John Lindal’s Blog

It’s a Small World

My wife just took a writing course from Bonnie MacBird, the original author of TRON and the wife of Alan Kay, one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc.

The iPhone Unlocked

People despair that the iPhone remains a closed platform, but I don’t think this will last forever.

When the iPhone was first released, Apple claimed it didn’t need applications — web apps were the way to go — but once Apple extended the iTunes store, they went app-crazy. Multitasking has been ruled out since the iPhone’s inception for several good reasons, including battery life, but that is apparently about to change, too — reasons be damned. Apple is building a history of changing their minds. Big surprise They do whatever they believe will make them the most money at the time.

I don’t know of any serious competitors to iTunes, and from what I hear, all the up-and-coming competitors to the iPhone are currently unpolished enough that ordinary people still prefer the iPhone. Apple has a monopoly and is milking it as best they can. Despite the example set by Windows — it has never managed to compete with Mac OS on polish — I hope that other handsets will eventually provide serious competition for the iPhone. Windows is the 800 pound gorilla, so it never had to care, but the phone market is much more competitive. When the competition catches up, Apple will no longer have a monopoly, and they will have no choice but to stop acting that way.

The same holds true for the iPad. Apple originally laughed at the netbook market. Now they have a netbook killer — at least for ordinary people. Some iPhone apps will be usable on the iPad, especially games like Canabalt and Evacuation, but most apps will need to be re-imagined for the larger screen. This monopoly is barely getting started. We can only hope that competitors to the iPad will eventually force Apple to unlock it, too.

The Arrow of Time

I just read an article about the Arrow of Time. The foundation of the author’s discussion was entropy and the observation that it always increases. From a macroscopic perspective, this is reasonable, but it seems to me that there is an even deeper argument. If I understand the Free Will Theorem correctly (always iffy for deep stuff like that), then, assuming humans have free will, the result of measuring properties at the quantum level cannot be known ahead of time. I believe Conway stated that the result doesn’t exist until the experiment is performed. I can’t conceive of anything more unidirectional than that. There is just no going backwards.

Note that the Free Will Theorem directly contradicts the article’s claim that knowing the exact state of the universe allows you to compute the future.