The Tablet Is The New General Purpose Computer

Apple’s latest iPad spot demonstrates that tablets have general purpose computing strengths that have never been exhibited by laptops.

Laptops have had decades in the spotlight as our portable computers of choice and were on their way to eradicating desktop machines before tablets came along. But they’ve never managed to exhibit the flexibility of purpose that tablets can.

Apple’s spot presents examples of people using iPads in various real world situations, which is a note they’ve struck before. But this particular spot focuses not just on the things that people are doing with iPads, but specifically things that would be cumbersome, irritating or impossible with a laptop.

It’s a brilliant rotation of the argument that tablets can’t be ‘seriously’ used to create.

In many ways this is the realization of the dream for the original ‘tablet computers’ of Microsoft — something you can view with more or less irony depending on what chances you give the company of succeeding in a crowded space.

 

It’s not that you can’t use a laptop to do any of these things. I’ve used a laptop as a tethered shooting companion for photography for years now. Seeing instant feedback as I shoot speeds up the process and makes editing faster, it’s great. But I’ve never wanted to use a laptop. They’re bulky, they’re not the right form factor and they’re not optimized for easy one-handed operation (not counting the one you hold them with, thank you). And some of these cases, like diving, present an impossible challenge for laptops. They’re simply not the right tool for a lot of jobs.

And I think that more of the jobs laptops aren’t any good at are becoming part of our lives every day.

It’s not as if laptops (or desktops) are going to go away over night, but they’re definitely going to fade in importance as new general purpose computers like the tablet and smartphone grow bolder. And they’ll work in concert to allow us to do stuff better — I wrote this piece on a combination of phone, tablet and computer as I’ve been traveling.

View the Original article

Managing Director Jonathan Teo Leaves General Catalyst, Might Set Sights On Asian Startups

. I also learned he’s been approached by other Silicon Valley firms but hasn’t shown an interest.

Though Teo is still based in San Francisco

View the Original article

RSA’s Deal With The NSA Reflects A General Mistrust

Here’s how it works when a big company believes that its power is in its girth: They enter this bizarre world that leads them to believe that what comes from their PR organs is enough to float their troubles away. It’s all about denial and avoiding any potential shareholder backlash. And so we come to the sad state of affairs at RSA, the security division of EMC, one of the big-bellied enterprise kings that apparently made a deal with the National Security Agency.

It’s a deal that is now affecting the trust that people have in the company and raises questions about other technology companies and how they have profited from their relationships with the government. It’s fine enough for technology executives to sit down with President Barack Obama like they did last week and say how awful the NSA is behaving. But the RSA’s work with the NSA shows that technology companies need scrutiny as well. The reality: mistrust is spreading, writes security expert Bruce Schneier.

I think about this all the time with respect to our IT systems and the NSA. Even though we don’t know which companies the NSA has compromised — or by what means — knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they’ll be able to say is: “We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don’t know about or can’t talk about.”

There’s proof that RSA made a deal with the NSA to use the spy agency’s random number generator as the preferred or default formula in Bsafe, its software for enhancing security on personal computers and other technologies, Reuters reports. This has put RSA in the bright light of scrutiny.  The $10 million deal looks especially bad, considering the connection it has to documents released by Edward Snowden and reported by the New York Times in September. In those documents it was revealed that the NSA formula was actually flawed and had been used by the NSA to create a backdoor into encryption products.

RSA said in a blog post on Monday that it does not  ”ever divulges details of customer engagements, but we also categorically state that we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA’s products, or introducing potential ‘backdoors’ into our products for anyone’s use.” But many in the security profession are just not buying it. Here’s a tidbit from an awesome rant and good summary of what happened from Melissa Elliott, a security analyst and novelist:

September 2013: Revelations derived from the Snowden leak show

View the Original article