First, a while ago I read this interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He expresses confusion that Google seems to be abandoning Android as a netbook OS in favor of Chrome OS. I was a little confused about that too, but Chrome OS does make more sense on a non-touch screen netbook than Android does. Also, the idea that an OS is really a browser is something Ubuntu needs to start thinking about. Windows 7′s search-able start menu is arguably their best feature (yes, Vista had it too).

On my honor, I was just thinking about this very thing, a watch that could connect to a smartphone via bluetooth. This prototype is for Blackberry only, it isn’t available now but may be someday. With the very long range of Bluetooth 2.0 this is a really good idea.

Verizon is blasting the iPhone in their new “Droid Can” ads in favor of the Android OS. Now it’s rumored a 4G iPhone might pop up on Verizon. At least you’re not burning any bridges…

Android is getting the advantage in the cell phone market now. It’s not locked to any hardware, so people can access the large app base with the form factor they most want. Even Maemo, which I think is better, only shows up on Nokia phones despite it’s being open source. I was hoping the Nokia N900 would position itself against the iPhone the way Verizon is doing with the Droid ads, but Nokia might already be a lost cause. Their last quarter reports are pretty bad. With smartphones, at least.

Android really is the techno-hydra. It’s non-exclusive and I don’t think Nokia can beat it in the US when their smartphone will only be fully compatible with one carrier. I mean really, the N900′s success in the US seems to be dependent on how well T-Mobile’s Project Dark goes. I don’t know if I like that very much.

I’m fine with using Android over Windows Mobile or the iPhone, but I really, really would like to see Nokia and Maemo get the success it deserves.

Lark

Guess what? Something much more convincing is now possible. It involves DNA evidence. Of course, you could always find DNA in somebody’s home and plant it in a crime scene, but in this case scientists can remove the DNA that currently resides in blood or saliva and replace it with a match to other DNA that was taken from, say, a drinking glass or a cigarette butt. Same blood sample, different DNA. How are we supposed to build a justice system around that?

The article points out that this evidence won’t hold up to any scrutiny deeper than simply checking for markers, however there are workarounds to that as well. However, most labs won’t look any deeper than they need to to confirm a match. The researchers that announced this exploit sent results of this technique to various independent labs, and they were fooled.

There is good news. There is a relatively an easy way to determine whether or not this process has been done to forge a sample. The question is, will crime labs start testing all samples for such tampering? Not until scientists have been caught in the act numerous times, I fear.

Lark

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an interesting article about this, with a form you should fill out to let Google know how they need to handle your private information. The EFF writes:

You shouldn’t be forced to pay for digital books with your privacy. Tell Google it needs to develop a robust privacy policy that gives you at least as much privacy in books online as you have in your neighborhood library or bookstore.

Security used to mean keeping your important personal documents in a safe. Now all our personal information is sent through emails, internet voice services, or to online backup utilities. All this redundancy is great–if you’re careful, a fire doesn’t mean you lose copies of documents, or photos, or music. And it’s a lot easier to search files on a computer than files in a cabinet. However, digital information is exponentially harder to keep track of. As more of our information becomes digital, it becomes increasingly important that we have more effective privacy policies.

Google is collecting such information. We need to make sure this information is safe. Go to the website. Fill out the form.

Lark

That is all,

Lark

What is an mp3? An ultra-compressed audio file. Actually, I don’t think compressed is the right term–it’s reduced (sound thrown away) and compressed (bytes shrunken through magic). I don’t know if anything lossy could be properly referred to as just “compressed.”

My first real experience with an mp3 must have been in 1997, because I remember the first mp3 I ever downloaded. It was Sheryl Crow’s theme for the movie “Tomorrow Never Dies,” downloaded from some site giving it away free as a promotion. Note, I wasn’t big into Sheryl Crow or anything, I just clicked the first link I saw so I could see for myself what an mp3 was.

Previous to this, if I wanted to find a song online, it would most likely be in Real Audio format. Real Audio was the “canned sound” of the early digital age. It sounded good for the file size, but not good overall. It was the best option when the majority of people online were on dialup, though.

I had seen mp3s mentioned many times before downloading this file, but I skipped over it just as I skipped over midi’s, a file type also more prevalent back then. Finally I did a real investigation of mp3s, found out what it was, what it claimed to do, and downloaded that song. It sounded really good for 5 MB. I started collecting mp3s. I still have that first mp3, by the way.

Now, for a kid in a small town, I didn’t have any money or any real source of CDs. I resorted to piracy. This was over a decade ago mind you, the climate was a lot different. We knew it was ilegal but it wasn’t like you could be put in jail for it. Today we have bittorrent sites. A few years ago peer-ro-peer file sharing was king. In 1997, if you wanted an mp3, you had to wade through dozens of crappy FTP sites.

FTP–file transfer protocol, was a device invented by the devil himself (probably) to make the internet less fun. I’m not going to go into ratios, or the obligatory banner-clicks in order to get passwords. No, I’ll just say that you had to spend hours to find one song, forget about entire albums, and then you had to spend hours downloading it.

I’m going to digress for a moment, to a time a year or two before I discovered mp3. Our family bought a new computer, with a one-point-something GB hard drive. My dad told my older brother and I we could each have 250 MB for games and files. I asked “What if we need more than 250 MB?” My dad and brother, they laughed at me. What could possibly use up 250 MB, my dad asked. “I don’t know, a game.” That would have to be some game, he said. See any games sold today smaller than 256 MB? Maybe on the Wii.

So back to my FTP days, imagine my shock when Napster came out, and I was the last to know about it. It would have been my senior year in high scchool, probably fall of 1999. I felt cheated. I’d been going on mini scavenger hunts for music, and now all these late-adopters barely had to type in the name and they could download much more than I ever found.

Now we have Bittorent. And the next big system will hopefully have bittorrent’s resource-utilizing capabilities matched with inpenetrable (from outside) security.

Now I’ll switch gears to ripping CDs. Ripping CDs to mp3 used to take hours. My newest PC can rip and encode a CD in 5 minutes. It’s sickening.

Shameless bragging–I’m the first person I know who had all his CDs in mp3 form. This was before mp3 players (I think). After CD burners, but before I could talk my parents into getting one. I used to make mixed cassette tapes with mp3s. I’d play the mp3s in Winamp, plug my brother’s radio broadcaster (for playing your cd player over your car’s radio) into the PC’s speaker-out port, tune into that station on my dad’s boom box, and record to a blank cassette tape. Seriously.

Eventually I bought an external hard drive. I don’t remember how small it was. I can’t even remember what it looked like. I actually had to re-encode all my mp3s from 256kbps to 192kbps because I was running out of room. On average, doing this to 3 albums made room for 1 more on the hard drive. Look at your 1 TB hard drive and think about that.

My first digital music player wasn’t an mp3 player, it was a minidisc player. It was actually pretty cool. It looked cool, it got attention, and the damned thing still works, sort of (won’t record anymore, put plays all my old discs). I’m not even going to go into minidiscs, or anything else, for that matter.

One thing to be thankful about is that my first choice for codec, mp3, is still the most widely used today. I looked at ogg vorbis, I did blind tests, and I did find it to be superior to mp3 at lower bit rates. The difference wasn’t good enough to convert all my old files, and even today it’s hard to find mp3 players that support it.

That aside, I think I’ve made my point, for now.

Lark

As I explained, I’ve never needed a DL DVDr. I’ve always bought the biggest USB drives I could find, and I use a media center PC to play movies, not a DVD player. This means I’ve never needed to burn 8GB on a disc, I could just throw it on a thumb drive, and I could play videos off the thumb drive on my television just fine.

However, looking at these thumb drives, I’m reminded of a rule of thumb, especially in regards to technology: Early adopters get screwed.

Take thumb drives. I paid maybe $20 for a 256 MB drive in the early 2000s. $90 for a 4GB, $60 for a 8GB, $90 for a 16GB, and last $90 for a 32GB. My next purchase will also be a $90 32GB, but it will be eSATA compatible. Tested at about 60 MB/s. That’s fast. I also bought most of those on sale, and the transfer rate is in the gutter.

Also look at hard drives. 2 terabytes, that’s 2,000 GB, for $220, external USB/eSATA. I could find it cheaper than that without the eSATA, or just buy an internal and put it in an enclosure. 1 TB 3,5″ drives came out in early 2007, at $500. Not you can get them for under a hundred. 2TB 3.5″ drives just came out in January of this year (2009). WD just announced the first 2.5″ (laptop-sized) drive, 1TB. It was announced three days ago and is expected to sell for $250.

Now think of the first laptops, that cost more than the most expensive laptops today, before anyone believed a GB herd drive would be possible or necessary. See, early adopters get screwed. More on this later,

Lark

PS – Don’t even get me started on minidiscs.

There are no absolutes. Sometimes early adopters come out ahead. For instance, web domains. If you looked ahead and snagged mcrosoft.com, or nbc.com, etc, you probably made some nice cash on the re-sales.

Certain cars are worth more now than they were originally, but not many. A lot of old vinyl records could probably be sold for more than was originally paid for them, as could be said about anything nostalgiac.

And phone numbers. Try getting a phone number that spells anything nowadays. I just tried, with my Google Voice account. No luck. So if you’ve got a good one, congratulations.

Of course, the last people on the bandwagon, the people who sneered at the idea of the personal computer originally, can now afford with one week’s pay a laptop hundreds of times more powerful than those bulky first PCs.

There are some exceptions, but they’re few and far between. Then again, the benefit of early adoption is inherent. The commands, “cut,” and “paste”? Those terms used to refer to physical actions. When there were no word processors, you’d type on a typewriter, then white-out, cut, paste, and re-copy your documents. The first computers may have taken multiple floppy disks to hold one document, but they were way better than the alternative. Early adopters only seem to be getting screwed when looking back from the convenience of the present, never when contrasted against the only other options at the time. This is the way technology works, and it’s the way it always will be.

Lark

Take revolutionary France. Once the revolutionaries took control of the country, they started what’s now called the “Dechristianisation of France,” one aspect of which was the proposal of an entirely new calendar to replace the current Pope-ordianed Gregorian calendar (which we use in the US). Reading about it, a new system would make sense.

Why do we have such a messed up calendar system now? Here are some of the Gregorian calendar’s problems, taken from Wikipedia’s article on calendar reform:

* It is not perpetual. Each year starts on a different day of the week and calendars expire every year.
* It is difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year or month.
* Months are not equal in length nor regularly distributed across the year, requiring mnemonics (e.g. “Thirty days hath September…”) to remember which month is 28, 29, 30 or 31 days long.
* The year’s four quarters (of three full months each) are not equal (being of 90/91, 91, 92 and 92 days respectively). Business quarters that are equal would make accounting easier.
* Its epoch (origin) is not religiously neutral. The same applies to month and weekday names in many languages.
* Each month has no connection with the lunar phases.

I don’t care about religious neutrality, even though I’m not religious myself. Christmas isn’t rooted in Christianity and most Christians don’t seem to mind, why should I mind that my calendar is?

There are a lot of proposed alternate calendars, but only two are seriously considered. The World Calendar, which has 12 months, and two days: Leapyear Day and Worldsday. Those days aren’t part of any month, they stand alone as “intercalary days”. Each quarter has the same number of days (91), weeks (13) and months (3). 8 months have 30 days, 4 have 31.

Then there’s the International Fixed Calendar, which has 13 months that are 28 days each, with one standard intercalary day, placed at the end of the year. Leap day is intercalary as well, and falls after June. The extra month, by the way, is called “Sol,” and falls between June and July. This was the official calendar of the Eastman Kodak Company from 1928 to 1989, and it’s referred to by some as the Eastman plan.

The main arguments against any calendar change are, firstly, about the general disruption it would cause. There would be a lot of confusion. Of course, many religious groups are against any sort of calendar change, as it would disrupt the dates of their holidays and holy times. The World Calendar and the International Fixed Calendar both have days outside of calendar weeks, yet religions would still have to worship every seven days, throwing them off the days of the week. Also, the International Fixed Calendar has 13 months–13 is a prime number and therefore wouldn’t break into quarters, so not good for bookkeeping. Oh, and every month has a Friday the 13th (OH NO!!!!). The good thing is, with technology, converting calendar dates wouldn’t be any harder than changing currency is today. A few keystrokes into most spreadsheet apps, or even into Google, and you’re good to go.

Really, I’d be down for a completely numeral system. Instead of July 30th, we would have 211 (the 211th day of the year). You can divide that by whatever base you want to assign weekdays, months or whatever. Okay, so that’s kind of stupid, but it’s so simple, and if we kept that number handy, it’d be that much easier to convert to it other calendars. Leap day would be put to the end of the year, of course. Then again, why not a four-year, 1,461-day cycle? Hmm, I think I’m on to something, I’d better call the President.

Till then,

Lark

PS-I’m such a dork, I really love digging through this stuff.

Hey Pope, hey Bishops, you think virgin births are so cool? Gonna worship sharks now? Huh?

Yeah, that’s what I thought,

Lark