was into this issue, France banned encryption entirely, but they lifted that in 1999, as the technology became pervasive. These days most of the regimes who restrict encryption are repressive, and their reasons for doing so obvious.

Encryption is an important tool for the citizen militia. It’s something gun owners should definitely care about. Part of the reason I started caring more about the Second Amendment rather than information restriction is because there was a ready made base of supports of the former who understood politics well enough to be a force. The geeky nerdy types don’t really get the political process as well as gun owners. If you think organizing gun owners is like herding cats, you haven’t seen anything if you haven’t worked with technology people. I think part of the problem is technology people tend to get wrapped up in ideas too much to think about how to implement those ideas in a highly imperfect political system.

But still, there are groups out there like EFF, who just won a very important victory for jailbreakers. This is very important for me since I have both of Steve Job’s walled garden devices.Â Jailbreaking should not be a crime. If I want to take a bite of the Apple, and cast myself out from the Garden of Steven, I ought to be able to without having to worry about grief from the feds. By the same token, Apple ought to be free to try to technologically keep me within the garden walls, but the only legal action they ought to be permitted to take is invalidating my warranty.

iPad Tips

Some things I’ve learned about the iPad after using it for a while:

Scaled up to a 10 inch display, iOS is far more useful on an iPad than an iPhone.
I needed to cut my thumbnail down to a nub because of my tendency to hit the spacebar with it. Capacitive displays don’t work well with fingernails. This substantially increased my typing speed.
Fingerprints are 1000x more annoying in the iPad than the iPhone.
Google Earth was made for the iPad. Google just didn’t realize it.
They’d probably sell a lot more of these if Apple was more OK with porn. It’s a great multimedia device.
Ten hours of battery life my ass. Only under very conservative use. More like 6 hours the way I use it.
My biggest pet peeve is not being able to easily upload pictures to with Safari. You can do that with the apps for Facebook and Twitter, but that sucks for the blog.

The iPad isn’t meant to be a general purpose computer. It’s hard to describe what it is, really. But I am certain others will copy it, and sell something that good enough for cheaper.