Live from Austin!

From the Wall St Journal:

 Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

So there we have it. Dicking around with the clocks twice a year and making life awkward for software developers is not only a waste of time, it’s also a waste of energy and money, at least in places where people have air conditioning in summer.

Metasploit on the iPhone:

Every process runs as root. MobileSafari, MobileMail, even the Calculator, all run with full root privileges. Any security flaw in any iPhone application can lead to a complete system compromise.

I really thought Apple had better software developers than that. I guess that explains Steve Jobs’ comments about it being impossible to provide a 3rd party SDK safely.

Yeah, if you made the incredibly dumb decision to have no security whatsoever in your mobile OS, then it’s impossible to support 3rd party applications safely.

More to the point, as soon as someone finds a security hole in Safari or Mail, that’s it—they will be able to pwn the entire system. I’d place bets that someone will find such a bug, sooner or later; and then we’ll see iPhone viruses and trojans spreading by e-mail or web.

It wasn’t much fun following Apple during the 90s. The transition from mono to color was painful, as it involved whole new chunks of OS and a different processor. The transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC was also ugly and painful, and a lot of software simply stopped working and was never fixed. Those of us who had 680×0-based Macs quickly found them made forcibly obsolete long before they would normally have become unusable. Then came OS X, and a bunch more machines were forcibly obsoleted, more software broke, and more developers gave up.

Things have been looking pretty good in the Apple world recently, though. The technically adept have been flocking to switch to the Mac, the OS keeps getting faster and better rather than bigger and flakier, and open source and Java software now runs better on OS X than on Windows.

And now, here we go again. Except that this time, it’s going to be much worse. Whereas PowerPC processors were able to emulate 680×0 at acceptable speed, it’s going to be a lot tougher to try and emulate a 3GHz PowerPC G5 on any kind of Intel chip, even the kind shipping next year. Everyone who uses Metrowerks CodeWarrior for their Mac development (i.e. all those big old legacy Carbon applications from the 68K days) is going to be out of luck, as they’ll first have to drag their entire codebase over to Xcode, and then spend weeks (according to Jobs) fixing up the code. So one thing’s for sure–we’ll be waiting years for another release of Quark XPress this time, too.

The core problem is that the x86 is a lot less like the PowerPC than the PowerPC is like the 680×0. For starters, the x86 stores all its numbers half backwards and half forwards–the least significant bytes are stored first, but within a byte the most significant bits are stored first. (That kind of ugliness is fairly typical of Intel designs, which are legendarily unpleasant to program for at low level.) Any program that does bit or byte manipulation is likely to break. The PowerPC also has a lot more registers than the x86, which means that emulation is tough.

Ultimately, though, the fact that the x86 is a hideously ugly design doesn’t matter too much, because hardly anyone touches machine code these days.

Still, will Apple be able to pull off this kind of screwing around with their developer and user communities again? I don’t know. The more interesting question is why they are willing to risk it. With Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all using PowerPC cores in their next-generation console systems, it really seems like a strange time to switch to Intel CPUs. Plus, if you want an x86 with PC-crushing performance and price, why not choose AMD rather than Intel?

One possible reason is that Apple is strongest in laptops, and IBM has singularly failed to deliver a G5 that can be stuck inside a laptop. AMD isn’t all that in laptops either, which would explain why Intel. But then again, there’s no reason why laptops can’t continue to use the G4, save for the perception that the G4 is “obsolete”, a perception which Apple itself has to take the blame for. Jobs says that there are no plans for improvements to PowerPC for the next few years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not; we’ll see.

Then there’s the intriguing possibility that Apple would like users to be able to run WINE. On the one hand, people could then switch to a Mac and still run their Windows software on it, for free. On the other hand, who would bother to develop Mac software if everyone could run Windows software? One possible answer might be to bring back Yellow Box for x86, which allowed Cocoa (NeXTStep) software to run on Windows. Still, even without WINE, software developers might just say “Hey, you want to run our software on your Mac? Just dual-boot into Windows!” (Jobs has already said that they’re not going to do anything to stop people running Windows on the Mac.)

So WINE on the Mac and Intel CPUs in the Mac could either be a colossal disaster that will kill the platform, or the best thing to ever happen to the Mac. I’m not going to pretend I know which is the case. I do know one thing, though: I’m sure as hell not going to buy a new Mac now, and I had been hoping to upgrade some time during the next year. No, I’m going to sit quiet and see what happens. I’ll want to see all my core applications available in native x86 versions, and an x86 based Mac that blows the doors off the G5, before I spend more money on Apple hardware. And as with the last round of turmoil (the switch to OS X), if it all goes disastrously wrong I’ll just switch to Linux everywhere.

My previous PDA was a Palm V. 16MHz 68000, 160×160 B&W screen that could do greyscale in special modes that most software didn’t use. I didn’t particularly want to replace it, but there were a few issues I was having.

First off, the fact that it was serial based rather than USB meant it was a pain to connect to any modern computer; getting it hooked up to the Mac involved a USB to serial adaptor, special drivers, and a lot of futzing with Palm Desktop, and the end result was painfully slow. As a result, I hadn’t synced it in ages.

Secondly, I’d never liked the screen. Going from the Newton MessagePad to the Palm had been a serious downgrade, necessitated by Jobs killing the Newton. I’d been waiting around for some usable Palm devices with at least 320×480 resolution and a 10cm screen, and they finally started appearing in the last year or so.

Other than USB and a big screen, I didn’t really care too much about fancy features; just the obvious stuff—a beeper you can hear easily for alarms, either Bluetooth or wi-fi with an option for the other one, enough memory for a comprehensive GTD list, and maybe a few games and e-books, and connectivity to Mac and Linux.

I did consider the “smart phone” option (again). I came to the same conclusion as last time I considered it: it just doesn’t work. Generally speaking, I want my PDA screen to be as large as possible, and my phone to be as small as possible. Specifically, I want my PDA screen to be big enough to be usable for reviewing an outline of a hundred or so items, and my phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of my jeans. The Treo 650 fails both tests—it’s too big for a phone and too small for a pocketbook. I’m sure it’s just the right size for some people, but not for me.

Pocket PC devices? Yeah, right. Even if I was prepared to assist Microsoft’s plans for World Domination, the Pocket PC is pretty much crippled unless you run Windows and/or Office, and I don’t run either. So Microsoft eliminated themselves from consideration.

Nokia Communicator? Tempting, but Nokia don’t seem to sell it in the USA. Or at least, I’ve never seen one, and I’m not buying one without seeing the screen first.

Psion? They seem to have given up on the consumer market, and they always price-gouged outrageously for proprietary peripherals and upgrades. No thanks.

Sony Ericsson P series? Again, I’d never actually seen one, and didn’t fancy buying sight unseen, especially not after my experiences with the Sony Ericsson t68i. Plus, you know, $700…

Zaurus? Tempting again. I kept waiting for Sharp to start selling the clamshell Zaurus machines. Unfortunately, all they sell in the US is the SL-6000. It’s thick and heavy and has a keyboard that’s too small to use, hidden in a sliding mechanism. I don’t like sliding mechanisms, they’re too unreliable. I met some guys from Sharp at a show, and told them I hated the 6000, and when would they be selling the SL-C7xx series or some other clamshell design? They said that they both wanted clamshell Zauruses too, but the Japanese mothership had decided that we were wrong, nobody in America wants clamshell machines. I wasn’t prepared to pay $800+ to Dynamism for an unwarrantied Japanese import Zaurus re-flashed with a partially translated OS, though clearly the fact that some people are rather puts a hole in Sharp’s official position. Anyway, I waited a year or so to see if Sharp would relent and sell my a PDA I wanted, then crossed them off the list when they failed to do so.

So, my short list of options was: Tungsten T3, Tungsten T5, Sony CLIE PEG-TH55, Tapwave Zodiac.

The Tungsten T3 has a gratuitous sliding mechanism. The slider wasn’t going to protect the screen, and I couldn’t imagine any concievable circumstance where I’d want to make the screen smaller than it already was, so what was the point? The T5 kinda illustrates the uselessness of it. I expect it was purely a matter of wanting to recycle the case of the Tungsten T and just drop in a different screen instead of having to do a major redesign. So, not really very appealing.

Ah, the Tungsten T5. Looks like a fabulous device until you read some reviews. The biggest problem is that Pa1mOne b0rked the OS on the T5 and the Treo 650, so that every single database entry is now allocated in 512 byte chunks, like on a desktop PC. So if (like me) you carry small databases with hundreds of phone numbers, to-do items and scraps of info, suddenly they bloat out to 10x the size. To me, it seems like that rather ruins the point of the thing. Palm say they are going to fix it, but the fact that they’ve given Treo 650 owners free memory cards to make up for it suggests otherwise, and they’re keeping very quiet about fixing it for the T5. The T5 has 128MB, so allowing for bloat of the kind Treo 650 users have observed, it’s like a 32MB machine—and Palm think that’s OK.

Even ignoring the memory issue, though, there are other problems. The T5 has software compatibility issues. Most software developers are scrambling with updates, but good luck getting classic Palm freeware to run on it. The connector for sync is yet another new design, so none of the existing peripherals will work. And worst of all, it has no vibration mode. Yup, if you’re in a meeting, cinema, church or whatever, you can’t have it vibrate instead of beeping for alarms. It’s the same rather anemic speaker as the T3, and it’s mounted in the center of the back of the device, so as soon as you lay it on a desk, put it in a carrying case, or even hold it in your hand, the sound is badly muffled.

So in short, the T5 fails the basic functionality requirements due to some very poor design choices by Palm.

Next to be eliminated was the CLIE. Sony decided they weren’t interested in selling in the US any more. That left the Tapwave Zodiac, and I bought one.

Things I like about the Zodiac:

• It has the biggest rechargeable battery capacity of any Palm device.
• The case is made of metal, not plastic like the T5.
• Because it was designed for gaming, it has two front-mounted speakers for loud stereo sound, and a strong vibration function.
• It has a graphics processor, leaving the CPU free to do actual CPU stuff, so performance is lightning-fast.
• The internal memory behaves as regular Palm memory, with most of the free space being used to simulate an internal memory card. This is important because Palm OS craps out once files get large, so your photos and MP3s and e-books need to go in “card memory”. With the Zodiac, you get some “card memory” built in…
• …and then you’ve got two SD expansion slots, one of which takes SDIO cards.
• A proper navigation joystick and a complete set of application buttons.
• Most color Palm software seems to run, including titles which I know don’t run on the T5.
• Real headphone jack capable of driving a pair of portable Sennheisers.
• It’s black.

Things I don’t like:

• The stylus just clips on the back. I can see that getting lost.
• The sync cable is hard to clip on; it tends to feel like it’s clipped on, only to suddenly drop off half way through a data transfer.
• Case and dock cost extra. C’mon, guys, would it kill you to bundle a cheap neoprene carrying pouch?

Basically, it’s the nicest Palm device I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame that Tapwave’s strategy is to sell it as a game console, because it’s not so hot at being one of those. As a Palm organizer, though, it easily beats the competition—at least as far as the hardware is concerned.