Technology: October 2006 Archives
And now this, from Gizmodo:
Seems like we were just talking about the Blackberry 8703e rolling out RIM's door, and now here's a picture and a partial spec list of the Blackberry 8800. Unlike its CDMA-only 8703e brandmate, this one will support GSM/GPRS, EDGE, and—wait for it—WiFi.
Technorati Tags: smartphones, wifi
Last weekend I went to put away all the CDs that have piled up on various surfaces around the house, and realized that things had gotten completely out of hand and that it was (long past) time to do something about it.
I have a lot of CDs - somewhere around a thousand, and I can no longer fit them all into the cabinet where I've been keeping them for the past ten years, filed alphabetically by artist in jewel boxes. Michele's been wondering for years about when we could do something about the physical clutter of the ever-mounting CD collection, and after spending a lot of time looking in vain for affordable CD storage cabinets that can handle that size of collection somewhat gracefully, the technology solution seemed cheaper and better.
So I went out to the University Bookstore and picked up a Mac Mini, a LaCie 500 gigabyte external drive, and a 15.4 inch widescreen monitor from Fry's new online store - the monitor was $89, which I thought was great, but now I see it's come down to $69 in the last week! I had an Apple keyboard around, and I added a wireless Mighty Mouse, and set up the whole shebang on top of the cabinet with the CDs and plugged the headphone output into the stereo.
I realized last night that I now have over a terabyte of data storage capacity in my house - it wasn't that long ago that a terabyte represented the total capacity of the commercial data center the company I worked for had (okay - maybe it was that long ago - around the late '80s).
I moved the 30 gigabytes of music I already had in my iTunes library on the family room computer, and started ripping CDs that I hadn't yet encoded, starting with the ones that I couldn't fit in the cabinet. My goal is to spend time working through the collection until the CDs can safely be put under the house. It'll be interesting see how it goes and how long it takes to get there.
Technorati Tags: music
I spend the other afternoon sitting in a conference room with good 802.11 (a,b, and g) but no cell reception looking at my Nokia E62 getting no updates, I again wondered at the way the cellular carriers are missing the connectivity point.
Stowe Boyd points out this article in the International Business Times predicting that Apple will release two phone models in the first part of 2007:
"Based upon our recent checks, we expect Apple to unveil two models of its widely anticipated cell phones in early [Calendar Year] '07," said Jesse Tortora, research analyst at Prudential Equities.
"We have learned that one model will be a smart phone, including integrated keyboard, video and music capability, while the other model will be a slimmer phone with music capability. At least one of the models will include WiFi."
It would be just like Apple to move the state of this art ahead while the phone companies waste a good opportunity yet again.
Technorati Tags: apple, broadband, e62, Nokia, smartphones
The MetaClasses.plist file is in the directory:
/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/
PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources
Make sure you make a backup copy of the file before you edit it. :)
Below is the text I entered - I put it in at the end of the section where Nokia devices are defined - I don't think it really matters where it goes. The XML fragment is also here as a text file.
The Mactomster isync plugin installation must have installed the Nokia E61 icon in the right place as it came up when I fired up iSync. The E61 looks just like the E62, so I didn't bother trying to find an E62 icon.
Your mileage may vary.
<key>com.nokia.E62</key>
<dict>
<key>Identification</key>
<dict>
<key>com.apple.cgmi+cgmm</key>
<string>Nokia+Nokia E62</string>
<key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>
<string>Nokia+Nokia E62</string>
</dict>
<key>InheritsFrom</key>
<array>
<string>family.com.nokia.serie60v2.3< string>
</array>
<key>Services</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>ServiceName</key>
<string>com.apple.model</string>
<key>ServiceProperties</key>
<dict>
<key>ModelIcon</key>
<string>NOKe61.tiff</string>
<key>ModelName</key>
<string>E62</string>
</dict>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
The Nokia E62 works with UW IMAP and SMTP email.
You can subscribe to IMAP folders, which in this case appears to mean that new messages that arrive in those folders will be shown in the mail index and you can then look at the messages in subscribed folders.
Here are the settings I used:
Connection Settings:
Incoming Email:
User name: My UW NetID
Password: My UW NetID password
Incoming mail serv: oren.deskmail.washington.edu
Access point in use: Always ask
Mailbox name: uw
Mailbox type: IMAP4
Security (ports): SSL/TLS
Port: Default
Outgoing Email:
My e-mail address: My UW email address
User name: My UW NetID
Password: My UW NetID password
Outgoing Mail serv.: smtp.washington.edu
Access point in use: Always ask
Security (ports): SSL/TLS
Port: 587
I just got a brand new Nokia E62 smartphone from Cingular. It's been a while since I had a full-featured smartphone - my last one was a Kyocera 6035 back in 2001.
I'll be writing about my exploration of this new generation device as I go, but first I already have a major complaint for Cingular -
WHERE'S THE DANG WI-FI?
I can swear that when I looked at Nokia's site for information on the E62 originally a couple of weeks ago it said that the E62 was equipped with WiFi (or WLAN, as Nokia calls it), as is the E61 that is sold in other (non-US) markets. But the phone doesn't, in fact, have WiFi, and it's been widely reported that the main difference between the E61 and the E62 is the neutering of the connectivity options.
I can only assume that Cingular and perhaps other carriers asked for removal of the ability to use high-speed connectivity that's not carrier-provided. This only points out once again how totally broken the US model of leaving control of the wireless market in the hands of the carriers is. The internet service providers don't dictate what features my computers have - thank goodness! And I don't buy my cars from the people who build the roads. So why should AT&T and the behemoths that the Baby Bells have become decide what phones I can use on their networks, and drive the (lack of) technological development in those devices?
In this respect the US lags far behind other parts of the world (like Europe, Japan and India) in the technology we use for wireless communication.
Other initial reactions to the E62 - the screen is bright and resolution is good, and the navigation controls seem easy to use. One problem I've noticed is that when I hold it up to my ear to talk on the phone, the screen rubs on the side of my face and gets smudged - it came with a wired headset, but I think I'll get a bluetooth headset for it.
The speakerphone is loud and has good fidelity, which is great.
The E62 is a little big and heavy (though nowhere near the brick that the Kyocera was), so I'm not sure how to carry it if I'm not wearing a jacket with big pockets.
Technorati Tags: Nokia, e62, smartphones, wifi
I finished off my time in Dallas with an appearance on a panel titled Leveraging Your Existing Campus Systems to Access Partner Resources: Federated Identity Management and Tales of Campus Participation (whew - now there's a mouthful). The topic of the panel is how the InCommon federation is making it easier for universities and vendors of web-based services to work together to get to single-sign-on types of authentication and to arrange for the exchange of information in those contexts.
The panel was chaired by the always delightful Tracy Mitrano and panelists included representatives from Penn State, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and me.
I haven't been involved directly with our work in leveraging Shibboleth authentication software or our participation in InCommon, but I was well coached by Bob Morgan and Nathan Dors, who have been doing a lot of heavy lifting on these efforts.
We've used InCommon to ease the deployment of Cdigix's CTrax music download service (replacing Napster at the UW this year); to authenticate UW users to Washington State's Combined Fund Drive (a charitable giving program that uses a web service called CreateHope to power its online presence) and to hook the Chemistry Department up with WebAssign, a service they use for managing homework for some courses.
Other universities have used InCommon for other vendors, and one of the lessons here is that when dealing with vendors the work that's done by an initial institution working with a vendor can make it much easier for other universities to work with that vendor if they're all working within the federation.
I was surprised to see that all the examples we saw were about universities working with vendors, and that none of them were about universities working with each other on collaborative efforts. Maybe we'll see more of that in the future.
Technorati Tags: authentication, Educause06, federated-identity, federation, identity, shibboleth
Ray Kurzweil is talking about being able to predict the advance of information technology. The key to success of being an inventor is in being able to estimate when technologies will be advanced enough to make an invention possible - timing is critical. Over thirty years of doing this he's found that the models he worked out to predict future technology trends has worked pretty well.
If we can measure information content of an area, we find that growth is exponential, with roughly a doubling every year - the power of technologies expands by a billion every 25 years, while the size of technology shrinks by a factor of a hundred every ten years.
Ray shows a new pocket-sized print-to-speech reading machine - he's been involved with reading machine technology for thirty years now. In 2002 he predicted that technology would be available for a pocket reading machine would be available in May of 2006, and that development of such a machine would take roughly four years. In July they introduced the pocket reading machine.
Ray goes on to talk about the extent to which artificial intelligence programs are providing generally useful functions now, and the narrowness of these applications are getting less narrow over time.
The Paradigm Shift Rate is now doubling every decade. People tend to extrapolate in a linear way, when progress is almost always faster. The rate is actually accelerating. He gives examples - the phone took half a century to be adopted by half of the US population - the cell phone did it in seven years. Another trend is the democratization of knowledge creation, which is fueling an explosion of knowledge. The amount of knowledge is also growing exponentially, doubling every year.
He shows a graph that he calls Countdown to Singularity, which shows technological evolution in a continuum with technological evolution, in a straight logarithmic trend line.
People criticize Kurzweil for thinking that exponential growth can continue - and it's true that each particular technology runs out of steam, but new technologies evolve that keep the trend going. When Moore's Law runs out in current chip design, we'll see three dimensional molecular computing rise to keep the growth going. There's nanotube-based memory set to hit the market next year.
By 2013 we should have computers that can equal the processing power of all regions of the human brain.
It's remarkable how smooth the trend lines are, given the vagaries of the activities of millions of people. It's like other examples in science where we see predictable activity come out of random, chaotic individual events. The classic example from the 19th century is thermodynamics. Technology evolution just such a case of predictable behavior.
Our consumption of information technology more than keeps pace with the growth of capacity.
In biotechnology we're using technology to reprogram biology. He's involved with one company that has cured pulmonary hypertension in animals by injecting a new gene - it's now going into human testing. There are thousands of these developments happening now. This is a new paradigm in drug development, designing drugs using technology instead of just discovering them.
He talks about repirocytes - robotic red blood cells that are already being tested by animals.
The ultimate source of utilizing the power of information technology will come from reverse engineering the brain - we're now getting to the point where we can scan brain data to see individual activities. The design information of the brain is a billion times simpler than the apparent complexity of the brain - we know this because of the amount of information the genome can contain. We will succeed in modeling the brain within the next twenty years - which will fuel truly intelligent systems.
Ray shows a video of a prototype of a translating telephone, where he speaks in English and the person on the other end hears him in German, and vice versa (also in French). He says these systems will be common in cell phones in the next ten years. This translation is done through pattern recognition informed by large databases.
By 2010, computers will begin to disappear - images written directly to our retinas with ubiquitous high bandwidth connections at all times and electronics so tiny they're embedded in clothing and glasses. Full immersion virtual reality will be feasible, and augmented reality (eyeglasses that tell you the name and birthday of the person you're talking to) and effective language translation will exist.
By 2029 we'll have 30 doublings. $1k of computation will buy 1,000 times the capacity of the human brain, reverse engineering of the human brain will be completed, computers will pass the Turing test, and nanobots will provide expansion of human intelligence.
Human life expectancy was in the 20s when life evolved. By 1800 it had reached 37, by 1900 it had reached 48. According to his models in twenty years we'll be adding more than a year of life expectancy to the lives of living people every year.
Technorati Tags: Educause06, kurzweil
Educause has given its first ever "Catalyst Award" to Course Management Systems for their "broad impact on higher education".
This strikes me as a wrong-headed award to a class of software that is largely a prime example of a siloed environment provided by systems that really shouldn't have had to exist in the first place.
I've said this before, but just to reiterate - most of what you get in Course Management Systems are a set of common communication functions (easy web authorship with templates, discussion forums, group management, etc) wrapped in a thin layer of workflow management. But the blog or wiki or mail list management tool contained in a CMS is unlikely to ever be as good as the individual tools that are widely available - would you rather blog in Sakai or Wordpress?
If we really had the tools we deserve we'd be able to integrate the good tools that are continually appearing on the open market with our own workflow and data from our student systems to provide the rich functionality that our students and faculty really deserve.
I do seem to have a minority view on this one, but as I watched the video honoring our late colleague Howard Strauss while writing this post, I thought Howard would agree with me on this one.
Technorati Tags: Educause06, course-management-systems
I'm in Dallas for the Educause 06 conference - just me an 7,500 of my closest friends. Most of my time here is committed to working meetings, but this morning I'm taking in a talk by Ross Housewright, a grad student at UC Berkeley, who's done a study of how students feel about the ways in which they download music.
There's nothing revelatory here, but Ross found that almost all students are using P2P file sharing to get music, and that the file sharing networks are (despite years of the industry battling against them) are still more convenient to use than any legal service - more comprehensive, less restrictive, and free.
Students know that file sharing is illegal, but they think of it as illegal like speeding or jaywalking. As far as education goes, they find industry efforts as unconvincing - it's seen as poor college students vs rich rock stars and the huge entertainment industry. Students don't know the details of the law, and they don't care to learn. They don't think they're likely to get sued.
Technorati Tags: music, Educause06
I installed the Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 yesterday, over the Vista Beta 2 release, which had been stable, if unexciting.
I also installed Office 2007, with a fresh download from the Office Beta site.
The new release started crashing on me immediately. Vista crashed a couple of times, and even after a restart Office kept crashing. So I turned off the computer, and like any sensible professional, called it quits for the day.
This morning, I came in and rebooted, and Vista runs, but IE7 crashes right after launch. I gave it my assent to go look to see if there are any known solutions to this problem, and I got back the following:
A Micosoft analyst has reviewed this error report and determined the problem you encountered will be resolved in a Windows Vista release, which will be available in the future.
Not very informative.
It's really interesting to realize how much work you can't get done without a functioning Web browser in this day and age.
I did manage to create a second user account, and IE7 seemed to run ok there. So, fearful of the same problem happening, I decided to use IE to download Firefox, so I'd have a second browser available. I installed Firefox and the Foxmarks extension, and then Firefox crashed on me. Now, after a reboot, IE7 crashes on that user account too, but Firefox 1.5 seems to work.
This is a release candidate? Sheesh - c'mon Microsoft, you can do better than this.
Andrew Benton tells me that RC2 is due out later this week - we'll see if that's any better.
