Nokia

It's a slippery slope, but they're hard to live without once you take the plunge. If you forget to program an address or write down a phone number you can look it up just about anywhere. See or hear something of interest- jot it down, or photograph it and look things up instantly. Easy to price compare right in the store. Streaming audio means you can listen to podcasts or radio programs in the car from anywhere. It doesn't quite substitute for a real GPS, though some people think so. It might substitute for satellite radio.

Mine cost whatever the unlocked phone costs ($600?) plus $60+ per month, (plus half again the phone cost for an encounter with H20). But you have a perfectly usable camera, e-mail, IM, GPS, notebook, access to the entire world's internet information etc. 24/7. And I can tether to my iPad or notebook computers, so they are instantly internet enabled too. Sometimes I even make telephone calls with it!

BTW, it's kind of fun sitting with an iPad while reading a good old-fashioned book with a lot of substance and being able to look up unfamiliar flora and fauna, locations, cultural references etc. as you go. Just reading "Quest for Ore", a classic on mineral exploration from the sixties, written by the son of one of the pioneers of exploiting the great Mesabi Range iron ore formation near Lake Superior- and a veteran of prospecting world-wide.

Vivid memory from an Italian family, from before cell phones were invented: Everyone sits down at the table, dad says the prayer. Pots get passed around, the usual. One of the kids starts to talk to another kid during dinner. Dad slams his fist on the table ... *NON PARLATE!* ... only the clanging of forks and knives is heard during the rest of the dinner. Immediately afterwards everyone started chatting and laughing, then it was ok.

He may be right.

And _you_ call _me_ cheap? It can be had for 35 bucks flat rate, includes 300 minutes talk/month.

Except I only need 10 minutes so I have the $7/mo no data deal.

Agreed. They do become indispensable. However, that doesn't mean you're forced to give up human interaction when you have one. We go out for meals at least two or three times a week. The only time I pull the phone out is while waiting for a table (I don't feel like private discussions in a crowd of strangers) or when I want to look something up that's come up during discussion.

My contract will be up soon. Looking at the prepaid plans, I'll probably use the same phone on one. Verizon has an unlimited phone and text plan, with 2GB data for $60/mo. Not too bad.

My wife prefers eBooks (she loves her Nook). I haven't gone there. ...but if I need to look anything up, I have my phone. I haven't figured out a "use case" where I want a tablet. The 4" screen is too close to a small (7") tablet and full tablets are too big to carry everywhere.

Yeah, but mysql is for weenies. If you want a serious database use postgresql. (the price is better too) Biased video here:

I can't say I've had any positive experiences with exchange, possibly because I don't know how to operate it.

I've noticed that people who are immersed in technology at work, tend to adopt a low tech approach to their personal lives. While not exactly a Luddite, there are some benefits to remaining low tech. I think I've reached a workable compromise.

I carry two devices. I have an ordinary LG VX8300 commodity cell phone. It makes and receives phone calls and has an address book copied (indirectly) from my smartphone. I have several almost identical VX8300 phones scattered in various locations, in case I forget or lose my phone, which seems to be a regular event. *228 and a few buttons, and the backup phone is usable. $10-$20 used on eBay. The VX8300 was one the last phone made with an external projecting antenna, which give better range than internal antennas. That's handy in the Santa Cruz mountains.

I also carry a Motorola Droid X2 smartphone, with the cell phone section turned off. It's main uses are a calendar, address book, camera, RPN calculator, GPS maps. It holds a mess of apps that I've downloaded, some of which I've run more than once. The reason for two phones is that I don't need or want a $30/month cellular data plan. Verizon will not activate a smartphone without a mandatory data plan. I switched to prepaid via PagePlus several years ago, which has no such restriction. However, I plan to buy a somewhat larger screen PDA to replace the Droid X2, so I've left the two phone arrangement in place.

Some of the technical apps are genuinely useful. Audio oscilloscope, audio spectrum analyzer, Wi-Fi sniffer, path loss calculator, and various calculators and table lookups. I use VoIP apps in areas where cell phone service doesn't function. I have the phone crammed full of videos, podcasts, and music, but rarely have time to watch or listen. I don't expect that you'll adopt my methodology intact, but it might give you some ideas. You might find a PDA or tablet to be useful.

At various periods in my consulting career, I've had to be a bit of a road warrior. At home, I do all the stuff that needs data security on my main Linux box, but on the road I'm in hotels and airports with unsecured networks, so my default assumption is that my laptop is compromised. Having a Blackberry allows me to do stuff requiring data security on the road, which is very comforting. (Of course with everybody being eavesdropped on by the Feds limits there's a limit to how comforting it can be, but I'm looking into alternatives, mostly Kolab.)

iOS and especially Droid aren't in the same class for data security.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

What I find annoying is the endless mix of arbitrary and confusing user interfaces, which have nothing to do with technology as such.

I *hate* the incredibly stupid user interfaces on my Audi and our microwave oven. I ripped out the "smart" thermostat in our cabin and put in a dumb analog dial one, which has no internal states to get tangled.

It's funny when some idiot newspaper refers to kids as "tech savvy" when all they have learned is how to push buttons on smartphones.

I'm an iPad widower; I have lost my wife to a fondleslab. She runs apps, does email, reads books, all that.

I have enough real PCs in my life, six or so, connected via Dropbox, that I don't need more gadgets. I can *program* a PC, do serious engineering, and run LT Spice and Filterpro and Appcad and pcb layout and all that stuff you can't do on a pad. We have a really cool parts/inventory/datasheet database that runs on PCs too.

Offline, I scribble on paper and read real books.

That is more or less coalescing along the Apple/Android lines.

Cars are still way behind cell phones, here. They'll catch up (likely going with a cell phone like interface). I really like our "Nest" thermostat. The web page is pretty crude but the device itself is quite easy to use. AIUI the Nest was designed by ex-Apple types.

It's the apps. ;-)

That's TERRIBLE. She reads books?

If I could carry that power in my pocket, it would be great. However, I need more than two displays at work, neither of which would fit.

Don't see the difference. I prefer dead trees, too, but perhaps because I haven't trained myself to read eBooks. OTOH, I print datasheets and store them in project binders (some datasheets get printed several times).

On the iPad. It glows. Kinda annoying, when I'm reading a proper dead-tree book.

Decades from now, the printed books will still be around.

I don't print data sheets or keep a lot of printed project notes any more. I photograph whiteboards, photograph breadboards, scan notes, do calculations in text files, and save all that to a project folder, which gets backed up extensively. But still on PCs with big screens and mice. I've run out of bookshelf for project binders.

That's one of my major problems with using a smartphone or PDA. I've had various apps steal my address book and use it to generate spam. I've had to limit the entries in the official address book to a few common phone numbers, and hide the rest in a encrypted separate file. I use Truecrypt (open source) because it runs on just about everything. There are several ports of Truecrypt for both IOS and Android.

For email, anything of importance gets encrypted with Enigmail (Open PGP). I doubt if it will stop the NSA but it's sufficient to frustrate casual data thieves.

I do little traveling these days, so portable data security is not an issue for me. However, I do use coffee shop wi-fi networks, where there is no security. For those, I have a VPN router at my office and sitting in a server farm. It's not end to end encryption, but it does take care of the sniffing problem at the wi-fi hotspot. There are also a few commercial services but I prefer to do my own.

My biggest fear is losing a smartphone or tablet, where it takes little effort to extract everything. So, the important stuff is on a removable micro-SD card, much of which is also encrypted. I usually remember to remove the micro-SD, but one time I forgot. I then misplace the smartphone. After a quick panic and search, I went online and tediously changed about 100 passwords. Then I found the smartphone sitting on the kitchen table. Oops.

It's Sunday. It's also a great day to drive to the office and do all the things I should have been doing last week and which are due Monday. For overtime pay, I'll buy myself an ice cream.

One-time pads are practical nowadays, what with memory sticks costing almost nothing per gigabyte. You would have to physically send someone a duplicate stick, full of random data. Each communication could start with a plaintext index to the start of the XOR data, but don't use any region twice and don't leave the stick plugged in. A simple drag/drop app would be easy; encryption and decryption are the same operation.

Then we could get millions of people to send bogus random data files to one another, just to keep the NSA boys busy.

I might go in later today and build another prototype or something. It's nice to be alone, without someone barging in every 20 minutes, shouting numbers.

I can stop by BevMo on the way in, stock up on Wexford and Purple Haze and Ron Zacapa 23.

That's like complaining about the different typefaces and styles in book. Even if they were printed in Olde English font, you could still read it.

I use 4 major operating systems and probably about 10 of their mutations. Every one has a different user interface. Some are better than others, but all of them have their problems. I have the most difficulty with the currently fashionable "swipe" and "gesture" interfaces.

However, none of the common user interfaces have much to do with the technology. Their purpose is to hide the technology from the user, not to educate the user in the use of the technology. The ultimate example is the common ATM banking machine. It has plenty of features buried under a dumbed down user interface that anyone can easily decode. Incidentally, I noticed that the banking machine at the local market was running on NT 4.0. I guess banking isn't into the latest and greatest.

Also, the only way to progress in user interfaces is to throw a user interface at the GUM (great unwashed masses) and see what happens. Some kid invented the highly successful inertial finger swipe system for Apple, not a committee of experts on standards. The new Windoze 8 "metro" interface is actually quite good, if you don't mine forgetting everything you've previously learned about operating a computer. Applications add another layer of creative user interfaces. Yeah, it's a mess, but it will eventually sort itself out, where what's left is what is generally accepted and possibly usable.

Well, that's the advantage of designing your own. You can have it exactly the way you want it. Well, you can have as much of what you want until you run out of time and patience. Incidentally, I still cannot do more than the basics on my office setback thermostat, even after reading the manual. Some things are just not meant to be understood by mere mortals.

What would you propose? Give them an abacus or slide rule instead?

I like to think of smartphones and computers in general as a means of hiding complexity. Usually, it's the math and methodology that gets hidden. Why bother learning how simple interest operates, when you can just plug the numbers into a spreadsheet or Javascript form, and out comes the answer. The kids are considered "tech savvy" because they can rapidly produce the required answer without have a clue what is happening behind the scenes. Worse, they often accept the answers produced, without a sanity check.

However, you're right that they're not really "tech savvy", unless the definition of "tech savvy" has changed to being able to operate a smartphone. Kinda like being able to play flying video games makes them "aircraft savvy".

I know many couples that both have tablets. I asked one yesterday how they deal with the tablets as a distraction from reality and interaction. Tablets are banned from the dining room table, from parties, and from restaurants. A quick lookup is all that's tolerated.

I have about a dozen or more. I also use my customers computers quite often. Total immersion in computers is not a good idea. For many years, computers were banned from the house. But that didn't last.

You probably don't need more gadgets, but you might need better gadgets. A more portable PC, as in a tablet, is a better computer.

True. A tablet is really made for viewing content, not creating it. I would not bother trying to do a simulation on a tablet. However, viewing the results (possibly in PDF form), reading the docs, skimming through books on the topic, and searching for clues, are perfectly acceptable. While it is quite possible to create content on a tablet or smartphone, it's much better for viewing.

So, login to your office PC with some remote desktop software such as Teamviewer, and run the office PC from your tablet. I do that all the time. Time burners like virus scans, updates, simulations, compiles, and ripping are best done on high powered desktops. However, there's no need to actually be in the office, sitting in front of the desktop waiting for the job to finish. Just leave and stay connected via a tablet.

I'm not much of a programmer. One of the reasons is that I learned to program on a Model 33ASR teletype machine. I would prepare my punch card desk on a card punch, feed it to the card reader, have the computer grind the program, and print the program and results on the teletype. Roll forward 45 years and I find myself printing my program on the laser printer, marking corrections with a red felt tip pen, and typing in the corrections using a line oriented text editor (vi or vedit). Old habits die hard.

Paper and books will eventually be dead or unaffordable. Already, most of the trade journals and magazines that I constantly devour have gone to online publications, eBooks, downloading, PDF's, etc. I can't claim that these electronic methods are much of an improvement, but they do have some big advantages; you can carry your library with you and they're searchable. I have trouble finding my paper scribblings and while I still read printed books and materials, find something I read even a few days ago is often difficult. Also, they're cheaper.

Perhaps paper and printed material is adequate for your purposes today. However, I doubt that will be the case in the future. I'm not suggesting that you rush out and buy the latest tablet or smartphone. Just don't write them off as unusable or useless until after given them a fair chance and experimented with one.

To be fair, I was offered a used Asus quad core something 10" Android tablet at a good price. I tried to fit it into my lifestyle and failed. To big, to awkward, too fragile, too much overhead, and full of bugs. I also had issues with the user interface. I returned it. However, when the next generation of tablets arrives, I plan to try again.

The two basic problems with OTPs: the problem of transportation, and the generation of statistically random data.

"Fortunately, it was more pseudo than random". - The late Tony Sale, speaking about the Lorenz cipher machine, and Colossus.

An electronic thing, using a zener diode or opto shot noise or Johnson noise, will work. Use a few of them, and post-mix and scramble the data.

People sell USB random data generators that have passed various tests for crypto-grade randomness. If you're really paranoid, do all the encode/decode operations on a laptop PC that has no network connection.

It's the journalists that are hopeless. They can't tell a million from a billion, and get anything substantive all tengled up.

I program apps in PowerBasic, the PBCC flavor, which lets you do windows apps in minutes, with the work concentrated on the math, not the Windows interface. Works great.

Wanna design Bessel LC filters quick?

I usually break any portable device that has an LCD screen. I carry my current phone in my pocket with all the other junk and it's unbreakable, so far. It has survived any number of ski crashes.

You read dead tree books in the dark? ;-)

Decades from now, I won't be reading them.

I can't read a datasheet from a monitor but it's nice to be able to search them. Notes are easy enough, now, on the e-versions. I like to have all of the datasheets for a project at my fingertips, without having to fumble through directories on my PC. My boss even made a note on my last performance review about how well organized I was (even though my desk is always 8" deep in papers - and my bench, worse ;-).

Not so much.

The problem is inconsistency. Cell phones are settling down. Cars and microwaves, not so much. Every one is different.

Banking, like many such industries (e.g. industrial automation), has a long qualification time. Those NT4 stations probably were OS2 in their last life. How long does NASA or the IRS keep hardware/software around?

Nonsense. That's how we get blinking VCRs. User interface design is not "throw it at the wall and see what sticks". ...or at least it shouldn't be.

GACK!

Oh, yet another UI to learn. No thanks.

STANDARDIZE. Computers are appliances now. They should work like a stove (NOT the other way around).

That's the way we operate. I don't have a tablet yet. I can't convince myself that I'd use it. OTOH, my wife really bought a Nook before the bottom fell out, so she wants the HD+ 10"(?). It's only $150, so she might buy it and I'll take her hand-me-down 7". If I like it, I'll go from there. For $150, why not?

Silly. I bought the IBM employee "first-day-sale" PC. My son was three at the time. It was a great tool. Wouldn't be without one.

Not convinced but we'll see. My first impression is that it's niche (between a cell phone and laptop) is too limited to be of great use.

Not sure. Dead trees are better for reading. Laptops better for searching. Where does the tablet fit in? Sales? Sure. Engineering???

Keyboard? Mouse?

;-)

I scribble on paper because that's how I remember. My penmanship is write-only but it helps me remember. If I write notes (or appointments), I will remember them. Otherwise, not so much.

Detailed notes that I have to remember, I type, but that requires a keyboard. Tablets just don't cut it.

Fair enough. I'll try a Nook, because they're cheap. If I find that I actually use it, I'll go for something more expensive. I'd prefer to run Win, though (so not cheap).

If you want an interesting bit of reading, locate a copy of Ray Bradbury's short story collection "The Golden Apples of the Sun", and read "The Murderer". Bradbury describes (in beautiful detail) the acoustic and social babble and distraction which fills a society thoroughly hooked on instant, always-on communication to everyone and anyone.

Bradbury accurately predicted the cellphone/smartphone culture... and he did it back in 1953.

Phil, sorry to go off-topic, but I need your help.

Do you know of any LGA1155 H77 or Z77 motherboards that will run Ubuntu

I have several system that I'd like to upgrade, but I have had a terrible time trying to find a suitable motherboard. I have spent weeks sifting through reviews and product documentation and found very little support for Linux.

The Asus P8B WS claims compatibility, but $270 is a bit much. It also means dealing with the legendary Asus non-support if problems occur. If I can't find anything else I may have to go with it.

I tried two motherboards: Asus P8H77-I and Asrock Z77 Pro 4.

The Asus has a place in the bios to turn off EUFI but it doesn't work. Ubuntu won't boot no matter how many variations I try.

The Asrock boots fine but requires special Windows drivers to enable the sound, and it does not display LM Sensors so you can't read the cpu temperature. I contacted their support group. The said Linux is not supported and to run Windows.

MSI, Gigabyte and ECS all say the same thing.

I tried Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity desktop. It lasted about 10 minutes. I reinstalled 10.04 and threw the CDROM away.

I'd be happy to run any other distribution that works like 10.04. This means pull-down menus, Synaptic Package Manager, Firefox, and compatible with VirtualBox 3.2 and 4.0. It would also be nice to be able to run VLC but that is not mandantory.

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks

JK