Pauls musings and tidbits

iPhone Report: “

I got a chance to play with an iPhone Saturday. The big-city Apple Store was packed. Even though they had about twenty iPhones out for inspection, you had to wait ten minutes or so to get your hands on one. Here’s my quick review, based on a thorough in-store inspection.

It’s a sweet-looking device. I was blown away by the screen resolution, which made photos and videos look great. For the first time, I believed I might actually be willing to watch a movie on a handheld device.

The other software, from email to Safari, seemed as slick as advertised. This has to be the biggest attraction of the iPhone.

The screen seemed big when I was playing videos. But it seemed too small when I tried to browse the New York Times site. You had to choose between seeing a good portion of the page in nano-print, or zooming in to see a couple sentences in a comfortably readable size. Other newspaper and magazine websites had the same issue.

I tried typing on the on-screen keyboard, which worked poorly, getting about 20% of the keypresses wrong. I typed with my thumbs, Blackberry-style, which was the only way that seemed natural to me while holding the device. My thumbs aren’t particularly large, so I assume many people would have the same problem. Maybe I would get the hang of it after a few days of typing, but if I didn’t the device would be unacceptable for touch typing and I might have had to fall back on tapping keys with a stylus.

The AT&T cellular data network was painfully slow when browsing the web. A colleague and I had a conversation about cellular plans while we waited for one web page to download. A WiFi connection was much better.

My first reaction was that even if you never used your iPhone to make phone calls, it would be a nice little portable communications device. You could use it only with WiFi and be pretty happy.

But Apple won’t let you do that. If you buy an iPhone, it won’t do much of anything until you purchase an AT&T Cellular plan for it. You can’t even use the non-phone features unless accept a two-year contract from AT&T, which I’m not about to do.

So: no iPhone for me.

(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Editor: The restrictions mentioned along with the fact that you have to use the AT&T network as your carrier area reason enough for me to hold off getting an iPhone. But then there is also the cost. Sorry but thats to much of my own money, especially since without SSL (or so I’m told) I can’t use it for my primary reason for getting one. Oh well. But the price will probably come down and they will probably add SLL, and hopefully get another carrier. Then who knows

IBM 1401 Mainframe, the Musical: “A touring song-and-dance performance uses musical sounds recorded by Icelandic engineers in the 1960s who worked with the decades-old, room-size computer. Older IBM-heads are loving it.

[…]

When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine’s memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.

It was a production defect but, captivated, amateur musician Gunnarson and his colleagues soon learned how to reprogram the room-size business workhorse’s innards to emit melodies that rank amongst the earliest in a long line of Scandinavian digital music.

Fast-forward four decades, and recently discovered tape recordings of Gunnarson’s works form the basis of a touring song-and-dance performance, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual. The show was composed by Gunnarson’s son Jóhann Jóhannsson, with interpretive dance choreographed by Erna Omarsdotti, whose father is another IBM alum.

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Editor: My first real full time job had a 1401 still in regular use. Luckily I wasn’t responsible for it. We had the same type of musical fun with radios using a Honeywell computer during Junior High.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — NASA’s aging but durable Mars rover Opportunity will make what could be a trip of no return into a deep impact crater as it tries to peer further back than ever into the Red Planet’s geologic history.

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Behind the iPhone Frenzy: “

Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not.

Either way, the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

Only a company with marketing muscle, design mojo, and a world-historic Reality Distortion Field could provide the needed bump. Apple decided to try, in the hope of selling zillions of the new, more capable devices. The real significance of the iPhone, whether it succeeds or fails in the market, is that it will trigger the transition to more open networks. Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

Whether or not the Jesus Phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different.

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(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Apple - Mac - QuickTime - WWDC 2007 Keynote: “Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil and demo Leopard features in his World Wide Developer Conference keynote address from San Francisco’s Moscone West. See the video-on-demand (VOD) event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.”

(Read Original Article .)

Fever Builds for iPhone (Anxiety Too): SAN FRANCISCO, June 3 — During an onscreen demonstration of the iPhone in Apple’s sprawling retail store here recently, an employee, clad in a black T-shirt, of course, surprised a potential customer.

Nonplused, the customer stammered, “You mean it’s a cellphone, too?”

Such is the spell that Steven P. Jobs has cast on the American consumer.

It has been almost six months since Mr. Jobs, the world’s consummate salesman, introduced the iPhone as the Ronco Veg-O-Matic for the Internet era. Tongue only partly in cheek, Mr. Jobs promised that Apple’s entry into the cellular handset market would be a better phone, Web browser and music player.

Mr. Jobs succeeded in building expectations for what some have called “the God machine.” The bar-of-soap-size phone is being coveted as a talisman for a digital age, and iPhone hysteria is beginning to reach levels usually reserved for video-game machines at Christmas.

Although the phones are expected to cost as much as $600 when they go on sale at Apple and AT&T stores later this month, each company has received more than a million inquiries about the product’s availability. Apple disclosed in television commercials Sunday night that the phone would be released June 29.

Further evidence that expectations have been wound up to a fever pitch: the phones, or promises to deliver a phone, are already on sale on eBay for $830. A pundit as unlikely as Arianna Huffington sought out Mr. Jobs directly for advice on being the first to score a phone. (He told her to go to an AT&T store.)

Last week, during an appearance at a technology industry conference in Southern California, Mr. Jobs teased the audience by briefly pulling an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and immediately slipping it back out of sight.

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Technology.)

40% efficient solar cells to be used for solar electricity: Scientists from Spectrolab, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, have recently published their research on the fabrication of solar cells that surpass the 40% efficiency milestone—the highest efficiency achieved for any photovoltaic device. Their results appear in a recent edition of Applied Physics Letters.

Most conventional solar cells used in today’s applications, such as for supplemental power for homes and buildings, are one-sun, single-junction silicon cells that use only the light intensity that the sun produces naturally, and have optimal efficiency for a relatively narrow range of photon energies.

The Spectrolab group experimented with concentrator multijunction solar cells that use high intensities of sunlight, the equivalent of 100s of suns, concentrated by lenses or mirrors. Significantly, the multijunction cells can also use the broad range of wavelengths in sunlight much more efficiently than single-junction cells.

“These results are particularly encouraging since they were achieved using a new class of metamorphic semiconductor materials, allowing much greater freedom in multijunction cell design for optimal conversion of the solar spectrum,” Dr. Richard R. King, principal investigator of the high efficiency solar cell research and development effort, told PhysOrg.com. “The excellent performance of these materials hints at still higher efficiency in future solar cells.”

In the design, multijunction cells divide the broad solar spectrum into three smaller sections by using three subcell band gaps. Each of the subcells can capture a different wavelength range of light, enabling each subcell to efficiently convert that light into electricity. With their conversion efficiency measured at 40.7%, the metamorphic multijunction concentrator cells surpass the theoretical limit of 37% of single-junction cells at 1000 suns, due to their multijunction structure.

(Read Original Article - Via physorg.com .)

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? - Independent Online Edition > Wildlife: “It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees’ navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London’s biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: ‘There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK.’

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, ‘man would have only four years of life left’.”

(Read Original Article - Via Independent Online Edition > Wildlife .)

John Kenyon - What Every Nonprofit Needs to Know About Technology: “Managing technology is no longer optional, it is a critical piece of any nonprofit’s business plan. In this talk, information technology consultant John Kenyon gives invaluable guidance on the planning needed for small and medium sized organizations to get the most out of their tech investment. Using a work systems framework, Kenyon explores the choices needed to minimize risks and strike the right balance between people, data and technology.”

(Read Original Article - Via Social Innovation Conversations.)

The alarm clock that runs and hides so you’ll never oversleep again: “‘After the first few beeps I always hear a nice loud thump as it hits the ground running,’ wrote Paciga in an e-mail message.

The escaping alarm clock is here.

Clocky, as it’s called, hit the market Feb. 13, and is the result of inventor Gauri Nanda’s own battle with her circadian clock. The 27-year-old created the runaway alarm clock while she was a graduate student at MIT.

‘As a designer, it was obvious that the alarm clock needed to be improved, both in functionality and in personality,’ Nanda said. She was studying at the MIT Media Lab, which focuses on the intersection of technology and design, when she invented the clock. Her other inventions include pneumatic clothing with a detachable part that, when placed on the floor, senses that it is no longer clothing and inflates to become seating. ‘My focus was wearable technology,’ she said.

Her prototype Clocky was covered in brown shag carpeting and had big rubber wheels at either end of its body. When Nanda hit snooze, the clock would rev up, leap off the nightstand, land on the floor and roll around, its random wheel function moving the clock around until it found a suitable place to wedge itself — under a couch, for instance, or under the bed. There, the clock would crouch, waiting for snooze time to be up. Then it would ring again. The invention generated enormous media coverage.

‘A lot of customers have been anxiously waiting for the launch because they heard about Clocky over a year ago when he was only a prototype and I was still a student,’ Nanda said by e-mail.

The interest in the clock led her to start her own company, Nanda Home, www.nandahome.com, after graduating from MIT. Nanda and her few part-time employees have sold just under 3,000 Clockies so far, primarily by word-of-mouth. The current Clocky comes in white, aqua and mint, but Nanda is planning a shaggy version, too — in homage to the original prototype. Users have taken to posting YouTube videos of their Clockies waking up and running away, as if the alarm clock were a new, cute pet.

‘A lot of people who purchase Clocky are parents who want one for their child,’ she said. The target demographic for the $49 clock is the 18 to 30 crowd.”

(Read Original Article - Via The Detroit News..)