My write-up of the Rapid Fire session at Macworld | iWorld:
How much can you teach in five minutes? That was the challenge for ten speakers at Thursday nights’s Rapid Fire session at Macworld | iWorld. Borrowing the format from the Ignite conference series, the wide-ranging, two-hour session gave every speaker five minutes to engage the audience and say something memorable.
AKA, how to get Brian Greenberg to maybe attend a Mac conference someday.
All of the guys onstage are Mac industry professionals who perform every year (and only once per year) at Macworld.
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Trying to figure out if this is one of the worst named iOS apps I’ve ever seen, or one of the best.
My coverage of the Creators panel:
It’s not every panel discussion that breaks in the middle for an improv freestyle rap with two human beatboxes. Then again, it’s not every improv rapper who responds to the topic of “Mac” by saying, “that’s so easy.”
Intego thinks that 2011 was a very bad year for Mac security:
2011“was the most active year for Mac malware since the release of Mac OS X.” Much of the stepped-up activity can be blamed on the emergence of MAC Defender malware and the Flashback program that masqueraded as an Adobe Flash installer. Intego estimated that “ several hundred thousand Mac users” were affected by the year’s “bumper crop” of malware.
I called bullshit on this a year in advance, and I call bullshit on this now. Sure, there are always possible attacks: I can write an AppleScript application that will fool you into giving up a password, then erase your hard drive. That would take me 10 minutes. But “several hundred thousand people” is a small percentage of all Mac users (even smaller now than in 2010), and frankly, you have to be fairly self-selecting to trip across many of the extant malware. It might be out there, but it’s no so much “in the wild” as it is festering in a swamp on the outskirts.
Ubuntu is experimenting with a new UI replacement for the menu bar. I’m seriously sleep-deprived, so I might have missed this, but there’s one big advantage in well-designed menus: they’re discoverable. Best as I can tell, if you don’t know about a particular function in complex software (and let’s face it, almost all Linux software is complex), you’re never going to find it. But with menus, you can also go searching for commands you’ve never tried before.
Most important aspect of a name tag: ability to read it discreetly at a distance. This is not it. It amazes me how many conferences screw this up.
A long long time ago,
I can still remember how
An aircraft used to make me smile.
I didn’t know it wouldn’t last
‘Cause after PATRIOT was passed
The airport made us into juveniles.
In the X-rays they deliver,
You can see my fat cells quiver.
Bare feet: no one’s shoes kept.
Can’t even take one more step.
The guard says I must step aside,
I packed a pint of Liquid Tide,
And that they just cannot abide
Before they let me fly.
So screw you, first class rows one and two,
Pricey ticket, you can stick it up your X-rayed wazoo.
We all had to pass a governmental review
Passing TSA’s microscoped queue
And have our pics snapped in the nude.
Now, for ten years we’ve been on our own
And it looks like we’re still pretty boned
Obama’s not for privacy.
There’s a snowball’s chance of last resort
Coming down from Chief Roberts’ court
And no voice that comes from you and me.
Oh and while your rights are blown to hell
The nation’s hooked on the NFL.
No courtroom to adjourn:
Your verdict is returned.
While Lenin read a book of Marx
The FBI used it for darts
And found out they liked several parts
Before they let you fly.
They’re still singin’
There, there, people up in the air,
We don’t care if it’s unfair to look up your derriere.
Just grab and spread ‘em ’til your sphincter is bare;
We hope you don’t mind if we stare.
We’ll keep the pics as long as we dare.
So there we were all in one place
Two hundred souls in a tiny space
And time has seemed to stop as well.
Though Jack be nimble and Jack be quick,
Jack has to stand to scratch his dick
‘Cause middle seats are a kind of hell.
But though I’m sorry for that guy
I have to smile, because I
Booked the exit row
with plenty room to stow.
Six thousand years of Jewish genes:
Low elevation for my knees.
I’m short, stretched out, and very pleased
Now that I can fly.
So screw you, first class rows 1 and 2,
Paid a pittance for remittance and I’ve more room than you.
Drink your whiskey and rye ’til you’re all nicely stewed
‘Cause if the shit hits the fan on approach,
Y’all are the airbag for coach.
Yeah, I was singin’
Fie, fie, from up here in the sky,
Damn the TSA’s lies, but it’s amazing to fly.
I hope their common sense is a future surprise,
But I think that’ll be the day that I die.
Upon reading first headline: “gotta post that.”
Upon reading second headline: “shit.”
The newspaper was dated August 7, 1945. If he had survived a few more days, he would have come home.
Helen: enjoying my new life in Milwaukee with my secretary. I know things are tough for you and your Mom, but someday a postcard delivered by a Nazi should be worth something. –Dad
Above the fold today at The Pirate Bay:
Under the Stop Online Privacy Act the penalty for uploading Michael Jackson music illegally is 5 years in prison. The penalty for killing Michael Jackson is 4 years in prison.
Good analysis on the eTextbook thing at Macworld.
The day before the event, the Macalope was chatting with a community college math professor who said the textbook his students needed to buy was almost $300. Two books like that and there’s your iPad. The Macalope also wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a cheaper iPad this year.
“It is the opinion of this court that the Constitution was crafted in such a manner as to uphold and encourage practices that are not right and, ideally, are very wrong,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, which also included Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts. “Despite the compelling case for goodness, truth, and justice made by our predecessors in the case of Right v. Wrong, we firmly believe that malice, dishonesty, and injustice were the framers’ original intent.”
I don’t really have the mathematics to understand this, but it sounds pretty exciting.
The Fourier transform is one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal — such as the voltage fluctuations in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a loudspeaker — as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, but it can also be used to compress image and audio files, solve differential equations and price stock options, among other things.
A group of MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that, in a large range of practically important cases, improves on the fast Fourier transform. Under some circumstances, the improvement can be dramatic — a tenfold increase in speed. The new algorithm could be particularly useful for image compression, enabling, say, smartphones to wirelessly transmit large video files without draining their batteries or consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments.
The new top-level domains are making the news again, and based on the mass media I’ve been sampling, they’re coming with a great deal of sturm und drang about how this will ruin the Internet, make everyone’s lives miserable, or force you to watch porn while Russian mobsters raid your bank account.
I think that’s all more than silly, so I’m linking to an article I wrote for TidBITS last February. Shorter version: top-level domains are mostly as important as your area code in determining how worthwhile you are.
