Darwin's Theories - Internet category

Top Ten for 2011

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:03:00 GMT

Happy {New,Gnu,Blue,Pneu} Year Everybody! As usual there may be less than 10 items.

Sheldon Richman's Why WikiLeaks Matters
Fred Branfman on WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
CBS news on How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010
Martha Rosenberg with some interesting (but unsubstantiated) claims that US government agencies kill millions (literally) of blackbirds, 1000 times more than the 1000 that died in Arkansas
John McWhorter on Getting Darnell Off The Corners: Why America Should Ride The Anti-Drug Wave (alternate title: Why Legalizing Drugs—All Of Them—Is The Only Path To A New Black America)
Cambridge University refuses to bend over to the "house of cards" and censor a students research into pin-chip card insecurity. Professor Ross Anderson's response is a delight.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (where "our kinds" is defined as computer geeks, libertarians, rationalists, etc.)
Kyung Hee Kim on the precipitous decline of productivity among American schoolchildren
Bradford Schmidt on expected sub-$100 Android smartphones (no-contract price). Maybe this will be the death knell of smartphone subsidies; why lock into a 3-year contract at $60/month when you can buy the phone for $100 and get service at $10 or $20/month?

It's Official: O'Reilly Android Cookbook

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:14:00 GMT

We've officially opened the site for Android developers to help build the world's best Android how-to site, If you've written any Android apps, please share what you've learned with your fellow developers, at androidcookbook.oreilly.com Sorry for the long name; if you're typing it longhand use androidcookbook.net or androidcookbook.com, whichever strikes your fancy. If you haven't written anything for Android yet but you know Java, or are any kind of developer, head on over, read some recipes, and submit comments to improve or clarify them!

Islands in the Stream

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Some will say that Apple's iPad is the be-all and the end-all of portable computing. I say nay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Apple. But look at the history. Datapads are not a new idea - Alan Kay's DynaBook and Mark Weiser's ideas of Ubiquitous Computing - both from the 1980's, with Weiser explicitly using the term Pad - predate the iPad by almost three decades. As much as I generally dislike Microsoft, their push for the "Tablet PC" probably led to some advances in hardware. Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader both pushed hardware makers to build better screens and raised the bar on users' expectations.

And one important thing that Weiser advocated in the 1980's is still missing (full disclosure: I admit to being in the field long enough to have read his papers when they were originally published). In Weiser's world you could just slide a task you were working on from a handheld pad to a wall-sized whiteboard or to a wristwatch-sized device for storage, and things like active TCP/IP connections would automatically move onto the new computing platform. While you may be able to drag a project from a Mac OS application to a USB stick for storage, this is a far cry from having running applications movable from one computing device to another. People are indeed working on this problem, but a general solution is not yet at hand, as far as I know. It's not something you can buy today from Redmond or from Cupertino, at any rate.

Until this happens, our computers will remain isolated islands in the stream. Even if they are iPads.

JavaFX: Late to the gate, but sweet

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:49:28 GMT

JavaFX is Sun's new Rich Client strategy for Java. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the demos on the JavaFX home page. Unlike Adobe Flash and unlike M$ Silverlight, this technology actually works on "minority" OSes - my OpenBSD laptop with Java 1.6.0 is officially way behind the requirements, but the demos mostly work in FireFox 3 (except you can't tear off the tear-off applet, that requires Update 10). Despite significant glitches on the web site - Sun should know better - on the day of the announcement (December 4, 2008), I'm impressed.

So much so that I've already added this JavaFX section to my Java Resources page.

Protecting Your Castle

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:35:00 GMT

SANS.org has a nice white paper showing how to protect your home network using OpenBSD and other free software. According to the abstract:

"It is possible to clean up the back yard with Free Open Source Software and a little design. Using off the shelf components and Open Source software the family geek can deploy a more multilayered security stance that will provide far more visibility and control over the network. This is not to say that large swaths of the Internet can be cleaned up just by plugging in a box, but to say that if anything should be a safe haven on the internet, it should be the family network, the backyard. It makes sense to clean up the backyard before taking on the world’s trash."

Presumably the same techniques would apply to the average small business. Check it out at http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/firewalls/32933.php [PDF].

P.S. According to Bartleby, the quotation in my subtitle, while commonly attributed to William Pitt, comes to us in its present wording from a précis done by Lord Henry Peter Brougham some sixty years later.