Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
Nuclear Fission will Never be Safe
Atomic energy has always promised to be our saviour - it’s touted as being clean and efficient and massive supplies of Uranium to fuel the reactors. Keeping in mind that there are two kinds of Nuclear/Atomic energy - that derived from breaking big atoms into smaller ones (Fission) and that from taking two smaller atoms and smashing them together until they stick (Fusion). Currently no-one has built a Fusion reactor that can create a sustained reaction to provide electricity on a mass scale. They’re working on it with the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) but 2017 seems a long way off and even if they can make it work it’s just a pilot plant and it would take decades to built lots more.
So in the meantime assume I’m not talking about Fusion (which can be clean if the right fuel is used) and that I’m talking about that 1950’s idea: Fission. Well, we’ve had 3 mile island, Chernobyl and it seems now that Fukushima is the next major disaster which is tragically unfolding even as I type this. This time it’s a disaster with a difference - this one was caused by nature and not by human error. Or perhaps, not by immediate human error. Some would argue that placing nuclear reactors in seismically active regions is questionable at best, and certainly not near a well known and active Tsunami region. Irrespective of this no matter where you put a reactor it will inevitably, someday, have a natural disaster affect it. Our planet is seismically active, weather gives us tornadoes, cyclones (hurricanes, typhoons) and floods and eventually these reactor sites will be affected. So long as humans are involved there will also be the opportunity of error leading to a disaster (like Chernobyl).
Even if these things are not considered statistically significant we also need to decide once and for all if the radioactive waste is worth it. With half-lives of multiple thousands of years for some of the nasty by-products of a perfectly functioning reactor (that’s the time it takes for the waste to lose half of its radioactivity) we then need to figure out where to store it. See previous argument for where to you find a place that is guaranteed to be stable for 100,000 years or more on this planet.
At some point people need to choose: Alternative energy sources and serious restrictions on power consuming appliances, or cheap fuel today and pay the price later with either global warming (from burning too much coal) or radioactive waste and radiation accidents (from Nuclear Fission). We have nuclear disarmament agreements and it’s time the leaders of the world agreed to stop building Fission reactors, mothball and shutdown the older ones and start looking elsewhere for safer energy sources. So long as we dabble with Nuclear Fission, we are playing with a very dangerous genie in a very fragile bottle.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by this horrible crisis.
Twitter to Developers: 'We're packing up our marbles...'
Somewhat of a bombshell was dropped by Ryan Sarver from Twitters own Platform Team on the developer forums on the weekend. Rather than quote it I strongly encourage Twitter fans to read it and also read the comments that follow his post. In a nutshell, Ryan (on Twitters behalf presumably) is informing developers not to develop applications that interact with Twitter (i.e. Twitter Clients) if all they do are the basic functions of the Twitter apps supplied by Twitter themselves. They are encouraging developers to focus on more advanced user interfaces with aggregation and very focussed and specific purpose-use of Twitter.
They argue that fragmentation is occurring (this is becoming a catch phrase lately it seems) in Twitter with different clients having different terminology and methods for retweeting, quoting and other basic Twitter functionality. The interface differences between products is something I have seen myself (not naming application names) so I see their point there. They go on to argue that 90% of Twitter users are using the Twitter supplied clients to access Twitter and claiming in effect that they (Twitter) have that covered and developers don’t bother.
They have created a service with a published interface and allowed developers to spend their own time and money developing clients to interact with the Twitter service. Once the clients had reached a level of maturity Twitter bought the clients they believed to be the best (and I note, not the BEST) then made them free for all users. Users given a choice between paying for a client and getting one for free usually pick the free option. Twitter then started adding functionality like push notifications directly from the Twitter service and remote account creation which were never available for Client developers to use and then the official Twitter clients have an edge over everyone else. In so doing, Twitter now knifes their developers in the back and says, thanks for your help, see you later.
In a parting salvo showing a sad indifference to the feelings of their now betrayed developers, Ryan then encourages them to try new and more advanced Twitter features in their clients beyond the standard features provided by Twitters own clients. Presumably this is so Twitter can buy the best of those clients in a few years and then screw the developers all over again.
Having said that, Twitter needs to run itself as a business and businesses need to make money. Twitter developers weren’t licensed by Twitter (an alternative model Twitter could have used but chose not to) and Twitter made no money directly from their clients. Twitter had therefore no real control over the applications that were developed and when developers didn’t follow their design guidelines there was very little Twitter could do to stop them and in the interests of growing their platform it’s likely that they turned a partly blind-eye until now. It’s their platform and their choice. For Twitters sake, I hope the near instant loss of developers doesn’t hurt their ecosystem too much, though I believe it will in the short term at least. Long term, probably less so. For the developers out there, so long, and thanks for all the fish. This is Twitter, and we’re packing up our marbles and going home. Such a shame.
The iPad 2 sold out? Here we go again...
Jim Dalrymple of The Loop mentions the iPad 2 stocks are running extremely low and with 3-4 weeks delivery in the US Apple Store similar delays to the Australian launch date (and other non-US countries for that matter) ala-iPhone 4 last year seem inevitable. If Apple has quarantined a quantity of iPad 2’s for he international launches you can bet they will be in very short supply. If you want one, pre-order and pick it up in store, and don’t be surprised if the release date slips into April.
The Engadget Dynamic Trio bow out
It’s both scary and amazing how time seems to fly and it seems like not that long ago I first tuned into Engadget Podcasts and started following the Engadget site. I downloaded some 40 or so episodes to listen to one morning and saddled up for a long week of site visits with 3+ hour round trips each day listening to Engadget podcasts as I drove. I had started listening in November 2008 and the podcasts had just been taken over by Nilay Patel, Paul Miller and the very vocal Joshua Topolsky. Having listened to the previous dozen or so podcasts I was almost ready to turn them off as frankly the older shows were sounding tired and the hosts were clearly getting a bit tired of it as well. Some of this was made clear when Ryan Block left and moved to get GDGT off the ground.
So I gave the new guys a chance and never looked back. I have listened to every episode ever since - some live but most not. The trio seemed to just click and their discussions would often get sidetracked well off topic but it was all good fun and was great to listen to. They took the podcast to a new level with enthusiasm and character and also regularity that was previously lacking. I’ve never heard of a podcast with such a loyal following so much so that in the last year a listener/programmer put together a podcast bingo app with many of the trios catch phrases that I admit to playing just once or twice.
I began reading the site and saw much needed improvements from site layout to cross-platform apps for mobile devices to new commenting systems - all driven by the new team and crowned by the great success “The Engadget Show”. Whilst the site is great and I haven’t always agreed with the trio in their posts and opinions to me they made the tech fun and interesting and they essentially were Engadget to me. With them now all gone it will never be the same.
My favourite expressions: Josh, “Nilay, you’re fired.” Nilay, “Don’t use an IR Blaster!” (sad music plays) Paul, “I don’t like the pixel density…”
It’s been a blast guys. Rest assured we’ll be following your future careers with great interest.
“Rock N Roll”