One Kelly Sweeney is publicly advocating that public access to AIS ship information should be prohibited in order to foil pirates and terrorists. I must respectfully disagree with the premise of this article. I’m the lead of GPSD, a widely-used open-source GPS/AIS monitor daemon, and I am thus both a domain expert on AIS and… Continue reading AIS “security” considered harmful
Category: Technology
The Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling
The shape of the cost curves that show up as we build and run communications networks have properties that seem counterintuitive to many people, but that have been surprisingly consistent across lots of different technologies since at least the days of the telegraph, and probably further back than that. Herewith, the Iron Laws of Network… Continue reading The Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling
Flattening the Smartphone Market
Common cellphone operating systems like Android, WebOS, and Maemo are depriving cellphone carriers of one of their most treasured means of keeping customers in the dark and feeding them bullshit. They’re making smartphones comparable to each other, and by doing so brutally intensifying the competitive pressure on the carriers. Before these common platforms, one of… Continue reading Flattening the Smartphone Market
Now’s a bad time to be an Apple fanboy…
It’s an unhappy day for Apple fanboys. Dan Lyons Newsweek’s tech correspondent just ditched the iPhone for Android, slamming the phone and Steve Jobs’s control-freak strategy in very harsh terms. It might be tempting to dismiss this on the grounds that Dan Lyons is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fool… Continue reading Now’s a bad time to be an Apple fanboy…
Android Rising
The news comes to us today that in 1Q 2010 Android phones outsold Apple’s iPhone by a significant 7%. As it said on the gunslinger’s gravestone, “I was expecting this, but not so soon.” Business Week and the Wall Street Journal are on the story, but the most interesting version is from the story they’re… Continue reading Android Rising
How many ways can you get Android wrong in one article?
One of my regulars pointed me at Is Android Evil?, an article by one Andreas Constantinou which purports to be a brave and hardhitting contrarian take on Android. I read this, and I’m asking myself “Wow. How many different ways can one guy be wrong in the same article?” Particularly entertaining, and the main reason… Continue reading How many ways can you get Android wrong in one article?
G-1 to Nexus One: an informal comparison
It’s been an eventful week here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs, what with robot submarines busting out all over and a “Disruptive Innovation Award” from the Tribeca Film Festival (!) landing on my somewhat bemused head (possible topic of a later post). And I’m writing from Penguicon, where in about an hour I’m going to… Continue reading G-1 to Nexus One: an informal comparison
The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!
Google sent me one of the unlocked developer Nexus One phones. It arrived today. And, in the wake of recent news about Verizon not after all carrying the Nexus, stimulated some interesting thoughts in my mind about where the cellphone market is going. The balance of power is changing fast in ways that are going… Continue reading The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!
Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad
It’s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else’s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse says of the iPad… I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don’t really use it. Maybe I think I’m going to be using it. But I also think… Continue reading Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad
The iPad: Second Coming of the Newton?
The just-released and much hyped iPad is Apple’s second foray into hawking a tablet computer. And all the reasons Steve Jobs would like us to forget that are, in fact, good reasons to remember the Newton and the fact that it never became more than an early-adopter status toy. It, too, was greeted with hosannahs… Continue reading The iPad: Second Coming of the Newton?
How smartphones will disrupt PCs
I never bought the hype that laptops were going to obsolesce the conventional desktop PC, nor do I buy today’s version of the hype about netbooks. The reason I didn’t is simple: display and keyboard ergonomics. I use and like a Lenovo X61 Thinkpad happily when traveling, but for steady day-to-day work nothing beats having… Continue reading How smartphones will disrupt PCs
LORAN, we hardly knew ye
There’s been some upset in the blogosphere over the shutdown of the LORAN system of radionavigation beacons. This post at Chicago Boyz is representative (hat tip to Instapundit). The author worries “I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.” and various commenters are much more emphatic, bemoaning the lack of a backup for… Continue reading LORAN, we hardly knew ye
Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront
I’ve spent the last seventeen hours living inside a cyberpunk novel. A libertarian cyberpunk novel. It’s been a weird and awesome experience. Within an hour after I received a plea for help from Iran, a regular commenter on this blog recruited me into a hacker network that has been forming to support the democratic Iranian… Continue reading Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront
Human ingenuity beats the neo-Malthusians yet again
OK, this is big news. A research team has worked out a way to nearly triple the efficiency of the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it
I’m the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it’s decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale… Continue reading Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it
moogly pwns the iPhone!?!
I got a chance last night to play with my friend Beth Matuszek’s iPhone, while she played with my G1. I’ve been blogging that I think the G1 is serious competition for the iPhone, but I must say I expected the iPhone to look better than the G1 when Beth and I did side-to-side testing… Continue reading moogly pwns the iPhone!?!
Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do?
One of my commenters asked, rather plaintively: You mentioned net neutrality. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. I’ve read about this, and the opposition to it. As far as I can tell, net neutrality is more supported by liberals/democrats, while the opposition is made up more of conservatives/republicans. But for the life… Continue reading Net neutrality: what’s a libertarian to do?
Why Android matters
I’ve posted a couple of times about how kewl I think my Android G1 is. But I’m not jazzed about a mere gadget; the really exciting thing about Android is going to be the second- and third-order effects of the software, and how these tie into Google’s strategic interests and the future of open source.
Great googly-moogly, the sequel
A few posts back, I described my good early experience with the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. It’s now two weeks later; I’ve learned the phone thoroughly and developed a stable usage pattern. That makes it a good time for a more considered verdict on the device.
Telecoms regulation considered harmful
Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.