Brain Assassin

Ques­tion of the day: Who needs an iPad? I sure don’t.  I mean, what’s it gonna be? An eBook reader? Just a big­ger iPod Touch? It’s too big to take with you on a whim, it’s too energy hun­gry to use it as an eBook reader, and it sucks way too much to use the built-​​in vir­tual key­board. So what exactly does the iPad do? Well, I’m not here to tell you that.

I do like the dis­play, though, which is using liq­uid crys­tal dis­play tech­nol­ogy. The IPS LCD offers a very wide view­ing angle — up to 178 degrees — and bril­liant color. It uses a 4:3 aspect ratio with a 1.024 × 768 dis­play res­o­lu­tion. Ah, yes, I almost for­got the won­der­ful fingerprint-​​resistant oleo­pho­bic coat­ing which Apple had intro­duced in the iPhone 3G S. Any­way, even though the IPS panel is quite good, it’s still not enough to turn the iPad into a good eBook read­ing device.

LCD screens get washed out in bright sun­light. Try to turn on the back­light to improve con­trast and you’re sure to drain the bat­ter­ies much faster than the LCD already does.  Also, star­ing into a light source only pro­duces more strain on the eye than read­ing words by reflected light.

Apple has already formed a con­tent part­ner­ship with Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmil­lan, Pen­guin, and Simon and Schus­ter to offer ini­tial eBooks in its iBooks store — in the U. S. only, of course. What a waste. Just as well that I dis­cov­ered an inter­est­ing sur­vey today. Just look at the chart. Do I see some light at the end of the tunnel?

In the movie Minor­ity Report, based on the short story The Minor­ity Report by Philip K. Dick, a spe­cial­ized police depart­ment appre­hends crim­i­nals before they even break the law. Three psy­chics called »pre­cogs«, mutated humans with pre­cog­ni­tion abil­i­ties, gen­er­ate future visions which allow the spe­cial police unit »Pre­crime« to take the future crim­i­nals into cus­tody even before they them­selves know that they will break the law. As such the movie heav­ily touches the philo­sophic ques­tions sur­round­ing fore­knowl­edge and free will vs. deter­min­ism.

Now, sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­sity of Darm­stadt have devel­oped a sim­i­lar sys­tem called DyR­iAS. This acronym stands for Dynamis­che Risiko Analyse Sys­tem (Dynamic Risk Anal­y­sis System). Allegedly, the soft­ware could have accu­rately pre­dicted every known ram­page in the US or Ger­many, accord­ing to Dr. Jens Hoff­man. As far as I under­stand, the pro­gram should be used by the police, school psy­chol­o­gists, teach­ers and sim­i­lar per­son­nel. The user has to anser ques­tions and the pro­gram will pro­vide the user with a pro­file. There are 32 known fac­tors that indi­cate a higher risk of a per­son going postal and DyR­iAS will check the answers against these factors.

Since March 2009 the sys­tem is being tested in a few schools in Ger­many. Addi­tion­ally, it is being tested by the Swiss police in Zurich. There are plans for fur­ther ver­sions of the pro­gram, espe­cially for mar­i­tal vio­lence and stalk­ing. Accord­ing to Dr. Hoff­man, this pro­gram is only intended for use with con­spic­uos per­sons. DyR­iAS can only be fed with anonymized data, no per­sonal data will be stored.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I admit to being a pes­simist so I don’t have any qualms what­so­ever to pre­dict­ing that after this piece of soft­ware has been estab­lished in our soci­ety it will be improved and it will get used in more sit­u­a­tions. Peo­ple will be tested when apply­ing for a new job, for instance. Sure, every­thing is fine, isn’t it? Nei­ther of us wants wo work with a sociopath who might go postal at any moment. I can appre­ci­ate that thought. But what if you’re not totally in the clear? Will you be flagged as a poten­tial risk? What’s more impor­tant: Will it stick? I don’t believe in data pri­vacy. It’s nice to have, it’s worth to fight for, but it is, ulti­mately, not to be taken for granted. Peo­ple still stick to the thought that knowl­edge is power with­out real­is­ing that knowl­edge is only pow­er­ful if you know why that is.

Any­way, never mind. DyR­iAS isn’t used for appre­hend­ing a poten­tial crim­i­nal. Yet.

Well, this topic came up at work today — twice — so I thought it’s about time to write a few lines about it. Puh, where do I begin? How about this: Don’t even think about a plasma TV if you intend to buy a model with a size of less than 42 inches. It’s sim­ply not worth it. Why? Because man­u­fac­tur­ers haven’t yet fig­ured out how to cram mil­lions of pix­els on a smaller dis­play. There’s no way you’re going to enjoy HDTV on a screen with so few pix­els. Because LCD and plasma TVs are very dif­fer­ent in the way they deliver the image to the viewer, the same restric­tion doesn’t apply to LCD TVs.

So, if you want to buy a 43″ or larger flat panel HDTV, there are quite a few things to con­sider. First, there’s the color. A plasma dis­play cov­ers a far greater area of the vis­i­ble light spec­trum and deliv­ers more dynamic col­ors than a LCD does. Plus, a plasma dis­play has supe­rior black lev­els. Good black lev­els are impor­tant to pro­vide a sense of depth. As far as the con­trast and the black lev­els are con­cerned, the plasma is supe­rior. Color accu­racy is not so eas­ily deter­mined, though. That depends on room light, man­u­fac­turer and model, but as a rule you can assume that a plasma will pre­vail in a room with nor­mal or lower light­ing. LCDs should per­form bet­ter in brightly lit rooms. (That hap­pens because plasma TVs have a glass sur­face where a mir­ror effect can take place when extremely bright light shines on it.) Then again, your liv­ing room shouldn’t be as brightly lit as it is the case with many show-​​rooms. All in all, the plasma has the advantage.

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Dur­ing my recent vaca­tion I was asked to con­fig­ure the wire­less LAN of a friend. I com­plied and did as I was asked. At the same time I thought I’d share a few of the most basic things with you. Since the most com­monly used routers on the mar­ket today are 802.11g/802.11 draft-​​n routers, I will focus on them. Most of the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion should be applic­a­ble to older mod­els (802.11b or 802.11a routers) as well, pro­vided the man­u­fac­turer has made the appro­pri­ate firmware avail­able. That said, let’s get started.

First thing you should do is to look for a firmware update, espe­cially if you own an older model. After hav­ing installed the lat­est firmware, you should change your default router pass­word which is almost always some­thing along the lines of »admin«, »pass­word«, »changeme«, »pub­lic«, »pri­vate«, or »1234«. A more com­pre­hen­sive list of default router pass­words can be found at Default Router Pass­words. Addi­tion­ally, most routers come pre-​​configured with an IP address of 192.168.x.y, where x stands for »0«, »1«, »2«, »8«, »11«, or »15«, and y mostly stands for »1« or »2«. Note that some routers have an IP address of 10.0.0.z where z often enough stands for »1« or »2«. A strong pass­word doesn’t really pro­tect your net­work but it should ensure that nobody will mess with your settings.

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I’m quite into movies, you all know that. I don’t own a nice home the­ater but then I think my 42 inch plasma TV is enough to keep me enter­tained. 1060i really is an improve­ment over the good old PAL stan­dard. Throw in a PS3 and you got your­self a pretty default setup. Of course, it’s not what I call a home the­ater. Today I’ve come across a setup that cost $6 mil­lion! That’s insane. Head over to Audio Video Inte­ri­ors and see for yourselves.

If I had $6 mil­lion to spare, I would have done things dif­fer­ently. I don’t know if I could’ve done bet­ter but I think $6 mil­lion is a waste. To my mind, it’s way too small. I don’t think this guy can accom­mo­date more than four peo­ple on that couch. There’s one more impor­tant ques­tion: What about the power require­ments? I mean, holy shit. Watch­ing one movie with this setup prob­a­bly wastes more energy than my com­puter does in a whole year. Any­way, it’s impres­sive nonetheless.

Actu­ally, I wanted to post my opin­ion of The Foun­tain, star­ring Hugh Jack­man and Rachel Weisz. Instead, I’m writ­ing about the PS3. First of all, I didn’t encounter any prob­lems at all after my ini­tial expe­ri­ence with the PS3. I did notice though, that a bunch of work­ing col­leagues weren’t so lucky (In ret­ro­spect, I should prob­a­bly call them dum­b­asses but that’s for another story.). Any­way, they have some prob­lems and so I ended up writ­ing this text to get them started. OK guys, let’s tackle your »problems«.

Here’s the offi­cial site and they have a work­ing forum. If you can read, stop try­ing to per­suade oth­ers to help you out. Check it out for your­self and you may actu­ally learn some­thing new. How­ever, some guys over at the PS3Forums have com­piled quite an exhaus­tive FAQ which should be more than enough for trou­bleshoot­ing pur­poses. And there’s a short list of PS3 error codes which can be found here.

As for the guys I’m writ­ing this — you most cer­tainly have a NAT prob­lem. Since the lousy lot of you has dis­abled UPnP on their wire­less routers you have to for­ward ports man­u­ally. Just access your router’s web inter­face where you should be able to find a topic like Port For­ward­ing. Here we are. Just for­ward ports 80, 443, 5223 (TCP) and 3478, 3479 (UDP) to your PS3’s IP address and you’re done. If you like to uti­lize the won­der­ful voice chat, you also have to for­ward 3658 (UDP). Now, every­thing should work like a charm. You may have to extend this list even­tu­ally, depend­ing on the games you play. Don’t ask me next time, look it up some­where on the net.

Since I’m already writ­ing this for your, here’s how to upgrade your PS3’s firmware. If you absolutely have to per­form the update using your PC, get your new firmware here. ATTENTION: Always use the firmware made and pro­vided for your region! After you down­loaded the upgrade, copy the firmware to a portable stor­age device. You have to cre­ate a folder called »PS3« and within that a folder named »UPDATE«. The lat­ter one receives the firmware. Please note, that you absolutely have to use upper­case let­ters or your Playsta­tion won’t rec­og­nize your update! Last but not least, remove all USB devices, start the update process and fol­low the instruc­tions on the screen.