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 »
Polaroid returns to its roots
Polaroid! The iconic camera that when you took a picture, the picture itself would feed out of the camera where you could stand around like a dope waiting to see if the picture you took was a masterpiece or not worth sullying the trash can you’d throw it into.
So iconic was it, that the framed film with the chin by which you would hold it became the standard imagery for what a picture would look like. Even digital pictures would have the ‘Polaroid frame’ on occasion. Those of a certain age can recall taking trips to some scenic or exotic location, where a group of tourists would all be waving film around so vigorously it sped up global warming.
Polaroid-style borders placed on digital images
But Polaroid has suffered greatly over the years. Iconic as it is, it didn’t keep up with the digital photography revolution and in fact we’ll use it as an example of the impact of what’s known as disruptive technology. Like Kodak years later, Polaroid became a shadow of its former self under the crushing juggernaut of digital cameras, and even those are now experiencing a fall in sales because of increased capabilities from phones.
Even so, you can’t keep an old brand down. First, there is – if you can believe it – a Polaroid museum right here in Las Vegas. At the oddly-spelled Linq. To be fair to the company, their cameras, their film, even their color scheme is very well known. They even had a surprisingly big booth at CES, and I spent a surprisingly long time inside their surprisingly big booth because, well, they’re Polaroid, and I’d really like to see them do something great with their brand.
Something, say, like this.
A New Polaroid!
Yes, Polaroid now has a new somewhat-digital camera with some awkward, boxy dimensions (the linked article compares it to the size of a paperback book whose top-third has been sheared off) and an equally odd-shaped display in the back for uploading pictures to, what, Instagram? But that’s not the best part. The best part is that the reason it’s so thick is because IT ACTUALLY HAS A PHOTO PRINTER BUILT IN TO THE CAMERA! Yes, just like the bad old days, you can take a picture with this Polaroid camera, then print it out onto physical photo paper right there at the Grand Canyon or wherever you are. It’s glorious.
The Polaroid name is very well loved; in fact, several years ago they stopped manufacturing the film for their instamatic cameras due to low demand, but the outcry was so loud they actually started making it again! That very, very rarely happens. I still have my Polaroikd camera from way back, and I’m glad to see them still kicking around and trying to innovate. At almost $400, I don’t see the camera being a huge success, but we’ll wait and see. I’m also still not sure what that happy-frowny face thing on the camera is all about, but maybe it will become more clear in the future. The article indicates the more you share your pictures online directly form the camera the more happy that face will be, but that sounds…well, you know.
Also, as the article notes, the Instagram logo is actually a play on the original Polaroid color design, but this new Polaroid camera is a square design that looks like Instagram logo, so this is turning into some kind of digital design-culture singularity that may very well destroy the universe but leave a nifty picture of the event behind.
The FBI’s facial recognition system comes online
Privacy and security come up a lot with technology, and if you’re the suspicious type, something may seem awfully suspicious about this. The FBI has announced “Full Operational Capability” of it’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which has been in development for three years and serves as an umbrella biometric identification system that will incorporate facial recognition and fingerprint identification capabilities along with things like voice prints sand other abilities.
For the fingerprint aspect of the system, NGI will be replacing the bureau’s current Integrated Automated Fingerprint identification System (IAFIS), which no one seems to mind. It’s the new facial recognition capabilities that have people riled up.
This new facial recognition component, the Interstate Photo System, is intended to treat faces like fingerprints; using automated software to scan photos of people and match the face in a photograph to a face already in the database. In other words, just like with fingerprints, if law enforcement has a photo of someone, they can compare it to the images in their database of faces, and the system will return 50 likely candidates. The database is expected to have over 50 million faces by next year.
Many states are already participating in the program, as can be seen in the map below. MOU, in the legend, means ‘Memorandum of Understanding,’ which is simply an agreement on an ideal between two parties, it indicates they are on the same page about something.
States participating in NGI
It has been decried, of course, by many groups including the main anti-monitoring group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is often at odds with government at all levels for their surveillance and monitoring practices. The big issue is the possibility of false positives, or accuracy in general, which is the main issue the EFF takes. From reports, of the 50 faces returned, there is an 80 percent probability that the actual matching face will be returned in the results. However, the system has already had success and I suspect will continue to expand rapidly in practice.
This is a sensitive subject, so let me make a couple of comments: First, as we have already said on this site, privacy and security are mutually exclusive. If you want one, you give up some of the other. You can’t have complete privacy and complete security. In this day and age, with what is happening in the world, the balance of one versus the other is a seemingly impossible judgement.
Also, Facebook and Apple have been using facial recognition for years and no one seemed to mind. In fact, here in Las Vegas s have been using it for YEARS for essentially – but not quite – the same purpose the FBI now claims and we’ve been ok with it. Priorities, I suppose.
You can see an unclassified PowerPoint presentation about the system that has a few additional details at this link.
Stern Pinball
And for some reason, Maxwell House.
Anyway, you may remember we talked in class previously about ways a company can maintain its competitive advantage, and one of the methods discussed was focusing on a specific strength. As an example we talked briefly about Stern Pinball, the last company on earth mass-producing pinball machines, along with an informative, yet absolutely terrible, web-page. We also discussed how Bally/Williams used to make them but they now focus on slot machines; that will become relevant in a moment.
So imagine my surprise when I learned about an advertising campaign – they refer to it as ‘sponsored content’ – from Maxwell House titled “Made Right Here,” in which they focus on inspiring ‘Made in America’ stories, and the premier episode was about Stern pinball!
One of the nifty things about pinball machines is that not only are they a very rare craft, but in this age of iPads and smartphones and Xboxes, a pinball machine is a mechanical device. It has advanced circuitry and software for everything from playfield objects to driving the plasma-based dot-matrix display, but ultimately it still uses flippers, plungers, and bumpers among other mechanical means. It’s a good reminder of how things used to be while still being incredibly advanced.
All Bally/Williams machines (Except Lord of the Rings, fourth from the left, made by Stern
Before I show you the video, one other interesting thing has cropped up in the recent acquisition of Bally, who along with Williams was once the largest pinball manufacturer on earth, by Scientific Games for $5.1 billion: You’ll remember that we have talked in class a couple of times about making strategic, or long-term, decisions, and that it is a very difficult thing to do. We mentioned those people who will say things such as “I could have told you that would happen” when in fact they could *not* have. In the announcement of the buyout by Scientific Games, just below the middle of the page, they have a heading titled “Forward-Looking Statements,” in which they acknowledge that much of what they are doing is speculative and is indicated as such by the use of words such as “intend,” “will,” “anticipate” and “believe” among others. In essence they are saying “we expect a certain outcome, but we can’t guarantee it.” That’s an important thing to say.
So, back to the original topic. I have embedded the video below. It’s only five minutes but it’s a surprisingly good behind-the-scenes documentary on this unusual company and their unique product.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ6mpAQkR8Y
Big increases in local storage
We all need more storage, no surprise there. Whether it’s for cloud services, enterprise systems, personal machines, or even phones and/or cameras, there’s just never enough room.
In the early days of the commercialization of the cloud, there was talk that personal storage such as hard drives might become museum pieces and the cloud would solve all, but we know that’s not true considering all the security and celebrity hacks. Not only that, with Seagate recently releasing their 8TB hard drives which have to be helium-filled to reduce friction, and now SanDisk releasing a SD card that is a half-terabyte which is the highest-capacity SD card ever made by far, it appears personal storage is more important than ever.
Small card, big storage
Let’s get some terminology out of the way: SD stands for ‘Secure Digital,’ and it is they type of card you would often see used in larger DSLR digital cameras, although we now have micro-sd cards (that larger one is just an adapter) that are used in everything from phones to tablets to portable game systems. They usually come in sizes like 16 or 32GB, which makes this new one so impressive. Additionally, there is a notational issue we should bring up: GB and Gb is not the same. GB refers to ‘gigabytes’ (remember our discussion of bytes, which are made up of eight bits?), whereas the lower case ‘b’ refers to ‘gigabits.’ That goes for any capacity or speed regardless of prefix, so if your cable company says you’ll get speeds ‘up to 50Mb/s,’ that 50 megaBITS per second, not megaBYTES.
We’ll talk very, very soon about drive sizes and what the future will bring, however it is quite clear that local storage is not going away anytime soon. As I mentioned in class, I have 12 terabytes in my system and I would never entrust that to a cloud service other than my own. Never mind the limitations and security issues of cloud services, with things such as Network Added Storage systems that allow people to set up their own personal clouds and maintain ownership of their own personal files, and have capacities as high as 24 terabytes, or higher if you’re willing to shoulder the expense, personal storage is still the best way to maintain your storage.
Brian Williams and Lester Holt performing “Rapper’s Delight”
In class on Friday I asked if anyone had seen the video of Brian Williams performing “Rapper’s Delight.” Not many of you had, and that’s good, because hopefully this will be your first exposure to what is, as I mentioned, an absolute masterpiece of editing and research.
Before I get to that, some background on the players. First up, Rapper’s Delight. This is a song that although you may think you’ve never heard before, you almost certainly have. It was a huge hit in 1979 for The Sugarhill Gang, and is widely considered to be the first mainstream rap song ever written, the first to crack the Billboard Top 40. It has maintained its popularity for decades, is a pop-culture phenomenon, and has been featured in many movies, television shows, and commercials (the latter winning them $3 million in a lawsuit, speaking of Intellectual Property). In case you need a refresher, that’s the original below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bKTzksZEw
Now that you’re caught up on the song (you remember it now, right?), some introductions about this new one. It was created by Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show staff, and it It stars Brian Williams, anchor for NBC evening news who covers war, disease, poverty, politics, and everything else both good and bad as the guy behind the anchor’s desk. As the link says, more people see him each night than anyone else. It also stars Lester Holt who, among other roles, sits behind the anchor desk for the weekend editions of the newscast. He has extensive reporting experience, and although I’m not a huge fan of national news, these are the two guys I watch because they seem like the most upstanding and straightforward. I expect Lester Holt will actually take over from Brian Williams whenever that day comes.
Brian Williams and Lester Holt
Before I get to the video, however, let me reiterate why I think it’s so unbelievable. First, as I said earlier, it’s a masterpiece of editing, the likes of which I haven’t seen before. Simply matching the voice to the music must have been a herculean task. For instance, consider the opening line of the first verse “Now what you hear is not a test.” That’s a line from the original song and appears in this version as well. Not only does it match in the words themselves, but it matches quite closely in tone and inflection also, it’s tonally accurate. They didn’t just match up words, they matched up the sounds of the words. If there was a slight up-tone in the word, they matched it, or a down-tone. Absolutely astounding. I couldn’t find info on what tools were used, but I would guess it was something along the lines of Premier Pro, or I suppose even Final Cut Pro is a possibility, but I can’t say for certain.
But what amazes me even more than that is the research that went in to finding all the clips that are used throughout. You’ll remember I mentioned there are companies who run thousands of DVRs recording 24 hours a day on over one thousand channels, then use special software to create subtitles for all that video then archive it in huge databases so people can search it all. Gigantic collections of text are known as a corpus, and the ones these companies have accumulated thus far must be gargantuan. One such company that does this is called TVEyes, and is (I believe) the biggest. They even have an iPhone app (and note they use WordPress as their web platform). They only charge a few hundred dollars monthly for their services which the Tonight Show can afford, so my best guess is that a service such as theirs was used to scan thousands of hours of broadcast news for just the right clips. The editing in this video is superlative, but the research that went into it to find just the right clips, and the clever uses of them (he says ‘bank’ instead of ‘bang,’ for example) is no less incredible.
It’s only about a minute and a half (the original song was fourteen!), but it just gets better and better as it goes on. The skill that went into this is unequaled.
So now, through the magic of video editing and data-mining a huge corpus, the video of Brian Williams and Lester Holt (with a brief guest appearance by Kathie Lee Gifford) “performing,” for lack of a better term, Rapper’s Delight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCeIgt7hMs
Time for a whole new you
Look, we’ve all done it. We’ve all used a fake, made-up email address for signing up on a webpage when we just need access but don’t want the associated spam. Don’t pretend like you haven’t!
Well, why stop there? Don’t waste all that brain power on coming up with new fake email addresses, or actually registering for some oddball gmail address when you just want one you can use once and throw away.
Well I have got you covered – here is 10 minute mail. It’s a service that provides you with an email address that lasts for only 10 minutes, and you can even get those confirmation emails that require you to click on them before the account is actually activated. Very sneaky, and useful.
That’ll show ’em.
But again, why stop there? Fake email addresses are one thing, but what if you need a whole new identity? What if the registration process demands a whole new you?
In that case, there’s the Fake Name Generator. It won’t just create a new name, it will provide a new username, password, date of birth, occupation, (almost) social security number….it really gives you the once over. It even assigns you a QR code! I’m not sure, but it appears to verge on the illegal. So grab the new you before the NSA does!
The new me!
Of course, if you need to show how socially acceptable you are, you know the only metric that matters there is a Facebook presence. But what if, like me, you don’t have one? Well you can just make your own fake Facebook posts. That’s right, this site allows you to say “I do so have a Facebook profile, it just has, uh, really strong privacy settings.” (Warning: I couldn’t get my picture to upload)
Be social!
But if you have a real Facebook page, why not let people think you’ve finally made it to that parallel universe they all think you were from in the first place? At Fliptext you can flip anything you type into the box upside down and use it on Facebook. The only catch is, when everyone asks you how you did it, you have to answer “Magic!”
Flip text
If Facebooking, which is actually a verb (by the way, in an interesting historical aside, note the date of that entry and the name of the website they reference), still doesn’t give you the social-cred you crave, then maybe you have to take it all to the next level. You know, pseudo-rubbing elbows with celebrities of all types. Whether it’s Bruce Willis, Snoop Dogg, Leonardo DiCaprio, the king of all celebrities Nicholas Cage, or any of a hundred others, Photo with Me has you covered.
It’s an excruciatingly bad design of a page, but the potential is endless, and hilarious. Just get the celebrity, put them into one of your photos, and no one will ever know it’s a fake! If they’re gullible. Very, very gullible.
Yep, Nic Cage. One of many.
Here’s an actually productive one. You know I make a big deal about your writing; not just its content but its quality. While I don’t want you to overuse tools to help with your writing (you should just write well to begin with), here is an interesting site that counts how many times each word in a passage is used. Very useful to see if you’re overusing words or relying to much on a single turn of phrase – get it? Become a Homer (not that Homer), or Shakespeare, or Stephen King.
This…
…becomes this
And finally, there always has to be the great applications of web-based technologies for people who just wish they were Hobbits. Or perhaps some other denizen of Middle-Earth…I don’t know, dragons? This time it’s an interactive map of lands and places from The Hobbit.
I’m not the hugest Hobbit fan in the world, but the site really is incredible. I don’t want to give away too much, but don’t forget to drag right and left (it works with touchscreens too) when you visit specific locations, they did a great job with the whole thing. You won’t be disappointed.
Mystery solved, and a little about tech patents
Remember that thing? Jet brought it in, I put it up on the screen in class, showed that it had the removable card and the patent for Apple’s rotational user input on the back , and guessed it was a very clever business card for a law firm that deals with patents and intellectual property. I was right about the business card, and you can read the full patent it displays at this link, and see a brief with the image of the device here in .pdf form. I just needed to figure out what the removable card was.
When I got it home, I realized the smaller card wasn’t removable, it just flipped out, and then it became clear what was going on – it’s a flash drive! Or thumb drive. Or USB drive. Or jump drive. Or whatever you call it, it’s one of those. 2 gigabyte flash drive no less, and even comes with a .pdf primer on patents – try saying that three times fast. If you compare the connectors to the USB drive I use for the class presentations, you can see it’s essentially the same. To be specific, it’s what’s known as a ‘Type A‘ connector even though it’s not enclosed as is typical. The two center pins are the channels through which data is transferred, and as is very common with data channels of all types, one is positive and one is negative.
The card opened, compared to standard USB.
Card when closed
This has to be one of the most clever and innovative business cards I’ve ever seen, it’s very inventive and frankly I plan on using it as an example in future classes. Plus, I can use it, and if it’s ever lost or stolen someone would be afraid to use it because it’s from a law firm! Well, maybe that wouldn’t deter them, but it’s an added layer of security. It’s so light it can be used without support, as you can see in this (very dark) image that shows it plugged into the side USB port of my Surface.
In use, with no support. It holds its own!
But because this is the business card of a patent law firm, it also lets me offer an introduction to the idea of intellectual property, trademarks, and patents in the tech industry. I don’t want to go too deep into it now because we have a whole class covering the topic and we will talk a lot about it towards the end of the semester, although in a way the conversation has already begun. In essence, when we talk about intellectual property (IP) or patents, what we mean is something you create or develop or invent and the establishment of your ownership of that creation, or design, or process, or thing, or whatever it is. This often takes the form of licensing fees, which is standard practice; For every Blu-Ray disc or player manufactured, Sony gets a fee. For every Android handset sold, Microsoft gets a fee. For (almost) every HTC phone sold, Apple gets a fee. And the list goes on and on.
There has been a big debate over what is and isn’t patentable, what should and shouldn’t be patentable, and what to do if you feel someone is using your idea without recognition or compensation. If you don’t think it could possibly be that big of an issue, remember that for some companies, their most lucrative – or only – product is its patents and patent portfolio.
So important are patents and the revenue they can generate, especially in the tech industry, that lawsuits happen ALL THE TIME. I’m normally against using bulleted lists for anything when writing, but I think here it’s warranted. Behold, just a few of the recent, and one not-so-recent, tech-industry patent/trademark/IP fights that have happened:
- Apple sues Samsung
- Samsung sues Apple
- Microsoft sues Samsung
- The Beatles sue Apple
- Oracle sues Google
- Apple and Microsoft sue Google
- Google sues Apple (Like all good wars, this actually ended in a truce)
- Google sues Microsoft
- Microsoft and Google sue the government (not a patent issue, just thought I’d throw it in there)
- NVidia sues Samsung *and* Qualcomm
- Bose even sued Beats
These are all recent, and only a few, but this has been going on for years. Many years. This link has 1188 pages of tech-industry patent and trademark lawsuits, and it only goes back to 2003! In fact, according to legal analytics firm Lex Machina, the top 10 targets of patent lawsuits in 2013 were tech firms, with Apple at the top of the list.
Even so, if you have developed something that makes a significant contribution to society, science or industry, you need to fight to keep that patent under your wing and in your portfolio, especially if it’s widely used. I like to think that most companies aide by patent laws (in fact, I was just today reading an article on Tom’s Hardware about building a budget PC, and the liquid-cooling unit they recommend hasn’t been released yet in the U.S. because of unspecified patent issues and a required redesign based on them).
However if you don’t watch your patents carefully, less scrupulous actors could hijack them and claim them as their own, or not pay the licensing fees, or make a knockoff and claim it as original. This also leads to a discussion of something very nefarious in the discussion of patents, something known as patent trolls; companies that create no products, but rather endlessly sue everyone, using questionable legal tactics, over patents they supposedly own. Luckily, they usually get slapped down pretty hard. Prenda Law is the most well-known and loudmouthed patent troll, although because of repeated and brutal defeats in court they’re somewhat quiet as of late. There are others, but it appears what happened to Prenda has made them afraid, with good reason. There are even sort-of patent trolls. The fact is, justified or not, it can be lucrative.
Watch out!
There have been loud calls for reform of patent laws. For example, some say it shouldn’t be possible to patent, say, rounded corners, or taking a photograph of something in front of a white background, or patent something that has been standard practice for centuries but now you’re “doing it on a computer,” which the Supreme Court has said is not enough. It’s very complex and convoluted, and from what I can tell it doesn’t appear there will be a change anytime soon.
I don’t mean to imply that all patent lawsuits are frivolous, not at all; patent ownership is important for the people who own patents. But as patent trolls illustrate, many of them are frivolous, and it’s unfortunate, because lawsuits like this can really stifle creativity and innovation in that case. It’s just that there are so many, it’s hard to separate what’s legitimate form what’s trolling.
You’ll notice we have a whole class on ‘Ethics, Crime, and Security.’ It is there that we will talk extensively about copyright, intellectual property, trademarks, domain squatting, and the general reality that the Internet has always been a haven for theft of not just goods such as songs or videos, but of ideas and attributions. In any industry it is absolutely vital to watch over your patents and ensure that others who use them, which in the tech industry could be a very large number of players, is doing so within their, and your, rights.
Very Important: Today is the great internet slowdown
(Before I get to the post proper, I implore you to at the very least watch the video at the end of this post.)
Did you wonder what that hovering-loading-pop-up-thing was on top of the site today? Did you fill it out? Submit it? You should have. If not, visit the site in a new browser (it only appears once per visit so you’ll have to use a new browser), fill out your info, and send it in.
That thing popped up because today is the National Internet Slowdown Day. Many sites are participating including Reddit, Vimeo, Twitter, WordPress.com, Netflix, Wikia, Digg, Imgur, Dropbox, Mozilla.com, Foursquare, Meetup, and Etsy to name only a few.
But why?
As you may or may not know, the Internet as we know it is under attack. Never mind the almost religious fervor with which the international community has attempted to wrest control of the Internet (inasmuch as it can be called ‘control’) from the U.S. based, but not U.S. controlled, ICANN organization. Or the fact that Russia has mandated that all bloggers with over 3,500 unique monthly visitors register with the state, or their offering of rewards for people who can crack the secretive TOR network and identify its users. Never mind our own attempts at regulation such as PIPA or SOPA, or the constant hacking attacks that happen all the time.
No, we’re talking about the equal treatment of data on the Internet, more properly known as Net Neutrality. Essentially it means all Internet traffic is treated the same, no data is prioritized over other data. Your email to your parents gets the same priority as someone buying from Amazon or watching Netflix or accessing Canvas. But cable companies don’t want that.
You see, cable companies want to charge big content providers to deliver their content more quickly and reliably than other content. For example, Comcast wants to charge Netflix and everyone else to give them higher-priority lines to their customers. They would also de-prioritize traffic from companies that couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. This would have sever negative effects; Netflix would have to pass the cost of that prioritized traffic on to you, the customer, and it would stifle small companies that may be innovative and offer innovative products and innovative services, but because they can’t pay for the bandwidth they need they would effectively be shut out of any type of success.
Not only that, your quality of service will go down, your Internet speeds will go down, and your costs not just for Internet service but the services that use it (like Netflix) will go up.
It’s true, you know
Not only that, say Comcast invested in a streaming service like, oh, say Hulu. They could prioritize Hulu traffic and stifle Netflix traffic. They have been directed not to do that, but they are so blatant about their anti-competitive practices it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see them do it anyway.
Or they could simply charge you extra if you wanted to visit certain sites like Amazon or Netflix or CNN or whoever. Perhaps they could bundle pricing like they do with cable channels: If you want good access to news sites like CNN and Fox News and NBC then you pay a fee for that group of sites, and if you want access to retail sites like Zappos or Macy’s or Barnes and Noble you’d pay for that too. Or if you’re a gamer, there’d be a bundle there as well. Something like this, perhaps:
This could be possible
Of course cable companies, ISPs, and hardware providers are doing all they can to make the Internet, your Internet, one big command-and-control that they lord over like dictators, and if something isn’t done the entire Internet and on-line experience will change, and not for the better.
Reclassifying them as common-carriers, which is being considered as what’s known as a ‘nuclear option,’ would mean they were considered a utility like power and water and therefore could be heavily regulated. Needles to say, they absolutely and steadfastly do not want that, because it would force them to be fair, ending idiotic statements like this.
There are opposing views, by the way, and some are able to make well-written, compelling arguments against the common-carrier idea. Of course, that link is actually to the National Cable and Telecommunications association website, so their position should be of absolutely no surprise. After all, below is what pops up if you visit their homepage – are you surprised?
If you *are* suprised, you shouldn’t be.
And the whole thing can be eerily convoluted.
Net neutrality is something people should be enraged about. They should be rioting in the streets, it will impact every single one of us and further cement the monopolies that the cable industry already enjoys. People’s passivity about the whole thing is baffling.
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who used to be a cable-industry lobbyist, didn’t seem to care in the past for pretty obvious reasons – he was still well-aligned with his previous industry.
But then something happened. Something very important. Something we didn’t expect, and didn’t see coming, but that we desperately needed. After witnessing it, suddenly the whole thing shifted tide.
John Oliver.
It turns out that you, yes YOU dear reader, can actually go to the FCC’s website and leave your thoughts about Net Neutrality, but many people don’t know that (I only linked to the main page so you can see all the issues open for comment. You want 14-28, but look at what’s number 1!). But once John Oliver laid out the importance of this fight in very clear language, the FCC’s servers crashed under the weight of the response. And that’s what we need! It’s what you need. It even miraculously appears to have swayed Tom Wheeler himself!
I posted this video last semester, and I am doing it again here because it is so important. If you do nothing else, please watch this video, and leave a comment with the FCC before September 15th. You’d better do it now, because very soon it will be too late.
So here’s what apple talked about
You may or may not know this already, but at their big reveal Apple on the 9th Apple announced Apple Pay, the new iWatch with its new dev kit and it’s health-monitoring abilities (the even teamed up with the Mayo Clinic!), iOS8, and of course revealed the iPhone 6 in two sizes, with an amazing screen, and camera, and running on the new A8 CPU. Also, iUh-Oh (actually, this always happens).
It was a lot, actually, and a lot of exciting announcements. There are many places you can read about all of those, and to avoid one of my overly-lengthy posts I have provided some links as you can see. However it is in the glow of all these wonderful reveals that I think it’s important to remember the ones who came before, and mourn a death in the Apple family.
I’m not referring to Steve Jobs, although his loss was tragic and far too soon. There will never be another like him, and without him Apple would never have achieved what it has achieved; this industry needed him. He was a master of design and reading the marketplace, his passing was an insurmountable loss, and just like with Elvis, I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news.
In this case, however, I want to mourn a different Apple-related loss; the death of the original iPod. Today, with the revamp of the Apple store, the original, hard-disk and rotational input-wheel is no longer supported or offered by Apple. How interesting that it was that very patent on the business card I showed in class, and on which I have based a post that will be going up on Thursday.
So long, buddy.
It’s ok, really, since we’re light-years beyond that technology anyway. But as a historian of the industry it’s always sad when something – especially something so influential – reaches the end of its life. To quote Indian Jones, “it belongs in a museum!“
It’s the big (apple) day!
Today is the day that Apple will finally make its big reveal. Everyone is expecting the iPhone 6, that isn’t news. In fact, people have already started lining up for it!
No, the big story is what else they’re going to announce. The standard response is that it will be the iWatch, although there’s no certainty. Well, there’s a lot of certainty, just not total certainty. There’s also the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS8, mobile payments, and health tracking.
We’ll see. The whole thing will be livestreamed over on Apple’s site at 10am (assuming you’re using a Mac and Safari), so if you’re interested and properly specced, head over and iWatch it all unfold live. Since this is also a defining moment for Apple CEO Tim Cook, whatever they do needs to be spectacular.
