iPhone Battery “Meter”
So, I was using my iPhone on wednesday, bright and early. I had it charging all night and then I unplugged it around 7 in the morning to get started on my day.
Full Battery.
I spend the entire day playing around with it, online, playing Boom, checking out the latest tweets on Tweetie 2… you know, my usual day on the iPhone.
Next thing you know, it’s 10:30 at night, and I’m looking at my phone… Still full battery. How is this possible?
I ended up rebooting, obviously under the assumption that the battery life shown on the phone MUST be wrong, and then when I started it back up, unsurprisingly enough it wouldn’t even LOAD unless I plugged it into the wall.
This got me wondering on a bit. Given that the battery was completely dead to the point that I can’t boot it up (and honestly, I’m surprised the phone didn’t die on me earlier in the day, like around 3-4 pm), I wondered if I hadn’t rebooted, how long the phone would’ve lasted until it shut down.
The way it was acting, however, I came to the absurd conclusion that the phone never would’ve shut off. But of course the battery would die eventually.
I guess I’m still just surprised that the phone lasted as long as it did.
Learning Something New: Alan Turing
I follow a lot of random news. I don’t visit many news websites directly, but I do get a lot of news from tweets on Twitter that sound interesting, and I follow through, and may even repost them if I find them interesting enough for my followers to need to check out. Lately, a lot of the news I tend to get are political (laughing at anti-Obama stuff from Huffington Post, etc), but I recently clicked on this new article on CNN titled “Petition seeks apology for Enigma code-breaker Turing”
From the article title alone, two things sprung to my mind:
- I didn’t know that Alan Turing, the Father of Modern Computer Science, the developer of the theoretical Turing Machine, was also the code-breaker of the dreaded Enigma machine of World War II that was vital to Nazi Germany war efforts.
- What in the world did they need to seek an apology for? I didn’t realize that Turing ever had a fall from grace.
Well, come to find out, Turing was the one that broke the Enigma machine, which is just plain awesome, given the importance of that to the Allies winning the European stage of World War II. He was one of many code-breakers of course, during that time, but the Enigma was definitely a major hurdle for the Allies.
Learning this gave me a higher respect for the man known as the Father of everything we know and use today when it comes to computers.
I mean, come on, EVERY day the majority of users on the internet use something that was originally created by Alan Turing. Every website you visit that uses a “security check” involving looking at an image with words and numbers that you have to type in. It’s called a Captcha and it’s known as a reverse Turing Test, testing the human instead of testing a computer (rather than vice versa. See the wiki entry for more information). The Turing Test was first described by Alan Turing in 1950.
Going back to the article, though. I was shocked to discover he was disgraced simply for being a homosexual. Well, for starters, I didn’t know he was gay before this article. That’s why I didn’t understand why they’d need to apologize. But of course, I realize that being gay was even more shunned upon back then than it is today, but it’s disappointing that someone, even with everything that they did for their nation, can become an outcast simply because of their sexual standings.
He was removed of his security clearance, because for some reason the government had (and still does, in the United States atleast, it seems) an opinion that homosexuals are more likely to be compromised, and more capable of divulging information. Grotesque enough, he was submitted to Chemical Castration for his choice in lifestyle, even if it was a completely private one at that, though he did agree to it in order to avoid a different sentence. It’s rather disappointing that he had to be subject to that. In fact, he committed suicide two years later, probably directly due to this (though this is not quite known).
I have brought this up in defense of homosexuality yet again, I think. I am not gay, but I tend to be a greater advocate for gay rights than even the homosexual people I DO know. I tend to speak out for equality more than they do. I certainly hope the UK Government comes through and apologizes for the way they treated Turing, especially after all of his contributions to their war effort, and what he stands for in terms of the last 50 years of advancement in Computer Science.
I hope you learned something new as well.
Net Neutrality
That battle isn’t over yet? I could’ve sworn it was over a damn long time ago. It certainly fell out of the mainstream media, atleast.
The net MUST remain neutral. Any attempts to control it will cause it’s collapse. The only reason why the internet made it as big as it is is because of the neutrality. The biggest forms of social media that is so popular today is due to the freedom of the internet. So many smaller businesses won’t be able to start. All of those little niche markets online that we know and love will cease to exist. Removing the net neutrality, from what I originally heard, would make it damn near impossible for any new company to spring up online, which is damaging to entrepreneurs and also allow the economy to grow a little stagnant with not enough change happening. Of course, I may be completely wrong about this. I really need to read up on it again, as I didn’t even know it was still around.
I found this interesting blog post on Take Part, a Social Action network. It mentions how much lobbyists are fighting against net neutrality. An excerpt:
Our friends at Free Press created this amazing widget that exposes fake grassroots groups formed and funded by big phone and cable corporations to kill Net Neutrality. These phony grassroots groups (or “astroturf,” as they are very cleverly named!) try to fool the public and politicians into thinking that they represent everyday citizens. Their populist names and vague mission statements misinform the public and fight on behalf of large corporations. But they can’t fool the grassroots, and certainly not the netroots.
The little widget below is about the big internet companies and what they’re doing to try to prevent a net freedom act from passing. Hell, I didn’t even know there was an Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 even in the makings.
Articles like these about Lobbyists working in Congress to resist certain bills just reinforces my opinion that they need to be REMOVED from the government process. They interfere with what the majority may truly feel, and interrupt politicians from really making decisions for the people they were elected to represent.
Twitter Statistics from Sysomos
Ogilvy PR 360’s Fresh Influence blog did a recent post about Twitter statistics that have been recently collected by the social media analytical company Sysomos.
The top 10 stats that Ogilvy lists show some of the highlights of the report.
Beyond the fact that Twitter is amazing for getting your product and news across, some stats show how Twitter just might not be hitting the amount of people you hope to be. For instance, the report shows that “a small minority creates most of the activity.”… only 5% of the users generate 75% of all of the activity on the site.
Hell, I used to think I was part of the minority for only having 148 followers (and only following 133), but the survey also tells me that “nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers.”… That was actually very surprising for me to read.
But yes, check out the rest of the 10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter, and if you’re still interested, download the rest of the report from Synomos
A Brief History of Twitter
So, Twitter is 3 years old this month (went Beta on March 31st 2006, and Live on June 13th 2006 so depends on what date you use)… I actually have been a member since February 7th 2007 (thanks to this api for that information). I joined a little bit later than it began, but I actually joined prior to @replies became an actual part of Twitter (prior, people used it for communication, but posts were not intricately connected when they were used).
I feel like I’m trying to say “I used them before they were popular” to not sound like a bandwagon fan of the service? Perhaps.
This is a great drawing shows, briefly, how Twitter has expanded over the past 3 years. I’m glad I have been part of it since near the beginning.
Thanks to Tech Crunch for reporting it, which is where I first saw it, I think. I’ve been seeing multiple mentions of it across the web today, and thought that my audience (do I even have one?) would enjoy it as well.
I find it particularly amusing that it includes the Twitpocalypse, which threatened to cause many 3rd party Twitter apps to crash.
History Lesson from Monolith