SuperBoB » technology

More on tablets

bob — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:38:38 +0000

I guess the Apple rumors have struck a nerve considering the number of new articles and commentaries written about the possibility. I liked Mr. Fulton’s take on this as he generally seems to have a level opinion on things, not too hot or too cold. Mr. Wilcox, not to be left out, has responded to his responders. After reading this second article, I can believe that he wanted to start a good discussion. However, his attempt to show “I’m one of you guys” by pointing out other articles he has written about technology in general and Apple in particular, seem to me to be about covering his bases. If the “iSlab”, (his nominal label) fails, he was right in predicting it. If it does well, he wrote this second article explaining why it did well and how he’s always been an Apple backer; so again, he was right. This probably sounds more negative than I mean it to be, because I am happy he wrote the original item and the follow-up piece as well. I think this is because I’m a news junkie and wanted something to carry me over until the (I hope) eventual announcement of such a device.

Others, including Mr. Scoble, Mr. Carr, and Mr. Flores also weighed in on the original article. Although I liked this last article the most out of the three, I had two issues with it. 1) The price still has to be low enough. Even adding magazine/newspaper/textbook subscriptions, media center remote control, and more pleasant web surfing doesn’t make me want to splash out more than $400 for such a device. Even that seems high. However, if Mr. Scoble is right, then all I have to do is wait to hit the price point I want. 2) I love the idea of textbooks, but textbook publishers as a group are generally stupid. I don’t think they will be much more enlightened than the RIAA, MPAA, Author’s Guild, or game publishers. They will love the idea of charging the same amount for an electronic textbook that expires after one semester as they do for the physical copy. They will even have all kinds of justifications of how this is better for the consumer and why they still need to charge the same amount. The especially dull in the group will even argue that they should charge more. In the end, they will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new business model invented by someone else, like iTunes, Netflix, Steam just like the other groups before them. Hopefully, the business cycles have shortened and someone “disrupts” them faster. Although they aren’t perfect, I like the way that Manning Publications Co. has enabled electronic copies. Maybe they would consider branching out into the general textbook publishing world if something like the “iSlab” gave them an opening. I guess one can hope.

The next step after arthroscopy, rebuilding knees

bob — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:33:20 +0000

I need this, or at least I think I will in about 20 years. I never liked the concept of scraping cartilage out of my knees. Doesn’t that leave me with less cartilage? Scientists are working on a procedure which goes far beyond just scraping the piece out. In fact, this even goes beyond microfacture surgery. This still isn’t true cartilage replacement from what I can tell, but considering that bone marrow can actually contain stem cells, and what microfracture surgery does, it kind of makes sense. Hopefully, they can continue along this line until the gel can contain extra stem cells when injected.

Bacteria are our friends

bob — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:05:04 +0000

Not only have scientists found new evidence of the Panspermia hypothesis, but they are now discovering that life may have the possibility to exist on a really small scale. In addition, scientists are learning how to harness this small life to do amazing stuff, like turning waste into hydrocarbon chains that look like petroleum.

Loading Firefox Extensions without the Restart

bob — Wed, 28 May 2008 02:43:06 +0000

Steve Yegge talked about programs that you don’t have to restart in his blog post on the Pinocchio Problem. Firefox is stable enough now, that the biggest need for restarts is messing with extensions (installing, enabling, uninstalling, disabling, updating).
You can do your own Firefox Extension Development after first setting up the environment. This gives you some ability to rework extensions without the Firefox restart. There is also a nifty extension boilerplate generator tool that can bootstrap that first extension in less than a minute.

More exciting is GreaseMonkey, where you can do a lot of damage without restarting. Greasemonkey scripts can then be turned into extensions after you have perfected them.

Yubikey and OpenID

bob — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:13:04 +0000

I like to listen to Security Now! when I’m out walking. Episode 143 had an explanation of a new product called Yubikey. The basic idea is that you have a device that plugs into a USB port and is recognized as a keyboard. Pushing the only button on the device causes it to type a 44 character string which acts essentially like a One-Time Password. Combining this idea with something like OpenID, you can have a relatively secure authenticator. It could be combined with a password/passphrase challenge to provide two-factor authentication. This isn’t anything new, as VeriSign and Paypal have tokens. The same limitations of physical tokens exist, mainly that your Yubikey could be lost. In the case of the USB interface, the interface on the USB could be physically damaged or worn down.

The pros of this device are where my interest lies. Yubico has opened up the specification and is providing SDK’s to make this work. Ubico has provided an OpenID provider that can use a Yubikey or you can host your own authentication server. For anybody who wanted to build their own system or experiment, this seems incredible. VeriSign is not likely to give you their code and let you set up your own token server to use with their tokens. That is Yubico’s business model. They want you to set up your own system and are working to help you do so. The second big pro is ease of use. It is not hard to see the 6 digit key on a VeriSign token and type this in to an input box, but the 6 digit key is pretty limited. Yubikey on the other hand has enough digits to play with that it can build some smarts in. The key is uniquely identified by the string it sends. It can now function as your id/username. The string as a whole is a unique string that acts as a One-Time Password. So with one string, I can provide a name/password pair to identify myself. The server can take the name piece of this to look up and check against my password. This string is generated by inserting the USB device and pressing a button. This is esentially one-button login. Combined with OpenID, it is essentially one-button login to a lot of websites. On top of that, you can’t “give your password away” to a phisher. You could lose the Yubikey, which is why I would recommend using it in conjunction with another password, but someone can’t sniff out a physical key. This is pretty cool. I recommend checking out the Yubikey link for more info.

Enhanced Reality and Illusions

bob — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:20:30 +0000

I read two interesting articles involving perception today. The first describes “projection” by our brain of what the immediate future will be based on what we are seeing. This is rather intriguing because it seems to describe optical illusions as caused by our mental processing of visual input. Where does this projection happen? If I bypass the optical nerve, where do I have to “hook in” to get raw input and not a massaged version of that input. If the article is correct, I wouldn’t normally want to do this. It would look like latency on a Quake server. I think the Quake analogy is appropriate because of the next article. frog design has come up with a “helmet” that would filter out perception. The article mentions that sight, smell, and sound could all be filtered. Consider that Quake clients had to predict where the viewpoint would be based on information it got from the server. If this prediction wasn’t in place, you got the sluggish, almost drunken response to controls. If latency got high enough, you got this behavior anyway. Nicolas Cage was in a movie release last year called “Next”. If a client in the helmet could be used to predict the future, possibly for up to seconds in the future, would we get the type of effect that Cage’s character Cris Johnson had? Because we would take too long to adapt our normal vision, I would anticipate a split-screen effect, where one part of the screen would show the proposed future while the other piece would show a basically unedited stream. I say basically unedited, because the present stream could still have enhancements like I have mentioned in earlier posts. There could still be enhanced range of vision, such as false color IR and UV ranges. There could also be on-screen HUD information showing additional information about a view, such as recognition of landmarks, or distance to a marked item. For the future stream, I don’t know if this would give us “bullet time”, but it would be an interesting application of the technology.

Virtual Police Lineup

bob — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:44:01 +0000

When I saw my brothers playing Tiger Woods golf on PS3, the character creator struck me as something that could eventually be useful to police sketch artists. Without having a whole lot of drawing ability, one could still use this tool to create a sketch of an alleged criminal. In fact, if a possible victim was able to run the software, they might be able to create a sketch on their own. Now someone has taken this one step further and created a virtual police lineup. We aren’t quite in the big brother society of V for Vendetta yet, but if you look at the CCTV system in England, it doesn’t seem too far away to have software that would compare a virtual sketch with faces caught on CCTV. Possibly this could be limited to cameras in the alleged area of the crime. The software would compare facial features to find possible matches. Possible matches could be put into a virtual police lineup. I actually feel that a scenario like this is pretty scary and perhaps awful. There are some protections like the Data Protection Act, which one band actually used recently to help film their music video. I will admit that I haven’t read the act and don’t know if people caught in this virtual dragnet would have to be informed that film of them was used. However, I doubt it considering how hard it would be to identify someone in the camera and tie them to an address if they weren’t a Person of Interest. Just because a scenario is scary doesn’t necessarily mean that the government won’t try. Even if the government (in this case of England) would shy away, I expect some private company would be more than willing to try it out. Minority Report was another movie with some very bad ideas. Call it Pre-Crime or call it guessing, but people in the movie were definitely convicted before they committed the crime. There wasn’t a court case, much less a presumed innocent phase. So I guess technology is wonderful, but unfortunately, because of the way it is used, technology is scary.

Bring on my Bionic Eyes

bob — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:09:08 +0000

Unfortunately, I don’t have 20/20 vision. Fortunately, more options are opening up all the time from RadK therapy to Lasik. However, I think want to bypass that and go straight for the Bionic Eyes. Granted, they aren’t perfected yet, but I am eagerly awaiting the days when something like this provides not only basic vision that most people (thought not all) take for granted, but advanced abilities such as infrared vision or visual overlays. Until then, I’ll be content to look at the pretty pictures with my Mark 1.0 eyeballs the way the God intended.

Is this the future of the world workforce?

bob — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:43:43 +0000

As Japan’s workforce ages, they look to replace retiring workers with robots. As the population pyramid in the US flattens out, will we have to do something similar? It seems likely that as countries move from a developing status to “developed” nations, their populations will also flatten out. As a comparison to the US, check out Japan’s population pyramid. They are simply farther along a curve that technology is likely to take countries. Combine this with the advances of technology worldwide in general. Consider Licklider’s paper from 1960, or Vannevar Bush’s seminal article from 1948 to see both two amazing prognosticator’s, and how far technology has come in that time.

Cyber-BoB

bob — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:33:47 +0000

Combine LED Contact Lenses, with a way to power them using only body heat, and we have another way to hack the senses, by enhancing something already there. This dovetails with my earlier thoughts on hacking the senses. I’m still leery of getting Lasik surgery, but I want better living through technology. Better living through chemistry wouldn’t be bad either, but I’m sure it puts me on some government watch list just to use that phrase.