Random Flux

Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

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Maybe it’s time to treat digital media formats in the same way as radio spectrum bandwidth: We don’t have any problem with regulating the radio spectrum because it’s clearly a limited resource that everybody needs to use. Leaving it completely open would obviously make the spectrum useless.

The same applies to digital formats, it’s just not as immediately obvious. For example, a situation in which four or five different high-definition DVD formats coexist would effectively be as chaotic and useless as an unregulated radio spectrum.

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There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about whether we might be living in a computer simulation. The current discussion is being fueled by a serious paper by Nick Bostrom and it is also being discussed in many blogs.

In terms of quantum mechanics the question as to whether our reality is a simulation or not is actually quite moot. To begin with, it is now as certain as science can be that matter as we subjectively perceive it does not exist — the huge majority of what we experience as matter is actually empty space and the rest is tiny areas of energy events popping in and out of “existence” (at least from our point of view) like whack-a-rats jumping in and out of their holes. Most people still miss this because physicists continue to use the comforting and misleading word “particles” for something that is actually about as particulate as an advertising popup on a website.

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Blue or grey – it’s still a screen of death!

Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.

Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict how new or updated programs will run on users’ computers. Third-party software, particularly security software, is making profound changes to the operating system, creating a constantly-changing digital environment. As a result, manufacturer accountability and due diligence are much less meaningful concepts than they used to be.

Releasing new software updates is a scary process nowadays. Even if you’ve tested everything on all the hardware, operating system and software configurations you can think of, you just know what’s going to happen: Within an hour of the release, six users on hotmail and gmail accounts with names like kilroywzhr779 are going to write you urgent and angry messages saying that your program, Windows or both are doing something radically weird. File output is taking two hours, bizarre error messages are jumping off the screen like popcorn, the program and/or Windows are crashing, and so on.

Looking at the messages, your initial response is always to think you’re in the wrong movie. You tested it, just know that there’s no way your program could be doing this…
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Paul Potts is a Welsh cellphone salesman who has always dreamed of being an opera singer. Apart from a few private lessons and amateur appearances he had never performed publicly before appearing on a TV talent show in England. Judge for yourself — this man is a living miracle. I’ve not heard anything like this since Callas…

Clip no. 1

Clip no. 2

The iPhone’s version of Safari will probably not support Flash. Pundits trying to explain this are coming up with many complex conspiracy theories, but the real reason is probably much simpler: Battery Life. Flash is a processor-intensive technology (just watch the processor load on your computer jump when you open a Flash site!) and supporting Flash could significantly cut battery life if users spend a lot of time viewing Flash sites and Flash videos. After all their travails with iPod batteries, reports about short battery life on the iPhone are definitely not something Apple wants in the first months after the launch.

There’s a lot of speculation going on regarding why Apple has introduced Safari for Windows — for example to get more Google ad revenue, as a platform for Windows developers who want to build iPhone apps and so on. One interesting point is that WinSafari doesn’t appear to be using normal Windows technology; in many ways it looks, feels and behaves like an OS X program, much more so than iTunes for Windows. If it’s built with a new class library created by Apple specifically to emulate the Apple look and feel on Windows this could have some interesting ramifications.

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Think Apple is innovative? Think the iPhone is the most revolutionary personal digital device on the planet, and it comes from Microsoft! Have a look at the first promotional video from Microsoft, just released. (Apparently Microsoft made this terrific spoof themselves. If that’s true then more power to them!)