A ‘concept’ illustration from the Chromium documentation site. They’re clearly envisaging a tablet as one of the platforms for Chrome OS.
So iPad 1.1 will have a camera after all.
Well, it will if this can be believed.
Mission Repair, a company that fixes broken Apple products, apparently got their hands on some iPad parts. Their pictures showed off the internal frame, which curiously enough has a small hole on the top of the frame.
When the Mission Repair team took a camera out of a MacBook and placed it inside the iPad’s top hole, it fight right in. You can see a comparison of the MacBook camera and the iPad slot in the image above.
Toyota: how even the mighty can stumble
As a Toyota owner, I have a particular interest in this.
The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”
The call ended with the sound of a crash.
The Lexus ES 350 sedan, made by Toyota, had hit a sport utility vehicle, careened through a fence, rolled over and burst into flames. All four people inside were killed: the driver, Mark Saylor, an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law.
It was the tragedy that forced Toyota, which had received more than 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, to step up its own inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.
Yet only last week did the company finally appear to come to terms with the scope of the problem — after expanding a series of recalls to cover millions of vehicles around the world, incalculable damage to its once-stellar reputation for quality and calls for Congressional hearings.
It’s sobering, this. Toyota has for two decades been the world’s best car manufacturer. But something clearly went very wrong. Success does strange things to organisations. And it leads to hubris:
At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes.
As recently as the fall, Toyota was still saying it was confident that loose floor mats were the sole cause of any sudden acceleration, issuing an advisory to millions of Toyota owners to remove them. The company said on Nov. 2 that “there is no evidence to support” any other conclusion, and added that its claim was backed up by the federal traffic safety agency.
But, in fact, the agency had not signed on to the explanation, and it issued a sharp rebuke. Toyota’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate,” the agency said. “This matter is not closed.”
We have two Toyota cars, and they’re the most reliable and efficient vehicles I’ve ever owned, with the possible exception of the old VW Beetles I had in the 1970s. Even so…
Why A4?
No, this isn’t about standard paper sizes, but the processor chip in the iPad.
I was puzzled that Apple had gone to the trouble and expense of doing custom silicon, and I’m still puzzled. So — according to this NYT report — are other observers.
But designing its own processors burdens Apple with additional engineering costs and potential product delays. It also forces the company to hire — and retain — experienced chip designers. Several who joined the company in 2008 after an acquisition have already left for a secretive start-up.
Though chip industry experts have yet to put the iPad through their customary rigorous tests, Apple’s demonstrations left them underwhelmed.
“I don’t see anything that looks that compelling,” said Linley Gwennap, a chip analyst at the Linley Group. “It doesn’t seem like something all that new, and, if it is, they are not getting far with it.”
Cloud capitalism — and its cultural implications
Charles Leadbeater has written a characteristically thoughtful pamphlet on Cloud Culture: the global future of cultural relations for Counterpoint, the British Council’s thinktank. It is being published next Monday (February 8) but he’s summarised the argument in this blog post.
The Internet, our relationship with it and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena. The rise of “cloud computing” will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. As Hillary Clinton’s announcement to release funding for the protection of the net – a day after Google’s announcement to stop self-censoring its service in China – indicates, the battle lines are already being drawn.
The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.
As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.
Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?
It’s interesting how these issues are gradually coming to the fore. Sometimes it takes events like the launch of the iPhone or (now) the iPad to provide a peg for thinking about what all this stuff means and where is it taking us. In my darker moments I have a terrible feeling that we’re sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare — that our great-great-grandchildren will one day look back on this period in history and ask “what were they thinking when they skipped happily into the clutches of Apple, Google & Co?”
Well, what are we thinking?
LATER: Bill Thompson reminded me of a column he wrote way back in October 2008, in which he wrote about cloud computing as “a generational shift as significant as that from the mainframe to the desktop computer is happening as we watch”. But, he wondered,
what does this do for the companies that sell cloud-based services rather than operating systems, routers or hardware? What happens when Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and IBM are actually running programs and storing data on behalf of their customers? We may criticise Google for censoring search results in China, but what happens when Microsoft data centres are being used to store data on political prisoners or transcripts of torture sessions?
There is already a lively debate about the dangers of having the US government trawl through a company’s confidential records using the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, taking advantage of the fact that the main cloud platforms are run by US companies.
But the other side of the equation matters too. Should Amazon feel happy that its elastic compute cloud could easily stretch to support human rights abuses that would still be considered unacceptable in most of the world? And if so, what should we do about it?
The iPad and dystopia
Very thoughtful essay by Alex Payne.
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.
Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.
For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home…
This is a lovely essay — and it attracted some interesting comments. What it illustrates is the gulf between the ‘consumer’ view of computing and the programmer’s perspective, where ‘freedom to tinker’ is of paramount importance.
One of the comments also makes an important point, namely that the dichotomy between ‘closed=safe’ and ‘open=vulnerable’ is a false one. The most insidious thing of all is a closed system that isn’t secure but which users believe is secure, because that leaves them open to hacking in a particularly unpleasant way. A bit like the false confidence that comes from using a bike-lock which you are told is unbreakable but which is, in fact, vulnerable to those who know how to break it.
FOOTNOTE: I found Alex’s essay via dive into mark, which has an equally thoughtful post about the iPad.
Virtual world generates real dollars?
Hmmm… Could this be true?
Second Life economy totals $567 million US dollars in 2009 – 65% growth over 2008
Gross Resident Earnings are $55 million US Dollars in 2009 – 11% growth over 2008
In 2009, the rest of the world caught up with what Second Life Residents have known for a long time – that virtual goods can be a very good business. Headlines about a billion-dollar plus trade in virtual items appeared in the mainstream press, but in many cases the articles focused on the platforms that create and provide virtual goods to their users, not on the users themselves.
And this is what sets Second Life apart: our users create, merchandise, and sell virtual goods as part of the largest user-generated 3D virtual goods economy in the world. By any measure – number of items, transactions, dollar value, revenues earned – Second Life is the leader. In 2009, Second Life Residents earned more than twice that amount – US$55 million – while the total size of the Second Life economy grew 65% to US$567 million.
‘Climate emails hacked by spies’
From today’s Independent.
A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government's former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit's emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation – especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December.
How to do an online catalogue
Quote of the day
“The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.”
Plato
That just about sums up the US today. The good people eventually became interested in politics and enabled the election of Obama. Then they went back to sleep, leaving the field to inhabitants of the Palin Reality Distortion Field.