Quotulatiousness

August 15, 2011

Google buys Motorola Mobile: it’s all about the patents

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

At least, so says Eric S. Raymond:

We’ll see a lot of silly talk about Google getting direct into the handset business while the dust settles, but make no mistake: this purchase is all about Motorola’s patent portfolio. This is Google telling Apple and Microsoft and Oracle “You want to play silly-buggers with junk patents? Bring it on; we’ll countersue you into oblivion.”

Yes, $12 billion is a lot to pay for that privilege. But, unlike the $4.5 billion an Apple/Microsoft-led consortium payed for the Nortel patents not too long ago, that $12 billion buys a lot of other tangible assets that Google can sell off. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google’s expenditure on the deal actually nets out to less – and Motorola’s patents will be much heavier artillery than Nortel’s. Motorola, after all, was making smartphone precursors like the StarTac well before the Danger hiptop or the iPhone; it will have blocking patents.

I don’t think Google is going to get into the handset business in any serious way. It’s not a kind of business they know how to run, and why piss off all their partners in the Android army? Much more likely is that the hardware end of the company will be flogged to the Chinese or Germans and Google will absorb the software engineers. Likely Google’s partners have already been briefed in on this plan, which is why Google is publishing happy-face quotes about the deal from the CEOs of HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson.

August 11, 2011

You have to wonder why it took them this long

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

The New York City police department announced that it’s setting up a group to monitor Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in order to detect criminals who are stupid enough to boast about their crimes online:

According to The New York Daily News, freshly-appointed assistant commissioner Kevin O’Connor — styled as the NYPD’s “online and gang guru” — will head the new unit, which will trawl Web 2.0 for information on “troublesome house parties, gang showdowns, and other potential mayhem”.

The idea is to pinpoint net-savvy un-savvy juveniles who divulge their criminal plans on the web or boast about crimes already committed. You might think of them as Idiots 2.0.

In his former post with a north Manhattan gang unit, O’Connor apparently tapped the net for vital information on “a number” of shooting cases. In March, the Daily News says, the NYPD nabbed an eighteen-year-old who was part of a fatal beating after he boasted about the killing on Facebook.

August 10, 2011

xkcd on the paradox of passwords

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

He’s absolutely right, you know . . .

August 9, 2011

(Temporarily) Drying out USS Monitor

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

John Tierney reports on the conservation efforts on one of the most revolutionary warships in history:

[In 1861] a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.

But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.

Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News. The team expects to have nearly all the barnacles and sediment removed by the end of this month, giving the public a new look at the dents from the Confederate cannonballs and shells that would have sunk any ordinary ship of its day. Then the turret will be submerged again in fresh water for 15 more years, until enough ocean salt has been removed from the metal to allow it to face the air permanently.

August 8, 2011

Another technical problem? Must be a day with a “y” in it

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:44

Last week, you’ll recall that I was bewailing the failings of the Microsoft Windows Easy Transfer utility. Having given up on that and managed the transfer of files by the traditional tools of Brute Force and Ignorance (BF&ITM), I thought I was done.

All the necessary files now reside on the new laptop, and the old laptop has been dedicated to a new life as a genealogy workstation for Elizabeth. Today’s problem was network connectivity.

But not just network connectivity for the laptop, as I discovered when I tried turning on my desktop machine a little while ago.

At some point while we were away, the wireless router seems to have had some hiccoughs, because now it seems to imagine that it’s actually two separate machines. When I tried to connect to the internet this morning (from the new laptop), it insisted that I was connected to both a public network and our own named private network. But because it thought the public network was the primary, it refused to actually interact with our named network. It took several iterations of running diagnostics and power-cycling the router before the phantom “public” network disappeared and I was able to connect to the internet normally.

This evening, I had a similar problem with my desktop, except that my desktop machine is connected by ethernet cable, not wireless. That phantom “public” network re-appeared, and nothing I could do would get rid of it. The physical connections were fine, but nothing could persuade my desktop that it actually had a connection to the router and it was unable to get an IP address.

Having just bought a new laptop, I’m hoping that these symptoms do not imply that I need to also buy a new router, as you can imagine.

China discovers that “You can’t stop the signal” again

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Strategy Page looks at the way news was disseminated about the high speed rail crash despite the Chinese government’s attempts to quash the story:

Since July 27th, China got another reminder that it no longer can control the news. On July 27th, China’s high-speed “bullet train” had a fatal accident, leaving over 30 dead and many more injured. The cause was inadequate safety and communications systems. In this case, one train was halted by a flaw in the signalling system and another came up from behind and there was the collision that sent four train cars off the tracks, and a bridge. The government immediately tried to keep the accident out of the news. This effort failed because of the ingenuity of Chinese Internet users, despite the government ban on Twitter in China. The ban was meant to impede the rapid spread of news the government wanted to control. Given enough time, the state controlled media could get out a story the government could live with. But blog, RSS and other Internet tools have been tweaked to do the same thing Twitter does. This was especially true of “micro-blogs” that quickly distribute the same 140 character messages Twitter does. Not as well, but good enough, and the news the government wanted to control spread uncontrollably. This included pictures and video of the accident, which the government planned to keep out of the news.

August 7, 2011

Wind turbines totally dominate the skyline over Wolfe Island

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:39


Click to see full-size (very wide) image

I took this photo from the Wolfe Island ferry on Friday. It amazed me how many wind turbines were in view (32, I think). I kept having images of James Blish’s “spindizzies“.

Trawling a virtual economy to support a non-viable “real” economy

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:47

Give North Korea some credit for finding a viable source of revenue:

What’s a dictator to do when his third-world economy is wheezing along on its last legs? Hack some video games, of course! According to a report in the New York Times, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il unleashed an army of young computer crackers on popular South Korean online gaming portals to find ways to make quick cash.

South Korean authorities claim that a squad of approximately 30 hackers operated from a base in China and were given the mission of breaching online gaming servers (including those of the immensely popular Lineage) to set up bot factories and automated farming collectives. The digital booty was then sold to gamers for a reported $6 million over two years.

Addressing traffic congestion (in any city)

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:03

Everyone knows that gridlock leads to wasted time and increased stress, but the effects of degraded mobility are worse than most people realize. Traffic congestion deprives job-seekers of opportunities, robs businesses of customers, and hastens the exodus of residents from the central city to the suburbs.

And although mounting gridlock may seem like the unavoidable result of increased population and strained budgets, the experience of nations from France to Australia proves otherwise. Reason Foundation draws on what’s worked worldwide and recommends a three-part plan:

1. Expand roads with underground tunnels and elevated structures.
2. Use pricing to keep traffic flowing.
3. Pay for new projects with private-sector financing instead of taxes.

That plan can help Chicago or any other city bust congestion and boost economic growth.

August 1, 2011

A quick plug for a useful EFF plug-in for Firefox

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

I’ve mentioned this before, but I was just reminded about it as I started using the new laptop with its new install of Firefox:

This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:

  • Google Search
  • Wikipedia
  • Twitter and Identi.ca
  • Facebook
  • EFF and Tor
  • Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines and lots more!

Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.

As always, even if you’re at an HTTPS page, remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and an unbroken lock icon in the bottom-right corner, the page is not completely encrypted and you may still be vulnerable to various forms of eavesdropping or hacking (in many cases, HTTPS Everywhere can’t prevent this because sites incorporate insecure third-party content).

July 31, 2011

Upgrades in slow motion

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:55

I bought a new laptop yesterday, as my old laptop is starting to creak when I load up a full suite of work tools (Adobe FrameMaker, Open Office Writer or Microsoft Word, a couple of web browsers plus a virtual machine or two under VMWare). Elizabeth will be taking over my old laptop and retiring her Acer with its constant beeping and lock-ups when I’ve finished installing all the software and moving over all my files to the new laptop.

I’m currently trying to transfer files and settings from my old laptop to the new machine. The Windows Easy Transfer tool makes it look pretty straightforward . . . but it’s slow, slow, slow. I started a transfer last night after dinner, anticipating it’d be done this morning, but the WiFi router glitched not long after I started the process, so it didn’t happen. Plus, we had some lively thunderstorms roll through early this morning, which meant I had to jump out of bed and shut everything down anyway.

Second attempt this afternoon, once the weather cleared up, and it’s now telling me to expect the transfer to take “1 day 15 hours”. And, of course, you can’t use either machine for anything else while the files are being transferred.

July 28, 2011

F-22 fleet still grounded due to pilot oxygen supply problems

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Earlier this month, I linked to an article about the F-22 oxygen problems. According to Strategy Page, the problem still has not been resolved:

The U.S. Air Force is making some progress in finding out what is wrong with their F-22s. It appears that some toxins are somehow getting into the pilot’s air supply. This has kept all 168 F-22s grounded for three months, so far. Despite the new findings, the air force still has not nailed down the exact cause of the problem, much less fixed it. The U.S. Navy had a similar problem with its F-18s (there were 64 incidents between 2002-9, resulting in two dead pilots). The navy found that the problem was carbon monoxide getting sucked into the aircraft air system (which the navy modified, eliminating the problem). The air force is looking into the navy experience with these similar problems, to see if there is anything similar going on with the F-22s.

First F-35C catapult launch

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Lewis Page has more:

The test launch took place on the landbased steam catapult at US Naval Air Station Lakehurst (also the location of a prototype electromagnetic one of the type the Royal Navy will be compelled to use).

The F-35C is intended to operate from the catapult-equipped fleet carriers of the US Navy and will equip the Royal Navy and the RAF too. The jumpjet F-35B (formerly the chosen British model) will now be delivered only to the US Marines to begin with. The F-35A version, intended for ordinary landbased runway operations, will serve with the US Air Force and many allied nations.

Signalling failure blamed for high speed rail crash

Filed under: China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

This sounds a bit fishy, as this kind of error has been known in railway signal systems for over 100 years: signals that fail to show stop as a default whenever power is lost:

After it was struck by lightning, the signaling device at the Wenzhou South railway station malfunctioned and failed to turn from green to red, An Lusheng, chief of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, told the news agency. He also said workers on duty were inadequately trained and failed to notice the malfunction.

Xinhua’s report, the first official explanation of the cause of the crash, raised further questions about China’s high-speed rail system, one of the world’s largest and most costly public works projects. The accident occurred when one high-speed train rear-ended another that had stalled on the tracks near Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province. High-speed rail has an excellent safety record elsewhere, especially in Japan, which has never had a fatality.

Chinese have flooded microblogging sites with furious complaints about breakneck development without heed to safety. Many also expressed fears of a cover-up, especially after reports that one train car was buried at the site despite the ongoing investigation and only later excavated.

July 27, 2011

US Navy’s (small) death ray/machine gun mounts

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:36

Lewis Page reports on the latest bit of weaponry being added to US Navy ships:

US Navy warships will soon be equipped with fearful combination weapons mounts boasting both heavy machine-guns and high powered laser rayguns, it has been announced.

Manufacturer Boeing says it has inked a teaming agreement with the US operations of arms globo-mammoth BAE Systems to build the Mk 38 Mod 2 Tactical Laser System to naval requirements. We learn that the new raygun installation will be based on the existing Mk 38 Machine Gun System, a robotic gun turret whose primary punch is provided by the fearsome M242 Bushmaster Chain Gun, effectively a light auto-cannon.

[. . .]

We aren’t told the power level offered by the laser, which suggests that it isn’t very high: raygun projects always like to boast of any decent power level. The fact that the laser is small enough to be clipped onto an existing weapon also suggests light weight and limited puissance, as does the suggestion that it is an alternative to the Bushmaster rather than a replacement for it.

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