We’ve had a pair of Magellan 1420 GPSs for several years, but they’ve grown very unreliable. I suspect they have some bad capacitors in them, but I hear a lot of complaints about Magellan hardware quality even today. Recently I was able to buy a couple of 3.5-inch Garmin units for less than $20 apiece. I prefer the Magellan user interface–I think it’s easier to learn and easier to use–but for that kind of money, we’ll learn to use the Garmins. And I’ll note these Garmins are every bit as old as our Magellans, but have held up fine. Read more
Stand up for net neutrality
Neocities has decided to do something about Net Neutrality–shunt the FCC into the slow lane, and post the code for doing it so the rest of us who run web sites can do it too. The original was written for Nginx; I need to give serious thought to implementing the Apache version.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with the political bent of the content–the people you may hear talking about it on the radio are wrong, which is why they’re yakking on the radio and aren’t working at ISPs or IT departments–and everything to do about raising prices. What we’re seeing now is telecommunications companies, who are already ultra-profitable, gouging companies like Netflix. And Netflix is doing exactly what a company that suddenly has to pay new taxes would do–raising prices.
The difference is that it’s old-line companies doing the taxing in this case rather than a government. That’s all.
The other objection I hear is that lots of innovation happened on the Internet without regulation, so why regulate now? The difference is that the environment in the late 1990s, when the seeds of all of this were planted and started to sprout, was very different. Back then we had hundreds of ISPs, all of whom participated in building out what we have now. None of them wanted to charge both subscribers and content providers, and none of them could have anyway. If Earthlink had tried to shake down Ebay and Amazon and make them slow, people would have switched to someone else–one of any number of regional providers, or equivalent services run by companies like IBM and the old AT&T (prior to its re-merger with Southwestern Bell). Today, many people live in areas only serviced by one broadband provider. Most people have two, but that’s not like the old days.
If I could have anything, I’d like more competition. I’d love it if the average U.S. citizen had a choice of a dozen or so broadband providers. Then we could have a truly free market. Instead, we have duopolies, a situation much like the situation with electricity and natural gas in most municipalities, and broadband providers face far less regulation than power companies do, even though as they grow in importance.
The droid I’m looking for: The $129 Moto E
On Tuesday, Motorola announced the Moto E, a new low-end, $129 phone. Sporting a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU, a single-core GPU, 1 GB of RAM, and a micro SD slot for expandability, it’s a modest phone for modest needs. It won’t be much good for gaming, but it’ll be a nice upgrade over my aging Samsung Galaxy S 4G, and I can take it to T-Mobile, where I have an unsubsidized, bring-your-own-phone plan. Not having a subsidized phone plan saves me about $100 per year, which pays for the phone. When the phone dies, I’ll buy whatever’s available at a comparable price then, which will be better than the most expensive phone on the market right now. There wasn’t anything out there like the Moto E in 2011 when I bought the SGS4G.
I’m probably the kind of person Motorola had in mind for this phone. I use my smartphone but I don’t live on it. I use it to check e-mail, occasionally look something up on the web, use it to download and listen to podcasts, and I have a few apps loaded on it to take advantage of having a dual-core computer in my pocket, but I don’t game or use social media on it. I also don’t use my phone as a status symbol. Give me two cores and a gig of RAM, and I can do everything I need or want to do.
I’ve been tempted by several of Blu’s supercheap phones, but their 512 MB of RAM was a dealbreaker. This costs $40 more than the Blu Advance I’d been eyeing, but to my mind it’s worth it. It ships with 1 GB of RAM, which is more usable, and Android 4.4, which is better suited to the Blu Advance’s skimpy memory than the OS Blu ships with it. Plus it’s guaranteed to get at least one update from Motorola. On top of that, Motorola ships its phones with a better screen and more durable build quality than Blu does. And, given Motorola’s storied past, the Motorola name is worth at least something to me.
I’m also sure the phone will sell well enough to get an aftermarket following, to extend its life even further by delivering future Android releases to it. The Moto G has good aftermarket ROM support, so I would expect the Moto E to follow.
The U.S. release date is June 3. I have better things to do than wait outside for a store to open to get one on that day, but I may very well get one sometime in June.
Windows Technical Support calls me again
“Oh, so you think you’re Mr. Genius Man,” the crackly voice said, drowned out by static caused by his cheap VOIP connection. “Enjoy your broken computer, Mr. Genius Man. Goodbye, Mr. Genius Man.”
So ended 23 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, but I figure it’s 23 minutes he wasn’t spending scamming someone else. I don’t do it often, but my kids were playing nicely and we were all in the same room, so I guess I don’t regret it too much. Read more
What I did for Mother’s Day
Last month, Rapid7’s Trey Ford appealed to security professionals:
You have an opportunity to be an ambassador. When you see XP out there, have an adult conversation, educate in terms that others will appreciate. Your actions and words reflect on the entire community.
As the family CIO/CSO – look for the smart investment. There are options that will make your life easier. A small investment is a lot easier to stomach than compromised shopping/banking/credit card credentials (or identity theft.)
Data compression, 1980s-style–and why PKZIP won
My employer has me doing some very gray-hat work that I don’t want to describe in detail, because the information has a tremendous potential for misuse. But suffice it to say I’ve been trying to send data places the data shouldn’t go, and I tried to do it by going all 1987 on it by compressing the data with obsolete compression programs. Ever heard of security by obscurity? I was trying to bypass security by using obscurity. In the process, I learned why PKZIP won the compression wars.
Larry Page’s exile and rebirth
A lot of people really dislike Google the way I’ve been known for disliking Apple and Microsoft. It never really occurred to me that all three are related, until I read this piece on Google cofounder Larry Page. Much of what I disliked about Apple and Microsoft were their founders. I found the Bill Gates of the 1980s and 1990s childish (even when I was still a child myself) and a jerk. I didn’t know much about Steve Jobs in the 1980s–back then, people talked about Steve Wozniak more than they talked about Jobs–but as he resurfaced from his exile, I didn’t especially like what I was seeing then, either. Jobs, you see, didn’t come back to Apple as a demigod. He was still a little rough around the edges and, from my outsider perspective, for those first few years at Apple when he was trying to turn Apple around, he was still turning himself around to a degree as well.
I always saw Larry Page as different. He and his classmate, Sergey Brin, developed this great search engine that actually presented the results you were looking for on the front page, and it was fast. And he had this motto that said, “Don’t be evil.” It sounded good to me. And I guess it doesn’t hurt that Page isn’t much older than me. I found him easier to relate to than Gates or Jobs, who literally were getting their start in computers a year or two before I was born. Read more
The desperation economy
The sharing economy is more of a desperation economy, argues New York magazine.
Someone was ranting to me about this last month, blaming the president. The problem is, this problem’s roots have existed since the 1970s, if not the 1960s, which means nobody’s solved it. Two presidents from two different political parties applied quick fixes that worked for a while–I’m thinking of Reagan and Clinton–but nobody has ever successfully addressed the root cause of the income gap. While top earners–the 90th percentile and higher–generally do better year over year, as you move lower on the earnings scale, you see people doing well to hold steady. At the bottom of the scale, you see people earning less and less year over year.
I think the problem is with society. And one thing I learned almost minoring in history in college–I was one class short of a minor–is that when society looks to a leader to solve problems a leader can’t solve, history suggests you run a great danger of it leading to dictatorship.
I think the underlying and overlying problem is materialism–we want too much and aren’t willing to wait long enough to be able to afford it. We’ve spent my lifetime figuring out how to make things cheaper, but then society just tells us we need more things. When I was growing up in the 1980s, two televisions in a home was fairly normal, and one of them was probably a 13-inch model. A 13-inch TV cost $200, so three TVs was extravagance. When I was growing up, I lived across the street from a millionaire who had three TVs. He owned half the town, and literally owned the whole side of the street he lived on, and at one point he had four cars, but he had three TVs.
We figured out how to make TVs a lot cheaper, so now some middle-class people have them in every room. Elvis had a room with eight TVs in it for watching football, and somehow we’ve gotten it in our heads that someone who makes $40,000 a year needs a room with eight TVs too.
In the process of fixing up an old house, I found some old light switches with the price tags still on them: $2.19. Today light switches cost 70 cents. The old switches were made close to here. Now they’re made overseas. The people who used to make things like light switches compete for a smaller number of jobs of that type. There aren’t a lot of those, so some of those people get by doing whatever they can. It helps overseas economies get on their feet and that will be great in the long term, but what do we do about the short term here?
Probably we’ll do what we always do–we’ll put the other political party in power and tell them to solve it. They’ll try a quick fix. As long as the quick fix shows improvement in some part of the economy, they’ll keep getting another four years. If it doesn’t, the other party will get four years. Some of us will climb the ladder enough that it’s no longer a problem for us. I’m not sure what we’ll do about those who don’t.
And as long as everyone has food and entertainment, everything will be just fine for those at the top, and close enough to OK for all but the very worst off that I don’t expect we as a society will address the issue voluntarily.
Microsoft was wrong whether it patched XP this time or let it burn
Years ago I heard a joke that reminds me of the situation Microsoft found itself in last week with its latest IE vulnerability:
If a man is alone in a forest, and there’s no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?
I was as shocked as anyone when Microsoft released just one last Internet Explorer patch for Windows XP on May 1. I can argue either side of the issue, but I don’t think I can argue either side convincingly enough to get a simple 50.1% majority of people to agree with me, because I’m not sure I can argue either side of the issue convincingly enough that Iwould agree with myself.
I think it’s important that 26% of all web traffic is still coming from Windows XP today, nearly three weeks after it went end of life. That likely played into the decision. Microsoft was in a no-win situation here, and they had to decide whether they wanted to lose 1-0 or 24-1. So I don’t think it matters all that much, but here are the pros and cons of each side, as I see them. Read more
IE gets patched and XP gets a reprieve
In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft released an emergency patch yesterday afternoon for the bad Internet Explorer bug that prompted the Department of Homeland Security to tell everyone not to use IE until further notice. That was no surprise, given the amount of publicity behind this bug.
What was a surprise was that they went ahead and released the patch for Windows XP as well. So, unless something really weird happens, the very last patch for Windows XP is MS14-021, issued 1 May 2014.
If you run Windows and your PC didn’t tell you this morning it applied updates automatically, go to Automatic Updates in Control Panel and download the fix.