the music itself is just a list of discrete digital values arranged in a particular order. You can't copyright binary numbers. How can they copyright that order?
Mobile and cloud computing present special challenges. Google is a particular problem for me. Consider chromebook. I have one password, my google password, and that logs me into the computer but it also gets my e-mail, and my google wallet. Anyone can remotely access my google docs if they have my password. Even worse is that I use my google mail account for all my banking and purchases (amazon) and other sites. So anyone who gets in can do a password reset on those, which will send the new password to the google mail account, and I'm destroyed.
So what about two facto ID. Well this is where mobile compounds things. Usually your mobile device is your second factor. So your mobile device not only can access your gmail but it gets sent the 2nd factor as a text message. So if you loose your phone there's no benefit for two factor ID. If you toss last-pass or some pasword wallet into the mix, again losing the phone can be your undoing.
What I try to do to ameliorate this is to maintain a separate password recovery e-mail account that is not hooked to the phone. But that really doesn't work. most sites don't have the ability to have regular e-mails sent to one e-mail address but password recovery go to another. For example, you probably want to get all yout paypal receipt or amazon receipts sent to your regular e-mail so you will see them immediately if there is activity. So there's no way to do that if you also want the password rest e-mail to go to an off-mobile-device account. Likewise Sites that want two-factor ID don't have the facility to prevent the mobile device from playing the role of both factors (password input device and 2nd factor generator).
Thus there is a lot of room for innovation in the cloud and mobile arena. Segregating authority and access in a more fine grained way is the path forward. Apple is pushing the ball here. It's not a complete solution yet.
I suspect what apple is doing is trying to breakdown the inconvenience of entering a password. right now we have one gate to the castle. Once you are in you have the run of kingdom. So that gate has to be secure, and therfore inconvenient. It would be nice to be able to trade weaker levels of security for convenient access to some applications. that would make it easeir to have some security, not all or nothing. so for example, perhaps my message notifications could be guarded with a gesture whereas my e-mail is secured more tightly.
if they could extend that so that some senders messages were secured even more tightly it would be on the way to solving my problem on the client side even if the servers don't cooperate with segregating password resets from regular e-mail.
I wonder which has the better profit margin, electronic devices or Tesla? Presumably that decides how this plays out. The interesting thing is that it's going to become a barrier to entry for electric car makers. The one with the highest profit margin can set the price of the batteries above the profit margin of the competition when there is a supply shortfall.
Here's several things you can do to make this faster. 1) first don't keep invoking egrep. this has to parse the command line and then re-load the egrep command itself every time. Instead do this from within a loaded program. Perl is a very good choice for this 2) the perl command can pre-compile the regular expression. So you can leave the perl program running as a process then simply feed it new data to analyse. 3) given you are searching for words, you probably want to split the incoming stream on white space one-time not every time. 4) even better than that, take the e-mail, parse it to words, then parse each word into all 3,4,5,6,7,8 consecutive strings. Then just look these up in a hash table. 5) if you are only trying to match from the start of the word, (not interior word strings) then this hashing becomes trivial.
IN the future we will wathc our television shows with freinds who are in other locations. We'll have the conference call running with their faces along the bottom of the screen and we can chit chat about how awesome a moment in Breaking Bad season 9 was. Skype and xbox are the devices you need for this.
Most moves in Chess are devoted to preventing an opponent from developing a new line of attack, and may have a cost of diminishing your own lines of attack. purchasing skype was a hedge against being caught in a position where google voice was the killer application for cloud based project management and microsoft had no response. If google could see that microsoft would be caught flat footed they could have pushed google voice harder. But now that they see that at best that line of attack is a draw they aren't pushing it. SO it's the line of attack Microsoft prevented that you don't see.
It says it will enhance cloud integration and "all your passwords" can be in the cloud. Of course one can do that voluntarily now (lastpass etc) but it wigs me out a little. I recently bought a chrome book and when you fire it up you realize how when you commit to the cloud whole hog that there is some magic. It's like going back to the convenience of the thin client days but in a full modern way. But what I find frightening is that literally my whole life hinges on my google password. My computer, all my documents, google wallet, and of course g-mail (which is where all your other accounts password recovery) can come to. With the advent of cell phones containing all your passwords and very likely also being your two-factor ID device, basically, if your cell phone gets in the wrong hands your data world is toast.
One of the things I love about macs is that if you don't want to go quite that far, macs are pretty nice. The make backing things up and syncing things pretty easy. Apps work across many devices in the same way. you dont have to have the same password for your login as your google account. I can have a lot of convenience without going the whole thin client and betting it all on one password.
I'm hoping that the icloud integration fixes this issue, so I can have my cloud and my peace of mind too.
First off you are right. But on the other hand DNLA completely sucks. I'm not sure if it's the DNLA protocol that sucks or the boxes that suck but they are slow and clumsy to use. The DNLA servers seem to use a lot of computer resources. What one would like is to screw DNLA and use an existing protocol like say file serving off of a NAS. I think DNLA was an attempt to roll up transcoding and file serving into one entity and it does neither well; I'm surprised it doesn't try to do e-mail as well.
yes they did advertise it playing local content. it is supposed to be able to mirror your browser window. that was a n advetised feature. Many reviews talked about how badly that feature sucked infact.
I bought a chromebook and was a little shocked to find that a network computer won't mount any local network disks! there's no way to do it in chrome at all. There's also no way to stream local media to a chromebook and have it play while it is streaming.
Uh, isn't this exactly what the GUI tool set for mac OSX server is for? I't s avery powerful suite of tools that lets you manage a suite of macs and the server services that connect them. It strikes a mid point between doing everything possible that your could do from a command line script, and being very easy to use. It's no walk in the park since you need to be fairly savvy about the services you want to provide. It just rolls up the confusing aspects of configuring and corralling all of them into a common interface, and giving you graphical ways to monitor them and the hardware health of all the macs in your intranet. it costs about $50 which is chump change. If it doens't save you 30 minutes of time then you really should not be touching any server.
THis is just changing the orientation of subunits and spacing of subunits without changing the center of mass. It would not seem magical if theywere connected by gears. Here they are doing it with magnetic coupling. But there's no "propulsion" since that implies changing the center of mass.
the chinese have a method for massless propulsion however:
edge gestures sound exciting till you consider that most phones live in cases to protect them from drops. Or I should say, everyone who has dropped a phone and broken it, has a case.
Grandpa here.
My recollection is that paper tapes and punchcard readers where a lot faster than cassette tapes for loading in programs. The reason cassettes were nice is that that the cost of the reader hardware was cheap--you probably already had a casstte player. and the results were compact. In my experience the paper tapes were the most durable. the tapes tended to go bad on you or not work between different machines with different settings. If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled. the paper tapes were compact and reliable.
What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
isn't the problem here, setting up the communication channel? for slow speed communication, the end goal may be just sending some short message like a credit card number. using something like a public key to exchange keys, might be very cumbersome, since those would grossly exceed the message length itself and thus require a much longer stable communication channel duration. That might not work with low bandwidth systems.
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have a camera on the same side as the screen. Virtually all phones have both items; but unless their locations differ enough between models and manufacturers that interfacing could get tricky.
Why? how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation.
First this is a wonderful idea so I don't want to put it down as a useful contribution to the low bandwidth limited distance problem for comunications. Where the authors seem to go south here is the huge time they devote in the article to touting that NFC has no physical security and their system does via "jamSecure". Unless I'm missing something there's no reason, other than changing the standard, that radio based NFC could not also implement JamSecure and even do it better. The idea of JamSecure is that both ends of the communitcation channel transmit at the same time, anyone listening in hears the sum. If one of the emitters is sending simply random noise then the sum is randomized. Yet because the receiver knows what they are emitting they can subtract it out. Don't see why NFC cant do that. Also I don't see why having two (or more) microphones in different locations on an eaves dropper doesn't ruin the addition the encryption is relying on. At least with NFC you can have the transmitters be spatially diverse too, with sound that's harder.
But for very close by communications using existing tech, why not use the screen and the camera? Each phone looks at the others screen and reads it. bandwith becomes the screen refreshrate time the number of resolvable pixels. Presumably at a meter or so that should be close to or better than sound in band width.
Why must Gamification die? It's a very potent concept. It's like saying "Placebos" must die. You might have some intellectual qualms about it "working for the wrong reasons" but it works really well. While we live in an age of explicit gamificiation including reality TV, which gamifies human interaction, basically people have always done things that make their work more than just work. We foster freindly competitions between work teams, we offer prizes for company groups that raise the most donations for charity, etc... You could easily say that the satisfaction of the work or the donations to charity, being incentive enough and we dont' actually need to add external conditions different from the the actual objectives. But that's not how humans work. We like taking long term goals and adding in extraneous rules that divide the long term goal into short term quick rewards--even if they are artificial. The couch potatoe's willingness to lie there perfroming pointless game playing is evidence that humans are sometimes powerless against this rapid reward system, so why not turn that to doing good things.
I think it's fair to say that when we look at eberharts mother of all demos now we see it's brilliance only because we can now appreciate it. In other words we see eberhart as brilliant mainly because steve jobs wrought the lens that lats us see it for what it was. Jobs reduction of computer science to consumer devices was his brilliance.
If you never saw the Mother of all Demos then you have missed the most important thing in your computer science education.
Sheesh, people try to measure apple in dollars or think of it as a bauhaus design center of shiny curved minimalist objects just don't understand what the vision always has been. Once you understand what Job's vision was, you can then decide if apple has it still or not. I'm undecided because on fiscal year of change is not the way to measure this.
When I think about the Jobs trajectory from apple through Next to the iphone I used to see it as a story about early adoption of technologies that let software replace hardware. e.g. the apple had refreshing of dynamic memory backsided on the video, and soft sectored disks, and replacing of parallel ports and UARTs with software system.
But when the iphone came out I finally realized that his vision was really fulfilling the Eberharts vision of the future in the mother of all demos. He was the translator of high concept computer science into consumer products. The iphone was the first truly practical ubiquitous reconfigurable hardware widget. It instantly transformed itself from one single purpose specialized appliance to another at the press of a single button. Each concrete form was single purpose and specialize not some do-it all device making it easy to on the user.
I think that is what jobs was shooting for all along. He always wanted to change the world and while we might have seen each brilliant little improvement as changing things (e.g early adoption of Postscript and WIMP interfaces) the real change that's never going to go away is this universal pocket device. He gave us something that even star trek didn't have. But when you watch Eberharts video you realize he was grasping in his crude way at simple universal interfaces to.
So I think Jobs actually completed the primary aspect of his journey.
Where would he have gone next with it? I think there's three things left to complete. First, Eberhart also enuniciated the cloud future of colloborative remote interaction on data sets that could be represent themselves in different ways depending on what viewing device each user was applying. (early model view controller, but for concrete devices). So number one is the iphone's becoming the physical manifestation that connects the clouds to points in the environment. It's going that way already as iphones control our cars and become networked games and video phones. Jobs just would have come up with some magical version of that which would delighted and surprised us with its simplicity. Perhaps that's where siri was going. The other thing that's not done more coupling between the cloud and the device. You shouldn't have to care where the computation is happening. And the third is enrichment of the devices ability to sense and interact.
All of those but the last one are obvious and thus incremental now. What does it mean for devices to interact? In the time of eberhart computer scientist thought that machines would learn to reason and thus learn to communicate on their own. So machines would be able to make requests to each other that exceeded some pre-defined "API". You would be able to communicate with them to, more along the lines of stating what you wanted and less along the lines of stating how to achieve it. That's the one thing there doesn't seem to be any progress in.
So where should apple go now? Well fulfilling the cloud dream of ubiquitous sensing and computing occuring transparently to enable handheld devices to become super powered tools has a long road ahead. Perhaps its a pre-requisite to the next step of interaction based on goals not defining process.
THe one thing I'm on the fence on is the current counter reaction against Jobs skewmorphic interfaces. I'm of the opinion that these contain powerful intuition and tap subconscious mental models we don't appreciate. I'd like to see machines adapt to our biases not try to make us like their natural interfaces.
DNS isn't secure. There are all sorts of ways to spoof it. Not that a government would bother - they'd just walk in and inform the key authority that key A was going to be, ah, temporarily replaced. Key authorities come down to having to trust some computer that's not under your control.
We DO have public key repositories. Every time you visit a site using https you're using one. They work reasonably well when a big corporation wants another big corporation to vouch for it (and also exclude anyone else who doesn't pony up the cash for the service).
For individuals it makes much more sense to arrange the key exchange yourself, or to refer to a key published somewhere that YOU verify. Am I talking to the guy who I was talking to last week? Check my list of keys. Am I talking to the guy who posted that message on that forum? Check the signature attached to his forum post.
Why doesn't everyone encrypt their messages then? Because the vast majority of people just can't be bothered.
SSH has a simmilar problem and they solved this with fingerprints. The first time you connect to a remote server you accept a fingerprint. From then on, when you connect it warns you if the fingerprint doesn't match. This is protection against impersonating the host. Surely one could do the same with public keys. The first time you send a message you use the public key-server and then keep a copy locally to use in the future. Thus you only need to establish that the first communication attempt is secure, just like ssh. If someone replaces the key in the key server you can detect this change.
Isn't the resolution to this to simply for everyone to create their own key pair? The CA is only useful for signing a document. But I don't care about signing it. I care about sending it confidentially. So I only need to know the recipent's self-generated public key. No need for Thawte to be involved. For this to work I still need to be able to trust that the key server is giving me the right key of course (just as I trust DNS to send it to the right IP.) But thats better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
the music itself is just a list of discrete digital values arranged in a particular order. You can't copyright binary numbers. How can they copyright that order?
Mobile and cloud computing present special challenges. Google is a particular problem for me. Consider chromebook. I have one password, my google password, and that logs me into the computer but it also gets my e-mail, and my google wallet. Anyone can remotely access my google docs if they have my password. Even worse is that I use my google mail account for all my banking and purchases (amazon) and other sites. So anyone who gets in can do a password reset on those, which will send the new password to the google mail account, and I'm destroyed.
So what about two facto ID. Well this is where mobile compounds things. Usually your mobile device is your second factor. So your mobile device not only can access your gmail but it gets sent the 2nd factor as a text message. So if you loose your phone there's no benefit for two factor ID. If you toss last-pass or some pasword wallet into the mix, again losing the phone can be your undoing.
What I try to do to ameliorate this is to maintain a separate password recovery e-mail account that is not hooked to the phone. But that really doesn't work. most sites don't have the ability to have regular e-mails sent to one e-mail address but password recovery go to another. For example, you probably want to get all yout paypal receipt or amazon receipts sent to your regular e-mail so you will see them immediately if there is activity. So there's no way to do that if you also want the password rest e-mail to go to an off-mobile-device account. Likewise Sites that want two-factor ID don't have the facility to prevent the mobile device from playing the role of both factors (password input device and 2nd factor generator).
Thus there is a lot of room for innovation in the cloud and mobile arena. Segregating authority and access in a more fine grained way is the path forward. Apple is pushing the ball here. It's not a complete solution yet.
I suspect what apple is doing is trying to breakdown the inconvenience of entering a password. right now we have one gate to the castle. Once you are in you have the run of kingdom. So that gate has to be secure, and therfore inconvenient. It would be nice to be able to trade weaker levels of security for convenient access to some applications. that would make it easeir to have some security, not all or nothing. so for example, perhaps my message notifications could be guarded with a gesture whereas my e-mail is secured more tightly.
if they could extend that so that some senders messages were secured even more tightly it would be on the way to solving my problem on the client side even if the servers don't cooperate with segregating password resets from regular e-mail.
Apple once famously code named new version "Sagan", but Carl Sagan objected. So they renamed it BHA, for "Butt head Astronomer". Sagan sued.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/butt-head-astronomer.html
I wonder which has the better profit margin, electronic devices or Tesla? Presumably that decides how this plays out. The interesting thing is that it's going to become a barrier to entry for electric car makers. The one with the highest profit margin can set the price of the batteries above the profit margin of the competition when there is a supply shortfall.
Here's several things you can do to make this faster.
1) first don't keep invoking egrep. this has to parse the command line and then re-load the egrep command itself every time. Instead do this from within a loaded program. Perl is a very good choice for this
2) the perl command can pre-compile the regular expression. So you can leave the perl program running as a process then simply feed it new data to analyse.
3) given you are searching for words, you probably want to split the incoming stream on white space one-time not every time.
4) even better than that, take the e-mail, parse it to words, then parse each word into all 3,4,5,6,7,8 consecutive strings. Then just look these up in a hash table.
5) if you are only trying to match from the start of the word, (not interior word strings) then this hashing becomes trivial.
IN the future we will wathc our television shows with freinds who are in other locations. We'll have the conference call running with their faces along the bottom of the screen and we can chit chat about how awesome a moment in Breaking Bad season 9 was. Skype and xbox are the devices you need for this.
All programs expand until they can read mail.
Most moves in Chess are devoted to preventing an opponent from developing a new line of attack, and may have a cost of diminishing your own lines of attack. purchasing skype was a hedge against being caught in a position where google voice was the killer application for cloud based project management and microsoft had no response. If google could see that microsoft would be caught flat footed they could have pushed google voice harder. But now that they see that at best that line of attack is a draw they aren't pushing it. SO it's the line of attack Microsoft prevented that you don't see.
It says it will enhance cloud integration and "all your passwords" can be in the cloud. Of course one can do that voluntarily now (lastpass etc) but it wigs me out a little. I recently bought a chrome book and when you fire it up you realize how when you commit to the cloud whole hog that there is some magic. It's like going back to the convenience of the thin client days but in a full modern way. But what I find frightening is that literally my whole life hinges on my google password. My computer, all my documents, google wallet, and of course g-mail (which is where all your other accounts password recovery) can come to. With the advent of cell phones containing all your passwords and very likely also being your two-factor ID device, basically, if your cell phone gets in the wrong hands your data world is toast.
One of the things I love about macs is that if you don't want to go quite that far, macs are pretty nice. The make backing things up and syncing things pretty easy. Apps work across many devices in the same way. you dont have to have the same password for your login as your google account. I can have a lot of convenience without going the whole thin client and betting it all on one password.
I'm hoping that the icloud integration fixes this issue, so I can have my cloud and my peace of mind too.
First off you are right. But on the other hand DNLA completely sucks. I'm not sure if it's the DNLA protocol that sucks or the boxes that suck but they are slow and clumsy to use. The DNLA servers seem to use a lot of computer resources. What one would like is to screw DNLA and use an existing protocol like say file serving off of a NAS. I think DNLA was an attempt to roll up transcoding and file serving into one entity and it does neither well; I'm surprised it doesn't try to do e-mail as well.
ADB connectors were phone jacks. not proprietary.
we don't need such opinionated flamebait to be rated +5 insightful
yes they did advertise it playing local content. it is supposed to be able to mirror your browser window. that was a n advetised feature. Many reviews talked about how badly that feature sucked infact.
I bought a chromebook and was a little shocked to find that a network computer won't mount any local network disks! there's no way to do it in chrome at all. There's also no way to stream local media to a chromebook and have it play while it is streaming.
Uh, isn't this exactly what the GUI tool set for mac OSX server is for? I't s avery powerful suite of tools that lets you manage a suite of macs and the server services that connect them. It strikes a mid point between doing everything possible that your could do from a command line script, and being very easy to use. It's no walk in the park since you need to be fairly savvy about the services you want to provide. It just rolls up the confusing aspects of configuring and corralling all of them into a common interface, and giving you graphical ways to monitor them and the hardware health of all the macs in your intranet. it costs about $50 which is chump change. If it doens't save you 30 minutes of time then you really should not be touching any server.
ChromeOS/android are linux based. THey show netflix. so what's the issue here?
THis is just changing the orientation of subunits and spacing of subunits without changing the center of mass. It would not seem magical if theywere connected by gears. Here they are doing it with magnetic coupling. But there's no "propulsion" since that implies changing the center of mass.
the chinese have a method for massless propulsion however:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/09/chinese-buildin/
edge gestures sound exciting till you consider that most phones live in cases to protect them from drops. Or I should say, everyone who has dropped a phone and broken it, has a case.
Grandpa here.
My recollection is that paper tapes and punchcard readers where a lot faster than cassette tapes for loading in programs. The reason cassettes were nice is that that the cost of the reader hardware was cheap--you probably already had a casstte player. and the results were compact. In my experience the paper tapes were the most durable. the tapes tended to go bad on you or not work between different machines with different settings. If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled. the paper tapes were compact and reliable.
What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
isn't the problem here, setting up the communication channel? for slow speed communication, the end goal may be just sending some short message like a credit card number. using something like a public key to exchange keys, might be very cumbersome, since those would grossly exceed the message length itself and thus require a much longer stable communication channel duration. That might not work with low bandwidth systems.
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have a camera on the same side as the screen. Virtually all phones have both items; but unless their locations differ enough between models and manufacturers that interfacing could get tricky.
Why? how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation.
First this is a wonderful idea so I don't want to put it down as a useful contribution to the low bandwidth limited distance problem for comunications. Where the authors seem to go south here is the huge time they devote in the article to touting that NFC has no physical security and their system does via "jamSecure". Unless I'm missing something there's no reason, other than changing the standard, that radio based NFC could not also implement JamSecure and even do it better. The idea of JamSecure is that both ends of the communitcation channel transmit at the same time, anyone listening in hears the sum. If one of the emitters is sending simply random noise then the sum is randomized. Yet because the receiver knows what they are emitting they can subtract it out. Don't see why NFC cant do that. Also I don't see why having two (or more) microphones in different locations on an eaves dropper doesn't ruin the addition the encryption is relying on. At least with NFC you can have the transmitters be spatially diverse too, with sound that's harder.
But for very close by communications using existing tech, why not use the screen and the camera? Each phone looks at the others screen and reads it. bandwith becomes the screen refreshrate time the number of resolvable pixels. Presumably at a meter or so that should be close to or better than sound in band width.
Why must Gamification die? It's a very potent concept. It's like saying "Placebos" must die. You might have some intellectual qualms about it "working for the wrong reasons" but it works really well. While we live in an age of explicit gamificiation including reality TV, which gamifies human interaction, basically people have always done things that make their work more than just work. We foster freindly competitions between work teams, we offer prizes for company groups that raise the most donations for charity, etc... You could easily say that the satisfaction of the work or the donations to charity, being incentive enough and we dont' actually need to add external conditions different from the the actual objectives. But that's not how humans work. We like taking long term goals and adding in extraneous rules that divide the long term goal into short term quick rewards--even if they are artificial. The couch potatoe's willingness to lie there perfroming pointless game playing is evidence that humans are sometimes powerless against this rapid reward system, so why not turn that to doing good things.
I think it's fair to say that when we look at eberharts mother of all demos now we see it's brilliance only because we can now appreciate it. In other words we see eberhart as brilliant mainly because steve jobs wrought the lens that lats us see it for what it was. Jobs reduction of computer science to consumer devices was his brilliance.
If you never saw the Mother of all Demos then you have missed the most important thing in your computer science education.
Sheesh, people try to measure apple in dollars or think of it as a bauhaus design center of shiny curved minimalist objects just don't understand what the vision always has been. Once you understand what Job's vision was, you can then decide if apple has it still or not. I'm undecided because on fiscal year of change is not the way to measure this.
When I think about the Jobs trajectory from apple through Next to the iphone I used to see it as a story about early adoption of technologies that let software replace hardware. e.g. the apple had refreshing of dynamic memory backsided on the video, and soft sectored disks, and replacing of parallel ports and UARTs with software system.
But when the iphone came out I finally realized that his vision was really fulfilling the Eberharts vision of the future in the mother of all demos. He was the translator of high concept computer science into consumer products. The iphone was the first truly practical ubiquitous reconfigurable hardware widget. It instantly transformed itself from one single purpose specialized appliance to another at the press of a single button. Each concrete form was single purpose and specialize not some do-it all device making it easy to on the user.
I think that is what jobs was shooting for all along. He always wanted to change the world and while we might have seen each brilliant little improvement as changing things (e.g early adoption of Postscript and WIMP interfaces) the real change that's never going to go away is this universal pocket device. He gave us something that even star trek didn't have. But when you watch Eberharts video you realize he was grasping in his crude way at simple universal interfaces to.
So I think Jobs actually completed the primary aspect of his journey.
Where would he have gone next with it? I think there's three things left to complete. First, Eberhart also enuniciated the cloud future of colloborative remote interaction on data sets that could be represent themselves in different ways depending on what viewing device each user was applying. (early model view controller, but for concrete devices). So number one is the iphone's becoming the physical manifestation that connects the clouds to points in the environment. It's going that way already as iphones control our cars and become networked games and video phones. Jobs just would have come up with some magical version of that which would delighted and surprised us with its simplicity. Perhaps that's where siri was going. The other thing that's not done more coupling between the cloud and the device. You shouldn't have to care where the computation is happening. And the third is enrichment of the devices ability to sense and interact.
All of those but the last one are obvious and thus incremental now. What does it mean for devices to interact? In the time of eberhart computer scientist thought that machines would learn to reason and thus learn to communicate on their own. So machines would be able to make requests to each other that exceeded some pre-defined "API". You would be able to communicate with them to, more along the lines of stating what you wanted and less along the lines of stating how to achieve it. That's the one thing there doesn't seem to be any progress in.
So where should apple go now? Well fulfilling the cloud dream of ubiquitous sensing and computing occuring transparently to enable handheld devices to become super powered tools has a long road ahead. Perhaps its a pre-requisite to the next step of interaction based on goals not defining process.
THe one thing I'm on the fence on is the current counter reaction against Jobs skewmorphic interfaces. I'm of the opinion that these contain powerful intuition and tap subconscious mental models we don't appreciate. I'd like to see machines adapt to our biases not try to make us like their natural interfaces.
yours is the first actual answer to my question!
Because somebody realised it was a dumb idea.
DNS isn't secure. There are all sorts of ways to spoof it. Not that a government would bother - they'd just walk in and inform the key authority that key A was going to be, ah, temporarily replaced. Key authorities come down to having to trust some computer that's not under your control.
We DO have public key repositories. Every time you visit a site using https you're using one. They work reasonably well when a big corporation wants another big corporation to vouch for it (and also exclude anyone else who doesn't pony up the cash for the service).
For individuals it makes much more sense to arrange the key exchange yourself, or to refer to a key published somewhere that YOU verify. Am I talking to the guy who I was talking to last week? Check my list of keys. Am I talking to the guy who posted that message on that forum? Check the signature attached to his forum post.
Why doesn't everyone encrypt their messages then? Because the vast majority of people just can't be bothered.
SSH has a simmilar problem and they solved this with fingerprints. The first time you connect to a remote server you accept a fingerprint. From then on, when you connect it warns you if the fingerprint doesn't match. This is protection against impersonating the host. Surely one could do the same with public keys. The first time you send a message you use the public key-server and then keep a copy locally to use in the future. Thus you only need to establish that the first communication attempt is secure, just like ssh. If someone replaces the key in the key server you can detect this change.
Isn't the resolution to this to simply for everyone to create their own key pair? The CA is only useful for signing a document. But I don't care about signing it. I care about sending it confidentially. So I only need to know the recipent's self-generated public key. No need for Thawte to be involved. For this to work I still need to be able to trust that the key server is giving me the right key of course (just as I trust DNS to send it to the right IP.) But thats better than nothing.