Hulluun Poroon pääsee pian Airbalticilla

Tiistai 06.07.2010 klo 09:13

 

KUVA: JUHA TÖRMÄLÄ/KL-ARKISTO

Airbaltic aloittaa marraskuussa lennot Tampereelta Kittilään.

Latvian kansallinen lentoyhtiö alkaa lentää talvikaudella suoria lentoja Tampereelta Kittilään torstaisin ja lauantaisin. Kittilästä Tampereelle lennetään perjantaisin ja sunnuntaisin.

In english: Next winter Air Baltic, a european low-cost airline, will be flying from Tampere to Kittilä. Giving me at least a second option when travelling to our cottage at Levi, excellent news indeed!

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they're current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

First the C guys can't imagine writing in assembly anymore, but C++'s vtable dispatch is still just too slow to consider. Then the C++ guys look back with chagrin at the bad-old-days of rolling their own half-assed object systems in C, but Java is dismissed as a ridiculous pig. Still later, the Java guys sneer at pointers and manual memory management, but JavaScript is ridiculed as a toy "scripting" language for validating web forms. And on and on.

....

Once again, let me anticipate your likely reaction. "Don't try to frighten us with your technological worries. Microsoft's sad devotion to its modern, multi-language runtime has not helped it conjure up some decent mobile market share, or given it clairvoyance enough to dominate any product category outside its core Windows/Office strengths." All of this is true. Successfully addressing a technical issue like this is not a guarantee of success, nor is being a bit behind in this area a death sentence.

John Siracusa at his best! I love the original stuff on Ars Technica, thought-provoking, interesting, funny and well-written. Unfortunately there are only so many John Siracusa's and Jon Stokes around and Ars needs to get pageviews after "selling out". Which means they are more or less copying Engadget, TechCrunch et al with similar, superficial, stories and "news".

Apple Inc. is now collecting the "precise," "real-time geographic location" of its users' iPhones, iPads and computers.

In an updated version of its privacy policy, the company added a paragraph noting that once users agree, Apple and unspecified "partners and licensees" may collect and store user location data. 

When users attempt to download apps or media from the iTunes store, they are prompted to agree to the new terms and conditions. Until they agree, they cannot download anything through the store.

The company says the data is anonymous and does not personally identify users. Analysts have shown, however, that large, specific data sets can be used to identify people based on behavior patterns.

I don't mean to sound paranoid but privacy-issues should be discussed and not hidden in a opaque privacy policy. The problem with this kind of functionality is that even if its used properly by Apple, there can be legal pressure applied on them to release the data - or it could be stolen. I'd rather not have this functionality and data so readily available.

It should be noted, and is in the end of the article, that Google does more or less the same with their Android-phones as well.

Update: Other blog and news sources make the point that Apple keeps the data anonymized and that this type of policy and wording is needed for apps like Google Maps and Foursquare to work. Anonymizing efficiently is surprisingly hard given enough data - if you track my daily life any wannabe-detective could figure out who I am. Other experiments such as AOL releasing search data and Netflix releasing movie-watching data shows that you can analyze the data to break anonymity.

Then again, if you trust the Steve, he has a reasonable take on location-privacy:

We worry a lot about location in phones," Jobs said. "We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take your personal data and suck it up into the cloud. A lot of people in the Valley think we are really old-fashioned about that, and maybe we are. Privacy means people know what they are signing up for in plain English...Some people want to share more data. Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data."

From this years D: All Things Digital Conference, via news.cnet.com

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

I realize that I won't persuade the many people who prefer to live in gated communities, believing they can leave any time they wish. But switching costs will only get higher over time for those who choose to live in the Apple ecosystem.

Dan Gillmor is saying what I have been thinking for a while, and why I bought the HP Mini 210 netbook. It's so that I can reacquaint myself with Linux on the Desktop and see if it could be an alternative (again).

On a wooded island more than a hundred miles northwest of Helsinki, in the town of Eurajoki, Finnish engineers are digging a tunnel. When it is done 10 years from now, it will corkscrew three miles in and 1,600 feet down into crystalline gneiss bedrock that has been the foundation of Finland for 1.8 billion years.

And there, in a darkness that is still being created, the used fuel rods from Finland’s nuclear reactors — full of radioactive elements from the periodic table as dreamed up by Lord Voldemort, spitting neutrons and gamma rays — are to be sealed away forever, or at least 100,000 years.

This sounds like a very interesting documentary! Reminds me that even with all the annoying things that finnish politics and policy-making can do, it is capable of making rational and pragmatic decisions that no other nation has been capable of yet. Like doing nuclear power the way it should be.

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

Of course available for free in various non-DRM electronic formats, excellent!

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

I'm continually amazed over how eloquent Adam Savage, from the Mythbusters for those of you living in a cave, is.

What if Microsoft took a 30% tax for all of those (not made by Microsoft) that were sold? They'd have so much money they'd have to burn it just to store it.

The article itself is a long-winded but thoughtful analysis and history of the iPhone. Tommi Ahonen is fun to read if you care about the mobile industry but uses too many words. Basically he argues that the iPhone market-share is currently peaking or has peaked (doesn't mean that iPhone will die, or that he hates the iPhone, just that while Apple will continue to be extremely profitable it still is a small luxury niche player in the mobile market).

The big battle this year in mobile will be in smartphones. Not because of reasons many pundits and analysts now suggest, that somehow this is that everybody caught the iPhone fever or that Google somehow energized the field with its Nexus phone. No, those are overhyped views with an overly US-centric view. Remember that differing from most high tech and media industries like computers, TVs, air travel, advertising, military spending, music, movies, rocket science etc, where the US tends to reflect about half of global spending of the given industry. That is not so in mobile telecoms. US cellphone users (about 285 million subscriptions) represent only 7% of the global subscriber base of 4.6 Billion.

Also by Tomi Ahonen, an excellent write-up on what to expect from 2010 in regards to mobile phones and the companies that build them.

While the side grip does not increase the risk of stovepiping, it is terrible for aim. It's extremely difficult to properly use the top-mounted sight on a handgun that is turned sideways. Not that this matters much to the average street criminal. According to an FBI study, 60 percent of them don't even use the sight.

Important information for all of you would-be rappers, try aiming.