Posts by Franklin 619 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2007
Now son, go clean your room or I will take away your favorite toy...and SEND IT INTO SPAAAACE!
(Actually, now that I think about it, I think I would have been a lot more motivated as a kid if my parents had said "Son, if you clean your room, we'll take your favorite toy and send it into space!")
One of my sweeties has a We-Vibe, and the one complaint we have about it is the user interface is rubbish.
It's got a single button, buried in the tip under the silicone, that's very difficult to press to turn it on and off. Worse, the vibrator has, like, 15 speeds and patterns...and you have to push the button repeatedly to cycle through them. Once it's on, you can't turn it off without cycling through all the patterns.
If this is an example of the state of the art in vibrator UIs, the vibrator is still pre-Windows 98...
"On a side not....this kind of "CHIPPING" for children (those who are truly loved) would be most helpful in the case of a child gone missing or kidnapped."
If they start chipping kids in order to prevent kidnapping, I hope the chips are placed in an obvious and conspicuous location. You know, to prevent the kidnappers from having to do too much exploratory surgery when they dig the chips out with a pocket knife. (Seriously, who thinks that chipping kids would deter kidnapping?)
The lowest bidder is still informed of the requirements...which likely don't mention security at all. It's amazing (and depressing) how many job specifications I've seen that don't say boo about security requirements...often from clients who really ought to know better.
Writing code in PHP is easy. Writing secure code is harder. Government departments hire the lowest bidder, who probably doesn't even think about security, much less know security best practices. If you put in a higher bid because your proposal considers security, well...let's just say you'll likely be disappointed in the outcome.
"Whilst I don't buy into their central claim that HTML5 is currently in a fit state to supplant native apps (just check out the recommended Android version), it's nice that they've gone to all this trouble to crawl along the bleeding edge and document (albeit subjectively) their findings. The code is open to inspection, at least on the client side."
My own personal takeaway from this experiment is twofold:
1. HTML5 really isn't quite ready for prime time, at least not without a lot of back-end massaging of the data you send to an HTML5 app; and
2. Notwithstanding point (1) above, Facebook's HTML5 developers are a bit rubbish.
Well, I suppose backing down is better than the North Korea approach (close the borders, plant mines, start a nuclear program). So they'll instead die a slow death of attrition, I reckon. It never ceases to amaze me how many social networking sites don't seem to understand how easy it is to lose their userbase's trust and how hard it is to get it back again.
"Fanboi's will go on about iOS Maps now, but be realistic, that is the first time Apple have ever admitted to poor design or a mistake."
I seem to recall some sackcloth and ashes over that horrible round "hockey puck" mouse, followed quickly on by a redesign that put a divot on the mouse button. I had one of those dreadful things. Simply awful.
They also knocked something like $5,000 off the price of the Twentieth Anniversary Mac and gave folks who had been dumb enough to pay full price for them a "free" PowerBook, which might not be admitting to a mistake in so many words but sure sounds like it to me.
Neither the model nor the photographer were paid by GoDaddy, because GoDaddyGuides is not owned, operated, or hosted by GoDaddy. It's a simple WordPress site being used by a GoDaddy affiliate. I thought it was rather obvious when I did a whois and discovered that it isn't even using GoDaddy's name servers...
Revisionist history? I recall seeing a GIF when the GIF89a standard had just been finalized, revising the older GIF87 standard with transparency and better compression. The first GIF89a-standard GIF I recall seeing was a photo of the standard's creator, Steve Wilhite, with a caption reading "By the way, it's pronounced 'jif'."
CompuServe's own advertising pronounced it the same way, as I recall.
A while back, I received a notice that a parody Web page I'd created was (allegedly) infringing on someone's trademark.
Rather than try to fight it, I changed the copy on the page, and then added a disclaimer in the footnotes saying "This page is not affiliated with nor endorsed by (trademark owner's name) and should not be confused with (trademark).
Lo and behold, the number of hits I got on the page went up, not down. People searching for the trademark term still found the page (because it appeared in the disclaimer), and people searching for more generic terms that weren't the trademarked term also found the page (because I'd revised the body copy).
Funny how trademark takedown requests can backfire like that.
"Is dark energy not magic?"
When infrared light was first detected (with prism experiments in 1800), the notion that there could be light that we could not directly see was quite baffling to people. If I recall correctly, Herschel referred to it as "dark light."
Today, infrared light is well-understood and doesn't seem mysterious or magical to us at all, even though it seemed that way at first.
I reckon that with time, as our understanding of the physical world expands, "dark energy" and dark matter" will become better understood and will no longer seem strange or magical; indeed, referring to them by those names will sound as quaint as calling infrared light "dark light."
"You see, you *can* apply Newton's Theorem of Shells to globular clusters, and oh look, no need for dark matter."
Unfortunately, doing that doesn't fit with OTHER observations, like the orbits of satellites around our planet, or the orbit of our planet around the sun. So in order to make this fit the observable data, you have to start adding all sorts of arguments and 'environment variables' to Newton's laws...without any sense of what, if anything, all those new terms actually mean in the real world.
In other words, you can kludge Newton's laws to explain the observed rotational speed of galaxies, but then they break for the observed motions of smaller systems, so you have to add a whole bunch of terms of unknown real-world relevance to make it model both, and, well...it all starts to look pretty messy.
It's a lot like the "electric universe theory" in that respect. It models one currently poorly-understood system well, at the cost of abjectly failing to model systems that we already understand. And kludging it to work with both starts looking pretty arbitrary and made-up.
A model that correctly predicts the behavior of galaxies and galactic clusters but fails to predict the behavior of solar systems or galactic superclusters isn't really an improvement on what we have now.
"The women who act this way may find no long term mates." [citation needed]
There's a pop-psych study conducted at the Mormon Brigham Young University that makes this claim, but its statistical methods have been challenged (for one thing, it recruited most of its samples from Mormon universities, where premarital sex (and coffee drinking!) can result in expulsion). Even with the author's data, the claims don't pass statistical analysis; see, for example, Dr. James Coyne's analysis, which found that after controlling for religion and education, among other factors, the correlation between pre-marital abstinence and relationship satisfaction later in life was very small--<2%--and would likely be even smaller if other confounding factors were included.
"We are genetically programmed to want to control the father of the offspring, and thus may not want to marry a woman who is likely to mate outside the marriage and leave me to raise the child of another man - thus extinguishing my genetic code for that pregnancy" [citation needed]
God save us from popular misconceptions of evolutionary psychology--itself a rather dubious "science" that seems more about validating social norms than about real understanding of human behavior.
I dunno, I had a Microsoft Intellimouse for quite a long time. Silly name, but great mouse; I used it on my Mac for quite a number of years. It was absolutely indestructible; I only stopped using it because it ended up disappearing on me last time I moved.
So that's one reliable piece of hardware, at least.
The thing about design patents is that they're very specific.
"Apple patents round-corner rectangle" is a great sound bite, like "Al Gore says he invented the Internet" and "human brains only use 10% of their capacity," but like those other sound bites, it isn't true.
With a simple design patent like this, any change, even a trivial one, means a product is no longer infringing. Take a tablet and give it a different aspect ratio, or change the radius on the corners, and it isn't the same design any more--and therefore isn't infringing.
There's an analysis over at http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/07/analysis-apple-got-a-design-patent-on-the-shape-of-the-ipad-and-it-probably-doesnt-matter/ for folks who continue to believe that Apple now has a patent on round-corner rectangles in general.
Oh, FFS.
"We shouldn't explore Mars before we fix the Earth" is just plain dumb, and no amount of ranting about what people who realize that will do with their lives will change that.
For one, it's not either/or. It's not like if we cease exploring space, all of a sudden all that money will be spent on "saving the earth," or that every dollar spent on space exploration is a dollar spent not saving the earth. (You do know that a lot of the stuff we learn from the space program actually benefits the 'saving earth' stuff, right? Right? No?)
And it's not like we're talking some vast quantity of money which, if it were only spent on some other thing, would suddenly result in a saved earth. The Curiosity program, for example, cost $2.5 billion spread out over about 7 years. Wow! 2.5 billion! That's SO much money, right? Right? That's, like, a big pile! Surely that much would be enough to save the earth, right?
Let's put it into perspective. Here in the US, we spend about the same amount of money, $2.3 billion, every October on Halloween candy. $2.5 billion sounds like a ton of money--surely, earth-saving gobs of money--but compared to the total size of the economy, it's nothing. Pennies.
But it's pennies that make a difference. It's pennies that let us learn how planets work. And that...that makes a lot more difference when it comes to earth-saving than some M&Ms to pass out on Halloween do.
I built a prototype smart sex toy around an Arduino Uno, moved it to a Teensy 2.0 to make it smaller, then went back to the Arduino (this time, and Arduino Nano). I found the Arduino easier to source, and had some weird problems with the output pins on my Teensy board not always responding to digitalWrite() correctly. (I was, to be fair, using the Teensyduino bootloader so as not to have to rewrite all my software, which may have been the problem.)
The Teensy's IDE isn't nearly as polished as the Arduino's, and with the Arduino Mini and Nano (the latter being, bizarrely, larger than the former), the form factor is pretty close to being the same.
"Didn't Google publish a study of HDD reliability (based on the results from their data centers), which came to the conclusion that SMART indicators were mostly worthless for predicting failures?"
Yes.
The results of analysis of a bogglingly large number of drives were pretty much "SMART can tell you that a drive has failed, but it's pretty much rubbish at telling you that a drive is going to fail."
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
The same report concluded that development of even a single bad sector is a pretty good sign that the drive is getting ready to check out.
"Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFEcIxJBkUE"
Okay, so I'm looking at this video, and I...I just...
Seriously? This isn't some kind of elaborate Internet joke? I don't know what's sadder, the fanbois obsessing about this, or the trolls spouting about how Apple makes crap products because of it.
Those might not be such good examples. Black & Decker has applied for a patent on the speed selector (application #20120222879, filed 09-06-2012). They had a patent on power tools with a grip containing a built-in power switch, granted in 1917. Ryobi has a patent on their power tool hand grip (patent #6796389, granted 09-28-2004). They also have a patent on a wheeled cart made out of a bent rod or tube (patent #6065189, granted 05-23-2000). Makita has held several design patents on the design of the grips of their power tools, now all expired, dating back to the early 1990s.
"However the revised trajectory seems to have been *much* less efficient and so the 2nd stage had to burn more to compensate for the losses, stuffing the plan to plan to place the Orbcomm satellite in its planned orbit (but it's still working)."
According to ORBCOMM, the satellite deliberately wasn't boosted into a higher orbit because the altered Falcon 9 trajectory did not place it inside the required ISS safety window for the second stage burn:
http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=38833
"My first reaction to this was "eh?" and my second one was that Apple are basically rallying the cult members after the disastrous iPhone 5 launch."
If selling five million gizmos in a single weekend is a "disastrous" product launch, then I hope one day to invent a gizmo that has such a disaster. :)
"So actually, it's an iOS6 issue then, not iPhone 5 specifically?"
It seems to be.
I experienced this problem when I upgraded an iPad to iOS 6. However, not being content with just grousing about it, and having the problem on my home WiFi network but not on other WiFi networks, I set out to do some trial and error to try to track down exactly what was happening.
First bit of faffing quickly showed that the problem went away if I used WPA or WEP encryption or no encryption at all, but appeared if I used WPA2.
I'd also been having trouble with my Mac desktop losing signal from my home router, so replaced the router for that reason and found--surprise!--that the connectivity problems with the iPad went away, even with WPA2.
So I invited a bunch of friends with various gizmos over and played a game of swap-the-routers, and here's what I found:
iPhone 5 running iOS 6:
Would not connect to an Asus router with WPA2. Would connect with WPA or WEP, or no security.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
iPad running iOS 5:
Connected to an Asus router with WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Same iPad running iOS 6:
Would not connect to an Asus router with WPA2. Would connect with WPA or WEP, or no security; signal always showed as weak.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
iMac running OS X 10.6.8:
Would not connect reliably to an Asus router with WPA2. (connection dropped every fifteen minutes or so.) Would connect with WPA or WEP, or no security, but with some reliably problems.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
iMac running OS X 10.8.1:
Would not connect to an Asus router with WPA2. Would connect with WPA or WEP, or no security, but the connection dropped often.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Dell laptop running Windows 7 (Home, I think)
Would not connect to an Asus router *at all*, regardless of security settings. Tried everything.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Dell laptop running Windows Vista; internal WiFi broken, using a cheapie no-name WiFi dongle:
Connected to an Asus router with WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
No-name desktop running Windows XP:
Connected to an Asus router with WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Dell desktop running Windows 7 home:
Connected to an Asus router with WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Nintendo Wii:
Would not connect to an Asus router with WPA2. Did connect with WPA or WEP, but connection kept dropping.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Sony Playstation 3:
Connected to an Asus router with WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected with a Netgear router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Connected to a Linksys router using WPA2, WPA, and WEP.
Conclusions:
1. Yes, there is a problem in iOS 6. For me, at least, it seems related to WPA2 on certain routers. Folks aren't making it up; the problem is there.
2. The router/WPA2 combination problem isn't (necessarily) unique to Apple.
3. Asus routers are a bit rubbish.
...and I am utterly, thoroughly lost without GPS, even in my own back yard.
I upgraded my iPad to iOS 6, and discovered in Apple's Maps application a reason to hang on to my Android phone. There's quite a lot I really don't like about Android, but Google's maps app is undeniably the only thing that lets me find my way around.
Now if only I could figure out why the voice synthesis in the turn-by-turn navigation keeps stuttering and glitching since I upgraded to Android 4.0...
"Apple do this thing where they change the connectors/ports thus making aftermarket devices obsolete. Anyone remember nu bus?"
Indeed, I had a NuBus-equipped Mac way back in the day. I'm sure glad that other companies don't make their connectors and devices obsolete, and that computers today still use the same VESA LocalBus standard the PC I had at the same time used...oh, wait. :)
"Removable backs are a great place to get dust into your phone and they tend to be creaky or flexible."
That's actually a problem I've encountered with my HTC phone, which I got rid of my iPhone for.
On paper, the replaceable battery really seems like an idea. In practice, unless you have a Class 5 cleanroom in your pants--which I assure you, I do not--the removable back lid tends to be a great place for dust and grit to accumulate. In fact, I've discovered that every month or two I actually have to pry the back off my Sensation and blow the grit out, or else the wake/sleep switch atop the phone quits working.
Pragmatically, plug-in battery extenders and a sealed phone actually seem like a better solution to me. Of course, other people might disagree, which is why we have a choice in phones. Buy the one that suits your needs best, but don't slag off everyone else who makes a different choice for being an idiot. :)
Microsoft's Surface tablets, at least, includes keyboards....at least partially overcoming the concerns about using a touch screen for office work. I have a BlueTooth keyboard for my iPad, and have found it a passable solution for things like light word processing. Obviously, if I'm doing anything at all complex, I'm doing it on a real computer, but having a small keyboard on a tablet does make it at least marginally useful for office apps.
Jawbone already has a patent on this, as well. Some of their Bluetooth headsets have accelerometers on them, and you can tap the side of the headset to answer a call, hang up, or switch to another call. Difficult to see how Microsoft got this patent when the existing Jawbone patent is so clearly and directly on point.
Methinks you underestimate the range of the human experience. I have found that far from homogenizing people, social media lets people whose ideas differ vastly from the social norm find one another--sometimes for ill, often for good. I, for example, am blissfully unbounded by the need for social acceptance, but somehow I still manage to use social media just fine.
"Its about choice...."
You're right. It is about choice.
Do you like Android? Buy an Android. Prefer BlackBerry? Get one (quick, before they fold). You like Windows? Get a Windows phone. You like Apple? Get an iPhone.
Personally, I prefer iPhones. I went from an iPhone to an Android phone, I've had the Android pgone for a couple of years now, and I'm going back to iPhone. Other people may come to different conclusions. That's OK. It's about choice. Different people have different tastes.
But fer Chrissakes, quit whining like someone stepped on your puppy. It's a phone, not a Holy Chalice. You don't need to validate your wounded ego by bleating about how awful the other choice is and how only a rank idiot with the cognitive capacity of a rabid weasel on crystal meth would ever be so stupid to choose the other.
Seriously, these holy wars were tiresome back in the TRS-80 vs. Commodore-64 days.
Yes. I've had to file many DMCA takedown requests myself when people copy parts of my Web site[1] (it's not just big globocorps that benefit from the DMCA; sometimes, just by accident, the law benefits little guys like me too). The process requires specifically naming the bit that's a violation of copyright and asserting under penalty of perjury that you're the rights holder (or authorized to act on behalf of the rights holder) and that you have reason to believe the material in question is a copyright infringement.
It seems to me to be eminently reasonable that anyone who fails to fulfill these requirements should be arrested and tried for perjury. If we started arresting executives of copyright trolling firms and major movie or music labels when they abused the DMCA, we might actually find less abuse of the DMCA, which would suit me just fine. The notion of a bunch of trolls and record label execs in jail is not a bad cherry on top, too.
[1] I publish a great deal of stuff under a Creative-Commons-like attribute/no commercial use license. And even in spite of that, you'd be amazed how many folks lift my work and then try to either claim they wrote it themselves, or sell it. I am still surprised by the number of folks willing to steal that which is available for free.
Huh. That conductive paint looks interesting.
I got into Arduino hacking so I could make programmable sex toys (I've built a prototype vibrator guaranteed not to get the user off--it shuts down when you get close--and another that's an Arduino cobbled to a Neurosky EEG chip so that you can turn a sex toy on or off just by thinking about it, hands-free). This tech looks like it has all kinds of interesting potential uses. I'm already envisioning conductive ink painted on a person, with software on the Arduino that will trigger changes in the output when someone else touches it...dunno if the normally (relatively) low resistance of skin will be a problem though.
Back to the workshop!
"But of course there is an Universal Universe UP and DOWN!!!! Look at all the SciFi movies, especially Star Trek - you can easily see that all the space ships move on the same plane and have the same UP and DOWN as everyone else!!!"
Not many people know this, but in the Star Trek universe, all starships (whatever the race that creates them) are equipped with sensors allowing them to detect and orient themselves to the edges of your TV set.
"Itunes is a mess because it's designed to stop you sharing music files -- presumably the price Apple paid for getting the record companies on board the iTunes site."
Huh?
I've always been a bit baffled about why folks find iTunes so hard to use. I've found it quite easy:
Launch iTunes.
Click on your folder chock full o' MP3 goodness.
Hold down the mouse button and drag your MP3 folder into the iTunes window, where they'll all be imported into iTunes. You can, if you like, tell iTunes to leave the MP3 files where they are, or have it make copies of them and stash the copies in its own library. Your choice.
Click Sync.
Sit back and sip tea while your MP3 files zip over the USB cable onto your iPod.
It doesn't stop you from sharing them; they're still there, sitting on your hard drive, ready to be shared any way you like. It doesn't prevent you from using them with other devices. I'm flummoxed; what is it that makes iTunes so difficult?
With all the patent litigation flying around the tech sector, it's nice to see a part of the IT community where real, genuine competition still thrives. Oracle is competing with Adobe to make the most insecure, vulnerable software available, and we as computer users reap the bountiful rewards of that competition.
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