Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2011

If you take typography seriously, you will surely go mad

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:51

Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent in this link with the subject line “This is amusing AND SPOT ON!”.

This is freaking me out today. You see, I hardly look at my calendar date on the iPhone. But today I did. I looked at that pixel-perfect, beautiful Retina screen and this problem got instantly into my eye, like a white hot scalpel pinching through my retina until it reached the back of my skull.

See what I mean? Can you see IT? The 1 is off center. Instead of being optically centered, it’s geometrically centered. So it just looks wrong. Really, what happened there, Steve? Where did all that love for typography and attention to detail go? Out the fucking window of your silver Merc, that’s where.

Perhaps this is some kind of cruel April Fools joke from Cupertino. Maybe they are all at the office, hahahing at their clever joke. OK. I don’t find it fucking funny, but I understand your desire to torture your users.

But rather than leaving it there, whimpering, Lickmuffin was suddenly seized with a typographical fit:

Well, the “all phones have it wrong” answer might be correct. [Name] sent me the Gizmodo link through Skype, and I went on and on about why the 1 is off:

[2:10:58 PM] Lickmuffin: The 1 is off centre because they are centering on the width of the entire character — that serif off to the left with no serif on the right of the 1 makes the whole character appear off-center.

[2:13:46 PM] Lickmuffin: The “wrong” version 1 has about 44 pixels on either side of it, measured on the left from the edge of the white box to the serif, and on the right from the edge of the white box to the body of the 1. I say “about” because how you measure depends on whether or not you include the aliasing in the character.

[2:14:26 PM] Lickmuffin: In the “wrong” illustration, the 1 is off-center — it measures 41 pixels from the white box border on the left, and 49 pixels from the white box border on the right.

[2:15:56 PM] Lickmuffin: What the author is complaining about is common — graphical apps tend to base centering on overall character width. For example, when I create callouts in an illustration that have a number in a circle, simply centering the number in the circle will not always look right: the 1 is usually off, especially with sans-serif fonts. The graphics apps center on the width of the 1 as an object, not on the “visual center” of the character that would make it look right.

[2:18:49 PM] Lickmuffin: There are ways to fix this — fonts can carry information called “metrics” that help align fonts when they are placed together. Most often, metrics are used to adjust side-by-side spacing of characters by nudging characters closer together when they fit together. For example: WA Here the app (or the font) would nudge the W and A together. In the case of the 1, metrics could tell apps to center the character on an imaginary centre line, rather than on the actual centre line determined by the character’s width.

[2:19:01 PM] Lickmuffin: Fonts are F A S C I N A T I N G !

Yes, I know that the dongle on the “1” is not a serif — it’s actually part of the “stroke” of the letter. But you know what I mean.

Humph.

After his collapse, I understand that Lickmuffin is now lying down quietly in a darkened room with no visible letters or numbers. Perhaps he will recover, in time.

New iPhone app for Prince Edward County wineries

Filed under: Cancon, Technology, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

There’s a new iPhone application devoted to the up-and-coming wineries in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. WineTour is in the Apple app store now (although I’m at a client site today, so I won’t be able to download it until tonight).

Touring the wineries of Prince Edward County? Plan your trip with WineTour, and find your way around the area with ease. We’ve collected all of the details you need to get the most out of your visit — so you’ll know what’s on, where the nearest wineries are, and what hours they’re open.

Most of the information in WineTour is available without the need for an internet connection, so iPod Touch owners, or those with an iPhone or iPad who don’t have a data plan will find it a valuable companion while travelling.

WineTour features continuously updated open / closed status information to help you see which wineries are open now, which are closing soon, and which are “by appointment”. It also includes the contact info for each winery so you can easily call, email or visit their website for more information.

May 17, 2011

Memristor breakthrough

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

A report at The Register talks about HP’s new leads in the development of the “memristor”:

HP scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of memristors, a fundamental circuit type that looks increasingly likely to replace NAND flash and possibly DRAM.

Essentially, they’ve figured out the physical and chemical mechanisms that make memristors work.

“We were on a path where we would have had something that works reasonably well, but this improves our confidence and should allow us to improve the devices such that they are significantly better,” the leader of the HP research team, R. Stanley Williams, told IDG News.

Memristors are the fourth fundamental type of passive circuitry, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Like flash, memristors are nonvolatile — they “remember” their state when power isn’t applied to them.

The core advantage of memristors is that they can theoretically achieve speeds 10 times that of flash at one-tenth the power budget per cell. They can also be stacked, enabling exceptionally dense memory structures.

Of course, this is all still in the research lab, so don’t expect to see memristor technology show up in your next tablet or smartphone. It could be several years before the new tech becomes widely available.

May 16, 2011

Josh Rosenthall tries to figure out who is behind the iOS developer patent troll

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:15

It’s not absolutely definitive, but it looks as if Nathan Myhrvold former Microsoft CTO and the founder of Intellectual Ventures might be the man:

It’s been confirmed today that a company called Lodsys recently sent out a number of letters to independent iOS developers, including James Thompson — the developer of PCalc — and Dave Castelnuovo, creator of Pocket God , informing them that their use of in-app purchases in iOS infringes upon on this particular patent. Of course, Lodsys is going after small developers who lack the resources of larger development companies to fight back, presumably to frighten them into striking a licensing deal as soon as possible.

So who exactly is behind this unabashed case of patent trolling?

Well, we did a little leg work and though we can’t say with 100% certainty who is pulling the strings, it’s looking a lot like Intellectual Ventures is behind this disgraceful lawsuit.

Intellectual Ventures was founded in part by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The company’s business model is simple — it purchases and applies for a ton of patents. It then licenses out those patents to others under the threat of litigation coupled with a promise not to sue if a deal is struck.

So let’s go through the chain of patent ownership.

A disturbing possible future: nanolaw

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Paul Ford writes about a morning in the near future:

My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I’d posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn’t know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who’d posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn’t actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn’t know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.

But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I’d posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn’t republish without permission.

H/T to Kevin Marks, retweeted by Cory Doctorow for the link.

May 15, 2011

How many e-books do you need to read to make your reading device economical?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:01

Dark Water Muse does the math for you:

In this piece DWM does not explore other possible ways that a tablet does things differently to a smart phone, net book, laptop or desktop computer. This is not a general review of tablet capabilities. It can be considered an update to DWM’s eReader versus Book piece [Ed: linked to from this post last week] with emphasis on the cost of the use of the tablet as an eReader.

Since DWM is focused on eReading then cost is an influential factor when considering any eReader device.

If you trust DWM to do the math and you don’t want to review DWM’s work (included further below in the section entitled “The Math”) then you can read the results in the Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs below.

If we assume the average book price is $20 and eBooks are discounted by 40% (a gracious discount from DWM’s experience) then we get the following equation for N, the number of eBooks you must purchase and read on your new device to ensure you’re not paying more for the content you could have read as a book:

N = cost of device / $8

Table #1: comparison of relative eReading costs: The following table indicates the number of books N you must read on the corresponding eReader on the market today (prices taken from the web as of May 15, 2011) in order that the cost of the device does not drive up the cost of eBooks you read.

May 13, 2011

Would you fly in a glass airplane?

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:24

If Professor William Johnson is successful with the new process, you may see lots of structural glass in use:

A new breakthrough in superspeed pulse mould technology will allow aeroplanes, mobile phone casings and suchlike to be made out of a miraculous type of glass which is as tough as metal, according to the inventors of the new process.

So-called “metallic glass” has been well known since 1960 and has been in industrial production since the 1990s. It is a metal alloy, but one with the disordered structure of glass — not formed into crystals the way most metals are.

The crystalline structure of metal is a disadvantage, making it weak. Unfortunately, ordinary glasses — while strong and rigid — generally crack and shatter easily. What’s wanted is a metallic glass, made of metal but with a non-crystalline structure like window glass. This won’t crack or fracture, but will be much stronger than an equivalent object made of ordinary metal.

[. . .]

“We uniformly heat the glass at least a thousand times faster than anyone has before,” says William Johnson, engineering prof at Caltech.

Using this method the metalglass is heated up, moulded and cooled to solid again before crystals have any chance to form: the new part is still metalglass, not rubbishy regular metal.

“We end up with inexpensive, high-performance, precision parts made in the same way plastic parts are made — but made of a metal that’s 20 times stronger and stiffer than plastic,” boasts Johnson.

May 11, 2011

QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29

Michael Geist: the “Lawful Access” legislation does not criminalize hyperlinking

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

At least, on a reasonable person’s reading of the proposed law, it doesn’t criminalize hyperlinks to material that “incites hatred”:

The source of the latest round of concern stems from the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service legislative summary of Bill C-51. On the issue of hyperlinking, it states:

Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.

I must admit that I think is wrong. The actual legislative change amends the definition of communicating from this:

“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;

to this:

“communicating” means communicating by any means and includes making available;

The revised definition is obviously designed to broaden the scope of the public incitement of hatred provision by making it technology neutral. Whereas the current provision is potentially limited to certain technologies, the new provision would cover any form of communication. It does not specifically reference hyperlinking.

Michael is much more informed about this issue than I am, so I find his confidence as a welcome balm to all the concern raised about this issue. The bill itself, of course, remains a civil liberty disaster in other ways, even with this issue addressed:

As I have argued for a long time, there are many reasons to be concerned with lawful access. The government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, it would mandate disclosure of some personal information without court oversight, it would establish a massive ISP regulatory process (including employee background checks), it would install broad new surveillance technologies, and it would cost millions (without a sense of who actually pays). Given these problems, it is not surprising to find that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.

How resilient is the internet?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Richard Clayton summarizes a recent study by European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on the internet’s ability to cope with disruptions. Among the ways the internet is vulnerable are:

First, the Internet is vulnerable to various kinds of common mode technical failures where systems are disrupted in many places simultaneously; service could be substantially disrupted by failures of other utilities, particularly the electricity supply; a flu pandemic could cause the people on whose work it depends to stay at home, just as demand for home working by others was peaking; and finally, because of its open nature, the Internet is at risk of intentionally disruptive attacks.

Second, there are concerns about sustainability of the current business models. Internet service is cheap, and becoming rapidly cheaper, because the costs of service provision are mostly fixed costs; the marginal costs are low, so competition forces prices ever downwards. Some of the largest operators — the ‘Tier 1′ transit providers — are losing substantial amounts of money, and it is not clear how future capital investment will be financed. There is a risk that consolidation might reduce the current twenty-odd providers to a handful, at which point regulation may be needed to prevent monopoly pricing.

Third, dependability and economics interact in potentially pernicious ways. Most of the things that service providers can do to make the Internet more resilient, from having excess capacity to route filtering, benefit other providers much more than the firm that pays for them, leading to a potential ‘tragedy of the commons’. Similarly, security mechanisms that would help reduce the likelihood and the impact of malice, error and mischance are not implemented because no-one has found a way to roll them out that gives sufficiently incremental and sufficiently local benefit.

Fourth, there is remarkably little reliable information about the size and shape of the Internet infrastructure or its daily operation. This hinders any attempt to assess its resilience in general and the analysis of the true impact of incidents in particular. The opacity also hinders research and development of improved protocols, systems and practices by making it hard to know what the issues really are and harder yet to test proposed solutions.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

May 10, 2011

Is Facebook “managing” your friends for you?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:54

An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect:

Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according to secret criteria.

What you need to know is that relationships and content that don’t get enough “Edges” will get “edged” out of existence. Facebook will cut your ties to people — actually end the relationships you think you have — and block content that doesn’t earn enough Edge points.

For example, many Facebook friendships exist solely through reading each other’s Status Updates. An old friend or co-worker talks about a new job, shares a personal triumph like reaching a weight-loss goal, and tells a story on Mother’s Day about how great his mom is. He posts and you read. You feel connected to his life.

Without telling you, Facebook will probably cut that connection. Using unpublished criteria, Facebook may decide you don’t care about the person and silently stop delivering your friend’s posts. Your friend will assume you’re still reading his updates. You’ll assume he’s stopped posting.

Any friends who fail to click or comment on your posts will stop getting your status updates, too. If you have 500 friends, your posts may be actually delivered to only 100 of them. There’s no way for you to know who sees them and who doesn’t.

I don’t use Facebook too often: certainly not every day. My Twitter updates are echoed to Facebook (but not retweets), so I don’t find it surprising that I haven’t seen everyone’s status updates lately: I just assume they’ve scrolled too far down the page by the time I get around to opening Facebook. This article implies that I never had the chance to see many of these status updates because they have “Edged” out of my feed.

IPv6 day is coming

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:45

There’s been a short cycle of “we’re running out of internet addresses” articles over the last few months, as the available free blocks of IPv4 addresses are allocated. By now, we were all theoretically supposed to have moved on to the successor addressing scheme, IPv6:

On the 8 June, it’ll be World IPv6 Day — a coordinated effort by major services on the internet, including Google and Facebook, to provide their services using the new version of the Internet Protocol. It’s part of the plans to cope with internet addresses ‘running out’. But just what is IPv6 — and what does it mean for most users?

At its most simple, IPv6 is the successor to IPv4 which has become the de facto standard for both local and global connectivity. It includes many extra features, including processing speed-ups, and enhancements to security and to quality of service, but the one that’s really driving the need to change is that there are many more internet addresses available with IPv6.

Most Reg Hardware readers will be familiar with the look of an IPv4 address: it’s 32 bits long, and typically written as a series of four eight-bit decimal numbers, separated by full stops, like 10.0.0.1.

An IPv6 address is 128 bits long, and usually represented by groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons. Each of those four digits represents 16 bits, so there are up to eight groups, giving IPv6 addresses that look like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8.

It won’t be a simple case of turning on IPv6 and turning off IPv4, however, as there’s still huge numbers of devices that depend on IPv4. Over time, more and more devices (not just computers, or not only what we tend to think of as “computers”) will work natively with IPv6 addresses.

You won’t just get a single IPv4 address from your ISP anymore: you’ll get a huge block of addresses (“you’ll receive more addresses for your home network [than the] whole of the IPv4 internet”).

Typically, a broadband customer will be given a set of IPv6 addresses for their network, and the router will also provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices that can’t use the new protocol. The big change for many people is that all their IPv6 devices will be publicly available to the net. That will make setting up many devices much simpler, but also reinforces the need for a proper firewall in the router.

May 9, 2011

Gadgets from science fiction

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:

Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.

Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.

As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.

Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.

His choices are:

  • Cloaking device — Predator
  • Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Hologram communication — Star Wars
  • Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
  • Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Personality glasses — Joe 90
  • Sonic Screwdriver — Doctor Who
  • Timebooth — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • Telepathic Lens — The Lensman series
  • Teleportation belt — The Tomorrow People

May 8, 2011

Can you tell the difference between Apple fans and cult members?

Filed under: Humour, Religion, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

An amusing comparison from PC World:

Some tech fanboys and fangirls become so lost in the technology of their choice that it becomes a big part of their identity. Cult members do something similar, only with a spiritual belief system or philisophical concept.

Covering tech for as long as we have (and reading our message boards), we can’t help but notice that tech fanboys and girls sometimes talk like those people who wear purple capes and Nike tennis shoes, or who drink the grape Kool-Aid and then go to sleep.

To make the point, we’ve assembled here a group of quotes, some of which are from tech fan boys and fan girls while others are from real cult members. Can you tell the difference? We’ll give you the answers at the bottom of the page. Good luck (you’ll need it)!

May 7, 2011

Comparing mouldy old tech with bright, shiny new tech

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:19

Dark Water Muse looks at competing technology from different eras:

The tech world is all a-buzz with reviews of eReaders and tablets capable of rendering eBooks, each of these device types purported to be candidates as the preferred host for future textual content to dethrone the lowly book as the natural media form readers turn to for reading textual content. Technical reviews focus solely on the merits of individual tablets and eReaders or line them up in comparative reviews. In DWM’s opinion these reviews completely miss the whole context of what is to be critiqued.

This tablet versus eReader battleground isn’t the real competitive landscape. Tablets and eReaders aren’t merely duking it out between themselves to win the hearts of readers. DWM views tablets as equivalent to eReaders when used to access published textual content such as books and magazines. Throughout the remainder of this piece DWM will refer to tablets, and other computer hardware which support eBook formats, and eReaders as simply eReaders.

As noted earlier, eReaders aren’t merely fighting amongst themselves for market share. The eReader, collectively, is fighting to displace the printed book. Read on as DWM explores exactly how that fight is going.

At the moment, I don’t really have any strong urge to purchase an ebook reader. I have a few dozen books on my iPhone, and it’s able to display the text acceptably well for casual reading (those few times I have to wait and for some reason don’t have a real book with me). My big concern with ebooks is less the reader and more the content: unlike a real book, you don’t own your copy of the content, and it can (and has) been remotely removed by the licensor in more than one case already. I have very great reservations about paying money to “buy” when it turns out that I’ve just paid a license fee that can be revoked at the licensor’s discretion without warning or compensation.

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