Practical Technology

Some Apple iPhone and iPad users are facing a major new problem with Wi-Fi/cellular data use while others are still dealing with earlier, unresolved iOS 6 Wi-Fi problems.

The latest annoyance is a real pain-in-the-rump. It turns out that while some of you have been watching videos, playing a game, whatever, on what you thought was a Wi-Fi network, you were actually running up your giant 3G data bill. Apple hasn’t commented on this, but on September 30th, Apple quietly released a bug fix for the problem for its Verizon customers.

In it, Apple states. “This carrier settings update resolves an issue in which, under certain circumstances, iPhone 5 may use Verizon cellular data while the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.” Users are loudly saying that is not just a problem with iPhone 5 or Verizon. Instead, they blame iOS 6.

A new Apple iOS Wi-Fi problem has popped up while others remain unfixed. More >

UltraViolet sounded good. “UltraViolet is DVD for the Internet. Just as the DVD logo means that you can buy a DVD from any seller and expect it to play in any player with a DVD logo (DVD players, DVD PCs, DVD entertainment systems in automobiles, and so on), the UltraViolet logo means you can buy UltraViolet movies from any seller, keep track of your ‘online locker’ or ‘virtual collection’ of movies, and expect them to play on anything with the UltraViolet logo (PCs, tablets, smartphones, Blu-ray players, cable set-top boxes, and so on).” Oh well, lots of things sound good at first.

I really liked the idea of having a networked copy of my movies. As it is, I’ve been converting my DVDs to Apple TV MP4 friendly formats with HandBrake. It’s not hard, but it is time-consuming. It would be great if every time I bought a physical DVD I’d also get a digital copy and that’s what UltraViolet seemed to promise.

Alas, my hopes were dashed when I finally looked at UltraViolet’s fine print.

UltraViolet: Another DRM dead-end for Internet video. More >

While IBM’s Watson expert system isn’t ready to take over the world ala Skynet, it’s certainly “smart” enough to beat the world’s best two Jeopardy players. The company isn’t treating this as a trivial exercise; they’re also hard at work turning Watson technology into medical expert systems for cancer research and treatment, as they explained at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego last month.

Watson, the most famous example of IBM’s DeepQA Project, is made up of ten racks of servers with 15 terabytes of RAM; 2,880 3.55GHz POWER7 processor cores; and a run speed at 80 teraflops. You’re not going to find one of these at your local electronics store.

Watson is far more than an ordinary supercomputer crunching linear equations. No, Watson is meant to solve the far harder problem of “understanding” natural language questions. DeepQA’s eventual goal, according to IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, the principal investigator for Watson technologies, is to create computers that learn through interacting with us. “They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” Ferrucci says.

How Watson Won at Jeopardy. More >

Two years ago, then U.S. federal CIO Vivek Kundra ordered all federal agencies to upgrade their public-facing Web services to native IPv6 by September 30, 2012. So, how did they do? Well, to cut to the chase: Not very well.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), out of 1,494 government agencies, only 287 had IPv6 up and running on their Web sites. That’ comes to a percentage of about 20%. Can we say “Fail?” I knew you could.

Fewer agencies still, 166, had IPv6 Domain Name System (DNS) services up and running and only a handful, 54, supported e-mail with IPv6. Other NIST estimates show as many as 387 federal Web domains working properly with IPv6, but the percentage is still very low.

US government gets an “F” for IPv6 Internet make-over. More >

Yes, we all hate Flash. Even Adobe’s not that crazy about Flash anymore. Too bad. There’s still no replacement for it.

HTML5 video you say? What about it? There’s nothing magical about it. 

HTML5′s video tag doesn’t define which the file format, such as MPEG4 or WebM, or video or audio codec, such as H.264 or VP8, that are permitted. The only thing HTML5 does is let Web developers set up case statements so that they can supply a choice of various combinations of containers and codecs in the hope that your device can support one of them.

In other words, HTML5 video is just a rug that covers the dirt of multiple video formats. It doesn’t replace Flash at all. In fact, you can still use Flash within it. We’re a long way from being Flash free.

Adobe Flash: I’m not dead yet! More >