“Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans”

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Interesting book, and interesting interview with the author. He says that Darwin “was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world”, then goes on to offer some pretty good evidence for how technology and the human brain set up a constant feedback loop that resulted in today’s humans.

Stupid Surveys

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What is it with companies these days? I just got an e-mail from a company I once did business with. They want me to spend “fifteen to twenty minutes” filling out an online survey, and in exchange they’re offering a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate.

A chance?!

If they were offering me the gift certificate itself, I’d probably do it. My professional time is worth more than the $30-to-$40 an hour that this works out to (assuming they are being honest about the time it would take), but I’d probably do it anyway, just to help out. But they’re only offering me an unspecified “chance” to win such a gift certificate. Apparently there’s only one such gift certificate, and likely several hundred survey-takers. Frankly, I’m more insulted by this offer than if they’d just asked me to do it without any offer of compensation.

I will definitely not be filling out their survey.

“Republican NY governor candidate sends out garbage-scented fliers”

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Talk about fighting dirty… 😉

Really though, this is a pretty shrewd move. Scent is a powerful anchor for memories. Anyone with a sense of smell who looks at this is going to be hard-pressed forget the association.

Of course, it might backfire. Think “my esteemed opponent, when he’s not playing in garbage…” 🙂 I doubt any Democrats will dare, since they won’t want to remind voters of their party’s starring role in it. An independent could get a lot of mileage out of it though.

My New iPod, Continued

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(This is the conclusion of yesterday’s post about my new fourth-generation 32GB iPod Touch. This first part is being written as iTunes loads my music and applications onto it for the first time.)

Kid in a candy store… GoddessJ didn’t sleep well last night, so she was taking a nap. When she got up to feed the cats, at around 1pm, she found me sitting in front of the living room window, with half my attention on the road outside. She asked me if I was waiting for the new iPod, and I answered by asking her just how sad it would be if I said yes. 🙂 I admit it, I’ve gotten essentially nothing done so far today, and probably won’t for the rest of the day either.

When it showed up, it was delivered by a UPS driver with the same unusual first name that I have, only the third I’ve met in my life. He asked me how old I was, and when I told him, was very happy to say that he was four years older, and the oldest person with that first name he knows. I’m not sure if he’s older than the other two that I’ve met, but I didn’t burst his bubble. 🙂

Unpacking was interesting. I couldn’t help but compare it to the first one. There was no helpful inclusion of a plastic adapter for the sync/charging base, like there was with the first one (not a big deal because I ordered a three-pack of them, delivered yesterday, since I have both a dock and a set of portable speakers that needed one). There was also no iPod-shuffle-like controller on the headphones, like there reportedly was with the third-generation one, just the same plain old white ear-buds that I got with my original one (also not a big deal, I ordered a Belkin adapter with remote too, delivered two days ago). There was just the iPod Touch itself, the ear-buds, and a sync cable. Oh, and (of course) a pair of Apple logo stickers. 🙂

It feels very weird in my hand, compared to the first-generation one. Thinner. Lighter. It’s not as curved as I’d been led to expect, it sits very nicely on it’s back.

The first sync took a little while. iTunes asked me if I wanted to restore it from my first-generation Touch’s most recent backup, and when I told it yes, it proceeded to put everything back onto it. Beautiful.

Here are my thoughts while using it for the first time:

  • Power button is on the upper-right instead of the upper-left, and is fairly recessed. Works fine if I’m holding it in my left hand and use my left index finger to press it though.
  • It was almost fully charged out of the box. Nice, I hate waiting for new electronics to charge before playing with them.
  • There’s a sound when turning it on or off now!
  • There’s a BACKGROUND PICTURE behind the icons!
  • TONS more alarm sounds — good thing, I was very tired the half-dozen that came with the old one, only two of which I found worth using.
  • Screen feels weird. Almost papery. Don’t know if that’s just because it’s new, but I like it. (Later: seems to be just the new-screen feel, once I’d used it for a little while it felt the same as the older one.)
  • Very noticeably faster, both in processing and downloading. Animations are much smoother.
  • Hm, not quite everything auto-loaded onto it. I had to enter my wireless network password separately, but from a security perspective, that’s fine by me.
  • Microphone and speaker work beautifully. Skype (over the local wireless network) is very clear through them. Dragon Dictation works extremely well too.
  • I love the ability to “stack” programs (like sticking them in folders). Had to play with it a while before I figured out how I wanted them, but I’ve got all the ones that I want to see on a single screen now, with some room to spare, thanks to a “games” stack and a “useful” stack (programs that aren’t used often enough to be on the main screen, but are still used commonly enough that I don’t want to banish them to the dark and seldom-visited recesses of the later screens).
  • The screen really is a lot better. I don’t notice it under normal circumstances, but when I go into a program like Read It Later that shows web pages, I can actually read the text without zooming in first — something that just wasn’t possible with the older one.
  • I used it almost continuously for three hours, and the battery meter has barely moved!

And later:

  • The eReader app didn’t restore properly either. Every time I tried to start it, it crashed and dropped me back to the home screen. Reinstalling it fixed that, but of course, wiped out all my books. Fortunately I was able to re-download them with no problem, and I had a record of the credit card number I used when I bought them so I could still decrypt them.
  • It seems noticeably louder than the older one, though the different set of ear-buds that I’m using might contribute to that. Previously, when I was out walking and got to a busy street, I could have it turned to maximum and barely hear what my podcasts were saying when a car passed. This time I could hear them with only minor problems with the iPod set to just three-quarters power. I’ll have to experiment further with that.
  • The new camera apparently isn’t sharp enough for the Key Ring app to read barcodes, either that or something else went wrong. Bummer. Of course, the fact that it has a camera at all is still a big improvement.
  • I’m ambivalent about the user interface for the multitasking system. We’ll see how it works out in practice.
  • There’s nothing to attract your attention to the voice control option. If I hadn’t noticed mention of it in the Wikipedia article, I’d never have known to look for it. It should come in handy when I’m driving.

That’s all for now. I probably won’t post about it again (I know this kind of thing can be boring), unless something particularly interesting comes up.

UPDATE: I just tried my Think Outside folding Bluetooth keyboard with it — the one that I bought to use with one of my last Palm PDAs — and it worked! AWESOME! If I want to travel light, but still have the ability to quickly take notes, I can just take the keyboard and the iPod Touch now!

My New iPod

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I bought a 16GB first-generation iPod Touch a few years ago. It has served me well, but its battery is starting to wear out, and iOS updates will no longer work with it. So when the fourth-generation ones came out a few weeks ago, I was ready to buy a new one.

They’ve added a lot of new and drool-worthy features. Twice the processor speed and working memory. Twice the storage (I bought the 32GB version since the 16GB hasn’t being made for a while now). Twice the battery life of this one even when it was new. Built-in speaker and microphone. iOS 4, with pseudo-multitasking among other things. Hardware volume controls. Headphone-mounted play/pause button. Bluetooth support. Voice control and VoiceOver. “Retina display.” Cameras. Gyroscope. Faster wireless networking (802.11n, earlier models only supported b and g).

Apple hasn’t been sitting still, that’s for sure.

So I ordered one last week. It shipped a few days ago, and I’ve been amusing myself (and soothing my impatience) by watching its progress via the tracking information on the UPS website. It started out in China, moved to Alaska, then bounced down to Kentucky (presumably crossing Canada along the way). It stayed there for thirty hours (!!), then left for New York, where it arrived a little after 1am this morning, local time.

With any luck, it will continue its journey while I sleep. The city it’s reported to be in is only a few hours away from me as the crow flies, so there’s a chance it could be on a delivery truck today. If it doesn’t make it that far before morning, I’ll probably have to wait until Monday for it… oh well, I’ve waited this long, what’s one more weekend, eh? (To which my inner five-year-old whimpers “but that’s FOREVER!” I know, kid, I feel the same way.)

UPDATE: It only spent twenty minutes at the New York facility, so there’s still hope. Fingers crossed! 🙂

UPDATE 2: It made it here — the website says it’s “out for delivery”! 😀

UPDATE 3, 1:48pm: IIIIIT’S HEEEEERRRRRRE!

“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”

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It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money from bank accounts) to, all unaware, bring down vital services for a huge area, or as in this case, contribute to bringing down a plane.

What to do about it? Well, the first thing would be DO NOT USE AN INSECURE FREAKIN’ CONSUMER OS LIKE WINDOWS ON VITAL CONTROL SYSTEMS!

A report released earlier this week says that 99.4% of malware is written for Windows. Why? It’s not just because Windows is the most common OS today, running on an estimated 80% of consumer systems; there are many more Linux servers running on the Internet than Windows ones, yet malware that targets servers (or tries to automatically run on any system) is almost exclusively aimed at Windows systems.

Windows was designed as a single-user system. Security is hard to do and annoys people, so programmers won’t design it into single-user systems. Such systems, the thought runs, don’t need to protect themselves from their user, because if the user does something stupid, he’s the only one that suffers. They don’t need to protect users from each other either, because there’s only one user to deal with.

Malware that targets people is also inevitably targeted at Windows, because Windows users can easily be tricked into letting such programs run. They’re trained to let programs run, not to think about whether they should let them run.

The problem is that when you try to bolt on security as an afterthought, it leaks like a sieve. There’s no defense-in-depth, all a malicious person has to do is get through a single layer of security and he owns the OS, and the machine it runs.

I doubt much malware will ever be written for Linux, and certainly not successful malware. Linux is based on a multi-user OS that was designed from the ground up to protect the system from its users, and protect the users from each other. On a Linux machine, only a system administrator has the power to open the system to that kind of subversion; even if a user does manage to install malware, he can only damage his own files with it, he can’t infect the system itself or the files of other users. The model had survived decades of bored college students before Windows was even a glint in Bill Gates’ eye.

The upshot: there is a secure OS, easily and freely available today, that will prevent disasters if used on industrial control systems. It is called Linux. Windows is not an equally-secure substitute, no matter what Microsoft claims, and it never will be.

Nothing’s going to change because of this post, except that I feel a little better for saying something. Businesses are still going to choose Windows, because a company like Microsoft, and an OS like Windows, is “too big to fail” (sound familiar?). Linux will continue to get the short end of the stick, except in places where technical people are given free rein and an absolute minimum budget (like server rooms). And disasters like Spanair flight 5022 will continue to happen. But some day people will start to put two and two together, and Windows will slowly be banished from control systems everywhere. Let’s hope it starts happening soon.