Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/30/2011 - 08:59
Folks at Dartmouth and the University of Bologna (Italy) have developed a smartphone app that uses the phone's camera to determine if, as you walk down the street, you are about to be run over by a car. This is expected to save the lives of many Darwin Award candidates who walk while texting.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 07:59
Facebook rolled out an updated interface and a bunch of new features yesterday, and I spent some time yesterday evening looking at what they had did. There is much buzz about a new music-sharing service, but to me, the most significant change is the addition of "lists," which is the equivalent of Google+ "circles." The concept is identical: you can group your friends and contacts into sets, and you can look at only what is going on in that set of contacts, rather than having to plow through every item that gets posted to your wall.
If you have lots of friends, this is a major improvement in usability. And it probably would not have happened if Google+ had not built a better mousetrap. Facebook was forced to respond, and they did. I have seen some grousing about how long it took Facebook to add the new feature, but as an old applications programmer, I'm impressed that Facebook rolled it out in just about three months, to 750 million users. That's good software and version control management.
Facebook has also changed the way you set your privacy options, and to me, it is also a big improvement--it's much easier to understand now who can see what.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 08/25/2011 - 09:49
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave."
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
No, wait, that was William Shakespeare. I'm trying to take a little vacation this week, and so I set an auto-responder on my business email account that automatically sends out an email to anyone who emails me, noting that I won't be in the office until next Monday. But I forgot that my only lightly used Facebook account has my business email address.
I also did not know notice that when Facebook sends you an email telling you someone has posted something of interest, that you can just reply to that email, rather than logging in to Facebook. Facebook takes your reply email and posts it on your wall or as a comment on someone else's wall.
Two handy little pieces of code, each handily doing their own thing. Until the two pieces of code meet each other. In a thread about my upcoming high school reunion, almost a dozen of my "I'm on vacation" notices have been posted in the last three days. Everytime someone comments on that thread, I get an email, and my vacation auto-responder responds, and my vacation notice gets posted yet again.
The fix was simple enough. I changed my Facebook email to my personal email account. But the complexity of our software continues to grow, and occasionally produces unpredictable results. Good testing of software is more important than ever.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 16:01
A new piece of software for the iPad demonstrates the innovation taking place within the Apple App Store software universe. SoundNote lets an iPad user take text notes that are automatically synced with an accompanying audio recording. Who would want this? Students....take your notes in class on your iPad while your iPad records the audio from the entire lecture. When you go back later to read your notes, click to hear the audio starting from wherever you are in your written notes. And it costs $5. That's right, five dollars. We have not even scratched the surface of the kind of applications that the iPad and other tablet devices are going to support.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 09:35
Benoit Mandelbrot, who created the mathematics of chaos and complexity, has passed on. James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science is, in my opinion, one of the best introductions to chaos theory, with a minimum of mathematics. As a side note, the phrase "chaos theory" is a misnomer, as Mandelbrot's major contribution was to show that the incredible complexity of nature could be modeled with very simple, almost trivial, equations.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 10:29
I was talked into going to see the movie "The Social Network" last night. Ostensibly about the rise of Facebook, it's hard to know how much of it was based on facts and how much was fantasy. I know that I thought the movie would never end. I can't recall another film in recent memory where every single character was so consistently unlikable. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, probably is hard to get along with, but by the end of the movie, I was starting to feel sorry for him. If you check the Wikipedia entry on Mark Zuckerberg", Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, admits that the movie may not have much to do with the real story behind Facebook. Fair enough--few movies based on a real life story do stick closely to the facts.
What I found depressing was the relentless anti-business, anti-geek, anti-software message the film seemed to have. After watching the film, if you have not worked in the software business, it would be easy to leave the theatre thinking that software is developed by misogynist, greedy, self-centered nerds with personality disorders who have only two activities: writing software or drinking heavily and using illegal drugs. There were only six other people in the theatre, so I suspect this movie has already passed its prime.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 12:14
In another sure sign of the eventual rise of SkyNet, a turn by turn GPS device guided a driver into a lake, where the man drowned. A second person in the car was able to escape. These devices are making us stupid.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 12:09
The city of Washington, D.C. challenged hackers to try to break into one of their secure Internet-based electronic voting system. It was part of a test for the software before deploying it in the city--letting D.C. voters skip going to the polls and voting online instead. Well, students from the University of Michigan hacked into the system and re-programmed the software to play the Michigan fight song after each vote.
The online voting project has been suspended. The online system was intended to make it easier to submit absentee ballots. Security experts had warned the city that the system would be vulnerable to attacks, and so it was. We have a perfectly good paper ballot and mechanical ballot system that is extremely resistant to internal manipulation. Making it "more convenient" to vote by introducing vulnerable systems is not progress.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 09/16/2010 - 16:05
In making a hotel reservation, I wanted to double check how to get from the hotel (B) to the office building (A) where the meeting will be held. The hotel appears to be less than one block from the office building. But the loop-de-loop blue line is the route that the map software gave. And that's why I seldom use a GPS device in the car.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 09:47
What do the following things have in common?
All of the above were the latest and greatest IT buzzphrases that, over the past thirty years, were supposed to solve all the world's IT problems. Cloud computing, which by squinting only slightly, could be replaced with the word "mainframe," is the latest buzzphrase.
A good buzzphrase is meaningless, so that it can be used in a variety of conflicting and confusing ways, meaning different things to different vendors and organizations. And cloud computing is no exception. Two incidents this week highlight the fact that cloud computing is just as vulnerable to problems as every past IT buzzphrase.
In Virginia, the Department of Motor Vehicles has been unable to issue drivers licenses for almost a week because the systems that manage that have been down. Some years ago, the state outsourced DMV computer operations to a third party, which has been having some problems getting the computers back up. This situation is basically a "cloud" computing model, where a third party in a remote location provides a service to the DMV--the processing of drivers licenses. In this case, the DMV has outsourced a core function, which puts the organization at risk if there is a major failure, as accountability for the failure is diluted via a business contract--as opposed to calling the head of IT in for a dressing down.
A second incident was personal. I got a call from a well-known nationally recognized bank, which happens to hold our mortgage. They claimed that we had missed a payment, but oddly, could not tell us immediately what month we had missed. It took over an hour on the phone speaking to a total of six different people before we figured out the problem. What does that have to do with cloud computing?
We pay our mortgage using the bank's online payment system, which is basically a cloud computing application. What I found out is that it is riddled with design flaws and bugs. We had confirmation numbers for every payment in the past several months, but several of the people we talked to had no way of looking up those confirmation numbers--confirmation numbers generated by their own cloud computing application. Furthermore, they stubbornly insisted that in fact, we had never even logged in to make a payment recently, even though we had confirmation numbers! What this told me was that their system stinks; it lacks adequate logging of transactions, loses transactions, and that the bank's internal interface used by their staff is grossly inadequate to provide even minimal customer service. The idea that a major bank could provide a customer with a confirmation number for a large financial transaction and then later have NO RECORD of that transaction is appalling.
Is cloud computing bad? No. It's a tool, just like any other IT tool. But slapping the term "cloud computing" on a computer system does not make it invulnerable to problems, and does not mitigate problems caused by careless design, inadequate planning, and poor data management.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/06/2010 - 09:08
Here is an article that alleges that Boulder, Colorado's SmartGridCity project is in deep trouble. The article has a long laundry list of problems, but what jumped out at me is the list of so-called "partners." If you look at the SmartGridCity Partners page, you can see the root problem of this project is too many cooks. Just the administrative overhead of supporting this list of high priced consulting firms would sink any project. And the descriptions that accompany each partner reads like one of those buzz-phrase generators you find online. Here are a sampling of the buzz phrases:
So you have at least seven companies with seven proprietary and very likely incompatible technology "solutions" that are going to use taxpayer dollars to try to do a mash up of their stuff that will somehow save money. These kinds of efforts never work, in part because if you start with seven complex technologies, it is impossible to make them less complex by combining them. Fifty years of software development studies have shown this over and over again. It's not that different than Fred Brooks' mythical man month treatise, in which he showed that adding more workers to a software project already late just makes it later--in large part because adding more workers makes the development process more complex. The same principle is likely at work here. Adding more complex power management software to an already complex design makes it even more complex and, as study after study has shown, more error prone.
Here at Design Nine, we call ourselves "broadband architects" or "information architects." We work the way the traditional architect works--we do a clean, coherent high level design for our clients first, develop the financing and funding strategies needed to show the client how it will pay for itself, and then and only then do we go out to vendors.
My guess is that Smart Grid City ended up with seven or more "design" firms all trying to gain an advantage for their own stuff, and Boulder ended up with a mess. It's as if you wanted a house built, and instead of having an architect produce the design and supervise the construction, you told the plumber, the carpenters, the electrician, and the drywall guys to get together and come up with something. It's called "design by committee," and it is never pretty.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 08:21
There has been a long running debate about artificial intelligence, with a large contingent of computer scientists always proclaiming that computers "smarter than humans" is only five years away. And there has been a small but persistent group of computer scientists who have insisted computers will never be "smarter than humans."
Here is an interesting read on speech recognition and why it has never caught on. The "computers will be smarter than humans" crowd will scoff at this and insist that speech recognition has little to do with artificial intelligence, but if you can't write a program to recognize speech, how are you going to write a program to make a computer "smarter" than a human? Our ability to hear and cognitively process the spoken work is absolutely staggering, and after thirty plus years of attempts to duplicate it, speech recognition is still lousy. Spend just a few minutes on the phone with one of those voice mail speech recognition systems (...say Customer service.... "Cus-tom-er ser-vice"...I'm sorry, I did not understand, say Customer service..."Cuuuusssttttommmer Seerrrrvvviccce"....I'm sorry, I did not understand, returning to Main Menu...) knows that speech recognition stinks.
Update (10/2011)
Apple's Siri voice recognition app on the iPhone 4S shatters whatever any of us previously thought about voice recognition. Siri does an incredible job of taking dictation and processing routine smartphone requests.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/01/2010 - 06:06
[Cupertino, CA, 4/1] Apple Computer announced today that it had purchased a majority share of the Microsoft Corporation by buying virtually all founder Bill Gate's remaining stock. Gates has continued to be the single largest stockholder, with approximately 56% of the outstanding shares of the company. The transaction, estimated to be worth $30 billion, still leaves Apple with a substantial cash reserve of at least $10 billion.
Gates, the increasingly reclusive founder of Microsoft, has not been actively involved in the management of the company for some years. He and his wife, Melinda Gates, have been spending much of their time on philanthropic work via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A spokesperson for the Foundation indicated that the Gates' had already indicated they planned to give most of the funds to the Foundation to help with the two keystone projects promoted by the Gates: malaria remediation in Africa and improvements in American libraries.
Gates himself has made no comment about the sale, but a short statement was released that said in part, "In recent years I have become increasingly embarrassed at the slow pace of innovation in Microsoft, and when I saw the iPad announcement back in January, I realized the company I founded had really fallen behind. I decided it was time to sell my shares and try to do some good with the money."
An Apple spokesperson said there would not be many immediate changes in the way Microsoft will be run, but did indicate that Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer might want to polish up his resume. Apple said the only thing the Cupertino firm intended to do right away was to eliminate Internet Explorer. Apparently, within weeks, IE users will be notified via the AutoUpdate software that a new Web browser is available, and when the update is run, Apple's Windows version of Safari will be downloaded and installed, and IE will be deleted. The Apple spokesperson said, "IE is and always has been nothing but a hack, and there are millions of Web designers whose lives have been significantly shortened, to say nothing of damage to their mental health, by having to try to make their Web page designs work with that piece of crap."
Apple also indicated that while Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint would be phased out in favor of Apple's word processing and presentation software, Apple would keep Excel for the time being. "We did some research, and we found most major U.S. corporations would collapse if Excel was phased out. You cannot believe how many bad Excel macros have been written by 27 year olds with brand new Wharton School MBAs. I mean, the spaghetti code we saw in Excel spreadsheets was downright frightening. I don't how those companies keep running."
When asked about the purchase, Apple said their primary interest was in what they called the "bitter clinger" market. "There are tens of millions of Microsoft customers still using Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Ironically, using our virtualization software or third party virtualization software like VMware Fusion or Parallels, the 'bitter clinger' crowd can have a better experience running Windows on a Mac. I mean, Windows 98 kicks butt running in Parallels on a brand new 27" iMac."
On news of the announcement, Apple stock jumped $14 to a current high of $228, while a sell off of Microsoft stock has begun.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 16:29
IBM has announced a new online service based on the popular Lotus Notes. The new service is called LotusLive iNotes, and the new service is aimed squarely at both Microsoft Exchange and Google's Apps Premier Edition. Regular readers know that I don't have much tolerance for the whole cloud computing buzz--it's a glorified mainframe, with less fault tolerance and much less data security. If I had to bet IBM's offering against Google, I'd go with IBM every time. Nobody knows how to do big, distributed computing better than IBM. Google is starting to get squeezed a bit, which is a good thing. I've been using Microsoft's Bing search engine for several weeks, and really like it--better results all around with far less dreck. And now IBM enters battle with Google. Good. Competition is great for everyone, especially buyers of services.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 09/06/2009 - 10:47
Diebold has thrown in the towel on its troubled voting machines business. It has sold the whole division to its competitor, ES&S. Diebold electronic voting machines have been plagued with problems, and the company says it is writing off tens of millions in losses, due primarily to lawsuits from disgruntled local governments who bought the machines only to find out they are a security nightmare.
Those of us that warned for years that electronic voting machines were a recipe for disaster can take little comfort in being right. Unfortunately, taxpayers are the big losers, as local governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars on untested equipment, much of which has had to be replaced already. It is not that the technology is inherently flawed--indeed, there are a few simple ways to make electronic voting machines reliable and auditable, like producing a paper record of votes entered. Buying technology and relying entirely on vendor promises can lead to unpleasant surprises.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 08:21
This story says that software for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch has grown to $2.5 billion. This is a market that did not exist just two years ago. What the article does not mention is that most of the programmers writing and selling software for the iPhone are working from home, and many of those businesses are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
This is where broadband becomes important. These home-based software businesses have to have reliable, high performance broadband connections--to coordinate activities with other programmers and co-workers also working with home, to upload and download software, and to access online business services (e.g. accounting, printing, etc.) that enables these work from businesses.
Economic developers: What is your strategy for attracting these new home-based businesses? Are you working with local builders and developers to ensure that "Internet ready" homes are available? Are you supporting a regional effort to improve access and affordability of broadband? Do you have a virtual business incubator that is designed to help home-based entrepreneurs grow successfully?
Communities that market their quality of life, their recreational resources, and that have open access broadband have a recipe for growth.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 08:36
The intertubes are abuzz with news about Google's announcement of its Chrome browser-based operating system. Folks that think it will be a Microsoft killer will be disappointed. The new entry to the OS marketplace will erode Microsoft market share at about the same rate competing software like Apple's OS X and the Unix-based Ubuntu. It's bad news for Microsoft, but the new software will barely put a dent in the Redmond company in the short term.
The good news is that more options are a good thing. Not everyone has the same needs, and having a variety of operating system choices, each with a different set of price points, applications, and features creates more competition, more pressure to continuously improve each OS, and more pressure to deliver more at reasonable prices.
Part of the reason Microsoft has been losing market share is because for a long time, there was a lack of competition. The company had little pressure to innovate, reduce prices, or add real value. With Google bringing yet another OS to market, Microsoft has to work harder to keep existing customers and to attract new customers. That is good for everyone.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/31/2009 - 09:02
Skype is now available for the iPhone. Sound quality for iPhone to iPhone connections on WiFi networks is excellent, and if you leave the Skype app running (in the foreground) you can turn the phone off and still get calls. However, if Skype is not the main app, you cannot receive calls, so there are still some limitations on the usefulness of it on the iPhone. But all that is set to change in June or July, when Apple releases the next major software upgrade for the iPhone, which is supposed to include "presence," or the ability of applications like Skype to sit in the background and still run--in the case of Skype, you could be browsing the Web or sending email and still receive incoming Skype calls.
Skype support for the iPhone is a big deal. There have been some helper apps that allowed Skype calls or used another third party VoIP service, but having your Skype phone book and preferences on the iPhone is very convenient, and at least gives you the ability to make phone calls via the Internet even when not in range of an AT&T cell tower.
When the software upgrade is released this summer and presence is fully supported, it will help sell more iPhones without a cell provider service contract. For some people, just having VoIP on the iPhone will be enough.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 18:48
A new study of smartphone Web browsing shows the iPhone positively crushing the competition. The Apple iPhone accounts for 33% of all the Web browsing being done by smartphones. The nearest competitor is a Nokia phone, the N70, with a measly 7.1%. After that, it goes downhill even more rapidly, with most of the other phones in the top ten barely breaking 3%. The iPhone has a good, fast Web browser, a large readable screen, and a touch interface; the combination is unbeatable at this time.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 10:16
Verizon gets a pat on the back for cracking down on spam. The company has announced that it will finally close Port 25 on its mail servers. Port 25 allows email be sent without any authentication, making it easy for spammers to use "zombie" PCs infected with spambot software to send spam email. The change will make it more difficult to send spam from infected PCs and will also make it easier to identify infected machines, since the infected machines will have to now provide authentication before sending the spam. Judging from the comments in the this article, anyone who provides PC support for a fee will see a surge in business helping some home users make the change. A single setting buried in each user's email client on their PC has to be changed; it only takes a minute if you know where it is, but if you don't, it can be frustrating (you won't be able to send mail until it is changed). Verizon will likely provide detailed instructions for a variety of email software.
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