I’m guessing his battle with cancer is not going well. He’ll stay on as Chairman of the Board, and as an Apple employee, but he’s naming Tim Cook as his successor as CEO. I’m glad I didn’t just buy Apple stock. Apple did not do very well with Jobs out of the picture. Those of us that were Apple aficionados back then know what a roller coaster it was during the days of Scully, Spindler, and Amelio. My concern about Tim Cook is that his track record is that of an operations guy, not as a visionary. Hopefully the company is positioned well to survive without Jobs at the helm, but most successful CEOs with narcissistic streaks a mile wide are usually too into the cult of themselves to work too hard on a good succession plan. I guess we’ll see.
Category: Technology
Turning Gamers into Side Income
While I’m mired in the suck of unemployment, the wheels have been churning. My previous job consumed enough CPU cycles to keep my mind pretty thoroughly occupied, and what was left over, I dedicated to shooting, the Second Amendment, and blogging about shooting and the Second Amendment. Shooting is now an expense, so I’m not doing much of it these days, and blogging was never more than a part time job. So that leaves me with what to do between rounds of looking for work, and doing interviews.
In my free time I’ve been doing some more flight simming, and involving myself more in that community. A few people have made games revolving around flight sims, but those have mostly involved Virtual Airlines, and Virtual Air Traffic Control. The problem I have with all of these ideas is that they are essentially extensions of simulations, and as games go, I think that caters to more of a niche audience.
I’ve always believed that the primary purpose in any gaming community is being able to compare yourself to other people. That’s true whether you’re a video gamer, or your game is competitive pistol shooting. If you don’t look at the people under you in a ranking, and think “Heh, I’m better than all those guys,” and look at the people above you on the ranking and think, “For now, I’ll learn from you, because you are better than me, but one day, one day, I’m going to totally pwn you,” then you’re not really endowed with the competitive spirit, and may even lament what I’m talking about. A true gamer prides himself on his competence in his craft, but in order to understand the bounds of that competence, comparison is necessary.
In order to compare yourself, you have to have a pretty good social understanding of the community in which your operating, which requires an active social element, where people know and interact with each other. In my college days, I was a high wizard on a MUD. A good MUD needed to have a balance of both these elements on order to succeed; you needed to know your fellow players enough to divide them into rivals and allies, and you also needed a way to measure your skills in relation to others.
Competition is an excellent driving force, but you can not make the path to masterdom easy, lest the view from the top of the mountain seem uninspiring. You also cannot make it too difficult, for then the sensible path is just to surrender to the mountain and turn back. In my experience with competitive Silhouette shooting, competence is too difficult, and that discourages beginners. I think practical shooting is more popular today because it has the right balance of difficulty to master, but still offers enough early reward to keep it interesting for beginners.
Fantasy is another important element in any game. At the risk of offending people, this is another major appeal of IDPA and IPSC that other, more traditional shooting sport lack. Both try to be simulations of defensive handgun situations. This translates to the flight sim community as well, which feeds pretty exclusively off fantasy. Flight sims cater to aviation enthusiasts who don’t have the time, money, or good health to do the real thing. Whether you’re an actual pilot who still dreams of flying large airliners, or a diabetic who can’t get a medical certificate to fly a Cessna, the community has something to offer you. But to go back to the shooting analogy, imagine an IPSC or IDPA competition essentially boiled down to a match director scoring everything up, and going down the line at the end of the match, “You lived, you died, you lived, you lived, you died,” etc, etc. You’d probably still have people who’d be interested, but who are the winners and losers? Who is better than the next guy? Sure, you want to live, but this is a game! It has to be to keep people interested long term.
If you can combine the fantasy with community and competition, I think you have something really appealing. This is the thought that’s been obsessing me for at least the past five days. I’ve been playing a game that’s a plugin to the two major flight sims, that almost has the right idea, but it’s a poorly thought out and shoddy implementation too focused on simulation rather than social networking and gaming. I think I know how to do it much better. To top it off, Microsoft largely got out of the flight sim business, and that industry is about to be upheaved with the arrival of X-Plane 10. All I keep thinking about is, if I could get 2000 people to pay me 15 bucks a year, that’s real money. If I could get 4000 people a year to pay me 15 bucks a year, that’s almost a job. This community is willing to pay money for entertainment, and a lot of folks have made money on third party add-ons. Even if I got 500 people t pay me 15 dollars, it’s decent money versus the effort. It’ll boost my skills at software development and integration, which can’t hurt for a job. My ideas will tax my skills in Python, C++, PHP, SQL and systems administration skills such that I’m having a hard time seeing a downside to doing this. At worst I keep working with some important jobs skills, and at best I make a few bucks on the side. This is one of those times when I feel a lot of things coming together. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I think this could help me out, and provide some people with entertainment, and perhaps contribute to another community that has a tough time recruiting new members.
Rejecting the Miracle of Public Power
Bloomberg is now leading a crusade against Coal:
That seems rather insane for the mayor of a city that sucks down electricity like it’s going out of style. Gotham consumes about 50 million megawatt-hours of electricity per year. However, if you dive deeper into the facts surrounding electricity and New York, you’ll find out why Bloomberg, being the class A asshole that he is, feels he can lecture the rest of the country on energy. The facts make it easy for Bloomberg to bad mouth coal, but it displays a profound lack of understanding on his part on the energy mix in various parts of the country, and why things are that way.
First, it helps to understand a bit about electricity, how it’s generated, and how it’s transmitted. If there’s one thing that’s universally true about the hippy subspecies belief system, is that if you protest and believe hard enough, we can derive all our power from one hundred percent green unicorn farts. The truth is a bit more complicated. In an electrical distribution system, supply must always equal demand. When supply does not always equal demand Very Bad ThingsTM happen. In order to make sure this is the case, engineers conceptually divide power generation between base power, and peaking power. Â Base power is roughly the power required when demand is relatively normal. It’s usually generated either by large coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric power plants, depending on what part of the country you’re in. These plants tend to be quite large and efficient, as they will usually operate at, or very close to their overall capacity. When electricity demand exceeds the power demand that can be supplied by base generation, power companies start firing up peaking stations. These are generally smaller, less efficient plants that are powered by petroleum, or more often these days, natural gas. Peaking stations tend to be located much closer to communities that are actually consuming the power being generated.
So where does solar and wind, the favorite source of power for hippies, fit in? Well, it can provide power when it’s available. It can help carry the load of the overall system when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, but because it can’t provide reliable power, it’s utterly useless as a means of providing either base power or peaking power. It can only act as a supplement to the existing power system, and not as a replacement. It can’t even be a significant percentage of power, due to the unreliability of it. The hippy vision, when applied to reality, is an electricity system when you have it available sometimes. We have no way of storing the kind of power a city like New York demands for times when wind and sun aren’t in a mood to give us power. The only remedy in that case is shutting electric consumers off until demand equals supply.
Due to where New York City is located, and due to the fact that New York generates enough wealth to afford sky high electric utility rates, it depends very little on coal as a source of power. Compared to about half for the rest of the country, New York generates less than one fifth its power from coal based plants. New York State also generates far more base power with natural gas than many other energy markets, thanks largely to all of those fracking gas fields in Pennsylvania and Western New York.
But this is largely luck. Hydroelectric power isn’t available in every market. Nuclear power plants are horrendously expensive, and can only be located near significant sources of cooling water. Natural gas is not plentiful and cheap in every energy market. In contrast, coal can be shipped in huge quantities by rail, and used just about anywhere. For parts of the country that are not lucky enough to be located near large pockets of natural gas, near hydroelectric dams, or near major oil pipelines, the only viable alternative to coal is nuclear power, and the greens hate that too. Not to mention that it’s really expensive to build nuclear plants. I’d like to see if folks in Albuquerque, New Mexico would feel OK paying New York and Chicago prices for their electricity.
There is no alternative universe where electricity plants that run off green unicorn farts can provide our energy needs. Demagogues like Bloomberg do not understand the practicalities of electric generation and distribution. He does not understand his city’s power mix is largely an accident of geology. All he knows is his city only uses about 15% coal, so everyone else should too. The message from Main Street USA should be to tell Mayor Bloomberg to go back to New York City, and stop lecturing the rest of country on topics he knows nothing about, and are none of his damned business anyway.
More on Privacy
Joe Huffman has more thoughts on privacy, from a discussion a few days ago. I would not say I’m comfortable with what’s coming, but I have to agree with Alan that whether we’re comfortable with it or not, it’s coming, and there’s not much we can do about it.
One issue I have with the idea of a transparent society is that I’m not sure information flows can ever be completely egalitarian. But I look toward the fundamental idea behind the Second Amendment, which is one way to have a check on governmental power is to make sure the distribution of military power within a society is more dispersed and less centralized. That’s the same fundamental principle working with privacy defeating technologies as well; as long as they are distributed more or less equally, the weak have the power to shine the light on the powerful as much as the powerful may shine the light on the weak. It’s not perfect, but then again, the distribution of military power in our society has never really been very egalitarian either, yet we have largely remained a free society, and have arguably become more free as the distribution has become more centralized.
When thinking of “Second Amendment remedies,” to borrow a phrase from our opponents, meaning citizens having to act as a check on abuses of governmental power, I think it’s unwise to limit ones thinking purely to military matters: to small arms, to infantry tactics, and the such. This is fighting the last war syndrome. When facing an out of control and abusive government, I’d think one of these would be as useful as hundreds of rifles, as would be one of these.
End of Adobe Flash? I Hope So.
PC Magazine is pondering whether Adobe getting into the HTML5 market indicates Flash may be going by the wayside. While not being particularly enamored with Steve Job’s walled garden approach to computing these days, I wholeheartedly endorse the destruction of Flash. PC Magazine notes:
Ultimately, though, this has more to do with Apple and its power struggle against Adobe with regards to Flash. The long and short of it, which is somewhat proved by Adobe Edge, is Apple won. Steve Jobs is a notorious opponent of Flash. Although it’s (reluctantly) supported on Macs, it’s nowhere to be found on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. Apple has declared Flash unfit for mobile, and whether or not that’s true, Apple’s massive influence in the space (and especially tablets) makes whatever Apple perceives a reality to a large extent.
Most pages these days are completely usable without having a Flash plug-in installed. I have blocked it by default on my Macs using ClicktoFlash, and it has greatly improved my browsing experience. Now if someone would just tell the folks who do web stuff for NRA that Flash is on the way out, we’d be good, because despite what the developers of that might think, it’s not, in fact, a world class online experience. Well, I suppose that could be argued, but definitely not in a good way.
Problems with OS X Lion
My first review yesterday was after upgrading and playing around with the new features a bit. Now that I’ve had more experience with it, I should warn you all that there are numerous problems I’ve found. Here’s my list of annoyances:
- Time machine tells me backups are delayed if I disconnect the backup drive more than an hour. Previously it would go ten days between warnings. Ten days was preferable, especially for laptops you’re roaming around with. I’m not certain this is a bug, either. From some reading, I think versioning might be integrated with Time Machine, and needs it to work.
- Versioning is annoying. There are some documents I might want to enable that feature for. I don’t want versioning to be universal unless it’s going to be transparent, which it is not. If this depends on Time Machine, it’s a poor implementation. Digital managed a good implementation of this idea in the filesystem for VMS.
- MacFusion broke, as did MacFUSE. MacFUSE was easily fixed, but you can’t delete shares in MacFusion. If you’re not using FUSE filesystems, this isn’t a concern.
- I had a weird error that prevented any apps from running. Upon examination, one of the OpenGL libs was trying to load another support library, “libCVMSPluginSupport.dylib”, but spelled “libCVMSPluginSuprort.dylib” The ASCII difference between r and p is only a single bit, so it’s possible a bit flipped in memory, and this isn’t related to Lion at all. That happens sometimes, and looking at the library trying to load it, it was spelled correctly in the binary code. A memory leak could also cause data corruption, which would be Lion related, but I would have expected more extensive damage than a single inverted bit in a string.
- I have previously used a plugin that blocks all Flash on any page I don’t specifically approve. It was sophisticated enough to display still images for popular Flash apps like YouTube. It has greatly improved my life when browsing with huge numbers of tabs already open, because I don’t have dozens of instances of Flash running, slowing my machine down to show me ads I don’t want to see. This plugin seems to have stopped working under Lion.
- The Mac will no longer wake on mouse movement. You have to actually click the mouse to wake the machine up. I’m fine with that, but an option to change it would be nice, and telling me would be too, so I’m not moving my mouse around frantically thinking my machine just crashed.
So that’s the list so far. We’ll see what else I find. My friend Jason thinks I’m nuts for suggesting it’s a good release. I believe his exact quote was “What the hell are you thinking? Its a horrible release.” Not doing any real work with this machine currently, I’m probably less inclined to find problems than he is. But just so anyone who wants to upgrade is aware, there could be problems.
Mac OS 10.7: The Lion Sleeps Tonight
I decided to upgrade one machine to Mac OS X 10.7, or Lion, as it’s branded. Just to make life more exciting, and because I’m bored, I decided to try it first on the Hackintosh. That added surprisingly little complication, given that there’s a procedure. The only complication I had was having to downgrade the sound driver, because Apple dropped support for the sound chip on my board some time ago.
So how is Lion? To be expected, Apple improved the eye candy. One thing I noticed immediately is a much improved text to speech capability. This showed up first on X-Plane, since it uses this to simulate air traffic control messages. If you upgraded from Snow Leopard, you may have to change it in the “speech” control panel. Apple also seems to be trying to bring iOS-like features to the Mac OS. That already happened in the later releases of Snow Leopard with bringing in the App Store concept. For Lion, there’s the LaunchPad, which is a virtual clone of the iOS Springboard. LaunchPad would seem to obsolete the Applications dock, so it would be interesting to see if a fresh install comes with the App dock enabled. Lion also comes with FaceTime, first introduced on the iOS platform, which is a videoconference app similar to Skype.
iCal and Mail are totally redesigned. I’m not sure whether I like it yet. You can go back to the classic view if you don’t, for Mail. Just as a warning, your calendar will probably be messed up when you upgrade. Mine was, and so was a friend’s. Mine was easy to fix. Apple also decided to change the way scrolling works. They’ve been pushing the trackpad device for Mac users for a while now, which is a touchpad interface similar to an iDevice screen. The Magic Mouse, which I use, is a touch interface as well, where you can scroll just moving your finger on the surface of the mouse. If you’re used to a scroll wheel, this seems counterintuitive, but if you’re used to an iPad, it might seem more intuitive. Tellingly, Apple refers to their reverse scroll feature as “natural scrolling,” implying if you don’t want to scroll Apple’s way, you’re unnatural, and clearly an abomination in the eyes of Steve.
One concept I do like is full screen apps through Mission Control, and the ability to move between them with mouse or trackpad gestures, similar to how iOS 5 is going to work when it’s released. The concept seems borrowed, in a way, from workspaces, in Unix/Linux environments, except it’s more suited to allowing you to use applications full screen and still being able to switch easily between them. There are some things I’m not sure I like about the implementation, however. For one, if you miss with a finger, you end up giving the mouse a scrolling gesture, which has different behavior in full screen apps. I’d rather have the option of a keyboard key, and gesture. Apple seems to have decided mice are so 1980s, man, and they stole that technology from Xerox anyway, so to hell with it. Trackpads for all! We’ll overlook that everyone pretty much stole the trackpad idea from Apollo Computer. Another deficiency with the Mission Control concept is that for multi-headed machines, it does not allow you to have one full screen app on one monitor, and another full screen app on another.
The new iChat has some extra features, but Adium is still better. Resume, which basically tries to emulate the consistent state of iOS between shutdowns and restarts would be nice if it worked a little better. Safari has a lot of new features, and what specifically is interesting for me is the “Reading List.” This was introduced a few weeks ago in Snow Leopard, but under Lion it’ll sync between other Macs and iOS devices, though I haven’t seen it work yet on iOS devices. Possibly this is an iOS 5 feature. For me, it’s important, because I do a lot of browsing on the iPad, and bookmark syncing between iPad->MobileMe->Mac and back again has been awkward. This might be a much better way to tag posts and articles for blogging that is readily available on all the devices I use, with syncing through MobileMe.
One feature I haven’t had a chance to play with yet is FileVault 2, which allows you to encrypt data seamlessly, and with high performance. I don’t have much interest in encrypting my day to day files, but encrypting backups might be something I’d like to do, since I often leave (left) that disk at the office so if my house burned down I wouldn’t lose everything. One problem, though, with encrypted data is remembering the key passphrase or not losing the key. Computer forensicists are also going to have fun with this feature, because with “Instant Wipe”, the key pretty much gets destroyed, rendering the data nothing more than digital gobbledygook, which then gets erased anyway. I am all in favor of pervasive encryption, however, because of governments who can’t seem to mind their own damned business. I’m glad this feature is present, even if I never use it.
Versions is another feature I haven’t played with yet, but essentially it’ll keep multiple versions of documents going back to its creation, and lets you browse versions and roll back. Though, I would imagine only iApps support that currently. I just opened up Word, and it does not seem to use the feature.
Overall, I’d suggest its not a bad release. It’s certainly a greater step than between Leopard and Snow Leopard, in terms of new features. One disappointing thing, for me at least, is that OpenGL performance on the MacOS is still fairly pitiful compared to Windows, and quite pitiful compared to Linux. Upon benchmarking, Lion is a very slight improvement in OpenGL performance over Snow Leopard, but not enough to be worth mentioning. Apple would be wise to work with AMD and NVidia to optimize its drivers for stronger OpenGL performance. Other than that, it’s worth the thirty dollars to upgrade. Waiting until the first maintenance release or two might not be a bad idea either, if you’re looking to avoid small problems and quirks. I plan on upgrading my two MacBooks, and Bitter’s MacBook Air, before I start a new job.
RFID Chips in Chiappa Firearms
Robb has a pretty good round up of the issue this past week, where Chiappa was found to be putting RFID tags in their firearms. Chiappa notes that it’s for inventory control. That is a legitimate reason, but if that is, indeed, the reason, you address your customer’s concerns by making it easy to remove, and helping the customer remove it. I also would suggest that banding the firearm with a tag would be far more preferable than gluing it into the grip.
But even as a form of inventory control, I am not pleased with Chiappa, or any other firearms manufacturer even going there, because this would make gun control in public places perfectly enforceable for the law abiding. Why? Because the next thing our opponents are going to start pushing, and thanks Chiappa, for giving them the idea, is to make RFID tagging on firearms mandatory, and making it illegal for an owner to remove or destroy the tag.
Now all you need is an RFID scanner to find out if someone is carrying. Now all a thief needs is a scanner to look for their presence in a home. Now all you need, if your goal is to get as many gun owners in prison as possible, to have a tag fail, and the police accuse the person of disabling it.
So I’m with Robb. Chiappa either didn’t think this through, or doesn’t care. Neither excuse is acceptable. We’re willing to pay more to do things the old fashioned way so we don’t open this can of worms. One thing I will say for sure, if they ever do mandate RFID tagging in guns, I’m going to develop a scanner for the pant wetters among our opponents that tells them when they are near someone with a gun. Why? Because they’ll find out how often that’s actually the case, and it’ll either help them get over their phobia, or force them to lead a secluded life behind closed doors.
No More TSA Nude-O-Scope
Apparently a software upgrade is taking care of the issue:
After complaints from travelers the TSA earlier this year began testing at four airports software for the full-body scanners that instead uses a generic body outline and highlights the area where any anomaly is detected, eliminating the actual image of the passenger.
This deals with my primary concern about these things. I’d also want to know that there’s no way an agent can pull up the image, and that the image is not stored. I don’t really give a crap if a computer analyses an image of me. Now the only concern is the long-term effects of the radiation.
Someone should probably FOIA specs for this software upgrade to ensure everything is as advertised. You know, someone like the media, who’s supposed to hold the Government accountable. Or something like that. Hard to say that with a straight face these days.
Flying Car Finally Hitting the Market?
While it’s good to see a company tossing new ideas into the General Aviation community, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the news that we may finally soon have a real flying car. As much as I’d love for something that’s really practical in this role, I’m not sure this is it, mostly because of the price, and because it will neither be a very good car or very good plane for that price.
Mentioned in the video, the range is about 400 miles, and the cost somewhere between $200,000 and a cool quarter million. Other than the novelty/cool factor, what does it practically get you? Well, you can drive the plane home to your garage, so it’ll save on having to store the plane at an airport. You can decide to fly one part of a route, and drive another.
A used Cessna 172 Skyhawk can be had for 25 grand. How much storage can 225,000 pay for at a local general aviation field? How many rental car days can a tenth of that pay for to get you to and from and airport? The Cessna has a range of close to 700 nautical miles, while the Terrafugia flying car ranges to 425 nautical miles. The Cessna’s cruising speed is 122 knots, topping out at 163 knots. Terrafugia’s flying car cruises at 93 knots and tops out at 100 knots.
Now it’s fair to note that the Terrafugia is a Light Sport Aircraft, but even in comparison to other aircraft in that category, it’s still really expensive, even if more comparable in terms of performance. The other issue is that the Terrafugia has a very low ground clearance for a plane, and combined with the four wheel undercarriage, I would imagine makes crosswind landings more tricky than in a regular aircraft. I’d be worried about wing scrape and tail scrape if you don’t nail your landing exactly right, though it looks like the Terrafugia has a smaller, extra set of wheels in the tail section.
My conclusion is this is a rich person’s novelty. A great way for keeping up with a Jones’, if you’re a little weird. I’m also really curious how you work insurance for one of these things. I’m guessing you need an auto policy while driving, and another policy for when it’s being used as an aircraft.