iOS and its open ecosystem

Retailers building their own iPod touch, iPad POS systems
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple’s open, third party iOS ecosystem is enabling retailers to build mobile point of sale devices based on the iPod touch independently of the EasyPay solution used in its own retail stores, with new retail applications of the iPad also in progress.

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Nice proof that iOS allows developers for corporations to create their own, independent applications for themselves. These private apps allow them to harness the hardware and software tools that Apple provides to create a polished and seamless experience for its employees. The iOS Developer Enterprise Program costs $299 a year and provides not only development help but the ability to distribute proprietary apps.

It started with Apple’s own experience, because their stores were using a point of sale suite that was based on Windows and caused problems:

Since 2005, Apple had been using hardware devices built by Symbol (now a subsidiary of Motorola) and running Microsoft’s Windows CE, but that hardware was fraught with problems, including frequent crashes and flakey WiFi support that required regular reboots.

Following its first contact with Apple, Infinite Peripherals began development of the iPod touch hardware sled that would later be sold as the Linea Pro. By early 2009, the design of the new hardware peripheral was nearly complete but it was running into a limitation of iOS that was fortuitously shattered by Apple’s release of 3.0, which debuted new support allowing hardware peripherals to communicate with iOS devices via their 30-pin Dock connector.

Production of the new hardware began mid-2009, with about 10,000 devices reaching stores for training and and inaugural launch that occurred last November. The combination of the iPod touch, Francis’ custom internal app, and the Infinite Peripherals sled greatly enhanced the experience of Apple’s retail store employees. “It’s like going from a tricycle to a Lamborghini,” Scott said of Apple’s response to the EasyPay upgrade.

So Apple’s own devices were used by a third-party developer to provide tools for Apple itself. No roadblocks. No walled garden. The developer was able to take the tools and provide Apple with an experience it had not been able to do itself.

It is now very easy to take Apple hardware and create unique enterprise-level apps for defined organizations.

I am sure glad he is not Commander in Chief

The Shamelessness Of John McCain – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
[Via The Daily Dish ]

Clips of McCain at DADT hearings:

John McCain talks to Howie Kurtz:

His explanation [for supporting DADT]: “The Marine commandant is opposed to [dropping] Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know for a fact the other three service chiefs have serious reservations.” As for their superiors, McCain casually mentions the commander in chief and defense secretary, “neither of which I view as a military leader.”

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McCain is not any sort of leader, military or otherwise and he has amply demonstrated that on this issue.

From the Kurtz article:

In 2006, he [McCain] said on MSNBC that “the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.” Now that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supports the Pentagon’s move toward junking DADT—and even McCain’s wife, Cindy, has appeared in a gay rights group’s video opposing the policy—the senator is blocking Obama’s plan.

John McCain has changed his position so many times on this issue that he might as well be a traffic light – except his would always be red. As each roadblock he puts up is surmounted, he becomes more and more of a lonely figure. First he would do what the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense suggested. They want repeal. Then he wanted to see the results of the survey. The survey says repeal. Now he is left with saying that the troops should be consulted and we should not repeal because a lot of Marines are uncomfortable.

Tuff. I bet a lot of the military was uncomfortable when the military was desegregated. They are soldiers and will do what their superiors tell them to. Their superiors want repeal.

Watching him lecture and interrupt the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was just painful. In my opinion, his comments show disrespect for the office of the President and of his Defense Secretary, who was first appointed under George Bush. He disrespected the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He is going against the combined views of both the civilian and uniformed leaders of our country.

McCain, and the Republicans, are on the wrong side of history here and will not be treated well by the history books.

Finding life doing the oddest things

by KidsLoveAnimals
Subsisting on Arsenic, a Microbe May Redefine Life
[Via NYT > Science]

Researchers said that the bacterium was trained to grow without phosphorus, one of six elements considered essential for life.

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Thirty years ago, a professor of mine described how a bottle of arsenic in his lab refrigerator was contaminated with something– something was growing in it. So he tossed it out. Only then did his forebrain hit him – what the heck grows in arsenic? I think we know.

This substantially alters what we can expect life to look like and what elements it decides to use. Arsenic is one row down from phosphorus, so it has some similar chemical properties.

But it is normally toxic to life. Here, scientists have found a bacteria that can replace its phosphorus atoms with arsenic. That means that the very structure of its DNA, which contains large amounts of phosphorus, now use arsenic. It also means that the major source of the energy needed for its metabolism, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), must also have been altered.

This suggest huge changes in the metabolism of the bacteria because I would expect something like adenosine triarsenate to have very different energy potentials than ATP. Current metabolic pathways are known the require the energy provided by the high energy binds of ATP. I would think that ATA would be very different possible causing substantial alteration of the metabolism.

As the researchers found, the bugs like phosphorus better – probably because of the more energy efficient ATP – and they have not yet shown that working DNA has no phosphorus. It may be that the bugs have recycled the phosphorus that they did have access to.

But there has to be some really interesting metabolism going on here. What sorts of proteins don’t get made because of the different energy carriers, ATP and ATA.

A viral cause for real insanity

The Insanity Virus
[Via Daring Fireball]

Douglas Fox, writing for Discover:

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.

Same for multiple sclerosis. Fascinating and compelling theory.

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It is a fascinating article and a nice demonstration of how science deals with a new theory that attempts to explain all the data that has been generated. And how discoveries by others in slightly different areas help more the research ahead.

And it is also a personal story of a researcher examining a disease that has affected his own family. He was right there for all the research that showed schizophrenia was a biological disorder not a psychological one.

Perhaps caused by an inactive virus that we all carry in our DNA. It just gets turned on in some people due to other viral infections young in life. It may be that these disorders are more the result of inflammatory responses than genetic causes.

It makes one wonder how much of the genome not normally expected to be active or even useful can have detrimental effects. And it makes me wonder if some of this also has beneficial effects that we have not yet found.

Getting the definitive answer will be pretty amazing.

A great perspective on a down day

Nothing like listening to Louis CK tell us why we should be amazed to be alive today.

I’m a Happy Foot kind of person… most of the time

People use Happy Foot / Sad Foot sign as fortune teller
[Via Boing Boing]

This is a rotating sign for a foot clinic in Los Angeles. If the happy foot is facing you when you see it, you will have a good day. But a sad foot means you will experience bad luck.

Kelly Coyne of Homegrown Evolution has more:

The podiatrist’s sign above marks the entrance to our neighborhood. It charmed us the first time we saw it: It’s a foot — with feet! And we immediately named it the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign. Soon we learned that other people called it The Happy Foot/Sad Foot Sign as well. The name seemed predestined and universally applied, and it was recognizable enough that we could pinpoint our location off of Sunset Blvd. by saying, “You know the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign?”

The Foot rotates slowly, unless it’s broken, which it often is of late. But when it’s rotating, you are always tempted to check out which side is facing you when you first come into sight of it. A happy, smiling foot is portends a good day, or at least a general thumbs up from the universe. We’ve always thought so, and come to find out, many other people also practice this form of primitive divination.

It’s even immortalized in fiction. Our friend, Anne, resident of this same ‘hood, tipped us off that The Foot is featured in You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem (2008):

Lucinda’s view took in a three quarter’s slice of the sign as it turned in its vigil over Sunset Boulevard: happy foot and sad foot suspended in dialog forever. The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: once glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.

A quick Google search shows the Foot is acknowledged (it shows up in Flickr sets and odd comments here and there) but not famous, outside this locale. However, I was delighted to find an animation called Happy Foot vs. Sad Foot. Instead of seeing the Foot as a marriage of opposites, as Lethem does, the animator portrays the Feet as two characters engaged in an endless, existential binary feud. For Sad Foot, life will always suck, while Happy Foot will always gets his way. (Note in the comments for this animation that someone steps forward claiming to be the designer of the sign’s graphics.)

Read the rest of Kelly’s essay: Our Happy Foot / Sad Foot Sign

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Kind of cute that the sign has become such an icon. the video is quite humorous, if you are a Happy Foot. i would imagine a Sad Foot might not find it funny.

I wonder if other places have similar binary signs that are used to predict the tone of the day or to make decisions?

[Listening to: Ruby from the album "Yours Truly, Angry Mob" by Kaiser Chiefs]

Where is a politician that will speak the truth about security and the TSA?

‘A Waste of Money and Time’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Bruce Schneier makes the case against the TSA:

Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

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The best security are other passengers. TSA did not stop the show bomber or the underwear bomber. Their ineffective bombs were stopped by passengers. And even the new scanners would very likely not have detected them.

Spending several hundred million dollars on better police enforcement approaches would do a much better job than these new scanners. But this way we have some people becoming very rich at the expense of American’s civil liberties, not to mention their health.

Unfortunately we live in a time where appearing as a rational adult is much more likely to destroy a politician’s career than appearing an a nutcase. In fact, several politicians seem to make a career out of being irrational.

Where is our Joseph Welch? Watch the whole video to get a true flavor of the event.

[Listening to: A Gallon of Gas from the album "Come Dancing With the Kinks - the Best of the Kinks 1977-1986" by The Kinks]

Since when did Homeland Security become the enforcement arm of the entertainment industry?

by Hot Rod Homepage

Homeland Security Admits That It’s The Private Police Force Of The Entertainment Industry
[Via Techdirt]

We’ve been quite concerned about the legality of Homeland Security’s domain name seizures — especially in cases where they took down sites that had a ton of legitimate content, such as various hip hop blogs, with no due process and no adversarial hearings. One other concern was where Homeland Security’s direction on this was coming from. As we noted, in an earlier similar domain name seizure situation, Homeland Security announced the seizures from Disney’s headquarters — which should raise lots of eyebrows. As we said at the time, imagine any other government agency announcing a third party action that benefits a particular company from that company’s offices. For example, imagine the FTC announcing antitrust actions against Google from Microsoft’s offices. Wouldn’t people question the legitimacy of that?

Well, apparently, Homeland Security and the folks in its Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group have no qualms at all about being quite upfront and frank about both the fact that they’re acting as Hollywood’s private police force and that they have little concern for due process. Entertainment Weekly spoke with Erik Barnett, the “assistant deputy director” for ICE, and he readily admitted that they were taking orders from the industry:

“In general, what we can say is, there are specific complaints from rights holders that these sites were infringing on copyrights.”

That alone should give you pause. Rights holders have a long and very detailed history of greatly over-exaggerating when their rights were supposedly being “infringed” upon. Remember Jack Valenti of the MPAA claiming that the VCR was the Boston Strangler to the movie industry? Why didn’t Customs “swoop in” and block all VCRs from being sold? Why? Because that would be ridiculous. So why is it effectively doing the exact same thing here?

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No due process. No warning. Just confiscation of web sites on the word of businesses. Both judge and jury without having to get any of those damned lawyers involved. They are out of control.what happened to the Constitution here? I thought they stopped terrorists and tried to keep people out of the country. Looks like they found easier work – acting as the muscle for business interests.

I guess Rollerball (the original one with James Caan) really was prescient regarding the ownership of government by corporations.