Feb

1

Gizmodo has an article up with video and text on the successful firing of the Navy’s new railgun. For those unfamiliar with the idea, it’s basically a really big eletromagnetic projectile accelerator. You pump a bunch of current through a series of really big electromagnets, aligned along a barrel, and it accelerates your projectile.

The US Navy has just completed a 10-megajoule test fire of their huge rail gun. For the first time ever, they fired a projectile with a velocity of 8,270 feet per second. That’s an amazing 5,640 mph, and the gun is only firing at a third of its potential power.

If you’ve got the time, a bit of skill with a soldering iron, and are bored, you can build your own. Please remember to wear safety glasses while firing.

I have to wonder a couple of things about this article. The first is, where do you get all the electricity to power one of these things on a ship? Would a nuclear reactor be sufficient (I’d think so)? How long would it take you to charge up the capacitors to fire it (what’s the rate of fire)? And finally, what kind of shielding are you going to have to put on all the electronics if you’ve got an electromagnet emitting an EMP this freaking big?

Jan

28

I’ve seen the story of a US spy satellite currently in orbit which has “lost power and propulsion” and is set to come crashing down to Earth in the near future.  Some sources are reporting that it’s likely a photo reconnaissance satellite. Both the articles I read mentioned that there’s no way to control the bird now, that we don’t know where it’s coming down, and “it may contain hazardous substances” (as if falling from the sky wasn’t hazardous enough).

The thing I keep wondering is, if it’s so highly classified that we can’t tell you what type of satellite it is, or why and when it lost power, then who’s going to go and make sure nobody looks at it when it crashes (by picking up the pieces, maybe?), and when are they going to know where they’re going to?

Jan

24

When I set up Adept Technologies, I needed to set up my own cell phone account.  So naturally I had to decide what type of phone or smartphone to get.  I bought a Palm Treo 755p, with service through Sprint.  Some of you are probably cringing already, but I’ve been telling friends since I bought it that it’ll be the last Palm I own. Not because I don’t like them, but I do think that Palm’s lost it’s edge. With the reports today that Palm is going to be closing it’s retail stores by the end of the month, I’m more certain than ever that this is true.

What happened to Palm? I’ve been a user of PalmOS devices for the better part of the last 10 years. I’ve carried a Palm V, a Palm Vx, a Treo 600, 650 and now a 755. For much of that time, there was a certain cache involved with having a Palm device.  I still recall the breathless reviews of the first Treo 600’s as “the thing to have”.

But Blackberry came along, and the iPhone, and the Nokia n95’s and soon there’ll Android, and I think Palm just failed to keep up. And the tech community believes in keeping to the Code, that’s for sure. Fall behind and you get left behind.

And to make matters worse, there’s the choice of Sprint as well for my service. *sigh*

I had misgivings right from the start about buying a Palm for this go-around. The primary reason I didn’t choose something like a shiny new Crackberry, like my friends have, was my familiarity with the Palm, and all the software that I already had after a decade of using them. Things like: a cryptographically secure password management tool (STRIP) with an established database of all the passwords I use; and time tracking software (with it’s share of annoying bugs, I grant you), that I’ve used for years to keep track of client billable hours.

So I went ahead and got the Palm. But it wasn’t that warm, giddy feeling I’ve learned to associate with new technology purchases. It was more melancholy, and I knew as I bought it, that it was the last Palm-powered device that I’d likely own. It felt in a way like Autumn, when you know that the days will soon be frigid and short, and you want to hold on as long as you can to what you have now.

Palm may manage to pull it off with a new OS (if they ever manage to ship it), but I’m not counting on it. And while the tech community is fickle, and might line up behind a new Palm OS (if they ever manage to ship it), Palm’s base of support continues to erode as the new devices attract all the neophiles. That new OS will have to be pretty good…

Anyone have a recommendation on what to get next?

Jan

22

I noticed today that Infoworld has an article about Apple and their increasing market share.

“However, malware researchers and industry analysts warn that as the sheer number of Apple end-point devices in use worldwide rise, so will the security concerns tied to the company’s products.”

This brought to mind a comment when I was doing my graduate school work. One of the professors at a presentation I was making on the Morris Internet Worm remarked that “Maples don’t get Dutch Elm Disease.” The point being sometimes diversity is good.

Sexual reproduction in nature evolved for a reason. Populations evolve with different gene pools, and those gene pools are recombined and remixed with every individual that comes along (if you’re doing it right…). That helps them survive attacks from bacteria and viruses, and also to provide them with that occasional mutation that gives them the edge to survive. Just take a look at the evolution of drug-resistant germs in order to get a view of this process in fast-forward.

Windows-based computers used to be the primary targets of all kinds of malware, and still are due to their popularity. But as other platforms become more prevalent, then they suffer the fate of rising above the radar: they become targets in proportion to their popularity. While the Mac can claim some resistance to these sorts of attacks (justifiably, I think) based on it’s *NIX heritage and the better compartmentalization of permissions, that’s at least partly irrelevant. The theater of action has changed.

Today, malware hides in application space just as much as in the OS space. And that’s a much more difficult problem to solve, as the number of applications is obviously bigger than the number of OSes on which they live. All it takes is for one developer to make a mistake in his code to create an opening through which malware can pass.

The days of blithely dismissing malware for today’s darlings (the Mac, the iPhone, and all those other highly connected devices) are numbered.
Update

Speak of the devil… Malicious MMS worm hits Nokia handsets

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