Becoming a designer
Boy, it’s been a while. An oxymoronic combination of being lazy and busy, I guess. Anyway, for this post I wanted to talk about design. It’s a topic that comes up a More »
Support for Windows 7 ends today
It is a sad day, as Microsoft is officially ending updates and security patches for Windows 7, the popular OS still being used by a large majority of PCs. Windows 7’s popularity More »
Returning Home: World of Warcraft Classic Comes Online
On August 26th, fans of the original World of Warcraft (henceforth referred to as WoW), and those who are just curious to see what all the hubbub is about, were finally able More »
The Lawnmower Man, and Vintage CGI
Inspired by a couple of Reddit forums to which I am subscribed, VintagePixelArt and VintageCGI, and being a fan of all things historical as it pertains to technology, I uploaded to the More »
Jony Ive leaves Apple
As someone who teaches extensively about design as it intersects with technology, and is also a computer and technology historian, I am conflicted about Jonathan (Jony) Ive leaving Apple. Mainly because he’s More »
I’ve jumped into home recording
I have always adhered to the belief that because sound is analog, it should be recorded, stored, played back and heard as such. It is not meant to be digital, either in form or function, and I am glad to see that there has been a not-so recent resurgence in the vinyl album market as people begin to realize the shortcomings of digital music (or the advantages, if you do it right).
However, a couple of years ago, I went into a Maryland studio with my bandmates to record our latest opus, and was looking forward to what is always a soul-cleansing experience – creation. Taking a song that came from nothing and going through the recording process to create something tangible and permanent is one of the joys of my life. I never get tired of being in the studio, ever.
We had worked with our producer many times before over the last twenty years, from his humble beginnings with a small mixer to his current status as a world-renowned engineer and faculty member at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute. Throughout those years we used many forms of storage for the recordings. We recorded to ADAT, SVHS (the latter dependent on the former and vice versa), even regular old cassette, all sorts of media that was considered the best at the time. Regardless, even though some like ADAT will claim they’re digital, the medium is not; it’s still magnetic tape.
A Life-Changing Experience
That’s me up there, mouth agape, experiencing the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced: the HTC Vive VR headset.
I have been hearing about VR for some time now. And I don’t mean all those admirable yet misguided attempts in the 80s and 90s – remember VRML or the woefully under-appreciated Virtual Boy? No, those were far before technology was ready to handle the capabilities, potential and technical requirements of VR, and it clearly showed. But over the last few years, I have heard people who have exclaimed that current virtual reality experiences have to be seen to be believed, and that they are even better than real life.
Come on, now. Let’s all just relax.
At least that’s how I used to respond. However, after experiencing the HTC Vive at a demonstration offered at the University of California, Irvine, I can safely say it has finally arrived. And those people were right, my mouth-agape expression in the header image says it all: the experience was life-changing.
About the slow death of the Sony Vita
I don’t care. I really don’t. It might be dead, it might not, I just don’t care. As someone who loves the industry and wants to see it thrive on all fronts, that’s saying something.
I wanted to like the Vita, I really tried, but it never grabbed me the way the original PSP did. Now that was a system; great games all over the place, simple controls, UMDs (one of TWO proprietary formats on the device, but I loved them anyway) the effective XMB which it shared with the PS3, which led to an easy-to-use system, and it had interesting, fun games like epic RPG Ys or quirky music game Every Extend Extra, to the glorious re-release of PC Engine classic Castlevania: Dracula X – Rondo of Blood, formerly a Japan-only release.
They even had the surprisingly fun Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, for Pete’s sake. Please don’t forget about Pete!
And when I say I loved it, I mean it. Here’s the box of PSP games in my closet:
PSP Heaven
A new post!
It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been insanely busy in my pedagogical duties here at UC Irvine, however there is so much going on. We now won’t see any virtual reality headsets until Q1 2016, self driving cars are making great strides, or perhaps they’re not, drones are everywhere, from saving avocados to fighting wildfires, and Microsoft had their best product conference ever, which is at once not saying much and on the other hand saying quite a lot (really, if you missed it, you can watch it here; it gave me chills).
Oh, and machines (cats too but we already knew this) might kill us all.
Yet even if they do, what a time to be alive. Then dead. I’m more excited about the capabilities and the future of technology than I have been for a very long time. I’m even excited for the likely unfortunate lessons we’ll be forced to learn along the way. Such is the price of progress, however, and those willing to put themselves in the lion’s den are the ones who will move us further than we would have imagined even a few years ago.
Even so, I still feel that everyone should take a break from technology once in a while, don’t let it own you or control you. My students have to give it up for 24 hours and by and large they don’t like it. I understand where they’re coming from, but I also believe they need it, as do we all.
I’ll never run out of material to post here, there is so much going on. In addition to simply posting about whatever is going on in the world of tech, I’d even like to branch out into doing some reviews of whatever strikes my fancy (Games, hardware, software, devices, whatever), and I may even throw in the occasional music or movie review, relevant or otherwise. I have strong opinions about those as well!
In the meantime, here is an episode of Computer Chronicles detailing the state of virtual reality all the way back in the technological dark ages of 1992. This is hosted, along with many other episodes dating back to 1982(!) and an incredible collection of old software and games, on the glorious repository of old tech known as archive.org. In case you’d forgotten how great a time we’re living in, technologically speaking, this should give you the jolt you need.
There’s something happening here…
In 1967, Buffalo Springfield released a song titled “For What It’s Worth,” which is more well known by it’s subtitle and the first line of its chorus, “Stop, Hey, What’s that Sound.” True to cultural misinterpretation, it was a song about the glorious rock and roll subculture in L.A. at the time, however it is widely interpreted (or, more accurately, misinterpreted) as an anti-war protest song.
When it comes to the current state of this site, however, it is the first two lines of the song that are relevant: “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” There is something stirring although I’m uncertain exactly what it is. I’ve updated the site name, the Twitter handle and some other things, but will I have what it takes to start making posts again? Celebrating the intersection of man, machine, and society as I have done so often in the past? I’m so insanely busy I don’t know if I have the time, never mind the wherewithal.
Even so, I’ve missed it and I’d like very much to slowly bring it back to life. We’ll see what happens; here’s hoping!
But it’s good to throw up another post, even if it doesn’t say much. In the meantime, for your viewing and listening pleasure, here is Buffalo Springfield performing “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound).”
It’s time for me to say farewell
As you may or may not know, after having taught at Nevada State for four years, and UNLV for nine years before that, I have accepted a position at the University of California, Irvine in their Informatics department, in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, which should be quite challenging and fun.
This blog, IS301.com, has been a lot fun to develop, maintain and author for, however its future is now up in the air. After all the time I have put in to developing it, and the personal affinity I have for it, I would be loathe to shut it down, so I will have to take some time and consider what to do with it. I may re-purpose it for my new endeavors at UCI, or simply continue it as a general tech blog (perhaps even with some contributors if I could find a few), or if it became too much or ended up neglected, I suppose I could give it a dignified, respectful death.
Whatever happens to this site, my time at Nevada State, my time at UNLV, and my time in Las Vegas has been glorious, an adventure for the ages, and I’m a better person because of it. I will always have ties to this area, I am keeping my house here, and I will be checking in to make sure my town is still doing ok.
Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to the thousands of students who have passed through my classes and all the friends I have made, it has been a privilege to know you all, to teach at these wonderful institutions, and I am looking forward to the the next chapter.
And remember: Go out in to the world, do good, and be good.
My best regards to you all.
Spam is at a 12-year low!
Or 10-year low, depending on who you talk to. The BBC states it’s 12 years. Either way it’s still a promising sign, although that still means it’s 49.7%, however that’s the first time since 2003 it’s been at levels under 50%.
It appears all email-based attacks including phishing emails, 419 scams (also known as Nigerian prince scams), fake products scams, and others have all fallen.
The reason for this is a concerted effort by private companies and governments to bring down botnets, which are networks of compromised machines – known as bots – that are used to send spam emails. We’ll learn all about all of this in our final class.
Curiously enough, Microsoft of all companies has been a leader in bringing down these networks. Whether working with U.S. Marshals to bring down the Zeus malware botnet, or the spam behemoth Rustock, or working with Symantec to shut down the Bamital botnet, which would corrupt users’ search results and direct them to malicious websites. Other times it just works on its own.
One thing to keep in mind about the reduction in spam overall, is that criminals aren’t going away, they are merely shifting their attentions elsewhere, mainly to malware; that’s software that does something bad. Keyloggers, drive-by downloads, Flash embeds, spam isn’t doing it for them anymore so they are developing new methods of attack. None of this means you can be less vigilant, if anything you should be moreso, be sure your anti-virus software is up to date, and be careful what you click on or agree to.
They’re just upside-down flamingos
Or perhaps upside-down ice cream treats in the process of melting. No, there’s no way around it, no way to sugar coat it, they’re middle fingers.
That’s right, Windows 10 is the first to incorporate middle-finger emojis.
They’ve been in the Unicode standard since 2014, however companies have been understandably hesitant to include them in their apps. The standard, incidentally, allows among other things, for new emoji symbols to be included in the ecosystem.
For now, only Microsoft has them included, and you can only use them in their new Edge browser, and only then if you copy and paste them, so their implementation is severely limited. I expect that will change in the near future, since based on comment sections from news sites and YouTube, many people could just post the finger instead and make essentially the same comment. Plus, we already have this, how much worse can a middle finger be?
If you’re interested in some of the other new additions as well as changes, you can take a look at the Windows 10 emoji changelog at Emojipedia (yes, there is such a thing).
My Windows 10 upgrade experience
Overall, it went quite smoothly. I expected some problems, but at this early hour everything seems to be working very well, with only some minor feature-based quibbles. No fatal problems, and everything (so far) is running not just smoothly, it appears to be much faster overall.
In fact, the only real issue I encountered was is301.com itself going down for an hour!
The process took about an hour to go fully from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, which is much faster than I expected. The Windows 10 beta that I mentioned in class I was running in a virtual machine on a Mac could take hours to upgrade, but this was very efficient.
The call to ban autonomous weapons grows louder
One more time!
I’m not big on banning things, unless they pose a public hazard. For example, when people drinking and driving became a problem, we had to ban it. Same for texting and driving. We do that to protect society at large.
Lately, however, there has been a vocal call by many (MANY) in the sciences, including over 1000 Artificial Intelligence researchers, developers and scientists, along with Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk, to ban autonomous weapons. Those are weapons that could seek out targets and kill them without the involvement of a human operator. They would, for all intents and purposes, be deciding who will live and who will die and doing it all on their own.
