BunkBlog

A few years ago, Thinkgeek introduced an 8-bit tie for April Fools Day. They eventually produced the thing for real. Last year, they featured the Tauntaun sleeping bag. In November, they produced it for real. This year, I hope they make this alarm clock come true.  It’s better than Tribbles ‘n’ Bits.

Some car dealers have installed “black boxes” in their new cars, which have the ability to shut off your car remotely, or honk the horn, when you’re late with a payment. What could possibly go wrong with that system?

Wow, that’s some incredible Facebook post…

see more funny facebook stuff!

I understand supply and demand, and what the market will bear, blah blah blah, but this is entertaining.

Yesterday, Newegg began selling a new gaming laptop, the Asus G73. When Gizmodo and other sites posted it at 8am or so with a claimed price of $1430, the price was $1449 at Newegg. Later in the morning, the sites that blogged about it mentioned the price as $1499.  When I got home, I showed it to my wife, explaining that it was nigh impossible to build a gaming desktop with the same specs for less than the $1500 they were asking. But, when I pulled up the listing, it was $1599.  This morning, just out of curiousity, I looked again – $1549.

There can’t be this much demand and supply change in one 24 hour period, can there? This is like watching Apple stock whenever Steve Jobs speaks.

Fans of the unfortunately-named iPad got another piece of bad news today: Netflix won’t be on it.

So, not only can’t you get any Flash-based web sites (um, most streaming video including Hulu), you also can’t get Netflix (the biggest streaming video supplier).  I know Apple really likes having their own little walled garden, but this is getting silly.

Apple finally announced their much-anticipated tablet computer yesterday, and I still can’t quite figure out what the market is for this device. I’ve spent many hours working on various small computing platforms, and many more hours ruminating over what usage model the tablet computer world is looking for.

I’m one of those strange people who don’t have a cell phone.  It’s not that I don’t see how convenient they could be. I just don’t have a reason to own one. I can’t take it to work (security-crazed high-tech area that forbids almost every piece of 21st-century personal technology), my commute is less than 15 minutes, and I don’t really spend much time on the phone to begin with. Not to mention, cell reception in this town, based on calls I’ve experienced, is sucky at best.

But, even without a cell phone, I’ve been using lots of small computing devices. I had a Palm III, a Sony Clie, and I currently have a Nokia N770.  My beautiful bride has a netbook (also known as the Netflixbook).  I also have my home desktop computer and my homebrew DVR, for non-portable computing devices.  I’ve owned a computer since 1980, and I think I understand how people use them and for what purposes.  But I’m absolutely mystified by where a mass market for a tablet is, at least for something that costs more than $200. I didn’t even buy the N770 until it was clearanced for under 150, because I couldn’t justify the expense of a $300 portable to myself.

Let’s see what the iPad brings, compared to Kat’s netbook (an Asus Eee 1000HE):

• The iPad has wifi 802.11n.  So does the Eee.
• The iPad has a 9.7″ screen, at 1024×768. The Eee is 10″ and 1024×600.
• The iPad has 16-64 GB of solid-state storage. The Eee has 160 GB of hard drive space.
• The iPad weighs 1.6 pounds; the Eee is 3 pounds.
• The iPad runs its own special version of the iPod OS, and only works with programs from the App store (or jailbroken eventually I’m sure). The Eee runs Windows XP, with all that it implies.
• The iPad has 10 hours of hyped battery life. The Eee has 9 hours of hyped battery life. The realities are always different from the marketing, but usually assume 70% of hype for real life.
• The iPad has no keyboard. Eee – keyboard.
• The iPad has available 3G data for an extra $130 and monthly fees. Eee has similar capabilies available (we don’t use 3G any more than we use voice cellular service).
• The iPad will display multimedia and ePub books, but not Flash apps. Eee can do all that AND Flash.
• The iPad has no camera. Eee has a webcam.
• The iPad has no USB ports. Eee has three.
• The iPad has no VGA connector nor Ethernet nor any other standard ports. Eee – yep, got ’em.
• The iPad can’t multitask with non-Apple applications. Eee – yay for multitasking.
• The iPad costs $500 for 16gb and no 3G, up to $830 for 64gb and 3G.  The Eee cost under $350.

I’m sorry. I don’t know who wants these besides fanboys. It runs the same OS as the iPhone, but doesn’t have a camera or the ability to make voice calls. It costs more than an iPod Touch or a netbook, but the only thing it seems to bring to the table is a big screen for your iPod. The reason tablet PCs haven’t taken off, even though Microsoft and others have been trying for ten years, is because they are a solution to a problem very few people have.  For the “vertical market” segment, tablets are big business; that market itself isn’t all that large, but it’s a niche and it can be exploited by standard Windows or custom Linux machines. It isn’t likely to be broken into by a giant iPod, and it certainly seems the iPad isn’t aimed at professional markets but at consumers. Consumers with an extra 700 bucks for a device with a very constrained media-consumption experience. I’ve been amazed at a few things over the years, and if the first-generation iPad is a huge success for Apple, it’ll be another one of those things.

All that said, if someone comes out with a cheap handheld computer with keyboard an a real OS, I’m buying it.  Obviously, I’m not Apple’s market. But, who is?

Kat and I thought they should have tried to get some of these into the broadcast.

Eighteen workstations wasn’t enough for the boss, no sirree. I’ve now chalked up 23 workstation installs in the past two weeks. You’d think I was some sort of computer geek or something.

One year ago, I made a series of 10 predictions for the new year.  Let’s see how I did.

1. The right wing noise machine did find new and interesting ways to make themselves look silly while calling the new president a socialist, a communist, a nazi, and a racist – all at the same time. If President Obama were on fire, the GOP would call fire departments a socialist plot, as John Scalzi wrote this week.
2. Windows 7 did not save the computer industry.
3. Netbooks were a bit easier to find than I feared, so there’s one point against me. To be fair, the good netbooks were harder to get hold of, so maybe half a point.
4. Yep, suck.
5. No single sign-on system of any note, although Facebook is getting a lot of headway into “sign in with Facebook” on various sites.  Maybe we’ll count this as half and half.
6. No crypto.
7. DTV changeover was, although delayed yet again until June of 2009, not a crazy display of incompetence and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Got this one wrong.
8. Politicians continued to line their pockets by picking ours, and gave as much largesse to their corporate overlords as possible. Sadly, I got this one right.
9. Weather was much remarked upon. Denialists continued to deny reality. Climatologists turned out to sometimes be jerks, but that overshadowed that the science continues to be reinforced with evidence.
10. Kit dropped me from her “LJ Friends” list after 9 years (no idea why), so I have no idea how amusing she is.

Let’s see, that gives me 6 of 10 completely right, 2 partly right, one completely wrong, and one I can no longer assess, so I can’t use it for any statistics. We’ll call it 7-2 or 78% accurate. I’m sure that beats all the “psychics” out there.  Now, what shall I predict for 2010? Stay tuned.

A few years ago, I had a coworker who routinely burned microwave popcorn. I don’t miss him much. I do wonder, though, if it would have been better if he’d been burning bacon-flavored popcorn instead. Is everything really better with bacon? Is it?

This is a great video. You should watch it in HD, and full-screen and ogle at the wondrousness.

Oooh, ooh!  I met the Geek Queen, Judie Lipsett, today.  It’s surprising this hadn’t happened earlier, I suppose, since she used to live about a half mile from me.  But, we bumped into her at Fort Concho today.  Yeah, not exactly CES, is it?  BTW, she’s incredibly tall.

Suddenlink killed my cable modem on Thursday morning. When I called tech support that night, they couldn’t get a signal from my modem, an old Motorola 4200 (DOCSIS 1.1).  The techie they sent to the house Friday said that Suddenlink had recently upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 locally, and therefore my old modem would no longer work. He offered to rent or sell me a modem or I could go out and buy a new one on my own. Since I know they sell a strange brand that nobody respects, I decided to hit the local Radio Shack to pick up a DOCSIS 3.0 modem. They only sell one modem, which happens to be a DOCSIS 3.0 model (Motorola 6120).

I plugged in the modem, hit DHCP refresh and got a non-local IP address, but couldn’t connect to the internet. This is expected, of course, and so I called the tech support help hell line and proceeded to be told that 1) DOCSIS 3.0 is not in my area, 2) the modem I had been using should work just fine, and 3) the modem I just spent $100 on was not on their approved list. Naturally, I find it absurd that a modem which complies with DOCSIS 2.0 and DOCSIS 3.0 standards would not work on a DOCSIS 2.0 network. Isn’t that the whole point of standards? The tech support guy was very patient and well-informed but was eventually unable to get the Suddenlink system to connect to my modem, regardless of the IP address that it granted me. He even had me connect the old modem, which would not grant me a routable IP address, and he couldn’t get a signal from.

Back to the store, to return the modem. And then to a different store a few miles away, to buy a less-capable modem. While at the store, I noticed a couple things. First, there were almost no DOCSIS 2.0 cable modems remaining on the shelf, although they normally stock three different models. Secondly, my old buddy Karl was there. Karl’s cable modem died on Thursday morning as well. He told me that his gym buddies also had widespread cable modem destruction visited upon them at the same time. Suspicious. We both left the store with new cable modems, and the shelves appeared to have one modem remaining that would work on our system.

I get the new cable modem (which is awfully tiny compared to the old one) home, plug it in and call the tech line to get the modem provisioned. This time, the person on the end of the line was less informed, which is always annoying. She was very obviously reading directly from her flowchart and would not deviate, no matter how absurd the things she insisted I do. At one point, she wanted me to unplug the modem, the router, and all computers connected to the router. This displays a deep lack of understanding of how routers work. Finally, after far too long on the phone with Flowchart Fanny, the connection was up and functioning as it was meant to.

I find it absolutely amazing that the two stores I went to both sold the Motorola 6120, which won’t work on the local system. Since there’s only one cable internet company in town, this exhibits a distressing lack of understanding of the market on the part of the local retailers.

Now it’s time to write a nasty letter to Suddenlink for breaking my modem, lying to me, and wasting my time and money. I don’t expect to get anything but catharsis from this exercise, but I must try.

When I awoke this morning, the internet was missing.  I was very sad, but figured it would be back up when I got home.  It’s not been dead for more than a few minutes in a couple years. I can’t get to many of my geek sites from work, and even if I could they block video and  I don’t have speakers and… SIGH

The home internet is still not up.  Good thing the coffee shop has free wifi.  Yay for free wifi.

Remember that adapid fossil from back in May? Turns out, all that breathless excitement over this “missing link” was premature and erroneous. Of course, most scientists would have told you the same thing in May, since the research was published on the Discovery Channel before it was peer-reviewed, the adapid line is actually not considered an ancestral family from humans, and a few other reasons too no doubt.

This is exactly why I dislike the automatic “missing link” verbiage that gets attached to any story about any prehistoric primate or ape. First of all, it’s ridiculously misleading to think of evolution as a series of links in some sort of chain. And, secondly, when your missing link turns out to have been on a different tree branch, the less-informed just use it as another bludgeon to hit the “ain’t no monkeys in my family tree” drum. Darwinius Masillae remains an interesting fossil and a remarkably well-preserved 45 million-year old find, but it’s not a human ancestor. Take that, premature publication!

On the other hand, this is a great example of why science needs to be better respected in this country. Unlike any other method of dealing with the world throughout history, science is willing (sometimes eager) to admit mistakes, and is always self-correcting. Every scientist wants to make a name for him or herself; proving your peers are wrong in a big way is a great way to do that. That it also advances human knowledge is a great thing for those of us not in the research world. Where would any of us be if previous generations had decided that any evidence contrary to “electricity is magic” was heretical and would be ignored? I’m rather glad to have this here electronic typewritery thingy.

Thinkgeek has a problem with their April Fool’s Day gags – some people actually want to buy them. In 2007, they posted the 8-bit tie as a gag. So many people wrote in, it’s now part of their catalog. This year, they invented the then-satirical Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. They’re gonna sell them in November. There ya go, Lys.  🙂

I hate the breathless and somewhat hyperbole-laden reporting of every new fossil find. This month, it’s Ardipithecus Ramidus, which the press is calling the “oldest pre-human” fossil. Um, wouldn’t the oldest pre-human fossil be the oldest fossil? This obsession with a “missing link” between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom is a bit tiresome. There are jillions of links, and there are undoubtedly going to be jillions more found in the future. Every time someone finds something from the primate branch, the media goes into a veritable frenzy.

Of course, we find anything which casts any light on our own branch of the tree much more interesting than the spectacular specimens of pre-whale fossils back in February. But to claim that this Ardipithecus shows that we didn’t evolve from chimps is ridiculous. Nobody claims we did. Some biologists and anthropologists may use the shorthand of saying we evolved from something that looked something like a modern chimp, but nobody ever said that we evolved and chimps stopped. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Everything is just as “highly evolved” as everything else. Each species occupies a niche for which it has become adapted over eons. That doesn’t in any way mean that humans are the most evolved form of life – we’re just the only ones who write about it.

Oh, and scientists have been writing about Ardipithecus since at least 1999, and even pointed out that it was a hominid but not a common ancestor with modern chimps back in 2001.

For what seems the infinitiest time, another media industry honcho has said something which makes you wonder about his sanity. APN News & Media chief executive Brendan Hopkins said the following recently:

“To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemising the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process.”

Really? And when Jack Valenti told Congress, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” that didn’t turn out to be a bit over the top and perhaps even, dare I say it, completely wrong?

If search engines are showing the table of contents of news sites, then aren’t they driving more traffic to the site?  Isn’t Google News essentially giving the New York Times and other media sites free advertising?  You can’t read the whole article on Google – you have to go to the news site. How is that in any way equated to theft? For that matter, how does one steal a good which is intangible and effectively infinite anyway?

When the media companies get a little pinch of economic hard times, they claim that people are stealing from them, that the world will come to an end if they don’t get paid what they want (rather than what the market will bear), etc. And every time throughout history, they’ve been proven wrong. Sheet music didn’t kill singing. Piano rolls didn’t destroy piano bars. Radio didn’t raid the coffers of the record companies. VCRs did not cause the complete collapse of the movie industry. MP3 players have still, after 10 years, failed to completely annihilate the recording industry, despite the music executives best efforts to jump on a sword or two. In most cases, the new technology has actually been a boon for the existing industry eventually. Stop thinking that your business involves one particular format, and think about what people actually want to buy. People don’t want records or CDs; they want music. People don’t want newspapers or magazines; they want information and pictures. Give your customers what they want in a convenient form they want, and your industry will boom. Prevent them from accessing your media and you’ll soon find you have very little media left to sell. People will read the news online, just maybe not from your company, if you make it too hard to do. It’s possible you’re just making buggy whips and everyone has moved to cars.

This is all in the context of folks like Rupert Murdoch saying he’s going to lock up his news sites behind pay walls, so that people must pay to read his NY Post articles. Hmmm… The NY Times actually took down their pay wall a while back. Their presence online suddenly became much larger, they got more traffic and I’d assume higher advertising revenue. It must be said that the Times is actually talking about rebuilding their pay wall; I’m sure it will be much more successful the second time around. /snark

On August 25th, four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei showed his telescopes to the Venetian lawmakers. With the Galileoscope the Boy and I assembled this weekend, we observed the four satellites of Jupiter that are called today the Galilean moons: Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.  Then the clouds covered them up again.

Although a bit later in the year than I’d hoped we have received our two Galileoscopes (no, I don’t know why I bought two of them, other than they were cheap so why not?), and they’re very spiffy. We’re using the basic 25x magnification right now, although we may put together the 50x eyepiece to peer at Jupiter more closely tomorrow. We should be able to see the Great Red Spot about 10:30pm this week. Not sure about how that will go. The Boy can’t seem to avoid bumping the scope, making massive changes in view far too common. The Woman, of course, was much better and caused no problems when she looked at Jupiter and its four moons.  Very cool night.

Somehow, the Boy convinced me to get up at 6am on a non-work day, so we could peer at Venus and Mars. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Should I be concerned that the IT field services rep for my company (who has a long list of acronyms in his signature block) referenced “Duel booting” between Windows and lynx?  I’m not sure if I’d trust someone who wants a text-based browser fighting with an operating system…