The Ownage

Frames taken with Canon SX30-IS + CHDK intervalometer. Assembled with Sony Vegas Pro 10.0. Royalty free background music from http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

There seems to be some common misconceptions (at least amongst those not familiar with the new iPhone). Probably the most common of these is:

• There’s nothing new, “It’s the same as the last model just with an S” (thus the new meme showing just a roll of “S” stickers).
• The only new thing is the camera (Most non iPhone people have at least heard of the camera upgrade).
• The S is for Siri which is just a software feature. I’m not actually sure of the official reason for the S designation. I know when the 3GS came out Jobs said “The S is for Speed”, so I assume that is the same deal now, with the cpu/gpu/network upgrade.

In short, the implication is that those of us who have or are considering an upgrade from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S are just idiots who are blindly upgrading because we are in some sort of Apple trance. In this post I am only addressing the differences between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S (except when I mention “any other phone/device”). If you were expecting a “This is why the iPhone is better or worse than an Android phone” rant, sorry, just FACTS here.

I have grown tired of having to correct people who are incorrectly repeating the “nothing new” garbage. I’ve noticed that many of these folks who attack iPhone owners do NOT change their attitude in the slightest when confronted with the actual facts, but nonetheless here I shall provide the raw data, and all the bashing and evangelical arguments can be done elsewhere.

iPhone 4S hardware upgrades:

• CPU – Dual-core CPU via the A5 processor that is in the iPad2 – more than 2X faster (even though underclocked by 200Mhz from the iPad2 – assuming to save battery life or heat build-up).
  
• GPU – New dual-core GPU for the best gaming possible on a mobile phone – 7x faster
• Camera – New 8MP camera, with new optics, 1080P video recording, & image stabilization – Captures 73% more light, takes successive pictures 2x faster than any other phone.
• Battery – Slightly higher capacity battery with more talk time despite the new faster CPU
• Antenna – New dual antenna design and new diversity (ability to select the antenna that has the best signal) for both transmit and receive for better call reception and quality.
• Storage – Top model now has 64GB – 2x more storage
• Data Speed – HSPA+ which gives 14.4Mbps down, 5.8Mbps up – 2x faster download. These are the exact same speeds that many other phones that call themselves “4G” have, including the “Motorola Atrix 4G”,  “HTC Inspire 4G”, etc.
• Vibrator – Yes even the vibrator motor on the 4S is a new “linear oscillating” motor instead of the old “rotational with counterweight” motor used in the ATT iPhone4 (The verizon model already got the new one). The new motor is reportedly more quiet and smooth.
• Sound Volume – Not sure what changes were made, but testing has shown that the iPhone 4S has at least 6db more volume output than the iPhone4. This was probably done to make Siri easier to hear, but also gives more volume for music playback, ring/text alerts, and speakerphone usage.
• GPS – The iPhone 4S now additionally supports both GPS and GLONASS (which is a Russian satellite network they are using for GPS that just came online this year). As a result, it gets a position fix more quickly, and displays your location more accurately.
• RAM – The iPhone 4S has the same amount of RAM, but the RAM is DDR2-800 instead of the DDR1-400 that the iPhone 4 uses. The result is memory bandwidth (speed reading and writing to memory) is doubled.

So there I have shown you at least 11 hardware upgrades that the iPhone 4S has. [EDIT: Even more upgrades that I didn't mention: Bluetooth 4.0, Front-facing camera is now 30fps, & Compass is now digital instead of analog.] I didn’t even delve into the software updates of iOS5 (200 new features) because technically the new iOS can be installed on older devices and so should not really count as an upgrade (except Siri, which for now only runs on the 4S – But I’m sure jailbreakers will port it to other devices soon).

I would like to point out that the iPhone 4S has nearly every feature that was rumored and wanted to be for the “iPhone5″ except:

1. It’s not called the “iPhone 5″ – people seriously are upset about this <facepalm>
2. Not LTE aka “real 4G” – I knew this would happen as the current generation LTE chipset is just too power-hungry and Apple would never allow a newer model to have LESS battery life. HSPA+ was chosen because it is faster than regular 3G without the battery drain.
3. No bigger screen / new design – The iPhone4S still has the “same old” retina display. While it’s not the 4″+ screen people wanted, it is still the best display in both resolution (960×640) and DPI (326 pixels per inch) of any mobile device. Sadly, if they had released with a larger display, people would probably complain about their old cases and mounts not fitting anymore.

I predict that the “iPhone 5″ will not come out until the new LTE chipsets arrive that use less power, and/or they do create a new model that has a larger display and could thus also have a larger battery to handle the drain of LTE. Honestly, the fixation people have with LTE is questionable, because, other than tethering, exactly why do you require 20MB/s downloads to your PHONE? Are apps going to be faster? No. Is YouTube going to stream faster? No. Are web pages going to load faster? Maybe. Is loading a page in .5 seconds instead of .8 seconds worth your phones battery not lasting all day? I don’t think so, but I totally agree for tethering LTE is awesome. I also predict that in any newer model that lets them expand the battery size they will also stop underclocking the A5 CPU, which will give it another 200Mhz and thus an instant “upgrade” of processing power (Assuming they underclocked it to save battery life and/or heat build up).

UPDATE/EDIT 08/26/2011: Well, I had to remove the embedded video clip. My YouTube account got the smackdown by 20th Century Fox who apparently doesn’t appreciate me posting a 20 second clip of their precious show. Sigh.
I extracted a clip from an recent episode of White Collar that made me chuckle. They basically were wondering how they could make contact with a “Hacker”, and one of the characters announces “The online underground communicates via IRC.”  That may be somewhat true, but hearing it on a TV show was amusing. One of the follow-up lines was also amusing; “How do you get the attention of a hacker, say ‘hi’ from Microsoft source code?”. Along with the realization of once text is entered into IRC it is too late; “You already posted it? Take it down, now! – It can’t be undone.” Along with the screen-shot of the IRC conversation with “Vulture”:

They weren’t too far off the mark. I usually wince when TV shows or movies try to accurately (or not) depict tech scenarios such as this. – Just see one of my ealier posts about “Spoof the PI” for a great example.

So, while the technical details were obscure enough to be passable, it was still amusing that they were able to instantly find some random Hacker on IRC, and within seconds get him to agree to meet with them. Ah well, it’s just a plot device right?

Once again, the “SyFy” channel has cancelled one of it’s top rated shows, (Eureka) despite its popularity, ratings, and fan base.

This seems to be continuing the trend of the SyFy channel being ashamed of its SciFi genre, literally to the point of changing their branding and spending money instead of wrestling shows. Yes, WRESTLING…on SciFi…WTH?

When they changed their name from “SciFi” to SyFy, they gave ridiculous reasons, including “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that…”. Seriously? dysfunctional geeks? Great way to alienate your customers and viewers.

The name change itself was a stroke of idiocy as well. “When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it, It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

Really? Because it’s “how you’d text it”? Is that the way we market everything now? I guess Comedy Central should become the “OMG epic lulz netwrk” ?

You know what, geekophobe execs…if you are so against Science Fiction, maybe you should go work for the Hunting and Fishing channel instead of trying to run the SciFi channel into the ground just so you can feel more manly and “cool”.  Cancelling all of your popular SciFi series and buying 3 franchises of wrestling and scheduling them in the place of the cancelled popular shows is just pure craziness!

Is it such a leap of logic to see that, yes, SciFi is a specific genre, but IT’S WHAT YOUR VIEWERS ARE COMING TO YOUR NETWORK FOR. Do you really think people tune to the SyFy channel to watch wrestling?? This would be like going to the PlayBoy channel to watch episodes of “This Old House” or some bass fishing show.

Are you really going to spend gobs of money on wrestling, dropping all your popular SciFi series, and making public statements insulting your viewers, and then wonder why your network is is failing?

Am I the only person who notices this? Oh well, in their final days I guess they can always rename their network to “SyFail”…because you know, that’s cooler, and how people would text it :\

Okay this time it is not “Hollywood” per se that goofed. My two previous posts (here and here) were nitpicking technical details of a movie.

This time, a technical jargon blunder happened on a show that I watch and enjoy, The Event.

While the show does have a high-tech aspect to it at times, it is mostly due to the use of advanced (non-terrestrial) technology and it is mostly visual and operational, without a lot of jargon or need to explain tings.

That may be a good thing, because tonight I watched an episode, “The Beginning of The End” (sadly aptly named since the show has been cancelled), that had a scene that made me grind my teeth and have a WTF moment.

In the scene, one of the characters, Sean Walker, who is an accomplished hacker, is trying to hack into the NSA network from a remote location. He casually tries to explain, I believe is that in order to access a server on their network, he needs to spoof the IP (IP address), so that it looks like he is connecting from inside the NSA network. (This is a valid scenario, although I certainly hope the routers of the NSA network would block packets incoming from an external interface that have a forged source address header.)

That being said, I don’t know if the actor had a dyslexic moment, or if the script had it backwards, who knows, but he says, quite clearly, “spoof the P.I.“.  PI? Could he have meant “Packet Information”? I sure hope so.  Here is a clip of the scene:

LOL, I just realized the other guy at the end of the scene seems to have a WTF reaction too.

Note: I realize that to non geeks this mistake may seem trivial, and honestly it is, as it did not ruin the plot or anything, it’s just one of those things that bugs you because you know it’s wrong.

Personally, I just wonder how mistakes like this make it to the final edit. They obviously have some sort of tech consultant to find the right sort of things to say for scenes like this, but you would think they would pay him for an extra half hour of his time to watch the final edit, so he could catch any screw-ups with the jargon he suggested.

Click the squares

You really can’t do it wrong

I’ve made a post once before about computer systems security as depicted in Hollywood movies. I do realize that even with an expert consultant, they just film “what looks cool” and don’t really care if it is accurate or not. All the same I find the discrepancies amusing.

This weekend I watched “Tron Legacy”, and few scenes made the geek part of me chuckle and say “heyyyy wait a second!”.

There is a scene where Flynn’s son goes to his fathers arcade, and finds his hidden office which contains his dust-covered computer system that we are to believe has been running for a couple of decades or so. His sun dusts it off and sees 3 terminal consoles running. One is running “top”. The other is running “iostat”, and the other is just sitting at flynn’s shell prompt.

One of the first things I noticed, as you can see in the screenshot below, is that “top” clearly shows that the system has been running for “8 days” – Whoops!

Another thing I noticed was that the console running “iostat” was running as the root user (the console running “top” probably was a root shell too), yet Flynn’s son feels the need to try to “hack” root from flynn’s user shell. And by “hack” I mean he simply tried “login -n root” and hit enter for the password – LOL! Even more laughable is when that doesn’t work, he shrugs and tries to login as “backdoor“, AND IT WORKS! The only way this would work is if there was a UID 0 user “backdoor” with no password (or the machine is truly previously pwned with a modified login binary or library hack) EDIT: It looks like the FAIL is mine here, because I definitely failed to recognize that this is actually an old school Solaris bug in /bin/login (see comments). I feel so ashamed!  So basically flynn not only left his console running as root with no screensaver, but he also had another root user with no password – not to mention that his “hidden” office main door literally had the key left in the lock – could his system be any LESS secure?

The other thing that kind of bothered me, is when Flynn’s son checks his fathers shell history, it clearly shows that one of the last things he did before activating the LASER was to edit a file called “last_will_and_testament.txt”. You would think that you would want to check that out? But no, let’s just blindly run the LLLSDLaserControl command and see what happens! Oh and when there is an ominous hum and a prompt to continue, just shrug and click on….LOL

Flynn’s son is clearly one of those kids who just click on anything that pops up and winds up infecting their parents computer with malware If only all kids who did this would get sent to “the grid” As far as him being a “l33t Hax0r”, his skills aren’t even on par with script kiddies. He had an open root console already, and still was only able to get root by logging in as a fabled “backdoor” user.

As for the movie itself. The special effects were great as you would expect. The story line was plausible (in the context of the first movie). However I just “wasn’t feeling it”, and overall I was a bit disappointed in the sequel. At least the UNIX gaffes were amusing though.

As promised I am posting again. Sadly this time it’s only a rant about the crazy people that were at the gym tonight. I’m not sure which was more aggravating:

• The girl who seemed to be staring in a FlashDance video, as she spent 10 minutes on each machine, using only a single weight (effortless) while twirling and swaying 2 tiny chrome barbells in the air over her head.

• The guy in the steam room that would alternate between crouching by the door while shouting (loud enough to literally hurt my ears) in guttural arabic at his buddy, and then standing and pacing back and forth while his buddy quietly and calmly spoke in arabic to him.

• The squeaky-voiced giggly girl who sits with just her feet in the hottub while she answers a never-ending flood of text messages while her 3 douchebag  guy friends exchange fighting stories. This is the third time I have run into them at the gym and had to wait for them to finish their hot tub party. This is the second time I have heard the story about one of the guys punching out his gym teacher.

• The dorks in the showers who were having a yelling conversation back and forth across several empty showers to each other, and also making racecar sounds? WTF?

I just realized it’s been ages since I posted here. Let’s see, how much can I condense and summarize new things in my life:

• I’m working for Cisco Systems Inc again (contracting).
• I am now going to the gym 3+ times per week, working on getting in shape and losing weight.
• I still haven’t finished my solar project.
• I got a new roof put on the house, thanks to an insurance claim from the massive freak hailstorm we had.
• Christine’s grandmother passed away. She was a wonderful sweet lady who we will all miss.

That’s all the major things. I will try to make an effort to post more, even though I don’t think anyone even reads this blog anymore

Okay, it’s really just a tale of a single kitty, but that wouldn’t make a very clever title now, would it?

One of our cats, “Pepper” somehow got out of the house this weekend. He has gotten out a time or two before, and was even gone overnight once, after which he came back and sat by the door, demanding to be let in after he got tired of exploring the “big room” which is the outdoors.

We think he got out on Sunday afternoon. We know that he was nowhere to be found when it was feeding time at 7pm. Upon discovering that he was missing, we did searched everywhere in the house, probably 5+ times (I know that just myself did 3 times, plus Christine & Alex made their own searches). I went outside and called him. I walked a block each direction up and down the street calling him. Alex went out and did a more thorough search of the neighborhood and found nothing.

I was now pretty worried since he was gone for so long. I realized that he could have gone missing on Saturday, because Alex wasn’t home Saturday night, so the cats didn’t get fed and thus their presence not verified. With all the swimming pools that everyone has here, I wasn’t too worried about him finding water, then again, what if he got thirsty and fell into a pool while trying to get to the water to drink?

I found some pictures of Pepper and posted an ad on CraigsList. I also decided to make some flyers and distribute through the neighborhood. At first I was going to just pop a small index-card sized flyer in everyones mailbox, but then I read up on the laws, and well it turns out its a federal crime to put anything inside or even on anyones mailbox. Time for plan B. I put the flyers into little ziplock bags. Now all I need is something to weigh down the bag so the wind doesn’t blow it away, and I can just toss one on everyones driveway (I find similar things on my own driveway all the time). I was initially going to use some of my landscaping rocks, but they have sharp edges and would have torn through the plastic. Then I glanced over at the huge pile pile of loose change next to my desk. There we go! I’l just throw a couple of nickels into each bag. It will weigh it down, and if any hardass complains about me “littering” I will point out to the heartless jerkoff that I gave him ten cents for his trouble. I actually ended up deciding to use quarters instead because they are heavier and I had way more quarters than nickels.

I spent a few mins with photoshop and some pictures of Pepper and made the “Lost Cat” flyers, tiled 4 to a page. I start to print them out and got a couple of pages, and then ran out of printer paper! Gah!

So I get in the car to go to WalMart and buy some printer paper and run some other errands.  Before I headed to WalMart, I slowly drove around the neighborhood and the neighborhood that backs up to ours. I called and called and looked and looked but Pepper was no where to be found.

Went to WalMart, washed and gassed up my car, picked up a bite to eat and headed home. I got home, ate my snack, and was pondering what to do next. I decided that I would first print out a few more pages of flyers. Then I would put some food and water outside the front and back door (If the smell didn’t entice him home at least he would have access to sustenance if he came home while I was asleep). Then I would walk around the neighborhood, and drop the flyers onto driveways.

I remembered that I left the printer paper in the trunk of my car, so I opened the door to the garage, and immediately heard a doppler-effect “meow-meOW-mEOW-MEOW-MEOW-MEEEOOOW” outside of the garage. It was evident that Pepper was running towards the house, meowing his head off as he was coming. I quickly opened a door which leads outside the garage, and he came barreling in, meowing loudly. He pushed right by me, into the house, and made a beeline for his food dish. He was apparently very hungry. I petted him and checked him over, and surprisingly he didn’t look like he had been in any fights, and wasn’t even dirty. After he wolfed down some food he then ran to the water dish and drank half the bowl of water.

I tweeted and Facebooked about his return, and now as I type this he is laying at my feet, on top of my sandals, as he likes to do. He seems exhausted. I hope it was an adventure for him and not an ordeal. It was certainly a harrowing experience for me, since I was so worried.

Pepper's Home - And Hungry!