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Books and stuff: three years of Amazon addiction

I'm a slow reader, but that doesn't stop me from buying a lot of books. Inspired by a Blippy review, I thought it might be fun to publish my Amazon order history.

My threshold for buying books is very low, so don't interpret these purchases as endorsements. Also, I haven't read most of them yet, so if you spot anything especially good, please let me know.

10 predictions for the world of January 1, 2020

After writing my predictions for the past 10 years, I decided it might be fun to write a few predictions for the next 10 years as well. This is a little more dangerous though, since I now lack the benefit of hindsight and at least one of them will probably turn out to be as dumb as "Palin/Gore win the 2014 presidential election".

That said, here are my (random and probably over-optimistic) predictions for the world as of Jan 1, 2020, assuming civilization doesn't collapse first:

All data lives "in the cloud" and can be accessed from anywhere. Most computers are essentially stateless caches which can be replaced without any data-loss or need for reconfiguration or reinstallation. This prediction was copied from 10 years ago, but this time it's right.
Android and iPhone kill off all the other mobile phone platforms. Android will be bigger (it will run on all of the "free" cell phones), but iPhone will still be "cooler", and will work more seamlessly with Apple's tablet computer.
Facebook will be a big success, possibly as big as Google. I'm probably over-optimistic because I work there, but the people are smart and ambitious.
3D displays will be popular because people want to watch Avatar and all future 3D movies and games at home (plus porn, of course -- think of the porn!).
No human-like artificial intelligence, but computers get a lot better at both high level and low level intelligence. At the high level, Google will release an amazing question answering service that can answer complex questions and is in many ways smarter than any human. Low-level, insect-like intelligence will become common enough that I'll be able to quickly build a Lego robot that uses computer vision to spot ants and physically squash them (and it will be awesome).
There will be an even bigger economic crash. The system becomes increasingly unstable as we try to paper-over the damage from one bubble by creating an even bigger bubble elsewhere. Nevertheless, things continue semi-working for some reason.
The health care system continues to be badly broken, and attempts at reform probably only make it worse (here is a nice summary). Fortunately, solutions will come from outside of the system. People will get better at avoiding disease (start with Taubes), and bio-tech will start to deliver in a big way. Unfortunately, the bio-tech will probably come from China, since they don't have so many rules to slow things down. The Chinese treatments won't be approved in the United States, but we can simply travel to Mexico for care. Urgent care will be local, but non-urgent procedures will be performed outside the US. Not everyone will do this, but it will be a very visible and growing trend by 2020.
The drug war will be over, mostly. An increasing number of people will realize that the war is causing a lot more harm than the drugs are (it's killing Mexico, for example). The end of marijuana prohibition in California will demonstrate that non-addictive drugs are not as dangerous as the government claims. It's unclear what will happen with highly addictive drugs such as heroin, but bio-tech may offer a solution that removes the addiction.
The energy problem is largely solved by cheap solar. It's not 100% done obviously, but we'll be on the ramp. Nuclear technology (Thorium?) could do it too, but probably isn't politically feasible. Edit: To be clear since not everyone has the same definition of "solved", for me it means that we have a relatively cheap and scalable energy solution, not that we're fully converted to it.
Politics will evolve much faster than in the past due to the Internet and social networks changing the core architecture of society (what people think and how they came to think it -- the professional media and government are no longer at the center). New movements will arise and gain power very quickly. Obama beating Clinton was the first hint of this. Political outsiders will begin winning elections. Steven Colbert will win the 2016 election -- the left will think he's joking, the right will think he's serious, and both sides will think that they are tricking the other ;)

My poorly remembered and partially imagined predictions from Jan 1, 2000

Reviewing old predictions is fun. Unfortunately, I didn't bother to write any down, so I'm working from memory here, and of course human memory is very unreliable and selective, so this is rather bogus.

Predictions for the next 10 years, from Jan 1, 2000 (as remembered on Jan 1, 2010):

Prediction: Linux will continue expanding into new spaces and will eventually make Microsoft irrelevant. Windows 2000 is the last release that anyone will care about.

Result: I was over-optimistic about Linux -- the community is unable to produce anything worthwhile on the desktop, most development has moved to the web anyway (making the desktop OS irrelevant), and OSX popularity among developers took away a lot of energy (I develop in Linux, but use OSX to host my web browser and other apps). Linux is a huge success on the server-side though and continues to grow in more "embedded" contexts, such as Android and Chrome OS. Microsoft made itself irrelevant -- they still make a lot of money, but they are no longer changing the world.

Prediction: Wireless data access (such as that provided by Ricochet) will become fast and practically ubiquitous, meaning that the Internet is always with us.

Result: It took longer than I expected, but we're finally starting to get there, and it is awesome.

Prediction: "Computer Aided Reality" will provide a cool visual overlay by using computer vision to identify objects and then fetching info about them from the Internet.

Result: I was very over-optimistic. There are a few basic "augmented reality" apps around, but nothing major. I still think that this will happen, though the display technology is still very uncertain (I haven't even heard about direct retinal projection lately).

Prediction: All data lives "online" and can be accessed from anywhere. Your computer is a stateless cache which can be replaced without any data-loss or need for reconfiguration or reinstallation.

Result: I was over-optimistic. We made some progress with things like Gmail, but computers still store information (configuration at the very least). Chrome OS may be more like what I had in mind, and the iPhone is too if you set aside the fact that it requires manual syncing.

Prediction: The Java VM will get good enough that people will finally stop using C++.

Result: I was over-optimistic. The JVM got somewhat better (though it still has significant GC problems), but Java got worse due to cultural problems. Fortunately, a lot of other interesting languages became popular, including Javascript, and there are a number of fast virtual machines in the works.

Prediction: Google will be a big success, possibly as big as Yahoo. I'm probably over-optimistic because I work there, but the people are smart and ambitious.

Result: I was under-optimistic. Google is bigger than Yahoo ever was, and is getting close to Microsoft (their market cap is 70% of Microsoft's).

Prediction: Humans will be cloned. After the initial outrage, people will stop caring once they see that the result is just a regular baby (like the "test tube babies" before them), not a "soulless monster".

Result: To my knowledge, that hasn't been any successful human cloning, though I wouldn't be surprised if there has and they are just keeping quiet about it.

Prediction: The stock market will crash, and take Silicon Valley (and other bubble-zone) real estate markets down with it.

Result: The market crash came (sort of), but instead of going down, real estate kept going up! Even when it did finally crash, local prices (especially Palo Alto) remained remarkably high.

Prediction: A meteor strike will destroy all life on Earth on November 5, 2007, so I don't need to waste time writing down my predictions for 2010.

Result: I meant 2012, there was an off-by-5 error in my calculation ;)

Membuat Partisi Hardisk dengan GParted

Labels: Open Source

Gparted atau Gnome Partition Editor merupakan software yang berjalan di atas Linux yang digunakan untuk membuat, menghapus, mengubah ukuran, memindahkan, mengecek, menyalin, dan memformat partisi pada hardisk. Ini misalnya digunakan setelah membeli hardisk baru dan ingin membaginya menjadi beberapa partisi atau membuat partisi baru setelah mengecilkan ukuran partisi-partisi yang sudah ada. File system yang didukung oleh GParted dapat dikatakan cukup lengkap, dari yang umum dikenal di Linux seperi ext2, ext3, jfs, atau reiserfs sampai yang biasa dikenal di Windows seperti fat, fat32, dan NTFS.

Selain dapat diinstall atau memang sudah tersedia pada berbagai distro Linux, GParted dapat juga dijalankan melalui CD atau media USB flashdisk dimana di situ linux dijalankan secara instan. Kemudahan penggunaan GParted melalui media CD atau USB flashdisk adalah ketidaktergantungan pada sistem operasi yang sudah terinstall pada hardisk termasuk hardisk yang hanya terinstall Windows.

Cara menjalankan GParted yang mudah adalah melalui media CD. Download file .iso GParted versi terbaru, kemudian burning ke CD. Selanjutnya lakukan booting komputer menggunakan CD tersebut. Ketika proses booting diminta memilih opsi tertentu, umumnya cukup dengan memilih [Enter] untuk menggunakan opsi default-nya, hingga tampilan linux dan GParted yang dijalankan sudah keluar.

Cara penggunaan agar dapat menjalankan Gparted melalui media USB flash drive, PXE server atau pada hardisk, sudah disediakan pula panduannya pada website GParted.

Xsplash Untuk Ubuntu 9.10

Labels: Open Source

Bosen dengan tampilan Splash di Ubuntu Carmic Koala? Jika kalian bosan, patut dicoba neh koleksi2 Xsplash gw.

Pertama kalian harus mendownload koleksi xsplash keren disini. File download berformat tar.bz2, extrak file tersebut di sembarang direktori yang anda inginkan. lalu tekan Alt+F2 dan ketik gksu nautilus (untuk menjalankan nautilus sebagai root). Salin isi direktori hasil ekstrak yang tadi ke /usr/share/images/xsplash , ada baiknya anda backup dulu isi direktori /usr/share/images/xsplash sebelum anda replace file-file didalamnya.

Jika anda ingin mengganti backgroundnya saja, replace bg_2560�1600.jpg dengan gambar yang anda inginkan (gambar yang anda ingikan di rename menjadi bg_2560�1600.jpg).

Untuk pengujian, ketik sudo xsplash di terminal, atau anda bisa reboot untuk langsung melihat hasilnya.

Thanks buat sh3lcr3w_b0y atas infonya

Tablet thoughts

I don't know anything about Apple's tablet, and I generally don't pay much attention to the speculation about their unannounced products. However, John Gruber has a nice post today which discusses the hypothetical Apple tablet.

The best part is the core product question -- how does this new product fit in with all existing products? Revolutionary products are underestimated because we evaluate them relative to existing products. This quote gets it:

Like all Apple products, The Tablet will do less than we expect but the things it does do, it will do insanely well. It will offer a fraction of the functionality of a MacBook� but that fraction will be way more fun. The same Asperger-y critics who dismissed the iPhone will focus on all that The Tablet doesn't do and declare that this time, Apple really has fucked up but good.

That was certainly the case with the iPod, or as slashdot put it, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

When considering revolutionary new products, we can not simply compare them with existing products, but must instead compare them with the products that don't yet exist, but should. For example, the PC was more than just an expensive, hard-to-use typewriter -- it was a whole new thing that just happened to have some typewriter features. Obviously this comparison is much more difficult than the "count the checkboxes" approach that we like to use when evaluating the "better mousetrap", but it's critical if we're going to understand or create anything truly new.

I have no idea what Apple is planning to release, but to me the revolutionary product need is in bridging the virtual and physical worlds. If you spend your entire day in front of the computer, this need may not seem real, but if you move between the two worlds you may notice that they are strangely disconnected. For example, imagine that I'm looking at a picture on my computer and want to give you a copy. In the physical world, I would simply hand you the print (I would have gotten double-prints), but with computers it's nearly impossible. Yes, there may be some complicated 10-step process that I can use to share the image, or maybe I can download and install some obscure software, but I'm not going to do that and neither are most other people. Imagine if I instead had a simple (built-in) gesture for passing the photo off to person standing next to me, and it were just as easy as handing them a real photo.

Of course exchanging photos is just one small example of these physical/virtual interactions. It's a whole new category, so many of them, including the most important, haven't been invented yet. However, you can get some ideas by thinking of the marketing cliche where two people are standing around a computer collaborating on something, taking quick notes, working off a recipe, etc. Those images occur in marketing because they are appealing, but they don't occur much in real life because our existing devices and software are awful. Current laptop computers are too bulky, awkward, and keyboard centric (the ui needs to be gesture-centric), and the iPhone is too small and limited. I want something about the size of a notepad that can be used naturally while standing up and walking around, just like an actual pad of paper, except that it's fully integrated with the virtual world as well as the physical world.

I hope this is what Apple is building -- it would be a great product. (or someone else could build it, though honestly I can't imagine anyone besides Apple getting it right)

Serangan Umum Internet di 2009

Labels: Hacking

Sepanjang tahun 2009 ini, gelombang serangan terhadap pengguna internet di seluruh dunia tak habis-habisnya menghadang. Symantec, salah satu pemain utama di bidang keamanan mencatat beberapa metode utama serangan yang marak hadir tahun ini.

Drive-by Download Semakin Banyak
Penyerang menginfeksi komputer penjelajah internet secara diam-diam dengan menyusup di situs legal. Popularitas metode ini terus tumbuh. Di tahun 2008, Symantec mengamati sebanyak 18 juta percobaan serangan drive-by download; akan tetapi, dari Agustus sampai Oktober 2009 sendiri, Symantec mencatat terjadi sebanyak 17,4 juta serangan.

Kembalinya Intensitas Spam ke Sebelum McColo
Symantec melihat penurunan sebesar 65 persen dari jumlah total pesan spam dalam 24 jam setelah penutupan McColo di akhir 2008 dan 24 jam setelahnya, jumlah spam turun mencapai level 69,8 persen dari seluruh email. Akan tetapi, di 2009, volume keseluruhan spam kembali ke angka rata-rata 87,4 persen dari seluruh email, mencapai maksimum 95 persen dari seluruh pesan di akhir Mei.

Meningkatnya Ancaman Polimorfis
Polymorfisme berarti memiliki kemampuan untuk bermutasi. Dengan demikian, ancaman polimorfis merupakan ancaman yang membuat setiap malware sedikit berbeda dengan malware sebelumnya. Kode pengubahan otomatis yang dibuat di dalam malware tidak mempengaruhi fungsionalitasnya, tetapi membuat teknologi pendeteksian milik antivirus tradisional tidak dapat mengatasinya. Symantec telah mengamati ancaman polimorfis seperti Waladac, Virut, dan Sality, menjadi semakin umum sejalan dengan penjahat dunia maya mencari cara untuk memperluas cara mereka mengelak dari teknologi antivirus konvensional.

Meningkatnya Pembajakan Reputasi
Geocities merupakan merek yang paling umum yang dibajak oleh spammer sebagai usaha untuk menipu pengguna komputer, tetapi dengan penutupan layanan web hosting tersebut oleh Yahoo pada akhir Oktober lalu, Symantec melihat bahwa terjadi peningkatan pesat dari jumlah layanan web gratis berskala kecil, seperti layanan pemendek URL, yang nama dan reputasinya disalahgunakan oleh spammer. Hal ini dikarenakan oleh kemajuan di teknologi penembus CAPTCHA, yang memudahkan karakter berbahaya membuat akun dan profil ganda yang digunakan untuk spamming. Symantec bahkan telah mengamati bahwa beberapa dari perusahaan layanan web berskala kecil tersebut telah menutup situs mereka sendiri sebagai satu-satunya cara untuk menghentikan spam.

Pencurian Data Terus Berlangsung
Menurut Identity Theft Resource Center, sampai 13 Oktober 2009, 403 kasus penerobosan data telah dilaporkan sepanjang tahun dan mengekspos lebih dari 220 juta dokumen. Menurut Ponemon Institute, orang dalam yang tidak bermaksud jahat terus mewakili bagian terbesar dari insiden hilangnya data dengan 88% dari seluruh insiden kehilangan data disebabkan oleh orang dalam seperti karyawan dan partner. Meski demikian, terdapat peningkatan perhatian terhadap kehilangan data berbahaya. Menurut penelitian Ponemon, 59% mantan karyawan mengakui bahwa mereka mengambil data perusahaan saat mereka meninggalkan pekerjaannya. Di saat organisasi semakin meningkatkan fokus untuk menghindari kehilangan data, tampak jelas bahwa banyak hal yang perlu dilakukan untuk mencegah informasi sensitif dibawa ke luar dari perusahaan.

Kabar gembiranya, di tahun 2009 ini, kerjasama intra dan lintas industri untuk mengatasi ancaman internet semakin semakin solid. Bersama dengan ulang tahun varian pertama ancaman Conficker pada pengguna, kita diingatkan bagaimana peningkatan organisasi dan kecerdasan penjahat dunia maya telah membuat jalinan kerjasama yang lebih luas di antara vendor keamanan, penegak hukum, dan penyedia layanan internet.

Contoh yang tampak di tahun 2009 antara lain adalah Conficker Working Group (CWG), gerakan �Operation Phish Phry� yang dilancarkan FBI dan Digital Crimes Consortium, yang menggelar pengukuhannya di Oktober.

Sumber : http://www.arrahmah.com

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