R.I.P. Steve Jobs

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” - Steve Jobs

Bits by Mike

How to correctly convert your medical bill payments into chickens.

Close-up of a solar flare. WOW!

And so Arizona starts its now-legal racial profiling.

In this video a baseball player scores a run in a very unusual (but creative) manner.

Step aside, Google Buzz. Microsoft's Hotmail is one-upping you with respect to revealing users' private information. Article also contains tips on turning off your exposure to the world.

Watch a controlled demolition from the inside.

Microsoft releases a free program that fixes common PC problems.

How to chose the best typeface for your project

I haven't been this excited about receiving a new toy in ages. Fedex is due to deliver it tomorrow:

If anyone whines about the iPad being too difficult to use, show them this video of a 2-year-old using it:

Cats are just too goddamn cute.

My previous posts about the iPad tablet gave both the pros and cons of the first model. Tablets in general, however, will quickly become a new part of most of our lives, iPad or not:

Why You'll Use a Tablet. Yes YOU! By Mike Elgan February 3, 2010 I know, I know. You've checked out the Apple iPad, and you're not impressed. You think it's a limited, pointless, overpriced unpocketable iPod for gullible trend whores drunk on Cupertino Kool-Aid. You despise its closed, proprietary platform, lack of built-in keyboard, missing camera, unremovable battery, no Flash support and monthly fee for AT&T 3G access. Besides, the sudden tablet craze is just an overhyped fad, right? It's easy to predict that tablets will be huge sellers. After all, even skeptics can believe that other people will get caught up in a marketing-driven trend. But I'm going to make an even bolder prediction. I'm going to predict that you, personally, will be using a tablet within 18 months. That's bold because if you're reading this Web site, you're probably far more technical and sophisticated than the average user. And you're probably a professional evaluator of computer equipment. Chances are, you're skeptical about hyped new fads, and have far better memory about the Next Big Things that never happened. But I think that if you're anti-tablet now, you'll change your tune once you see what's really on offer. Here are my 10 reasons why I believe that you'll be using a tablet within 18 months: 1. Tablets will become hobbyist dream gadgets. Love to tinker? Tablets will be ideal for that. The home automation crowd will go nuts with these things. And the tablet craze will be accompanied by powerful, simplified development tools. People will build tablet cradles into their car dashboards, and will use tablets for GPS map display, audio control, engine diagnostics and more. Tablets will serve as robot controllers, model airplane controllers and will function as the brains and interface for homemade smart appliances and devices. Why wouldn't you want to build your own Microsoft Surface-like smart coffee table? 2. They will be optimized for specific tasks. If you do those tasks, you'll want the optimized tablet. For example, aviation companies will use the new touch tablets for their "electronic flight bag" devices, because they can hold all the documentation, charts, tools and so on that pilots need, both private and professional. Education? Forget about it. Touch tablets are tailor made for K-12, as well as university education. Tablets with cameras will be useful as magnifiers, security-cam, nanny-cam and crib-cam monitors. Solutions providers will take the open systems and build proprietary, optimized applications that take advantage of the touch interfaces. 3. You will be compelled by apps we can't now predict. When personal computers first arrived, nobody thought we'd use them to do social networking. When graphical user interfaces first took over, few predicted we'd use them heavily for surfing a very graphical Web (since the Web didn't even exist then). When cell phones started becoming popular, we never imagined people would use them for capturing data with applications like Evernote. The same thing will happen with tablets. Nobody knows what the "killer apps" will be. It's very likely that something will be invented, designed or developed that will thrill you, and make you change your mind. 4. Tablets will have uses that don't involve replacing something you're already doing. Tablets are viewed now as hobbled netbooks or giant cell phones. In fact, they'll be used for totally unpredictable purposes that currently nobody now does with computers. For example, imagine if a tablet computer could function as a remote control. And image it had "presets" on it for, say, 12 of your favorite channels. Now imagine that instead of buttons with numbers on them, 12 "buttons" show live video of what was currently playing on each of those channels. 5. Tablets will be open. Touch tablets will come out optimized for operating systems ranging from closed (iPhone OS) to open (Linux) and everything in between. There will be a gazillion Android tablets. We'll see Windows and Windows Mobile tablets, and more. Take your pick. 6. Your company may buy one for you. While you're busy not buying a tablet for your home, your company will become increasingly likely to purchase them for your use at work. I believe companies like HP, IBM and others, as well as VARs, will add Linux- and Windows-based touch tablets to their lineups of IT equipment, and as part of larger solutions packages. They reason is... 7. Tablets will become ideal for IT pros. Data center staff use clipboards and documentation. Help desk staff need remote desktop capability and remote access to network tools. IT executives attend meeting after meeting. Everybody uses laptops. Tablets will do all this in a single package. Management tools will be optimized for touch user interfaces. And anyone who wants to use a physical keyboard and/or a mouse will be able to do so with the tablets. If you work anywhere in IT, you will be surrounded by tablet users. 8. Tablets will be better netbooks than netbooks. Tablets will soon be able to do 90% of what netbooks can do, but netbooks will be able to do only 50% of what tablets can do. I'm making these numbers up, but my point is that for most users, tablets will be able to replace netbooks, but netbooks won't be able to replace tablets. A universe of special purpose tablet apps will be created, while very few netbook-specific apps have been or will ever be built. A rational buying decision means that if you have to pick between buying a tablet or buying a netbook, you'll buy the tablet. 9. Tablets will get huge. Ten inches today, 13, 15, 21, 27 and more inches tomorrow. They'll be HD TVs you can bring anywhere. You'll use them for board games, arcade games, first-person shooter games. 10. Tablets will be cheap! It's a foregone conclusion that the tablets of tomorrow will be cheaper than the netbooks of today. It's the Law! (Moore's Law, to be specific.) You'd have to be pretty aggressively anti-tablet to not pay $200 for a gadget that will do so much. Skepticism is great. You have good reasons for dissing the Apple iPad. But the future is unpredictable, and the touch tablet concept is going to prove absolutely compelling. That's why I believe you'll be using one within 18 months. Who knows? Maybe you'll even use an iPad.

iPad: The Bad

10 reasons why I'll be passing on the iPad By Debra Littlejohn Shinder, MVP On January 27, Apple held a much-hyped and long-anticipated "event" in San Francisco, where Steve Jobs unveiled the company's new tablet device, named (perhaps, in the wake of all the jokes it inspired, to its regret) the iPad. I was looking forward to finding out exactly what the specs on this were going to be. I've been trying to find a really good tablet PC for years, since way back when Microsoft introduced Windows XP Tablet Edition. I love the concept, but none of the devices that have hit the market since then has quite gotten it right -- at least for me. Would Apple be the one to finally do it? Given my experiences with the Mac in the past, I wasn't overly optimistic, but I was willing to give it a chance. Now, after all the speculation and rumors, its tablet is out in the open for everyone to see. And no, I won't be lining up outside the Apple Store to buy one. Like so many of Apple's products, it's pretty, but that's just not enough. This device may fit your needs completely, but here are the top 10 reasons that it falls short for me. There's no physical keyboard There are two basic tablet form factors. The first is the "convertible," which includes a keyboard and a swiveling screen that allows you to use it like a regular laptop or lay the screen down on top of the keyboard and use it flat. The second is the "slate," which is a flat screen with no physical keyboard. We all knew the Apple device would fall into the latter category. Up until the unveiling ceremony, the rumor mill was calling it the iSlate. Thus the lack of a physical keyboard doesn't come as a surprise, but it is a strike against it in my book. Some are saying the virtual keyboard is very good, but I've tried touch typing on them before and it's just not the same. If I want a compact touch screen device I can use to watch videos, surf the Web, read my email, etc., I can do all of that with my smart phone. If I need to do more than that, it's probably going to involve touch typing. And for that, I can use my laptop or netbook. If I want to watch a movie or TV program on a screen that's larger than my phone's, I can do that on the laptop, too. Why would I need to buy and carry a third device? This one size doesn't fit all If the tablet is going to fit into some gap between the phone and the netbook, the size should be somewhere in between, too. The iPad's screen is about 10 inches, the same as most netbooks. It won't fit into your pocket. It's thin and light, but so are many of the netbooks on the market now. For example, the Sony VAIO X series laptop/netbooks are the same half-inch thick and virtually the same weight (1.5 lbs. vs. 1.6 lbs.). And we're also starting to see netbooks in the convertible tablet form factor, which is really exciting. It runs a phone OS I would have been more tempted by the iPad if it ran OS X instead of the iPhone operating system. A phone OS is much more limited in what it can do, and the iPad suffers from the same limitation as the iPhone when it comes to applications: Yes, there are lots of them, but you can get them only from one source, Apple's App Store. Can you imagine the outcry if Microsoft said you could buy Windows programs only from them? One of the biggest limitations of the iPhone OS is that you can't multi-task. Like it or not, we live in a multi-tasking world today. People may be satisfied with running just one app at a time on their phones -- after all, the screen isn't big enough to see multiple windows -- but with a device that's four times as big and costs quite a bit more, we expect to get a real computer. And real computers multi-task. There's not enough storage The iPad will come with 16, 32, or 64 GB of storage. From my experiences with the early netbooks, I learned that 16 or 32 GB of storage isn't enough for me. Granted, my needs may be greater than that of the average user. But by the time I install all the programs I want to use and put my music, photos, and a few videos on there, what once upon a time seemed like a lot of space really isn't. The 64 GB model might be just barely enough, but the price is high -- much higher than a netbook with four times the storage. There's No HDMI output or camera Today, computing is all about multimedia -- both consuming it and creating it. You can watch HD movies on the iPad (although it doesn't have the 16:9 standard aspect ratio), but you can't output them to your HDTV because there's no HDMI connector. And you won't be making movies or taking pictures with your iPad, either. One handy use for a device of this size and form factor would be video conferencing… except Apple forgot to include a camera and microphone. Most new laptops and netbooks have a built-in Web cam. Even the iPhone has a camera, albeit not a particularly good one. You could just buy a Web cam and connect it… but what do you connect it to? That brings us to the next problem. There are no USB ports Even those $299 netbooks have USB ports for expandability. Not only could it be used for a flash drive, to ameliorate the storage problem; it could also be used to plug in a standard USB keyboard when you need to touch type. But Apple chose not to build any USB ports into the device. I understand that you will be able to add USB support by buying a special dongle that connects to a dock. That's all well and good, but it means that you have to spend more money for something every netbook already comes with. And even worse, you'll have to carry these extras around with you if you want that functionality when you're on the go -- which sort of negates the whole idea of "thin and light and compact." There's no flash memory slot The saving grace for my first netbook was that I could add storage with a flash memory card. The iPad, unfortunately, doesn't have a built-in flash memory card slot. Again, Apple is going the dongle route. More to carry around, and more to spend money on. By the time you buy everything you need to get it closer to the functional equivalent of a netbook, you may end up spending a bundle. And that brings us to the next point. The price is not right Those who love the iPad are seemingly in awe of its "aggressive pricing." And for those used to paying Apple's prices, I guess it does seem like a bargain. But for those who come from a PC world, not so much. I think there is a market for a low-cost touch screen tablet device that serves as an ebook reader, Web browser, and mail client, and on which you can view photos and videos. The iPad is priced several hundred dollars too high for that market. Lots of people would pay $299 for something like that. But the iPad pricing starts at $499 for the 16 GB model with no 3G connectivity. From there, it goes up to $829 if you want 64 GB of storage and 3G. For that much money, you can buy a powerful compact laptop that runs a full-fledged operating system and multi-tasks and that has USB and SD and Ethernet connectors, 4 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of storage. The iPad is being touted as a better ebook reader, but it costs twice as much as the Kindle and other ebook readers. It's locked in Apple loves to lock you in, and it hasn't broken precedent here. You have to buy your apps from the App Store, you have to buy its dongles to use standard accessories like SD cards and USB devices, and you can't even remove and replace the battery yourself. The 10-hour battery life is impressive (although some netbooks offer comparable times), but if you were flying to Australia and wanted to bring along an extra battery for the extra-long flight, forget about it. On the software side, you can't run Skype to make phone calls with it, either. We wouldn't want to cut into the iPhone market, after all. Nor can you download Flash to install on the browser, which means you won't be watching those YouTube videos. It's all about the network One reason I was actually thinking that Apple's tablet might be a possibility for me was the rumor going around, pre-release, that it was going to work on the Verizon network. You could almost hear the silent groans when it was announced that the 3G versions of the device will use AT&T's network. I know dozens of people who love the iPhone but won't buy one because they don't want to deal with AT&T. The company has already had network congestion problems that it blames on the popularity of the iPhone. Now it plans to add iPads to the mix? And you'll have to pay another $30/month for unlimited data for your iPad (or $20 for 250MB), on top of what you're already paying for your cell phone. Or do they expect people to give up their phone data plans and just use the iPad for data? I don't see all those iPhone users doing that. This thing is looking more expensive by the minute. Of course, if you buy the lower priced versions of the iPad, you won't have to worry about 3G anyway, since they don't come with that capability. Here's wishing you good luck on finding those wi-fi hot spots.

Source (subscription required)

Grasping the size of the universe

Shopping for a Hybrid car? Be sure to first check out the Hybrid Scorecard.

Terrific 99-cent sale of WinPatrol Plus - Friday, January 29 only. Regular price is $30. If you've used the free version then you know what a great deal this is on this high-quality computer security software.

Wow. For once the hype really does match the product.

This is getting ridiculous. I can now buy a wristwatch that lets me know if I've
received (or am receiving) a phone call or email on my Blackberry that's in my pocket.

 I'm guessing that the geeks are salivating right now...

10+ reasons why people write viruses [subscr. req] By Chad Perrin, et al The image of virus writers as intelligent kids with too much time on their hands resorting to digital vandalism to entertain themselves persists. Years ago, making such a guess about why people write viruses might have been accurate most of the time, but the world has moved on. The writers of viruses and other mobile malicious code are many and varied, and their reasons are as wide-ranging as they are themselves. The forms of replicating mobile malicious code are multifarious, too. The most common forms are viruses, worms, and Trojans, though non-replicating equivalents are gaining prominence as well. Cross-site scripting is an example of non-replicating code that serves much the same purpose as self-replicating malicious code; it can affect millions without having to actually “infect” the victim’s computer at all. I can’t claim to know why everybody who writes malicious code does so. I haven’t met them all. I can make some generalizations about reasons people might do so, though. Anger issues There are those who, for whatever reason, just do destructive things for the sake of their destructiveness. They may be malicious narcissists, psychopaths, or just so self-centered in their impression that the whole world is against them that they will blindly lash out at anyone and everyone when they get the chance. For such people, who I believe are a thankfully rare breed, the harm they cause others has no point beyond the harm itself. They are unreasoningly destructive, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. They might think they’re misunderstood and want to communicate with the world by harming it in some way -- and maybe they’re right, that people just don’t understand them deep down. When they react to this state of affairs by maliciously setting out to harm anonymous strangers, however, I don’t think I want to understand them beyond the minimum required to track them down and put a stop to their antisocial behavior. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re a criminal psychologist. Do it for the Lulz Some still do it for the “fun” of destruction. They may get a thrill out of reading news items about their work causing people trouble, or they may just take a fire-and-forget approach, creating destructive, self-replicating programs for the joy of it without much caring whether they ever see the consequences themselves. Mostly, I’m sure they find it funny to read about people being inconvenienced by what they’ve done. In short, some people write mobile malicious code for the same reasons vandals break windows and spray paint garage doors that belong to people they don’t even know. Espionage321 I’m not talking about sabotage here; I’ll address that later. By “espionage,” I mean attempts to gather information through underhanded means for reasons other than identity fraud and other directly, criminally profitable purposes. Viruses, worms, Trojans, and even backdoors and other malicious code slipped into your software by the vendor may serve the purposes of espionage. People worry about the potential for Chinese manufactured computers having some kind of hardware backdoor built into them; conspiracy theories about commercial software vendors being required to provide backdoor access to the NSA run rampant; the government of India famously demanded that Blackberry provide universal decryption keys for all Blackberry devices sold in the country; and the NSA’s Dual_EC_DRBG NIST encryption standard may itself include a backdoor of sorts, as I mentioned in What my grandmother taught me about IT security. Considering the fiasco of federal warrantless wiretapping violations of the law during the Bush administration’s tenure, and the worse violations hinted at by several officials’ carefully phrased testimony that such worse violations weren’t a part of this particular program, it would be foolish to assume that government agencies never spy on people via software. How many of you remember ECHELON? Online gangs It probably sounds like something out of a 1980s vintage techno-thriller, like Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, but it is disturbingly becoming a reality -- there are actual “gangs” of angry, or just plain ignorant, kids who engage in digital vandalism as part of a misdirected urge to enhance group identity and personal pride in a fractious, underground community. Such groups may target each other or, more often, some third party whose troubles at the hands of such a gang of vandals will be easily noticed and identified. With dramatic names like “Team Holocaust” and “Phalcon SKISMs,“ such cybergangs may occasionally claim a higher purpose (like YAM), but they may also have no pretensions of purpose other than claiming a strong group identity. Like being a Denver Broncos fan, except they mark their territory with digital vandalism instead of by painting their torsos orange and waving giant foam fingers in the air. The hacker instinct Keep in mind the difference between a hacker and a security cracker. People with a hacker mindset usually find themselves eventually drawn to specific fields of interest. In some cases, that interest might revolve around understanding self-replicating mobile malicious code. Sometimes, the best way to understand something is to experiment with different ways to create examples of it. Sometimes, the best way to test something you’ve created is to see it operating under real world conditions. Some immoral or amoral hackers with an interest in self-replicating mobile malicious code may test their creations by releasing them into the wild and seeing how they do. Money money money Most writers of malicious code in the wild these days seem to fall into this category; people who are in it for the filthy lucre. Viruses and worms often carry payloads that open up avenues of intrusion into a system, providing a means for either security crackers or their automated tools to slip past the system’s defenses. Such automated tools can harvest authentication information and other sensitive data (such as for reasons of identity fraud), set themselves up as automated spam generators, or contact a centralized control mechanism of some sort, such as an IRC chat room to create a botnet of thousands, or even millions, of unwitting users’ computers, all of which can be controlled simultaneously by a single security cracker. It is increasingly common for botnets to be offered for rent, for any of a vast number of reasons. Political agitation Sometimes, digital vandalism -- whether accomplished by a virus, a worm, a DDoS attack, or some other means -- can be accomplished for the purpose of making a statement. Whether the reason for something like that is directly political in the sense of addressing matters related to government or more indirectly political, such as interfering with certain types of Web sites and other operations of some class of people with whom one disagrees somehow, the point is sometimes to make people who aren’t directly responsible for whatever’s being targeted aware of one’s own disapproval of those targets. DDoS and other attacks against Microsoft or Yahoo! might fall into this category. Depending on their specific choices of targets and their motivating issues, some such political agitators (as in the case of those targeting and protesting Chinese and Australian national firewall policies) might even be admirable for their principles and the courage of their convictions to some degree. In extreme cases, on the other hand, such as where large numbers of innocent bystanders are materially harmed (having their checking accounts wiped out to make a political statement, perhaps), action taken on behalf of this kind of motivation might reasonably be called “terrorism. Romance and drama Some may be drawn in by the perceived romance and drama of a criminal life itself. Just as some people may start out seduced to a life of crime by the power they perceive in street pushers in their neighborhoods, the exploits of cat burglars in movies, or the rare reports of some criminals who always seem to get away with their criminal acts in the news, the artificial mystique manufactured by the media around “Computer Hackers” can inspire the aspirations of the amoral youth with technical talents. Because of the character of certain online communities, it can be much easier sometimes to feed one’s own delusions of the romance and drama of being a “Computer Hacker” for a longer time than in most other criminal enterprises where the physically gritty, and petty, reality of what they do becomes quickly inescapable. Once fully absorbed within such an insulated, self-reinforcing fantasy life, I don’t know how easy it is to overcome the illusion and realize that one has become nothing but a criminal security cracker -- that being a real hacker is about skill and not 1337 h4xx0r nicknames -- without being forcibly disillusioned by getting caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned for one’s crimes. Sabotage Sometimes the purpose of malicious code might be directly targeted at disrupting the operations of some class of people one doesn’t like. While this sort of behavior might seem superficially similar to that of terrorism as described under "Political agitation," or to vandalism as described under "Online gangs," it’s not terrorism, and it’s more personal than typical vandalism. It is a simple criminal act, aimed at a specific target, more akin to assault. People with business interests may do this not for profit or for political purposes, but to damage other businesses’ ability to compete, at least temporarily. Government agencies may do so to try to bully another government into doing something it doesn’t want to do, as appears to have been the case in the Estonian “cyberwar.” The motivation to sabotage may even be based on something as petty as personal revenge. The intellectual challenge (and to pass the time) From member jim.parlett: Why do people play online games? Why do people do crosswords or play chess? It's the element of competition, pitting your wits and skill against that of others. It's a competition to see who can write the best virus, who can beat the antivirus companies, who can beat Microsoft's developers. I suspect the vast majority of virus writers are male, because competitiveness is a predominantly (but certainly not exclusively) male trait. It's not necessarily about being malicious, not always about money; it's sometimes about winning, about challenging the rest of the world and beating them. It's the cyber age version of graffiti, the Internet equivalent of the adolescent challenging the mature and making waves. Extortion From member Dixon: Let's not leave out plain old-fashioned extortion, as with Vundo/Antivirus2009/Antivirus360. "You're infected! Give us sixty bucks and we'll fix it!" Resume material From member Oz_Media: I knew a few guys in the early 90s who wrote viruses simply to get noticed as capable programmers. Offering up a virus, then creating a removal tool and sending it to major players (F-protect, Computer Associates, Kaspersky, etc.) put them on the map as code savvy. In fact, I remember a time when that was the key focus behind writing viruses and exploiting code -- to show off your talents compared to existing engineers. Who do you think major antivirus companies hire to write removal tools? The same criminals who exploit systems, of course. Also, if a company wouldn't hire them as programmers, they'd hack the software and send the exploit details to the engineers, offering to fix it for $$$$. Then they'd go to a competitor and show them the competition's weaknesses and use THAT to get work with the competitor. Think of Stuart from MAD TV, "Look what I can do!" NOTE: I said I knew them, I didn't say they were friends. Follow the money I had to guess, I’d say that the most common reasons to write viruses these days, by far, are at least somewhat profit-motivated. The I Love You email virus was kind of a watershed incident, the point where a lot of people really started noticing the growing trend in profit-generating mobile malicious code. Any attempt to explain away all virus, worm, and other malicious code writing using a single generalization is unreasonably simplistic, though. Virus writers are people, too -- at least in that they may have any of millions of different motivations for what they do -- even if they’re often subhuman in some respects as well (notably in their ethical development). Most are probably motivated by some combination of more than one of the above suggestions, in fact, and perhaps by other reasons we haven't touched on.

For many years I have subscribed to Neat Net Tricks Newsletter, which is always chock full of information about useful, unusual and interesting web sites. I highly recommend this bi-monthly newsletter, and now the free edition is returning. Go to Neat Net Tricks and subscribe. You won't be disappointed.

FRIDAY F U N

• The 157 best totally free software programs.
• Slow-motion videos of bursting water balloons
• The world's most versatile cell phone
• Truck spills
• Kinda creepy: Lady's eyes follows pointer
• Best Pictures of the Year 2007
• 10 products that might save your life.
• 10 very superstitious athletes

This warning from Windows Secrets seems pretty important:

Disable QuickTime until Apple releases a patch A problem was recently discovered in Apple QuickTime that could let Web sites silently install malware on your computers. Malicious banner ads with images that infected visitors' PCs have previously run on such well-known sites as Monster.com, NHL.com, and MLB.com, according to Windows IT Pro articles published on Aug. 23 and Nov. 15 (free registration required). This means that even a "trusted site" could possibly expose your system to harm. Because working exploits are already circulating, and the risk is so severe, I'm recommending that you completely uninstall Quicktime until Apple releases a fixed version. Individual users can do this using the Add/Remove Programs control panel.