Monthly Archives: January 2010

Apple iPad

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The iPad has been unveiled, but I’m not as impressed as I expected to be due to excessive hype and speculation prior to today’s event. Many of the comments regarding the iPad also hinted at disappointment, which is not typical at Apple product launches.

Prior to the unveiling, I was anticipating a revolutionary device such as the iPhone rather than the evolutionary device shown today. Despite this letdown, many of the criticisms about the device are without merit as they completely disregard what the iPad is meant to be, a casual use, portable media center rather than a full featured tablet PC. Some have cited lack of features such as keyboards, a full OS, a phone and USB ports as, but none of these features would improve the device when considering that touch screens are not especially conducive to work. If you need that level of functionality, buy a MacBook Air. The iPad leans more toward iPod rather than MacBook, and it strikes a good balance between portability and function.

Lack of Adobe Flash, multitasking and camera were also mentioned. If there’s anything the iPad isn’t missing, it’s Flash support. It runs slowly and is mostly used for advertisements and video players, the latter of which won’t be needed with HTML5. The only flaw with the iPad is its lack of multitasking. For a product with more emphasis on actual computing, it seems that multitasking would be important enough to include in the first release.

Also, why complain about missing features on an Apple product at all? The first iteration of all Apple products are invariably short on features so that they can be added in as hot new selling points in later models. It would seem that this would be obvious by now.

In other news, Microsoft is working on its Courier device, but as usual there’s no word on its status.

Cadmium In Jewelry

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Today, this article was featured on Yahoo!’s homepage. It documents how American consumers desire toys that are cheap yet made of the finest materials the earth has to offer, even though such trinkets are likely to wind up in a landfill within weeks.

It reads like a joke, and at the end the author suggests that readers could purchase cadmium testing kits if they are worried about cadmium contaminating their ten cent tchotchkes. Did you just spend money on garbage? Why not spend more money on even more garbage to fix the problem! This could be the topic of a comic strip. Buy, buy, buy!

If it were not for consumerism, would this even be a problem? Consumerism is the source of many problems in society. While I do believe that money buys happiness, the happiness is not derived from such junk, but time. Time means freedom to do what you want other than shop.

Aside from the laughable irony, the article is typical media fear mongering. But that’s to be expected from the media in general, and I shouldn’t expect any better from Yahoo!. What typically qualifies as news these days consists of murders, feel good stories (Local Woman Finds Lost Dog!) and fear mongering.

Thankfully, the original article written by the AP actually provided some useful background information regarding what cadmium is, what’s being done about the problem and relevant details, but it is the shoddy summarized version that makes it to the front page.

The original article by the AP states, “Children can be exposed by sucking or biting such jewelry. But without direct exposure, most people do not experience its worst effects: cancer, kidneys that leak vital protein and bones that spontaneously snap.” The summarized article featured by Yahoo! was devoid of context, and simply spit out these worst case side effects, with the implication that even touching cadmium could put a child at risk of snapping bones and dripping kidneys, with no details regarding the various effects caused by the degree of exposure. Wouldn’t recommendation to dispose of all jewelry deliver the message just as well without inciting unnecessary alarm?

Conscious Robots

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While Wikipedia I stumbled upon a book called Conscious Robots. My old post, A Conjecture On Consciousness, seems to be similar to this book, which I found interesting. Now that I read the original post, I realize the writing is terrible, rambling, disjointed and does not use the words I necessarily intended, nor does it accurately capture what I had in mind, which was not consciousness but free will.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”

- John Watson

But in reality I hope all of this is wrong and there is free will, whatever that is.