Android phones come with spyware preinstalled?

Not exactly sure what all this Carrier IQ stuff (via DF, of course) on Android and Blackberry is about yet, but the smartphone landscape right now reminds me of the middle ages when marauding bands would roam over the countrysides -- "pillage and burn". Castles were principally built for safety during this period, and I imagine they were enviable places to live.

When you choose Android, you're choosing life out in the countryside, free from rules and limitations, but at risk of having 30 guys show up and dragging you out, stealing all your stuff and burning the house down (spy- and malware).

When you choose Apple, you choose life within castle walls. Doors are closely guarded, and the vast grounds are kept neat and friendly. Come and go (i.e. surf the internet) as you please, but home (your phone OS and apps) are by all measures safe. Pretty easy to be happy as long as you trust the lords of the castle.

The question a smartphone buyer has to answer is this: do I feel safe inside castle walls, or imprisoned?

Apple vs. Samsung

Wow, check out all those phones.

I wonder how many of them run the latest Android OS?

Moments That Matter Most

Nest

Nest thermostats.

We need more design like this.

Mormon Milieu

For my LDS friends, on the 40th anniversary of its delivery one of the finest talks I've ever heard: Mormon Milieu, by Neal A. Maxwell.

The Gospel is really the counsel of a Super Intelligence as to how we may survive and progress in a cold universe that responds only to law. Man didn't get to the moon with random trajectories and with each astronaut "doing his own thing." The price for reaching the moon was obedience to universal law.

iPhone 4S announced

I'm pretty sure this will be my next phone, so I was excited to read about the new features.

A quick summary:

• faster (2x)
• longer battery life
• new antenna design
• fancy 8 megapixel camera
• voice integration (speak your texts instead of typing them, ask it random questions, etc.)
• location-based reminders ("remind me to feed the dog when I get home")
• iCloud
• availability on Sprint

No near-field communication (use your phone as a credit card), no 4G (which is still an ambiguous term), no new form factor, still no data connectivity during phone calls on Verizon, and not waterproof.

So not everything everyone wanted, but overall a very solid upgrade. I can't wait (till I can afford it =).

Graphing Calculator (Lite) is here!

In August 1996 I had just returned from Ecuador, and needed to get registered for the fall semester at the U of A in Tucson. I ended up crashing with some good friends Chris and Ivy Bonhorst who I'd known there in 1993 before I left. While I was there Chris had a PowerMac 6100 on his desk, one of the first PowerPC Macs, and he said I could poke around and try it out. I'd been away from computers for 2 years, so playing with the newest 7.5 (?) OS was fun and exciting...

I soon saw an application called "Graphing Calculator", and upon launching it very quickly came up with this:

It wasn't a static image either, it's like a sheet floating in space that you can grab with the mouse and spin in 3-d. Zooming and panning and animating were all perfectly fluid -- no ugly stepping, no entering in plot bounds, no "plot" button to re-click every time the view changes. Any mathematical relationship I could think of was instantly visualized. Any piece of the equation could have an "n" inserted which lets you animate that piece and see the sensitivity to that parameter. It was amazing! 2-d plots are great too, but my mind quickly was unsatisfied with only 2 dimensions. 4-d and beyond suddenly made perfect sense.

Within minutes I had knocked out half my unresolved math questions. What a thrill! Not only that, I'd never seen a computer do anything like that before, I didn't think computers would ever be fast enough to do anything close to what I was seeing right in front of my eyes.

And this was 1996. 66 MHz.

I immediately knew I needed a Mac, and worked like crazy to get one. Graphing Calculator sold me.

The story of how Graphing Calculator got on the Macs is crazy. Crazier still is that Apple didn't buy the guy out (I'm guessing his price was too high).

The advent of OS X in the early 2000s brought with it a crappy "Grapher" app replacing Graphing Calculator. GC was still available on the website, but it was $100 (?!), which I couldn't ever justify spending. For me that took all the fun of math back out of the Mac and has been a sore spot for me for the last 9 years.

Well, for anyone else out there like me, the wait is finally over. $10 on the App Store, the "lite" version has everything I missed. I didn't even blink between seeing the screenshots/price and clicking the "Buy now" button.

Math is already more exciting again. =)