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 »
What’s the best antivirus program?
I don’t think I need to tell anyone reading this that digital security is a big issue at all levels: Personal, corporate, government, and international. On your PC, at the very least, an antivirus program is mandatory, although many people feel they don’t need one. Take my word for it, you do.
But there are many options, and for something like that you want the program that performs the best, detecting the most viruses and other malware compared to the competition. To offer some clarification, antivirus programs have a list of what are called ‘virus definitions,’ which is just what it sounds like: it provides characteristics of the viruses known to the antivirus package that it uses to determine if you have been infected (whenever you update your AV program, you’re downloading virus definition files).
No Amazon drone flights for now
Last semester, I made a post about Amazon’s intention to start testing the use of drones for the purpose of making deliveries. That’s right, they wanted to have a drone, with your box attached to the bottom, fly to your house, land, drop off the box, then fly back to wherever it originated.
However, Amazon isn’t the only one interested in drones; they’re really popular. So popular, they have caused problems for commercial jets, landed on the White House lawn, and you can even take an aerial tour of various places in the world thanks to drones.
Drone that crashed on White House lawn
So popular have drones become that the FAA decided they had to develop some regulations regarding their commercial use, and it appears that because of this regulations Amazon’s dreams of drone delivery will be left out in the cold.
Facebook now lets you choose a digital heir
Since its inception, Facebook has been struggling with what to do when one of its subscribers passes away. In the past, their general approach was to either lock the profile when they discovered its owner has died, causing grief for those left behind at one of the most difficult times a person faces, delete the account or convert it into a memorial. The latter would remove personal information, status updates, and only allow friends to post on the wall of the deceased.
Now, Facebook is allowing you to choose what they refer to as a “Legacy Contact,” who can take control, in some ways, of your profile. They won’t be able to see your messages or remove friends, but they will be able to respond to friend requests, as well as make a header post on your profile and update the main photos. You have to let Facebook know that the person has died, and the person chosen as the legacy contact won’t know they have been chosen until after the person who chose them has made their way to the great beyond. There’s no doubt that memorializing and Facebook itself can be one way to help people grieve.
What happens to social media profiles in the case of death has been an issue for a long time, and every social media site deals with it in their own way. Twitter, for example, only allows for an account to be deactivated, and their policy on this explicitly states that they will not give anyone access to a deceased’s account, regardless of their relation to the person (although in some cases they have).
I deactivated my Facebook account almost a year ago for reasons I detailed extensively on this post. However, considering over a billion people use it, and that it is *the* social network, I’m surprised it took so long for them to implement something of this sort.
Specifics can be found on this Facebook page.
Apple is worth a whole lot
On Tuesday, Apple became the first company ever to be valued at $700 billion, a number so big I can hardly process it.
As this post over on Fortune.com explains, that value was reached thanks to their share price reaching $122.02, which is then multiplied by the number of shares outstanding to reach total market capitalization. And that capitalization destroys even the companies who follow behind; The next highest market capitalization is Exxon/Mobil at $382 billion.
Nutella can be used as thermal paste!
Some background: Two semesters ago, one of my students mentioned – in class no less – how much they loved Nutella. I had no idea what Nutella was, so they explained it was some kind of Frankenstein-like combination of nuts and chocolate smashed together to form a peanut butter-like substance. It sounded like an offense to the senses.
But she was insistent. So much did she want us to understand the glory of this substance, she made pastries that had Nutella in them and brought them to class to share with everyone. I have to admit that she was right; Nutella was glorious. She might have brought them for students but I dismissed the class and ate them all by myself. Not really, but I wanted to.
Now I understand
A couple of controversial apps
There are a couple of apps out there that are causing some controversy, but for two very different reasons. One is about class, and one is about cops.
Class120
The first one we’ll discuss is a class-attendance app called Class120, and it sends a message to the student and other designated people, usually a parent and administrator, when the student misses a class. It’s participation-based, meaning the student or someone authorized uploads their schedule into the app, and the phone uses its GPS in order to determine whether or not the student is in class. It won’t say where the student actually is, it will just say they are not in class.
Worm’s brain in Lego robot
What a time to be alive! In class on Friday, we had a tantalizing foreshadowing of fascinating topics for next class such as Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Intelligent Agents among others, and in our preliminary discussion about them, it was brought up that researchers had implanted the brain of a worm into a robot made of Legos.
Well, not really. Although it sounds remarkable (and it is), the link between a computer and a brain is not so far off. Computers are sort-of brains, and our brains are computers. Just like a digital machine, our brains rely in large part on electrical activity known as the action potential and the ability to carry that potential down a path of interconnected neurons, so transferring the behavior of a brain, if not the ability to cognate, into a machine shouldn’t be the insurmountable task it may at first seem.
Neuronal cell
So to be clear, the researchers, members of the groundbreaking OpenWorm project (download their app!), did not transfer the *actual brain* of the worm into the Lego-bot. They recreated its activity in software, simulating its low-level stimulus-response actions into programming code. Once that was complete, they were able to stimulate the robot in various ways, and it would respond in the same way the worm would respond. As stated in the post over on Smithsonianmag.com, when the nose of the robot was stimulated, forward motion ceased, just as it would in the worm.
What’s amazing is that none of that behavior was programmed in. It’s a result of them programing the structure of the neurons, so that the behavior is a *result* of the programming, not *because* of the programming.
Here is a video of the robot and its resultant behavior watch, and be amazed (Thanks to Dane for the subject and the link).
Goodbye Radio Shack
After 94 years, Radio Shack, a store that elicits very fond memories for me, has declared bankruptcy and is negotiating to close half its stores and sell the other half. They’re even being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
This is sad news. To me anyway. I’m willing to guess that for many people the nostalgia will seem misplaced, but for me it was an integral part of my tech education.
Radio Shack hasn’t been the store I remember for years and years, over a decade to be more specific. In those days, you could buy breadboards, capacitors, diodes, all sorts of adapters, cables, every kind of electronic component you could imagine. If you needed oscilloscopes, soldering irons, magnetizers, anything of the sort, they had it.
If you needed some oddball adapter so you could use headphones that had a 1/16″ headphone jack with a device that had an 1/8″ jack, they could set you up. If you needed to connect three game consoles to one TV and switch between them, they had the switchboxes for that. I have a jar out in the garage filled with adapters that I’ve used over the years for countless projects, mainly when wires ran endlessly throughout the house, all but one bought at Radio Shack. I dumped them out a took a picture of a subset of them. This is by no means all of them, but it gives a good idea.
Title II incoming, maybe
It appears that Tom Wheeler will indeed attempt to re-classify Internet service as a utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.
This is a world-changing event, however as some of you stated in your comment to my previous post on this, Title II may not be the best way of going about this. Utilities are regulated, but they are the only choice out there. Opponents of Title II classification make arguments that are much more compelling than those who outright oppose government intervention of any sort.
Bear in mind that one of my big hopes – the death of data caps – is not part of the proposal, nor is local loop unbundling, in which multiple providers could use the same physical line. Both of these concern me greatly: In my opinion, regulation with data caps will serve no purpose and would punish cord-cutters such as myself, who watch local news and other content via streaming, and I would burn through a data allotment in a single day. Without local-loop unbundling, where would the actual competition be? In fact, unbundling the last mile might be the only solution that’s really necessary, as a commenter in the linked article states.
Strange days, we’ll have to see how it all plays out. Either way, if this goes through in any form, it is likely to be world-changing, at least for us.
What smartphone apps really want
It’s no secret that when you install an app on your smartphone, it asks you for certain permissions. Well, perhaps ‘asks’ is the wrong term – it tells you what it will do, and if you don’t like it you can just not use the app, there’s no real choice involved. The problem is, many of us install apps without checking what the app will be doing at all, a holdover from our approach to privacy policies.
Source: Welivesecurity.com
Some permissions seem nefarious but really aren’t. For example, if an app says it needs to ‘monitor your phone state,’ that would be understandably concerning, however all that means is that the app needs to be able to determine is you’re receiving a call and hand control back to the phone so the phone can tell you there’s a call coming in and allow you to answer.
