For those of you with a Kindle Amazon just released their reader software for Mac OS. This software allows you to read books purchased on the Kindle store on your laptop. I find the reason to get a Kindle and thus purchase books on the Kindle store is because of the glorious e-ink display. But I have begun wanting the ability to read some technical books on my computer screen. This should solve that niche need pretty well.
Tag: Technology
And People Want This Stuff in Their Cars
One thing people seem to clamber for more and more are methods of tracking and disabling cars remotely. Usually people talk about wanting to be able to track their car and disable it if it gets stolen. There are various methods of implementing such a device allowing for these things to be done via SMS or a web page. Of course companies that make these devices promote them as enhanced security and peace of mind. Parents love the idea of being able to track their teenager’s every move. The problem made apparent by Bruce Schneier is such devices are double-edged swords:
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
Oh yeah and the part to concern yourself with:
Ramos-Lopez’s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee’s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.
Any device that you can use to remotely disable your vehicle can be used by somebody else as well. In this case the devices were put into place by banks since the people buying the cars had been delinquent on payments. But after the WAY over-blown Toyota fiasco there is a lot of talk by government officials about requiring automobiles to be equipped with black boxes. If the government does that you can bet money they will also put in a remote kill switch.
Imitation is The Sincerest Form of Flattery
That’s always been Microsoft’s policy. Unfortunately the parts Microsoft usually imitate are the parts that suck. Take for instance Windows Series 7 Phone 7 Series Phone Phone Series 7 Phone 7 Series. Microsoft it taking some queues from Apple but they’re the bad ones.
Apparently Windows Phone 7 Series will not allow multi-tasking, installation of application not provided by Microsoft’s market place, and will not accept removable storage. These have always been the weak points of Apple’s iPhone in my opinion. I like being able to multi-task. Sure it can drain battery life but hey I’ll deal with that to gain added functionality. So it still looks like I’ll be moving to WebOS or Android when I decide to change out my phone.
End Of An Era
Well I knew this day would come eventually but alas it’s still rather sad. I received the following e-mail today:
Dear Developers,
For more than a year, Palm’s primary focus has been on webOS devices and
development. As development for legacy Palm devices has transitioned to new
development under webOS, we have made the decision to put all of our
resources into webOS development support. To this end, the Palm Developer
Network site (https://pdnet.palm.com), which supported legacy PalmOS and
Windows Mobile development for past-generation Palm devices, will be taken
offline effective April 30th. The PDN developer forums will be taken offline on
March 31st.If you would like to continue development on a platform similar to PalmOS and
would like assistance, we suggest that you contact ACCESS CO., LTD. at
http://www.access-company.com. ACCESS currently supports its own proprietary
Garnet OS platform, which is a variant of PalmOS 5. ACCESS may be able to
provide you with assistance under one of ACCESS’ own support or developer
programs. Please note, that ACCESS CO., LTD and Palm, Inc. are not related or
affiliated companies, and any assistance you may receive from ACCESS shall be
subject solely to ACCESS’ own terms and conditions.If you have development support issues for Windows Mobile applications, please
visit the Microsoft Developer Network for Windows Mobile at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx.We thank all of you for your support of PalmOS devices over the years, and hope
that you are all enjoying developing for webOS. If you haven’t started developing
for webOS, please visit http://developer.palm.com to learn more! We think you’ll
love the new platform.Best regards,
The Palm Developer Team.
It appears as though Palm OS is officially dead (No longer supported). I’m glad I already have copies of everything I’ve used while developing on Palm OS. I really wish Access (The owners of Palm OS) would open source the aging system but I doubt that will ever happen.
On the upside they are also dropping support for Windows Mobile. Good riddance!
Broadband For Free*
Tam at View From the Porch brings up an article dealing with the recent decision by the United States government to provide broadband for everybody. The article is about a whiny ninny web developer who is crying because she doesn’t have broadband:
Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn’t own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access.
By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university’s Web site, which she built and codes from scratch.
But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load. Her high school-age son is so fed up with the glacial pace of their Internet connection that he asks his mom to update his Facebook page from the office.
Let’s look at this shall we. My father is a mechanic and he owns his own shop. I can tell you one thing the government never provided him with a car, tools, hoist, alignment rack, or even a front desk. Likewise I don’t know a single photographer who has a camera purchased for them by the government. But using these examples this story tries to convince you that the government should be providing Ms. Prissy with boradband for her work? Why does a web developer get special treatment?
Oh because she’s in a rural area where she only has dial-up. Let me check if the government will provide tools to an auto shop that’s in a rural area away from any tool shop. Nope. Will the government provide cameras to photographers in locations far away from a camera store? Nope. Hm I guess those situations still remain irrelevant.
Stop running to the government every time you need something. Oh and I love this part:
She could install a satellite and connect to the high-speed Internet, but the installation fee is $300, and she said she can’t afford that right now. She’s been waiting for wired broadband to come to her home for five years, and she holds out some hope that the network will get to her eventually.
She can’t afford $300.00 but wants broadband Internet? How much money does she think it’ll cost to run wired broadband out to her rural house? Here’s a hint, a fucking lot. Of course I’m sure she’s fine with it so long as every tax payer in America is footing the bill and not just her. God this entitlement society pisses me off. And I haven’t even touched on the subject of government provided and therefore controlled Internet access.
* And by free I mean you’re paying for it through your tax dollars.
If Everything is Bigger In Texas What Are Things in The Former Soviet Union
They say everything is bigger in Texas. If that’s the case everything must be positively HUGE in the former Soviet Union. I present for your pondering pleasure the Lun class air craft. Also some massive photographs.
What was the Lun class transport? It was a soviet ground effect craft that could transport two million pounds of Soviet anger. To top it off it was also able to six nuclear warhead equipped surface to surface cruise missiles. The entire craft was powered by the collective rage of the Soviet Union. I believe the idea here was to nuke the shit out of the shoreline, release the peasant conscripts, and laugh manically as they died shortly afterward of radiation poisoning.
Seriously some of the shit thought up during the Cold War amazes me.
Terminator’s .45 Laser Sight
Here is a rather interesting article I stumbled upon. I’m sure everybody here has seen Terminator, if not go watch it. In the movie he uses a .45 with a laser sight attached to it. This day and age that doesn’t sound impressive but back in the ’80’s:
This was the early days of lasers for commercial use. “At that time we were dealing with helium neon laser. All the newer lasers are solid state, about the size of an aspirin or smaller.” HeNe lasers are much larger than that, he explained, and required about 10,000 volts to get started. Once ignited, they take 1,000 volts to keep them running. That makes the power supply a tricky thing to design.
Now consider the movie didn’t have a terribly high budget and this article makes for an interesting read.
Vision, This Man Had It
When it comes to the technology field we get some great predictions and quotations. For instance take this article written in 1995 for Newsweek:
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
That’s what I call a visionary! Oh and:
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Yeah there’s now way that online shopping thing could catch on. Never!
What $18 Million of Your Tax Money Gets You
This one comes to you courtesy of care of No Agenda. I’m sure everybody has heard of the government’s website for “tracking money” use in the “recovery effort.” If you haven’t you should have since $18 million of your tax money went to make it. Well either way part of the mandate for the site was that it needed to be accessible by the blind. That brings us to the complain form.
In order to submit a complaint you need to enter a capta. This is pretty standard and is mostly used to prevent spam bots from posting on a web site. Well blind people can’t use them as they can’t see the words so there is often an audio version of the capta for accessibility reasons. Click on the audio version link in the capta box on recovery.gov. Now try to decipher what is being said in those audio clips. Do you think you could understand what is being said and type it all into the box accurately? Didn’t think so.
Technically it’s recapta that is the problem here as recovery.gov is using that. But for $18 million you would think they could have come up with their own spam control system that blind people could use. Seriously funny and sad at the same time.
More On Big Brother
A few days ago I posted a story about a school district that got caught remotely activating built in web cams on laptops provided to students. Well some more information has come out. Apparently the school did activate the web cameras remotely 42 times. Of course they claim it was only to track stolen or lost laptops but I’m pretty sure those weren’t the only reasons considering how this case cam about. Now the fun part:
Either way, it looks like this is going beyond a civil case of the families suing the school district. The FBI is now investigating the case as well, to see if the district violated either wiretapping or computer-intrusion laws.
Now the FBI is involved. Yeah I hope this school district gets nailed to the wall over this. I’d love to see some people getting arrested or at least fired due to this whole fiasco.