Category Archives: Technology

iPad, BeBot, Pandora and the ‘tech’ industry

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iPad wallpaper

Jobs Motto

So I haven’t said much about my constant companion, the iPad, recently. 

  • I updated to iOS5 the day it released, of course on an Orig, it’s not  the same as it probably is on a 2 but it’s still good.  I think iCloud’s (base) is going to work out well and the iMessage etc look interesting.  The tabs in Safari took a few hours to get used to but they are an improvement.
  • Other than a pretty good hand holding experience during set up I haven’t had much ‘contact’ with the new.  Which in my experience is actually a good thing.  I may be a fantasist and romantic but I’m als a bit of a stick in the mud, if something works, why change it for the sake of change?
  • Biggest headache was having to update what seemed like umpteen Apps but as usual it happened pretty seamlessly. 
  • My biggest iPad laugh was taking it(them actually) to my sister in-law’s and I think her little grand son(4?) whose had an iPad longer than I have, flipped the selector switch on the side of my wife’s iPad, muting it.  It took me an HOUR and several hard boots and harder words, to figure out the poor thing was doing what it was told, I just didn’t understand.  
  • So at the same meeting of iPad carriers, we were introduced to BeBot, a simply wonderful time sink, and maybe the closest thing to a new instrument I have seen in a long time.  It’s just an App but it turns the iPad into a synthesizer with a pure touch interface, you run your finger(s) over the screen to make synth music.  Quite a few interesting base options and lots of ways to vary them.  I could see someone becoming a professional BeBotist in the future, or BeBot Groups getting together.  It’s currently only an instrument, it does not record, I hope they come out with a version which lets you ‘lay tracks’ etc. 
  • Pandora, the phenomenon, I listen to little else these days, on my iPad or laptop.   I have found music that I love, that I had never heard or been able to follow up on before.  This is by far the best way to listen to music.  As I have said elsewhere, the fact that I cannot absolutely control what I am listening to but can make my opinion ‘heard’ is simply a phenomenal breakthrough in listening pleasure.

And so to the Tech industry, who is finally settling into a funk over the dominance of Apple, iOS, the iPad, and to some extent the death and ascencion to TechSaintHood of Steve Job’s (that’s a comment on others, not a slam at Mr.Jobs who was as human as they come but the right gifted man at the right pivots of  [tech] history.) 

It seems to me that anyone out there who looks at the industry with a reasonably open mind will see that pervasive lacks have impaired broad swaths of the industry

  1. originality
  2. innovative risk taking
  3. long-range vision
  4. middle distant financial horizons. 

Jobs seems to have recognized these things and was able to use Apple and the experience he gained while in the wilderness to build a product platform + family + business-model that others seem unable or perhaps unwilling to compete with. 

Most fundamental to the paralysis is item 4 above with a lot of 3 in support. Jobs was able to keep building his model over a long period of relatively lack luster performance.   He was lucky, in that no one really expected great things of Apple but it had a dedicated customer base and no one in a place to counter or make use of the knowledge understood what he was doing till it was too late.  He was cagey and secretive, probably because that was just the way he was, but also because he knew that if some of his business partners understood what he wanted to do and came to believe in it like he did, he’d probably have a harder time making enough money to keep the project going when he needed cash flow to push some of the concepts forward. He was also like most visionaries and his understanding of his own  vision evolved and developed detail over time.  And of course, no one else knew what they should be watching for. 

So now we have people talking up Amazon’s Fire as a competitor.  Why, because its Amazon and Amazon had the Kindle.  I’m not sure but I think they miss the point.  The Kindle was the front end of a digital book store.  The Nook showed that with color and the right price you could have a bit more than that.  The Fire is a shopping window and digital sales point for Amazon, yes it’s also a reader and a tablet, but its main purpose is as a shop window. 

The iPad is a more general purpose tool than Fire.  IPad is part of a larger tech infrastructure from the iPod Touch to the top of the line Mac workstations. This is essentially an intellectual interface infrastructure for creation and consumption, with a powerful shopping window built in.  The Fire is never going to compete with that.  And neither is the Android platform by the way.

Android is like Linux it has a good chance of lasting a long time because it is widely dispersed and open for people to build on and use.  It is also likely to be very important, but as an also ran competitor in all but the phone space, where in some senses it may already dominates because of the variety of companies and price points it supports. 

So is this bad….yes because Apple is not going to be able to carry the ball forever and maybe not for very long unless Jobs trained his heirs well and left them with the tools to control the kingdom.  It’s bad because competition is good within reason and no one is competing with Apple at the moment which will weaken them eventually  The competion seem to be in a ‘waiting out the deluge’ mode.  Waiting for Apple to stumble giving them the opportunity to pull it down to their own level. if (when) that happens then the leaps we have seen recently may end as the industry falls back into the frothy stagnation it suffered from the later nineties to mid noughts. 

Lets hope not….

Reuse, respin, start-from, even salvage: how is this bad?

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20111017-171748.jpg

A concept to boost parts of the ISS either into Lunar orbit or to one of the Lagrange points. One negative comment pointed out the ISS requires a lot of support. Well there is no reason you can’t resupply and crew as needed instead of full time. The point here would be reuse of a facility that is already in orbit ( $aving in the tens of millions to billions in the process) and by that point would have fulfilled it’s original purpose (however vague that was.)

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Boeing is getting crap for suggesting the X-37 could be used as is, scaled up, or scaled and crewed. How can it be a bad idea to take a successful aerospace-craft as the basis of future growth. The original X-37 was intended for just this sort of scaling. O.K. it being Boeing does worry me, a little, but they have the scale, resources, focus (maybe) and balls (probably) to do this. My main concern is the crowding out of smaller eSpace players. But the eSpace crowd appear to have gotten their climbing claws dug in and seem to be on a flight path of their own. As long as BigB is climbing as well as, not instead of, I think we’re good.

Space – Dreams – Mind – Future Mil

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International Space Station's Expedition 29 crew on September 17, 2011, while cruising over the Indian Ocean near Australia and south of Madagascar

 Is it only after certain brute needs are met that we can look up and see the wonder, the beauty of the world around us? And if you are trapped in the mental, social, and light smeared deserts where too many of us live in, does it takes a special imagination to see beyond the here and now?

SNC Dream Chaser Docked with ISS

Sierra Nevada Corporation dreams big with the Dream Chaser, a crewed spaceplane based on the NASA/AF experimental lifting body designs from the ’70s (It was the crash of one of these that was a lead in to the Six Million Dollar Man TV show by the way, not to put you off.)

They have a composite fuselage built and have experimented / developed (like Virgin Galactic) a hybrid rocket motor.  A hybrid rocket motor has a solid fuel but liquid / gaseous oxidizer. You don’t have to deal with the complex plumbing of a pure liquid motor or the uncontrolability of a solid. They are talking to Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic about catching a ride into the stratosphere on a White Knight II.  I’d even guess a sub orbital launch from a WKII is likely. I then hope they talk to SpaceX about a ride to orbit on a Falcon.  There is no reason these various guys shouldn’t be looking at cooperation as their technologies mature, or not.  Its possible the SpaceX dragon will be a wonderful cargo hauler but not a real solution for crew return or maybe won’t really be reusable….

There seem to be a lot of people dreaming about a lot of options, far and away above what NASA has been able to do for most of my life.  I can only hope this continues. 

And by the way, the guys who are supporting this stuff, they’re all in the 1% the OWS crowd are against.  When OWS talk about bankers, they almost have my sympathy, but when I look to eSpace and Steve Jobs, even Gates, then that faint flicker, flickers out.

You have to have big assets to make big dreams real, and as long as they are spending it on this sort of thing, I’m all for them keeping every last cent of what they make in the money world. 

Article Front Piece

What happens when your memory is so faulty you don’t even know your memory is faulty?

I was reading an article in an actual paper magazine Brain Power that was discussing the problems of a patient with a particular type of brain damage. The patient had a form of amnesia that let him remember old information, from before the brain damage, but not since, the person can do all the normal things, dress and take care of themselves, but they are living in an eternal now. And because all they have is a fixed past and an utterly confusing now their mind basically fills in the gaps, without ongoing memories the persons brain/mind cannot do the sort of ‘running average’ comparison of the now with the near, recent, etc past that keeps us (most of us, relatively) grounded in the hear an now.  So this person asked a simple question about where they are and why, would come up with various stories, from the nearly right to the utterly fantastical and apparently believe them and operate as if they were true. 

So maybe writing Sci Fi requires a certain amount of amnesia?

Baen Article header
Beating the Decline..

There is a very interesting article at Baen the premier outlet for Sci Fi these days particularly Mil Sci Fi.  Mr. Dunn has done an excellent job of outlining the current trajectory of the mil world from the threat to the budget and the current reaction of the Tech Services, the Navy and Air Force, I eagerly await the second part which will deal with the ground forces. 

The situation in grunt land has always been more complex than that in the technical services, not to say that the sea or the air are simple, just simpler, on land you have the interaction of so many things that it is hard to readily predict what will work and what won’t.

I can hear a lot of cat calls regarding the fact that Navies and Air Forces have made huge missteps. And I agree but in general those mistakes while suboptimal where still better than what came before.  In the mud its not clear that this is always the case. Now I’m not talking about weapons like nukes or even heavy artillery, these are technical services, but as we have found out in Iraq and Af’stan its boots on the ground that matter and a thousand little actions that eventually spell success or failure.

In the J.S.Zaloga book Panther vs. Sherman focusing on the battle of the bulge the author re-examines the face off between these two tanks. And while in most pure technical terms of armor, gun, ground pressure, engine power, the Sherman comes off the worse, in fact tactically it often won. For many reasons, reliability, more vehicles, fighting from ambush, generally more agile, better visibility. 

While better equipment is often an amplifier, training, logistics and morale are generally more important once you have reached reasonable parity.  You are not going to beat even a PzKfWgn II with straight up lancer charge. But there is no reason that an armored force couldn’t be fought to a standstill by folks on horses given horse portable anti tank weapons, equivalent logistics and lack of air superiority (Russia in Af’stan anyone?)

Precision weapons and ubiquitous day/night recon and observation are having profound effects on open field warfare.  And the emergence of extended urban/sub-urban campaigns are making things even more difficult.  Then there is the emergence of powerfully armed subnational or non-national forces whose operations are distributed temporally and geographically, to such an extent that they look like policing problems, but are really outside of the scope of traditional police force, since they are often heavily armed and operate largely within the law except for occasional egregious exceptions…..

So I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Dunn has to say in his second article.

Rage Against DCA

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When you travel to the northeast you have a series of not good options for transfer hubs.  There is Chicago, La Guardia , Kennedy, Newark, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington Dulles and DCA, Ronald Reagan International, Washington District of Columbia.

I actually prefer smaller aircraft these days, the Embraer 145 and 170/190 mainly because you either get an aisle or window seat, I’m a big guy and I and my seat mates hate it when I get a middle seat. So that means that I tend to fly through the smaller airports when I can.  Cleveland has been a favorite but its likely the United buy out of Continental will curtail that option. That means DCA which some people find surprising.

DCA is actually a very small airport with a lot of flights.  It has very good links to the rest of the country east of the great plains because it’s a taxi ride to congress and the rest of the gov’t.  All the state capitals (like say, Indianapolis) have pretty good service albeit on regional or smaller mainline jets. Early in the day and later in the afternoon there are all sorts of options to provide your Gov’ts functionaries access to each other. 

Since even in today’s America the movement of bureaucrats and politicians and other sundry functionaries couldn’t support a commercially viable network the hoyploy are allowed to use it as well.  And the flight links are business friendly.  So I get to pick this as a hub far more often than I want to.

There have been various efforts to close DCA over the years as a security (passengers on one side can look down the mall at congress, from less than a mile, as you land or take off) or safety (it’s a bit tricky to fly into along the Potomac, to avoid over flying things like the Pentagon, Naval Research Labs, an Air Force base, etc.)  The ride can be interesting from a sight-seeing viewpoint. But I wonder how many weapons targeting systems are tracking us as we wind down the river.  

You can see this as a test in itself… it takes a reasonable pilot to stay on the twisting flight corridor…its unlikely the 911 hijackers could have gotten close without being ID’d.  Is it possible that one of these days there will be a series of mistakes made, resulting in a shoot down?  In fact I’m (pretty) sure any active defenses are even closer to the targets and its likely the defenses are purely passive, but who knows? And of course that’s the point, and I think that’s just fine…it just makes flying into DCA a little more ‘fraught’ than I like.

Physically Ronald Reagan International is a highly constricted piece of land on the Potomac across from the center of the city.  And it’s not optimally laid out, because of the constriction and because it was designed and built just before 911. So if you land at gate 24 and fly out of gate 38 you have to climb down outdoor steps get on a bus and get driven between the two concourse arms dodging baggage trucks and backing jetliners.  I actually don’t mind the ride but the steps in the rain snow, horrid heat/humidity with my luggage is not a fav. 

Because many of the flights are direct links (the ones I’m on anyway) even when the rest of the east coast traffic goes ‘blewwey’ because of bad weather I get in and out of DCA reasonably reliably.  But also because of those same links I have sometimes run into the the timeout or other passenger unfriendly events.  Towards the end of the day pilots are getting towards the limit on the number of hours they can fly in one 24 hour period.  I was on a flight earlier this year where we pulled away from the gate, and were delayed a few minutes because of flight routing, and the pilots told us we were going to be staying in DCA because one of them would be out of hours before landing, (this happened to a flight to Indy just earlier in the evening las night.)  Another time a flight was canceled because another aircraft had a mechanical problem and my flight was relatively thinly populated so they switched aircraft.  There is no room for spare aircraft at DCA so we found ourselves staying the night. 

So to last night, cue the thunderstorms, delays and canceled flights all up and down the east coast, concourses full of people trying to get home.

Arrive in DCA on time, exchange concourses in the rain, find a seat, start writing a post on my trusty iPad.  Then I hear that my flight is now departing from a different gate, in the other concourse.  Back on the damned bus and back to the other side.  Set up start typing and time gets away from me.  Hit the line just in time to get aboard and get a spot for my roll-a-board then I dash off the message I posted last night. 

Then we sit….finally the doors close, with empty seats because the aircraft they were holding for did not leave La Guardia and they didn’t have time to get other displaced passengers aboard.  Then we push of the gate….and sit. Then the mains wind up…we’re on our way!  No we aren’t. Get out of the alleyway and the engines spool down…and we sit.  We’re going to be routed south to avoid thunderstorms in the lower flight levels. Good we’re going right?!  Spool up, wander around the airport for a while, then the engines spool down again (and by the way every time you light off a gas turbine you take hundreds of operating hours off its life, they love to run, they hate starting up and stopping. But sitting there with the engines running was burning fuel we’d need for the hop to Indy.) We sit…then the engines start and we taxi again….back towards the terminal! Then we start seeing massive flashes of lightning.  There’s a major storm cell heading straight for us!  And the engines spool down again! We sit and rock as the wind and rain lash us.  Then the engines start again! We taxi sloooowwwly past the terminals, I figure we’re staying the night.  But we don’t turn in!  Then we tuck in behind another liner, and the captain makes only the third announcement, that we’re waiting for the storms to clear our departure vector and we can call our loved ones that we’ll be late!  And the engines spool down again! 

Then finally, ‘everyone back to your seats, less than six minutes to take off!’ And we were off in about the six minutes.  Of course it was well after midnight instead of ten but we were off. 

SO? I got home, why am I whingeing? Because it was painful, every damn step was painful, getting through security, waiting, getting on, getting off, waiting, getting back on, the delay, everything! everything was painful.

Why was it painful. Probably because I was tired and depressed but mainly because I’m a romantic.   Flying should be an adventure, the power and beauty of the aircraft, the wonder and beauty of the sky and world.

We have taken a dream humanity has probably had ever since we had self-consciousness and turned it into Kafkaesque Bureau-Industrial grotesqueness.  As I said earlier in the week its like traveling on a prison tram with well behaved inmates. 

At least once in the air, I can close my eyes and dream of starships as we wing home.

My cute little assistant

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The introduction of Siri on the iPhone 4S could be another defining moment for tech. I hear some pundits deride the move but I see it as a bit like the transition to a graphical user interface. Believe it or not there were those who derided that change (a few of them are still out there.). There are things that the modern human to data net interface device (pick your type) should be able to do better with a verbal interface. This is not to say we’ll do it all that way, most of us type faster and more succinctly than we speak, I’d hate to think I’d start getting raw transcript output in text it would rapidly drive me to Ludditism! But the types of things Apple and others demonstrated seemed pretty much on, have Siri make the call, have Siri set the wake up time, have Siri check the weather. These are all things I can do but having Siri do them while I do other things, like a human assistant can, will make me more productive and perhaps less stressed.

Who knows miracles probably do happen. I am certainly looking forward to trying Siri out when she comes to iPad 3…

Work a day World….which will come

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Another article about the end of work as we know it and I have to agree that this is the ‘feeling’ i get when looking and listening to the world at large. My jobs over the years have taken me to many companies, many new, some middle aged, a fair number ‘old line industrial.’ And the way I see it now is that we’ve been overlooking profound changes that were happening without causing much of direct stir while looking in the wrong direction and perhaps (probably) pursuing the wrong ‘solutions’ to what may not be real problems.

The story I would tell is this, that the heyday of the giant integrated conglomerate as a generic solution in the technology arena was probably sometime around the middle of the twentieth century. Not that anyone realized it or noted it, but after that smaller companies were often able to outmaneuver the big guys and started carving away chunks, not directly but by making managers/owners make decisions that marginalized pieces of their business. These middle sized companies started small and sometimes grew big and became conglomerates but on average the company size got smaller and more focused.

Many of the companies I visit have huge factories built in the heyday of mass production. Today these factories instead of producing just one product, produce several, or dozens and the people who service the machines are a fraction of the ‘old’ work force, or much of the facility stands vacant while the still sell just as much in raw value as they did when they had hundreds if not thousands of workers. Many stay in these old factories, because they’re essentially free and/or tearing it down would open them up for problems with the EPA re ‘Brown Field Remediation’ etc.

What happened to all those workers? We’ve heard about the hollowing out of our manufacturing for a long time but the pain was ‘mostly’ pretty low level, why? Because for the first forty years most of the the effects were hidden. Those smaller, mid sized companies were usually, less automated and less efficient but less expensive in terms of human driven overheads (generally younger staff, lower wages, small efficient shops, small effective teams, managerially efficient), and they sopped up, the workers no longer needed by the ‘mainline’ shops.

So why the agony now? I think that the internet bubble then the financial bubble hid the tailing off of the gentle transition, or maybe it kept more of the old line industries / jobs in play and then dropped them on the floor in one steaming pile. And suddenly the staid old like companies appear to have vanished, and the jobs appear to have vanished, but they had mostly vanished a decade and more ago, the rest was financial illusion.

If there had been no 911 and a need to hide the cost of the wars it sparked and a Ranch and Cancun Vacation (instead of bread and circuses) program put on to distract our attention, we would probably have seen the pain earlier and I think less severely. Now we probably are going to undergo a painful decade of recession, maybe more until we understand that the world has changed and work and the economy have to evolve.

How that evolution is going to happen is a blank to me. But what I see as happening over the next several decades is an ongoing evolution of work to highly automated mass production of basic needs, and the creation of more and more boutique, even artisanal companies often supported by constantly shifting teams of people who are engaged for short run needs.

And perhaps the gov’t and many folks who are still looking at the past to guide the future, will stop trying to save industrial age health and retirement systems that are unsustainable in the long run, and look to a much more personally focused system one that is portable across the country and across the globe if we have any sense.

Why I miss coughing

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Flying was something you did very infrequently when I was young. By the time I joined the workforce as a junior civil servant it had become quite common for the engineering set. By the time I left deregulation had made it cheap enough for folks to go places several times a year, even fly to Vegas for the weekend.
Those too young to remember should be assured that flying in ‘the good ole days’ really was a different experience, you have to deal with it in a metal tube at 30,000 ft know how horrid cigarette smoke really is, and I even smoked at the time! But they did really feed you and they gave you the whole damn can unless you didn’t want it. People where polite and seemed happy enough. You didn’t often have a full flight. The xray machine was a formality and you didn’t have to undergo the equivalent of a strip search every other flight just to appease the god of a little more security.
These days the only joy I get are the occasional extra special views out the window. A few months ago flying out of Cleveland between storms, looking into the side of a thunder cell at eyeball level and seeing the strokes of lightning lashing down. Flying out over the hot coal orange symmetry of Chicago at night and seeing it end in the moon silvered black of lake Michigan.
But other than that I might as well be on a inter prison subway train with a politer than average set of inmates.

Sometimes I miss that wheezy after flight cough!

Written from an undisclosed location far from the bosom of my family on my trusty iPad.

Ideas for a NaNoWriMo Novel

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Anybody got any ideas regarding NaNoWriMo, still not firm on my basic approach or genre or anything….probably should keep it simple and the ideas I have even a flicker are all SciFi  or Fantasy:

  • Elgin Hampstead Chalmers, the down and out cowboy in spectacular north Wyoming who finds out that there is more to life than he had ever imagined.
  • Fifty, the living trigger of an interstellar IED left to wait long after the war she was created to die in has ended in extermination for her creators and their enemies.
  • Jason DoubleHammer, the son of heroes who just wants to be an ordinary boy and sail his boat in the big race. When he finds an odd friend hiding in a tree and quickly finds himself running for both of their lives across a world in turmoil.
  • Finna the swordmaid bodyguard of an elderly mage lord, she just wants to keep out of trouble for a year or so. But mage lord has found a gate into a strange new universe and he needs his bodyguard to come along on his last adventure. 

Any takers?

Pandora…..Its not all about Free

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Pandora, another technology and service that has changed my life.  A couple of years ago I stumbled across some mention of Pandora and pushed it aside.  A while later I went looking for a better way of getting music.  I tried Yahoo, Google, iTunes and started listening to internet radio but didn’t like what I found, even for free.  Then I ran across Pandora again and read the blurb on the Music DNA project that the company was based on. 

I started to use Pandora, a little at first, then more and more, finally running into the hours per month limit.  I did that for a couple of months, then had a look at the premium service.  I almost quite because I hated paying for something I’d been getting free. 

Then I had a bit of an epiphany, I cannot expect to always get good to great services for free, and the ones coming closest irritated me with their commercials.  Pandora had already introduced me to multiple new artists and completely new genre and I liked how it worked…

I paid up and have never regretted it.

There are always a lot of words flying about how Free has killed the web, and how so many magazines and papers started providing free services and could not sustain it or get the readers they had to start paying. There were the ones who tried to start charging from the beginning, which generally died out.

But there are more and more places where people will pay for content.  In particular in cases where, like me with Pandora, they really come to love the application and want more and can get it for a modest investment.  The Economist essentially does this, (I was an addict long before the web version, but their current model has gotten me re hooked several times) and there are others out there.

The secret is providing the customer with a compelling experience and charging a fair price.  Providing a me too experience with nothing special is not going to get customers.  Newspapers in particular have yet to develop the right combination of experiences via the web.  Local papers survive in the paper form because/when they have local value and because many of us love the crinkle of the paper in the morning.  But its the value/content that does not transfer to the web. 

I have to say as much as I love my iPad for most other forms of reading I still like the morning paper and its combination of format and topics….and by the way the funnies….the web-crowd always seem to miss how important the morning funnies are to folks.  And its not just  the ones I like.

And maybe that’s a secret someone needs to ponder.  Like Pandora (and the Economist and WSJ etc) the paper pushes content at me that I would not necessarily choose to (or know to) go searching for on my own, I trust the paper to do a reasonably unbiased job of putting out content that is of local importance (even if that importance is in others eyes) making me an informed/understanding local citizen. 

 I cannot know what I should be paying attention to outside of a small set of things that are central to my life.  The newspaper helps me pay attention to secondary stuff, I will not always agree with what is written but it does point it out.  And that is important.

And to receive that daily packet of local color I pay, I would pay for it online if the layout and the presentation were compelling.  But right now I go out to the mailbox every morning, rain or shine, snow and Ice, etc, for that few minute scan of my local environs and a few chuckles or groans at the comics.

By the way I live in Indianapolis and get the Indianapolis Star.  A very good local paper that I hope has many more successful years ahead of it.