Category: Technology

I was told when I was a kid we’d have flying cars by now. Well, no flying cars. There’s also been persistent rumors of a Verizon iPhone. Screwed again. That’s a shame too, because the specs for the new iPhone are impressive. The 3GS wasn’t enough to compel me to upgrade from my 3G, but the 4G iPhone is something I’d love to upgrade to now. The specs from today’s WWDC:

• Thinner, though slightly heavier than the 3GS, but with stainless steel construction which doubles as an antenna for the radio equipment.
• 326 ppi display running at 960×640. This I have to see. It’s shocking to me how much better Bitter’s Droid screen looks over my 3G, but this leapfrogs the Droid, which has a 256 ppi display at 854 x 480 resolution.
• Forward facing camera, finally, along with a standard rear facing with a 5 megapixel display and LED flash, similar to what the Droid has.
• Uses the Apple A4 processor, which runs at a 1GHz. It’s the same one the iPad uses, and the iPad is fast. This eliminates one of my primary complaints about the 3G, which is that it’s slow enough to make browsing painful. The 3G is powered by a Samsung ARM CPU at 412 MHz, the 3GS by a 600MHz version. Bitter’s Droid is powered by a chip similar to the A4, the TI OMAP3, which is an ARM CPU running at 550MHz, with a graphics unit running at 430MHz.
• Much better battery life. Apple is claiming 300 hours of standby time, 40 hours of music, 10 hours video, 10 hours of browing over Wifi, or 6 hours over 3G, and 7 hours of talk time. That’s pretty impressive. A lot of that is because the A4 processor sips power.
• Apple has finally untied multitasking. Jailbroken phones have been doing this for a while, and the underlying OS, being MacOS, has always been capable of doing it. But previous iPhone OSes have disallowed it because of battery life concerns.

It’s a good release. Apple needed to leap over the competing smart phones rather than merely match them, and so far it looks like they’ve done it. You can bet the competition will be out with bigger and better versions of their products, but it’s a compelling reason to upgrade. The question is, am I willing to put up with another two years of AT&T? Their upgrade offers are attractive, but I’d hate to take the bait, and then find out there’s a Verizon iPhone in early 2011. But perhaps the Verizon iPhone is the modern day flying car after all, and I’ll just be stuck with outdated technology for no good reason. It’s a difficult call.

If Apple actually manages to kill Flash with the iPad, I will definitely have to get one, despite my previous skepticism I had no use for one. I’ve hated Flash from the moment it started to get popular on the Internets. I didn’t think Apple would have the market power, but if they actually pull it off… great. Even for those of you with Androids, Flash will destroy your battery, crash your browser, and do all the things it’s known to do. The sooner it dies, the better off we’re all going to be, and if it takes Steve Jobs’ narcissism to kill it, it’ll be the greatest thing Steve’s narcissism has accomplished since the NeXT cube.

SayUncle wonders why with all the press about miracle cures, life is still pretty much putting up with horrible diseases until finally one kills you. I actually most like this explanation for how these stories end up in the media, from the comment section over at Uncle’s. I don’t blog much about work topics, mostly because they pay me to make computers solve drug discovery problems, and I don’t like mixing work and hobby. But I can speak on this topic a bit.

The short answer is that taking breakthrough scientific discoveries and turning them into a pill your doctor can prescribe you is a very difficult, long path that spans more than a decade typically, and that assumes you’re successful in the end, which you probably won’t be. As much as libertarians will want to blame the FDA for this, the FDA isn’t really entirely responsible for this state of affairs. That’s not to say the FDA is blameless, but, for the most part, the problem is rooted in the fact that most of the easy drugable targets have been hit already, and what the industry is left with are harder problems.

Moreover the current industry paradigm for discovering drugs is poorly suited to more difficult targets. The best way I can put it is that if our industry built airplanes, we’d throw thousands of workers at the problem, without too much of a plan, assembling parts and hurtling them up in the air to see if they flew. Do that enough, eventually you’ll probably get some hastily assembled hunk of metal to fly for a bit. But it’s not very efficient at getting a final product. When the industry was hugely profitable, and easy targets were plentiful, this was a successful model. When the problem got harder — we not only need planes that can glide for a bit, we need jetliners — that method no longer works. The problem is, the industry is just starting to figure this out, but they don’t have a paradigm to replace it yet. We still don’t really know how to build airplanes in a systematic way, going back to the analogy.

There have been companies that have developed a more systematic way to discover new compounds that can hit more difficult targets. I currently work for a company that is trying to do drug discovery using supercomputers (which is where I come in). But even doing things this way just offers you a better chance at success. It doesn’t automatically make getting a pill your doctor can prescribe you an easy problem. In the mean time, the industry is in the process of imploding, as patents run out and pipelines dry up. There aren’t enough new drugs to replace what’s going off patent, and that is going to have an effect on research into new drugs.

So where does the FDA come in? The FDA approval process is a significant reason why investigational new drugs fail. Most of the times drugs fail this process, it’s for good reasons, like a really poor side effect profile, which is a nice way of saying the drug slowly cooks your liver, or damages your heart (think Vioxx). Other reasons are that they aren’t efficacious. And having watched this process happen, I can tell you if the FDA approval process, or something like it, weren’t in place, the industry would put drugs on the market that kill people. Not because we’re evil, but because it’s relatively easy to convince yourself of things that aren’t necessarily true, fail to do the right tests, and overlook things. The problem with the FDA is they’ve take their primary role and taken it way beyond basic safety and efficacy. The joke is you couldn’t get Tylenol approved today (toxic to the liver in doses not much higher than the therapeutic dose) nor could you get Aspirin (promotes gastrointestinal hemorrhaging) approved, even though both are generally regarded as safe by the FDA. To me the FDA’s role is essentially to prevent fraud — if you’re marketing a drug to do X, and saying it’s safe and effective, you need to prove that first. Obviously a drug that fries your liver shouldn’t be acceptable. But there are many cases where the FDA is taking their mission way beyond what’s good for society as a whole, and are erring way too much on the side of caution. That’s good for covering the asses of bureaucrats, but not too good for getting life altering and life saving treatments into people’s hands.

Since we’re leaving for Charlotte do early, Dan from PAFOA is staying with us here for the night, and he brought his iPad. I’m doing this post from it to try out how I like the keyboard and interface. First impressions is that the iPad is fast, much faster tine the iPhone, and the interface is fantastic. The display is really nice, and I’m finding it much easier to use for blogging than an iPhone. Not sure still if I really have a need for one, but it’s definitely a solid product.

This article talks about how Apple is losing some of it’s lustre among tech people:

But, there’s evidence that Apple is losing some of its luster with techies. The company’s stubborn refusal to support Adobe Flash (which wins props with some IT pros but breaks a lot of Web sites), its draconian and ambiguous review policy for the App Store, and it’s strong-arm legal tactics with HTC and Gizmodo are having a negative impact on how young, tech-savvy professionals view Apple, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex.

I’m definitely not with Apple when it comes to strong arming HTC and Gizmodo, but when it comes to Adobe Flash, I am conflicted. I count myself among those who would like to use Flash on the iPhone, but I also am fully behind Apple’s efforts to try to destroy this monstrosity that’s been poisoning the Internet for years. You can see why it is to be loathed here and here. All valid reasons for hating Flash.

The only aspect of not having Flash on the iPhone that really drives me nuts are for video playback sites. This is something that probably will be mitigated by HTML5, when, sometime next Century, W3C finally gets around to cementing the standard. But will anyone use HTML5? There are issues with that as well, namely that it pushes video support on to the browser. I would like to see Flash die and be replaced by a W3C standard, but in the mean time it’s highly prevalent on the Internet, and becomes more widespread while the W3C dithers on a solid HTML5 standard.

I think this is a pretty good, and fair comparison. I have familiarity with having supported and used all of these platforms except for the Palm Pre. Surprisingly, the iPhone integrates the best with a Microsoft Exchange environment, with the Android OS being a close second. Blackberrys are generally the business standard, and they are bloody awful as far as I’m concerned. Popular Mechanics misses what to me is the biggest drawback of the iPhone, is that it’s only available on AT&T, who’s network is just atrocious.

I’ve been a Smartphone user back since the days of the early Treo’s, and was a Palm Pilot user before that. Back then, Palms used Graffiti, which completely screwed up your brain when it came to handwriting. But it was more reliable than the Newton’s handwriting recognition, which actually wasn’t too bad for what it was trying to do. The Newton was too big to carry around, however, which was its main drawback.

Palm was the real innovator in the handheld computer category early on, and I liked the Treo better than the early Blackberries, but the Blackberries quickly got better. No one really got the Smartphone genre right until Apple did with the iPhone. As much I like Bitter’s Android, and as much as an improvement as Windows Phone 7 will probably be, most of the user interface ideas had their genesis in the iPhone. Apple’s always been the big innovator in technology when it comes to designing user interfaces and devices, but stage two of that has traditionally involved everyone else copying their ideas and crushing them with cheaper products. In this market, Apple’s not necessarily going to get crushed on price, but they could be crushed on the “price” of being tied to AT&T and the restricted nature of their App Store.

I’m still enjoying, in the rare event that I have a few hours to kill, the X-Plane Flight Simulator. Recently I’ve been learning the Boeing 737 which is produced by the x737 project. I’m really excited that there’s a project to do the Boeing 787 Dreamliner in X-Plane:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd1nzmLT8hU[/youtube]

I don’t know how the virtual X-Plane 787 cockpit compares to the actual cockpit, but it sure does look pretty slick. Here’s another video of the virtual 787 doing a crosswind landing. One of my main complaints about the x737 simulator is the lack of 3D cockpit, which hopefully will be addressed with the next version of x373, version 4.0, which is also due out soon:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8peEdDhV8Q[/youtube]

Of course the best preview video is this one, which is very high quality, but isn’t on YouTube. When the Zombie Apocalypse hits, obviously it’s useful to be able to fight your way to your rifle with your pistol, but then what? Fight your way to a plane, and get the hell out of there. That’s my plan!

A few weeks ago I decided to try out Google’s release of Chrome for MacOS. The Mac version is only in beta, but I have to say, I’m a fan. It’s faster than Safari and Firefox by far, and I’ve found it to be incredibly stable. Even though it’s a beta, it has yet to crash on me a single time, and it seems to handle keeping a large number of web pages open for a long time with no problem.

It’s crash recovery, however, is not quite as seamless as either Firefox or Safari, so that’s one area that could be worked on. I also tend to prefer to work in individual windows rather than tabs, so that’s one other area I would like to see more user flexibility on. But overall, I think Chrome is a great browser, and I haven’t found myself switching back yet to Safari or Firefox.

This pretty much lists all the reasons I haven’t rushed out to buy an iPad. I can’t really see what I’d do with it. I might end up getting one, after they fix all the bugs and reduce the price, but it’ going to be mostly a toy, just like the Newton I have in my attic somewhere was. In fact, given the iPad’s size, it kind of reminds me of the Newton, which wasn’t a rousing success for Apple. Despite that, I think the iPad will probably be largely successful. Back in the years Apple was run by the sugar water salesman, the cult following wasn’t quite as big as it is today, and back then even the devout fans of Apple understood they produced bombs every once in a while.